by Terry Madden
Seeking a place to rest, Talan found his way to the jarl’s personal quarters where he found a treasure of silver bowls, combs, ewers, and an effigy of a god with a single red stone for his one eye. He picked up a silver mirror and opened his mouth wide, searching for those ember eyes. But the little man hid in his gullet.
He heard Maygan enter the room. Come to taunt him some more, or force her soporifics down his throat to quiet the little man. Like a crow harassing a hawk.
He picked up the crude sculpture of the one-eyed god, saying, “Why did this god fail the jarl? He clearly abandoned him in his hour of need.”
When she did not reply, he went on, “Or perhaps the god was usurped by another, a younger god who wielded powers far greater than those of the old. Isn’t that the way of gods? Just like men, they fall to the stronger ones who come after. Just like Nechtan fell to my spear.”
He turned to look at her. There was no shock on her face. She didn’t even humor him with a look of fear. Of course, she knew that Talan had killed his uncle. Didn’t everyone? Yet no one cared, for Talan had brought peace through strength. He had brought them a king who could not die, a king who would rule forever. His fingers absently touched his neck, the scar left by an ice-born axe that should have taken his life.
Maygan looked at her hands and swallowed hard. “The green gods allowed you to take the throne, my lord. Without their will, you would not have succeeded.” But her words lacked conviction.
“What gods will usurp your green gods, Maygan?”
“It is not my place to predict the future for my gods. Let me mix you a draught.” She reached for a silver cup and pulled a pouch from her belt. The sum total of the magic she knew lay in some crushed weeds.
He batted the cup across the room. “Your gods are powerless, sister greenleaf. Others stir. You feel them. You sense them. You hear the voice of the little man, but claim to be deaf. I know you hear him.”
He felt a surge of hope that she understood, that she wasn’t as useless as he’d thought. He gripped her hands and placed them on his chest. “Feel him. He’s singing his blasted tune. His wailing drives me mad. Do you feel his voice shake my ribs? Look.”
He opened his mouth wide and forced her to peer into his throat. It’s where the little man lived. And he was awake again, his commands could not be ignored.
“Do you see him?” he cried.
Her eyes were round and full of tears. She shook her head and tried to draw her hands away. But he held them.
“Let me go, my lord!”
“You must feel him! You must cut him out of me! Here—here,” he fumbled to take his dagger from his belt. “Take my blade. Cut him out!”
But it fell from her weak hand and clattered to the floor. Worthless bitch. Worthless leaf from a worthless tree.
The back of his hand landed on her cheek and knocked her to the floor.
“Please, my lord,” she begged. “You’re troubled, your senses deceive you.”
She’s a pathetic kneeler, the little man said aloud. She’s unworthy of her title, unworthy of our trust.
Maygan clung to his legs. “My lord, I have served you with all of my being—”
He crouched over her, clutching the silver statue of the ice-born god. “Then. Why. Have. You. Failed?”
Talan felt tears sting his eyes. What was he doing? A searing heat rose from his gut and flooded his limbs. The little man clawed his way to his tongue and screamed, “The green gods will fall!”
The silver statue felt ice cold in his hand. He tried to drop it. But that was not the action written upon the skin of time. He knew what he must do. If he did not, the sun would not rise. The little man had been clear about it.
She made no move to defend herself. Talan hammered her skull with the silver god. He fought to step away, but his feet had grown to the floor. His body was not his own.
When she lay in a pool of blood, the little man laughed. He wasn’t laughing at Maygan, but at Talan.
The little man touched the blood. Tasted it. He rewarded Talan with a wave of ecstasy that coursed through his flesh.
The little man whispered with Talan’s lips, “You will find another solás, one who has the ear of a new god.”
Talan crumpled to the floor beside his solás. How would he ever be free of this beast inside?
After the hall had fallen quiet but for the soft sobbing of the women, Talan carried Maygan’s body to the shore in a sack. There, he sent her to the bottom of the fjord. An offering for a new god, one of Talan’s own making.
