Forests of the Heart (30 page)

“What
don’t
they believe?” Miki said. “I listened to so much of this shite when we were staying with my Uncle Fergus that all I have to do is think about it and I can hear his bloody voice ranting away in my head. God’s truth, at the time it all sounded like adolescent boys deciding what they’d do if they ruled the world. You know, take a bit of this Roman lore, some of that Druidic ritual, a dash of Wagner and Yeats, mix it all together so that it works—in your own mind at any rate. I can’t recite all the details, in all their bloody confusion, but basically it boils down to a belief system that conveniently incorporates whatever they might find appealing or useful from a number of different folk traditions. Most of it comes from sources that have their origin in folklore from the British Isles and the Continent—myths, granny tales, fairy stories— but it becomes unrecognizable in their hands.”

“Such as?”

Miki stubbed out her cigarette and lit another. “Well, this business with the Summer King, for one. It’s an old belief, the idea that the ruler of a land is directly tied into its well-being. He sows his seed in the spring, lives high and mighty through the summer as the crop grows tall and green, then comes the harvest and he’s cut down with the rest of the yield, sleeping in his grave through the winter only to rise up again the following spring. But in the hands of Fergus and his lot it comes along with all sorts of made-up garbage that, in the end, lets them simply string up some poor, daft bugger—to give them personal luck and power, forget the welfare of the land, if such things ever did work.”

“You mean they kill him?”

Miki nodded. “Which makes for a Summer Fool, rather than a King, I’d think. Of course the poor sod never knows the truth until it’s too bloody late. And you can bet there’s no rising from the dead involved either. That dumb bugger’s dead and he’s not coming back.”

“How do you know all this stuff?”

“That’s the laugh, isn’t it? From my da’, the old drunkard. But I’ll give him this much: Even he turned his back on Uncle Fergus and his cronies. ‘A man can find enough ways to hurt himself on his own,’ I heard him tell Fergus once, ‘without turning to the likes of your hard men and their ugly magics.’ “

Hunter shifted in his seat.

“Makes you uncomfortable?” Miki asked. “Calling it magic, I mean.”

“No, it’s just this bruise on my side. Doesn’t matter what position I’m in, it just starts to ache after I’ve sat still for too long.”

“That’s something else Donal owes us.”

“You don’t think he had anything to do with it, do you?”

Miki shrugged. “I don’t know him anymore, so I can’t say.”

Her voice was casual, but Hunter could see how much it pained her to say it.

“So why do you call it magic?” he asked. “You don’t believe in that kind of thing, do you?”

“If you’d asked me yesterday, I’d have said no. But right now?” Her gaze took on a distant look and for a moment Hunter thought he’d lost her again. But then she took another drag from her cigarette and focused on him once more. “Right now, I don’t know anymore.”

Hunter decided it was time to get back to her brother and what had started her off on this morbid line of thought which was so out of character for her.

“So,” he said. “You think these Gentry are planning to use Donal as their Summer King?”

“I know it,” Miki told him. “Why else would he paint his own face behind the Green Man’s mask?”

“But he knows the same stories you do.”

Miki nodded. “Except it’s like my cigs,” she said, holding up the cigarette she was smoking. “I know they’re going to kill me, but somehow I can’t believe that it’ll actually happen to me. Don’t ask me how it happened, but it seems Donal’s got himself convinced that he and the Gentry are working for the same cause: taking back a piece of the world for themselves because, well, the bloody world owes them, doesn’t it? It’s so pathetic, but I shouldn’t be surprised. It would take an Irishman to buy into such a cobblework of shite and pledge himself to their cause.”

“What does being Irish have to do with it?” Hunter asked.

“It’s that you’d have to be either drunk or mad, and we’re too good at both.”

“But—”

“Well, Ireland’s a peculiar place, isn’t it?” Miki said. “It seems to breed loyalties that grow all out of proportion to reality or common sense. Back home, a feud is as real today as it was a few hundred years ago. It doesn’t matter that all the original participants are long dead and gone. The descendants will continue with the hostilities until there’s no one left, on one side or the other.”

She lit another cigarette from the smoldering butt she’d been working on before adding, “It must be something in the air, or that comes up from the land itself.”

