The Invasion

by Peadar O'Guilin

‘By Crom!’ mutters Liz Sweeney, stunned. Aoife can only stare, her heart fluttering in panic. What Ms Breen is saying is that the enemy has gotten between them and Dublin. The students are trapped behind enemy lines.

  ‘Miss?’ Aoife is surprised to hear herself speak. So is Liz Sweeney, obviously, who hisses her disapproval.

  ‘What is it, Aoife? We don’t have much time for questions. We need to organize our escape now.’

  ‘That’s just it, miss,’ Aoife says. ‘I was wondering … I …’ She takes a deep breath, pushing against the impatience she sees on Ms Breen’s face and her own nerves. ‘I was wondering if some of us could take the … the pills.’

  A moment of silence follows her comments, with wide eyes staring at her, and yes … at least one of the Year 4s, Lada, dares to nod in agreement.

  ‘I knew it!’ says Liz Sweeney. ‘You dirty coward. You spear-licking mutton waste.’

  ‘Enough!’ says Alanna Breen. ‘That’s enough. No, Aoife. We need to think about the Nation. We need to live for it, and that’s exactly what we’re going to do. I know all of you. Your hidden strengths. Any one of you might grow up to become the saviour of our people. Is that not so?’

  Nabil nods. ‘And don’t worry, Aoife, all right?’ His eyes are the deepest brown she has ever seen. They hold hers long enough to remind her that this man will die before he will let anyone hurt her.

  ‘All right,’ she whispers back. She is trembling all over. Somehow, speaking up in front of a crowd has scared her every bit as much as the Sídhe.

  It all goes quickly after that. Everybody is made to eat, regardless of their nerves. Warm clothing is found, and Miss Sheng comes in before dark with the news: ‘The road is clear. I hear mortars firing to the southeast. It probably has them distracted.’ She’s a skinny, elderly woman with the longest neck Aoife has ever seen. But she’s far from fragile and is said to have smashed several of the enemy with well-thrown rocks during the fighting before Christmas.

  Taaft looks excited. ‘I didn’t get my fill of killing ’em last time,’ she says. ‘I’m ready for another go, but listen up. The rest of you gotta run, OK? No talking. Nothing. Me and the French frog,’ by which she seems to mean Nabil, who scowls at her, ‘we do all the shooting and talking. You just have to obey orders and run where we tell you. We’re going right down to the main road. Sheng will be in the front to make sure there’s nothing waiting for us. Slow jog all the way.’

  She’s not expecting questions, but she gets one from Mitch Cohen. He’s twelve years old, but barely taller than Bronagh Glynn in Year 1. His parents spoke only Sídhe to him and he struggles with English a bit. ‘What if for us something is waiting?’ he asks.

  ‘We got to take our chances, kid, while they’re distracted with the army. We’ll win this. We’re the ones with the guns, remember. You and I just got to get out of the way until the regulars arrive.’

  And out they go, running two by two in total silence, except for Alanna Breen and Mr Hickey, who both have bicycles. Ms Sheng has a bike too, and has gone on ahead.

  It’s one in the afternoon, but clouds are moving in over the watery sun. Aoife is running alongside Lada Bartoff, but Liz Sweeney muscles her way in, presumably so the two Year 5s can keep ‘sticking together’.

  This is madness, Aoife thinks. Her bare feet slap down on the rumpled, icy surface of the road. Trees loom to either side; they could contain any number of ambushes, any number of snake things like the one that got Lena. She shudders, missing a step and only Liz Sweeney’s sure fist saves her from a tumble.

  ‘Idiot,’ mutters the other girl.

  They don’t see a single bird. No foxes or hares or anything else. Aoife is sick with worry so that the sandwich she ate earlier is a restless hot ball in her stomach.

  In front of her, Lada Bartoff comes to a sudden halt and Aoife runs into the back of her. Everybody else stands stock still, while Nabil, at the front of the column, raises a fist to keep them that way, his dark handsome face straining to see what lies ahead.

  Aoife should be looking down the road too, but she’s distracted by a fluttering in the trees. The crows. The crows are here after all! And she feels such relief to see those dark little shapes settling on to the branches nearby. She alone seems to care enough to look up at them … and she convulses, she can’t help it. Her jaw clenches, biting her own tongue bloody. Because, on the nearest branch, a face is staring back at her, that of a tiny old woman moulded on to a birdlike body. But it’s not a bird at all. It clutches its perch with full-sized human fingers that emerge from a skirt of black feathers. Even these have been made of human skin, each one individually crafted by loving, cruel hands. The creature grins, as do a dozen others that surround it.

