by Neil Clarke
The ancient wall was renovated in the thirties. Four meters of gray-painted concrete is supposed to keep looters out of the castles and weeds and feral cats out of the woods.
Ever since the big enviro-disaster, though, there’s been something spooky about the wall. On the outside, like all the local houses and farms, the soil tests toxic.
Not inside the wall, strangely enough. No poison seeping up through the roots of those gnarly old oaks. Nobody knows why.
Nobody cares why. They want to open up the gates to let the sheep and cattle in to graze.
Today!
But not today. Today we’ve got enough warm bodies to make a human barricade.
I wonder how we’re going to organize tomorrow, without phones, but then there’s no time for wondering because we milling protesters must speedily handcuff ourselves to one another. In fact, since I’m late, I’m surprised there aren’t patrol cars here already.
But the phones aren’t working. I guess the farmers can’t call the Gardaí.
Everyone’s brought their own bangin, blacksmith-made manacles.
“Faster!” the organizer bellows. “Next!”
I’m next.
And that’s when I see I’m supposed to be locked onto one of the aos sí. He’s sitting cross-legged on the ground, being careful not to lean back against the iron of the gate.
How ninety-nine aos sí got stuck on this side of Lough Leane.
1. This is the story they used to be telling the tourists: Every seven years, on May 1st, the famous warrior chieftain O’Donoghue Mór rises from the lake near Ross castle. The fairy host from the land of youth floats over the waters of Lough Leane in the wake of his hovering white horse.
2. Catching a glimpse of him is pure good luck.
3. Nobody actually catches any glimpses of him.
4. Rephrase: Nobody, in those early-millennium days of miniature cameras everywhere, managed to film him.
5. Then one morning, the sun came up on ninety-nine ethereally beautiful eternal-youths and one pissed-off warrior ghost. Teenagers had their drones out there in a heartbeat to confirm what the shocked groundskeepers reported to Radio Kerry.
6. Later, scientists surmised all the drilling and hydraulic fracturing for gas and shale oil caused a miniature earthquake sometime between dusk and dawn. Half the lake water drained away into underground parts unknown. Phenols contaminated the other half.
Fracking fluid poisoned the groundwater, too. There were dead fish. Trees losing their leaves mid-summer. A rain of death.
A magic door closed and locked, perhaps in self-defense, from the other side.
7. The ghost of O’Donoghue Mór swore to find a lake still pure enough to reopen the portal between worlds. He set off alone.
8. He hasn’t returned. That was ten years ago.
The aos sí looks the way they all look, the ones that come from royalty.
Something like Orlando Bloom, circa two thousand, in a long blond wig made from Russian ladies’ hair. But pecs, by God! This one’s got magnificent pecs making the buttons of his silk shirt pop.
And I remember the last thing I saw on the free web before it stopped working. That serial killer, Cian, and how he looked at his trial. Much the same as this. Much the same as an ageless aos sí supremacist still looks after nine years in maximum security, I’d be guessing.
I stared at the accused in that witness box. I knew he was pure evil. But society had trained me to find him beautiful, and beautiful he was, feck it all to hell. The words of the human reporter washed over me without leaving any impression. I stared at the flawless face of that ruthless cunt, trying to imagine the screams. The blood. The bodies of Cian’s victims on that inter-island ferry where he’d cut them down with keen-edged, aos sí-forged silver before sinking the ship with a thousand corpses on board.
I couldn’t find him ugly.
No matter how I tried.
I think that moment was the moment. It was the first time I turned on myself. I always liked who I was, before then. That moment was when the self-hating started.
At the woodland gate, nobody offers to sit down next to the aos sí. Nobody rushes forward to take my place. Nobody trusts the fancy titanium handcuffs he’s brought because he can’t be abiding the touch of iron.
Of course he cares about the oak woodland. Of course he wants to do something, the same as the villagers do.
I just wish he’d do it somewhere else. When I look at him, I see Cian. Worse, I remember the repulsive inner me that wanted to fuck Cian, even knowing what he’d done.
