A Cage of Roots (9 page)

After half an hour, they had crossed through three farms, never erring from a straight path up the foothills, over stone walls and dense ditches. The grass gave way more and more to rock, and, after scaling one more wall of round boulders, they reached the base of a tall hill, the colour of oyster shells.

‘Are you frightened?’ Fergus asked earnestly, as they ascended.

‘Of course I am,’ Sean replied, short of breath. ‘But I’m trying not to think about it. I think at this point I’m more confused than anything else. Bewildered, I think, is the word.’

‘You should be frightened, lad,’ Fergus said, ‘and I don’t blame you for being bewildered. There’s a lot to get your head around, and there’ll be more things to face. Stranger things. Dangerous things.’

Sean said nothing.

Fergus continued, ‘We’ve told you what, and who we are. A headful of odd information, that’s for sure. I suppose you could say it was totally unbelievable. But then, you have to trust what you saw. What Lann showed you.’

Sean thought back to the forest clearing, and the baffling visions they’d seen in what Lann had called the Truelight.
Distracted, he tripped over a deep fissure in the limestone beneath his feet.

Fergus was still speaking. ‘We never trusted in magic. When we were young, I mean. Me and the brothers, we believed in real things, in what we could see in front of us. We were warriors and hunters, though not entirely ignorant of what some of those strange old druids could do. But we stayed well away from it, and concentrated on staying out of trouble. Well, at least
that
kind of trouble. The other kind – fighting and such – followed us wherever we went. Taig and his women, me and my mouth, Lann and his temper: these things meant a fight was never far away.

‘But, in the end, there was no escape from those dark arts for us. We were sucked right in, chosen by the old men and women of magic – those druids, the Old Ones – to bear a heavy burden for the good of the child. For the good of everything, really. We had no choice, to be honest with you. And watching everything you know wilt and rot in front of you, all for the sake of some child that hasn’t even been born yet? Well, it was a heavy, heavy burden. Too heavy at times.’

‘But none of that makes any sense!’ Sean pleaded. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about! Who is Ayla? Really?’

Fergus stopped on a lumpy slab of limestone, staring out over Sean’s shoulder. The boy turned to follow his gaze, and gasped at the view. A sea of silver stone billowed
out before them, heaving up into commanding bluffs and sweeping down in long curves to the writhing Atlantic. Rain fell as mist over Ballyvaughan, hiding the far side of Galway Bay in fog. The Twelve Bens peeked over the gloom, like hooded giants.

‘The business of kings and queens and old druids and what they all got up to was none of our concern, you understand? But this situation involved
everybody
. There was a queen in the south: Maeve was her name. A sinister woman who dabbled with dark powers; we stayed well clear of her. Anyway, she had a husband, but took another man as a lover. Such things happened now and again, usually resulting in a battle or two, and the winner took all. But this union was cursed, and no one could have guessed how perilous it would become for everyone.

‘He was an evil man, you see, this lover. And he too held a fascination with nefarious things. Their thirst for power became boundless; they goaded each other to darker and darker acts, immersing themselves in baneful magic. Together they cast the south under a hellish shadow, which quickly crept over the rest of our land like a pool of black blood. The Old Ones intervened and there was war, fought not with swords but with incantations. The rest of us were helpless, left to scratch a life out of a land under a foul veil, always with the fear that Maeve would win.

‘At last, after a great effort, the lovers were defeated. But
they couldn’t be killed; their power was too great. Instead they were transformed, their
humanness
ripped from them, and were banished to the bowels of the earth to rot with the worms.

‘But there was something the Old Ones hadn’t accounted for, and that was a child. When they discovered her existence, just a babe in the womb then, they knew that that unborn girl alone held the power to free Maeve and her lover. Some wanted her killed, but good people, led by a druid called Cathbad, fought for her life to be spared. And so she was banished in time, to be born when the threat of Maeve was over. We were charged to wait. She was born thirteen years ago and she is Ayla: your friend.’

‘But …’ Sean’s mind spun with questions.

Fergus continued, ignoring him:

‘We had waited and searched for so long, long enough for history to be rewritten a dozen times. And then we found her at last, brought her home and raised her as our own. But if we failed in our task … Well, that’s where you and your friends come in, lad. There are things you’ll have to face that will haunt you forever, whether you succeed or not.’

‘Hang on. Okay,’ Sean struggled to compose himself. ‘Leaving aside the four thousand questions I have for the minute. I mean: Ayla, unborn, banished in
time
? If we fail? What then?’

‘Nothing then. Then you die. Then everything dies.’

They didn’t speak again until they arrived in the car park of Ailwee Caves.

The gift shop was thronged with tourists, ambling between souvenir stands, browsing the coffee-table books and novelty pens. Fergus bought two tickets for the guided tour, and handed a red plastic disc to Sean. Their tour started in thirty minutes, so they had time to have some food and gather strength. Sean was starving, and wolfed down thick soup and brown bread. The journey had made him weak and slightly sick, and he was very glad of the chance to sit and recuperate.

When he had finished, he left to join the shuffling tourists in the shop, and bought a book with the last of his money. He forced the thick hardback
Symbols in Stone: Celtic Carvings of Ancient Ireland
into his packed rucksack, and met Fergus by the mouth of the caves, at the head of the queue. The guide announced the start of the tour, warning them of some tight sections to come, and the group muddled through the entrance and past the pits where bears once slept through the winter.

