#tsr2017

I can’t really hear anything now. There are all these people telling us their condolences, hugging my mother with tears in their eyes. I wonder why they are crying. Why does it hurt so much, feeling other people’s grief? Though some of the grief must be their own. Aggy knew everyone on this island, and all but the most cold hearted loved her. She was mischief and kindness wrapped in a wild package, and everyone loved her. But no one really did, either. No one loved her like I did. Not even my mother. Only I could love her with my love because I am the only one who can love with my love, and she had all of it. She still has it, she will always have it, and death can not take that. I am angry at death for trying. I am vindictive because he has failed. He can not take my love from my sister. It goes with her forever.

Mother Oman says some words. The pyre blazes.  They keep adding more wood, as if it should burn forever. I think how beautiful that would be, if she could be a beacon on this hill, shining forever.

They are calling me forward. No, just one, Terrance, calling my name softly and holding out his hand. I want him to do it for a moment, because I feel so weak, but I know I am the only one. I would have no one else do it. It is my place.

I take a bowl of her ashes and I take the reins of her mare, Fiain, and lead her down to the water’s edge. Just a little ways away there is another pyre, and another figure and capall silhouetted against it, waiting to do the same thing.

Aggy’s friend’s horse got in a fight with another horse, and they both died trying to pull them apart. I don’t know which capaill ripped a hole in her chest. It doesn’t matter. The one got away, and the other is being led down after I am done. They will both go back to the sea.

It seems a shame, as I look at Fiain’s slender face, eyes so unsure, that she should go back to her watery home so soon. We never found out if she was fast. We never got to ride her at all, barely got to know her. She barely knew us. I run a finger down the slope of her nose, and whisper in her ear. She dances soundlessly on the sand. There are tears trickling down my face, and getting in my nose, and they are going to make my sneeze, which would not be good right now. I wipe them quickly away. I walk her carefully into the sea.

I hold her steady, singing into her ear. I hold her head with one hand and the bowl of ashes in the other. I know how this is done. I’ve done it once before. I didn’t want to ever do it again.

I slip her halter off her head and chant the words I know by heart from them repeating in my head as I dreamed again and again the memory of releasing my father’s capall into the sea. I scatter her ashes with hands that are bigger than they were then, but that shake just as much. I whisper her name three times as her capall arches its back and dives into the deep. I am standing in silence, like I am in a trance, holding the empty bowl in a limp hand, and watching the sea where that grey back just disappeared. Someone is whispering my name. I turn. It’s Elfleda, all the color drained from her face; or maybe it’s just the moonlight. I look up. It’s a full moon. Aggy said she would ride her grey mare forever under a full moon. I can see it in my head. I am crying again. Elfleda takes my hand and gently pulls me back up the hill.

It’s only as I stand, alone again, in front of the dying fire, and the crowd from the other pyre joins ours, and I realize that people have been flitting between the two, that I realize what song I had been singing in Fiain’s ear. Over and over and over again, just one line, over and over and over again:

We’re kings and queens, we’ll always be.

We’re kings and queens, we’ll always be.

I wrote it for someone else. But now, with flames stained in my eyes, I realize that it’s also Aggy and I. King and Queen forever. Racing under the full moon. Timeless gods in our bones, the infinite, stretched inside our skin, ages quick.

Mortal but infinite. Gone but still here. I get a chill, and look back out towards the water. No one sees them but me, a pack of silvery dogs, spread out like an arrow, like geese fly, running over the water. Chasing her ashes over the tide. Escorting her home. Home to the sea.

I look back to the crowd around the fire, now thinning. She must be here. Surely, even with everything, she would come. I don’t see her, but, Mona has always been good at hiding. Unless she has gone back to Hastoway. She usually stays for the races, but perhaps this year she has gone back home. I close my eyes. The heat from the low fire is hotter than when it was high. Someone is taking my hand. This time it is my mother. She is still crying. Neither of us say anything. We stand like that until they dose out the embers, and then, at last, we go home.

The King comes to me late that night. He smells of ash and grief. There is only one loss that could cause him to be this distraught. He was not the one to come get my grey sister, but even then, I knew what it meant. He taps my nose halfheartedly, and leans his face against my stall bars for awhile, and I blow on him gently. I wish I had words. Even then, would I know what to say to him? My heart is heavy in my chest. The Queen is gone. I will miss her. Not as much as he does, but I will miss her.

