The Sword of Feimhin (4 page)

Just about all of the money from Mrs Patel had gone into the box. He had so wanted to impress Penny with his haul. He picked out the little pot of waxy honey. He wanted to see the look in her eyes when he gave it to her.

But then, he asked himself, wot would Penny see if she looked him back in the eye? Goggle-eyed glasses, flecked
with eye crud and finger marks. He had a sloppy bridge to his nose that caused the glasses to slip down, no matter how hard he tried to stop it happening, even to the extent it was putting wrinkles on his face.

He had chosen the denim jacket he wore because of its six pockets; the upper two zipped and the lower four flapped, so he could carry stuff when he was on the move. Now he emptied what change he'd kept from the ten pounds fifty pence Mrs Burlington had given him when another station picture got sold at the post office on Clemshod Street. He placed the note and coins in a tin.

‘One of us is doing it, Penny. One of us is keepin' body 'n soul alive!'

But that wasn't really fair. Penny painted the pictures.

There was still light enough in the sky to see the sights – pigeon fashion. It was here Gully and Penny would have come to celebrate his success. Only she wasn't here like she promised. He grumbled some more about that, moving around in the gloom, spreading the blinds he had rigged up, pulling them all tight before he lit the candle in the wax-splatted saucer.

‘Mrs Patel,' he heard himself tell Penny, ‘'as these two evil cats: a black tom with 'alf his ear bitten off, called Spike, an' a tabby wots more cunning and sinister, called Moll. Soon as they get me all to themselves they come rubbing up against me calves. Moll does all the begging, with her smoky blue eyes. Spike's eyes is a kind of snake-like yellow, so he got no begging appeal at all. They think
they can read my mind – honest – even before they makes a move. Cats is mad about food, especially food that's nice and bloody. That's how I get them in my control. I gives 'em the juicy giblet bits of me trapped birdies.'

‘
Those pigeons will be the death of you, Gully
.'

‘Nah!'

‘
You go crawling out onto that broken concrete roof, you never know when it's going to give way
.'

‘Listen to me. There's folks down below would pay good money for fresh pigeon. I could set up a market stall.'

‘
You're just dreaming, Gully
.'

White-haired and unshaven, Father Noel Touhey paused in his shaky progress down the main aisle, to announce the words for the dead into the clammy emptiness of his abandoned church. The light coming in through the oriel windows above his head was so poor he had borrowed a brass candlestick from the altar, its uncertain flame casting dancing shadows into the echoing nave, with its silent rows of pews.

‘
De profundis clamavi ad te, Domine
.'

His hands were blue with cold and stiffly arthritic, so he rested the candlestick on the lid of the coffin – the first time he could recall the need for candlelight since he had been a child in his grandmother's whitewashed cottage on the foothills of the Comeraghs. Or had it been an oil lamp? At eighty eight years old, it was hard to recall. An age ago, certainly. Just thinking about it caused him to lose track of his progress. He picked up the candlestick
again, reminding himself of where he was and what he was doing.

‘We have to show respect for the dead.'

‘Yeeesss, Fadah Toowee.'

‘Touhey,' he corrected her for what must have been the dozenth time.

‘Toowee, Fadah,' she acknowledged.

His Belizean housekeeper, Henriette Boleyn, was a tall, elegant woman who exuded presence. She dragged a brass bucket over the black and white tiled floor, causing the round-headed brass brush to clang against its sides, like a bell. She was wrapped to the ankles in a pea-green gingham dress and a matching band was tied around her brow, with a big knot holding together her bun of ink-black curls at the back.

‘It's hard to remember at my age.'

‘Weh, de good Lord forgive you Fadah.'

My good and faithful Henriette!

She had taken care of him for a long time. Or at least, she felt so familiar he thought she must have. Tsk! If only he was not beset by a failing memory. These days there was a part of him that wondered if his entire life was a dream; his memory playing tricks with him. A lot of recent events were missing. He found himself shaking his head with bewilderment. He even wondered if it was true that the Lord would forgive him. His thoughts lagged behind his legs these days, so that he stood still for a moment or two on the glazed tile floor and waited for his memory to catch up with him.

The words, in English, wandered sluggishly through his mind as the Latin of the Tridentine Mass for the Dead emerged from his lips.

