Uan the Fey

I

OF all the builders in Hy Brasil, the lost Atlantic isle, Uan Shane was the most promising. For a thousand years the Shanes had made firm and solid the fanciful towers and cheerful roofs which that country was ever adding to its magic sky-line. Each Shane had in turn been a wielder of great knowledge and power among all tools and materials, and, among men, a formidable voice proceeding from a menacing beard. They knew all stones and woods and irons. They knew the pine for girders and for the backs of lutes. But if any man had said that one pine was for strength and the other for sweetness, they would have emitted a great voice at him. They loved materials as some do women — grossly and passionately. Their thumbs, passing over a panel or forging, could tell them more than most men’s whole minds. With a hatred as bitter as a lover’s they hated everything but t he best.

Uan’s own father, on finding that a gargoyle on a hammer beam in the Hall of Gryphons had been mortised on, not carved in place, threw the woodworker into the sea, with his carving after him, and tore off the bronze roof with his own hands, to put in another. On the day the new beam swung into place Uan himself was born, and that night the elder Shane gruffed at him through his beard and ran his thumb over the feebly expostulating body.

‘He’s soft,’ said the Shane and scowled.

‘Babies are soft,’ said the mother.

‘Soft in the face; I call him “Uan.”’

‘A lamb — that’s pretty.’

‘And what’s a lamb but a young sheep?’

The great bushy man saw little of the boy as he grew up. The Shane was always busy. He built a church for the Powerful Gods and a church for the Little Gods, and was to build one for the Friendless God. But his mind suddenly failed him, and he could not understand the requirements of this project. At length they found him bowed forward among the plans on which he had written laboriously, just before he died, the one word, ‘absurd,’ and then, evidently, with a firm final gesture, had crossed it out.

The boy had by this time become a man and a skillful builder, able to take his father’s place. In the dimmer recesses of his mind lay the stores of old experience of the bygone Shanes and in the foreground his own quick brain wove to and fro — a brain keener than that of any Shane before. Instead of their incoherent fury for work, a flame of joy in making things burned in his heart, its smoke a curling wisp of quizzical fancy, its ashes God knows what lost visions of ease and comfort. This was to be a builder before whose dreams-come-true the works of the bearded Shanes would be lifeless things, without form and void.

But here came the first premonition of failure. Uan had no beard and none to come. Nor had he the omnipotent invective and fierce sudden judgment that went with it. The resounding curses of a Shane had smothered the sound of hammers on every building for a thousand years, and for a thousand years workmen had scuttled before them, abject but grinning, terror clutching at their livers, but in their hearts pride in being the object of so majestic and unspeakable a blast. The Shane anathema, in which the profane and sacred were fantastically mingled, was regarded as an accolade, and men believed that no worker could pretend to craftsmanship until his shoulders had shrunk beneath the corroding fulmination of a Shane.

Uan had not been in his father’s place a day, before it was felt, throughout Hy Brasil that the thousand years of roaring Shanes had ended. Some indulgently pointed out his youth, and hopefully prophesied that trenchant words would come to him with time. But the wise, who were numerous there as never elsewhere or since, all knew that change was impossible. Toward himself Uan was inexorable, but he looked on others with a whimsical kindliness born of too great understanding.

The workmen quickly saw this and acted as workmen do, also as do shipchandlers, scullions, acolytes, bargemen, and all other persons. The most of them eased off and set themselves to discover, by nicely calculated progressive experiments, the tenuous minimum of labor which would still hold their job. The others felt stirring within them the magical pulse of fellowship between man and man, and knew for the first time what it was to put their hearts in their work.

In consequence, Uan’s buildings had both a beauty and a sloven flimsiness never seen before. Towers soared, singing like larks, from battlements of illmatched, half-dressed stone. Bronze carillons, carved with warriors and dragons and veined with threads of silver, swung softly throbbing chimes from crazy campaniles which creaked discordantly at every note. And still Uan built on, childishly happy in his own toil, and racked with futile pity for even the petty failings of others; until, at length, he met the day which changed his life.

