by CE Murphy
THEN.
Auntie Sheila was a tall woman whose black hair grew wild and whose nose was as pointed as her wit. She wore skirts and strong boots, for she said knees were easier to clean than jeans and that there was no sense risking your ankles climbing up and down the mountainsides. And climb she did, up the Reek eight times a year, up Croagh Padraig, Saint Patrick’s holy mountain, to say holy prayers on holy days. The strangest thing was that the Reek was always empty when Auntie Sheila went up, even if it meant there were a hundred tourists coming down and looking as if they weren’t sure why.
Caitríona O’Reilly was a little afraid of her aunt, but that had never stopped her from scrambling up the loose scrim that called itself the pilgrim’s path on the Reek to watch Sheila MacNamarra lay down her prayers. The same way every time, first striding North East South and West to touch the ground, and in the last year or so Caitríona had fancied that she saw a flare of white, like the aurora borealis bursting up from the earth, when Auntie Sheila finished that circle. Then she wandered the mountain’s small top, avoiding the chapel at the front-center, and laid her palms against the rocky soil time and time again. Sometimes pain creased Auntie Sheila’s face, and sometimes she flinched like the ground had burned her, but she never stopped. For an hour beneath the open sky each time, she laid her hands on the earth, and at the end of that hour she walked her circle the other direction to unwind it, and came back to the switchback trail leading down the mountain.
Until Caitríona was thirteen, Auntie Sheila pretended that she never saw her at all, not even when she swept by Caitríona’s hiding place at the edge of the mountain. The year Caitríona turned thirteen, Auntie winked when she passed by, and all the times after that, Cat crept closer and closer to the mountaintop, trying to see more clearly. Auntie never stopped her, but nor did she tell her what it was she was doing, beyond what was clear: blessing the holy mountain, as if a site for Christian pilgrims needed a pagan’s help as well.
For there was no question of that, at least. Auntie went to the mountain on the old high holy days, on Imbolc and Beltaine, Lughnasa and Samhein, and on the quarter-days as well: the solstices and equinoxes, or close enough as didn’t matter. “Every day is holy somewhere, to someone,” she said to Caitríona the summer Cat turned fifteen, the first words she’d ever spoken to Cat as they came off the Reek together. Caitríona, in trainers and cut-off jeans, was cold and wet to the bone after a summer storm had lashed them on the mountaintop. Sheila was every bit as wet, her denim skirt sodden and sticking to her legs, but her boots gripped the slippy mountainside more surely than Cat’s trainers did, and Sheila gripped Cat’s arm in turn, keeping her arright. “I like to come on the old holy days, but if I can’t make it then I come as close as I can. It’s what’s in your heart that counts, Caitríona.”
“What’s in yours?” Scree shifted under Cat’s feet and down she went, Sheila’s grip not strong enough after all. Scrapes and bruises appeared as if by magic, but her head hit last and there were no stars to be seen, thanks be to God. She sat and turned her hands up, palms abraded, and Auntie Sheila clucked like a good maiden auntie and pulled Cat to her feet.
“All that’s in me heart now is getting me auldest niece off this hill alive,” Sheila said cheerfully. “Ask me again on another day and perhaps I’ll tell another tale. Now I’e a plaster for ye when we get back to town, but ye mustn’t take it off for three days.”
“You always say that, Auntie.”
“And I always mean it, and I trust ye’s always listen.” Auntie Sheila gave Caitríona a green-eyed glare that made her laugh and squirm at the same time, for as often as the cousins listened, they also didn’t. No one could stop themselves, not with what they called Auntie Sheila’s magic plasters. Auntie Sheila herself called them Band-Aids sometimes, because she’d lived in America for a time and that was the American word for plasters. Cat’s youngest brother was certain the magic of Auntie’s plasters was that they came from America, where everything was better, and so of course no matter how soon a lad took the plaster off the wound beneath was healed.
