Holder of Lightning

by S L Farrell

  “Dúnmharú?” At the name, the crow cawed again and spread wide wings, gliding down to land in the grass in front of her. Its head cocked inquiringly at her. “Dúnmharú, is that really you?”

  The crow cawed once more as she reached out toward it. It didn’t move, but let her touch the soft, black feathers of its head and back. She glanced about her. “Seancoim, is he here, too?”

  Dúnmharú hopped backward, then flapped away again to the barrow, alighting there and cawing again. When Jenna got to her feet, the crow flew up again and landed just past the end of the grave, moving away from the fire and the encampment. Another caw. Jenna glanced back to where the Banrion and Máister Cléurach were sleeping, then followed after the bird. Fly several feet and wait; fly several feet and wait . . . The pattern went on for some time, until Jenna was well away from the camp, moving steadily down and east into a wooded valley. Dúnmharú led her along the bed of a stream tinkling merrily as it descended the slopes, until it finally merged with a river wending southward through a stand of sycamores. Dúnmharú cawed again, loudly this time, and flew off with a great flapping of wings, circling high and disappearing into the leaves of the trees.

  “Jenna!”

  The call was soft in the darkness, the voice familiar. She saw a flickering gleam of white beard in the shadows, and Seancoim stepped out toward her, leaning on his staff of oak.

  “Seancoim!” She rushed to him, enveloping him in her arms and taking in the familiar smell of spices and herbs that exuded from his body and clothing. “I can’t believe you’re here. How did you know, how did you get here . . . ?”

  The old Bunús Muintir seemed to gaze past her with his cataract-white eyes, his hand holding hers. Dúnmharú came flapping down from the branches above to land on his shoulder in a flurry. “You still overlook the slow magics,” he told her. “It was always the fault with most of you Daoine. You’ll likely ignore them entirely now, with the power you wield with the clochs na thintrí.” He took a long, slow breath and let it out again. “I saw, I heard,” he said. “Once this was Bunús Muintir land, and some of us still live here, hidden.” His blind eyes looked aside, but Dúnmharú regarded her with steady, bright eyes. “I came as quickly as I could. But it seems I’ve come late. I saw the pyre two nights ago, and I felt your anguish. I’m sorry, Jenna. I knew that there was to be love between the two of you. Even when you denied it back in Doire Coill, I knew. I’m sorry.”

  The tears came again then, sudden and hot, pushing from deep within her. She’d thought that she cried away all the pain, but it returned now, redoubled, and she realized how much she’d been holding away, hiding it from Aithne and Máister Cléurach and herself.

  “You’ll always feel this pain,” Seancoim murmured in her ear as he held her. “It will always be with you. You’ll hear a sound or smell something, and it will remind you of him and you’ll feel the loss all over again. But it will stop hurting you so much. You’ll get used to carrying the grief, as you’re starting to carry the pain of Lámh Shábhála without thinking about it.”

  “I was there. I saw them kill him and I couldn’t do anything to stop it.”

  “I know. And that’s not your fault. You need to mourn, but you also need to move past the grief. You’re still here, Jenna, and while you are, you can’t forget this world. If you’re going to Thall Coill, I knew I should be with you.”

  “Thall Coill . . .” She repeated the name, sniffing and wiping at her eyes. “That’s what some of the Holders told me. Riata . . .”

  “I know. I saw his spirit, wandering restless from his grave and looking north. Come with me; we have a long way to travel and night is the best time.” He hugged her again, then started to move away into the trees. Jenna began to follow, then glanced back up into the hills, where the campfire glimmered like a yellow-orange star. “You can choose only one path, Jenna,” Seancoim said.

  “How do I know which is the right one?” Jenna asked him.

  “You don’t,” he answered. “And you never will know. Not until the Seed-Daughter calls your soul back to Her and whispers the tale of your life in your ear. But you need to choose now. Go with them, or with me.”

  “I’ll go with you,” Jenna answered, and with the words she could feel the doubt dissolve within her. She gave a final glance back at the campfire, wondering whether the Banrion or Máister Cléurach realized yet that she was gone. Soon they would, but Jenna felt certain that she knew what the Banrion’s decision would be: We can’t waste time searching for the Holder. She’s made me a promise, and she’ll keep it if she can. We return to Dun Kiil . . .

