Thereupon, Iosa rose and took me by the hand, and led me out of that room. When, once, I looked back I saw none of the Twelve save only the Weaver of Hope, and he sat singing a wild sweet song that he had learned of the Weaver of Joy, sat singing amid a mist of rainbows and weaving a radiant glory that was dazzling as the sun.
And at that I woke, and was against my mother’s heart, and she with the tears upon me, and her lips moving in a prayer.
THE AWAKENING OF ANGUS OGUE
THE AWAKENING OF ANGUS OGUE
One noon, among the hills, Angus Ogue lay in sleep. It was a fair place where he lay, with the heather about him and the bracken with its September gold in it. On the mountain-slope there was not a juniper tall enough, not a rock big enough, to give poise to a raven: all of gold bracken and purple heather it was, with swards of the paler ling. The one outstanding object was a mountain ash. Midway it grew, and leaned so that when the sun was in the east above Ben Monach, the light streamed through the feather-foliage upon the tarn just beneath: so leaned, that when the sun was on the sea-verge of Ben Mheadhonach in the west, the glow, lifting upward over leagues of yellow bracken, turned the rowan-feathers to the colour of brass, and the rowan-berries into bronze.
The tarn was no more than a boulder-set hollow. It was fed by a spring that had slipped through the closing granite in a dim far-off age, and had never ceased to put its cool lips round the little rocky basin of that heather-pool. At the south end the ling fell over its marge in a curling wave: under the mountain-ash there was a drift of moss and fragrant loneroid, as the Gaels call the bog-myrtle.
Here it was, through the tides of noon, that Angus Ogue slept. The god was a flower there in the sunflood. His hair lay upon the green loneroid, yellow as fallen daffodils in the grass. Above him was the unfathomable sea of blue. Not a cloudlet drifted there, nor the wandering shadow of an eagle soaring from a mountain-eyrie or ascending in wide gyres of flight from invisible lowlands.
Around him there was the same deep peace. Not a breath stirred the rowan-leaves, or the feathery shadows these cast upon his white limbs: not a breath frayed the spires of the heather on the ridges of Ben Monach: not a breath slid along the aërial pathways to where, on Ben Mheadhonach, the sea-wind had fallen in a garth of tansies and moon-daisies, and swooned there is the sun-haze, moveless as a lapsed wave.
Yet there were eyes to see, for Orchil lifted her gaze from where she dreamed her triune dream beneath the heather. The goddess ceased from her weaving at the looms of life and death, and looked broodingly at Angus Ogue—Angus, the fair god, the ever-young, the lord of love, of music, of song.
“Is it time that he slept indeed?” she murmured, after a long while, wherein she felt the sudden blood redden her lips and the pulse in her quiet veins leap like a caged bird.