The Last of the High Kings (7 page)

Between them Jenny and Donal found three shoes on their way home. None of them matched any other, but two of them, Jenny was fairly sure, had partners in her room. The other one must have been out on the hillside for a very long time because it was faded and bent and looked at least two sizes too small.

When they got in, the first thing they saw was Hazel's enormous suitcase parked beside the front door. There were several plastic bags there as well, bulging with clothes and CDs and magazines. The sight of all that stuff made Jenny wonder if Hazel was leaving home forever.

They went through into the kitchen, where Aisling was removing a tray of flapjacks from the oven and Aidan was screaming for a piece at the top of his lungs.

“No,” said Aisling. “It's too hot.”

“Not too hot,” yelled Aidan. “Give me one!”

Jenny handed him the twisted old shoe in an attempt to divert his attention. He grabbed it and threw it very hard at Aisling. It hit her on the elbow. She gritted her teeth, picked up Aidan, all flailing fists and feet, and deposited him in the backyard. For a few minutes the rest of the family sat in a tense silence, weathering the storm of hammering and screaming on the other side of the locked door.

Then Hazel asked: “Where's Dad?”

“He's coming home the long way,” said Donal.

“How long is the long way?” said Hazel, glancing at the clock. “He was supposed to be driving me to the station.”

“Don't worry,” said Aisling. “I can take you.”

“Typical, though, isn't it?” said Hazel. “I'm going away for three months, and he can't even be bothered to say good-bye.”

“He just forgot,” said Donal.

“That's even worse!” said Hazel.

“He might get here,” Aisling said in a calming voice. “There's still half an hour or so.”

Aidan had stopped protesting and was now banging something metallic in the yard. Aisling looked out
of the window to make sure it wasn't dangerous.

“We're going over to Mikey's,” Donal said.

“Both of you?” said Aisling. “Jenny as well?” Donal nodded and she went on. “That's nice. Mikey will love that.”

She was smiling, but Hazel's face had fallen. “We'd better say good-bye,” she said. “I'll be gone by the time you get back.”

She gave her brother a quick hug and a peck on the cheek, and then she turned to Jenny. “Will you come up and visit me in Dublin?”

“No,” said Jenny, who couldn't stand the city.

To her surprise, Hazel's eyes filled with tears. “This is good-bye then,” she said, and flung her arms around Jenny, hugging her far more tightly than she ever had before. When she pulled back, she looked Jenny in the eye and said: “I'm sorry if I've been mean sometimes. You're the best sister in the world, and I'm”—she was choked by a fresh wave of tears, but she struggled on—“I'm going to miss you so much!” She hugged the bewildered Jenny again, even longer and harder, sobbing all the while into her hairline.

Jenny knew she didn't understand this emotional stuff very well, but even so, this seemed way over the top. She looked toward Aisling for some clue to how
to behave; but to her astonishment Aisling's eyes were filled with tears as well, and she was wiping at them with the collar of her blouse. Jenny turned to Donal, but he was staring, with determined concentration, at the butter dish.

“Mummy!” called Aidan from outside, his voice filled with intense satisfaction. “I broken it!”

Hazel at last let go of Jenny. Aisling laughed. “It's only an old bucket,” she said, dabbing at what Jenny hoped were the last of her tears. “Go on, you two. Get off down to Mikey's before it rains.”

They collected their instruments and walked down the driveway, across the New Line, and through the fields beyond to Mikey's house. Neither of them said a word the whole way there. Jenny was trying to make sense of Hazel, and for a while, so was Donal. But he forgot about it sooner than she did and moved on to thinking about something else, something he had seen, or thought he had seen, on the top of the beacon.

J.J. was feeling a little less enthusiastic about his hill walk since the encounter with the goat. Although he was familiar with the broad table of the mountaintop, everything looked different in the mist, and before another ten minutes had gone by, he realized that he had lost his bearings. He had passed by the crossed walls, which had been built for sheltering cattle some time in the previous century and were, he knew, the most recent stone structures up there. That meant that the two small cairns ought to have come into view shortly afterward, but they hadn't. They might be just out of sight, shrouded in the mist, but they might not be. Perhaps he had not come far enough yet.

