N I G H T B R I N G E R . S E
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THE HEART'S FAR-CARRYING CALL
In the season of mists, when the earth was white with hoarfrost and the trees gleamed bare and black, a solitary knight wandered the Kentish hills. He was a young man, but his gait was shambling and slow. One he had been comely, now his bones stretched the pale skin of his face, and his eyes were sunk in shadows. The knight had been brought to this pass by an encounter during the summer of that year. The land was blooming then: The meadows were carpeted with primrose and heartease, and the air was laden with the scent of lavender. One bright morning, he set out for London to join the King's armies. He rode briskly at first, but the country lanes were warm and quiet, save for the blackbird's song and the echoing notes of the cuckoo, and soon the knight's horse slowed to a walk. The young man rode on unheeding, drowsily dreaming his young man's dream. After some time, his reverie was broken by a fluttering movement near an oak beside the lane. He spoke, but no one replied. Made foolhardy by curiosity, he dismounted and strode to the tree.
"Come out," he said.
A thrill of laughter was the only reply.
"Come out," called the knight again.
A woman stepped lightly into the lane and stood before him. She seemed clothed with the dawn, for her draperies were the color of rose petals, and she was crowned with a cascade of fiery hair. She met the knight's stare with green cat eyes as shy as any forest creature's, and in that instant, the knight was lost. Every thought of king and country faded into that gaze.
Without speaking a word, he held out his arms to the fairy. She came quite willingly, it seemed, and the knight lifted her to the saddle of his horse. In a language he could not understand, she whispered to the animal, which turned obediently from the path and, with the knight pacing alongside, threaded its way through the trees and into the sunny meadows that lay beyond.
They traveled thus for hours, now in field and now in shady forest. From time to time, the lady spoke softly. The knight plucked wild flowers for her, and with nimble fingers, she fashioned them into garlands for her blazing hair. When the sun stood high in the heavens, she began to sing, weaving a net of melodies around the man who walked beside her. She leaned from the saddle and peered into his eyes with a look of such absorbing tenderness that he could not speak for longing.
At last, when the afternoon was well advanced, the lady spoke a word in her strange tounge, and the horse halted in a small elder copse. The knight lifted her from the saddle and looked again into her face. He saw inexpressible sadness. Tears glistened in the green eyes and glittered on the lashes. The knight kissed the fairy then, but she drew herself from his arms and once more began to sing. Light as morning mist, the voice coiled around him, and the young man's eyes grew heavy. He swayed and sank to the ground. He saw for a moment the rosy draperies of the lady and the bright tendrils of her hair, swinging as she bent to watch him, above her head, the canopy of leaves wheeled. He closed his eyes.
As he slept, he dreamed of darkness. He saw a line of men, knights like himself, but haggard and gray in death. Their dry lips were split over gaping block mouths, and shadows filled their empty eye sockets. The lips moved, and the knight realized that the ghostly figures were calling his name. Their bony fingers waved, summoned him.
He awakened bathed in icy sweat, staring up through the leaves at the stars. He was alone. He sighed and closed his eyes and slept again.
Dawn came, and the knight's second waking, and with it a premonition of dreadful grief. The fairy was gone, having taken his heart from his breast. He knew that she had left him as surely as if he had seen her die. He knew that from then on, every hour would be achingly empty. His fate had come upon him - a life full of yearning that never would be satisfied, of calling and hearing no reply.
Sick with desire, he rose and searched. He hunted through the copse but found no sign of the fairy. He paced the meadows, following every path and byway, and still he found no sign.
So that first day passed and the next and the next. The flowers faded in the fields, the harvests were gathered in and the birds ceased their singing. Still the knight wandered, a gaunt figure silhouette against the winter sky, a man bereft of hope but not of longing. At last he could walk no farther. He lay down on the bracken. The final earthly sounds he heard were the moan of the wind and the hoarse cries of quarreling rooks. In that hour, he died.
