‘Sure it’s the strangest story I’ve ever heard.’
‘I suppose it must be.’
‘You say that Kate’s lost? She’s a prisoner of a … a witch?’
‘So Alan told me. By the time that happened I was … Well I was out of the picture.’
‘And that’s why I haven’t heard a word from her in two years?’
Mark thought: Two years! In Tír it had seemed no more than one.
‘She’s a prisoner – but alive, as far as I know. Alan has gone to rescue her, with the help of the army of the Shee.’
‘Dear lord!’ Bridey’s hands loosened on the dog, which took the opportunity of scrambling out of her lap. But it only moved a foot or two away from her, staring up at her bewildered face. ‘Sure none of it makes a bit of sense!’
Mark hesitated, uncertain how to convince Bridey of what he was telling her. ‘Look at me, Bridey. Look at my face!’
Bridey’s gaze lifted to Mark’s face, her eyes fastening on the black triangle in his brow. She could hardly miss the silver motes and arabesques that were pulsating within it in time with his heartbeat.
‘Look at Nan – at her face.’
Bridey gazed from one to the other.
‘They’re not birthmarks.’ Mark’s own eyes wandered over the central portion of the table surface, which was covered by an accumulation of newspapers. Everywhere he saw pictures of a world in turmoil. Buildings, whole streets, in flames.
‘There’s something going on here. I didn’t guide the Temple Ship to you, Bridey. I had the image of the sawmill in my mind.’
Bridey sighed, looking down at the dog.
‘You know, just to look at us, that we haven’t come from anywhere normal or nice. But things seem to be wrong here too. What’s going on?’
Bridey murmured, barely audibly, but clearly expecting him to hear. ‘Could be that madman of a father sent ye?’
The triangle pulsated violently in Mark’s brow. It brought a rush of sweat to his face.
‘What has Grimstone got to do with it?’
‘Don’t pretend ye don’t know.’
‘What am I supposed to know?’
‘What he did to Padraig!’
‘What did he do, Bridey?’
‘Them eejits burnt his sawmill to the ground.’
Mark stared once again at the pile of newspapers – at the mayhem in the pictures all over the pages. Has Bridey been gathering newspapers – hoarding them for some particular reason?
‘Padraig was hurt?’
‘Dead – so the guards have assumed. Though such was the intensity of the heat there was nothing left of him.’
Mark slumped in his chair. ‘When did this happen?’
‘Barely a month ago.’
‘And Grimstone was behind it – you’re sure?’
‘His eejit sect.’
‘Bridey, could you possibly find us some boots for our feet? We need to go to Padraig’s mill. See what happened for ourselves.’
Bridey stared back at him, a hard glint entering her eyes. ‘Then ye should look harder at them papers.’
Mark began searching through the newspapers, page by page. There was a pile of them, going back several months. With a snort of impatience, Bridey grabbed one of them, a Dublin-based broadsheet. She opened it out onto two central pages. She tapped with her finger at the single picture that took up two-thirds of the pages. It showed hooded figures running from a chasing pack of uniformed men wearing riot gear. They were silhouetted against the flames. The headline read: NEW OUTBREAK OF RIOTS IN LONDON.
Mark felt the triangle pulsate in his brow.
‘Nan!’ He spoke quietly. ‘Come look at this!’
She came and stood beside him, gazing down at the shields of the uniformed figures, which displayed a silvery logo. It looked like a very familiar triple infinity.
Bridey watched them, her eyes filled with suspicion. Mark took hold of her unresisting hand. ‘You recognised the symbol, didn’t you?’
‘It’s the same as Grimstone’s eejit sect.’
Mark looked more closely at the newspaper picture. ‘These people dealing with the riots – they don’t look like ordinary police.’
Bridey’s glare was unrelenting. ‘Paramilitaries, they call themselves.’
Mark was silent for several minutes, working his way more carefully through the mass of newspapers, which detailed riots going on for months in London as well as several other major cities in Britain.
He heard the gurgle of Bridey pouring herself a second whiskey, the swig of her downing half of it in one.
The following morning Mark hesitated in the area that had formerly been the sawmill yard, swivelling the battleaxe around in his left hand. The best Bridey could find for him were some ancient forestry boots that had belonged to Kate’s grandfather. They laced to just below his knees, their uppers now coated in ash. Nan wore one of Kate’s hooded cagoules over the thick-knit pullover and blue jeans, with the yellow calf-length Wellingtons Bridey had found for her. Around them there was nothing left standing of the great sheds that had stored the lumber. The red-brick house was gutted and roofless. Tatters of rugs and remnants of furniture had been hauled out of the wreckage and lay scattered over the yard. Mark’s gaze picked out some framed photographs, trodden into the dirt.
Is Padraig really dead?
Mark thought about what Bridey had said. No remains had been found in the ruins. The authorities had naturally assumed the worst, putting the lack of a body down to the intensity of the fire.
Their den was wrecked, the door hanging askew from a single contorted hinge. He looked down at the stump of the old pear tree, where the four friends had sat out of the sun and listened to Padraig’s fables. The tree had been sawn off close to ground level, used maybe to fuel the flames. He walked over to the smithy, with its blackened iron chimney, peering into the trashed inside. The anvil still stood, half hidden in the debris of the roof. Here, in the blistering heat of the furnace, with sparks flying, Mark had helped Padraig to forge the Spear of Lug.
He mused aloud: ‘Bridey’s right. Grimstone couldn’t have done this on his own.’
Nan sniffed at the air, like a cat. ‘There were many.’
