Isle of Man (The Park Service Trilogy #2) (17 page)

CHAPTER 14
The Feast

The boiled human skull is the guest of honor.

It grins at us from the table’s head in the great hall.

It’s hard to believe I helped carry her corpse out just this morning. But despite death joining us for dinner, the mood is jovial as the guests laugh and tell stories, drinking wine poured from jugs and passing great platters heaped with food.

When the venison comes my way, I pass it on to Jimmy without taking any for my plate. Not because I have any trouble eating meat now, and not because I suddenly think hunting is cruel, but because I don’t feel worthy of consuming the stag’s flesh when I was too weak to take its life.

Finn sits at the head of the long table next to the skull. I notice that every time he takes food for himself, he places some on her plate, too. It’s strange to see that lipless and bony grin disappearing behind a mound of uneaten food. But Finn seems remarkably celebratory, recounting the story of our stag hunt for those at the table who weren’t present. Kindly, he leaves the part about my failure completely out in the retelling. As I watch the guests hang on his every word, it’s clear that they really love him. I think I’m beginning to also. He has a cool kind of calm, as if nothing were ever any big deal to him, and his wide smile is an almost constant counterweight to his blue, twinkling eyes.

“Tell us a poem!” someone shouts.

“Yes,” another chimes in. “Time for a poem.”

The guests fall quiet by ones and twos until the only sound left is the splash of pouring wine as Riley refills glasses. Finn sighs unconvincingly, putting on a show of reluctance when his eyes clearly give away his pride in being asked. He stands and pushes his chair in, leaning against its high back. Then he reaches down and places a hand gently on the skull.

“I’d like to dedicate this to Lady Awen, my dearly departed daughter.”

His daughter? Did I hear him right? There’s no way. That woman was twice Finn’s age if she was a day. At least she was twice his apparent age. Then it hits me—what if Finn’s like Radcliffe? What if he’s had the serum? Could he be hundreds of years old too? Was he installed here to guard the encryption key hidden in the David? My head swirls with questions, but before I can even begin to sort through them, Finn sweeps his arms out theatrically and bursts into song:

“In the dawn of Earth’s distant past, the gods gave birth to a lowly beast. Naked and cold in darkness vast, one grew bold and joined the feast.

“It’s fair to say she raised a stir—how dare a lowly woman dine with gods. Fierce they fought over who would eat her, but not before one fell in love.

“Concealed in his cloak they snuck away, he pledged her his heart and began to weep. While in his arms she begged to stay, and on an island he made safe her keep.”

Here Finn pauses to gulp his wine, grinning mischievously. The crowd sits riveted, looking on and waiting, even though I get the feeling they’ve heard this many times. He continues:

“On the island god and woman together lay, safely hidden beneath his cloak of fog. Then there came at last a fateful day, when shame sent away the god.

“For inside the woman a child grew, from the seed of Mannan an immortal son. Half god, half man, a deadly duo—a gift of love by a woman’s courage won.

“But the jealous gods had other plans, they opened hell above and sent beasts to kill. But preserved by sacrifices made of man, Mannan’s cloak of fog protects the island still.”

Finn finishes the song with a bow. The guests leap to their feet with wild applause. Jimmy glares a silent warning at me not to challenge anything in Finn’s story, but he doesn’t need to worry because I learned my lesson with the pig people. Besides, I’m still too hung up on the old woman being Finn’s daughter to think much about the poetic mythology he just delivered.

Now that the poem is over, everyone reclaims their seats and commences another course of drinking and eating, this one more conversational than the last, either due to the elevated mood after Finn’s performance or to the wine.

A woman turns to me: “Finn tells us you two are here for the games?”

“Yes, that’s right.” I nod.

“Did you travel far?” she asks. “I haven’t seen you before. Wait. Let me guess. You must have come from Ayre in the north. You have that look.”

“Yes,” I say. “You guessed right.”

“Does the heather still bloom purple there in the spring?”

I nod and smile, looking for a way out of the conversation. Fortunately, Jimmy jumps in.

“Tell us about the games?” he asks. “If you dun’ mind.”

“Have you never been?” She looks surprised.

“No,” we say in unison.

“Well,” she leans in closer, her tone conspiratorial, “I’ll give you a tip then. But you mustn’t tell, or they’ll give away my seat. The one to watch out for this year is Bree.”

“And why should we watch out for him?”

