Night On Loch Adhartha
A Winter’s Tale by Shay Phelan
Restless - yes; and the air, the icy cold air, clings beneath your torn quilt. There’s no chance of sleeping, not with feet this cold. Try putting one foot up against the warm calf of the other leg, and then the second foot up against the calf of the first - no, it doesn’t work; your toes just won’t thaw out. Even the moon-light silhouetting the stark, black tree-branches outside your window - even the beautiful silvery-blue moon-light is made of ice. But it is tantalisingly beautiful.
So beautiful in fact is the moonlight that you rise to look out. Well of course there’s no need to dress; you wore your warmest winter clothes to bed tonight. Everything except your shoes and socks. Put them on now and gaze through the window. On a leafless, moon-glossed ash-tree, snow pads the branches; snow full of glittering crystals carpets the garden and hushes the fields beyond. Earlier, after the snow had fallen, the clouds had cleared with unnatural swiftness, and a dazzling frost had gilded everything. Now the snow clings crisp and compact beneath a frosty royal-blue sky, a sky full of distant worlds, jeweled mysteries; and the frost, the snow and the sky are all silver and blue, and awesome with silence. But this window also is being frosted - you must come outside to see, really see.
No one hears you leave; the latch lifted, the door pulled to, you’re alone in the wide, winter world. Now your feet crunch softly through the crispy-deep carpet, while your breath is a cloud. The gate - the garden gate is rooted and grounded in snow - easier to climb over than to open. So you clamber over; too long unused to this, you slip and fall into a white snow-drift, and a hundred childhood memories return. You’re young again and awake, but where are you going? Across the field to the lake, to see the frozen water reflect the moon in an eerie silence, to stand by the shining ice extended like a mystical ball-room floor to the hills beyond. Go there and feel the wonderful mystery of it.
There it is. Between soap-sudded rushes, trickles of streams from the hills above have crystallised into twisted icicles, and the lake is solemn and still, the air above it full of a frozen expectancy. You do feel it, don’t you? At any moment a flock of swans might fly right out of the moon and alight on this ball-room floor. They could become princes and princesses, dancing and flying, far from the gaze of all men except you, figures full of light, set loose from an ancient enchantment. How? A touch of God in this beautiful moon-light. But that’s only a ballet-tale, isn’t it? Or an old Irish myth…..
Wait, though - what was that? Some shadow is moving among the white, fur-coated bushes. Now he is standing by the lake, not far from you, gazing across the ice, listening, his mind penetrating the silence. Someone small and twisted, like the frozen mountain streams, someone with unkempt hair, clothed in rags, someone you think you know.
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