by John Lenahan
I used to think that anger was a bad thing, but now I realise that in times of extreme stress and fear, anger can be the emotion that focuses your mind and gets you through. Did I hate my uncle? You bet. And the idea of killing him was the only thing that kept me from whimpering like a damp puppy. I held on to that thought as he came at me.
Cialtie paused. ‘You know, I just had a thought. Is it not ironic that the day you become an immortal is the day you die?’
‘If I’m an immortal, how are you going to kill me?’
Cialtie laughed, a sickening laugh that deliberately went on too long. ‘Oh my. I never thought I would see the day when I would meet a son of Duir who was so thick. Immortality, my boy, may save you from illness and getting old, but it won’t save you from this.’ He drew his sword and swung at my wrist.
Then it happened again. The world seemed to slow down and a golden–no–an amber glow encircled Cialtie’s sword and me. I felt the pressure of the blade on my wrist but it didn’t hurt, and more importantly, it didn’t cut. Cialtie flew into a rage–he began hacking and stabbing at me. I didn’t even try to dodge it–the amber glow seemed to protect me. Finally he threw the sword across the room in a rage.
‘This is Shadowmagic,’ he hissed. ‘That witch’s doing, I’ll wager. Well, I have a sorceress of my own.’ He turned to leave–then looked back. ‘You have a reprieve, nephew. I suggest that you and Daddy say your goodbyes. Just don’t take too long,’ and then he was gone, leaving me shaking, half from fear and half from anger.
‘I’m sorry, Conor,’ Dad finally said.
‘How come you never told me?’
Dad laughed. ‘What was I supposed to say? “Son, you are old enough now for me to tell you that I am the heir to the throne of a magical kingdom.” You think I’m loony enough as it is. I can imagine what you would have said to that.’
‘So, you’re the heir to a throne?’
Dad thought for a second, and took a deep breath that looked like it hurt. ‘My father–your grandfather–was the lord of this castle. His name was Finn and he held Duir–the Oak Rune. He was the king, if you like, of Tir na Nog.’
I was struggling to make sense of all of this. My head was spinning. ‘You’re a prince?’
‘Yes.’
‘The one-handed prince?’
He nodded
‘So why did Cialtie say I was dangerous?’
‘Ona,’ Dad said, ‘made a prediction.’
‘Who is this Ona?’
‘She was my father’s Runecaster.’ When I looked puzzled he said, ‘Like a fortune teller.’
‘And what did she say exactly?’ I could tell that the question pained him but I was angry. Some old bat throwing stones around was causing me a lot of trouble.
‘She said, “The son of the one-handed prince must die, lest he be the ruin of Tir na Nog.”‘
‘That’s ridiculous! You don’t believe this crap, do you?’
Dad lowered his head, and when he spoke I could hardly hear him. ‘Ona was never wrong.’
‘So let me get this straight. You lose your hand in a gardening accident and then everybody wants me dead!’ As soon as I said it I realised how ridiculous it sounded. ‘You didn’t lose your hand in a lawnmower, did you?’
‘No.’
‘Are you going to tell me about it?’
‘That is a long story,’ I heard a woman’s voice say. It sounded as if it was coming from inside the wall to my right. ‘And if you want to get out of here,’ she said as she appeared right before my eyes, ‘we will have to save it for later.’
You could have knocked me down with a feather. If I thought my aunt was stunning, this was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. Dark, tall, with a straight black ponytail plaited to her waist and wearing–check this out–animal skins. She seemed to just step through the wall.
She worked fast. She placed what looked like honey in the locks that shackled our wrists and Dad’s neck. Then she dropped to one knee, lowered her head, mumbled something and the irons fell away. I can’t tell you how good it felt. If you have ever taken off a thirty-pound backpack after a twenty-mile hike, you have the beginnings of an idea. Dad and I stood up.
‘Quickly!’ she said, and walked straight through the wall.
Before Dad could follow I put my hand on his shoulder. ‘Who’s the babe in the skins?’
‘That’s no way to talk about your mother,’ he said, and followed her through the wall.