No wonder they had changed from the Latin to the vernacular. What did words like these mean to ordinary folk grieving over their departed loved ones? Yet still there was a place in his heart for the lovely Latin cadences and the poetry of it.

The young curate was surely gone – gone as every single one of the parishioners was. They had fled … or worse. Father Noel turned and looked around at the shadowed emptiness of both nave and chancel. The church had a presence all to itself. It was something he had always felt about it. It was as if it were watching, listening, feeling. A silent presence, sadly observant, as an old man being tended to – only its melancholia was deeper, more poignant.

Folk were afraid. Who could blame them?

I'm afraid too. But I have nowhere else to go
.

There had been no electricity in weeks. Cabs and buses no longer frequented the area and half the tube stations, including the one nearby, were no longer functioning. All that was left was him and Henriette; faithful Henriette, who had cooked him a pot of her ‘Caribbean beenz soop' just
before the service, ignoring his grumbling and complaints about it. Oh, and she had such a lovely alto voice in the hymns. But there were no hymns to sing any more. No altar servers. No parishioners. No relatives to mourn the dead.

Reaching down with a trembling hand, he removed the brush from the bucket, its black horsehair wetted in the holy water, and he continued his progress around the coffin, his course widening to avoid the wooden horses that supported it at the furthermost limit of the central aisle, just within the locked and bolted doors.

‘Are you all right, Fadah?'

He was far from all right. His heartbeat felt irregular, as if an upended turtle were struggling to find its feet in the empty bowl of his ribs. Where in heaven's name was the curate? It was cruel, at his age, making him remember the details of the service. Latin had fallen out of favour for a while. But then it had been permitted again for special circumstances. And surely these amounted to special circumstances. And its poetry and majesty comforted him, reminding him of the old days, familiar in a way the vernacular had never really been.

The elderly priest stood amid the flickering light and attempted to clear his mind. He was expecting visitors. He thought it was today, but he could be mistaken. He did get the days confused. A young man and a young woman. No point in attempting to remember names, he found that almost impossible now. And he had no way of confirming the date or day since his mobile had died.

His thoughts alighted on the object he had to give them. ‘You put it somewhere safe?'

‘I hide it good.'

He didn't ask her what she meant by that. He'd rather not think about the ‘it', or know where she had hidden it. The thing frightened him. When it had arrived, brought into his flat by two hard-faced fellow countrymen, he had taken one look at it and refused to handle it.

Now he carried on, walking around the oblong shape of the coffin, splashing the holy water onto the waxed yellow wood. Oh, yes – if there was a place and a time for the ancient resonance of the
De Profundis
… His mouth moulded itself around the psalm again, as if the words were metamorphosing into something deeper, something solid as a shield, against the morbid hush of the empty church.

‘Hurry up, Fadah!'

‘I'm doing my best.'

Father Noel had been thinking about the message from his niece, Bridey. Lost in his thoughts, he was startled by the arrival of a high pitched musical tone, as if the finest
pipe in an organ were sounding directly into his ears. The hackles rose on the back of his neck.

‘Hurry up! It startin' again.'

He was struggling to think clearly, already sensing the change. There was a tingling over his skin, as if the air had become charged with static electricity. Then the eruption of shouts and cries from outside.

‘What in the world?'

‘De Razzamatazz, Fadah.'

‘The what?'

‘De young people. Jigi-jigi!'

Her patois was so strong at times he had to stop and try to figure out what she was saying. Did jigi-jigi mean what he suspected?

‘Are we secure?'

‘I lock all de doors. But de light … !' He followed her gaze to the uncurtained windows. His trembling hands were unable to do it. It was Henriette, wetting finger and thumb in the pail of holy water, who snuffed out the flame, plunging the church, and Father Touhey, into deeper shadow.

Oggy's Café was on Lower John Street, the bottom floor of an ancient multi-storey block in which all of the upper floors looked forsaken. Inside Mark and Nan found a half dozen or so Formica-topped tables in an otherwise empty room. They chose one by the window, with stools that were screwed to the floor. Outside the window the air was so smoggy it felt as if dusk were falling.

The situation in London was far worse than Mark had anticipated. It had been such a miraculous stroke of luck when they found a way of returning to Earth from Tír. Being subsumed, body and spirit, by the Third Power had left him and Nan marooned in Dromenon. They had been devoid of physical substance. For all they knew they might have been dead. They had risked everything on a foolhardy plan. Recalling a legend told around the fireside by his friend, the dwarf mage Qwenqwo Cuatzel, in which the Temple Ship was referred to as the Ark of the Arinn, Mark
had gambled on the possibility that the ship might carry them back to Earth. The gamble had paid off.

