Lenna and the Last Dragon

by James Comins

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Darkness

  or, Why Are You Sorry?

  There was no light. The last thing Lenna had seen, only for a moment, was a thousand ghostly clawed forms of mist seeping through the wreckage of the fallen room. Then the silver light was snuffed.

  “Andy?” she whispered.

  The only response was the continuing torrent of dirt and stone. “Andy! Andyandyandy I’m sorry!”

  Her fingers interlocked and she said,

  Kast minn baen

  Ad himnariki

  Tak hugmynd hedan

  thinking of Andy brushing dirt away in the light of Manannan’s harp. The thought rippled away from her like heat. She opened her eyes.

  “Fomor Fomor! Andy’s trapped and we’ve got to help him. Will you become motas or or foxes or or or earthworms and dig him out?” She bobbed up and down on her toes in the darkness. “Please?” she added.

  The sound of moving dirt began. Should she help dig? She shuffled forward and got a faceful of dirt. “Plaa.” She reached down and felt the floor around her in the darkness. She started shoving the accumulating dirt piles away, keeping her eyes closed tight, hoping it would help. As the Fomor progressed inward, her hands hit cold stone blocks wedged between the piles of dirt. Grubbiness and grittiness and sandy wormy old loam was everywhere in the blind black. Shuffling snuffling was constant. It went on and on. Lenna shielded her face and slid the dirt towards the water behind her. She found the wooden door in the disorienting dark. It was propped open by a mountain of earth, but its magic circle was spent. Digging and digging and digging. Lenna felt dirt sticking to her cheeks as well as her hands. She was crying.

  “I said the spell,” she told the shuffly darkness quietly. “I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry.”

  The digging went on. And on. At one point Lenna put her hand on something fuzzy. “Oop. Sorry.” It scurried away.

  “I’m here,” groaned Andy off to the right.

  “Andy!”

  The shuffling shifted. A gleam of silver and a plang crept out of the dirt as Andy fumbled the harp out of the soil, revealing an army of

  “Giant bunnies?”

  Andy got his arms free, heaved a chunk of ceiling off his legs, and climbed out towards the tunnel, playing the harp absently. His head was bleeding. Lenna thought she heard sirens above. The Fomor faded back into ghosts.

  “Um, um, they’re very good diggers,” she said.

  “I’m not talking to you.”

  “No! Andyandy, you know how Brugda hurts people. She hurt me. I don’t want anything to do with her or or her spells.”

  “Listen to me.” Andy looked at her in the silver light, wiped his head, stared at the blood, then back at her. “That was a real, life-or-death situation. And you chose death. For me.”

  “I did not! I told you to give me the hammer.”

  “Lenna. If I’d have given you the hammer you’d have been buried. Maybe you can magic up a future where I survive, but I haven’t got that power. Okay? That was a real-life decision. This is the last time I talk to you, is that blindingly clear? Now come on. Let’s get this over with.”

  The Fomor changed into people and said thank you or something, and they said a lot of solemn stuff in another language, and they led the way through the tunnel of tombs and water toward the Liffey, and she didn’t care. In her heart, Lenna suspected she ought to be feeling proud or brave or something. But she wasn’t. She hurt all over. The lilting harp music only made it worse.

  Baldur was there at the river bottom, and he talked to her about something, and she didn’t care. Andy was hurt and hated her and it was her fault. It was Brugda’s fault, too, for sneaking into her dream and reminding her of her promise, but mostly it was Lenna’s fault. It was always her fault. Maybe she needed more magic. Then she could’ve used one of her own spells. If Momma Joukka Pelata had taught her spells instead of ignoring her, she would’ve known what to do. She wished Pol had been there. He could have told her how to use the magic of stone. He could’ve kept the stones together. That would’ve worked. She knew it would’ve. Why hadn’t anyone else come with them? Why was it her fault? If she hadn’t had all these magical superpowers to begin with, then it wouldn’t be her fault. Why did she have to do anything? Binnan Darnan didn’t. Lenna wouldn’t even be here if that little servant hadn’t messed everything up. This was her fault.

  Baldur lifted her to the surface with one of his enormous hands. The Fomor became fish, jumping into the water wall and swimming upstream to the banks of the Liffey. There they became a crowd of bearded men wearing bearskins and carrying bows and leather quivers.

  “My oh my,” said Mo Bagohn, clapping her hands. “You two are a pair of wonders. What a moment in the history of--eh? What’s the matter?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” said Andy with a brief glare, his hand compressing his forehead.

  “It isn’t my fault,” said Lenna quickly, without looking. Mo Bagohn looked back and forth between them. So did Pol.

  “Andrew, what happened to the two of ye? Has it got to do with the earthquake and the sirens?”