Chapter Three
Mom
I stood there as if rooted to the spot. I don’t have a mother. My mother is dead. My father told me so. Emotions swirled around me like a leafy breeze. I was five years old. I remembered the pain in my chest, the taste of my tears. I remembered the look on my father’s face as I stared up to him from my bed.
‘Is Mom in heaven?’ I sobbed.
‘I’m not sure I believe in heaven,’ a younger version of Dad replied. ‘The ancient Celts believed in a place called Tir na Nog, where people never grow old. I think that’s where your mother is.’ He held me until the tears slowed and my sobs were replaced by sleep. Was this the only time my father had ever told me the truth?
‘Conor?’
I looked up and saw her standing there. ‘Are you my mother?’ I said in a voice I hadn’t used in fifteen years.
‘Yes,’ she said, and I knew it was true. I looked into that feminine mirror of my own face, complete with the tears, and I could hardly stand it. I know it contravened all eighteen-year-old cool behaviour but I couldn’t help myself. I threw my arms around her.
She held me tight and stroked the back of my head.
‘Conor, oh my Conor,’ she said.
I could have stayed in those arms for days, for months, for the rest of my life. She gently pushed me back by the shoulders, and in a motherly voice I so long had yearned for, said, ‘Conor?’ When I didn’t reply I heard the other motherly voice, the one that says, I’m your mother and you had better listen to me or else. She shook me and said again, ‘Conor!’
That got my attention.
‘We don’t have time for this. We must leave here.’
Still in a daze, I wiped my eyes and nodded.
Mom gestured to our right. ‘This way’
That was when I heard his voice at the door.
‘You!’ shouted Cialtie.
That snapped me right out of it. I looked to the door and saw my uncle standing there with some tall, spindly, pale woman. She was dressed in hanging black lace with dark, dark eyes, black lips and a skunk-like streak in the front of her jet-black hair.
I lost it–I flipped out. ‘Leave me alone!’ I screamed so forcefully that spit flew out of my mouth. Neither of them was prepared for a fight. They expected to find us chained to the wall. I loved the look on Cialtie’s face as he reached for his sword and realised that he had thrown it across the room after he had failed to cut off my hand. It was lying on the floor to my left. We both looked at it at the same time. Cialtie went for the sword, but I went for Cialtie. Some people would think I was brave, but bravery had nothing to do with it. I was plain loco. All of the day’s craziness, the pain, the revelations, the emotions–I had just had enough! I hit Cialtie with a picture-perfect American football tackle. My shoulder caught him square in the solar plexus and smashed him into the wall. I actually heard all of the air fly out of his lungs and I knew he wasn’t getting up in a hurry. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the goth woman smash into the wall with a shower of golden light from something my mother did. I reached down and picked up the sword. It was so much lighter than it looked. The pommel fitted in my hand as if it was made for me. I started to raise it, fully intending to bring it down on my uncle’s head, when two guards ran into the room. As they reached for their weapons my mother grabbed me by the collar and threw me at the wall.
Passing through a wall is a scary thing. I instinctively threw my hands in front of me but they went right through. When my face reached the stones every cell in
my body said, This is going to hurt!- and then pop–I was on the other side. Technically speaking I hadn’t gone through a wall, I had gone through an illusion of a wall. The real wall was in front of me with a big hole chiselled in it. I could see daylight through the opening and Dad beckoning me through. My mother appeared next to me and lobbed an amber ball behind her. I heard screams of, ‘My eyes!’ and then I crawled through. Dad was on the other side standing next to three enormous horses but I hardly noticed him. My eyes were filled with my first look at Tir na Nog–The Land.
Imagine spending all of your life in a world of black and white and finally seeing in colour…No, that’s not right. Imagine never being able to smell and then walking into a bakery, or being sealed in a bubble and feeling a touch of a hand for the first time. Even that doesn’t explain it. Try to imagine that you have another sense, one that you feel in your soul. A sense that activates every nerve in your body. Imagine a view that makes you feel like you could live forever–and you can. That’s what I was looking at now.