“Not him,” she says. “Her. She was last year’s runner-up, and I’ve heard talk around that she’s been training ever since. Someone said they saw her running the eastern hills, carrying a goat on her back. But I happen to think that’s exaggerated.”

I want to ask her more about these games, but at the same time I don’t want to give away the fact that we don’t know anything at all.

“Why would running hills help?”

“Stamina, of course,” she says. “That and everyone knows she has a ball tied to a post in her uncle’s pen that she swats at in between doing chores. Strictly forbidden, but she does.”

“A ball on a post?”

“Yes. To toughen up her hands.”

Before I can get more out of her about these games, we’re interrupted by Riley ringing his bell. Finn is standing at the head of the table, holding his daughter’s skull in his hand and an auger drill in the other. He looks at his guests and speaks.

“It would please me greatly if you would be so kind as to observe a moment of silence while I formally install Lady Awen in her place of honor among the Clan of MacFinn.”

He lays the skull sideways on the table. Riley appears at his side and holds the skull in place while Finn sets the auger at its temple and rotates the handle, drilling a hole into the bone. When the drill is clean through, he backs it out and turns the skull and performs the same operation on the other side. Then he holds the skull up to the massive starlit window in the far wall and closes one eye and sights a line through the skull, as if he were some ancient astronomer contemplating the heavens through a telescope made of bone. He nods to Riley, apparently satisfied with their work. Riley steps over to the wall and pulls a gold, braided rope, and the tapestries covering the walls of the long hall part like curtains, revealing many hundreds of hanging skulls grinning down from recessed racks. Adult skulls, child skulls, baby skulls, even a few deerhound skulls. My skin crawls to think that they’ve been hiding there all during dinner, silently waiting behind their curtains.

Riley sets a stepladder against a corner of the wall, and Finn gracefully climbs up it, carrying his daughter’s skull. He pauses to look down on the guests and speaks.

“As you can see, we’re quickly running out of space here. And as I have no intentions of remodeling again anytime soon, you Clan MacFinn folks had better just slow down with your dying already.”

The guests break their silence with a laugh.

Finn reaches to the highest row, slides out the wooden dowel that holds the skulls, and slips his daughter’s skull onto the rack. When she’s tucked away with the others, he climbs down, dusts his hands together, places them on his hips, and looks up at the wall.

“Not a bad-looking family, if you ask me,” he says. “I just look forward to the day when we’re all together again.” Then he nods to Riley, and Riley pulls the rope and the tapestries slide closed, covering the wall of skulls.

The guests raise up their glasses to toast.

“Today for Lady Awen,” one of them calls. “Tomorrow for us!”

Jimmy and I raise our glasses, too, although the wine is beginning to go to my head. I’ve tried to take only sips during dinner, mostly because it tastes horrid, but they seem to drink no other liquid here with dinner. Even so, I’m afraid I’ve had more than I should already, because the designs woven into the wall tapestries begin to swirl together in fantastic images of living color, and I can almost hear the chattering of all those grinning skulls hiding behind them.

The guests leave the tables now and spill into the center of the hall, carrying their goblets and jugs, and the party takes on a less formal feel. Candles are blown out, the lamps lowered. Several men grab the tables and slide them against the far wall. Angus wheels in a cart filled with wood and builds up the fire. Riley drags in deerskin bean bags, and people begin to sprawl on them in pairs. Finn disappears and comes back carrying a grand harp that he sits down with beside the fire and begins to play. The music is beautiful in the open acoustics of the great hall and even more beautiful yet when he begins to sing again. Jimmy flops on a beanbag and closes his eyes, either entranced by the music or feeling the wine himself. Taking advantage of the distraction, I wander off by myself to explore.

The laughing and music fades in the hall behind me as I enter the dark statue room. No candles or lamps burn here, and it takes a long time for my eyes to adjust to the small amount of moonlight coming in through the tall windows. I dance my way nimbly betwixt the shadowy figures, as if trespassing into the distant past. Silent warriors stretch to strike me down; frozen mothers nurse their cradled infant sons; ivory angels rise up on outspread wings; busts follow me with shadowy stares.

By the time I reach the David, the music has faded to just a distant melody, soft like something I might have heard in a dream. The yellow, quarter moon hangs in the window, directly in the path of the David’s stare. But the moonlight seems to have softened his gaze to a look of longing, as if the moon were his lover circling forever out of reach in the sky.

