The Dark Citadel (The Green Woman)

by Jane Dougherty

  “Well we choose our own names,” Grania said emphatically. “They’re important.”

  “I like Zachariah; it’s a good name.” Maeve had spoken, and to his surprise, Zachariah found he was pleased she approved.

  “Enough chatter.” Ezekiel lifted the lid of the cooking pot. “Time to eat.”

  He ladled a small piece of meat, dumplings, and a dark, pungent broth onto each plate. Zachariah closed his eyes and took a deep breath.

  “This smells delicious. What is it?”

  “Rabbit,” Grania replied, “cooked with mushrooms. They grow in the dark, damp places, velvety brown and creamy coloured. They give a good flavour, don’t you think?”

  Zachariah nodded slowly, his eyes wide with astonishment. “And this is rabbit? I’ve eaten rabbit occasionally, on feast days, but the flesh was never like this. It never tasted of anything at all, like eating pulped paper, and full of little bones.”

  “Ah ha!” Ezekiel’s eyes twinkled. “That’s because this isn’t one of those pink-eyed trembling little beasts out of a breeding cage. This is a real rabbit, a wild one.”

  Zachariah looked puzzled. “Where did it come from? I mean, there’s nothing for it to eat down here, is there?”

  Ezekiel scratched his head. “They burrow through from Outside. That’s when we catch them. They must be able to live out there.”

  Maeve turned her insistent gaze to Zachariah. “I don’t care what the Elders tell us—it can’t be as poisonous as they say. One day, I’m going to find out what it’s really like.”

  David snorted contemptuously. “Don’t be daft! People can’t live Outside. It’s all sand and demons.”

  “Rabbits manage it.”

  “So, now you’re a rabbit? Go on then. Get diggin’.” David laughed.

  Maeve lunged at him. “I’ll dig you a second hole, you poxy little—”

  “Maeve, David,” Ezekiel slammed his hand down on the table, “just mind your language, you little savages!”

  “If Maeve says she’ll do it, who knows?” Grania said indulgently. “She’s as stubborn as a mule.”

  “What’s a mule?” Demeter asked.

  “It’s a beast with the scutters that stands next to the cesspit crossing its legs, saying Not till somebody cleans it out,” David shouted, rocking back on his chair with laughter at his own joke.

  “Not that an overflowing cesspit would bother you,” Maeve snapped scornfully. “It’s your natural element, ya ball o’ shite.” Then she pushed his chair over.

  David suddenly stopped laughing.

  “That’s enough now,” Grania shouted. “I don’t know where you picked up that kind of language.”

  “It’s Ruairi!” Demeter bounced up and down on her chair in excitement. “They all talk like that at his house.”

  “Just remember we have a guest, and that you are not always foul-mouthed little barbarians.”

  Maeve looked at Zachariah who this time could not drag his eyes away.

  “I will go, one day. I mean it.”

  “In me arse,” David snorted.

  Ezekiel put up a hand for silence. “Instead of trading insults with one another, David, you can help me clear the dishes, and Maeve, you can take Zachariah to hear Mother Freyja sing. Ask her for the one about Adam and Eve. It’s a good story, the Danann version anyway.”

  Ezekiel and Grania watched Maeve lead Zachariah down to the story rock in the centre of the amphitheatre.

  “He’s a brave boy,” Ezekiel mused. “There’s not many have the gumption to get themselves out of the House of Correction.”

  “Not many children care enough about their parents to risk prison going to visit them,” Grania agreed. “And he’s such a handsome lad, too,” she added. “Those lovely brown eyes, and that quick, shy smile. I’m not the only one who’s noticed either.” She nudged Ezekiel in the ribs and nodded in the direction of their daughter.

  * * * *

  Men, women, and children sat out in the open, forming a circle around the storyteller. Fionnuala was there with the children. Maeve waved across to them, but there was no calling out, no fidgeting. The crowd was silent, waiting. Mother Freyja was a rotund, middle-aged woman with laughing eyes and short, stumpy fingers that moved constantly as she sang. Her voice ran up and down the phrases, not exactly in a tune, but pulling the words along, leaving them hanging in suspense, or tumbling down into the thick of the action. Zachariah listened, absorbed, as she related the story of the Garden of Eden, the wicked serpent, and the flight of Adam and Eve. Maeve watched Zachariah.

