Knaves Over Queens

by George R. R. Martin

  ‘By God,’ he breathed. ‘Haven’t seen this in an age. Eoin?’ He switched to English. ‘Look at this, boy. It’s your grandfather.’

  ‘He’s got a big nose,’ said Eoin and Séamus laughed.

  ‘Sure, we all do! Right, Anya? Even the bandages can’t hide yours.’

  She could only look at him, still clutching the palm he had held in his only moments before. But then, the man’s merriment seemed to die and he crouched down, face-to-face with his boy. ‘Your granda gave his life for Ireland. You understand? So the country could breathe free again. And still the English cast their filthy shadow over six counties in Ulster.’

  ‘You’ll free them, won’t you, Da?’

  ‘I will, son. Or you will. Or your boys if you have any, please God.’ He raised his voice and the air seemed to thrum around him. ‘Life springs from death! From the blood of patriots! We feed the land from our veins!’ His face was shining, his eyes were as sharp as razors that Anya could feel in every inch of her torn and leaking skin. Her cheeks felt hot under the bandages. Life from death. Blood of patriots. The kitchen spun around her, and then she toppled right over on her face.

  As often happened when she fainted, Anya had a vision.

  From above, she saw her cousin, Eoin, pelting down the road towards the school. Men in green uniforms crouched behind the ruined cottages, watching him, but from his position on the ground, Eoin saw none of this. He fetched Daddy out of the classroom and back home.

  Daddy also missed the soldiers. He ran like a maniac, but when he found his brother at the front door all he said was, ‘How dare you! May the devil splinter your bones! You were never to come again!’

  Anya’s vision brought her to the roof of the house. Her heroic uncle stood just outside, a head taller than Daddy, his shoulders wide enough to carry a full-grown cow.

  ‘There’s no problem, Páidí. I’m fairly sure they didn’t follow me.’

  ‘Fairly sure?’ Her father’s voice rose to a screech. ‘Fairly sure?’

  And Daddy did what Anya had never seen him do before, he threw himself at the larger man, his hands around his brother’s neck until both went down in a heap while little Eoin, arriving only now, screamed at them to stop.

  Anya sat up in bed, breathing like a piston. She was bleeding everywhere and knew that under the sodden bandages entire flaps of skin would be sloughing off like a beggar’s rags. She couldn’t say why, but she had to see the fight, she had to! The pain in her joints slowed her to a hobble, but she would not be stopped, not by mere agony, nor by the waves of dizziness that followed.

  She found them breathing hard, but sitting like civilized men at the kitchen table, with water boiling on the stove and Eoin absent. Sent off to play, perhaps.

  ‘There she is!’ Séamus smiled and Daddy tried to match him. But then Daddy said, ‘Listen, Séamus, I don’t care about your cause.’ He spoke English. He must have thought Anya wouldn’t be able to understand, despite the fact that it was always on the radio.

  Her uncle replied in the same language. ‘Our cause, brother.’

  ‘No. I’ve paid already. More than any man should have to. Anya is my only cause now. I can trust the doctor and the priest and a few others, but if anybody in Dublin thinks …’ His eyes slid over to her, moist with the mood of ‘sadness’. ‘If they think she’s a joker …’

  ‘But, Páidí, she is a joker. She must be.’

  ‘It’s a skin disease,’ Daddy hissed. ‘There’s nothing that can’t be explained by that. No … no cloven hooves. No wings or whatever.’

  ‘For God’s sake, Páidí, her mother dissolved. I saw it, I was there when she opened the crates.’

  Ah, Anya thought. That’s why the grave in the back field had been empty when she’d gone digging last spring.

  ‘If …’ Séamus continued, ‘if your little girl is one of them, don’t you think she’d be better off getting specialist care?’

  ‘She’s not, though. I told you. It’s mostly Americans who caught that thing. And a few others. Like the passengers on the British liner that was steaming for New York at the time.’

  ‘Oh, there have been several outbreaks by now,’ said Séamus. Then, his beautiful deep voice became a whisper. ‘But you know, brother … you must know what else was being stored in New York when Jetboy got his comeuppance?’

