Holder of Lightning

by S L Farrell

  She would have sworn that the seal nodded. Its head lifted, the mouth opening, and a series of wails and coughs emerged: like words but in no language Jenna understood. Then, with a flash of shimmering lapis, the seal turned and dove back into the water.

  “It said that the Holder should be more careful, and warned you that not only humans want to possess a cloch na thintrí, especially Lámh Shábhála.”

  Jenna turned. O’Deoradháin stood on the bank, his hand extended to her. “Come out of the water,” he said. “I’ll start a fire, and we can get you warm and dry.”

  She didn’t move. Waves lapped at her waist. “You understood it?”

  “Her, not it. And aye, I understood her.” He stretched out his hand again. “Trust me, Holder. I will explain.”

  She ignored the hand. “I thought I knew you,” she said.

  His mouth twitched under the beard. “Not all. Come out of the water, Holder; I don’t know if that creature will be back.”

  She took a breath, shivering. Then she reached for his hand. “Then tell me,” she said as he helped her from the lough. “Tell me why the seals come to you.”

  He nodded.

  I was perhaps four or five when I realized that my mam was . . . strange. I woke up one night in the bed I shared with my younger brother. I don’t know what it was that woke me—maybe the sound of a footstep or the creaking of the door. I managed to get out of the bed without waking my brother. Our house was small: my sister—the youngest of us at the time—slept in her crib in the same room, beside my parents’ bed. I could hear my da snoring. The moon was out and the sky was clear; in the silver light, I could see that where my ma should have been, the blankets were flung back. I called out for her softly so I wouldn’t wake the others, but she didn’t answer. I went out into the other room, but she wasn’t there, either. The door to our cottage, though, was ajar.

  My da was a fisherman, and we lived just above a rocky shingle of beach on the southern coast of Inish Thuaidh not far from the island of Inishfeirm where your family lived, in the townland of Maoil na nDreas. Sometimes, when the day was clear, we could even see Inishfeirm like a gray hump on the horizon to the south. But that has nothing to do with this story . . .

  I walked out of the cottage. I could see my father’s boat pulled up on the beach and hear the waves pounding against the shore. I thought I heard another sound as well, and I padded down toward the water. The wind was brisk, and the breakers were shattering on the walls of our little cove, splashing high on the cliff walls that rose out like arms on either side. In the bright moonlight, I could see seals out there on the rocks, several big ones, and they were calling loudly to each other, occasionally diving awkwardly into the surf and pulling themselves back up with their flippers. These seals, I noticed, were different than the small harbor seals that I usually saw. They shimmered in the moonlight, their fur sparkling with blue highlights. I watched them for a while, listening to what sounded like a loud conversation. One of the bulls noticed me, for I saw him turn his snout toward the beach and bellow. A few of the other seals looked toward me too, then, and one lurched from the rock into the sea and I lost sight of it. I watched the others, though, especially that old bull, who kept roaring and staring at me.

  “Ennis . . . ?” I heard my mam call my name, and she came from around da’s boat to where I was sitting on the beach. She was soaking wet and naked, and water dripped from her hair as she crouched down by me, smiling. Her eyes were as dark and bright as a seal’s. “What are you doing out here, young man?”

  “I woke up and you weren’t there, Mam,” I told her. “And I came out and saw the seals and I was watching them.” I pointed at the old bull and the seals gathered around him on the rock. I laughed. “They sound like they’re talking to each other, Mam.”

  “They are talking,” she said, laughing with me. She had a voice like purest crystal, and she seemed entirely comfortable in her nudity, which made me comfortable with it also. “You just have to know their language.”

  “Do you know the language?” I asked her wonderingly, and she nodded, laughing again.

  “I do. Would you like me to teach you sometime?”

  “Aye, Mam, I would,” I told her, wide-eyed.

  “Then I will. Now, let’s get you inside and back into bed. It’s cold out here.” She lifted me up, but I struggled to stay.