  In the flickering light of the candles, as they made their way back to the cave, Maeve and Zachariah talked about the story.

  “It’s in the Book, more or less,” Zachariah said, rather pompously. “How Woman let her head be turned by the Serpent Witch and tempted Man to taste the forbidden apples of knowledge. How the Witch is the source of all evil, and knowledge must remain forbidden to Man. The Elders say it was the fault of the woman’s weakness and pride that they were chased out of the Garden, and that’s why women are not allowed to speak in public now.”

  Maeve looked disappointed. “But our version’s completely different! Remember, in our story there is no Wise God, just a wonderful tree. It’s the tree that makes the Garden. The Serpent creeps into the Garden to steal the apples of knowledge. Once evil enters the Garden and gorges on the apples, it becomes enormously powerful, and Adam and Eve run away in fear. The apple tree perishes rather than let the Serpent devour all the apples of knowledge, but the story says Eve crept back and hid in the Garden to collect the seeds the Serpent spat out. They have been in safe keeping ever since, waiting for a brave heart to plant them and complete the cycle of life.”

  Zachariah frowned. The Ignorants were notorious for their blasphemous stories.

  Maeve went on. “We Dananns believe the Garden is still there, and one day we will find it, drive out the Serpent, and be happy again.”

  “But what about the Wise God? He imposed an eternal punishment on the human race. Because of Eve’s heresy, we have all been banished from the Garden forever.”

  Maeve looked at him pityingly. “We don’t want anything to do with a Wise God who throws out his children and condemns them to an eternal punishment with no hope of ever being pardoned. What kind of a father would do that to his children? The Elders invented the Wise God to organise the chaos after the war. The Old Ones were forgotten, the Pattern was broken, and the people believed only in their nightmares. But someday, a descendant of Mother Eve will take the broken pieces and put the Pattern back together. Nothing makes sense otherwise.”

  * * * *

  Maeve’s words echoed in Zachariah’s head all night as he lay by the hearth in a cave within a larger cave that was the Danann’s world. He thought of the Garden ravaged by Evil, the Serpent frustrated in its quest for ultimate power, and the seeds of the future lying safe in the dark, watched over by an unknown guardian. As he slept, he walked in a dusky darkness from cave to cave, each larger than the last, until he stepped out of the largest cave of all. The dim roof disappeared, a blinding light he could not describe took its place, and he walked on green growing things rather than dead rock. His head filled with the scent of flowers, and tall trees cast moving shadows at his feet. Peace fell from the green shadows and he was filled with an immense joy.

  Chapter 24

  They filled the cramped room: Deborah, Persephone with her parents and brother Aengus, old Lugh and his blind wife Frigga, Fiachra and Ceres from across the way with their small children.

  “I don’t think we should wait,” Persephone’s mother was saying. “We should disappear now, in the night, before it’s too late.”

  “But what about the others,” Fiachra objected, “the ones who stay behind? If half the Danann workers don’t turn up for work, the Black Boys will turn the quarter over searching for them. Who knows what they’ll do to the people they find, the sick babies, or the families with too many children in Overworld.�
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  “Fiachra’s right.” His wife Ceres sighed. “It’s going to be difficult, but we have to stick together. We’re forewarned this time. We just have to be all eyes and ears. If we post guards like we did at the time of the Quarantine—”

  “Fat lot of good that did us,” Persephone’s mother muttered.

  “They say the Green Woman is moving. Perhaps this is what she’s been waiting for. We must stay, hold firm, until she comes. If the Elders suspect, if too many of us disappear, if they look too hard…” Fiachra’s voice trailed off.

  Persephone finished his thought. “They’ll discover our secret entrances to Underworld, and they’ll murder us all.”

