The Absinthe Earl

by Sharon Lynn Fisher

  I could see my feet resting against the bottom of the lake—but the lake itself was somehow melting away from me. My eyes followed the rushing motion of the water, watching it rise like a wave on the opposite shore. The water collected there, its surface diagonal, much like water in a glass that has been tilted. The movement of water revealed the mucky lake bottom, and a few yards in front of me, I noticed a round opening.

  “What is that?” Edward gasped, joining me.

  “I don’t know.” Heart pounding, I took a couple of steps toward the opening and noticed rocky stairs leading down.

  Edward shouted an oath, and I looked up. The high end of the diagonal of water was slowly curling, as a wave does just before it crashes to shore. And then that curl was racing downhill toward us, building power and speed. The banshees began to wail.

  “This way!” I cried, running for the stairway.

  I hesitated a split second at the mouth of the opening, confused by a stairway that plunged into the ground yet also, somehow, up into the sky. The stairs did for a fact lead downward, but below I saw only star-flecked blackness.

  As I hit the first stair, my wet slipper slid, and I skidded down several more, landing painfully on my backside.

  “Edward!” I shouted, glancing back. He dived into the opening and rolled down half a dozen stairs, thudding to a stop just below me. I screamed as the water roared over our heads—but by some miracle, not a rivulet, not even a trickle, penetrated the opening, as if a pane of glass separated us from the lake.

  “Cliona’s Wave,” I said breathlessly, heart pounding against my ribs as I watched the violent waters swirling above us. It was the title of every version of Cliona’s story I had read, and it referred to the wave that had taken her life. But in the Morrigan’s version, Cliona had died only to reawaken in another world, much as we just had.

  Rubbing my bruised back, I turned to look down the stairs. I hadn’t imagined it—what seemed to await us at the bottom of the rocky tunnel was a field of stars.

  “The Gap,” said Edward.

  “Of course!” I replied.

  I glanced again at the opening, wondering about the banshees, who seemed not to have followed us. “Shall we descend?” I asked.

  “It appears to be our only option,” replied Edward. “Give me your hand.”

  We made our way carefully down the stairs. The stones were sharp in some places and slick in others, and we had only the filtered, watery sunlight streaming through from the other side of the lake. It’s how I imagined it would feel to stand at the bottom of a well, or perhaps in the cave of a merrow, the Irish mermaid. But it was not cold here, and that was a vast improvement.

  In fact, the air was warm and humid, as it had been when Captain O’Malley’s ship passed into the Gap. Ferns the color of absinthe, and an odd kind of moss grew in clefts in the rock walls. The moss was phosphorescent and velvety to the touch. It left a glowing gold residue on my fingers, reminding me of the time, as a child, I had accidentally mashed a firefly between my fingers.

  I gasped on discovering that the stairway ended abruptly not more than a dozen steps below. There was no landing, and nowhere for us to go but into the open star field. What would happen if we fell? Would we plunge as from a cliff? I gripped Edward’s hand.

  We lingered there, wordlessly assessing our severely limited options. Edward had just turned to say something when we heard voices. A vessel of some kind was moving into view below us, at the foot of the stairs. Edward flattened himself against the rough wall of the stairway, and I did the same. His hand closed over the hilt of Great Fury.

  The voices rising from the vessel—a tugboat like the queen’s, but whose hull was pitted and thickly crusted with verdigris—were gravelly and growling. Their speech was at first unintelligible to me, but after a few moments I began to understand them. They were arguing, it seemed, about which of them would carry an item of value that had been entrusted to them.

  Catching my eye, the earl held a finger to his lips.

  We watched as a ladder rose from the deck of the tugboat to rest against the bottommost stair. Two men with rust-red caps mounted and began to ascend. They were wiry, armored fellows, their knotty hands the color of an apple cut open and left out to brown. The leader’s head tipped back as he glanced up, and I held my breath as he surveyed the tunnel, the bluish whites of his bulging eyes glowing brightly. We held our breath, pressing ourselves even flatter against the wall, and the men continued to climb.

