Emerald Magic Page 5

  Anna Livia came up to the IFSC and looked it over, peering in through the windows. Then She stood up straight.

  “Gods bless all here save the cat!” she said in a voice of thunder.

  At the sound of Her raised voice, glass exploded out of the IFSC in every possible direction, as if Spielberg had come back to town and said, “Buy all the sugar glass on Earth, and trash it.” From the spraying, glittering chaos, at least one clandestine billionaire plunged in a shrieking, flailing trajectory toward the parking lot of Tara Street Station, missed, and made a most terminal sound on impact: apparently blessings weren’t enough.He was followed by his chef, who had fallen on hard times (only recently acquitted of stealing a Titian from his signature restaurant’s host hotel) and now fell on something much harder, ruining the no-claims bonuses of numerous Mercedes and BMW sedans parked below.

  And in their wake, something else came out—growling, not that low, pleased growl we’d heard the other night, but something far more threatened, and more threatening.

  Through the wall, or one of the openings left by the broken glass, out it came. It slunk, at first, and it looked up at Herself, and snarled and showed its teeth. But there was going to be no contest.Anna Livia was the height of the Customs House dome, and Her proportions to the Celtic Tiger’s proportions were those of an angry housewife to that of an alley cat.

  It did all it could do, as She bent down and reached for it. It ran. Crushing cars, knocking mortals aside, it ran to get as far inland as it could. It got as far as St. Stephen’s Green, and dived into the Square, through the trees, and out of sight.

  From way behind, I cursed when I saw it do that. By the time we caught up with the Tiger, it would be out the other side of the Green and into Dublin 2 somewhere—

  I looked over at the Eldest Leprechaun, then back to see where Anna Livia had gone. She was briefly out of sight, a block or so over now. “Come on,” he said, “the Green—”

  We went there—it was all we could do. When we got to St. Stephen’s Green, all surrounded by its trees, there was no sound of further disturbance anywhere else. “It’s still in here—” I said. We looked through the archway at the bottom of Grafton Street and could see nothing but the little lake inside, placid water, and some slightly startled-looking swans.

  “Now what?” I said under my breath.

  The Eldest Leprechaun gestured. I looked where he pointed. At the top of Grafton Street, by Trinity College, Anna Livia had taken a stand.

  She ventured no farther south. She simply raised Her hands and began speaking in Irish. And as we looked back through the archway into the Green, down toward the lake, we saw something starting to happen: water rising again—

  “The swans . . . !” the Eldest Leprechaun said.

  It wasn’t the regular swans he meant. These were crowding back and away from the center of the lake as fast as they could. The shapes rising from the water now were swans as well, but more silver than the normal ones, and far, far bigger. They reached their necks up; they trumpeted; they leapt out of the water, into the greenery, out of sight.

  A roar of pain and rage went up, and the Celtic Tiger broke cover and ran up out of St. Stephen’s Green into Grafton Street, down the red bricks, in full flight, with the Children of Lir coming after him fast. It may not sound like much, five swans against a tiger: but one swan by itself is equal to an armed knight on horseback if it knows what it’s doing. Five swans fighting, choreographed, in unison, are a battalion. In a city street lined with chain stores, and with plate glass everywhere, when you hear the whooping whooshing uncanny sound of swan wings coming after you, you think: Where can I hide? But five giant swans who are also four pissed-off Irish princes, and their sister, worth all the rest of them put together . . . if you were a tiger with any sense, you’d leave the country.

  This one didn’t have quite that much sense.Maybe it was bloated with its own sense of its power—for hadn’t it had its way all this while? It turned, roaring with fury, and leapt back down the street toward its pursuers—

  A swan’s wing caught it full across the face. The Tiger shied back like a horse struck with a whip across the eyes, then was battered by more wings,merciless. The Tiger turned and ran again, back the way it had been going first, around the curve in Grafton Street, with the Children in hot pursuit . . . and ran, in turn, right into Anna Livia.

