Ahead of her, she notices that the bone-white trees are even stranger than they had first appeared. They are little more than lumpy columns of wood rising straight out of the ground. None has branches or leaves, but they do vary in height from two to seven metres. They sway in the wind, and moisture glistens on their lumpy trunks, as if to warn her off any attempt at climbing. She stumbles to a halt, all of her senses screaming in alarm.
‘Don’t be a fool, Fonseca,’ she scolds herself, while heaving for breath. ‘Of course it feels wrong. This is the Grey Land. It’s all wrong.’ Then the hunting horn sounds again. She dares to look over her shoulder and there they are! No more than a few hundred metres behind her, a score of figures making far better time than she has. Their every step is graceful and the breeze carries happy, childlike laughter right to her ears. But she’s already exhausted! How on earth is she supposed to escape them? Angela’s knees threaten to buckle, but then she remembers Nessa’s words. What she needs, in order to save herself, is a high place from which she can threaten to jump, thus breaking the promise of their ambassador.
Or I can find something sharp, she thinks. Something to cut myself with.
She throws herself back towards the trees, only a hundred paces away now. The ground booms like a drum beneath her feet as immature spider bushes snatch at her and flecks of ash twirl down through the air like black snowflakes.
It’s only when she finds herself in among the trunks that she realizes the lumps under the bark are pulsing and that the trees themselves have begun to sway further than before, curving all along their lengths. And this without any increase in the wind!
And then, a ‘tree’ right ahead, three times her height, whips its top towards her. There’s a mouth at the tip! She sees this in a flash as it arcs down. Glossy and red, flecks of drool spraying from it. At lightning speed a tongue shoots out. She screams, but her old training throws her aside just in time. And then another of the ‘trees’ crashes its body against the first, allowing a third to lean over and lash at her with its rasping tongue.
She totters backwards. One of the trunks is right before her, the lump under its bark writhing, and she cries out in horror as she recognizes human hands pushing at the surface as though desperate to break free. She dodges behind that awful trunk as another tongue whips towards her face. Vomit burns the back of her throat. Her breath is all gasps and panic. But she still has enough air in her lungs to scream when her ankles are ensnared and she is yanked off her feet so that her face smacks into the ground.
Angela grabs at the warm bark in front of her. ‘God save me. Holy God, save me. Danú! Crom! Jesus!’
At least one of the deities is listening, for the grip on her ankles is loosened at once and a warm liquid sprays over her legs.
A grinning Sídhe stands just behind her, a man with huge beautiful eyes and glinting skin.
‘Welcome, thief!’ he says, before a tongue curls around his neck. He doesn’t get to say another word. The tongue yanks him, fast as an arrow, into the slimy red gullet of a tree. The monster’s success only seems to inflame the hunger of the rest of the forest. They all want Angela, every white neck curves towards her, buzzing with urgent need.
But now the cavalry are here. A Sídhe princess of impossible loveliness throws herself at the wall of tongues coming for Angela. ‘Run, thief!’ she cries, laughing, even as her body is literally ripped apart. The human obeys, going back the way she came rather than deeper among the trees. Every step of the way, there are Sídhe who give their lives to save hers, chopping at the tongues with knives of bone, grinning and dying and crying out with joy.
Their sacrifice might not be enough: the moss from earlier in the day has robbed Angela of both blood and energy; terror has done the rest, wringing her dry.
But, bizarrely, it is not for her own life that she struggles now. It is for the heroic Sídhe, her enemies. The tragedy that such beauty must perish for the sake of a useless lump like herself is too much for her conscience to bear. So Angela pushes herself harder than ever she did in the survival college at Ballinasloe. She totters out from between the last of the ‘trees’ and falls to her knees before a lone Sídhe male.
‘You cannot rest, thief,’ he cries. He has the chiselled jaw of a hero. ‘Up! Up!’
Her head is swimming too much for her to understand his meaning. She doesn’t realize that she hasn’t moved far enough out of range.
