The Changeling

by Helen Falconer

  About a quarter of an hour later, the trees thinned and they came out on the crest of a steep hillside. Caitlin was standing with her back to them, her hands on her hips, silhouetted against the brilliant sunset.

  Yet it wasn’t sunset, because the sun had long set. It was the pyramid city, its rose-coloured walls lit by a thousand golden fires that burned on every balcony and in every courtyard.

  Falias up close was vast – much vaster than it had appeared from the top of the waterfall, because from there the lower two thirds of the pyramid had been hidden, and only the tip visible. The city that was now before them rose up out of a deep, circular valley; most of it burned gold, but its upper levels were pale blue, and the very point seemed to float above the rest, a delicate minaret of silvery white. The hill at their feet formed one side of the valley. On the far side, half circling the pyramid like a vast protective hand, was a hemisphere of marble cliffs, reflecting the city’s lights as a solid sparkling wall of rose-gold. Above was a warm green sky, with a round yellow moon. The river emerged below to their left and swept round the city’s foot, so bright with mirrored fire that Falias appeared to rise from a sea of crimson lava.

  ‘Nearly there . . .’ Shay started immediately down the hill. But Caitlin ran after him, grabbing him by his torn shirt.

  ‘Stop. We can’t just turn up.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because we can’t get in without a pass and we need money, and we can’t get either without handing over a beast to the zookeeper.’ She plumped herself miserably down on the dark grass. ‘Danu, I so want to get back in. What d’ya let them cooshees go for?’

  Aoife said sharply, ‘They saved us from the dullahans!’

  ‘They didn’t need to, stupid dogs – we could have sneaked off and got away. It’s your fault for not keeping them under control. This is a complete disaster. Even that burned-up cat would have been worth something to us. If stinko-boy there hadn’t taken a dump near a pooka—’

  ‘I didn’t know it was there!’

  ‘I bet it was the awful smell that attracted it, like blood to a shark.’

  Shay hefted Eva higher in his arms. ‘We have to chance it anyway – there’s got to be a way.’

  Caitlin said fiercely, ‘Don’t you listen? We can’t get passes off the zookeeper without bringing him a beast!’

  Ultan said, ‘Well, let’s go see him anyway, and explain we did have loads but we lost them.’

  ‘Oh, for— Why bother?’

  ‘I’m starving, Cait. He feeds the animals, doesn’t he? If he can feed them, he can feed us. And maybe he can get us some new kitbags before we go back out.’

  ‘I’m not begging animal food off Seán Burke! I’d rather starve!’ Caitlin’s eyes were flashing, yet at the same time she sounded very young and hopeless. She sat cradling her kitbag in her arms like she was using it for comfort; like it was a doll. ‘I’m telling you, we have to go back to Gorias – we have to get ourselves another beast.’

  Aoife stepped away under the trees and waited a while until her eyes got used again to the dark green dusk. The fallen needles were spongy under her feet; the bitter smell of them sharp to her nose. There was an utter stillness in the woods – the sounds of the desperate dogs had long faded to absolute nothing. She felt a deep sadness at having abandoned the dogs to their fate. What were dullahans – creatures or men? They were headless? With what had they ripped the dogs apart? Claws? Weapons? Bare hands?

  She listened, and the wind moved in the wood and branches bent. The needles on the floor shifted. The hairs rose delicately on her neck . . . So hard to see more than a few metres into this tree-cluttered darkness. She took another step forward. A darkness slunk through the trees . . . And another.

  ‘Here, boy?’

  She was only whispering, but her voice cracked with strain. Supposing it was the dullahans. The sweat rolled down the hollows of her neck and under her arms.

  Five, six shadows, closing in around her. Aoife stayed where she was, her arms extended. They pushed their long bony heads against her back and chest; their thick fur was wet with stickiness. She stroked one after the other, running her hands up the ruffs of their huge necks. She counted only seven of them. The younger, smaller dog was present, but the biggest, the king of them all, was among the missing.

  CHAPTER TEN

  ‘Seven cooshees? Sure you have. Lovely creatures. I seen one once. A dead one, mind.’

  ‘We had twelve—’

  ‘Course you did.’

