by C. E. Murphy
As far as I was concerned I’d never seen her before. Her gaze flickered from Méabh to me, back to Méabh and then, with a Herculean effort, back to me, where it stayed. “You don’t remember me, do you?”
“Um. Well, no. Sorry.” She almost had to be related. I hadn’t met anybody in Ireland I wasn’t related to, which was more commentary on my limited social circle than the interconnected families on a tiny island. But I was pretty sure I’d remember that hair, and none of my cousins had worn that style or color.
“Caitríona,” she said. “Caitríona O’Reilly? Sheila’s oldest niece?”
Caitríona was one of those names a bit like Siobhán. To my English-language eyes, it looked like Cat-ree-OH-nah. It was in fact pronounced Katrina, which was most of why I remembered her at all. I blurted, “Oh! I didn’t recognize you! Your hair was—” I waved at the middle of my back. “And you were—”
“Shorter,” she supplied, which probably kind of covered the same ground I’d been going to cover with “rounder.” “Yeh.” She brushed a hand over her shorn locks. “Forgot that, so I did. I liked yours.”
I clutched my own hair, as if it had changed colors without warning. “I’ve never dyed mine.”
“Sure and I couldn’t have them all sayin’ I was trying to be like the American cousin, could I. Especially after—” Her jaw snapped shut, but I could fill in the blanks easily enough. Especially after I’d cold-shouldered everybody. Especially after I’d left on the next flight after the funeral.
Especially after, and this was the part they didn’t know, I’d been in large part responsible for my own mother’s death. In my limited defense, it had been her decision, but I’d made a lot of bad choices over the years that forced her hand toward that decision. I’d thought at the time that the woman had basically decided she was done living and had willed herself to death, which seemed pretty extreme for someone in her early fifties. I’d discovered later that yeah, she’d done exactly that, all in the name of making sure I stayed alive.
And now she was a banshee and I owed her every chance I could take to free her from that. I wasn’t exactly close with my Irish family to begin with, but I seriously doubted I’d win any friends if all of the sordid details about what I was doing there came out.
“What are you doing here?” Caitríona demanded. “And who’s that?”
That, of course, was Méabh, who required far more explanation than I was prepared to offer. After barely an instant’s consideration, I shrugged. “That’s Méabh. Méabh, this is my cousin Caitríona.”
“Méabh,” Caitríona said, and laid the accent on thick. “Av carse it is.”
“We’ve come to lay your auntie’s bones to rest,” Méabh said as though it was the most obvious thing in the world. “This is grand so, three of our bloodline to do the job. We couldn’t ask for better.”
Caitríona’s expression went peculiar. She said, “I’ve never heard an accent like that,” in English, then said something else to Méabh in Irish. It became instantly clear to me that Méabh had been speaking Irish all along, because Caitríona sounded more or less like Méabh did if I listened hard to the words and not to what my magic told me she was saying. Bizarrely, though, I couldn’t understand a word Cat said in Irish.
Worse, I then couldn’t understand Méabh when she answered. I made a strangled noise and waved my hands. “English, please, Caitríona. I can’t understand Méabh if you speak Irish. I mean, I can’t understand you, either, but—English. Please? Just English?”
“I only wanted to know if she’d learned Irish in the Donegal Gaeltachs.” Caitríona shrugged, then did something with her face that reminded me of me. It was this little quirk of her mouth, a tightening of the skin around her eyes, a tensing of the nostrils, all of it minute body language I’d felt myself do a thousand times. It indicated that she’d been ignoring the completely outrageous thing Méabh had said until it made some kind of sense in her own head, except the making sense part wasn’t happening so she might as well bite the bullet and ask.
I couldn’t decide if it was creepy or fascinating to see all of that on somebody else’s face. Especially somebody I barely knew. She also looked like she very much wished she could say two things at the same time as she opted for, “Lay me auntie’s bones to rest?”
That was the one I probably would have chosen, too. The whole bloodline thing was a little much to take a run at. But before I had a chance to explain, Cat said, “It’s just after fifteen months we’ll be doing that.”
My American-English brain cramped. Caitríona’s statement was a perfectly accurate comment on what was about to happen, but what she, the Irish-English speaker, meant, was that they’d done that fifteen months ago. I’d forgotten the peculiar direction sentences landed from in Ireland. I vowed to listen harder to what she meant and to focus less on how she said it. “There was a mix-up at the mortuary. I thought if I just came and dealt with it myself it would be less upsetting.”
It almost sounded plausible. Almost, except the part where no local undertaker would have called the American daughter instead of the extensive Irish family, which Caitríona’s expression indicated clearly. “Look,” I said a bit too loudly, and before she could speak, “look, just go with it, okay? And really, Méabh might be right but you’ll be happier if you just head on home and forget you saw us. What’re you doing here, anyway?” That was not a tactic to make her leave. I wanted to kick myself again.
“Sheila liked the old holidays. The solstices and Beltane and all. I come to put flowers on her grave at each of them, but I was away to Dublin for the Saint Patrick’s Day crack so only could come this morning.” Caitríona looked hard between me and Méabh, then crossed her arms under her breasts. “I think I’ll be staying.”
Of course she would be. I looked for a compelling argument and came up fast on, “Crack?” because admitting to larking off to Dublin for a drug fix seemed a little brash.
Both the Irish women said, “Fun,” and Caitríona added, “The parties, the parade and all. Me sisters and I went for a bit of crack and now I’m home again and whatever you’re doing, I think I’ll be part of it.”
“Oh. Okay. No, wait. I meant okay, that’s what crack is, not, like, cocaine, and not like okay you can come al—oh, to hell with it, fine, come on then.” I had better things to do than argue with people who wanted to get in over their heads. She’d scare off soon enough, and in the meantime, “You can show me where the grave is. I don’t really remember.” I set off the direction she’d come from, hauling the carry-on behind me.
Caitríona ran to catch up, then to pass me, then to eye the suitcase. “What’s that?”
“Mom’s bones are in it.” It hadn’t been practical to keep them in the coat, which was not, after all, especially baglike. Caitríona’s eyes bugged. “Really, you’re happier not knowing. I should probably warn you we’re going to burn them, too.”
She stopped dead. I almost crashed into her, and she hopped into motion again. A few steps later she said, “She’d like that so, but sure and you’ll have the town up in arms if you’re setting fire to the cemetery. You should bring her up there, to the Reek. To Croagh Patrick. She’d like that even more.”
Magic lit up within me, fishhook tugs that signaled approval of Caitríona’s suggestion. I turned to look at the mountain that dominated the western skyline. There was a lingering low fog, but the mountain was clear and the chapel atop it was almost visible if I used my imagination. I so very much did not want to haul a suitcase up a three-thousand-foot mountain.
“We called it Cromm Crúaich. My father fought a battle here when they first came to Ireland,” Méabh said. “Who is Patrick?”
“He was…” I didn’t really want to give her Saint Patrick’s whole story. “A holy man after your time. He did a pilgrimage on that mountain so they named it after him.”
“Patrick defeated Cromm on the mountain.” Caitríona gave Méabh a good hard stare. “Cromm was an old god and Patrick banishe
d him along with all the snakes in Ireland. Who are you?”
“She’s Méabh,” I said again. “Honestly, are you sure you don’t want to go home? It’s too early in the day to be climbing mountains, isn’t it?”
Caitríona turned her good hard stare on me. “No.”
Well. No arguing with that, then. I sighed and turned back to the car, bumping the suitcase along behind me. “You really think she’d like to be burned up there on the mountain?”
“Oh, yes. She wasn’t even a pagan, was Auntie Sheila. She was something else all her own. Connected, like. Connected to everything. Are ye like her?” she said to me, and I startled guiltily.
“Not very much, but in some ways, yeah.” Wow. Prevarication 101, that was me. “Yes.”
