The Sword of Feimhin (42 page)

The shock of the old woman's words felt like a wound in Mo's heart. Yet she had met her birth mother for the first time. That she had been allowed to be one with her senses, even with all the fear of what Mala knew expected of her, was comforting. Mala, her birth mother, was a young woman, no more than sixteen – little different from Mo's age.

The old woman began to chant anew. She removed the thong that carried the Torus from around her neck.

‘This
tjurunga
is the sacred thing. It was fashioned from a star that fell. The snake skin that holds it is blessed in the name of Wanumpi.'

She began to chant anew, telling the story of Wanumpi the rainbow serpent and how it guarded the water of life. As she chanted, she threaded the leathery thong around Mala's neck. A loud, rhythmic shouting erupted among the people as, with wide eyes, they saw the Torus glow with inner light. The ultramarine flowerets within the darker green and grey crystals pulsed in time with the young woman's heartbeat.

The elder took several steps backwards with her head bowed. Mo's heart was beating so wildly she thought she might faint.

Mala rose to her feet.

She turned so that she, too, was facing the dying sun over the horizon of rock they called Uluru.

The elder spoke: ‘Something has happened in this time.
Tjoti a-nu
– the child has moved within her, making the songline of this place. This daughter-child will leave her mark in the land. That is her dreaming.'

Mo blinked away the tears so she could see her mother, so young and afraid, bathed in the light of the pulsing Torus.

A single star came down to hover in the space between the elder and the gathering of her people, but the voice came from the Torus hanging around Mala's throat. It spoke the tribal language, the words invading every mind as clear as still water: ‘The child, Mira, is special. The people of Uluru must guard her. She will be hunted by her enemies. You must leave this place of the dreaming before the sun has washed the sleep from its eye. You must do everything you can to protect her.'

‘This must we do,' the people called.

The vision, the dream journey, began to fade.

As her vision faded, Mo heard the voice of the True Believer, issuing through the Torus around Mala's throat. ‘You must abandon this place. You must leave no trail of your passage. Always, from this day forward, you must move and move again. The danger will never leave you. This
tjurunga
will help to protect the birth mother, Mala, and the child within, who was fathered by the dreaming.'

Gully emerged from the crack in the ground trembling from head to foot. It was much colder up here than underground. A light sleet was drifting down onto his head. He had twisted his left ankle on the climb out of the cavern and now he limped painfully as he made his way across the rubble-strewn land, heading for an abandoned caravan he saw opposite.

‘Shit!'

He shifted some rags so he could get inside and even then there was no way of locking the door because the bleedin' lock was broken. And then he had to wipe the filthy Formica table with his snotrag and all the time he was arguing with Penny inside his head.

He had brought her a cuppa, even though she said she didn't want it. He was standing there, offering it up to her on the gantry, only she wouldn't stop scribbling even to take it out of his hand.

‘
Penny, gel
, w
hy won't you come down 'ere for a cuppa an' a bit of bread an butter with me?
'

‘
You know why
.'

‘
I don't know nuffink
.'

‘
You wouldn't understand, Gully
.'

He watched her left hand twirl her hair. He watched her scribbling again. Scribbling, filling in bits of paint, scribbling, panting for breath, like her bleedin' life depended on it.

‘
Don't it matter I been taking care of you? Gettin' in the food. Takin' chances. I made that gantry so you could scribble up there on the ceiling. But look at you now, sayin' no to a cuppa tea with me
.'

Her face, now she turned it round to look down at him, was red and swollen with what looked like a broken nose. She was bawling all the time as she was drawing. She blinked her tearful eyes at him. ‘
I have to concentrate, Gully
.'

‘
I think you should stop it now. Just come down 'ere an' let me hold you. There ain't nuffink wrong with me just holding you. I been tellin' you that for ages. It's just natural
.'

‘
I'm leaving you, Gully
.'

Her words cut him. They cut deep into his heart, like a blade. ‘
No, you ain't. I won't let you … I won't let you
.'

‘
You can't stop me
.'

‘
You won't even say why you're doin' this – why you doin' it to me? It ain't right, Penny. It ain't natural
.'

‘
Please don't be angry with me, Gully. Let me finish it while I can. It's all in my head and I have to finish it before I lose it
.'

‘
You already gone an' lost it, Penny
.'

‘
You don't understand. It's all linked, Gully. The City Above and the City Below. They're linked. They're one
.'

‘
There ain't no such thing as no City Below. You gone an' lost it, gel. Them maps is playing tricks with your 'ead
.'

She had stopped her scribbling to look down at him then, the lank blonde rat-tails of her hair falling unkempt to below her shoulders, her eyes such a pale grey they looked like water in a glass. He could see she was thinking hard. She was struggling to make her mind up about something – about him. ‘
You're wrong, Gully. It's real. It's real and it's important. Something extraordinary is about to happen
.'