  She reached down and picked it up, yowling and howling, like a woman picking up a badly behaved housecat. Herself turned and walked past Trinity, the flood that had been following Her carefully containing itself, and She made her way north toward O’Connell Bridge, the waters roaring, the Tiger roaring, the horns of frustrated drivers honking all up and down the Quays as She went. What are they seeing? I wondered, as in company with the leprechauns I followed Herself as best I could. I had a feeling that the next day there would be stories in the Irish Times about flash floods, water main breaks, anything but the truth.

  The truth was mind-bending enough, though, as we looked at the River Herself standing on O’Connell Bridge and looking north up the street.

  “Yes,” She said, and Her voice rumbled against the buildings. “Yes, that’ll do nicely—”

  In Her hands, as She walked up O’Connell Street, the Tiger writhed and splashed and yowled desperately to get away. But there was no escape. Slowly it was borne up the street, shoulder high to Herself, spitting and clawing in terror, until She stood right across from the GPO, just in front of the Millennium Spire. Slowly She lifted the Tiger up over Her head.

  “So you would kill Old Ireland?”Anna Livia said. “You would kill yourself, for without Old Ireland, you wouldn’t be.And as we brought you about . . .”

  In one hard gesture She brought the Tiger down.

  “So we can end you,” She said, “or the badness in you . . . if we have the sense.”

  She turned and made Her way back to O’Connell Bridge. Traffic was in an uproar, and Gardai were rushing in every direction.No one noticed a guy and a few leprechauns and a little slender man in turn-of-the-century clothes standing there by the water, watching the huge woman’s shape that eased down into it again . . . if they saw that last at all.

  “Not dead yet, boys,” She said, as She subsided gently into the water; “not dead yet.” She threw a last loving glance at Joyce.

  He took his hat back from the Eldest Leprechaun and tipped it to Herself.

  The waters closed over Her again. Joyce, or his ghost, vanished as She did. Overhead, we glanced up at the sound of swans’wings, heavy and dangerous, beating their way down the air over the river.

  And then I looked back over my shoulder, north up O’Connell Street, and had to grin. There, at the top of the Spire, impaled like a limp hors d’oeuvre on a cocktail stick, and not burning at all bright—hung something green.

  Speir-Bhan

  BY TANITH LEE

  This I offer to the memory of my mother,

  my unmet grandfather and great-grandfather—who never, so far as I ever heard, reneged on any bargain.

  I

  This story, if that’s what it is, is written in two voices. Both are mine.My blood is mixed, fire with water, earth with air.

  I WAS NEVER in Ireland, though from there I came.

  The answer to this riddle is simple enough. I am mostly Irish, genetically and in my blood, but was born in another country.

  My mother it was who had the Irish strand. Her eyes were dark green—I have never seen elsewhere eyes so dark and so green, save sometimes now, with those who wear colored contact lenses.

  She it was who told me of that land where, too, she’d never gone. O’Moore was her maiden name. She said the weather there was “soft”—which meant it rained, but a rain so fine and often warm, a sort of mist, accustomed as the air. They came from the Ghost Coast, the O’Moores of my mother’s tribe, the haunted west of Ireland, where the rocks steep into the sea, harder than hearts. My mother’s father had a Spanish name, Ricardo. She used to speak of him lov
ingly. His father, her grandfather, was a gallant man called Colum. He lived to be over a hundred, and died in his hundred and first year from a chill, caught while escorting his new wife, a young lady of forty-five, to the theatre in Dublin. Ah the soft weather then wasn’t always kind.

  Ireland is the land of green—emerald as her eyes,my mother. She has gone now, to other greener golden lands under the hollow hills. But one day, searching through her things some years after her death, I found my great-grandfather Colum’s book. It wasn’t any diary, or perhaps it was. It seemed the book of a practical man who is a poet, and cares for a drink, the book of a canny liar who will tell stories, or it is the book of one who speaks the truth. All of which, with arrogant pride and some reticence, I might say also of myself, saving the book and my gender.

