Holder of Lightning tc-1

by S L Farrell Неизвестный Автор

  She saw her attacker now, and shock nearly stole the breath from her. The creature's torso had risen from the water with her, its arms around her-the face nearly featureless, its body the blue-black of the depths as if it were made of the water itself. A finned row of spines ran from its smooth-featured crown down the back of its sinuous body, and the hands that encircled Jenna and snagged the cloch's chain were webbed, long-hungered, and wide. The eyes were dead black and shining-emotionless, cold shark eyes-and thin fanged teeth glistened in a gaping round mouth. Jenna tried to scream once more but the creature folded its arms around her and with a powerful wriggle of its body and a splash, yanked her away from the rock and back under the water. Lamh Shabhala’s chain broke and tore away; she grabbed for the cloch, but it vanished, drifting down.

  Eyes open in terror, Jenna struggled, trying to strike at the creature though the water softened and slowed her blows. She pulled at the thing's hands, and felt it bite at her shoulder and neck. It bore her down to the bottom, turning her under its body. She felt rocks and mud on her back and she

  knew that she had only seconds, that the first breath she took would be her last. She saw another dark form speed toward them, churn-ing white foam on the dappled surface, and she despaired. Yet at the same moment she was about to give up and take the breath that would mean her death, the form above dove and struck her assailant hard. The creature shrilled in pain, releasing Jenna to respond to this new attack. Jenna pushed herself up from the rocky bottom, surging toward the rippling promise of sunlight above. Her head broke the surface and she took a desperate breath, her arms slapping at the waves. She could feel herself going under again, the weight of her clothing dragging her down. She gulped water. .

  A hand caught hers and pulled her up: O’Deoradhain. She choked and gasped, bleeding and coughing up water, as he helped her onto the shore. "Lamh Shabhala," she managed to say. "They took it. ." She started to plunge back into the lough, but he held her back, grasping her from behind. She struggled in his arms now, trying to get loose, screaming and crying as she fought to dive back in and find the cloch, but he was too strong.

  "Jenna, you can’t go back in there. ." he was saying to her, his lips close to her ear as he hugged her to him. "You can’t. ."

  She continued to try to break free, but exhaustion took hold and she hung limp in his arms, struggling to catch her breath. The surface of the lough showed nothing, then a silken head surged up through the small wind-driven waves several yards out: a seal. It roared at them once and dove again, surfacing closer to the shore. Bright blue highlights glinted in its ebon fur where the sunlight touched it. Metal glinted in the animal’s mouth and Jenna cried out wordlessly. She pushed out of O’Deoradhain’s grasp and floundered into the water toward the seal. It waited for her; wading in waist-deep, Jenna snatched at the broken chain with the silver-caged stone. Her hand closed around Lamh Shabhala; the seal opened its mouth and released the necklace at the same moment. Sobbing, Jenna clutched the stone in her hand. The seal stared at her with its bulbous chocolate eyes, its whiskered snout wriggling as if it were sniffing the air. "Thank you," Jenna told the seal, tightening her right hand around the cloch.

  She would have sworn that the seal nodded. Its head lifted, the mouth opening, and a series of wails

  and coughs emerged: like words but in no language Jenna understood. Then, with a flash of shimmering lapis, the seal turned and dove back into the water.

  "It said that the Holder should be more careful, and warned you that not only humans want to possess a cloch na thintri, especially Lamh Shabhala."

  Jenna turned. O'Deoradhain stood on the bank, his hand extended to her. "Come out of the water," he said. "I'll start a fire, and we can get you warm and dry."

  She didn't move. Waves lapped at her waist. "You understood it?"

  "Her, not it. And aye, I understood her." He stretched out his hand again. "Trust me, Holder. I will explain."

  She ignored the hand. "I thought I knew you," she said.

  His mouth twitched under the beard. "Not all. Come out of the water, Holder; I don't know if that creature will be back."

  She took a breath, shivering. Then she reached for his hand. "Then tell me," she said as he helped her from the lough. "Tell me why the seals come to you."

