Mo lifted her face to gaze heavenward at the wheeling swallows. From somewhere nearby came the humming of bees, maybe a hive. Far away, down the slope, a chalk-blue plume hung in the air, metamorphosing subtly, as if a cloud of butterflies had just taken to the wing. Mo heard a faint sound, a pleasant but unexpected sound. She turned so she was facing the valley of the Suir. She could even smell something now, an unfamiliar scent, not a flower scent but a muskier smell, like the smell of bread baking.
Then she saw the blooming.
It was as clear as an island of lambent green in the middle of a gray ocean, a gigantic circle of fecundity, vast in diameter, around a single focus. The very center was monumentally clear across the valley. And now, as she opened her mind to it, she sensed a new stirring, as if the very landscape had whispered something into the air, and that awesome message was spiraling and eddying toward her without any sense of wind.
Was she imagining it?
She waited patiently, all senses alert. She sensed it again. She laid herself bare to it this time, throwing open her entire body and mind. It was definitely coming in waves. She felt another wave touch her. It didn’t feel like a tangible physical sensation. She didn’t know how to describe what she was feeling, other than it was some kind of contact, being-to-being. She felt no premonition of harm. Without hesitation, she slipped off
her sneakers and socks to feel the ground under her bare feet. She took the bog-oak figurine out of her hip pocket and palpated its familiar shape with the fingers of her right hand. She felt the smoothness of the body, the three knobs of heads, twirling them around and around. She brought it to her lips and kissed it.
She began to sing.
Tentatively, like a glimmer of moonlight, the presence reached out again, eddying like a wave through water, and found her. This time Mo gasped with the intensity of communication, the feeling of oneness.
Turning, in a slow rapture of motion, she looked back at her friends, willing them to join her. But they were too preoccupied to notice. The communication was intended for her alone.
She wondered:
Is it the blooming? Is the blooming reaching out for me?
She saw the opalescent glimmer sweep past her to reach her friends. Their faces reflected it, as if moonlight were alighting on them while at the same time washing over their exposed arms and legs. She was sensing communication in some way she had never known it before.
What does it mean?
Kate lifted her head and stared at the tiny doll-like figure thirty yards away, perched, as it seemed, on the very edge of the abyss. Mo’s body was erect, forming a perfect shallow curve from her heels to the nape of her neck. Her head was tilted back on the apex of the curve,
her dark brown hair standing up in a nimbus around her ears, her arms outstretched to either side of her body, the hands facing forward into the enormous valley. It was her singing that had caught Kate’s attention.
Kate heard a voice like the most perfect trill of a thrush or a lark, only deeper, more sibilant and sensual than any thrush or lark Kate had ever heard.
“What in the world!”
Alan’s voice sounded in Kate’s ear, like a nervous whisper. Mark was also calling out, from somewhere farther away, at the edge of her vision, having yanked his earphones out of his ears.
Mark said, “It’s Mo. She’s singing.”
Kate squealed to Alan, “I’ve never heard Mo sing before.”
“Me neither!”
All three friends were struggling excitedly to their feet.
Mo wasn’t stuttering at all. There were no recognizable words to her song, but it sounded as if she were expressing words, beautiful words, that belonged to a language softer and gentler than any language Kate had ever heard.
“Oh my God—it’s the voice of an angel!”
“What’s going on?” Alan’s voice was every bit as shaky as the muscles in Kate’s legs.
Nobody answered him. Already they were moving, stumbling clumsily, too jittery to run, to reach Mo’s side, to join her on the roof of the world.
“Oh, boy!” Alan stared across the valley.
“What is it, Mo?” Kate searched Mo’s blank face. She saw the wide, dilated pupils. Instinctively she grabbed Mo’s hand.
Kate’s body jerked with something that felt like a powerful charge of static electricity. She felt her back arch, her eyes spring wide open, staring with Mo along the perfect line of force, across the green-carpeted landscape of the Suir Valley, to another mountain that rose, soft-shouldered and gentle, yet dominating the landscape. Slievenamon glowed in the midday sun, clothed in the lilac, jade and gold of life, the perfect symmetry of her slopes forming the mammary shape that had given it its name: the Mountain of the Women.
Breathless, Kate said, “Do you feel it?”
“Yes!” returned Alan.
She heard a guttural exclamation, perhaps Mark’s, as the first wave struck, then flowed about them, enveloping their bodies like the gossamer touch of a million butterfly wings, quietly announcing its presence in their ears, invading their beings.
Come!
it whispered.