He walked on for another couple of hundred meters until he came to a hollow in the ground,
bordered on two sides by little escarpments of limestone, like natural walls. Inside it was a jumble of loose stones that might once have been some kind of human shelter. The grass in the bottom of the basin was greener than the other hilltop grasses, and J.J. could see that the soil, where it had been exposed by grubbing badgers, was rich and dark. It was quite a distinctive feature of the landscape, and that fact made J.J. uneasy because he didn't remember ever having seen it before.

There was something very attractive about the formation and its promise of shelter from the gales that lashed across these hills and caused the few stunted blackthorns that survived them to grow almost parallel to the ground, with all their sparse branches pointing east. J.J. was practically certain that the place must have been a little settlement at some time. He could almost sense the presence of those small, hardy people in the air around him, like ghosts in the mist.

He sat on the damp rock at the lip of the hollow and thought about Jenny. Why had he been so hard on her? He knew that púkas existed; he had met one twenty-five years ago, and he may have just met one again. Fairies existed as well, and one of them was his grandfather. So why not ghosts as well? He ought to
have listened to Jenny instead of taking that juvenile, sneering tone. And he should have asked her straight out, in a perfectly natural way, whether or not the white goat was a púka. That was what a good parent would have done.

J.J. feared that he was not a very good parent. He was afraid that Aisling was right when she charged him with being absentminded and feckless. Sometimes, with a secret pride, he blamed it on his fairy blood, but he knew that was no excuse. His mother had twice as much fairy blood as he had, and she was the most hardworking and well-organized person he knew. Perhaps it had been the visit to Tír na n'Óg that had caused it. Perhaps he had caught fecklessness from the fairies, like a disease.

He looked around him, wishing that the cloud would hurry up and find its way back into the sky. He would, he decided, give Colman's church a miss. Its ruined walls were tucked away in the fringes of the hazel woods that ran along the base of Eagle's Rock, and it was in exactly that place, on the other side of the time skin in Tír na n'Óg, that he had first met the púka. Instead he would skirt the woods and cut straight across to the Carron road and walk home from there.

But when he stood up, he realized that he had absolutely no idea how to get there. He couldn't even remember which direction he had come from. If he went the wrong way, he could be wandering around for hours before he met a road. On the other hand, if he sat and waited for the cloud to lift, he might be here for days.

It was then that he remembered, with a shock, that he had promised to drive Hazel to the station. He cursed the mist, himself, and his fairy grandfather, took a wild guess, and began walking rapidly across the rough ground. He passed a couple of stone piles, but nothing he recognized until after about twenty minutes he made out the squat, conical form of the beacon over to his left. What was more, the children were still there.

Or at least he could have sworn he saw one of them standing on the top. But when he got there, the beacon was deserted and utterly, anciently silent.

 

Hazel was just dragging her case across the yard to the car when she spotted her father careering down the hillside above the house. She laughed and pointed him out to Aidan.

“Goat,” said Aidan.

“It's not a goat,” said Hazel. “It's Daddy.”

“Goat,” said Aidan. “There!”

Sure enough, he was right. Higher on the slope, just below the level of the cloud that was obscuring the top of the mountain, a big white goat was standing with its front feet on a boulder. It was a long distance away, but Hazel had the distinct impression that it was watching every step of her father's precipitous descent.

Nancy McGrath went shopping for Mikey whenever he needed it, and her car was just pulling away as Donal and Jenny arrived.

“Whatever happened to your shoes, girleen?” said Mikey.

“I left them at home,” said Jenny.

“She never wears them,” said Donal, not sure whether this sounded like a defense of Jenny or a condemnation and not sure, either, which it was meant to be.

Mikey was leaning against the dresser, waiting for the kettle to boil. “Well, you should wear them,” he said. “You're lucky to have them.”

Jenny traced a pattern on the oilskin tablecloth with the mouthpiece of her whistle.

“My feet can't see where they're going when they have shoes on them,” she said.

“Is that right?” said Mikey. “All the same, you should wear them. I was never without shoes, and nor was my father; but there were people in this parish in his day that couldn't afford to have shoes. I thought you were a little ghost from them days when you came in the door.”

Donal seized the unexpected opportunity. “Do you believe in ghosts, Mikey?”

“I do, begod,” said Mikey, without hesitation. “I usedn't to, but these days I do.”

“Have you ever seen one?”

