Besieged
Page 24
“Au contraire: That’s exactly what we need to do. We have to go where the devils are, and most of them aren’t going to be living in close proximity to full kitchens.”
“Nope. They don’t live a privileged existence like you.”
“What is all this melodrama? Just because they’ve never heard of your favorite thing doesn’t mean they hate their lives or they need your sympathy or need you to come along and show them how to fix it. In fact, it’s kind of arrogant of you to think that. Imperialist, even.”
“If you like. Think about it for a while. I have to bind this tree to Tír na nÓg, and I can’t be interrupted. We’ll talk when we get home.”
It took about fifteen minutes to tether the tree, and the rain had begun before I finished. Oberon smelled like wet dog already and probably needed a proper bath. When I said we were all set to go and to put his paw on the tree, he asked me to wait a minute.
“I think you’ve made an admirable decision, Oberon. That’s what I’m all about too.”
“Wow, uh…that’s an intriguing offer. Let me think about it for fifteen centuries, okay? Come on, let’s go.”
—
When we shifted to our cabin near the McKenzie River in the Willamette National Forest, there was of course a few minutes of ecstatic doggie homecoming festivities. Jumping and running and flapping tongues, playful nips on ears and back legs, and plenty of happy barking.
Starbuck the Boston terrier had quite the vertical leap, which allowed him to vie for attention against the much taller wolfhounds. He was just beginning to pick up a few words of language from the hounds and myself, and he employed every single one of them when Oberon and I appeared.
“Hi, Starbuck. I’m very happy to see you. That’s how you greet someone. Can you say that back to me? Say ‘Hi, Atticus’?”
“That’s much better. You’re learning very fast. Hi, Orlaith.”
“They’ll be running around here soon before you know it,” I said, giving her some scritches. “Shall we go for a run in the woods to work up an appetite, and then maybe some sausage?”
The hounds all agreed, and I ran into the house to shed my clothes and sword and everything before shifting to a hound and leading the charge into the forest. We scared up some deer and a couple of wild turkeys and annoyed the everloving hell out of some squirrels, which automatically counted as a Glorious Outing in the minds of the hounds.
But I did note that Orlaith was close to delivering and shouldn’t be shifting anymore. I had to get back to Tasmania, and Granuaile would be occupied in Poland for a while enforcing the treaty we signed with Leif Helgarson: All vampires were supposed to be out now, yet some were being stubborn about it and staying, challenging both Leif’s leadership and us. We really needed someone to stay at the cabin and look after Orlaith and, eventually, her puppies while we took care of business abroad. We didn’t have any solid friends in the area, but I did think of a potential lead: Earnest Goggins-Smythe, the owner of Jack, the purloined poodle Oberon and I had tracked down and returned during the same caper that resulted in us adopting Starbuck. He was a British expat who lived in Eugene, but that wasn’t so far away as to make it inconvenient.
I gave him a call once we got back to the cabin and I had dressed and put some burgers on the grill.
“Hey, Earnest. Connor Molloy here,” I said, using my current alias. “How’s Jack?”
“Oh, he’s brilliant!” I almost laughed aloud because I’d forgotten how hoity and toity Earnest’s British accent sounded. “How is Oberon?”
His question perfectly summed up why Earnest was an excellent choice: He didn’t give a damn about me, but he couldn’t wait to hear how my hound was doing.
“Very well, but hoping I could ask you for a favor. The well-paid kind.”
“Training Oberon for the circuit?”
“Oh, no. I’m not interested in showing him. But I do need another wolfhound and a Boston looked after for a while. I wondered if you’d like to come out to the cabin and watch over everyone. Jack’s welcome too, of course, and your boxer, Algy. Plenty of room for them to run around out here, and you can even work from here like you do at home.”
“I can?”
“Well, we have great Wi-Fi.” Earnest wrote code and only left the house for groceries and trips to the dog park.
“That’s very tempting, and in theory it’s possible,” he said. “I’d need some more details, though.” We talked those through, and since I’d recovered quite the hoard of gold from Arizona recently, I was able to make him an offer he couldn’t refuse. He showed up in the morning with his dogs, and they got on famously with Orlaith and Starbuck once the compulsory round of polite ass-sniffing had been observed. I gave him the keys, showed him around, and he was engaged for an indefinite time. I hoped I’d be back before Orlaith’s litter dropped, but if not, she and her puppies would be looked after until either Granuaile or I could return.
