by John Lenahan
A little buzz started on the other side of the room which caused me to turn. Mom and Dahy had just entered and were making a beeline to our table.
Araf stood, so I did too. Mom gave me a hug and asked after my head.
‘I’m fine thanks.’
‘Are you sure?’ She held my face in both of her hands and looked deep into my eyes.
‘I’m sure, Mom.’
‘Good, because we have work to do.’
The next couple of days were exhausting. The Land is a magnificent and beautiful place but it is seldom restful. I spent my time equally between rebuilding walls, training new recruits in sword-fighting and, most taxing of all, deciphering and filing old manuscripts, read with Mom’s magic paperclip.
There were only two of Mom’s amber reader thingies, so ten of us rotated in twenty-four-hour shifts. It meant that I did four hours reading every twenty hours, resulting in my stint getting four hours later every day. My first couple of shifts were mostly spent trying to get my written Gaelic back up to speed. Dad had made me learn how to read, write and conjugate ancient Gaelic but it wasn’t the language I read my comic books in and the stuff I was reading could hardly be called page-turners. My first thrilling manuscript was a contract and shipping manifest between the Elves and the Vinelands. It took me all of the four hours to figure out that it was a barter agreement where the Elves would provide wood for barrels and Fingal (who was Essa’s grandfather) would pay in wine. From the amount of wine it seemed to me that the timber industry is a pretty lucrative business. I guess it’s hard work when you have to ask permission from the trees if you want to cut them down. I had an image of an elf kneeling in front of a tree with an axe, saying, ‘Please, I’m desperate for a drink?’
When I finally figured out that the piece of parchment I was studying didn’t contain anything that would help us with Dad’s condition I would place it in an envelope and label it so that in the future it could be transcribed into a new book. Not a job I will be volunteering for.
It wasn’t just the grammar that was proving taxing but the actual reading of a manuscript required immense concentration. The paperclip thingy sensed the page you were looking at as long as you were focused, but if you were reading, say, a scintillating essay on seed germination and you happened to let your mind wander, the page you were reading would fade into all of the other pages in the book, producing thousands of words on one page. Since there was no way to find your way back to the page you were reading, you would have to go back to the beginning.
After my first session I staggered back to my tent and blissfully closed the eyes that I had been afraid to even blink for the last four hours. Not even the blinding headache could keep me from falling asleep, but I didn’t nap long. Dahy woke me and, despite my protests, dragged me out to the training fields and put me in charge of teaching sword-fighting to a group of helpless recruits. As soon as the old man was out of sight I told my charges to take the rest of the day off and I crawled back to bed. The next day Dahy warned me that if I did that again I would be cleaning latrines and I had a suspicion that he meant it.
My second reading session started promisingly enough when I found what I thought was going to be an interesting essay on banta stick manufacture. After I don’t know how many pages, I figured out it could have easily been condensed to this one sentence without losing anything: ‘Get some good wood and make a stick out of it.’ By the end, my head hurt worse than when Essa hit me with one of those sticks.
I periodically saw Essa but we didn’t speak to one another. I was desperate for some alone time with her but I was so busy, and when I wasn’t busy, I was exhausted. When I did see her she was always with The Turlow. The closest I got was an uncomfortable lunch where the royal couple sat behind me at a table just within hearing distance. I couldn’t make out much but every time I heard him say ‘Princess’ I felt like returning my lunch back onto my plate.
After about a week’s worth of reading sessions I was starting to believe that 99 per cent of the books that were in the old library were about farming. I ploughed through endless manuscripts explaining crop rotation, plough manufacture, planting timetables and even one about delineating soil types by taste. I filed that under the heading of ‘Eating Dirt’. I got mildly excited when I found a scrap entitled ‘Leprechaun Genealogy’ but it was literally just a list of names. I filed that as ‘A Short History of Short People’.
