by C. E. Murphy
“No.” All of a sudden my rage vanished. Not the good kind of cathartic burning out, but the subsumed fury that powered people through the most hideous scenarios and saw them triumphant on the other side. Mentally disturbed, of course, and wrung out til there was nothing left, but triumphant. “Let’s get something straight, Méabh. You may be aos sí and ard rí…ess…of all Ireland. You may be a legendary queen and a hero to the masses. But what you are not is in charge here. This is my time, you’re here at my invitation, and by your own admission you’re a warrior, not a healer. I’m both, and we will do things my way. Either that or you’re going home right now and I’m doing this myself.”
“And how is it you’ll be sending me home when it’s no idea you have of how I got here?”
Shit. She was going to make me ante up. Well, that was fair enough, because if I was going to be slinging myself or other people through history, I’d better have a clear idea of what I was doing. I lifted my gaze to the low ceiling once more, looking for cracks in time.
There weren’t any.
What there was was a sense of the passage of years. The idea of eons settled into the stones around me. They had been stacked by human hands millennia ago, each touch leaving the faintest impression of the men and women who had put them there. They had built this place and others like it as signals to the future: they had been here.
And if they could touch me from thousands of years in the past, I could touch them from as many centuries in the future. That was the bedrock of shamanism: belief and change, and for one precious instant I absolutely believed I could connect with a people and a place far out of my time just as they had in their way touched me. I reached, and like Tara had, Knocknaree changed around me.
The mountain had never been pointy, of course. Not since the ice ages had faded, anyway, but stories of great battles flattening it were at least as good as sheets of ice. There was no sense of battles being fought, for that matter; it was just the old patient earth and the footsteps of hundreds moving stones from one place to another. Building cairns, but Méabh’s tomb was not yet among them. Hers was the last and the greatest, and it dissolved around us as I strained to anchor us in time. Méabh took a sharp breath, and that reminded me of what she’d said. That she’d been pulled away from a wedding, ard rí to warrior queen, and so from our tenuous place in ancient history, I searched forward, looking for the moment where time hiccuped and a wedding was disrupted.
It was that simple. It was not easy. The effort pulled at my bones, time objecting to being stretched. Time and space, because the wedding had been at Tara, not in the west at Knocknaree. A flash of understanding hit me: I’d timeslipped at Tara in part because of the sheer ancient power built up there. Knocknaree was sacred, but not quite so persistently holy. It didn’t stand at the center of a power circle, the one defined by the towers around Tara. Tara was made for magic users. Knocknaree was made for the dead. No wonder, then, what had been literally thoughtless at Tara was exhausting here.
But time did shift at my command, speeding awkwardly forward. Méabh’s tomb lurched up around us, dozens of smaller kings and chieftains buried there before Méabh was even born, much less before she became a legend. And once her tomb was built, I still saw the world pass by, Sight unhindered by the aging stones around us.
There was a battle atop Knocknaree, brief and bloody, and for a heartwrenching moment I laid eyes on Gary.
He rode a horse I recognized, not the golden mare that belonged to the boy Rider, but the solid brown beast that later would carry a sad-eyed king. He looked confident on the animal’s back, wielding my rapier like he’d been doing it all his life. The Morrígan was there, blade flashing and hair wild, and as she rode for Gary, Cernunnos intervened.
A cloak of blackness shot up from beneath the earth and swept away all hope of seeing what happened. I cried out and time nearly stopped, but Méabh was suddenly, finally on her feet, and held my lapels gripped in two strong fists. “You were not here,” she warned. “You cannot be here, Granddaughter. This fight is not yours to fight. Should they fall it cannot be your fall, too.”
“You said they won!”
“Legend says they won,” Méabh said with great and honest sorrow, “but sure and legend never lets truth get in the way of a good story.”
“I don’t care! It’s Gary!” It was also too late. Too much of my energy had been focused on shoving us forward to the moment Méabh left, and she had broken the concentration that had almost stopped us at the battle. We were spinning forward again, rushing headlong toward a spike of familiar silver-blue power: my magic stabbing backward, finding Méabh, the one person my subconscious thought could get me through the werewolf and the banshee alive. Teeth gritted, I put the brakes on, and time lurched to its normal pace around us as I scowled at Méabh. “This is it, sister. Pay up or get off the ride.”
