Mythology Abroad

by Jody Lynn Nye

  “Well, how can I learn if I don’t ask questions?” Keith said innocently.

  “You wouldn’t just happen to have your pictures with you?” Holl asked. “The Niall would like to see the rolls of the folk at Hollow Tree Farm.”

  Keith smiled brilliantly. “I had a hunch I’d need the whole kit,” he said cheerfully, swinging the camera bag around. “Here.” He dug out the envelopes and handed them to Holl. Immediately, a crowd gathered around to look at the photographs. Holl looked helplessly at the Niall, who waved a resigned hand.

  “I can wait. Bring them along to my home when you can wrench them away, and your tall friend, too.”

  ***

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Keith and Diane dined with their new friends, who guided them out of the vale and back to their car by moonlight. There had been dancing and games on the green until it was too dark to see. They were both quite exhausted by the party.

  “I think I danced with everyone in town,” Diane said, limping up the bank. “But it was fun!”

  “The Niall’s compliments,” Fergus said as he bade them goodbye at the head of the path, “and he’d be pleased if you’d all come back along in the morning.”

  “You bet,” Keith said enthusiastically. “I’ll be there with bells on.”

  “Eh, there’s no need,” Fergus said deprecatingly. “They make too much noise. Come as you are.”

  Holl started laughing. “They’ll need a lexicon to understand you, Keith Doyle.”

  O O O

  The next morning was overcast and showed threatening signs of rain. With Peter’s permission, Keith left his car in the lane behind the pub. He stood in the stone courtyard and looked out over the fields below. There was the village, nestled among trees like an egg in the nest. A few rooftops were actually just visible from there, which made Keith fear for its vulnerability. Holl assured him that no one could reach it.

  The only place where the two Big Folk could fit comfortably out of the weather was sitting on the floor in the Chief’s front room, so that was where they spent the morning. The furniture looked comfortable, but it was too small for them to sit in. The Niall’s wife, Ketlin, piled wool rugs and sheepskins for them to recline upon. What Keith took at first to be bouquets of purple and blue flowers with attendant greens turned out to be living blossoms growing right there inside the house. So was the vine design on the walls and ceiling. A bee actually flew out of one of the trumpet flowers as they watched.

  The Niall and his wife had as many questions for them as the children had the day before. Other Little Folk wandered in and out of the great house at will to pass a few moments with their odd guests. Keith discussed the problem of visibility with the Niall.

  “It’s been no worry so far,” the Chief told Keith. “Yet there will come a day when long-held belief will no longer stay the curious, or strangers will stumble on our secret and reveal it to the world of Big Folk. Then we may have to move on.”

  Keith, keenly aware that he was one of those stumbling Big Folk, assured the Chief that he’d keep their secret. “I mean, except for my father, I don’t know who I’d tell, but Dad understands. He knows Holl.”

  “That’s good. We need friends. There was a time when the Big Folk and the Little had a war to divide up all the land in the world. The Big had many more people and took the best, leaving us what little they did not care to own. In the ripeness of time, and with good health and many children, we came to be at elbow’s point,” the Niall said.

  “The hilltop. We were there,” Keith said. “And that was when the Master left.”

  “Aye, that’s a fair summation.”

  “You know, I don’t see a lot of difference between the way you folk live here and the way they do at home, barring differences of surrounding culture, to quote my unlamented Sociology professor. Um, how long ago was that they left?”

  “Oh, a wee while ago,” the Niall said disinterestedly. Keith was disappointed again. The way people talked around here, that could have been a year or an eon. Tiron poked his head in.

  “Good morning to you all, though I’m disinclined to believe the good. Will it rain or not?” the green-eyed lad asked. “Holl, come and see. I’ve made you a set of plans for the loom.”

  Holl rose from the chair next to the fireplace. “With your permission, Niall?”

  The leader waved a hand blithely. “Be free as you will.”

  “Ah, a chair left for me next the fire,” said Fiona, arriving as Holl and Tiron departed. “There’s kindness itself.” She seated herself and spread her skirts around her.

