The Black North

by Nigel McDowell

  Oona wondered aloud, ‘How long do we have before they know we’re gone?’

  ‘No time at all is the way to look at it,’ said the Lough-Master. He stood, feet set, blade ready, looking back towards Innislone. ‘Took us so long to build that town, so much hard work from so many men. It was home, and now it’ll go down in no time.’

  Oona didn’t know what to say. But she knew how it felt, this kind of leaving. Knew what it was to see home changed. She knew what it was like to have no place to return to.

  ‘Billy,’ said Oona, thinking that if they were to have a chance at the world ahead, she needed to know all she could. ‘Have you seen any Invaders taking anyone by on the way to the Divide? Any prisoners?’

  Billy sighed and said, ‘Dunno about prisoners, but I know you’re not the only ones with a notion of going up into the North. Week ago – must’ve been about that – some of the Cause went through, recruited some of my men to go with them.’

  ‘Fools,’ said Merrigutt. ‘Only boys playing with their father’s guns, chasing echoes!’

  ‘For once we’re agreeing, old bird,’ said O’Riley. ‘They think they’re going off to challenge this King – not a chance.’

  ‘So what’re you going to do then?’ said Oona. ‘Where will you go now?’ Billy opened his mouth for some reply but –

  ‘Lough-Master!’

  A harsh whisper from one of the rowing-boats and a finger pointing towards shore. Oona looked – along the edge of the lough ran lamplight.

  ‘Told you it wouldn’t be long,’ said Billy.

  But it was less time than Oona thought before gunfire came.

  ‘Quickly,’ said O’Riley, and he suddenly had Oona lifted like she was nothing and carried her quickly to the edge of the roof. A boat no bigger than a coffin was waiting, bolted to the side of the building, and Billy lowered her in. He began to crank something at the stern.

  ‘Listen now,’ he told her. ‘There’s a town I’ve heard tell of, not far on from the Divide. But like all places up North, there’s some strange chat about it – some have been and come back, called the place haunted. But might be a place to aim for. That’s little enough, but it’s all I know.’

  Oona nodded, crouched in the boat, Merrigutt settled on the prow.

  Billy looked at her, then let his eyes wander to the jackdaw.

  ‘That’s one stubborn creature you’ve bound yourself to,’ said Billy, his voice lowering, leaning close to Oona. ‘And I’ve heard stories about her kind, and not of the pleasant, hearthside kind. But one thing you can’t do is go into the Black alone, so be glad you’ve got someone with you, no matter who it is. Hold tight now.’

  He stood and swung the largest of large knives he had in his hand –

  Rope cut, the boat dropped –

  It struck water and as soon as it did what Billy had been winding tight was released – a wooden propeller began to whirr and Oona and Merrigutt were taken fast from the building, towards a shore not yet Invaded.

  ‘Stay low now,’ said the jackdaw.

  Oona lay on her front and looked back towards Innislone. But so much smoke and steam was entwining that she could hardly see. And Billy himself? Already the Lough-Master was far behind. Too far for seeing.

  ‘Do you still have the Loam Stone?’ asked Merrigutt.

  Oona’s hand went to her cloak to check – the Stone was there, safe and cold.

  ‘Aye,’ she told the jackdaw.

  Merrigutt said, ‘Good. Maybe put it into that satchel he gave you, if you can find room.’

  So Oona slipped the Stone in among the supplies Billy had given. But when her hand was retreating it found the final thing the Lough-Master had gifted. Oona decided to take a swift look – it was a pistol, fully loaded, wrapped in a length of faint lace. A box was packed beside and it contained plenty of bullets. And bringing it close (and not letting the jackdaw see) Oona managed to make out an inscription along the barrel, to feel out words with the slow wander of her fingertip: For my very best niece, Bridget. Best with a gun I’ve ever seen! With such love, your Uncle Billy.

  28

  Quickly from the currach and Oona and Merrigutt were grateful to be enfolded by dark – firelight and fire-lit lough were soon behind. Oona moved ahead without knowing the way ahead, every step taking her more into the uncertain. She had to say, ‘Can hardly see!’

  ‘Just keep on going,’ said the jackdaw from her (becoming-permanent) perch on Oona’s shoulder. ‘Keep moving yourself.’

