The Invasion

by Peadar O'Guilin

  Of their own accord, her muscles turn her to face the arena. She made a promise after all, and it won’t be denied, not here, not when it’s this close to fulfilment.

  Lassair approaches, the monster sliding along at her side, groaning and wheezing.

  Kill the pointy-nosed little whore, Megan urges. Just kill her for me. And Nessa wants to, she really does. And what about that poor beast? Nessa could – must! – put it out of its misery.

  The woman smiles, nods encouragingly, and it’s all Nessa can do to resist. She needs the fire. Or does she?

  ‘Tell me,’ she says, hiding all her roiling emotions. ‘Has Dagda made himself … like me? Proof against fire?’

  The question seems to disturb Lassair, so that her magical smile turns to disgust. ‘How would the Cauldron recognize us if we altered ourselves?’

  Nessa breathes a sigh of relief.

  Lassair escorts her right to the centre of the arena. The ground is not as even as it should be. Little hummocks pop up here and there. Rocks, even the occasional boulder. But nothing has been allowed to grow. At least Nessa won’t have to worry about the Grey Land’s lethal flora when she’s fighting for her life.

  Now Lassair turns to Nessa and bows. ‘My thanks to you, thief. I leave you to your fate. When Conor kills you, I will return to the Many-Coloured Land.’

  ‘Dagda is not Conor.’

  ‘Of course not!’

  And now Nessa finds herself alone in the midst of an area the size of the gym hall back in Boyle, with the crowd growing restless, especially up on the far hill where Sídhe wait for the door that must soon open.

  Then silence falls. A man strides out to meet her, heroically proportioned, beardless; his glorious eyes shine beneath prominent brows. She has seen him before. Of course she has! Dagda, a living deity – even his name means ‘Good god’! His arms can tear an oak tree in half. His chin looks hard enough to shatter mountains, and his clothing – a living creature in its own right – moulds itself to the contours of a body such as only a comic-book artist could believe in.

  He is granite. He is the wrath of a tormented people made real and his target is a lame, half-starved teenager.

  She had meant to look away, she really had. But now he stands before her. Right before her and Nessa sees him.

  The air shivers. The door opens.

  It comes like a flash that awes the watching thousands even more than the sight of a god, because sunlight pours through. Into the Grey Land. It dazzles in its golden beauty. And the blue behind it! ‘Oh!’ Nessa cries, because in her time here she has forgotten the sky, the power of it like an endless pool of glory. And there’s green too, but not the sickly hue of the ghostly doorways. This is the green of a joyful, fecund nature.

  ‘Thank you,’ Dagda whispers. For all he is a god, he seems to be feeling more awe than anybody else. That’s good, Nessa thinks. And she wonders, Is there a referee for this fight? Are there rules? She doesn’t wait to find out.

  As Dagda watches his troops file joyfully through the door, Nessa holds out a hand and unleashes the flame.

  Nessa doesn’t hold back the fire. She releases a good half of it. A gout of red fury that would melt, she thinks, a house.

  When the flames die away, Dagda stands there, a little singed in the eyebrows and no more. ‘You forget, thief,’ he says, ‘I know you.’ He shrugs something from his back, something almost as large as she is. A slab of some kind. A board? A weapon? ‘I know your range and I stood just beyond it.’

  Nessa wastes no time thanking him for this valuable information. Instead she swings forward on her crutches and, before even hitting the ground, she spits a little fire in his face – just enough to blind him, she thinks. But the thing he removed from his back turns out to be a shield and he swings it between them just in time.

  It screams when the flames hit. The horrible sound drives her staggering back.

  ‘I am proud of this work,’ he says. ‘Do you like it?’

  Tell him to shove it up his hole! Megan says, but Nessa can only stare.

  Dadga made the shield from the body of a man. It looks like something out of a cartoon: a naked human steamrollered flat. The hands are splayed out in front, as though he is pressing against the entire weight of the world. And she sees too that her attack has set his hair on fire and blackened the teeth in his pitiful flat face.

  And Dagda laughs. ‘Did you think you were the only one I could protect from the flames, thief?’ He steps closer, keeping the ‘shield’ up. ‘You have used all your fire now?’

