chapter 6
Siodhachan says it’s great to have a name like Owen Kennedy in this modern world. A Kennedy was President of the United States not so long ago, which I guess means he was fecking important. I should be proud that someone of my family name rose to be a great leader.
“Of course,” says he, “John Kennedy was a Catholic. And Catholics were the ones who drove the Druids out of Ireland.”
“Stab me in the tit, why don’t you,” I says.
But then Siodhachan says this JFK was a good sort as far as leaders go. All the Kennedys were while they lasted.
“While they lasted?” I says.
“John was shot to death, and so was his brother. They never caught the bastards who did it.”
“Well, now you’re just throwin’ rocks at me stones,” I says.
“Life must be a kick in the head for you right now,” he replies, and he’s not far off. It’s more like a bucket of cold water every few seconds. The cars and the buildings and what the hell people wear on their feet these days. And fecking plumbing! Siodhachan introduced me to that modern miracle after he took me to the woods to drink his thrice-damned tea. I never would have thought that taking a dump could be a luxury instead of gambling with your arse every day. And when I asks him why he didn’t let me use one of those toilet things to begin with, he says it’s because everyone knows that a bear shits in the woods, and then he laughs like he’s fecking funny. I don’t know what my bear form had to do with it, but I told him a bear kicks arse in the woods too, and he’d be finding out personally if he messed with me any more.
“You should write all of this down,” he says. “It will help you learn the language faster and process everything.”
“Druids don’t need to write anything down,” says I.
“And how did that work out for us?” he says. “The Romans were able to wipe us off the earth and we never got to tell our side of it to history. Most of your time—most of my youth—it’s all gone because no one wrote it down. All the world knows is based on what someone dug up out of the earth, and rocks with a few scratches of Ogham script on them marking land boundaries tell the world very little about how things really were. But the world knows about Julius Caesar and all the Caesars that followed, because they wrote everything down and it survived. We need to write if we want the world to know about us. I’ll do it with you. We’ll write together.”
He has a point. He’s still an enormous cock-up, mind, but I have to admit that Siodhachan has the occasional moment of competence. If I ignore the embarrassing side effects, that tea of his did me more good than a week of sex in a cave. I have all me dark hair and muscles again, and the ache in me knuckles is gone like he promised. And protecting himself with that cold iron aura so the Fae can’t touch him—that was a clever idea.
I suppose, when I see such things, that he’s done me proud. But he’s also done some other things so stupid that if all the other Druids weren’t already dead I’d have to kill them before they blamed me for it.
I’m told this language is English, which wasn’t around in my day. Kind of a great soup of a tongue, with influences from all over Europe. He’s teaching me to speak it with a modern Irish accent and spell words according to British rules. “The Americans adopted a bunch of nonsense, thanks to a bloke named Noah Webster,” he says. “And, besides, the Americans don’t swear as much as the Irish do, so having an Irish accent is the best fit for you all around.”
“And I suppose ye think I should get an Irish wolfhound like you?”
“Can’t go wrong with a hound. I know a good breeder.”
“I say balls to that, lad. You get a hound and people always want to pet them. I’m going to get a monkey and let it throw shite at people. They’ll clear the feck out of me way right quick.”
I didn’t really say that. I didn’t know what a monkey was until one threw shite at me a couple of days ago, and now that I’m remembering this conversation and writing it down after the fact, I wished I’d known about them in time to be clever.
Instead, I told Siodhachan I wasn’t ready for an animal companion yet. I had so much to learn right then that I’d be a poor friend to it, and I never was one to form such relationships anyway. I suppose I’m ornery. Siodhachan tells me that’s the English word for my character. Or my disposition. Or some other big fecking word for the same thing. English is full of words like that.
And it’s full of fancy words for the ache in your knuckles and every other pain ye might have. Siodhachan warns me that I have to watch my health and heal infections in the blood as soon as they appear. Tells me I’ve never been vaccinated and I don’t have any antibodies or immunoresistance to modern disease and I’ll be dead shortly if I don’t monitor myself closely and break down infections. All those big words require lengthy explanations, and eventually I cut him off when he gets to modern drugs people take with side effects worse than the problem they’re supposed to fix.
