“Aenghus Óg has tempted him with something or other,” Flidais said with a dismissive gesture. “Bres acts only when it is in his interest to do so.”
“I understand that. But why send Bres? Is he to kill me?”
“I do not know. He certainly cannot be coming to outwit you. Truthfully, Druid, I hope the two of you do come to blows and you defeat him. He does not respect the forest as he should.”
I offered no response, and Flidais seemed content to let me consider what she had said. She sipped her smoothie and reached down to give Oberon a friendly scratch behind the ears. His tail sprang to life and quickly thumped against the legs of our chairs. I could hear him begin to tell her of the sport to be had at Papago Park, and I smiled at the way he always kept his goals firmly in mind—the mark of a true hunter.
"There are desert bighorn sheep in the hills there. Have you ever hunted them?"
Flidais told him no, she had never hunted sheep at all. They were herd animals that offered no sport.
"These are not regular sheep. They are larger, they are brown, and they move very fast among the rocks. We have yet to corner one, though we have tried only a few times. I always enjoy the hunt anyway."
“Does your hound jest with me, Atticus?” Flidais raised her eyes to mine, and a note of contempt crept into her voice. “You were unable to bring down a sheep?”
“Oberon never jests about hunting,” I said. “Desert bighorns are nothing like the sheep you are used to. They are significant game, especially in the Papago Hills. Treacherous rocks there.”
“Why have I never heard of these creatures?”
I shrugged. “They are native to this area. There are several desert creatures you would probably enjoy hunting here.”
Flidais sat back in her chair, frowning, and took another sip of her smoothie as if it were an elixir to cure cognitive dissonance. She stared for a few moments at the low-hanging branches of my mesquite tree, which were swaying gently in a whisper of desert wind. Then, without warning, her face exploded in a smile and she laughed in delight—I would almost call it a giggle, but that would be beneath the dignity of a goddess.
“Something new!” she gushed. “Do you know how long it has been since I have hunted anything new? Why, it has been centuries, Druid, millennia even!”
I raised my glass. “To novelty,” I said. It was a highly prized commodity amongst the long-lived. She clinked her glass against mine, and we drank contentedly and shared silence for a while, until she asked when we could begin the hunt.
“Not until a few hours after nightfall,” I said. “We must wait for the park to close and the mortals to retire for the night.”
Flidais arched an eyebrow at me. “And how shall we spend the intervening hours, Atticus?”
“You are my guest. We may spend it however you wish.”
Her eyes appraised me and I pretended not to notice, keeping my gaze locked on my bicycle still lying in the street. “You appear to be in the summertime of youth,” she said.
“My thanks. You look well as always.”
“I am curious to discover if you still have the endurance of the Fianna or if you are hiding a decrepitude and softness most unbecoming a Celt.”
I stood up and offered her my right hand. “My left arm was injured earlier this afternoon and is still not fully healed. However, if you will follow me and assist in mending it, I will do my best to satisfy your curiosity.”
The corner of her mouth quirked up at the edge, and her eyes smoldered as she placed her hand in mine and rose. I locked my eyes on hers and didn’t let go of her hand as we returned inside and went to the bedroom.
I figured, to hell with the bike. I’d probably feel like jogging to work in the morning anyway.
Chapter 5
Pillow talk in the modern era often involves the sharing of childhood stories or perhaps an exchange of dream vacations. One of my recent partners, a lovely lass named Jesse with a tattoo of a Tinker Bell on her right shoulder blade (about as far from a real faery as one can get), had wanted to discuss a science-fiction television program, Battlestar Galactica, as a political allegory for the Bush years. When I confessed I had no knowledge of the show nor any interest in getting to know it or anything about American politics, she called me a “frakkin’ Cylon” and stormed out of the house, leaving me confused yet somewhat relieved. Flidais, on the other hand, wanted to talk about the ancient sword of Manannan Mac Lir, called Fragarach, the Answerer. It kind of killed the afterglow for me, and I felt myself growing irritated.
“Do you still have it?” she asked. And as soon as she did, I suspected that the entire visit—even the conjugal part—had been planned just so she could discover the answer. I had flat out lied to the lesser Fae who’d attacked me earlier, but I didn’t feel safe doing the same to Flidais.