The countrymen who found the wasted body said little, but their faces were set and grim. When they were safe in their homes again, they whispered of fairy enchantments and of the ranks of mortals who were victims of fairy love. They spoke with fear, as mortals often did when they talked of the powers of Faerie.
Yet, in those distant days, the current of love between the mortal and the fairy realms ran deep and strong. Impelled by longing, mortals and fairies both strove to breach the boundaries that separated them, and sometimes they suceeded. But not even passion and affection were sufficient to keep open the invisible walls between the worlds. Ever desiring, human and fairy were ever divided. The stories of their loves were almost always pervaded by sorrow and filled with the pain of loss.
Mortal customs did not help, for they were weighted against strangers and strangeness. Among mortals in those dangerous times, the only certain trust was in kinship. The names of their fathers or mothers identified men and women and showed their place in the hierarchy of a family. In Celtic countries, carefully recorded blood ties spread in ever-widening circles. The Welsh, for instance, understood relationships to the ninth degree - that is to say, to the position of third cousin once removed or of great-great-great-great-great-great-great-greatparent - and the Irish to the seventeenth. An outsider who injured one member of a family clan was answerable to all of its members to specified degrees, and all of them could exact appropriate vengeance.
The importance of blood kinship was such that marriage among mortals posed a special problem - that of safely admitting into a family a bride or groom who did not share its blood. In earliest times, the stranger was surrounded by all sorts of conditions that indicated his alien status. Wives might go through life forbidden to call their husbands by name, for instance, since the mention of it gave power to the speaker. Women used such epithets as 'My Master' instead. And in those places where husbands joined their wives' families, the grooms were hedged about with rules of behavior that set them apart. They might be forbidden to speak to their wives' relatives, or be required to live in the household in special, separate quarters.
In later, safer times, of course, more comfortable arrangements prevailed, but throughout Europe, wedding customs continued to reflect the sense that a stranger entering a family carried about him something of a threat. In Ireland and Wales, weddings were celebrated with mock battles during which the groom's party - in the role of enemy, for the moment - attacked the party of the bride and spirited her away; the role of best man was originally that of groom's strong right arm in the abduction. (Among the Irish, the ride to the wedding feast that followed such a battle was referred to as 'dragging home the bride.') Or, in an echo of half-forgotten barriers, mock trials were set for the groom who desired a bride: In Brittany, relatives disguised themselves as the wished-for maiden; the prospective groom's task was to identify her properly. In Wales and Russia the trial was often the answering of riddles.
Given the distrust of outsiders, mortals' fear of fairy lovers was unsurprising. A fairy, after all, belonged to a separate race entirey, one whose nature was variable and even perverse. Entrancing in their beauty, fairies extended a powerful claim on the human heart - yet the love of some of them brough only death, as it did for the Kentish knight and the knights whom that fairy had ensnared before him.
Not all such death-bringers were as complex as the Kentish temptress, who wept at the fate her nature made inevitable. Among the Irish, for instance, there was a fairy called the leanan-side - or 'fairy mistress' - who drifted through villages and towns at night, battening on amorous young men. When they entered her embrace, however, life and breath drained from them, while the fairy grew bright and strong.
European countryfolk knew that forests, streams and pools sheltered appealing but destructive fairies such as the vile and the nixies. In Russia, infinitely desirable and infinetley dangerous fairies called rusalky inhabited rivers and lakes. They sat upon the shores, combing their hair in the moonlight and smiling secret and seductive smiles. No man, it was said, was proof against one. Even ascetic monks were found drowned in the waters where rusalky trailed their pretty fingers.
But fairies of both sexes might deal in fatal love. The water nixies of Germany, for example, had male counterparts. And from the British Isles came tales of elfin seducers whose power over women was very strong indeed.