  Oona’s feet encountered a slope and she began, ‘Is there no easier way to –?’ Then a sudden fall into wet. Again – every bit of her soaked.

  ‘Watch yourself,’ said Merrigutt.

  ‘Thanks for warning,’ said Oona, feeling her way upright again, hands on the satchel, keeping it closest. At the top of the slope was no kind of view – the world looked unmade yet, undecided on anything but black.

  ‘We can’t go on in this,’ said Merrigutt. ‘You’ve no sight for seeing in the dark, like all South of the Divide. Wait here a wee minute.’

  Then the jackdaw left, calling, ‘You’ll have to follow my voice! There’s a sort of cottage here. It’ll have to do for somewhere to stay till it gets a bit lighter.’

  Oona moved. Her feet met the other side of the slope and she tried not to slip, keeping herself low with arms out and hands open in case she tumbled. At the bottom she stopped: the cottage was half-hid by a swell of dark ivy. A disjointed tree stripped of its leaves was sprouting from the roof, making a painful shape against the sky. An unwelcoming darkness – like the Big House of Drumbroken – was in place of a door.

  ‘Hurry!’ called Merrigutt.

  Inside the cottage Oona saw only a vague furniture of broken rock, all clothed with web. There was that expected reek of things stale and damp. (Or maybe, Oona thought, that’s just myself I’m sniffing?)

  ‘Don’t get fussy now,’ said Merrigutt, flying past Oona and on, further into the cottage.

  ‘You can’t be choosy when we’re out in the wilds like this.’

  ‘It’ll do,’ said Oona. ‘I’ve slept in worse. Me and Morris once found this cave and he told me a Hunched Hermit must live in it, so we –’

  ‘Sounds like a great adventure,’ said Merrigutt. ‘But maybe another time – I’m bone-wrecked and exhausted! Freezing, too.’

  ‘Fire then?’ said Oona, looking to the cracked hearth at the centre of the room. ‘Cook some food? Fish would go down well.’ A smallish pause.

  ‘Suppose it would,’ said Merrigutt.

  Oona saw the darkness around the jackdaw twitch and shiver; there was a groan of discomfort and the dark returned the sight of the old-woman-version of Merrigutt. She told Oona, ‘Now don’t get the idea that you can just demand me to change and do magic any time you feel like! It’s not easy transforming all the time. It’s a pain in the arse, if you’re interested.’

  Oona said nothing – if she knew anything, she knew when it was best to keep quiet.

  No pan or griddle about, so the trout had to be skewered on sticks Oona snapped from the tree and then held over flames Merrigutt had brought into shivering being with a little of her scarlet powder. Oona wanted her fish well-cooked, so held it over the fire for as long as her hollow stomach could endure. She was gut-sore and drained enough herself, so didn’t bother with speaking. She had enough to be thinking about. Innislone was large in her mind, and the discovery of her great-grandfather and the Big House and Bridget and Granny Kavanagh and the Loam Stone … but Oona’s thoughts clung most to Morris. What dark was he in? Where out in the Black was he resting?

  ‘Moping about that brother?’ asked Merrigutt. Oona looked at her.

  ‘How’d you know?’ said Oona, then wanted to disagree: ‘Not.’

  ‘Fibbing,’ said Merrigutt. The old woman turned the stick in her hands, trout getting an even blistering from the flames. ‘I’d say you’re definitely brooding about that brother.’

  ‘He has a name,’ said Oona. �
�If you know a person’s name then you should say it. It’s an insult otherwise.’

  ‘Right,’ said Merrigutt. ‘That a Kavanagh family rule, is it?’

  ‘It’s a decent person’s rule,’ said Oona.

  Merrigutt said nothing. Did Oona hear the old woman chuckle to herself? Perhaps just the splutter and cackle of the fire. Anyway, Oona wasn’t staying silent any more.

  ‘You’ve something against the Kavanaghs.’

  ‘Only some of them,’ said Merrigutt.

  ‘But you’d no problem talking to my great-grandfather, did you?’

  ‘He’s different.’

  ‘How different? And how anyway do you even know him?’