That, of all things, that was the moment that came back to Caitríona over and over as she stood at her auntie’s graveside. None of the other times, none of the hunting thigh-deep through mucky bogs for ancient bodies whose spirits Auntie Sheila said needed laying to rest, not the hundred times Cat had asked again what lay inside Sheila’s heart, not the digging for herbs or the winding of holly and hawthorn together for protective boughs to hang above a door. Those things did come back to her, sure and so, but it was the magic plasters that she couldn’t stop thinking of. She had plasters in her purse now, ones she always carried so she would always think of Auntie Shelia.
And thinking of those plasters was safer than thinking about the tall lean American woman who was Auntie Sheila’s daughter, and who had no tears in her eyes as she stood alone at the grave, for all that the whole family stood together. Joanne Walker still remained apart, her jaw set in a way that reminded Caitríona of Auntie Sheila, though they didn’t look so much alike as all that. Cousin Joanne wore her own black hair short and had shoulders like a man, broad and strong in the black knit turtleneck that fell over faded blue jeans. She wore shoes like Auntie Sheila had favored, heavy boots for walking in, and at her throat glimmered the silver necklace Auntie Sheila had always worn.
Caitríona wanted nothing more on the earth than to ask Joanne the story of Auntie Sheila and himself, the man not one of them even knew the name of. Joanne’s father, who’d stolen Auntie Sheila’s heart and never given it back. Cat was the oldest of the Irish cousins and only seventeen, so she had no memory of Auntie Sheila’s pregnancy. It was something the sisters barely spoke of, and only when they were certain Sheila was nowhere within hearing. She’d fallen in love, they said, and come back to Ireland to bear a child when a baby out of wedlock was still a shocking and shameful thing. She’d shown not a whit of shame, they said, but before the child was born something happened, and not one of them knew what. Sheila had grown reserved and cool, given no sign of joy when her daughter was born, and in the dead of night six months later she had left Westport for America, only to return days later with no babe in arms. She’d said not a word about it, either, save that Siobhán was with her father now, and that was the end of it.
And now Siobhán, who called herself Joanne, was here, because Sheila had announced months ago that she was dying, and she’d say no more about that than Joanne’s father. She called Joanne to her and they’d disappeared together, touring Europe, Caitríona’s mother said. Learning to know one another before it was too late, though from the look of it they’d not known each other well enough for Joanne Walker to weep over her own mother’s death.
The whole of them, all the clan who were MacNamarras once and O’Reillys and Curleys and Byrnes and some few MacNamarras still, they stood together as one, left behind by the American cousin who turned and walked away with the first fistful of dirt thrown onto the coffin, and that was that, so. The end of Joanne Walker as much as the end of Sheila MacNamarra, and the one left a hole because it left them with nothing at all of the other.
And sure, as Cat’s da would say, and sure if Caitríona wasn’t still thinking of magic plasters when she reeled off the train early on a Monday after the St Patrick’s craic in Dublin town, and sure if those thoughts didn’t bring her to visit Sheila’s grave first, before going to the Reek herself, as she’d done a dozen times since her aunt’s death.
And sure and if she didn’t pass Joanne Walker on the way, and another woman, calling herself Maeve, who was the tallest thing Caitríona had ever laid eyes on, and sure and if by the end of the maddest three days any mortal had ever known, if Caitríona didn’t know then that her aunt had been the Irish Mage, and that she, Caitríona O’Reilly, the oldest niece of the MacNamarra clan, was meant to take up that mantle now.
NOW.
Perfect, Caitríona O’Reilly thought, and because Joanne was on her mind, she then heard th
e word echoed as Joanne would have heard it: pair-fect. And what, Joanne would have wanted to know, was a Pair Fect? Maybe it was two people who were fecked, as if fect might be the past tense of fecked, which was already the past tense of feck, the Irish way of saying a word that puritanical American television always bleeped out. Unless it was an Irishman saying it, because feck slipped by their censors when the more Anglicized version of the word wouldn’t.
Americans and Irish. Separated by a common language. Caitríona put her fingertips against the glass case encompassing the Clonycavan Man, one of the most perfectly conserved bog men to be found in Ireland. His fragile thin skin, sagging over shriveled muscles, his bones, his teeth, they were all stained rich mahogany brown from the ancient peat they’d nested in. Pickled, they were: bog acid pickled the creatures caught in it, and she’d read about each and every circumstance that improved the chances of a body being preserved instead of disintegrating. They were many, and in Ireland, they were easy to come by. Nearly sixty bog men had been found over the years, and that, Caitríona reckoned, was just the ones they’d found. Whole civilizations might be buried in the peat, if only they dug deep enough.