  No sooner had they clambered onto the stairs than the earl stepped out of the shadows, raising Great Fury.

  “Who are you?” he demanded in a voice that echoed loudly in the tunnel.

  The foremost of the men gave a piglike squeal and raised a spear in threat. His wide, bloodshot eyes sparked with malice. His lower jaw protruded beyond the upper, and two long canines spiked upward, giving him a fierce appearance. He wore a rough and filthy tunic, leather armor, and heavy boots. His exposed forearms and calves were all sinew and ropy muscle.

  The heavily browed eyes narrowed. “’Tis thou, is it?” he snarled.

  The second man also brandished a spear, and he let slip to the stairs a large burlap sack lumpy with unknown contents. The sack thudded against the stones and then began a slow, awkward roll that carried it past the last step and back down to the deck of the tugboat.

  “You know me?” Edward asked, sword still raised.

  “Aye, I know thee,” replied the man, spitting onto the stair. “’Twas thou that laid us under this bondage. All for foolish woman’s sentiment.” The creature narrowed his eyes. “But I see that Diarmuid has forgotten old Billy Redcap, King Under the Millstone.”

  I felt a slight drift of air against my face. It carried a sharp metallic odor that soured my stomach. Redcaps were a type of fairy with a dark and vicious reputation. Their caps were said to be kept red by frequent dyeing with human blood.

  “What was that you were carrying?” I called, drawing the fairy’s attention to me. His gaze sharpened, and I shivered.

  “The banshee woman herself,” he said with malicious interest. “And well met too. Roup here was not relishin’ the swim.”

  “Answer the question, Billy Millstone,” the earl snapped.

  The redcap’s lips peeled back in a gruesome grin. “Gifts from Lord Balor to the Celts, m’lord. Best for thee to step aside.”

  Balor, the legendary king of the Fomorians. And by “Celts” the redcap could very well mean the Irish people.

  “Don’t let them through,” I cautioned the earl.

  “You’ll not pass, redcap,” said Edward.

  The man was perhaps two-thirds the earl’s height but sturdy as a farmer’s cart. The redcap’s bulk did not prevent him from swinging his spear with a quickness that caught Edward off guard. He stumbled backward, and had he not tripped on the stairs, the swing would have caught him in the ribs.

  Both redcaps surged forward, and the earl and I retreated. Edward regained his footing and raised his sword in time to parry another thrust of the spear. I expected the wooden weapon to snap in two, but it held fast.

  Before the combatants could attack again, I felt a sensation I could only describe as a humming in the blood. The keen of the banshees also rang in my ears, and I recognized it as a warning. Glancing over the earl’s shoulder, I saw that the second redcap, Roup, had flung his spear at me. I should not have been able to watch the progress of the pointed tip, but the spear progressed slowly, as it might in a dream. In the heartbeat before it reached me, I leaned out of its path and plucked it from the air.

  I stared at it, astonished.

  Weapon of thorn and iron. It will serve you well.

  Before I had a chance to wonder about the power that had allowed me to do this, or the source of this whispering in my mind, I heard the earl shout.

  The combatants tumbled, colliding with
Roup, who was knocked backward down the stairs.

  “Edward!” I cried, watching helplessly as redcaps and man rolled and dropped from the bottom stair, landing in a tangled heap on the deck of the tugboat below.

  Gripping the spear in one hand, I turned and stepped onto the ladder. It wobbled under my weight, but I steeled my grip and my resolve and started down while, on the deck below, the fight resumed.

  “Now, thou Danaan poxbottle,” snarled the redcap king, “Billy will end thine heirless descendant and bid thee farewell for good.”

  Stepping down onto the deck, I saw that Roup’s arms were clenched viselike around the earl’s torso, and Billy had aimed his spear at Edward’s chest. Diarmuid’s blade lay on the deck a few feet away. As the weapon appeared to be selective about who handled it, I assumed there was no danger of its being used against us.

  Raising the spear, I charged forward.

  “M’lord, the lady!” Roup shouted.