  For long moments, nothing. Then Merrigutt brought her mouth to meet fish and she took small bites, her words slipping out between: ‘I knew him because I’ve seen a lot of this Isle. I might’ve started out in the back-end of nowhere much, beside the sea, but I’ve seen this Isle from shore to shore. From the Burren to bog, from the Marrim Meadows to the Scree, Beggar’s Bluff to Helen’s Falls – I’ve known many places. I’ve not lingered about in this life.’

  ‘Then tell me things,’ said Oona. ‘Tell me about this King of the North.’

  Oona could feel Merrigutt’s reluctance, saw it shape her: the old woman’s shoulders sank, her whole body sagging and leaning in towards the fire. Then Merrigutt’s teeth tore tail from trout and she grunted, and she began to tell –

  ‘This King – King of the North, King of the Echoes! He lives at the edge of the Black, beyond everything, beyond even the Burren. At the “edge of everything”, people are fond of saying. Close enough to where I was reared.’

  ‘When did he come?’ asked Oona. ‘How? I’d never heard of him till this past day or so.’

  ‘Like this: quiet and sudden, like all bad things. Imagine now, my girl, your whole world shaking beneath you. Imagine time telling you it was dawn but the sky telling you different – so dark it might’ve been a winter’s night. Imagine leaving your bed in bare feet and running outside and watching the sea itself being parted. And then this – something dark rising in the distance. A single peak, sharp as a Briar-Witch’s claw.’ Merrigutt paused, wetting her lips. ‘The King’s Mountain.’

  Oona clung tight to what she had so little of – patience. But it didn’t stay in her grip for long and she opened her mouth for a question, but Merrigutt said first –

  ‘How do I know this? Because I saw it. I was there. I saw the waves rush in when that peak appeared and I saw the town destroyed around me. Whole chunks of coast taken away like bites from an apple!’ Merrigutt paused, examining the trout. ‘Sea could hardly be fished in after that. Everything that came out of it was too foul for eating, like it was all poisoned.’

  ‘How long ago was this?’ asked Oona.

  ‘Long time,’ said Merrigutt. ‘And it was a long time silent, that mountain. Just there, just dark, quiet. And then the Invaders arrived.’

  ‘Has no one tried to get to it?’ asked Oona, thinking that if she and Morris had had a thing like that peak near, they’d be the first to take a boat and try.

  ‘No one,’ said Merrigutt, ‘except the fools, and there’s been plenty of them. Many a Northern man has gone out with his boat and his gun and his stubborn ways. Many’s a one has rowed out, and not a single soul has come back. It is a place where no bird will settle, and where no man’s foot has a chance of settling either. It is protected by a powerful magic. I heard some rumours there was a way to get to it. But only at night, only with the fullest moon in the sky.’

  Oona wet her own lips and tried to still her own breathing to ask, ‘And the King himself, he’s living on that black peak?’

  ‘Not a peak any more, and not black,’ said Merrigutt. ‘It’s changing. Sometimes it’s the colour of smoke, other times the colour of scorched stone. Sometimes just the same white as deep winter. And it’s no longer a peak. On the coast they call it the City of Echoes.’

  ‘“City”?’ said Oona. ‘But you said it was –’

  ‘I said things change,’ said Merrigutt. ‘That’s what you need to get into your head – nothing stays the same, especially in the North.’

  ‘And that’s where they’re being taken,’ said Oona. ‘The boys, Morris – being taken to the King’s City?’

  Merrigutt nodded.

  ‘But –’ began Oona.

  ‘Mind your fish doesn’t burn there, my girl,’ said Merrigutt.

  Oona’s concentration had been so much on talk that her trout had burned black.

  ‘Here,’ said Merrigutt, and she passed what remained of her own fish to Oona. ‘Eat, then try for sleep. And try not to nightmare.’

  But Oona had to throw one last question: ‘Echoes – my friend Bridget talked something about that. Why do they call it the “City of Echoes”?’

  A last sigh from Merrigutt, the old woman settling, limbs all bunched close. And then she said, ‘Because of the sound of the place. They say on the shore that if you listen hard enough at night, you can hear voices coming off the sea. Echoes. Words all frightened and pleading, drifting through the dark, all sounding from inside the walls of the King’s City.’

