by Tom Deitz
Between every set of arches was a waist-high vase in the shape of a giant purple murex. And in each of those vases grew one of those insipid flowers Nuada had brought from the Lands of Men.
And there is Himself, Ailill added as the fair-haired Lord of the Sidhe stepped from the shadows of one of the arches with a handful of dead leaves in his hand, at which he gazed in a somewhat bemused manner.
“At the flowers, again?” Ailill inquired to Nuada’s back. “Perhaps Lugh should make you his gardener instead of his warlord.”
Nuada did not look up, but Ailill saw the hard muscles of Silverhand’s back tense beneath the dirty white velvet of his tunic. The sight pleased him considerably.
“Well,” the dark Faery went on, “perhaps there is something to the study of the mortal lands after all. Perhaps you have had a favorable influence on me—”
“I doubt that,” Nuada observed archly, without turning around.
Ailill moved his hand a certain way and the rose closest to Nuada wilted.
Nuada whirled; a tiny dagger appeared, needlelike, in his hand exactly where the leaves had been.
Ailill was not impressed. “For you see, Silverhand,” he said languidly, “I too have taken up the study of men—and a fascinating study I find it.”
Nuada raised a skeptical eyebrow. “Indeed?”
“Yes,” Ailill went on, “and one of the things I find most fascinating is how they can get along without Power.”
“Very well, I would say,” Nuada retorted.
“Perhaps.” Ailill looked idly at the bush, blinked thrice in succession, and sent three more blossoms crumbling to dust. “But take an example here, Nuada. Suppose that one of us lost something. Well, then, all we have to do is to call upon the Power and there are half a score ways we may use to find it.”
“This is not unknown to me,” Nuada observed.
“Ah! But mortals cannot always find things when they lose them, and one of the things I have learned in the process of my recent activities is that mortals lose things very frequently—very frequently indeed. But they do not find them nearly as often.”
Nuada tapped impatient fingers on his hip. “What, in particular, are you talking about?”
“A certain ring.”
“A ring?”
“A particular ring that offers some slight protection against some forms of Power.”
“A particular ring?”
“—That is no longer in the mortal boy’s keeping.”
“Nor in yours, either, I would guess,” Nuada replied. “Or you would have taken special care to call it to my attention by now.”
“Would I?”
Nuada glared at his adversary. “There are things about that ring you do not know, Ailill. There are things about that ring I do not know. Probably even things Oisin himself does not know.”
It was Ailill’s turn to glare. “Indeed?” he echoed sarcastically.
“And besides,” Nuada replied calmly, “there is other protection to be had than the ring, protection older and stronger.”
“You would not be speaking of yourself, would you, Silverhand? You are certainly older than I, if not the ring. As to stronger?” Ailill shrugged. “It is not a boast I would make, if I were you. I have not noticed that you have had any particular success in protecting the boy.”
“I am as successful as I need to be. My strength has never failed me. Can you say the same?”
“My Power has never failed me.”
“Indeed? I was under the impression that a certain summoning of yours had not gone to your liking.” He paused. “Surely you see the foolishness of what you undertake, Windmaster. Whatever you may think, mankind is no docile foe, be assured of that. You may think the Sullivan boy easy prey, but that is not necessarily true, either, even without help from our side. And be assured, Ailill, that though I do not approve of intervention in the World of Men, I will do whatever I have to in order to keep the Worlds apart. The boy will not be harmed.”
“So you are a traitor?” Ailill sneered.
Nuada’s eyes narrowed dangerously. “I would be careful how I used that word.”
Ailill’s eyes narrowed as well. “I listened to you once, Silverhand, and have been put to much trouble because of it. I should have known that you could not study the ways of mortals as closely as you have done and not be won to their cause.”
“I have not been won to their cause,” Nuada flared, “but I believe in making no enemies without reason, and in making allies where they may help us. I have no more desire than you to return into the High Air, or to retreat into the Hollow Hills or the Deep Waters.