  Before Aoife can say a word, Ms Sheng comes flying back towards them on her bike. Fifty-five years of life have left her looking like a top athlete, and of all the staff, Aoife has always considered her the most mentally stable.

  She leans low over the handlebars, threads of grey hair streaming out behind. Ms Sheng is a woman who cycles every day and knows the potholes and bumps of this road like she knows her own face. But even thirty years before, at her peak, when the roads of her Kilkenny home were as smooth as glass, she never moved so fast as she is doing now.

  It’s not going to be enough.

  Other dark figures round the corner behind her. They come on horseback, all of them shouting who knows what. It doesn’t matter because they’re moving at a fierce gallop, weapons of some kind raised above their heads.

  ‘Get off the road!’ Nabil cries.

  The first of the horsemen catches up with Ms Sheng. A weapon swings, and even at this distance, her blood is the reddest thing Aoife has ever seen.

  Then Taaft has Aoife by the shoulder and is shoving her towards the nearby trees. ‘Get off the road, moron! Off! You too, Krishnan, you long string of crap!’

  Everybody else is already leaping into the undergrowth. Lada and Bronagh, Mitch Cohen and Bianconi. None of them wastes a second looking backwards, but Aoife can’t help herself.

  ‘I’m so sorry!’ a voice cries. It’s one of the riders, Ms Sheng’s murderer, and she sees now that it is a man – or rather two. One has been twisted into a headless horse by the Sídhe. His face has been moved down to the chest. The eyes are mad, and the tortured mouth exhales clouds of mist with every breath. Another man – the ‘rider’ – grows out of his back. This one has swords of sharpened bone instead of hands and the face of a kindly farmer. ‘I can’t help myself!’ he cries. ‘Run! Don’t let us catch you!’

  Aoife does. Finally. She’s the last of the panicked students. A gun goes off – Nabil’s probably. The shots are calm and steady, but already a number of the centaurs have left the road too, heedless of brambles, smashing through the skirts of giant rhododendrons.

  ‘There’s a girl here! A girl!’

  Above Aoife’s head is the tiny crow-woman she saw earlier.

  ‘She’s a slow one! Come and get her!’

  ‘Leave me alone!’ Aoife shouts.

  ‘Not until I’ve fed on your tongue!’

  Aoife runs in among trees. She cries out when something grabs her coat, but it’s only a thorn and she tears herself free, plunging after the others as more shots come from the direction of the road and the crow-woman cackles above her head.

  She stumbles into a clearing, to find Lada Bartoff picking Mitch Cohen up off the ground. Both look up in terror at Aoife’s arrival, but they should have been looking the other way. A centaur bursts through the foliage.

  ‘I don’t mean it!’ he wails and his left sword hand cleaves into Lada’s shoulder and down as far as her belly. ‘Oh, no! I’ve killed somebody else! Oh, no!’ He tries to shake the body off his weapon, but he can’t.

  His ‘mount’ prances about, as though panicked, and any moment now Mitch could get one of the clawed human feet that serve the creature as hooves in his neck.

  Aoife plunges forward and drags him free. ‘Come on, come on.
’ And together they push in under a huge spruce.

  The forest is full of screams of students, the shouted apologies of centaurs and tiny little voices that cry, ‘There’s one here! Don’t miss this one! Oh, what a feast!’

  Aoife is stumbling through the woods. Branches slap her in the face. She has lost her hold on Mitch’s skinny wrist and is no longer even sure where the road is. And then, as though parting curtains, she pushes aside the branches of a fir to see one of the woodland paths ahead of her.

  ‘Oh, God!’ says a voice. ‘I’m ever so sorry!’

  One of the centaurs is out there, stalking somebody. The tortured lower mouth on the ‘horse’s’ chest drools. The upper man’s torso gleams with sweat and the kindly face grimaces in genuine sadness. ‘They’re making me do this, don’t you see?’

  Nevertheless, the sickles of sharpened bone that serve the creature as hands drip with gore.

