King of Dublin

by Lisa Henry

  Seamus and Noel were old enough to remember the city before the pandemic and economic collapse. Old enough to remember the way that people had lived then. They’d run with the king of Dublin back when he was nothing but a hoodie youth offender, always in trouble with the garda and the courts. They were still running with him now, only this time they owned the city. They said it like they were proud, as though they didn’t mourn the dead at all, or find anything pitiful about their existence. Like they saw the collapse of Ireland as something glorious, something that had elevated them by razing everything else to the ground.

  Darragh didn’t see anything grand about inheriting a ruined city, but he still carried country air in his lungs. They didn’t live like rats in the country.

  The others were younger. If they had memories of a different Dublin, they didn’t bother to share them. They didn’t seem to think it was a laugh to be living in Trinity, like Seamus and Noel did. They didn’t seem to think it worth remarking on at all.

  Of all of them, Michael seemed the most affable, but even when he smiled, there was a hard edge to it. Dublin had made these men cruel. The sooner Darragh got back home, the better. Until then, he could bite his tongue, keep his head down, and do whatever was expected of him.

  Though sometimes, keeping his head down was easier said than done. Like now, rounding the corner in the middle of the night and finding the king’s boy standing there.

  Naked.

  Darragh flushed right up to the roots of his hair.

  “This is the Boy,” Noel said, and Boy looked up, a brief look of horror plastered across his too-pretty face before it melted into bland disinterest. “The only boy precious enough to wander around the king’s palace alone.”

  Darragh stared. Couldn’t believe the boy just went about naked like that. Except for the gold, of course. He tried to shift his gaze away, instead of down, but too late. He’d looked. He was looking. Boy had a lithe, small body, nearly hairless except for the gold curls at the base of his soft cock. Pale, curvy thighs you’d want to use as a pillow. Boy’s body gleamed as bright as the gold in the scant light, damp with sweat, and suddenly Darragh had an image in his mind of exactly what Boy had been up to. An image that was followed very quickly by the first stirrings of heat coiling tight in his belly, and lower.

  Darragh really shouldn’t stare. Boy wasn’t his to look at, and certainly wasn’t his to have. It seemed a bad start to his time here to be coveting the king’s lover.

  “You smell like cum, Boy!” Seamus taunted, elbowing Darragh in the ribs as he laughed. “Doesn’t he smell of cum, culchie?”

  Darragh clenched his jaw.

  “It’s a fucking slut,” Hugh said. “You go that way, culchie, and you can have a lend of it.”

  “No,” Boy said suddenly, his gaze darting between them. “I serve the king. If you smell cum on me, it’s the king’s cum, and you’d do well to remember that.”

  Seamus snorted and reached out to pat Boy on the cheek. Boy pressed back against the wall. “Don’t pretend you haven’t bent over for half the king’s men, screaming out for it like a fucking woman.”

  Boy shrank even smaller against the wall, if such a thing were possible. “Don’t say that. N-not even as a joke. Because I wouldn’t. I’ve never.” The panic in his voice brought it high and reedy, but then something changed in him, and he lifted his chin defiantly. Brave again. “I’d never stray from the king’s bed. I’m loyal. Although you certainly aren’t looking it just now. I’m his prized possession, and you know what happens if you take from him without permission.”

  Seamus dropped his hand. “You threatening me?”

  Boy nodded, never breaking eye contact. “That’s right. I have his ear. You know I have. All day. All night. So you’d best let off me, right now.”

  Seamus curled his thin mouth into a smile. “Maybe I will. And maybe the next time the king offers me a boon, I’ll take your arse again. You spread your legs fast enough last time, didn’t you?”

  “I serve the king,” Boy said. His chest rose and fell rapidly as he breathed. “I do what he commands.”

  “Damn right you do,” Seamus replied and stuffed his hand between Boy’s legs. “And you love it, too, don’t you? Little whore.”