I started screening my reading material so as to keep my sanity. I’m sure Araf would find a paper on ‘Planting Row Orientation According to Crop and Season’ fascinating but it just made me want to hold my breath and bang my head against the floor. When no one was looking I scanned my new manuscripts for key terms. I’d clip the reader on a sliver of paper and if I saw any words like: seed, or soil, or yield, I would slip the piece under the bottom of the pile. I prayed to the gods that I wouldn’t still be doing this by the time we got down to that fragment again.
The reading eventually got easier, partly because I got better at it but mostly because Mom invented a Shadowbookmark that held your page if your mind wandered. But it was the sword-fight teaching that became the highlight of my day. In the beginning my students were pretty much in awe of me, even after seeing me get popped in the temple by Essa. They all wanted to know about the Battle of the Twins of Macha and how I chopped Cialtie’s hand off and the Army of the Red Hand and what the Real World was like. I spent a lot of the first couple of days just talking to them, especially when Dahy wasn’t around, but then I really started to get into teaching. A lot of these kids were just bad, so I had to reach back into my memories to the basics that Dad had taught me when I was a kid. Back when I thought it was really cool being taught sword-fighting, as opposed to when I was a teenager and I thought Dad was a borderline lunatic. I found that the nice thing about teaching is that it makes you realise that a lot of the stuff you think you do by instinct and without thinking, is actually a well-honed skill. Dishing out all of this stuff to eager students, who were improving, made me appreciate my father even more and it gave me strength when I had to go back to the reading sessions.
I was usually so tired at night that I didn’t have the energy to kick Brendan out of my tent – so we became roommates. He spent most of his days under the tutelage of Spideog. When no one else but me could hear, he made fun of his master’s mystical ravings, but he listened and adopted every drop of archery advice he was given. When he wasn’t talking about arrows and trajectories or how sore his arms and fingers were, he quizzed me on our progress towards finding a cure for Oisin. He never talked about his daughter. I suspected that the reason he had thrown himself so fully into training was to give himself something else to think about.
Mom gently kicked me awake at four in the morning. It was my shift in the reading room. Since Mom had the stint before me we saw each other every day at changeover. We didn’t say much. I didn’t ask her if she found anything ’cause I knew if she did, she would tell me. She looked tired as she handed me an envelope that had my handwriting on it. Inside it was a fragment of a document I had read the morning before about the cross-pollination of grape plants. I had entitled it, ‘Everything will be Vine in the Morning’.
‘Is that a joke?’ she asked.
‘Well, it was supposed to be but obviously it didn’t work on you.’
She gave me that patronising mother look.
‘Sorry, Mom, I’m just trying to keep my sanity in there.’
‘I know, son,’ she said as she cupped my cheek in her palm. ‘Just have a little thought of the poor people who are going to have to sort this paperwork out after us.’
‘OK,’ I said, kissing her on the cheek, ‘get some rest, you look beat.’
It was still dark when Mom and I got outside. The November air stung my cheeks as I walked her back to her tent. She promised me she would sleep and not sit up all night working and worrying. Then I turned and took a deep cold breath and steeled myself for an early morning adventure in dull l
iterature. It was as bad as being back at school – worse actually; I didn’t have Sally’s notes to borrow here. As I groped in the dark towards the always lit reading room, a flicker of light caught my eye. As I got closer I saw it was the unmistakable glow of Lamprog light. My heart skipped a beat as I saw the only girl I know that travels with a firefly. As she heard me approach she cupped the bug in her hand but when she recognised me, she opened her fingers and bathed her face in light. Wow, Essa is beautiful in any light but she really is made for firefly light.
‘What are you doing up?’ she said, breaking the magical moment that was obviously playing out only in my head.
‘I’m off to do my shift in the reading room. What are you doing up? Is the Turd-low snoring?’
‘It’s Turlow,’ she said, ‘and you only have to call him The Turlow at official functions.’
‘Like your wedding?’
‘Well, yes.’
‘So are you really going to spend a lifetime with a snorer? You would think with all of the magic healing stuff around here they could cure that and you wouldn’t have to be roaming around all night.’
‘I’m not awake because of him. I’m not sleeping with him and he’s not a snorer.’ She was getting more flustered with every word.
