Tirnahiolaire

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"...a showcase for Green’s bone-dry satire and deadpan humour...Green’s agile imagination constantly wrong-foots the reader. A delight."

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Tirnahiolaire

published by

Dominic Green

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2012 Dominic Green

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Table of Contents

I Three Brothers

II The Arrival of the Thing

III Something in the Trees

IV. The Unhanged Man

V. A Great Deal of Moving About in the Dark

VI. Aneliz

VII. The Halfway House

VIII. The Royal Demesne

IX. Lug

X. Pest Control

XI. The Domestic Spirit

XII. The Trees of Steel

XIII. Heresy

XIV. Rollo

XV. The Nature of Magic

XVI. The Right Hand of the King

XVII. Serpents Underfoot

XVIII. In the Pit

XIX. Preparations for War

XX. The Presence of His Majesty

XXI. Niall On Trial

XXII. Homecoming

Appendix 1 - Scatoglossus' Grand Periodic Table

I: THREE BROTHERS

There were three brothers, living in a house in Ballachan Bochda.

This house, like most houses in Ballachan Bochda, was small and low and mean and poorly-lit. Uncharitable people might have called it a hovel. But the language spoken by the people of Ballachan Bochda had, according to commentators on the primitive tongues, only one word for 'House', and that word meant house, hovel, cottage, lodge, villa, manor, mansion, manse, dwelling and domicile, all in one syllable, taigh. Taigh meant any unfortified dwelling made of stone, and to a Ballachan Bochder, only the black-haired henkilot peoples of the plains, who were widely reputed to eat dogs and show their bottoms to strangers, did not live in taighs. The language of Ballachan Bochda was in many other respects quite erudite, possessing over fifteen different synonyms for 'turnip', and one hundred and twenty five words for describing pigs; but the District Baron's mansion at Ballachan Briste was a taigh mòr, a Big House, whilst On's temple in Hyrex to the south was a taigh naomh, a Holy House. But all were, quite definitely, Houses.

The houses in Ballachan Bochda were described by people from the villages that surrounded it as 'Small Houses'. The smallness of Ballachan Bochda’s houses was caused by the shortage of trees in the windswept highland district Ballachan Bochda was situated in, the Daradaoinetachd, which was named after its people, the Daradaoine. The small size of the local houses was also influenced by a shortage of stone caused by an Daradaoine practice called Divisioning. Daradaoine families were large, and when the father of the household died, the family pig and turnip field would be divided between his sons according to his wishes. It was a common Daradaoine practice for the sons to build sturdy stone walls across the division to stake out their territories immediately. Unfortunately, over many hundreds of years of settlement, the number of Divisions had grown so large that cottages now nestled in fields no larger than a Ballachan Briste back yard, and the demand for stone for use in Dividing walls had drastically reduced the possible height of cottages - so much so that the Ballachannan dialect contains a verb 'cóigdeugar', meaning 'to bump one's head on the roof-tree for the fifteenth time'.

In any case; there were three brothers, and they lived in a house in Ballachan Bochda.

Iain, the eldest, was a sturdy, brown-haired neighbourhood-pig-wrestling-champion of a boy, so tall that his mother was teased by the local midwives for having had an alleged affaire de coeur with one of those invading giants who were known to the local Ballachannans as Ceannfodar. Liam, the middle brother, was a slim, pale, dark-haired boy, who looked like no-one else in the village. Predictably, Liam’s appearance led to his mother being talked about for having gone with a Henkilot. Niall, meanwhile, was the youngest, and so perfectly looked like what a Ballachanner should - short, swarthy, and indestructible even when dropped from a great height - that the midwives were at a loss to employ their unique brand of humour with respect to him, and contented themselves with gathering round in circles whenever the mother passed and muttering that the child would never prosper.

This worried the child's mother. Many things did, poor thing, for she was cursed with a husband who seemed to be given to drink and the casting of dice. Certainly, he was never in the house at any hour. Furthermore, despite the fact that the man got a great deal of practice in casting dice, he never seemed to get any better at it. He had been the youngest brother of thirteen, and so the family smallholding only amounted to a narrow yard about their cottage, uncultivable due to the height and sturdiness of the Dividing wall that his other twelve brothers had built around it, which prevented sunlight from reaching the family turnips.

The only family possession of any value was a Ballachan Briste Large Pink boar named Rollo II. In some parts of Hafocynedom, naming a farmyard beast after the current reigning monarch would have been considered high treason and grounds for slow hanging, but in Ballachan Bochda, attitudes were more relaxed; pigs were animals of high value to the Daradaoine, and to share names with such an imposing animal as Rollo II was considered a great honour for His Majesty. Rollo II (that is, the four-legged Rollo II) was a major source of income for the family, and the fees for his amorous encounters with the breed sows of the owners of neighbouring Divisions went towards paying off much of the family's steadily accumulating debts and the father of the household's losses in games of chance.

