Wolfking The Omnibus: Books 1-4

by Sarah Rayne

  “For,” said the first Keepers, “anyone adjudged indiscreet; anyone who it is considered will not keep absolute and total silence about the reality of the Glowing Lands, cannot be allowed to live.”

  It was a harsh law, but it was a necessary one. Even so, twenty years earlier, the young Michael, brought before the Keepers, had stammered, “But I cannot take a vow of silence until I know what the Secret is.” And then, with a spurt of anger, “In any case, how would any of you know if I broke my vow?”

  “We would know,” said the Keepers.

  Flynn would be trustworthy; Michael thought he could be sure of that. The boy was a bit wild, he was a dreamer – still, I trust him, thought Michael, glancing at the silent figure at his side. And wondered was that an odd thing to think about your own son.

  Flynn was amused and intrigued by this midnight meeting; he was also intensely curious. No one, or at least no one Flynn could think of, went up Tara’s Hill after nightfall, and no one ever stood on its summit and looked down on the Glowing Lands.

  “Haunted,” said the villagers and shuddered, but Flynn thought that if the Hill was haunted, it was not haunted by anything you could put a name to. Several tales of hauntings had survived from the Letheans’ time, but Flynn knew that Tara’s Hill was not haunted by anything the Letheans would have recognised. There was a tremendous sense of anticipation tonight; there was a feeling of someone (something?) existing on the Hill, just out of sight and just out of hearing. Something that tried ceaselessly and tirelessly to make itself seen and heard. Flynn mentioned this to Michael as they began to ascend the hill, but Michael only said, “Perhaps. There are some odd things in the world since Devastation,” and fell silent.

  Flynn was aware, as never before, of the immense stillness of Tara’s Hill, and of a queer thrumming note on the night air. He tilted his head listening, for surely his father could hear it as well. But Michael, appealed to, said, “I hear nothing.”

  “Yes … listen. Surely it is music …”

  But no music he had ever heard the like of. Few of the Letheans’ music-making machines had survived, but some had. People had lately begun to rediscover these machines’ secrets; there was a little more time now from the healing of the land, there was not quite such a need to be endlessly tilling and planting and reaping. People were learning how to relax just a little. A family in Donegal had found music notation in an old tin trunk; someone had fathomed the principles of it. Flynn and his father had actually heard the most marvellous sounds made by something called a violin, and something else called a piano, played at a gathering of O’Connor families. Remarkable. The music had been written long before the Great Devastation, hundreds of years, it was thought. A German, someone said.

  But van Beethoven’s music had been nothing like the music Flynn was hearing now. He thought: I am not just hearing it, I am feeling it. The someone or the something that is just out of sight is pouring it into my soul, as easily as pouring water from one jug to another. He felt himself filling up with the music, until it spread to every pore of his body, and he wanted to shout aloud with delight and he wanted, as well, to turn and run away, because there was besides something cold and inhuman and rather cruel. I think, said Flynn to himself, that to listen to this for too long might drive a man insane.

  He glanced at his father again. “Do you truly not hear it?” he said, and Michael replied, “I hear nothing,” so that Flynn fell silent, for his father’s tone was dismissive.

  They had crested the summit of Tara’s Hill now, and below them, Flynn could see clearly the incandescent light. The Glowing Lands. There were many belts of them throughout Ireland; throughout the world, it was believed. They were known to be dangerous, although no one knew why, and they were thought to have been cursed. They were feared and avoided and they were never built on. “Never build on Glowing Lands,” said the old warning, and no one ever had.

  “Are we going down there?” said Flynn.

  “We are.”

  “To the Glowing Lands?”

  “Yes.” Michael looked at his son out of the corners of his eyes. “Afraid?”

  “Terrified,” said Flynn, and grinned. “Will I lead the way?”

  “If you wish.”

  And then Flynn saw the hooded and cloaked figures waiting for them.

