by Alan Early
Praise for Arthur Quinn and the World Serpent
Shortlisted for the Best Children’s Book, Senior, in the 2011 Bord Gáis Energy Irish Book Awards and chosen as the featured book in the first UNESCO Dublin City of Literature ‘Children Save Dublin’ Project
‘A brilliant creation … fast-paced and thrilling.’ – Eoin Colfer, author of Artemis Fowl
‘A clever blend of fantasy and the every day. It’s like Harry Potter, Dublin style.’ – Irish Examiner
‘A gripping yarn that races along towards its epic finale on the streets of the capital … This is bound to be a sure-fire hit and in the Potter, Jackson, Quinn death match, I’ll be shouting for the boy in green!’ – Inis Magazine
‘A truly superb book … with several real surprise twists built into the plot, this book was an amazing read … a must read for fans of fantasy and mythology … simply wonderful.’ – Mary Esther Judy, The Bookbag
‘This original and gripping story skilfully draws out the threads linking modern-day Dublin to its darker Viking past by bringing Viking mythology vibrantly to life. A sure-fire hit with adventure lovers.’ – Bookfest
‘A mystical world of mythological characters comes alive, time stops, the unimaginable occurs, and the excitement is full blast from beginning to end.’ – VOYA, Voices of Youth Advocates
MERCIER PRESS
3B Oak House, Bessboro Rd
Blackrock, Cork, Ireland.
www.mercierpress.ie
http://twitter.com/IrishPublisher
http://www.facebook.com/mercier.press
© Alan Early, 2012
ISBN: 978 1 85635 998 6
Epub ISBN: 978 1 78117 142 4
Mobi ISBN: 978 1 78117 143 1
This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
All characters and events in this book are entirely fictional. Any resemblance to any person, living or dead, which may occur inadvertently, is completely unintentional.
Prologue
The last wolf in Ireland was slaughtered over two hundred years ago. In times before that, they freely roamed the Irish countryside. They slept and hid during the day and prowled the land at night, feeding on livestock and men too weak or stupid to escape them. But man fought back. And by the late 1700s, all wolves were eradicated from Irish soil.
So if someone had wandered through a certain Irish forest in the early twenty-first century, they might have been surprised to find a wild wolf lapping at water from a stream.
The glow of the near-full moon hanging over the forest highlighted the tall, bare trees. Fresh frost glistened on the hard and mossy ground, while sheer ice formed at the stream’s edge. The wolf was covered in grey fur, matted around the legs with caked mud. He was a young wolf, no larger than an average Labrador, but with lean muscles in his shoulders bobbing up and down as he drank up the cool water.
He had been on his own for three nights now, heading north, heading home. Nothing felt better than leaving the rest of the pack for a few days once a year, for time by himself, time to think, time to run, time to hunt. But food was scarce in this part of the country. He’d devoured a hedgehog on the first night but had found nothing since. His stomach rumbled, paining him. He wasn’t drinking the water out of thirst but rather to fill his stomach.
He was so grateful for the water that he didn’t hear or smell the wolf on the opposite side of the stream.
The second wolf was unquestionably larger and broader than the first. It didn’t have the same malnourished look as the grey one, but appeared sturdy and well fed. Its fur was golden blond – lustrous and thick – with a black stripe running down its back. It stood on a rock by the stream, not drinking, barely breathing, merely watching the grey wolf.
The water felt good on the grey wolf’s tongue, though it was so cold it stung the nerves of his teeth. If the weather continued as cold as it had been, the stream would be frozen over in another night or two. The ice at the edge was sure to spread. As he slurped up the water, he studied it for the first time, noticing thin icicles dipping along on the stream. No doubt these had broken off from the branches of trees further upriver. It was while watching one of these icicles that he spotted the golden wolf’s reflection.
Without even chancing a look at the wolf on the other side of the stream, the grey wolf bolted in the opposite direction. He’d just reached the cover of the undergrowth when he heard the golden wolf follow, splashing in and out of the stream in one fluid motion.
The grey wolf knew it would do no good to hide. If the other wolf could smell him as well as he could now smell it, then his only option was to outrun it. He raced through the undergrowth, diving headfirst into the darkness with briars and branches swatting him in the face and tearing at his coat. And all the while, the golden wolf pursued.
As he plunged deeper into the forest, the grey wolf recognised some landmarks: a certain mossy stone, a gnarled branch, a tree that had been split by lightning. He’d come this way only minutes beforehand, when he was searching for the stream. He quickly formed a plan. If he turned off course fast enough, then he might trick the golden wolf into following the scent he’d left on the track earlier, and this would give him enough time to escape.
He took a deep breath and broke off to the left as swiftly as he could. He was moving so fast now he couldn’t hear if he’d shaken the other wolf. The muscles in his legs were burning by the time he came upon a felled tree stump. The stump was lying on its side. It was hollow and large enough for him to crouch down inside. He crawled in on his belly, held his breath and listened to the woods around him.
Silence. Not so much as a breeze rustled the dead leaves on the ground. Total silence.
The wolf stayed there and watched the moon until it had moved what he judged to be a good distance across the sky. Then he cautiously emerged.