To augment Rollo's feeble earnings, the brothers' mother took in darning and spinning work for wealthy sole inheritors of undivided estates, and Liam and Iain, the two eldest brothers, also worked as hired men for their neighbours in the time-honoured local industries of turnip harvesting, peat cutting, and Division-building. But all three brothers regarded with trepidation the day when their father's ill and drink-despoiled health would fail, and the tiny yard would be divided in three between themselves.

II: THE ARRIVAL OF THE THING

The Thing timed its arrival with aplomb. Coinn MacCoinneach, the father of the house, had managed to lose the entire Quarterly Land and Pig Tax fund, which was payable to the crown on the fourteenth of every third month, on a game of hazard concerning the celebrated White and Black Pig of Aonghas the Unethical. Aonghas, a notorious dice-sharp and cheat, had acquired from some undisclosed source a pig white on one side, black on the other. This he would tether in the centre of a crossroads, with its white side on to the direction of an approaching traveller, and, after luring the traveller into a trivial dice game and stupefying him with drink, would himself feign drunkenness and lay long odds on the pig being black on the opposite side.

Coinn now sat, head in hands, moaning drink-addled complaints such as Snot Fair! and But It Was White! to his wife as she sat and rent her garments whilst anointing herself with dirt and calling upon the nine hundred gods to provide her with the wherewithal to pay the Royal Reeve on his next tax inspection, already long overdue. In times of crisis, the Daradaoine were prone to reverting to their primitive pantheistic beliefs, and forgetting those of the invading Ceannfodar.

***

The Reeve was himself a Ceannfodar - all officers of the State were - and he thoroughly disliked his position. He had been too short to become a Captain of Cavalry, and had instead accepted this assignment to a forlorn outpost of Hafocynedom up in the foothills of the Isikels Inverts, where the inhabitants had not even attempted to integrate into the society of their conquerors. The word the Reeve used for the inhabitants was not Daradaoine, the name they gave themselves. Instead, he favoured hoyploy, a more insulting term from his own language. To the Reeve, hoyploy were squat, stocky, dirt-haired, brown-skinned and seemed to spring directly from the ground itself.

The Reeve felt a certain horrible admiration for these short, unsightly creatures. The Land, Turnip and Pig Tax of King Odo the Implacable had been intended to wipe them from the face of Hafocynedom; it struck at the most basic sources of their livelihoods and turned prosperity to hunger. And yet, they were still here, scratching out a living from the heavy peat soil. Had they turned their Divisioning zeal to building fortifications to keep their villages safe, he thought grimly, the conquest of the Kingdom might not have been accomplished with such facility so many centuries ago. He did not, however, let admiration interfere with social etiquette, and employed a native assistant to actually handle and weigh the coinage which other natives had held in their sweaty spadelike paws.

Ballachan Bochda was called Waepsnaest - the Wasps' Nest - in the language of the Ceannfodar. It was built of a grey and powdery stone, like wasp wattle, and housed teeming masses of the tiny but fierce hoyploy who had once had a king of their own and ruled this country from the straits in the south to the land in the north where the sun never set; like wasps and hornets, the insides of their settlements were mazes of boundary walls constantly changing in configuration. Hoyploy did not build highways, only meandering alleys picking a route through ever-mutating field systems. Confined to a triangle of arable land where river clay had covered the normally unfarmable waterlogged soil of the district, Waepsnaest could grow in population, but not in area. When a family was prosperous, none of its children survived; having many heirs reduced the available land to be doled out to each heir, and made the family destitute in turn. In this way, Waepsnaest controlled its own population. The Reeve had seen the figures. In the past seven hundred years, the number of registered taxable inhabitants of Waepsnaest had not varied by so much as a hundred souls - if, of course, the Reeve reflected, the hoyploy had souls, which was a matter of some theological dispute. When a man died without descendants, his nearest relatives were found and the land given out to them; in practice, this meant that the courts in Brocenburg were filled with screeching relatives brandishing scrolls of lineage. Thank heaven, today's collection was not the annual Death Duties, which needed a company of horse to keep the peace between warring factions.

He thought this as his Angustian horse, standing the height of a man at the shoulder, picked its way through the meltwater stream towards the settlement. The horse was the key to the conquest and subjugation of the hoyploy, he knew. The hoyploy could not ride them, could not train them, could not breed them. They did not understand horses, except as food.