  The warning came too late. I swung the spear with all my might, and it cracked hard against the leather jerkin, causing Billy to stumble. The iron tip sizzled against the leather, leaving a brand.

  When traveling on a moonless night, remember, iron is a fairy’s blight.

  I couldn’t recall where I’d read or heard the old rhyme, but some folklorists did cite iron as a protection against fairies. Since I was wielding the redcap’s own weapon, the threat appeared to lie in direct contact with the metal.

  Edward, still in Roup’s grasp, thrust outward with his legs, kicking the off-kilter Billy. As the redcap fell, I jabbed at him with the spear, catching him in the shoulder, below the protection of his jerkin. The skin sizzled and Billy squealed in pain.

  Edward’s lunge toppled his captor, and Edward scrambled for Great Fury. Roup made a desperate grab for the earl’s legs, but it wasn’t enough to stop Edward from grasping and swinging the sword. Roup’s ill-timed lunge was halted by his head’s sudden parting from his shoulders. So powerful was Edward’s strike, both head and helmet flew over the tugboat’s rail. The earl thrust a foot against the redcap’s chest and sent his body after.

  Such violence was alien and shocking to me, yet I was surprised by the small volume of blood—as well as by its color. Thin, silvery trails dribbled down the rail, glowing in the low light. The head and body of Roup did not plummet as they should have according to the law of gravity, but drifted away from us in a ghastly, dreamlike fashion, trailing mercurial beads of fairy blood. I glanced at my feet, planted solidly on the tugboat deck, and wondered. I took a step back from the rail.

  The word aether came to mind—a so-called fifth element that appeared in some ancient alchemical texts. Modern physicists also used this word when referring to a theoretical substance that formed a medium for the travel of light through space.

  The grunts and curses behind me drew my attention, and I saw that Edward had immobilized Billy with the tip of Great Fury. Each time the panting redcap squirmed, the sword’s tip touched his armor and sent up a curl of smoke.

  “Don’t kill him, Edward,” I urged.

  “Billy and I are merely coming to an understanding, are we not?” growled the earl, raising the point to Billy’s face.

  The redcap’s eyes went wide, and spittle dripped from his thin lips.

  I scanned the deck until my eye fell on the burlap sack, a few feet away. It had partially spilled its contents. I walked over to examine two brown lumps, which I took to be stones.

  “What is this, Master Redcap?” I asked, poking at one lump with the tip of the spear. The object was easily pierced—not a stone after all.

  I glanced back at Billy, but he only stared balefully.

  “You said ‘a gift for the Celts,’ did you not?” I recalled. “What sort of gift?”

  “Do as thou wilt to oul Billy,” he whined. “Lord Balor will deal out worse for betrayal.”

  “Get up,” Edward snarled, kicking him.

  Billy obeyed, making disgruntled noises in his throat, and the earl’s sword followed his movements closely.

  They walked over and joined me, and Edward toed one of the lumps. “Potatoes,” he said, grunting in surprise. “Rotten, by the look of them.”

  I frowned at Billy. “Why are you carrying rotten potatoes?”

  The redcap kept his stony silence.

  “Answer the lady,” Edward said, again pressing the point of the sword into the redcap’s armor.

  Billy faltered back at the hiss of singed leather, and Edward thrust the sword in his face.

  “Answer the lady,” repeated the earl, “or I shall send your head after your fellow’s!”

  Billy cried out, cringing in terror. He raised his arms in front of his face and made a sound very like a sob. “Sure, ’tis praties for the journey, is all,” he wailed, sounding even less convinced by this answer than I was. “Or did ye think oul Billy had no need to eat?”

  “It’s no use,” I said, sighing. “He’s more afraid of ‘Lord Balor’ than he is of us.”

  Edward, still training his sword on Billy, glanced at me. “You believe this is important?”

  “I think it might be.”

  As he considered this, something about the change in his countenance made me uneasy.

  He turned his attention to Billy again, and my heart quaked at the power in his voice when he said, “What does the King Under the Millstone want with a sack of rotten potatoes?”

