The Snowmelt River (The Three Powers) (10 page)

It was frightening to accept that there was no logical explanation for what was happening to them. That there was no way of dealing with it other than to embrace it.

And yet it seemed curiously unsurprising to discover that, night after night, all four friends were now sharing common dreams—dreams of Slievenamon and its age-old history, of the brutal conflicts that
ebbed and flowed around its breast of stone. Dreams of battles in which a prince with blazing eyes lays siege and breaks through wooden forts atop mounds of earth, only to see everything end in slaughter. Dreams about the eternal movement and murmuring of the three rivers—the Suir, the Nore and Barrow—flowing about the mountain’s skirts. And dreams about the peoples who lived about their shores and adored them before the coming of the Celts. The strangest visitors of all were the beings who whispered the names of the Tuatha De Danaan, beings that came as lights or masks of fire, who brushed their minds like Lords of Magic, as though to promise truths and wonders beyond human logic and comprehension.

If, in their waking moments, they knew that such things made no sense—that what was happening to them couldn’t possibly make any sense—it no longer mattered. They had moved beyond caring whether things made sense any more.

One morning Mo followed her brother as he entered the forge at first light. She stood just within the open door, and watched, in fascination, as Padraig kindled a battered cob pipe from a piece of red glowing iron, humming some lines in the old language, then dowsed the fierce metal in water, so it hissed and spluttered, with his smoky blue eyes sparkling.

“Wh-whu-what are yuh-yuh-you doing, Mr. O’Brien?”

“Aha—it’s you, Mo. Come looking for the meaning of dreams?”

Mo’s eyes widened. “Do yuh-yuh-you know the uh-answers?”

“Hasn’t young Mark here been asking me the same questions? My answer to you, as to himself, is that you’re sharing the memories of the mountain.”

“Buh-buh-buh-buh—” Mo shook her head in frustration.

“But mountains don’t have memories? Is that what you wish to say?”

She nodded.

Padraig stopped working and arched his tall body back beyond his center of gravity, as if to ease a nagging ache in his spine. His chest above the broad belt holding his trousers was only partially covered by a scarred leather waistcoat. He looked over his shoulder to where Mark was stirring a bowl full of engine oil. “If your brother is determined to make himself useful, he’d do better to work those bellows.”

Mark’s face was already awash with sweat from the heat. He was stripped to the waist, and covered in streaks and smudges of soot. He winked at Mo as he started to pump the big wooden paddle.

Mo turned back to Padraig. “Wuh-wuh-wuh-will you explain . . . how muh-muh-mountains have memories?”

Padraig withdrew the red-glowing bar of iron from the furnace and, in a single sure swivel, dropped it on
the anvil. He started to hammer it, talking disjointedly in between blows and the crackling showers of sparks. “The entire countryside is alive with memories: mountains, woods—if they are old woods—and rivers too. But these are not memories such as you might imagine them, memories seen through human eyes and preserved in the language of human tongues.”

Mark wiped sweat from his brow with his discarded T-shirt. He had stopped pumping while the metal was out of the furnace. Mo knew he was listening, while pretending his concentration was elsewhere.

Padraig brought the metal back into the coals. Mark started pumping again. Mo could see her brother’s sweat dripping onto the flagstones.

“So whu-whu-what kind of muh-muh-muh-memories are they?”

“Harder, Mark!” Padraig shifted the iron in the furnace to find a hotter position before glancing over his shoulder at Mo. “You wouldn’t be playing with me, thinking me simple as mutton?”

Mark’s ears followed the conversation, hearing Mo dissolve into a rare fit of giggling. He grinned to himself. They enjoyed bantering with Padraig, now that they were no longer afraid of him.

“You still huh-huh-huh-haven’t explained.”

“Do you omadawns imagine you will simply go up there and take a stroll through Feimhin’s gate?”

Mark’s ears bristled to full alertness.

“Whu-whu-what are you trying tuh-tuh-to tell me?”

“I’m growing a bit tired of your games. We’re gabbing too much. The furnace is cooling. Mark Grimstone, put your lily-white English back into it!”