The Sídhe leaps straight at her, knocking her aside, and once again a tongue that tried to take her captures one of the fair folk in her place. But before he can be yanked away from her, she grabs hold of his fine wrists, anchoring her feet around a few rocks.
‘It is a big tree,’ the Sídhe tells her gently. He is right. It is a monster, several metres taller than any of the others, its tongue as wide as the red carpet that used to usher celebrities into one paradise or another in the world of her parents. It wraps right around the man’s torso and gives him a python squeeze strong enough to pop ribs like matchsticks.
She gazes into her saviour’s eyes and finds both joy and pain there. Why do we hate them? she wonders. She knows the answer, of course, just not in those few seconds, not when so many heroes of the enemy have died in her stead.
‘You are not strong enough for this place,’ he whispers as the tongue gets a tighter grip and his whole torso shrinks and creaks. Blood dribbles from between his perfect lips. ‘Most of the day remains, but … urgh … ha ha! Urgh … But you can leave here earlier if you … if you find the exact place you came in … Oh, Danú! The glory!’
He yanks himself free of her grip and disappears as fast as a frog-caught fly. And she’s alone, weeping for those who would make her kind extinct. But the tears don’t stop her crawling back the way she came. ‘You can leave earlier,’ her saviour said. Earlier. No need to spend a full day. Can that be right?
For all their murderous ways, nobody thinks of the Sídhe as liars. And isn’t this just what the ambassador promised? That she would return home alive?
Angela stops, breathing hard, her naked body crusted with blood and tree saliva. Should she have allowed herself to die back there? It would mean not one but two broken promises for the Sídhe, and wasn’t that a good thing for the future of the Nation? And what about Nessa? Angela’s survival will somehow allow the enemy to threaten that nice girl in some way.
But then she thinks of the red tongues. Of the horrible gullets. Of the writhing lumps, slowly digesting in the bone-white trunks. And she weeps with the horror of what almost happened to her. She will help Nessa any way she can. Yes, she will. But not that way. She will help by living.
‘On your feet, Fonseca.’
Her mam, God rest her, used to speak to herself in exactly the same way, and it’s always her voice Angela hears when she orders herself about. It helps. It gets her upright so that she can follow her own tracks and those of her rescuers across the mud. She is puzzled at first, for the little hill she rolled off when she first arrived in the Grey Land has doubled in size. But as she approaches she sees that the compact earth has been replaced by massive piles of loose soil, as though an entire army has been digging here, and indeed, when she clambers over the spoils, she finds that her original little hill has been replaced by a narrow tunnel leading down into total darkness.
‘You can leave here earlier,’ she’s been told, ‘if you find the exact place you came in …’ And here, in the exact place, is a tunnel.
Who dug it in the short time she’s been away? They must still be down there, still digging. But why are no more spoils coming up to the surface then?
She ponders staying here to wait out the rest of her day in the Grey Land, but in the distance a pair of lionsized creatures are loping towards her. She hasn’t the strength to take on a fly right now, and there’s no way she can hide with the trail of blood she’s left behind her, so down she goes, Angela Fonseca, into the smothering dark.
Far better had she faced the lions.
The Great Slaugh
ter
It’s morning. Anto squeezes into a rickety bus with forty-three men and eight women. The interior stinks of fried food and when fumes shoot out the back they obscure the other dozen members of the North Leinster Infestation Squad who’ll be taking the surviving truck.
All around him, everybody speculates about why they’re being sent to the far end of the country. Never before have all the island’s infestation squads gathered together, and more than once along the road they cross paths with ragtag convoys heading in the same direction. Anto loves the mascots they paint on their trucks. He spots horned pigs, cows with spider’s legs, a whole variety of unnatural animals that make the toothy red-eyed stag of his own new comrades look positively tame.
‘I hear the Sídhe have found a way in,’ Ryan says. ‘I hear that’s what it’s about. An invasion.’
Anto shudders. He knows what this means. ‘They’ve found another king,’ he says.
‘A what, lad? A king? We have no kings in this country.’