  ‘But they got in a fight—’

  ‘You’ll get that. So, where’s this famous seven— Mary, Mother of God, ye were serious! Get them away from me! Them’s dangerous beasts! Oh, my heart . . . Don’t you be after coming one step nearer, girleen – you get them straight over there into that cage – there, the one that’s open . . . Holy Mary, Mother of Christ, and all her saints . . . Close the door on them! Close it now!’

  ‘I have to get out again first, don’t I?’

  Aoife jumped out of the high wooden cage, then slammed it shut against the dogs, which were whining and jostling to follow. ‘Sorry, lads . . .’ She slipped her hand through the bars, stroking the bony nose of the youngest cooshee – badly slashed around the head and missing an ear, but otherwise one of the survivors.

  Caitlin said, ‘Now. Seven beasts. We want passes and money.’

  ‘Tie the rope, tight . . . Tighter.’

  ‘All right, all right.’ Caitlin wound the thick sugán rope repeatedly around the doorframe, knotting and re-knotting. ‘Safe enough for you now? Scared of cooshees? I’m not, they’re safe as houses. Thought you were a zookeeper.’

  ‘Can’t help the job I was given by the Beloved. Lovely man, lovely man, not saying a word against him. Said I was perfect for this job even though I never minded nothing before but two cows and three chickens— Tight.’

  Caitlin snapped, ‘It is tight! Give us the passes and lots of money.’

  ‘Don’t be in such a hurry, girleen. I have to answer for every penny that goes through these hands.’

  ‘There’s seven there, Seán Burke – count them for yerself!’

  The zookeeper drew nearer to the filthy cage; he had a head like an outsize conker, dusted with a cobweb of grey hair as fine and fluffy as a cat’s. Every item of his clothing was heavily patched – shirt, trousers, even the heavy boots on his feet. ‘One, two . . . God save us. Ye might say seven, but if ye stirred these up together in the one pot ye’d be lucky to have enough to make one—’

  Caitlin snarled, ‘There’s no rule we have to bring them in absolutely perfect. They’re still in good working order. ’Tis only a few ears.’

  ‘And three with stumps for tails – d’ye think I’m blind? And look at these horrible gashes across their backs – what did ye do to them? They’ve been whipped to pieces with something right powerful. I’m going to have to get the vet to them – it’ll cost me a fortune, so it will.’

  Shay’s voice came from the darkness. ‘We haven’t got time to stand around chatting with you – we’re in a hurry, so we are.’

  The old man’s eyes shifted, searching. Barely half a kilometre away across the valley, the city of Falias shed its brilliant light, but here between the high wooden cages all was shadowy. ‘Who said that?’

  Shay stepped forward. ‘I did.’

  ‘No time to chat, is it? That’s very sad, very modern.’ Then the zookeeper’s gaze fell on Eva, who was now asleep with her cheek pressed to Shay’s shoulder, mouth distorted. His face lighting up with interest, he hobbled over to peer more closely at her. ‘Well, well, well. Is that your own sheóg, if you don’t object to my asking?’

  ‘She’s mine,’ said Aoife quickly.

  ‘Yours?’ He turned and looked her up and down, and his expression changed from blustering meanness to something deeper – cleverer. Like the ancient farmers at the mart judging the worth of cattle, hands in their shabby black coats and caps pulled down low. ‘So you’re the . . . A
new arrival, are ye? That’s very, very interesting, so it is.’ He leaned closer to her, attempting a friendly smile, his face as creased as the patched leather boots on his feet and his teeth sticking out at curious angles. ‘Why don’t you come up to the house, girleen, and I’ll find you a special pass?’

  Aoife winced at the foulness of his breath. ‘Four passes and some money.’

  He cast up his faded, watery eyes. ‘All right, all right – daylight robbery, but come on, the lot of you. I have the water on and I’ll make ye all a nice hot cup of tea.’

  Ultan’s plump face lit up with sudden longing. ‘Tea?’

  ‘Not real tea, laddie, not unless ye’ve brought a handful of Barry’s with you.’

  ‘Oh . . .’ Ultan’s face fell again. ‘No. I haven’t.’

  The zookeeper said sympathetically, ‘I know, ’tis desperate, the food and drink ye get here in paradise, isn’t it? No decent tea, no Kimberley biscuits. Unless ye know the right people, that is. But I’ll do me best.’ And he shuffled off between the ramshackle cages, beckoning to them, grinning and bobbing – servile yet powerfully insistent.

