The Hounds of the Morrigan

by Pat O'Shea

  ‘Oh!’ he said, taken by surprise.

  They both leaped and tried to jump high enough to reach the tail-end of the string; but it was already impossible.

  ‘Come back, Kite!’ Brigit cried.

  But it went away.

  Up and up and up it went and then it was lost altogether, in fleecy clouds.

  ‘It’s gone; well, that’s that,’ Brigit said cheerfully enough, but Pidge had only to look at her face to know how she was really feeling. She looked as if she was holding it together by the power of her will, or stubbornness as older people call it sometimes; and he knew that it would take very little to make her cry.

  ‘That’s all right, Brigit. When we get home, I’ll make one just like it. I can find out how to do it from a book. It shouldn’t be too hard.’

  ‘It was ours! It was in that nut and you owned it, didn’t you?’

  I don’t want her to cry, he thought. If she starts crying she might start saying that she wants to go home and I wouldn’t know what to do. What’s the best thing to say? If I’m too kind, she’ll just bawl.

  ‘It wasn’t ours; the journey was ours. Just think, Brigit, we are the only two in the whole world who had that journey! And you are the only one in the whole world who played the whistle for The Maines. Isn’t that so?’

  ‘Yes,’ she muttered, mollified.

  ‘And on my word, I really will make one for you when we get back.’

  ‘When will that be?’

  Oh, here it comes, he thought.

  ‘After our quest is over. I imagine we’re going to have a lot more adventures.’

  ‘Good,’ she said, without sounding aggrieved.

  Pidge was very relieved.

  ‘We should be making a move now,’ he said. ‘Though I don’t know which way we should go.’

  Trusting to luck, they followed one of the sheep tracks.

  ‘And will it have a ship painted on it and ribbons and everything?’ she asked as they walked along.

  ‘Yes. Of course.’

  ‘And will it be mine?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well Pidge, when I know how, I’ll knit you … two pairs of socks.’

  ‘Only two pairs? You promised Tom Cusack twenty pairs for your brooch,’ he answered, laughing.

  She heaved a deep sigh.

  ‘Oh dear, don’t remind me. It’s going to take the rest of my life.’

  The sheep track led them to better ground and later to a wider track, where marks from cartwheels had printed two shallow scars. Patches of bilberries grew wherever it was rocky and blackberry bushes were everywhere. They picked a handful from time to time and ate the shiny, ripe berries.

  ‘Brigit,’ said Pidge, ‘do you feel very hungry?’

  ‘No. I like eating these, though.’

  ‘We haven’t had anything to eat since that last bit of chocolate, have we?’

  ‘No. Why?’

  ‘We should be starving and we’re not. I wonder what time it is? We don’t know if it’s breakfast or dinner-time. Our stomachs usually tell us the time.’

  ‘What?’ Brigit yelled and got such a fit of laughing that she had to sit down for some minutes.

  ‘I never heard of such a thing,’ she snorted, when she got her breath back. ‘My stomach telling me the time; it’s a wonder I don’t have to wind it up at night.’

  Pidge was glad that she was laughing and had forgotten her disappointment about the kite.

  ‘I mean—first you’re hungry and then you eat, and for a while you feel full up; and then, after a time, you don’t feel that full up; and then a bit later you know you could eat a bit of bread and butter; and later still, you begin to get hungry. And then, not long after that, you’re really hungry again. And it all sort of chops the day up into lumps.’

  But Brigit still thought it very funny and kept saying: ‘What time is it by your stomach?’ to beetles and butterflies and every kind of live thing that they met for a long time afterwards.

  Occasionally Pidge would stop and look all round to detect any movement that might be a following hound; not because he really expected to see one but because he thought he should. He was pleased to find each time that they were alone but for the insects and a couple of crazy hares sparring with each other, a long way away—too far to be worth watching. Larks sang high above them; everything was as it should be. The cart-track took them through heather and clumps of harebells, with a blackthorn growing here and there; and it wasn’t very long before the growth around them was richer, as the land was better.