  Daddy didn’t answer, his head down as though at prayer.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Uncle Séamus. ‘The guns.’ And Daddy was weeping now, with Séamus saying, ‘Just tell me where you buried them, Páidí. I’ll take them off your hands. We’re finally rearming. We’re getting ready to take the north back from the Brits and if you want no part of it any more, sure I understand. Just tell me where to find them.’

  ‘I can’t,’ Daddy snivelled like a child. ‘What … what if it’s true? What if they are infected somehow?’

  ‘All the better,’ Séamus breathed. He was a god compared to Daddy and Anya’s heart still responded to him as though his every breath were food and drink to her. ‘We’ll gladly risk the virus,’ he said. ‘Sure, a few of the boys will die for the cause, maybe. They’ll give their blood so Ireland may be free. But some of them … Some of them might become aces. And what would the Brits think of that? Imagine picking up tanks and throwing them across the sea!’

  Daddy didn’t answer. Instead, he looked up at Anya, and switched back to Irish. ‘Is it sore, pet? We need to change you. Come on.’

  He led her hobbling back to her room with Uncle Séamus calling after him. ‘Just tell me, Páidí. I’ll have the lads collect them and we’ll be gone! Just tell me!’

  The bandages had soaked too long and didn’t come away easily. Even Anya gasped and couldn’t stop herself blacking out when the dizziness came again.

  She found herself wheeling through the sky, watching the house below her no larger than a fist. She saw a convoy of three green trucks moving in from the east. She saw the glistening bog, each tiny pool red with the setting sun. The land was always drinking, and yet, always thirsty too. What could possibly satisfy such an appetite? Blood, said Pearse and the other poets. Blood and life. The ancients had known as much. She’d seen pictures in the books kept in the back room of men fed to bogs to bring good harvests.

  She wondered then, if her vision would allow her to see her own body. Sure enough, her view of the world swooped down until she was looking through her bedroom window at a stooped and skinny child, dressed in the loosest of clothing and wrapped head to foot in rolls of reddened bandages.

  ‘How can there be so much blood in one little girl?’ Daddy was asking. But then, he looked over at the window. ‘Dirty crows,’ he said. He raised his hand as though to strike her. Anya leapt away, only to fall, it seemed, back into her own body.

  ‘Anya? Did I frighten you?’

  ‘No, Daddy,’ she said, although her words slurred and the look of worry on his face said he might be calling the doctor down from Letterkenny again soon. Or perhaps he’d listen to her uncle’s advice and send her away altogether.

  ‘It doesn’t hurt at all, Daddy.’

  That night in bed, Anya heard footsteps and knew immediately who they belonged to. She still felt weak, but an opportunity like this might never come again.

  She dressed, careful to put on shoes so as not to leave a trail of blood after her. Then, from behind the wardrobe she fetched the remaining knife Daddy didn’t know about.

  The front door had already been repaired – the two brothers working together had it back in place in a jiffy. But nothing anybody could do would ever fix all the draughts in this house. She limped, shivering, into the back bedroom to find Eoin sitting in a pile of picture books with a gas lamp for company.

  ‘You couldn’t sleep either?’ he asked. ‘What’s the knife for? You didn’t think I was a robber, did you?’ He smiled at that last part, showing a gap in his front teeth.

  Anya studied him, wondering at the best way to do this. Right now Daddy was in bed with an em
pty bottle, but he would certainly have one of his moods if he caught her looking inside another creature. And who knew how Uncle Séamus would react? In all the stories daddies fought for their offspring.

  But sometimes children wandered away from a parent’s protection and lost themselves forever. That’s what was going to happen here, she decided.

  Eoin was still grinning. ‘Look at all the books ye have!’ Stacks of them towered over him, their shadows pitching about the room as he waved the lamp around.

  Anya cleared her throat. ‘Let us go out,’ she said.

  He clapped his little hands. ‘Oh, yes! We’ll have an adventure. We won’t tell anybody.’

  She nodded, waving at the window.

  ‘You want me to open it?’ he asked.

  Another nod. But even as he turned to obey, he spotted something on the floor. ‘You play chess? I love chess. Daddy says I’m good enough to be a champion one day.’