Mark worked like a fury until the entire smithy was bathed in a fierce white glow from the furnace. He wanted Padraig to be impressed enough to continue to talk. The metal came out of the coals again for another thunderous racket of spark-haloed hammering on the hard gray steel of the anvil, then back into the water again.

More pumping.

Padraig paused, waiting for the reheating. “Isn’t it obvious that such a portal will be fiercely protected—and thus dangerous?”

Mo waited against the backdrop of the hissing and spluttering in the steaming pit of water.

“I duh-duh-don’t understand.”

“Sure you, who can sense the forces of mountain and river, should know the answers better than anybody. The gate will be warded by some form of guardian—a dangerous one that will already be aware that you are coming.”

As Mo ran from the forge, looking for Alan and Kate, Mark stared in her wake, his own heart beating like a drum inside what felt like a hollow rib cage. He wanted to join Mo in talking to Alan and Kate, but he was obliged to stay and keep working the bellows. There were times each day when the old man explained the strange
spellings and grammar, or taught him by chanting the common invocations that had been found in examples of Ogham, and sometimes Mark imagined Padraig’s throat encircled by a golden torc, like he recalled from Celts he had seen in the history books. He imagined a circle of believers all gathered around a sacrifice, of an animal or maybe even a human, with the druid invoking the old powers.

Right now, as Padraig put the hot metal through another cycle of annealing, Mark expressed his curiosity about the weapon.

“Why don’t you make an axe, like the Fir Bolg battle-axe?”

“Such a weapon is beyond my skill. My aim is to construct a spear. Even then it should be cast with a head of bronze. Bronze would carry the Ogham invocations better. But bronze working is a skill largely forgotten. Iron is easier because it is more malleable with the heat. We must have faith that a spear of tempered iron, spell-warded, will be enough to protect you. I take comfort from the knowledge that a blade of warded iron was woven for the great king, Lug, remembered in legend as Lug the Longhand for his fierce strike with the spear.”

It was all Mark could do to stop himself grinning, much as Mo had earlier. It was all so fantastic.

Over lunch in the sunlit grass, Padraig regaled them with the tale of the boy hero, Lug, whose father, Cian, was a prince of the Tuatha De Danaan and whose
mother, Ethniu, was the beautiful daughter of the one-eyed monster, Balor.

“Hopefully,” Mark whispered to Mo, “Ethniu took after her mother.”

Mo pinched Mark’s blackened arm, wanting only to listen to another of Padraig’s wonderful tales. Mark merely grinned, amused to find himself set apart from the others, like a reproach. Surprise, surprise—of the triplets, only Lug survived! And surprise, surprise, and surprise again, it all led to a great battle in which Lug wounded the monster, Balor, with a single cast of his magic-warded spear!

The prophecies predicted that Lug would kill his monstrous grandfather and so Balor imprisoned Ethniu in a tower of crystal. But with the help of the druidess, Birog, Cian broke through the seals and seduced Ethniu and she gave birth to triplets who Balor tried to drown in the Atlantic Ocean.

Mark clapped with the others at the end. Padraig was a pretty good spinner of yarns, with princesses as ambitious and lecherous as the worst of the men. “No problems,” Mark intoned seriously, “boys and girls. If we encounter Balor, we’ll know what to do.”

“Your mocking tongue has not abandoned you, Mark Grimstone. But let me warn you not to confuse the romance of storytelling with the real danger you will face soon—or the power of real magic.”

Kate squealed, “Real magic?”

“Perhaps,” added Padraig, “young Mark should reflect on the fact that, if my thinking is correct, his
adoptive father has kept him and Mo close so they would lead him, ultimately, to this very situation.”

Mark was silent after that. Had the old man, in a single sentence, explained the puzzle of Grimstone’s behavior—explained, indeed, why Grimstone and Bethal had kept them alive, while appearing to hate them? Mark was deeply thoughtful all the way back to the forge. Then he called out to Padraig above the hammering, “So that’s what we’re forging—the Ogham-warded Spear of Lug?”

