by John Lenahan
‘That is correct. Once you enter the second archway only success allows you to survive.’
‘But the Second Muirbhrúcht is easier?’
‘That is what others say but I found it harder. Just remember: whatever the Chamber throws at you, you must keep walking, you must keep your balance and you must hold on to your rune.’
‘What about the Third Muirbhrúcht?’
‘Ah well,’ the big man said. ‘The third one is different for everyone. It is not difficult. In fact, it is the opposite, it is quite a relief. You see, if you make it that far – you receive a gift.’
‘A gift?
‘Yes. Some receive an insight into their lives. A blacksmith may realise how better to forge steel, a dancer will leave The Choosing knowing a new step. Others get a glimpse of their future.’
‘What did you get?’
‘Oh my, I’ve never told anyone that.’
‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to pry.’
‘No. I think I’d like to tell you, Conor.’
And he did. I felt honoured. When he was through I asked, ‘You didn’t bring any beer with you, by any chance?’
‘There is far too much work ahead of you for beer drinking.’ He stood to leave and then opened his arms to administer his famous rib-crushing hug. I stood and accepted it. As he lifted me off the ground he said, ‘I’ll have a cold one waiting for you in your chamber tonight when this is done.’
‘Thanks, Gerard.’
As he walked away he stopped and said, ‘Essa is very mad at you.’
‘What did she say?’
‘Nothing. That’s how I know. I would look out if I were you.’
The rest of the day was more of the same with Master Eirnin making me walk while quizzing me and trying to make my concentration slip. Focusing had always been a problem for me at school. Maybe they should fill swimming pools with honey and give the teachers whips. OK, that’s a bad idea but at this time in my life – with that life being on the line – the technique worked. I really did think I was ready.
Eirnin didn’t, but he had no choice but to graduate me. ‘Your father has told me that the Pooka hawk scouts have spotted Banshee troops marching towards Duir. You are needed at the castle.’
I got out of the pool and rinsed off. When I was clean and dressed I reported one last time to the Master Beekeeper.
‘I listened to what Gerard told you at lunch, young prince. I have little to add. Your task is to keep focused and your goal is to reach past the Third Muirbhrúcht with your rune still in your fist. That may sound simple but the Chamber makes even that simple task very difficult. I hope to see you again, Prince of Hazel and Oak.’
‘Won’t you be at my Choosing?’
‘No, I have seen too many of my pupils fail. I can no longer watch Choosings.’
With that cheery statement ringing in my ears I limped back to the castle. My first stop was to see Graysea in the hope that she had enough time to unswell the bee stings on my foot and armpit. If I hadn’t just walked in there myself, I would have sworn I was in a different place than Castle Duir. The Room of Healing was now a proper blinding white infirmary with fully stacked shelves of bandages, sheets and medicine bottles. Cots were lined up in rows like airplanes on an aircraft carrier. Graysea was taking an inventory of a pile of things on the far wall but dropped everything when she saw me limping.
‘Are you injured?’
‘No … well … yes. It’s a bee sting.’ I sat on a cot, took off my Brownie slipper and showed her my double-sized foot.
‘That is a bee sting?’
‘They were big bees. I also got stung under my arm.’
Graysea sat down behind me and pulled my shirt over my head. ‘You smell like honey.’ She was reaching around to feel where the sting was when, of course, Essa walked in. Graysea didn’t see her and started her healing fish transformation. I was hit with the pain of the stings for a second and then experienced that wonderful relief that only mermaid healing can provide. I had to close my eyes. When I opened them – Essa was gone.
‘Damn.’
‘Does something else hurt?’
‘Oh, no, Graysea, thank you, I feel much better now.’
She kissed me on the cheek. ‘I have so much to do. I imagine you do too.’
‘Yes. Sleep.’
She slapped me on the arm. ‘You’re so silly.’
This time I managed to eat my supper before passing out.
I awoke to find Dad standing over me with a steaming cup of tea. I sat up in bed and groaned. Every muscle in my body was sore.
‘I’m going to go back to the Real World,’ I said, ‘and open a gym with a honey pool. It’s a hell of an all-body work-out.’