Caitríona said, “Hnf,” which I felt was somehow condemning, and we all went and got in my car and drove to Croagh Patrick.
Sometime on Saturday night I’d sworn I would take up jogging Monday morning. I hadn’t, of course, expected to be in Ireland when I’d made that oath. Nonetheless, Méabh bounded up the damned goat trail leading to Croagh Patrick’s summit with the agility and speed of…well. A goat. And Caitríona, full of teenage resiliency, was barely a few steps behind her. I did have the excuse of lugging a suitcase full of bones, but mostly I was just in no condition to be running up mountainsides. I felt this was not unreasonable, as normal people didn’t climb mountains anyway.
Of course, I’d left normal behind a long time ago, a fact which Gary should be happily reminding me of right about now. I hitched the suitcase over a rock and threw out the promise to start jogging in favor of a promise to get him back. I’d already made that promise about a thousand times, but once more didn’t hurt. Especially if it got me out of jogging.
I walked into a wall and bounced off. The wall said, “You’re no fit warrior, Granddaughter.”
I sighed and edged my way around Méabh. “I’ll start running up and down mountains as a fitness regime next week. Right now I just need to…” She’d been in the way of my view of the path, and now that I could see it, I wished she’d stayed in front of me. “…I just need to get up that horrible, hideous switchback without killing myself. Does anybody have anything to eat?” The last real food I could actually remember eating was a sandwich sometime early Saturday afternoon. There’d been some candy and potato chips since then, but they didn’t count.
“You will not want to have eaten, for this.” Méabh passed me again, taking long easy strides up the mountainside while I drooped. Ritualized magic apparently went hand in hand with self-denial. Cleansing the body and spirit and all that crap, I guessed, but since no food was forthcoming there wasn’t much reason to bitch about it now. I was going to eat half a cow when we got back down to ground level, though.
“I’ve eaten.” Caitríona surged ahead to catch up with Méabh. “Will it be a problem so?”
Méabh gave her a considering look. “Have ye the power?”
Cat glanced back at me, then settled on Méabh. “Like Auntie Sheila? No. Me Gran had it, but then, she was Sheila’s mam, too. We all thought one of us cousins might have it.” She said that like it was my fault, which in a way I supposed it was. Probably if Mother hadn’t had me, the magic would have come to the fore in somebody else. It didn’t seem likely it would just die out after several thousand years of coming down the line.
“Then it should be no trouble. It’s Joanne we’ll be looking to for the circle.” Méabh glowered at me over her shoulder. “Should she survive the walk up the hill, at least.”
They were starting to piss me off. As a rule, the healing power I commanded didn’t think much of me utilizing it for personal gain, but I took a deep breath and tapped into it, searching for the cool rush of strength that would buoy me through the last couple hundred yards up the mountain.
Instead my arm cramped, muscle around the bites twisting as if using the magic within me only encouraged the impulse to transform. I clenched my fist, afraid to look and see it had become a wolf’s paw, but it closed normally. Or as normally as it could, when the muscles used to close it had big teeth marks through them. I swallowed down a whimper and dared peek at it.
The bite itself was starting to look hot again. Not quite as bad as before, like my brief shape change had bled off some of the infection, but it was building again. For the first time I thought maybe I should do what other people did, and go see a doctor. Maybe I would. After I got done climbing a mountain and burning my mother’s bones.
On the positive side, panic over the idea of turning into a werewolf gave me a plenty-big boost, and I trotted up the rest of the mountain on Méabh’s and Caitríona’s heels with no problem.
The view was incredible, with the Atlantic spilling off to the west and half of Ireland glimmering through soft mist around and behind me. Not for the first time, the old country steeped me in magic and power, in presence and in continuity. There was a peace to it unlike anything I’d ever encountered in Seattle. I understood why Saint Patrick had stayed up there for forty days, absorbing everything that Ireland had to offer.
So it really was a pity about the residual human sacrifices staining the mountain so deeply it felt like a mallet to the head.
Chapter Fifteen
I did very well, all things considered. Instead of collapsing, I carefully knelt until my forehead touched the ground and folded my hands at my nape while I took some deep breaths. Being that close to the earth didn’t make it any worse. There were mitigating factors at play, which probably helped. Saint Patrick really had been here once upon a time, and whether I approved of going around converting the masses or not, the guy had apparently wielded—welt?—some significant power. The land had been healed to some degree, the deepest of the bloodstains washed away, and several hundred years of ordinary human worship had gone further yet in wiping out the death magic that had been done here. Had gone a long way, in fact, because otherwise I’d have known from Westport’s streets that the mountain was a blight on the land. That didn’t make it any more pleasant to discover now that I was up here. Muffled, because I was mostly talking into the dirt, I said, “So who was the Crúaich guy your father fought here, Méabh?”
“Cromm,” she said. “Crúaich is the mountain itself.”
If I wasn’t trying so hard not to puke I’d have gotten up and kicked her. “What. Ever.”
Sensitive creature that she was, she picked up on my irritation. “He was the Fomorian king. It was his people we drove from this land so we might call it our own.”
“Fomorians. I don’t know the Fomorians.” I’d been doing so well to pull the Fir Bolg out of my sketchy memory. Discovering there were still more ancient Irish peoples I’d missed was kind of depressing.
“Dark and cruel monsters,” Caitríona said, but she said it with an edge. I turned my head half an inch to peer at her. She clearly didn’t know which of us to glare at more fiercely. “Cromm was defeated by Nuada of the Silver Hand when the Tuatha de Daanan came to Ireland.”
I decided Méabh was getting the hard end of the glower. That was okay with me. I put my head back where it had been and kept breathing deeply. The impact was lessening some. I was reminded of the baseball diamond back in Seattle where three ritual murders had been carried out. It had been a literal black stain on Seattle’s psychic energy. Croagh Patrick was both worse and better than that. The deaths here were far more numerous, but also much older, and a lot of effort had gone into cleaning them up. They still made my stomach churn, and the sweat standing out on my body wasn’t from hiking up the hill. I snaked an ever-so-tentative thread of power into the earth, torn between hoping to help and terrified at how my magic might respond to being used. Bizarrely, it didn’t object at all, and the ground sucked it down greedily, like a drink it was dying for.
While I did that, Méabh, serenely, said, “Yes. My father was Nuada, and he would be your grandfather a thousand times removed.”
“Joanne!”
I had never had a younger s
ister, but I imagined that was exactly what one sounded like when someone older and presumably wiser was giving her a line of bullshit and she wanted Big Sis to make it stop. It was kind of nice. It was equally annoying. I wondered if that defined the relationship between most sisters, and thought maybe I was glad I didn’t have one. “I told you she was Méabh.”
“Yes, but—em. Em. What are you doing?”
I’d forgotten how many of the Irish said “em” instead of “um.” It had driven me crazy when I’d visited the first time. Now it was more of a charming idiosyncrasy. “Trying not to puke.”
“No, I mean like everything’s glowing so.”
I peeled one eye open. Caitríona was right. The ground half an inch away glowed with my magic, silver-blue power pouring into parched earth. I’d done something like that one other time, in Cernunnos’s home world of Tir na nOg, but it had taken it out of me then. This was a much more gentle flow, magic seeping down dry cracks and swelling them with revitalization.
All of a sudden I had the distinct feeling it had been one year, and possibly as many as, oh, twenty-eight come May, since someone had been up here to offer anything other than ordinary human worship to the mountain’s hungry stone. “You said my mother would like to be burned up here. Did she come up here a lot?”
“All the time. On the holy days when she could, but she’d say there were so many sites that needed tending to that she couldn’t always be here on the day itself. So she’d use other holy days instead. There isn’t a day in the year that someone doesn’t hold high, she’d say. I liked that idea, so I did. It’s why I didn’t worry about coming to the graveyard on the equinox proper. There’s always something special going on in the world. Always a reason to give thanks to God. Always a good day to worship.”