‘Why not? Oh no, is he diseased? These royal weddings are so treacherous.’
Essa threw both of her hands into the air. ‘Why did you have to come back?’ she hissed and stormed off, leaving her firefly fluttering around confused. I whispered, ‘Lamprog,’ and it tentatively came and sat in the palm of my hand as quietly, in the darkness, I answered Essa’s question, ‘I came back for you.’
I bounced into the reading room with the echo of Essa saying ‘I’m not sleeping with him’ rolling around in my head. It wasn’t until I placed the first piece of parchment into the Shadowreader that my spirits dipped. The Shadowbook was a collection of Leprechaun poetry. I had to stick it back in the pile – there was no way I was going to sift through poetry at this hour all of the morning. The next piece caught my eye ’cause it was short and it had two names I recognised on it. It was a letter from Spideog to Dahy describing the last battle of Maeve’s army in the Fili war.
Apparently the forces of the House of Duir were seriously getting their butts kicked by Maeve and the Fili. The Shadowmagic stuff was completely unknown to them and they found it impossible to defend against. After Maeve issued an ultimatum to Finn, which he refused, the Fili regrouped into one giant battalion with Maeve in the centre. Using several barrels of tree sap, the Fili queen conjured up some sort of spell. Everyone watching could feel the power of it building in the air and then, with a large flash of light that seemed to implode without a sound, the Fili were gone.
I always thought the Fili were killed but they just vanished. They left behind their clothes, weapons and every other earthly possession, but the Fili themselves had just disappeared. Spideog finished by writing, ‘It was a blessing for The Land, my friend, but a personal disappointment for me. I would have liked to have taken a few Fili down before I died in battle.’
I could see now why my grandfather Finn had forbidden Shadowmagic – it had caused much hardship. Now, ironically, it was the only thing keeping my father alive.
The next slip of paper grabbed my attention; it was a thesis on sword parries and counter-attacks. I knew I would find it interesting and possibly very useful for my students but it wasn’t going to get Dad healthy so I just skimmed it and stuffed it into an envelope. I wondered when I would have the leisure time to come back later and read it properly. With a little over an hour to go I found something else. I was pretty sure it had nothing in it that would help Dad but there was no way I was going to skip it. It was entitled: ‘Banbha and The Turlow’.
Chapter Thirteen
The Grey Ones
This manuscript was old and it certainly wasn’t easy to decipher. I admit I started reading it just to get some dirt on Essa’s Turd-low boy but I soon forgot all of that when I got into the meat of it. It was the story of the end of the first millennium, when the three sisters ruled The Land. The original Turlow went to Banbha and demanded to be allowed to return to the Otherworld. Banbha told him that leaving was impossible. She warned that the further any of them sailed from The Land, the faster they would age and die. The price of immortality, Banbha told Turlow, was that he and his kinsmen must remain in The Land.
Turlow refused to believe her and set sail for his long-lost homeland. But as he sailed away he and the members of his crew felt the effects of ageing in their bones. Their skin creased and when their hair began to grey, they turned back, daring to go no further. Turlow and his group, now called ‘the Grey Ones’, still did not give up searching for a way to leave Tir na Nog. A sorcerer atop Mount Cas told them of a creature called tughe tine whose blood could renew their youth and allow them to leave unharmed. Even though the sorcerer told them that gettinhis blood would be an extremely perilous undertaking, they swore that they would find it.
When Banbha heard of their quest she and her guard set out to stop them. Neither Banbha or her guard, nor Turlow and the Grey Ones were ever seen again.
I scoured my dictionaries and allowing for slight changes in spelling I translated tughe tine into ‘red eel’.
I had been at this manuscript for well over my allotted time. Twice I told the Imp scholar who was scheduled for the slot after me to go away and have a cup of tea. When she came back a third time I could see she was just itching to get stuck into more gardening tips but I told her that I was keeping the Shadowreader and went in search of Mom.
I found her in the canteen sitting with Spideog. When she saw me holding a manuscript she stood. ‘What have you found?’
