by Russell Moon
“They are coming, aren’t they?” I say.
“Yes,” he says.
“Do we stay? Do we meet them?” I ask, terrified that the answer is yes.
He shakes his head. “This is theirs. We should not meet them on their ground.”
“Good enough for me,” I say, and the three of us make a calm but direct retreat across the field, through the standing stones, and out.
We immediately step into yet another world I have not been to before. It is like the surface of the moon, almost, a rolling, undulating landscape of bald limestone hills and crevices through which every imaginable type of flower pokes, one small stem at a time. It is colder, much colder, than the land we have just passed out of.
“What are we—?”
“You have been walking, my son, through your kingdom,” he says with a sweeping gesture. “You were earlier, and are now, walking through not only land but time. The ancient Celtic forests, bogs, hillocks—all under your aegis, if all goes according to the will of Cernunnos, god of Celtic forests.”
Already the limestone has given way to brown, marshy, thick, pungent peat squishing under our feet. This immediately gives way to fields of heather, before falling away before us and once again plunging into warm, dense forest.
“I still don’t know about you,” I say, following closely at his heels.
“I know you don’t. As time is an issue, perhaps you had better ask.”
I surprise myself by getting rather directly to the point.
“Can you tell me that you are not evil?”
He laughs for a good thirty uncomfortable seconds. Then, as it settles, he answers.
“No,” he says. “If indeed evil exists, then I am in part evil.”
“So do you doubt it exists?”
“I do not.”
“Jesus,” I say, backing off the pace a bit. “You know, I’m giving you every chance here to work with me….”
“You cannot live as long as I have lived, through all I have seen, and deny the existence of evil, son. Likewise, I believe that the individual who disclaims any evil content in his own nature is immediately to be feared and distrusted more than anyone. Because then you are in the presence of both evil and deceit.”
We walk through snow now, but we are not hampered.
“As I have told you, you are evil too,” he says. “You already understand this, I know. It is now your duty, your destiny, to learn to gather your strengths and overcome your mighty flaws to do what is right for your people, for the world. Such is the obligation you and I carry, Marcus Aurelius, that our adversaries do not.”
I find myself certain of one thing he has tried to instill: the sense of time getting away. I feel it strongly, that we have none to waste, and so I don’t.
“Why are they our adversaries?”
He stops and faces me. It is still snowing on us, and the snow caps his shoulders and his head, making him look older, more austere, more like a mountaintop statue than somebody’s father.
“The coven, Marcus, is an ignorant and hateful race. Because of you, because of the union of myself and your mother, it declared a holy war of purity. They’re so threatened by the reality of mortal blood mingling with their own that they have threatened the existence of us all. They have pledged that if they don’t extinguish this”—he points at me, touching my chest with his long-nailed finger—“then the flame of an entire race will go out with their efforts.”
“They claim the flame is going out anyway. Because of you. Because you had me. When you and Eleanor … because she was a nonwitch.”
He takes a deep, slow breath, continuing to tap my chest lightly. “They lie, Marcus. This is about you, but not in the way that they say. It is about their fear of you, your mixed blood, and their ancient, closed society.”
I am staring at the finger, contemplating it all.
“They say they want you,” I say.
“And so they do,” he says. “As I’ve said, they want us both. They want the throne. They want these.”
As he says it, he holds two fists up, at his shoulders. Then he extends two middle fingers toward the sky, bearing the two now-massive staghorn rings.
“And as you know,” he says, “these rings do not come off.”
“Oh my,” I say nervously. “Oh … shit.” I look at my own ring, at the Prince ring, which I now see has grown bigger. I feel the roots of it extending up my arm, down into my chest.
His rings, their root system, after all these years, must reach all the way to his legs.
“There have always been good and evil together, Marcus, beating in the same breast of every creature to draw breath. The essence of a life lies in one’s capacity to carry on a good struggle from within.
“The finest, the leaders, the caretakers of a people are the ones with the strength to carry on that struggle properly. That is how Cernunnos chooses.”
Emphatically now, he puts the backs of his hands, and the bulk of those rings, up in front of my face.
“Cernunnos chooses wisely.” He gestures around at the suddenly lush and warm and aromatic forest enveloping us. “He chose our line to rule centuries ago. We must be equal to this. That is how we know. That is how we know we are right.”
He grabs my hand now, holds it up next to his own so I can see them together.
“Cernunnos chooses wisely,” he says again.
Without another word, we travel on, beyond everything everywhere. He knows not to say more. He knows I cannot take any more inside a head that is full to bursting with millions of years of absorbed history. With evil, rattling away at the bars of its cage.
He knows too that he has reached me.
Just as I am convinced that there is no end to this journey, and no end to the ancient Celtic forests of our kingdom, we reach the end.
We walk through yet one more almost impenetrable thicket of trees and emerge.
To an immediate cliff edge.
It is Chuck, grabbing my shirt in his teeth, who keeps me from going over and falling all that way.