‘But … but we used to. Back when the treaty was made that kept the Sídhe there. In that place. We had dozens of kingdoms on the island. Maybe hundreds. The Sídhe just need a traitor to make himself ruler of one of them so the treaty can be revoked.’
Even now Anto finds it hard to believe that some human could be ruthless enough to set the enemy loose. Certainly under the pain of torture a person might promise anything, but afterwards, to actually go ahead with it, they would have to be an utter monster.
‘Ha!’ says Ryan. ‘Is that so? Well, I hope that treaty has been revoked because I can’t wait!’
‘You can’t?’ Anto asks. ‘Aren’t … aren’t you afraid?’ He and Ryan have both felt the touch of the enemy’s hands. Even the thought of it …
Ryan guesses what’s on the boy’s mind, but he just grins. ‘Listen, lad, here’s the thing. Those sour udders have been gone two thousand years or more. They’ve missed out on a few bits and pieces, yeah? Those hands of theirs might be dangerous, but they can’t fire seven hundred rounds a minute like we can!’
‘Your gun can hold seven hundred rounds?’
‘Well, ha ha, no. More like thirty, but you get the point, right? And they’ll get it too, believe me, lad. Thirty rounds will be more than enough.’
Enough for what? Anto wonders. He remembers the thud of bullets into the body of the poor bull, and he has felt bones crunch against the massive knuckles of his left hand. He’s struggling to accept any of that as a good thing. And yet a part of him thrills at the thought. As though it wants to hurt and smash.
‘Uh, Ryan … Do you think when the Sídhe caught you in the Grey Land, when they touched you …?’
‘Lad?’
‘Do you think it made you more … violent?’
Ryan shrugs and winces as his wing stubs brush the seat behind him. ‘Maybe it did. Or maybe it was the loss of three children that did it to me.”
‘I’m … I’m sorry.’
‘Thanks, lad. Let me just say this though, to answer your question. Plenty come back from the Grey Land with a taste for blood. But any kind of horror will do that for you. It takes decades to breed a war out of a people that went through it.’
Anto nods unhappily.
Still, though. Still. If the Sídhe could be defeated here, once and for all, there’d be no need to keep Nessa in prison any longer, would there? The Call would stop for ever. The Nation would be saved!
He can see it in his mind’s eye, like one of those movies with dancing in the streets and fireworks. He imagines Nessa, hand in hand with him. A kiss of shared excitement while, all around, soldiers grin at the hopeless, lovestruck teens. Lovestruck. Yes, that’s the word and that’s the truth too!
Spirits are high as the bus crawls along past overgrown houses and bare-branched trees. Somebody starts singing the drunken-nights song and while Anto joins in with the chorus his eyes track the long line of vehicles taking soldiers north. He can’t help feeling afraid, because when has the crumbling state of Ireland ever made such an effort before? And is there a link with Nessa’s disappearance? It seems like such a coincidence that she should be gone at the same time as this.
He distracts himself by staring out the window: at the overgrown houses and the icy fields; at untamed woodlands and Norman towers. Who lived in all these places? Will they ever be homes again?
The column trundles on.
The army has barely made it into County Leitrim, when Corless, near the front of the bus, interrupts the singing to say, ‘Will you look at that? That certainly wasn’t there when I was on my way to my father’s funeral …’
‘What’s he on about?’ Ryan wants to know. But Anto, who has often travelled this way to school, immediately spots it. The road rises here with views of rich fields on all sides. Why is there a hill now just to the north? A new hill. Warm muck covers all two storeys of it and there’s not so much as a sapling growing there, nor a single blade of grass. And where is the layer of frost that covers everything else?
The driver, a tall, skeletal man, brings the bus to a stop, ignoring the angry horns of the vehicles behind.
‘Everybody out,’ Karim says. Her voice is quiet. As calm as somebody suggesting a Sunday walk. ‘Get the weapons down.’
And then the hill disintegrates. Soil explodes in all directions, blackening the windows, cracking glass, rocking the bus so that Anto falls hard against Ryan.