“What is it you hold in your right hand?” I whisper, half expecting him to turn to look at me when I do. But he stands as still as the stone he’s carved from, and only the shadows of his eyes move to follow the rising moon.

I lie down on the cold, stone floor and rest my head in my hands and look up at the statue. It’s so tall anyway, that lying on the ground it seems to be a god—a god who could easily reach up and pluck the moon from the sky like fruit if he really wanted to. I think about Finn’s song telling of a god who fell in love with a woman and gave her a child. It doesn’t seem so farfetched when you’re looking at the David. I wonder about the skulls. About his old daughter. And while I can’t believe in an immortal son of the gods, I can believe in the science of Radcliffe’s serum. But how did Finn get it? And when?

My thoughts turn to Hannah and Red. I hope they’re okay. I need to solve the riddle of this encryption key and get back to them. ‘In the right hand of David you shall find your key.’ It’s an odd riddle for Radcliffe to leave, and it seems strange that all this could have been here without the professor or anyone else knowing. I think about the professor killing time, waiting for us beneath the waves. We said fourteen days. It’s our third night.

And what about these games that we’re supposedly here for? So far all I have is an image of a girl running the hills with a goat on her back and swatting a ball tied to a post.

I close my eyes and try to picture my father’s face. Every day it slips away just a little farther. I see his hands sitting across the breakfast table from me. I hear his voice reading me stories. But I can’t make out the features of his face. I wonder, for the first time, why we didn’t take photos down in Holocene II. We had the technology. I guess we just didn’t bother because we all assumed we’d spend an eternity together in Eden. But what a load of crap that turned out to be. I can remember my father hugging me before he walked through the door to Eden. I can still smell the tobacco in his hair. But I just can’t see his face. I hope he heard me when I told him that I loved him. I hope he knew that I heard him when he told me.

When I wake, my arms are asleep, and I have to stand and shake the feeling back into them. The room is dark, the David now just a black shadow looming above me. The music has gone away with the moon. I thread my way carefully through the statues and into the great hall where the only light is from the fire, now burned nearly to coals. Several people lie passed out on beanbags; several others lie on the floor. I creep through the room on tiptoes, looking for Jimmy, but he isn’t there.

When I get to the upstairs hall, I stop at Jimmy’s door. My hand rests on the handle, but I just can’t turn it. I don’t know why I can’t. Now that we’re around all these new people, things just seem different from when it was just him and me.

My room is empty, which surprises me with all of Finn’s family crashed out in the great hall. But I’m grateful for it as I crawl beneath the covers and fall fast asleep.

CHAPTER 15
The Guests Arrive

In the morning, I can hardly walk.

My shark-scraped calf has begun to heal, but my legs are as stiff as boards from riding that mad horse all over the highlands yesterday. I hobble to the window and look out.

I must have slept late because the sun is up over the hills, shining on a caravan of horse-drawn wagons stretching as far down the road as my high window will let me see. Most of the snow has melted away, and the road is a muddy mess. Men walk beside the wagons, their boots covered in mud, while women huddle together in the seats, staying dry. I can see other wagons already in front of the castle. Men are busy unloading supplies and setting up tents in a grove of trees while their wives chase down children and direct the men with impatient gestures clear enough even to me.

I stop by Jimmy’s room, but he isn’t there. He isn’t in the breakfast room either, although several of last night’s dinner guests are. Riley pushes me into a seat and proceeds to fill me up with hot tea and leftovers from the feast. The guests make light conversation about what a splendid evening it was and about the upcoming games, but I get no better sense of things from eavesdropping on them. When they address me, it’s all I can do to sit and nod without wincing from the pain in my ass. I’ll be happy if I never ride another horse ever again.

When I’ve had all the food and company I can stand, I politely excuse myself and head outside to look for Jimmy.

The drive is alive with excitement. Wagons are backed up waiting to unload, sweaty horses stamp and blow, people shout directions, kids scramble about, playing at wooden swords. Tents under construction fall and are pulled up again. One catches a draft of wind and goes cartwheeling through the trees while men scramble after it. And through the center of it all, Finn walks as fresh and as calm as could be, stopping to lend a hand wherever one’s needed, answering questions, and greeting everyone with his charming smile. I get the impression he loves having company.

Jimmy doesn’t appear to be anywhere amidst the madness of the camp construction, so I head toward the backside of the castle, hoping to find him there. But I don’t get far when I’m stopped by Finn and asked to lend a hand offloading heavy sacks of grain for the horses, which I begrudgingly agree to do. Fortunately, the heavy lifting seems to loosen my stiff legs.