  Jenna turned to Seancoim, and followed his shuffling steps into the deep shadows of the sycamores, Dunmharu flitting ahead above them.

  As Seancoim had indicated, they moved by night and rested by day, slipping through the landscape while the peo ple in the villages and farms slept. They met other Bunús Muintir: they crossed the River Teann in a currach oared by a Bunús they met on the shore, apparently waiting for them. Seancoim and the other man spoke in their own lan guage briefly, the Bunús occasionally glancing at Jenna, but he either didn’t speak the Daoine language or had nothing he wanted to say to her. When she thanked him for his help, he merely grunted and pushed his boat away from the shore, paddling back the way they’d come.

  Jenna remembered the maps she’d seen in Inishfeirm and Dún Kiil. Though she couldn’t read the markings on them, both Ennis and Máister Cléurach had pointed out to her the townlands and geography of Inish Thuaidh. Ingean na nUan, through which they walked now, was a lush land of rolling hills, punctuated here and there by the wide, checkered expanse of farmed lands, with small villages that reminded Jenna achingly of Ballintubber, tied together with the narrow ribbons of rutted dirt roads. They avoided the settled areas, keeping to the forest that wound in and around the farmland. As the nights passed, they moved steadily eastward and the land started to rise again. With each dawn, as they settled in to rest, Jenna could see the mountains ahead of them less blue with distance, looming higher until their path started to lift toward them and they were walking in green, narrow valleys where rills and brooks rushed frantically down steep slopes toward them, half-hidden in bracken and thickets. They turned northward now, and when they were forced to climb up to one of the ridgelines, Jenna could glimpse off to the east the shore of Lough Áthas; then, a few days later, to the north, the endless expanse of the Westering Sea, its waves touched with the milk of moonlight. Jenna wondered if, somewhere out there, Thraisha or her kind swam. But they never came close enough to the shore for Jenna to call for the Saimhóir with the cloch. Seancoim now turned north and east, roughly following the coastline but staying with the spine of mountains, steep hills, and drumlins bulwarking the island from the winds and storms that the sea often flung at it, and passing into the townland of An Ceann Ramhar.

  This townland was sparsely settled, and the villages grew even smaller and farther apart as they continued north. They began seeing large herds of storm deer, their hooves striking thunder from the land. Wind sprites wafted in clouds through the branches of trees, and the red, glaring eyes of dire wolves could be glimpsed watching them as they passed, though none attacked. There were other sounds and calls in the dark, and glimpses of creatures Jenna couldn’t identify. Even the more normal creatures seemed strange. She saw eagles flying high overhead with wingspans wider than she was tall, and they called to each other with voices that sounded almost human; there were enigmatic ripples in the dark lakes, odd footprints in the earth.

  “The land has almost fully awakened here,” Seancoim said one morning as they settled into an overhanging hollow in a hillside to sleep. He lit a small fire with dead branches, striking the tinder into reluctant flame with flint and steel. Dúnmharú flapped over to roost on a nearby branch, his head down on his breast. “It spreads slowly, but soon all places will be like this. When the mage-lights last faded, hundreds of years ago, these creatures faded, too, remembered only in the tales of
the old people. In a few generations, they were nothing more than myths and legends, and those who claimed to see them were ridiculed and laughed at. Now the mage-lights bring them back from the hidden, lost places where they rested.”

  “All the fables are real?” Jenna remembered the tales she’d heard back in Tara’s Tavern: from Aldwoman Pearce or Tom Mullin or in the songs Coelin sang.

  “Not all. But most are based on some truth, no matter how twisted and distorted they’ve become over time. In another twenty or thirty turns of the seasons, everyone will have seen the real meaning of the Filleadh.” Seancoim groaned as he settled back against the rocks. He rummaged in his pack for an earthenware pot, filled it with water from one of the skins, and set it at the edge of the fire. He unrolled a packet of dried fruit and meat and passed it over to Jenna. “In Thall Coill, the awakening is nearly complete.”

