A Spriggan Moon
By Laura L. Hill
As I climbed the last steps onto the plateau of my Moon, the brilliant orange ball of the Sun was low on the horizon to my left and a large blue sphere was high to my right. The ground of this strange Moon was covered with giant brown flakes of lichen, similar to, but much larger than, the lichen of the mountains to the north and south of my home, wherever that was.
On a mission to find a giant black mushroom with a yellow gold band, these huge flakes shifted and broke under each of my cautiously placed steps, but I could not place a foot down without stepping on one of them, so densely did they cover the ground. I was so thoroughly distracted by watching my step that it took me moments to notice that I was actually surrounded by a variety of very colorful giant mushrooms.
I was astounded at the blaze of color; red, purple, lavender and pink, red with white and black spots, striped black, grey and indigo, multiple mounds of yellow and white, blue and green set elegant and lean. As I turned each way to admire the spectacle of umbrellas on stalks, I became very dizzy, stumbled and fell back onto my bottom.
A rainbow of colors swirled around my head and from somewhere I could hear the melodious music of a lute. My last meal almost voided from my stomach as I lay on my back in the flakes of lichen regarding the colorful giants that towered above me.
When the spinning of my head and my stomach had subsided, I very carefully tried to stand up again, but when I attempted to use a bright yellow and maroon mushroom as a support, it shifted sideways under my weight and I fell from a ledge of my small plateau.
With the wind knocked out of me by my nasty tumble, I writhed at the bottom of a gully between monster mushroom towers, a roaring in my ears almost masking the melody of the lute. Vaguely, amidst my pain and confusion, I remembered that I had been sent to find a black mushroom with a yellow gold band.
It should have been an easy task to find a relatively drab mushroom amongst the multitude of rainbow hue, but with the orange ball of sun low on the horizon and the blue sphere now draped in a purple haze, I was having difficulty seeing anything at all. I felt like a Crusader returned from the deserts and forests of Africa or Asia afflicted with the miasma of a fever, without the fever, although my brow dripped with sweat. In this abysmal state, I noticed that I was now beneath a very gigantic black mushroom with a yellow gold band.
I reached up and clutched at the gold band, but the whole mushroom strangely stayed out of my reach as oddly as it had appeared so close to me. Suddenly, the gold band spewed amber fluid that drenched me. As I floundered and gasped, a furry mold began to smother my face.
In a surge of terror, I struggled to get away, kicking at the mold and the lichen on the floor and moving backwards to lodge myself against a wall. When satisfied that I had gained some security, I noticed that my right leg, clothed in harlequin hose, had come untied from my breeches and was now near my knee and that my breeches belt had come loose. In addition, the striped hose on my left leg was sagging away from my well-formed leg. Before I could wonder why, I was once again drenched by amber fluid, only this time I realized that it was sweet mead and that the grey mold was a hound, now licking my face with a very long pink tongue.
The wall against which I had backed into was the great, strong legs of the esteemed Chevalier Noir, a visitor of the Court whom I had been directed to entertain. This gentleman now picked me up by the back of my doublet and set me before my Lord Earl with my bottom half out of my breeches and the hound licking at my face.
The roar that I still heard was the sound of laughter, but why people had become mushrooms, a fireplace a sun, a window another world, a Great Hall a Moon, a feast laid out for nobles flakes of lichen and a hairy hound mold, I could not fathom. Until I saw the grimacing faces of my cousin and two half sisters at a far table, standing out from all of the other faces filled with merriment and knew with a sad certainty that the tea that they had fed me had led me to a strange, dreaming sleepwalk that entertained the court and visitors so well.
From the Great Hall I crawled, red with shame, and vomited on a bed of rose bushes. Tomorrow the gardener would be certain to box my ears. I left a dog to lick at my mess and stumbled towards the stables.
Just outside was a spring-fed water trough into which I sank my burning face before I drank. Feeling little better, still very queasy, I entered the stables through the main door and stumbled to the ladder. Looking up, the ladder became three. Uncertain which rung to grasp, I raised a trembling hand which also became three. I wavered, then decided to attempt to match my three hands with the three rungs of the ladder. This was successful with one weak and wavering grasp, so I decided to make a match with the other hand.
Then holding with both hands, I dragged my feet up until my toes snagged a rung. One rung at a time, I clawed my way onto the landing where I lay for a couple of dry heaves.
Then through the straw I wormed to a little-used side loft. With no official status at my Lord Earl's castle, I dossed where I could, and enjoyed the company of those my age in the stable, but usually I found a room inside the castle. Tonight I only wished to be alone with my pain and was glad to see that no stable boys were sleeping nearby.
I half-dozed in the strands of moonlight that came through the slate roof, half-listened to the squeak of mice in the straw and a dog below scratching his fleas. Then the dog fled with a yelp that startled me and set my head aching more. I heard the furtive shuffle of a couple sneaking into a vacant horse stall. With idle curiosity, I peeked through a crack to see one of my sisters, with raised skirt, and one of the lairds visiting from the north. She clasped a post to her bosom, and moaned and groaned as he grunted away until he was satisfied. They then murmured to each other for a few more minutes before sneaking out.
My heart hammering, I was trying to sift through the implications of their relationship when my eldest sister arrived with the Chevalier Noir and crept into the same stall. After some muttered conversation and groping of her bosom, which made her titter, she too raised her skirt for the Chevalier. She also moaned and groaned, yet the Chevalier finished his ride with a gallant double-handed grasp of her lower cheeks and a kiss to her upper cheek.