Just to have made it back, to have recovered his flesh and blood again, should have been more than enough to satisfy Mark. But now, with the discovery that Padraig was missing and the Sword of Feimhin stolen, their joy had been short-lived. And now they had arrived in London he and Nan found themselves lost in a dystopic nightmare, with raving mobs rioting in the streets and fires making a wasteland of large areas of the city.

And now, heading over to the galvanised-zinc counter in the greasy café, Mark was confronted by the male reincarnation of the Willendorf Venus. The eponymous Oggy was no more than five foot four, but looked equally wide, with pendulous man boobs and a belly wrapped in a curtain-sized apron that overflowed half way across the counter. A wicked-looking meat cleaver dangled from a hook by his shoulder.

‘Yeah?'

Mark looked over the menu, which had been drawn in chalk on a blackboard amid numerous ‘For Sale' posters and ads for cheap accommodation. The safest item looked to be the English breakfast.

‘English breakfast – for two, please.'

Dark eyes in a face that merged, with a mere dimple of a chin, into a truck-sized chest, looked Mark up and down. The voice that wheezed out of the fag-decorated mouth said, ‘That'll be twenny pahnd.'

The price was outrageous. But very few cafés had survived and Mark was obliged to shove the twenty-pound note across the greasy metal surface.

‘I'm looking for the Church of the English Martyrs.'

Oggy ignored the question, affording Mark a slanted perspective of his backside as he swivelled around to shout the order through a serving hatch in the poster-strewn wall behind him.

Making his way back to the window table, Mark thought that Nan looked increasingly restless. He saw it in the pallor of her bronze-hued face, her skin lit by the neon streetlights, which had been fooled by the murky light to come on early.

Moving so he was sitting adjacent rather than opposite to her, he reached across to take both her hands in his. ‘Come on – don't look so worried!'

‘I sense danger. I sense it very strongly. But I cannot say what it is – or why it should so alarm me.'

‘The state of the city is alarming, even for me. I can't figure how it could have deteriorated so much in the short time I was away.'

‘I'm confused by so much that is unfamiliar. But you know what is the most challenging?'

‘What?'

‘So much despair in the hearts of the people here. I have gone for so long without experiencing such sentiments. Feelings can be overwhelming when you have become unused to them.'

‘It's the oraculum, Nan. Maybe you should switch it off?'

Her hands were cold, the skin waxy. He reached up to brush the outside of his fingers over her face. ‘Hey – I won't let anybody, or anything, hurt you.'

She took his hand, kissing it, then clutching it tight between her own. Her eyes darted about the empty café. ‘This place – it is not a good place to spend any time!'

‘It's just a greasy café.'

Mark looked over at Oggy, who was pulling a stainless steel teapot down onto the working surface. He scoured it with steam, dumped a couple of tea bags into it, then slapped it under the stream of boiling water. Glancing across at Mark and Nan, those piggy eyes glowered before he carried the pot over to their table.

Nan had released Mark's hand in Oggy's presence. But as soon as he had gone, she caught hold of it, squeezed it tight. ‘I sense the same unease growing in your mind too. You're sensing danger.'

Oggy was back, slamming a tray with the two breakfasts onto the table. Lifting the plates, cutlery, the tiny pot of milk and then the two mugs, he used his filthy apron to wipe sweat from his face before waddling away again, avoiding any direct eye contact.

Mark waited for him to go. ‘What is it?'

‘He knows something. They all do.'

‘Such as?'

‘He's refusing to help us. He knows where the church is – it is surely somewhere near to here.'

Mark lowered his voice. ‘So why is he doing that?'

‘He's afraid.'

‘Afraid of what?'

‘I don't know.'

‘But you sense something?'

‘I think everybody we meet is afraid. That's why they are all refusing to help us.'

‘But what are they afraid of?'

‘Maybe they know something we do not know.'

Mark thought about that. What could be so important about some tiny church that it scared someone like Oggy? He shook his head. It didn't make sense. He saw that Nan had pulled her overcoat tighter around her throat. She had refused the food, even the tea, leaving her mug untouched on the bare wood surface.

They know something that we don't
.

