The Last of the High Kings (4 page)

Jenny, sitting on top of the hill of stones, watched the people approaching. She had seen plenty of backpackers—Kinvara was heaving with them in the summer—but she had never seen any up here before. It didn't surprise her that they would want to come and see what was on top of the mountain, but she couldn't understand why they would want to bring so much stuff with them.

Stuff and the attachment that people had to it were a source of constant bewilderment to Jenny. Hazel's room was crammed full of things, but she was forever complaining that she hadn't enough money for clothes and CDs and that she couldn't afford to buy the latest thing for sticking her earphones into. Donal had loads of stuff too. He had mountains of toys he never
played with and books he had already read and DVDs he had already seen, and his drawers were overflowing with clothes he had grown out of. Jenny liked her room empty and clear. Most of the stuff that was in it she didn't want, and she was always putting things in the trash bin. Hairbrushes and go-go bands and clothes she didn't like and never wore. Shoes. It was a waste of time, really. Aisling or J.J. always took them back out and cluttered up her room with them again.

But when she came up here, as she did nearly every day now, she brought nothing with her at all. If it was really cold and windy, she sometimes wore a jacket, but that was all. What could those people possibly have in their rucksacks? It was beyond Jenny's capacity to imagine.

 

Alice Kelly dropped her gear at the foot of the barrow and, feeling delightfully weightless, walked up the side of it to where the little girl was sitting. Despite a fresh breeze, the child wore only a light cotton frock, and her feet were bare. She looked like something from another century.

“Hello,” said Alice, trying her best to sound friendly. “What are you doing up here?”

“I'm talking to the ghost,” said Jenny.

Alice felt a chill run through her. She had always found this mountain a bit creepy, and today it was worse than ever. A huge white goat had appeared when they got to the top, and it had followed them, keeping its distance, all the way. It was still there now, a few hundred meters away, still watching every move they made. And now here was this child, who was so thin and pale she might almost be a ghost herself.

Alice glanced back down the slope of the barrow, but the others, as though they were a bit apprehensive themselves, were showing no inclination to follow her.

“Is there a ghost?” she said. “I can't see it.”

“There's only one way to see a ghost,” said the child. “You'll never see it if you're looking at it. You only see them when you're looking the other way, and only out of the corner of your eye.”

“Really?” said Alice.

“I had to figure that out for myself,” said Jenny a little proudly.

With an effort, Alice remembered where she was and what she was doing there. She was, she decided, taking all this far too seriously.

“That's clever of you,” she said, assuming a patronizing tone that was as familiar to Jenny as it is to most children. “And what's your name?”

“Jenny.”

“Jenny who?”

“Jenny Liddy,” said Jenny. “Why have you brought all that stuff with you?”

“Because we're archaeologists,” said Alice. “Do you know what an archaeologist is?”

“Yes,” said Jenny.

“Good. Well, I'm Professor Kelly, and this is my research team. We're going to excavate this barrow. Do you know what
excavate
means?”

“Yes,” said Jenny. “But I don't think he'll let you do that.”

“Who won't?” said Alice.

“The ghost,” said Jenny.

Alice Kelly took a deep breath. “We have a lot of work to do,” she said. “I'd better be making a start.” She turned to go back down the hill of stones, then stopped and turned back.

“Shouldn't you be in school?” she asked.

“Yes,” said Jenny.

The archaeologists had brought two large tents with them. One was for use as a workstation, for cleaning any artifacts they might find, and for drawing and photographing them, and for writing up progress notes. The other was a mess tent, where the team could take a break and make tea and meals. Everyone there knew that they were in for the long haul. This project was going to be not so much a dig as a rock haulage camp for at least the first few weeks. It would be tedious, backbreaking work, and it would have to be done slowly and carefully, with each stone examined and numbered, so that it could be put back in pretty much the same place when the job was finished. The sheer size of the barrow and its isolated location were the
main reasons why it had never been excavated before.

It was soon clear to the team that nothing up there on that mountain was going to be easy. The occasional sheltered hollow had over the years accumulated enough soil to drive a tent peg into, but there was none of this in the vicinity of the beacon. Everywhere the team looked they found the same thing. Limestone rock lying on or just beneath the surface. They agreed on a campsite eventually, but there was no way their tent pegs would hold in the thin soil. There were stones on the barrow that would have anchored the flapping guy ropes, but the team leaders wouldn't allow them to be used. Instead the students were sent off to search the bleak landscape for stray rocks and to cart them back across the treacherous ground. The breeze strengthened as they unpacked the tents, and it snatched at the light fabric, making it next to impossible to construct the frames. In the end two of the students were consigned to lie inside the tent shells and hold them down while the others struggled to get them secured. It took most of the morning for them to get the tents up, and when they finally succeeded and had gathered inside the smaller one to get something to eat, they all agreed that it
would have been a lot easier if they hadn't been under such close scrutiny.