  There arrived a night when, having found his book, I met my great-grandfather Colum, for the first, in a dream. He was a tall, thin man, who seemed in his sixties, so probably he was about eighty, for at ninety-nine I had heard, he had looked ten years his younger.

  “So you found it then,” he said.

  “So I did.”

  “Where was that?”

  “In a box that had my mother’s letters and some of her mother’s things.”

  “Tucked up among the girls,” he said. “Why should I complain.”

  I didn’t mention my grandmother’s fox-fur cape, also in the box—I had been afraid of this cape when a child, and last week, locating it again, had sent it to a charity.

  In the dream, Colum told me of his house that was of stone, and had a narrow stone stair. The windows looked across the valley to the sea, where the sun went down at night. It was not the Dublin big house of later years, this, but where he had been a boy.

  In the dream, we walked, he and I, through that valley of velvet green.We climbed up inside the house and watched the sunset. Birds cooed, settling on the roof, and in the yard was an old well, full of good water.

  Nearby—that was, maybe, seven miles along the shore—stood ruinous and supernatural Castle Seanaibh, or Castle Sanvy as the tourist guide has it.

  In his book, Colum says that he was there all one night. In the dream he told me that, too.

  We drank whisky, the color of two garnets in amber, and the red sun set, and a magpie flew over the stone house in the valley, chattering its advice.

  But all this I dreamed had been written in Colum’s book anyway. Along with a story, between two lists of things, one of which is a list of fish caught from a boat, and the second a list of likely girls he had seen in town.

  IN THOSE DAYS, Colum was twenty, tall and slender and strong, with hair that was black, and eyes that were grey, with the smoky ring around the iris no one, who does not have it—they say—can ever resist.

  He worked at a desk in the family business, which was to do with leather goods, nor did he like it much, but it left him time and gave him money to go to the dances, and once a week to drink until he could call to stars, and they would fly down like bees. It was on a night just like that, having danced for five hours and drunk for two, that Colum set off along the road to get home. It was about a mile along that road, to the house. On either side the land ran up and down, and trees stood waning in the last wealth of their summer leaves. The full moon was coming up from her own boozy party, fat and flushed and not quite herself. So Colum sang to her as he walked, but she only pulled a cloud across her face, petulant thing. Oh, there were girls like that, too.

  A quarter way along the road, Colum stopped.

  It felt, he said, as if he had never been on that road, not once, in all his days, when in fact he had traveled it twice a week for many years, and often more than twice. Since he was an infant he had known it, carried along it even, in his mother’s belly.

  Boulders lay at the roadside, pale, like sheep that dozed. That night he felt he had never seen one of them, though he had carved his name in several.

  It was not, he reckoned, a special night, not a night sacred to any saint that he could think of, or to any fey thing, not Samhain, nor Lug’s night either.He stood and blamed the pub whisky, or the fiddler in the hall, for the way the road had altered.

  And then there they were. Those Others.

  He said, in the dream, “It wasn’t like the magical effects they do now, with their computer-machines for the films.” He said, one minute there was just the empty road under the cloudy moon, and then there was something, as if vapor had got into your face. And then you saw them.

  They were of all kinds. Tall as a tall man, or a tall house, or little as a rabbit, or a pin. They trotted along the road, or walked, or pranced, or rolled. There were horses, with flying manes, but they were not horses, you could see that plainly enough; they had human eyes, and human feet.

  None of them had any colors to them, though they looked solid. They were like the stones at the roadside, only they moved, and all of them in front of him, and none of them looking back.

  Another man would have dropped down by the boulders. Another again would have run off back to the dance hall and the public house.

  Colum fell in behind the travelers, at a mild, respectful distance.

  He had learned two things in his young life. First, he could not always get or have everything he would like. Second, he could have and get quite a lot.

  He thought anyway, none of them would turn to see him. They were the Royal Folk, some band of them, and what they were doing out he didn’t know, for they had no business to be.He was not afraid. As he told me, if he had danced and drunk less, he might have been—but that was to come.