So it wasn’t only herbs Auntie Sheila had been digging for in the bogs. What could be worse than being murdered and thrown into the bogs but to lie in rest for centuries before being dug up by a rumbling peat harvester with teeth so vicious that no one could be sure if the poor mummy had been cut in half before death, or if his lower half had been severed and chewed up by the peat cutter. And the Clonycavan Man, he was one of the lucky ones. He’d only been murdered, his head smashed in and so well-preserved there were still bits of brain inside his perfectly preserved skull, and they knew what his last meals had been as well. And he’d been a bit of a dandy as well, with imported hair gel in the straggly hair that remained on his head. Caitríona hoped he’d died before being chopped in half, but she could feel the poor creature’s spirit still trapped within his body, the agony of his death never leaving him.
Auntie Sheila had searched out lost people like these in the bogs, and laid their spirits to rest. But these ones, the bog men brought to the museum on Kildare Street, they had been separated from their place of death before Sheila had found them, and their spirits cried and clawed at their glass coffins, a torture the anthropologists could never study. It was the memory of bog-tromping, and the thought of these glass-encased bog-men, that had brought Caitríona to Dublin at all.
Joanne, Caitríona thought, would know what to do. She’d dealt with ghosts before, though she said she couldn’t see them herself. Nor could Caitríona, but she felt the captured spirit within the glass regardless, as she’d never felt it before in all the times she’d visited the museum. The bog men had been spectacles then, a breathtaking glimpse at the horror of perfectly preserved death. Now she could hardly understand how she’d missed their cries.
Joanne would start with a power circle, that, at least, Cat knew, and so that was where she was to begin as well. The bog men display was strangely suited for it, with each mummy encapsulated down a winding ramp within a border of taller walkways. She couldn’t quite make a complete circle, at least not in one go, but then, there was more than one lost spirit to attend to, too.
Cat murmured, “Sorry, sorry,” as she stepped around visitors. Most moved easily, more fascinated by the mummies than a living girl, but a few glanced her way in surprise. The spear, she supposed, for there was nothing extraordinary about the rest of her, except perhaps the fire-engine-red hair straight from a bottle. Still, it would be the spear that caught their attention, though in the week and some she’d carried it not a soul had mentioned it as a spear, but as a walking stick. A very tall walking stick, to be sure, but not one of them seemed to see the black ironwood spearhead atop a white wood haft.
Just as well, for there’d be no explaining to the guarda why she was carrying a deadly weapon through the hills of Ireland and the streets of Dublin.
There were places between the circular displays where she could slip through, build a circle that way, though there was nothing elegant about creating a power circle by way of squashing herself. If she hadn’t grown two inches and gotten slimmer with it, she’d have never fit, but as it was she squeezed through, thinking resentfully of Joanne’s height and slender build and the deadly white leather coat that proclaimed her cousin as a hero not to mess with. Cat popped out the other side with a whoosh of breath and stumbled over a child trying to go the way she’d come. They stopped, sharing a guilty, wide-eyed look before Cat bowed to show the boy the way. He beamed and scampered through, and Caitríona wound her way around the displays.
I’ll set it on fire with me mind, she thought, and all but laughed at herself. A few months was no time to learn magic in, not without a teacher. She had no sense of what she ought to do to save captured spirits, but the first magery she had done had been simple: I’ll set it on fire with me mind, she’d said again and again, until she had.
I’ll free them, so, she said to herself again and again. I’ll build a circle to keep them safe as they’re drawn free from their broken bodies, and then I’ll release it and them, so their spirits may go where they will. It had no skill to it, no shape or rhythm to make it a spell, but that was how the magic had been built on Croagh Padraig, and it was how she would make it today. Auntie Sheila would have had an elegance and a form to it, but that would come in time: she was young still, and had long years to learn in.