Which must be seven hundred feet, straight down. It is a sheer face, this cliff, as if a giant had sliced two great lands apart with a huge, serrated knife. At the bottom, past ledges and ledges and improbable horizontal trees growing into a stiff wind, is the crashing, screaming mayhem of the ocean’s edge.
“We’re pretty near the sea,” I say to him, looking straight down as puffin and tern fly sorties to and from precarious cliffside nests.
“We are always near the sea,” he says.
“And you were going to let me fall,” I suggest.
“It is your kingdom. You had better learn it.”
“So,” I say. “What now?”
“They have to be stopped. Immediately.”
“How? There are so many of them.”
“Spence. He is our problem. He is the Doctor.” Again, he holds up the fingers. “The Surgeon.”
“How do we get him?”
“Through she who would be Princess,” he says.
“Come again?”
“We must go the way they go. Up through the bloodline. We must have the daughter.”
“Eartha?”
“We need her. I cannot get near any of them without being detected by all of them. But you, son, can have her. She is, in fact, stalking you. And since you have eliminated her familiar, she is not as aware as she would be.”
“So what am I supposed to do about it?”
“She will come to you, and you will know the time is right. You will bring her to me, here.”
“And what?” I ask, getting that nervous, lost, things-are-bigger-than-me feeling again.
“We will convert her,” he says calmly. “And put an end to this detestable blood war.”
I find myself shaking with the suggestion, and I do not know why. It is warm, there is a sweet salt-air mist spraying up from the white foam at the base of the rocks, but I am shivering like a newborn pup.
“Convert her?” I say
cautiously. “That sounds … what is that all about?”
“Magic, Marcus. An obair at its zenith. You have seen much of the worst of our world, and now you are to see its best. You and I are going to make things right. We are going to heal a deep, angry, weeping fissure running through the heart of our people.
“Through this girl, in this girl, our people are going to return to being one people. A magnificent people again. Like we have not seen in a generation.
“Like you and your mother have not seen, ever. A world we all should have had for a long time now, which we will have, finally.
“All of us, Marcus,” he says.
All of us.
Chuck has to grab me again before I stumble off the ledge, overwhelmed by the thought of it.
Healed. One. Together again. A family.
My family.
As it should be. The way it was supposed to be a long time ago.
But for now, he is gone. Vanished in the mist.
And Chuck and I begin the long walk—all the way back through time and forest—home.
CHAPTER
7
Sad and scary things happen to me on a regular basis now. But nothing so sad or so scary as the fact that Eleanor can no longer speak to me.
I have made several attempts over the last couple of days to make contact with her, to try and claw my way through the mountainous awfulness that lies between us. But each time she has burst into tears, barricaded herself in her room to punch demonically away at her computer keyboard, or, worst of all, fled the house entirely without returning for several hours.
I wonder if I should try and blurt all, tell her that once we pull off this one magic moment, a kind of father-son outing, we will all be one happy, royal family, and life will be more perfect than ever, with the one unfixable exception of Jules. Life will be what you deserve, Eleanor.
Probably not. Probably I have done enough damage already and should keep my mouth shut.
She still prepares meals for me, runs the house and, more and more, works for the good doctor. But she does it all without being able to face me or what I am.
What I do is I wait. I am like a death row prisoner in my own house, the way I do nothing but watch television, play video games listlessly, bathe, collect the sustenance that is silently slid toward me on a tray.
And sit in anticipation of a great and frightening moment, worrying that it will come too soon or too late.
I have been at this for three days solid when the time arrives. Eleanor is out, because I cannot watch her all the time, though I would like to. Chuck and I are lying out on the porch, listening to the stream babble meekly, when Eartha appears. I go hot and cold at the sight of her.
“Hi,” she says.
“Hi,” I say.
“I guess you’ve sort of dropped out of school, huh?” she asks.
“Ah, well, unofficially, I guess so” I say. Swallowing deeply, but she doesn’t seem to notice.
She wags a finger at me playfully. “You won’t graduate.”
I get up from my prone position and sit cross-legged.
“You want to sit?” I say, patting the dried-out decking beside me. She sits. “Watch the, ah, splinters,” I say.
She smiles, sits close enough that our knees are touching.
Despite myself, I notice that it feels nice. It feels warm. Human contact—if that is even what you call contact between the likes of us—is suddenly so valuable to me, so foreign, lost, and wonderful. She comes over all gentle now, none of the more powerful earlier bits coming into focus at the moment, and the tension in me eases a little.
“We aren’t evil, Marcus,” she says.
I turn away from her and focus on the water beyond.
“We know you were there,” she goes on. “At the seat, our church. We know, of course.”
“If you would do me the favor,” I say, “of please not saying we, anymore. I’m not really interested in what we think, as much as what you think, when you are speaking.”
I look at her and she smiles shyly. She nods. “If you really are interested,” she says.
“I am.” I’m staring into her and, whether she knows it or not, wondering if Eartha, stunning Eartha, really wants to do me harm. I find it so hard to believe right now, despite everything.