The Reeve, as has been said before, was a Ceannfodar. He might have been, in his own estimation, tall, fine-boned, handsome, fair of face. In the hoyploy estimation, he would have been lanky, unsuited to the climate and in need of a bit of colour. And if hoyploy did not understand horses, a hoyploy would argue that it was equally true that Ceannfodardid not understand pigs. Pigs, to the limited barbarian minds of the Ceannfodar, were mobile lard farms for producing edible fat and protein out of turnips. But to a hoyploy, a well-trained, intelligent pig was much more. It was a guard pig, a boundless dispenser of useful garden fertilizer, a bottomless repository of domestic waste, a skilled and discriminating wild truffle locator, and a trustworthy and fearless companion.

It was in the latter two categories that Rollo II was being employed by Iain, eldest of the three brothers, high on the brown hills that rose above the settlement like a rumpled carpet.

I wish I were an only son, Rollo, he said, as Rollo cast his snout about professionally, like a general feeling out his enemy. The people of Ballachan Bochda laughed at men who praised the powers of the bloodhounds of the Doggasvamm marshes to hunt down outlaws, for only a pig could smell out its quarry under three feet of solid earth.

Of course, I wish Liam and Niall were only sons as well. Not dead or never born or anything. But what will my family live on when I marry? If I marry. Girls go for men with land and pigs and turnips, Rollo. I'm going to be of age before any of my brothers, and if I spend all my life keeping my brothers out of trouble and just plain keeping my father, bless him, what girl's going to welcome me over her threshold?

Rollo answered Iain with a low snort and set to work homing on subterranean truffles with his own peculiar grunt-related variety of sonar. The two companions, pig and boy, walked outside the great white steaming sprawl of continually-rearranged masonry that was Ballachan Bochda, over the half-solid, half-liquid soil that surrounded the settlement on all sides. Water would not sink into the soil, but stayed in the upper layers, almost but not quite as cold as ice, late into the autumn and well into the spring, allowing a misplaced foot to be both soaked and frozen simultaneously. Only in summer or winter, when the soil froze or dried hard, was it warm and dry to walk about up here; for as any traveller knows, it is not the cold that eats into the bone, but the wet.

A stand of scraggy pines reared their heads from the muck up here, and small children were gathering shelf-fungus from their bases. Otherwise, all around, the landscape reared and swelled treeless, like a great brown sea, right out to the huge blue ground-swell of the Eastern and Western Ranges - more distant than an eagle could fly between sundown and sunset, it was said - that hemmed in the world. Somewhere up there high in the Western Range, so the old men said, lived the Hafocyning. The King of all this country, the largest country in the world, Tirnahiolaire. Or Hafocynedom, as the Ceannfodar called it.

Bet he hasn't got any sisters or brothers, Iain concluded. No, he'd be Singleton all the way. That's how he came to be King, I expect.

He bent down to pull his pig away from a patch of wild carrots.

"Ah well. There's one thing to be thankful for. I only have to be dragged down by them, but I don't have to actually be them. I mean - his face tried to break into a smile, but found it difficult - what girl's going to go for a black-haired, green-eyed freak and his thimble-sized brother?"

And as he followed the pig along, his thoughts turned more to sympathy for his unfortunate brothers than to his own predicament.

Whilst Iain's thoughts were elsewhere, meanwhile, Rollo's nose had risen from the ground and the pursuit of truffles to smell the air. He knew the scent of horse, and the garlic scent of Ceannfodar. When Ceannfodar came to the settlement, the fatted pig was always the first to suffer, slaughtered as an offering to the big, blond-haired man-gods who walked, not like men, but as single two-headed creatures sprouting from strange four-hoofed bodies.

Rollo signified his displeasure with a low grunt, aiming his body at the incoming Ceannfodar like a pointer. Iain, mystified at first, bent and squinted down the line of the pig, then spied the Reeve and his two Ceannfodar guardsmen and one native lackey crossing the ford on the path down into the settlement.

Iain gulped and cursed in a way that his mother would never have allowed him to, then took up his truffle-trowel and scuttled off in the direction of the grey walls.

Now we must return to the Thing. Still high, high in the air it was, soaring above the earth, but beginning to slow and to descend. Iain was unaware of this as he pelted down the back lane towards the family house, arrested himself with one hand on the crumbling doorpost and skidded down into the low subterranean space that formed the main (and only) room of the MacCoinneach home. As ceiling heights decreased in Ballachan Bochda, families compensated resourcefully by digging the floors down into the foundations and strewing the floors with rushes to absorb the inevitable damp.

The MacCoinneach floor was ankle-deep in rushes.

Ceannfodar! Iain shouted. Mother -!

The remainder of his sentence was unheard, for at that point the Thing made its entrance through the ceiling with a BANG like wind and thunder breaking, and the roof disintegrated and filled the air with straw and small insect civilizations dislodged from the thatch overhead.

Wet rushes splattered round the room, covering the family in strips of wet water leaf like a tribe of mermaids. There was much coughing, and Iain's family eventually came back into view through clouds of settling dust and worse-than-dust. Nobody was hurt. Everything was as it had been before, except for a temporary lack of ceiling, and one central feature of the room which had not been there before.