  “Tell me about Thall Coill,” Jenna said, breaking off a bite of the smoked meat. “Tell me about the crúdú. I asked En—” She started to say the name, and her throat closed. She forced back the sudden tears, swallowing. “. . . Ennis,” she continued, “but he didn’t know much about it, and Máister Cléurach simply wouldn’t talk about it at all.”

  Seancoim shook his head, his white, featureless eyes seeming to stare at the fire. “I won’t, either,” he said. “Not until it’s time.”

  “Máister Cléurach believes that it’s not real, that it’s a Bunús Muintir trick to kill the Daoine Holders.”

  “Is that what you think?”

  “I don’t believe you would do that to me.”

  Seancoim didn’t answer, only nodded sleepily. The eastern sky was lightening, though the sun was still behind the hills. The clouds were painted with rose and gold. “If I fail at Thall Coill,” Jenna said, “I want you to take Lámh Shábhála.”

  Seancoim laughed at that. “Me? An old, blind man? A Bunús Muintir?” He laughed again, setting his pack behind his head as a pillow. “No,” he answered. “It’s not a burden I want. Not now. If you fall, I’m certain that Lámh Sháb hála will find itself another Holder, all on its own—one that it wants.” He turned on his side, facing the fire. “And if you don’t let me rest these old bones, we’ll never get there and you won’t have to worry about it at all.”

  The mountains curved away east to their end at the long bay that jutted deep into Inish Thuaidh. Here, they were taller and stonier than their green-cloaked brothers and sisters to the south, thrusting jagged peaks into a steel-gray sky, piercing the clouds so that they bled rain and oozed a mist that cloaked the summits and sometimes fell heavily into the valleys below. This was wild land, and if there were Daoine here at all, Jenna saw no sign of them. “The only towns of your people are well off to the south, in the farm lands away from the coast,” Seancoim told her, Dúnmharú sitting on his shoulder. He pointed away with his walking stick to the hazy triple lines of ridges, one atop another, receding into the mist, and gestured to the ramparts yet to the north of them, a wall of stone. “Past there is the peninsula of Thall Coill.”

  “Do you know the way through? Have you been here before?”

  “No,” Seancoim answered. “But we’ll be shown the way, I’m sure.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Be patient,” he told her.

  They rested there that day, and Seancoim roused Jenna before sunset. They broke camp and trudged northward, toiling steadily upward between walls of gray rock spotted with lichens and garlanded with slick green mosses. To Jenna, it seemed that Seancoim wandered, moving left or right at random, their progress erratic. He said nothing, but seemed to be waiting. As they trudged on, walking in deepening twilight while the peaks above them were still touched with the last rays of the sun, Jenna had the sense of being watched, though she saw nothing and no one. The feeling persisted; it was so strong that she touched Lámh Shábhála and opened it slightly, letting the cloch’s energy be her vision. She could sense life around them, but she recognized none of the patterns it made in the cloch-vision. Somewhere, near the edge of the cloch’s sight, though, there were pinpricks of radiance less bright than a Cloch Mór: some of the clochmion, the minor stones. She started to mention it to Seancoim, but he simply grunted and shook his head at her, and she subsided into silence.

  They walked on, and the feeling of being watched persisted and strengthened as the sun vanished and the sky above darkened to ultramarine, then black. The crescent moon had yet to rise, but the constellation of the Oxcart wheeled ahead of them. The birds had settled into their roosts and Dúnmharú was nearly unseen as he moved from rock to rock ahead of them.

  Suddenly Dúnmharú gave a caw of alarm and hopped quickly into the air. The mound of rocks on which he perched seemed to shiver and lift and change, until . . .

  . . . the mound shifted like molten glass and solidified again, taking on the shape of a bulky, humanlike form standing shorter than Jenna or Seancoim, nearly as wide as it was tall. It raised its arms, then cracked them together again with a sound like two boulders smashing. A few seconds later, there was an echoing clamor to their right, and two other rock piles began to move, flowing slowly into similar forms. In the darkness, their exact shape was difficult to see, but there was a scraping sound as they walked forward with a rolling, side to side gait. They wore no clothing, their bodies a light brown-gray color like slate yet with a glossy sheen like fired pottery, their limbs thick and muscular. They stopped a few yards from Jenna and Seancoim as Jenna reached for Lámh Shábhála, ready to use the cloch at need. Thick eye ridges curled downward on the lead creature’s face; its rough-hewn features frowned. Again, it clashed hands together, and this time Jenna saw sparks jump as the hands came together.