In the morning, he would set a course for the Isle of Glass. For there, Lyleth had given birth to Nechtan’s child. Talan’s little cousin. The Child of Death.
Chapter 1
“You haven’t been home in over seven years.” Bronwyn was capable of instilling guilt from four thousand miles away. Dish let the phone fall to his lap, as his sister railed against his self-inflicted alienation. He pushed his wheelchair to the window. Out on the quad, the last departing students struggled with their rolling luggage toward a waiting airport shuttle.
He switched it to speakerphone and interrupted her tirade. “Do you understand how bloody difficult it is to travel when you’re paraplegic?”
A long silence was followed by her controlled command, “Merryn loves you. She expects to see you before she dies.” She hung up on him.
Dish tossed the phone on his bed.
The silence of a boarding school during summer loomed before him. The other faculty members had gone, on their way to one resort or another. In truth, Dish didn’t know where other faculty members went on summer holiday, nor did he care. He did his job, did his best to make no friends and marked, with spite, these days he spent in exile from the world where he’d left his soul.
Aunt Merryn was gravely ill, his sister had reported, pointing out that Dish hadn’t seen his aunt since he had awakened from a coma six years earlier. Merryn would be ninety-six now. Dish envied her. She would soon find her way through the well to the warm comfort of a young mother’s womb, to be reborn into that distant beauty he had the misfortune of remembering, a land called the Five Quarters.
A rapping at his door became insistent.
“Come in,” he called, and spun the wheel of his chair so he faced the visitor.
“I've come to say goodbye, sir,” Edward said. He was Dish’s current “pusher,” assigned to help him when he needed it, especially to the dining hall where two steps impeded his entrance in the wheelchair. Dish’s dorm room had been outfitted with handicapped bars and a low sink, everything a paraplegic English teacher could wish for. Dish could get to the toilet himself and dress, which was all that really mattered if he wanted to keep this job. Showering had taken much experimentation, but he had conquered it, and the weekly visiting nurse made sure he was washing behind his ears and everywhere else.
“Best of luck at Yale, Edward. You’re a fine young man.” Did the words sound as tiresome as they felt?
“All thanks to you, Dish. For the recommendation, for being tough. Everything.”
Dish forced a smile. His nickname showed no sign of fading. Iris McCreary had started it. Hugh Cavendish had become “Dish” not only to the students of St. Thomas Aquinas Preparatory School but also to himself.
He took Edward’s outstretched hand and pressed it between both of his own. The water horse tattoo on his wrist contorted as the tendons contracted to grip Edward’s hand. A constant reminder. He had given up trying to hide it.
“You’ll do great things,” Dish recited. “I expect to hear of them.”
“My mother wanted me to give you this.” Edward placed in Dish’s hands a leather-bound book wrapped in a red bow. “She thought you’d like it. I told her you were into medieval literature.”
Dish slipped the ribbon and unfolded the wrapping. “Why, The Canterbury Tales!” He hoped his surprise didn't seem too practiced. “Quite lovely. My thanks to your mother—and you. Best not miss your shuttle, Edward.” He nodded tow
ard the window and Edward started for the door.
Edward was not brash and rebellious, but something about him did remind Dish of Connor. He would send Edward off as he had Connor and the rest, to make his way in a shadow world, his life frittered away by owning and consuming. Edward would walk this land of the dead believing he was alive, having forgotten what living really is. If Dish could just forget, as everyone else had, what it is to watch the sun rise over the land of the living, to feel Lyleth’s hand in his, he might find some purpose here in this hell.
The tattoo drew Dish’s eye to his wrist again. He ran his fingers over the deep blue ink. His farewell to Connor upon graduation had been even more awkward than this one. Dish had squashed Connor’s hopes of ever finding the third well, and he’d not been kind about it. There were players in their lives he could never explain to Connor. The green gods had played them all. Their silence was testament to a goal completed—they had what they wanted, and Dish was certain it wasn’t the photo of the well stone.
