Notes from a regicide, p.5
Wings of Fire, page 5
Jack was suddenly coldly and furiously angry.
Give her to me!
Shura looked up, made a dismissive gesture. Go away, vodyanoi. She is mine.
Jack circled her, and she turned to face him. She was intent on this kill; he knew he might have to fight her over this. He would, if he had to. It was his lake. I claim her. Do you think you can stand against me here? Go to all your other victims on the boat. Them I cannot save. But this one is mine.
Shura showed her teeth, but he had the right. She could not fight him here and expect to win. What is she to you, vodyanoi?
I claim her. Her and the other one. He moved closer. Do you stand against me?
She thrust a taloned hand at him. Not here!
And then she was gone. He could sense her turning back for the ferry. There were still people alive there, trapped in a bubble of air in the sinking boat, but not for much longer. Damn that creature!
He gathered up the dark girl and kicked for the surface. She was still alive, too, but only barely. He had to get air in her lungs.
For such as him it was easy to rise in the lake until he was high enough above it to hold her clear; he squeezed the copious amounts of his lake that she had swallowed out of her, and she coughed and began breathing again, taking gasping, painfully shallow breaths. He held her at the surface, trying to decide what to do next. She was cold, much too cold to survive out here much longer like this. She was not of the water, not of this water, not of his lake—not in this form. He would have to take her ashore, leave the lake.
It was a little awkward, changing shape when he had to keep the still unconscious Fiana above water. He could not just climb ashore and change there. In the end he had to swim close enough to the shore that he could leave her beached while he adjusted to the environment out of the water, turning back into the form he had worn on the boat and becoming Jack again. This had the disadvantage of leaving him suddenly clad in sopping wet clothes, and he shivered when he picked his still unconscious charge up and waded ashore with her in his arms. He climbed the steep bank to a ferny hollow, and laid her down gently on the soft bracken while he lit a small fire to warm them both.
Before he had not been able to light a fire without tools, he mused as he fed the flames with wood to get enough warmth out of it to bring Fiana back to life. One advantage with being what he was now. But it was a lonely life. He had almost welcomed Shura when she had claimed the spillway of the new dam, at least until he found out what kind she was.
He brought Fiana closer to the fire. In her present form, with those wet clothes, she was courting pneumonia; Jack peeled off the outer layers of soaked clothing and started rubbing warmth into her body, starting with her cold hands and working up gently into her arms and shoulders. He laid her clothes out close to the fire to dry them as best he could; his own jeans and black sweater would have to dry while he was still wearing them. He had adopted the dress of the workers at the power station when men had first come there and asked to build on his lake. Copying their appearance had worked well; on those occasions he had needed to walk among humans he had rarely been afforded a second look.
Fiana was still icy cold, but she was at least beginning to get some colour back in her face. She was of sturdy stock, slight as she was, and cold and water were not enough to harm her badly once she was safe from dying in their embrace. He continued warming her, watching for signs of life in her face and was soon rewarded by the glimpse of a return of consciousness, her eyes moving under heavy eyelids. They flew open very suddenly, and she struggled to sit up, pulling back from him, her terror stark in her face.
“Easy!” Jack raised both hands, palms out, in an age-old appeasing gesture and smiled at her. “How do you feel?”
Fiana had gathered herself into a wary, tense huddle; Jack could almost physically see every physical and magical sense that she had scan the forest around her. Then she relaxed as she realised Shura, the pale killer of the lake, was not there.
“C-cold,” Fiana said, teeth chattering slightly with chill and shock. “Where is...”
“Shura? The pale one…? Feeding off the people on the boat.”
He couldn’t keep his distaste out of his voice. Fiana looked at him. “You allowed it.”
“I didn’t get a choice. You were there.” Then he softened his voice. “Here, put this on.” He pulled off his sweater and handed it to her. “It’s probably still a little damp for comfort, but you need to get warm. It’s better than nothing.”
She accepted without questioning. Pushing her head through the neck of the garment, her eyes sought his face again. “What happened… to Sabrina?”
He grinned. She wanted to know, but she wasn’t sure if he could be trusted. “I caught her paddling for the shore...”
The attack was completely unexpected as her body uncoiled like a whip, and he fell backwards under the storm of blows from the slight girl’s fists and of words in a foreign language that he nevertheless understood perfectly well as insults. “Wait! What did I do to deserve this…?”
“You drowned her! You...” And she let loose another stream of words in her own language.
He reached out and caught her at the wrists, holding her effortlessly as she continued flailing at him. “Easy, there! Why would I drown her?”
“You threw her into the lake!”
“Calm down, girl. I gave her a lifejacket and sent her ashore. She is alive. Trust me.”
“You tried to kill her before.” She was still not convinced. But at least she had stopped trying to pummel him.
“I did. But all those other lives paid for her passage.” Jack’s words were defiant. Both of them were what they were, creatures who had lives spanning two worlds. Both knew laws had been broken that day on the lake, old laws, strong laws. Both had chosen to disregard those laws. She—it had something to do with Sabrina, something deep, something she was still not telling him. As for Jack, he was still not sure what had made him change his mind.