  *

  They were welcomed courteously, but rather solemnly, into the circle of dark figures; Flynn thought afterwards that there was an air of glancing over the shoulder about them. He thought they were not exactly afraid, these unseen faces, but they were very, very wary.

  There were not very many of them; were there ten? Perhaps eleven or twelve. Certainly not more. One of them stepped forward and handed Flynn a cloak.

  “You must put this on.”

  “Why?”

  “You will blend better into the night. We do not want to be seen.”

  Flynn considered rebelling, but only for a second. His imagination was stirred and his curiosity aroused. As well as that, his sense of humour was awake. Were they all to caper goat-like on the damp grass and invoke the Old Gods? I’m not missing any of this, thought Flynn, and donned the cloak and a sober mien, and waited to see what came next.

  The men drew round him in a circle, and the one who had given him the cloak looked at him intently. Flynn thought, he is attempting to see into my soul, and felt at once uneasy.

  The man said, “Flynn O’Connor. Son of Michael, son of Liam, son of Patrick, son of Seamus, son of Donal, the First Keeper of the O’Connors. Listen. And listen carefully. Do not interrupt.

  “When the Great Devastation nearly killed the world and the Apocalypse stalked the land, many things died. Many things the world knew then will never be known to the world today.

  “But when the Apocalypse left his paw marks on the world, he did not know that in doing so he had disturbed something very ancient and very dangerous.”

  A pause. Michael glanced at Flynn, but Flynn was silent.

  “Ours is not the only world,” said the speaker, his eyes in shadow. “There have been many other worlds; there are still many other worlds, and there will be many worlds that will come after us. We cannot know of them, nor they of us. Ever since time began, they have been hidden from us, for the Gods who made the world drew down the Time Curtain, so that there should be no passage between these many and varied worlds.”

  Again the pause, as if he was listening to Flynn’s reactions. He appeared satisfied; he gave a small nod, and continued.

  “Imagine, if you can, Flynn O’Connor, son of the unbroken line of an old Irish family, the men and women who lived through the Great Devastation. Think of those ancestors of ours, think of what they endured. They were Letheans — the last of those extraordinary people, and yet they were the first of a new race as well. They had lived in the Lethe world with all its marvels and its learning and its luxuries. Its decadence, also, for we know that the Letheans, towards the end, had become very decadent. They had been born into it, those ancestors of ours, and they had never known any other world.

  “And then the Apocalypse came. We do not know what sort of warning they had, but we can assume there was some. Think of them, terrified, powerless, visualising the horrors about to be unleashed on them, for whatever else they may have lacked, we know they did not lack imagination.

  “And when the Apocalypse came, there would have been unimaginable terrors. Fiery walls of light. Blazing furnaces. Cities burning and floods and earthquakes. And afterwards, when the Apocalypse had gone, there would have been disease and hunger and thirst. People dying by the thousand. It has been said, and perhaps truly, that the unfortunate ones were those who survived …

  “The world was a burnt-out graveyard, Flynn, but the people who survived were courageous beyond description. They were survivors in the truest and oldest sense of the word. An extraordinary people. They were strong and they were fearless.

  “They rebuilt the world, Flynn, and they tried to explore all of its possibilities
, and they took on tasks that we would perhaps shrink from.

  “The Glowing Lands fascinated them. They knew the dangers — they knew they were the stigmata of the Great Devastation, but they still explored them. This is perhaps the greatest example of their courage, for we know that the Glowing Lands were very much brighter than they are now, and they would have been frightening places. They are dimming, you see, Flynn. With every generation that passes, the Glowing Lands — and their powers — are fading. A little each year. It may be that one day in the future, there will be no such things as Glowing Lands, and then there will be no need for Keepers of the Secret.”

  He stopped speaking and appeared to wait. Flynn said cautiously, “But what is the secret? And why does it need – all of this?”

  “The secret is a vast one,” said the man. “When it was discovered, it was thought by our ancestors to be too vast and widely reaching for it to be made generally known. Only the people who had Lands on their own territories …”

  Again the pause. “Yes?”