  The redcap’s bulging eyes stuck out even farther, and he reached a hand to his throat, clamping shut his menacing jaw. He made a choking noise and clapped his left hand over his right.

  I recognized his distress; Diarmuid was compelling him.

  “The black rot,” he answered in a high and grating voice, panting from the effort of holding back further disclosure.

  Apparently, my suspicions were well founded. “Queen Isolde told of blight and famine visited by the Fomorians,” I said. “‘Balor’ is the name of a Fomorian king, is it not?”

  “It is,” said the earl. Though from the light in his face and the deeper timbre of his voice, I knew I was speaking to Diarmuid. “Balor is an age-old foe of the Danaan. A horrible brute with a deadly gaze. I have met him in battle before.”

  Holding his gaze, I said, “I am willing to bet these are for spreading disease, my lord.” As I watched him, the familiar intensity burned down, marking the earl’s return. His brow furrowed.

  “Many people in the Irish countryside eat little other than potatoes,” said Edward, studying the prostrate redcap. “They are easily grown here and require no processing, and they don’t fetch the high prices of exported grain that are so appealing to landlords.”

  “Why here on Achill, I wonder?” I replied. “Would it not be to greater effect on the Irish mainland?”

  The earl considered. “The boundary of Diarmuid’s Seal is weak here,” he recalled. “Perhaps it is the only place they can pass through.”

  I stared at him with a creeping sense of unease. “But this is not the only place the boundary is weak.”

  Low laughter, bitter as dark ale, bubbled up from Billy Millstone. “The hour is late,” he cackled. “Ye’ll not stop it now. Neither of ye, nor the warrior queen herself.”

  “We must find the other locations where the seal has been weakened,” I said to Edward, ignoring the redcap’s taunts. “The queen is looking to the battle to come, but the Fomorians—are they not masters of plague and blight? Is it likely this threat is limited to potatoes?”

  The earl eyed me darkly, shaking his head.

  “This is the first threat to be faced,” I continued. “If we can stop it, perhaps we might prevent the battle.”

  “Or at least even the odds.”

  “Not to mention all the lives that may be lost if we don’t try.”

  Edward frowned. “But how?”

  I swallowed, r
eluctant to say what I knew he would not want to hear. “We need Diarmuid.”

  “THE STORY OF US”

  Ada

  The dread in his expression pained me. He glanced at the redcap. “I don’t think I will be able to compel him further. He is in mortal terror of Balor, and more than that, I sense a …” He drifted off, considering a moment before going on. “Something like a blood oath. If I try to break it, I may kill him.”

  As if to reinforce these words, Billy Millstone’s eyes went wide, and the already protruding jaw jutted further. I felt encouraged that the earl seemed to be in some manner communicating with his ancestor without ceding control to him.

  No sooner had this idea crossed my thoughts, however, than I watched the rekindling of that otherworldly brightness in his eyes. Turning suddenly, he surged forward with the sword, making Billy stumble backward onto the deck. He planted a boot on the redcap’s chest and thrust the tip at his throat. Billy gave an ear-rending squeal.

  “So be it,” were the potent words of Diarmuid. “It would be no more than he deserves.”

  “My lord,” I called, drawing his attention. I would never grow accustomed to his intensity. The more time I spent in his presence, the more my body answered with a welcoming heat—a simmering anticipation that caught fire in my belly. Was I Miss Quicksilver falling for the Earl of Meath, or Cliona responding to the presence of her lover?

  I stepped toward him. “Can you tell me the other places where the boundary is weak?”

  He did not bother to mask a feverish longing as he studied me. “Almost from the beginning, the seal was threadbare in sacred places, and Faery peoples have sometimes found their way back to Ireland. In some of these places, the Morrigan’s alchemists constructed Gap gates to make it even easier to pass between worlds.”

  Fairy lore contained descriptions of such places, usually referred to as “fairy doors.” They tended to be located in ruins like those at Newgrange, in enchanted lakes, or in notable landscape features like Ben Bulben, the tabletop mountain recently mentioned by both the earl and Captain O’Malley’s scribe, Mr. Yeats.