King of Dublin

by Lisa Henry

  Still on his knees, Ciaran shuffled around to face his captor, and discovered he was looking at someone hardly older than a kid. Skinny, sinewy, an angular face, and a sharp glare. His skin was nut brown, with grime most probably, and his dark hair was a tangled, thorny mess. He looked like one of Peter Pan’s Lost Boys.

  And the gun in his hands was a piece of fucking pipe.

  Rabbit grinned. “Could still knock you out with it but, hey?”

  Ciaran rubbed at a phantom pain on one arm. Yes, he’d been hit with pipe before, many times. He wasn’t looking to relive the experience. “You could, sure.”

  “Probably won’t but,” Rabbit said, swinging the pipe. “Come on, come and meet the boss.”

  “I was just passing through,” Ciaran said. “What if I go back the way I came and you pretend you never saw me? I don’t want any trouble.”

  Rabbit snorted. “Too late for that, Danny Boy. We seen you comin’ for miles. Boss is already waitin’, so.”

  Ciaran rose slowly to his feet.

  “Anyhow,” Rabbit said as he ushered Ciaran towards the camp, “you’re just in time for grub.”

  Ciaran had too much experience with the worst-case scenario for him to feel anything even approaching hope as he entered the bandits’ camp. So he was very surprised when Rabbit sat him down in front of a fire and shoved a plate in his hands. A hubcap actually, but it looked clean enough. And when Rabbit dropped what looked to be a drumstick onto it and nodded at him to eat, Ciaran could hardly believe it.

  “It’s duck,” Rabbit told him, chewing his own. “There’s a heap of them around here. Look.” He lifted a hank of his filthy hair to show off a feather woven in. “Got that from one, with so gentle a touch he thought I was tickling him instead of snapping his neck.” He laughed.

  Ciaran risked an answering smile.

  There were people milling around the camp. Men and a few women and even children. All as filthy as Rabbit, but none of them timid. None of them overly hostile, either. Having obviously decided Ciaran was no threat to their camp, the bandits regarded him curiously but went about their business, whatever that may have been.

  Rabbit and Ciaran sat on the edge of the camp, in the shade of a canvas sheet, and ate.

  Rabbit fixed his gaze on Ciaran again. “So this fella you were travelling with, what happened to him?”

  “He stole my stuff and ran off,” Ciaran said.

  “Sure, it’s a mean old world, little birdie.” Rabbit’s short, sharp grin told Ciaran he knew it was a lie. “When brothers steal from brothers, what an awful shame, and God rot us all.” He crossed himself. Backwards.

  Ciaran wanted very much to like Rabbit, the odd wild boy, and his quick grin. But he wouldn’t. He couldn’t. Boru had been quick to laughter as well, hadn’t he? Quick to laughter and quick to blind fury, with only a heartbeat between the two. And this was a cruel world.

  “Have you lived here always?” Ciaran asked, wondering if he could bring the conversation around to what he really wanted to know: whether these bandits were allied with Boru.

  “Always and forever,” Rabbit said.

  “What about before?”

  Rabbit scratched his nose. “Don’t remember before. Them old ones talk malarkey about all that, but what good can come of harping on about it? Before counts for shite in the now.”

  “Suppose it does,” Ciaran agreed.

  “What? You remember before?” Rabbit asked him.

  “Bits,” Ciaran said.

  Rabbit made a face. “But surely you were just a tiny babby then.”

  “I was four.”

  “Get out!” Rabbit elbowed him. “You’re no bigger than a wee ’un now.”

  “I’m twenty-one,” Ciaran said. “How old are you?”

  Rabbit shrugged. “Dunno. Old enough.” He puffed his chest out and grinned. “Bigger than you!”

  An inch or two taller, maybe, but he was scrawny as hell. Although maybe that wasn’t due to deprivation, the way it was on the people in Dublin. It looked to Ciaran like the bandits ate well. Certainly they wouldn’t share with a stranger if they didn’t. Maybe Rabbit was just going through a growth spurt. Ciaran had desperately waited for one of those when he was about seventeen or eighteen, his last chance to shoot up and fill out before adulthood, but it had never arrived.

  “You been on the road a while?” Rabbit asked him.

  “Few days,” Ciaran said, knowing that he was too clean to pretend it had been any longer.

