Besieged

by Kevin Hearne

  “Right. And I was turned into a werewolf by Gunnar and Hal a long time ago. It’s one hell of a chain of cause and effect. But you’ve never shared with me a crucial link of that chain.”

  “And what link is that?”

  “How did you become the archdruid of Atticus O’Sullivan? Is there a story worth telling behind that? Or was it an ordinary thing, like your archdruid assigned him to you?”

  “Ye really want to hear about Siodhachan and me? I thought ye would rather milk a cockroach than hear tell of him again.”

  She shakes her head once. “I want to hear about you. What brought you to cross his path and take him on as an apprentice? I mean, I know you said his father got killed in a cattle raid, but there was more to it than that, wasn’t there?”

  “Oh, aye, there was a right load of ox shite that led me to his blasted door, and that’s no lie. That’s a proper story for ye, I suppose.”

  Her head drops back down to the crook of me arm, her hands roam in the curls of me chest, and she calls me that pet name. “Tell me every little thing, Teddy Bear.”

  —

  If I have it right, this would have been seventy years before this Common Era of yours began. Or something. We weren’t thinking at that time that we would have an entirely new calendar in a few centuries; we were very much in tune with the seasons and solstices but didn’t call the months and years what ye call them now.

  I was a fairly young Druid, in me twenties, the younger and stupid side of it if I’m being honest, and me own archdruid had assigned me to tend to the needs of a village in what I believe is now County Offaly. They hadn’t had a Druid around for some while, and they were doing some daft shite and turning the land into a giant peat bog. Clearing away trees, ye know, that were keeping everything balanced, sucking up all that rain, but with them gone, the soil turned acidic and the ground became waterlogged. I think ye have some modern term for it now…Yes! Clear-cutting. Does tremendous damage.

  By the time I got there, the bog was already bigger than a king’s ego and at night darker and more dangerous than a badger’s arsehole—ye just really didn’t want to be pokin’ around in there. I was supposed to keep ’em from makin’ it worse and maybe do something to heal the soil.

  Problem was, the villagers didn’t want to hear that they had anything to do with that bog. Way they told it, the bog owed them a few dozen head of sheep and cattle and maybe ten girls and boys over the years.

  “Ye mean ye lost all that in the bog?” I asks them, and this red-faced knob of a man says no, ye giant tit, they were stolen.

  “Stolen?” I says. “By who?” Or whom, whatever is proper—feck all the rules of this shite language ye have me speakin’ anyways.

  Well, the knob looks at his wife and she nods at him, and he looks at his friends and they nod too, which means he has everyone’s permission to go ahead and say it out loud to a stranger.

  “There’s something out there,” he says. “A bogeyman.”

  “Do ye mean one o’ the Fae?” I asks him. “If it’s one o’ the Fae, there might be something I can do about that.”

  “Like what?” he sneers at me. “Are ye goin’ to give us a hunk of iron? We’re not as simple as ye think, Eoghan Ó Cinnéide. We’ve already taken all the precautions, and given all the offerings, and said all the prayers, and still it’s been happening. And not just to us, not just here. All the villages near this fecking bog suffer, to the south and east and maybe the west too. During the night they lose a cow here, a sheep there, and every so often we lose a lad or a lass too. There’s a gods-cursed bogeyman out there, sure as I have a cock to piss with, and if ye want us to give a single sad shite about your advice, which we never asked for, then ye will shuffle your bony arse into that bog and kill what’s been killing us for all these years.”

  The others all grunted their assent and I saw that there was no help for it. I couldn’t do Gaia’s business until I attended to theirs. And in truth I thought Gaia’s business could wait. Kids should be allowed to grow up in peace or else no one has any, do they? The desolate looks on those faces glaring back at me, well, there was only one way to fix them: justice. Whoever took those kids had stolen their parents’ joy and their hope for the future along with them.

  “All right,” I says to them, and it’s a good thing I did, because they were ready to tell me to feck the oldest goat in the meadow if I said anything else. “I want to hear some details, please. But one at a time. The more specific ye can be about times and places of property or children stolen—especially the children—the more it will help me. Because I do want to help ye, and that’s no lie.”