‘
Them's not even proper maps. Them's just pictures – them's not even proper
pictures.
Them's just scribbles
.'

‘
There's a pattern – I'm telling you the truth, Gully. There's a pattern so big you just don't see it at first. You don't see it because it's so enormous. I was just seeing bits of it, but now I see the wonder of it
.'

‘
Things like that, they're not real except inside your 'ead. All them things, that stuff about the dagger and the Scalpie and the Grimlings. You been imaginin' it, an' now you're tellin' yourself it's real
.'

‘
Go away, Gully
.'

‘
No, I won't, not until you come down. Come on down, now, and 'ave a cuppa an a bit of bread an' butter with me?
'

Gully saw her face then, and the haunted look on it. ‘
Okay, Gully. I'll come down. We'll have a last cup of tea together
.'

Wot she up to now?

He saw at the time that she was up to something. And now, sitting slumped on the Formica table in the derelict caravan, he saw her face again. He recalled her expression and wondered what she'd been planning inside that head of hers that would need him to sleep for a night and a day to get it done.

The sense of betrayal rose in Gully. It caused him to clench his teary eyes tight shut. Then he heard a voice speaking to him and it seemed at first to be inside his head.

‘Evrytin' gonna be all right.'

Gully's eyes sprang open. He was staring at a tall black woman, wrapped in a dress so colourful it blurred into rainbows. A matching blaze of colour was tied around her brow, with a big knot holding a bun of thick black curls at the back of her head.

‘Who the bleedin' 'eck …?'

‘Henriette – a friend to poor lost boys.'

She was so massive, she seemed to fill the entire caravan. There was no way Gully could make a break past her. How had she got here without his noticing? A woman her size and yet Gully hadn't heard a squeak of her entry to the caravan.

‘Dry up dem tears, Dahlin'. Dis shithole wet enough already.'

Gully trembled so violently that the Formica table was making a racket against the floor. He started counting one to twenty. He went through the ritual of patting his six pockets, in the right order, his right hand, P for protection,
O for ordinary, C for clear … The fingers of his left hand brushed by K for Keys. They discovered the hard oblong shape of the mobile phone in the second down on the left, E for emergency, before the T for traps. The mobile was in E – the mobile what had been given to him by Mark.

‘Go ahead, Gully. Time to ring him.'

How the shit did she know his name? Gully's hands lifted to brush his cheeks, stubbly with a ginger, boyish beard. He removed his glasses and wiped them with the filthy snotrag from Pocket 2, making the smudging worse. He wiped his glasses and stood up. He sat down again and still he wiped and wiped and wiped.

‘You're one of them. Like Mark an' Nan. You're jiggerin' about with the thoughts in me bleedin' ‘ead.'

‘Penny for them, Gully?' Her whole body wobbled as she cackled a wicked sounding laugh.

‘Slipped us a Mickey, she did, so's to make me sleep. Knocked me for six a whole night an' a day.'

‘Clever of her, wasn't it?'

‘Not so clever after she gone and drawn it all out there on the bleedin' ceiling.'

‘So clever Gully follows her map?'

‘Took a snap with the mobile.'

‘All de way to de ghost Tube station?'

‘Once inside I didn't need no map. There was a trail of Penny's footprints showing me the way.'

‘Clever bwai!'

Henriette laughed, showing two rows of large even teeth.
She slapped a shiny black walking stick down on the Formica table. The stick was dripping with rain. It had a sharp tip on the end of it that was hot and steaming. In Gully's vision the walking stick writhed like something half alive. She said, softly: ‘You jus' go ahead – call him, Gully.'

In the smelly caravan, with the sleet coming down outside the window, Gully blew onto hands that were raw with cold. The mobile was slippery in his wet fingers. A hot key number, the geezer, Mark, had said. There was just the one number to press, to make the call …

He thought:
You did it, Penny – you left me
.

He saw that look on Penny's bruised and forlorn face, all red and blubbery with bawling. That look had followed him all the way down the tunnel and into the big cave where the waterfall was roaring. He had followed her footsteps up to the crack in the wall. He had peered in there, that place full of blue light, where Penny had gone.

He didn't care that the alien woman was watching him, listening to him. ‘I'm sorry, Penny, but I couldn't follow you in there. Just couldn't do it. Me bottle was gone.'

He switched on the phone. Tears surged again, blinding him. He heard Mark's voice in his ear. ‘Is that you, Gully?'

‘Yeah.' He wiped the snot from his face with his sleeve.

‘You sound upset. Is everything okay?'

‘Penny's gone.'

‘She came back?'

‘Yeah, but now she's gone again.'

‘Gone where?'

‘She wanted me to catch her some live pigeons so the Grimlings would let her through.'

‘What?'