“Aenghus Óg certainly thinks so,” I hedged.
“That is no answer.”
“That is because I have reason to be cautious, or even paranoid, where that subject is concerned. I mean you no disrespect.”
She eyed me steadily for a full five minutes, trying to get me to talk by merely remaining silent. It works well on most humans, but the Druids taught that technique to the Tuatha Dé Danann before I was born, so I kept my smile on the inside and waited for her next move. I busied myself in the interim by trying to find patterns in the popcorn ceiling and idly stroking her right arm, which was tattooed like mine, ready to draw the earth’s power with an effort of will. I found a woodpecker, a snow leopard, and what might have been the snarling face of Randy Johnson throwing a slider before she spoke again.
“Tell me the story of how you came to possess it in the first place, then,” she finally said. “The legendary Fragarach, the sword that can pierce any armor. I have heard several versions of it in Tír na nÓg, and I would like to hear you tell it.”
It was an appeal to my vanity. She wanted me to lapse into braggadocio and get so carried away with my tale that I’d wind up blurting out, “It’s in my garage!” or “I sold it on eBay!” or something similar.
“All right. I stole it in the Battle of Magh Lena, when Conn of the Hundred Battles was so bent on slaying Mogh Nuadhat during the night that he hardly cared what weapon he was holding in his hand.” I raised my fist as if it grasped a sword. “Conn was outnumbered and knew he’d have little chance of winning in a straight-up fight, so he decided to attack in the night to skew the odds in his favor. Goll Mac Morna and the rest of the Fianna refused to fight until the morning, citing something about honor, but I have never had much of that in the middle of a war. Being honorable is an excellent way to get yourself killed. Witness the British getting their hair lifted by this continent’s natives in the eighteenth century because they refused to break their silly formations.”
Flidais grunted, then said, “This was before Finn Mac Cumhaill led the Fianna?”
“Oh, aye, well before. So I slunk away from the Fianna’s fires and went to join Conn in the slaughter. He was hacking his way amongst Mogh Nuadhat’s army—which was about seventeen thousand Gaels and two thousand Spaniards, if you can believe it—when his hands, slick with the blood of his fallen enemies, slipped on the hilt of Fragarach as he raised it for another blow, letting this magnificent sword sail behind him, over his head, to literally fall at my feet in the chaos of a night battle.”
Flidais snorted. “I don’t believe you. He simply dropped it?”
“ would be more accurate.” I raised my right hand. “Every word is true or I am the son of a goat. I picked it up, felt the magic thrumming through my arm, wrapped myself in mist, and exited the field with my prize, never to return until the time of Cormac Mac Airt.”
“Nay, they did not let you simply exit with Fragarach!”
“You’re right,” I chuckled. “There was a bit more to it than that. I thought you might enjoy the short version, though.”
Flidais seemed to seriously consider whether or not she had enjoyed it. “I appreciated the denial of expectations; it is similar to when prey refuses to behave in standard fashion, making the hunt more interesting. But I know that you have skipped many details, and it already differs from what I have heard, so now I must know it all. Tell me the longer version.”
“Wait. What did you hear in Tír na nÓg? The short version.”
“I heard that you stole it from Conn through chicanery and guile. In some tales you put him to sleep through use of a potion; in others you switch swords with him using an illusion. You come across as little more than a scheming, cowardly footpad.”
“How delightful. All right, then, I think perhaps it is crucial to know my state of mind leading up to the point where the sword dropped at my feet—for that is truly how it happened. Night battles are ridiculously crazy; I wasn’t sure that I was always facing people from the opposing army, you know? The only illumination saving it from being black as tar was the pale glow of a crescent moon, the stars, and a few distant campfires. I may have accidentally killed a man or two on my own side, and I was paranoid about being cut down in a similar accident. So I was thinking, this is absurdly dangerous, why am I doing this, and why am I here, and the answer that I came up with was this: We were all killing one another in the middle of the night because Conn had a magic sword given to him by Lugh Lámhfhada of the Tuatha Dé Danann. Fragarach’s power had allowed him to conquer most of Ireland. Great as he was, he could not have done it without that sword. Conn would have never had the stones to attack Mogh Nuadhat without it. Everyone who died in the battle to that point had done so because a single sword gave one man in power the lust for more. And as I maniacally hewed down whoever faced me, I realized that, even as we fought for Conn, Conn was fighting for the Tuatha Dé, manipulated by Lugh and his cronies as sure as a tree drinks water.”
“I remember this now,” Flidais said. “I stood apart because I have never had much interest in human affairs outside the forest. But Lugh was very interested, and Aenghus Óg even more so.”
“Aye. I think they wanted to bring peace to Ireland at the point of a sword. They encouraged Conn to do what he did—and all the High Kings after him. And perhaps it would have been the best thing for Ireland, I don’t know. What bothered me is that the Tuatha Dé were manipulating human events, when they were supposed to have been removed from them centuries before.”
“Meddlesome, are we?” Flidais grinned sardonically.
“In that particular case you were. I was mentally cataloging which of you were on Conn’s side and who was on Mogh Nuadhat’s when the sword fell at my feet. I knew immediately what it was; I could feel its power pulsing through the ground, calling to me. And that’s when I heard a voice in my head, already half expected, telling me to pick it up and exit the field. Pick it up, the voice said, and I would be protected.”
“Whose voice was it?” Flidais asked.
“Cannot you guess?”
“The Morrigan,” she whispered.
“Yes indeed, the old battle crow herself. I would not be surprised if she had something to do with it slipping from Conn’s grasp in the first place. So I picked it up. When you’re in the middle of a killing field and the f**king Chooser of the Slain tells you to do something, you do it. But of course there were many agents, human and immortal, who objected to this.”
“Conn came after you?”
“Not personally. He was too busy fighting for his life with a normal sword he’d snatched from a corpse. He was in the very thick of the mêlée, and thus he sent some of his chiefs behind him to find Fragarach. What they found was a Druid holding his sword and not particularly anxious to surrender it. In fact, they found me trying to summon mist to cloak my escape.”
“Only trying?” Flidais raised an eyebrow. I noticed that she had a few freckles underneath her eyes, high on her cheeks. She was comfortably pink all over and slightly bronzed from the sun, not the marble white of the Morrigan.
“It was rather difficult to concentrate. Aenghus Óg and Lugh were in my head, telling me to return the sword to Conn or die, and the Morrigan was telling me I would die if I gave it back. I said to the Morrigan that I wanted to keep Fragarach for my own, to which Aenghus Óg and Lugh both shouted no, so of course the Morrigan instantly agreed.”
Flidais laughed. “You played them against one another. This is utterly delicious.”
“But wait, it gets tastier. The Morrigan shielded my mind from Aenghus Óg and Lugh, and just in time. Conn’s lieutenants tried to slay me and quickly discovered that, while Fragarach was a great sword in Conn’s hand, it was a terrible sword in mine. They all shouted ‘Traitor!’ before they dropped in the mud, however, and I abruptly found myself surrounded by hostiles—hostiles egged on to kill me by Aenghus Óg and Lugh, no doubt. The Morrigan suggested to me that the best way out would be through Mogh Nuadhat’s army. Charging in that direction, I whirled Fragarach around me with all the strength a Druid could muster from the earth, cleaving bodies in two and shearing anonymous torsos from their trunks. The flying halves of men bowled whole men over, and fountains of blood showered upon my erstwhile comrades. I eventually reached Mogh Nuadhat’s Spaniards, who parted for me like the Red Sea for Moses—”
“For whom?”
“I beg your pardon. I was alluding to a figure from the Torah, who escaped an Egyptian army by appealing to the god Yahweh for aid. Yahweh parted the Red Sea for Moses and his Jewish friends to escape, and when the pharaoh’s army tried to follow, the Red Sea fell upon them, drowning them all. And so it was when Conn’s men tried to pursue me; the Spaniards closed ranks and thwarted them, and I ran freely to the other side of the field, thanking the Morrigan for her assistance. But that’s when Aenghus Óg decided to take a very personal hand in the matter. He appeared before me, in the flesh, and demanded that I return the sword.”