The Call

by Peadar O'Guilin

  But Nessa gets up anyway, walks down a towering aisle of books and then along the narrow gap between the archaeology section and the windows that leads toward the girls’ bathroom. And that’s where she sees her friend—or at least the back of her, because the library looks out over the lake and the path into the forest, and Megan is hurrying along it with Squeaky Emma and another girl with a blonde fuzz on her head who must surely be Aoife.

  Nessa watches them disappear, a slight pang of jealousy settling in her throat. You could have gone with them, she thinks, leaning her forehead against the chill glass, allowing her breath to fog it up. Best to study now though. She needs to get through a few more Testimonies. Five a day is her target, but on a library day she can easily double that and still find time for a poem or two.

  The girls disappear into the trees, and she’s about to turn away when she sees another group taking the exact same path. It’s the knights. Or some of them: Conor and Liz Sweeney and Chuckwu. If anything, they are moving even more carefully than the girls had before them, and Nessa realizes at once they are tracking them. And it won’t be for any good reason either! Conor is finally going to have his revenge on Megan for the jibes about the dogs.

  Don’t get involved. She made her bed and she can lie in it …

  But that’s just the jealousy talking, and Nessa is already moving toward the back exit that will lead down a rarely used stairway to the outside.

  “You’ll need help.”

  She jumps at the whisper. It’s just Anto, however. He’s only a hand taller than she is, but he’s as lean and well built as any of the lads, despite his strange diet.

  “How do you know what I’m doing?”

  “Oh”—he smiles, totally unafraid to show the gap where he lost a tooth last year—“nobody ever knows what you’re doing, Nessa. That’s the point, isn’t it? But Megan … now there’s a different story. She’s gone to find again whatever you two discovered the night of the hunt. And the great galloping Knights of the glorious Round Table—they want to find it too.”

  She fights and fights against his magical grin. So he knows about the “knights” too?

  Maybe she really does need Anto’s help. Not that she knows exactly what she plans to do yet, or if there’s even anything to worry about. Conor, after all, might simply want to know the secret for himself. But she doubts that. He owes Megan one, and knows she won’t dare report him even if she were to return with a broken arm or worse. Snitches never prosper in the school.

  “Come on,” Nessa says, turning to hide the coloring of her cheeks.

  They have other classmates in the library, but the full shelves hide their departure.

  The third week of October has brought a chilly eastern wind that has them longing for coats and especially shoes. Frost lies on the grass this morning, and everywhere are drifts of damp and slippery leaves.

  Anto ignores the discomfort to get down on his knees, his face close to the ground.

  “We don’t need to track them,” Nessa says. “I know where they’re going, remember?”

  “You know where they’ll end up,” he corrects her. “But they’ll be avoiding the instructors and whoever else is supposed to be keeping us out of the trees.”

  “A point to you,” she says, feeling foolish. She leaves him to his work and selects branches to make crutches out of, breaking them off with the strength of her arms that she has worked so hard on, keeping the sound to a minimum.

  “I always wondered,” Anto said, “why you don’t just make a permanent pair for yourself?”

  “It’s the rules,” she says, removing twigs and excess bits of wood. “Like the way the college forbids us from wearing shoes, because we won’t have any when we’re Called.”

  Anto nods. He has seen the way she has learned to move with those crutches of hers. And the practice of making them has served her well too, because she has created a new set in less than two minutes: springy but strong staves of ash, that she knows instinctively are just barely the right thickness to hold her weight.

  “They went this way,” he says.

  “The knights or the girls?”

  “Both, far as I can tell.”

  And that’s the last they’ll speak for some time. They know what it is to play the hunter as well as the hunted. They can communicate by numerous signals and signs, but so practiced is everyone in Year 5 by now that even such communication is hardly necessary.

  By day at this time of year, with little cover and such careless prey, they barely need to slow. Neither group ahead knows they’re being followed, but Nessa too can’t shake off the feeling that somebody is after her. She spends as much time looking backward as forward. What if Taaft is out there, ready to catch them all out? But no. That wouldn’t be her style. Why sneak up on them when their presence here is already enough to condemn them to the Cage?