The kettle had boiled, but Mikey ignored it. “Well,” he said, “that depends on what you mean by
seen
. You can't see a ghost the way you can see you or me. You can't look straight at them, like. You just—” He stopped, aware of the wide-eyed, earnest gazes of the two children. “Sure, what am I on about?” He went on. “Pay no attention to me now, you hear? I'm getting soft in the head in my old age.”

He turned and poured water into the teapot to warm it.

“You can only see them out of the corner of your eye, can't you?” said Donal seriously.

Mikey put the teapot down and turned to face him. He reached for a chair back to support himself, missed it the first time, caught it the second.

“Come here to me,” he said, in the sternest voice Donal had ever heard him use. “Did your father ever say anything more about that helicopter?”

Donal colored, embarrassed by J.J. “I think he forgot,” he said.

“And did you remind him?”

Donal nodded. He wanted to tell Mikey what J.J. had told him, that he was only messing and had never really meant it, but he couldn't find the courage.

“Good man!” said Mikey, his spirits visibly rising.

“But you should talk to him about it yourself,” said Donal hurriedly. “Why don't you phone him?”

“I will,” said Mikey, turning back to the teapot. “Now. What about a tune?”

 

When Donal and Jenny got back home a couple of hours later, they found J.J. frantically trying to organize musicians for the céilí that night. Since most of his big tours happened during the summer, the house dances ran from September to May and then stopped for three months. The last one of the season was happening that evening, and J.J. had forgotten about it
until now. He and Hazel normally played fiddle, with Aisling backing them on the electric keyboard, and more often than not, his mother, Helen, would come down from Dublin and join them on the concertina.

“Why didn't she come down and then take Hazel back with her tomorrow?” he asked Aisling.

“Why didn't you ask her to?” she answered.

She took Aidan with her and went off to organize the food and drink, and J.J. phoned Flo Fahy, who was delighted to come along and join him with her concertina. And so it was that the céilí, like every céilí that had ever been held at the Liddy house, turned out to be a resounding success.

Jenny didn't think the archaeologists would work on a Sunday, but she went up to the beacon anyway, just in case. She waited for a couple of hours, even though it was pouring with rain, and when she was certain that they weren't going to come, she joined the púka at the edge of the mountain, and together they descended into the woods.

It was the púka who had told Jenny that she was wasting her time at school. The sum of human knowledge, he told her, was getting smaller and smaller, and school was one of the main reasons for this. The human habit of imprisoning their children in learning factories led to their being overloaded with information and deprived of experience. The study of nature had been reduced to an occasional discretionary
ramble, and cut off from its source, human life was fast becoming safe, sterile, and completely meaningless. Jenny understood only about half of what the púka said, but that half was enough. What he taught her made far more sense than what they tried to teach her at school.

Like the ghost. It was the púka who had told her about him and how she would be able to see him if she sat still for long enough and waited. It was the púka who had taught her how to be comfortable in the cold and wet and that human intolerance for wild weather was a mental, not a physical, problem. And it was the púka, that May Sunday, who taught her how to see the wind.

Goats, he explained, could see the weather on the wind. That was why they were always in the right place at the right time, always sheltered when they needed to be. People, if they were taught properly, could see it too. But that wasn't all that could be done. An assiduous reader of the wind could tell a great deal about the world and many other things besides.

He would begin by teaching her to see the coarse winds, those that moved in simple time across the surface of things and pushed the weather fronts from place to place. They were relatively easy to see, and
before too long Jenny should be able to forecast not only the upcoming weather but more long-term things, such as the optimal growing and harvesting times and the probable movement of fish and bird nations in their migrations around the globe.

Then, if and when she was proficient at that, the púka would teach her to see the winds of change, which also moved on the surface of things, and in simple time. They could show her the trends that were affecting not only humankind but all life on the planet, whether animal or vegetable. They were blowing sour these days, he said, and they had been for some considerable time; but he hoped they would sweeten again before much longer.

After that, if Jenny passed muster with those ones, he would try to show her the winds that traveled across complex time. These were the stellar winds, which blew from one side of the universe to the other and took all the shortcuts through space and time, and the subtle winds, which crossed between worlds, as well as within and without, behind and betwixt, above and below, and beyond.

It was somewhere around there that Jenny lost the plot, and the púka decided it was time to move from the theoretical to the practical. He gave her
a first short lesson and sent her home.

“Bad storm tomorrow,” she told Donal when she got home.

“That's not what the weather forecast says,” said Donal.