He must have been staring idly, for he realized Edward had not gone, but was looking back at him from the doorway.
“Goodbye, Mr. Cavendish.”
“Goodbye, Edward.”
The door closed and that was that. The end of another school year. And Aunt Merryn was preparing for her journey home. Dish would give anything to go with her.
Six years had passed since he had left Lyleth in the middle of a flood with ice-born warriors racing to cut her down. A lifetime might have passed since that day. Six years in this world, how many in the other? Lyleth could be ninety-six herself; the tick of time had no meaning between worlds, wasn’t that what she had told him? If she had died in the muddy sheepfold and crossed over, if she had awakened as a squalling babe somewhere in this monotone world, how would he ever know? He wanted to believe he would feel her awaken here.
He had tried to convince himself that whether she had died or not made no difference, he would meet her again in some future world if the green gods allowed it. And he could only wait.
“She’s waiting for you,” Bronwyn had told him over the phone. She meant Aunt Merryn, of course. It was Merryn who had set Dish on the trail of the third well of the sea when he was younger than Edward. He wondered what provisions airlines made for paraplegics.
**
“Dish?”
The voice on the other end of the phone was much deeper than Dish remembered.
“Yes,” Dish said, “I’m sorry to bother you, Connor.”
The anticipated silence replied.
“I know it’s been some time,” Dish said, “but I wanted you to know that Aunt Merryn hasn’t got long. Her kidneys are failing. I know you were close.”
Connor had corresponded with Merryn, but Dish didn’t know how long that had lasted. A young man posting letters to an old woman in England might be a fancy that would pass quickly. Dish didn’t even know where Connor was now. Their last conversation had been the yearly Christmas Eve call. He had been in Arizona or New Mexico then, bussing tables or some such.
“I’m sorry,” Connor said at last. “I’ve never known anyone like her.”
“You’ve kept contact with her these past few years?”
“Yes,” Connor said. That was it. Just, yes.
“I’m flying to London Friday. Will you come?”
The silence was even longer this time.
“I have work.”
Dish wanted to explain his distance, why he had snuffed Connor’s every attempt to resurrect the search for the well. But instead, he said, “I see. Shall I give Merryn a message from you?”
“Tell her I’ll see her again.”
“Right. Cheers.”
There were times in his life that Nechtan felt more real than Hugh Cavendish and other times when his life as king and fool felt like a dream that shook him to the marrow. Unless he again found something the green gods wanted, he could do nothing but wait for death to send him back. The idea of hurrying that process presented itself with increasing frequency.
He would leave for England the next day.
The roaring sound of a jet taking off reminded him he needed to check in for pre-boarding.
Ten hours on a plane could only be accomplished with humiliating modifications to Dish’s travel plans including a catheter. He met a nurse at the airport in Bristol to remove the thing and replace it with a nappy before starting the long ride to Bronwyn’s house in the far west of Cornwall.
Through the tinted windows of the airport shuttle an impossible summer green assaulted him. The sky embraced a landscape sculpted by the rise and fall of successive civilizations. Sheep tracks were etched into hillsides by millennia of flocks herded over the remains of ancient battlefields; forests long ago stripped of timber and cleared for livestock and grain fields. Cattle rested in the shade of stone circles and befouled holy wells. Dish had grown up here, and the sight of it brought a pungent rush of memories stirred together with those of the Five Quarters. England was so like that other land in many ways.
Bronwyn had built a plywood ramp up the front steps and turned her office into a guest room. The loo was moderately accessible, though it required a five point turn to enter.
“You’ve lost weight,” she told him at the dinner table.
“You’ve colored your hair,” he replied. And that was the end of the critique and the beginning of the customary silence.
She’d bought pasties at a local shop, removed the shop’s wrappers and put the meat pies in the oven as if she’d made them herself. Dish wondered if her two boys had grown up on takeaway, for he’d never known Bronwyn to be a cook. He wondered what else she misrepresented as her own these days.