‘That’s why I brought you willow tea. Normally I would have given you a couple of days to recover but we don’t have that kind of time.’
‘How far away is Cialtie’s army?’
‘They’re not here yet but they are coming. It’s nothing for you to worry about today. Today is the day of your Choosing.’
‘Dad, I know you’re gung ho about me doing this but really with Cialtie on the march and me feeling like five miles of bad road, can’t my Choosing wait?’
‘No. Cialtie on the march is the reason why we can’t wait. If something happens to me, you have to be holding a Duir Rune or my brother has a “legitimate” claim to the Oak Throne.’
‘That’s not the way Ona’s prediction goes …’
Dad put up his hand to stop me. ‘You of all people should know that Ona’s predictions are a curse and certainly are nothing to act upon. I loved that old woman but I often wish she had never been born. Her damn predictions are almost as much to blame for my brother as he is. We fight Cialtie not because of anything Ona has said. We stop him because he must be stopped. Get dressed, Prince of Hazel and Oak.’
I walked down the long staircase by myself. When I arrived at the Chamber of Runes, I had to momentarily shield my eyes from the supernova-like glow coming from the thousands of Leprechaun candles that covered almost every surface. When my pupils had finally contracted to a suitable diameter, I saw that almost everybody was there.
Mom and Dad were flanked by Nieve, Fand, Dahy, Gerard. Brendan and Araf were standing holding up a ceremonial robe. I waved hi to everybody and then turned my back to let my mates help me don what I hoped was not going to be my funeral shroud.
‘If you don’t make it,’ Brendan said in my ear, ‘can I have your room?’
‘Araf,’ I said, ‘shouldn’t you be doing a Choosing too?’
‘I thought I would see if you survive before I tried it,’ the Imp replied.
These guys were my mates. Making jokes was exactly what I needed.
As I walked to Mom I stopped and quietly asked Gerard, ‘Essa?’
He just shook his head.
Well, that cinched it. I had suspected that I had blown it with the princess and now that she hadn’t shown up here, I was sure of it.
Mom placed a blank wooden rune in my hand and then tilted my head down with both of her hands and kissed me on the forehead. She didn’t say anything, and that scared me too.
Dad lifted the rune in my right hand and placed a nugget of gold underneath it. He placed his hands on my shoulders. ‘For once in your life – concentrate.’
I turned and faced the first archway. It looked perfectly clear just like any other hallway I had ever walked down. I turned, ‘Are you sure this thing’s plugged in?’
I got nothing – not even a snicker. So what else is new? I stepped into the First Muirbhrúcht.
Chapter Twenty-Three
The Choosing
There is an old expression in The Land: ‘The First Muirbhrúcht is the hardest.’ That’s what people say in Tir na Nog when they start some mundane task like baking a cake or cleaning out a moat. It’s like when Real Worlders say: ‘Every journey begins with a first step.’ Well, let me tell ya: the first Muirbhrúcht is not like baking a cake.
I had once seen Dad thou
ghtlessly run at a Muirbhrúcht and bounce back like a pinball off a bumper so I entered it slowly expecting the barrier to be a bit like jumping into Master Eirnin’s honey pool. What I wasn’t prepared for was the turbulence. I had seen people walk in the Chamber of Runes and you don’t walk that slowly for nothing, but I expected the resistance to come from the front. In reality it came from all directions. Like the honey pool, the surrounding air – or whatever was in it – was hard to push against but forces pushed different parts of you in different directions – and they were fierce. I thought I was going to get my ears ripped off. Saying that, losing my ears wouldn’t have been that bad a thing ’cause it sounded like my head was in a washing machine. That must be where they got the name from. Muirbhrúcht means tidal wave and it sounded like my head was under one.
