Aengus promises

For the first night and day and the second night, Aengus had believed it best to sleep in turns. They had the girl’s cloak and his own, and the two together made some semblance of a bed – for one.

But he had found it difficult to sleep with Lena sitting beside him, watching him, still as a cadaver; and he found it even more difficult to work on a means of escape when she lay there watching him, unable or unwilling to sleep, her little blonde head peering out from beneath the leaves she had piled over herself.

On the second and third days it had rained. Despite the roof over their heads that trapped them in the pit, there was no shelter for them anywhere. There were cracks between every beam, and even where the plants had grown over them, they were not proof against so much steady rain. After the first few hours there had been water dripping everywhere.

Lena had showed him how they could shelter beneath the leaves. She had spread out the cloaks one atop the other and piled the leaves over them, and she had showed him how to smooth the leaves down into layer upon flat layer so that the water would only run over them. Then they had crawled carefully between the buried cloaks like ferrets inching into a rat’s nest, and there they had stayed nearly all the time it had rained, two in a single bed.

The leaves had come to seem both a God-​​sent gift to him and the sign of their doom. He had realized by now what those leaves were trying to tell him. On the evening he had fallen, he had been riding down the path from Nothelm to his own manor, and that path ran through a beech wood.

These were maple leaves.

He was far from the path, and far – who knew how far? – from home. In seven days they had not heard so much as a distant shout from men. He was certain his friends were searching for him, but it seemed he had been taken so far away that he could not even hear them calling for him. And by now, he was beginning to believe, they would have stopped calling.

Now he and Lena slept together – chastely, of course – even when it did not rain. After a week in this pit, anything else would have led to insanity. He could stand to work for an hour or two while she slept, but she could not bear to be alone.

They had become great friends in those seven days. That too was necessary if two people were to keep their sanity living together in such squalid intimacy.

Aengus liked to talk, and Lena liked to listen, and as the days passed they gradually learned to understand one another. He would have liked to have rattled on in Gaelic, but she already knew a few words of English, and if he spoke that language to her, occasionally she would recognize some unexpected but very useful word.

But there were a few things that he had found difficult to explain. He had told her all about his little girls, but he had not quite known how to explain Maire to her – how did one pantomime ‘mother’? or ‘wife’? After a day or two he had not bothered to try.

In any case, he was finding that the sort of introductory narrative that men carried on when getting to know other men was not what applied here – neither in the miserable, desperate circumstances in which they found themselves, nor with such a creature as Lena. He was not even certain she understood the difference between “I am, I do” and “I was, I did.”

As for the future tense, she seemed to consider their fate sealed. They would always be in this pit because they were in this pit now. It was, as she said, dark-​​cold-​​die for them.

It broke his heart to see the way she greeted the occasional rays of sunlight that slipped through the cracks. She sat beneath them, her rapt face uplifted so the light would fall upon her cheeks, and when the sun moved too far for her to lean, she moved a foot or two to the side to follow it until it faded.

She was a creature of the light, even more than he, and he thought that just as she greeted those stray glimpses of sun with more joy than the rabbits she lured into the pit with her humming, so would she sooner die from lack of light than from lack of meat.

And when the sun grew too low to light their prison; when the light died – then his heart broke, for her. Then she turned her face to him, and then he tried to cheer her with words that she did not always understand.

Tonight he decided he would make her understand the word “promise.” After a week of hearing him repeat it after his many, many attempts to assure her that they would escape from this prison, she seemed to have understood that it was a sort of emphatic punctuation, for she had just shivered and announced, “It’s damned cold in here, I promise!”

“No, Lena!” he laughed. “You do not promise that, though it’s damned true.”

“It’s damned true in here!” she corrected herself.

“No, Lena. ‘I promise’ means ‘I shall make it so.’ It means ‘It is aye, aye.’”

“It is cold, cold in here! Aye, aye! I promise!”

“No, no… Ach, Lena!” he smiled.

“Ach, Aengus!”

“Promise is this: I make it. If you say, ‘It is cold,’ or ‘It will be cold, I promise,’ it means you make it so. It means Lena makes it cold,” he smiled and tapped her chin.

“Cold, damned cold!” she laughed. “Lena make it blow, blow cold wind, damned cold!” And she blew on his face to demonstrate.

“Silly girl!” He clapped his hand over her mouth. “Did you make all this cold?”

She giggled beneath his hand.

“Naughty girl! I shall take all the blankets, just for that.”

“No! It is blanket for you, for me, I promise! I make it blanket for me, for you in all dis cold!”

“Oh, aye?”

“In all dis cold I make,” she added softly to herself and giggled.

Aengus put an arm around her and pulled her closer – because she was cold. “I will share the blankets with you,” he said. “I promise. Do you see?”

“I see, it is share blankets, you promise. You make it share.”

“And what else do I promise? I promise we will get out of here, Lena. We will go home. I promise.”

He was gradually carving handholds and footholds into one of the walls by breaking away bits of the rough stone that lined it. It was a miserable existence meanwhile, but as long as she could summon rabbits to them, they would have enough to eat, even if the meat was usually raw. As long as it rained on occasion, they would have enough to drink from the puddles that formed in the low places she had lined with leaves. And so long as they could eat, drink, and sleep – so long as they were together and didn’t go mad – he could work, and soon they would be free. Freedom was directly over their heads.

“You make it go home?” she asked wistfully.

“For you and me,” he said. “I make it go up, up. I make it go into the light and sun, for you and me. I promise.”

“For dis elf it is dark-​​die here,” she said, pointing with one of her long fingers at the corner where the skeleton lay, covered now with litter so that Aengus would not have to look at it.

“This elf did not have me, and this elf did not have you. This elf was alone. But you have me, and I have you. We will go up, up. I promise.”

“It is promise for you,” she whimpered, and she winced as a tear slipped out of each of her eyes. He always scolded her when she cried, and though he always tried to outdo himself in gentleness when he did, she always seemed ashamed.

“It is promise for you and me,” he said.

“It is promise for you, dark-​​die here for me. It is cold, cold, damned cold. It is dark, dark, damned dark…”

“Whisht!” He smoothed her hair back from her face as he did with his little girls when they cried, and he brushed her tears back into her hair. “It is no tears for you, Lena-​​elf. Díní kéaldrú dalûm.”

“You see, I make all dis cold wind, I make all dis cold rain, I promise.”

She was trying to make a joke. She was trying to smile, and at the same time she was trying to pucker her lips to blow on his face again, and at the same time her mouth was trembling with despair. Her face seemed to quiver between several expressions like a reflection in a wind-​​rippled pond.

Aengus thought her at once the most beautiful, the most touching, the most tragic thing he had ever seen. This time he stopped her cold, cold wind by kissing her mouth.

For an hour or two, he would forget the cold, the damp, the filth, and the misery. He had spent so much time with Lena that he was beginning to think like her and her people. They would always be in this pit, because they were there now. They would always be in this bed of leaves, because they were there now. They would always be together, because they were together now.