“Call out in your head to your powerful ancestor,” she told Michael. “Reach him through your blood; request him to help us.”
The three linked hands and began a slow, measured dance, following the spiral patterns described in the Book. Michael threw back his head and closed his eyes. In a deep voice, he began chanting the names Amer Crafter had once written in connection with the symbolism of the spiral.
“Bootes and Canes, provide!” he exhorted. “Aries, Camelopardalis, Cancer, Cygnus, Delphinus, Equuleus, Pisces, Serpens, Taurus, Ursa, Vulpecula ... “ Names known to the science of astronomy.
Their feet beat an ancient design on the earth as Michael called to the stars. Swirling and swirling, the three danced, summoning, invoking, drawing down the powers of the cosmos.
The names Michael called upon changed. “Perseus, Orion, protect!” he cried. The pattern of the dance also changed, mirroring different configurations in the sky. Michael felt as if his strength were being literally drawn from him, pulled into the earth. His knees trembled with weakness. At last he staggered to a halt, but Broce’s fingers pressed his like iron, and Aisling’ s voice demanded, “Not until you say the final words from the Book!”
And so he did. Using the incantations Amer Crafter had discovered long before, Michael wove a spell in the ring-fort that night, a spell to alter the very nature of time within those crumbling walls. He and Broce and Aisling rested a brief while afterward, then moved on to another site. And yet another.
Each night for three nights, they met to repeat the rituals. Each night for three nights, Michael was left totally exhausted; yet he felt a growing sense of elation as if his flesh and bones knew their effort would succeed. He felt the gift of magic growing in him with practice; he felt doors opening inside himself.
During the day he traveled far afield to visit the pathetic hovels remaining to the surviving Irish peasants in the district. Though the peasants considered Michael a sasanach, his ancestors had indeed been kind to them and the people had not forgotten. They listened to what he had to say and a faint light of hope began to illumine their faces.
“Take shelter in the old ring-forts,” he told them. “There you will be under the protection of . . . the Good People. No harm will come to you within the walls, and while you are there you will not feel the pangs of hunger. Time is stopped there; you can stay as long as you like, until the awful Famine has passed from the land, and you may then emerge still alive, though thousands have died.”
When he invoked the name of the Good People—the sidhe, the fairy folk—he saw fear leap in his listeners’ eyes. Some crossed themselves and would have nothing further to do with the idea. Some would tell their priests, who condemned the plan in the most shocked phrases. But some, who knew the Crafters as decent people, believed. They followed Michael’s instructions, making their way to the old and long-abandoned ring-forts, and hid there amid briars and nettles while Famine stalked through Ireland.
When at last it was over, they emerged, no thinner than when they went in, to slowly repopulate the land. The legend of the fairy forts came with them, to be told in whispers down the years, each telling more wild and wonderful than the one before, until a great aura of superstition attached itself to the ‘fairy forts’ and it was believed—as it is to this day—that to harm or desecrate one was to bring the direst of punishments upon oneself. So many an ancient ring-fort stands unscathed in the center of an otherwise plowed and productive field, a field once belonging to the native Irish, who have taken back the land where their ancestors suffered and starved.
As for Michael Crafter, who used New World magic in the Old World, no man knows his fate. During the worst of the famine he was seen throughout the west of Ireland with two strange companions who let no man get close to them. It was rumored they danced in ring-forts by the dark of the moon. Then, when the Famine faded at last, Michael was seen no more. His great house stood abandoned to the elements, tenanted by wind and rain, sinking back into the earth.
In time the Christ-men in their churches began accusing Michael Crafter of having formed an unholy alliance for unspecified purposes. They said the collapse of the once powerful Crafter line was proof of evil, an evil not mitigated by the acts of charity Michael’s predecessors had performed. Michael Crafter’s soul now burns in Hell! they assured their flock, and the same will happen to you if you surrender to pagan superstition!
Protestant and Catholic alike, they condemned him most heartily.
But there is a song still sung in the district of Cratloe Wood, in the county of Clare, where the wild wind comes wailing across the Atlantic from the next parish, which is Boston. The song tells of a lonely man with a gentle nature, a man who did the best he could, and loved the land where he was born. This man went off with the fairies, according to that ballad. He followed a beautiful vision into the hidden halls underneath the earth, and he lives there still. Lonely no longer.
The song celebrates him as being a man of magic and science, though science is not a word often used in the county of Clare County Clare, one of the worst hit by the hideous specter of Famine. County Clare, where an incredible number of people somehow survived.
JEFFREY AMBROSE CRAFTER was exhausted, yet exhilarated. He had seen what he could do, what had to be done, and he had done it. He smiled as he hurried through the gray, damp Moscow dawn, the briefcase containing the leather envelope and velvet bag held tightly in his hand. Around him the stolid citizens of the U.S.S.R. made their weary way through the icy streets. On the other side of the world, he knew, the citizens of the U.S.A. were ending their work hours. There were going to be some changes soon for them all, he hoped.
Later that afternoon, the acknowledged protégé of Yuri Andropov sat in his limo sine as the chauffeur drove him to his dacha, and considered the amazing events of the day. First his mentor, and then President Brezhnev himself, had called into question years of propaganda, years of data analysis. They had voiced aloud, had dared to voice aloud, criticisms of the state of Mother Russia, forced into decline by the moribund bureaucracy of the Party. They had, they both agreed, awakened that morning with an astonishing clarity of vision and a new sense of purpose.
They had voiced, in fact, thoughts that the soon-to-be Premier of the Soviet Union and Chairman of the Communist Party had privately held for some while. Extraordinary. But then, Mikhail Gorbachev thought, these were extraordinary times . . .
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The Crafters Book One Page 27