I wasn’t three steps in when I started laughing. At first I thought it was just the usual little nervous giggling bout I get when I’m in mortal danger or in an uncomfortable situation, like when Fergal and I thought we were going to be killed by Big Hair and his Banshee tribe – but when I tried to stop, I found that I couldn’t and I didn’t know why. No matter what horrible things I imagined: squashed puppies with their eyes bulging out, Essa snogging The Turlow, tofu burgers, I still couldn’t stop laughing. The strange thing was, I wasn’t laughing at anything. I just had an overwhelming need to laugh but nothing in my head said anything funny. I threw my head back and howled with laughter, for a nanosecond I stopped my forward momentum. Immediately the ear-ripping turbulence intensified by a factor of 100. Let me tell you, even though I was laughing there was nothing funny about that. I instinctively knew that the increased pressure was because I had stopped moving and pushed into the non-gooey ectoplasm that passed for air in there. I continued to move. The turbulence subsided and so did my giggles.
When the sorrow hit me I remembered what I had been told. The First Muirbhrúcht bombards the Chooser with emotions. Getting past these emotional attacks was not easy. In life when emotions hit it is almost always the result of a thought but here in the First Muirbhrúcht the emotions were pure feeling. No manner of cheery thought could dispel the soul-crushing sorrow. I am tempted to call it grief but it wasn’t that. Grief is the cause of sorrow – this feeling had no cause. There was no poisonous thought I could divert or mask with levity. I simply wanted to die – to sit and stop everything because what was wrong with my life at that moment went beyond my mind. My entire being was simply agony and nothing anywhere, in any world, could fix it. Through all of this I kept my feet moving and my fingers wrapped around my rune. I don’t know how. I’m sure I couldn’t have withstood one second longer. Fortunately sorrow was replaced by rage and I welcomed it. Even though I could feel the veins in my temples popping and my jaw clamping down until I thought my face would snap – I welcomed the rage. I wanted to kill someone and that was a lot better than wanting to die. I toyed with putting a thought with the emotion and it wasn’t hard to imagine my Uncle Cialtie. I thought of what he did to Fergal. How he killed his mother and how he lied to his own son and then shamed him before ultimately killing him. And then like a snowball tumbling down a hill gaining size as it went, I added Fergal’s death to all of the other deaths he was responsible for: Frank, Spideog, everyone who died in the attack on the Hall of Knowledge, all who died in the Battle of the Twins of Macha, the genocide of the village of More, the destruction of the Hazellands. By the time my mind had conjured up all of those atrocities, I wasn’t sure if the rage I felt came from The Choosing or from my own mind.
The last emotion was contentment. It was a little gift that the First Muirbhrúcht gave me right at the end. In some respects this was the most dangerous emotion of all. After all that went before, I felt like sitting down and just enjoying the feeling. I think I would have, but the habit of putting one foot in front of the other that had been whipped into me by Master Eirnin came in handy.
Then I popped out of the First Muirbhrúcht.
The silence was almost the best part. I wanted to turn around and shout ‘I did it!’, but I had been instructed not to turn except on the way out or if I wanted to give up. Apparently you can turn around after the First Muirbhrúcht and live – but Oisin didn’t raise no quitter. I wanted to rest a while but I had been warned not to do that also. Apparently taking too long of a break saps your energy. I didn’t have all that much zip to begin with, so I gritted my teeth and entered the Second Muirbhrúcht.
If the First Muirbhrúcht is the hardest then the second one is the prettiest. I was faintly aware of lights and colours sparkling in the air while in the First Muirbhrúcht – when I entered the second one, colour was all I saw. What, minutes before, had been crystal clear air was now alive with pulsating light. It was like the luminescent algae in the ocean that the Mertain call ‘The Stream’, except here it wasn’t one colour, it was thousands.
The electric rainbow air made me hesitate but what made me stop in my tracks was the huge vision of my mother’s face that loomed in front of me. Master Eirnin’s training kicked in. I could almost feel the sting of his whip on my back and I automatically willed my feet to keep moving. Even though I was looking straight ahead, in the vision, I was looking up at my mother’s face. This was the kind of paradox that usually happens in dreams but this was no dream. This was a memory, my memory. I not only saw the huge face looking down on me but I felt the loving arms that cradled the tiny me. I grew up with no memory of my mother but obviously they were in there. You might imagine that this would be emotionally overpowering but I reacted to this memory with the emotions of an infant. Babies are binary. They are either happy or sad, wet or dry, hungry or satiated. I was happy and it was such a simple happiness that I slowed. Immediately the pressure of the Muirbhrúcht forced the training back into my head and I continued forward.