The Irish, for instance, spoke of the Ganconer, a debonair elf who migh appear to maidens so unwise as to venture alone into the wild. The pipe that he smokes was his hallmark and a warning to women, but even those who knew of this were seduced by his gleaming black eyes and his caressing voice, speaking the sweet words that gave the elf his name - which meant 'Love Talker.' A woman who yielded to the Ganconer's whispers and kissed him was lost.
"Who meets the Love Talker," ran the Irish saying, "must weave her shroud soon." And it was true. After his interludes with mortal women, the elf would disappear, satisfied for a time. The mortals always pined and died.
Another such fairy - the subject of many a Scottish song - was an elfin knight known as the demon lover. He was once betrothed to a mortal but left her for seven years (why he did so is not known). Before he left, she promised fidelity. She married a mortal in his absence, however.
When the demon lover reappeared, he reproached the woman bitterly - and then seduced her. She deserted her husband and her infant children to follow the elf to a ship he had waiting for her, a fine galleon with sails of taffeta and masts of beaten gold. She could see no crew, but the fairy's thrall held her, and she followed him aboard. At once the wind rose, and the galleon skimmed across the sea. When it was three leagues from shore, the demon lover struck the topmast once and the foremast once. The beautiful ship cracked and sank, carrying the faithless woman to a grave on the ocean floor.
The demon lover's vengefulness, while harsh, was at least understandable in human terms. Throughout northern Europe, however, lived elfin knights who existed only to destroy. Maidens who crossed into their enchanted territories found themselves as helpless as the mortal vitim of the demon lover. Sometimes the knights only seduced the maidens - but the loss of a woman's honor was a serious fate in those days. More often, the elves murdered the mortals.
Still, if songs and tales from Germany, Scandinavia and Scotland are to be credited, the power of those elfin knights could be combated. One woman who refused to succumb was Isabel the Fair, who lived at her father's court in the north of Scotland long ago.
On the morning of the first day of May, Isabel sat alone in her bower, busy at her embroidery. Far away and faint across the hills, she heard a horn of elfland (a sound so sweet could be no other). The wild call trembled in the air, and the maiden's flashing needle paused. An image came to her, a vision of shining castle walls and still lakes, and of an elfin knight astride a mighty charger.
"If I but had that knight to sleep beside me..." whispered Isabel the Fair, but her thought was never finished.
It was unwise to wish when the sound from the other world had yet to die. Before her needle plunged again, a princely man appeared in the courtyard beneath Isabel's window, he was riding a tall horse and leading a pretty palfrey. He raised his head and smiled upon her gravely.
"Isabel the Fair," said the man, "you called and I have come for you. Ride into the greenwood with me now."
The palfrey tossed its head, and the bells on its harness rang merrily.
The needle and embroidery silk slipped to the floor. Isabel sped down a winding stone stair and into the courtyard. Without a word she mounted the palfrey, and together she and the elf clattered across the cobblestones and out through the castle gate. As they galloped across the hills, no word was said between them. Finally, they came to a wood, and there the elfin knight drew up. He leaned from his saddle and took the palfrey's reins from her.
"Isabel the Fair," said he, "dismount now. You have come to the place where you are to die."
She stared at him. He returned her gaze with one as calm as a mountain pool.
"I have slain seven kings' daughters here, Isabel the Fair. You are to be the eigth."
His voice was gentle, his eyes clear and blank. Isabel slid from the saddle to the ground, and he swung down beside her. He slapped the horses' flanks, and the animals ambled into the forest, reins trailing.
Suddendly Isabel smiled. She stroked the knight's sleeve with a small, soft hand and in her sweet voice bade him lie down with her, that she might rest before she died. And he did that. Isabel sat in the grass of the greenwood and held his head in her lap and stroked his hair. In her mind, she recited a charm, one that her mother had taught her for bringing on sleep, and sleep he did.