To my credit, Méabh looked very slightly impressed. I had the idea that making the aos sí look slightly impressed was kind of like calling the Grand Canyon a little ditch, so I was good with that. “It’s your rules, then,” she said. “It’s your time. It’s your way we’ll do things, but—” and she gave me a gimlet stare “—if we cannot rescue the banshee…”
“Sheila,” I said. “Sheila MacNamarra. My mother. And yes.” The last was through once-more gritted teeth. “If we can’t rescue her I’ll finish it. I. Will finish it. Not you. You understand that?”
Her eyebrows lifted, a mixture of agreement and mild offense. I didn’t imagine most people went around using phrases like “You understand me, young lady?” on legendary warrior queens of old. Then again, I wasn’t most people. “Okay then. We’re going home now, and then we’re going to rescue my mother.”
Reaching back through time was exhausting. Staggering forward trying to find the moment Méabh had left was uncomfortable. Going home, though, was like a rubber band snapping into place. I cast one miserable look over my shoulder, like I’d be able to see Gary through the annals of history, then lurched back into the modern day with Méabh still standing more or less nose to nose with me.
Nose to nose because we were still in her tomb, and standing up she really was about eight inches taller than I was. There wasn’t room for her to straighten, so she hunched uncomfortably and half a breath from my face said, “I’ll be leaving this place now.” She shouldered past me to uncover the dug-down tunnel that led out of the cairn, and crawled out.
I stood there alone in her tomb for a long minute, a dozen tiny thoughts whirling around my brain. She was so very tall. The other aos sí had been tall, but not that tall. It was magnificent. I was six feet and a bit in the boots I had on, but I wanted to be tall like her. Except then I would tower over Morrison, and while once upon a time I’d have liked that, now the idea we were exactly the same height was kind of appealing. And I wouldn’t want to be that much taller than Gary. Gary, about whom I was trying hard not to think. It wasn’t working very well. I kept seeing the Morrígan riding down on him, and ashy-haired Cernunnos blocking the way. In theory, I knew Cernunnos survived because I’d met him for the first time in my past, but he wasn’t quite bound by time, so I couldn’t be sure. And Gary’s linear life was still in effect, so there was no reason I couldn’t have met him a year ago and still have gotten him killed in the distant past. And I really needed to sit down and talk with Coyote about this time thing, because it was absolutely beyond me why anybody would be given the power to timeshift.
It struck me that although I’d napped the entire transatlantic flight, I was still very, very tired, and that dragging my ass back and forth through time today hadn’t helped that at all. I said, “Miles to go before I sleep,” to the empty tomb, took one thing from its inner sanctum and followed Méabh back into the modern world.
She stood watching jet contrails in a fading sky. She didn’t seem like a woman out of time right then. Aside from the contrails, there were no particular signs of my world visible from the mountaintop, and her tall, slender, armor
-bedecked self fitted in better with the gray cairns than my leather-coated stompy-boot self. The armor—a breastplate, some kind of thigh guard and what I cautiously thought of as greaves—was silver. Of course it was. Probably magic silver, compliments of one Nuada of the Silver Hand, also known as Daddy. Like the Morrígan, Méabh’s arms were both bare and tattooed, bands of knotwork around each biceps. I’d noticed all that in the cairn. I just hadn’t noticed it. Somehow it all made a much more impressive picture out in the open with fiery sunset washing over her than it had in the little fire-lit stone room. I wasn’t strictly sure that made sense, as she’d been the most impressive object in the cairn, but sense or not, that was how it was.
She’d collected a small round shield and a silver helm on the way out, and stood over my mother’s bones with the one on her arm and the other tucked into her elbow. “I would have been thinking the world had changed more, from the way you’re dressed, Granddaughter.”
