Читать книгу The Shadowmagic Trilogy - John Lenahan - Страница 9

I stood there as if rooted to the spot. I don’t have a mother. My mother is dead. My father told me so. Emotions swirled around me like a leafy breeze. I was five years old. I remembered the pain in my chest, the taste of my tears. I remembered the look on my father’s face as I stared up to him from my bed.

‘Is Mom in heaven?’ I sobbed.

‘I’m not sure I believe in heaven,’ a younger version of Dad replied. ‘The ancient Celts believed in a place called Tir na Nog, where people never grow old. I think that’s where your mother is.’ He held me until the tears slowed and my sobs were replaced by sleep. Was this the only time my father had ever told me the truth?

‘Conor?’

I looked up and saw her standing there. ‘Are you my mother?’ I said in a voice I hadn’t used in fifteen years.

‘Yes,’ she said, and I knew it was true. I looked into that feminine mirror of my own face, complete with the tears, and I could hardly stand it. I know it contravened all eighteen-year-old cool behaviour but I couldn’t help myself. I threw my arms around her.

She held me tight and stroked the back of my head.

‘Conor, oh my Conor,’ she said.

I could have stayed in those arms for days, for months, for the rest of my life. She gently pushed me back by the shoulders, and in a motherly voice I so long had yearned for, said, ‘Conor?’ When I didn’t reply I heard the other motherly voice, the one that says, I’m your mother and you had better listen to me or else. She shook me and said again, ‘Conor!’

That got my attention.

‘We don’t have time for this. We must leave here.’

Still in a daze, I wiped my eyes and nodded.

Mom gestured to our right. ‘This way.’

That was when I heard his voice at the door.

‘You!’ shouted Cialtie.

That snapped me right out of it. I looked to the door and saw my uncle standing there with some tall, spindly, pale woman. She was dressed in hanging black lace with dark, dark eyes, black lips and a skunk-like streak in the front of her jet-black hair.

I lost it – I flipped out. ‘Leave me alone!’ I screamed so forcefully that spit flew out of my mouth. Neither of them was prepared for a fight. They expected to find us chained to the wall. I loved the look on Cialtie’s face as he reached for his sword and realised that he had thrown it across the room after he had failed to cut off my hand. It was lying on the floor to my left. We both looked at it at the same time. Cialtie went for the sword, but I went for Cialtie. Some people would think I was brave, but bravery had nothing to do with it. I was plain loco. All of the day’s craziness, the pain, the revelations, the emotions – I had just had enough! I hit Cialtie with a picture-perfect American football tackle. My shoulder caught him square in the solar plexus and smashed him into the wall. I actually heard all of the air fly out of his lungs and I knew he wasn’t getting up in a hurry. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the goth woman smash into the wall with a shower of golden light from something my mother did. I reached down and picked up the sword. It was so much lighter than it looked. The pommel fitted in my hand as if it was made for me. I started to raise it, fully intending to bring it down on my uncle’s head, when two guards ran into the room. As they reached for their weapons my mother grabbed me by the collar and threw me at the wall.

Passing through a wall is a scary thing. I instinctively threw my hands in front of me but they went right through. When my face reached the stones every cell in my body said, This is going to hurt! – and then pop – I was on the other side. Technically speaking I hadn’t gone through a wall, I had gone through an illusion of a wall. The real wall was in front of me with a big hole chiselled in it. I could see daylight through the opening and Dad beckoning me through. My mother appeared next to me and lobbed an amber ball behind her. I heard screams of, ‘My eyes!’ and then I crawled through. Dad was on the other side standing next to three enormous horses but I hardly noticed him. My eyes were filled with my first look at Tir na Nog – The Land.

Imagine spending all of your life in a world of black and white and finally seeing in colour … No, that’s not right. Imagine never being able to smell and then walking into a bakery, or being sealed in a bubble and feeling a touch of a hand for the first time. Even that doesn’t explain it. Try to imagine that you have another sense, one that you feel in your soul. A sense that activates every nerve in your body. Imagine a view that makes you feel like you could live forever – and you can. That’s what I was looking at now.

