The Last of the High Kings (5 page)

The archaeologists had brought enough water with them up the mountain to last them for the day, but when the work began in earnest the following week, they were going to need far more of it than they could carry. Their budget didn't come anywhere close to providing helicopter assistance, but Alice Kelly had persuaded the air-sea rescue to help them out. They had agreed on the ground that it would provide a good training exercise, and it had been their chopper that Mikey and Donal had heard above the mountain.

From where Jenny was sitting on the top of the beacon the roar of the engine and the clatter of the rotor blades were deafening. She had seen helicopters before on her visits up there, and once a pilot had passed close enough to wave at her. But this was quite
different. That thing up there was a huge, bellowing, violent creature, and she didn't like it one little bit.

The drop went like clockwork. The rescue crew lowered the fifty-gallon drums, two at a time, on the winch line. David Connelly guided them to the ground and unclipped them, and the students lugged them away and stacked them between the two tents. There were twelve containers in all, six hundred gallons of freshwater. When the last one was safely landed and the winch line freed, Alice Kelly waved to the pilot. The door of the chopper closed, and it drifted sideways across the mountaintop, set its nose toward the sea, and powered away over the plain.

In the resounding silence left in its wake, Alice thought she caught a glimpse, out of the corner of her eye, of a slim figure standing on top of the barrow. But when she turned to look, there was no one there.

“Where did the little girl go?” she asked the others. But no one had seen Jenny, or the big white goat, for that matter, as they slipped away and headed down the side of the mountain.

J.J. finished shaping the new bridge he was making for Sean Pearce's fiddle and glanced at the clock. It was nearly five, and it was his turn to make the dinner. He set the bridge aside. Tomorrow, or perhaps later tonight, he would string up the fiddle and try it out. He might have to make some adjustments to the position of the sound post, but essentially the job was finished, meaning that he would have one less disgruntled customer on his back. There were still quite a few to go, though. He looked at the rack of instruments on the wall, then looked away again before he could be tempted to start counting them. Some of those fiddles had been hanging there, awaiting his attention, for more than a year.

The problem, as he saw it, was that he was trying
to live two lives. Three, if you counted being a father and housekeeper as well. He would have been happy to give up the touring or most of it, but he couldn't make a decent living from the fiddle business unless he could sell some of his own handmade instruments. And he couldn't make the kinds of instruments he wanted to make until he got the wood from the chiming maple that Aengus had promised him.

He sighed and began to put away his tools. He should have known better than to trust Aengus Óg. He should have agreed to nothing without seeing the wood first. He was sure that he would get it soon—the wheels were already in motion—but he had already waited far too long, and as he thought about it, he found it hard to believe that he had let it happen. If he had gotten the wood when he should have, he would be making fiddles from it by now. As it was, even if he got it tomorrow, he would have to wait another eight or ten years before it was dried and cured and ready to be used.

He glanced around the workshop. It looked as if a tornado had recently passed through it. Every level surface was cluttered with old cases, half-made or half-mended instruments, bows, tools, fittings and strings, wood shavings, dust. At Newark, where he
had learned his trade, the teachers drummed it into the students again and again:
Keep the workbench tidy
. J.J. was afraid that his workshop was a reflection of his personality. If it was, then it showed him to be careless and sloppy and unable to attend to the basics.

He looked at the clock again. He had time to finish off that fiddle and still get the dinner on. But instead of going back to work, he gazed out of the window. The workshop was at the back of the house and gave him a view out across the farm and the steep slope of the mountainside beyond. Far over to the right he could see a small band of wild goats, browsing their way across the edge of the crag. A few hundred meters to their left, completely separate from them, was another goat, a single white one, making its way down the hillside. It was the one he had seen when he went looking for Jenny on New Year's Eve, and he noticed now that she was there as well, trotting along close behind it. Even as he watched, the goat stopped and waited for Jenny to catch up with it.