“But there are ways and ways of achieving one’s ends,” Nuada went on, “and I also believe one should study one’s foes and learn from them—and if possible seek to win their friendship. No war is yet declared between Mankind and Faerie, though I know you itch for battle. Yet mortal men do not know us as their enemy, they do not know us at all, except for one, and you yourself know that even his closest comrades think him both a fool and a liar. There is no honor in attacking the innocent and the ignorant, Ailill. And there is no honor in making war for your own glory. You despise mortals because they have no honor and have lost sight of truth, and yet you behave no better. And so I must stand with the lad.”
“But are you prepared to die with him?”
“I seriously doubt I will have the opportunity.”
“Do not be too certain of that, Silverhand.”
“I have seen mortal men at war. You have not. It is a thing worth remembering.”
“Perhaps I will, if it suits me.”
Nuada frowned. “Then perhaps there are a few other things you should remember while you are so engaged: your status in this realm, for instance. You are a guest in this land, an ambassador of your brother, Finvarra of Erenn. Lugh Samildinach reigns in Tir-Nan-Og—yet you have defied him a hundred times over in the short time since you came here. Lugh will tolerate only so much interference.”
“Interference may not be needed much longer,” Ailill replied.
“Nor may Finvarra’s most current ambassador,” Nuada shot back as he turned his face once more toward the Cherokee roses.
Chapter IX: Hiking . . .
(Tuesday, August 11)
Fortunately David did not have a concussion, as a quick trip to the hospital had shown. But he did have a headache two days later—in the form of an early morning phone call from Liz Hughes. She had called simply to check on his recovery (which was progressing nicely), but things had quickly taken a more irritating turn.
“No, Liz,” David said firmly and for the third time, “you cannot go ginseng hunting with Uncle Dale and me.”
The phone receiver crackled ominously.
“But why not, Davy? I think your Uncle Dale is pretty neat, and I’ve never even seen any ginseng, and I think this would be a good time to combine both—kinda kill two birds with one stone.”
“It’s a matter of tradition, Liz. The men in my family have always been the ones who know the secret places where the ginseng grows; only now am I allowed to find out, and no Sullivan male has ever, ever taken a woman along.”
“Except your Aunt Hattie.” Uncle Dale sauntered into the kitchen.
David covered the phone with his hand and looked skeptically at his great-uncle.
“Who is it?” Uncle Dale asked.
“Liz Hughes,” David answered hurriedly. He spoke back into the receiver, “Just a minute, Liz.”
“What’s she want?”
David lowered the receiver to waist level. “Oh, she wants to go hunting ginseng with us tomorrow.”
“She does, does she? I think what she’s huntin’ don’t grow in the ground, though.”
“Uncle Dale, come on! I don’t want her goin’!”
David could hear Liz calling his name from down by his hip.
“Better talk to her, son; don’t want yore hikin’ partner mad at you. Bad luck. I ’spect she’ll be wantin’ to go d
eer huntin’ next, and it wouldn’t do to be on her bad side—might get shot.” Uncle Dale’s voice was pitched a shade too loud, deliberately so, David suspected.
Reluctantly David raised the phone to his ear again.
“What was that?” Liz asked, slightly irritated.
“Uncle Dale thinks it’s all right for you to go,” he said glumly. “Seems Aunt Hattie used to go with him.”
“Good! When do we leave?”
“Early, Liz. Before daylight. It’s supposed to rain again tomorrow afternoon, and Uncle Dale wants to get an early start.”
“So why doesn’t he just wait till the weather’s better?”
“That’s what I asked him,” David sighed in some annoyance, “and all he’d say was something about having to do it when the moon was in the right phase. You can find ginseng anytime, apparently, but only certain times are best to harvest it. And it’s supposed to be most potent if you get it early in the morning while the dew’s still on it, or something like that. So it’s gotta start before sunup. Still want to go?” he added sarcastically.
“I’ll be there when I need to be,” Liz replied firmly, “and I’ll be dressed right and I’ll have what I need, and I bet I find some ginseng before you do.”
