Mairéad Ní Dhálaigh (Human, Celtic Union, keeper of the holding)

The almanac was printed in the town and was right about the moons, and it said nothing else, and the holding knew the rest.

It hung on the nail by the door where her mother had hung it, a season to a page, and the page for the autumn had the two moons drawn as two circles and a line of small print under them giving the minutes. Cliona across Donn. A span you could boil a kettle in, the print said, more or less, and the more or less was the town's, because the town's almanac had never quite agreed with itself about the night, and the holding had never written to tell it. Mairéad Ní Dhálaigh had read that page in the spring, when the year's almanac came, and had not needed to read it since. The ewes were brought down off the top field that afternoon. The lamp was out before the dark came, not after. The house was shut, and the shutter on the child's room left the width of a hand, because her own mother had left it so and had not said why, and Mairéad had worked out why at about the age Úna was now and had not said either.

"Bed, a stór," she said, and the child went, which was not every night.

Then she went out to the gate.

The gate stood at the top of the yard, where the yard became the top field, and the top field went up to the trees. Her mother had stood at the gate on these nights and Mairéad had taken it, as a child, for watching. It was not watching. It was standing where the house ended, so that nobody from the house went past it, and the only body in the house that might was her own. She put her hand on the top bar. The bar was cold and the wood was the wood of the gate, and she kept her hand on it.

The large moon was up over the trees, full and ordinary, the moon. She did not look for the small one. You did not see Cliona come; you saw Donn lose his edge, a little, on the one side, as if someone had breathed on him, and that was the start of the minutes.

He lost his edge.

The light began among the trees. Not at the top of them and not from behind them, where a moon or a fire would have put it, but low, between the trunks, where there was nothing to make light and nothing to carry it. The trees were bare already this year. It lay among them level, the way the first light lies along a field before the sun is up and before you can say where it comes from, and it was not much. A lamp's worth. A lamp left in a room you were not in.

She heard it before she had decided she was hearing anything. It was not the wind. There was no wind, and she knew every noise the trees made and this was not one of them: a long held note, very low, of the kind a person makes with the mouth shut, and far off, and not far off. When it rose the light rose. She did not make anything of that. Her mother had not.

At the tree line, something stood.

Tall. Standing as somebody stands who has been standing a while and is in no hurry to do anything else, and in the light that was its own and nobody's lamp. She did not look at it long. The custom said nothing about looking, and it was not the custom that turned her eye; it was that the thing was correct, every part of it where a part should be, and the correctness was what her eye kept going back to and could not settle on, and she had the gate under her hand and that was enough to be going on with. She looked at Donn instead, and at the edge of him going, and at her own hand on the bar.

Nothing came down the field. Nothing was called. Nothing was set down at the trees and nothing was lifted from them, and she had not heard, from her mother or from anyone, of a thing passed either way on one of these nights.

When she looked again it was among the trees and not at them, and then there was the light and not it, and then the light was less.

Donn's edge came back. The note went down under where she could hear it, if she had been hearing it, and the light went down with it, between the trunks, into the ground or into nothing, and the trees were the trees, bare, with the moon over them. The whole of it had been the minutes on the almanac's page, more or less.

She took her hand off the gate. She went in by the front, and said at the door what her mother had said, and did not look at the almanac on its nail. There was nothing to write on it, her mother had never written on it, and the margin for the autumn was clean.