  He went back to the window, but she stopped him with a touch to the shoulder and a nod towards the chess set.

  ‘You want to play, cousin?’ he asked her.

  Want didn’t come into it. Chess was deeper and more mysterious than the bog itself. But it could not be properly explored without an opponent and Anya had yet to meet anybody capable of immersing themselves farther than the depth of an ankle. She had played the angry priest; the doctor from Letterkenny, who perched glasses on his nose; and various friends of Daddy’s. All of them became nervous even when she held back and permitted them a win.

  But a champion? She shivered, the knife forgotten at her side. She could always open the boy later.

  He set up the pieces, putting the white queen in the wrong place. For a moment, she suspected a ruse, or a different set of rules. But no. No. Mere stupidity.

  And that’s when a great crash came from the hall behind them. Boots hammered the floorboards and their own door flew open to smack against the wall.

  A man stood there in a green uniform, his face blackened by polish, a rifle in his hands. ‘Stay royt dere!’ he shouted. It wasn’t the English of the radio, by any stretch, but Anya grasped the intent. Other soldiers were checking her room and Daddy was getting quite a surprise by the sound of him. The invader paused for a second, surprised perhaps, by the sight of a little girl covered in blood and bandages. But then he shook his head and demanded, ‘Who else is hee-urr?’

  ‘N-nobody,’ Eoin said. The man, unsatisfied, shouldered down several of the columns of books and opened the only wardrobe – a haven for yellow, curling newspapers and a tidal wave of dust.

  A single volume dropped from the top of the nearest stack to land at Anya’s knee. It was a book she knew well. Her younger self, the Anya from before the sickness, had loved this one. That little girl had filled it with drawings of hearts and stick figures holding hands. Some of the pages even bore tiny stains of what might have been tears.

  It fell open now at the picture of a glorious woman, surrounded by a flock of birds. Badb, the caption read, Goddess of War. She took the form of the crows that served her. She who renewed the land through the blood of young men. But not just any men: heroes.

  The soldier might have searched some more, but right then there came the sound of shouting and a window smashing. ‘Stop! That’s an order!’ and ‘He’s getting away!’ Gunshots echoed down the hallway, followed by a scream. ‘He’s armed! He hit Tom!’

  Anya’s sluggish heart began to beat. It was Uncle Séamus, of course. Suddenly, she wanted to be with him. She had to see him! She had to! Nausea came when she tried to stand, like a stranger’s fingers shoved down her throat. Pain flared in every joint, and all over her body new lesions ripped themselves open. She had a brief vision of the house, seeing it from the outside with lights in every window, but she forced herself back into her own head in time to see the soldier leave the room.

  Eoin’s face displayed attributes of both fear and panic, so it was the easiest thing in the world to take charge of him. She pointed at the window. ‘Open it,’ she told him. He helped her climb outside and then she led him into the night, towards his father.

  Soldiers ran everywhere with flashlights. Shouting. Looking in all the wrong places.

  ‘What … what’s that?’ Eoin leapt up in fright as something flapped past his face.

  ‘Crow.’

  ‘There’s more of them! They’re everywhere! They should be asleep!’

  To shut him up, Anya said, ‘We find your father. He is this way.’

  ‘How … how can you know that?’

  That was a good question, for other than the glow from the windows and the flashlights of the soldiers, the darkness was complete. Yet Anya knew where Séamus was the way a compass knows the north. He had run behind the shed, and from there across the bog, probably blundering into every pool along the way.

  Anya did not splash even once. She remembered nothing of the years leading up to her mother’s death, but since then her mind had preserved entire games of chess, books, diagrams and, yes, the location of every stone and hummock around her home.

  She brought Eoin with her, using his strength when her own failed, swallowing the pain that tried to make her faint. Energy drained away with every step. Anya might well die tonight, but she felt the answers were closer than they had ever been, to the mystery of who she was. Of what she was.

  Still she couldn’t see her uncle. But he was there, all right. The glory of him was like a furnace and she the helpless moth. How was it that nobody else could sense it? The soldiers shouted somewhere behind her, only ever blundering into each other.

