The Last of the High Kings (17 page)

Like a man pushing a car, Aengus put his shoulder to the pig's rump and heaved it up the final few meters of the final escarpment of the stony steps. They had reached the top at last, and the rest of the way to the beacon, about a quarter of a mile, would be level going.

Jenny flung her arms around Aengus's neck and kissed him on the cheek. “You're the best daddy in the world!” she said.

“Can we let Mikey walk now?” said Donal. “I mean, can we turn him back into himself?”

Aengus wiped the sweat from his brow and ignored the question. “Is there anything to eat in that backpack?” he said.

Donal reached into it and pulled out the paper bag
that had contained the sandwiches. There was nothing in it apart from a few broken crusts and stray bits of cheese. Aengus shook his head, but the pig was not so fastidious. It snatched the bag from Donal's hand and ate it whole, with obvious relish.

Aengus sat down on a flat rock and watched it. “Well,” he said, “you can probably manage without me now, can you?”

“No, we can't,” said Jenny. “I'm frightened of the púka.”

“Two things you should know about púkas,” said Aengus. “Always answer them politely and”—he looked sternly at Donal—“never, but never, shake a stick at them.”

“Is that all?” said Jenny.

“Well, it's not quite all,” said Aengus. “There are a few other things.”

At that moment J.J.'s head appeared over the edge of the escarpment.

“So that's where you two are,” he said to Jenny and Donal. He walked over to join them. “Hello, Aengus.” He went on. “I see you have a pig at last.”

“It's not a pig,” said Donal.

“I think it is,” said J.J. “And a fine pig too.”

He gave it a few hefty pats on the shoulder. It
staggered and sat down with a grunt. J.J. stepped away from it, quite pleased that he had not, after all, bought any cattle that day.

“Did you make me that fiddle yet?” said Aengus.

“You're joking!” said J.J. “I've only had the wood for a few days.”

“Well, how was I supposed to know?” said Aengus grumpily. “There's no logic to your world at all, as far as I can see.”

J.J. sat on the limestone slab beside him. “So what brings you here this time?”

Aengus gestured with a thumb toward Jenny. Then his eyes widened with surprise, and he turned to look. J.J. turned too. Where the pig had been, Mikey was now sitting, rubbing his bristly cheeks with both hands.

“Hello, Mikey,” said J.J. “Where did you spring from?”

“Did you do that?” said Aengus to Jenny.

“I think so,” she said, looking pleased with herself.

“I've seen everything now,” said Mikey. “Whoever would have thought there was so much brains in a pig? I'm sorry now I ever ate so many of them.”

“What are you doing up here, Mikey?” said J.J.

“I've come up to stand on the beacon,” he said. “I
love the way the world looks from up there. Help me up now, and let's finish what we started.”

J.J. stood and helped him up and then stepped closer and got a grip under his left arm and elbow.

“There's no need for that,” said Mikey. “I'm well able to walk on my own!” He took his stick from Donal. “Let go of me now!”

“I will not,” said J.J. “The ground up here is very rough, and I'm not prepared to carry you back down if you break your knee or your ankle.”

“No one's going to carry me anywhere,” said Mikey, but he submitted to J.J.'s support, and the little group began making rapid progress. But they didn't get far. Up from the blind side of the hill came the púka, and as he had done before, he planted himself directly in their way.

For a moment Jenny didn't understand. Why would the púka come back and try again when he knew that Aengus was with them? Then she saw movement away to her right and looked. The edge of the mountain was swarming with goats.

J.J. saw them too. They were a motley crew: black and brown and tawny and piebald and white. There were craggy old nannies and elegant young does, big bearded pucks and a scatter of half-grown kids. J.J.
had been observing herds like this all his life. Surely they were just ordinary goats? They couldn't all be púkas, could they?

Aengus answered the question for him. “Uh-oh. Looks like a bit more than I can handle.” He grinned sheepishly at J.J., took a step to his left, and vanished into the hilltop.

“I thought I'd seen everything,” said Mikey. “I have now.”

The goats ranged themselves in a rough semicircle, not taking part in the standoff but watching with obvious interest.

“You've had your little jaunt now,” said the púka. “Well done. You got the pig to the top of the hill, and now you can take him back down again.” He advanced a few steps, tossing his dangerous horns.

“I think we'd better go back,” said Donal. “Don't you, Mikey?”

Mikey didn't answer, but Jenny did. “We're not going back. Not until we've got Mikey to the top of the beacon.”

She was thinking hard. She knew she had one trump card left in her hand, and she had to work out the best way to play it. Then it came to her, and without a word to anyone, she began to walk toward the púka.

“Jenny!” J.J. snapped. “Stay where you are!”

She ignored him, and he raced after her and grabbed her by the arm. Jenny spun around to face him and yanked herself free of his grip.

“For once in your life will you do as you're told!” said J.J. He reached out and tried to take hold of her again, and without a moment's hesitation, she turned him into a pig.

“Would you look at that?” said Mikey. “And she's only eleven years old!”

Jenny's eyes were blazing with anger as she confronted the púka. “Are you deliberately trying to ruin everything or are you just as stupid as you look?”