But he had changed his mind, he had spoken nothing but the truth to her when he said he’d tried to send Sabrina to safety, and Fiana’s mobile features were telling him that she was beginning to believe him.
“It is my lake,” he reiterated.
She sat back, watching him suspiciously. “Where is she, then?”
He shrugged, letting go of her captured wrists. “I don’t know. Ashore. But she is well.”
“How do you know?”
He smiled, an introspective smile, nursing a secret known only to himself. “I know.”
She didn’t press for that answer, but she had other questions. “What about me? The last thing I remember was her… what did you call her?… Shura… she was drowning me, trying to drown me….”
“I claimed you. You and your Sabrina, both.”
“Why?”
That was a more difficult question. In the end he gave the easy answer. “Sabrina asked me to.”
“Sabrina did?” Fiana leaned back, surprised. “But she doesn’t know who I really am.”
“Neither do I.” He smiled to take the edge off his words, but she nevertheless blushed violently. She had intruded on his domain, and he only knew her by a human name.
“I am Fiannuala ni Naoise, from the shores of Dun-na’n-Gall,” she said, formally. Her full name, the Gaelic form which her family used, which her kind used—not the Anglicised form she had once given to Sabrina. There was a foreign lilt to the unfamiliar names, but it sounded pleasant to Jack. Pleasant, and familiar. “I go by the name of Fiana,” she added.
He nodded politely. “Where is this, uhm, Donno...?”
She laughed softly. “Maybe you know of it as Donegal,” she said. “It is in Ireland, on the other side of the world.”
He thought he had recognized the accent. But he was puzzled. “A long way to come. Did you follow Sabrina here?”
“I was sent to protect her.”
It made sense, of course. Sometimes their kind did such things. “Who sent her here?”
“I don’t know. She left her home suddenly, secretly, without me knowing; I only just found her again before she came to the lake. Had I known, she would not have carried that...thing across your waters.”
Jack found himself believing her. But it was his turn for the formalities. “I am te taniwha o manapouri.” He smiled at her trying to mouth the words. “I used to be Taunui, but Jack O’Malley will do.”
She giggled, suddenly, and he blinked at the change in her face as the serious expression gave way to relieved mirth. “Jack O’Malley! A fine Irish name, to be sure!”
He found himself unable to stay serious. Her giggling was contagious, and the corners of his mouth made their own way upwards until he too was grinning at the absurdity of such a name for one such as him. But it hadn’t been his choosing. It had been Tom O’Malley’s fault, years ago, so many years ago…
<<>>
Taunui had heard the singing long before he saw the man, and he knew that it was not one of his own tangata whenua who approached—the words of the song were in a language he did not know, and none of his own people would make quite as much noise as the one who approached the lake. Taunui stayed in the water, his eyes barely above the surface, watching.
He didn’t know what he expected to see, but it had not been the sight that met his eyes when his visitor finally emerged from the trees and stood on the lakeshore, finishing off his song with a loud and joyous flourish before he turned to survey his surroundings. He was short and wiry, burnt brown by the sun—but he was no Maori, and his eyes were bright and piercing blue under bushy white eyebrows.
He smiled and said something, still in that strange tongue Taunui did not understand, apparently talking to himself. A large bulging pack was allowed to slip off his shoulders and onto the only piece of flattish beach around for some miles. It was obvious that he had decided that the place was as good as any to make camp.
Taunui kept an eye on the camp-making proceedings, with his visitor alternately singing strange songs or talking to himself in his unintelligible language. His pack was hung with two small pots and a shallow metal pan, and had a bedroll tied on top of it; in short order the bushy-browed stranger had a fire going and had set one of the pans, filled with water from Taunui’s own lake, over it to boil. A battered tin emerged from the pack, proving to contain some pungent-smelling leaves which the traveller threw into the pot of boiling water; another tin, smaller and flatter, followed it out of the pack, and something even more pungent was taken from it between two yellow-stained fingers of the man’s right hand and stuffed into a pipe. He caught a flame from his cooking fire using a small twig as a taper, and set whatever it was he had put into the bowl of the pipe alight with it. The air filled with aromatic smoke. The old man stretched his legs in front of him and crossed them at the ankle, leaning back against his pack with a contented sigh.
Taunui’s curiosity was great, and he had allowed it to over-rule his caution. He was not quite sure when the old man had noticed him, but all of a sudden he was aware of that piercing blue stare on him through the billows of the pipe smoke. He returned the scrutiny. It had been many years since Taunui had had company, human company, and he was suddenly aware of a strange feeling, something he knew he had been carrying for a long time without really knowing what the small, constant, ever-present ache was.
Loneliness.
The visitor took his pipe out of his mouth, and smiled.
Taunui rose out of the water, unthinking—it had been a friendly gesture, and he found himself wanting company. But he had forgotten what he was, what he had become. As the black shape of the taniwha rose from the lake’s dark waters, the old man by the fire scrambled to his feet in some alarm, his eyes widening—but he didn’t flee. In fact, after the initial surprise, there was actually something very like glee in those blue eyes. He said something again, and Taunui growled; it was so frustrating not being able to understand…
He moved forward—he thought he had seen the old man actually beckon—but in a motion that was purely instinctive the other shrank from him, in spite of the lively interest still dancing in his eyes. Well, there was something that Taunui thought he could do about this.
