Read The Last of the High Kings Online
Authors: Kate Thompson
J.J. left on the seventh of June for a six-week tour of Japan and the United States. Before he left, he took over the running of the house while Aisling went up to Dublin and spent a week with her in-laws and Hazel.
She had badly needed that break, and although she had only been back for a few days, she felt as though she already needed another one. Aidan was still making the most of the “terrible twos,” and Jenny was as dreamy and unreliable as ever. But that was not why Aisling called the police. Calling the police was another part of J.J.'s master plan.
It was about nine-thirty on a damp evening. Although it wasn't really getting dark yet, low, heavy clouds made it seem as though it were.
“My daughter's missing,” she told the duty officer who answered the phone. “She went out walking this afternoon, and she didn't come home for her dinner.”
The guard took all the details. He asked how old Jenny was and whether she had ever gone wandering off before. Aisling told him that she was eleven, and that she often went walking around and about but that she was afraid something must have happened to her this time because she was out so late.
The duty officer said he would send someone around to the house, but by the time the Garda car arrived Jenny had come home.
Aisling apologized profusely. The guards were sympathetic and told the bewildered Jenny not to be frightening her mother like that. Aisling saw them out, then stood leaning against the front door, shaking with guilt and anxiety. She couldn't believe it was ever going to work. The whole plan was insane.
“Did you ever wonder,” said the púka, “how it is that human beings have become so plentiful? In almost every other one of the myriad worlds there is harmony and balance between the plants and the creatures that inhabit them. They eat one another, of course, but that is natural. And it is also natural that if any one species looks like it's becoming too successful and dominant, we step in to correct the balance.”
“We?” said Jenny.
“We have been called many things, but you don't want a list of names, do you? Nature gods is possibly the most accurate description of us. Would you be happy with that?”
“I suppose so,” said Jenny.
“It was several thousand years ago that things
began to go wrong in this world,” said the púka. “From the beginnings of time we were the only gods human beings had ever known, and they respected us and obeyed our laws and cared for every living thing that grew on the planet. They ate other creatures, of course, but that is only natural and part of the scheme of things that we had devised.” He shook his head ruefully. “A lovely place it was. One of the loveliest. Until the fairies came along.”
“The fairies?” said Jenny. “From TÃr na n'Ãg?”
The púka shuddered. “The same,” he said. “They came across into this world with their magic and their music, and the human race fell under their spell. They abandoned us and adopted the fairies as their gods.”
He paused to pluck a wild strawberry leaf, and for a while he chewed on it thoughtfully.
“They lost respect for us and began to flout our laws. They started to cut down forests for their cooking fires and their huts and to clear space for grazing their herds. They began to spread out and multiply at an alarming rate. Taking over the place, essentially. We used all our power to get the human race back under control; but the fairy folk liked being worshiped, and they protected the human race with their magic. Eventually the state of the world got so bad that we
approached the Dagda, the king of the fairies, and explained our concerns. He agreed to meet us in TÃr na n'Ãg so that we could discuss what to do. But he tricked us. When all my brothers and I were in TÃr na n'Ãg, he sealed the time skin and locked us in. We have a lot of power, Jenny, and we move freely between the worlds, but TÃr na n'Ãg is the Dagda's realm, and he too has a great deal of power. As long as the time skin was sealed, we couldn't cross through it. We were his prisoners.”
“So what happened?” said Jenny. “How did you get out?”
“We agreed to bury the hatchet with the people of this world. Do you know what it means, to bury the hatchet?”
“I'm not sure,” said Jenny.
“It means to make peace,” said the púka. “It means that both sides agree that hostilities are over. So while we were still locked in TÃr na n'Ãg, the people here found an old stone battle-ax, and when it was well and truly buried, and they had built that dirty great pile of rocks over it, the Dagda let us out.”
“The hatchet,” said Jenny. “So that's what it's called. Not a chopper, a hatchet.”
“That's what it is,” said the púka. “Just an old lump
of rock, in fact. But it was the symbolism that mattered. The fairies might be tricksters, but we are not. We are honor-bound to keep our word as long as the hatchet remains buried.”
On the twentieth of July, three days before J.J. was due home, Aisling phoned the police again and reported Jenny missing.
This time Jenny got home ten minutes after the guards arrived at the house, and this time they were a lot less sympathetic. They gave Aisling a severe lecture about the responsibilities of parenthood and the dangers lying in wait for children who were allowed too much freedom. Aisling took the opportunity to explain how difficult Jenny was, and how she never listened to either of her parents, and how their other children were all perfectly well balanced and dependable. The guards suggested she get in touch with social services if she was having problems; she couldn't keep wasting valuable Garda time like this.
That was exactly what she had wanted them to say. Because next time she phoned them they would ignore her. And next time, in just a few short weeks, Jenny really would be gone.
Forever.
“So where does the ghost come in?” said Jenny.