As the ecstasy of contact ebbed, its retreat made them moan and sigh with their mouths fallen open, willing it to return. They heard Mo’s song begin again, heralding a new wave. They couldn’t help but stand still, hands discovering hands, trembling fingers closing around each other, then fiercely holding. The new thrill of communication was utterly intoxicating. It
overwhelmed their senses, like the sweetest scent magnified a thousand-fold. It rose to a peak in their minds in an ecstasy of total abandonment, sweeping out into the tips of their fingers and toes, like the whole-body tingling of a dive into ice-cold water.
Come!
Mo’s song began again, even as the second wave was still ebbing, so there was no gap between. The next wave rode over the previous, swirling around and through them, breaking and rushing over them, enveloping them with longing. It flowed in their arteries and veins on a tide of enchantment. Their skin erupted into goosebumps. The hair jerked erect on every head. What could be so dreadful, and yet so wonderful, that it demanded such complete possession? There were no further words of communication, only the ravening hunger of the seduction. But even as Mo’s song sounded again and again, and as wave after wave swept over them, overwhelming their senses, they knew, at the core of their beings, that it was the mountain, Slievenamon, that was calling them.
Fear of Loss
Alan came rushing through the house, flinging doors wide open, then ran out into the timber yard, calling, “Grandad!”
He found Padraig in one of the sheds. The old man lifted his eyes from a tally of hardwoods to appraise Alan’s tense silhouette in the opening, backlit by the bright sun of late afternoon.
“You look like you ran all the way down the mountain!”
Alan couldn’t stop his limbs trembling. He was so breathless he could hardly speak.
“Back into the house with you! You’ve overheated your engine.” Padraig ignored his attempts to question him, ushering him out of the doorway and back inside the redbrick house to the foot of the staircase. “No arguments! A cold shower will do you the power of good!”
Alan stood under the shock of icy water. But even the Niagara Falls would not have slowed his heartbeat. He found clean clothes in his bedroom. He was still yanking a white T-shirt over his head as he ran back downstairs. Padraig was sitting in one of the old Edwardian buttoned-back green leather armchairs. He was as still as a doll, his arms limp against his thighs.
“I surmise that you’ve made a discovery?”
“You already knew about the mountain!”
Padraig’s eyes seemed to film over. His hoary old head fell. “Must I lose you, like I lost your mother?”
“Lose me? What are you saying?”
“When you arrived, when I picked you up at Shannon Airport, I saw her in you. Sure you have her in your eyes and your smile.”
“Grandad, I can’t stand this! I can’t stand not knowing what’s going on. You know more. You’ve always known more than you’ve been telling me.”
“You think such knowledge will be redeeming?”
Alan was familiar with the sepia photographs on the walls. Stuff to do with his ancestors dating back to the nineteenth century. In a cluster on one wall were pictures of his mother as a girl. He had seen the obvious, but had not questioned it. Now he did so.
“Why aren’t there any photographs of Mom and Dad? You haven’t a single photograph of me as a kid, of me growing up.”
“I couldn’t bear the thought of Geraldine leaving me.”
A fever burned in him, as cruel as it was wild. “Wasn’t that—well, kind of selfish?”
“You don’t understand.”
“Well, then! Explain it to me.”
Padraig said nothing. He went to an oak cabinet and poured himself a glass of home-distilled poteen. He took a swig of the powerful liquor, which was as clear as spring water, then carried it back to the old leather armchair.
“Please talk to me!”
“You’ll never understand anything.”
“Well make me understand. There are things going on—bizarre things—and I need to know what it’s all about. Tell me! Hey, Grandad, please?”
Padraig regarded the boy for a moment. “Geraldine was all I had. She grew up here, in this house and these woods. Then, all of a sudden, she was determined to be off.”
Alan hesitated. These were events he knew next to nothing about. He fought against his impatience to know what had happened on the mountain. He had to suppress his overwhelming anxiety, to wait.
Padraig suddenly took his head between his hands. He rocked, in that anguished posture, and moaned.
“For God’s sake!” Alan’s mind struggled to grasp what was going on here. “Grandad, what are you really trying to tell me?”
Padraig shook his head.
“What? You’re worrying about me? That I’ll leave?”
“You’re man-sized, but not up here,” he tapped his brow. “Mentally you’re little more than a child. You know nothing.”
Alan shouted. He couldn’t stop himself. “I’ll stew in ignorance until you explain what’s going on!”
Padraig stopped holding his head. He closed his eyes for several long moments. When he opened them again, he downed what remained of his poteen.
“I hoped, fervently, when you came here, that I was being given a second chance. You were Geraldine come back to forgive me. I consoled myself that you might even be happy here, in time.”
“You’re skating around it! There’s stuff going on I need to understand. All that business about Mark and Mo. And Kate—what happened in Africa. Don’t you think I deserve an explanation?”
“Are your friends more important than what is left of your family?”
“Grandad, I’ve got to know. I won’t rest until I know. You know that, if you know anything at all about me.”
