[fic] Cakes of Oats and Barley

[kittydesade]

For March Madness, starwatching 2500 words



I was out on the strand for my health, which I had thought would have prevented me from enjoying myself. It hadn’t been that long ago that I had had my breakdown, one audition too many. I had started crying and I couldn’t stop for three weeks.

The stage is supposed to be a nervous profession, but no one had ever insisted that it was that hard on a body.

Everyone in the business knows of a doctor or two who is willing to provide an evaluation on a sliding pay scale based on what you can afford, which at the time was very little. He had given me a great deal for my money, including the name of an elderly woman on the seaside who was between boarders, and didn’t like the idea of living alone. She was, he said, willing to take me in for six weeks while her latest tenant finished up a university degree in Spanish, for God’s sakes.

I’d had the money for the train ride but little else. It seemed a miracle that I’d gotten out of London alive, and I blamed the depression and hysteria for that. Six weeks enforced vacation would do nothing for my pocket book, but no one wanted to hire an actor who couldn’t be counted upon to show up at rehearsals sober and sane, and I had enough to cover the rent for three more months if I wasn’t actually going to be living there.

“Hello there.”

“Hullo.”

“Well, don’t just stand there, come on. Don’t spare the clay dust, there’s plenty of it to go around. You can put your stuff in the trunk, there’s a good lad, and mind you keep anything you value on your lap, it’s a bumpy road we’ve got ahead of us.”

That was my first encounter with Maggie MacAlister, and it was typical of the many brief conversations we had over the next several days. She seemed to come out with these talkative moods every so often, but when she wasn’t in one of her moods you were lucky to get an enigmatic smile out of her. She spent a great deal of time either in the kitchen making sweets or in her studio making pots, pipes, and whistles. I estimated that my waistline was to grow three inches, one a fortnight.

Not that I minded. It was comforting, if not like home without the noise and the mud and the rain that had always kept a hard-water quality, then like a sort of home. And right now I was glad of any comfort I could take. My misgivings about this sort of a holiday, as it turned out, had been completely unfounded. And the doctor had probably been right after all; given half a chance if I’d taken the holiday in the city as I’d wanted, I would have been back at work in two weeks and then back where I started.

I’d never been out to the seaside before. The sound of the waves lulled me to sleep every night the way it was supposed to, the smell of Maggie’s cooking woke me every morning. Everything was sharper at the seaside, I noticed. The grass on the dunes, in particular. I learned very quickly not to walk barefoot out to the shore, even if I promptly lost my shoes in the sand when I got there.

It wasn’t much more than three days into my stay when I noticed a peculiar habit of my hostess’s. She had a computer, drove a car that couldn’t have seen more than three or four years, and refused to go without her internet bingo, but she left a plate of some kind of cakes and a saucer of honey, a glass of milk out by her front stoop every night. I let it go for another week before asking her why, and receiving a look that I might have given another person who asked me who Margaret Thatcher or the Beatles were.

“For the wee ones, of course,” she said, not in a disgusted way but quite perplexed as to how I could not have known that.

“The wee ones?”

“The fair ones? The fey folk.”

“I don’t…”

“The fairies.”

Well, I suppose there was no harm in believing in fairies, but through no fault of her own she had slid into the daft old woman category of my thinking. It seemed, at least, a harmless sort of pursuit for a cottage dwelling elderly lady who lived by the sea with only the occasional boarder for company. I thought I had even gotten into the spirit of it with her, filling the plates each night if it seemed her rheumatism was acting up and setting them out for her. I think she thought I was humoring her, but neither of us brought it up again after that. Or at least, we didn’t bring up the matter of the bread and milk. The Shining Ones, the Fey Folk, however, weren’t done with me yet.

It was another week before I’d hear anything about them. One long week of reading bits and pieces of her not inconsiderable library, and spending a great deal of time playing in the surf. There was little to do, and I was discovering that I liked being idle and lazy. It was a nice treat.

The sand was thick and solid for several feet up beyond the water’s edge, marked only by shades of black and lines where the tide washed in. It kept my footprints for several hours, along with the marks of the birds that ran along the edge. After a couple of days I started seeing hoof prints at what looked like a galloping pace, all along the water’s edge. It was another couple of days before I worked up the nerve to ask Maggie about it, and if she knew the owners, who might teach me to ride. It was something I’d always wanted to try.

“Is it that time of year again?” she asked. “Oh, I hadn’t realized.”

“Are they seasonal tenants?”

“You might call them that.”

“Do they come here on holiday?”

“Not exactly. They’re a reclusive sort, keep to themselves most of the time, but if you catch them at the right hour you might see them.”

That seemed to be an end to the conversation, although she managed it in such a way that I didn’t realize she hadn’t answered my questions until hours later. Well, it wasn’t that important; I had gone for over two decades without knowing how to ride, and one more summer wasn’t going to kill me.

Some time in the next week she invited me to try my hand at her studio, working clay with my hands since I viewed the potter’s wheel with the same baleful eye that the average man views a tax auditor. It was fun, if messy, and brought back childhood afternoons spent playing with things that were liable to get you a scolding and a scrub-down if you weren’t careful.

But we were adults, and it was permissible for adults to play with messy things, and we did with a will and a glorious amount of laughter.