‘The Skulls was huntin' 'er. She … She killed one with the dagger.'

‘Gully – we need to find her.'

‘I followed her down a Tube tunnel to this waterfall cave. There's Grimlings down there. Grimlings all over the bleedin' place, buzzing about! There's some kinda Grimling factory goin' at it like jack 'ammers.'

‘Grimlings?'

‘Yeah.'

‘Where are you, Gully?'

‘Dunno.'

‘What can you see nearby?'

He stared, blinking, at the terrifying woman opposite him, who was grinning encouragement. ‘I can't see nuffink with the sleet, but I can smell smoke. There's streets burnin' all around the place.'

‘Which streets?'

‘Round about St Paul's – I can see the bowl on the roof.'

‘Where do you think Penny has gone?'

‘The City Below.'

‘What are you talking about, Gully?'

‘I took a picture with the mobile.'

‘A picture of what?'

‘Penny's map – the City Above an' the City Below. I took it before I left. So I could follow 'er on the map.'

Gully could hear voices, the two of them, Mark and Nan, talking. Then Mark's voice came back on the phone. ‘Gully – I'm going to ask you to trust me. Will you please trust me? We'll come and get you.'

Henriette was nodding, still grinning over the Formica table at him.

‘I got no place else to go.'

‘You look worried.'

Alan's thoughts were interrupted by the arrival of Mo, bobbing and weaving on the back of her onkkh amid the bustle and dust cloud of the marching army.

‘Hi, Mo.' He shifted position to ease his aching bum. He had never thought much about the tiny bone at the bottom of his spine before, but he was all too aware of it these days, and of how it could become the seat of excruciating discomfort after another day's ride.

‘You're still worried about the pyramids?' She said.

‘I don't like the fact we had to leave the place without understanding the creatures that live there. We don't know if they're entirely innocent. Or even if the pyramids themselves might have been some kind of warning.'

‘Magtokk is equally concerned. He can't keep still for a moment. He's constantly disappearing and reappearing and then flitting from one place to another.'

They were facing into powerful winds, hot and uncomfortable under a cloudless azure sky. For several moments they could hardly hear one another speak as hundreds of onkkh added their honking to the roaring of the winds. It wasn't hard to figure where they had gotten their name. The army was passing a row of conical black hills, which forced the columns to stream around them. The beasts were sensitive to any kind of change – a rise in the wind, a slight increase or decrease in the slope of the land or, as now, an unusual degree of undulation underfoot. The gritty landscape was volcanic again: the conical hills were small calderas and the ground was splattered with ancient eruptions of spongy black lava.

Alan had to wait a minute or two for his beast to settle. ‘To tell you the truth, Mo, I don't like mysteries.'

‘You sense danger?'

‘We're getting closer to Ghork Mega's outer defences. The Tyrant must know we're here. We have to expect attack. It's only a question of when it happens – and what form it will take.'

Alan looked up at the Garg lookouts wheeling overhead. Iyezzz had taken the bulk of them forwards, fanning out in a wide crescent to scout the land ahead. They estimated that the Tyrant's capital city was, maybe, fifty leagues to the north, and the outer defences were now much closer, but so far they had encountered no resistance.

Mo said, ‘I keep worrying about Mark and whether or not he made it back to Earth. I wonder what he found there.'

‘Me too – I keep thinking about Mark and Kate.' He shook his head. ‘You getting any more information from the True Believers?'

Mo hesitated. She looked perplexed, her fingers toying with the Torus hanging back around her neck on its thong.

Alan had the impression she might be holding something back. He sighed, waiting for another chorus of honking to settle before speaking.

‘I know that Magtokk thinks we missed a trick back there. Perhaps there was something to be discovered in the pyramids, or maybe the creatures that created them.'

‘The Akkharu,' Mo nodded.

Alan could hardly fail to notice how Mo was changing. The shape of her face was lengthening, her eyes were turning up at the outer edges. She looked stunningly beautiful, if also wonderfully alien.

Mo interrupted his thoughts: ‘Now's your opportunity to ask him if we did.'

He wheeled to find the bulky form of the orang-utan knuckle-trotting in their wake. Magtokk could keep up his own good pace when he wanted. Alan slowed the beast down so the magician could come alongside. He said, ‘You sure look worried about something.'

‘What could possibly worry me in these clement pastures?'

They were forced by the pressure of the army around
them to continue moving. Alan glanced down at what looked like a scuttling shag-covered rug. ‘Something you're not telling us?'

Those dark eyes looked back up into his own. ‘I have been giving some thought to a mystery.'

Alan rubbed at one of the many sore points in his back. ‘Uh-huh?'

‘Ask yourself what the Tyrant will benefit if he succeeds in taking complete control of the Fáil.'

Alan thought about it for several onkkh paces through the black spongy terrain. ‘Immortality?'