  ‘I have plenty left.’ But Nessa swings back, using the crutches to lengthen her stride, to move away faster. She needs to get behind that shield somehow, because, in spite of what she’s just said, Nessa only has a few more shots left in her and then, well, then she’s dead.

  On the hill behind Dagda, the small army has almost passed through the door. Another large group waits on a nearby hill for their chance to leave. Lassair must be among them, Nessa thinks. Needing only Nessa’s death for the chance to return home.

  Don’t get distracted!

  She returns her attention to her opponent. He has not yet tried to hurt her, but now, from his belt, he removes a weapon, and the crowd on the slopes applauds, some even jumping up and down with excitement. Which is strange, for while Dagda himself looks like something that might have stepped from the frame of a Jim Fitzpatrick illustration, the weapon is the most primitive of spears. Nessa expected a gleaming sword as long as her own body. Or some horror like the shield that would spit poison at her.

  But all she sees is a little stick topped with blackened charcoal.

  Dagda misunderstands her look. ‘Don’t worry, thief,’ he says. ‘It is sharp enough. I am too impatient today to make you suffer long.’

  And then he leaps. It’s an incredible feat of strength. From a standing start, carrying the weight of an adult human body in the form of a shield, he covers three metres and lands right in front of her. The rotten stick in his hand sweeps forward. Nessa stumbles away. The pain! A slash across her face, stinging, brutal, her own blood on her chin and a wisp of fire released by mistake boiling free into the air.

  Another stab comes for her belly; a third, her arm. The crutches swing her away just in time and a bubble of flame spat towards his eyes forces him to cover up. He laughs and laughs while Nessa scrambles off to the far side of the arena, breathing hard, bleeding. Her already exhausted arms vibrating like the strings of a guitar.

  His grinning face follows her. He’s not even slightly out of breath. This has been nothing for him, nothing at all. She leans for support on what she takes to be a boulder at the edge of the arena. It turns out, however, to be a giant skull, its eye sockets disturbingly human.

  ‘Well, she won’t last long,’ says a voice. ‘But sure, what did you expect? She’s what? A crippled little girl, am I right? And he’s what? A hero out of legend.’

  Nessa realizes that between the giant’s skull and the crowd she has backed herself into a corner, and already Dagda is walking calmly in her direction.

  ‘But,’ says another voice, ‘she’s fast, isn’t she? I mean. It’s a lifetime since I’ve seen one survive his first attack like that. Sure, sure, she had fire to push him back a bit. But still. She’s a snake, that one.’

  These aren’t Sídhe. At least, they don’t speak like Sídhe.

  The first voice says now, ‘Those crutches move her right out of the way. But look at the sweat on her! She won’t survive another—’

  Dagda’s weapon sweeps towards her. She moves her head just enough so that the long blackened tip passes before her eyes. It is not charcoal, as she first thought. Nor is it wood or metal.

  Before it can strike her again, she has fled behind the skull and away. The Sídhe applaud her, oohing and aahing when she springs over a rock like a mountain goat; when she uses the crutches to swing clear of a swipe from the spear, vaulting from boulder to hummock to boulder as Dagda pursues her, lacing her body wit
h tiny cuts that leak precious fire as well as blood.

  How long has it been since the start of the fight? A minute? Two?

  Nessa feels light-headed. Her arms shudder with sweat and she thinks, Oh, Mam! Oh, Dad! Anto! And she remembers this same shattering exhaustion from her Call, when she clung to the walls of a monstrous stomach that wished only to knock her into a pool of acid.

  On the hills above, the first door has now closed, taking all beauty away with it. The next door quivers, ready to open, and the Sídhe are impatient to return to the home that is also Nessa’s. When she dies, they will see it and she will not.

  She’s fading fast. She knows it and the crowd does too, although they enthusiastically applaud her efforts. Across the arena she sees the giant skull, sightlessly staring back at her, and remembers the conversation she overheard there. Something about it is nagging at her. Something that—

  And the second door opens.

  Nobody is expecting that. Even Dagda pauses and turns to look back and up. Light comes through again: weaker than before, as though so much time has passed that it is already later in the day.