  While he was deciding that the leaping boxing hares were too far away to repay time spent watching them, Brigit gave an unexpected whoop of delight and shouted:

  ‘Look Pidge!’

  He saw that a little distance from them, there grew a pear tree. It was thick with ripe pears and the branches drooped low with their weight. They ran to it, with Pidge marvelling that everything should be so ripe this early in the year; and thinking that maybe this particular place got a lot of sunshine, or was some way protected from frost in the spring, so that everything got off to a good start.

  Even though they were not really hungry, he reached and plucked as many as he could hold. Finding anything like a fruit tree—even a crab-apple—always seems marvellous; a free gift. Many a time, they had eaten crab-apples just because they had been lucky enough to find them and not for any other reason at all.

  But pears! Ripe pears!

  They sat under the tree and Pidge selected a pear and started to wipe it carefully on his sleeve. It looked mouth-watering and would tempt even a person who was as full as a sausage, or make a composed monk break a vow, laughing. It was a luscious, inviting yellow with lovely brown marks and pin head dots on its skin. The smell made them long to bite into it.

  He was in the act of passing it to Brigit, when he froze.

  She was urging him to hurry and not be too fussy, when he went like a statue.

  Something was wrong; he knew it before he recognised it.

  All about them, the insects made a soft racket as they went from flower to berry and back again, as if spending their lives in furious indecision; but beneath the tree there was nothing at all to be heard. Not one insect was there paying a visit; not even one wasp. Not a leaf of the tree stirred. The tree was the centre of a strange silence and Pidge suddenly knew.

  It was that watching silence again, just as it was at the crossroads; but now only beneath the tree.

  He sprang to his feet and threw the fruit on the ground.

  ‘Maggots,’ he said.

  On the grass, the perfect pears dissolved into a sort of grey slush and some white maggots squirmed in the mess. The fruit remaining on the tree shrivelled in an instant and hung in dried-out, twisted tatters and the smell was vile.

  They hurried away from the dead, ugly, thing.

  ‘I know who is to blame for that,’ he said grimly.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘She—They. The Mórrígan. The Fair Woman, Melodie Moonlight and Breda Fairfoul. She knows where we are but I don’t really care; she makes me feel so mad.’

  ‘Dirty tricks to do that with pears,’ Brigit replied bitterly. ‘I feel like biting a lump out of her leg!’

  To think that, in spite of all the birds, she found us, Pidge was thinking angrily, while his eyes grew bright and hot, as tears of pure rage welled and almost spilled over. I imagine it’s because the birds were magic and she’s good at that herself. It may be that some other thing will work in the end as she can’t easily be swizzled at her own game. Now I suppose that the hounds will be nosing after us again quite soon. But even so, we will be helped by The Dagda and if it’s not going to be as easy as I thought—well, she’s not going to have it all her own way, either.

  Not knowing what else to do, he looked back over his shoulder to see if the hounds were there anywhere; and he fancied that he saw a gleam of gold or strong sunlight from the pear tree before it trembled and vanished but he couldn’t be sure beca
use of the hot tears blurring in his eyes.

  In a moment, the chance that the smarting in his eyes would really turn to a spasm of angry tear-shedding had vanished; and his eyes were suddenly dry and he felt braver than he had ever felt in his life before.

  ‘Come on, Brigit,’ he said forcefully, and they took the chance to run.

  Chapter 9

  THERE was a shared snigger from the women sitting at the table in the glasshouse.

  An object had just shimmered and fallen over. The Mórrígan reached across and picked it up. There were some mocking sneers about fruit not being the temptation that some people claimed it was.

  Smiling placidly, The Mórrígan put the tiny golden tree back on her bracelet. With her wand, she gave the little figure who was Findepath, a poke in the right direction. He howled, calling the part of the pack that was searching nearby.

  ‘Are we cheating?’ Melodie Moonlight asked, with a delighted smile. ‘I send Fierce.’ She prodded a second little figure, who called to his companions in his turn. She made him move in the right direction.