The púka stood his ground and stared at her through those hard, unsettling eyes.

“Don't you realize the ghost can see you?” She went on. “You and all your cronies? You're ruining everything I've done. He'll smell a rat when he sees you, and he'll never believe another word I say.”

The púka glanced over his shoulder at the beacon and then turned back to Jenny.

“You can't make a deal with someone and then just go and sabotage it!” she said, still speaking angrily. “I've already started to keep my side of it. The ghost is weaker. You know he is.”

Still, the púka said nothing and continued to gaze at her with an inscrutable expression.

“I was going to talk to him again today, but I can't if you won't let me through.”

The púka looked over her shoulder at the others, but Jenny didn't turn. She could hear the pig snuffling around behind her, probably grubbing up worms or roots.

“Why did you bring half the county with you then?” asked the púka.

“Because the ghost loves company. I wanted to give him a proper sendoff.”

“I don't want that old man on the beacon,” said the púka.

“Why not?” said Jenny. “What do you think he can do?”

“He's the High King,” said the púka.

“So what if he is?” said Jenny. “He's just an ancient ploddy. He doesn't have any power.”

She waited. The púka neither moved nor spoke.

“It's up to you,” said Jenny at last. “If you let me through, I'll have that ghost out of there before the end of the day. But I'm not going anywhere without the others. I'm not going to disappoint Mikey now he's come all this way.”

The púka still said nothing, but he swished his tail and shifted restlessly from foot to foot.

“Well?” said Jenny. “Do we have a deal or don't we?”

Despite what they thought, Aengus Óg had not abandoned Jenny and the others. He had in fact dropped back into Tír na n'Óg to try to get a bit of help from his father, the king of the fairies.

On this side of the time skin the world looked very similar to the way it did on the other, although the sun was a little farther toward the west. Aengus and the Dagda stood on the flat mountaintop beside a pile of stones that looked, in most respects, exactly like the one on Sliabh Carron. But there were slight differences. This one looked fresher, as if it had just been built, and there was no grass growing on the sides. It didn't have a hatchet buried underneath it either, or a ghost guarding it. It was there for an entirely different reason.

Aengus explained to the Dagda about Jenny and Mikey and their trip up the mountain and the resistance they were meeting from the púkas.

“Why would you concern yourself with that?” said the Dagda, swinging a fold of his heavy cape dramatically over his shoulder. “It's ploddy business. Nothing to do with us.”

“But it's my daughter, you see,” said Aengus. “I promised to help her if she asked me to. I never thought she would, of course. But she did.”

“And since when have promises been so important to you? I don't recall your ever keeping one before.”

Now that he thought about it, Aengus wondered if his father wasn't right.

“You can't go running around after them every time they don't get their own way.” The Dagda went on. “It's easy to spoil children, you know, and not at all easy to unspoil them.”

“But there's definitely something fishy going on,” said Aengus. “You know that white púka? The one that sometimes hangs around here in the woods?”

“I do,” said the Dagda.

“Well, he stole a chiming maple from the bottom of the hill. Just put in his hand and took it without a please or a thank-you. And now the same one is up
there getting in everyone's way.”

“I'm sure he has his reasons,” said the Dagda. “On reflection I'm not at all sure I did the right thing when I persuaded them to bury the hatchet with the ploddies.”

“
Persuaded
is good,” said Aengus quietly.

“What?”

“Nothing, Father. Do go on.”

“Well, it's just that the ploddies have made such a dog's dinner of the place. I'm not sure we shouldn't have left the púkas to do as they pleased.”

Aengus found it hard to disagree with this as well. The land of the ploddies had changed an awful lot since he grew up in it. He didn't mind going over for a visit now and then, but he wouldn't have wanted to live there.

“Anyway”—the Dagda went on—“they're not our concern now. Let their new god sort it out for them, if he can.”

“You're probably right, Dad,” said Aengus. “I probably shouldn't interfere.”

“You probably shouldn't,” said the Dagda. “But you probably will.”

The púka moved out of Jenny's way, and she turned the pig back into J.J. He retrieved his fiddle case and checked that there were no signs of damage, then strode up beside Jenny.

“Don't you ever, ever, ever do that again,” he said, in the best angry father voice he could manage. When his words met with nothing better than a cold shoulder, he decided to take a slightly less authoritarian approach.

“Please?”

Jenny promised, and the two of them stopped and waited for Donal and Mikey to catch up. Behind them the goats had regrouped and were standing together at the top of the stony steps, watching intently.

It wasn't far now to the beacon, and there were no
further obstacles apart from the low stone wall that separated the Liddy winterage from Mikey's and that J.J. demolished. Leaving the others to follow on at Mikey's pace, Jenny ran on ahead and scaled the beacon to talk to the ghost. She was shocked by how depressed he had become, and she realized how little effort would be required to fulfill her promise to the púka. But he perked up a little when she told him that the old man slowly making his way across the hilltop toward them was a distant relative of his. He told Jenny that he recognized Mikey and that he used to see him every day during the winters, although Mikey never saw him. He had missed him when he stopped coming up here, and he thought he must have died.

