Holder of Lightning tc-1

by S L Farrell Неизвестный Автор

  "Wait," Jenna said. She imagined her memories opening to him, as if they were gifts that she could hand him, letting him see within her as Eilis had, only this time she directed the sharing, choosing what she allowed him to know. She could feel his gentle touch on her memories, and as he comprehended them he gasped, the knife and seal falling from his grasp. They made no sound, vanishing before they reached the floor.

  "I'm dead. A ghost."

  "Aye," she told him softly. "Or neither dead nor ghost, only a moment caught forever, like a painting. I don't really know, Da. But Eilis, the lady in the falls, told me that Lamh Shabhala carries its Holders. Which means you were one, too, even though the mage-lights weren't there for you. Here, do you remember?" She took the cloch out and held it so he could see the stone. He started to reach for it, then let his hand drop back.

  "I remember, aye. I carried it with me, everywhere. Then, on Knobtop one day, I lost it. I was never sure how that happened. I go up there and look for it, all the time, still. Did I. .?"

  "No, Da. You never found it, but I did, the night the mage-lights came."

  The wraith of Niall nodded. "So the stone truly was Lamh Shabhala. I never knew for certain; for all I knew, it was just a colorful pebble, though I'd always been told it was a cloch, and supposedly the cloch, the Safe-keeping. But it was dead-or waiting for the mage-lights-when I had it." He sighed. He looked at her for a long time, a slow smile touching his mouth. "You look like her. You have Maeve's eyes, and her hair."

  "She always says I have your nose, and the shape of your face."

  He laughed. "I remember her saying that, not long after you were born." He was silent for long moments after that, his face somber. "Why did you call me here, Jenna? If I’m dead, why did you rouse me? Why didn’t you leave me to rest?"

  "I wanted. ." Jenna stopped. Now that she had called him, she wasn’t sure what she wanted. There was so much. "I need to know what you know about the cloch. I need you to help me."

  He stood and came toward her, reaching out his hand. She extended her own hand for his touch. She expected to feel his skin, or perhaps a waft of chill air. She felt nothing. Her fingers went through his as if they were mist. Is that what would have happened with Eilis? She seemed so real, so whole, but she was trying to scare me… Jenna felt disappointment, and the figure of her da drew back, sighing. "You’re a dream. Not real."

  Jenna shook her head. "No. I’m real. It’s you who aren’t."

  He may have believed her. He made no protest.

  "If this is death, why is it so… ordinary? Why don’t I remember dying? Why do I seem to be still in our house, and you standing before me like a ghost?"

  "I don’t know," Jenna answered. She looked at the carving in her hand. "Though this wasn’t with you when you died, and it’s all I have of yours. Maybe that’s the reason. There’s so much I don’t know, Da. The stone was yours for a while-tell me why. Tell me how you came to have it. Tell me everything. Help me as you would have helped me if you were still alive."

  He clasped his hands together, staring at them as if marveling at their solidity. "If I were still alive, I would have Lamh Shabhala," he answered. "Not you. I would have been on Knobtop that night."

  "But I have it now, Da. Your daughter."

  He looked at her. "My daughter," he said. "I never expected to have the gift of a daughter. For that matter, I never expected to fall in love at all… "

  Chapter 15: Niall’s Tale

  MY mam, your great-mam, was the one who took the cloch. No, that's not quite true. Actually, it was your great-da who stole it from where it rested. .

  "No, let me begin again. It's easier to start farther back. Let me tell you the story as my mam used to tell it to me…

  "She was born on Imshfeirm, an island just off Inish Thuaidh. Inish-feirm's best known for the Order of Inishfeirm, with their white stone buildings set high on the peak. From what my mam said, there weren't many residents of Inishfeirm outside the Order; of those few, most were fisherfolk, her family included. They knew the Brathairs of the Order, though. Couldn't help it, since the Order dominated what social life there was on the island. They'd meet them in the streets or in the market, buying fish for their table or some of the greens that came over from the big island.

