No sound but the swishing of the water around the boat, and the ceaseless singing of the birds, and Carla’s soft regular breathing.
Aoife closed her eyes.
CHAPTER FIVE
When she woke, it was night. Through the black net of trees, the sky was ink; a fat moon sailed in and out of view, shedding buttery light.
She sat up slowly, coming to herself.
The boat was still moving rapidly through thick forest. The river rushed on between the banks; the trees crowded densely to the edge, a deep blue-black. Over the surface of the water flickered sharp-edged shadows – bats. Curled up on the cushions beside Aoife, Carla was snoring softly, her hair spread out over the cushions; her Superdry jacket was pulled up over her shoulders.
Where were they now? There was no way of telling. The only sound was the hiss of the boat cutting through the water, and the squeaking of the bats. The tip of a branch brushed against Aoife’s bare arm, scratching her. And suddenly she was alert, sniffing deeply at the warm night air. Instead of the leafy sweetness of the oak woods, an acrid scent of resin stung her nostrils. She reached out her hand, and when the next branch touched her fingers, she pulled off a few leaves. Not leaves – needles. Not oak trees, but conifers. She rubbed the greenery between her fingertips and inhaled its scent. Poisonous.
Yew trees.
Falias was surrounded by yew trees . . . Ahead, the waterway widened. A tingle of anticipation ran across her skin.
If this was the same yew forest she had travelled through before, any moment now she would see the glow of the mighty pyramid city, carved from a single crystal of rose quartz, every bronze door and golden window gleaming like a jewel. Brilliant as a bonfire in the velvet night.
The boat swept out from under the yews into a wide, dark, empty plain, where the butter-moon had just sunk behind distant cliffs, leaving only a lick of cream, rapidly fading. The river circled to the left, bubbling up around smooth boulders. Despairing, Aoife leaned her forehead on her knees. She had been so sure . . . Without raising her head, she turned her face to the right, staring out over Carla’s sleeping body into the night.
High in the air, a pale blue circle flickered, hovering above the valley like the spaceship in an old movie. Above the circle floated a thin finger of silver, pointing directly up at the black velvet sky, sequinned with stars. Aoife lifted her head, staring. Below the circle of blue, a pyramid of darkness . . . The river turned to the right and poured like molten grey metal under the stars across the flat dark plain, towards the circle and its faint blue light. Towards the mighty city of Falias, all its fires extinguished in the night, dark and cold and camouflaged against the ring of marble cliffs behind.
Minutes later, Carla stirred beside her and sat up, hair sticking to her face, rubbing her cheeks, yawning till her jaw cracked. ‘I can’t believe we slept until it got dark.’
‘It’s OK, we’re nearly there – look, there it is – Falias!’
‘Where?’ Carla peered blindly into the darkness.
‘There – two, three kilometres?’
‘Can’t see a thing.’
Aoife had forgotten: changeling eyes were much sharper than human eyes, especially in the dark. But back in the direction from which they had come, the cliffs were faintly rimmed in darkest turquoise. ‘You’ll see it soon – I think it’s nearly dawn.’
‘Dawn?’ Shocked, Carla again automatically reached for her phone, then remembered it was broken. And then, yet again bursting into tears, remembered why it would have been no good to her anyway. ‘We’ve been gone for nearly a day! One day is a hundred days! November, December, January . . .’ She grabbed her jacket and pressed it over her face, muffling her hysterical sobs.
Aoife groaned, ‘I’m so, so sorry . . .’
‘Poor Mam, poor Dad, I can’t bear to think what they’re going through . . . And Killian’s sure to be with Sinead by now . . .’ Carla wept for a bit longer and then, with her face still buried in the material, breathed a long, deep, shuddering sigh. ‘Oh well. As Mam says, no point worrying about things we can’t do anything about.’ Then she sobbed again – a helpless, painful sound, as if something that should have stayed stuck together had torn apart in her chest. ‘Oh, Mam. Poor Mam. I just hope she’s taking that advice for herself.’ And then wiped her face in a final fashion and said sadly, ‘Only, she never does.’
Over the yew-topped cliffs, a first flush of pink was leaking up behind the turquoise – the rim of new dawn, softening the edges of the world. The boat rushed on across the plain, drawing ever closer to Falias. The topmost layers of the city were slowly warming with the dim early light.
