~ Dullahan Mountain Breakdown ~

by

D. H. Parker

Certainly I didn’t need to waste time half hoping to see things that didn’t exist. I had come to the sìthean for something much more tangible than possible contact with my mother’s ghost. The last gift she’d given me, the ornament she had worn most of her life, had no power to undo what the evil had accomplished. I knew that. Even so, I couldn’t reconcile what I knew with what I wanted. I wanted the gift somehow to strengthen my resolve, reinforce my precarious courage, give me back something of my mother’s stubborn, fighting spirit.

If only I had kept it with me...

No. If I had kept it with me, my dad’s sister, Idris, would have found a way to destroy it. I’d realized that the moment she came for me. Touched by an instinct that transcended the fear and shock of that day, I had slipped away from them, brought it to the sìthean for safekeeping and stuffed it into one of the hundreds of crevices that honeycombed the limestone walls.

Would it be there still? Even the most unsophisticated eye could have seen the monetary value of it. The chances of its remaining undisturbed for all those years were slight.

I probed into the little cave-like hole, swept out rotted leaves and a few shards of stone.

There. Yes. A glint of gold, dulled by neglect, but still unmistakable. Aislin’s ancient arm-ring. Proof of my heritage, she called it. The phrase was meaningless to my child mind, and she didn’t try to explain. No explanation would have made it more dear. It was my mother’s. It was sparkling with strong magic. Then.

It was far from magical now. Though its delicate, evocative beauty was still evident, its exile in the miniature cavern had left it dingy and damp, encrusted with patches of slimy mold. I cleaned it as best I could in the water of the pool, polishing the dirt and mold away from its chill, dead surface with a handful of moss.

How different it felt from when my mother passed it on to me. Leaving her hand, it had been a warm and vibrant thing. The memory of the occasion was as clear in my mind as if it were eighteen minutes instead of eighteen years between that time and this. In the face of Idris’s eradication campaign, I had taken great care to keep it clear.

The sharp autumn wind had whipped Aislin’s cloak around both of us as we walked, my hand in hers, along the forest path to the sìthean. I always loved going there. For me, the place was as delightful a spot as the name (straight out of her favorite fairy lore) implied. For Aislin, it was something much more. It was a rare place of peace, a world far removed from the hostile eyes and whispering tongues that tormented her. As young as I was, I understood that her visits to it were pure escape.

Only within the confines of this green space could she be the lighthearted creature she was meant to be. Only here was she free to laugh and sing and fill my head with grand tales, tales of shining princes and capable maidens. Tales of the People of Peace, the Fair Folk, and their deep, potent magic. Tales with inevitable, if unbelievable, happy endings. Child that I was, I believed anyway. Despite the intentional cruelty that drove Aislin to need escape, I never doubted happy endings.

Not until she gave me the arm-ring.

Aislin was all sadness and silence that day. She had no story for me, no song. Not even a smile. She dipped her hand into the icy water of the pool and lifted it again, watching the crystalline droplets form at the tips of her long, delicate fingers. The trembling in her sigh snagged at the smooth fabric of our familiar pattern.

“The winter’s coming, Maura Aislin,” she said to me. “Long and cold and dark it’ll be. I doubt I’ll be seeing the end of it.”

As if to emphasize her words, a flock of migrating geese high overhead honked their own mournful warning of winter. The sun was near setting. Enclosed as we were by rock wall and fern, the light was already dusky green.

She wrapped an edge of the soft, woolen cloak about me. I was warm enough in my fine new coat bought for the beginning of school. The sìthean, even on the coldest days, was never too cold, but I nestled closer, wanting to comfort her.

“Heart of my heart, you are growing so quickly,” she said.

She had never before been sad inside the sìthean. What could I say to banish her uncharacteristic gloom? It hurt to see her eyes dimmed darker than dusk light by that strange sorrow. I took refuge in the happiest thing I could think of. “I’ll be seven tomorrow.”

“You will. And may God keep you safe if I cannot.” So soft was her voice that I hardly heard the last phrase, but it seemed to me there was lament in it to match the lost, aching cries of those searching geese.

“Maura, I’m needing to give you your gift now.”

“Now?” In our family, birthday gifts never arrived before the birthday. This breaking of tradition was unlike her. It bewildered me, but it didn’t yet frighten me.

She removed that ancient heirloom she always wore, slid it onto my wrist and bent the flexible gold until its terminals touched, so it wouldn’t fall from my thin arm.

“Mama, your bracelet?” She looked oddly helpless without it.

“It’s to be yours now. It’s your legacy from our people, a sure proof of your Danann heritage. See you keep it safe, for there will come a time when you may have great need of it.”

Had I been older, I might have wondered that this was the first time she’d ever mentioned her family in my hearing. I might have worried over what was surely a warning. I was only a child. I believed in happy endings. I believed in magic.