“It has. You just can’t see it from up here. You forgot this in there.” I came forward with her sword, which she glanced at with a spasm crossing her face.
“I would not have taken that. Not from a dead woman.”
“You’re not dead yet,” I said almost cheerfully, and offered it again. Her mouth twisted, but this time she accepted. Once she had, I pointed down the mountain toward my distant car. “There. There’s your first hint that the world’s changed. Horseless carriages.”
She squinted into the light, then raised her hand to block the long gold rays so she could see better. I copied her, then froze. It had been early afternoon when I’d climbed Knocknaree. Sunlight had been sporadic, falling in occasional bolts, not blazing orange on the horizon. I turned around slowly, like I could convince the world to shift on its axis if I looked carefully enough, but the sun was not on the western horizon. It was on the eastern. Sunrise, not sunset. “You said it’s the equinox, right?”
“I said you called me on the quarter day,” she agreed. I stared at the sunrise another moment, then fumbled my phone out of a pocket to stare at it instead.
Apparently it was half past ten on Monday evening. I glanced at the sky, like it was somehow lying to me, then shook myself. I hadn’t changed the phone’s time zone. It was six-thirty Tuesday morning, not ten-thirty Monday night. I changed the time, then shoved my phone back in its pocket and started counting on my fingers. I’d left Seattle Sunday morning. It was a ten-hour flight to Dublin, plus eight hours of time zones. I’d gotten in Monday morning. Gary and I had gone to Tara. It had been early Monday afternoon when I’d reached Knocknaree. No matter how I counted it, I couldn’t make it morning again without having lost well over twelve hours. “Son of a stone-cold bitch. How long was I out?”
Méabh’s eyebrows rose. “Some hours. It’s burning with the fever you were, and nothing I could do for it.”
“And you didn’t think to mention that?” We’d had a kind of busy half hour or so since I’d woken up. It probably wasn’t her fault she hadn’t brought up the length of my nap. That, however, was reason, and I had no truck with reason. “Look, never mind, forget it. We’re about a day shorter on time than we thought, though. We’re going to have to find Sheila by tonight, just in case it counts from equinox to equinox and not 365 days of the year. Otherwise…”
Otherwise my mother spent the rest of eternity in thrall to the monster she’d fought against her whole life, and in general the good guys lost a round. I didn’t want to say that aloud, so I drifted into, “…banshees usually haunt their families, right? That’s their thing when they’re not performing ritual murders for the Master?”
“It is.” The Irish I’d met never said “Yes” or “No” if two or more words would do, because their English was heavily informed by the Irish language’s structure. I kind of liked that Méabh sounded that way, too. It made a nice connection between the island’s history and its present, even if I was pretty sure she wasn’t speaking English any more than Cernunnos usually did.
“It is,” I repeated under my breath, then got to my feet and pointed down the mountain. “Okay. That’s the only possible lead we’ve got, so we’re going back to the farm, Junior. My family’s in Westport. Let’s go.”
“Not without the bones.” Méabh crouched and began to collect them while I watched in macabre fascination. That was my mother she was picking up. I hadn’t even known my mother had false teeth. I wondered if they counted as bones, and decided not. “Have ye a sack?” Méabh wondered, and I looked in dismay toward my distant car. There was a suitcase in there, anyway, but I didn’t want to traipse down and up the mountain.
I sighed, shucked my new, expensive, damaged leather coat and made a sack of it. Méabh, approving, started tossing bones in. I couldn’t quite bring myself to help. “Why are we doing this?”
“To burn them or bury them in holy ground. To break the link between body and soul. It’ll weaken the wailing woman, and her weakness will be our advantage.”
Burn or bury. I thought I could handle that. I knelt, but I didn’t start picking bones up. “She was buried once already. I was at the funeral. The coffin cost a fortune.”
Méabh paused to give me an uncertain look, and I wondered what magic translations did with words like coffin, which probably hadn’t existed in her time. I imagined something like “black box of death,” which sounded a lot more impressive. “Was she in this ‘coffin’?” Méabh asked.