  “Fiona is the one of us who seems best to understand the language of plants,” Niall explained. “You see a bit of her handwork on the walls here.”

  “They’re wonderful. Um, has Holl mentioned what he’s here looking for?” Keith asked diplomatically.

  “The weddingbells?” Fiona asked. “Oh, yes. We’re trying to find some for him, to be sure. Though we only use them when we find them, I can see that tradition will have to change when you have to come four thousand miles to look for clumps.”

  “I saw white foxglove on the way here, but they said that those aren’t the ones, is that right?”

  “Here, now,” the herb woman said, showing him one of the living nosegays. Keith was amused to find clover of the ordinary three-leafed variety growing there. It ought to have been four-leafed. “This is the bellflower wearing its everyday clothes.” Fiona bent a stem toward him. Keith saw a cluster of purple-blue flowers. “It’s just an ordinary blossom which closely resembles the weddingbells. They call it ‘cuckoo’s shoe’ here,” she said with a goatish grin, “but some know it as ‘thimble of the goblin.’”

  “Appropriate, I guess,” Keith chuckled. “You know, I saw some of this in Scotland, just before Holl got sick. We overlooked it for the foxglove. It was on the plain below the fairy mound. I was expecting something a lot more—you know, large or impressive. It looks so tiny and insignificant.”

  “But it is, except as one of Nature’s works. Sometimes the smallest or most unimportant seeming things have the most virtue to them,” the Niall said. “We let the Big Folk know the white foxglove is a fairy flower, so they’ll let our other resources be. This one has no magic. Only the white variety does.”

  “How do you know?” Diane asked.

  “By the feel,” Niall said simply.

  “Well, what does magic feel like?” Keith asked.

  “Hold up your hands, palms in front of you.” Keith raised them obediently. “If you don’t look straight at them, you can hardly see a sort of field around them like a glowing glove, can’t you?”

  Taking “hardly” to mean “barely,” Keith looked off into the distance, but glanced at his hands in his peripheral vision.

  Diane tried it. “I don’t see a thing.” She dropped her hands in her lap in disappointment.

  “There is sort of a glow there. I think,” Keith said slowly, seeing a faint halo surrounding his hand. “It could be an illusion, or just my eyesight.”

  “It’s not an illusion. It’s part of your body, though you can’t see it, feel it, or cut it off,” Niall explained. “Now, it’s in this glove that lie the senses for feeling magic, and doing some types. Good magic feels good to you, like velvet or joy. Evil magic has a nasty prickle, like nettles.”

  “I’ve heard that some people do black magic on purpose,” Keith said.

  The Niall clicked his tongue. “I can’t imagine why, for all of me. There’s a lot of power in black magic, and nothing with the senses to feel it will blunder into its sway, so you have less to expend doing it. The workings of all are very subtle, and it changes the character of the worker over time to something twisted and warped.”

  Keith gulped. “Can you do it by accident?”

  “No. There must always be intent expressed when fashioning a spell. There are some charms worked in which the hand of the body never touches the physical form of the subject. The work is all done in the aura, w
hich affects the subject’s reality.”

  “Oh.” Keith was beginning to go cross-eyed trying not to look directly at his hand but to keep his aura in view.

  “Though you can set up a good-intentioned repulsion spell that keeps things out without being evil,” Fiona said. “It’s a born necessity around the lettuce patch, we’ve so many rabbits.”

  “But strong magic,” Niall continued, smiling at the clan chief, “that feels powerful, like a white hot fire or a wall or a terrible fall, whether it was designed by good or evil intentions or by nature. It can do as much harm as boon if a charm is too strong.”

  “So there’s everyday magic, like magic lanterns,” Keith said, thinking of the Hollow Tree crafts. “And then there’s the serious stuff.”

  “Well put,” Niall laughed. “If you’re willing, we’ll teach you to feel it first with strongly imbued articles, working downward in concentration as you become accustomed to it, to the most subtle, featherlight touch.”