She was sprawled with the púka in a mossy glade in the middle of the woods. Sunshine burst between the branches, and the púka's white coat glowed so brightly that it almost hurt her eyes to look at him.
“He came in a long time later,” said the púka. “It was after the war between the fairies and the ploddies andâ”
“Who?”
The púka laughed. “The ploddies. That's what the fairies call the people of this world.”
“Ploddies,” said Jenny. She laughed. Somehow, although no one had ever told her so, she knew that she was not one of them.
“Anyway,” said the púka, “the ploddies seem to
have no loyalty for their gods, and sooner or later a new one was bound to come along. It caused a war between the fairies and the ploddies, and the fairies were banished to TÃr na n'Ãg and forbidden to set foot in this world again. So after that, with the fairies out of the way, we reopened negotiations about the state of this world. We had to. Things were going from bad to worse. There were no bears left in Ireland by then, and hardly any wolves. And this”âhe gestured toward the mountainâ“had begun to happen.”
“What?” said Jenny.
“Thisâthis desert. The Burren wasn't always like this, you know. All this endless bare rock. There were forests here once, and after that there was the best pastureland in the whole of Ireland. That was why too many people settled here and kept too much livestock and why the soil became depleted and began to erode.”
“Wow,” said Jenny. “I never knew that.”
“But we did, and what we saw broke our hearts,” said the púka. “We asked the chieftain here to stop the destruction and move his people somewhere else. We said that if he didn't, we would unearth the hatchet and return to open warfare. He wouldn't agree. So we went up the mountain to dig up the
hatchet, but we found we had been tricked again. By the time we got there he had posted his son's ghost on guard, and he has been there ever since.”
Jenny, deep in thought, said nothing. The story was coming together at last, and something about it was making her uneasy.
“We are the gods of the material world, Jenny.” The púka went on. He reached out a hand and grabbed a fistful of soil and leaves from the woodland floor. “This is our realm: the earth and the air, the leaves, the grasses, the birds, and the beasts. We have no understanding of the spirit world and no jurisdiction over it. A human ghost is a very powerful thing. It cannot move itself, but it can move other things. Small things. Like molecules in the brain and in nerve endings.” He shuddered again. “Very nasty having your nerve endings twisted. It can do permanent damage, even to us. That's why one little ghost can hold us at bay forever.”
“I see,” said Jenny quietly. She thought for a while and then went on. “So he isn't deluded after all? There
are
monsters. The monsters are you.”
The púka stretched his long, loose limbs and yawned. “That's what he thinks, Jenny,” he said. “But what do you think? Do I look like a monster to you?”
Jenny tried to explain to the ghost that there were no monsters. She told him that she had traveled far and wide and that she had never seen them. She told him that she had asked J.J., who had traveled to every continent in the world, and that he had never seen them either. But she was wasting her breath. The ghost was adamant in his beliefs, and he was not about to be moved. He wanted to be free, she knew that. She could sense the longing in him. But he really seemed to believe that the fate of the human race was in his hands, and nothing she could say would change his mind.
She might have stopped visiting the ghost altogether if it hadn't been for the púka. He persuaded her to keep on going.
“He's so lonely and deluded,” he said to her. “I hate to think of his being without a friend. It will take time, I know, but I'm sure that in the end you can persuade him to see the truth.”
But Jenny didn't think she could. She had become bored with the ghost, tired of his eulogies on the nobility of the human spirit and general worthiness of humankind. He wasn't the noble, courageous soul she had first thought him, but a sad, mixed-up character, imprisoned by his own delusions. She viewed him if not with contempt, then certainly with a degree of condescension. She found it hard to think of things to talk about, and since the ghost never saw anything new, he was short on conversational openings. Sometimes, on a clear day, she quite enjoyed sitting in silence on top of the beacon and looking out over the plain and the sea beyond, but the truth was that she would rather have been with the púka, learning how to read the winds.
She came to understand many, many things from watching them. In school she had learned a bit about pollution and global warming, but the weather winds taught her to mistrust people who told children to recycle their pop bottles and turn off the tap when they brushed their teeth but who drove everywhere by
car and flew off in airplanes several times a year for cheap weekend breaks. They taught her about the melting ice caps, the winds in perpetual fury, the droughts and the floods and the landslides. They brought her news of the death of the rain forests, the despair of the whales, and the extinction of deep-water fish species, vacuumed up from their lightless homes to explode on the decks of factory ships. She read of the relentless expansion of the human race into every dark and deep corner and every high, bright place on the surface of the earth. And when she learned to read them, the winds of change taught her that all this would soon be coming to an end.
But what kind of end, she didn't have the skill to understand.
One very early morning in late August Jenny got up and found J.J., Aisling, and Donal already downstairs, apparently waiting for her. Aisling looked very unhappy. Her eyes were red, as though she had been crying all night, and Jenny wondered if something terrible had happened while she was asleep. J.J. looked bright and chirpy, but he kept smiling at her in a reassuring kind of way that made her feel anything but reassured. There was something up, Jenny was sure.