As I walk back from dropping a load at the stables, I see Jimmy beneath an oak tree with a raven-haired girl about our own age. She’s tutoring him as he practices a swatting motion, squatting and whipping his open hand through the air, then looking at his palm. He says something. She laughs. He smiles. If a female version of Jimmy were possible, she’d be it. Tall and athletic, her outfit as rugged as the proud features of her olive-skinned face. I immediately dislike her. My heart quickens. My jaw clenches. My eyes narrow. And I don’t enjoy the feeling at all. I wonder if this is how Jimmy felt when he saw me together with Hannah. I drop my gaze to the ground and head back up to the wagon for another load.

When I heft the bag of grain onto my shoulder, someone behind me strips it away. I turn and see Jimmy grinning at me, the bag cradled in his arm.

“One at a time’ll take us all day,” he says. “Give me another’n.”

I throw another bag at him.

“Thought you were busy.”

“Busy? I’ve been up since dawn waitin’ on you.”

“Who was that?” I nod toward the tree.

“Oh, that’s Bree. The one the lady was tellin’ us about at dinner last night. Remember?”

“Yeah, I remember,” I say, shouldering another bag. “The girl who carries goats. I’m still confused about these games.”

“Ain’t you seen the court?”

“What court?”

“The ball court,” he says. “Bree already showed me ever-thin’. Let’s finish loadin’ these sacks, and then I’ll show you.”

By the time the wagon is emptied, another one is waiting to be offloaded behind it, so we spend the next hour humping grain and hay to the stables, where the resident horses are none too pleased with all their new companions. We’re both dripping with sweat when we finally sneak away.

Jimmy takes me to the south side of the castle where an expansive, open courtyard is enclosed by rock walls. In the center of the courtyard are tiers of stone bleachers surrounding a sunken, four-walled rectangular court, shaped like an enclosed alley. The court’s walls are smooth concrete, and it looks like I’d imagine a deep swimming pool might look, except clever drains in the bottom carry away what little water remains from the melting snow. There appears to be no way in or out of the sunken court, except by being lowered from above. Of course, my mind races with crazy and horrific possibilities.

“What’s it for?” I ask.

“It’s a ball court,” Jimmy says.

“Ball court?”

“Yeah. Handball. Bree says they call it hero’s alley.”

“Why hero?”

“I dunno. But she also said they’s usin’ a new ball this year. Somethin’ called a goat-skinned alley cracker. ’Cause of the sound it makes against the wall.”

“She sure told you a lot, didn’t she?”

“Yeah. She’s pretty smart.”

“Really?”

“She said they mixed deer blood in with the concrete—is that what it’s called, concrete?—to make it bounce better. See how it’s kinda reddish?”

“I doubt that would help provide any bounce,” I toss out.

“I dunno,” he says. “But she said I’d make a good player ’cause of my long arms.”

“You’re not actually planning to play, are you?”

“Sure. Aren’t you?”

“We didn’t come here to play games, Jimmy.”

“But that’s why we told ’em we was here ...”

“Yeah, but—”

“But what?”

“You can’t possibly think you’d be any good. I mean, we don’t even know how they play it, and we haven’t practiced.”

“Bree says practice is forbidden. There ain’t even any other courts than this one. That lady was lyin’ about her having a ball on a stake, too. And Bree says that goat is jus’ a skin filled with water that she runs with sometimes.”

“Sounds like you’ve got it all figured out, then.”

“Well, I was thinkin’ maybe I’d play, and while everyone’s distracted by the games, you could figure out what’s goin’ on with the encrypto key.”

“Encryption key.”

“Yeah.”

“What makes you think I’m not going to play?” I ask.

“I dunno. Are you?”

“No.”

“Then what’s it matter.”

“What’s what matter?”

“Why I figured it?”

“You don’t make any sense,” I say, turning to walk away.

For the rest of the morning, I avoid Jimmy and keep myself busy by helping with the wagons. By afternoon a full on camp has taken shape outside the castle. Tents everywhere, lanterns hanging overhead from ropes strung between trees, several outhouses patched together from gray-weathered wood over deep holes dug in the ground. The people who were here last night are clearly Finn’s closest relatives, all bearing a striking resemblance to him, but the people setting up in the camp look to be from different parts of the island. Many with red hair and fair skin; others, like Bree, with dark hair and dark skin. An atmosphere of celebration hangs in the air.