Padraig nodded, a wry smile wrinkling his lips. “Yes—or as best my aging memory and arthritic hands can fashion her!”

“That sounds like quite a challenge!”

“Sure there’s a devilment in you, Mark Grimstone, that would make a mischief out of virtue!”

Mark had to look away again, to hide his ear-to-ear grin, working the big paddle for all he was worth. “I don’t imagine, Mr. O’Brien, that you believe in princesses in crystal towers any more than I do.”

“Take care that sarcasm does not lead you into confusing truth with fact.”

“Surely they’re the same?”

Padraig lifted the fierce red-glowing blade from the furnace and inserted the point into the jaws of a vice. Then, with enormous grippers, he began to add the spiral twist that would run lengthwise from tip to stock.

“Sometimes,” he said, panting and wiping sweat from his brow with his forearm, “a very great truth, yes even a very terrible truth, can become embellished in
the telling. When you were very young how did your adoptive parents talk of your biological mother and father? Did they say they had gone away?”

“Nothing so sweet.”

Padraig loosened the blade from the vice and rammed it back into the furnace, speaking all the while without losing his concentration on the task, or even glancing in Mark’s direction. “I have no doubt they were unkind. But even if they had told you your parents were hymning with the angels, do you think that sugar coating would have hidden the painful truth from your heart?”

Mark was silent through some more pumping and reworking of the metal.

“I’m doing my best to understand, Mr. O’Brien. But if there really is something, some important lesson, hidden away in the fairy tales and legends, I just don’t see it.”

Padraig continued to extend the spiral for a while in silence, dousing the metal in the oil-sheened water, then started the cycle of reheating all over again. Only then did he pause to take a hard look at Mark.

“Take comfort from skepticism, lad, but don’t let it rule you. If it’s real truth you’re after, put aside your gadgets and look into your heart.”

Day after day they worked on the spear. Mark learned some of the tricks of forging iron, in between studying Ogham and its common inscriptions. To his surprise, he discovered that Irish was a very ancient language, one of the most ancient languages on Earth, and little
altered over thousands of years. It had no
th
diphthong, and no letters
v
or
w
or
y
, so it manufactured the sounds out of pairs of letters, or dots on top of the most unlikely letters, like
b
and
d
. An
h
after a consonant was the same as a dot over it. This was why the Sidhe, of
Sidhe ár Feimhin
, was pronounced
Shee
—because the
dh
was pronounced like a
y
. The
v
sound in Slievenamon was really spelled as
bh
. This was apt to confuse anybody, even when they were skilled at reading Ogham. There was no other way to learn than to work like hell at it. So it was that the first Ogham words he learned to spell and inscribe for himself, over the edges of a square tile of blue slate, were the words
Sidhe ár Feimhin.

He took home the handful of battered old books Padraig lent him and he hammered their rules and coded messages deep into his brain, even when it involved staying up half the night. And day after day he found it worth his while learning the rules of this new game he was playing. Knowledge was power, as some wise old wrinkled man had once said. And so, with Padraig’s help, and the monotonous details he discovered, Mark felt closer to understanding the old legends and superstitions. And boy was there a bonus!

The way he saw it, it was a matter of logic. If there really was some magical wormhole on top of the mountain, and if Ogham was the key, he’d be the one holding the answers.

The Three Sisters

So it was that sensuous July metamorphosed into early August, a time of tottering sandcastles and incoming waves of change—eleven days, to be precise, in which the four friends were summoned again and again by the mountain, their hearts and minds seduced by enchantment until they had no choice but to heed the call. And then, all of a sudden, the waiting was over. It was that beautiful sunny morning in mid-August when Alan had kissed Kate for the very first time. They were cycling away from the Doctor’s House, heading over the second of the stone bridges with the Comeraghs directly ahead of them, riding into the sunrise in silence. And his heart was still racing from the excitement of the kiss even as he stood on the pedals to push against the upslope of the approach lane, rattling and
swaying through the green-painted gateposts, past the blacksmith’s forge, with its smoke-blackened tin roof, heading for the red-brick garages, still retaining the old wooden horseboxes. Standing by the gates was the flatbed truck, its hinged splats hand-painted in camouflage shades of brown and pea-green. Now, at the sight of it, the real implications of what they were planning was at once exhilarating and frightening.