  Aoife said to Ultan, ‘We’ll just have to get the passes and go; we haven’t the time for tea.’

  ‘I don’t mind – if it’s not Barry’s original, I’m not interested.’

  ‘Shut up about stupid Barry’s,’ grumbled Caitlin, hitching the kitbag up onto her shoulder again.

  Seán Burke plodded along the muddy track in front of them, a stick in his hand which he occasionally poked into a cage to disturb whatever misshapen creature was curled up on foul straw trying to get some rest. If any hissed or snapped at him, he leaped back very nimbly for his age – which must have been well over eighty. It hadn’t struck Aoife that there might be changelings here who hadn’t been called home to paradise until they had grown old. How had this man spent his life, before he found out who he really was? He reminded her of two or three ageing bachelors in Kilduff: fanciful types, full of extraordinary stories about aliens and monsters – or ‘pure shite’, whichever the listener chose to call it. ‘Away with the fairies’, people said of them – and maybe they should have all gone away with the fairies years before, but they had stayed behind instead, trapped in the pub with only themselves and the barman for company. Had Seán Burke been walking back along the bog road late at night, full of brandy, when the sheóg finally called him home – and had he run after her like he was young again?

  ‘Jaysus, will you look at the state of these craiturs,’ said Ultan.

  In one cage, a strange beast with toad-like skin and one leg was asleep on heaps of dirty straw. In another that looked empty, a small child-sized being suddenly materialized out of thin air, leaping and clinging to the bars with human hands – for a second Aoife thought it was a child, then saw its wizened face and claw-like nails. The little creature was naked, its body covered with a thick reddish coat of hair, matted with sticks and leaves.

  ‘Grogoch.’ Ultan grimaced. ‘Disgusting thing.’

  ‘Dangerous?’

  ‘Only to priests.’

  ‘Priests?’

  ‘Can’t stand ’em . . .’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘Ask Caitlin – apparently everything about everything is in that fancy book of hers.’

  ‘I don’t have no book,’ hissed Caitlin over her shoulder, jerking the strap of her kitbag tighter so that it rode higher over her shoulder blade.

  ‘But—’

  ‘But nothing.’

  Ultan dropped his voice to a whisper. ‘Oh. Right. Sorry.’

  ‘You thick or what?’

  ‘Sorry.’ He leaned in close to Aoife’s ear. ‘She stole it off the druids, and fat lot of good did it do her – she can’t even read the useless yoke.’

  The old man was peering at them over his shoulder. ‘What’s all the whispering about back there?’

  ‘Nothing!’ Caitlin glared threateningly at Ultan.

  The building that the zookeeper had grandly called the ‘lodge’ was set apart in a clearing of muddy ground. It was circular like the cob house, but built of rough dry stone. A thatch of reeds jutted out all around it, extending almost two metres from the walls like the wide brim of a hat. Smoke, tinted orange-pink by the torchlight, rose from the high apex of the thatch. Inside, the floor was flagged with grey stone and the furniture was an odd mixture of roughly made sugán stools and heavy oak chairs, carved with fruit and flowers, that must have been salvaged from a grander residence. A small bed was covered in fluffy rust-red blankets. Stacked against the far wall were several rows of drawers with bronze handles, like something from an old-fashioned chemist’s. There were keys in some of the drawers; a few stood half open. A copper pot with bronze claws for feet was boiling over an open fire, and bunches of dried herbs dangled from the rafters.

  ‘Come in, sit down, the lot of ye – ye must be longing for some tea . . .’ Seán Burke had climbed onto one of the stools, and was pulling down handfuls of the brittle, shrivelled leaves, picking and choosing, clicking his tongue against his loose yellow teeth. ‘Dandelion, nettle . . . Basil, where’s me basil?’

  Aoife sighed, ‘We don’t have time for tea. Can you just give us the passes?’

  Caitlin said, ‘Yeah, and the money, you aul slobberer, and then we can get ourselves a proper decent drink in Falias.’

  ‘Hold on there, now – where’s yer rush? Ye must be tired to yer bones, all of ye. Sit down by the fire, warm yerselves while ye wait.’

  ‘Wait for what?’

  ‘Mm . . . I have to find another three passes, they’re behind in the shed.’ As he spoke, the old man stepped up onto the hearth beside Caitlin and threw his handful of herbs into the boiling water.