  And that, me love, was what got me on the soggy, squelchy road to meeting Siodhachan, though I sure had no inkling of it at the time.

  They gave me a lodge of earth and wood to work in, and there I received them, one by one, to hear stories of loss and mourning.

  What grabbed me most was the tale of Saoirse, who had lost her daughter, Siobhan, not a fortnight before. A thin and underfed thing, as most of the villagers were, she wiped tears and snot away from her face as she sobbed out her tale in gulping fits and starts.

  “ ’Twas thirteen nights ago, sir. I puts her to bed and gives her a kiss on the cheek and tells her she’s loved, for she is. And I have me worries like we all do but I’m thinkin’ she’s safe, for who is sleepin’ next to her but me an’ her own da? She has the iron about her neck, and we says the prayers to Brighid and the Morrigan and all the gods below, and nary a peep out o’ her all the night long. But when the dawn comes and the cocks are scolding the sun, she’s gone! Her blanket turned down, her doll left behind, and no answer to our calls. We checks the grounds, ye know, to make sure she’s not out relieving herself, but she is nowhere to be found, is she? Not anywhere. Nowhere in the village. We rouse the lot of it, but Siobhan is vanished. So what can it be, sir, but the bogeyman of Boora Bog what’s been plaguing us for years now?”

  “Are ye sure as ye can be in your most secret of hearts, Saoirse,” I asks her, “that the Fae cannot be involved in this? Have ye, or perhaps your husband, done anything to draw down their wrath in years past?”

  “I can’t be positive, now can I, sir, when what offends them is so often a trifle what humans would never understand. But in me heart I’m sure I can’t think of anything that would invite such a punishment upon our heads.”

  “I understand,” I says, and nod to indicate that I’m in the same room, looking at the same facts. “Now think back to that morning ye found her gone; were there any footprints or anything at all unusual?”

  “Oh, aye. We followed a pair of footprints right into the bog. But it wasn’t a stretch of a hundred steps before we lost the trail. The waters, sir, are worse than clouds at covering up what ye wish to see.”

  “But these footprints, now: Were they a man’s, a woman’s, or something else?”

  “Oh, it was too difficult to tell, sir, beyond they being human and full-grown.”

  “How old is Siobhan? Could they have been her footprints?”

  Saoirse shakes her head. “I doubt it. She’s fourteen and wee for her age. And she knows better than to go wanderin’ in the bog anyway. And me husband said, look at the depth of those prints, now, for sure they was made by someone powerful heavy—or else someone carrying Siobhan! Me daughter could never make heavy prints like that.”

  The interviews with the others are all of a kind; whatever they lost, they lost in the night, and no clues except for the occasional footprints trailing off into Boora Bog before getting lost in standing waters. Well, that and the almost visible holes torn in their spirits. This wasn’t like the mourning of men and women who’d lost their partners in a battle, where ye knew the risk and knew that death was to be expected and borne. This was the terror of the innocent, at the mercy of a world gone mad, and the way they looked at me, like I was the only one who could give them a reason to carry on in the mud and the rain and the infinite fog of their despair—well, it near
stabbed me in the guts.

  I’m still thinkin’ it’s some kind o’ rogue Fae that’s clever enough to glamour itself into a human shape, for I can’t imagine what else might have an appetite for humans—unless it’s a fecking vampire. Once I think o’ that, the possibility grows in me mind. I had yet to meet one then, but the Druids on the continent said they were nasty and creeping north with some very disciplined armies—the Romans, ye know. The method fit with what I had heard about them: They hunted at night and had a strange ability to charm people into doing what they wished.

  I had to hunt down this bogeyman regardless of what it turned out to be, and after a night’s sleep that was about as restful as a Scotsman dancing on me stones and playing the bagpipe, I cadged a cheese here and a hunk of salted beef there and sloshed into Boora Bog, which is even bigger today than it was back then.