Padraig’s eyes widened, as if he were haunted by inner visions. A gray shadow invaded his face.
“Is a father wrong to try to prevent fate? I have learned that if he is not wrong, he is surely misguided to hope that he can do so. We, who love you, would protect you from that pain. But still you will not be protected.”
“Are you saying you knew that Mom was in some kind of danger?”
“Of course I knew. D’you imagine I didn’t try my very best to dissuade her?”
“You knew? And you didn’t stop her?” Alan could hardly breathe. His lungs were filling up with something so heavy he couldn’t take a real breath.
Padraig said nothing.
Alan was close to tears. “I hate you! I hate you for that. You should have stopped Mom from leaving. You knew and you failed to stop her!”
There was a long silence in which he could hear the ticking of the old wall-mounted pendulum clock. Alan really felt like he was drowning. Nothing made sense. Yet he had been there. He had faced the mountain. He had felt the mountain calling. He knew he had not imagined that.
“You failed Mom. I can’t even begin to understand why you failed her.” He paused, marshaling his emotions. “Is there anything you can tell me, anything at all, about what’s going on? Why Mom and Dad died? Who killed them?”
Padraig’s voice was flat, as if all feeling had been wrung from him. “Don’t even think along the lines you’re now thinking.”
“You think I should forget what happened to them?”
Padraig looked like he’d aged a century. His voice was dry as sand, his gaze unfocused. “Alan, sure you’re the closest thing to a son I will ever have. You’re as fiercely uncompromising as I might have been at your age. I would have cherished you.”
“Grandfather—”
“I could no more have stopped her than halt the seasons. And now it’s true of you in your turn. I have lost you both.”
“What do you mean? Why are you talking this way?”
But before Padraig could say more, the house was filled with the babble of other voices. Alan’s friends had caught up with him. A pandemonium of excited voices was flinging questions at the old man in his chair.
Kate had her hands to her face, blurting out, “It felt as if we were standing on top of the world. And Slievenamon was calling us.”
Padraig spoke, soft as a whisper, “Well, now!”
Mo’s eyes were round and shining. “It fuh-fuh-fuh-felt like—like a thu-thunderstorm . . . like it was ruh-ruh-raging in me.” She slapped at her breast with the palm of her hand.
Kate hugged Mo. “Mr. O’Brien, every word is the truth. My hair stood on end. I felt like I could just take off from the mountain ridge and fly, like an eagle, over the valley.”
“Oh, Muh-Muh-Mr. O’Brien, tuh-tuh-tuh-tell us everything about Suh-Suh-Suh-Slievenamon!”
“Oh, yes. You must! You must tell us everything!”
Alan stood trembling, observing how the gray shadow still cloaked Padraig’s features as his eyes moved to consider the two excited girls. “Ah, now, wouldn’t we be here for a year and a day.”
“Oh, puh-puh-please!”
“Mr. O’Brien, don’t torment us!”
“Tuh-tuh-tell us uh-uh-uh-everything!”
“Everything, is it?” A wintry smile lit up the shadows that haunted Padraig’s deeply wrinkled face. “I think, perhaps, that, like Alan, you should all cool down. Your clothes are one with your skin. Alan will show you to the bathroom. Cool off and get out of those clothes. Find something dry to wear.”
They ran upstairs and, after ten minutes or so, ran back down again. Mark wore a pair of Alan’s jeans, cuffed. Kate and Mo wore assortments of shorts and T-shirts a quarter of a century out of fashion—they had discovered them in a bedroom that had been kept tidy and clean in homage to a daughter who had never returned home. Padraig could hardly fail to notice but he said not a word. Instead he waved at them all to sit down and join him and eat some sandwiches he had rustled up in the kitchen. There was also a choice of drinks, hot and cold.
“Now.” The old man sat back in his leather armchair, pallid as a marble statue. “First you must tell me what happened, every last bit of it, if you can manage that while stuffing your mouths!”
Mo, Kate, even Alan, couldn’t wait to talk about it. They talked as they were chewing and it took a long time for each to explain what he or she had experienced on the mountain. But Padraig just let them talk and talk until there was nothing more any one of them had left to say.
“And, young Mark, what did you make of it?”
Mark shook his head, with an incredulous grin on his face. “I’m not pretending that nothing happened. But it wasn’t like everybody is saying. It couldn’t be. Mountains don’t call you. Like, ‘Hello! I’m your big nosy neighbor. I just thought maybe it was time I called in for a chat.’”
Kate turned on him, her eyes flashing. “So what do you think just happened back there?”
“It must have been some kind of mass hysteria.”
“Hysteria?”
“These Irish superstitions are getting to us. All that stuff about crystals and power. Mountains don’t call you. Come on, Kate! You all know it as well as I do. Mountains are just big lumps of rock.”