  But Nessa’s skin crawls the farther they move into the trees. Anto’s too, by the look of him. He clutches the little crucifix his mother gave him so hard that his knuckles gleam white.

  By Crom, she thinks, he’s lovely. Even the way he moves is magical, every part of him in balance, his footsteps too light on the forest floor to disturb the fallen leaves.

  The two of them make good time and work together well as a team. Although Nessa—she can’t help it—shows off rather more of her skills than are strictly necessary for the task at hand. At one point, risking both the snapping of her crutches and the twisting of an ankle, she springs right over a fallen tree that Anto himself has to clamber past. She plays it cool as she waits for him to join her, pretending to examine a mark in the mud on the far side.

  He grins when he reaches her. He uses his hands to mime her flight through the air, his eyebrows raised in appreciation at her feat. He’s so close she can almost feel the heat of his skin. She’d pull him to her right now, she would, if it wasn’t for the weird sensation that they’re not alone. Every hair on her body is standing on end.

  Focus, she tells herself. Focus. She needs to work out what a girl on crutches and a pacifist can do to stop the likes of Conor. And she’d better come up with it quickly, because up ahead a voice, Megan’s voice, shrieks, “Oh, Crom! Watch out!”

  This is gonna be amazing,” says Megan. She might as well be speaking to herself and she feels her temper begin to rise. Look at them holding hands like that! Aoife couldn’t care less about the wonder she’s about to witness. She’s always got that lottery-winning grin on her wide peasant face when Emma’s with her.

  “She’ll break into a bloody song next,” Megan mutters.

  “What was that?” Emma asks.

  “I said we need to get a move on. It’s too quiet.”

  Let them moon over each other if they like, she thinks. But it’s Crom-twisted rude when they’re all supposed to be out here together and her the one doing them the favor! And what will Nessa say? Playing the Goody Two-shoes back at the library? Scowling? An unworthy thought, Megan realizes, because Nessa’s loyal unto death and will provide the world’s best alibi without the tiniest flicker of a lie showing on her face.

  “What do you mean, quiet?” asks Emma. The girl looks strangely uncomfortable. Megan’s not sure she’s ever seen her sweat so heavily after so little exertion.

  “They’re supposed to be excavating the thing. To be keeping us away with instructors and the like.”

  “They’re on a tea break,” says Aoife. “Every day at this time. We’ve been watching.”

  I have, you mean!

  Mind you, it was Emma who had spotted the pattern. Aoife on the other hand has weighed them down. Oh, she’s a generous soul. She smiles the biggest smiles in the dorm. She gives away glorious cakes, each crafted to genius levels of perfection by an obsessive old Pole. But she would sleep twenty-four hours a day if she could, and has no more initiative than one of these dead branches. Only Emma keeps her in this world at all.

  They are crouching under the skirts of a few evergreens. The ground is dry here and
the branches provide cover from the wind and any instructors that might be about. No more than sixty feet ahead of them, the ground slopes dramatically upward into what they all recognize now as a Fairy Fort.

  “Lucky for us they’re not leaving any guard dogs around,” says Emma. Her voice is hoarse. She clutches Aoife’s hand hard enough to hurt.

  “That’s cos the poor things went crazy,” says Aoife. “You remember the first night? The noise of them! Can’t have the dogs out here now. Strange that even the corpse of a Sídhe will upset them.”

  Megan checks her grandfather’s mechanical watch. “Only ten minutes left of the break,” she says. “It’s now or never.” But she’s reluctant to leave the cover of the trees, and that’s not like her at all. Someone is there, she thinks. But she’s not even sure where “there” is. It’s just a feeling she has.

  She crawls from under the evergreen on hands and knees and hears Aoife following, but not Emma. Nobody ever hears Emma unless she wants you to. And yet she must be there, or Aoife wouldn’t have moved at all.