The next memory was the other side of that coin – it was simple unhappiness. I was crying because she was crying. My mother was crying. I felt myself being taken from her arms. I tried to reach for her but I was so young my arms would not obey. When she was out of view I felt and tasted a salty tear hitting my face; when I looked up, Dad’s face was as miserable as my mother’s had been.
More childhood memories floated into view. Just like no one else can hear a tree talk, even though it’s perfectly loud in your head, I’m sure no one else could see these visions but to me they played in the air like a Shadowcasting. These were memories that I had almost forgotten and they were captivating. The desire to just sit on the floor and watch, cross-legged, was overwhelming and if not for Master Eirnin I would have done just that and died. I took back everything I ever said about the old beekeeper and his lash.
I remembered living in Ireland and then moving to England. I replayed a childhood event that always puzzled me. I saw myself maybe seven years old and coming home from school and telling Dad that a rider on a black horse had spoken to me. We were packed and in a hotel before midnight. Two days later we were on a boat to America.
I got to watch puberty and adolescence again which made me want to close my eyes and press fast-forward – and I found that I kind of could. I slowed things down when I came to Sally. Sally hadn’t fared very well in my recent memories and it was nice to relive how wonderful we had been in the beginning. I had had girlfriends before her, but she was a real relationship. She taught me … no that’s wrong … together we learned how to be close and how to trust. I was mad at her for her choices at the end but now I saw she didn’t have the full picture – I never gave her a chance.
Nieve’s spear flew at me again and I felt the tingling glow of my mother’s protective force-field. And then I sped through the memories of my life since I discovered I was the Prince of Hazel and Oak: escaping from Cialtie, meeting my mother, meeting Fergal. I willed that scene to slow down and it did. My smile matched the ear-to-ear smile my cousin wore and I realised that the debilitating sorrow that I felt in the First Muirbhrúcht was the missing of Fergal. I re-saw that first sight I had of Essa with the li
ght shining up on her face from that glowing ball. I swallowed hard as I walked, just as I had at her father’s party.
I relived joining up with the Army of the Red Hand and how with Dad we stopped my uncle from destroying The Land. I remembered how proud I was of Dad and how I regained the feeling I had when I was a little kid – that he could do anything.
I got to travel back to the Hazellands with my mother again. How wonderful it was to get to actually know a mother that I had only ever fantasised about. That warm motherly love that I imagined and missed didn’t even come close to the real thing.
Like an anchor against the madness, Araf was a solid presence all through the visions.
I had to laugh when I remembered how angry Brendan was when the cop was accidentally dragged to The Land. He came around fast. I don’t know what I would have done if he hadn’t been there to help me save my father.
I saw the bravery of Tuan, the treachery of The Turlow, the magnificence and terror of Red’s transformation into a dragon. And then came Graysea. She really is the sweetest creature in any land. OK, she’s a bit ditzy, but she is beautiful and talented and funny and would literally give anything to make me happy. But I realised that even though I am oh so fond of her, when I saw her she didn’t make my heart skip like Essa. Maybe that was the gift of The Choosing. I knew now that I had to make Essa know that she is the only one for me.
After saving Dad with his dragon blood rebirth, all the most recent events sailed past. As I saw the scene of me entering the Chamber of Runes, I popped out. I took one deep breath and entered the Third Muirbhrúcht.
As Gerard warned me – this was a piece of cake. The resistance was still in the air but the pressure was gone. This was more like the honey pool than the previous two and I found myself sighing at the relief of it. A shower of sparks like from a grinding wheel issued from my closed fist but it didn’t hurt and I hardly noticed it. I thought about what Gerard said had happened to him when he was here. Gerard had been hoping for some tip on how to make super wine but instead he received a vision of a young girl. He spent years looking for her but never found her until he had a child of his own. His gift from The Choosing was the promise of Essa.