  Eyes slid anxiously in Deborah’s direction then away again, not wanting to cause offence. She noticed the sidelong glances and remembered the look on the face of the guard who checked her papers. She decided she owed them an explanation. She had never experienced such a thing—all these individuals speaking earnestly of collective security and self-sacrifice, as though the notion of every man for himself was unthinkable. She realised that notion was unthinkable to the Ignorants, and for the first time in her life Deborah felt just a little humbled.

  She told them part of her story, cautiously, not wanting to trust anybody, not entirely anyway. She described how her father was still in prison but her mother, some kind of rebel, was free somewhere Outside. Deborah had inherited her mother’s gift for rubbing the authorities up the wrong way and was herself in danger and had to get out of Providence. She also hinted her mother needed her help.

  “She needs help rebellin’?” Aengus asked with a false air of innocence. He had not taken to Persephone’s new friend, with her airs and graces and her assumption that the entire Danann people would take time off from being massacred to help her. “You just got your rebellin’ diploma, or somethin’?”

  His mother clipped him sharply round the ear. “You mind your manners, Gus. Deborah needs our help ’cos she has nowhere else to go. Don’t you go making her feel small.”

  Aengus blushed slightly, but not as much as Deborah, who had not thought of her position in those terms before. She couldn’t even answer Aengus’s question; she had no idea what help she could give her mother. But all the faces were turned towards her, waiting to hear what she had to say.

  “It’s possible,” she said finally in a quiet voice, “that my mother and your Green Woman are one and the same person.” A hush fell on the gathering, and perplexed looks flitted from one to another. “Father said she’s the keeper of the Memory. He said I’ve inherited some of it too.”

  Deborah looked at each face in turn, at the expressions of hope and confusion she saw there. No one trusted her, she thought bitterly, not even the Ignorants who had nothing to lose. In the silence, she found herself studying the people around her as she had rarely done before. She noticed how Fiachra and Ceres clutched their children tighter, how Frigga’s blind eyes filled with tears as she fumbled for Lugh’s hand. Old Lugh returned Deborah’s inquisitive stare with one of longing that made her feel suddenly ashamed.

  “We’d like to believe you,” he said with a tired smile, “really we would.”

  “So why won’t you?” Deborah’s reply shot out, too quickly.

  “We want to, child.” The blind, old lady’s voice was warm, soothing. “There’s nothing we’d like more than to believe the Queen is among us at last and you are the daughter she left behind in Providence.”

  “Sorry,” Deborah muttered, blushing at her rudeness.

  “It’s not that we don’t think you’re sincere,” Persephone put in hastily. “We’re just afraid you might be…mistaken.”

  “And those kind of mistakes could be fatal for people like us,” her mother added. “I don’t know about the Green Woman returning. Yes, of course I’ve heard the rumours, but all I’ve seen are the wraiths who peer in through the crystal with their hellish eyes, the demons who creep over the Hemisphere at night with their rustling and their scratching, the guard patrols armed to the teeth, and,” her voice dropped to barely a whisper, “I’ve seen him.”

  The others nodded, and Deborah felt cold.

  “The demon king,” Fiachra agreed, “no longer a serpent, but dog-like, thin as famine, and his eyes burn like the fires of Gehenna!”

  “You see, dear,” Frigga turned her blind face in Deborah’s direction, “the Protector has made a pact with Abaddon, the Destroyer. And the first people he wants destroyed are the Green Woman’s allies.”

  Deborah looked at the earnest faces, not understanding.

  “Us,” Fiachra said.

  “Then you have to get out of here, escape!” Deborah shouted. The others cast down their eyes and shot sideways glances at one another.

  “That’s what we keep telling them, isn’t it, Ma?” Persephone said excitedly. “Surely now is the time to test whether the—”

  “Quiet!” Fiachra’s voice was tense. “We have no right to put the lives of the whole community in danger by gossiping like this.”

  Deborah caught Persephone darting her a sheepish glance and wondered what she was not going to be allowed to know.

  “Lugh, let me see her.” Frigga held her hands out before her, and Lugh beckoned to Deborah to move closer. She bent her head with a puzzled frown and let Frigga run her hands over her face, the touch of her fingers dry and papery as dead leaves. When the old lady was satisfied she spoke. “We have a place to hide, child, and we suspect there is a way out of the city.”