They tumble outside, through front door and back, but once on the road all they can do is stare slack-jawed at the thing that was hiding under the hill, that was the hill. Nobody can look away.
The monster stands the height of a building. The four seemingly delicate, many-jointed limbs that support it must each be as thick as a dozen welded girders. But it’s human beings that make up the entirety of its flesh. Thousands of them melted together, all still alive, all moaning and screaming and begging.
Right at the top, a tiny distant Sídhe balances. Anto sees it point at the slow-moving vehicles a hundred metres ahead of him, and at this command its terrible mount rushes for the road.
Two steps suffice to reach the convoy. The first of its ‘feet’ flattens a bus. A truck is delicately kicked, barely a tap it seems from this distance, but it’s enough to send the vehicle flying off into the far fields.
‘Shoot!’ Karim screams. ‘Shoot that thing!’ Her voice wakes the infestation squad from their trance. They’re used to monsters, are they not? Of all the Nation’s defenders, this fight couldn’t have fallen to a better group. They kneel and point and fire. A hail of bullets tears into the monster’s legs and the underside of its torso. Many of the individual men and women that make up the creature’s body die in horrific explosions of blood. Some are ‘merely’ wounded, their screams horrible, their agonized writhing obvious, as the Sídhe driver, having destroyed a dozen irreplaceable trucks, urges his mount around to face his assailants.
Karim grabs Anto by his normal, right, wrist. ‘Get off the road, child. You don’t belong. Go!’
He obeys at once, for he has no gun and knows himself to be useless here. And he’s afraid too, no doubt about that. But if there’s one good thing the survival schools of Ireland have taught the young, it’s that cowardice bears no shame. Above all, you must stay alive. Leave your guilty feelings for the counsellors to deal with after you make it home.
He has barely scrambled over a ditch and into the gorse bushes when the creature arrives. So large is it that it can’t fit all four limbs onto the road, and one stamps down mere metres from where he crouches in the muck. Everybody who made up the base of that leg is dead, squashed against the frozen earth. Others have been shot by the infestation squad: men and women, little boys and girls, their bodies hanging limp like pieces of flayed skin. But none of that is the worst. What horrifies Anto are the agonized looks on the faces of the living. Every one of them moans and cries. So many are weeping that, with the spider’s great body hanging overhead, Anto is bathed in a salty mist of tears and blood.
The gunfire has intensified. One of the legs begins to wobble, but it’s not enough to save the squad, for the limb nearest Anto sweeps past him, rips through the gorse to crash into the men and women on the road. A dozen are gone in a heartbeat. The return sweep scatters twenty more. Byrne is down. Ryan drags him away. Karim and Ellie are firing their weapons straight up into the belly. The captain screams what might be an order to retreat just as the leg comes back and flattens him.
The squad dissolves in panic.
But Karim is still there, in the very centre of the road, her whole face a snarl. She keeps firing and reloading, even as one of the feet smashes down right beside her.
The Sídhe up top goads his mount along the road to where the next few units are already abandoning their vehicles and running for their lives.
‘Shoot the rider!’ cries Karim. ‘Somebody shoot him!’ She’s trying herself, but the enemy has lain down flat in the middle of his monster’s back and nobody can hit him from here. The beast charges the unfortunate units behind.
The infestation squad regroups.
‘Grenades,’ Karim says. In the heat of the moment, her accent had slipped, but it’s right back now. ‘If we can cut even one of those legs, the whole thing will fall. Then we’ll have a jolly time with the scoundrel on top.’
They jog back down the road, digging into pockets and bandoliers. Anto is following along for some reason. He can’t help himself. They hop over bodies and run around the crushed wreckage of a tractor. The supply trailer it was pulling has overturned so that tins of food are rolling everywhere, and Anto thinks there can’t be a single truck left to the Irish army. Maybe the army itself is gone by now, lost in one battle. The thought sickens him. He’s struggling to keep up with the soldiers, for although he has a big advantage in age, no-one else has to carry half their own weight in the form of a Sídhe-twisted limb.
The Invasion Page 7