  29

  Morning made Oona need to move. Soon as any light came to the cottage she said, ‘We need to be going.’ She was always up early in Drumbroken, but she had some sense of things following them here – knew they couldn’t linger. And her own insistence felt matched by the Loam Stone: its impatience, its whisper: It is close now. The Divide, the long dark – it isn’t far. You need to move towards it.

  So through morning and so much mist Oona was wandering. On her shoulder, more of Merrigutt’s moaning: ‘Need to be more careful than you usually are, my girl. Need not to be just storming on, reckless as anything.’

  ‘I’m not!’ said Oona, and she was telling honest. She was determined, true enough, but not stupid: her steps went slow, and her eyes were sharp enough to any sight. The jackdaw was the only truly reckless thing – Merrigutt didn’t know what to do with herself, one moment in the air and lifting so high she was nearly lost, and then falling back to Oona’s shoulder and saying, ‘And they say the Divide’s much wider now. Grows wider all the time, probably wider today than it was even yesterday!’

  ‘Aye,’ said Oona.

  ‘How are we gonna see it?’ asked Merrigutt. ‘Sure not even my eyes can see anything in all this mist!’

  I can show you things.

  Oona stopped.

  ‘What?’ asked Merrigutt.

  ‘It’ll show me,’ said Oona. ‘It’ll let me see.’

  ‘All right,’ said Merrigutt. ‘But be careful.’

  Oona sent one damp hand to her satchel, letting it slither inside to tighten around the Loam Stone. She held it, and waited. And after not long and without need to shut her eyes, Oona was shown: houses she’d never seen the like of before arranged beside a river, wheels clinging to gable walls, churning, scooping clear water from the river and carrying it up and over. Laughter: children chasing one another through tangled gardens, hiding behind neat rows of broad beans and peas, their parents near by, chatting. Oona saw this perfect scene, sunlit, and she relished it for the moments she had. And then the Loam Stone showed its truth, the nightmare: the river began to drop, to drain into a widening gulf opening in its bed as the ground cracked and everything slipped, a swift dark unpicking the earth in a swift zig-zag and houses and children and parents and gardens all tumbling into the sudden Divide, any screams soon echoes –

  Oona stopped herself. Her hand left the Stone.

  ‘Well?’ said Merrigutt. ‘Did you see?’

  ‘I saw,’ said Oona. She swallowed, shivering. ‘Not far now.’ Oona walked – unsteady, awaiting.

  And no more than minutes passed before they arrived.

  The mist released them and Oona stopped and looked out onto the same dreamed-of dark. Same nightmare, same obscene chasm stretching away – the deep of the Divide. She was glad of the Loam Ston
e’s warning – it had filled her with terror, but had prepared her, too.

  ‘Sorrowful Lady preserve us!’ said Merrigutt.

  Oona said nothing. She stood, because what else was there to do when the world ends under your feet, gives up to be succeeded by dark? And beyond and beyond … in the distance mist shrugged its shoulders, stopping signs of the other side, giving no sight of the North. But it wasn’t pale mist – it was black. On the brink Oona could feel – almost hear? – the will of the land, the strain and want of it to separate further. And at the same time such quiet, not unlike the hush brought by the Coach-A-Bower. She shifted her bare feet as if she needed to keep finding fresh purchase or fall. Oona felt drawn to the dark – it seemed to be inviting her, as though it was saying, Want to see how far I go down? How deep and how dark? Well, come close and –

  ‘Stop!’ called Merrigutt.

  Oona stepped back, only realising then how close she’d come to toppling.

  ‘How are we gonna –?’ she started the question, and then spied inadequate answer: a rope-bridge with a blasted look, the planks all broken, or missing. All of it was battle-worn and bullied by the elements and drawn taut by the Divide.

  ‘Well,’ said Oona. ‘I suppose there are no Invaders about, so that’s something.’

  ‘Doesn’t need to be any Invaders,’ said Merrigutt. ‘You should be more worried when there are none – never a good sign, far as I’ve learnt. And why would they patrol here anyway? Sure only a fool would try to make a crossing on that excuse for a bridge!’

  There’s that word again, thought Oona. Fool.

  ‘You’re going to, aren’t you?’ said Merrigutt, and she leaned in so that there was hardly a hair’s space between the jackdaw’s eyes and Oona’s own. ‘You’re actually standing there and weighing up and thinking of crossing that bridge, are you not?’