The Lost Years

by T.A. Barron

  28: A SIMPLE QUESTION

  Cairpré led me to the twin stools by the pantry. After removing some leather-bound books from the seats, we sat down. Shim, for his part, had already climbed onto the pantry’s bottom shelf and seemed very comfortable, surrounded by ample supplies for his supper.

  The poet observed me silently for several seconds. “You have changed since I last saw you. Quite a lot! So much I didn’t even recognize you at first. Though you could, I suppose, say the same about me. It has been five or six years, after all.”

  I could not contain my excitement. “You have met me before? And my mother as well?”

  His eyes darkened. “You don’t remember?”

  “I don’t remember any of my childhood! Up to the day I washed ashore, it’s all a mystery.” I grasped the sleeve of his white tunic. “But you can help me! You can answer my questions! Tell me everything you can. First—about my mother. Who is she? Where is she? Why did you say she was a friend?”

  Cairpré leaned back on his stool, clasping his knee with both hands. “It seems as though I will be telling you a story, after all.”

  After a pause, he began. “There came a day when a woman, a human woman, arrived on the shores of this island. She came from the land of the Celts, from a place called Gwynedd.”

  A sudden pang of doubt struck me. Had I been wrong all along about Branwen? Hesitantly, I asked, “What was her name?”

  “Elen.”

  I breathed a sigh of relief.

  “Now, Elen looked very different from us Fincayrans. Her skin was lighter than most, more creamy than ruddy. Her ears were shaped differently, too—more round than triangular. Truly, she was beautiful. But her most striking feature was her eyes. They glowed with a color unlike any ever seen on this island. Pure blue, untinted with gray or brown. Blue as a sapphire. So she was called Elen of the Sapphire Eyes.”

  I shuddered.

  “She came here,” he continued, “because of her love for a man of Fincayran blood. A man from this world, not her own. And soon after she arrived, she discovered yet another love.” He glanced around the room. “Books! She loved books, from all lands and all languages. In fact, we met over a book, when she came here to collect one I had borrowed that was slightly overdue—a decade or so. After that, she came here often to read and talk. She sat in the very chair where you sit now! Especially, she was interested in the art of healing, as it has been practiced through the ages. She herself had a gift for healing others.”

  Again I shuddered.

  Remembering something, Cairpré smiled to himself. “But her favorite books of all, I think, were the stories of the Greeks.”

  “Is this true?” I demanded. “Do you swear this is true?”

  “It is.”

  “She told me so little. Not even her name! She only called herself Branwen.”

  Cairpré turned toward a high shelf of books. “How like her to choose a name from legend. Yet it grieves me to hear that she chose such a tragic one.”

  “Alas that I was ever born,” I quoted.

  The poet gazed at me. “So you know the legend?”

  “I know it.” My lower lip trembled. “But I didn’t know her. Not at all. She said so little about herself that I refused . . .”

  A knot filled my throat, and I started to sob quietly. The poet watched me with the compassion of someone feeling the same stab of pain. Yet he did not try to comfort me. He merely let me shed the tears that I needed to shed.

  Finally, in a hoarse whisper, I finished the sentence. “I refused . . . to call her Mother.”

  Cairpré said nothing for some time. When at last he spoke, he asked a simple question.

  “Did she love you?”

  Raising my head, I nodded slowly. “Yes.”

  “Did she care for you when you needed help?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you did know her. You knew her down to her soul.”

  I wiped my cheeks with my tunic. “Perhaps. But it doesn’t feel that way. Can you tell me some . . . about my father?”

  A strange, faraway look came into Cairpré’s eyes. “Your father was an impressive youth. Strong, willful, passionate. Full of zest, the ardent quest. No, the rhythm’s all wrong. Let me try again. Awake! Alive! A startling drive. There, that’s better. In our most ancient tongue, his name means Tree Climber, because as a boy he so enjoyed climbing trees. Sometimes he would even climb to the top of a tall tree and stay there just for the experience of riding out a fierce storm.”

  I laughed out loud, understanding more fully than the poet knew.