Deeply troubled, J.J. stared at them. He knew a lot about goats. His parents had run a herd of them on this farm when he was growing up. The room where he sat now had originally been built onto the house as a place for making cheese. When J.J. first married, he
and Aisling had intended to keep the business going; but then J.J. had gone to college, and after that his musical career had taken off, and he was away too much of the time. Aisling couldn't manage the farm and the family on her own, and eventually, reluctantly, they had sold the goats. J.J. had missed them more than he had expected. They had been part of his life, and even when he saw wild ones on the mountain, he felt that he knew them inside out.

But not this white one. He had never seen any goat, wild or domesticated, behave like this. As he watched, it folded its knees and lay down on its belly on a patch of grass. Jenny sat cross-legged beside it. They were much too far away for J.J. to see any details, but it was clear that Jenny and the goat were extremely comfortable with each other. They looked like a couple of friends sitting down to have a chat. And J.J. was very afraid that was exactly what they were doing.

Hazel burst in through the front door and slung her schoolbag the full length of the hall.

“Freedom!” she yelled at no one in particular.

Her mother was in the sitting room, reading a homeopathy text. There was evidence that she had been showing Aidan how to make potato prints with poster paints, but at the moment he was busy hacking the spud halves into pieces with a pair of scissors.

“What's for dinner?” said Hazel.

Aisling looked up from her book and shrugged. “Your dad's cooking.”

“Oh, no,” said Hazel. “That means we won't be eating until ten o'clock.”

“Oh, no,” said Aidan, stabbing one of the colorful prints through the dead center with surprising accuracy.

“Can I make beans on toast?” said Hazel.

Aisling put the book down and stood up. “Yeah. And make some for his nibs as well, or we'll never see the back of him.”

Aisling set about separating Aidan from the scissors and Hazel went into the kitchen. She found J.J. in there, peering into cupboards.

“What are we having for dinner?” she asked him.

“Erm—” he said.

“You forgot to go shopping, didn't you?” she said.

“I didn't forget exactly,” said J.J. “I just—”

“Forgot,” said Hazel. “You'd better go now. I'll hold the fort here.”

 

In the yard, on his way to get the car, J.J. met Donal returning from Mikey's with the accordion.

“Where are you going?” Donal asked.

“Just to the village,” said J.J. “Back in ten minutes.”

Donal knew it took ten minutes to get to the village and another ten minutes to get back. Presumably there was some reason to be going there, which would also take some number of minutes as well. His father had never been any good where time was concerned. But Donal knew a great deal about it. He knew, for instance, how rare it was for him to get some of it
alone with his father, and he knew how much of it he would need to pick a small bone with him. That was why, without another word, he opened the passenger door of the car and got in.

 

Hazel loved having the old kitchen to herself. She decided she needed a cup of tea before she did anything else, and while she waited for the kettle to boil, she sat in the elderly horsehair armchair beside the stove and enjoyed the solitary moment.

She had been through a rough time. The affair with Desmond had come to an early conclusion, and it had knocked her confidence badly. Although her friends had been sympathetic, there was a strong underlying current along the lines of “I told you so” running through their condolences. Desmond was one of those guys. “A bit of a lad” was what some people called him, though Hazel used other, less diplomatic terms. He was always stringing girls along, and Hazel had been embarrassed to discover that if all of Desmond's ex-girlfriends had been gathered together in one place, they could have filled a double-decker bus.

She hadn't told her parents, but it was during her depression following the breakup that she had agreed
to play her part in J.J.'s plan. She didn't want to go clubbing and see Desmond chatting up her successors, and although she didn't tell her friends the reason, she had a ready-made excuse for going around wearing bulky sweaters and a long face. And when she came back from Dublin, having apparently had a baby, people could draw their own conclusions about who its father was. That would be up to them. She was saying nothing, not now and not ever.

She wasn't exactly happy about it, but she could see that this wild scheme of her father's had its advantages. He was treating her like royalty, for one thing, and she was looking forward to going to Dublin and being spoiled by her grandparents, Helen and Ciaran. Best of all, she was getting an extra fortnight off school. Term didn't finish for her class until the end of May, but her mother had written a letter, deliberately ambiguous, saying that Hazel needed the last two weeks off “for health reasons.” She was between her junior and leaving cert years, so nothing was to be lost by missing a few end-of-term lessons.