  ‘Greymuzzle for me,’ said Breda Fairfoul, and she whacked a third diminutive figure a brisk whack on the head with her pointer and turned him round and round until he too, faced the correct way, although dizzy. He called his team-mates with a feeble cry. The three groups of hounds soon came together and led by Findepath, they ran the way they were bidden.

  Melodie Moonlight handed round the cigars. Breda declined and, instead, popped half a plug of tobacco into her mouth and chewed. The Mórrígan accepted one which she examined with great interest. After a few moments of sniffing it and considering it, she opened her mouth and ate it.

  ‘Sweet,’ she said appreciatively.

  Growing tired of looking at the table landscape, Breda Fairfoul yawned and allowed a small frown to appear on her forehead.

  ‘It becomes tedious between moves,’ she remarked and to pass the time, she began to read a book by a great Russian genius whose name was Tolstoy. The name of the book was ‘War and Peace.’ As she read, she chewed her tobacco quid with relish and spat from time to time.

  Melodie Moonlight, too, yawned. She drifted from the table and put a dance record onto the turntable of an old wind-up gramophone. With her shadow as her partner, she danced a number of frenzied brawls, until the shadow was forced to sit down and rest, panting. She allowed it to fan itself with the shadow of a rhubarb leaf, which it picked up off the floor, before challenging it to compete against her at boxing. She kept winning by knock-outs.

  Breda closed the book.

  ‘Too much Peace; not enough War,’ she complained with a profound, critical air and threw the book out of the glasshouse.

  ‘I believe I might like to invent a new kind of rat,’ she added, and dressed in cap and gown and wearing a pair of thick-lensed, horn-rimmed spectacles, she sat at a small laboratory bench, boiling various things in glass round-bottomed flasks; while she studied a Biology textbook and one on Advanced Chemistry, for her B.Sc, because even Gods must work with what already exists in the Universe, especially nowadays.

  The Mórrígan herself simply lounged like a fat snake under the sun.

  ‘A little time, a very little time, and they shall hear of me again,’ she said, and she watched the table-top from under the lazy, half-closed drapes of her eyelids.

  Melodie Moonlight’s shadow lay flat on the floor, exhausted.

  ‘Get up and fight, you cur,’ Melodie snarled in a sudden temper, ‘or you will be sent to the dark side of the Moon.’

  And the shadow got up and tried to fight. It crawled and cringed after her and did as she wished, because it knew that the dark side of the Moon would be its death.

  A shadow needs light to live.

  The hounds were running marvellously. They had covered a great deal of ground when a small herd of deer broke from cover and crossed over the countryside at a point that was not very far ahead of them. The hounds didn’t immediately give chase as natural hounds would have done, but they ran on without veering away from the straight path of duty. They had even passed the invisible line on the ground at the place where the deers’ spoor must have lain so fresh and enticing.

  And then one of the hounds broke away from the pack and went in pursuit of the deer.

  This breach in discipline was too much for the others and baying loudly they went after the bold one. They were now running with a terrible purpose after the herd. Soon the leading hound made a sort of leap forward and sank his teeth into the hind quarters of a deer. An indescribable sound came from the doomed animal’s throat, and then there was the snarling and the excitement as the victim fell on its side, with its delicate legs moving stiffly in the air. The deer tried to raise its head from the earth but a hound took it by the throat and sank down on it. In the finish the hounds were sprawled all over their kill, dipping their heads to its flesh and nuzzling it. The scene now looked almost affectionate, as the hounds licked at the blood of the deer.

  The Mórrígan’s fury glittered in her eyes as she regarded the events on the table landscape. With her wand she punished the hounds rapidly and severely and they broke off from their feasting and ran cringingly to take up their duty again. They were desperately eager in their work; all but one.

  Fowler complained in a low voice:

  ‘We are treated not as servants but as slaves,’ he said bitterly.

  ‘What are you saying?’ responded a shocked companion.

  ‘We behave as slaves,’ Fowler said.

  ‘Hush!’ Greymuzzle warned.

  ‘No,’ Fowler insisted. ‘I will have my say. Who can blame her if she walks on dirt?’