  Megan runs in a crouch from tree to tree, regretting the swishing sounds she makes in the leaves and the panting of her breathing, as loud to her as a fire alarm on a still night. But she feels a grin rising on her face. I love to be bad! she thinks. Danú’s hairy tits, I love it!

  She scrambles up the slope, and moments later the girl in the rock is revealed. But it’s all she can do to smother a cry of delight, because the sight is so, so much better than she thought it would be.

  The researchers are not like the archaeologists of old, whose passion for their subject caused them to spend weeks carefully brushing dust away from moldy bits of pottery. This lot have come down from Dublin as part of a war effort. Lives—the entire future of their nation—might depend as much on their speed as their diligence. And so they have not hesitated to chisel away the boulder from which the young Sídhe woman sought to free herself. The girl is exposed now from the hips down, and it is extraordinary for two reasons. The first is that the rock has prevented the rest of the woman’s flesh from rotting at all. Her gold-flecked skin is bared for all to see. What a fine specimen she is, except … except …

  “She shrank!” said Aoife, a little out of breath, either from the run, or from the bizarre sight of the dead Sídhe.

  The lower body is much smaller, way out of proportion. The farther down you look, the more she seems to shrink: her buttocks belong to a child of ten; her knees to an infant; her calves to a newborn; and her feet, her feet are no longer than the first joint of Megan’s thumb with the toes too tiny to see at all.

  “I don’t like it,” Emma whispers. She has a slight Galway accent that gets stronger when she’s afraid. It’s been very strong the last few minutes, all the O’s changing to “ah,” the S’s to “sh” when they crash into the consonants. Her narrow shoulders shiver in the wind. “There’s someone here,” she says. “I … I feel it. There’s definitely somebody here.”

  Conor is grinning. He has his two best knights with him, and they are hiding under the very same tree their quarry was using just moments ago. What better proof of their weakness could there be than that they didn’t even look behind themselves to see that they had been followed?

  The girls have scrambled up the hill together. Megan, Squeaky Emma, and the useless Aoife. All of them are a waste of resources, he thinks, except perhaps for Emma, who is as lucky as a devil.

  Chuckwu lies on his belly, chewing away, as always, on who knows what. Liz Sweeney waits to his right, and she breaks discipline now to whisper, “Forget the stupid secret. Let’s just kick the shit out of them while we have the chance.”

  Conor mulls it over. He takes no special pleasure from cruelty, and only Megan, after all, is guilty. But it might be a good thing to blood his troops.

  “We should just go back,” says Chuckwu.

  Conor almost chokes. “What are you talking about?”

  The boy is one of very few in the school to have truly dark skin, but the queasiness shows in the set of his mouth and the rapid blinking of the eyes, as though he is one swallow away from throwing up.

  “Are you scared, Chuckers?”

  The answer is yes. It’s written all over the boy’s strong young body. “Not … not of those three … Lugh no! But can’t you feel it?”

  And as it happens, Conor can. Not as strongly as Chuckwu, or Squeaky Emma before them, or Anto, still two hundred paces away behind them. But he can feel it. Whatever it is. An unpleasant tingle. A pressure.

  It’s a dare, he thinks. A challenge to his authority, to his great future. He decides to meet it head-on.

  “I like Liz Sweeney’s idea,” he says now. “We’re running up there and we’ll take one each. A good kicking, but no permanent damage, you understand me? I’m looking at you, Liz Sweeney! I know Emma made a fool of you a few hunts ago. But nothing permanent that will affect them if they’re Called. They’ll die anyway, but it shouldn’t come back on us.”

  They nod, but Liz Sweeney, red-faced at his reprimand, asks, “What about the secret though? We need to find what they’re hiding out here.”

  “We’ll see it when we climb the hill, I’m sure. But no matter what it is, we investigate after we’ve taught the lesson that needs teaching. Understand? Distraction has killed thousands in the Grey Land. Focus on the task in hand.” His words are as firm as those of any commander and he makes sure they both nod at him, although Chuckwu looks unhappier than ever.