It’s clear who will be participating in the games and who will be spectating. Groups of athletic young men and woman gather together and eye one another with contempt. Flexing or spitting or just swinging at invisible balls. Bree is the loner in the bunch, and I notice that she stays clear of the others. Except from Jimmy, who I spot introducing her to Junior. Ugh.

The adults, on the other hand, sneak glances at the young athletes, their longing looks filled with curious appreciation. I spot them nudging one another and appearing to comment on players’ appearances. Several of them scratch notes on wrinkled parchments as if setting odds. They seem to pay a great deal of attention to Bree. I, however, do my best to ignore her.

By evening fall, the camp has settled down as everyone rests from their long journeys, and I head inside to find a bath. Riley, despite looking exhausted, brings me to a bathing room and fills an old oak barrel with steaming water. As I soak away several days’ worth of grime, along with the aches and pains from my scabbed-over, shark-scraped calf and horse-bruised thighs, Riley busies himself with draining barrels and preparing them for other guests. He hums while he works.

“Riley, may I ask you a question?”

“Yes, of course, sir.”

“How come you call me sir when I’m so much younger than you are?”

“Yes. I’m sorry, sir. Please forgive me. I’m afraid that I come from a long line of proud housemen, and the habit has been bred into me. Was that your question?”

“No. My question is about Finn.”

“I’ll be happy to answer anything Lord Finn wouldn’t mind obliging you with an answer to himself.”

“Well, it’s just that last night he referred to—well, to the deceased woman—he said she was his daughter.”

Riley nods. “Yes. I’m afraid she was the last of them, too, since he hasn’t taken a new wife since Marta. Despite all my encouragements for him to find one. A solitary life is a sad life, I say. But he assures me he’s seen off all the children and wives he can bear to part with. Although I can’t imagine it’s any easier seeing off your grandchildren and great grandchild.”

“Well, that’s my real question. Just how old is Finn?”

“How old? Well, I’m afraid you’ll need to ask Lord Finn that yourself. And be sure to catch him in good spirits when you do. He sometimes doesn’t like to talk about his condition.” Riley lifts my pile of clothes to his nose and sniffs them. “Dear Lord. How can you stand to smell yourself in these? I’ll fetch you a fresh outfit straight away, sir. Straight away.”

Alone now in my bath, I sink beneath the water and hold my breath, listening to my heartbeats. They come at about one beat per second. That’s sixty a minute, or 3,600 beats per hour. That makes 86,000-and-something beats per day. I wonder if a heart gets only a certain amount of beats. I wonder how many beats my heart will have now that I’ve been injected with Dr. Radcliffe’s serum. I try willing it to stop. Or even to slow down. But it won’t. It just keeps on beating with a rhythm of its own.

I skip dinner and stay in my room, alone. Nobody seems to notice I’m gone, anyway. I crack the window and lie on the bed, listening to the festivities outside in the camp. People sing songs and laugh at jokes. Someone plays a set of pipes. But exhaustion overwhelms me, and the chatter and music outside carries me away to a restless sleep filled with strange dreams.

I dream I’m flying over the ocean, my speed drawing up a wake of mist as I race across the moonlit waves. I can turn on a dime with just the twitch of a toe. I can rise and fall by simply moving my head. Soon, I come upon a massive ship silhouetted against the night sky, a ship like the one that slaughtered Jimmy’s family in the cove. As I approach the ship, in the strange, inexplicable illogic of dreams, I can suddenly see clearly, as if it were midday and not midnight. The ship’s decks drip with blood and dead people hang like fileted dear from its riggings, their entrails spilling out and swaying beneath them as the ship rocks on the waves. I circle the ship closer and see the Park Service crest on its side. And I know before I even look that all the dead people wear Jimmy’s face.

My pillow is soaked with sweat when I wake. The room is dark; outside the window is quiet. It’s cold. I search for a match and strike the lamp lit, carrying it with me into the secret passageway and down to Jimmy’s room. I need to talk to him, to apologize for being a jerk, to make sure he’s all right. I open the panel and step inside, expecting to find him sleeping as I did before. But his bed is empty and the covers undisturbed.

I walk to his window and look out. The camp is sleeping, the shadows of tents glowing in the dying light of abandoned fires. I know Jimmy must be out there somewhere, probably with Bree. But I can’t understand why that makes me worry.