  “With some other fella,” Rabbit said.

  “That’s right.”

  Rabbit elbowed him. “You oughta pick your friends more careful.”

  Ciaran snorted.

  “Where’d he go then?” Rabbit asked. “This one who took all your stuff.”

  “I don’t know.” Back where he came from, if he’s smart. But realistically? Probably following me. Or trying to, anyway. He wondered if Darragh was much of a tracker.

  “Hmm,” Rabbit said. Unimpressed by Ciaran’s answer?

  “He took off in the middle of the night,” Ciaran added, feeling the need to elaborate.

  “Hmm,” Rabbit said again. “Well that’s what you get for trusting folk, little birdie.”

  Ciaran glanced at him warily, wondering if that was a warning under Rabbit’s careless grin. Well, if Ciaran had ever been trusting, Boru had long since extinguished that.

  And Ciaran had, in turn, extinguished it in Darragh. It left a hollow space in his gut that wouldn’t be filled with food.

  Ciaran looked up as a man approached, redheaded and bearded.

  “Boss,” Rabbit grinned. “This is Danny.”

  “Danny.” The man nodded. He squatted down in front of them, resting his forearms on his knees. His big, scarred hands hung loosely. “Garvan. Leader of this bunch.” He showed his discoloured teeth in a smile. “Don’t let this fella talk your ear off, Danny. He’ll rabbit on all day.”

  “Talk through a mouthful o’ wet concrete,” Rabbit agreed.

  “So what did Rabbit tell you about our merry gang?” Garvan asked.

  “Um, not much,” Ciaran replied. “Mostly he’s been asking about me.”

  Garvan shot Rabbit a look that Ciaran couldn’t read. “Rabbit, asking questions? Now there’s a fuckin’ new one. Right so. This is my band of misfits, half travellers and tinkers, half orphan Irish, all cutthroats.”

  “Um, about that. Do you … do you normally bring people in for a meal?” Ciaran held up his half-finished plate in illustration. “Doesn’t exactly fit the whole bandit image to be giving instead of taking.”

  “You got nothing for us to take. And like I said, half orphans.” Garvan smiled. “We did think you were a fair bit younger from a distance. But since you already been robbed, so, the least we can do is take you in before you wind up dead.”

  “Awfully generous,” Ciaran murmured in the direction of his makeshift plate, remembering Rabbit’s warning. He’d heard talk of bandits, back in Dublin. Roaming the countryside outside Dublin—beyond Boru’s control—holding up travellers, terrorising villages, lawless lost boys and thugs out for blood and mischief and loot.

  “Well, everyone’s of some use,” Garvan said. “Even if they’ve got nothing in their pockets, eh?”

  “You got any skills?” Rabbit asked. “Garvan took me on because I’m a fierce fast runner and I got good eyes. Make a good lookout.”

  “Not really,” Ciaran said and involuntarily shuddered. Not if you don’t count whoring and cocksucking. “I suppose I’m a storyteller, but I imagine you need one of those like a hole in the head, what with all these mouths to feed.”

  “Stories,” Rabbit said, his smile growing. “I like stories!”

  “If you can shut your mouth long enough to give your ears a go,” Garvan told him. “Well, Danny, we’ll find a use for you, don’t you worry.” He rose to his feet again. “Stay awhile. Get a feel for the place. But don’t head out without saying. We’ve a few traps set around the place. You�
��re lucky you didn’t stumble on them getting here.”

  Ciaran nodded.

  “Rabbit, a word,” Garvan said.

  Ciaran watched as Garvan drew the boy away and spoke to him in a hushed tone. Rabbit nodded eagerly at whatever Garvan said, then opened his mouth, paused, and frowned. Garvan narrowed his eyes and said something else. This time Rabbit’s nod was less enthusiastic. Garvan cuffed him gently around the head, a gesture more affectionate than anything else, and Rabbit grinned and danced away from him.

  “Eyes and ears open, Rabbit,” Garvan said and walked away.

  “Eyes and ears, boss!” Rabbit said, executing a sloppy mock salute. He sat down next to Ciaran again and stretched out his lanky legs. “He’s all right.”

  “You said …” Ciaran frowned. “You said ‘that’s what you get for trusting folk.’ What did you mean?”

  Rabbit’s grin faltered. “Nothin’. Just what people say, so.”