  “Yet Tree Climber’s childhood, I believe, was far from joyous. His mother, Olwen, was a daughter of the sea, one of those beings the Earth folk call mer people, though Fincayrans prefer people of the mer. So he—like you—was born with the strange depths of the sea in his bones. Yet Olwen’s Long Journey came too soon.”

  “I’ve heard about this Long Journey.”

  Cairpré sighed. “And long it is. Arduous, too, according to The Glories of Dagda. Unless, of course, you happen to be one of the few who are taken to the Otherworld right in the moment of death. But that is rare, extremely rare.”

  “You were talking about my father.”

  “Oh, yes. Your father. Since Olwen died when he was but an infant, your father was reared by his own father, a Fincayran known as Tuatha, son of Finvarra. Now Tuatha was a masterful wizard and a powerful man. It is said that even the great spirit Dagda would sometimes come to his home to confer on high matters. But alas, this wizard had very little time for his own son’s needs. And Tuatha had even less time when he discovered—when your father was about the age you are now—that the boy lacked the gift of making magic. The powers, as Tuatha called them.”

  I swallowed hard, knowing that such powers were not a gift, but a curse. I recalled the prophecy of my grandfather, as told to me by Branwen—Elen—my mother. That she would one day have a son who would possess powers even greater than his own. Whose magic would spring from the very deepest sources. Such folly! He might have been a great wizard, but he could not have been more wrong.

  “Your father’s life changed, however, when he first met Elen during one of his travels to Earth. They fell deeply in love. Although it is rarely done, and still more rarely done with success, this man and woman of different worlds were married. Elen came to live in Fincayra. And because of her love, a new strength came into his heart, a new calm into his eye. The loving bond may reach beyond. Their happiness was great, for a time, though I am afraid that time was all too brief.”

  Grasping the edge of the stool where my own mother had sat long ago, I leaned forward. “What happened?”

  Cairpré’s face, so serious already, grew still more serious. “Your father,” he began, then paused to clear his throat. “Your father was part of the royal circle of Stangmar. When the evil spirit Rhita Gawr, who has long had designs on Fincayra, began courting the king, your father was present. And your father—like the rest of the circle—slipped gradually into trouble. The same trouble that eventually corrupted the king, as well as the whole of Fincayra.”

  “Didn’t my father try to resist Rhita Gawr? Didn’t he try to keep the king from listening to him?”

  “If he tried, he failed.” The poet sighed. “You must understand. Many good people have been fooled by Rhita Gawr’s treachery. Your father was only one of them.”

  I felt heavier than a boulder. “So my father helped to bring the Blight to Fincayra.”

  “That is true. But all of us bear some of the blame.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Cairpré winced, so painful was the memory. “It all happened gradually, you see. So gradually that no one quite understood what was happening—until it was too late. No one but Stangmar himself understands just how it started. All anyone else knows is that, somehow, Rhita Gawr offered to protect the king in a time of need. To have refused this help would have placed the king, and therefore Fincayra, in some sort of danger. R
hita Gawr must have planned it out very carefully, because he made it almost impossible for the king not to accept his help. And Stangmar did just that.”

  He paused to lift a small brown moth off his white collar and place it gently on top of a pile of books by his stool. “That one little decision has led to a cascade of tragedies, one after another. When Rhita Gawr convinced Stangmar that his enemies were plotting to overthrow him, the king forged a questionable alliance with the warrior goblins and the shifting wraiths. Out of their dark crevasses they crawled! Then came the rumors that the giants, Fincayra’s most ancient people, had suddenly become dangerous. Not only to the king, but to the rest of us, as well. So not many objected when Stangmar ordered the giants hunted down. Giants always seemed so . . . different to most people. Those of us who did object were either ridiculed or battered into silence. Next Stangmar heeded Rhita Gawr’s warnings and began a campaign to cleanse the land of all the king’s enemies—and to confiscate the Treasures of Fincayra because they might somehow fall into enemy hands.”

  “Didn’t anyone try to stop this?”