I plonk myself on the pavement, shoulder to shoulder with the aos sí protester, and thrust my hand through the cuff without a word.
“Hello,” he says as he locks my wrist tight to his. I ignore him. A gray-haired granny in a flannelette shirt sits on my other side.
“How’s she cutting?” I ask her casually, offering my other wrist.
“Straight down the middle like a razor blade,” is granny’s gruff reply as she snaps herself onto me.
“I’m Miach,” the aos sí tells me, trying again.
“G’luck, so,” I say, giving him my best stop-talking-to-me glare. His eyes are the color of green glass held up to the sun; green like the woodland in spring; green like the new leaves on Mam’s hazel trees that I didn’t water til it was too late.
Then it dawns on me that this aos sí isn’t one of the stranded ninety-nine. Mam and I looked closely at all those faces on the news, trying to see if any of them was the fomoiri she met at the pub. None of them were.
“You’re sitting on my foot,” he says, at the same time as I say,
“What did you say your name was?”
“Miach,” he replies patiently.
I move my arse off his ankle.
“You’re not one of the ninety-nine.”
“No. I came through the door long before they did. My father kept trying to kill me, you see.”
Flashback of Da’s fist raised in anger.
“Which door did you come through?” I wonder aloud. “The lake? The same as O’Donoghue?”
“No.” Miach gives a subtle shrug. “Centuries ago, I was brought out of a stone well in a hazel thicket. Its waters were even purer than the waters of the lake. Since coming back here a few days ago, I haven’t been able to find it. It must be covered in iron. Somewhere under the village.”
Jaysus.
“I’m supposed to be helping the ninety-nine find their way back home,” he carries on, unperturbed, “but today the woodland seemed more important.”
The woodland isn’t important. I don’t give one single flying feck for the woodland. I’m here because Mam would have been here. I’m just doing what she would have done.
“I’m supposed to be at the hospital,” I say. Respect enters Miach’s already rather stiff and respectful expression, so I add quickly, “I’m not a doctor.”
“A nurse?”
“No.”
I’m not a nurse. Too dumb for that. Remember that nurse who killed a man by putting a decimal point in the wrong place? I clean floors. I lift heavy things.
Before that, I vacuumed the carpets at the fracking company offices. That was prior to the earthquake. Mam never told me straight out that I was aiding and abetting the ruination of the natural world, but I saw it in her sad eyes whenever she straightened me uniform collar.
“Oh.”
“Are you a nurse, yourself?” I react rudely.
“A doctor,” Miach says. Of course he is. “At least, I used to doctor to my people. My sister and I took after our father, a celebrated healer, but it turned out we were more gifted than he was. Out of jealousy, he cut me once with his sword, through the skin. Then twice, through the bone. Then three times, all the way through my brain.” He angles his head, and doesn’t need to part his long hair with his fingers for me to see the faint pink scar running up the middle of his forehead and over the crown of his head.
“Jaysus,” I mutter. Da might have wie
lded his fists but he never sliced my brain in half.
“My sister thought I was dead that third time, for sure. She brought my body through to this world. Her tears made healing herbs grow up and over me. I had to claw my way through them when I woke. By that stage I figured I’d better not go back and give my father another chance at it.”
“Is your father one of the ninety-nine?” I ask. “Is your father Cian?”
“No.”
Sirens drag my attention away from Miach. The Gardaí are finally here. Also arriving are the shepherds with their dogs and swarms of goats and skinny border leicesters. The sheep look like they might chew through, not just herbs and bark, but the trunks of the oaks like living chainsaws.
“Don’t mention how you can heal yourself,” I suggest to the aos sí, “or they might be sawing through your arms instead of the handcuffs.”
“I can’t heal myself. Not in this world. That’s why I’m talking to you and not this other fellow. You’re on my right side. Since my father cut my head in half, I can’t hear anything with my left ear and I can’t see with my left eye.”