  "My mam's name was Kerys Aoire. The Aoires weren't Riocha, just plain folk, but well enough off and one of the main families on the island, from what Mam told me. They were often invited by the Maister to dine at the Order Hall on the feast days. The Order was a contemplative one, devoted to the Mother-Creator. In the last decades of the Before, the Order was known for its cloudmages, but when the mage-lights failed, so did their prominence. By the time my mam was born, they were a curiosity from another age, a place to visit and hear the old tales, to see the spectac-ular scenery of Inishfeirm, with its buildings clinging like lichens to the steep cliff walls of the mountain peak that formed the isle, with the bright parapets of the Order, built five centuries before, standing proud at the summit. Once, the cells of the Brathairs were crowded; now, half of them were empty, though the Order still attracted occasional acolytes from Inish Thuaidh, young men sent to serve by wealthy families, mostly, and even a few from among the mainland Riocha, primarily from Falcarragh in Tuath Infochla.

  "One of the acolytes, a boy of eighteen summers named Niall, caught my mam's eye. Aye, that's my name as well, and I'm sure that tells you some of what happened next. I don't know much about my da. Mam always claimed that she wouldn't tell me his family name because she wanted to protect him, but I'm not certain she ever knew it. I suppose it

  doesn’t matter. They fell in love, or at least lust. My mam was probably your age, sixteen or seventeen, and naive. It wasn’t the first time a Brathair of the Order and a local girl had become lovers; I’m sure it wasn’t the last, either, though afterward I’ll bet the Maister watched things more closely than before.

  "One of the treasures of the Order of Inishfeirm was its collection of clochs na thintri. Once, the Order’s founders had even held Lamh Shabhala, and three of the other Clochs Mor had been theirs, as well as several of the minor stones. But when the mage-lights failed, Lamh Shabhala was given away or lost, though they retained the other clochs. Over the centu-ries, they had accumulated more stones reputed to be clochs na thintri, though of course no one could know for certain with the mage-lights long dead. Some of the clochs had been handed down through families for generations; others were purchased or found, and as to their lineage and the truth of the claims made for them. . well, no one knew.

  "Some two hundred years before my mam’s birth, the Order acquired a stone that was reputed to be the long-lost Lamh Shabhala. I don’t think anyone actually believed that tale. Mam said that she’d seen the collection a few times when the Moister would order it brought out for the admira-tion of his guests, and some of the clochs were gorgeous stones: gleaming, transparent jewels of bright ruby, midnight blue, or deepest green, faceted and polished, some of them as big as your fist. The one called Lamh Shabhala looked puny and insignificant alongside them, at that time wrapped in a cage of silver wire as a necklace. Even the necklace was plain: simple black strands of cotton. The Moister seemed somewhat skep-tical about the claims. You know how tales grow and change with each telling, and by that time it had been four centuries and more since the clochs were alive with power, so it’s no wonder that no one knew for certain what Lamh Shabhala had looked like.

  "The Brathairs were contracted by their families for life to the Order.

  Marriage was forbidden to them. When Mam twice missed her monthly bleeding, she told Niall. She was afraid that he would go to the Moister, confess, and be forbidden to see Mam again, and Mam would be left to the shame of a bastard child. Certainly that had happened before, and there were women on Inishfeirm who were pointed out as local

  scandals. Now Mam thought she would be one of them, a cautionary tale to Inish-feirm girls who looked with love on one of the Brathairs.

  "But Nial
l was true to her. He promised Kerys that he would go away with her, that he would take her to one of the Tuatha where they might be married. And to prove that his promise was in earnest, he gave her a token of his love and also of his rejection of the Order. He stole what he perceived as one of the least of the clochs, and gave it to my mam.

  "Aye, the very cloch you hold now.

  "They managed to steal away at night, taking a small currach that be-longed to my mam's family. Though the moon was out when they started, my mam said, they chose the wrong night, for a quick storm came thun-dering out of the west and south after they passed the last island and were nearly across to Tuath Infochla. A currach is fine in a calm sea; in the storm, in the huge wind-driven waves, only a very lucky and very experi-enced sailor could have kept the tiny craft afloat and neither Niall nor Kerys were experienced or lucky. The currach foundered just off the coast. Both Niall and Kerys went over-Mam, at least, could swim well, and she knew to rid herself of her wet clothes before they dragged her down. She said she never knew what happened to Niall. She heard him call once, but in the storm and night, she never saw him again.