II

He was just completing the common room of the Elder Druids. The low vaulted ceiling was checkered with the reflection of the black-and-white slate floor. High in the wall, broad flat windows ran around the room, and above them a carved band of oak leaves and mistletoe, and a magical inscription in the ogham character, which looked like the markings on some weird and mighty yardstick, measuring its own dark words and the whole unknown.

From below the windows, down to the floor stretched fresh, white plaster waiting to be painted the green of oak leaves. Nothing else remained to be done, and as Uan stood there, the master painter, slow and soothing in movement and yellow with the sickness of his calling, glided up and spoke softly of the amount of paint they would need.

Uan turned to the wall and began putting down the figures on its clean stretch — a handy place where they would soon be painted out. The soft pencil made velvet lines on the smooth surface. The figures flowed easily; more easily and gracefully than he had ever been able to form them before. It was fascinating. He made his calculation, then kept on. Somewhere behind him the voice of the master painter, dimly heard, droned with a pleasant, numbing intonation. Above, the inscrutable ogham characters, half-seen, marched processionally around the mysterious hall.

The figures flowed from his hand and look shape. He saw that they could be turned into swans and gnomes and leprechauns. Every figure could be made into something beautiful and strange. He went on to draw more; then to join them all together with oak leaves and acorns fancifully entwined. A pattern wove itself in his mind and started to grow upon the wall. In it were all the beauties and marvels and fears of the Druids and of the Old Days, peeping alluringly or menacingly out of the foliage, always half-hidden by the leaves, as they had been for centuries in the great forest itself.

The master painter’s voice had long since faded away. Once Uan had a dim, troubled sense of some obscure disturbance in his far-off forgotten life. He never saw the little knot of workmen, who had gathered and stood, with shaking head and finger along nose, divided between fear and morbid pleasure at the fate that had made the master builder mad.

Night was coming on, but Uan only called for a light, and the workmen, with the respect of simple men for the insane, brought him rush torches and, making a sign to guard themselves from evil, left him. The rushlight flickered, luminous tides surged and ebbed on the walls. A homed owl peered through the casement, and tapped with his little hooked beak on the pane. Uan, not looking up, put owls and curling sacrificial fires in the ever-growing leafscreen. He became drowsy, the torch sputtered in the sconce and went out, with a pulsing afterglow like the deathstruggle of a living thing. Uan stumbled blindly home.

For nine days he was bound by the spell of those unfinished walls. He drew, then painted, till every part of them was covered. The room glowed with the crude, strange loveliness of his unskillful toil. As the last white patch of plaster vanished, the madness flowed out of him. He stood back weak and dazed. A moment before he had been slaving in the grasp of inexorable frenzy. Now he felt only that he had been left shaken and wrung out by a senseless force. With every second his experience seemed more meaningless. Looking dumbly at the curiously colored walls, he saw how crude they were. He felt that he had been a fool.

He thought of all the bygone Shanes lying in a row inside the great stone ring at Kroona — grim and able men, more able, doubtless, now than before; perhaps grimmer, too. His heart turned cold and stagnant as he pictured how pallid a figure he would appear, among that, gathering of old giants, when called upon to stand in the dark ring and render his account.

He must restore the ancient tradition of the Shanes. He called his foremen together, and with a manner most crisp and practical, discussed their next undertaking: a bathing-pool for pigeons in the castle garden. He asked why the plans were not ready, and, with more asperity than he had ever shown before, why, on the occasion of his taking a few days for his own diversion, all his force should stop work.

The foremen were overjoyed at his improvement. They busied themselves with intricate drawings in charcoal on boards of white pine, and details painted in color on the skins of goats. Work started; bricks of mottled browns and rough-dressed drums of mulatto stone were hauled to the ground by dun oxen; a wall rose against a terrace, and columns were set in front of it in a flat arc. They were roofed with shingles of dark-green glass, which grew smaller as they rose to the summit to mingle with the grass of the terrace, and threw a deepening emerald glow on the portico beneath.