After a while, she carefully unbuckled his belt, pulled it off and bound it around his body just above the elbows, so his arms were strapped to his sides. Then she waited for the power of her simple spell to fade. At length, the knight stirred, his heavy head lolling across her knees. He opened his eyes and looked up at her drowsily, and in that instant she moved. She stabbed him in the heart with his own dagger.
He made no move or sound when the bloody stain spread across his breast, but the light faded from his eyes. Isabel watched until they dulled, then she shifted herself from under him.
"If seven kings' daughters you here have slaid," said she, "then lie here a husband to them all." She rose, turned her back on the stiffening elf and began her long walk home. That is the last that is known of the Scotswoman, whose walk from the greenwood took her out of history.
But the dwell on Isabel and her kind - or on the perils mortals faced in seeking fairy love - is to distort the story, for it ignores the mortals and fairies who sought each other not simply with amorous intent, but with steadfast and faithful love. They found - before they met the fate that goverened their loving - the perfect comfort of companioned hearts.
Thus it was with mortal men who fell in love with swans - birds so splendid that they were admired from the dawn of history and in every country of the world. The race of swans was held in such awe that in lands as far apart as Russia and Ireland, it was said that to kill one of them would bring death to the killer. For swans were beings of Faerie sojourning in the mortal world, as some mortals learned to their joy and sorrow.
A Norwegian chronicler tells this tale. A huntsman once rested beside a mountain lake as night approached. All was quiet except for the lisping of the water at the lake's edge. Then, barely audible in the air, the huntsman heard a ringing trill - the lovely sound called wing music, made by the mute swan in flight.
The huntsman looked up. High above was the flock, tiny specks growing rapidly larger as the birds began their descent. They wheeled in a gyre of white like the whorls of a seashell, each in turn setting onto the waters of the lake. There they floated in the swan's graceful fashion, inclining their long necks to watch their reflections. At length they turned toward the shore and, two by two, approached it, unaware of the huntsman who sat motionless among the trees.
But a curious thing happened as the great birds neared the shore: The figures shimmered in the twilight, and when they stepped upon the land, they walked not with the stately waddle of earthbound swans, but with the light tread of young women. They had shed their swan forms, which trailed from their slender fingers as feathered cloaks.
As the hunter watched transfixed, the maidens dropped their cloaks upon the ground and - in a manner as grave and courtly as their swan-swimming - danced. How long the dance lasted or what the music was, the huntsman never afterward could say. When the full moon rose high, silvering the maidens' hair, they gathered up their feathered cloaks and streamed toward the lake. They reached it, and two by two they entered it. As their feet touched the water, the maidens disappeared, and the huntsman saw only pairs of white swans, drifting in the moonlight.
Filled with longing love for the beautiful creatures, the huntsman returned night after night, but a month passed before th moon was full again and the swan flock descended to the lake. Again he watched the maidens' ceremony. This time, however, he stealthily approached them while they were absorbed in the patterns of the dance. As quietly as he could, he drew one feathered cloak from the white pile on the ground.
When the moon was high, the maidens gathered their cloaks and returned to the lake. But the last to leave had no cloak, for hers was the one the huntsman held. She began to search, while her sisters circled anxiously near shore. Then the hunter stepped from the trees, and the swans took wing in a rush of wind. The huntsman was left alone in the moonlight with the swan-maiden. He held out his hand to her. Bowing her head submissively, she took it.
He led the maiden to his house, where he dressed her in mortal women's clothes. In time, he made her his wife. The feathered swan cloak he put away in a locked chest. He wanted the woman, not the swan, but he was afraid to destroy the cloak that transformed her, because it was part of her being. The swan-maiden made a sweet and loving wife. She bore the huntsman a daughter - perfect except for the translucent webs of skin that joined her small toes - and seemed to love that daughter dearly. The huntsman grew accustomed to his wife's silence - she never spoke - and he came to accept her hours of sitting beside the lake where he had found her. She never seemed to tire of gazing at the water. In the spring and autumn, when the wing music of migrating swans sounded above the house, the wife's eyes filled with tears, and the hunter comforted her as best as he could with mortal love.