  “The exact opposite of Szechuan food, huh?” Keith reasoned, giving up the struggle to watch the aura, and rubbed his eyes. “There you start with mild, and end up flat on your back.”

  They practiced for a while, letting Keith try out his newly trained sensitivity on a variety of objects. The other Little Folk seemed to be impressed that the Niall was taking so much interest in a Big Person, but Keith was so interested and so respectful that they soon got over their resentment. In time, the whole room was coaching him, calling out suggestions as he tried his new skill with varying results. Diane sat back and watched, interested, but not interested enough to try for herself.

  “How about this,” Ketlin said, holding up a lantern by the ring.

  “We have those at home,” Keith said. He took it and looked at it, trying to see an aura. “On a scale of one to ten, I’d say this was a two. I can feel it, too.”

  “Good!” she said. “And this?”

  Keith stared at the carved needle case she laid in his palm. “Barely a tickle. Right?”

  “Right. Good lad!”

  “How about this?” the sour-faced elder said, passing him a bronze key.

  Keith felt it and looked at it. Nothing. By the expression on the old man’s face, he was expecting something. Keith felt sweat starting on his forehead, and they were all looking at him. “Not a thing,” he admitted at last.

  “Well, you’re honest, at any rate,” the old man said grudgingly. “It’s only an ordinary key.”

  “Not too bad for the first day’s attempt,” Niall said, praising Keith. “You’ve a bit of aptitude. If I had twenty years of the teaching of you, you’d be one of us in no time.”

  A youth running up the path to the house skittered to a halt in the doorway. “Fiona, Niall,” he panted, “we’ve found a wee spot where the flowers are growing.”

  The Chief of Chiefs led a grand procession through the stream path, up over the road, and down into the next meadow. Everyone wanted to be present when Holl plucked the weddingbells. On either side at eye level, the fields were full of crops. Because of the leafy outcroppings overhead, they couldn’t see more until they clambered up out of the trench beyond the next crosspoint.

  This little piece of land had been left to grow wild by the Big Folk owner. It was too steep to make good farmland. Bushes and wildflowers sprang through the sparse, knee high grass over most of the rocky ground, but on the far side, under a lush carpet of green, there was the unmistakable shape of a fairy mound. Faint lights floated in the air around the hillock like fireflies, though it was just barely evening.

  “There’s a lot of flowers growing there,” Keith said, squinting across the field, “but nothing special.”

  The Niall clapped him on the back. “With your new eyes, see!”

  Obediently, Keith concentrated. It was hard to let his eyes go unfocused and still look at an object eighty feet away. Suddenly, there was a white glimmer like a candle flame in the midst of the flowers covering the hillock.

  “Hey!” Keith exclaimed.

  “Ah, you see it now, do you? And there they are. Not easy to locate, are they?”

  “You remember what to do,” Fiona instructed Holl seriously. She handed him a small sickle with a crescent-shaped blade. “Concentrate on your purpose. You cannot take them if you are married or promised already. The flowers will stand no nonsense.”

  Repeating to himself the strictures, Holl walked across the open land. He stopped at the perimeter of the fairy mound, and spoke quietly. “I am Holl. I mean no harm. I crave permission to walk upon this hill. I want to gather these flowers.”

  A tiny voice like the jangling of silver bells answered him, not in his ears, but in his mind. “Walk and be welcome.”

  Holl stepped onto the smooth grass. The tiny clump of bellflowers beckoned him. The clustered blossoms were white and shining and more alive than anything he had ever seen in his life. They positively radiated power. Holl understood why no one picked these without a good purpose. He knelt beside them, and glanced up at the waiting crowd one more time. Across the field, Keith Doyle threw him a thumbs-up. He smiled, and grasped the stems with one hand.

  Hot power coursed into him like an electric shock and threw him backward across the mound and halfway down the other side. Holl struggled to his hands and knees, and sat up again. Dumbfounded, he stared at the flowers, and down at his hand, which was red and felt burned. Why did they do that? Were they refusing to be harvested? Had he come all this way to fail at the last minute? He moved toward them again, but the flowers emitted an angry noise like static as soon as he placed his hand near them. He drew away.