Ahead of me I looked down onto a vista of magnificent oak trees. Trees that if you hugged, might just hug you back. Trees that you could call family without irony. Trees that if you were to chop one down, it would mark you as a murderer to the end of your days. To the left, rolling fields started as foothills and culminated in blue, snow-capped mountains that seemed to touch the sky. To my right the trees changed to beech, but not the thin spindly trees I was used to; spectacular white-barked beeches with the girth and height of California redwoods. When I finally tore my eyes away, I saw that my father too was lost in that panorama, and his eyes were as wet as mine.

‘Come on, boys,’ my mother said as she came through the wall, ‘tearful reunions and sightseeing will have to wait for later.’

‘What about Cialtie?’ I asked.

‘He didn’t seem to be breathing all that well,’ she said with a smile. A smile of approval from my mother – I can’t tell you how good that felt.

‘Nice sword,’ Dad said.

‘Yeah, my Uncle Cialtie gave it to me.’

Dad smiled. ‘I always liked that sword.’

‘You recognise it?’

‘I should,’ he said, as he swung himself up onto a horse. ‘It used to be mine.’

‘Come, Conor,’ my mother said as she jumped into a saddle, ‘he will be back with reinforcements in a minute. Mount up.’

‘I can’t ride that thing!’

‘Surely you know how to ride,’ she said.

‘Nope.’

She gave my father a stern look. ‘You didn’t teach him to ride? You, of all people, didn’t teach your own son to ride?’

‘I taught him to speak the tongue,’ he explained, ‘and I taught him swordplay.’

‘But not ride,’ she said, in a tone that made me realise she was not a woman to be trifled with. ‘Typical.’ She kicked her steed and galloped directly at me. Next thing I knew she grabbed me by the collar and hoisted me into the saddle in front of her.

‘Hold on tight and be careful with that sword.’

She took two amber balls out of her pouch and hurled them over the top of the wall above us. ‘Cover your eyes!’ she said. Even at this distance and with my forearm over my eyes, I saw the flash and could imagine how painful it must have been up close. To the sound of more screams, we galloped off towards the beech forest.

Considering that this was my first getaway, I thought it went pretty smoothly. I got spooked by a couple of arrows that zinged past us, but by and large we just rode away. I sat in front of my mother as we galloped and imagined I was an infant and she was behind me in my pushchair.

‘What is your name?’ I asked.

‘Deirdre,’ she whispered.

We entered the beech forest. Every time I spoke she shushed me, like I was speaking in a library, but when the trees thinned out, Mom answered a couple of my questions. She told me that she had been planning this jailbreak for a long time. She and some people she called the Fili had been secretly tunnelling through that wall at night for weeks. Each morning she would cast some kind of magic to conceal it. I asked her how she could have known that we were going to be there. In a conspiratorial tone of voice, she told me that she cast Shadowrunes. When I asked her why we were whispering she answered, ‘Because beech trees are very indiscreet.’

Other than that we rode in silence for about an hour. The beeches gave way to flowering ash trees. Fine yellow flowers covered the ground and marked our hoof prints like snow.

Dad pulled up beside us. He looked very tired. ‘Castle Nuin is near. Can we get sanctuary there?’

‘I’m afraid when the lords find out about Conor,’ Mom said, ‘we won’t have friends anywhere.’

Dad nodded in resignation.

‘We don’t have much further to ride. I have a boat up ahead. If we can make it to the Fililands we will be safe.’

We travelled for another fifteen minutes or so until we came to a river. Dad dismounted and splashed his face with the water. ‘River Lugar,’ he sighed, ‘I thought I would never see you again.’ He looked up at my mother. ‘Nor did I think I would ever see you again, Deirdre.’

‘Come, Oisin.’ Her voice cracked a little as she spoke. ‘We don’t have time for this. The boat is just a little way downstream.’

The boat was a canvas-stretched canoe. Dad called it a carrack. It was hidden under some ash branches. Mom returned the branches to underneath a nearby tree, then placed her hand on the trunk and said, ‘Thank you.’ Maybe it was a trick of the light but I could have sworn the tree bowed to her – just a little.

The boat was lined with straw mats and was big enough for Dad and me to lie down next to each other. Mom sat in the back and told us to rest. We had drifted downstream for maybe thirty seconds before I was out cold.

Let me tell you, the dreams in Tir na Nog are worth the price of admission. Even though I had nothing to compare it with, I can’t imagine that people in the Real World have dreams anything like I had in that boat.