Carla, now able to see the outline ahead of them, murmured sadly but with increasing interest, ‘That’s Falias? It’s so beautiful!’
There was as yet no sign of city life. Only, very far above, the bluebell lamps of lenanshee quarters, shining out softly and coldly over the valley. Aoife stared up at the pale azure light. Shay’s mother lived there – perhaps she would help her? Yet she had once told Shay to stay away from Aoife. And the lenanshees were themselves dark creatures, with dangerous passions. Beautiful, but more of the darkness than the light.
Above the layer of azure was a layer of darkness – the stables where the dullahan coachman kept Dorocha’s real coach and horses. And further above rose her own mother’s crystal minaret, crowned with hawthorn, poised at the summit of the rose-quartz city, catching the very first glint of the new day – a solitary spark, like the match Mícheál Costello had struck from the wall. With sudden foreboding, Aoife crouched lower in the boat. Perhaps Dorocha was there even now, standing on the same balcony where she’d come upon him once before, at dawn.
(She’d asked him then: Have you been here all night?
And he had smiled at her, and said: I never sleep. His beautiful eyes on her, rich with stars like the midnight sky.)
Could he see her now, in this little boat, a dark speck running across the plain towards the city? The bottom of the valley was still sunk in night. But Dorocha had said to Caitlin, the ugly changeling girl: I can see better and further in the dark than I can in daylight, and I can see better in daylight than any other being.
Above the hawthorn summit, against the paling sky, a mighty bird circled – but not a golden eagle; this bird was bigger than an eagle, and its wings as black as the fading night. Far off across the purple-shadowed plain, a high coarse howling and screaming rose.
Carla flinched: ‘Jesus!’
Clustered almost a kilometre away was a ramshackle collection of huge wooden cages, charcoal-coloured scrapheaps in the early dawn. Relieved, Aoife said, ‘Oh, it’s OK, that’s the zoo – all the beasts are safely locked up.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Pretty sure . . .’ Although the cages were flimsy. Over the other howls, she could hear the cooshees barking and – even at this distance – the thud and creak of the demon dogs throwing themselves against the bars. She felt a deep rush of gladness to know that her dogs were still alive – her violent, loyal dogs, with their dark green fur and bone-white eyes and yellow teeth. She hadn’t liked leaving the seven cooshees with the zookeeper – she hadn’t been sure she could trust Seán Burke to feed them or tend their wounds after the battle they had fought with the dullahans. Now yet more animal voices were joining in the howling – screams and roars and grunts. She thought with some satisfaction: Seán Burke must be finding it hard to sleep. But then she realized she didn’t want the zookeeper awake and on the prowl, and again crouched low in the boat, this time pulling Carla down beside her. ‘Keep out of sight for a bit – there’s someone whose attention I don’t want to attract.’
‘Who?’
‘A spy for Dorocha. Nasty little old man.’
‘And who’s Dorocha?’
Aoife shivered. It was strange: she had told Carla so much, and yet nothing about Dorocha . . . And she still didn’t want to talk about him. ‘He’s a man I met here. Sort of in charge of this place. I
think he knows where the demon has taken Shay. If he finds out I’m on my way, he might warn her.’
Unexpectedly, the boat looped away to the left, leaving the main river for a narrow tributary that snaked through massive fields of barley, silvery pink in the mixture of starlight and early dawn. Here, the slender green-painted craft rode low between steep banks, and the cooshee’s head seemed to dip, snout skimming the dark water. Above their heads, the barley stalks stood high, a silhouette of spears, blocking the view from both the zoo and the city. When Falias finally became visible again, they were directly beneath the shadow of its walls, out of sight of the tower. The boat swung smoothly into the moat that ringed the city’s foot; they were still shielded from the zoo by the high outer bank.