It takes the authorities another six or seven hours to get the equipment that they need to hand. By sunset, I need to piss badly. The old lady on my right confides that she’s wearing an adult diaper. Obviously I didn’t think the protest through.
They cut Miach out of his titanium handcuffs with a steel saw. When sparks touch the blue-veined, paper-white skin of the inside of his wrist, his whole body convulses, like they touched him with an electric cattle prod. But he don’t make a sound.
He does piss himself.
Then I do, too, not because I’m in pain but just because it’s been so long, and if anyone smells me, they’ll probably think it was him. I try not to care that they’re hurting him. He chose to be here, same as the rest of us.
“Feckin fairy,” swears the Garda sergeant, hauling Miach to his feet. She’s a head shorter than he is but solid. A mean, freckly tank. They take all two dozen of us to the station and throw us behind bars, but what for? Our punishment is that the woodland gates were thrown open. Sheep and dogs went inside the fence in an endless stream. We couldn’t even keep them out for one full day. The police can’t punish us.
Can’t punish me, anyway. I don’t think Miach likes those metal bars very much at all. He’s sweating like a priest in a playground. People sneak in to ask him if he’s really Miach, the fairy magician, who can heal anything, even cancer, but he shakes in a corner, as far from the cold steel as he can manage, and doesn’t answer them.
But I deserve to be back here again.
Evidence I’m mostly Da (my worse half):
1. On weekly ration delivery night, I steal from the single mother upstairs.
Not from the two little shitehawks. I leave their stuff alone. Just the mother. Her English isn’t great. Don’t think she can read the manifest. Don’t think she even knows she’s supposed to get mutton and Guinness in her ration.
Probably she’s a Muslim vegetarian, anyway.
2. She’s not a fecking Muslim vegetarian. I’m full of shite like a Christmas turkey. The fact of the matter is, I used my severance pay-out from the fracking company to pay off my house when I should have been boycotting them like everyone else. I go to protests to stop sheep from grazing in the woodland but secretly I have a terrible meat craving. A devil’s buttermilk before bed helps me forget how many toxins are probably in the meat. And how I took that tainted money, and I’d be taking it again, for a roof over my head, or, more accurately, for those solid oak boards under my feet.
3. Most of the time, someone in the hospital is dying of cancer. Most of the time, there aren’t enough nurses to be staying on death watch with them. A lot of the time, the dying folks don’t have any family that gives a flying feck.
Sometimes, they ask me to stay with them, but I don’t stay. Nobody stayed with Mam when she was dying of cancer in the hospital and I was in prison, so feck ’em.
4. I told everyone, including my boyfriend Raoul, that I was in prison because of the protest against overturning property rights. For throwing a bottle at Gardaí and then assaulting them.
5. Actually, I was trying to impress an aos sí queen who was at the protest. The Gardaí put her in the back of the van and I wanted to be near her, so I threw the bottle. That wasn’t enough to get me convicted so later I literally hurled shite at them, monkey-style. Everyone knows the aos sí give off pheromones. It’s not my fault I wanted to fuck her so badly. I would have cheated on Raoul, who was loyal and kind. But the aos sí queen laughed at me in ugly disgust.
I didn’t think anything could make that perfect face turn ugly. Still, it didn’t stop me wanting her at that time. I have a superficiality problem. Or had. Or the world I grew up in has the problem.
6. When I let Mam’s trees die, it was like I killed her extra dead. All they needed was a bit of water. I should have smashed through those floorboards to find her imaginary spring. The same way I smashed through the sunroom windows because they showed me my ugly reflection too clearly. And because I was the only one in that reflection. No Raoul, after I confessed to wanting to fuck the aos sí queen. No Mam.
And then, because our protest about property rights had been a complete waste of time and energy, no different to the lock-in, the Council allocated half my house to strangers.