  He nodded.

  I was perhaps four or five when I realized that my mam was. . strange. I woke up one night in the bed I shared with my younger brother. I don't know what it was that woke me-maybe the sound of a footstep or the creaking of the door. I managed to get out of the bed without waking my brother. Our house was small: my sister-the youngest of us at the time-slept in her crib in the same room, beside my parents' bed. I could hear my da snoring. The moon was out and the sky was clear; in the silver light, I could see that where my ma should have been, the blankets were flung back. I called out for her softly so I wouldn't wake the others, but she didn't answer. I went out into the other room, but she wasn't there, either. The door to our cottage, though, was ajar.

  My da was a fisherman, and we lived just above a rocky shingle of beach on the southern coast of Inish Thuaidh not far from the island of Inishfeirm where

  your family lived, in the townland of Maoil na nDreas. Sometimes, when the day was clear, we could even see Inishfeirm like a gray hump on the horizon to the south. But that has nothing to do with this story. .

  I walked out of the cottage. I could see my father’s boat pulled up on the beach and hear the waves pounding against the shore. I thought I heard another sound as well, and I padded down toward the water. The wind was brisk, and the breakers were shattering on the walls of our little cove, splashing high on the cliff walls that rose out like arms on either side. In the bright moonlight, I could see seals out there on the rocks several big ones, and they were calling loudly to each other, occasionally diving awkwardly into the surf and pulling themselves back up with their flippers.

  These seals, I noticed, were different than the small harbor seals that I usually saw. They shimmered in the moonlight, their fur sparkling with blue highlights. I watched them for a while, listening to what sounded like a loud conversation. One of the bulls noticed me, for I saw him turn his snout toward the beach and bellow. A few of the other seals looked toward me too, then, and one lurched from the rock into the sea and I lost sight of it. I watched the others, though, especially that old bull, who kept roaring and staring at me.

  "Ennis. .?" 1 heard my mam call my name, and she came from around da’s boat to where I was sitting on the beach. She was soaking wet and naked, and water dripped from her hair as she crouched down by me, smiling. Her eyes were as dark and bright as a seal’s. "What are you doing out here, young man?"

  "I woke up and you weren’t there, Mam," I told her. "And I came out and saw the seals and I was watching them." I pointed at the old bull and the seals gathered around him on the rock. I laughed. "They sound like they’re talking to each other, Mam."

  "They are talking," she said, laughing with me.

  She had a voice like purest crystal, and she seemed entirely comfortable in her nudity, which made me comfortable with it also. "You just have to know their language."

  "Do you know the language?" I asked her wonderingly, and she nod-ded, laughing again.

  "I do. Would you like me to teach you sometime?"

  "Aye, Mam, I would," I told her, wide-eyed.

  "Then I will. Now, let's get you inside and back into bed. It's cold out here." She lifted me up, but I struggled to stay.

  "I'm not cold at all. Mam, what were you doing out here?" I asked her, staring up at her face, her hair all stringy and still dripping water from the ends, a bit of seaweed stuck near her ear. "Aren't you cold?"

  "No, Ennis. I was. . swimming."

  "With the seals?"

  She nodded. "With the seals. Maybe, someday, you can swim with them, too, if. ." She stopped then, and a smile curled her lip. She rubbed my hair. "Come now. Back to bed." She led me back to the cottage door and stopped
there. "Go on in," she said. "I'm going to swim a bit more. ."

  She kept her promise. She taught me how to understand the language of the blue seals. And, once or twice a year, she would leave our house late at night to "go swimming with the seals." I don't think my siblings ever noticed, but I did. I would see her slip out of bed and follow her. I think she probably knew that I was watching her, but she didn't seem to care and never paid any attention to me at all.

  She would stand at the water's edge and take off her night robe, standing naked under the moon with the seals all wailing and moaning and calling to her.