“Maybe you will and maybe you won’t,” David said, hanging up the receiver before she could reply.
“That’s some gal,” Uncle Dale said wryly as he helped himself to a cup of the morning’s coffee. “She really does remind me of yore great-aunt Hattie, rest her soul. Fine woman. Got up at four o’clock every mornin’ of her married life and sent me off to the copper mines to work. Damn fine woman, though, and a sight better with a gun than I am, too, if the truth was known. You know that ten-pointer I got over my fireplace that I always said I shot?” He took David by the shoulder conspiratorially. “Well, she got it, really—but I never told, and she let me have my glory. But why you reckon that Hughes gal wants to go huntin’ ’seng with us?”
David contemplated the floor. “I dunno. Just being pesky, I guess.”
Uncle Dale looked straight at him. “I think you do know.”
David leaned up against the wall and folded his arms. “Well, she’s into this back-to-nature thing and all—survival skills, wilderness living, herbs and all that. She’s a walking Foxfire Book.”
“That may be true,” laughed Uncle Dale, “but there’s some things to a woman’s nature she’s never far from. Trouble is, us menfolks are usually too late in findin’ it out.” He laughed again.
“I can run pretty fast,” said David.
“Can you outrun one of Cupid’s arrows, though? That what you was runnin’ from the other day?”
David rolled his eyes. “You know that I don’t want you to go, either, for that matter.”
“Why, Davy boy! Why not? I been trompin’ around in them woods for sixty-odd years. I ain’t gonna quit now.”
“That’s a good reason: them sixty-odd years. You ain’t as young as you used to be.”
“I’m not? Well, that’s a fact—but them woods is a lot older’n I am, and they can still show a man a good time.”
David considered this unexpected piece of philosophy.
“But, Uncle Dale, suppose something happened to you out there?”
“What can happen? I know every rock and tree and stream for ten square miles back where we’re goin’. Been there every season and every weather. They ain’t nothin’ there can hurt me. Bears’ll run, what few there may be; ain’t no cougars no more; snakes you just gotta watch for; Indians gone a hundred fifty years; what else is there?”
“Oh, things like broken legs, sprained ankles . . .”
“Heart attacks?”
“Now that you mention it, yes.”
“Look, Davy, us Sullivans’re long lived folks; takes a lot to kill us. You ought to know that yoreself, considerin’ how busted up you was just two days ago. That even put the wind up me, if you want to know the truth. But look at you now. Just a scab or two to show for yore trouble. Few of us are ever sick more’n an aspirin’ll cure, and when we die, it’s usually ’cause we think it’s time for us to die—none of this lingerin’ in the hospital business. Shoot! Wars get more of us than anything else, and at that it takes some shootin’ to catch a mortal spot.”
David recalled how Uncle Dale had been wounded a couple of times in World War II, and he wasn’t a young man then. He glanced out into the yard and saw the red Mustang, recalled how another war had claimed David-the-elder and nearly unleashed a bitter retort, but restrained himself.
Uncle Dale was looking intently at him. “So what else is there to be scared of?”
“Maybe there’s things in the woods that you can’t see.”
“You been at them weird books again, ain’t you, boy?”
“They’re not weird; they were written by learned people.”
“As learned as you’ll be one day, I’ve no doubt. But look, David, I know they’s things in the world besides what we know; I’ve been too close to some of ’em to disbelieve entirely, like when I seen yore grandpa’s ghost that time, and I know you believe a darn sight more than I do, but I believe I’m gonna be all right, and that they ain’t nothin’ to be scared of this year that ain’t been there for sixty years before.”
The old man poured himself another cup of coffee and buttered a cold biscuit. “Now you tell me somethin’, boy: What’re you scared of—or is it ‘who’?”
“I’m not scared of anybody,” David replied sulkily.
“You’re the first man alive who ain’t, then. That’s part of your life—that, and facing up to it. But just remember who you are and what you are, and what you believe in. That’s all it takes.”