  As soon as I’m out o’ sight and I find a patch o’ turf that’s moderately dry and sprouting heather, I strip down and shove me clothes into me bag and shape-shift into a red kite. The bag isn’t heavy by human standards—the food is the heaviest part of it, because I don’t have a weapon—but it’s still a boulder’s worth of weight to me as a kite. I struggle to get off the ground with it, and I can tell I will have to land every so often to replenish me energy from the earth, but it’s still far faster to look for trouble this way than wade through sucking mud and mosquitos.

  It’s miles and hours and clouds of midges like low-flying thunderheads before I see anything worth investigating. A lone figure trudges through the muck, heading roughly southwest, and when I circle closer he cranes his neck around and watches me. It’s not long before he waves at me like we are old friends. That’s stranger than a skunk dropping in on a Franciscan friar sex party, so I spiral in even closer. He holds up his arm, back of the hand toward me, and I see the familiar healing triskele of a Druid. He knows what I am because red kites don’t glide over bogs with a bag of provisions clutched in their talons.

  Disappointed and relieved at the same time, I pick a small rise of earth that practically counts as a hill out there and swoop down for a landing. It gives me time to shift and pull on me clothes while he jogs over to say hello.

  He’s older than me, a single shock of gray pouring down one side of his beard like he fell asleep with a mouthful of gravy and it dribbled out while he slept. He’s taller and broader than me too, his frame packed with muscle, and he’s got both an axe and a short sword slung about him, as well as a pack significantly larger than mine. With all those trappings he can’t be shifting easily to haul them around, which is no doubt why I saw him traveling by foot out here, far from any grove that would let him travel where he wished. He greets me with a huge grin, happy to see another Druid out here.

  “Well met, sir!” he calls when he’s close enough to shout. “Gaia’s blessings be upon ye!”

  “Blessed be,” I reply, and when we’re near we clasp forearms and smile like we grew up together, though we had never met before. Up close, I see his face is grimy and dotted with what is either something nasty from the bog or dried blood. Poor lad hasn’t seen a bath or his own reflection in a long while, I expect, nor even a river.

  “Dubhlainn Ó Meara,” he says, his voice bright as a child given a puppy to play with.

  “Eoghan Ó Cinnéide,” I says. Me eyes automatically stray to his right arm, looking at the bands around his biceps to see what animal forms he can take. It’s always interesting, because Gaia chooses each Druid’s forms, and they are often not animals ye might find in Ireland. His eyes do the same, dropping down to me arm. As always, I get asked about me water form.

  “Your water shape is something with tusks?” he asks.

  “Aye. It’s called a walrus. I rarely use it.”

  “And your predator?”

  “Ah, that’s a bear. I like that one. What’s yours, then? Some kind of big cat?”

  “Aye. I’m told it’s a tiger, though they don’t live anywhere on the continent, much less here. Some part of the great wide world I’ll never see, I suppose.”

  “Ah, now, don’t be sayin’ that. Looks like ye have it in mind to see a good portion of it. Where are ye headed, all loaded down like that?”

  “Back to me camp. It’s not far. Want to come along, share a cup and a story or two? I have some mead and root vegetables to munch on if we don’t come across a hare or two for dinner.”

  “Sounds grand. I have some cheese and salted beef. But why would ye be camping out here?”

  Dubhlainn shrugs. “I’ve been asked to do something about this bog. It’s been growing and it will just keep at it if we don’t amend the fecking soil.”

  “I’m to do the same. But I also have to convince a village to stop creating these conditions with their constant clearing of trees. How far is your camp?”

  He squints into the afternoon sun. “Probably another hour’s slog through the bog to the southwest.”

  “All right, let’s go, then.”

  Turns out, as we waded through the slime and shared our backgrounds, that Dubhlainn grew up in Erainn, or what’s called Munster now, near the southern port of Cork. And his archdruid knew mine—which made sense, since they had both sent their apprentices out to prevent the island from becoming one giant bog from coast to coast.

  “Imagine,” I says to him, “if there weren’t any Druids around to tell people they’re cocking up the earth and teach them how to fix it. Everything would be shite.”

  He shudders and agrees. “Shite in the air, shite in the water, folk getting sick because there’s no end to the shite. May the Morrigan take me before I ever see such a day.”