  ‘Look, we don’t want your disgusting tea.’ But Caitlin said this in a softer, less urgent tone, as sweet steam rose from the pot and swirled thickly around the room.

  ‘Lovely smell, ain’t it?’ Seán Burke set four clay cups on a tray, ladled in the boiling herb-water, and hobbled around handing them out. ‘Drink up, all of ye. Let a poor lonely old man show ye a small bit of hospitality.’

  It was hard to refuse – with a grimace at Shay, Aoife took the steaming cup; she was thirsty, and the scent reminded her of home, somehow. The sweetness of the garden, coming through her window on a soft summer night.

  The zookeeper was saying to Shay, ‘Lay the little sheóg down on the bed there – it’s not much but it’s grogoch fur; strange little beggars moult like nothing else. I’ll be back nearly afore I’m gone.’ And the door of the house opened and shut as he went off into the night.

  Aoife inhaled more steam from her cup, and an intense wave of sleepiness washed over her. She sank down on one of the stools. Shay was also sitting down, on the fur-covered bed beside the sleeping child, head on hand, his cup resting on his knee. Ultan, who had taken one of the sturdier chairs beside the fire, tried a careful sip. ‘Ouch – too hot.’ He took another. ‘Ouch . . .’ Then he started snoring incredibly loudly.

  Caitlin, yawning, picked up the poker and prodded him. ‘Oi, Fat Boy, you’re after frightening the animals.’

  Aoife inhaled deeply again. Her mother’s face drifted into view . . . She opened her eyes with difficulty. Shay was raising his cooling cup to his lips. She mumbled, ‘Don’ . . .’ then tried to stand up and crashed sideways off the stool, her drink spilling across the floor. Shay set down his cup and came over to help her up.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Don’ . . .’ She made a desperate effort to control her tongue. ‘Don’t drink . . .’

  Caitlin’s face appeared at the blurred edge of her vision. ‘She’s right. I been having a good dig at Ultan with the poker and he still won’t wake up. That cheating sneak of a zookeeper is up to something. I bet he has plenty of passes right here. Let’s find them.’ Still yawning, she marched over to the rows of little drawers, pulling out the ones that were already half open. ‘Nails . . . string . . .’ She turned the keys in the dra
wers that had them – ‘Ugh, more herbs’ – then tried the ones that had no keys. ‘Locked. Bet they’re in one of these.’

  ‘Hang on.’ Aoife got shakily to her feet and went over to join her. ‘Sometimes you just have to . . .’ One after another, the locks clicked open beneath her fingers, as she’d known they would – like the drawer in her parents’ bedroom, and the locker at school, when she’d forgotten her key.

  The changeling girl threw her a puzzled glance. ‘How many powers do you have, hey?’

  ‘It’s just a knack.’

  ‘No, no – opening locks, that’s a real power; it’s on the list.’

  ‘Oh. OK.’ Aoife felt pleased with herself.

  ‘And you can fly too, nearly as good as me. Ultan calls it lepping about, but we know it’s flying, don’t we?’

  ‘Mm.’

  Shay had joined them, and was checking through the drawers which Aoife had unlocked. ‘What do these passes look like? These?’ He held out a handful of small green and blue enamelled pebbles, like tiny worlds.

  ‘No, that’s paradise money – good find. Take as much as you can. And look for some thin red stones – that’s what the passes look like.’ Caitlin turned back to Aoife. ‘You should meet this old fart of a chief druid, Morfesa. He was always on to me about how no one could have more than one power, always said I couldn’t fly even though I showed him I could.’

  ‘I wouldn’t mind meeting a real druid.’

  ‘Yeah? I’m not going near that beardy freak again.’ Caitlin, head down, began rifling through the newly opened drawers herself. ‘Ha! I knew it – here they are, loads of them. I’m taking four – no, what the hell, thirteen. That’s the number of beasts we had today; not our fault the pooka and them dullahans picked off a few. We can use the other passes another time.’ She glanced towards the door. ‘Where’s that aul slobberer got to, anyway?’ She shoved a lot more than thirteen of the red stone wafers plus several drawer-fuls of enamelled pebbles into her kitbag and slung it over her shoulder. Then she suddenly launched a fierce assault on the unconscious Ultan, punching his head and kicking him in the legs. ‘Wake up, you thick lump of a fool! What d’ya want to drink that tea for?’