by David Waid
Outside, in the eaves of the cottage, nestled beneath the roof thatching, he found two pipits. Slipping like a dream between them, he thought he might taste the birds’ lives as he had the wolf’s. But the thunder of horses, the jolt of the wagon, darkness, moonlight, they all came back. His mother’s body in the snow, now stretched on a bed ten paces away. With that image, his concentration scattered.
Once again he lay in his blankets, felt the weight of his body. Nairne’s stool rested on its side and the poker had fallen to the floor, but she wasn’t there.
He spotted her in the dark with her back to the wall. She held one hand out against the stone, the other clasped over her mouth. As he watched, Nairne stepped away from the wall and groped a path toward him. “I felt ye,” she whispered, kneeling next to him. “Yer presence in the air around me. I felt ye.”
His face flushed in the darkness. He couldn’t think clearly. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
She laughed into her hands and rocked back and forth. Watching her like that, swaying while red light from the hearth danced across her blind, white eyes made the hairs on Eamon’s neck stand up. “Hoot-toot!” she said. “Ye know full well what I’m talkin’ about.”
Something cracked in Eamon. He started whispering to her in a rush. “I’m sorry. I’ll never do it again, I promise. Don’t tell anyone. Don’t tell Duff or my sister.”
Nairne stopped laughing abruptly and grabbed his shoulders. “Don’t ye be sorry, an’ don’t make a promise ye can’t keep.” Two points of color had risen in her cheeks. “What ye have is a gift! We shall indeed tell none about it, but ye may be sure ‘t is a great gift.
“From the moment we met I thought ye might have a feel fer the song.” She leaned close and her breath smelled like earth and nutmeg. “What ye did so easily now — an’ you little mar than a pup — took most of me life to learn. Even so, I must perform a ritual to achieve the thin’. An’ here I’ve been countin’ meself among the blessed.”
Her voice had risen in excitement and she caught herself. Stopping, she listened to the quiet breathing in the room for a space, continued in a lower voice.
“The blood of yer family connects to others in these mountains like the roots of bog grass. I thought ye might be one of those who can hear the song; they’re common enough, though few know it. They call their power ‘luck.’
“I even thought ye might be one with a small knack fer the workin’s, though these are fewer — once in a span of decades, belike. That itself would have been a wonder, but yer somethin’ mar an’ different altogether.”
The words she spoke frightened him, stirring an echo from his dreams.
“I’ve been facing the world’s wind fer many a year,” she continued, “and have developed a weather eye. There’s mar hardship in yer future or I’m a leipreachán. Sorry I am t’say it, but there it is. Yet, trouble or no, ye need sleep. Close yer eyes and take what rest ye can.”
4. Something Wicked
Genoa
Teresa woke with a start. She was cold, stiff. Her bottom hurt from sitting and her head felt as if it had been packed with cotton. Why was she sleeping on this step? As she looked up at the moon and stars, things began to return. Madonna! Night! Teresa jumped to her feet.
Earlier, she had followed Ignacio to the unassuming door in the plain, side street wall, and couldn’t believe it. This was the Maestro’s home? From the stories her brother told, she had expected an old palazzo, maybe, with trellised vines and tall, impossibly thin servants who never spoke.
But he entered here.
Fine. She’d sat down to wait for his return; perhaps she would catch him by surprise. Hidden in the recessed arch of a door up the street from the Maestro’s, she peered out occasionally, but Ignacio never emerged. Shadows lengthened, her vigil grew dull, but she waited…and waited. And at some point she slipped into dreams. When she woke, she was disoriented. A queasy anxiety had settled on her and she didn’t know why. Some clinging tissue of dreams, maybe.
Where was Ignacio? Was it possible he had walked right by her in the night? Yes. Certainly. It was also possible he was in the house down the street, still at work with his master. It had happened before. So why did she have this crawling itch on her neck?
Per Dio! Since when did her dreams mean anything?