Aoife began looking out for a place to stop and tie up – steps, or maybe a water gate. Just ahead of them, a cluster of blossoming hawthorn trees overhung the river, branches trailing in the water, the roots breaching the walls, cracking the quartz like an eggshell, forming a small beach out of crumbled crystal. Aoife mentally willed the boat to stop at the little landing place, but it continued to ignore her and swept wilfully on, rounding the next corner. From here, far off she could see lights burning – a row of orange paper lanterns strung across the width of the river. The boat, which had been moving steadily down the centre of the current, slowed and pulled in tight to the wall, where the shadows were impenetrable. ‘Oh, come on.’ Aoife slapped the stern of the boat in her frustration.
The boat shuddered and crept forwards, under the dark walls; it was moving at less than walking pace now – a mere crawl – inching along. Drops of water showered on their heads from above; the quartz city was carved with vines and flowers and figures, and whispering rivulets spilled down from the cupped hands of one gargoyle to another – endlessly pouring from the hawthorn pool at the summit of the city. In daylight, the rivulets would shine crimson – the water was stained with the blood of her mother’s lover, murdered on the pretext of having killed the queen, and hurled by Dorocha down the city walls.
A small indignant flurry erupted in the dark bottom of the boat, and the robin hopped up onto Aoife’s knee, shaking droplets of the falling water from its feathers. Carla whispered: ‘He came all this way with us! I bet it is that that little boy. He definitely seems to know you.’ The robin studied the human girl, head on one side, then fluttered up onto the figurehead, where it perched between the cooshee’s ears, shoulders hunched, gazing ahead like a tiny lookout.
As they drew nearer to the orange lights, it became apparent that the paper lanterns weren’t suspended on a string but were placed along the parapet of a stone bridge – the entrance to the city. More light was beginning to leak into the valley now, as somewhere on the far side of the cliffs the sun broke free of a concealed horizon. There was a bad smell in the air, as of rotting meat, and Carla wrinkled her nose and gagged. ‘What is that stink?’
Only metres ahead, a set of steps led up the walls onto the bridge, and Aoife was already beginning to hope that the postern door in the bronze city gates would have been left unguarded, when the boat stopped altogether, pulling in behind a sloping block of rose quartz that jutted out at an angle into the water. The nose of the figurehead stuck out a few centimetres past the buttress – but remained concealed in the darkness, helped by another hawthorn tree that had taken root in the fractured crystal, forming a natural screen.
As soon as it was clear that they were going no further, Aoife said, ‘Right – wait here. I’ll swim to the bridge and check the coast is clear.’
But before she could swing her leg over the side, Carla grabbed her wrist, whispering, ‘No, wait. Maybe the boat’s hiding on purpose, like when it took that roundabout route through the barley fields.’
‘You think it did that because it was deliberately hiding?’
‘You said it was magic – it must know what it’s doing . . .’
And as soon as Carla had said it, it was obvious. She’d been about to make another really stupid mistake. ‘Oh, you’re right. It must be part of its magic, to avoid getting caught.’
Carla said lightly, ‘I’m always right, if you haven’t already noticed.’
‘I have noticed. Stay here, I’ll try and see what the boat is hiding from.’ Aoife crawled cautiously up to the prow and knelt behind the cooshee’s arched neck, peering through the thorny blossoming branches. In the early light, a small figure was hobbling down the road that led from the zoo. The hairs on the back of her neck pricked. Judging by the stick and the limp, it was the zookeeper – although both his head and body seemed an odd shape.
Behind her, Carla whispered, ‘See anything?’
‘Dorocha’s spy. Stay out of sight.’
Seán Burke was drawing close to the far end of the bridge, where the orange glow of the lanterns made him visible. He looked busy, as if on his way to do something important, and he was misshapen because he was swamped inside a huge, roughly made black fur coat and wearing a peaked fur hat far too big for his head – it had a long pointed brim with a bone-white button stitched to either side of it. The coat had yellowy bone toggles, like a duffel coat, and the hat had a stiff fringe of thin yellow tassels.
Not tassels.
Teeth.
Not toggles.
Claws.
Not black fur, but inky green.
Something flipped over inside Aoife’s stomach; she was flooded with a nauseous surge of rage. She started to stand up. Carla dragged her back down. ‘What are you doing? I thought you wanted to stay out of his sight!’
Aoife hissed through clenched teeth: ‘I’m going to kill that evil bollox, right now. He’s murdered one of my cooshees. He’s wearing its skin for a coat and its head for a hat. My poor brave dogs—’
‘Stay down, he’ll see us!’
Seán Burke had reached the bridge, but now he paused, peering over the parapet across the dark water. The button eyes, glazed orange by the lantern-light, also gazed blindly in the boat’s direction from each side of the cooshee head that he was wearing for a hat. Ice thickened in Aoife’s veins. Her power was flooding her . . . With one quick blast . . .
Yet Carla was right. Attacking the zookeeper would just give them away. And Seán Burke was hardly a worthy foe – just an evil, feeble, hobbling old man. She dug her fingernails painfully into her palms, holding back the icy rush.
The old man stopped looking and went hobbling on over the bridge, only his head and shoulders visible above the parapet, the tap of his stick ringing out loud and hollow. Every time he passed a glowing paper lantern he would pause and, with a quick furtive glance towards the city gates, raise his stick to shoulder height as if he longed to knock the thing into the river, but dare not. The seventh time he acted out this little pantomime, he flinched and stopped mid-swing, hastily lowering his stick. A tall hooded figure was moving smoothly towards him from the direction of the gates – so tall it was visible from the waist up. The little zookeeper ducked his head obsequiously. ‘Good morning, my lord.’ His thin voice quavered through the purple air.
The figure pushed back its hood – around the headless stump of its neck revolved a cloud of darkness: flies. The dullahan picked up the lantern that the zookeeper had been threatening to knock into the river and, cupping it in black-gloved hands, turned it to gaze up-river – bringing rotting eyes and a maggoty mouth into view. Instantly Aoife understood the smell of death that tainted the air – the glowing paper lanterns were a row of dullahan heads, left out on the parapet to guard the city, watching the road across the plain.
Behind Aoife, Carla gave a little moan.
Aoife glanced round, finger to lips – her friend had gone deathly white, biting her lips to stifle her terror; eyes huge with fear at the sight of the headless monster holding its head in their direction.
The old man was shrilling, ‘’Tis grand to see so many of ye on guard, my Lord! No calling the queen by name, mind, if she does turn up. If anyone’s with her, by all means call them –
but not the queen. The Beloved wants her alive, for his own purposes, whatever they might be these days – which is none of my business! I have a special cage set aside in case she does appear. We’ll tie her hand and foot and keep her bedded in straw with a grogoch to watch over her, and keep her as hungry as her dogs until the Beloved returns from whatever dark secret place he’s retired to while Morfesa gets over his rage. Ah, but when the Beloved returns it will be a mighty celebration, and we’ll all wear cooshee fur and drink and dance.’
Aoife clenched her hands tighter, listening intently. So Dorocha was gone from Falias – and even the zookeeper did not know where.
The dullahan carefully replaced its stinking head on the stone parapet, then stretched out its right arm to the side, hand forming a black-gloved fist. Seán Burke flinched away as a leathery black creature swooped down the city walls, the speed of its descent disturbing the flies that clustered around the dullahan’s neck, sending them briefly buzzing in all directions; it settled itself on the outstretched forearm, gripping it with bony feet and hands. It was a hideous creature, not a bird but a crouching old man with a few greasy strings of hair dangling from its scalp – an emaciated version of the zookeeper himself. Its horny mouth was slightly beaked, and as well as wizened arms it had leathery wings, which it flattened like a cloak around its shrivelled body. Perched on the dullahan’s arm, it turned its bald head from side to side, showing twisted, pointed teeth, before fixing its hooded eyes on the buttress behind which the boat had concealed itself.
The robin, which had hopped up into the hawthorn tree, crouched low in the bush, pressing its breast to the thorns.
The zookeeper recovered his equilibrium and began edging carefully round the hideous apparition and its master. ‘Good birdeen! Are you watching out as well? Nothing like the eyes and ears of the sluagh! I’ll be leaving ye then, to take a turn of the city streets. You’ll wait here till nightfall, my Lord? After that, I might bring the cat-sidhes down. Ah, Jaysus!’ The creature had swung its beak to snap at him, before rotating its head back again to gaze intently up-river. ‘Nice chatting to ye – great craic.’ And Seán Burke was gone, the tap of his stick fading away into silence.
The Dark Beloved Page 20