“Well, of course she was! People don’t go around burying empty co—” The coffin had been closed, actually. There’d been no viewing, apparently at my mother’s vehement insistence in her will. The Irish aunts and cousins and things had tutted over it, but nobody had been quite willing to ignore the last wishes of a dead woman. And I, bitter, closed-off, angry adult daughter that I was, had refused to help carry the coffin. I had no idea if a body’s weight had been within it. I cleared my throat and, more mildly, said, “Now that you mention it I’m not sure. I assumed so.”
Méabh gave me a look that said a lot about people who made assumptions, then loaded the last of my mother’s bones into my beleaguered leather coat and stood. “Now it’s to Westport we’ll go.”
I hopped to it, and only remembered halfway down the hill that I was supposed to be in charge.
Chapter Fourteen
Tuesday, March 21, 7:56 a.m.
Westport, as advertised, was a western port in the County Mayo. Basically there was nothing between it and Canada except a stray whale or two. That didn’t do the town justice, though. It was gorgeous, with a cool little octagonal town, er, square, and wide streets, which meant two cars almost fit past each other on them. A river ran through it, there were charming back alleys that opened into unexpected shopping streets, and one of the town pubs was owned and run by somebody in the Chieftains. On the whole it didn’t look like the sort of place to go burn bones and battle banshees. But then, I didn’t have a long list of places I thought did look like a girl ought to be doing those things there, so Westport was as good a scene as any. I nearly said as much to Méabh, but then like almost everything else I’d been inclined to say during the drive down, I bit it back.
In all fairness, she was handling the modern world very, very well. She’d stared at the car with interest and hardly seized up at all when I turned the engine on. She’d been wide-eyed and delighted as a kid when we hit the open road, or she had been until the first oncoming traffic came on. I was probably grateful the magic hadn’t seen fit to translate what she’d said then. She’d craned her neck to gawk at the towns we drove through, especially when we hit a bigger one a few miles outside of Westport and there were several-story buildings towering above us. She’d turned a little gray then, and only when we’d left its outskirts had she said, “How many people live in this land?”
“What, in Ireland? I don’t know, I think it’s like four million.” I’d glanced her way, seen total incomprehension slide over her features and wondered what had constituted a large town in her time. Hundreds or thousands,
probably. Not tens of thousands. Millions was beyond her scope, and realistically, beyond mine. A million was pretty abstract, somewhere in the “One, two, many” range as far as my ability to really comprehend it went.
She took a breath, but let it go again after a long few seconds and murmured, “It wouldn’t be mattering.” I imagined she’d just decided not to pursue a whole litany of questions, trusting that the modern world’s fascinating ways required no approval or understanding on her part. If she could accept them on any level at all, she was doing very well. I nodded and kept my mouth shut as I drove us to the graveyard. Méabh didn’t need any of my smart-ass side commentary to distract her from coping.
We got out of the car and I said, “Hey, wait up,” before we headed in. She glanced at me and I gestured at her clothes. “You sort of stand out. Maybe you should…”
Wear some of my clothes was the only way that sentence could end, but Méabh was the tallest woman I’d ever met. My shirts would stop halfway down her rib cage. My jeans would look like pedal pushers on her. There was no chance any of my shoes would fit her at all, so she’d have to leave the leather boots and greaves in place anyway. I gave up before I’d really begun, and dug the carry-on suitcase out of the car’s backseat as I said, “You should just keep right on standing out.”
Méabh, legendary warrior queen of Ireland, gave me a wink and a smile and strode past me into the graveyard.
Past a young woman on her way out, too. The girl lifted her eyes, gawked, tripped over her own feet and kept herself upright with a hand on a gravestone. I winced an apologetic greeting as I scurried by in Méabh’s wake.
A few seconds later, the girl called an incredulous, “Joanne?”
Méabh and I both stopped. She turned toward me curiously, and domino-like, I turned toward the girl, though not so much curiously as with a sinking heart. She was probably a decade my junior, had fire-engine-red hair as short as mine and a slightly too-chubby-for-hourglass figure. Probably baby fat. She’d grow out of it in another year or two and be very attractive.