‘That, maybe, and more.'

‘What more?'

‘Who controls immortality?'

Alan shook his head. ‘Fate? The gods?'

‘Perhaps.'

There was excitement among the Gargs overhead. The crescent was closing together, hurrying towards a single focus.

Alan followed the direction of Mo's gaze before returning to their conversation. ‘What are you implying? He will become a god?'

‘Not
a
god.'

Alan inclined his head, his eyes finding the orang-utan's. ‘What – he will become
the
god?'

‘Take it a step further. Who might thus be threatened?'

‘The Trídédana?'

‘Who brought you into this world?'

Alan felt a shock of understanding pass through him. Mo was studying Magtokk with widening eyes.

‘This might explain something else that has puzzled me.'

‘What?'

‘Why the Tyrant did not trouble himself to kill all four of you back in your home world before you assumed your powers.'

Alan hesitated. Magtokk's question reminded him of a thought that had nagged at him since even before they had arrived in Tír. Mark and Mo – they had been adopted by the sadistic Grimstone, who would also have had plenty of opportunity to kill them. ‘What conclusions did you draw?'

‘He killed some, perhaps all, of your parents without much difficulty. This was the brutal challenge that brought you together as friends.'

‘He tried to kill me – to kill Kate.'

‘Not hard enough.'

‘I don't get it.'

‘What if he wanted to frighten you while allowing you to live?'

‘Gee – he wanted us to come here?'

‘It is, at the very least, an intriguing question.' Their small party was obstructing the flow of the central columns of Shee, many carrying aides on their backs, who eyed them as the cats trotted by.

Mo could remain silent no longer. ‘But why would the Tyrant possibly want us here? We've brought nothing but trouble for him.'

‘Ah, Mo, your enemy is capable of great subtlety as well as ruthlessness. No doubt you, and Alan too, have asked yourselves what purpose the Trídédana might have had in bringing you to Tír.'

‘The Trídédana?'

They had all accepted the word of the high architect, Ussha De Danaan, when she had explained their purpose as she lay dying on the gates of Ossierel. Her world – a fairer world, one that respected life and the beauty of nature – had been threatened by the Tyrant. De Danaan had brought the friends to Tír because they were born into a world uninfluenced by the Fáil. But now Alan wondered if he should have questioned this idea further. Had the De Danaan merely served the purposes of the Trídédana? Could it be that it was the Trídédana that actually felt threatened by the Tyrant?

Magtokk inclined his head a little to the side. Those dark eyes still held Alan's, encouraging him. ‘You are now part of a war that has lasted thousands of years – for mortals. But thousands of years are nothing to the divinities.'

‘Well, okay. You're asking me to consider if the Tyrant might also have some vested interest in our coming here?'

‘I'm merely asking you to consider all possibilities.'

‘But why – what would he gain?'

‘That is part of the mystery I have been considering.'

‘And your conclusion?'

‘What great prize lies at the heart of it all?'

‘The Fáil?'

‘Have you not wondered as to the nature of this all-powerful entity – this so-called malengin of the Arinn, which controls fate?'

‘The Fáil controls fate?'

‘The Fáil
is
Fate.'

Alan's mind reeled. He thought back to what had happened to the demigod Fangaroth at the Tower of Bones. ‘You're suggesting that Fate – the Fáil – is more powerful than the gods?'

‘I'm asking the question: is Fate all?'

‘What you're really asking is: what would happen if the Tyrant wins and he takes over ultimate control of the Fáil?'

‘Might he then control Fate?'

The conversation was deeply unsettling. His eyes swept upwards to see a dense gathering of Gargs in the sky. They were growing larger, swelling in size. The scouts were returning in a single block of hundreds: the bearers of news, perhaps?

The onkkh that was carrying Alan wobbled as it encountered an unexpected crater. Alan had to hold on for dear life as the saddle heaved from one acute angle to another, before righting itself again. His eyes returned to the swooping Gargs who were alighting at the head of the column. The Kyra was calling out his name. She was standing next to a breathless-looking Iyezzz.

Alan jumped down from the onkkh and then helped Mo to do the same. They both ran clumsily because their muscles were so exhausted and aching from the uncomfortable
ride. Though he was nearly as tall as his beanpole grandfather, Padraig, Mo no longer seemed tiny beside him.

The Kyra addressed him when he was still a dozen paces away. ‘The Garg Prince has identified a fortification up ahead.'

Iyezzz's skin was a shimmering scarlet from his hurried flight. The parallel gill flaps in his throat were panting for breath. His voice was no more than a husky purr, but Alan understood the words perfectly. ‘It's a guarded fosse – complete with a heavily garrisoned fortress. We are not fifty leagues from the outer defences of Ghork Mega, but fifteen.'

Alan conducted a rough calculation in his head: fifteen leagues – just forty miles.