  She called for him, called many times, but only the thunder and the hissing of rain answered her. She was certain she would die, too.

  "But she did not. When Mam told the tale, she always said that a pair of large blue seals came to her, and kept her above water, her arms around their bodies as they swam toward shore. I don't know if that's true at all; in the midst of the storm and the terror, who knows if what you remember is true. What is true is that, gasping and choking on the cold salt water, she found herself on the rocky shore, naked and shivering.

  "Around her neck, somehow, the necklace Niall had given her was still there.

  "Mam saw a light high on the hill behind her, and she walked to a cabin. The shepherd family there took her in, set her by the fire, and gave her clothing and blankets. If the storm hadn't thrown Kerys ashore at that place, where there was a

  sparse shingle of beach and a house close by, she would have died anyway, of cold and exposure. She always wondered whether some faint power still lurked in the stone, that it brought the seals and found the beach and saved her so it would not be lost. Again, I don’t know if that’s true or not. Certainly the stone never did anything else for her… or for me. But I get ahead of my tale.

  "The next day, the shepherd, his wife, their two children, and my mam went back down to the beach. They found shattered pieces of the currach, but nothing else. Niall’s body wasn’t ever found; he drowned, most likely, and his body was dragged to the bottom by the weight of what he wore, or tossed to the shore at the foot of one of the wild cliffs nearby and never seen.

  "Kerys stayed with the shepherd family, whose name was Hagan, and I was born that winter. I don’t know what tale she gave the Hagans regard-ing that night-for all I know, it may have been simply the truth. The Hagans kept to themselves, rarely going into the nearest village, and Mam said they told the villagers that she was a cousin who had come to stay with them. When the shepherd’s wife died the next spring in childbirth, my mam remained, and eventually married Conn Hagan, my stepfather. They had two other children of their own. I can say little but good about Conn Hagan-he treated me as well as he treated his own children. If it was a hard life, it was no harder for me than for his own.

  "There’s not much more to tell. When I was sixteen, I felt the need to see more of Talamh an Ghlas than the few acres of our farm. When I left, Mam gave me the cloch and told me the tale about her and Niall. I set off north and came to Falcarragh, and sailed from there over to Inish Thu-aidh, and lived on the island for a few years. I even visited Inishfeirm, though I didn’t tell anyone who I was. I visited the Order, and they told me about the Before and the clochs na thintri and Lamh Shabhala, the Stone of Safekeeping.

  "I played the stranger with them, saying that I’d heard the Lamh Shabhala was also there at the cloisters, but they said ’no.’ Many years ago, they told me, a cloch had been stolen from the cloisters, and though some had claimed that the stone was Lamh Shabhala, the Moister was unconcerned about the loss because the claims regarding the cloch were almost cer-tainly false. If the stone was a

  cloch na thintri at all (and the Moister doubted it) it had been no more than a clochmion, a minor stone. No one knew where Lamh Shabhala was, they told me. That cloch was lost.

  "But I learned a lot about the clochs na thintri from the Order of Inish-feirm and from other places, and I always wondered. Many of those I talked to spoke of the Return, the Filleadh, for they believed that the mage-lights would return soon, maybe within my lifetime. I thought that if this cloch was truly Lamh Shabhala, then I would be the First Holder. I would hold the renewed stone. I wandered more, leaving Inish Thuaidh and traveling the High Road south until I came to Ballintubber.

  "And I found a new and more enduring type of enchantment in Maeve, and I stayed…"

  "What happened to the cloch, Da?" Jenna asked. "How did you lose it on Knobtop?" The phantom of her father glanced up from his chair, where he seemed to have fallen into a reverie after his tale.

  He shrugged.

  "I lost it, or it lost me," he said. "I don't know which. I wore the necklace all the time. I walked often on Knobtop while in Ballintubber-I seemed to be drawn to the mountain, or perhaps it was the cloch that drew me there. After I married your mam, I'd take the flock up there nearly every day. One night, not a month after we married, I returned from grazing them there, and when I took off my shirt that night, I saw that the silver cage that had held the stone was empty. The wires holding the stone had moved apart enough for it to fall through.