All Hunter could do was think of the former Yugoslavian Republic, or Rwanda, or any of the how many other places in the world where intolerance was the norm, genocide the solution.

“I think it’s an unfortunate part of human nature,” he said.

“Maybe so, but it also seems particularly Irish to me. What are we known for?”

“Before or after
Riverdance?”

“Ha, ha. No, I’m serious.” She held up a hand and ticked them off. “Drinking, fighting, melancholy… and overwrought songs and novels concerning the three. It’s bloody pathetic, but you know, it’s not such a bloody lie, either. Christ knows I like a drink myself, and I’m just as liable to give someone a whack to settle a difference as talk it out.”

“I think you’re generalizing.”

“Well, of course I’m generalizing. But the thing with generalizing is that it holds a certain grain of truth, overall. Look at the peace process Blair’s negotiating. Everybody’s going, hurrah, but if you think Northern Ireland’s not still a bloody powderkeg waiting the tiniest spark to set it off, then I’ve got a bridge to sell you.”

There was nothing Hunter could add to that.

“Anyway,” Miki went on, “what seems to be happening here is, one, the

Gentry plan to use Donal as their Summer King, and two, something to do with that—maybe the power they’ll accrue—is going to let them take the land here from its own
genii loci.”

“That’s presupposing any of this is real,” Hunter said. “Summer Kings. Magical powers. Even the
genii loci.”

Maybe especially them, he added to himself.

Miki nodded. She butted out her cigarette into the ashtray and for once didn’t immediately light another.

“I
know
it sounds mad. But there’s something else besides us in the world, don’t you think? And if there is, who’s to say what it’ll be like? You’ve seen the Gentry. They’re not just creepy, there’s something
more
to them.”

Hunter put the palm of his hand against his side.

“Being nasty doesn’t also make them supernatural,” he said.

“But where do they live? How do they live? All they do is speak bloody Gaelic, so how do they get by?”

“They spoke to me in English,” Hunter said. “With a thick accent, I’ll grant you, but it was still English.”

“Fine. But that doesn’t change the
otherness
of them.”

“And I still say—”

“I know, I know. But ever since I listened to Donal go on about them last night, I’ve had a bad feeling that all this shite Fergus and my da’ talked about could be real.”

“So we need to rescue Donal from them.”

“I don’t think that can be done,” Miki told him. “You know Donal. That moroseness of his isn’t all an act. If he thinks he sees a way out, a way to get even with the world, he’d take it. And he’s so bloody stubborn.”

“Unlike you.”

That won him a faint smile.

“I’m only stubborn when I’m right,” she said.

“And you’re always right.”

The smile grew a little. “As good as,” she said, before it went away again.

“So what is it you want to do?” Hunter asked.

“It’s not a want so much as a need.”

Hunter nodded encouragingly.

“I don’t want to see them take what isn’t theirs from those who were here before them.”

“But that’s how it works,” Hunter said. “Isn’t history one long summation of conquests and the like? The Celts didn’t originate in Ireland—they took it away from someone else.”

“That doesn’t make it right.”

“No. But… well, why wait until now? What happened when these Gentry showed up with the original conquering Celts?”

“Well, my da’ had something to say about that, too—when he was sober, or at least not so drunk that he could still talk. See, the
genii loci
preside over a particular place. When the landowners change, those original spirits remain. It’s only how they’re perceived that changes. They’re the same spirits, but they wear different names, different shapes. But for some reason, when the famine and all the troubles drove our people out of Ireland to cross the Atlantic, some of these originally localized spirits made the journey as well. The Europeans were able to displace the original inhabitants of this land, but it appears the Gentry weren’t as successful with the local spirits. Or so my da’ said.

“They’ve been able to claim the cities for their own, but I’d guess it’s only because the local spirits aren’t interested in streets and buildings. The Gentry have spent so much time walking among us, that a forest of concrete and steel buildings doesn’t trouble them the way they would spirits more in tune with their natural environment. But now …”

“Now they want it all,” Hunter said.

“And they think that calling up the Glasduine will give it to them.”

“The what?”

“Glasduine. It’s an old name for a Green Man.”