Sipping despondently from his mug of tea, Mark had also lost his appetite. He peered at his own reflection in the window – at his beanie-covered head, the rim pulled down low over his brow. Looking further, through the steel mesh that protected the glass on the outside, he saw the occasional person hurrying through the spoiled streets. Were they really as scared as Nan suspected?

Mark shouldn't have been surprised by Nan's reaction to London. A modern city must appear completely alien to her. He wanted to comfort her shock at the size and complexity of the city, at the electric lights, the speed of mechanical things, the cars, and cabs and buses – even
the bicycles – that rushed about through some of the streets.

‘Do you want to go back to our hotel room, Nan? Call off the search for today?'

‘No.'

‘All right. But you must try to relax.'

‘How can I relax when there is so much that dismays me? These people who press by you, never meeting your eyes!'

Mark kissed the palm of her hand, an awkward kiss, with her fingers close to scratching the skin of his cheek. It was so good just to be able to touch her, the living girl he loved. Not very long ago he had so longed to be able to do just this; they had been trapped in Dromenon as nothing more than soul spirits, unable to touch one another, even to communicate with each other except through thought alone, unable to express their feelings in any physical form at all.

‘You know, maybe it's understandable that people are frightened. So much is going wrong here. They don't know where to turn.'

‘Mark – there is something wrong here. It isn't merely the people.'

‘What's wrong? Do you sense something specific?'

‘I think I do. I think what I'm sensing is the proximity to great evil.'

‘What does that mean?'

‘It's the same feeling I sensed before the calamity.'

Mark glanced back out through the filthy window. Those streets out there were grimy and threatened with anarchy, ruin – but Nan was suggesting a more arcane danger. He presumed that by calamity she meant the war and invasion of her mountain fastness by the Tyrant's Death Legion, which had resulted in the fall of her civilisation two thousand years ago, in Tír.

‘
Proximity to great evil?
'

Nan was a lot more experienced with her oraculum than he was with the same power embedded in his brow. It was possible that she was more sensitive. He felt a prickle of disquiet constrict his scalp.

A sound: a faint rapping on the steel mesh beyond the glass, so close it seemed only inches from his mind, startled him, and focused his attention on somebody who was standing on the other side of the steamed-up window.

Unkempt fingernails, like claws, withdrew from the mesh to be replaced by a spectre. A face was peering in at him, through the white lettering of the words HOT SANDWICHES painted on the window: a pale face, the skin semi-transparent. The eyes were a pale shade of grey that looked almost as clear as glass. The large black pupils were starkly highlighted. He saw tawny yellow hair, filthy and matted, tied into rat tails with rolled-up strips of silver foil. It was a girl, maybe fifteen or sixteen years old. She was pressing her cheek and brow so hard against the mesh that her face was distorted by it. When she moved back slightly, Mark could see she had a beaky face, a pink tip of nose, a
sharp little chin, and heavy lids over those pallid eyes. The confrontation was so direct and unflinching he felt obliged to shake his head, motioning her away.

But she refused to be dismissed.

The feral girl withdrew from the screen but she still stared at him as if she somehow knew him. Her eyes darted from his face to Nan's. Mark saw that Nan's fringe had parted. The black triangle in her brow, with its pulsating arabesques, was visible. Mark felt at the rim of his beanie to make sure he was hiding his own. He guessed that the girl had spotted the oraculum in Nan's brow and now there was a heightened restlessness about her, an urgency that he felt unable to ignore. She was scribbling something into a grubby little spiral notebook. He sensed something very strange, something very needful, about her. And he sensed that it mattered to him, and to his purpose here.

‘Nan?' he whispered.

‘I see her too. Her mind! It is so difficult to enter, so different to read. It's as if she were erecting barriers to every effort of my probing. All I'm getting is … is pictures. Extraordinary pictures.'

‘Maybe she was following us through the streets.'

‘Yes – I think so.'

The girl pressed a single page of her notebook against the glass. Mark thought it was whatever she had been sketching. He was gazing at the drawing of an entrance to what might be a church.

‘She knows what we're looking for.'

‘But how?'

‘I don't know. But she might be able to help us.'

Mark had forgotten his chair was screwed to the floor. In his hurry, he almost tripped over his own feet. He stumbled out of the warm café, with its comforting food smells, and into the refuse-strewn coldness of the street. But the feral girl had melted away into the smog.