“There's something weird about that child,” said David Connelly. “How come she isn't freezing up there?”

“I don't mind the child so much,” said one of the students. “It's that frigging white goat that scares me.”

When they came out again after their lunch, both observers were still there, Jenny up on the top of the beacon and the goat, just visible, on the flat horizon of the hilltop. They continued to watch as the archaeologists set up their tripods and tapes and measured the barrow from every conceivable angle, and set down colored markers, and moved them, and set them down again. They watched as the team finalized their measurements and set up the boundaries of the excavation area with wooden sticks and orange twine. They watched as the five of them finished up with that and stood together, admiring their day's work.

Jenny waited eagerly to see what would happen next. Nothing that the archaeologists had done so far had bothered the ghost. Over the thirty centuries that he had been there, thousands of people had visited the heap of stones. Some had sat up there and meditated upon the view. Some had come with friends and
families and brought food with them to share. Some had brought a small stone with them to add to the pile, and others had taken one away with them as a souvenir. None of these things had caused him the slightest concern. He loved people, he told her. The human race was the pinnacle of perfection, the lord of all beasts, equal in beauty and valor to the gods. The thing that had sustained him throughout the thousands of years that he had guarded the beacon was the knowledge that he, he alone, was keeping the world safe for humankind. That made him proud, even though he knew he had been forgotten. No one, he told Jenny, had ever come to talk with him the way she did. Since the time he died, he had never had a friend.

Jenny had never had a friend before either. There was the púka, of course, but he was more like a teacher or a kindly old uncle than a friend. Anyway, she wasn't sure he really counted because he was a goat. A sort of goat anyway. Sometimes he changed and looked more like a goaty kind of man, but mostly he looked like a goat.

She wasn't really sure that the ghost counted either. He couldn't come to dinner and for sleepovers the way Hazel's friends did. He couldn't practice hurling or play computer games the way Donal's friends did. He
couldn't even go with her on her explorations of the mountains and the woods because ghosts, he had told her, were anchored to the place where they died. But he was, Jenny decided, a kind of friend all the same. She liked coming up here to visit him and to look out over the plain toward the shining sea and to hear about his life and about how it had felt to die.

The archaeologists stood around for a while, looking at the barrow and at Jenny and at the sky. Then they went back into the smaller tent, and after a while one of the young people came out and brought Jenny a cup of hot, sweet coffee and a little pile of chocolate biscuits.

“I'm Maureen,” she said, sitting down beside her. “What's your name?”

“Jenny.”

“Aren't you cold, Jenny?”

“No,” said Jenny, accepting the coffee but not the biscuits. “Why do you want to excavate the beacon?”

“The beacon?” said Maureen. “Is that what you call it?”

“What do you think you'll find inside it?” said Jenny, unwilling to allow the subject to be changed.

“Well,” said Maureen, “we don't want to try to predict, but we're hoping there will be an ancient burial
chamber in there and maybe some remains of whoever was buried in it.”

“There won't be any,” said Jenny.

“We'll have to wait and see, won't we?” said Maureen. She waited, and when Jenny said nothing more, she went on. “Won't your parents be wondering where you are?”

Jenny considered this carefully. Maureen had touched upon another of those things that, like the desire for stuff, Jenny found impossible to understand. If what people said was true, most of them seemed to have the ability to know, or at least to guess, what other people were thinking and feeling. But Jenny couldn't do it. She couldn't even remember to try to do it, even though she was constantly being told off for having no consideration. According to her family, she was always hurting someone's feelings or making their lives miserable. The problem was that she couldn't really see how a feeling could be hurt, and although she had seen other people being miserable, she hadn't ever been miserable herself, and she didn't understand how someone else could make her feel that way. If she didn't like what was happening, she found a way of changing it. Being miserable seemed to her like a waste of valuable time.

So, would her parents be wondering where she was?

“They might be.”

“Do you often come up here?” said Maureen.

“Yes,” said Jenny. “What are you going to do next?”

“Nothing else today,” said Maureen. “We're just waiting on a delivery.”

Donal walked down the drive and crossed the New Line, the road that ran along the edge of the mountain range between New Quay and the Ennis-to-Galway road. He climbed over the wall at the other side and went through the fields to Mikey Cullen's house. Two or three times a week now he put the accordion into the new backpack that J.J. had bought him and made the short trip over to see Mikey. To begin with, he had walked only when there was no possibility of catching a lift, but lately, now that the weather was milder and the evenings were longer, he had come to enjoy the quiet time by himself. He noticed that the light and the feel of the air and the way it smelled were different every day. He also liked talking to Peter Hayes's cattle,
which were down from the mountain now and grazing Mikey's home meadows. They seemed to like talking to him as well and always came bunching around him when he appeared.