  ‘Findepath speaks: guard your tongue, brother. The Great Queen will punish any treachery and woe to you, Fowler, if you ever rise against her.’

  ‘What was lost?’ Fowler persisted. ‘We took a few bare moments of freedom. No loss to The Mórrígan for we still do our duty.’

  ‘Your speech lacks respect,’ Greymuzzle said. ‘I caution you as Findepath did.’

  ‘You, Fowler, were the first to break away in pursuit of the deer and now we have all been punished,’ Fierce said accusingly.

  ‘It is true that I was the first to break away and give chase. But why did you follow? We obey an instinct; was our crime so great? It is equally true that the deer was caught by you, Fierce. My teeth were not the first to bite; I was not first there.’

  Fierce shivered and licked away the few red berries of congealing blood that clung to his muzzle.

  ‘Hush!’ Greymuzzle said again, this time more strongly.

  ‘Hush! Hush! Hush!’ Fowler repeated in bitter mimicry. ‘This is the word that puts infants to sleep!’

  No more was said.

  The hounds ran on and for a while the others ran a little way apart from Fowler, until as time passed—they forgot his queer defiant words.

  Chapter 10

  AT intervals, Pidge stopped and looked back and searched the countryside, his eyes darting here and there; but he saw nothing, except once, a flock of sheep tumbling through a distant gap. He waited to see if they had a man and a dog following after; but they were just running on their own.

  He didn’t bother looking in the scrying-glass to discover how near the hounds might be; there was no point in doing that. The region they had passed over with the kite had been completely concealed by the birds; so there was no way he could recognize landmarks—a tree, a corner of a field or a ditch—to know if the hounds were far or near. He knew that they must catch up with Brigit and himself eventually. He wasn’t even ill at ease, just on his guard.

  At length they heard a low whistle coming from a way off and they turned and saw coming after them on the cart-track, two men with an ass.

  One man carried a spade over his shoulder and the other one had a scythe. The ass wore panniers.

  As the men came nearer it was possible to hear that they were arguing with each other. Their voices carried crisply in the natural stillness of lone
ly places; loud and sharp against the low sing-song of insects and the random flourishings of birds at melody. One man was old and the younger one was cut from the same pattern as the old one, so Pidge judged them to be father and son.

  When they saw that Pidge and Brigit had noticed them, the men waved in greeting and the children waved back. Pidge now became extra watchful, just in case they were something of The Mórrígan’s doing and he thought it curious that they didn’t stop their squabble now that they might be overhead. Far from it; if anything, the argument livened up and improved for having an audience.

  The younger man was saying:

  ‘Stop dictatin’ to me about the potatoes and onions! And stop layin’ down the law about the turnips and cabbages! I’m the one doin’ the work and I’m the master of the garden, now. And when we get to the valley of our relations and connections, watch you don’t make small of me in front of the other men, with your mean-mouthing!’

  ‘And who are you to talk to me like that? Do you think you are King Of The Aztecs with your prate about gardens and who’s master? Master of the garden, who told you that?’ the older man responded with spirit.

  ‘Nobody told me. It was time for me and I a man this long time.’

  The old man made a great show of being staggered by this.

  ‘Well, hold me up!’ he said, and pretended to go weak at the knees.

  ‘See?’ said the younger one, taking advantage of this bit of play-acting. ‘The legs of you couldn’t take the weight of a wren. Isn’t it a pity for you that they haven’t the same horse-power as your oul’ jaw!’

  ‘I’m strong yet—no better! I’m a better man than you, any day of the week!’ And with that, the older man took to leaping off the ground in a series of high, quick springs, shouting gleefully:

  ‘Here I am, the real, right, thing! That’s me; I’m that man. The real McCoy, in bone, breeding and action! From a long-tailed family that goes back before the flood, and strong enough to gather the world up in my fist and throw it over the sun!’

  ‘Stop tricking around, Da. You’re enough to turn an ordinary brain, and you’ll unnerve the grass itself below your feet and stunt its growth.’