Eventually, he slumps down with his back against my stall door, and starts talking. He is debating with himself. He is asking me questions I can’t answer. He has to answer them for himself.

The races are tomorrow. He is wondering if he should ride. Would it dishonor his sister to ride tomorrow? Would it seem calloused? He tilts his head back to look up at me. I have my head tilted sideways and down, to watch him with one eye. We look at each other for a long moment. I think we understand each other like we never have.

Riding would not dishonor her. Winning would honor her more than anything.

He stands up, grabs the bars between us, and says, “For Aggy.” I keen her name back to him. Does he know that is the sound of my name for her? From the water in his eyes, I think he does.

I will run faster than I ever have before.

I don’t have an answer to that. I just know that Aggy would want me to ride. I know she would ride for me, if our places were switched.

Oh God, how I wish our places were switched.

Ceol is unusually focused. There is dark purpose in his liquid eyes. He snaps viciously whenever anyone gets too close, capaill or human, and he feels like an electric current when I touch him.

I’ve got to keep my skin away from his today, or my mother really will lose another child to the sea.

The time comes. I do not feel ready. I never feel ready. We line up as best as capaill can. There is a rushing in my ears. I barely hear the gun. I don’t even tell Ceol to take off, but he charges with the others. I focus on my breathing, make my eyes take in the riders around me, get my grip on the reins. If I don’t ride this race, Ceol will race it for me, and it is in his nature to run it into the sea, no matter how much he does or doesn’t know my need to win. I can’t trust him like that. I need to be in control.

I see a flash of green copper out of the corner of my eye; Elfeda is riding, all focus, all charge. She is several riders away from me, towards the edge. I am being pushed nearer and nearer to the sea. Ceol’s ears are flickering away from me, towards the waves. I snap the reins, and reach out to pull one of his ears towards me. I sing a stronger melody than the sea. I sing what he is to me. I sing our need to win. I sing of Aggy. I push him forwards, towards a gap, trying to get away from the sea.

It’s such a short race. All races are. It feels like forever stretched inside a moment. So many opportunities to die strung together in just a few moments. It feels like two days and half a second at the same time. There are so many things you have to see. You can’t see them all. You don’t have enough time. Everything feels slow, but it isn’t. You don’t have time. You can’t see and you can’t predict.

I did not see the black horse on my right snake out to grab my foot. Ceol did. He should have run faster, but he was already angry. Angry with my anger.

I could not predict that he would turn on my attacker, instead of running on. I could not see the tan capall breaking away from it’s rider, surging towards my unprotected back, grabbing onto my shirt, ripping off my paper number, unbalancing me in my saddle. I could not predict Ceol turning his hind feet towards the black horse for a kick, and now aiming his teeth at the passing tan horse instead. I could not see, as I suffered from the whiplash and struggled to regain my seat, the blue roan that came crashing into us as the tan one got away from Ceol’s snapping teeth, as a crowd of close riders come upon us, slowed as we are to nearly a halt.

I try to urge Ceol on, but I am slipping. I don’t have any grip at all, the others are rushing past me, Ceol tries to leap for the clear-

I am rolling into the water. What sounds like a thousand feet rush past me. Ceol rears in menace at a horse that tries to come towards me. I am struggling to me feet. Ceol is dancing in the water, eyes wild, sweating hard. By the time I calm him enough to remount, it will be too late. There is a stone in my stomach. I sit back down. Ceol is still dancing, watching me with wild eyes.

I whisper, “It’s alright.” Something escapes as I say it. Something inside of me tells it back to me. “It’s alright.”

His dancing slows a little. A strange song is coming out of my throat. It doesn't have words. I don’t know them yet. Maybe I never will. His ears are swiveled towards me, and not the sea. We are the only people in the world. Aggy is in the sea. She said… what was it she said to me? About the races. I’d asked if she’d won, in her capall dream. She’d said something about not thinking that that was the point.

I close my eyes. I can see her laughing, running, racing me home. I hear the small splashes of Ceol walking towards me. I put up my hand, and open my eyes. He stops just short of touching me. I’ve stopped singing. He’s shivering. He’s standing a few feet from rushing to his home, and there is hunger in his eyes. But he won’t eat me. He wants to go home, but he won’t eat me.