“Ye could have stopped at ‘watch your health, nasty diseases around here,’ ” I says.
Siodhachan has taken me to some place in Gaul—which they call France now—to touch up his tattoos. Says manticore venom is evil brew, and he isn’t lying. His skin is a mess even after he’s had time to heal, and I’ve never seen a wound like it.
“It’s the strongest poison I’ve ever encountered,” says he, “and I’m not sure I even got a full dose, because I removed the thorn before it was finished pumping the toxin into me.”
“So where did you run into the manticore?” I asks him. “Because we’d heard about them and how to tame them from Druids on the continent—they were supposed to be monsters from the east somewhere—but none of them ever showed up in Ireland.”
And he says, “You probably won’t believe me. It was in Tír na nóg, in the home of Midhir, where it was chained up and waiting for me. One of the Tuatha Dé Danann put it there. And I figure it was the same member of the Tuatha Dé Danann that strung up Midhir in iron chains and cut his throat so that he’d bleed out, separated from the earth.”
“Gods below, lad, that’s a terrible way to go. Who would do such a thing?”
“That’s what I can’t figure out. Someone is playing me for a fool, but I don’t know who. They didn’t just kill Midhir at Brí Léith, but they conspired against me with the Fae, a good number of vampires and dark elves, and the Roman gods as well. I bet they told Loki where to find me a few times and sent those Fir Darrigs after us too. And it’s not only me they’re fooling. They’re also keeping it secret from all the rest of the Tuatha Dé Danann. Either that or they’re all in on it, but I seriously doubt that.”
“What have ye been doing for two thousand years to make someone hate ye so bad?” I says.
“Hiding out, mostly. I could use your help figuring out who’s after me. You’d bring a fresh perspective to the problem. And by spending time in Tír na nóg, you wouldn’t have to deal with all the shocks of modernity right away.”
It’s taken me a while to figure out what to call Siodhachan in this new language, but I think I have it figured out: He’s a bullshit salesman. You’ll walk away thinking you got something for free, but Siodhachan’s a buy-now-and-pay-later sort, and the coin you pay for buying his bullshit now is grief later. I knew right away that this talk of me spending time in Tír na nóg would be for his health and not mine. “What do you expect me to do, lad? Go ask the Tuatha Dé Danann one by one if they’d like to stick a sword in your guts?”
“Perhaps you could be a tad more subtle than that.”
“What’s that? I don’t know the meaning of subtle.”
“No, you never have. Might suit you, though. No one would expect it.”
“I don’t have enough information to make a rational decision. It’s like you’re asking me to order a drink according to how me nipples are feeling instead of telling me what they’re ready to pour. Why don’t you tell me who’s killed who and why, and how they’ve been trying to kill you. Take your time; we have plenty. And keep teaching me this new language.”
We had at least a week of work ahead of us. Most of that would be getting in direct touch with Gaia, and we could do that in one headspace and keep talking in another.
The story he told me, which he swore he’d write down soon, took up the largest part of that time. All about how he killed Aenghus óg, then cocked up everything with the Norse, except now they had an uneasy alliance against Hel and Loki, and the Greco-Romans were standing by too, and meanwhile he was financing a shadow war against vampires and dodging the occasional batch of dark elves who were being financed to kill him.
“Oh, yeah,” he says near the end, like it’s something he almost forgot, “I should probably tell you that the Morrigan’s dead.”
I took a break from the tattoo work to give him a thorough cussing for that. But I have to admit that the week passed quickly with all the talking, and I had only a half hour’s work left on his arm when he finished.
“I noticed a pattern,” I says to him after taking some time to think it over. “When ye stayed hidden, nobody died.”
“Well, everybody thought I was dead for a while.”
“They didn’t think ye were dead for two thousand years, before ye killed Aenghus óg, and somehow they all survived. It’s only when ye exposed yourself and waved your sword around that—”
“Hold on, now, that’s a poor choice of words,” he says.