What was it Bridey had called them? His eejit sect. Local people, Mark assumed. Local idiots who had been brainwashed by Grimstone. Mark looked across to Nan, who stood twenty yards away, her jeans and sweater almost luminescent against the black of the ash. It was strangely comforting to see her wearing Kate’s old clothes. She had also washed her blue-black hair in Bridey’s sink, before gathering it up in a purple scrunchie. He watched her throw her head back, eyes closed, sniffing further at the air.
‘I cannot sense death!’
‘You think you’d be able to smell it – even after such a furnace?’
‘I would sense it.’
Mark fell silent a moment, just looking at her and feeling the wave of love that swept over him. But there was something else missing here. Padraig had brought down the ancient bronze Fir Bolg battleaxe that had decorated a lintel over the barrow grave. Mark wondered if the historic battleaxe was still here, lost in the tumbled walls and fire-ravaged ruins.
‘You really think Padraig escaped?’ she interrupted his musing.
‘Or they took him away.’
Grimstone liked to possess people. He had kept Mark and Mo alive when he could easily have killed them. He liked to possess people even when he hated them. It allowed him to torment them. There was no mystery as to where ‘the eejits’ had gone after they had razed the sawmill. The trail led upland – into the rain-swept trees.
The last time Mark was here, Padraig had led the way with a machete. Today Mark led with his own Fir Bolg battleaxe, hacking at the nettles and brambles at the edges of Padraig’s woods, then climbing higher within the deciduous forest that grew thick and shady over the foothills of the Comeraghs. Their jeans were soaked from brush and brambles, and their hair plastered to their heads from droplet
s falling from the disturbed foliage overhead, before they arrived at the coppice of oaks that Mark remembered, trees hoary with age, with gaps where branches had been torn from them by winter storms. The mound was there, at least what was left of it after Grimstone’s fanatics had torn away its roof with picks and shovels. With the loss of the roof the octagonal stone-lined chamber had been exposed to the weather. The stones of the upper walls lay broken and scattered amid the white fragments of bone.
Nan asked him: ‘What is this place?’
‘It’s a barrow – the Grave of Feimhin.’ Mark stared about himself in sorrow. ‘Padraig was its guardian. Alan’s mother was an O’Brien – Padraig’s daughter. She ran away to America to escape the burden.’
Nan nodded – who better to understand that sense of burden. For two thousand lonely years her soul spirit had protected her island fortress in the Vale of Tazan.
Mark climbed down into the open wound of the grave. He ran his fingers over some of the broken lines of Ogham. He recalled Padraig’s words, when he had attempted to explain things that had seemed too preposterous to be taken seriously. Now those words seemed altogether prophetic.
‘What did the writing say?’
‘It described a history of terrible things from long ago.’
Mark pointed to the flat oblong of stone in the centre of the chamber. ‘There was a skeleton laid out here – a warrior, dressed in armour. Padraig said his name was Feimhin – a prince from the Bronze Age – maybe four thousand years ago.’
His eyes searched the debris-strewn floor, poking and probing with the blade of the battleaxe, until he found a piece of the green-tarnished armour, what looked like a cheek-plate.
‘The sword is gone.’
‘The sword? This is what they came for?’
‘Padraig treated it with great respect. There were warnings all over the walls. He told us the sword was dangerous.’
‘How dangerous?’
‘It had the triple infinity symbol on the hilt. Padraig showed us what it meant. Even after thousands of years the blade was ominous with magic – loaded with some kind of killing frenzy.’
Mark climbed back out, the Fir Bolg battleaxe strapped across his back. He couldn’t suppress an involuntary shiver. ‘The Ogham inscriptions talked about war – never-ending war.’
‘Like Tír?’
‘Exactly like Tír. So long as Prince Feimhin lived, and he had possession of the sword.’
‘And now Grimstone has it?’
Mark nodded. He was reflecting back on those pictures in Bridey’s newspapers. Riots. The streets of London in flames.
‘Oh, Mark – what does this mean?’
‘I’m not sure. But I wonder if it could have been the sword that really brought Grimstone here to Clonmel.’
‘To what purpose?’
‘He already had his twisted cross. At least it looked like a cross, forged out of some blackish metal. But it wasn’t a cross. It was what remained of a dagger. Like the dagger of the Preceptor that Alan fought by the river.’
‘Grimstone – he’s a Preceptor?’
‘I don’t know what he is. With the sword I dread to think what he might become.’
Nan came over to hold him.
Mark took a deep breath. Leaning back against the rain-soaked bole of an ancient oak tree, he stared down into the valley of the Suir, the road junction by the ruined sawmill far below them, and the little Irish town of Clonmel, with its smoking chimneys, stretching out in the distance around the silvery stream of the river.
He thought: Riots in London – and Grimstone has the Sword!
Acknowledgements
I should begin with a ‘hundred thousand thanks’ to my agent Leslie Gardner for her encouragement and guidance over several years. It was Leslie’s influence that led to what promises to be an exciting and creative symbiosis with my publisher, Jo Fletcher, of Jo Fletcher Books. My thanks also to David V Barrett, who was tough with me when I needed it, and to my copy editor Seán Costello, who was perceptive and sensitive as a good copy editor must be. It is a special pleasure to acknowledge Brendan Murphy, whose practical support was helpful from the outset, and Mark Salwowski, whose artistry has been much appreciated over the years. Finally, I am indebted to my wife, Barbara, for her enduring patience and indefatigable support.
www.frankpryan.com
The Tower of Bones Page 40