Here stood the basin, or pool, itself. It had been turned in flowing lines on a gigantic potter’s wheel and fired the color of the walrus tooth. Now in the green light its creamy curves looked like the waves of a shallow Northern sea. The wall behind was covered with coarse plaster. A plumber was making ready to let the water into the pool, and on the grass outside, as if they knew, the pigeons had gathered, preening and sidling and bubbling among themselves. There were pigeons with necks of purple and lavender, of jasper and opal; pigeons violet, bronze, silver; pigeons the color of ash trees and of autumnal oaks.

Uan stood in the portico watching the man link up the last length of hammered pipe with the great basin. Behind him suddenly he heard the sound of wings, like the water-whistles in the cave of witches on Mount Niknikor. Three pigeons with burnished necks flew in under the roof, their speeding grace silhouetted against the light, tan of the wall behind. They were gone, but their image seemed to linger faintly on the smooth expanse — to linger and to move. Uan’s hand, holding a broad builder’s pencil, stretched forward toward the wall and began sweeping in sharp curves like pigeonwings. He felt himself drawn forward with the strength of a dream; he heard himself murmur, ‘ If only I could make them move!’ All other things faded away before a great longing to fill that wall with the glory of flying birds.

The laborer, tinkering away, oblivious, had remarked, ‘Now this white lead — it’s not what it was in the days of Shamus Shane, God save his teeth!’ Receiving no answer, he had looked up to see the changed man working feverishly at the wall. The plumber, who kept beagles at home, said afterward that Uan looked like a hound running mute on a cold scent. He said that he had dropped the length of pipe in his hand and run away, fearing that he might hear the young Shane give tongue and thus himself become bewitched.

But it was Uan who was again enchanted; this time with the soaring beauty of flight. Working more freely than before, he had by nightfall covered the wall with countless pigeons winging across the sky. He came down each day and painted them every color that pigeons might be, and two colors that they should be and are not. Having finished, he stood back among the ring of pigeons on the grass and gazed at his work. It was marred by many faults, but in spite of all, there across the wall stretched a flock of pigeons, flying fast and strong. He saw that, they did move. As he looked, the birds beside him rose and tried to join them; and he knew that his work was good.

After that there was no longer much hope for him. He began one or two more buildings, but each time the white walls drew him, and he forgot all else until he had covered them with wonderful half-mad conceits. More than half-mad the workmen thought him, and soon it was known throughout. Hy Brasil that the young Shane, and with him the great tradition, had fallen into the clutches of some shameful demon. His men left him, half in contempt and half in fear and hatred. He got no more jobs, only sidelong glances of suspicion or, among the better class, of smug pity.

Sometimes he would wander out into the countryside and stay for a little while at the croft of a shepherd or goosetender, or in the little houses of the foresters and peat, cutters. And when he could persuade them to let him, he would paint a queer design over the mantelpiece or door lintel.

As time went on, the little money he had saved as a promising young man was spent and he went into the country more than ever. It is true that in town the keepers of two low taverns asteemed his art and frequently fed him for decorating their walls. But this was because it furnished entertainment for their patrons to see him working. As soon as the picture was finished, he was asked to paint it out and do something else. So he used to practise there until some strong idea would come to him, and then he would be off to the uplands, in search of a friendly cottage and a mellow wall.

In the uplands, the men’s faces are ruddy and wrinkled like frosted persimmons; their hair is black and curly, and their eyes are black and merry. For long they welcomed the mad stranger and gladly let him paint as he wished. He did processions of geese and of swine, and bare birch trees against a cold, intense winter sky, the backs of women churning, and the hands of poachers splicing night-lines, and many other matters besides.

They used to gather to watch him work, nudging each other and sidling as the pigeons had, murmuring in simple delight as their slow minds recognized a familiar scene. Always they held him in a little awe, as being not wholly human; a wizard, perhaps; harmless and kindly, but a wizard.