  And then the hillside above them explodes.

  The Plan

  Over the next two days Anto sees five more Sídhe lose their lives to him and his fellow savages. One of the enemy holds out against the initial assault, barricading herself into the upstairs of a house near Collooney.

  Like the man they killed in the park, she cries, ‘I can’t die here!’ Their return to the longed-for Many-Coloured Land has turned the enemy into cowards.

  When Liz Sweeney and Krishnan drag her out, Anto places massive fingers around her shapely, bloody neck. ‘The king!’ he cries. ‘Where is the king of Sligo? I will have his head.’

  Her fear falls away at once and she laughs at him, that famous Sídhe grin stretched wide. ‘What good do you think that will do, thief? Our promise to him has already been fulfilled!’ She is all too happy to betray Morris. She even tells them where the gate is, and it’s nowhere near any of the famous archaeological sites of Sligo. ‘We have three gates now,’ she boasts. She’s smiling, because she honestly thinks that humans will keep their word and spare her.

  Of course they do not.

  Later, it’s Aoife who says, ‘Killing Morris isn’t going to save the Nation, is it? I mean, if there really are other gates anyway …’

  Anto doesn’t want to hear that, because what else can they do now? And Morris … Morris has to die, he just has to. This one purpose is holding him together. And Taaft too – that much is obvious.

  He knows closing the gate, all three gates even, won’t fix things. The Sídhe can find other ‘kings’ to revoke the treaty. All it takes is somebody willing to have their wildest dreams come true. Age can be reversed. Wounds can be made whole! Anything! Anything at all!

  Why, they even made Nessa fireproof.

  He remembers her triumphant return from the Grey Land. Impossibly alive. Impossibly happy. And he was so happy too, especially the day he kissed her in the hospital tent and she made plans for a future for both of them …

  ‘What’s wrong?’ asks Liz Sweeney. He’s breathing hard. ‘What is it?’

  It’s Nessa of course. She collapsed into his arms that day, her legs even weaker than usual after her Call. Why? he thinks. Why didn’t she ask for her limbs to be straightened as part of the deal? Isn’t that what a real traitor would have done? Maybe not. His own uncle, Paddy Cluxton, profoundly deaf, had been offered some kind of implant once, that would have healed him. Or so Mam said. And he’d refused it. Angrily even! ‘There’s nothing wrong with me!’ he’d said, and that was that.

  But others had accepted the implant, and there’s no getting away from the fact that Nessa’s entire life has been a war against her own disability; against other people’s impressions of it.

  He feels dizzy. He doesn’t know what to think. Liz Sweeney’s arms are like the branches of a spider bush and he shrugs them off more roughly than she deserves.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘I need to get out of here.’

  Nessa didn’t get the enemy to fix her legs because she didn’t think of it. Simple as that. The Sídhe are like the devil in an old story. When you sell them your soul they’ll give no more than you think to ask for.

  Or maybe she is like his uncle after all. Maybe she just didn’t want it. Certainly Anto wouldn’t have changed a hair on her head. He loved her. Loved her. That day in the gym is the most glorious time he can remember, both of them survivors and destined to be together for eternity.

  He finds himself leaning forward, wanting to throw up. But when Liz Sweeney finds him again to ask what’s wrong, Anto straightens and says, ‘The Sídhe upstairs told me where Morris is headed. Come on. Let’s get after him.’

  And so it is that on the evening of the third day of the pursuit, just as it’s becoming too dark to cycle any further, on a distant hillside they see a dozen bonfires light up simultaneously. They smell the Atlantic on the chill breeze and Anto thinks he might have spotted it on the horizon before the sun went down. But now he has eyes only for his enemies.

  How many of them are over there? How many can he kill? It doesn’t matter. He can only do his bit and get Morris, because otherwise what use is he? What use has he ever been? If he can achieve this one thing, then he and his evil arm can go to the grave and be at peace.

  They leave the bikes and their packs behind a wall. Mitch hesitates, looking at the metal of the spokes gleaming in the moonlight.

  ‘Shouldn’t we cover them with soil or something? What if they’re found?’