  “I’m not cold at all. Mam, what were you doing out here?” I asked her, staring up at her face, her hair all stringy and still dripping water from the ends, a bit of seaweed stuck near her ear. “Aren’t you cold?”

  “No, Ennis. I was . . . swimming.”

  “With the seals?”

  She nodded. “With the seals. Maybe, someday, you can swim with them, too, if . . .” She stopped then, and a smile curled her lip. She rubbed my hair. “Come now. Back to bed.” She led me back to the cottage door and stopped there. “Go on in,” she said. “I’m going to swim a bit more . . .”

  She kept her promise. She taught me how to understand the language of the blue seals. And, once or twice a year, she would leave our house late at night to “go swimming with the seals.” I don’t think my siblings ever noticed, but I did. I would see her slip out of bed and follow her. I think she probably knew that I was watching her, but she didn’t seem to care and never paid any attention to me at all. She would stand at the water’s edge and take off her night robe, standing naked under the moon with the seals all wailing and moaning and calling to her. She’d run toward the water, diving into the surf. Somehow, though I looked, I never saw my mam after that—she would vanish among the bodies of the seals and emerge hours later as light began to touch the sky, dripping wet but somehow not cold. If I were still there asleep on the beach, she would wake me and take me back to the cottage with her.

  I asked her, the first time, why I never could see her after she went into the water and she told me I might understand one day. She also told me about the blue seals—that there was but one small group of them left in all the world here at Inish Thuaidh, but that soon a time would come when they would return in greater numbers, and that she hoped I would be part of those days . . .

  Aye, my da knew. He seemed troubled by his wife’s occasional forays into the ocean, but did nothing about them, or perhaps it was just that he’d learned over the years that this was simply part of her—he didn’t speak to her about the seals, or her swimming at night, or mention any of it to us. “Your mam must do what she must,” was all he would say the one time I dared to bring up the subject with him. “And if you’re lucky, you won’t share her curse and find yourself out there swimming in the moonlight.” Then he turned his back to me as he mended his fishing net.

  I didn’t think of my mam as cursed, though. I saw the joy in her face as she came from the water. I saw the cavorting of the seals and the way they flew through the water and thought that it must be wonderful to be able to do that. I listened to their talk and sometimes tried to speak with them, though our throats aren’t made to speak their words, and they would laugh at my poor attempts and answer.

  And, one day after my body had started to grow hair and my voice had gone deeper, I did swim with them . . .

  “You’re . . . ?” Jenna breathed, and O’Deoradháin nodded solemnly. “I thought . . . I mean I’ve heard of changelings and such, but I’d always believed they were only tales.”

  “Not only tales. And not only me. Wasn’t your grand-mother mysteriously rescued by seals?—or maybe she unconsciously, under the stress of nearly drowning, tapped a part of herself she didn’t know was there.”

  The fire O’Deoradháin had built while he told his tale crackled, and Jenna snuggled close to the flames, letting the welcome heat sink into her still-damp clothes. She glanced back at the waters of the lough, half-expecting to see the seal again, but it was gone. “Are all the blue seals . . . ?”

  O’Deoradháin shrugged. “Some of them are changelings, aye, but not all and almost none can change at will. Most of
those who can change are water-snared, nearly always a seal but changing for a few short hours a year into human shape. Somewhere, back in my family’s past, a many times great-mam must have met a bull in his human form and loved him, and that blood manifested itself in my mam—she said that her sisters and brothers weren’t that way, just as my siblings also weren’t affected. But the blood occasionally shows to create the few Earth-snared ones like me or my mam, who feel the call of the water-part of us only rarely.”

  Jenna didn’t know what to say. She looked up the sloping bank of the lough to where the horses stood, to the pack on her mare where her father’s carved seal was hidden, and she remembered the blue paint he’d used to paint it and she wondered.