  So he followed them up the road, and soon enough it turned in at a wood. There was no similar wood in the area that he recalled. The trees were great in girth, and thick and rich with leaves, and moon-washed. The road was now a track. They and he ambled along, and presently the track curved, as the road never had, and then they were climbing up and up, and where the tree line broke, Colum saw the fish-silver ocean fluting down below. They must all have covered seven miles by then, and done it in record time, for next up ahead he beheld the castle called Sanvy. But it was not a ruin that night, it was whole and huge, and pierced with golden lights like spears.

  It was haunted, naturally, this castle. Every castle, crag, cot, and byre is haunted, it seems, along the Ghost Coast of Ireland. So Colum thought it was the ghosts who had tidied up and lit all the lamps, and he waited for some coach with headless horses, or running fellow with hell’s fire all over him, to come pelting down the track. But instead there came a walking woman, with a burning taper held high in her hand.

  Ah, she was lovely. Slim and white, but colored in, not like the others, for her hair, which was yards long, was like combed barley, with stars in it and her eyes, he said, like the gas flame, blue and saffron together.

  She let the Host pass her, bowing to some, and some in turn nodded to her. Then, when they had gone by and on toward the castle gate, her gas-flame eyes alighted on Colum.

  Colum, well he bowed to the ground. He was limber enough and drunk enough to manage it.

  She watched him. Then she spoke.

  “Do you know me, Colum?”

  “No, fair miss. But I see you know me.”

  “I’ve known you, Colum, since you were in your cradle, kicking up your feet and sicking up your milk.”

  Colum frowned. You did not like a pretty girl to remind you of that sort of thing.

  But at his frowning, she laughed.

  She came down the track and touched him on the neck. When she did so, it was the coldest—or hottest—as ice will burn and fire seem icy—touch he had ever felt. He paused, wondering if she’d killed him, but after a moment, he felt a strange sensation in his neck.

  “It was as if an eye opened up there—as if something looked out of me, out of my throat.”

  After that, he found he could speak to the woman on the track in another language, that he had never known, though perhaps he might dimly have heard it sometimes, among the tangle o
f the hills and valleys.

  “What night is this, fair miss,” he said, “when the Folk are on the road?”

  “Your night, Colum,” she said.

  Then she turned and moved back toward the castle of Seanaibh Sanvy. And he realized, in that instant, what and who she was. She was a Speir-Bhan, his muse. So he ran after her as fast as he could. But, just before he raced in at the gate, he threw a coin away down the rocks into the sea, for luck, and since no others were left now save that water, and the moon, to watch his back.

  Then he was in the gate, across a wide yard, and up among the lights.

  WELL, HE WROTE this in his book—wrote it in years later, obviously, in another ink. It says: “I have seen a motion picture in color. An American gentleman showed me. It was like that, when I went in there.”

  He said, coming in from the yard to the castle’s hall, it was as if a rainbow had exploded, and the sun come up out of the night without warning.

  If there were a hundred candles burning, there were a thousand, nor did they resemble any candles he had ever seen before, but were stout, and tall like a child of three years. In color they were like lemon curd. And behind, torches blazed on the walls, and showed tapestries hanging down, scarlet, blue, and green, and thick with gold. The Royal Folk had taken on color too. He could see the milk-whiteness of their skins and the berry-red of their women’s lips, and how their hair shone like gold or copper. Their clothes were the green of water or the purple of lilac, as the trees are, half of them, they say, in the Lands beneath the hills. But that was not all, for all around, in the body of the castle, which had suddenly gone back in time and back to life, sat the human persons who had once dwelled there, kings and princes from countless centuries, in their finest finery. And the fey horses with human feet walked couthly up and down, white as snow, with silver manes, and the tiny little creatures bounced and rang against the walls like bells, and white dogs with crimson eyes and collars of gold lay still as statues.Yet one thing now was all the same with them. Every eye in that great place was fixed on Colum.