  The speaker seemed to hesitate, choosing his words.

  “When the Apocalypse stalked the world he did something to it that no one could have thought possible. I have not the learning to explain it to you fully; none of us has. The Letheans, with their scholars and their men of science and their philosophers might have done, but even then we cannot be sure. There are no recorded instances …”

  Once again Flynn said, “Yes?”

  “It is simple enough,” said the man. “The Apocalypse tore the Time Curtain, Flynn. The Glowing Lands, every one of them, are gateways to the past.”

  At once there was an air of relief about the silent figures; a feeling of: at last it is out in the open again! Now we can talk, even if only for a short while; for a short while we can relax our guard and share with our own kind the marvellous, terrible inheritance of Devastation.

  Flynn did not speak. His mind was tumbling with new ideas, struggling to adjust to something he had never before thought about. Or had he? Did so much not now become clear? The other-world feeling of Tara’s Hill. The strong sense of something pressing close to him whenever he was there. And the music — oh yes, above all, the cold, beautiful music. And then above that, of course, above everything, the knowledge that Tugaim had of the past. Not the near past; not the Letheans and their terrible battle, which had been only eleven — was it eleven? — generations ago; not that.

  The Deep Past — everything remembered and written and preserved. Every ancient book hoarded and jealously guarded by Flynn’s family. “For,” had said Flynn’s grandmother, “this is our heritage, and we must keep it so that it can be handed on.” And there had been fire-lit evenings when the family would gather in the long low-ceilinged room of the farmhouse and weave stories and tell legends, and there had been long drowsy afternoons in the apple orchard when they would sing some of the old old songs, old before the Letheans’ time, of the Ancient Ireland.

  The Ancient Ireland — the misty beginnings of time when creatures not quite human but not quite animal had ruled; when the Court of Tara had sat in unguessed-at splendour on this hill — oh dear God yes, thought Flynn, this very hill — and when Ireland had been ruled by sorcery and enchantment and by cunning and strength and intrigue. The Plain of the Fál, the Stone of Knowledge, phallus-shaped and giving voice when touched by the destined High King. The people of legend: Niall of the Nine Hostages, and the Twelve Chariot Warriors, and the Couch of Conchobar. Mab the Intoxicating One and Cormac mac Airt, Cormac of the Wolves, who had been exiled from Tara. Flynn sat and stared and listened and all the time thought: of course it is true! Of course we know it all. We were there. In the lost past of Ireland. In the mist-shrouded days when there were High Kings and sorcerers and battles.

  People were there. Recently. Since Devastation. The Apocalypse tore the Time Curtain and people have been back. That is why it has been so important to preserve the past. That is why the past is so important to us. A great sense of awe filled him, and he leaned forward, anxious to hear, eager not to miss anything.

  The discussion had become general now; the hooded figures were seated in a tight little circle on the grass, words tumbling from them, clearly keen to welcome him into their ranks, delighted to give the newcomer as much knowledge as they had.

  There were Glowing Lands throughout the world, said one; there were Keepers of the Secret in every country the Apocalypse had visited.

  Flynn asked: was the Great Devastation after all so widespread? What of the rumours that a few lands had escaped? Was that only a myth?

  “We do not believe any part of the world escaped,” said the man sadly. “Devastation was total. The Apocalypse was merciless, for although in other lands he is called by a different name, the results of his wrath are exactly the same.”

  Flynn was at once intrigued by the idea of knowledge filtering in from other lands, and the man, sensing this, said, “We have occasionally met Keepers from far-off countries. From time to time, the journey has been undertaken, for although it is arduous and long to travel such immense distances, still we have done it in order to learn and in order to gain a little understanding.”

  “Everywhere, it is the same,” said another. “The Great Devastation. War, plague, famine and death. In some lands, the Apocalypse is called the Armageddon. In others he is called by a name we could not pronounce. But everywhere it is the same.”