  “They’ve followed me, as well as they can, since I left Inish,” O’Deoradháin was saying. “They haven’t told me why, just that ‘the WaterMother’s voice tells them that they must.’ The WaterMother is their god, like our Mother-Creator. The ‘voice,’ I think, is a euphemism, a feeling they have or perhaps part of an old song-tale—all their history is passed down in songs since they don’t write at all, and there are thousands of them. Their—I suppose I should say ‘our’—memories are very good, and they pass the songs down generation to generation. I don’t know them all yet, only a few hundred.”

  Jenna remembered the seal who watched them when they talked at Deer Creek, and the shapes in the water that had pushed their boat away after they’d crossed Lough Lár . . . “What was the thing that attacked me?”

  O’Deoradháin shrugged again. He took a stick from the ground and pushed at the logs in the fire; sparks and smoke went whirling upward. “I don’t know. Garrentha—that’s the name of the seal who came to your rescue—didn’t either. There are things that live in hidden places that we don’t know, and more and more of them are waking as the mage-lights grow stronger. It’s not only humans who want to hold the magic.” He rose to his feet. “If you’re dry and warm enough, we should go. I think we’d be safer in the village at night than out here.”

  Jenna glanced back at the lough. She nodded. “Are there other secrets you’re keeping from me, O’Deoradháin? You ought to trot them out now, before we go farther.”

  He grinned at that, but the expression turned oddly serious when his dark eyes found hers. “I only have one,” he answered. “I suspect you already know what it is.”

  She found herself blushing under his gaze, and she turned away rather than say more.

  36

  Ambush and Offer

  THE folk of the village of Banshaigh had a name for the creature: “Uisce Taibhse,” it was: the water ghost. “No one fishes at the eastern end of Lough Glas now,” one grizzled old man told Jenna and O’Deoradháin. “At least not if you care about coming back. Too many boats have been mysteriously sunk there—in broad daylight and calm water—and many of those aboard lost. The Uisce Taibhse is an evil creature—or creatures, since there is more than one of them, and they don’t like us. We’ve caught one ourselves, snagged in our nets; it died out of the water like a fish, but it fought like a mad, cornered dog to its last breath. Why, if I had one of those clochs na thintrí the Riocha are wearing now, I’d just kill them all . . .”

  As would have happened in Tara’s tavern back in Ballintubber, the newcomers to The Green Waters, Banshaigh’s only inn, were greeted with curious looks and many ques tions. Jenna and O’Deoradháin agreed on their cover story before entering the village: they were cousins uprooted from their homes in Tuath Gabair by the recent troubles and hoping to return to the home of their uncle in Inish Thuaidh. Banshaigh wasn’t much larger than Ballintubber and though the villagers were aware of the hostilities between Connachta and Gabair, they were far enough removed from the larger towns and the Riocha that they were more sympathetic than hostile to the unfortunate travelers, especially since O’Deoradháin seemed to know as much about fishing as any of the locals.

  Lough Glas, the green lake, was fed by springs, brooks, and rills running from the high hills around it, and fed from its western end into a mountain-flanked and marshy tidal basin and the sea. Aye, the village fisherfolk sometimes ventured out into the open ocean. Aye, there was one fisherman in the village who would doubtless be willing to sail them to Inish Thuaidh for a fair price—Flynn Meagher had a large enough boat and often sailed the coast, if never that far north.

  They went to see Flynn Meagher the next morning near dawn, in a windy downpour.

  Meagher was a burly, nontalkative man, who grunted as O’Deoradháin explained what they wanted. “Maybe six days out, six back, fewer if the wind is good,” Meagher said finally. “Need to take another person to help me sail and I won’t be able to do any fishing. A half-mórceint a day is what I’ll need.” His face showed that he expected the bedraggled strangers to turn and leave with that. When O’Deoradháin showed him three golden coins and placed one of them in Meagher’s palm, he seemed astonished.