  Before him, a long branch in her hand, stands Liz Sweeney. The girl is breathing like somebody who has run a marathon, her mouth wide, gulping in the air. She doesn’t look afraid though, not even slightly. With her back straight, her eyes narrowed, she is the very image of Macha, goddess of battle.

  ‘Oh,’ the centaur says, stepping closer. ‘It’s good you defend yourself. I hope you win!’

  One of his blades slices through the air and cuts her branch in half. The other whistles in towards the girl’s neck. But she’s gone, rolling away and back on her feet in an instant to strike the ‘horse’s’ back with the remains of the branch.

  The lower mouth whines and spins around to follow Liz Sweeney. She whacks it again. ‘Oh, don’t anger my mount! Don’t be cruel! It can’t help itself!’

  The girl leaps back before the sweeping blades, but there’s a stone waiting just behind her and down she goes. Clawed hooves dance forward. Liz Sweeney rolls, as the earth is stabbed behind her hard enough to send stones skipping. She fetches up against a rotting log with nowhere else to go.

  Aoife has no memory of picking up the rock, but when she brings it down on the horse’s spine, something snaps and the lower mouth screeches. The hindlegs collapse on to the path.

  ‘Oh, no!’ cries the upper body. The blades reach back for Aoife, but she throws herself out of the way, as her fit young body suddenly remembers four years of training.

  ‘Oh, dear,’ says the man’s torso. The whole creature has rolled over on its side. ‘I’m so glad you’re getting away. Honestly … but did you have to hurt my poor mount? Was that so necessary?’ The blades of bone keep slashing in Aoife’s direction, but they can’t touch her.

  ‘Come on then,’ says Liz Sweeney, ‘you waste of space. Come on.’

  Come on where? A gap in the trees allows Aoife to see all the way back to the road. More centaurs, each one apologizing for what they’re about to do, are gathering to take Nabil down. Lovely, kind Nabil.

  They should have me instead.

  Aoife feels exhausted, her senses overwhelmed by the sounds of violence; by the scent of pine and the bulge of roots against the toughened soles of her feet. She is running in the wrong direction, following Liz Sweeney towards her death.

  But then, a great bang drives both girls to their knees. A cloud of dust engulfs the monsters, and when it clears they have been replaced by a mass of dead and bleeding flesh.

  ‘Was that …?’ Aoife’s ears are ringing, her vision a blur. ‘Was that a … a bomb?’

  Liz Sweeney grins and rises again, but at least three of the monsters remain alive.

  ‘We have to get out of here!’ cries Aoife. ‘Ms Breen would want us to …’

  And then she sees him: a boy standing right in the middle of the group of centaurs. He snarls like an animal, tall and dark-haired, his left arm a ridiculous lump of muscle. It’s Anthony Lawlor! Anto! Where on earth did he come from?

  It doesn’t matter. The boy grabs one of the creatures by the hindleg – ‘I deserve it,’ it screams – and he swings it like a club until the remaining centaurs lie dead.

  Then all is quiet. A few of the horrible birdwomen look down from the branches, but even they keep the peace, shocked perhaps, by what they have just witnessed.

  It’s carnage on the road. Bodies lie everywhere, friend and foe alike. Bianconi is unconscious. Mr Healy’s legs peep out from beneath a butchered ‘horse’ and Taaft just stands grinning at all of it. Finally the sergeant spots the two girls.

  ‘What?’ she shouts, although they haven’t opened their mouths. ‘Can’t hear a word you’re saying. Kid had a grenade. Can you believe it?’ Blood spatters the sergeant’s face, none of it hers.

  Anto trembles amidst the bodies of those he has killed, but nobody approaches him, as if he’s no different from any other creation of the Sídhe; as if he might strike at them. But finally he looks up, and it’s Aoife’s eye he catches.

  ‘I came … I want … I want to speak to Ms Breen.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ says Nabil, putting down his weapon. ‘She has been injured. She may not have much time left.’

  Death of a Scholar

  Alanna Breen can’t move her legs. In the branches up beyond Anto’s head, she can see one of the crow-women peeking from behind an abandoned nest. It licks its lips, slowly, deliberately. One wing rubs at where its belly must be.

  Alanna doesn’t care. She’s resting on the boy’s lap. She knows her remaining hours can be counted on one hand. She remembers another boy long ago, his face twisted in spite. ‘You’ll never be a mother! Look at you! The squashed, ugly head on ya!’