I dreamt my father was teaching a lecture at the front of a classroom and I raised my hand in answer to a question. He drew a sword and sliced it off! My hand landed on my desk where it seemed to be encased in amber glass, like a huge paperweight. When I looked back, my father was now my uncle and he was laughing at me, saying, ‘No glow now.’

The classroom became a room in a high tower; my mother and my aunt were clenched in a fight to the death. Mom’s pouch was open and amber balls were falling to the floor in slow motion. Each time one hit the ground there was a blinding flash, and after each flash the scene in front of me changed. One moment the two women were fighting, the next, they were embracing, like two sisters sharing a secret. Fighting – embracing – fighting – embracing – the scene kept changing until the flashes came so frequently that I could see nothing but bright light.

The last image I saw before I awoke was Sally. She was waiting for me outside the cinema. She waited so long that her legs became tree roots and burrowed into the ground. Her arms turned to boughs and sprouted leaves. At the last second before she turned entirely into a tree, she saw me. She tried to say, ‘Where are you?’ but the wood engulfed her in mid-sentence.

I awoke from my first dream with such a jolt that I instantly stood up, which was a mistake. I was still in the boat. Even though it was beached, it tipped over. I fell smack down in the shoreline as the boat flipped over painfully on the back of my legs. I quickly struggled out from under it and desperately searched for Sally (or the tree that had become Sally) before I came to my senses. I collapsed on the ground and rubbed the back of my calves. So that’s what a dream is like. I couldn’t decide if I wanted to close my eyes and continue it, or never fall asleep again.

A tug on my collar made me realise that something was hanging around my neck. Attached to the end of a leather strap was a beautiful gold ornament. It was shaped like a tiny tornado with leaves spinning in it. As I marvelled at the intricacies of my new jewellery, the smell of food and a campfire hit me. My nose went up like a batter who had just hit a fly ball. It was a smell I was powerless not to follow.

At least this day was starting better than the previous one. Yesterday I awoke to the nightmare of finding myself chained to a wall by a lunatic uncle who was determined to give me a new nickname – Lefty. Today I walked into the dream-come-true of my father and my mother sitting around a campfire. They were holding hands (well, hand) and deep in conversation when I came around a huge weeping willow. They broke off when they saw me.

‘Good morning,’ my father said.

‘Good morning,’ I replied, not really looking at him. My eyes were glued to my mother. At a glance I would have thought she was my age until I looked into her eyes. I was starting to learn that here, in Tir na Nog, it wasn’t grey hair or a wrinkled face that betrayed someone’s age, like in the Real World – it was the eyes.

‘Good morning,’ I said.

She stood up. It was an awkward moment, like we were meeting for the first time. She was nervous.

‘Good morning, Conor.’

I wrapped my arms around her. I had a lifetime of mothering to make up for. Her return hug told me she felt the same.

‘I could get very used to this,’ I said, trying unsuccessfully to stop the dam from breaking behind my eyes.

‘And I too.’ She wept.

Dad left us for a respectable amount of time before he interrupted. ‘Cup of tea, Conor?’

I wiped my eyes and saw Dad grinning from ear to ear, holding a steaming cup in his hand. ‘Thanks,’ I said as I took a seat next to him. ‘I think I just had a dream.’

‘Yeah, me too. Intense, isn’t it?’ he said.

‘Are all dreams like that?’

‘I don’t know. Like you, I never had a dream in the Real World. This being your first one, it must have … What’s that phrase you use? Freaked you out.’

‘Freaked you out?’ Mom said.

‘You’ll get used to it,’ Dad replied.

I have had a lot of breakfasts in my day, but let me tell you, if all breakfasts were like this, I would never sleep late again. The tea was made from willow bark. It didn’t taste good as much as it felt good. Mom said that it would ease the strains and bruises of the previous day. It wasn’t until the willow tea started to do its work that I realised just how much pain I had been in: my neck from the whip, my arms and wrists from being clapped in chains, my back from the horse ride and my head from – just plain shock. Blessed relief came as each part of my body stopped hurting, like the peace you get when a neighbour finally stops drilling on the adjacent wall.

‘Found this around my neck,’ I said.

Dad reached inside his shirt and produced an identical necklace. ‘Me too. It’s one of your mother’s specialities. It’s a rothlú amulet.’

‘Thank you,’ I said, ‘it’s beautiful.’

‘It’s not for show,’ she replied, ‘it’s for protection.’

