Pharais; and, The Mountain Lovers

by William Sharp

There was no one there to overhear his muttered words. Perhaps the wood-doves that watched him pass, listened unheedingly to his angry exclamations—half sobs, half vague outcries against the bitterness of his fate that he, Nial the Soulless, was shunned by all human beings, or by all save the child Oona, and treated as though he were a wild thing of the woods—and that even the creatures of the hillsides and the forest-glades knew him, while not of their own fellowship, to be no human.

These thoughts always tortured him. His unspeakably lonely and remote life, indeed, was one long martyrdom. Rightly or wrongly, he, and others, had ever believed he was a changeling, a soulless man, perhaps the offspring of demon parentage. Had he been blessed with the mind-dark he might have gone through his span of life as blithely as any wildwood creature. Two things only, besides his human form, differentiated him from the birds and the beasts he loved so well, though from their world, too, an involuntary exile for ever: one, the faculty of speech: the other, the possession of a reasoning, if a restricted and perverted mind.

How innumerably often he had brooded over the fantastic, and to him part-maddening, part-terrifying, and wholly obsessive legend of his birth!

All in the region of Iolair knew his story: how he had been found when a little child, in the woods, and had been taken care of by Adam Morrison, the minister: how when yet a boy, a cripple, and a trial to his foster-father and all who knew him, he had disappeared with vagrant gypsies, and had not been heard of for fifteen years, till one autumn he was seen among the pines in the forest of Iolair. He had been in the neighbourhood for weeks, though none knew of it. During that ensuing winter he was fed and sheltered by Torcall Cameron, or by Murdo the shepherd, or by Alan Gilchrist on Tornideon, the mountain on the north side of Strath Iolair. For the rest, he lived no man knew how, and slept no man knew where. He was an outcast and homeless: but if he lost much, much also he gained. He knew the living world as few could even approximately know it: sight, hearing, smell, each sense was intensified in him. He saw and heard and was aware of much that to others was non-existent or dubiously obscure.

But the real mystery of his life, to himself as well as to his human neighbours, who half-disowned him, was in the reputed fact that he was the child of the Cailliach.

A year before Mr. Adam Morrison had found the puny wailing child close to the tarn in the heart of the forest, a man who lived high on Sliabh-Geal, the mountain that leaned southward from the shoulder of Iolair, had fallen under the spell of the Cailliach, the beansìth or demon-woman. No one knew much about him. He was a shepherd, but none had heard whence he came or of what folk. He asked none to cross his airidh. But the rumour was everywhere held that Black Duncan—all the name he was ever known by—was a changeling. The minister was wont to disavow this, but added that Duncan certainly lived under a curse, though the nature or source of the malediction was beyond the ken of all save the unfortunate man himself, if indeed even he knew of it.

One winter the Cailliach was seen of several women. Her tall figure, clad in a yellow robe, as she drove her herd of deer to the waterside, was unmistakable. She was seen again and again. The following summer, as Torcall Cameron was crossing the Gual, the ridge betwixt Iolair and Sliabh-Geal, he heard a strange voice singing through the gloaming. Looking about him, he discerned a woman sitting among the bracken, and milking a hind, the while she sang a song that brought a mist about his eyes, and made his heart throb. By her exceeding stature, and the yellow plaid about her, as well as by the unknown words that were wedded to that wild song, he knew her to be the Cailliach. He fled, lest she should turn and ban him. A little later he saw the beansìth again. It was a long way off, but he recognised her: and even while he watched, she turned herself into the guise of a grey deer, and went leaping toward the high remote sheiling where Black Duncan lived. That autumn Duncan was more than once heard laughing and talking in shadowy places, and in the forest. On the first day of the equinox his body was found in the tarn. The face had an awful look upon it. The same afternoon Mr. Adam Morrison, going to the spot to verify what he had heard, found the miserable little waif he adopted afterward. No sooner had he taken it in his arms than a large grey deer sprang from a covert of bracken and leaped into the forest gloom. Despite its size and haste, its passage through the undergrowth was absolutely soundless.

The thing was unmistakable. The Cailliach had put her spell upon Black Duncan. When her hour had come upon her, she had strangled her mortal lover and thrown his body into the tarn. Then she had borne her doubly cursed babe.

All who heard of these things averred that the child would be soulless. Mr. Morrison said no: that he would give it Christian baptism, and rear it in godly ways: and that God would have pity upon the innocent. The old people of the strath shook their heads. The minister was wise in the Scriptures and in the book-lore, but was it not well known that he knew little of and cared less for their treasured oral traditions and legends and obscure ancestral runes? Was it likely he could judge, when he barely knew who or what the Cailliach was? Had he not ever preached from his pulpit that there were no "other people" at all?

The good man was wrong. He admitted it, when, three years later, the child Nial—so called by Mr. Morrison in memory of a young brother of his own, and because he had refused to give the foundling the pagan designation of Nicor the Soulless—was lost one summer gloaming. When, after long searching, the truant was discovered, the child was no longer the same. The shepherd who had found him said that, earlier in the evening, he had noticed a tall woman leading a child through the forest, and stopping every now and again by some tree-hole, as though she listened for some one or to some thing. Later, when he was on the quest for the strayed little one, and as he approached the spot where his search was rewarded, his dog had stopped, snarling, and refused to advance. While he wondered at this, a large grey deer sprang out of the bracken and disappeared into the forest. As soon as it vanished the dog recovered from its sudden terror, and ran forward, and was soon barking over the body of the child.