Sometimes I have to bark at Siodhachan to make him focus. “Stop paying attention to me word choice and pay attention to what I’m telling ye!” says I, and he shuts up and gets that sullen expression on his face he always gets when I tell him how it is. “Now, ye know right well I’m in favor of solving problems through stomping on nuts, but the first rule to follow—the one ye didn’t remember—is not to stomp on your own. If ye want to learn how to do it right, take a lesson from the person what’s causing all your trouble lately. Who did ye say it was again?”
“I didn’t. I don’t know who it is.”
“Fecking exactly, lad. We’re dealing with a sneaky nut-stomper here. That’s what you need to be.”
“I’m trying, Owen,” he says. “You’re part of my sneaking, because you haven’t revealed your loyalties or even your name yet to the Tuatha Dé Danann. They’re going to be seeking your favor.”
I hawked up something loose and spat to the side. “It’s nonsense you’re talkin’ now, lad.”
“It’s true. I’ve been the only Druid in town for centuries. Granuaile is obviously on my side. But unless you told them who you were before I got there, you are still an unknown quantity.”
“No, I kept my mouth shut. You can’t trust the Tuatha Dé Danann, and I didn’t know what was going on. But I’m sure they know who I am.”
“I’m not sure of that at all,” he says. “Why would they?”
“Because you’re so well known, lad. How can it be a secret?”
“Because I wasn’t well known back when the Morrigan put you on that island. I was just another Druid amongst many and had done nothing special to draw their attention. And the Morrigan was not the sharing type. She told Goibhniu that she put someone on that island but didn’t tell him who. He had no way of knowing anything about you.”
“But he knows something now, doesn’t he?”
“Aye. He knows you’re ugly.”
I punched him in the arm where it was still tender, and he winced. “Well, then, you can bet he’s been doing some investigation on top of that.”
“It’s been more than two thousand years since she put you on that island. That’s a pretty cold case.”
“And don’t I know it?” I says, and I shuddered, remembering. “What a miserable fecking day that was.”
“No, a cold case has an additional meaning apart from the temperature, but never mind. Tell me what you were doing when the Morrigan put you on the island.”
“I was telling your mother her cooking tasted like salted shite.”
“Oh. Guess you don’t want to talk about it,” he says.
“You guess right. What kind of favors do you think the Tuatha Dé Danann would be seeking from me?”
“They might begin with seeking your actual favor. If you pray to some and not others, you lend them more power. But they may have other ideas that they would never share with me, and they might say things to you that they would keep private in my presence.”
That deserved another spit to the side. “Are ye really thinkin’ they’ll just spew all their secrets to me because I haven’t walked the earth for a while? I’d be a fool to count anything they say as more than a half-truth. And they may tell me all sorts of things merely to see if it reaches your ears.”
“Understood, but anything they do will provide us more information than we have now, which is nothing.”
“What’s all this ‘we’ business, Siodhachan? Are we sharing the same pair of pants now? Don’t be making any plans for me, lad. I’m grateful to ye for bringing me here and setting me up, but I won’t be running any errands for ye.”
Siodhachan sighed in frustration, and it was like old times. But he collects himself and then keeps his voice civil—respectful even—as he says, “I’m not sending you on an errand. You have to go to the Fae Court anyway and present yourself to Brighid. She’d feel slighted if you didn’t. All I’m asking is to be aware that someone already has Granuaile and me on their list of people they’d like to kill, and you might be added to it. If you happen to learn of a way to keep us safe, I’d appreciate knowing about it.”
“Aw, Siodhachan. That was so sweet, you’ll be having me thinking ye want to get into me pants after all.”
“Gods below, are you finished yet?” His irritation was clear.
I stabbed once more with the ink-stained thorn, and the soft green glow of Gaia’s guidance faded. His bindings were whole again, and his skin returned to normal, with a bit of assistance from Herself. “Aye. All done. Ye can shift to a dodgy otter and get eaten by an eagle if ye like.”
Can ye believe he didn’t even thank me for my help?