  “A quarter-mórceint a day is twice as much as you should get, but we’re in a hurry,” O’Deoradháin countered. “I’ll give you one mórceint now so you can hire your crew member and provision the boat. You’ll get the other two when we get there.”

  Meagher stared at the money in his hand. Slowly, his fingers curled around the coin, then opened again. He seemed to be thinking. “Can’t leave today. Tomorrow. Better weather, better tide.”

  “We’ll be here tomorrow morning, then. Same time.”

  A nod. His hand closed around the money and disappeared under the oiled leather coat.

  “He could take us a day’s sail out, kill us while we’re sleeping, steal the money and dump our bodies overboard for the fish,” Jenna said as they walked back to the inn.

  “Aye, he could,” O’Deoradháin admitted. “We’ll need to be careful. But we also have defenses he doesn’t know we have, and I could sail that boat myself with your help if we needed to. Do you have a better plan?”

  She didn’t. But she didn’t feel easy about the decision.

  The next day they sold their horses to the proprietor of The Green Waters and went to meet Meagher at his boat near the end of the docks. The day promised to be a fine one, as Meagher had suggested, but despite the yellow glow on the horizon and the deep, nearly cloudless azure above, Jenna felt more and more uneasy as they approached their rendezvous. She opened Lámh Shábhála slightly, examining the space around them with the cloch’s vision. There were several other people in the dock area, which was to be expected, but if there were other clochs nearby, they were well-shielded. They walked toward the small wooden shack on the shore where Meagher stored his nets and other equipment.

  Jenna put her hand on O’Deoradháin’s arm. “Wait,” she said. She could feel several people in the immediate area, yet the only one she could see was Meagher, on his boat and waving at them. “There are too many—”

  It was as far as she got. The door to Meagher’s shack opened. Tiarna Mac Ard stood there, and she suddenly felt the concealing shields go down around the rubied jewel already grasped in his hand.

  “No!” Mac Ard shouted as both Jenna and O’Deorad háin reached for their own clochs. “Don’t move!” Several men now appeared around the dock area, at least a half dozen with arrows nocked in bows already pulled back at full draw. They wore no colors, but they were obviously gardai. “Those arrows are aimed at your friend, Jenna,” Mac Ard continued. “I’ve seen what you can do, but I doubt that he’s had enough practice yet to know how to use that cloch well. If they see him touch poor Gairbith’s stone, though, they will fire.”

  Both of their hands went back to their sides and a grim smile came over Mac Ard’s face. He took a few steps toward them, though he stopped several yards away. “Your mam sends you her love and concern, Jenna. When I saw her last, a month ago, she was big with your half brother—at least the midwife tells us she thinks it’s a boy.”

  “Have you married her, or will this son be a bastard?” Jenna spat out, and Mac Ard’s smile faltered.

  “
Marriage is . . . a tool,” he answered slowly. “You know that, even if you don’t like it. In my position, one should only use it at need.”

  “What about my mam’s needs?”

  “My heart is with Maeve, Jenna,” he answered. “It will always be, whether I marry another woman or not. I don’t know if you can believe that, but it’s true and your mam knows it. And I know that my love is returned. She understands why I don’t marry her; she also knows that I will always take care of her, as I’ll take care of your brother when he’s born. Despite what you might want to believe, I’m not a monster.” He spread his hands wide as if he were about to embrace her, the cloch glinting in his right palm. “Give me Lámh Shábhála, freely, and I will also give you my promise that I will use the tool of marriage in a way that would please you. Your mam and my son, your half brother, would share my name. I would make her Bantiarna Mac Ard.”

  Jenna didn’t answer but glanced at O’Deoradháin, and Mac Ard’s gaze followed hers. “You’re more resourceful than I’d thought, Inishlander,” he said to O’Deoradháin. “I’ve underestimated you twice now. It won’t happen again. I also see the way she looks at you. Poor Coelin would be jealous, I think, though I doubt his wife lets the young man out of her sight any more.”