Thus the years passed peacefully enough, and the huntsman half-forgot the swan cloak. The day came at last when he opened the chest and saw it once more. His wife saw it, too, but she, of course, said nothing. She drew her small daughter into her arms, however, and watched while her husband locked the chest and put away the key.
The swan-wife left at the next full moon. The huntsman returned home to find the fire out, the house cold and his daughter playing alone on the floor beside the treasure chest, whose lid was open and whose interior was empty. At that moment, he heard the wing music of the swans, and when he carried his daughter to the door, he saw the flock overhead. The great white birds circled above the house, then headed away.
The huntsman lived alone with his daughter for the rest of his life. He never married, for no mortal could match his swan wife. And though he watched and waited patiently for years, he never saw the enchanted flock again. The swan fairy gave the huntsman love for love, in her gentle fashion. But she was a wild creature taken by capture. Out of her element in the world of mortals, she always pined for her own kind.
It was often so with the wilder elves. A tale was told in Shropshire of a knight who paid through many a long year for his capture of a fairy bride. His name was Edric and his story was this:
Edric rode out hunting one afternoon and lost his way in a wood. Night fell, and he rode out in the darkness for hours. Finally, he came upon a palace, ablaze with festive lights. Through the windows he saw dancing maidens, taller and more lovely than any mortal maid could be, and one of them taller and lovelier than the rest. Edric, overcome with passion, burst into the palace and tore her from the ranks of her sisters, although they fought him as best they could.
In the morning, Edric rode home with his prize. But not all of his wooing could gain a look or word from her. Three days passed. At last the fairy turned to him and said:
"You have captured me for a wife, and I must bride with you. But if you once name my sisters or the place that I come from, I will have my freedom and you will lose your fortune and your life."
So the fairy captive stayed with Edric as his wife. She vanished from time to time, and the mortal bore this as patiently as he could, for she always returned. One day, however, jealous of her absence, Edric reproached his wife, crying that her love for her elvish sisters was greater than what she owed her husband.
She vanished at once, as she had warned him she would, to rejoin her fairy kind. But it was said that when Edric died - which he soon did - she returned to claim his soul. Condemned to a restless existence in Faerie forever afterward, he periodally led an armed host through the English countryside, and people who saw that company clled it a portent of war.
Some fairies were less attached to their own world than Edric's bride. They loved mortals of their own free will and could be wooed and won. Nonetheless, conditions were imposed upon these marriages - conditions that served, like the symbolic rituals in marriages between unrelated mortals, to emphasize the alien character of man and wife. A mortal man who married a fairy woman, for example, might be forbidden to touch her with iron - always an anathema to fairies, for reasons no one knew - or, as with Edric's wife, to speak of her fairy origin, or to strike her, even lightly. And these conditions were no mere sybols. They were charged with power. The fairy's continued stay in the mortal world depended on the rigorous observation of them.
A lord of the castle of Argouges in France, for instance, loved a fairy who loved him in return and agreed to marry him, provided only that he never mention the word 'death' in her presence. This seemed an easy task, and the union was a happy one that lasted for many years and produced handsome children. One day, however, the fairy - who seems to have been somewhat frivolous - lingered long over her dressing. When, at length, she appeared in the great hall of the castle, her irritated husband snapped out a common proverb.
"Madam," he said, "You would be a fine messenger to summon Death, for you take a long time to finish your business."
At the word, his pretty wife wailed and disappeared. Her husband found no trace of her ever again, save for the print of her hand on the castle gate.
It was ever thus. The price of love that spanned two worlds - small as the price might be - seemed greater than mortals could pay. Even so, the joys of that love, however brief, were remembered for centuries, as a Welsh tale tells.