“And he’s this Summer King you were talking about earlier?”

Miki shrugged. “According to folklore and tradition, they’re not the same, though if you follow the threads you can see where they meet from time to time in figures such as Robin Hood. But it doesn’t matter to the Gentry. When I think back to all the things Uncle Fergus attributed to them, it was just one big borrowed mess that’d take either a scholar or a madman to decipher.”

She fell silent again and this time Hunter didn’t know what to say. None of what she was telling him made much sense in the view he’d always held of the world. And, just supposing it was real, why get involved in a struggle that was so far out of their league? If the local spirits were half as powerful as the Gentry were supposed to be …

He put his hand against his side again. There was nothing supernatural about his pain—nor in how he’d gotten it. But the hard man who’d hit him definitely fit in with Miki’s description of them being mean-spirited.

“Aw, Christ,” Miki said suddenly. She drank off the remainder of her cold tea, stuck her cigarettes in her pocket and stood up. “I feel like a bloody fool, going on like this. It’s just Donal’s got me going and I can’t tell up from down anymore. Last night, it was like seeing himself again—my da’, in all his drunken, stupid glory.”

Hunter stood up as she started to put on her coat.

Miki shook her head. “I half expected him to take a swing at me, but I guess he knows I wouldn’t even begin to stand for that sort of shite.”

“Let me walk you home,” Hunter said.

“Yeah, I don’t suppose I’d be much use around the shop today.”

“It’s not that.”

She put her hand on his arm. “I know. Thanks for putting up with me.”

“I’ve heard worse.”

“Oh, please. I’d like to know from who.”

“I meant in terms of going through a bad time,” Hunter said.

Miki cocked her head. “You’re not going to go all sage and wise on me now, are you?”

She almost sounded like her old self.

“I doubt I could pull off either,” he told her.

“Yeah, you’d at least need white hair and a beard. But you’ve got a deep enough voice …”

They paid their bill and walked back through the cold streets to her apartment with Miki cracking jokes along the way. Hunter wasn’t fooled by her sudden change of mood. It was just her way of dealing with … well, everything, he supposed. From when he first met her as a kid, busking, living on the street, she’d always been as cheerful as Donal was morose. He’d just never stopped to think about what that cheerfulness might be hiding.

By the time they were climbing the stairs onto the porch of her building she seemed completely like her old self, though Hunter didn’t think he’d look at her in quite the same way again. Not with what he knew now.

“So you see,” she was saying as she opened the front door into the foyer, “it’s probably better this way. I don’t doubt I was getting on Donal’s nerves as much as he was getting on …”

Her voice trailed off and it took Hunter a moment to realize what was the matter. Then the smell hit him, a thick musty reek of wet animal fur and urine and worse. He stepped past Miki, breathing through his mouth, and looked around. The foyer was as spotless as ever.

“Where’s it coming from?” he said.

He turned to look at Miki, but she made no reply. She stood frozen by the door, a stricken expression on her face. And then he knew, just as she did, unable to explain how, he just knew. He took the keys from her fingers and crossed the foyer to her door, unlocked it, pushed it open, almost gagging as an enormous wave of the horrible stench came rolling out into the foyer.

He’d been prepared for bad, but this was far worse than his imagination had been able to call up. It looked like a storm, no, like a hurricane had torn through the apartment. The furniture was all overturned or smashed, upholstery shredded. CDs, books, magazines torn apart and thrown about as though spun in a tornado. Feces were smeared on the walls, where the drywall hadn’t been kicked in. Urine dripped in long streaks among the smears, puddled on the floors.

Christ, Hunter thought, gagging on the horrible reek. What had they done? Robbed a sewage plant?

All that remained untouched were the windows—to keep the stench locked in, he realized. But nothing else was in one piece. Even some of the baseboards and molding had been torn up and broken.

Then he saw her accordion, the Paolo Soprani, torn in two at the bellows, the keyboards on either side smashed in, bass and treble reeds broken and scattered around the ruins of the instrument that lay in a pool of urine. And just to make sure the message of hate and disdain was absolutely understood, someone had taken a huge dump right on the shattered remains of the instrument. Even if it could be repaired, who would want to?