Suddenly something was on him, turning him around and pinning him down on his back. He looked up to see the golden wolf there, fangs bared and growling.
The grey wolf started to struggle, but it was no use. A green light unexpectedly flowed out of his captor’s eyes. The radiance covered him entirely, obscuring the other animal. It was momentarily so bright that the grey wolf was forced to close his eyes, then suddenly it faded away. The golden wolf was gone now. There was a man in its place, his hand locked on the wolf’s throat. His hair was platinum blond and his nose was long and stately. His facial hair had been shaved into a neat, modern beard. He wore a three-piece suit underneath a black coat that reached down to his shins.
Terrified, the grey wolf yapped and whined. The man just smiled. The grin went from ear to ear, exposing two rows of sparkling white teeth.
‘Who am I?’ the man said, as if in response to the wolf’s whimpering. ‘I am the Trickster Lord, the God of Mischief, the Father of Lies. I am Loki.’ He leaned forward, tightening his grip on the wolf. ‘Now it’s your turn to answer me. Where are the others?’
Chapter One
‘Where are the others?’ Arthur Quinn asked when he returned from the bathroom.
‘Just gone to get some drinks and stuff,’ his dad, Joe, answered.
The bowling alley was alive with noise: coins being dropped into slot machines, pinballs bouncing off bells, video games buzzing and whirring and firing, pins being knocked down and replaced in th
e alley itself; and over it all pumping pop music from the 1980s. It was Sunday evening, the last day of Joe’s Christmas break, and he had brought them here for one final treat before the January drudgery began.
Arthur ran his hand through his short hair – he’d gotten his once shaggy mane cut just before Christmas – and sat next to Joe, who was busy putting names into the electronic bowling scoreboard. Arthur studied his reflection in the screen. He had the same blue-green eyes as his father but his freckles were a gift from his mother. At the thought of her, he instinctively looked down at the pale gold ribbon tied around his wrist. It had been hers. Before she’d died.
At the time he’d thought that her death was the worst thing that could happen to him. But since then he’d been through a lot of craziness. Looking at Joe, he mused that he wasn’t the only one. Only a few months ago his father had been viciously attacked by the Norse god of mischief, Loki. Joe had been seriously injured and for a time Arthur wasn’t sure if he’d survive. Even now, his right leg hadn’t healed properly and Joe still had to use a stick in order to move around. Apart from that, things were starting to get back to normal for Joe. He worked as head engineer of the Dublin Metro tunnel-drilling team, overseeing the massive excavation job under the Liffey – and it had all been going smoothly of late. Arthur was pleased for him.
Of course, Joe had only a fragmented recollection of his attacker and he certainly didn’t suspect that it had been a Norse god. But then, apart from Arthur and his friends, Ash and Max, no one else in the world knew about their tangle with Loki. The god had gotten close to them by posing as Will, a shrewd and personable boy who turned out to be just one of the forms the Trickster God was able to assume. He had fooled them into helping him free the Jormungand – a giant flying snake also known as the World Serpent, who was Loki’s oldest child. Loki’s plan had been to use the Jormungand to destroy the world, and he would probably have succeeded had it not been for Arthur, his friends and a resurrected army of dead Vikings.
‘Here they come now,’ Joe said, looking up from the scoreboard. Their neighbours, Ash, Max and Stace Barry, were approaching, each one loaded down with boxes of popcorn, hotdogs dripping with ketchup, and drinks. At twelve, Ash – short for Ashling – was the same age as Arthur. She usually tied her auburn hair up in a ponytail, but this evening it hung free around her face. Stace was seventeen and in her last year of school before going to college. She looked just like an older version of Ash. Max, their younger brother, was an excitable seven-year-old who had had a difficult couple of months. Arthur was pleased to see Max back to his old self. During the incident with Loki, Max had been held hostage by the Trickster God. For several weeks after, Max had suffered terrible nightmares. He would wake up sweating and screaming and only Ash’s cuddle could calm him back to sleep. During the day, he would be jittery and paranoid, afraid to leave the house by himself. But the longer there was no sign of Loki, the more the nightmares faded, until finally, a couple of weeks ago, they had stopped completely. Max was now almost back to that same boy who, even when Arthur had just arrived in Dublin, constantly pleaded with him to play football in all weathers. He, Arthur and Ash were the only people Loki had allowed to retain their memories of his devastating attack on Dublin, and even though it was over two months since the attack, Arthur knew that all three of them thought of it frequently, although they rarely spoke about it.
Arthur shook away all thoughts of Loki and got up to help the Barry siblings with the snack food.
‘What took you so long?’ he chided with a smile.
‘Somebody had to fix their make-up!’ Ash said with a sideways glare at her sister.
‘It wasn’t me!’ shouted Max with a mouth full of popcorn, simultaneously trying to take a sip of Coke.
‘You can’t really blame me,’ Stace said as she handed a hotdog to Joe. ‘There are some good-looking guys around here.’ She surveyed the bowling alley, fluttering her eyelashes, then turned back to Ash. ‘Don’t worry. You’ll understand one day when you get interested in boys.’