  And o’ course I remember him sayin’ that now because the Morrigan made sure I did see such a day, skipping over two thousand years just so I could see how badly humans could cock up the planet without Druids. Dubhlainn had been right, damn his eyes.

  His camp, when we reach it, is largely underground, built no doubt with the help of the elemental, solid stone all around to prevent water from seeping in. For a good fifty paces all around, the land is solid and balanced. He even has a garden.

  “It looks like you’ve been at it a while,” I says, and he nods.

  “More of a home than a camp at this point,” he admits. “It’s slow work. It took hundreds of years to get this bad, and I can’t fix it in a week or three. I keep calling it a camp out of optimism, but it may turn out to be me life’s work.”

  “Ah, I can see where ye might be worried. But I’m on it now too, and I would wager there will be more soon, and before too much longer ye may be able to move on to someplace drier.”

  He takes a large ceramic jug down from a shelf and tears the cork out with his teeth, spitting it into a corner because we’ll presumably be finishing the whole thing. He pours two cups of mellow yellow, hands one to me, and says, “May the gods below make it so.”

  “Sláinte, lad,” I says, and we drain our cups, being more thirsty than a whale swimming in the Sahara, and he refills them. I look around and see a wee straw tick for sleeping, some odds and ends, what looks like a woman’s fancy jewelry box, and some wicker baskets of vegetables, kept cool and dry in the usual darkness. He also has a hearth and a stack of wood next to it for fires, though I saw a fire pit aboveground that looked like it got more frequent use. He follows me gaze and shrugs when he next catches me eye.

  “Not much to look at, I know. The chief luxury here is staying dry and warm when it’s cold and wet outside. I prefer it out there, honestly. Shall we build a fire up top?” he asks, and I quickly agree. After the open sky, a shelter can seem like a prison when it’s fine out.

  We haul up an armful of wood and get the lot of it popping and crackling before the sun goes down. The cheese isn’t going to last long, so I offer him a wedge and he gives me an onion that I eat like an apple, which was perfectly normal back then.

  “Are ye familiar with the village up north of here, on the edge of the bog?” I asks him when we have filled our bellies
.

  “Aye. They keep clearing land for their cattle and goats.”

  “Right. But they seem to be mighty vexed about something in the bog. I nearly cut meself on the sharp words they had for me; never heard so much as a ‘good day’ when I came to town. Have ye seen any Fae in these parts what would give these people fits?”

  His bottom lip juts out and his brows come together as he considers, then he shakes his head. “Not for years. There was a bog troll some years back, but I convinced him to relocate.”

  “Some natural predator, then? Though I don’t know what it could be. An animal wouldn’t fit the facts.”

  “What facts do ye have, then?”

  “Missing cattle. The stray goat or sheep.”

  “Animals could do that. Though wolves are scarce now and on their way to dying out on the island if I’m not mistaken.”

  “Aye. The wolfhounds are too fecking good at their jobs, eh?”

  We have a chuckle about that and I ask for another refill of that honey mead of his. He left the jug below, so he goes down to fetch it while I grab an iron poker to stir up the fire a bit and throw on another log. I notice he’s got quite a deep bed of ashes in the pit and he should empty it soon. There are bits of charred bone in there, which I don’t think is unusual, until it registers that these aren’t the bones of a hare or even a sheep or goat. They’re undeniably human.

  Even with the evidence in front of me, I can’t believe it. Me first thought is, Who put these bones in Dubhlainn’s fire? As if it weren’t himself all along. And then the facts assemble themselves like a well-made boot and it fits him perfectly.

  If the Fae weren’t responsible, then it had to be a man; neither wolves nor trolls left human footprints, and neither can sneak a child out of her village without someone seeing or hearing something. A Druid can, though, and Dubhlainn was the only one living in the middle of Boora Bog with bones in his fire pit. He’d been there for years, and he could strike at any of the villages surrounding the bog whenever the fancy took him.

  I toss down the poker and rise, stepping away from the fire as Dubhlainn returns with the jug of mead.