by Tom Deitz
Chapter X: . . . And Later
Little Billy looked up at David, who slumped beside him in the white-walled waiting room of the Enotah County Hospital. “Will Uncle Dale die?” he asked earnestly.
A lot of people were jammed up against the walls around the waiting room, but David didn’t know any of them, nor care to just then. He wished they were all somewhere else—or that he was; he was feeling very alone just then. It was mid-afternoon, and his parents had not yet returned from securing things at Uncle Dale’s farm; Liz had stayed for a while after they had first brought the old man in, but then she had had to leave. Alec had phoned, but there was nothing to tell him. Nobody knew anything.
“Will Uncle Dale die, Davy?” Little Billy asked again, tugging insistently on David’s sleeve.
“I don’t know,” David growled back, so harshly that Little Billy cowered down into his shirt collar. “I hope not,” he added more softly, reaching over to ruffle his brother’s hair, feeling how soft it was, realizing suddenly what a neat kid Little Billy was. And then more deeply in the pit of his stomach rose the fear that had engulfed him after the Faery boy had left, the fear that the same fate might await all the people he cared about. David found himself clenching his fists.
A brown-haired nurse came out of the room into which they had taken Uncle Dale.
“Nurse?” David called shyly, looking up.
The woman glanced down irritably, a little taken aback by the dirty hiking togs David still wore. “Yes?” she asked sharply.
“My uncle—Dale Sullivan—will he be all right?”
The nurse grimaced. “He’s had a stroke, we think, but Doctor Nesheim has him stabilized. He won’t get any worse at least. But he oughta know better’n to be running ’round in the woods at his age. ’Course it coulda been worse, coulda been a heart attack—but he still oughta know better.” She frowned offhandedly at David, who felt himself cringe under the combination of her gaze and his own guilt. “Good thing you were with him, though,” she added, before continuing down the corridor.
“Can I go see him?” David shouted after her.
“Not yet,” she called back, still moving. “Maybe later.”
David slumped back in his chair, folded his arms on his chest, and tried to sleep. He wished he had something interesting to read, but he had already exhausted the supply of outdated magazines in the reading room, and had hardly been in a position to snag anything at home before the trip to the hospital. Sleep was thus the only way he could think of to speed the time until he found out something about Uncle Dale’s condition, or at least until his parents returned.
Two hours passed before a friendlier nurse—Talbot was the name on her plastic badge—let David in to see Uncle Dale. His parents still had not returned, and he found himself suddenly alone in the hospital room with the old man. Uncle Dale lay propped up in bed, tubes running out of his nose, a bottle of some nameless clear fluid set up leading to needles taped into his arms. He was under heavy sedation, probably had lost the use of his right side, the doctor had said. The real fear, though, was that knowing he was half paralyzed, he’d just give up and will himself to die. That didn’t sound like Uncle Dale to David, but, then, he didn’t know as much about his uncle as he had thought. One thing for sure, though, David thought, I’ll bet he never expected to die of elf-stroke.
Uncle Dale was breathing more or less evenly, but his face had a sort of cold pallor to it, and age lay heavy upon him. Cautiously, David reached over and pulled down the covers. Curiosity had gotten the best of him; he had to know something.
David worked the hospital gown down on the side where he knew the elf-arrow had struck, right in the triangle below the outer end of the collar bone. He noticed the pale, flabby skin, the stringy muscles like old ropes, the stray coarse hairs, but look though he would, he could find no wound. Somehow, though, he knew the damage was still there, invisible to mortal eyes and machines.
David kept straining his eyes, hoping to conjure the Sight, and was finally rewarded by the faintest glimpse of a pale red X-shaped mark exactly where he was looking for it: in the outer point of the depression below the collar bone. He stared at it foolishly. There was nothing he could do. Help would have to come from some unorthodox direction, because no human doctor could cure an elven wound.