Near the Black Mountains of that country was a small lake called Llyn y Fan Fach. A farmer of the region used to graze his cattle close to its shores. Early one morning, he saw a strange sight indeed. A gleam of gold shone through the mist on the water's surface. As the sun rose and the mist burned away, the gleam became a real image. Sitting lightly on the surface of the water was a beautiful young woman. Head bent so that she could use the water as a looking glass, she was combing her golden hair. The farmer made a movement, and the maiden looked up at once. When she saw the tall young man on the bank, she gave a smile of piercing sweetness.
The farmer was enchanted. He knew her for a gwragedd annwfn, a lake fairy who, unlike the dangerous water spirits of other countries, was full of affection for mortals. Heart pounding and hands trembling - for her beauty was unearthly - the farmer stretched out his hands and entreated her to cross the water to him. He offered her the only gift he had to give - a loaf of bread, the staff of mortal life. She shook her head.
"Your bread is too hard," said the fairy.
But she smiled once more upon him before she sank into the lake, leaving only a golden nimbus on the water to mark the place where she had disappeared.
The farmer returned the following day and found the fairy drifting gently just above the ripples of the lake. He bore a loaf of unbaked bread dough, but this she would not take, saying it was too soft, and she sank once more beneath the surface.
The third day, the farmer brought the proper offering for a fairy: a lightly baked loaf that, being neither raw nor fully cooked, partook of the mystery of borderlines and of all things that escaped definition. The surface of the lake was empty when he arrived, but when he held out his gift, there rose from the depths of the water a tall old man with a flowing beard. He was flanked by two golden maidens. The old man regarded the farmer impassively and said;
"You may have the maiden you desire, if you can tell me which of my daughter is she."
This was like the riddle trials sometimes held before mortal weddings, but infinitely harder, for the young women who stood before the farmer were as alike as two pears.
He studied them, searching for a clue. He looked at their hair and their faces and their flowing gowns and found them exactly the same. His glance dropped to the surface of the water, where the hems of their skirts rippled. From the skirts of one maiden peeped two small shoes. The farmer recognized them and made his choice. There was a pause.
"You have chosen well," the old man said at last. "That is the maiden you love, and you may take her to wife. But treat her kindly. If you strike her as many as three causeless blows, I will have her back with me."
The farmer gave his word that he would cherish his wife, and the old man sank into the water, taking with him the gwragedd annwfn's sister.
Light as a dragonfly, the gwragedd annwfn skipped across the water and onto the shore. She ran straight into the farmer's arms, smiling her sweet smile. So the two were married, and they were happy indeed. As the years passed, the fairy bore her husband three fine sons, who in later life became physicians of otherwordly and intuitive skill.
But the gwragedd annwfn had curious ways, and these disturbed her husband, happy as he was with her. She fell sometimes into trances and sometimes conversed with beings he could not see. And she did other things as well.
The couple went to the christening of a neighbor's child, and the gwragedd annwfn wept throughout. To a fairy, a christening was a sad occasion: The conferral of a mortal name severed a human's inborn ties with the other world. But the farmer did not understand this, and in his shame at her behavior, he rebuked her with the lightest of taps on the arm.
"That is the first blow," was all the gwragedd annwfn said.
They went together to a wedding, and while those about her were joyful, the fairy wept. They went to a funeral, where she laughed. She understood that sadness and joy could go hand in hand on any occasion, and she lacked the fear of censure that governed much of mortal behavior. But her husband understood only that his wife had shamed him. After the wedding, he railed at her for weeping, and then he struck her.
"That is the second blow," the fairy said. "Take heed how you treat me if you would keep me." And she wept with sadness as she looked for the last time on her husband who had betrayed her.
The farmer understood then what he had done and what he must pay. Tears coursed down his cheeks as he watched the fairy leave his house and cross the meadows to the lake where he had found her. He saw his wife no more and lived alone the rest of his life, but it was said that while her sons were young, the gwragedd annwfn visited them and that she disappeared for the last time only after they were grown.