One evening in the last fortnight of my stay I took a lump of wet clay down to the sea, despite knowing that the salt water and the sand would likely ruin it. The night air was beautiful, the sun was just finishing its evening performance, and I’d made a picnic out of apples, cheese, bread, and a piece of rhubarb pie that was better than anything named rhubarb had a right to be. I had thought to spread out a blanket and enjoy the sky, making what I hoped would become a round-pipe out of my mud.

After the sun dissolved into the water I leaned back on my blanket and prepared to drift off with clay on my chest, an act which consisted of resigning myself to messiness and removing my shirt, since it would be less easy to wash. I remember hearing some kind of a commotion, something that sounded like percussion and flute, but I thought at the time that it was my hostess engaging in some of her more esoteric music from cultural artists whose names I could never pronounce.

I was halfway to sleep when the first glimpse came at me from the water, and I wondered to myself who could be boating at this hour. My only excuse for thinking so was that it was a dark shape in the surf and a white shape on top of it. As it grew nearer, it solidified into a cavalry of horses without riders, all but one. On the horse in the lead rode a young woman, and my only defense was that from this distance her skin was as pale as her dress. My first thought was for Lady Godiva.

I opened my mouth to say something to her, and found that I couldn't think of a single thing that might be appropriate. What, after all, did one say to a young woman with a herd of horses and neither tack nor company in sight?

She looked at me with an expression of faint curiosity, and absolutely no fear. Either she had not been raised as the modern generation had, on stories of untoward people doing unspeakable things in remote locations, or she really didn't believe I would hurt her. Her horse took a step towards me, raising its head and snorting in what I decided was a threatening manner. Its hooves were the size of dinner plates, or so it seemed at the time.

It was the strangest thing, the two of us standing there, she looking at me and me looking mostly her horse. I had the feeling that if I made a wrong move towards her it would do its best to crush my head under those powerful forelegs, but also that she had complete control over her mount and her herd. After the tense sort of moment in which government stare at each other over the border lines, she laughed and pointed at my chest.

"What on earth did you been doing?" she asked.

I started to stammer, then remembered that I'd left my lump of clay on my chest when I'd been expecting a nice evening doze. It was still in my hand, and I held it out to her for her inspection.

"It's not very good," I said, which was a high overstatement of my abilities as a sculptor. "I was attempting to make one of those little round pipes."

"Ocarina," she said, putting her hands around mine. There was a moment in which I noted that her hands were unusually warm, and that I was distracted by the fact that the clay seems to be growing lighter. In fact, it was growing lighter, and I pulled my hand away before she could do anything else to it.

"What did you...?" I asked, half ready to yell and mostly ready to flee.

She pointed at my open hand, and it certainly looked like an ocarina sitting there. But I hadn't made it, nor had it been fired.

"Play me a song," she said, sliding off her horse and going to the contents of my picnic to poke about for something she liked. It seemed she shared the equine tastes, for she went straight for my apple. "Play me something."

"I..." I had no idea what to say. "I don't know how to play."

"It's easy," she said, and she was no tidier an eater than the horses. "Just put your lips to it and blow. Like a kiss." In case I had missed her meaning the first time.

I blushed, but this time I didn't dare disobey. And I did try, but the first sounds that came out more resembled some water-bird’s mating call than anything like music.

It was easier the second time, and the third. Whatever the sounds were, for I damn well didn’t have any tune in mind but what came out of the clay pipe, she seemed to like it. Her horses swarmed around both of us, trotting here and there fast enough to make me dizzy, as if the way she twirled in her surf-white skirt wasn’t bad enough. Yet I didn’t seem to mind.

In fact, it was becoming easier to coax something resembling a tune out of the damned thing, enough so that I felt a little like dancing, myself. She laughed, and took my hands, spinning me around in circles until I didn’t notice that the music had not ceased when I ceased to play.

I should say, in those few moments, or hour or two or however long I stayed there on the strand, it seemed perfectly reasonable that Miss Maggie should leave out her bread and milk for the fairies. I would have believed anything anyone had told me of the Fey Folk, the Wee Ones, for wasn’t I dancing with their queen or at least their princess and her magical sea-born steeds?

We danced in circles up and down on the sand, the horses leaving their half-moon prints and us in our bare feet leaving eddies of upchurned sand. I couldn’t have remembered a better evening than this if I’d lived a hundred years, even her laughter had music in it. I understood, too, why the fairy tales spoke of being drunk on Sidhe wine or entranced by Sidhe voices. I didn’t notice the sun coming up until it was at least nine o’clock high in the sky.

Maggie said not a word, only giving me a knowing look as I staggered back into the house and to my bed. I slept most of that day away and woke feeling very little worse for the wear, but it was dark when I next looked out the window.

“What …?” I started to ask, then realized I didn’t even know the question, and wasn’t sure of understanding the answers. “Will they be back tonight?”

She chuckled, the indulgent sort of noise a parent gives when a child asks if she should leave out cookies for Santa Claus. “No,” she said. “In fact, I don’t believe you’ll see her but once more.”

That seemed more than a little unfair to me, but I let it go. As beautiful as the night had been, I also remembered more than a few stories of people who had gotten trapped under fairy mounds, spending hundreds of years until they no longer recognized the places they’d come from.

And I did see her again, once, many upon many years later. Maggie’s cottage was gone, but as the sun fell back under the horizon I knew I had to be at that sea strand under the silver light of the moon again. She took my hand with that sweetest smile of hers and we rode underneath the waves together.