As time went on, however, dark whispers began to be heard of his wizardry. Not many at first, only now and then a low word from the comer of a twisted mouth, with the eyes fixed on Uan. But little by little they grew, until at last it came to be known that certain of these pictures had been seen to move — the square backs rising and falling before the churn, the geese advancing majestically. Above all, a gleaming mass of blue adders on a rock, which he had painted for the headman at Kroona, were said to weave sinuously in and out among themselves at some seasons of the moon. And then, one morning, the headman, himself, was found dead among the embers, his lips blue and on his wrist, a little blue scar, the death-mark of the adder.

III

The countryside rose against Uan and hunted him with mattocks and brush hooks; he strapped his paintbox on his back and fled away over the frozen bogs.

It was night when he reached the City, the night before the Feast of Mistletoe. Two wolves that had followed him turned back at the first house. Candles at every window gilded the snow, and muffled groups with links hurried past, their faces dark as Sikhs in the death-still cold.

The streets seemed stark and rigid in the winter night as he passed by. But ahead he saw a glow against the sky, and, coming to the open place before the Druid’s Great Temple, he met a procession with candles, marching in. He followed into a long high hall. The people knelt close together all down its length. The flames of their tapers flickered and blended in an aureole over the humble stooped throng. Through the soft undulating light, the gray stone columns rose like oaks and spread branches in the gloom above. At the temple’s end, a Druid in a white goat’shair robe was intoning a rune and weaving a subtle pattern in the air with a long, thin knife. Before him lay a small lamb, patient and confused. Uan turned his head aside. At length the people’s hoarse, swelling chant told him that all was over. Still singing, they filed out, leaving him alone. Their processional sounded ever fainter, yet ever higher and fiercer, till it died away.

He stole forward to the raised dais at the end, where a great bronze basket of coals glowed and the odor of burned flesh dulled the keen edge of the winter air. He knelt beside the embers, shuddering as the warmth reached his bones. Soon he began to relax in the grateful heat. He was a little tired, but his body seemed light, immaterial, and he felt his heart expand and stretch itself in its new liberty. Lighter and lighter he became, until at length he was suspended in nothingness, warmed without and within, and thinking unhindered and flowingly of many mysterious things. He thought of the djins and Little Men of the bogs; of hares in the snow, with the wind eddies blowing their fur the wrong way and fear always lurking in their placid eyes; of woodchoppers swinging their waists with sturdy grace; of the old gray priest with the knife; of the lamb’s soft helplessness. All the things in wood and cottage that had stirred him came back to him again and filled him with the knowledge of beauty, its thousand shapes — some grotesque or terrible — flowing together to form the curling wave of life.

Contentedly he began repeating to himself the runic prayers he had learned as a little boy — half-prayers, halfcharms to keep bees from swarming or to make butter come or such small affairs. Thus he stumbled along with great things in his heart and dull jumbled words on his lips; then knelt at last in peace. A bat, roused from winter’s sleep, wheeling his lop-winged, furtive flight, among the shadowy, carved, stone branches, came down so close that his shadow, gigantic and unearthly, flapped on the high blank wall behind. When it was gone, Uan still kept looking at the wall. Near the ground the buff of the sandstone was bright as a sunset haze; higher it merged into dull gold, then into bronze and deeper and deeper velvet browns, till lost in the unplumbed blackness of the roof.

The fire, glowing on the wall and in his body, drew them together. For the moment he had insight into the beauty of life. He was in the temple where men, who neither understood this beauty nor the gods who gave it, made their vain sacrifices. He would paint there an offering from his spirit, which would be understood by the gods and, perhaps, by men. He moved over to the wall and began making small sketches in one comer, humming a marching song, happy. His idea took shape. He dragged over two benches, whose unwilling groans reechoed down the great nave, and standing on them commenced work high up on the wall. He was in no dreamy trance now, but cheery and vigorous, elated with the knowledge that he was doing what he had been born to do. He worked steadily as the night hours passed, jumping down only to stir the coals for a better light or to warm his hands.