The tour took them through three caverns, each with their own spectacular features: the Praying Hands, the Carrots and the Frozen Waterfall all still held wonder for Sean, even though he had been there more than once before. In his determination not to think and just to follow Fergus,
he never contemplated what exactly they were going to do once in the caves. As far as he remembered, the tour simply brought them back out into the open air at the far side of the shop. Where were they supposed to go? The guide began to speak, interrupting his thoughts.

‘Now ladies and gentlemen, we’ll soon be approaching the waterfall in the Cascade Chamber, so please be aware that you might get a little bit wet! Also, do duck your head as the ceiling gets a little low in parts. Some of you may need to bend over quite a bit,’ he said, glancing at Fergus.

‘We’re going to switch the lights off in a minute or two, to show you what it was like when farmer Jacko McGann first discovered it, while looking for his little scamp of a dog.’

They stood on an iron bridge perched over a deep drop, into which thundered a gushing torrent of water. A spotlight beamed up from the bottom, illuminating the waterfall in an orange glow, making bright sparks of the edges. The guide had to shout over the noise.

‘Okay, we’re going to switch the lights off now, so anyone with small children, please hold them close. We won’t keep them off for long. We just want to show you how absolute the darkness is down here.’

The lights clicked off, and they were in complete blackness. Sean waved his fingers in front of his face, but he couldn’t see them. There was no adjusting to it. He was
beginning to enjoy the feeling, when the most horrible thing happened. He felt himself lifted off the ground, and then falling, all so quickly that he never had a chance to cry out. When the spotlight came back on, it was beside his feet. The waterfall was drenching both him and Fergus, who still held on to the scruff of his neck. They were at the bottom of the hole, backs pressed to the cavern wall, four metres beneath the metal gangway. He could hear the guide above pause in his usual spiel to ask where the ‘large gentleman’ had gotten to, while Fergus held a finger to his lips.

‘We need to go,’ he urged, and stepped behind the cascade, beckoning Sean to follow him. The guide was now on a radio, urgently trying to explain that he had lost two of his party and calling for assistance.

‘You can’t miss him! He’s
huge
!’ the guide was saying. ‘Well I don’t know! He was just here. He’s probably stuck in one of the tunnels!’

Behind the deluge of water, hewn into the rock, was a triple-spiral. Fergus began to hum, as deep as the caves, as he traced a finger along its curves.

Taig sang and told stories the whole way along the N7 motorway, then around the outskirts of Dublin and on to Meath. For three hours, Benvy was entranced and
delighted by this entertainment, forgetting the long journey and even, at times, why they were on it. Guilt surfaced every time she laughed at a funny tale, or was so enamoured with his singing that any worry in her evaporated. By the time they reached the village of Slane, she forced herself into seriousness, and asked him what they would find in Newgrange.

‘It’s one of the gates, Ms Caddock,’ he told her, mirthfully. ‘The old ghosts opened them for us, so that we can go back. There’s only a few around the place, and these are the only ones open, and only for a short time.’

‘Old ghosts?’ she asked.

‘Ach, you don’t need to bother about them. The Old Ones? They’re that bunch of horrible old codgers that gave us this task in the first place. Not nice people, young Benvy. But powerful, that’s for sure.’

Taig was always chirpy, always a word away from singing. But now, when she had time to think seriously about what was happening, Benvy felt it was a bit out of place.
Ayla must be so frightened,
she thought.

‘You seem in a good mood,’ she observed.

The smile dropped from the blond giant’s face. ‘Don’t let it fool you, Benvy. I won’t lie: I look forward to smelling the air in my own land. I look forward to taking a handful of wet grass and breathing in that sweet green scent, but I am hurting. And what we are about to do is so
serious, you can’t even imagine.’

‘What exactly are we about to do?’

‘We are going to go through a door in time, young lass. When we get to the other side, we’ll be in Ireland; but not the Ireland you know. It’ll be
our
Ireland – Fal: no walls or fields or brick houses or tarmac roads. Just land, green and wide. When we get there, we have to go to a place where I have hidden something of mine. It’s my javelin, and you have to fetch it.’

At least a javelin was something she was familiar with, being one of her best sports in school, but she still couldn’t quite allow herself to believe this connection to the past. However, she felt she had no choice but to go along with it, especially after what they had witnessed in the clearing.

‘Why me? You know where it is; why can’t you get it?’

‘Ah, but sure where would the test in that be?’ he answered cryptically. After a few minutes of silence he added: ‘We’ve told you that we can’t rescue Ayla alone. We need you, and Sean and Finny to help us. But in order to show that you’re up to it, we had to leave our weapons under the protection of some pretty fierce …
things
. If you can get my javelin, then you’ll be ready to get your friend.’

‘What kind of things?’ she asked.

‘I would say, young Benvy, that the less you know about that right now, the better,’ he replied, and turned the car onto the main Drogheda road.

A wide, squat mound, held up by a thick wall of whitewashed stone, stood in the middle of a field. Under it was the famous Newgrange burial chamber. Taig and Benvy had parked at the visitors’ centre across the river and taken the shuttle bus to the main attraction. The bus was full, and the mound was surrounded by visitors of all shapes and sizes. Some were even dressed up in long white gowns, and stood waving branches over their heads, swaying to beats pounded on a fur-skinned bodhrán drum. Taig explained that it wasn’t simply dress-up; these people were modern druids, albeit completely misguided ones.