He remembered his shape, the shape he had worn when he was still Taunui, Koronae’s brother, the chief’s son.
And came back to it.
Before the old man’s eyes the dragon shrank into a muscular young man with bronze skin and liquid dark eyes, wearing the garb he had worn in his warrior days long ago.
The fear left his visitor, and the interest strengthened. This time he beckoned with authority, pointing to the fire, to himself.
Taunui took that as an invitation, and accepted.
He spent a lot of time with the old man in the days that followed, even travelling with him some way away from the lake on occasion—but he could not leave the lake for long even if he wanted to, and after a while the old man understood this compulsion (although he was of necessity ignorant of the reasons behind it) and made his own base camp on the lakeshore. If he went away on some extended excursion, Taunui would be left behind to watch the camp, which had graduated into a crude shelter and a real fire-pit as the old man semi-settled there with his new-found companion. They learned how to communicate, but the old man, whose name was Tom O’Malley, could not easily get his tongue around Taunui’s name, and so gave him one of his own.
“Jack,” he’d said one evening, watching the taniwha sitting crosslegged by his campfire in his human form. “Tom O’Malley will call you Jack. It’s easier on Tom’s tongue.”
He always spoke of himself in the third person, as though he wasn’t there.
Jack, as he soon learned to think of himself as in Tom’s company, learned that Tom was a drifter who had abandoned his farm and stowed away on a ship from Ireland one year when disease had taken his wife and small son. He had not even known where the ship was going when he sneaked aboard in the dead of night, too poor to pay for his passage, too maddened with pain and loss to stay in Ireland any longer. He was not discovered until the ship was almost a week on her way, and by then he was half-dead with hunger, delirious, his flesh stretched against his bones. The captain did not throw him overboard—but neither was he treated with anything more than a practical decision to let him live. He was allowed to help the cook in the galley, and in return he was fed whatever scraps he could find there. He went seeking death, and death eluded him. When the ship docked in the New World, Tom O’Malley was still alive. He crossed the continent of America, dog-legging his way from occasional job to occasional scam, until he reached California and thought he would look for gold there. But he found enough only to whet his appetite, and to pay for passage for his restless soul—further, always further, looking for his lost and beloved ghosts, following them west around the globe as though he believed he would find them again if he could find the place where the sun went into darkness every day. And every day, instead of being closer, he was further away.
He drifted first to Australia, and then to New Zealand. They spoke of gold here, too, and that was why he was in the inhospitable wilds of the South by himself, seeking the yellow stuff, looking for the streams nobody else had yet panned, gathering riches to travel on when the time came.
Somewhere during his peripatetic wanderings he had quite lost his mind.
He was afraid of nothing, and that was why he had not run when he had first glimpsed the taniwha in the lake. Once he had met Jack, he adopted him as a younger sidekick, or maybe the son who had died so many years ago now. He wanted somebody to talk to, and he had become strange and wild, and when he met other people, other human people, they would whisper and point and avoid him. But Jack, himself a lost and lonely soul, welcomed his presence. He would clean the fish that Tom caught, expert with gutting knife, scales falling like silver flakes at his feet, while Tom told him wild and tangled stories, an intricate mix of the real—his own travels and history—and the legendary, tales of Irish myth, invoking leprechauns and pookas and ancient kings and heroes on this distant shore which had never before heard of the Dagda and of Cuchullain.
But Tom was worn out, tired, old before his time. He had found peace of a sort, there in the camp he shared with Jack, but it lasted only a few short years. When Jack came to wake him one cool winter morning, the chilly mists from the lake drifting through the camp like unquiet spirits, he found Tom in his tidy bed, a small smile of contentment on his face. Perhaps he had caught up to his own lost ghosts at last, after following them so faithfully for so long. Jack liked to think so. He had buried his old friend there by the lake, and the forest had claimed his grave by now, wrapped in green silence.
<<>>
It had been many years since Jack had heard an accent such as Fiana’s, but he was a taniwha and he had a long memory. Old Tom suddenly lived again.
“Do you know the story of Coocollain?” he asked on an impulse, remembering, mangling the name as he always had.
Fiana, startled, stared at him. “Chu Cullen? Why, of course. He was a great hero.”
“I heard of him,” said Jack laconically.
She raised a quizzical eyebrow. “A long way for a tale to travel.”
He grinned. “Tales of heroes do. It is the way of things.”
He told her a little of Tom, then—of the strange old man who had given him his name, and whose unmarked grave lay somewhere in these woods—and of Tom’s stories. He was curious about this new visitor from that distant land; in his own way, he had loved old Tom, and he felt close to him again now that he had another voice speak to him in the same brogue.
But Fiana was not Tom, no drifting human spirit, driven by irrational searches for things that could not be found. Fiana was here for a reason. Her kind always had a reason. Jack wanted to know more about her, about her people; he had always been curious, and he had first heard of her kin long ago, in Tom’s stories. But she was distracted, on edge, jumping at every crackle of the small fire. This was no companionable camp.
