She looked up absently from her knitting, then saw what I was holding and took it in both hands. She glanced at me severely over her spectacles.
"Where did ye find this, child?"
"In the attic, in a box."
"Och, go on, ye didn't. I've looked there high and low."
"In a wood box behind the trunks."
"Aye?"
I nodded.
She shook her head and laughed. "Never mind, ye've keen eyes for a wee lass. Ye want me to read it ye, then?"
I nodded again.
She sat me on her lap, and I remember still the smell of her hair. "I don't know who wrote this," she said, "but I'll read it ye same as Mother did me."
I later found she left a few things out, and expanded perhaps on some others. I didn't see the document again for 20 years. She died while I was in college, and I looked through her things without success. No one else in the family had ever heard of it. "Sounds peculiar," said my dad. "Mum probably made it up. She could be like that, you know."
My fourth year in graduate school, while I was studying Celtic religion quite seriously, I started meditating. Witchcraft, said my friends, but it wasn't, exactly. Not Wicca, anyway. I found Bríde rather interesting, though. It was she I kept meeting in my meditations.
I had a very bad breakup with Peter, whom I'd been seeing for years and thought to marry. I admit, it made me sad enough to think of dying. In the middle of all that, one evening, I opened the drawer of the little dressing table beside my bed, that I'd inherited from my grandmother, and heard for the umpteenth time the little scratching sound it made. For some reason, I reached to the very back of the drawer, and felt shelf paper wadded up back there. I pulled it out and it wasn't shelf paper at all, but the parchment from my childhood.
It was written in Gaelic, which I could read a bit by then. I worked most of that night to make a rough translation. The next day something came up at school, I can't remember what, and when I got back to the parchment again a few days later, I couldn't lay hands on it. I knew I'd put it somewhere safe, but I turned the whole apartment upside down without remembering where.
I still have the translation, which follows, tidied up a bit, with some extrapolations where I couldn't make out the original.
--
This is my true testimony, given for my daughter in secret that even should I burn as they plan, she and her daughters after her will not forget the grey lady's words. Men fear us that we read and write, for our knowledge and our [ ? ], but of all things these can be the hardest to take from us.
In the winter of my seventeenth year there came to our glen a son of the English lord, with servants and soldiers. We were hungry even then. Not liking the little food we had, he went into the hills to hunt, taking with him a handful of his men. Of those who rode out, only his steward returned that night, and he pale as a shadow on the snow.
The steward told of coming to a stone cottage high on Beinn Aigsaoghal, where the lord's son fancied a pretty lass tending goats on the hillside. An old man, the only other soul in that lonely place, told him she was spoken for. The lord's son declared he would have her in his bed nonetheless. The man said laughing that rank carries little weight in the high lands, for which insolence the lord's son struck him down.
But when the lord's son rode to take the girl, the steward saw goats rise up as men at arms in disguise. Though his own soldiers joined the lord's son, all were slain in the span of a bird's song. The steward fled, but a terrible pursuit down the flanks of the hills scared the wits out of him.
On the next day the remaining soldiers, near 40 men, left the steward pale abed and rode to avenge this deed. Not one returned.
Though I heard of these events, I did not feel their effect on me until a spring morning in the following year. I had given slops to the pig and was bringing the bowl back to our cottage when I saw the soldiers in the road and around our gate. My father, hat in hand, was speaking with them while my mother and sister waited within. The captain drew his sword in anger.
My cry of fear prevented bloodshed, for it happened they sought a comely girl. When they seized me, I spoke boldly to my father, bidding him go inside and trust my protection to others. He went quick enough, but cursed me nonetheless, knowing of the secret sweetheart in whom I was placing faith.
They bound my hands together and led me by a rope behind the officer's horse. There were 500 soldiers on the road, more than I had ever seen before. A tall, pale man on a fine horse led them; he was the steward of the lord's son who had died.
All day, we climbed into the hills. The soldiers tormented me at the start. "Is she virgin?" they demanded of each other. They told one boy to find out. He was young and not yet hardened, but in all of them was that desperation that deafens men to their hearts' voices.