  But he was wrong, whatever he called himself. She’s been mother to hundreds. She moulded them more than any biological parent and shepherded them through the most terrifying days of their lives.

  She knows them all by name, never forgets them. Rarely feels anything less than love, and even the monsters like Conor, she pities rather than hates.

  Her breath hitches. Oh, lord, it hurts! A bubble forms at the side of her mouth. Blood, maybe. She wouldn’t look, even if she could. When Anto came and lifted her up, she saw the state of her bike and knows her poor body won’t be any better.

  She wants to moan with the pain, but she’s not going to do that. Her job is to be strong for the children, and she’ll keep working right up until the very last beat of her heart.

  Poor Anto, she thinks. He’s in pain too, this child of hers. She sees how his eyes avoid the carnage he created. He’s a vegetarian, isn’t he? He was the one who wouldn’t even kill the animals on pig day. How much worse to have murdered – as he probably sees it – the intelligent, suffering centaurs. The victims of the Sídhe.

  ‘It’s all right,’ she tells him. She wants to pat his hand, but her own won’t move. She knows why he’s here. It distresses her that her last moments on God’s green earth must be spent hurting him further, but the truth will serve him better in the long run.

  ‘I’m looking for Nessa,’ he says. ‘I … I know she’s not here but …’ His face twists, trying to hide the hope he feels, but you can’t keep such a feeling from your own mother, can you? Your real mother.

  Alanna Breen, known to her students as ‘the Turkey’ or ‘Gobbler’, or a hundred other terms of abuse, wants nothing more now than to slip away. She has worked so hard! But she summons the will, as she has always done, to do the right thing.

  ‘She’s gone, boy. I’m sorry … Accused of betrayal. Out … out in a boat …’

  Anto feels the old woman die. It’s early afternoon in winter. He crouches on a freezing road covered in the bodies of dead children and the monsters shot by Nabil and Taaft, along with the ones he blew to bits himself. He could have killed one of his own side with his carelessness. But, just as happened the first time he used a grenade, his giant arm did exactly the right thing. Maybe he can’t miss now. Or maybe it’s beginner’s luck and the next time it will go off in his hands.

  His new limb doesn’t care. Unlike Anto himself, it comes from the Grey Land and it likes to kill. That’s what it seems like to hi
m.

  ‘Give her over, kid,’ says Taaft, her English harsh after the formal elegance of Ms Breen’s Sídhe. The principal’s voice will never be heard again. He should mourn for her, the famous scholar. The shepherd that brought so many through hell.

  ‘Give her over, I said.’

  Taaft takes the body away and a darker pair of hands helps Anto to his feet. Nabil.

  ‘You all right, my friend?’

  He’s not. He’s not all right. It’s not because of the death he’s just witnessed, or the giant made entirely of human beings that he helped to destroy yesterday. Anto has seen the Grey Land, after all. His imagination has no more unexplored dark corners.

  Except for one.

  Nessa is gone. Not dead! Dead is easy, as any student of a survival college can tell you. The bells ring. You weep, yet you make damn sure you get up again afterwards. The problem is that Nessa will live on, her name on everybody’s lips as a traitor. It’s a bitter, terrible thing.

  And she may live on in another way too: as a centaur sent to kill; as one of the nasty whispering crows in the trees above. His knees tremble under the enormous weight of his arm. His throat feels thick, his stomach a rock.

  ‘But she didn’t even do it!’ he cries.

  ‘I know, my friend,’ says Nabil quietly.

  ‘She isn’t a traitor. They don’t know her like I do. The guards didn’t even ask me! They just put me out of the way in case I’d cause trouble.’ He’s shuddering now, his whole body an engine of sobs and snot. ‘She couldn’t have betrayed us! She didn’t!’

  But in his soul a voice whispers, She would do anything to survive. Conor for all his strength couldn’t resist the Sídhe. Nor Melanie. Nobody could. And how can Anto explain what Cassidy said to him? That thing the prison guards overheard, about how the Sídhe sacrificed themselves to protect Nessa?

  He shakes his head, angry now, furious. He jerks himself free of Nabil’s kind hands. ‘I can get her!’ he cries. ‘I’ll take a boat. I’ll find her in the Grey Land and bring her back!’