  Ciaran held his gaze. “So if I wanted, I could walk away from here?”

  “Sure.” Rabbit dropped his gaze and nodded at Ciaran’s makeshift plate. “Why would you want to, but?”

  Ciaran wished he could ignore his unease.

  “Besides,” Rabbit said, looking up again, “where else is there to go?”

  Another thing people just said, or was the strange boy actually asking?

  “There are other places,” Ciaran told him.

  “Are there, so,” Rabbit breathed, his dark eyes wide. “Well, isn’t that a fine thing?”

  Fine for some, if you didn’t know that most of the other places were worse. The crowded, filthy refugee camp at Crossmaglen, every gut-wrenching horror of Dublin … where else was there for people like this? Nowhere, probably. Nowhere better than this.

  Cúil Aodha, he thought. Cúil Aodha and places like it. Ciaran had never dared imagine places like that before. He would never have believed somewhere like Cúil Aodha could exist at all if Darragh hadn’t come blundering out of it.

  There was hope in Rabbit’s eyes, so Ciaran showed him a smile. Hope was such a rare thing that Ciaran couldn’t bring himself to crush it, even in a stranger.

  Ciaran wouldn’t have been stupid enough to stick to the road. But that left a lot of country to cover. At least there was no doubt about what direction he would’ve headed in: back to Dublin as fast as his legs could carry him. Stubborn little shite. The straps of Darragh’s pack dug into his shoulders as he walked, and he had a blister coming up on his left heel. Jesus, if he caught Ciaran again—when he caught Ciaran again—he’d tie him up so tightly he couldn’t wriggle away again.

  And he’d most certainly never be fool enough to love the man again.

  He groaned in frustration, scrubbing his eyes against the mental image the thought had conjured up. Ciaran, looming above him, chest heaving, hips rolling, taking Darragh so deep that his soft arse bounced against Darragh’s pelvis. How could he be so masculine and graceful at the same time? So open and so giving—biting his lip, huge luminous eyes watching Darragh as he rode—and yet keeping such ruthless secrets?

  Darragh had no real experience with secrets. He thought he’d understood their purpose back in Dublin—they were to shield, to protect—but he didn’t know anymore. What use were they? Why did Ciaran keep them? And how did he keep them? He’d stared into Darragh’s eyes as pleasure unmade them both, and he’d lied. Not a spoken lie, but a lie all the same. Because Darragh had thought in that moment that he was wanted—no, needed—and more than that, that he was loved. But no, nothing was that simple with Ciaran. Secrets, and lies, and manipulation.

  He hated Ciaran. He pitied him.

  He still wanted him.

  The day wore on.

  Darragh had no idea if he was going in the right direction or not. He walked through what appeared to be the remains of an industrial estate. It was mostly overgrown. Where there had once been buildings, only the skeletons of them stood: the rusting framework left behind when everything else had been scavenged. Bones picked clean.

  It was an eerie sort of wasteland, so different from the green overgrowth of Darragh’s home, and different still from the crumbling stone and brick of Dublin. Darragh wondered how many different landscapes he could find in Ireland now, different visions of the same apocalypse. And what of the outside world? Was there anything left of it, or had it changed, as well? Darragh hadn’t really given the places beyond his borders much notice before his journey to Dublin, and most certainly hadn’t given any thought to countries outside Ireland before meeting Ciaran. Ciaran, who had crossed what most assumed to be an impenetrable border. What was on its other side? Civilisation? Stability? Or just the same decay in a slightly altered form?

  It was impossible to know. But also impossible to believe that it was as bad in the North as here, because of Ciaran. He wasn’t just smart; he was educated. He’d been to school. And schools, Darragh knew, meant other services as well: hospitals and councils and police. All those things he only vaguely remembered. All those things he understood were necessary for when survival wasn’t enough. For when you wanted a future as well. And Jesus, you didn’t trade one hell for another, did you? No. Ciaran had been an idealist, hadn’t he? A missionary, or something like one. Coming to help the poor and downtrodden. You could only do that from a place of privilege. There was no helping others when you were just scraping by for your next meal yourself.