Orlaith and Starbuck were so distracted by the two new hounds and a kind human who was ready to feed them that they hardly noticed when Oberon and I shifted back to Tasmania.
—
Nine days into our healing project and more than two hundred devils cured of facial tumor disease, the Morrigan visited me in my dreams. It tore me away from a nightmare where I was trying to teach high school science to a room full of creationists, so I was mightily relieved to see the Chooser of the Slain.
“Your idyll is almost at an end, Siodhachan,” she said, a tiny smirk on her blood-red lips. If she was amused, it meant I was in for some pain.
“Huh? What idyll? I was trying to explain to my students that they were all going to believe in evolution when an antibacterial-resistant supermicrobe infected their spleens, and it wasn’t going well.” I looked around at my new surroundings. The Morrigan and I were sitting across from each other in the healing pools of Mag Mell. Birds chirped in hedges, and nymphs frolicked and giggled close by. We were neither of us clothed. “I think this is much more idyllic,” I concluded.
“This idyll is almost at an end as well. I am paying you a courtesy by informing you that Loki will cease his scheming soon. He’s going to act.”
“Act? As in begin Ragnarok?”
“Yes. He has just left the hell of Christians after speaking with Lucifer. Since I know you have numerous affairs, I thought you might like to put them in order. I can’t protect you as I once did. I’ll see you soon, Siodhachan.”
“Wait, Morrigan—”
My protest did me no good. I woke up under a canopy of swamp gum trees with a shout, and Oberon leapt straight out of his slumber, ready to fight.
“No, it was the Morrigan.”
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“Not even. What were you dreaming about there—The Matrix?”
“Well, maybe we won’t get to that point. The Morrigan just told me we’re all going to die from fire and ice and the World Serpent.”
Oberon looked around as if those things would appear at any moment, then, when nothing happened and there was naught to battle but the drone of insects, he sat down.
“No, I don’t think sleep is possible now. Might as well build a fire and have a talk I’ve been putting off for a while.”
“It’s actually for your own good.”
I snorted. “No, it’s more serious than fiber,” I said, getting up and throwing a few dry branches onto the glowing embers of the fire we’d let burn low earlier. “Be patient while I build this up again. It’s a fireside kind of chat.”
“I’m going to need you to stay with Orlaith and Starbuck at the cabin until further notice.”
“You’ve done nothing wrong. This is a safety issue. You’ll be safe with Earnest back at the cabin while I take care of something.”
“The end of the world, possibly. The fire-and-ice business I was talking about. Plus a really big snake and maybe Lucifer, I don’t know. The Morrigan kinda shorted me on the details.”
“I’m sorry, Oberon, you really can’t. Do you remember me telling you a story when Granuaile was a new apprentice, about a wolverine companion I used to have? His name was Faolan.”
“That’s right.”
“Now is that other time. Are you ready?”
“Ready as a…? Never mind.”
—
Faolan was my companion during a good portion of the time I was binding the New World to Tír na nÓg. He was surly and easily angered and I loved to tease him. For some reason he stuck with me even though he claimed I drove him mad—well, I should amend that. He told me one night during a hurricane on the Gulf Coast why he didn’t just take off and return to the north, where it was cooler and populated by far fewer alligators: It would be boring.
“That’s really sweet, Faolan,” I told him, because for him, it was. He didn’t invite belly rubs or pay me compliments—wolverines just aren’t like that—but I could feel through our bond that he was intensely loyal to me.
In the ninth century, we were down by the Yucatán Peninsula, which is in modern-day Mexico, and he had occasion to demonstrate that loyalty.
Back then the Mayans had built an impressive civilization throughout the region, with cities of up to fifty thousand people supported by advanced agriculture. They had the most astounding architecture, which persists to this day, a complex mathematics system, and a firmer grasp on astronomy than anyone in Europe at the time. I was awed by the Mayans and was one of the very few Europeans to see their civilization while it was still mighty. I had so much to learn from them that I stayed in the region a bit longer than strictly necessary and learned their language. And as I learned that, I started to absorb bits of their religion too: It was rich and complex, populated by many gods. And once I heard some details about their plane of the afterlife, Xibalba, I became curious to see at least part of it.