Having the arm-ring on my wrist was the most magical thing that ever had happened to me. The warmth in it fairly sizzled with life. It seemed to snuggle against my skin with a little quiver of gladness. “It’s magic,” I whispered, knowing beyond all doubt that it was.

“Magic,” Aislin repeated, with another deep sigh. “No, my heart.” She stared into the pool and went on as if she were speaking more to herself than to me. “There never was magic except in the stories. There is knowledge, right enough, for those who recognize it. There is yet some small power for those who dare use it. But the cost of using that power now... Ah, Maura, the cost of it may be altogether too much to pay.”

A few times after we moved to the little village of Amberwell, I had encountered unexpected flickers of fear in my mother’s unguarded glance or heard them in her voice. Now, for the first time, I caught the full breath-snatching storm of the terror she had been hiding. There was no shelter from it, no defense against it.

I knew then that I was going to lose her.

The arm-ring! Surely the arm-ring was responsible for that unspeakable, unbearable knowledge! I panicked, tried to jerk it off my wrist. “Mama, it hurts me.”

“Oh, darlin’.” She quieted my frantic hand. “There will be strength in you much greater than my own, but it’s not yet, by itself, enough to help you. I didn’t dare wait longer.” She held me close and kissed the top of my head. “Forget the pain for this little while. There will be time and time enough for that.”

I did forget. How can I ever forgive myself? At the touch of her light kiss, I forgot everything except the beauty and the seductive warmth of the gold.

Then Aislin’s wide-pupilled eyes were glowing with the soft emerald light that focused on nothing, saw everything. That sort of thing happened with her, the thing she called an taibhse. It never frightened me, nor even seemed strange. I had, after all, inherited a child-sized portion of the ability. I knew it was as natural a thing as breathing, and as unavoidable.

Not everyone accepted it as natural. The people of Amberwell put quite a different spin on it. Soon after we moved to the town they began whispering foul lies about my mother, avoiding her. It was one of her great sorrows, yet she could no more stop their whispering than she could stop her ability to see beyond what they saw.

She began to speak, her voice taking on the dreaming quality that so frightened our superstitious neighbors. “You will have the Golden One for your shield, my heart.”

Whatever she was seeing put a soft smile on her lips. A strand of hair had caught at the corner of her mouth, and I pushed it gently away. The words of her vision made no sense to me, but as I rarely understood them at first telling, I wasn’t troubled by that.

I was troubled by the people who kept lying about her because she was different from them. My whole young being burned with a fierce desire to protect her. She shouldn’t have to live with those malignant lies. Aislin was no witch. She wasn’t wicked. I had blackened a classmate’s eye only yesterday for saying she was.

“What is a Golden One, Mama?”

As quiet as my question was, it broke the vision, and her eyes found my face. She drew a deep breath. “He’ll be standing between you and the danger, between you and the darkness,” she said, touching the arm-ring where it lay warm and snug on my wrist. “A blessed, shining shield.” It still didn’t make sense to me. It did seem to lift a heavy load from her.

She rose in one graceful movement, pulling me up with her. “Come, love. There is supper to fix and your father to feed before much longer. If we’re not at home when he comes, he’ll be accusing the daoine sithe of stealing us away.”

“Not Daddy. He doesn’t believe in the fairies.”

“He’s right altogether. They are only the people of legend.”

Despite her words, I was sure she believed in them no less than I did.

I had no doubt at all that they existed. I had heard their unearthly music in the laughter of the spring water and in the whispering of the autumn leaves. I had translated it for both my parents on the big black piano by the front window. Since the music was real, the People of Peace also must be real. And my mother—nobody could have convinced me that she didn’t have some direct connection. From the way she told those stories, I had long since decided she, herself, was one of them.

I was still admiring the bracelet when she came to kiss me good night. She held me a long time, until I began to fidget, then she tucked in the quilts and went quietly away.

It was the last time she ever held me. In the cold darkness of that windy October night, on the eve of my seventh birthday, she vanished.

The gossips said she had deserted my father and me. It pleased them to believe that. It fit their rumor-warped image of her.

Wherever she had gone, I knew she had not gone voluntarily. I knew because of the inescapable nightmares that had beat at me the night she vanished. I knew because sometime that same night the living warmth of the arm-ring became so cold and leaden that when I finally struggled out of the grip of those first horrid dreams, I could barely endure its frigid weight.

I had just turned seven years old. I had no power to say what I knew, let alone try to prove it. I couldn’t talk about it even to my father. But maybe he didn’t need my telling him. Maybe he knew all on his own, without any special sight.

He spent the week after Aislin’s disappearance—a week of chilling, drowning rains—searching for my mother. He didn’t go to the cities. He searched through the soggy woods and in the cave system that riddled Dullahan Mountain.