  Boy’s head tipped back against the wall, his eyes falling closed in an expression that Darragh couldn’t discern as pleasure or pain. But then, for some, pain was pleasure. Maybe Boy was like that. Maybe the cruelty of this new world suited him, the same way it suited bloodthirsty brutes like the king’s men. Nothing in this place would surprise him.

  “Come on,” Noel said, rolling his eyes. “We’re to show the culchie the ropes, remember?”

  Seamus grinned at that. “Doing the Boy is the ropes.”

  The others laughed.

  Michael caught Darragh’s glance. “It’s true,” he said. “There’s a few we keep over at Trinity, but they’re not so pretty. Please the king and you’ll get your turn with this one in time.”

  Darragh scoffed and curled his lip, looking at the pale little thing clinging to the wall, still glaring at the men who surrounded him. “Don’t want a turn,” he said. And he didn’t. Whatever heat the Boy had inspired in him before, it had been extinguished. Darragh just wanted to leave him and his sick loyalty behind. Dublin was a hard, cruel, ugly place, and as beautiful as he was, Boy was the living essence of it. Better to return to the countryside; things there may be plain and simple, not a single glint of gold, but they were good. He hadn’t known how good until he came here. Somehow he’d always worried about what they’d lost but never realised how much they’d held on to as well. And just like that, a wave of homesickness broke over him. “Come on,” he pleaded. “Can’t stand to look at him.”

  “Ha!” Seamus cried, throwing a companionable arm around Darragh’s shoulder and leading them all down the hall, leaving the Boy behind. “Fancies himself straight, the culchie does. Well, just know, culchie, it don’t make you a poofter to fuck this one, since he’s such a slut ’n’all.”

  “I give it a month,” Colm said, showing broken teeth when he spoke, “before his balls are so blue he’s knocking down doors to get to the Boy!”

  “The king don’t like women. Don’t want them around. Thinks they divide loyalties. Useless, too, when they’re always pregnant or got babbies hanging off their saggy tits. Not to mention I think he just likes bein’ surrounded by arse and cocks!” Seamus laughed. “You can try and have a go with the rats you take, but don’t let the king hear wind of it. Not that he cares a whit about any woman’s virtue, but he’s convinced men turn traitor after a taste of their cunts.”

  “Whatever you do, straight culchie,” Hugh advised, “know that most of the women of Dublin run wild as a pack of feckin’ dogs. You’re either with the king or you’re against him, and since there’s no women with him, that means they’re all against him.”

  Noel grabbed a fistful of his crotch obscenely. “Birdies of Dublin don’t like the king’s men. Don’t like our cocks, either. That’s how Colm got his scar.”

  Colm nodded sombrely. “It’s true. I’m beginnin’ to think the only women tough enough to survive ’til now have only done so by eating the balls of men.”

  The men all laughed, except for Darragh, who looked over his shoulder just in time to see the king’s boy slinking away around a corner like the coward he was.

  Darragh didn’t sleep at all that first night. He tossed and turned in his bunk, unable to stop thinking of the king’s boy. How had he come here, and why? Maybe there was no real mystery; you did what you could to eat in a world like this. But it took a real different sort to whore himself out like that, so blatantly. Just another thing Darragh was glad he didn’t understand. Rather be a dumb culchie any day. At home, they were a family. Sometimes they fought and sometimes they even came to blows, but at home you didn’t have to debase yourself for anyone. If you had any pride to begin with, that is. Maybe Boy didn’t.

  He should be pitying the
boy right now. Not resenting him, and yet there it was. Maybe the resentment was for himself, for his attraction to such a pathetic little creature. Even now, if he let his mind’s eye linger on images of the boy’s body, he felt his cock stir. So gently shaped. So smooth. To have those lean legs wrapped around his waist, to have that cock and balls covered in his saliva, to suck on those nipples or squeeze and spread that plump arse.

  Damn. He tightened his hands in the scratchy wool blanket that covered him to keep from touching himself, from palming his growing erection. He wouldn’t let himself into the fantasy. He wouldn’t think of Boy that way. Wouldn’t use him like the other men had. Wouldn’t have any part in the sad enterprise at all. Not because he was straight, as the other men believed—he wasn’t, not even remotely, had known since childhood that he wasn’t like the other boys in his village—but because simultaneously hating Boy’s desperation and wanting to take advantage of it, even in fantasies, was vile and poisonous hypocrisy.