The kettle boiled, and she got up to make the tea. A brief cloud of anxiety crossed her mind when she thought about what she would have to face when she came home again in August, but she decided to
ignore it. Tomorrow she would be on the Dublin train, and she just couldn't wait.

 

“Dad?” said Donal to J.J. as they drove toward the village.

“Hmm?” said J.J.

Donal waited, watching the passing hedgerows, which were flush with the shining green of early summer. This waiting was a deliberate ploy. He knew how good adults were at pretending to listen when in fact their minds were working away furiously at something entirely different.

“What is it?” J.J. said at last.

Confident that he now had his father's attention, Donal said, “When are you going to get the chopper for Mikey?”

“When am I what?”

“To take him up the mountain. You said you would.” J.J. slowed to negotiate an oncoming tractor on the narrow road. “No, I didn't,” he said.

“You did. He said he wanted to go up to the beacon, and you said the only way he'd get up there was in a chopper, and you said—”

“I was only messing, Donal,” said J.J. “Where would I get a chopper?”

Donal looked out of the window again. They were nearer the village now, and there were new houses every few meters, some of them only half built. There was nowhere comfortable for him to rest his eyes.

“Well,” he said at last, “you'd better tell him you were only messing. He thinks you meant it.”

J.J. slowed again, for a van this time. He wondered how his family had come to be so bizarre. He had a daughter at home pretending to be pregnant, a son in his car expecting him to produce a helicopter, and weirdest of all—He tried to steer his mind away from Jenny and the thing, possibly a goat but probably not, that she appeared to have befriended.

It took his mind cleanly away from Mikey and the chopper. It was far more important to get to the bottom of that.

When J.J. got home, Jenny was in the armchair in the kitchen, and as far as he could see, she hadn't brought her big white friend with her. He would have liked to ask her about it, but she was engaged in an occupation that was of such value to himself and the rest of the family that he was reluctant to divert her attention. She was reading a book to Aidan.

The effect that Jenny had upon the toddler was remarkable. Unless he was exhausted or hurt, he would never sit on anybody's knee except Jenny's. He was always far too busy storming around the place and looking for things that weren't broken yet. His parents were allowed to read him a story at bedtime, but at any other time of day that privilege was reserved for Jenny. It always amazed J.J. to see the transformation that
came over him at those times. His square-shouldered posture and his firmly set jaw would relax as he settled back against Jenny's skinny frame, and a kind of blissful calm would come over his features.

J.J. moved carefully around the kitchen, making himself as small and as quiet as possible. He cleared away the dirty plates and washed the saucepan that the beans had been in. Then he started to chop onions. Jenny read on. J.J. risked a glance in her direction and saw that she was still, at the age of eleven, pointing to each word as she read it. She had a reading age of about seven, the teacher said, but to J.J. and Aisling it had been a cause for celebration because it had looked for years as though Jenny would never learn to read at all. She wasn't stupid by any means, and she wasn't lazy. She simply wasn't interested. School was an ordeal for her, a torment to be endured on those days when she didn't succeed in escaping to the hills. It was a bit of an ordeal as well for her teachers, who found it practically impossible to get her to concentrate on anything and who couldn't let her out of their sight for a moment in case she slipped out and made her way home. From her third year in school she had been under the supervision of a remedial teacher, but it had been a long time before Jenny had made any progress.
It was only recently that she had begun to enjoy reading, and she particularly enjoyed reading to Aidan.

J.J. fried onions and added minced beef. Jenny came to the end of the book, and Aidan said: “Again! Again!”

They were reading a picture book called
I Am I
, which Aidan insisted on taking out of the library time after time. It was about two boys engaged in a struggle for power. Jenny loved the pictures, especially the one of the dragon, but she didn't really understand what it was about. It was more of that feeling stuff, about wanting and fighting. She suspected, though she couldn't be sure, that little Aidan, who wasn't yet three, already understood it far better than she did.