Mo was waving to them from the open door of the dairy.

Kate abandoned her bike and ran to hug her friend. Mo’s face was dimpled with a nervous smile. She murmured, “Guh-Guh-Guh . . . Guh-Guh-Grimstone wuh-wuh-will be buh-back tomorrow.”

“Oh, Mo, I’m a complete bundle of nerves.”

“I’m muh-more tuh-terrified of whu-whu-whu-what will huh-happen if we don’t escape!”

Kate’s heart missed a beat with Mo’s choice of the word:
Escape!

Leaning against the pear tree, Mark welcomed their arrival with a cheeky smile. How jealous Mark would be if he knew about the kiss! Alan turned away from the glimpse of tousled fair hair, as if embarrassed by it, then joined Kate and Mo in entering the den to gather up precious possessions.

Mo was the first to come back out, her backpack in place, clutching the bog-oak figurine and her precious notebook. She looped the figurine around her neck on a shoelace but she kept the notebook in her hand. Making
a final tour of the den, she inspected her altars of skulls, starfish and sea urchin shapes, her piles of feathers and gemstones—a treasure trove that had grown into a continuous sweep around all four walls.

“Jeepers!” murmured Kate, overcome with the excitement. “I hope you lot remembered to bring some money.”

Mark, who was still leaning against the tree, remarked, “Hey—you think the Irish Euro will be legal tender where we’re going?”

“I don’t care,” laughed Kate. “I know that it’s legal here. So let’s all empty what we’ve got onto the grass and count it.”

Dutifully they sat in a circle and emptied their pockets. Kate was impressed to find that they had gathered more than thirty Euros between them. She gazed at the pile of money with awe before Alan gathered it up and stuffed it into the pocket of his jeans. There was a moment of silence in which all four looked exceedingly nervous yet impatient to be off.

Mo broke the tension with a giggle.

Kate and Mark slung their backpacks over their shoulders. Wordlessly, they all came together for a team hug.

Alan hauled out three battered-looking plastic drums, opaque and weightless, and lifted them onto the bed of the truck. Mark took pictures with the camera on his phone. Mo twirled in a circle that took in the entire sawmill yard, holding aloft her triple-headed talisman. Finally, Alan loaded the Spear of Lug onto the truck, placing it carefully along one of the long sides and
hiding it under a layer of logs. His preparations complete, he brought out a small, flat silver flask embossed with the American bald eagle that had belonged to his father. He filled the cap with the throat-burning poteen he had lifted from his grandfather’s cabinet.

“Girls first!” He passed the capful to Kate.

The two girls coughed after mere sips of the fiery liquid, then passed it on to Mark who threw a capful back in one swallow, screwing up his eyes and gagging, then farted loudly and solemnly, like a drum roll.

“Slievenamon—my bum salutes you!”

The other three chorused, in unison—“To Slievenamon!”

Mark donned a leather parka over his T-shirt while Alan slipped into the faded brown all-weather denim jacket that had been his last present from his parents. Like Kate, Mo wore a pullover with her T-shirt and jeans. Alan left the others to put their packs on board the truck while he headed back to the main house. It was the moment he dreaded. Padraig was sitting in the leather armchair, in the room with the photographs of Mom growing up. Alan felt hopelessly inadequate, holding out his hand as if to formally shake Padraig’s.

As his grandfather climbed stiffly to his feet, Alan felt himself tremble with emotion. He threw his arms around the tall figure and hugged him.

When he had recovered his voice, he spoke huskily. “I’m really sorry, Grandad, but you know I’ve got to do this.”

Padraig was stiffly silent.

“I have to do it—for Mom and Dad. If these people, these unknown forces, had anything to do with their deaths—!”

“Sure I’d feel exactly the same as you do if I were in your place!” Padraig took a step back and took a firm grip of Alan’s shoulders.

