Esther M. Friesner - Hallowmass

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ESTHER M. FRIESNER

HALLOWMASS

Esther Friesner reports that her recent efforts include a collaborative novel

with Mercedes Lackey, as yet untitled, and that her fourth "Chick" anthology,

The Chick Is in the Mail, will be out in January.

This new fantasy story was inspired by a trip to Chartres cathedral At one

point, Esther heard "beautiful, silvery threads of music that seemed to spiral

down from no visible source in the shadows above." Further examination, however,

revealed a young man playing a flute ,in front of the cathedral and some trick

of acoustics obviously drew the melody into the building.

Read on and see how our Connecticut bard transmuted this small scene into a

lovely yarn.

MASTER, THE HEART OF THESE things came to pass in the autumn of the year that

the great cathedral neared completion. Beyond the town walls the fields were

nearly bare and the forest put on splendor. Bright leaf crowns of bronze and

purple, scarlet and gold flung themselves over the secret fastnesses of the wood

where terrors crouched. In the shorn fields asters winked blue among the

stubble. And everywhere, in the streets and on the narrow track slipping between

the hills to the outlying villages, there was song.

The countryfolk sang because their harvest was done and the war had slithered

its huge, armored body far into the south that year. Mothers sang cradle songs

to cradles where for once no spectral hand of famine or illness or whetted steel

had crept to touch and take their babes. Farmers bellowed drinking songs in the

taverns because singing drowned out the noise of backbones that creaked and

snapped when honest working men at last unbent their spines from the labor of

reaping and stacking, threshing and winnowing the grain.

Giles was a man who made his songs with stone. He was well past the middle years

of Adam's sons, his raven hair streaked and stippled with gray, his beard blazed

silver like the back of a badger. When he first arrived, over fifteen Easters

agone, no one in the town knew where he came from or who paid out his wages. He

presented himself to the widow Agnes who had a small house hard by the

cathedral's growing shadow and offered her a fair price for the rental of a

room, food to fill his belly, and the free use of her modest yard. The yard

stood behind the house and was supposed to contain the widow's humble garden,

but the plastered walls of the house itself hoarded sunlight from what few

plants struggled their way out of the sour soil, and in time the cathedral's

rising walls shouldered aside almost everything but shadows.

The widow Agnes therefore did not complain too loudly when the nature of Giles's

intent for her property was made known. The very next day after his arrival, a

dust-faced man named Paul the Brown presented himself at her door driving a cart

with a load of fresh timber. She recognized him as one of the bishop's

lowest-ranked servants and kept her thoughts to herself when Giles rushed out to

greet him eagerly. Together the two men transported the lumber into the widow's

yard and from it built a spacious, slant-roofed shed on ground where flowers

often had been planted but never had lived to bloom.

In the days that followed, the widow Agnes witnessed more strange shipments

arrive on her doorstep for her new boarder. There was a small, sturdy table, a

stool standing on four fat legs, a coarse hempen sack that clanked demons out of

the widow's white cat Belle, and lengths of sailcloth, thick with pale dust and

neatly folded. All of these effects were trundled out to the shed in the yard

where some were put in place and others put into ironbound chests of wood that

locked with a snick-clack sound like jackdaws laughing. Last of all came the

stones.

A squadron of servants showed their yellowed teeth to the widow when she

answered their thunderous summons on the day the first more-than-man-size block

of stone arrived. As with the first servant, Paul the Brown, their faces were

all familiar to her--work-creased vizards of skin glimpsed in passing on market

day, or when the widow's curious eye wandered during mass, or in the shadow of

the tavern sign.

The leader of that burly crew doffed a cap frosty with dust and asked, "Where'll

Master Giles have it?" He gestured to the block of raw-hewn stone on the cart

behind him.

"Master Giles?" the widow echoed. Her commerce with the man until this had been

scant and small (and she a woman whose inquisitive tongue could winkle out a

fellow's life history in the time it takes to break a tinker's promise!). She

knew him by that name but not that title.