I handed her the manuscript and gave them a brief summary of what I had discovered. It occurred to me that I might be telling a tale that everyone except me knew by heart but judging by the expressions on both of their faces, I was surprising them a bit.
When I had finished Mom said, ‘I always suspected that my father had secret manuscripts that he only allowed certain people to see. I remember Banshees coming to the Hall and my father being very secretive with them. This story is amazing.’
‘So you have never heard this before?’
‘Well, I have heard of “the Grey Ones” of course but I assumed that that was just an old tale to warn us about going too far out in boats. I never heard that they were Banshees that wanted to leave. And there has never been an explanation as to why Banbha left.’
‘How about this tughe tine?’
‘I have never heard of it. Have you, Spideog?’
‘No, my lady.’
‘But if we could get some of this eel blood then it might reset Dad and the hand will stop killing him.’
‘It’s a very old manuscript and it doesn’t even say if red eels exist. This is an exceptional find, my son, but I wouldn’t get too excited.’
‘What about this Mount Cas? We can at least check if this sorcerer guy is still there.’
‘Conor, this was the first millennium, there will be no sorcerer there now.’
‘Actually, my lady, that may not be entirely true.’ Mom and I both snapped to attention as the old archer continued. ‘The last time I saw Cialtie was not long after Oisin disappeared. I was travelling cross-country and at the base of Mount Cas I saw someone coming down from the mountain. I set camp and waited for the traveller, hoping to swap a meal for information about this mountain that I had never explored. As he approached I was very surprised indeed to find that it was Cialtie. The Prince accepted my hospitality but gave away little of what he was doing on the mountain except that he had been visiting a very old Oracle. A year later I travelled up Mount Cas in search of this man. About two thirds of the way up I found a house, made entirely out of yew wood, built into the mountainside. I knocked at the entrance but was told by a voice on the other side of the door that only those who are worthy eive an audience there. I left and never returned.’
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bsp; ‘We should go,’ I said, standing.
‘Hold on, Conor,’ Mom said. ‘Let us stop and think about this.’
‘What’s to think about, Mom? We have been ploughing through these scraps of paper night and day for almost two weeks and what have we found – zip. This is our first good lead. Let me look into it. I’m going crazy around here. Please,’ I said, sounding like a ten-year-old asking if he can go to the park by himself.
‘It may be too late,’ Spideog said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Winter is close here but it may already have arrived on the mountain. The pass may be impassable.’
‘Then we have to go now,’ I said, getting to my feet. ‘Mom, you said yourself that maybe the gods want me to find a cure for Dad, well maybe they wanted me to read this manuscript. Look, Mom, I don’t want to defy you but I gotta talk to this Oracle guy.’
She stood and I braced myself. It’s never a good idea to get into a conflict with my mother. She hugged me and said, ‘Promise me you won’t do anything foolish.’
‘Who me?’ I said, flashing a House of Duir smile.
‘And dress warm.’
Araf, Brendan, Spideog and I set off at dawn. It was freezing out but I didn’t complain. I was excited to be doing something other than just reading. Brendan and I spent all of the previous night trying to borrow warm clothes off my students. I felt sorry for a few who gave us wool underwear. Tomorrow they would find out from Dahy that I didn’t have the authority to give them vacation. I may have looked like I got dressed in total darkness but I was toasty. I tried to dissuade Brendan from coming, on the count that it might be too dangerous, but he insisted. ‘I’ll be right by your side,’ he said. I was a touched by his loyalty until he continued, ‘I go where Master Spideog goes.’
Dahy saw us off. Before I mounted Acorn he whispered in my ear, ‘If you get into trouble, trust Spideog. He is arrogant and annoying and he talks nonsense and I really do not like him – but he is a good man under pressure.’ He gave me a leg-up. As he guided my foot into the stirrup he lifted my trouser cuff and strapped a leather sheath, containing one of his knives, to my leg. Then he pulled down the cuff, patted my leg and winked at me. I saluted the Master with a nod of the head.