  The sooner Darragh got out of Dublin, the better.

  The next morning, they ate a communal breakfast in the Trinity dining hall, served by shifty men dressed in rags who never spoke or made eye contact. More bland nutritional gruel, which made Darragh miss the fresh eggs from the village chickens and milk with the cream on top. As he spooned the gruel into his mouth, he wondered where it came from. There were no farms here, no means of production, but the king’s men weren’t starving. If they didn’t produce the food themselves, did it come from the North? And what could they offer in exchange? Because nothing was free in this world.

  “You got a weapon in that bag of yours, culchie?” Michael asked him after they ate.

  Darragh nodded.

  “Bring it,” Michael said. “We’re going on patrol.”

  Today, Darragh rode up front in the armoured van, squeezed in with Michael and Hugh. Hugh drove, peering around the cracks in the windscreen and Michael pointed out landmarks to Darragh. Some of the names he’d heard before and read about in the books from home or on his map. But most of them were nothing like their pictures anymore.

  “Still get scavengers sometimes,” Michael told him and grinned. “You know all about that though.”

  Darragh returned the smile uneasily. “I surely do.”

  “Where you from anyway, culchie?”

  “The country,” Darragh said.

  “I know that.” Michael reached out to hold the dash as Hugh took a corner fast. “No hiding that! But this place in the country, does it have a name?”

  “Don’t remember it,” Darragh told him. That couldn’t be unusual. Plenty of things taken for granted in the old world were gone and forgotten in the new. Why not names among them? He stared out the window. The day was grey, overcast. Darragh looked at the river as the van roared over a bridge. It reflected the clouds above.

  The king’s patch, from what Darragh could tell, was essentially a square mile surrounding his palace and Trinity. He owned the city, no doubt of that, but that square mile or so was his heartland, and it was secure from his enemies.

  “What enemies?” Darragh asked when Michael had told him about it.

  That was a mistake.

  Laughing, Hugh threw the van into reverse, causing the men in the back to bang against the walls, which were too thick to make out what they were yelling. Darragh guessed it wasn’t complimentary.

  They pulled up by the river. Darragh didn’t know where they were. An open space, an old space, the stones overgrown with weeds. There was a stone plinth in the middle of the space, but if a statue had ever stood there, it was long gone. Railings ran along the side of the river. Posts lashed to the railings were topped with weird misshapen somethings that Darragh couldn’t quite make out as he climbed out of the cab.

  Hugh went to let the others out.

  “See over there?” Michael pointed across the river, further down. “That’s the king’s docks. So all the boats that pass, they pass here, don’t they? And they all see this.”

  The wind turned, blew back towards them, and Darragh caught the sudden stench of it in the back of his throat. The things on the posts were heads. Human heads, in various stages of decay.

  The king’s enemies.

  Michael and the rest of the king’s men watched him, and Darragh understood that this was a test. He stared at the posts, at the things that still didn’t look like heads even though he knew they were—strange and distorted like they’d melted in the sun—and wondered if this was where he would have ended up if the king hadn’t liked him.

  Where he could still end up.

  “Keeps his enemies down, don’t it?” Seamus said at last, his thin mouth twisted into a smile.

  “It does, sure,” Darragh said.

  They wanted him to be scared? Fine, he was. However dumb they thought he was, he wasn’t dumb enough to mistake this as anything but a threat: Stay in line or this is you. Didn’t have to be a genius to work that one out.

  In a few months he’d be home again, with medicine, and none of the others would have to know what he’d seen here.

  “Do boats still come?” he asked Michael, looking past the heads to the river.

  Michael nodded. “Mostly traders. We trade for supplies. ”

  Darragh drew his gaze back, frowning. “What do you trade?”