Ahead of me I looked down onto a vista of magnificent oak trees. Trees that if you hugged, might just hug you back. Trees that you could call family without irony. Trees that if you were to chop one down, it would mark you as a murderer to the end of your days. To the left, rolling fields started as foothills and culminated in blue, snow-capped mountains that seemed to touch the sky. To my right the trees changed to beech, but not the thin spindly trees I was used to, but spectacular white-barked beeches with the girth and height of California redwoods. When I finally tore my eyes away, I saw that my father too was lost in that panorama, and his eyes were as wet as mine.
‘Come on, boys,’ my mother said as she came through the wall, ‘tearful reunions and sightseeing will have to wait for later.’
‘What about Cialtie?’ I asked.
‘He didn’t seem to be breathing all that well,’ she said with a smile. A smile of approval from my mother–I can’t tell you how good that felt.
‘Nice sword,’ Dad said.
‘Yeah, my Uncle Cialtie gave it to me.’
Dad smiled. ‘I always liked that sword.’
‘You recognise it?’
‘I should,’ he said, as he swung himself up onto a horse. ‘It used to be mine.’
‘Come, Conor,’ my mother said as she jumped into a saddle, ‘he will be back with reinforcements in a minute. Mount up.’
‘I can’t ride that thing!’
‘Surely you know how to ride,’ she said.
‘Nope.’
She gave my father a stern look. ‘You didn’t teach him to ride? You, of all people, didn’t teach your own son to ride?’
‘I taught him to speak the tongue,’ he explained, ‘and I taught him swordplay.’
‘But not ride,’ she said, in a tone that made me realise she was not a woman to be trifled with. ‘Typical.’ She kicked her steed and galloped directly at me. Next thing I knew she grabbed me by the collar and hoisted me into the saddle in front of her.
‘Hold on tight and be careful with that sword.’
She took two amber balls out of her pouch and hurled them over the top of the wall above us. ‘Cover your eyes!’ she said. Even at this distance and with my forearm over my eyes, I saw the flash and could imagine how painful it must have been up close. To the sound of more screams, we galloped off towards the beech forest.
Considering that this was my first getaway, I thought it went pretty smoothly. I got spooked by a couple of arrows that zinged past us, but by and large we just rode away. I sat in front of my mother as we galloped and imagined I was an infant and she was behind me in my pushchair.
‘What is your name?’ I asked.
‘Deirdre,’ she whispered.
We entered the beech forest. Every time I spoke she shushed me, like I was speaking in a library, but when the trees thinned out, Mom answered a couple of my questions. She told me that she had been planning this jailbreak for a long time. She and some people she called the Fili had been secretly tunnelling through that wall at night for weeks. Each morning she would cast some kind of magic to conceal it. I asked her how she could have known that we were going to be there. In a conspiratorial tone of voice, she told me that she cast Shadowrunes. When I asked her why we were whispering she answered, ‘Because beech trees are very indiscreet.’
Other than that we rode in silence for about an hour. The beeches gave way to flowering ash trees. Fine yellow flowers covered the ground and marked our hoof prints like snow.
Dad pulled up beside us. He looked very tired. ‘Castle Nuin is near. Can we get sanctuary there?’
‘I’m afraid when the lords find out about Conor,’ Mom said, ‘we won’t have friends anywhere.’
Dad nodded in resignation.
‘We don’t have much further to ride. I have a boat up ahead. If we can make it to the Fililands we will be safe.’
We travelled for another fifteen minutes or so until we came to a river. Dad dismounted and splashed his face with the water. ‘River Lugar,’ he sighed, ‘I thought I would never see you again.’ He looked up at my mother. ‘Nor did I think I would ever see you again, Deirdre.’
‘Come, Oisin.’ Her voice cracked a little as she spoke. ‘We don’t have time for this. The boat is just a little way downstream.’
The boat was a canvas-stretched canoe. Dad called it a carrack. It was hidden under some ash branches. Mom returned the branches to underneath a nearby tree, then placed her hand on the trunk and said, ‘Thank you.’ Maybe it was a trick of the light but I could have sworn the tree bowed to her–just a little.