We look just like that for a minute, just like two seventeen-year-olds with simple, recognizable problems and feelings. Part of me—and I have begun to see my psyche as this massive wall full of drawers which are pulled out one at a time—completely forgets who or what I am dealing with right here. The larger issues seem so easily to float away now, here, with the world so far away from me. I see Eartha’s smile, I feel her knee just barely touching mine.
She comes to kiss me, and I cannot take her lips fast enough.
I close my eyes fully. I try to open them, but they keep defying me for as long as the kiss lasts.
And it lasts several minutes. It lasts not nearly long enough.
“I wish you would trust us,” she says.
The moment is temporarily cracked.
“Who is ‘us’?” I ask grimly.
“I wish you would trust me.” she says meekly.
“I would like to trust you,” I say. And I mean it.
“Come with me,” she says.
“Where?” I ask.
“That doesn’t sound like trust,” she says.
Chuck makes a half growl, half sigh. But I am going.
“Does he have to come?” Eartha asks as Chuck naturally tags after.
“Oh,” I say, having just assumed he was invited.
“You can bring him if you want, Marcus,” she says. “I was just”—she holds my one hand within her two as she says it—“thinking about the trust thing. Wondering if you need him.”
“It’s okay,” I say to Chuck as he makes that odd little noise again. “I’ll be fine.”
It takes nowhere near as much time to reach the standing stones as it did before. Probably because this time we walk through nothing more than normal terrain, encountering none of the ancient forests along the way.
“This is what you wanted to show me?” I ask.
“It is,” she says.
“But I already saw it.”
“I wanted you to see it with me. This could be all ours, you know, Marcus.”
“There you go with that plural thing again.”
“This time I mean ours. Yours and mine. I want to be your Queen, Marcus. I want us together, I want us leading our people.”
Again, the pervading sense of time, of needing to get to the point, takes over.
“This is used for dark magic, isn’t it, Eartha? This … theater or whatever, that’s what it does, right?”
“Certainly we use dark magic, Marcus. Do you think it would be possible to match your father without it? We do what we have to do, nothing more.”
“Well,” I say, “from what I understand, you all are capable of plenty more.”
“No, Marcus, no. Believe me, you are being deceived. We are not evil. Your father betrayed Cernunnos and our people by growing wildly powerful, by thinking he was beyond the reach of all—Cernunnos included. He failed to abide by ancient laws and traditions, and by doing so has jeopardized our very existence. We are the ones who are faithful to our religion, to our people, to our god.”
I hear it, but I cannot feel it. What she says may in fact make perfect sense to somebody else, somebody who has not been sorting through this stuff as persistently—and as persistently mind-bendingly—as I have. I don’t give a shit about the religion, frankly. I give a shit about my life. About what I want out of it. About what I feel.
And so I am not listening to words. I listen, more intently, to what I feel.
And what I feel is strong.
She has believable eyes. I am believing her eyes and disregarding her words. And still believing my father. Believing both.
My instincts, admittedly, are in tatters. I would not trust myself to make the simples
t decision at this stage, let alone one that could determine the life or death of an entire people.
But I can do nothing. I am falling into her right now. Falling into those eyes, those once-familiar, newly familiar eyes. I am falling into her, onto her, under her.
“Trust me,” she says as we lie at the foot of a monstrous standing stone.
I am about to pledge my trust. Maybe we can’t actually consummate it, maybe my head will explode or I will simply evaporate, but one way or another I am going to make this happen, and the consequences be damned.
But then I feel it. Same as I felt it in this same spot the previous day. Same as my father and my faithful familiar felt it.
They are coming. Now. And it’s not me who evaporates but the mist in my head.
I get immediately to my feet, and I start pulling her along.
“What?” she says.
“I don’t like this spot,” I say, pulling perhaps a bit hard. She stumbles, almost falls, but regains her balance and keeps up.
“Okay,” she says. “Whatever you think, Marcus. I’ll go where you want. But I do wish you would just—”
“Trust you,” I say. “I know. I heard.”
Again, time is not what it was a mere few days ago. We reach the spot in what seems only minutes, and Eartha lets out a startled gasp when the density of the forest becomes instantly cliff top and sea air.
And he is there waiting.
She screams when she sees him, trying to back away and run through the woods, but I hold her in place.
“No, no,” she screams. “Marcus, you can’t let this happen.”
“Why?” I say. “Does this spoil what the coven was going to do to me at the church?”
“There was nobody at the church. Just us. The only one who spoiled anything was you.”
“Liar,” I say. “They were coming. I felt them coming.”
“No, I swear,” she pleads. “I swear, Marcus, I know nothing of that. I was there with you. Just you … just us.”
My instincts remain shot. From constant abuse. I believe her. I half believe her.
That is my problem: I half believe everyone.
“Listen,” I say, “don’t struggle. This is all going to be for the good anyway. Good or bad, we will all be one again after this. There will be no more war.”