  “Some brave souls tried, but they were too few and too late. Stangmar stamped out any opposition, burning whole villages to the ground on the slightest suspicion of treason. Yet even that was preferable to what he did to the village of Caer Neithan.”

  I jumped. “You mean . . . the Town of the Bards?”

  “You know of it? Oh, what a loss, to our world and all the others! For ages beyond memory, that town has been a fountain of music and song, home of our most inspired storytellers, nurturer of generations of bards. Laon the Lame was born there! Pwyll wrote her first poem there! The Vessel of Illusion was composed there! I could go on and on. Here song is ever in the air, while story climbs the spiral stair.”

  With a nod, I observed, “The words on the sign.”

  “Quite so. They were written in truth, though now they are but a mockery. I should know, since I wrote them myself.” He sighed. “Caer Neithan was my birthplace, as well.”

  “What happened there?”

  Cairpré studied me sadly for a while. “Of all the fabled Treasures stolen by Stangmar—the sword Deepercut that can slice to the soul, the Flowering Harp that can call forth the spring, the Cauldron of Death that can end any life—the one most celebrated by bards throughout time was the Caller of Dreams. It was a horn with the power to bring wondrous dreams to life, and for centuries it was used only sparingly and wisely. But with the help of Rhita Gawr, Stangmar used it to punish Caer Neithan for harboring some who dared to oppose his policies. He called to life the most horrible dream ever beheld by any bard—and inflicted it upon the entire town.”

  Remembering the half-crazed eyes of the man with the spear, I was almost afraid to ask, “What dream was that?”

  The poet’s eyes grew cloudy. “That every man, woman, and child in that village would never speak, nor sing, nor write again. That the instruments of their souls—their very voices—would be silenced forever.”

  His voice a mere whisper, he continued. “By this time, no one was left to protest when Rhita Gawr urged Stangmar to destroy his own castle, the grandest yet most welcoming home any king or queen could ever ask for, including its library of books, a library more vast than my own by a thousandfold. And why? On the grounds that it was not safe enough from attack! So Rhita Gawr, calling it a gesture of friendship no doubt, built a new castle for Stangmar, a castle infused with his own evil power. Thus arose the Shrouded Castle, ever spinning on its foundation, from which spreads the impenetrable cloud that now darkens our sky and the terrible Blight that now strangles our soil.”

  He rubbed his chin. “The castle is guarded by Rhita Gawr’s own deathless warriors, the ghouliants. Their lives, if you can call them lives—for they are actually men whose bodies were raised from the dead by Rhita Gawr—will never end, at least not by mortal blows. For their lives are sustained by the very turning of the Shrouded Castle! So as long as the castle keeps turning, they will remain there, performing deeds even darker than the Shroud itself.”

  I ached for Rhia. If she was still alive, she was probably in the bowels of that very castle! She would be at the mercy of the ghouliants, and of Stangmar himself. What would become of her when he concluded that she neither could nor would help him obtain the Galator, the last Treasure? I shuddered at the thought. And I despaired at the Grand Elusa’s belief that the only way to topple Stangmar was to destroy the Shrouded Castle. I might as well wish to sprout wings!

  “Now you can see,” Cairpré added, “that Stangmar is truly the prisoner of Rhita Gawr. And as Stangmar is imprisoned, so are we all.”

  “Why hasn’t Dagda intervened to stop all this? He is battling Rhita Gawr on other fronts, isn’t he?”

  “That he is. In the Otherworld as well as in this world. But Dagda believes, as Rhita Gawr does not, that to win ultimately he must respect people’s free will. Dagda allows us to make our own choices, for good or ill. So if Fincayra is to be saved, it must be saved by the Fincayrans.”

  29: LOST WINGS

  Cairpré reached around Shim, who had managed to spread himself (as well as clover honey) across the pantry shelf. The long-haired man tore off a slab of dark, grainy bread and ripped it in half. Keeping one piece, he handed me the other.

  “Here. Before your little friend eats it all.”

  Shim did not seem to notice and continued stuffing himself.