“That nutcase, Grimstone—you know he’ll be back tomorrow. Things could get pretty mean when he finds Mark and Mo gone.”

“I’m capable of taking care of myself.”

“You know he has spies here in the town. Maybe we should leave the truck and just take the bikes—make it look like another beach trip?”

“The truck it must be. You cannot arrive at the mountain already exhausted. Conserve your strength for what you will face there.”

Alan nodded.

“So long then, Grandad!”

“You take care. I’ve already lost too many of those I love. I couldn’t bear it if I lost you too!”

When Padraig came out to wish the others farewell, Kate kissed him on his white-stubbled cheek. Mo just stood in front of him and trembled. She pressed her notebook into his hand.

“Ah, you know I cannot accept it, Mo. It’s too precious to you!”

But Mo just hugged him once and then spun away, running madly toward the truck.

Mark also stood there a moment, overcome with emotion, and then, awkwardly, he reached out and shook Padraig’s callused hand before hurrying after his sister.

Padraig gazed after them all with his watery eyes glistening.

Mark helped Mo clamber into the back of the truck, then joined her among the logs. Alan raised the flatbed sides and fixed them into position before yanking himself up into the cab. He couldn’t help but smile at Kate’s excited face as he reached across the bench seat to throw open the passenger door for her. Then Kate suddenly howled with laughter, scratching at the boyish stubble that prickled Alan’s cheeks.

“I bet you’ve forgotten to bring a razor!”

“Damn!”

That provoked a round of laughter.

“All ready?” He called back through the broken window into the bed.

“Aye, aye, Cap’n!”

Alan’s eyes met Mark’s in the rearview mirror.

The sound of the revving engine, Mark and Mo high-fiving in the back, the stench of diesel—suddenly they were off, the logs and passengers alike bouncing about on the bare metal floor as the truck lurched and swayed down the slope of the rutted track.

Alan slowed as he approached the gates. He squeezed his head and right arm out through the open window and gave a final wave to the solitary figure in the yard, continuing to watch Padraig in the side mirror until he
disappeared as they passed out through the gate posts. He thought,
Take care of yourself. Don’t get yourself hurt. Be safe until I return
.

They trundled through Irishtown, where the houses hugged one another in pastel-washed single-storied terraces, until the stony bulk of the West Gate straddled the road. They cheered as they squeezed through the medieval walls and onto broad O’Connell Street, then the Narrow Street, past the Main Guard and by the Old Bridge. Although Slievenamon was still twenty miles away, it towered over the graveyard where Alan’s Irish grandmother was buried.

They made their first stop at a gas station on the Carrick Road. Here, just about the only place that was open this early on a Sunday morning, they topped up the diesel and bought some cola, potato chips and chocolate. They got beyond the town boundary, rattling along the tree-lined banks of the River Suir. As if knowingly approving, the river coursed by them, mile after mile of broad, slow-moving current. It was a chilling reminder that at least once a year somebody drowned in its waters: a careless child or even an experienced swimmer, underestimating its flows and currents, so it seemed that the ancient sacrifices continued to this very day in homage to its darkling majesty.

Alan pulled the truck to a creaking halt on the riverbank about half a mile after Carrick, where young
willows dangled their drooping leaves over the water. It seemed as good a place as any to fill the first of the plastic drums with water from the Suir.

After helping Mo through a gap in the hawthorn hedge, Alan followed her down the bank into the shadows of the trees, watching as she pressed the neck of the container below the surface. Mo turned for a moment and looked fearfully over her shoulder. He saw the expression on her face, the prickling of worry in the dark pools of her eyes. For a moment, as he leaned down to pull her back, he thought he saw a shadow at the periphery of his vision, as if a darker mass was congealing out of the shade of the trees. They started back toward the truck.

Then as they reached the hedge, an instinct prompted them both to look back. A figure was silhouetted against the bright reflecting water. Mo left Alan with the container as she tore through the hedge, calling out a warning to the others. A creeping horror prickled Alan’s skin as he paused to take a second look. The figure really was there, shrouded by a black hood and cloak. The figure seemed to reach out as if to close the distance between them. Alan had to suppress the instinct to abandon the container in his panic to run back to the truck.