There were supposed to be three rivers the dead had to cross into Xibalba. Rivers in the underworld are common to many cultures. Tír na nÓg has one, and the Norse have thirteen rivers under the spring of Hvergelmir, and the Greeks had the River Styx, and so on. All of these rivers typically symbolize the boundary between the living and the dead, and the dead must cross over them, never to return to the land of the living.
Xibalba had three: a river of scorpions, a river of blood, and a river of pus.
—
“Heh! I thought you were going to question the scorpions.”
“You see why I was intrigued.”
“Or maybe just one giant, legendary wound like a spring, oozing pus into the darkness…”
“Some things are best left as mysteries, Oberon. In any case, I wanted to see these rivers if I could, because when you live for as long as I have, every new experience is something to be treasured. And this would be next-level amazing, a land created by human imagination rather than geologic forces.”
—
I sat down under the canopy of the rain forest and contacted the elemental Yucatán: //Query: Can Druid visit plane of Xibalba?//
It’s a good idea to ask such things. Realms of the dead often have rules about the living walking around.
//Yes// the elemental replied. //With protection//
I asked for such protection for a short trip, and Yucatán agreed, directing me to a cave in modern-day Belize that would serve as the portal to the plane. Once there, I bound a tree to Tír na nÓg and told Faolan that he had two choices: I could shift him back to the north, where we first met more than a hundred years before, and say farewell, or he could wait for me outside the cave, for a possibly very long time. Under no circumstances could he follow me into Xibalba.
He challenged me immediately.
“Because it’s a land of the dead. The living don’t go there without protection, and Gaia will only protect me.”
“No, it’s because this is the kind of favor Gaia does only for Druids. You simply can’t go. Stepping into a land of the dead means you’re dead. So what’s it going to be: Wait here, where there are jaguars and too many bugs to count, and I might not come back and you’d be stuck here—”
“It could be very dangerous for me even with protection. I could run into something awful, and I’m just being honest. However, I hope it won’t take me long. But to finish my thought: You can wait, or you could just go back to the north, where you frequently say you’d rather be, and not have to put up with my annoying attacks of curiosity.”
—
“He didn’t like squirrels either.”
—
The yawning mouth of the cave had moss hanging from the top like green fangs. I stepped past and through, bare feet on cold stone, and cast night vision to help me see in the dark.
To the living, Xibalba’s cave was normally just a cave, but to the dead it extended and changed. Yucatán opened that portal for me at the appropriate point, and the temperature, already chilly compared with that of the jungle, cooled further. The floor was strewn with skeletons, calcified and broadcasting a warning in their eternal repose.
For a hundred yards or so, I simply descended into the shivery damp and worried about my footing.
And then a clicking and dry, raspy susurrus warned me that something waited ahead; the passage turned and opened wider and I came to a river of black scorpions, strangely lit from below. No bridge, no ferry, just a wide expanse teeming with poisonous dudes—an apt metaphor, now that I think of it, for my few brief attempts to understand social media.
The river extended in either direction into darkness, and the scorpions seemed content to stay within the confines of their riverbank.
Yucatán helped me bridge it, creating a thin strip of stone to walk across. It was as awesome as it sounds, and I even said it aloud in the middle, with a goofy grin on my face: “I’m walking across a river of scorpions right now.”
I smelled the river of blood before I saw it—that sorta nasty metallic scent, you know, from the copper and iron in there, like dirty pennies. It burbled a bit, and parts of it were bright and oxygenated like arterial spray, and other swirls and eddies were darker as if spent from veins. It was more blood than Lady Macbeth ever had to deal with. Another stone bridge grew across it courtesy of Yucatán, and I stepped lightly over.
And then I saw the river of pus.
As with the others, something in the riverbed provided illumination, so it was glowing pus I was looking at, a pale-yellow flow with twirling fingers of darker yellow in it. The smell was of moist rot, the kind that blowflies grow fat upon, and indeed there were churning fists of squirmy maggots floating upon it, and clouds of buzzing flies hovering above it.