She was turning for home when a dog barked, just once from a house in the direction of the Maestro’s, the sound deep and resonant. A sign? She believed in such things. And what would it take to check? A moment to knock on the door. Perhaps Ignacio would be embarrassed to be fetched home by his sister. So be it.
Walking to the door, she raised her hand to knock, but never let it fall. Her breath caught in her throat. A sense of something wrong — something bad — clung to the house. When she brought her knuckles to the wood, they tingled, when she pulled them away the feeling faded. Why would her fingers tingle like that? And why should that mean wicked things were afoot? No reason.
But it did mean that. She knew it with complete certainty.
Footsteps and a muttering voice sounded in the hallway beyond the door. The sound came so suddenly, she nearly screamed. The steps drew closer. A hand fumbled with the lock.
Teresa looked back up the narrow street to where she’d been earlier. This could be her brother coming out, yet something in her heart urged her to run. Spinning, she raced back to the recessed archway. Behind her, she heard the bolt being drawn, the door as it creaked open. She pressed into the recess, heart hammering, listening for her brother’s footsteps. She heard the clatter of a pushcart instead.
A man stood in the light of the Maestro’s open door, struggling with a large burlap sack in a wheelbarrow. The bundle was heavy, that much she could see. The man wore a cloak and hood, but was too short to be Ignacio, too fat. As she watched, the stranger closed the door, lifted the wheelbarrow with a grunt and started in the opposite direction from where she hid.
Once again she wondered where Ignacio could be and her eyes were drawn to the stained, grimy sack. Maybe this would all turn out to be nothing and she would laugh about it with Ignacio in the morning, but the chance of that seemed to grow smaller with every moment.
Whispering a quick prayer, Teresa stepped out of the doorway to follow, staying close to the houses that lined the street. She tried to move quietly, but her own breathing sounded raspy and loud and her sandals scuffed against the cobblestones. Please, God, let him hear nothing over the rumble of his cart.
It soon became clear that the man was trying to avoid notice. He followed side streets wherever he could and, twice, at wider thoroughfares, he watched until he was sure they were empty, then hastened over the cobblestones with his cargo jouncing in its bed. At one point, he pulled back into deeper darkness by the side of a building as three drunk strangers wandered by, arm-in-arm on a cross street, singing some bawdy tavern verse.
Teresa kept looking at the sack and felt her mouth go dry. God, please let that not be Ignacio. If Ignacio was hurt she could help. If he was dead…she wouldn’t think about that, but she wouldn’t leave him. Never.
They went on this way until they came to a run-down neighborhood Teresa had rarely seen in daylight hours and never at night. The ground was cut with a steep-sided trench, deep enough to be bridged in places. At the bottom ran a sad piece of river that, twenty miles inland, split into a hundred creeks and fingerlings before coming this way and expiring at the sea. When she was younger, Teresa had heard people lived under the bridges, like trolls in a fairy tale.
As if recoiling from the canal, the houses stopped short of it by the width of an avenue on both sides. The city’s paving stones gave way to weathered, half-buried wood beams, castaways from the nearby wharfs.
The hooded man rolled his freight right up to the lip and looked around, peering into the dark. From one of the houses nearby, an infant’s thin, wavering cry rose. A gust of wind picked up behind as if nudging Teresa into the open. With great effort, the hooded man lifted
the handles of his cart so that the bag and whatever was inside shook out. She heard a muffled thud and the loaded sack tumbled and slid to splash in the lifeless water.
Looking around one last time, the man turned with his handcart, starting back the way he came. Teresa squatted in shadows as man and cart passed. She feared she might be seen, yet the hooded stranger didn’t so much as look her way. Appearing more relaxed, he took up the tavern tune the drunks had been singing, whistling as he clattered up the street he and Teresa had just come down.
She waited only half a breath after he passed before crossing the avenue to the embankment’s edge. It couldn’t be more than ten feet deep, but Per Dio! it could stretch all the way to Hell and she wouldn’t know because of the inky blackness hiding the bottom. Liquid gurgled and there was a terrible smell of raw waste. She imagined whatever flowed at the bottom was what flowed through the fens and reeks of Purgatory, a thick, lumpy running.
