King of Morning, Queen of Day Read Online Free PDF Page B

and potential, it seems impossible that there has been no faery manifestation; yet every day since I came home I have gone into Bridestone Wood, expecting, hoping, wanting to see something. But there is nothing! Not even that sensation of watching I remember from the spring, and again, that time in the bower, just before…
    Perhaps the problem is that I am expecting too hard. Faeries have always been tricksome, flighty creatures. Maybe when I stop wanting something to happen, then something will happen, but oh, how difficult it is not to want the thing which deep down in your heart you want more than anything.
    Mummy has been working in the garden—how, in this heat, I don’t know. All I want to do is flop about in a sun frock, but she is hard at it, researching a book. Not a book of poetry this time, she told me, but a proper book, a serious book. It will be called The Twilight of the Gods, she thinks, and it will be about how Christianity has dethroned the old, elemental gods of the Celts, first driving them underground to become the Host of the Hollow Hills, the sidhe; and ultimately, to reduce them into leprechauns and pookahs and brownies and Trooping Faeries. That seems to me like a sad and terrible end for the old gods who could be many things at once—young and old, male and female, human and animal. Much better, I told Mummy, for them all to have died in some great and noble last battle than to dwindle and shrivel like the old generals at Kilmainham Hospital with their medals and bath chairs, changed into green-gaitered pixies guarding crocks of gold. Mummy agreed, but said that the secret of the Old Gods was that they were never totally defeated by Christianity; they merely changed form again and went more deeply into the land. Irish Catholicism, she maintained, contains many elements that are not Christian at all but stem directly from the old pagan religions. Many Irish saints are just old gods and goddesses sealed with the Pope’s stamp of respectability, and the so-called Holy Wells, like the one at Gortahurk where Mrs. O’Carolan goes for her rheumatism, are nothing more than old Celtic votive sites to the water spirits. Old sacrificial stones were often decorated over with new Christian symbols. There is a standing stone in a village in County Fermanagh where an old deity has been converted into a bishop, complete with bell, crozier, and mitre! And many of the Church festivals, including Christmas, Michaelmas, and Halloween, are the old Celtic festivals of Lughnasadh and Samhain, Christianized, tamed and stripped of their old pagan power, like lions in a circus with their teeth pulled.
    So sad, that the great days of the gods and fighting men should have dwindled away to nothing. But when I think about it more, I can see Mummy’s point—perhaps Christianity, in all its arrogance, did not succeed in putting a ring through their noses and leading them down the aisle to kneel before the cross. Perhaps it liberated them from the shapes and characters people had forced upon them, and allowed them to be at last what they wanted to be, free from the cares and responsibilities of the world to hunt and play once again through the endless forests of Otherworld.
    If Otherworld was never lost, merely hidden as if it had pulled a sky-coloured cloak around it, then perhaps it may still be attainable to those with the sensitivity to seek it. Perhaps it is close at hand to those who sincerely desire it.
    And then, today, confirmation. The woods were smothering: the leaves seemed to trap the heat beneath them in a dense, stifling blanket. Bridestone Wood was filled with a sense of exhausted stillness—not a bird sang, not a leaf stirred. The only motion in the entire wood was the drifting balls of thistledown turning lazily in the still, thick air. There was a spirit in the trees I could not name—not the feeling of watching, nor the electric prickle of something about to happen. A more diffuse sensation of waiting