Toward morning the picture had taken shape. A man of the uplands, in a shepherd’s cloak, was kneeling by a peat fire in a woodland clearing. His square, blunt hands held in his lap a brown, earthen bowl of milk. Out of it, a little lamb, with feet oddly planted, was drinking eagerly, its muzzle buried up to the gentle, witless eyes. The man was sturdy and rugged; his position had the awkward grace of the upland people. His face, brown and ruddy, was so kindly that many would have thought him a little mad. He was looking at something in the distance and laughing in a shy, friendly way. It was a wolf on the edge of the clearing, gazing back at hint with the most intense interest. His gray pointed ears were cocked, his brush waved recognition, and his tongue peeped out in a doglike grin. But in his longing eyes gleamed also the iron wilderness pride, which would not let him come.

The first streaks of a dawn as cold and yellow as the cat’s eye slanted high upon the wall where Uan painted. They dropped down and mingled with the brazier’s glow, and from the union sprang a puny, bastard light, shedding drab unreality on the artist and his work.

With the day came three men, laborers with their tools, who had stopped in to pray. They stared, huddled in a group, nodding their heads, jerking furtive thumbs. One spoke under cover of his hand, and all three shuffled out. Uan had not seen them. He was eagerly putting on the last little touches, hurrying before the fear that dawn’s bitter death-cold would chill him before he had done. The singing tide of happiness was ebbing and might not flood again. He prayed for a better light, and worked.

Brighter and brighter grew the great brown wall. The first thin warmth of the early rays struck gratefully upon his upraised arm. With a last rush he put in the finishing strokes; then he dropped down on the bench, and weary peace came over him. Always before, he had stepped back to look at his paintings. This time he had given all that he had, and for the rest he was beyond caring. He sat there gently rocking, tired to the marrow of his bones, but quietly radiant with the contentment of the gods. He did not turn to look at the picture, but it seemed to him that, light from it, striking his drooping shoulders, warmed him more deeply than ever the dawn could do.

With a blare of color the sun’s own eye at last blazed down the nave. He swung around to greet it. As he did so the oak doors at the far end gave slowly back and a struggling crowd pushed in. In front were the three laborers and the ancient Druid. Uan’s heart was lifted up, his face shone in the last passionate dying glow of his vision. Springing up, he raised his long brush, as if it were a sword, in the victor’s salute.

Then he understood. Dropping his hand, he waited with a sad smile.

The crowd had checked at first sight, of him. The Druid stood aside. With a rising growl, they started down the hall, running hard and close together; their soft shod feet, pounding the stones with quick, blunt thumps, sounded the long roll of a muffled drum. They hit the benches where he stood like a flying wedge. There was a crack of timbers and Uan, gripping his brush, was plunged in a sea of clutching hands. He was swallowed at once, but the place was marked by a ring of kneeling figures. They crouched on him, their necks stooped like vultures, leaning their weight forward on their rigid arms till their buzzard shoulders peaked higher than their ears.

‘The swine!’

‘Daubing the temple!’

‘Insulting God!’

Then one: ‘Who has a knife?’

‘No, not in here.’

But. all looked at the Druid. The color flowed from his face and he licked his dry lips. Then he held out the knife. Over their heads it passed from hand to hand till it reached the crouching circle. It rose and fell.

‘Stand back, fools,’ said a voice; ‘have you never seen blood before?’

They fell back, and a second time all looked at the Druid. He raised his arm stiffly and commenced to beat time, chanting on a low note the sacrificial chant. They joined in and formed a column, swaying in rhythm, moving their goatskin sandals with a sifting sound. The chant, rose a note; they heaved the body on their shoulders. Again it rose; they moved forward with their burden out through the door. Their song rang and quivered for a moment, like a bowstring in the bright morning air, and then was drowned in the hoarse, full-throated wolf-scream of the city mob.