“You really shouldn’t live alone, Hugh.”
“I don’t really live alone, if you count adolescents as people.” She returned his smile with a lift of her wine glass in salute.
Underneath all that sanctimonious judging, he thought he saw a bit of pity written in the lines beside her green eyes. Pity was something he found intolerable. What had happened between them? As children, they were inseparable. He tried to remind himself of the love they had shared, but sometimes, that just wasn’t enough to heal new wounds. It was simple. Life had taken them in opposite directions, and neither valued the ideals the other had grown to embrace. For Bronwyn, status and money had supplanted adventure and wonder. And Dish would appear a callow pedant with his degree from Oxford.
“Merryn hasn’t asked to go home?” He took a sip of wine and watched Bronwyn weigh her answer.
“It’s not just the kidneys, you know. There’s the dementia. She needs round the clock care.”
“But she’s not going to survive this,” Dish said. “Perhaps she’d like to make her end at home.”
Charles, Bronwyn’s husband, looked up from his pasty. Soft and red-faced from high blood pressure, Dish could probably still beat him in a sprint. Charles had a hand in changing Bronwyn, and Dish would always blame him, even if it wasn’t altogether true.
“She would need in-home care,” Charles said.
“I have the summer,” Dish said.
“You?” Charles had the ability to convey an entire diatribe with one word.
“I would care for her myself,” Bronwyn said, leaning over her plate, “but I have work, and the boys’ football schedule ties me up daily.”
“As I said, I have the summer off.” With his eyes on Charles, Dish added, “I’m not actually as useless as I look.” He pushed the remainder of the dry pasty around his plate. “Shall we be off, Bronwyn? Visiting hours are till nine.”
**
Bronwyn drove Dish to hospital, a fair distance away in Truro.
“I’ll have a visiting nurse come,” Dish said. “I can take care of the rest.”
“You’ll cook? Help her to the loo?” Bronwyn said. “Like bloody hell you will, you can barely care for yourself.”
“My cooking involves more than getting take-away from a pasty shop,” he said.
; The remainder of the ride was spent in welcome, stagnant quiet.
Bronwyn’s bluntness had gained no charm in the past six years, still as bitter as ever. She had played a part in several of the multitude of powerful dreams that had plagued Dish. She was a squid in one, and her translucent tentacles had squeezed the life from his legs as Lyleth hacked at it with her dagger. His time in Cornwall would be well spent if he could repair the bond with his sister.
They arrived at hospital with a half hour of visiting time to spare. They found Merryn in a dormitory with two other women. The room smelled of iodine hand scrub, black pudding, and commodes in need of emptying. A braided corn dolly hung above Merryn’s bed, and several bouquets of sweet peas and asters did their best to mask the other smells. A visitor had pulled a chair beside Merryn’s bed, and from the back, Dish assumed it was one of Bronwyn’s boys. No wonder he hadn’t seen them at supper.
The visitor held Merryn’s hand, and her face was alight as she gazed into his.
Bronwyn wheeled Dish to the foot of the bed and Merryn looked at him with a broad smile. So did Connor. Dish felt his lip begin to tremble.
Bronwyn announced, “Look who’s come, auntie.”
“Hugh,” Merryn said weakly and reached a hand to him.
Connor offered a forced, lopsided smile. He’d changed so much, Dish almost failed to recognize him. He looked like a Renaissance artist with lank, wavy hair and a sparse musketeer beard to match. He stood, offering his hand, his size confirming he’d become a man since the last time Dish had seen him. The restless questioning hadn’t left him, and Dish felt a surge of affection for the folly he saw burning in Connor’s eyes.
“I’m sorry,” Bronwyn said with barbs, “have we met?” She extended her hand to Connor.
“Connor Quinn.” He took her hand and held on, unsmiling.
“My you’ve changed,” Bronwyn said. “It’s been some time.”