  Darragh glanced around at the ruined estate. Yes, things had to be better in the North because how could they be worse? And if they were better in the North, maybe there were other places in the world that had been left untouched entirely by the disaster. Places where the death toll from the pandemic had been limited and where people had jobs and went to school and bought each other gifts, maybe even went on vacations. Darragh remembered all those things from before, or at least, remembered the want of them. Matthew Kelly’s cousin going to Australia to work in construction. Margaret Lewis complaining that she couldn’t afford the vacation to Portugal she’d been looking forward to all year. Birthdays. Christmas. Darragh remembered Christmas especially, remembered coloured lights and gifts and the big dinner his mother had cooked for them all every year, until suddenly there were no stores to buy the gifts from and no electricity for the coloured lights and then no family left to celebrate with at all.

  If Ciaran were here, Darragh would have asked him about Christmas. Did they still celebrate it, in the North? Even if he had the tree and the gifts and the fancy dinner, Darragh wouldn’t have been able to pinpoint which day, exactly, that Christmas was supposed to fall on anymore. Couldn’t even tell you the current month, if you asked him. There had been more important things to keep track of, more important things to remember and observe. Seasons. Weather patterns. When to sow and when to harvest. When to expect the frost and the thaw. When to expect the illness.

  But maybe, when times were a little less lean for them, they could bring Christmas back again.

  Now if only Darragh didn’t feel such a strange ache wishing to share it with Ciaran, one day.

  Damn him.

  Darragh walked on, stopping when his attention was caught by something on the ground. A snare, probably set up to trap a cat or a rabbit. A thrill raced through him. There were people nearby. Careful not to disturb the snare, Darragh kept going.

  Friendly or hostile? He wouldn’t know until he found them. And maybe not even then, considering how badly he’d judged Ciaran’s character. But maybe whoever had laid the snare had also seen Ciaran passing through. If he could ask them, at least he’d know if he was on the right track or not.

  A while later, he found another snare. And became aware that he was being watched. There was a flash of movement behind a screen of trees. Darragh stopped and wondered how best to approach. He didn’t want to appear aggressive.

  He took the pack off and sat down in the grass. He unwrapped a protein bar and ate it slowly, hoping that would bring the watcher to him. Or at least show them that he had something wor
th trading. And if they were hostile … well, easier to run without the pack, and the scavenging of it might slow down or even halt any pursuit.

  After a moment, a small figure detached itself from the trees and approached.

  A child. Darragh hadn’t seen a child in years. Not since Saoirse could no longer be called one.

  “Tithe for the road,” the child called from a safe distance.

  “This isn’t a road,” Darragh called back. He reached into the pack and found an unopened bar, and threw it to the child. “What would you do if I didn’t pay?”

  The child ripped the packet open. “You? You’re a fucking giant. I’d run.”

  Darragh laughed. “I’m looking for my friend. Has anyone else come by here?”

  “A man did,” the child said. “Yellow hair. Good clothes. All pale like he never saw the sun.”

  Ciaran.

  “Which way did he go?” Darragh asked, relieved.

  The child pointed. “Go on that way,” he said. “You’ll find the camp there.”

  “What camp?”

  “Bandit camp.”

  Darragh’s blood turned cold. He opened his mouth to ask the child if it was safe, but he’d already bolted back into the trees.

  Well, it didn’t matter. Darragh had already committed himself to finding Ciaran, whatever trouble the fool had gotten himself into.

  He stood up, shouldered his pack, and headed in the direction the child had pointed.

  Rabbit had a coin in his pocket. A tarnished old thing that was worth nothing now, but he took it out and showed it to Ciaran, then made it dance across his knuckles and back again before he caught it in his fist.

  “That’s amazing,” Ciaran said.

  Rabbit wrinkled his nose. “Ah, it’s nothin’.” But he grinned proudly.

  All around them, the bandits continued about their daily business. A man skinned an animal on the hood of rusted car. Two women talked as they hung the washing on a clothesline slung between trees. A child, hardly older than a toddler, sat at their feet. Towards the middle of the camp, a group of men talked around a fire. They didn’t seem much like bandits at all. More like just a group of people doing their best to survive. If they stole from travellers on the road … well, they stole. Ciaran could hardly condemn them for it. Not when they’d welcomed him with a hot meal and a place to rest. And although he tried to temper himself, he couldn’t help drawing Robin Hood comparisons in his mind. Hell, the country even had a mad, evil king sitting on a stolen throne.