They chatted on about the brevity of human existence and the longevity of ghosts until eventually the rest of the party made it to the foot of the beacon. Mikey was looking very tired, and J.J., clearly worried about him, tried to get him to sit down at the bottom. But Mikey was determined to get to the top, and with a lot of assistance from J.J., he finally made it. Then he stood at the highest point, trembling and fighting for breath, and gazed out over the plain toward the sea.

“I made it,” he said, gasping. “And fair play to the lot of ye for helping me do it.”

J.J. was shaking his head distractedly. “I don't know what you were thinking of, Mikey. And I don't know what these two were thinking of, either, egging you on.”

“I'll sit down now,” said Mikey. “Give me your hand.”

J.J. and Donal helped him to the nearest patch of grass and took his weight between them as his knees buckled. They got him sitting down; but he didn't seem to have the strength to keep his head up, and J.J. eased him gently into a lying position with his head nearly at the top of the beacon.

Donal took his hand. “Mikey?” he said.

“Don't worry, Donal,” said Mikey. “I'm exactly where I want to be.” But his voice was very frail, and Donal was very worried indeed. So was J.J.

“I think I'm going to call the air-sea rescue,” J.J. said. He patted each of his pockets several times before he remembered that he had left his mobile phone, quite deliberately, on the kitchen table.

 

It was, along with Aisling's reading glasses, Donal's gamepod, and a framed photograph of Helen and
Ciaran, getting a really good wash, in about five pints of extremely sudsy water.

Aisling was wandering the house, searching for her reading glasses. She looked at her watch and wondered where everyone had gone. Hazel had told her she hadn't seen Donal or Jenny all day. That wasn't unusual for Jenny, but Donal was more considerate and generally let someone know what his plans were. Aisling rang J.J.'s mobile, only to be informed that the person whose number she was calling was unavailable.

Slamming the phone down, she went into the kitchen and looked out of the window to check on Aidan. He, at least, was as happy as a clam, up to his armpits in his washing-up bucket. Aisling smiled a fond smile and resumed the hunt for her specs.

 

Mikey's lips were blue, and his breathing was rapid and shallow.

“Donal,” said J.J., “run down to the house, will you, and get your mother to phone for the air-sea rescue.”

But Mikey shook his head and tightened his grip on Donal's hand. “Don't anybody go anywhere,” he said, his voice faint but clear. “I want you all with me now.”

At the top of the beacon, not far from Mikey's
head, Jenny was watching and talking, quietly but urgently, to the ghost. And the ghost, listening, was gradually losing his grip on the earth. He was getting ready to leave, and out on the rim of the mountain-top, the gathered púkas sensed how fast he was weakening and began to close in.

“You did the right thing, Donal,” Mikey was saying. “Don't ever let anyone tell you any different.”

“You'll be okay, Mikey,” said Donal, fighting back tears.

“I will,” said Mikey. “And very soon too.”

The ghost was drifting, his vague form curling like smoke in the corner of Jenny's vision.

“I have a promise to make,” said Mikey. “But you have to make one first, Donal. A promise to me.”

“I will,” said Donal. “Anything you want.”

“You've to come up here every single day of the winter and stand up here on the beacon. And then you've to go on and cast your eye over your cattle.”

Donal was in tears now. Convinced that Mikey was raving, he glanced at J.J. But J.J. just nodded, and Donal managed to get the words out.

“I will, Mikey. I promise you I will.”

The ghost was in the air above the beacon, still attached to it, but only just. The púkas, swelling as
they came, were racing across the grassland with terrifying speed. Jenny watched them, her heart in her mouth.

“And now for my promise,” said Mikey.

His voice was so weak that Donal and J.J. had to lean close to hear. “I swear that I will stand guard over this place…”

The advancing beasts could be heard now, their colossal feet shaking the rock beneath the thin soil. J.J. looked up and saw them coming; but Donal kept his face beside Mikey's, and only he heard the very last words he said.

“…whether I am alive or dead.”

The ghost lifted high into the air, and with a crash like an air strike, the goat gods hit the beacon. Staring out in horror, like woodlice on a burning log, J.J. and Jenny saw the huge reptilian eyes level with their own. The púkas could have swallowed them whole with their huge fang-lined jaws, but they were still on their honor. Until they unearthed the hatchet, they could not harm people, and so they didn't. The beacon shook, then began to subside as they gouged at the stones, each of their clawed fists tearing out a truck-load at a time.

J.J. was thrown off the side and ran clear between
the huge, scaly thighs of the raging gods. Jenny clung on, thrown from rock to shifting rock. Donal's wails of terror rose above the sound of crashing rocks. Beneath him the whole structure was heaving and collapsing, but in all the turmoil he never once let go of Mikey's hand. He stayed crouched beside him right to the end, and when that end came, he was the only one to see the light in the old man's eyes finally go out.

But everyone felt the effect. It was instantaneous and extraordinary. The destruction of the beacon stopped. Hissing and snorting, the púkas flung themselves clear of it, and resuming their goat shapes, they raced away from it as fast as they could.