  “Yes,” said Andy. “Yes it has. Me and Lenna aren’t friends anymore.”

  “Andy!” Emily exclaimed. “What happened?”

  “She had a chance to save me life, but she was too busy being angry to bother.”

  Lenna hugged herself. “You were the one who wanted to be brave!”

  “I wasn’t after letting you risk your neck. Don’t you get it? They couldn’t get out without burning. All you had to do was keep the ceiling up, and we’d have been fine. We’d have been heroes. I hear there was an earthquake because of you. Wonder how many people--”

  “Andrew Manannan O’Donnell. You shut it right now and leave the lass alone,” barked Emily. “I don’t give a damn what happened, she’s a little girl and doesn’t deserve it. Cut it out.”

  “Right.”

  Brugda stooped beside Lenna. “Little Len. Is it I who should pain?”

  She didn’t want Brugda there, didn’t want the nasty old woman to invade her feelings, to steal them. She bit her lips together and felt her face turn ruddy. “Brugda Brugda. Please don’t think this. It won’t do you any good. But you shouldn’t ask me to do your magic. Not ever.”

  Brugda kissed Lenna on the forehead. “I won’t.”

  Lenna wiped her forehead off when the old woman wasn’t looking.

  “Yeah, well maybe you’d better have cleared that up earlier,” Andy began, snarling. Pol grabbed him by the ear and hauled him aside and told him some things in sharp whispers. Emily sternly tied a handkerchief over the boy’s forehead. It had stopped bleeding.

  Lenna decided to ignore Andy and Brugda. She looked at the crowd of blinking men instead. They all seemed to be dazzled at the sunlight, basking in it, almost too overjoyed at the light itself to notice the cars and crystal skyscrapers and robot animal boats and gem stoplights that surrounded them. They all had bad posture, their heads slumped a little--maybe from being unicorns so much, she thought--but they carried proud faces with fuzzy wreaths of beard and long hair. Their bearskin robes were draped to their knees and braced with belts, and thick silver bracelets were clasped to their wrists and upper arms. Along the street, a crowd had gathered silently to watch the strange men. Everyone could see them.

  Mo Bagohn spoke with them in the Irish language. They answered back in dignified tones. The most was said by a man in front with singed fingernails. Kaldi leaned down and told Lenna how good it was that she had succeeded and how proud they all were of her and other things that were supposed to make her feel better. They didn’t. Her stomach hurt from feelings.

  “Lenna,” said Andy, returning from getting yelled at. “Look. I’m sorry I was angry atchu, okay?”

  “Why are you sorry? I was the one who killed you on purpose, because, because clearly that’s what I was doing.” She wiped at her eyes. “Right?”

  “Oh, hell. Look.”
He looked up at the spinning spirals around the sun, at the careful honeycomb chessboard of thin cloud. “Look.” He exhaled. “I said a lot of stupid things.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “I wish I hadn’t of said them.”

  “I’m sorry you think I’m a murderer. I hope my earthquake didn’t kill too many people.” She stared at him with fire eyes until he turned red and went away.

  The leader of the Fomor watched their conversation carefully. He approached Lenna and bowed. To Andy he repeated the gesture. Then he punched Andy hard in the shoulder, knocking him thock to the ground, and said something in Irish.

  Mo Bagohn laughed. “Ha! That’s the old life for ya. He said now you’ve really got something to cry about.” Andy glared and rubbed his shoulder.

  A passerby on the sidewalk asked, “Are you an historical re-enactment troupe, then?” Pol whispered to the Fomor. They smiled, went into a huddle, split in two and began staging a mock battle. The leader recited a speech in Old Irish. The two groups charged each other and threw punches. With a yell, the leader stopped them. He put a hand to his ear, nocked an arrow to his bow and shot the arrow at the sky. The arrow plummeted back with a live pigeon wriggling on the end of it. He snapped its neck and offered it to the passerby.

  “Uh, no, no thanks.” The passerby held up a hand, and his jowls wobbled. “You must practice a lot to get that good.”

  The leader ripped the feathers off the pigeon, took a bite, offered it to the passerby again with pigeon blood on his lips. The stranger hurried along with a nervous smile. The rest of the Fomor laughed.

  Annie Morgan leaned down and nudged Lenna. “See? The battle was silly until they used weapons. Then it was real.”

  “But he killed a pigeon! And you’re a bird.”

  “Yeah, but now it’s a dead thing, and I like dead things. Hey,” Annie said more seriously. “Are you all right?”

  “I think so. My hands hurt from digging so much.”

  “Digging? Yeah, you’re both kind of filthy.”

  “Mm-hm. Maybe I should tell you what happened.”

  “I’d like that.”