  “And everywhere has belts of Glowing Land,” said yet another. “In every country, the Time Curtain has been torn.”

  “But what happens? How does it work?”

  There was a sudden silence, and Flynn thought: I should not have said that. They are shocked.

  But they considered his question courteously; they glanced uneasily at one another, until, at length, the man who had told the story, and who appeared to be some kind of leader, said, “That is one of the things we do not know. It is one of the things you must promise, Flynn. Never to test the power of the Lands. Never to try to go back.”

  If you break the vow, we shall know … Michael, quietly listening, contributing little to the discussion, remembered his own initiation, twenty years earlier. If you break the vow, we shall know … of course they would know.

  “We know the power of the Lands,” said the leader, “for it is one of the things the first Keepers discovered, and one of the things they have handed down to us. We know that some of them did go back.”

  “And returned?”

  “Yes,” said the leader, carefully, “yes, they returned. But as each decade passed, it was a little more difficult for them to do so. It is easy to travel back, but it is not so easy to return.”

  And the power of the Glowing Lands is dimming … No one said it, but the words hovered. Flynn thought: to go back there, to find undreamed of wonders and terrors, but perhaps never to return …

  “Eventually,” said the leader, “it was agreed that to test the power of the Gateways must be strictly forbidden. That is one of our two laws, Flynn. The other is absolute secrecy. You must never speak of what you have learned tonight, and you must never, under any circumstances whatsoever, try to go through the Time Curtain.”

  *

  “But of course, people have gone through it,” said Michael, walking slowly back to the snug stone farmhouse, where fires would still burn for them, and where they would pour themselves tots of Peg Flanagan’s poteen and probably talk until first light of what had happened.

  “Of course they have gone back,” said Michael again. “It is how we in Tugaim have acquired our knowledge of Ancient Ireland.”

  Flynn said, “But why only Ancient Ireland? Why just that one time?”

  “If I had the learning,” said Michael, who was, in fact, a gentle, scholarly man when he had not taken poteen, “if I had the learning, I could explain it all clearly. As it is, I can tell you best by saying that each piece of Glowing Land is like a doorway. It opens on to one part of the past, and one part only. There are Tunnels of Time, gre
at echoing caverns, which go on and on, and where a man might wander forever in the dark, searching for the doorways that would lead him into the Past. They say that there are endless winds in the Tunnels,” said Michael, his eyes staring ahead unseeingly now. “And wouldn’t that be a terrible thing to find yourself trapped in one of those Tunnels.

  “But the tears in the Time Curtain are not where the Tunnels are,” he said, “therefore, we do not have unlimited access to the Past. We cannot get into the Tunnels and walk along them until we reach the doorways we want. Whole centuries are still sealed.

  “But each of us who owns Glowing Land, has a gateway into a portion of the past. A direct doorway, you see. The English have a chink through to the days of the druids, and another to the time of a chieftain they revered — Arthur. And there are many others I wouldn’t know about. The Keepers are reticent. Each guards his Gateways jealously.”

  They had reached the farmhouse now. Normality! thought Flynn. And was glad to see the place again. Wasn’t he? And then he remembered that strange, beckoning, other-world music on Tara’s Hill, and wondered if he was glad. He lit lamps from the embers of the fire on the hearth, and tugged off his boots. There was a basket of sweet-scented applewood logs in the fender, and he tipped several of them on to the dying fire. Yes, normality. Perhaps after all it was safest.

  “Tell me about the Keepers.”

  Michael sat down and stretched his legs to the blaze. It was good to be home. It was very good indeed to be able to talk to Flynn about the Secret.

  “The Keepers came into being after Devastation. When people who owned Glowing Lands began to discover the truth. No one knows how they did discover it, and to be sure, the Lands themselves were nothing to take much notice of. They were always blackened and arid. Nothing ever grew there. But there were reports of odd visions; strange lights, creatures that did not fit into any known category. That, of course, was not so very remarkable then; you have heard of the Mutants —”