The boat was lined with straw mats and was big enough for Dad and me to lie down next to each other. Mom sat in the back and told us to rest. We had drifted downstream for maybe thirty seconds before I was out cold.
Let me tell you, the dreams in Tir na Nog are worth the price of admission. Even though I had nothing to compare it with, I can’t imagine that people in the Real World have dreams anything like I had in that boat.
I dreamt my father was teaching a lecture at the front of a classroom and I raised my hand in answer to a question. He drew a sword and sliced it off! My hand landed on my desk where it seemed to be encased in amber glass, like a huge paperweight. When I looked back, my father was now my uncle and he was laughing at me, saying, ‘No glow now’
The classroom became a room in a high tower; my mother and my aunt were clenched in a fight to the death. Mom’s pouch was open and amber balls were falling to the floor in slow motion. Each time one hit the ground there was a blinding flash, and after each flash the scene in front of me changed. One moment the two women were fighting, the next, they were embracing, like two sisters sharing a secret. Fighting–embracing–fighting–embracing–the scene kept changing until the flashes came so frequently that I could see nothing but bright light.
The last image I saw before I awoke was Sally. She was waiting for me outside the cinema. She waited so long that her legs became tree roots and burrowed into the ground. Her arms turned to boughs and sprouted leaves. At the last second before she turned entirely into a tree, she saw me. She tried to say, ‘Where are you?’ but the wood engulfed her in mid-sentence.
I awoke from my first dream with such a jolt that I instantly stood up, which was a mistake. I was still in the boat. Even though it was beached, it tipped over. I fell smack down in the shoreline as the boat flipped over painfully on the back of my legs. I quickly struggled out from under it and desperately searched for Sally (or the tree that had become Sally) before I came to my senses. I collapsed on the ground and rubbed the back of my calves. So that’s what a dream is like. I couldn’t decide if I wanted to close my eyes and continue it, or never fall asleep again.
A tug on my collar made me realise that something was hanging around my neck. Attached to the end of a leather strap was a beautiful gold ornament. It was shaped like a tiny tornado with leaves spinning in it. As I marvelled at the intricacies of my new jewellery, the smell of food
and a campfire hit me. My nose went up like a batter who had just hit a fly ball. It was a smell I was powerless not to follow.
At least this day was starting better than the previous one. Yesterday I awoke to the nightmare of finding myself chained to a wall by a lunatic uncle who was determined to give me a new nickname–Lefty. Today I walked into the dream-come-true of my father and my mother sitting around a campfire. They were holding hands (well, hand) and deep in conversation when I came around a huge weeping willow. They broke off when they saw me.
‘Good morning,’ my father said.
‘Good morning,’ I replied, not really looking at him. My eyes were glued to my mother. At a glance I would have thought she was my age until I looked into her eyes. I was starting to learn that here, in Tir na Nog, it wasn’t grey hair or a wrinkled face that betrayed someone’s age, like in the Real World–it was the eyes.
‘Good morning,’ I said.
She stood up. It was an awkward moment, like we were meeting for the first time. She was nervous.
‘Good morning, Conor.’
I wrapped my arms around her. I had a lifetime of mothering to make up for. Her return hug told me she felt the same.
‘I could get very used to this,’ I said, trying unsuccessfully to stop the dam from breaking behind my eyes.
‘And I too.’ She wept.
Dad left us for a respectable amount of time before he interrupted. ‘Cup of tea, Conor?’
I wiped my eyes and saw Dad grinning from ear to ear, holding a steaming cup in his hand. ‘Thanks,’ I said as I took a seat next to him. ‘I think I just had a dream.’
‘Yeah, me too. Intense, isn’t it?’ he said.
‘Are all dreams like that?’
‘I don’t know. Like you, I never had a dream in the Real World. This being your first one, it must have…What’s that phrase you use? Freaked you out.’
‘Freaked you out?’ Mom said.
‘You’ll get used to it,’ Dad replied.