She peered down where the hooded man had tipped the cart, but couldn’t see anything. That man — and God only knew what else — roamed the streets behind her, yet she peered into the trench, hesitating. She didn’t want to descend, only she had to. Ignacio’s life could depend on it.
That was enough. She sat, swung her legs over the edge and, bit by bit, slid down into the stench and darkness. When she entered the lightless place at the bottom, slick, unidentifiable things beneath her hands and feet made her shiver. From all around came the angry chittering of rats she’d disturbed. Clenching her fists, Teresa remained perfectly still until her eyes adjusted to the murk. She choked back a scream when something live brushed the back of her hand, yet after a few moments she saw better, a few feet, anyway, from the starlight which reflected from above.
Luck was with her; she had descended near the sack. Teresa saw it as a darker lump in the canal. It wasn’t moving. Turning around with her hands and feet in the wet dirt of the lower slope, she sidled across to the bag. At one point, she slipped and, with a plop, her foot sank into the creek up to her ankle. The cold muck beneath the water’s surface sluiced up into her sandal and between her toes. Teresa groaned in disgust, yet she kept going.
When she got to the sack, Teresa found she couldn’t touch it. A smell came from the thing, which, sealed as it was, didn’t quite cut through the stink of the creek. Yet that smell hovered at the edge of awareness, setting her teeth on edge. She whimpered.
“Ignacio,” she called to the sack in a hoarse whisper. “It’s me, Teresa.”
There was no response, no answering movement.
The sack was bound shut with a piece of cord. The knot was impossible to loosen in the dark with her hands shaking. She forced herself to take deep shuddering breaths with the stink in her nose and tried to feel her way through it. Twice she thought she had it solved, yet had to start again until, finally, she pulled a part of the knot that gave way. From there it was easy and the thing quickly came undone.
Teresa yanked the cord from the sack and threw it behind her. When she did, the bag fell open and she breathed air thick with the stench of rotten meat. She gagged and her eyes watered.
Reaching forward, she gingerly pulled the material back. A little more and something pale was revealed in the dim light. She had to get close to see and the putrid smell was in her face. With a shock, she made out what looked like an animal head from the slaughterhouse yards, all the skin stripped away, the two eyeballs obscenely bulging and exposed. Only when she leaned closer still did she see it was a human face.
Teresa screamed, pushing herself away from the corpse in the bag. Her feet splashed backward through the cold, filthy creek. She could feel another wild scream rising and clamped a hand over her own mouth, the touch of wet muck on her lips and cheeks. In her mind, she saw the head and her imagination furnished details it had been too dark to make out: veins, maggots, the little gray tip of a tongue. Then she was vomiting, retching until there was nothing left. She was making too much noise, but could do nothing to stop. When her body quit of its own accord, she was soaked with sweat and her arms and legs shook.
Suddenly, Teresa went rigid. She’d heard a sound, but where had it come from? A crazy image rose up of those people emerging who were supposed to live beneath the bridges, shambling out to recover what the day-dwellers cast away. She held her breath, cocked her head to the side and listened. Nothing. Just the slow gurgle of the creek.
She had to get out of here before she went mad, but couldn’t leave without being certain the body was not Ignacio’s. She pulled apart the fabric again as tears rolled down her cheeks. Wiping her eyes, Teresa brought her head close. Some faint starlight touched the corpse’s hair. She couldn’t tell its color, yet could see that it was both straight and short. It was some time before Teresa allowed herself the hope that came with the realization. Short, straight hair. Not Ignacio.
Praise the Madonna. She let out a silent sob and put the back of her wrist to her mouth as fresh tears sprang forth. If she lived to be a hundred she would always remember that moment. In the instant that relief flooded her, a scrape of gravel sounded above and a handful of tiny stones came skittering down the slope. She froze, held her breath. When she tipped her head back, there at the top of the embankment stood the hooded man, looking down.
