Dagmar's Daughter - By Kim Echlin Page 0,45

fiddlers joined in to accompany the wild dance until it was all so fast that even those extraordinary musicians of Millstone Nether could not keep up and everyone fell back panting and laughing. The old people were tired and began to drift away home and the young people left in twos, and more than one young couple tried out love for the first time that night, alight with the music of Donal and Nyssa. While they heaved in the forest, the musicians tidied up.

Donal loosened his bow. Nyssa tucked her fiddle into her case, slung it over her shoulder across her breasts. She twisted her wild hair into a knot, baring her long neck. Then she ran lightly on her toes down the path. He knew the path she was taking. She’d walk through the woods and then turn either back to the settlement or along the shore and northward. Donal watched her turn to see if he would follow.

Dagmar lay awake waiting for Nyssa. She listened for her to come through the door, take off her boots and pour a drink of her nana’s whisky. She waited for her to shed her clothes by the bed. She waited for her to climb in and slip one leg over her mother’s as she’d done since she was a baby, waiting for her old lullaby.

Loola loola loola loola bye bye

In your momma’s arms a creepin’

soon you’ll be a sleepin’

loola loola loola loola bye.

Dagmar waited and waited.

Donal had built his rooms on stilts on a bit of shore an hour’s row on a civil sea north off the coast of Millstone Nether. The water rose and fell. It was a studded house, stogged with dry mosses, shingled and clapboarded, dry and safe from winds. He had made two small rooms and a third larger room that served for his living, cooking and eating. He moved his double bass into one of the small rooms. His hands had stiffened with snake-bite. He had bathed them in seaweed and wrapped them with spruce and brown paper.

He had hesitated to go back to Millstone Nether, which he could see on a clear day. He had explored his rough deserted shore through two seasons. He had watched the sooty fog-birds skimming the surface of the ocean and listened for the tiny striped-heads in the trees of the forest behind with their trilling oo-ee-ee-ee-eeee. Most days his horizon was all water. Close enough, he thought, and far enough. A line to be followed.

Now the willing young woman carrying nothing but her fiddle met him at his dory moored and waiting. He jumped in and reached up for her fiddle, tucked it up in the bow safe from the salt damp. She slid into the skiff and headed for the bow seat by her fiddle. But Donal reached for her and settled her between his legs on the middle seat. Reaching around her reed body he placed his hands on the oars and she put her hands on his, leaning back against his chest when he rowed, opening her arms and leaning forward when he lifted the oars out to skim the surface of the waters. He tucked his head into her hair, her hands slipping down to his thighs. He said, Watch the sky for me and keep us straight. Stars hung above them as they steadily covered the expanse of water, Millstone Nether shrinking before their eyes.

When the skiff rocked against the first shallows of the mainland, Donal pulled in the oars, jumped out and pulled the wooden boat up the shore. No wharf to protect it. He tied the dory firmly on an old pine tree, then he held out his hand to help Nyssa who stood, fiddle across her back, ready to leap. She waved him away and flew through the air, toes slipping on the shore stones and falling lightly forward.

Donal led the way through the darkness along the short narrow path, birch trees luminous against the black sea. At the end stood his ramshackle house, stilts stained by the water’s ebb and flow. By the door, Nyssa turned him around to kiss her and they pressed together in the stitched light and darkness of their journey.

Donal pushed open the outside door into the larger room with windows overlooking the coast, nothing on the roughly hewn chinked walls. He led Nyssa through another door into a plain room where his bass sat in front of a music stand. He waited silently as she