  He couldn’t imagine anything worth having in Dublin. Not even the king’s gold, but that might have been his naivety talking. Couldn’t eat gold. Couldn’t grow anything from it. Could there really be something in Dublin after all these years that was worth trading?

  It was Seamus that answered, his mouth pulled back in a grin that looked like a rictus. “Wanna see, culchie?”

  Darragh shrugged, careful not to show his unease. “If you like.”

  People.

  The warehouse was full of people, penned in like cattle—worse somehow than the heads on posts because they were still alive, still full of fear and hope.

  “Trader can get three hundred for one in good condition,” Hugh said. “That’s worth a few bags of supplies our way.”

  “What happens to them then?” Darragh asked. His brain felt like it was stuffed with cotton. He couldn’t think.

  Hugh shrugged. “Don’t much care.”

  “Isn’t that the way of it, though,” Seamus said. “Even in the old days, the only thing Ireland ever had of value for export was the Irish.”

  But never like this.

  “These traders. They are …” Darragh struggled for the word. It seemed so childish, a word from a fantasy like elves or wizards, but no, he knew it was real, even if it seemed absurd. “Pirates?”

  Noel laughed, the sound terrible and twisted in this place of human suffering. “I think Viking’s the better word, considering. But sure, some are pirates. And some are pirates in the hire of governments, not that the ones paying them would ever admit it.”

  Governments trading in human chattel, and the king turning a profit.

  And now Darragh was aiding them in the effort.

  Medicine. He needed medicine. Not wealth or power or boys dripping with gold.

  Medicine, upon which the lives of his people depended.

  He looked down at the pens below, at the people standing huddled together, shifting and hugging themselves in the cold. Men, women, and even children. The whole place stinking of desperation and human waste.

  Their lives for the lives of Darragh’s kin.

  A grim trade, to be sure.

  As grim as any the king might make.

  They made their rounds through the empty streets, the van following a complex path of routes blocked by barriers of wrecked cars and collapsed buildings. Everywhere they went was deserted, ruined, the great and wonderful city of Darragh’s memories brought to its knees.

  “Where are the people?” Darragh asked, because he needed to know there were still free men and women in Dublin, that they weren’t all sold as slaves at the docks.

  “They hide when they hear the van, the rats.”r />
  “Ah.” What sort of life that was? One of constant fear, he imagined.

  Years ago, a pack of dogs had found their way to Cúil Aodha. Big, feral things, like wolves out of a fairy-tale book. At night, the doors to the house barred, the little kids had huddled together and cried when the dogs howled outside. They had no fear, those dogs. Predators with no enemy. Even during the day they were fearless. Maeve had barely gotten away when she’d rounded the corner to find the pack waiting there. The sound of her screams had made Darragh’s blood run cold. He’d been thirteen at the time, the oldest of the village survivors. Maeve was twelve, fast and long legged. She’d climbed a wall to get out of their reach, and that’s where Darragh and some of the others had found her: standing there, still screaming, as the dogs leapt and snapped at her feet.

  Darragh had never killed a living thing in rage until that day. Never in a fight, with his blood up. Never kill or be killed. But he did that day; they all did. A pack of kids armed with bars and scythes, and a pack of dogs with slavering jaws. He’d been terrified of dying but more terrified of what would happen to the smaller kids if he did. He had ended up with a vicious bite to his lower leg. Cathleen had lost a finger. And Brendan had bled from the throat until he died.

  They’d burned the dog carcasses in the south field, and buried Brendan near his parents.

  Darragh never wanted to feel like prey again, cornered and desperate.

  The van roared through the streets, and Darragh remembered the sound of those dogs growling and the way it had raised the hairs on the back of his neck. He imagined people, hidden away and huddling together in the ruins of the city, cringing at the noise of the van.

  If he hadn’t been sure before, Darragh knew now without a shadow of a doubt that the king’s men were monsters. A pack of predators, and he’d joined them.

  Well, if it came to it, there was no way he’d hand another human being over to be sold as a slave. He’d turn and run before that happened. Until that time, he’d shut his mouth and keep his head down and earn his medicine from the king.

  But this was not loyalty.