It wasn’t a circle and it wasn’t a shamrock that she walked. Her purse bumped her hip and the heel of the spear clacked against the ground with each step, a quiet rhythm that helped her trace a shape across the floor. It was something of an infinity loop, a never-ending figure 8. That would do, and more, the idea of it sparked delight in her heart, as if the circle wasn’t the best shape for her magery anyway. As fast as delight came, it slipped away again with a pang of wondering what Auntie Sheila might have taught her, had she lived. Both those things slipped into the circle, making it one of hope and regret, and that felt right to her, for what else was she weaving but a story of that? A story of death, which was always a story of regret even when it was a good death, and a story of hope that she might release the captured spirits of the dead. And stories were the lifeblood of her people, their pride and their joy. Their weaving ran deep in the blood, and that became what she wanted to do: to tell the stories that could only be told through magery.
The power wove faster and faster, until it began to spin tales of men she had never known: the story of a tall, handsome man with soft hands, a rich man whose bog-bound body had only two scars, little more than paper cuts on his hands. He had studied magic once himself, perhaps, feeling it deep in his blood, but none of his people had trusted him, seeing him as a giant, as a danger, as Fir Bolg, with his black hair and brown eyes and quick and tempting smile. The Fir Bolg had to die, and die badly, to keep the tribe safe from deviltry, and so holes were punctured through his arms so ropes could bind him, and pain inflicted upon his body while he screamed no!
And no indeed, the story whispered, no, not the Fir Bolg, not the dark and dire monsters of Irish folklore, but their opposites, their elfin bretheren, the aos sí. They had been tall, so tall, and Caitríona knew that in her bones as much as the dead man had felt magic in his, for she had met Maeve of Connacht, Queen Maebh, the Ulster Queen, and she had been born of aos sí blood too, and tall with it. That was the crime this man had died for: for the magic born to him as a man not of mankind, but a last and lingering soul from a dying race.
Until it wove the story of the Clonycavan Man with his gelled pompadour, and there told of a man, petty and vain, afraid his small stature made him unimportant in the eyes of his people, and so he spent what coin he had on the gel and on other bodily improvements to make himself grander than he was to catch the eye of beauty, the only thing he felt he deserved. But a woman who was not beautiful fell in love with him, and he with her. Ashamed, he began to change his ways, but her brother whom h
e had wronged so long ago objected, and the finely gelled head was split into pieces and his body thrown into a bog. His spirit should be bitter, but its greatest sorrow was in knowing that the woman would have thought him the small and petty creature he had once been, and that she would have died believing he had left her because he did not love her.
They wound themselves around Caitríona, these stories and others, four or five in all, until she knew them in her bones. I’ll keep them safe as they’re drawn free from their broken bodies, and then I’ll release it and them. A simple spell indeed, and the first part had worked a treat. The second, though: now that she knew them, how was she to free what she’d taken into her soul?
In light, as she’d seen Aunt Sheila’s spirit released. A goddess had helped then, though, and Caitríona had nothing of that power in her.
No: she did have that power inside her. It was Aoife’s kiss that had awakened her magery. She was nothing so grand as a goddess herself, but nor were these captured spirits so badly bound as Aunt Sheila had been. Aoife’s magic had burned Sheila away. Surely Caitríona needed only lift these broken souls up beyond the confines of their glass coffins to free them. Like sunshine on the water, a burst of light that rose into the sky. Now that was more poetic, sure, and Caitríona held that thought close, to make magic of it, too.
It took time, minutes or more, but a soft white light filled the museum hall, growing brighter with each moment until it erupted from each encircled body. The boy Cat had played with gave a bold happy shout and was hushed by his ma, but Cat felt the same shout rising in her. She had no great skill yet, but her ugly spells were working, and the beauty would come in time.
Faces came alive in the light, all the discoloration and distortion of mummification fading away. They might have been men of Dublin, walking the city that very day: broad faces, fair skin and light eyes. Bad teeth and thinning hair on some, but handsome cleanliness on others. Recognition and gratitude gleamed in those faces as clearly as they would on any modern man, and together they began to speak. They were thousands of years of age, and couldn’t speak a word she knew. But then, neither could Maeve of Connacht, and that hadn’t stopped them from speaking Irish and English both to one another. Cat bowed her head and listened, and the words came clear:
