"There are thirteen standing stones in Old Caledon."
Finbar the Bard had sat them down at the low table, fed them grainy bread and wild honey. He had pulled his cloak around Jack's shoulders and brought him to the bench nearest the fire, although he wasn't cold now.
All of his senses were back again, no whispering in his ears, echoes in his mind. No ache and burning in his eyes. He looked into the fire and watched the flames flicker and dance. He could smell the air, still feel the touch of the clear water on his skin. It was as if he had come completely and fully awake. Of a sudden, he felt alive again.
In a burnished copper pan hanging by the fire, he saw himself reflected, golden in this light, warm and whole again.
And that clear red handprint stood out like a coat of arms across his heart.
"Thirteen stones where the Ley Lines meet," the Bard continued. "Where the Way Lines meet. It's the place where all the worlds touch, where the skin between them is thinnest."
"I'm not with you," Jack began to say. "All the worlds?"
"You're not the first journeymen to step through," Finbar said, ignoring the question for the moment. "And when men come from Old Caledon, it's a sign."
He held up a hand before Jack could speak. "Thirteen stones and a capstone in the centre. Twelve spaces between the stones, and an infinity of ways. They built on Old Caledon after the ice, on land that would not shift nor quake, and they did it to bar the ways to worlds."
"Why did they do that?" Corriwen asked.
"There's power in all worlds. For good and evil, just like there's magic in some worlds, more in some, where magic is young, and less in Caledon, which made it the place to join the leys and bar the ways. There's always a power that would break through, use the Waystones to invade. The keepers and journeymen have always kept them out. So far.
"In Caledon, they set the MacBeatha, the Sons of Life, to guard the ways, all down the generations."
"The MacBeatha?" Jack interrupted. "You mean Major MacBeth?"
"From what Kerry told me, that'll be the man. The Keeper of Ways. How you came to be here, I don't know. But there's always a reason."
"Everybody says he was a major, like in the army," Kerry said.
"Oh, he'll be a soldier, sure enough."
Jack just sat, listening intently. Maybe this explained the Major's mysterious disappearances - and his equally surprising arrivals. And perhaps his collection of ancient things in the old house. The man who had raised him had kept his secrets to himself, and things had happened too suddenly on Samhain night for him to share any of them with Jack.
He scratched at his beard. "The last journeyman to come through the Farward Gate was Cullian, and he brought the sword to face the Morrigan when she was rampaging through Temair. A strong man he was, strong enough to fight the hag and bring her down. The sword he brought became the Redthorn Sword, and it has guarded Temair since."
He paused again, had another scratch. "We need the sword, and we need another Cullian, because the Morrigan wakes again from a long dark slumber. It's a long story to tell, and I don't know where to begin."
"Might as well start at the start, Mr Finbar," Kerry said lightly. "For we haven't a clue where we are or what we're doing."
"Now there's a thing that's easy said, Kerry boy." Finbar flashed him a jovial grin. "You've the gift of the gab.
"It's the Irish in me," Kerry threw back. He always got the last word, even when it brought trouble. "Sure, didn't I kiss the Blarney stone?"
"Whatever that is," the Bard said. "I'll have to believe you. And none of this Mister stuff. We're friends here. You can call me Finn."
He drew out a long stem pipe and packed it with something that smelt thick and aromatic when he lit it with an ember.
"Now, what you have to remember is, the start is a long way back." He blew out a plume of haze. "Longer than you might think. Yet the circle has turned and the past comes round to greet the present. Now we have the last of the Redthorns hunted high and low, and some dark and bad things happening in this old Temair of ours."
He turned to Corriwen. "He'll hunt you down, you know. He can't have you alive while he clings to the high seat. And he's not working alone."
"I don't understand you," Corriwen looked genuinely puzzled.
"Your uncle Mandrake. He's mad of course. Raving mad, but we always knew he was a bit cracked. Your father should never have let him delve into the old magic. Should have sent him out to the marches to keep the Scree in their place. Now look what's happened. He's brought them down from the Scree mountains and put the people under a hard hand. Bad times all round."
"I don't get it," Kerry said. "I don't get any of this place at all. I keep thinking I'm going to wake up and find I've been eating mouldy cheese and dreamt the lot."
Jack said nothing. He just wanted to savour the comfort of being himself again. And he wanted to hear what the Bard had to say.
"Ah, it's a nightmare sure enough," Finn said. "And the sooner people wake to it, the better. He's not finished yet, old Mandrake. And the shadow that's pulling his strings, she's not even started, believe me."
"Now you're just talking riddles," Kerry countered.
"Riddles and conundrums," Finn grinned again and sucked on the pipe for a while. "They're the secrets that turn the world. There's magic in riddles and conundrums young Irish. To every riddle there's a key, and I have a feeling you three are the key to this one."
"I still don't understand," Corriwen spoke up again. Jack remained silent, concentrating on the old man's words.
"You thought your uncle was just jealous, and maybe you can't blame him for that. Ten minutes is all it took for him to be beaten to the high seat and the lordship of Temair. Can't have been a summer dance growing up with that. But Mandrake has always been touched, and the dark finds its own cracks to seep into. Like ice. It wedges the cracks apart and makes its own space."
He puffed on the long pipe again, flooded the room with fragrance.
"Mandrake spent too much time studying the old lore, when there were those that thought it was all just myth and riddle. Always remember, there's a key in every riddle and a truth in every myth, and what Mandrake wanted was power. Now he has it and he'll do what it takes to keep it. What he doesn't know is that he'd just a glove puppet with a dark hand inside him, working his every move."
"That's the part I don't understand," Corriwen said.
"Well, Corrie Redthorn," Finbar said, kindly, "you sit still, have some broth, and I'll tell you all a story. Some of it you've heard before, but there's new chapters written all the time."
She looked up at him, tears springing to her eyes.
"That's the name my brother called me."
"He was a good man, strong and clever and brave as a boarhound. But he had not the slightest clue what he was fighting, that's the truth of it. And that's something you're going to have to learn."
"Me?" She blinked back the tears, then wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand. "What can I do? I'm an outlaw in my own land. Hunted all over the place."
"That's true enough. But never say die until they put stones on your eyes. And you're a long way from crossing to Tir Nan Og."
He turned to the boys, Jack still swathed in the pelt cloak, Kerry in his drying rabbit-skin tunic. "And you two travelling men, you're both a long step from home."
"Well, we have to get back," Jack said. "The Major is in trouble."
"Was in trouble," Kerry said. "He'd never have made it out of there. Look what it did to you with just a touch."
"Save that for later," Finn said. "First, we have to go back a long way, in the telling and the seeing."
He moved to the bench by the small shuttered window on the bare stone wall and busied himself with an array of old leather pouches of different colours and ages, each tied at the neck with a thong. When he turned back, he held a stone bowl, filled to the brim with what looked like crushed herbs.
"Sometimes you need help to see back," he said, bending over the glowing hearth. "Now it's all going to seem a bit strange to the three of you, but just remember, I'm the latest in a long line of my people." He touched his forehead with a finger.
"And what they know and what they were, are all in here. So just sit and listen and watch, and we'll see what's to be seen."
He placed the stone bowl right on the embers in the hearth and they watched as it began to glow in the heat. Very soon a pungent aroma of herbs and spice drifted out of the fireplace. The old man sat on a stool, hands flat on the rough table bench. He began to talk, very softly, as if to himself, as the roasting herbs sent drifts of white smoke out into the room. The scent was both sweet and acrid, carried on the smoke that spread like a mist. Jack watched the old man, listening to the chant in low words that he could almost, but not quite make sense of.
The Bard's face wavered in the smoke and shadows rippled across it.
Jack kept his eyes fixed on him as he breathed in the heady fumes.
In the billowing haze, he saw the old man's features waver in and out of focus. At first he thought it was a trick of the light. But then, he jerked to attention.
It wasn't the light, or the smoke. He stared, nailed to the spot, as the man's face changed. His expressions flowed like wax, contorting and morphing from one face to another. His hair colour darkened, then lightened. His beard slowly vanished, became dark and braided, then turned to red, long and bristled.
Finbar the Bard began to speak, very softly at first, barely more than a whisper. Jack could hardly make out the words at first.
The heat from the fire reached out and enveloped all four of them and the white smoke and the strange smell thickened perceptibly, and as the Bard spoke, Jack saw shapes in the hearth, faint at first.
"It was when the Fomorians," Finn said, voice low, "when the Fomorians were exiled to the Scree mountains. It was in the days of darkness and She ravaged the land."
Jack couldn't move. He breathed in slowly and for a second the room spun and the images in the hearth coalesced, developing like the pictures in the old book.
"The Shee. The Bane-Shee. The Morrigan herself was awake and hungry, out of the dead lands beyond Tir Nan Og."
Jack could feel the presence of something cold and dark and cruel and for an instant he was back in the dream.
"The witch of the Banshee. The Morrigan.""
Jack saw a shadow flow across a fair land. He felt a pain behind his eyes as the shadow came swooping out of high hills, like nightfall on a sunny-day.
"She was ever the bane of all life," Finbar said. "The bane of all men."
Jack saw ranks of soldiers, moving out from keeps and stone castles, marching northwards to meet the shadow. And he saw, like pictures flickering in front of his eyes, hordes of the grey creatures, the Scree, cascading like an avalanche of stone out of barren mountains to meet the warriors.
He saw them clash, a tide of grey breaking upon the mass of men and the darkness covered the sky. Lightning flashed and stabbed down amongst the men, searing them where it touched. Thunder boomed so loudly the rocks split open.
The battleground was awash with blood and filled with the cries of dying and the awesome, awful laughter of the thing inside the darkness.
The Scree poured down in their thousands, their hordes, to where the men took their last and desperate stand. Amongst the warriors, he saw swords flash and flicker and heard metal grind and spark against metal and in the midst of it all, a bright shimmering sword held aloft.
"A Redthorn. A Redthorn!" A deep voice boomed through the cacophony. "Hold and rally to the Red Hand."
The shapeless thing inside the flowing darkness shrieked and raved and the earth split and things that should never breathe air or be seen by men crawled and loped and slithered and flew.
Then, in the height of it, in the death of it, when the men were pushed backwards pace by bloody pace by the irresistible force of the grey Scree, came another sound in the dark.
It was a sound like Jack had never heard before. The sound of five voices in the closest harmony, and the music of it swelled across the slaughterfield…
He saw five men in fur cloaks, each of them standing on top of the low hills that surrounded the battlefield on the plain, each with arms raised against the bruised and roiling sky that hid the sun. From their outstretched hands, he saw silvery pulses of light, arcing in blinding flashes from hill to hill, from Bard to Bard.
Jack heard the power of that song. He could feel it sizzle in his veins and jitter on his nerves and pulse with the beat of his own heart.
The sound had a force all of its own. It was a physical thing. It was in the mind and the heart and in the earth and sky. It swelled, growing stronger to overwhelm the ravings of the half-seen baleful thing in the darkness over the slaughterfield. It swamped the cries of men and beasts and the clash of sword against club. The light from their hands wove pure silver in arcs and flickering ropes of energy, joining together.
The voice on the battlefield came again, more powerful now.
"A Redthorn! Lift your hearts."
The sword raised again, pure as ice, catching the strange tangling luminescence, drawing it in to itself like an earthing wire.
The Bards on the hills chanted in harmony, mingling song with light and the thing in the shadow shrieked rage and defiance and pure hate, blasting men and ogre alike with its own awesome power.
But the light and the song held it.
The hand in the melee held the great sword above the blood slaughter and the light and sound entangled the dreadful force in skeins of blistering power, cutting off its shrieking rage and its dark badness.
The Scree people fell and covered their eyes, howling in pain and bewilderment and fear.
The dark cloud pulsed and shivered.
But it shrank as Jack watched, shrank and sank, slowly diminishing and falling as the Scree turned, screaming and roaring in flight, their power cut off, and men rolled out after them, slipping and stumbling across the bodies of their own dead, pursuing the misshapen things across the plain into the mountains.
The song swelled triumphant, and the skeins of light snared the shrinking, twisting dark, drawing it down to the ground between the five low hills, down to where the glittering sword blade pointed to the now-brightening sky. Light cascaded from the blade and the things that had squirmed out of the fissured ground shrivelled and withered and crumbled to dust.
A Redthorn….A Redthorn…the light returns to Temair.
Jack saw the stone now, a great slab of pure obsidian, black as night, polished to a liquid ink, as the sword held steady, binding the five ropes of light into a braid of energy.
The shrieking faded, and a writhing mass of black that seemed to be all claw and tooth was forced ever downwards, onto the stone.
And then the dark welded with the obsidian rock, melded into it and sunk deep inside the pure stone.
Jack saw the sword now, stabbed to the hilt deep into the burnished rock.
The wielder held it there, athwart the great slab, one hand raised in the air, a red gauntlet clear and bright. A red hand.
A tall man in old plain leather clothes and a wide brimmed hat. There was something about him that tugged at Jack. He saw new sunlight glint in blue eyes under the brim.
The tall man raised himself up and drew the sword out, soundlessly and clean and held it up for the living to see.
The five bards raised their hands and then their song, still in the closest, clearest harmony, trailed away until nothing could be heard but the soughing of the wind.
Somewhere off a bird sang, and Jack Flint thought it was the sweetest sound he had ever heard as the white mist flowed over the battlefield and hid it from view.
He was sitting there in the diminishing smoke, heart thudding, muscles jumping with excitement and horror and wonder. Very slowly, the hearth in Finbar's stone house became visible, and Jack was aware of the voice, talking low.
"They snared her in a song of power and the light of true day."
Finbar the Bard was himself again. His features were set, his beard white, and the braids of his hair tied together at the back of his neck.
"The Morrigan. They snared her and trapped her spirit in the Fireglass rock."
He opened his eyes now. "They built a hill around the stone, and put a geas on it, a curse and a prophecy, because no deed is forever, no victory complete, no matter how folk might wish it. It was long ago, in the beginning of Men in this place, when the Dalriada fought the Morrigan and her Fomorian hordes and sent them out of the land to the bare mountains to become the Scree."
Finbar nodded, almost to himself. "As ever, it was between dark and light. Between the good and the bad. Between real men and those goblin Scree.
"The curse!" Jack found his voice. He had seen only some of this in his dream. He had felt her touch. It was like sickness and poison inside his mind. The curse, the geas, it was breaking down. Of that he was suddenly and completely certain.
"They trapped her in the high salt barrens, where nothing grows in land poisoned by Fomorian blood and the wrath of the Morrigan. It's a cursed place now, you can imagine. They trapped her in the stone and heaped earth to form a Barrow on it, and buried twelve heroes who died on that day to guard her spirit."
"But what was the curse?" Jack insisted.
Finbar closed his eyes, as if searching back, way back to an age long ago, yet still clear in his mind.
Until the Cullian sword returns
'til heroes fail their lien
'til waters drown the fireglass stone
This holds the Baneshee Queen.
A blade to wake from deadly sleep
A flood to free in fathoms deep
For in the ebb the foul takes form
To ride the night, on wings of storm.
"So something's happened," Jack said.
"Yes," Finbar said. "Something has happened."
"This thing," Jack insisted. "Whatever she is. She's out."
"Not yet," Finbar replied after a while. "But she's working on it."
"And what will she do?"
"She's the Hag. The Morrigan. She'll lay waste to everything she touches, all she sees. But there's more than that. She wants more than Temair."
* * *
It was dark now and Jack sat with Kerry outside the small stone house, each on a smooth stone not far from the river, but far enough from the falls to be able to hear each other over the roar of tumbling water. Finbar the Bard had drawn Corriwen aside while he cooked fresh fish over the coals of an open fire. The two of them were talking, heads close, the girl's face angled up attentively while the old man spoke.
"So what do you think of Obi-Wan?"
Jack started out of the memory of the man with the sword and the red gauntlet on the stone.
"Who?"
"Obi Wan Kenobi," Kerry said. "He's a dead ringer. All that stuff about the dark and the light. It's straight out of Star Wars."
He rummaged about in his bag and brought out the crumpled pack of cigarettes, lit one up and grinned. "Go with the force Luke."
He laughed aloud and the Bard looked up from the embers.
"He's probably never seen it anyway," Kerry whispered.
The moon was rising, hard and silver, haloed in the high cold air, and bigger than Jack ever remembered it before. Stars crowded a purpling sky, so many of them that they blazed down on the two boys and pooled shadows behind them. Moonlight glistened on night dew.
"And that stuff he burned?" Kerry blew out and made a slow smoke-ring. "You reckon that's legal here?"
Jack found it hard to concentrate. There was something in the smoke-dream, the haze vision, whatever it was, that was important to remember. He didn't know why. He closed his eyes and breathed in the cold, clean air, feeling his strength return with every breath, and the first pangs of hunger begin to stir.
"I think we're in trouble," he finally said. He rubbed a hand on the skin of his chest underneath the jerkin. It tingled a little, not painfully, but with inner heat. That was so much better than the sucking cold and the sick sensation of invasion.
"You just beginning to get the picture?"
"No. It's just…." Jack paused, getting his thoughts together. "We're stuck here. I need to get us back home again."
"Easy said. I thought it was a dream, but listen Jack, this place is for real."
"And that's why we have to find the way home. Finn seems to think I'm supposed to be here for some reason. But I don't want to be here. It's weird and it's dangerous, but that's not it. I have to get back to see if the Major's all right. He said something to me just before we…before we fell into this place, wherever it is. Whenever it is."
"I was too busy getting my backside out of there," Kerry admitted. "So what did he say?"
Jack fumbled in his pocket and took out the heart-shaped stone on its chain. He looped it around his neck.
"He told me to keep this safe, because it used to belong to my father. He knew my dad. I need to find out."
Kerry eyes followed dragon-flies dancing in the moonlight over the silvered water.
"Dads aren't all they're cracked up to be. Look at mine!" He turned to his friend. "And anyway, I thought you were an orphan."
"I suppose I am. But I don't know who I am. I never got the chance to find out."
"You're Jack Flint," Kerry said sagely. "What else is there to know? Me? I'm Kerry Malone, the thick Irish bogtrotter and proud of it." He punched Jack on the shoulder. "And we're both stuck here in fancy dress. Can it get any better?"
Jack managed a wan smile. "I wish it was so simple. But we have to do what the book says. We keep going west until we find the way home. The Major said curiosity would get me in trouble some day, and he was right enough. But now I know I wasn't curious about the right things, and I'm going to do my best to find out."
"Okay," Kerry said. "I suppose I should come along and keep you out of trouble."
He took a last pull on his cigarette. "But you know, if you ignore the great freaking hounds, and those crazy pigs. And them ugly-bug loonies. And green women under the water. And an old feller that thinks he's a Jedi knight and makes us smoke weird stuff.
"If you ignore that lot, this place could be a whole lot worse."