  “What’s the matter?” Keith called.

  “I don’t know!” Holl shouted back.

  “Tch, tch,” Fiona said. “You’ve gone and promised yourself to your lass before this, lad. It’ll never work.”

  “Do you mean I can’t do it myself?” Holl asked, panic-stricken. “After all this, I can’t finish my own task?” He looked helplessly at his own hands.

  “Holl! A good leader knows when to delegate responsibility,” Keith called out suddenly. “Order someone else to do it!”

  Light dawned on the young elf’s face as Keith’s meaning sank in. “Ah. Keith Doyle, if you’re willing, would you undertake this task for me, under my direction?”

  “I could do it,” Keith agreed. “I’m not promised yet. I mean, with the you-know, I can’t even say anything.”

  There was a momentary discussion among the elders. “All right,” Fiona said at last. “But be careful. You must wear neither silver nor gold, nor carry any iron.”

  Keith laughed shortly. “The bodach took care of my fillings. I can empty my pockets.” He handed his camera to Diane, and put all his change and the car keys into her purse.

  “I think the lacings in your shoes are steel,” Diane said, pointing at his sneakers. He doffed them, too.

  In his stocking feet, Keith strode out into the field to where Holl was nursing his palm. “Once again you write yourself into our history, Keith Doyle. But thank you.”

  “What do I do first?” Keith asked.

  “Ask permission to climb the hill.”

  Keith repeated the phrases Holl had had to learn. “Holl, did something just say to you ‘walk and be welcome’?”

  Holl raised an eyebrow. “You heard it, then. Go ahead.”

  The youth stepped up onto the grassy side of the hillock, and started to bring the other foot up behind him. He found himself tumbling backward in a somersault across the field. “Stone wall,” he said, shaking his head and feeling his nose to make certain it was still straight. Holl watched him with bewilderment. “I’ll try again.”

  He threw himself against the invisible barricade. Again and again, it repelled him, rebounding him backward like a springboard. He was bouncing off of the fairy defenses like a cartoon character. “Hey, I thought you said I could walk here,” he complained to the invisible silver voices. His bones felt as though they had been jarred askew.


  “What could you possibly hold that would keep you from entering?” Holl asked.

  “I don’t know,” Keith said. “Pants zipper? I think it’s brass.” He patted himself down from shoulders to socks. “Wait!” He fished under his shirt and came up with a small bag on a cord. “Mrs. MacLeod gave me this to protect me.”

  “Well, it is. It’s protecting you from picking flowers,” Holl said wryly. With a grin, Keith pulled the cord up over his head and dropped the charm on the grass. Now there was no barrier to climbing the fairy mound. He stepped up and joined Holl. The grass felt pleasant and springy under his stockinged feet.

  “Hey, Diane, can you take some pictures?” Keith called out. “This could be interesting!”

  “You’re out of film,” Diane shouted back, after checking the indicator on the back of the camera. “I’ll go and get some out of the car. Wait a minute.”

  O O O

  Michaels had managed to get a positive identification from the bartender in the Skylark. O’Day had picked his place well. No one who hadn’t business in the immediate area would ever find this godforsaken hole in the wall. O’Day and the boy were not here, and hadn’t been in to the pub that day. The landlady hadn’t seen them either. They must be out waiting for the contact to arrive.

  Suddenly, the blonde girl appeared out of a break in the hedge across the road from the pub. If she was here, O’Day couldn’t be far away. Here was an opportunity to divide the party and conquer.

  Diane walked toward the car park, jingling the keys in her hand. She was paying no attention to him. He walked up and quietly put his hand through her arm and leaned against her side.

  “What?” she demanded, in surprise, and tried to pull away. She recognized him in a second. “You!” She raised her other hand with nails bared to tear out his eyes. Michaels grabbed her hand and pinned it.

  “Please, miss, don’t try to attack me. The martial arts I’m trained in aren’t the slap-the-mat-and-get-up kind. I’m sorry, but that’s the way it is.”