When the boy reached between my thighs and sought with his hand to open me, I saw in his eyes a fear and blindness that made me afraid. I cried out my lover's name, and the sound of my voice echoed off the cliffs like thunder answering from afar. The mad look left the boy's eyes, and though the soldiers cursed me, they let me be.
Near sunset, we came to the ruins of a blackhouse such as is common in our lands. The roof was gone, and the grass grew from the walls in a way that said plainly the place had been vacant many seasons.
The pale man looked around with narrowed eyes. "Bring the girl," he said, "This is the place." When they brought me before him he shouted into the hills, "Look you, foul wights! Behold a mortal girl you shall not aid! These soldiers shall use her as they will as long as she has breath, and her empty husk after she is lifeless, and you shall not stop them!" Then, quietly, the captain told the men to strip off my clothes and one man after another should force me while the whole troop prepared to fight.
Then they tore my clothes and held me naked on the ground, and I made ready to die, for even my lover could never stand against so many, I thought.
It was then that the glaistig came naked down from the hill. Her skin was the color of clouds at dusk, grey as a beech tree, and she was older than any there, yet she was tall as the captain, straight-backed, and none could look her long in the eye.
She came first to the pale man and in an instant he tried flee, crossing himself, but his great horse would not move. He leapt off, and ran as fleet as a deer, not heeding where he went. I heard that the crows ate his body at the foot of the high cliffs.
Next the lady came to the captain of the soldiers, who drew his sword. She held out her hand, and unwillingly he gave it to her. She held it by the blade, and her face showed a terrible pain.
"Colonel Lambert," she spoke clearly in the English tongue in a voice that rose and fell like a breeze over the grass. "It is said that my people fear cold iron, but this is only half true, for iron comes pure from the earth's heart. What we shrink from is the print of mortal anguish it holds so clearly, to which your people are blind." She held him with her eyes. "I give you back your sword," she said, and he took it from her in some confusion.
"For what you would willingly have done to the lady of my son's heart," she went on, "and for what you have done willingly to others of your own, I give you and your men here present the gift to read your iron now, with threefold return."
With these words, they were thrown into a living hell much like the one the pastor likes to preach. The shrieks and screams of 500 men in mortal torment from the memories carried in their blades and halberds were unbearable to hear, and in spite of what I had been about to endure of them, my heart was moved to pity.
I stood unclothed before her, but such was her power that I was not ashamed. "Spare them, lady," I said in our tongue, "or kill them quickly. They are like chained dogs, vicious from the beatings they have endured, but not deserving further cruelty."
Her eyes were deep and her skin the color of death. "I came here for my son's heart," she told me. "Your request has a price." In her eyes I found nothing I feared. "You think of the fickleness of mortal men, who have forsaken you for their mortal wives. Yet a mortal woman may be more constant, growing old with a changeless lover too wise to grant her issue. And so we suffer on both sides. You gave your heart to bear him and I mine to love him. I have paid my price, lady."
She understood me, but shook her head. "Nay, you are mistaken on all counts, child. And there is yet a price between us that you do not know, for he will give you a child and become grey in the half-world in his turn. Would you squander that on mercy for these fools?"
I looked around at the great crowd, rolling like poisoned cattle in the grass, bellowing and mewling. "I would waste nothing," I said, "But these men are my kind."
"Then in payment of your mercy, you shall suffer at the hands of such."
"So be it," I said with the rashness of youth, which I now in large measure regret.
The grey lady turned and a gentle wind sprang up, dispersing the soldiers with their armor and horses like mist over the edges of the hill. I later learned they were drowned before reaching us in a great storm at sea, set back by her magick like hands on a clock tower.
With her back to me, the grey lady said, "Tell your daughter, and her daughter's daughter, to remember what we give, at what cost. Your people, who so bewitched us once, forget too easily. War and wealth, the idle dreams of your mortality, now distract you from our gifts, leaving you heedless of the bees in the heather and the dew that glistens on a morning flower. We are ever fewer. Do not forget, for our children are soon all we shall leave on this side of the veil."
I gave my word to her, that I hope you shall keep. Oh my daughters, however hard it may become in the waking world to recall our songs and dances under the bright moon, do not discount what we have learned, nor less forget what we only glimpse.
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