  I looked for the stone for the next year, almost every day, combing the ground while the sheep grazed. I never found it. But I know if I'd seen the mage-lights over Knobtop, I'd have come running. But from what you've said, it seems I never had the chance." He seemed distraught and upset. "I wonder," he said finally. "I wonder if the cloch did it all: brought itself to Knobtop because it knew that the mage-lights would come there, pulled itself away from me so it could stay there. Or maybe that was just all coincidence. Maybe the mage-lights would have found the cloch wherever it was. I don't know."

  As her da talked, Jenna became aware of light moving against the walls, colorful, swirling bands. She glanced at the balcony door; outside, the night sky was alive with the mage-lights, sheets of brilliance flowing as if in some unseen wind, dancing above her. "Da!" she cried. "There! Can you see them? Da?" She looked behind; he was gone. The wraith had vanished.

  The cloch called to her, still in her hand from when she had shown it to her father’s spirit. Jenna went out onto the balcony, into the chill night, into the blazing shower of hues and shades. She lifted the cloch to the sky, and the mage-lights coalesced like iron filings drawn by a lodestone. She could hear people in the streets below, shouting and calling and pointing to the sky and to the tower on which she stood, and behind her, her mam and Mac Ard hurried into her room.

  "Jenna!" Maeve called, but Jenna didn’t turn.

  The first whirling tendril of the mage-lights had closed around her hand and the cloch, and the freezing touch seeped into the patterns etched in the flesh of her arm: as Maeve and Mac Ard rushed toward her and stopped at the balcony doors; as the people below exclaimed and gestured toward her; as the mage-lights enveloped her, encased her in color as energy poured from the sky into Lamh Shabhala; as Jenna screamed with pain but also with a sense of relief and satisfaction, as if the filling of the cloch’s reservoirs of power also fulfilled a need in herself she hadn’t known existed. She clenched her fist tight around the stone while billows of light fell from the sky and swept through and into her, as she and Lamh Shabhala shouted affirmation back to them.

  Then, abruptly, it was over. The sky went dark; Jenna fell to her knees, gasping, holding the stone against her breast. Lamh Shabhala was open in her mind, a sparkling matrix of lattices, the reservoir of power at its core stronger now, though not yet nearly ful
l. That would come, she knew. Soon. Very soon.

  "Jenna!" Her mam sank to the balcony floor in front of her, hands clutching Jenna’s shoulders. "Jenna, are you all right?" Jenna looked up, seeing her through the matrix of the stone. She shook her head, trying to clear her vision. She blinked, and Lamh Shabhala receded in her sight. The full agony of the mage-lights was beginning now, but she would not lose consciousness this time.

  She was stronger. She could bear this.

  "Help me up," she said, and felt Maeve and Mac Ard lift her to her feet. She stood, cradling her right arm to her. She shrugged the hands away, and took a few wobbling steps back into her room, with the tiarna and her mam close beside her. She sat on the edge of her bed, as her mam bustled about, shouting to the servant to bring boiling water and the anduilleaf paste. Mac Ard knelt in front of her, reaching out as if to touch her arm. Jenna drew back, scowling.

  "It wanted me, not you," she told him. "It's mine now, and I won't let you have it. I won't ever let you have it."

  She wasn't sure what she saw in his eyes then.

  "I'm sorry, Padraic," she said. "I didn't mean that. It's just the pain."

  He stared at her for long seconds, then he nodded. "I'm not a danger to you, Jenna," he said, his voice low enough so that only Jenna could hear him. "But there are others who will be. You'll find that out soon enough." He stood then.

  "I leave her to you, Maeve," he said, more loudly. "I'll send for the healer. But I doubt that he has anything that will help her now."

  PART TWO: Filleadh

  (Map: Lar Bhaile)

  Chapter 16: Lar Bhaile

  IF Ath Iseal felt large and crowded to Jenna, Lar Bhaile was immense beyond comprehension. The city spread along the southeastern arm of Lough Lar, filling the hollows of the hills and rising on the green flanks of Goat Fell, a large, steep-sloped mountain that marked the end of the lough. Along the summit of Goat Fell ran the stone ramparts of the Ri's Keep, twin walls a hundred yards apart, opening into a wide courtyard where the keep itself