  “Then show it to me,” Deborah blurted out. “When I find my mother I can help her do…whatever she’s doing and…and…then you will all be free!”

  Frigga shook her head sadly. “To do that we would have to show you Underworld. If ever you betrayed our trust, we would all die. I believe you are what you say, but I can’t decide for everyone else—too much is at stake.”

  “So who can decide?” Deborah looked around the room, her eyes lingering on Fiachra.

  “The Council,” he said. “I’ll call a meeting, and as soon as we can get everybody together—”

  “But I have to get out now,” Deborah interrupted, fear gaining ground on her impatience. “Who knows what…things the Protector will send after me. You don’t have to show me your Underworld, just the door. You told my father about it,” she added reproachfully.

  “There is no door, child. Not even Raphael, the husband of the woman who has the Memory—”

  “My father!”

  Frigga sighed. “All right, your father. Not even he knows all the secrets of Underworld.”

  “Then if your secret way out isn’t a door, there has to be another way,” Deborah said emphatically. “Father said so.” Admiration for the solidarity of these desperate people had been growing on her, and compassion for what was in store for them. But she had her own problems. Deborah turned to old Lugh.

  “Do any of the old stories mention a door?”

  * * * *

  The Yellow Rock rose sheer above the shifting desert sands. Pitted with black holes like a hundred eyes, the rock faced Providence defiantly. Deep in the holes, in the darkness at the centre of the rock, the demons hung, wrapped tight in their leathery wings, eyes tightly closed against even the memory of the light, waiting. They hung in leather-bound silence, waiting for the dark, waiting for the screaming of the sandwraiths to veil the Hemisphere in burning sand, waiting for the signal to soar out into the sand-filled darkness and pick up the trace of the girl.

  Chapter 25

  Dusk fell. Brown air thickened. Grey buildings cast uncertain shadows. Streetlights flickered here and there, but between the pools of light lay deeper shadow. Silence grew, filling the spaces between words and swallowing the last ringing echo of footsteps. No rain fell in Providence to bounce and splash off loose guttering. No wind gusted down streets rattling loose shutters, no laughter rang out, no cars roared, no music poured from open windows. Silence hung like a pall over the city, grew out of the shadows and spread like the dark, like
fear.

  This was the Holy City State of Providence, never-changing, crepuscular—not life, though not quite death. But the nameless fear was creeping closer, the silence growing more like the hush that falls before the final breath. A subtle change was occurring, and even the most pious, the most law-abiding, the most worthy of the Goodwives and Goodmen felt its stirrings.

  In the silence and the fear, the streetlights guttered and died. The Ignorant tenement blocks and the solid townhouses of the élite alike were plunged into darkness. For a few seconds real silence gripped the city as the background hum and vibration of the life support system, its extractors and purifiers, oxygen producers and refuse recyclers all cut out. Then guards’ whistles and the sound of running, booted feet filled the thick air, followed by voices shouting, “To the temples! The divine breath is stilled!”

  Hector and his father, the public executioner, joined the compact stream of citizens moving steadily towards the centre of town and the great temples. Only the hot, sweating faces and the heavy labouring of their breathing betrayed the crowd’s intense fear. Father and son filed into the temple with the other men then fought against the current that tried to carry them deep into the body of the building and push them up against the altar rails.

  Odin preferred to be at the back, to keep an eye on the worshippers. Hector, his slight frame jostled from side to side, hung onto his father’s sleeve as Odin pushed his way to the side out of the crush. Annoyed, men turned to berate the uncouth lout pushing away from the altar. They saw who he was with, and the insult never left their lips. Instead faces paled, and the crowd parted to let the executioner pass.

  Hector hated crowds. He hated the way, however densely packed the people were, he and his father always seemed to find themselves in the centre of an empty, lonely space as if they had some terrible disease. He raised his eyes to the tiered balconies and tried to pierce the wooden screens that hid the women. He knew his father was watching him out of the corner of his eye, knew what he was thinking. But he was wrong. Hector had little interest in ogling the young women; he was searching hopelessly for a small, tired-looking woman with puffy, sleepless eyes, and a bruised face.