  Everybody else stares at him. Liz Sweeney actually sniggers.

  ‘Oh,’ he says, when understanding hits him. Nobody will be going home after this. Nobody will have a home to go to.

  In the distance the music starts.

  It’s beautiful. The hands playing it have honed their skills over thousands of years. The sound travels up through the cold air, jaunty and fast. Joyous whoops can be heard and the rhythmic stamping of a hundred pairs of feet.

  Anto nods to the others. No need to say it aloud; they all know it’s time to go. They run in a crouch, shielding themselves with walls and bushes and trees. As if sensing their approach, the music grows wilder, the stamping harder, the shouts more exuberant. And soon Anto’s squad has reached the top of a lesser, tree-crowned hill in the shadow of the first. There they halt, stunned by what they’re seeing.

  A thousand of the enemy are on the facing slope. They lie about in groups, pointing joyfully at the stars. They dance with such perfect grace, such ecstasy! They form circles that merge and swirl, eddying around rocks where individual athletes throw themselves carelessly into the air, diving metres downhill, knowing with complete certainty that their fellows will catch them with an easy laugh. And the colours! Bronze bangles; green jewels; astonishingly tooled garments of scarlet human leather and gleaming bone; hats made from the bark of the Grey Land’s most dangerous trees; living cloaks woven from a dozen unfortunate exiles to the hell from which the Sídhe have only now escaped.

  In the centre of it all, perched on a magnificently decorated horse – this too made of a human being – is Morris. Every now and again the horse cries out, ‘Morris! Morris! Lord of the Battle Kingdom!’ And the man himself, smugly resting on top, waves to the uncaring crowd, as though he is their master and not the other way around.

  Aoife whispers, right next to Anto’s ear, ‘I don’t see a … a gate, do you?’

  ‘You wouldn’t,’ says Liz Sweeney. She sounds as if she needs to throw up. Of all of them, she alone has been in the presence of such a door. ‘It’s too small to see if … if you approach it wrong.’

  ‘Yes,’ Anto nods. ‘Nessa told me all about it.’

  ‘That Crom-twisted, diseased sow!’

  Anto stiffens, almost biting his own tongue. Liz Sweeney notices and pulls away from him.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he says.

  ‘It doesn’t matter. I know y
ou don’t love me, Anto, but I thought …’

  ‘I don’t love her. I can’t. She betrayed us. She’s nothing to me.’

  ‘By Crom, you can’t even scratch without thinking of her.’ Liz Sweeney is angry. Upset.

  ‘That’s not true! Look, can we talk about this later?’

  And they both know there is no later, but even if there were, they are no longer a couple.

  Everybody else pretends not to notice.

  Taaft sets up her rifle. It has a scope she found in Longford, and a bipod mount to hold it steady. It points down the hill to where Morris saunters about on his ‘horse’.

  ‘I’m sure to hit him from here,’ she says. She hasn’t touched a drink since they set off on the hunt. Nor has she shouted a single order. All she seems to care about is seeing Morris die. But a vestige of her former duty returns for just a moment. ‘Listen up, boys and girls,’ she says. ‘The rest of you shouldn’t be here when I pull this trigger. They’ll come swarming up here like ants.’

  ‘That’s exactly what we want,’ says Anto. ‘It’s what we always wanted. To be on top of a hill with automatic weapons while they charge us.’ Even Aoife agrees. Even she would rather kill than run.

  Taaft grins and leans into the scope of her rifle. Everybody else gets their weapons ready too, except for little Mitch who says, ‘You know, lads, this hill … it’s perfectly round. I mean, the trees sort of disguise it, but still.’

  They all realize at the same time that he’s right. They’re in a cluster of Fairy Forts. Sitting, in fact, right on top of one and looking across at the next, where their enemies dance. But what difference can that make now? Morris has to die.

  ‘For Froggy,’ Taaft whispers, and with no more warning than that, pulls the trigger.

  The terrified horse rears at the sound of the shot. ‘My king!’ it cries. ‘Oh, my king!’ Morris tumbles to the ground, one leg caught in a stirrup made from his mount’s own flesh, and it drags him around the rocky hillside, through flocks of dancing Sídhe …