Ash’s face flushed. She glanced at Arthur, hoping he hadn’t noticed. But he was too busy helping Max unload his armfuls of food and drinks. He looked up, catching her gaze.
‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘I missed that. Did you say something?’
‘Nope!’ Ash said hurriedly before Stace could butt in. ‘Nothing! So, are we ready to play?’
‘All set!’ exclaimed Joe, hitting the Enter key one last time on the scoreboard. ‘You’re up first, Max.’
Across the city, in the cobblestone square of Smithfield, was the Viking Experience. Surrounded by a high wall covered in murals depicting ancient life and legends, it was a recreated Viking village, chock-a-block with small plywood houses topped off with thatched roofs. Among all the laneways and streets, there was even a market area and a short bridge over a shallow moat. It promised to give visitors a chance to ‘See how the Vikings really lived in ancient Dublin!’
It was after eight o’clock on a frosty Sunday evening so, of course, it was shut. In fact, as it was the off-season, it had been shut since mid-November and wasn’t due to open again until the end of February. During the days that it was open, actors played the parts of the inhabitants of the village, while worn mannequins represented other Vikings at work in the small houses. Except that they weren’t all really mannequins.
Following the incident with Loki, Arthur was faced with the prospect of hiding almost one hundred dead Viking soldiers who had been resurrected to help him fight the Jormungand. He came up with the plan of sneaking them into the Viking Experience. Here they could mingle with the flaking mannequins and no one would question their dark, leathery faces. It suited them perfectly. They’d feel at home and yet they’d still be hidden, in plain sight. As long as they didn’t move much during the days while there were visitors, the nights were theirs to do what they pleased. And on this night they’d lit a bonfire in the centre of the market.
The army had been hidden under the earth for over a thousand years. And yet it seemed like mere minutes from the time they’d all died silently to the time they awoke last October. They’d given their lives to protect the world – each one taking a potion to stop his heart, only for it start up again if, or when, the Jormungand was to escape – and the world would never know it.
Bjorn, the leader of the soldiers and Arthur’s second-in-command, sat closest to the fire on a papier mâché throne they’d borrowed from the prop room. Even though they were dead and the cold didn’t bother them, Bjorn was still glad to be reclining in this seat of honour. It felt good to pretend that they still needed a fire to keep warm. He looked around at his army. A handful of his men had been destroyed by the Jormungand, but most had survived. They all wore the same dusty tunics they’d put on the day they were sent to guard the World Serpent’s lair. They could have exchanged them for cleaner, more comfortable clothes from the costume room, but they didn’t want to. It was nice to still have that link to the past, to their families, to their wives and children who’d died centuries ago.
Bjorn smiled to himself as he watched his men. They were joking and laughing – although, in the grunts that were all their dried-up voice boxes could manage, the chuckles came out as wheezing, throaty sounds accompanied by shoulder-shakes. A couple were even attempting to sing songs from their homeland in high-pitched snorts. They were happy. But for how long? He had assumed that once the Jormungand was defeated they would finally have been granted a peaceful death. And yet, here they were, still alive in a strange place and a strange time.
Suddenly a shiver ran up his spine.
This was unexpected. He hadn’t felt the sensations of hot, cold or pain since he’d awoken, and yet what had just happened was unmistakable. A cold shiver, rising from the base of his spine, had shot upwards to his neck.
A nearby Viking grunted to him. It roughly translated as, ‘What was that?’ From the fearful expression on all of their faces Bjorn knew that they’d all experienced the same th
ing.
‘I don’t know,’ Bjorn grunted back, ‘but I fear that dark times are coming.’
In another part of Dublin, a few miles from where the bowling was now well under way, in Arthur’s empty bedroom something equally strange was happening.
It was almost totally silent in the Quinn household. The flat-screen TV downstairs was on standby, the buzzing of its tiny red light barely audible. The large refrigerator in the kitchen hummed faintly. The numbers on the alarm clock that had been a birthday gift from Arthur’s mother to Joe a few years ago blinked softly in the dark. The light was on in the downstairs hallway to dissuade potential burglars. Abruptly all of these things and every other electrical item in the house simultaneously switched off, as all electrical power was drained within a two-mile radius of the Quinn home, plunging the area into darkness. Mobile phones turned themselves off, MP3 players stopped playing, laptop computers ceased to run. Even cars were stopped in their tracks, their electronics failing instantaneously.
There was only one glimmer of light in the entire blackout area, but nobody was around to see it. It was in Arthur’s room, emanating from under his bed. It was a steady and pulsing green glow coming from a mysterious object: a hammer with an iron head, curved at the top. There were runes – ancient letters – carved into the head, while fine rope was wrapped around the short handle. Arthur had found it in the Jormungand’s lair with the Vikings. He’d used it to defeat Loki and then, unsure of what it was or what to do with it, but sure it might come in handy at a later date, he’d stashed it under his bed. And now it was glowing vividly.
It was Arthur’s third turn to bowl. After the second round, Stace was in the lead, which surprised even her. Arthur stepped up to their lane – to cheers of encouragement from the others behind him – and concentrated on the pins at the far end. He squinted and lined up his ball. When he was happy with his aim, he took two steps backwards.