As it was with the lake fairy's husband, so it was with all mortal men - and women, too. The rules that governed elfin marriage always were broken by mortal spouses, through stupidity or curiosity or mistrust or carelessness. It was as if the condition of mortality demanded that sorrow follow joy. And as the history of the fairy Melusine showed, the sorrow engendered by a fairy marriage - unlike its joy - could last from generation to generation.
To relate the tale of Melusine, it is necessary to begin with the fairy's birth and unhappy early life. She was, in fact, just half an elf: Her mother was a fountain fairy named Pressina and her father, named Elinus, was a mortal King of Albany - the ancient name for Scotland. Pressina agreed to marry the King only after he agreed to the elfin condition, which in her case was that he never see her in childbed.
Her husband broke his vow on the day that Pressina gave birth to three beautiful daughters, Melusine, Melior and Plantina. The fairy had to leave him then. Taking her daughters, she fled to a fairy island said to be Avalon.
Years passed, and as the daughters grew, the lonely mother told them of Elinus and his broken vow, and as she spoke she wept for the love she had lost. When the daughters grew into their full powers, they took revenge. They lured their father into a mountain cave in Northumbria, and with a web of spells they closed the cave, so that Elinus remained a prisoner in the dark for the rest of his life.
When Pressina heard what her daughters had done, she wailed with grief and rage, and she set upon them solemn punishments. The fates of the younger daughters, Melior and Plantina, are not important to the story, but that of Melusine - the eldest and the leader - is. Her mother cast this curse: Every Saturday Melusine was condemned to become a loathsome serpent from the waist down, and to stay that way for twenty-four hours. She was doomed, the mother said, not to know the joys of love, unless she could conceal her periodic deformity by finding a lover who would agree not to visit her on the day of her punishment. If that lover agreed to the condition and then broke his word, the mother added, Melusine would spend eternity as a winged snake in perpetual flight - and perpetual pain.
The tale of Melusine's marriage begins in the sun-washed west of France, where the fairy either had fled or had been sent by her mother to guard a forest fountain sometimes called the Fountain of Thirst and sometimes Lusinia. Melusine whiled away the hours there, occasionally attended by forest fairies. For the most part, she bathed in the fountain and sang fairy songs to herself. On Saturdays she retreated into the trees to hide her shameful punishment from any travelers who might chance by.
But none appeared for many months, until at last a young man strode into the clearing. He saw the fountain and heard the sparkling harmonies of its falling water, and at the fountain's edge, half-hidden by leafy shadows, he saw Melusine and heard her wistful, whispering song.
He was charmed by the beautiful maiden. As for the fairy, her heart was captured, and she mourned her ugly secret. But the young man kneeled beside her, stroked her hand and spoke so sweetly that Melusine was calmed. He understood that she was a fountain fairy, and he offered her both heart and hand.
Melusine agreed and, with some hesitation, told him the condition imposed upon them: that he leave her in seclusion each Saturday. (She did not tell the reason.) The young man had a generous and trusting heart, and he gave his word.
According to chroniclers, that is how the great family of Lusignan was formed: Melusine was to be forebear of countless counts and kings. For the mortal was Raymond, son of the Earl of Forez. When he married Melusine - and marry they did, in splendid fashion - luck came to him. After the marriage he built the fortress of Lusignan, near Poitou. Some said it was constructed in three nights because of the fairy's aid, but it seems unlikely. Others said it was named for the fairy's fountain, Lusinia, and this is possible.
Whatever the truth, the fortress rose high above its forested mountain, bristling with towers and gleaming with gold. Within were all the pleasures of a palace: The walls were painted in the style called mille-fleurs, or 'thousand flowers,' and the archways were hung with tapestries so finely embroidered that only fairies could have made them. Because of the fortress Raymond was thereafter Lord of Lusignan.