I did not need to race today. I should not have tried to race today. I am barely back in my own mind, my own body. I could have died. Maybe a part of me wanted to die. I am very lucky that I didn’t die. My job in this race is to look out for my capall, and instead, Ceol looked out for me.

I stand slowly. He’s backing away. There is a look in his eyes that I can not call him back from, not for all the singing in the world. Still I sing, and whisper through the singing, “Let me at least untie you, let me at least-”

But he is shying away from my hand. Deeper and deeper. Wild thing. I should move away, before he changes his mind. Today is the day he should eat me, of all days, when I have no fight left in me. We look into each other’s eyes. I think he’s sorry we didn’t win. I whisper again, “It’s ok.”

He turns. He leaps. He takes himself and everything he carries into the sea. I stand alone, with the roar of the crowd coming from a different world. The overwhelming smell of blood coming from a different world.

In this one, I am alone. So alone, that it feels as if no one will reach me ever again. My sister is in the sea. And so is my friend. And even though I let him go, all this grief is too big for my body.

Mom actually came to the race, to watch me not die. She is very glad to hold me in her arms, when it is all over. She doesn't really care that Ceol is gone. She goes on home while I stay to check on Elfleda. She made it through. She didn’t win, but she did well, and she is very happy. I don’t tell her that I lost Ceol. She didn’t see. I’ll tell her later. I can’t say the words right now.

I walk home by myself. My feet drag, and make the walk longer than it has ever been. The song that I’ve written and the this new song that I haven’t are getting tangled in my head.

There is someone standing in the doorway to my house. I think it is Mom, until I get closer. She is smaller. Her hair and skin are dark. There is all this water in my throat. There is water in her eyes. I walk into her arms, and she holds me while I cry.

When I am done, and as I prepare to heave my weight against the wheelbarrow to dump its contents outside, a cold breeze waifs past my legs, and my head jerks up to see a silvery shadow of a dog dash out of the barn. I freeze, waiting for more to rush past me, but feel nothing else. I look around, expecting to see her, expecting to see Mona. I have never seen the Madrai Uisce except around her. Ghost dogs from the sea. I don’t know how she summons them, or why, or why there are ghosts of dogs in the sea, but she says they used to come here, like the horses, but they could never be tamed, so they were killed. And now only their ghosts remain. I don’t know how she knows all that, but if anyone would know, it would be her. Still, I can’t find Madrai Uisce anywhere in the history books of Thisby. If they did roam here, it was long, long ago, before people wrote things down.

Wherever they are from though, they are real, and they are ghosts, and one of them was just here, even though she is not. Ceol and Fiain, as Aggy has decided to call her mare, are both on edge.

There is only one reason why they ever run apart from her. All the hair on the back of my neck is standing on end, and there is a wild drumbeat in my chest instead of my heart. There are running footsteps coming towards the barn. I don’t want to turn around, but the owner of the footsteps has started to shout my name.

“Jan! Jan!” It is one of the stable hands, and she catches hold of the doorway, panting. I can not describe the look on her face. I don’t think I really hear the words that come out of her mouth. She says, “Jan, your sister. It’s your sister, the beach-”

I am already running and I do not think I heard the words she said because she can not have said them, she can not have meant what I know she means, the ghost dog can not have come as a messenger for me, Aggy is fine Aggy is not dead Aggy is not- I am choking on wind and water in my throat. Why is there water in my throat?

I don’t remember getting to the beach. I remember leaving the barn and I remember tripping through the sand because my feet don’t want to lift and I can’t breathe and my heart is now beating outside of my body instead of inside my chest where it should be, and there is a crowd and she is just hurt, or she saved someone’s life, or her friend is dead or… she is just hurt Jesus in heaven she is just hurt let her just be hurt-

The crowd looks up and parts for me. There are two sheets on the ground covering two bodies. I can see her hand poking out. I’d know that hand anywhere. There is a strange noise coming out of my body and I fall to the sand beside her and grip her hand and am somehow expecting her to grip it back. She doesn’t grip back. Someone is pulling back the sheet for me to see. I don’t want to see. I need to see. That is not her face. Cold and white with eyes closed. That is not her chest, red and only half there. They put the sheet back. I think I am screaming. Maybe someone else is screaming. I think I am calling the King of Heaven awful names. Someone is trying to pull me away.

Aggy is dead. Aggy is dead. Aggy, Agatha Olivia, my heart, my sister, I would go with you anywhere, don’t leave me, don’t leave me, don’t leave me.