  She found one of Séamus’s shoes and then, just ahead, she heard him lose another, sloshing and whispering a curse.

  ‘Daddy!’ cried Eoin. Anya grabbed at his hand, but the boy shook her off, plunging forward only to fall face down in a pool with a massive splash.

  ‘Over dere!’ cried one of the soldiers. A whistle was blown. A line of flashlights – at least a dozen of them – swept the area. Every one of those men carried a weapon, Anya knew. They charged and cursed and fell. An army of shadows, panting, equipment jouncing, ready to kill.

  And then, the strangest thing happened. Anya’s lips rose to form a smile. This was not a decision she had made to influence others, for there was nobody here to see her. It was something her body had decided of its own accord.

  ‘Get away, Eoin!’ Séamus cried. ‘Get away from me! Stay down!’

  ‘Daddy! Don’t leave me!’ More splashes came, followed by shots, crack, crack, crack, splitting the night. Anya felt the breeze of something whipping past her face. Her knees shook. Her body trembled, but not from cold.

  ‘Dere’s sumptin’ hee-ur!’ a voice cried. It was just another crow – the soldiers were shooting at anything that moved.

  Anya’s left arm suddenly went numb. She was lying on the wet hummocks of the bog with no memory of falling. Blood seeped out of her faster than ever it had before. Her eyelids fluttered and then, she was in the sky, watching the chaos below her. Her own, twisted little body lay transfixed by the beam of a flashlight as a soldier cried out and splashed towards her. He meant to kill her, she thought, but that mustn’t happen! Not yet! Something vital was occurring here and she had to see it.

  She swooped down at the man’s face, like an arrow from the sky, until she smashed right into his left eye.

  The pain! The pain! Even Anya had never felt the like before! As though she had snapped in two.

  But then she opened her eyes to find herself still alive, still on her back. The soldier lay next to her with the smashed corpse of a crow jutting out of his head. Fascinating! But she had little time to ponder the meaning of this, because confused voices told her that the other soldiers had lost her uncle again in the darkness.

  He hadn’t gone that far – she could point right at him, less than a hundred yards away. She had to help him now, she realized. To get what he wanted, what the land wanted and needed more than anything. She couldn’t stand, but she still posse
ssed one tool: the crows, of course. The crows.

  Anya pushed her right hand into the bullet wound on her left arm. It hurt, yes, but she was used to worse, so she pushed harder, deeper, feeling flesh part until the agony drove her out of her own body entirely.

  As a crow, she could see no better in the darkness than a human could, but her uncle still drew her. She led the flock down around him and every bird cawed at the same time until the torches of the soldiers converged on their position.

  ‘We see you, McNulty!’ came a shout. This time, the accent was cultured enough for the radio. ‘Time you handed yourself over. The lad you shot will live, so it’s just going to be prison.’

  Séamus spat back at them, as Anya knew he must. ‘I don’t recognize your so-called republic!’ he cried. ‘Without the north, what are we but lickspittles? Tugging our forelocks for the masters.’

  He glittered with sweat in the torchlight, as heroic as Cú Chulainn tied to the rock. His mighty chest heaved, his jaw clenched. Bleeding, wounded, Anya dragged herself closer to him, helpless before his power, but at last she recognized it for what it really was: belief. A conviction so strong that only death could put an end to it. It was glory in its purest form; at the very peak of ripeness.

  ‘Daddy!’ Eoin cried from somewhere up ahead. ‘Daddy!’

  ‘Tell them, son. Tell them what you saw here today. Spread the word so that all Ireland may be free.’

  Then, the great man pointed his pistol and shot towards the flashlights. One of them fell, but answering shots flew out of the night to take him in the leg, the chest, the neck. Anya cried out, as though every wound was a hammer taken to her bones. Crack, crack, crack. Light spurted from her uncle’s body, or so it seemed to her. Nausea rose in her throat; her belly rioted; her skin … her skin burned as though doused in petrol and set alight. And when Séamus McNulty finally fell, she threw her head back and screamed loud enough for soldiers to drop their torches and cover their ears.