He lived happily with Melusine for many years. She was as light and laughing as the waters of her fountain, and gaiety and good fortune followed her dancing footsteps. Throughout those years, Raymond kept his word. Each Friday just before midnight, he left his wife alone in her tower chamber, returning only when the bells tolled the next midnight.
They had but one grief, and that was their children. Perhaps because of her mother's curse, Melusine bore a succession of malformed children. She brought forth only sons. The first had one eye of red and one of blue - not a great disfigurement, but a sign of otherworldly blood. The second had a face as red as fire; the third had one eye lower than the other. The next boy was hideous scarred, bearing a mark on his cheek that resembled a lion's claw; and the boy that followed him had only one eye. The sixth child had a tooth like a boar's tusk that protruded from the side of his mouth; he was called Geoffrey au Grant Dent - Geoffrey Great Tooth. He was followed by a brother named Fromont, who had a monstrous brush of hair bristling from his nose, and another brother who had three eyes. The last two children were normal little boys.
But they were small consolation. As Melusine bore son after deformed son, whispers began, first among her women, then in the palace corridors, and finally throughout the countryside. Harsh voices said the fairy blood was destroying the mortal line; others said that Melusine committed adultery on the Saturdays she kept alone, and so brought forth demons.
At last, Raymond - despairing of his hideous brood - heeded his kinsmen and broke the vow he had given his wife. He left her, as he always did, at midnight on a Friday, but instead of returning to his own chambers, he concealed himself where he might watch her. This was no difficult task, for Melusine trusted him and therefore was careless of locks and bolts.
What Raymond saw that night filled him with sickness. His wife crept into the bath that awaited her. Her shoulders and arms and breasts were as white and lovely as he knew them, but at her waist the skin roughened and took a greenish tinge, and below that gleamed the scaly, coiling tail of a serpent. Melusine lounged in the bath all day, heavy lids drooping over glittering eyes. From time to time, a long tounge flicked between the pretty lips and she gave a hungry, hissing sigh.
Raymond left as quickly as he could and said nothing, for he had betrayed the wife he had loved - and he loved her still. They might have continued this way - Raymond with his secret, Melusine with hers - but for Geoffrey Great Tooth. As brutally vicious as his appearance suggested, Geoffrey crowned a career of murder and pillage by setting fire to the monastery where his brother Fromont had retreated. A hundred monks died.
The news was brought to Raymond as he sat with his wife and courtiers in her chamber. In his despair, he turned on her and cried;
"Go, foul snake, contaminator of my children."
Melusine gasped and whitened and swayed. She sank to the floor, and the courtiers gathered around her. When she gained her senses again, her eyes filled with tears at the betrayal. She walked to a window and set her foot on the stone sill. (The footprint, it is said, stayed there for hundreds of years.) With a last glance at her husband, she leaped into the air.
The courtiers clustered at the window, but no body lay in the courtyard below. They waited in silence, and then they heard the howling cry and saw the shining scales of a great winged snake. It circled the tower three times and disappeared.
Raymond stumbled from the room. No one knews if he ever spoke again; he became a hermit and spent his days not on the field of battle or in the courts of the mighty, but in monastic contemplation.
It is said that Melusine flew to Lusignan in secret to nurse her two youngest sons, and that they survived because of her anxious care. No one knew if that was true. But for centuries after, each Friday before the current Lord of Lusignan was to die, a great snake flew wailing around the battlements of the palace. In this way, Melusine lived out her mother's punishment.
So, once more, an alien pairing failed to hold. Once more, a marriage between fairy and human ended in tragedy. It would not be the last time. As long as fairies showed themselves in human form, their love was avidly sought. And no wonder: Mortals, bound by rules and beset by mundane woes, saw the hope of immortal happiness in those bright beings, shining with gallantry and grace, and swathed in mystery. The rewards seemed worth the risk. Even at the end of their time, when fairies no longer sought to human company, glimpses of them added enchantment to the mortals' measured earth, spinning its stately way through the eternal heavens.
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