Kate murmured, “What was that?”

“I don’t know!”

With a clattering roar of the cantankerous old engine and trailing clouds of smoke, Alan accelerated along the Carrick Road, only reaching out to take Kate’s hand
when they had put a mile or more of distance between them and the stopping point. Her hand felt cold, the fingers stiff and crabby with fear.

After they had traveled a few miles farther, Mark tried to cheer Mo up, telling her jokes in his Homer Simpson voice. Mark was so clever with his jokes and his voices that Mo, although not exactly laughing, appeared to take comfort from his attempts.

All four talked to each other through the missing rear cabin window.

“Duh-duh-do you think that Puh-Padraig is really a duh-druid?” Mo asked as the truck took a left turn and headed north.

Alan shook his head. “I don’t really know.”

“I muh-muh-mean, he saw it all from the buh-beginning. Buh-buh-before any of us ruh-realized . . .”

“Yeah, Mo! Now I wish I’d talked a lot more with Grandad.”

Kate screwed her head around so she could talk to Mo directly. “Wasn’t it mind-blowing when we all started dreaming the same dreams!”

Alan rubbed at some scratches he had picked up from going through the hawthorns, meanwhile wondering if Mo was right, and that maybe his grandad really was a druid. If so, a druid’s grandson was driving this truck, illegally as it happened, since Alan was well under the official license age. Mark suddenly cut through Alan’s thoughts, pointing into the air behind them with a trembling hand. He cried out, “The watcher! The watcher!”

Kate paled and she clutched at Alan’s hand.

They passed through minor roads that were so enveloped by trees that they were effectively driving through tunnels. The sky that had been so limpid earlier had given way to gathering clouds and although the truck would sometimes emerge from shade into sparkling sunshine, it was never long before the shadows swallowed it up again. Alan knew some of the byways from helping his grandfather deliver loads, but he quickly lost track of the narrow and winding lanes, which, at times, were no more than single-track shortcuts. Kate did her best to follow the route on her crumpled map. An hour or more passed of weaving through flat farmland with scattered, gray-walled cottages surrounded by fields of crops. Then a shout from Kate announced that they had arrived at the second of the sisters. They had reached the Nore, close to its headwaters, where it was little more than a stream below gentle rapids, white spray flecking the currents over glistening black rocks.

This time it was Kate’s turn to fetch the water.

“You go with her, Mark,” Alan called up to him.

But Mark had already climbed onto the roof of the cab, holding up the harmonica, ready like some kind of warning siren, and shading his eyes from a sudden appearance of the sun.

Alan snorted with irritation.

He had to squeeze past Mo, her hands holding apart the barbed wire at the top of the slope, so he could run after Kate, who was thirty yards ahead, lugging the
second of the plastic drums down the slope of tussocky grasses and birch saplings. By the time he got to her, Kate had already jammed the neck into the stream. It took longer to fill in this shallow water, and the Nore hissed softly, as if warning them to be quick. Alan found himself darting fearful glances back over his shoulder into every shadow under the small trees.

The shadow loomed over them as the sun clouded over. Alan sensed it like a cold shroud spreading over the landscape, licking about them, discovering them, making the hairs on the back of his neck stand up as he pressed his lips into a taut line, willing Kate to hurry.

Clammy, ghostlike tentacles wrapped themselves around his legs, as if trying to inhibit all possibility of escape, as Kate’s hand reached up with the container. He yanked it from her hand and together they ran. Lungs bursting, they reached the barbed wire at the top of the slope, struggling between the strands of wire that Mo was again holding apart for them. Suddenly the harmonica began to scream out a warning. Neither Alan nor Kate could bear to look back behind them. Mo was stammering incoherently and bleeding from multiple tiny scratches as they dragged themselves through the wire, hauling the water onto the back of the truck. They dove into the cab, slammed the engine into gear, and tore off with the pedal to the floor.