  She'd run toward the water, diving into the surf. Somehow, though I looked, I never saw my mam after that-she would vanish among the bodies of the seals and emerge hours later as light began to touch the sky, dripping wet but some-how not cold. If I were still there asleep on the beach, she would wake me and take me back to the cottage with her.

  I asked her, the first time, why I never could see her after she went into the water and she told me I might understand one day. She also told me about the blue seals-that there was but one small group of them left in all the world here at Inish Thuaidh, but that soon a time would come when they would return in greater numbers, and that she hoped I would be part of those days…

  Aye, my da knew. He seemed troubled by his wife's occasional forays into the ocean, but did

  nothing about them, or perhaps it was just that he'd learned over the years that this was simply part of her-he didn't speak to her about the seals, or her 'swimming' at night, or mention any of it to us.

  "Your mam must do what she must," was all he would say the one time I dared to bring up the subject with him. "And if you're lucky, you won't share her curse and find yourself out there swimming in the moonlight." Then he turned his back to me as he mended his fishing net.

  I didn't think of my mam as cursed, though. I saw the joy in her face as she came from the water. I saw the cavorting of the seals and the way they flew through the water and thought that it must be wonderful to be able to do that. I listened to their talk and sometimes tried to speak with them, though our throats aren't made to speak their words, and they would laugh at my poor attempts and answer.

  And, one day after my body had started to grow hair and my voice had gone deeper, I did swim with them…

  You're…?" Jenna breathed, and O'Deoradhain nodded solemnly. "I thought… I mean I've heard of changelings and such, but I'd always believed they were only tales."

  "Not only tales. And not only me. Wasn't your grandmother mysteriously rescued by seals? — or maybe she unconsciously, under the stress of nearly drowning, tapped a part of herself she didn't know was there."

  The fire O'Deoradhain had built while he told his tale crackled, and Jenna snuggled close to the flames, letting the welcome heat sink into her still-damp clothes. She glanced back at the waters of the lough half-expecting to see the seal again, but it was gone. "Are all the blue seals. .?"

  O'Deoradhain shrugged. "Some of them are changelings, aye, but not all and almost none can change at will. Most of those who can change are water-snared, nearly always a seal but changing for a few short hours a year into human shape. Somewhere, back in my family's past, a many times great-mam must have met a bull in his human form and loved him, and that blood manifested itself in my mam-she said that her sisters and brothers weren't that way, just as my siblings also weren't affected. But the blood occasionally shows to create the few Earth-snared ones like me or my mam, who feel the call of the water-part of us only rarely."

  Jenna didn’t know what to say. She looked up the sloping bank of the lough to where the horses stood, to the pack on her mare where her father’s carved seal was hidden, and she remembered the blue paint he’d used to paint it and she wondered.

  "They’ve followed me, as well as they can, since I left Inish," O’Deoradhain was saying. "They haven’t told me why, just that ’the Water-Mother’s voice tells them that they must.’ The WaterMother is their god, like our Mother-Creator. The ’voice,’ I think, is a euphemism, a feeling they have or perhaps part of an old song-tale-all their history is passed down in songs since they don’t write at all, and there are thousands of them. Their-I suppose I should say ’our’-memories are very good, and they pass the songs down generation to generation. I don’t know them all yet, only a few hundred."

  Jenna remembered the seal who watched them when they talked at Deer Creek, and the shapes in the water that had pushed their boat away after they’d crossed Lough Lar. . "What was the thing that attacked me?

  O’Deoradhain shrugged again. He took a stick from the ground and pushed at the logs in the fire; sparks and smoke went whirling upward. "I don’t know. Garrentha-that’s the name of the seal who came to your rescue-didn’t either. There are things that live in hidden places that we don’t know, and more and more of them are waking as the mage-lights grow stronger. It’s not only humans who want to hold the magic." He rose to his feet. "If you’re dry and warm enough, we should go. I think we be safer in the village at night than out here."

  Jenna glanced back at the lough. She nodded. "Are there other secrets you’re keeping from me, O’Deoradhain? You ought to trot them out now, before we go farther."