Abruptly a heavy arm fell across his shoulder. “We’re back,” came Big Billy’s voice behind him. “Mama and me’ll stay here tonight; you take Little Billy and go on home. We’ll keep you posted.”
David nodded reluctantly and shuffled out of the room, noticing in the hallway window outside that the promised rain had begun.
The glass in David’s bedroom window rattled, struck by a gentle wind, and he jumped, alarmed, as the sound brought him fully awake. He had been dreaming of the Sidhe, and now found himself trying to make sense of what Oisin had said, of what that other boy had told him.
They were perilous, David knew, and some of them had it in for him—but still, they were not really evil by their own standards. He could even understand how they felt, a little; he felt the same way about the people who moved into the mountains from Atlanta and Florida, putting up their summer homes on the high places, spoiling things for the natives who didn’t want an A-frame on every mountaintop but preferred inviolate wilderness where a man could walk for hours and not see another house or another person.
It was crazy, he knew, considering what he’d been through, but a part of him still wanted to watch the Sidhe ride again. They were so beautiful, so heart-breakingly beautiful . . . if he could only watch without being seen, see them just once more astride their long-limbed horses: black and silver, gold and frosty gray; see them in their silks and velvets and fine wool: wine-red and midnight-blue, forest-green and amber; hear the rustling of their mail or the bells ringing on their clothing; see their beautiful faces, cold and remote; see those fair women with hawks on their shoulders and braided hair hanging to their knees, and the clean-faced warriors with their sharp spears and silver armor; see their ghost-thin greyhounds or their great hunting dogs that were first cousin to wolves; and see those banners that floated above them unfurled by no wind of the mortal World.
One banner in particular he remembered, borne at the head of the procession: Long and narrow, maybe thirty feet long, and held aloft on a staff of ivory, it had been made of silk, or at least something as soft and shiny, red as sunrise, cut at its trailing edge into flickering flamelike dags so tenuous they might have been flames, and worked near the staff with the stylized image of the sun—a sun in splendor, he recalled. But this one glowed of its own light, its alternating straight and curved rays shrinking and expanding, rotating in the figures of some obscure dance in praise of fire.
The wind rattled the window again, and a patter of rain sounded on the roof. He was not at all sleepy, he realized, as he got up, turned on the light, and settled himself to rereading Paradise Lost.
So it was that David was still awake when he heard Little Billy talking quietly in his bedroom across the hall. He frowned, climbed wearily out of bed, and slipped into the hallway, to pause by the closed door to his brother’s room. He could hear the little boy inside, talking as if in his sleep, but couldn’t quite make out what he was saying. Gently David opened the door and peeked inside.
Little Billy was kneeling on his bed, peering out the window, and as he watched, David could hear him saying, “But I can’t let you in; we can’t have dogs in the house. My mama won’t allow ’em.”
“Come outside, then,” said a voice from beyond the window.
“I can’t; I’m not allowed to go outside at night, and Davy told me special not to go outside tonight.”
“Your brother is a fool,” said the voice.
David could contain himself no longer. He rushed into the darkened room, lunged toward the window, stared out above Little Billy’s head—and saw the shape of a huge black dog glaring back at him: a shaggy black dog with its feet on the sill, and its great black nose nea
rly touching—but not touching—the window screen. Its eyes were red as coals—a familiar red. The logical part of David’s mind told him that the ledge was at least seven feet off the ground. But then he recognized the voice: Ailill, his enemy.
The dog howled and growled through bared teeth. David caught a glimpse of fabulously long fangs and a black tongue and a red throat from which a small flame seemed to issue; and then it howled again and leapt away into the yard. David watched as it ran, wolflike, toward the road up the mountain. As it disappeared into the obscuring gray drizzle, he thought he saw it joined—and in none too friendly a fashion—by another dog, a white dog. David glanced nervously down at his little brother, who still knelt beside him gazing quietly—too quietly—out the window.
“You saw that?” David asked incredulously. “Tell me what you saw, Little Billy, tell me what you remember.”