7. Since Raoul left, I’ve felt worthless because I have no romantic partner. Which is stupid.
When you feel something even though it makes no sense and is stupid, that makes you even more stupid, and you spiral down, down, down, in a never-ending loop of stupidity to where Satan’s kicking back in the flooded shafts of the fracking wells, smiling, sipping phenols and biding his time.
They let me and the aos sí, Miach, out of the cells without charge a week later.
It’s a shame, because the food in there is better than the ration, and there’s no washing-up to be doing. Not much worse than boiling the sudsy water, saved from my personal ablutions, til I’m sure all the arse- and armpit-germs have been killed, before putting the saucepans in to soak. I don’t even get to toss the water out after that, no matter how many bits of potato peel or oat hulls are floating in it, because it’s got to be used for flushing the toilet.
I’d have to kill someone to get put away for good, though. Unfortunately they keep Cian in the capital and he’s the only one I can think of worth killing.
“Could you use a volunteer at the hospital?” Miach asks mildly as we linger outside the station building, blinking in the sun. There used to be hanging baskets of flowers out the front but they’ve been lowered and the sheep have cropped the leaves to dirt level.
Before I can answer, a haggard-looking woman comes up to him, carrying a baby on her back and hugging a toddler to her skirts.
“They said you’re that magic fairy doctor, called Miach,” she calls out. Two old men with leashed dogs at the street corner lift their wagging chins with interest, and a couple of lads using a smashed shopping trolley for transport wheel it over so they can listen.
“That is my name,” Miach says, holding out his hand for her to shake, but she doesn’t take it.
“You can cure cancer. I’ll take you to the hospital, so. My husband’s there.”
“I’m sorry. I can’t cure him.”
“His powers don’t work here,” I say scornfully, wishing the growing crowd would get out of my way. I’m hungry and it’s a fair walk home. “He can’t cure anyone. Not in this world.”
“There were herbs in the oak woodland that could have cured your husband, if he had stirred himself to defend it,” Miach tells the haggard-looking woman. “Goats and sheep have eaten them by now.”
Stunned silence from all onlookers meets this pronouncement. I’m the first to recover.
“You could have said so, at the lock-in,” I tell him, getting jostled from behind by a carpenter with hammers hanging from his belt. “You could have stopped it before it happened.”
“I did say so,” Miach answers calmly, giving a slight shrug of his bulky shoulders. “The organizers said all aos sí were liars and I wouldn’t be believed, that I was best to sit down with the rest and keep that mythical shite to myself.”
“What’s going on here?” demands the mean, freckly Garda sergeant from the doorway behind us. “Called a press conference, have we? Move along, all of you, and your godforsaken fairy, too.”
“Which herbs?” the haggard woman asks shrilly.
“You couldn’t have picked them anyway,” Miach says. “They were rare. Protected by law. My sister planted them with her tears when she wept over my dead body.”
“I’ve never seen the likes of you cry,” she accuses. Both the baby on her back and the toddler at her feet begin bawling, perhaps in uncanny sympathy, perhaps from hunger.
“Let’s make him cry,” the carpenter suggests.
“Let’s make him a dead body that stays dead,” somebody else agrees.
And then they’ve got hold of the steel shopping trolley and knocked the aos sí down with it. They turn it over, onto him, and throw their bodies on top so that Miach makes a sizzling sound like wet batter in a grill.
I don’t want to care, I’m as angry as they are, but I find myself trying to get hold of the trolley, to pull it off him.
“Are you mad?” I scream. “You can’t do this!” I glance back towards the Garda station. “They’re killing him!”
The Garda sergeant watches, unblinking, with folded arms, as the carpenter joins in with swinging hammers. When I go to grab his arm, to stop the blow from descending, I’m cracked in the head with a flying elbow for my trouble.
When I wake up, the haggard woman cradles my head, resentment in her eyes. I’m in the spot where I fell, in front of the station, but the crowd is gone. There’s no sign of the woman’s two children.
Greenish blood dries on the pavement where Miach’s body lay.
“Where is he?” I ask thickly.