After murmuring together some more, they too crept away and I was left to puzzle things over as I stared at the roof beams. All that was left of my family to come was my cousin, but rumor had it that he had the clap and I did not think that he would find a willing lover. Who my sisters bedded or where was of no interest to me, even if they had put mushrooms in my tea.
Their harsh joke was bound to bounce back in their faces. But the laird from the North and the Chevalier Noir were both presently neither allies nor enemies of my Lord the Earl.
The effort to think made me nauseous and I put it off for later. In my half-sleep, I heard my snores and watched mice run over me in the moonlight. Strange movement above me in the beams and tiles brought my snores to a startled stop. One joint in the beams appeared to be a face, contorted and twisted as a harmless buffoon, then angry with great fangs. I stifled a scream when I realized that a giant towered over me. My nightmare was not yet over. A musky odor joined the smell of horse and straw.
Two great arms straddled me on massive knuckles and huge beams of legs knelt at my feet. I quivered and wished that I had paid more attention to the lessons of my friar, especially how to pray, rather than how to tweak his nose with smart comments or enrage him with insults about his girth.
When my effort to give myself last rites burbled out unintelligibly, my giant gently shrank into an ugly spriggan with a big smile and orange teeth.
He wore no clothing and there were about ten stiff hairs protruding from his bulbous head, his nose and ears were swollen monstrosities. When a cloud covered the moon, he almost disappeared, amusing himself by winking lids over his glowing red eyes.
I clutched my hair with both hands when he appeared to flow around me, but neither my headache nor my stomach were improved by the additional pain. When I reached out to grasp him, he melted out of reach, an ethereal that I could not touch. Since a small part of my head told me that he could easily hurt me if he were real and not another fantasy bought by poison, I feigned a faint.
With a deep, wonderful chuckle, he melted away to and down the ladder, barely visible as he flowed around the rungs. I had scrambled to watch. He had offered me no threat, but I was shaking with fear. On the floor of the stable, he appeared to be a moving rug of stone and straw.
Afraid that I was imagining him and would fall if I attempted to follow down the ladder, I crawled to the slats and watched. Every stone and ray of moonlight was matched by the shape-shifting spriggan as it flowed towards the inner castle. Across the courtyard, the spriggan flowed up the wall into a window slot.
This should, I thought, be the guest room of the laird that had trysted with my sister earlier. I wondered why he had not taken my sister to his room.
Soon the spriggan flowed out, moving slowly through the slot until braced by branches of stone on the courtyard. I caught my breath as I could have sworn that I heard the clink of a coin. It was enough to turn a man-at-arms from his post across the courtyard at the drawbridge. The spriggan froze until the man-at-arms turned away, satisfied that the courtyard was empty.
The spriggan completed his flow down the wall, across the courtyard and into the garden to a giant oak. The root ball seemed to raise, then all was still. I blew my nose on a handful of straw and strained my eyes impatiently.
I almost missed the coiled slither from the end of an exposed root blending into a ripple of grass as the spriggan headed to another section of castle wall. Again it climbed and flowed through a window slot. This room was that of the Chevalier Noir. I wondered as I waited to see the spriggan again, why the trysts in the stable, one after the other?
The spriggan soon came out, so well-blended with the background, I was certain that no one would see him and that if he so chose, I would not either. Again the spriggan flowed under the oak, and I knew that his deeds were done for the night. I wondered what exactly those deeds had been and how they would affect me, yet as the moon waned with the dawn, I smiled and fell asleep with the memory of his mischievous red eyes.
Next morning, I was roused by the roar of the Chevalier Noir and the laird, each charging the other with stealing and pretending to being stolen from.
At a castle door, my Lord the Earl stood quietly and watched. The men-at-arms watched the brawl escalate, waiting for word from their Lord with their hands on their sword hilts.
The angry pair were only half-dressed and looked very funny prancing on the cobbles of the courtyard. My giggles overwhelmed my headache and I muffled them with straw as they ranted and fumed. I knew that no one would find the stolen coin and that my Lord the Earl would not punish anyone without finding it.
Leaving direction with the Sergeant at Arms to monitor the dispute, my Lord went inside to break his fast with porridge. I slid down the ladder to slip past the angry men into the kitchen in search of broth to settle my stomach and head. The cook and her kitchen maids laughed, but took pity on my misery and spooned warm chicken broth into me. Their good-humored company and the warm broth eased my various pains and made my small world a little better.
But they had news for me. A messenger had come after my display in the Great Hall. My Lord the Earl's younger brother had died with his two sons fighting a Crusade in the Holy Land. His third son had died of a strange fever not long after serving his Holiness in Rome. Years before, my father had taken my eldest brothers in search of their knighthood to the same fate in the Holy Land.
I was told that a maid had been sent to make up a room for me and that my Lord the Earl wished me to make use of it. When I was feeling better, my Lord wished to speak with me. My cousin, son of the youngest brother of the Earl but wealthy by his mother's family, had been locked up overnight. That news caused me no grief, but I was saddened to know that my Lord the Earl's favorite sparring partner was lost.
Through a heavy wood door, I could see the oak of the spriggan. As a bonny lass set down another bowl of broth and called me 'Lord', I was sure that I saw a knot in the oak give me a big wink.