"Aye, this is the first of 'em," the servant said. He might have said more, but

Master Giles was there, white Belle a mewing ghost at his ankles. He spoke with

brief courtesy to his landlady, begging her pardon for not having forewarned her

of this visitation while at the same time telling her no more about it. Then he

hustled forward to direct the men to move the block of stone into the widow's

yard, under the shelter of the shed.

Some days later the widow Agnes found the form of a man emerging from the great

stone. Crude as God's first tentative pinchings in the red clay that would be

Adam, Master Giles's man lacked the features of a face (unless the first hint of

a high-bridged nose could be reckoned to that credit) and could be said to

possess human hands only as a courtesy to the lumpy mass of rock at the ends of

what might have been arms.

Master Giles saw the widow staring at his work and grinned. His thick hair and

beard were now all white with the breath of chiseled rock, as if the stone were

sucking away his alloted lifespan, but he worked bare-armed and bare-chested in

the pleasant summer weather and the knotted muscles moving sleekly beneath the

skin cried liar! to any who dared to call him old.

"Good day to you, goodwife," he said, still swinging the hammer, still holding

the steel-edged cutting tool to its task. The tapping blows and the chinking

sound of the stone's thousand small surrenders underlay his words in a smooth,

steady rhythm. "What do you think of my Saint Clement?" He lowered the hammer

and gestured at a protruding lump of rock with the chisel. "Here's the anchor

that dragged him to a glorious martyr's death. I would have given him a

stonecutter's tools, but my lord bishop would discover my vanity all the earlier

then." His hearty laugh was for himself and for all the petty conceits of a

fragile world.

The widow crept nearer, but she could see neither the offered anchor nor the

stonecutter's point. His smile did not mock her when she confessed herself

either bewildered by the light or merely bewitched by her own ignorance.

"You will see the anchor in time," Master Giles said kindly, setting his tools

down on the worktable and taking her plump hand in his calloused palm. "The

saint is still being born. You see, my lord bishop has brought me here for the

cathedral's sake. I am to adorn the south porch below the great rose window with

twelve figures in stone, and since Master Martin whose province is the north

porch has already laid claim to the Twelve Apostles, I have a free hand in the

choice of my saints. I thought to begin well by invoking the protection of Saint

Clement. He has always been a friend to those of my trade. The Emperor Trajan

tore him from the papal throne and sent him as a slave to the marble quarries of

Russia, but even there he made conversions and worked miracles. Once, they say,

his faith called forth water from a rock for the sake of his fellow-slaves'

thirst. Soon after, he was flung into a great sea, the anchor around his neck.

The angels themselves built him a stone tomb beneath the waves. That is beyond

me, so I do this, to his glory."

The widow Agnes bobbed her head. She loved the tales of saints' lives, for she

was a devout woman--all the more so since her husband had gone to sleep in a

churchyard bed. He took with him to eternal rest the staff with which he used to

beat his bride, but he forbore to fetch away his money. If this was not proof of

divine grace, it would do for the widow Agnes. "Which saints will you choose for

the other--" She did a quick tally"--eleven?"

"I don't know," said Master Giles. "Saint Barbara, perhaps, to keep the peril of

fire far from the holy place, and Saint George to aid the farmer and protect

good horses. Who can say?" His smile was whiter than the fresh-cut stone as he

glimpsed Belle's pointed face staring boldly out at him from behind the widow's

skirts. "I might even carve a likeness of Saint Anthony to mind the fortunes of

some small animals in need of watching."

The widow Agnes laughed out loud and told him he was a sorry rogue, and that she

would warn my lord bishop of the jackanapes he'd hired for the adornment of the

south porch. Then she brought Master Giles the good wine from the cellar and

when the sun's setting cheated the eyes of gossips everywhere, she took him to

her bed.

The years ran and the cathedral grew. The shapes of saints blossomed in the

widow's yard and were duly bundled away to their places in the niches of the

south porch. The widow and Master Giles lay down together many times with only

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