“Mark! Shut up!”
Mo whispered to Mark, who was sitting on the couch next to her. “It was so. It was cuh-cuh-cuh-calling!”
“Calling us to do what?” Kate looked to Mo, ignoring Mark’s stare.
Mark’s own face turned an angry pink. “What are you all saying? What? Like we were hit by some pheromone from a million tons of rock?”
Padraig’s voice, low and calm, penetrated their argument. “Ah, now, Slievenamon is more than a lump of rock. She’s ancient enough to have seen the first meanderings of the three sisters. She was older than time when your King Henry came upriver seven centuries ago.”
“Mo, for goodness’ sake!” Mark appealed to his sister. “You know as well as I do this is just rubbish.”
Mo shook her head. She refused to meet his eyes.
Kate’s voice was insistent. “Mark, whatever you think about it, you know you can’t tell Grimstone about this.”
Mark heaved a sigh, dropping his eyes down to the cell phone, which he had been fingering in his lap.
Alan said, “Padraig has been trying to explain things to me ever since I got here. I didn’t listen. I didn’t want to listen because I didn’t want to believe him. It’s all somehow linked to the accident that killed Mom and Dad.”
“It was no accident,” Padraig reminded him.
“And Kate’s family, maybe they were killed for a reason. And maybe it’s even linked to what happened long ago to Mark and Mo.”
Mark cut in. “Mr. O’Brien, tell Alan he’s raving. Stop this, all of you. You’re all raving, just like Grimstone.”
Kate cried, “Stop kidding yourself, Mark. Surely we need to know what’s going on! We need to make sense of it all!”
Padraig agreed. “Of course you must, Kate.”
Mark shouted, “You’re all bonkers!”
“Shut up, Mark!” Alan glared at him. “Kate is right. If we could find the reason for all we’ve been through, we could, maybe, find who was responsible. We could even get back at them. Get justice for Mom and Dad.”
“Why don’t you go ask the mountain?”
Mo’s voice cut through the arguing, her eyes round and pleading, looking to Padraig. “Puh-puh-puh-please?”
Padraig’s face had never lost the gray sheen since Alan had first spoken to him after coming down from the mountain. But his eyes were gentle and turned now
to the dark-haired girl dressed in the clothes once worn by his daughter. He was deeply touched, it seemed, by the excitement in Mo’s elfin face.
“Maybe you all know already that in Gaelic
Slievenamon
, or
Sliabh na mban
, means the ‘Mountain of the Women.’ But the mountain also goes by other names, older names, names she had already taken for herself before even the Celts first came to this valley. Those people of long ago saw the richness of the valley of the Suir. They fought battles to win these lands for themselves, each in turn renaming valley and mountain, until, in Celtic times, the valley became Clonmel, the Vale of Honey, and the mountain Slievenamon. Even the three rivers, the Suir, Nore and Barrow, relinquished their older names, the names of a sacred trinity so ancient and powerful that perhaps the Celts were fearful of their true names. But some remembered and whispered the old names in secret places. And they remembered the old names for the mountain herself, and what’s more, the knowledge of her portal.”
“Whu-whu-what puh-portal?”
Padraig gazed into Mo’s excited eyes. “The mountain is believed to be a gateway.
Sidhe ár Feimhin
, such was it called. In English it means ‘the Gate of Feimhin.’”
Kate blurted, “Who was Feimhin?”
“A prince of old—a very terrible prince, if the legends are to be believed.”
“What legends?”
“Legends of grim times, Kate. Battles that scarred the entire landscape of these parts, turning the Vale of Honey into a wasteland.”
“But even if there is a germ of truth to the legends,” Alan said, “what has this to do with what’s happening to us?”
“Some legends claim that Feimhin merely craved power, others that he was losing everything and his back was to the wall. But whichever is true, he stood on the summit of Slievenamon and there, where the tumulus of stones stills marks the spot, he called for assistance from a power of darkness.”
Mark chortled. “Hey, come on, guys! If that worked, I’d have done in Grimstone years ago!”
“Mark! Put a sock in it!”
“Young Mark, you should not speak in such terms, even as a joke.
Sidhe ár Feimhin
is not to be mocked. Those who have studied the legends believe that it describes an opening, or portal. Sure enough they’ve embellished it with fairy tales, peopled with elves and leprechauns. Yet the legends do speak of strange beings that live in a world very different from ours, a world not dominated by machines but by forces that would appear magical to the likes of us. Magic is despised today, yet in former ages it was seen as natural, the lore of Magi. Yet magic requires knowledge and power which has been lost over the ages.” Padraig spoke softly, but plainly. “If you would ask my counsel, I would say that
Sidhe ár Feimhin
describes a gateway leading to another world.”