“Right-makes-might is easy if you’re six-foot-two and one-eighty.”
“Shoot, size don’t matter none. Why, when I was yore age I was littler than you. I did all right.”
“Oh, it’s not that, Uncle Dale,” said David, drumming his nails against the wall by the phone. “I can fight okay, if I have to. It’s just the hassle that bothers me, having to put up with things that I can’t control, but that try to control me. I’ve got a whole lot bothering me right now, and I’m gonna have to start back to school real soon, and that’ll only make it worse. I can’t stand this being in a bunch of worlds at once, like at school, where half the town kids won’t associate with me ’cause I’m too country, and half the country kids won’t ’cause I’m too town, and they all think I’m weird, and the girls . . .”
“Go on.”
“Oh, nothing! I just wish I could go off and not come back.”
“Do it, then. Nobody’s stoppin’ you.”
“You know I can’t.”
“I know you won’t. There’s a difference.” The old man’s voice softened. “Look, David, you are you: smart as a whip, good lookin’, healthy as a moose, well brought up, honest. You’ve got a good turn, an’ I don’t know what else—you’re everything I’d want in a son . . . and you sit there talkin’ like you ain’t worth nothin’. That’s a bunch of crap, boy. Now tell me, what’s got you so bothered?”
“I’m afraid of words, I guess, of being hassled and made fun of . . . and of something else I can’t tell even you.”
“There ain’t never been much you couldn’t tell me.”
“This is one of those things, though; this is one of those things I can’t even tell Alec.”
“It’s about that ring, ain’t it?” Uncle Dale took a sip of coffee, but his gaze never left David.
David didn’t say anything, but he could feel the weight of that stare.
Uncle Dale nodded knowingly. “That’s it, ain’t it? I thought so. Just remember one thing, boy: You ain’t the only one in the family that’s ever lived here, and that’s ever been up in them woods of a summer night.”
David looked up incredulously. “You?”
Uncle Dale shook his head almost sadly. “I told you, we didn’t dare . . . but my pa did. He seen something not of this world
, and, you know, that light in his eyes was just like the one I been seein’ in yores lately, and it was there till the day he died.”
“Uncle Dale . . .”
“Now’s not the time, boy; you’d best be seein’ to gettin’ your gear together for tomorrow. Won’t be no time for it in the mornin’.”
Fog filled the lowlands the next morning, hiding the farms, the lakes, even a good part of the mountain. Ragged bits lingered higher up, too, hanging eerily among the oaks and maples. An unseasonable cold front had moved into north Georgia during the night, bringing with it record-breaking low temperatures, even scattered reports of frost. David had had to get up in the middle of the night to turn on the heat in his bedroom.
But it was still a splendid morning. Or would be when the sun rose, David thought—even allowing for Liz, who had been on time, and dressed right, and had brought everything she was supposed to bring, and had even helped his mother make coffee. And David wished he had another cup as the three ginseng hunters pushed through a patch of rhododendron and paused for a rest atop a rock outcrop twenty or so feet high from which they could look both out and down.
David sank down on his haunches with his runestaff braced across his knees and took in the view, huddling himself up in his electric orange nylon hunting jacket—the same color as the jaunty cap Uncle Dale was wearing. He could see his breath floating away in the morning air, reminding him of the fog down below. To the east the sun still hid sleepily just out of sight behind a fold of mountain.
“That sure is a pretty view,” Liz commented.
“It is for a fact,” agreed Uncle Dale, “and I shot my first deer from right up here, too—back before Davy’s pa was born.”
“Was that before or after the Flood?” Davis teased offhandedly as he continued to contemplate the view. The first ray of sunrise cast a glitter into the air, and David found himself gazing across the fog-muffled lake that filled the valley below to the nearly symmetrical cone of Bloody Bald, now completely ringed by fog. Would it happen? he wondered. Would he see what he expected to see? Funny how nearly two weeks could pass without him ever getting time to catch Bloody Bald right at sunrise or sunset.