  He grinned at that, but the expression turned oddly serious when his dark eyes found hers. "I only have one," he answered. "I suspect you already know what it is."

  She found herself blushing under his gaze, and she turned away rather than say more.

  Chapter 36: Ambush and Offer

  THE folk of the village of Banshaigh had a name for the creature: "Uisce Taibhse," it was: the water ghost. "No one fishes at the eastern end of Lough Glas now," one grizzled old man told Jenna and O’Deoradhain. "At least not if you care about coming back. Too many boats have been mysteriously sunk there-in broad daylight and calm water-and many of those aboard lost. The Uisce Taibhse is an evil creature-or creatures, since there is more than one of them, and they don’t like us. We’ve caught one ourselves, snagged in our nets; it died out of the water like a fish, but it fought like a mad, cornered dog to its last breath. Why, if I had one of those clochs na thintri the Riocha are wearing now, I’d just kill them all. ."

  As would have happened in Tara’s tavern back in Ballintubber, the newcomers to The Green Waters, Banshaigh’s only inn, were greeted with curious looks and many questions. Jenna and O’Deoradhain agreed on their cover story before entering the village: they were cousins uprooted from their homes in Tuath Gabair by the recent troubles and hoping to return to the home of their uncle in Inish Thuaidh. Banshaigh wasn’t much larger than Ballintubber and though the villagers were aware of the hostilities between Connachta and Gabair, they were far enough removed from the larger towns and the Riocha that they were more sympathetic than hostile to the unfortunate travelers, especially

  since O'Deoradhain seemed to know as much about fishing as any of the locals.

  Lough Glas, the green lake, was fed by springs, brooks, and rills run-ning from the high hills around it, and fed from its western end into a mountain-flanked and marshy tidal basin and the sea. Aye, the village fisherfolk sometimes ventured out into the open ocean. Aye, there was one fisherman in the village who would doubtless be willing to sail them to Inish Thuaidh for a fair price-Flynn Meagher had a large enough boat and often sailed the coast, if never that far north.

  They went to see Flynn Meagher the next morning near dawn, in a windy downpour.

  Meagher was a burly, nontalkative man, who grunted as O'Deoradhain explained what they wanted. "Maybe six days out, six back, fewer if the wind is good," Meagher said finally. "Need to take another person to help me sail and I won't be able to do any fishing. A half-morceint a day is what I'll need." His face showed that he expected the bedraggled strangers to turn and leave with that. When O'Deoradhain showed him three golden coins and placed one of them in Meagher's palm, he seemed aston-ished.

  "A quarter-morceint a day is twice as much as you should get, but we're in a hur
ry," O'Deoradhain countered. "I'll give you one morceint now so you can hire your crew member and provision the boat. You'll get the other two when we get there."

  Meagher stared at the money in his hand. Slowly, his fingers curled around the coin, then opened again. He seemed to be thinking. "Can't leave today. Tomorrow. Better weather, better tide."

  "We'll be here tomorrow morning, then. Same time."

  A nod. His hand closed around the money and disappeared under the oiled leather coat.

  "He could take us a day's sail out, kill us while we're sleeping, steal the money and dump our bodies overboard for the fish," Jenna said as they walked back to the inn.

  "Aye, he could," O'Deoradhain admitted. "We'll need to be careful. But we also have defenses he doesn't know we have, and I could sail that boat myself with your help if we needed to. Do you have

  She didn’t. But she didn’t feel easy about the decision.

  The next day they sold their horses to the proprietor of The Green Waters and went to meet Meagher at his boat near the end of the docks. The day Promised to be a fine one, as Meagher had suggested, but despite the yellow glow on the horizon and the deep, nearly cloudless azure above, Jenna felt more and more uneasy as they approached their rendezvous. She opened Lamh Shabhala slightly, examining the space around them with the cloch’s vision. There were several other people in the dock area which was to be expected, but if there were other clochs nearby, they were well-shielded. They walked toward the small wooden shack on the shore where Meagher stored his nets and other equipment.