Madra bared his fangs at that, for all the world, the Cork man said, as though he spoke Gaelic like a Christian. Liam stroked the poor animal’s ears while the lighter docked and the steerage passengers of the Irish Maid began to gather their bundles and their boxes, their ghosts and their memories and staggered down the gangway. On the pier, customs officials herded them to a shed where uniformed clerks checked their baggage and their names against the ship’s manifest. These formalities concluded, the new immigrants were free to start their new lives where and when they pleased.
The lucky ones, the provident ones, embraced their families or greeted friends who had come to meet them, and moved off, chattering. A group of the less well prepared, including Liam and the man from Cork, lingered on the dock, uncertain where their next steps should take them.
With a sinking heart, Liam looked about at the piled boxes, the coils of rope, the wagons, the nets and baskets of fish, thinking he might as well have been on a wharf in Dublin. There was the same garbage and mud underfoot, the same air thick with the stink of rotting fish and salt and coal fires, the same dirty, raw-handed men loading and unloading wagons and boats and shouting to each other in a babel of strange tongues.
“That’ll be you in a week or so,” the Cork man said, slapping Liam on the shoulder hard enough to raise dust. “I’m for the Far West, where landlords are as rare as hen’s teeth and the streams run with gold.”
A new voice joined the conversation—in Irish, happily, since his audience had only a dozen English words between them. “You’ll be needing a place to sleep the night, I’m thinking. Come along of me, and I’ll have you suited in a fine, clean, economical boardinghouse before the cat can lick her ear.”
The newcomer was better fed than the dockworkers, his frock coat only a little threadbare and his linen next door to clean. He had half a pound of pomade on his hair and a smile that would shame the sun. But when the boardinghouse runner saw Madra, his sun went behind a cloud and he kicked the dog square in the ribs.
“Hoy!” Liam roared, shocked out of his usual good humor. “What ails you to be kicking my dog?”
“Dogs are dirty creatures, as all the world knows, as thick with fleas as hairs.”
“A good deal thicker,” the man from Cork said, and everyone snickered, for Madra’s coat after five weeks on shipboard was patchy and dull, with great sores on his flank and belly.
The boardinghouse runner grinned, flashing a golden tooth. “Just so. Mistress O’Leary’d not be thanking me for bringing such a litany of miseries and stinks into her good clean house. A doorway’s good enough for the pair of you.” And then he turned and herded his catch away inland.
Liam sat himself down on a crate, his knapsack and his mangy dog at his feet, and wondered where he might find a glass and a bite in this great city and how much they’d cost him.
“Yon was the villain of the world,” Madra remarked. “Stinking of greed and goose fat. You’re well shut of him.”
“The goose fat I smelled for myself,” Liam answered. “The greed I took for granted. Still, a bed for the night and a guide through the city might have been useful. Are you feeling any better, at all, now we’ve come to shore?”
Madra growled impatiently. “I’m well enough to have kept my ears to the wind and my nose to the ground for news of where we may find a welcome warmer than yon gold-toothed cony-catcher’s.”
“And where would that be, Madra? In Dublin, perhaps? Or back home in Ballynoe, where I wish to heaven I’d never left?”
The hound sighed. “Don’t be wishing things you don’t want, not in front of me. Had I my full strength, you’d be back in Ballynoe before you’d taken another breath, and sorry enough to be there after all the trouble you were put to leaving in the first place.” He heaved himself wearily to his feet. “There’s a public house north of here, run by the kind of folk who won’t turn away a fellow countryman and his faithful hound.”
“You’re not my hound,” Liam said, shouldering his pack. “I told you back in Ballynoe. I did only what I’d do for any living creature. You owe me nothing.”
“I owe you my life.” Madra lifted his nose to sniff the air. “That way.” Moving as though his joints hurt him, Madra stalked away from the water with Liam strolling behind, gawking left and right at the great brick warehouses of the seaport of New York.
The Pooka was not happy. His eyes ran, his lungs burned, his skin galled him as if he’d been stung by a thousand bees, and the pads of his paws felt as though he’d walked across an unbanked fire. He was sick of his dog shape, sick of this mortal man he was tied to, sick of cramped quarters with no space to run and the stink of death that clung to mortals like a second skin. Most of all, he was sick, almost to dissolution, of the constant presence of cold iron.
He’d thought traveling with Liam O’Casey was bad, with the nails in his shoes and the knife in his pack, but Dublin had been worse. The weeks aboard the Irish Maid had been a protracted torture, which he’d survived only because Liam had given over his hammock to him. This new city was worst of all, as hostile to the Fair Folk as the most pious priest who’d ever sung a mass.
Yet in this same city, on this poisonous dock, the Pooka had just met a selkie in his man shape, hauling boxes that stank of iron as strongly as the air stank of dead fish.
The Pooka had smelled the selkie—sea air with an animal undertang of fur and musk—and followed his nose to a group of longshoremen loading crates onto a dray. As he sniffed curiously about their feet, one of them grabbed the Pooka by the slack of his neck and hauled him off behind a stack of barrels as though he’d been a puppy.
“What the devil kind of thing are you?” asked the selkie in the broadest of Scots.
“I’m a Pooka,” he said, with dignity. “From County Down.”
“Fresh off the boat and rotten with the iron-sickness, no doubt. Well, you’re a lucky wee doggie to have found me, and that’s a fact.”
The Pooka’s ears pricked. “You have a cure for iron-sickness?”
“Not I,” the selkie said. “There’s a Sidhe woman runs a lager saloon in Five Points. All the Gaelic folk who land here must go to her. It’s that or die.” The selkie pulled a little wooden box from his pocket and opened it. “Take a snort.”
The Pooka filled his nose with a scent of thin beer, sawdust, and faerie magic. “One last question, of your kindness,” he said. “Would a mortal be welcome at this Sidhe woman’s saloon at all?”
The selkie replaced the box. “Maybe he will and maybe he won’t. What’s it to you?”
“We’re by way of being companions,” said the Pooka.
“Dinna tell me he knows you for what you are?” The selkie whistled.
“That’d be a tale worth the hearing. Tell it me, and we’ll call my help well paid.”
The Pooka knew very well that his tale was a small enough price for such valuable information, but it was a price he was reluctant to pay. Stories in which he was the hero and the mortal his endlessly stupid dupe—those he told with pleasure to whoever would hear them. A story in which the stupidity had been his own was a different pair of shoes entirely. Still, a favor must be repaid.
“I will so,” he said.