‘I don’t think I need any protection around here. Every time I get attacked, I seem to be surrounded by some gold force field.’

‘You have been lucky,’ she said. ‘I placed that spell on you when you were born, but it only protects you from attacks from your relatives.’

‘Like a spear from Aunt Nieve,’ I said, ‘or Uncle Cialtie’s sword.’

‘If Cialtie had gotten someone else to cut your hand off …’ she said.

‘Then Dad and I would be bookends.’

‘Yes. Also,’ she said, ‘it only works for one battle with each relative.’

‘So next time Aunt Nieve decides to make a Conor kebab – I’m on my own?’

‘What’s a kebab?’ Mom asked.

‘That’s right,’ Dad said, ‘that’s what the rothlú amulet is for.’

‘What’s it do?’

‘It’s only to be used in an emergency,’ Mom said. ‘All you have to do is place your hand over the amulet and say “Rothlú”. Then you’re somewhere else.’

‘Like on the edge of a cliff,’ Dad said, ‘or a snake pit.’

‘There are no snakes in The Land,’ Mom retorted. ‘Oisin here is not a fan of this spell.’

‘It’s dangerous, Conor, you can end up anywhere and it hurts like hell. Did she mention that?’

Mom nodded reluctantly. ‘But it may save your life. Make sure you do not use it unless you really need it.’

‘Is this that Shadowmagic I’ve been hearing about?’

They both seemed to jump a little bit when I mentioned Shadowmagic, like I’d blurted out the plans of a surprise party in front of the birthday girl.

‘No,’ Mom said. ‘This uses gold. It’s Truemagic.’

My fifty next questions were stopped dead by the next course. I had never had roast rabbit before but I can tell you right now, I’m never going to be able to watch a Bugs Bunny cartoon again without salivating. Breakfast finished with an apple each. I thought it was a bit of an anticlimax but Dad took his apple like it was a gift from God. He held it in his hand like a priest holding a chalice, and when he bit it, a moan escaped from his throat that was almost embarrassing. I looked at my apple anew. It looked ordinary enough but when I bit it – I’ll be damned if the same moan didn’t involuntarily pour out of me. What a piece of fruit! It hit you everywhere and all at once. This was real food, not the fake stuff that I had been wasting my time eating all my life. This is all I will ever need – this is the stuff that makes you live forever. This was forbidden fruit!

‘Wow,’ I garbled with my mouth full, ‘I feel like Popeye after his first can of spinach.’

Dad thought that was funny. Mom looked confused.

‘Come,’ Mom said, ‘we cannot stay here any longer – I would like to reach the Fililands before tomorrow night.’

Dad packed up the mugs and the water skin. Mom placed the bones and the apple cores on the burning wood and then placed her hands in the flames. The fire died down and then went out. The charred wood and earth seemed to melt into the ground until only a dark circle remained.

As he left, my father placed his hand on the trunk of the willow we were under and said, ‘Thank you.’ My mother did the same.

When I started to walk to the boat, my mother said, ‘Are you not going to thank the tree for his shelter and wood?’

Feeling a bit stupid, I went up to the tree and placed my hands on its bark and said, ‘Thank you.’

I swear the tree said, ‘You are welcome.’ Not with words – it felt like it spoke directly into my head. I will never make fun of a tree-hugger again.

I got back to the boat to see Dad rooting through the supplies. He found a belt with a sword in a leather scabbard. Without any of the clumsiness that you would expect from a one-handed man, he withdrew the sword from its case and replaced it with the one I had taken from Cialtie.

‘You’re taking your sword back?’

‘Actually, I think you should have it,’ he said.

He handed me the belt and I buckled it on. He reached for the hilt and withdrew the sword, holding the perfectly mirrored blade between us. It made for a strange optical illusion. I saw one half of my own face reflected in the blade, while the other half of the face I saw was my father’s weathered countenance.

‘This is a weapon of old,’ he said with gravity, ‘it belonged to your grandfather Finn of Duir. It is the Sword of Duir. It was given to me and stolen by my brother. He was foolish to lose it.’ He turned the sword horizontal, breaking the half-father, half-son illusion I had been staring into. ‘I want you to have it.’

‘Are you sure?’ I said as I took the blade.

‘Yes, I’m sure. To be honest, I would be glad not to have it hanging around my waist – reminding me.’

‘Reminding you of what?’

‘That’s the sword that chopped my hand off.’