The man spoke in a soft voice. “I saw you come out of the shadows and run down here, street rat,” he said. “You scream like a girl. Come on up and let me have a look at you.”
He held his head as if listening for an answer and she realized there was no way he could see her in the black night-shadow that cloaked the trench bottom. She was invisible for now, yet she could see his head moving as he searched the darkness.
When she didn’t respond, he muttered under his breath and made a movement toward the edge as if to come down.
“No,” she said. “I will come up, but don’t hurt me.”
“I won’t,” he said, swinging around to the sound of her voice. “I need a helper like you.” As he said this he put one hand behind his back and fumbled like he was pulling something from his waistband. “Look here, I have some money. You can start now. Come on up and I’ll give it to you.” He said that, but his hand remained behind his back and she doubted very much it was coins he held. In the distance, the baby began to cry again. She almost screamed for help, but the man would be down on her like a flash. Long before anyone could get to her, she would be dead.
“First tell me what I have to do for this job,” she said.
There was a smile in his voice and he glanced over both shoulders. “It’s soft work. Good pay and meat from my lord’s table. We clean up after him, tidy the house and such. Sometimes we travel with him and see the country. That’s what my life is like. It’s a position many would pay to hold and I am offering it to you for free. I can see you’re brave and not easily taken in, that’s why. Those are the qualities I need. Now, I’ve done my part, you come on up here with me and let me put good silver in your palm as first payment.”
But as he spoke, Teresa had been moving to the left with infinite care. She could make no noise, allow no flash of pale skin to draw his attention. She did not reply.
“I have no time for this foolishness, come up now or I’ll come down for you.”
Teresa moved with even greater care. It took everything she had not to get up and run. The silence stretched on.
He made a throaty noise like a growl and snarled, “Where are you, whelp?”
Snatching up a pebble from the embankment, she tossed it underhand into the creek, on the other side of the hooded man from where she crouched. The tiny stone splashed as it hit the water and immediately he was over the side and scrambling down.
“Got you, runt!”
He came straight at the darkness where he supposed Teresa to be, ten feet away. In the hand which he had concealed behind his back, he held a thick, curved knife. Dirt showers came before him and he was grunting like an animal. Just as swiftly, Teresa was up, clawing with hands and feet for the top, loose s
oil giving way beneath her, slowing her. All attempts at stealth were gone.
“You street rat!” He splashed toward her as she was only halfway up. Where she ascended was steeper than where she’d come down, yet she was almost to the top. She looked back as he made a lunge for her ankle, face upturned in the starlight. In that wild snatch of time Teresa saw his small eyes shining with fury and threw a fistful of dirt into them.
“Argh! Puttana!” The man missed her and rolled down the slope in a cascade of soil, splashing in the creek. Teresa clambered over the rim of the ditch and onto level ground. She wanted to lie there panting at the sky, but scrambled to her feet and spun around to look down. There was only silence. Silence and deep black shadow. She yelled, “I’m going to get you, murderer!” then ran for home and safety as fast as her legs would carry her.
5. Inn of the Three Shrikes
Leinster
Clods of snow flew up behind the jet-black, galloping horse as it tore from beneath a tangled wood of leafless trees. Its rider bore south along the road from Dublin, across a white blanket of open farmland where the sun’s reflected glare was blinding. The Irish Sea lay to the east, the salt smell of it thick on the freezing wind, while the Wicklow Mountains rose to the west. It seemed the only sound in the expanse between them was the muffled drumbeat of the horse’s hooves.
Horse and rider galloped along the road that was cut with the tracks of wagons from nearby farms. The path took them towards a stand of trees bordering a snow-choked creek, spanned with an arched wooden bridge.
As they drew near, a flock of starlings burst into flight. They darted aloft, rising like smoke and flew together above the field. The line of their flight swung out and around in the pale blue sky. Below them, the rider pulled the horse to a canter and then a stop. The horse stepped sideways, turning, its head tossing and sides heaving as the powerful lungs worked for air.