  They crawl out from under the tree, and like the magnificent athletes they are they run silently through the leaves and up the steep slope. The girls have their backs to them, but Megan looks up in time to cry out the alarm, rather louder than she should in the circumstances. “Oh, Crom! Watch out!”

  Already spooked, the quarry scatters, darting behind the boulder and all the equipment.

  Liz Sweeney dives for Emma, but her feet catch on the cord that stretches between a power drill and a small diesel generator. Down she goes. Neither Chuckwu nor Aoife are anywhere to be seen and Megan has no time to worry about them, because Conor himself is coming for her, his fists pumping like a locomotive.

  Megan stumbles over something—she has no idea what—but she is already on the far slope of the mound and is tumbling downhill, crashing through bracken and stopping just long enough at each rock along the way to draw blood.

  She fetches up against a lightning-shattered stump, dazed as a turnip. She has been taught well, however, and wastes little time in getting up again. And here comes Conor, charging down toward her, foiled only when she stumbles in behind a nearby ash tree so that his own momentum on the slope carries him a dozen steps too far. Then she shakes off the shock and flees back around the base of the mound, heading for home. Her two friends will have to fend for themselves. Nobody can deny that Conor is the greatest threat that Year 5 has to offer, and he’s been waiting, waiting for just this opportunity …

  Conor would punch himself if he could. He allowed his emotions to get the better of him, hurtling down the slope like a bull so that his victim can elegantly sidestep away from his flailing fists. But he catches himself on a branch and swings around after her.

  Facts are facts. He’s one of the fastest runners in the year, and Megan is not. He’s the best fighter in the whole school; a natural leader; a fine hunter. She will never be any of these things.

  Megan has no more than a hundred-fifty-foot head start on him, and even though he has already had to run up the hill toward that weird statue in the rock, or whatever the hell it was, there is simply no way she can escape the future king.

  Megan’s only talent is a smart mouth, and already the idea of seeing it sputter in fear and drip with blood is filling him with glee.

  Soon he has narrowed the distance to sixty feet. They are passing the tree under which both groups were hiding earlier. She is running well, he notes. Not wasting all her energy in panic; not throwing any pointless glances behind her. Anything can happen. If he stumbles, if he tw
ists an ankle, she might reach the path in time and come out the gap there into the playing fields, where even now the high voices of the Year 1s can be heard.

  But he too has been taught too well to fail now. Part of his attention is always on the ground ahead. He avoids slippy piles of leaves and pointed rocks and broken branches. Sixty feet become fifty, become fifteen …

  And then, from his left, Nessa arrives. Nessa! She has never moved so fast on those crutches of hers. Each is like a long, long leg, giving her—with enormous effort!—a giant’s stride. Nobody could keep up such a pace for long using only their arms, but she doesn’t need to.

  He sees her land on the top of a hummock just to his left, balancing there on her weak legs, swinging the crutches down ahead of her. Then she seems to shoot toward Conor, feetfirst, a human arrow. The crutches shatter, but it makes no difference. Pain explodes in his belly and his hip. Then his head bounces off a tree trunk and he’s on the ground.

  An eternity passes.

  “Is he … ? Did you kill him, Ness?”

  Two girls swim into focus above him.

  “He’ll be all right,” says Clip-Clop. “We need to get out of here. We’ll find Anto first. He’s around somewhere … ”

  “Are you sure Conor will be all right?”

  Nessa must have nodded, because Megan sighs, then spits—she actually spits at him! It runs down his face and he sits up, in agony, in fury. But everything hurts.

  “Stay down, big boy,” says Megan, “or you’ll be getting this here rock in the face.”

  Somewhere Aoife is screaming, and Conor thinks, At least Chuckwu succeeded in his mission.

  But that’s not it at all.

  Emma never gets caught on the weekly hunts. Her ability to hide is her pride and joy. So much so that it’s always her first boast, when, late at night, she sneaks into Aoife’s bed. “They’ll never catch me,” she whispers. To which Aoife inevitably replies, “Well, you’re in my web now!”