Little Billy turned a white, tear-stained face toward David, a face so white and wracked with fear that David almost cried out.
David took his brother by the shoulders and held him firmly. “Look at me, Little Billy. It’s me, Davy. Now tell me what you saw. I’ll believe you, don’t worry.”
“I don’t know, Davy,” Little Billy sobbed. “I woke up and saw these red lights shinin’ in the window, and I got scared and hid under the covers. But then I heard a voice sayin’ not to be afraid, and I looked out again and saw they were still there, but it was the eyes of this big black dog, and I got scared again, ’cause dogs can’t talk. Only this one was, and I heard it say that it wasn’t just any old dog, that it was a magic dog and would make me magic, too, if I’d come with it, and that I wouldn’t ever have to go to school, but could do whatever I wanted to do, and could play all the time. And I said I couldn’t do that unless Ma and Pa said I could, and it told me not to ask, ’cause if I wanted to go, I had to go tonight.”
“Did it ask you to let it in?”
“Yeah, and I told it we couldn’t have animals in the house.”
David couldn’t help but smile at this simple but effective logic. He wrapped his arms around Little Billy and held him tight.
“You did fine, kid. You did real good.”
Little Billy was shaking convulsively, wracked with sobs, but David held him firm. “Tell you what,” said David, “you can sleep with me tonight. I don’t think I want to be alone either.”
Interlude: In Tir-Nan-Og
(high summer)
Fionchadd was shooting pomegranates out of his wyvern’s mouth when Ailill finally found him practicing archery in the Court of the Kraken. He stepped into the shadow of a rough-hewn pillar and for a moment watched his son unobserved. Fionchadd was almost full-grown now, but still a long way from the sort of manhood Ailill had hoped to see him achieve. More of that Annwyn blood, Ailill thought. I should never have acknowledged him. . . . Still, the lad is a skillful archer, he conceded, noting the boy’s confident stance, the purposeful tension of the bare arms revealed by the simple blue-and-white-checked tunic.
Fionchadd drew to the cheek and released. The arrow flew true to its mark, striking dead center in the rough red globe which Dylan held delicately in his needle-toothed beak. But instead of piercing the pomegranate and bearing it away, the arrow was stopped in mid-flight, as, with exquisite timing, the creature snapped its jaws shut to trap both fruit and shaft. The wyvern staggered under the impact but did not lose its footing. A loud crack and the drooping of the white fletching marked the final closure of its beak. Twin trails of red juice trickled across the silver scales to drip in a starfish-shaped puddle at the suckered tip of a mosaic kraken arm that curled by the wyvern’s taloned feet. Balancing precariously on one elegant claw, the creature delicately extracted the arrow halves with the other. It swallowed once, the fruit a visible lump in its supple neck, then spread its wings and glided somewhat awkwardly forward to receive another from its master.
“You have become a fine archer,” Ailill said, emerging from the shadows where he stood.
The boy’s head snapped up, his expression clouding when he recognized his father. Dylan scurried behind him, to peer uncertainly from beneath the dark blue fringe of the boy’s tunic.
“I don’t like being spied upon,” the boy snapped.
“Then you should use the Power.”
“Why? Yours is stronger, so there’s no point there; and in the case of anybody else, there’s no need.” Fionchadd fumbled in his quiver for another arrow. “But you spy on everyone, don’t you?”
“Very nearly—but, then, everyone spies on me. Silverhand has been following me like a shadow.”
“I understand you have been in the Lands of Men again,” Fionchadd said as he nocked the arrow and drew experimental aim on a distant squirrel. “Did he follow you there?”
Ailill nodded sagely. “Oh, yes, there have been more white animals than I can count. But there is little he can do to stop me.”
The boy took aim. “That you know of.”
Ailill’s nostrils flared. “Sometimes I doubt your loyalty to me.”
His son did not reply.
“Fionchadd?”
The boy lowered the bow and glared at his father. “Sometimes I doubt your loyalty to anyone at all—except yourself.”