  Seancoim answered with a like gesture, the sound of his handclap almost comically soft in contrast. The creature uttered a low, warbling tone and seemed to nod, its head inclining slowly first to Seancoim then Jenna. It stretched a thick-fingered hand out to Jenna, beckoning once.

  “Seancoim?”

  “They are Créneach,” he answered. “Have you never heard of them?” Jenna shook her head. “If you’d been brought up here, you would have,” he continued. “They belong to yet another one of the old tales: the Clay People who live in their mountain fastnesses. The Hewers of Rock, the Eaters of Stone, the Dwellers In Darkness, the Boulder-folk. There were a dozen names for them in my childhood.”

  Jenna touched the cloch as the Créneach gestured again to her, its voice a liquid sibilance almost like a bird’s call. As she did so, she felt that same presence of a clochmion, focused in all of the Créneach before her—not hung about them like jewelry, the way she carried Lámh Shábhála, but inside. A part of their being.

  Glancing back once at Seancoim, she went forward slowly, stopping an arm’s length from the creature. Now that she was close, she could see umber eyes that reflected light back at her as it stared up toward her, as a cat’s eyes might. The skin was unnaturally smooth, flecked with color like polished granite, and muscles bulged in arms, the torso, and legs. The unclothed being in front of her seemed to possess no gender at all; like its two companions, there was only a smoothness where she would have expected to see genitalia. The Créneach had no nose; instead, twin fissures ran between the eyes, each curling outward and under the deep eye sockets. The nasal openings flexed as the creature inhaled deeply in Jenna’s direction, still venting its warbling noises. It leaned closer to Jenna, its head level with the cloch hanging on its chain. It snuffled and a trill of musical notes came from its mouth. A long tongue flicked out, a flash of purple. Before Jenna could react, the creature licked at Lamh Shábhála, the long, thin tip snaking between the silver wire of its cage before retracting. The creature smacked its lips, its eyes half closed as if considering the taste as Jenna’s hand went belatedly to the cloch. She closed her hand around it, stepping back. The Créneach gave a final smack and turned to its companions; they conversed loudly in their own language for a moment.

  Jenna opened Lámh Sh�
�bhála, and in the cloch-hearing, words mingled with the warbling voice as the Créneach swiveled to face her again. “Soft-flesh bears the All-Heart. She returns to us. Soft-flesh will follow.” It beckoned as the trio turned and started to waddle away between the rocks.

  “Wait!” Jenna called to it, wondering if it could understand her through the clochmion inside it as Thraisha had understood her. “Who are you? What do you want?”

  It looked at her. “You may call me Treoraí, for I’ve come to escort you,” it said, then continued to walk away.

  Jenna glanced at Seancoim. He was already shuffling to follow them, his staff clattering against the rocks. She re leased the cloch, not wanting the Créneach to overhear her. “You’re going to follow them?” she asked. “Seancoim, we don’t know them or what they might intend to do.”

  “They seem to know where they’re going,” he answered. “And I don’t. Have you a better idea?”

  He smiled at her. Dúnmharú cackled on his shoulder.

  Jenna grimaced, but she followed.

  51

  The Tale of All-Heart

  TREORAI and its companions led them on a winding, upward path between two peaks. After a long climb, Treoraí turned abruptly, descending by a set of steep and narrow stone steps into a barely-visible cleft. They followed the stairs down, then walked another mile or so before again turning through a jagged fissure into a short passage and out into a small valley. The moon had risen by then, and Jenna could see a few other Créneach there as well as the black openings of caverns set in the overhanging, furrowed cliffs that lined the hidden spot. There were no more than fifteen of the creatures; in the cloch-vision, Jenna could sense that each of them held within it a clochmion . . . and that there was one spot of greater brightness: a Cloch Mór.