Donal was still too young to play at the classes and céilís that were held at his house at weekends, but he was not too young to enjoy the pleasure that his music could bring to other people. He liked playing at home with his parents and Hazel, but he was always aware that they were accommodating him and that they played with more speed and energy when he wasn't joining in and slowing them down. But playing for Mikey was something entirely different. He was able to settle into his own steady rhythm, and the old man's enthusiasm and encouragement lifted his spirits and made him feel like a real musician.

Early in the new year J.J. had enlisted the help of Eoin O'Neill, a box player who was also a plumber, and they had, despite Mikey's protestations, fitted a simple central heating system in the old house. It came on automatically every morning and evening, and although Mikey still complained about it, there was no denying that he was in better health on account of it. He was still a bit stiff, and nothing was going to make him any younger; but the threat
of hypothermia no longer lurked in damp corners, and his persistent, wheezy cough had completely cleared up.

Donal knocked at the door and went in. There was no sign of Mikey. Donal called, then checked in the kitchen and the bathroom and bedroom. He put the box down on the chair beside the fireplace and went back out into the yard. Belle appeared from behind the house and came to greet him. He patted her shoulder, noticing that her fine ginger coat was growing back. She too had benefited from the central heating.

“Where's Mikey?” Donal asked her.

She wagged her tail and whined. Donal walked in the direction from which she had come, toward the haggard where Mikey's vegetable patch had been when he was still strong enough to manage it. Now it was just nettles and brambles, but there was a well-worn path through the middle of them, leading to the old fort that lay between the house and the meadows beyond.

Donal had explored it before. It wasn't much of a fort. There were a few meters of tumbledown stone wall on one side and some lumpy patches of ground in the middle that might once have been the sites of
dwellings, but the rest of the area was choked with twisted old ash and blackthorn trees. That was where Mikey was now, hidden by the foliage. Donal could hear him talking to someone.

“You know I would if I could,” he was saying. “But look at the state of me. I can barely get out of bed in the mornings, let alone—”

“Mikey?” Donal called.

There was a rustle of bushes, and Mikey came out, bending with difficulty beneath some low branches.

“Donal Liddy,” he said cheerfully. “Come down from the mountainside to play me a tune.”

“Who were you talking to?” said Donal.

Mikey looked at him carefully for a moment, then said: “Ach, no one. Myself, that's who I was talking to.”

 

Belle, Donal noticed, had a bad habit of walking right in front of Mikey and obstructing his progress. It was for all the right reasons—she was watching him carefully and waiting for him—but it could be dangerous as well. If Mikey wasn't looking, he could easily trip over her. She preceded them now as they went into the house, and while Mikey made tea in the kitchen, Donal swept the hearth, took out the ashes, and brought in a basket of turf. He added a few sods of it
to the bright embers, still burning from the night before, then sat down in the high-backed chair and unpacked the accordion.

“You don't really need this fire anymore,” he said when Mikey came in with the tea, “now that you've got the central heating.”

“What would I look at in the evenings?” said Mikey. “You can't watch central heating. Besides, there has been a fire burning in this spot for thousands of years. That same fire there burned in front of the first of the High Kings and it never went out since, not once. When I'm dead, then we can let it out.”

They drank their tea. Then Donal played tunes, and Mikey yipped and roared and tapped the spotless hearth with his booted feet. Donal showed him the new tunes he had learned, and Mikey requested old favorites, and before either of them knew it, an hour had passed and the new sods of turf were producing a rich red heat. The little session was just reaching a natural conclusion when Mikey heard the helicopter.

“Is that my one?” he asked, making for the front door with surprising speed. “Did J.J. send it for me?”

“I don't think so,” said Donal, putting down the box and following him out into the yard.

Together they scanned the skies. They couldn't see
the helicopter, but they could still hear it. It sounded as if it were hovering somewhere over the mountain, but too low for them to see it from where they stood. Mikey leaned against the wall, and they waited for it to appear. It didn't. The noise of its engines stayed constant, just maddeningly out of sight.

“What's it doing up there?” said Mikey.

“I don't know,” said Donal.

They waited and waited, but still the machine didn't appear.

“Is it a helicopter?” said Mikey.

“Oh, it is,” said Donal. “It's definitely a chopper.”

“A chopper,” Mikey repeated, grinning at the word. “It sounds like it's coming from the beacon. What would it be doing at the beacon?”

Eventually, when they had been waiting for about ten minutes, the engine sound changed, and the helicopter passed above them, heading back toward Kinvara and Galway Bay.

“Well, blast it anyway,” said Mikey, detaching himself from the wall. “When is my one going to come?”