“Those words are not good ones for you to say.”
“Nevertheless, they are mine. They are all I have.”
Ailill folded his arms and stared at his son. “You have failed me, boy. Twice I have sent you into the Lands of Men, and twice you have failed me.”
“I have provided information,” Fionchadd replied quickly, “which is the main thing you sent me for. And while I was your spy I missed two hunts and almost lost my bow.”
“But you have failed at the quests I set for you.”
Fionchadd laid the bow carefully aside and turned to face his father. “I have not failed. I watched the mortal boy. I saw him meet with Oisin. I heard that one’s words. When the power of the ring awakened the Track I was there. I ran. I would have captured the ring, if only . . .”
“Yes?”
The boy’s shoulders slumped. “If only the Power of the ring had not wrenched him from the Road.”
“The chain broke, you have told me. Yet you did not see where the ring fell?”
“I did not expect the chain to be made of iron, it burned me. The boy was in his own World by the time I recovered from that shock. And then it took an instant to shift my Sight.”
“And what about the old man?”
“I made the arrow as you instructed. My aim was true. You said not to kill him. You said the boy’s fear for his family would drive him to us. And, anyway, the fact that I could wound the old man but could not touch the boy confirms that the ring no longer protects anyone but the lad himself. I tried to get him to join us.”
“You were not very persuasive,” Ailill snorted.
“I am not a diplomat.” Fionchadd shot back.
“I do better than you, boy! I almost have the younger brother where I want him. There is a storm brewing in the Lands of Men, which I can augment to good advantage.”
“Lugh will not like that,” Fionchadd interrupted. “He says you spend too much time there at the expense of your other duties. You missed his feast last night.”
“I thought it more important to investigate threats to his realm than the food on his table.”
“I’m sure.”
“My brother would think so.”
“Uncle Finvarra would not care what you did as long as you were not underfoot. That is, after all, why he sent you here.”
“So you know my brother’s mind better than I do? If you would second-guess him, you tread on dangerous ground indeed.”
Fionchadd raised an inquisitive eyebrow. “As do you, if you would go up against Lugh Samildinach. I have seen that much while I have been here. Shall we see who has the greater number of friends?”
“And which are you, boy? You give your oath everywhere else; even to the very one you are sworn to seek.”
Fionchadd’s face reddened with indignation. “Forced to seek, more likely. Twice the boy has bested me in combat, Father: at running and at wrestling. It was the honorable thing to do. Even Morrigu commended me.”
“They were not fair fights, though, for the ring’s protection was still upon the boy. The Mistress of Battles is a fool to say otherwise.”
“A very powerful fool, however,” Fionchadd retorted.
Ailill raised his fist as if to strike his son, then lowered it again decisively. “Very well, boy. Since you are so concerned with her rules, I invoke the Rules: You owe me one more attempt on David Sullivan.”
Fionchadd’s eyes blazed. “By what right?” he demanded.
“By the Rule of Three,” Ailill shot back. “Twice he has bested you. There must be a third.”
“The boy is not my enemy!” Fionchadd shouted.
“Then you are not my son,” Ailill replied, his voice chill as the space between the stars, and as hollow.
Chapter XI: What The Lightning Brings
(Friday, August 14)
“So what was it you wanted to talk to me about that was important enough to make you offer me a ride home?” asked David after Liz had carefully eased her mother’s pickup truck out of the Enotah County Hospital parking lot and onto rain-slick Highway 76. Curved tails of spray rose behind her as the truck splashed through the puddles that still remained from an earlier thunderstorm. Clouds hinted at more, and soon.
“Not that I don’t appreciate it,” he added, “but it is a little out of the ordinary for you.”
Liz frowned pensively. “Oh, I don’t know where to start, David—Uncle Dale, I guess. What do you think’s really wrong with him?”
“He’s had a stroke, of course,” David answered indignantly. “You don’t recover from one of those in two days.”
“I know that, dummy. But why doesn’t he want to fight back?”