  I half grinned and took a bite of the crusty bread. It felt hard, almost like wood, until some vigorous chewing softened it up a bit. Then, to my surprise, it swiftly dissolved into liquid, filling my mouth with a tangy, minty flavor. Almost as soon as I swallowed, a wave of nourishment flowed through me. I straightened my back. Even the usual pain between my shoulder blades eased a little. I took another bite.

  “You like ambrosia bread, I can see,” said Cairpré through a mouthful. “One of the Slantos’ finest achievements, without doubt. Still, it is said that no one from other parts of Fincayra has ever tasted any of the Slantos’ most special breads, and that they guard those precious recipes with their lives.”

  I scanned the walls and floor of the room, so densely jammed with volumes. Being here felt like being in the hold of a ship whose cargo consisted of nothing but books. I remembered Branwen’s wistful look when she had spoken about being in a room full of books—this very one, no doubt. Even with the spreading Blight, it must have been difficult for her to leave this room, this land, forever.

  I turned back to Cairpré. “Bran—I mean, my mother—must have loved being here, with all your books.”

  “Indeed she did. She wanted to read the teachings of the Fincayrans, the Druids, the Celts, the Jews, the Christians, the Greeks. She called herself my student, but it was really more the other way around. I learned so much from her.”

  He glanced at a mound of books at the base of the ladder. On the leather cover of the book on top, a gold-leaf portrait, showing a figure driving a blazing chariot, gleamed in the light of the hearth fire.

  “I remember once,” he said in a distant voice, “when we talked the whole night through about those remarkable places where beings of mortal flesh and beings of immortal spirit live side by side. Where time flows both in a line and in a circle. Where sacred time and historical time exist together. In between places, she called them.”

  “Like Mount Olympus.”

  The poet nodded. “Or like Fincayra.”

  “Was it all the mounting troubles that made her want to leave Fincayra? Or was there something more?”

  He eyed me strangely. “Your suspicion is correct. There was something more.”

  “What?”

  “You, my boy.”

  My brow furrowed. “I don’t understand.”

  “Let me explain. Do you know about the Greek Isle of Delos?”

  “Apollo’s birthplace. But what does that have to do with me?”

  “It was another in between place, both sacred and historical at once. That is why the
Greeks never allowed anyone to give birth on Delos. They didn’t want any mere mortal to be able to claim a birthright to soil that belonged first to the gods. And they killed or banished anyone foolish enough to disobey.”

  “I still don’t see what this has to do with me.”

  At this moment, Shim released an immense belch, far bigger than one would expect from a person so small. Yet the little giant did not seem aware of it, just as he seemed to have forgotten about Cairpré and myself. He merely patted his belly and returned to the serious matter of fresh clover honey.

  Cairpré’s shaggy eyebrows lifted in amusement, then his expression darkened. “In the same manner as Delos, it is strictly forbidden that anyone with human blood should ever be born on the island of Fincayra. This is a land not of the Earth, nor of the Otherworld, though it is a bridge between them both. Visitors come here from either world, and they sometimes stay for years. Yet they cannot call this place home.”

  I leaned closer. “I have been searching for my own home. So help me understand this. If my mother had to leave Fincayra to give birth to me, where did she go? Do you know where I was born?”

  “I know,” replied the poet, his tone grave. “It was not where you should have been born.”

  I caught my breath. “Are you saying that I was born on Fincayra, even though I have human blood?”

  His face told me everything.

  “Does that mean I am in danger?”

  “More danger than you know.”

  “How did that happen? You said it is forbidden.”

  “I can explain what, but not why.” Cairpré scratched the top of his head. “It happened this way. Your parents, aware of Fincayra’s ancient law, knew that Elen must sail to another land to give birth. But they also knew that no one can be sure, when setting sail from Fincayra, whether or not he or she will ever return. The passage here is a strange one, as you are well aware. Sometimes the door is open; sometimes it is not. Many who have left this island, hoping desperately to return, have found only a shred of mist upon the waters. Others have met their deaths in the stormy seas. Nothing is known but we sail alone.”