“We're going on a little adventure,” J.J. said. “You and I and Donal.”
Donal was yawning vigorously and didn't look at all enthusiastic.
“What kind of adventure?” asked Jenny suspiciously.
“A magical mystery tour,” said J.J.
“Do we have to go in the car?” said Jenny, trying to think of an excuse to back out.
“Nope,” said J.J. “We're walking.”
He bent to put on his boots, and Donal, still yawning, started putting on his as well. Jenny waited for someone to tell her to put hers on, but nobody did, so she didn't.
Aisling was wearing a peculiar smile that looked as if it had been glued on top of an entirely different expression. It had, too. When she came to wave them off at the door, she suddenly threw her arms around Jenny and burst into tears.
“Good-bye, sweetheart,” she said. “Have a lovely time.”
J.J. hustled the children out ahead of him and turned back to speak to Aisling.
“If we're not back in two days' time, send Séadna TobÃn to fetch us. But whatever you do, don't let him bring his fiddle.”
Jenny knew Séadna TobÃn. He was the pharmacist in Kinvara. His son ran the shop now, but Séadna was nearly always there, pottering around the place and chatting to the customers.
“Why Séadna TobÃn?” asked Jenny as they set out along the track that ran up toward the top
meadows of the farm. “Where are we going?”
J.J.'s smile was now completely genuine and stretched from ear to ear. “We're going to a really special place, Jen. It's a secret place, and it's so nice that it's easy to forget to come back. The only other person round here who knows about it is Séadna.”
“What's the place called?” said Donal.
“It's called TÃr na n'Ãg,” said J.J. “The Land of Eternal Youth.”
“Don't be ridiculous,” said Donal. “That's not a real place.”
“Want to bet?” said J.J.
He had thought long and hard about Donal and the best way of explaining everything to him. When he told Hazel, her reactions had been mixed. Although she had agreed to go along with his plan, he wasn't sure she really believed him. He didn't want Donal growing up with any doubts about Jenny's disappearance, so in the end he and Aisling had decided that he should go along and see for himself.
Jenny, on the other hand, did not need to be convinced about the existence of TÃr na n'Ãg. The púka had already told her all about it. She wasn't sure how she felt about going there, though. The sunshine and the dancing and everything sounded okay, but what if
the Dagda sealed the time skin and she couldn't get out?
“Well, where is it then?” Donal was saying. They had reached the end of the track and were walking through the gate into the top meadow, the one with the old ring fort in it.
“It's not far,” said J.J. “You'll be amazed when you see how we get there.”
Donal was wearing a resentful expression, but his eyes suddenly widened, and he pointed ahead, upward and to the right. “Look!”
J.J. looked. The white goat was careering across the mountain slopes at an unbelievable speed. They watched its progress until it plunged into a hazel-filled hollow and vanished from sight.
“I wonder what's got into him,” said J.J., doing his best to hide his concern from the children.
Jenny was wondering too. In all the time she had known the púka she had never seen him move at anything faster than a gentle trot.
They walked across the meadow, their footsteps making parallel tracks in the dew. They had taken a good crop of hay from it, and now a bright new growth was pushing through the cut stalks. This year they hadn't sold the hay but had stored it in the barn. In a week or two J.J. would put cattle in here to eat
this new grass. And they would be his own cattle. He had already applied to the Department of Agriculture for a herd number. No more touring, he had promised Aisling. He would stay at home, farm his cattle, make his fiddles, and help with the new baby.
If they had one. It all seemed totally unreal now, out here in the summer dawn.
“Are we going to the fort?” asked Donal.
“We are,” said J.J.
“Why?”
“Because the way into TÃr na n'Ãg is in there.”
“No, it isn't,” said Donal, who was convinced this was all a stupid joke. “I've been to the fort millions of times, and I've never seen the entrance to TÃr na n'Ãg.”
“Ah,” said J.J., “but have you been down the souterrain?”
“The what?”
“You didn't know about that, did you?”
“What's a souterrain?” said Jenny.
“It's an underground shelter. There are two chambers down there, under the fort.”
“Really?” said Donal. “Like a bunker or something?”
“Just like a bunker,” said J.J., “only very, very old.”
“How come I've never seen it?” said Donal. Jenny was surprised by this as well. She thought she knew
every inch of this mountainside, and that included the fort.
“There are stones across the opening,” said J.J., but he didn't tell them about the wall that wasn't really a wall, but a barrier that kept time in this world and out of TÃr na n'Ãg. It was easier to show people things like that than to try to explain them.
They came to the rough circle of hawthorn trees and stepped over the encircling bank of grass and stones.
“So where is this underground thingy?” said Donal.
“It's justâ” J.J. stopped. They all did. Standing between them and the mouth of the souterrain was a big white goat.
And this time J.J. had no doubt at all that he was a púka.