A large black sphere, about the size of a cat’s head, sat untouched in the centre of the forest of uprooted floor-rushes. A sphere with a pitted and uneven surface. Steam hissed from the floor around it. There was a strong smell of what, if Iain had been a Natural Philosopher, he might have recognized as sulphur, but was instead recognized by the family as something very different.

"Niall MacCoinneach - what have you been eating", said his mother - which, considering the degree of variation in the local diet, was a redundant question.

But Niall was already on his hands and knees, examining the spherical object from the sky. Experimentally, he touched it with a finger. Though it was the colour of a cold coal, it was as hot as a burning one. Ow! he said.

Listen to your mother when she asks what you've been eating, said Father MacCoinneach, suddenly on form again, coming out of his drunkenness with surprising speed.

What is it? said Liam.

It's a Falling Star, said Niall, speaking with divine authority. No doubt about it.

Why ain't it shining? said Liam.

But it is not shining, said Niall, still with divine authority despite the fact that he had clearly changed his mind. In which case, it is a thunderbolt, forged by Lug, who forges the lightning, in his forge. This, brother, is why it made a noise like thunder.

Ah, said Liam. Now I understand.

Iain, meanwhile, was wide-eyed, staring at the spheroid, lips attempting to frame the words, Listen to me, you idiots. The Ceannfodar Reeves are coming. Shortly we will all be sold into indenture, and our cottage burned. Failing that, he tried to communicate the same sentiment through elaborate gestures. But gestures were of little use to him, since there was nothing in the house that he could point to to convey the meaning Ceannfodar with two dirty great guard captains. When, abruptly, something he could point to did actually turn up, standing in the doorway taller than the tallest Daradaoine, armoured skin glittering and clanking like money, it was too late. Looking at the Ceannfodar soldiers’ armour, Iain supposed they didn’t take the tax they collected away in bags and coffers, like a Daradaoine would. Instead, they probably just absorbed it into their glistering bodies and rode away.

Two such bodies stood in the doorway, huge and shining with Ceannfodar steel.

The mother of the house prostrated herself in the rushes. Liam and Niall, being already prostrate in the rushes, looked up. Their father, whose nervous system didn’t seem to be up to prostration right now, coiled into a small ball and moaned softly.

A shorter, darker-haired figure walked forward between the two man-mountains, and attempted with stumpy dignity to bang a spiral-striped staff bearing the three bezants of the Chancellerie on the mushy and unbangable floor.

IF IT IS THE WILL OF ON, THE RIGHTFUL ROYAL REEVE OF THE HAFOCYNING ENTERS THIS HOUSE TO REDEEM TITHES DUE TO THE ROYAL CROWN. SUBJECT COINNEACH MACCOINNEACH WILL PLEASE COME FORWARD?

The Reeve sat outside, looking down at the small brown scurrying world of the natives all around him. He wished it were not necessary to put the task of communication with the creatures into the hands of one of their own kind, but their language was harsh and contained sounds that, scholars concurred, a civilized larynx was incapable of producing. Also, it was unthinkable to learn it, for to learn it would involve being close enough to the creatures for their breath to be inhaled.

The very thought turned the Reeve's stomach. He turned his horse about, to face the other way.

Subject MacCoinneach. Do you have due tithes to present to the Reeve?

Coinn's mind attempted frantically to claw its way out of its ale cask.

It was white, he yelped.

The short hoyploy signalled with a rap of his stick on the (more solid) doorpost that the taxes had not been paid, and the Reeve nodded to his two guardsmen. Coinn stared as the two huge metal men walked stiffly about the room, half-heartedly poking into the mulch with the butts of their horselances.

The Reeve peered into the room from off his horse. This family were indeed poorer than most. They appeared not to be able to afford a ceiling, and seemed to have taken to wearing rushes. Perhaps - the thought whispered in his ear like a flatterer - this was some native religious ceremony of the sort forbidden by the Church. But there were no images, no wicker men filled with combustible infants. There was, however, one curious discrepancy. A spherical discrepancy. A discrepancy that smoked and steamed and smelled like an alchemist's underwear.

What is that? the Reeve exclaimed in Ceannfodar to his native mongrel, pointing at the Thing.

The mongrel passed the question on to the family.

Niall stepped up with a face of grave authority, and Iain and Liam groaned.

Please sir. We believe it may be a thunderbolt -

The mongrel clouted Niall squarely on the crown with his spiral-striped stick.

Don't talk rubbish to me, boy. It's the most docile thunderbolt I've ever seen.

The Reeve, however, seemed more disposed to listen, and quieted his mongrel with a sentence in his odd language, which seemed to involve sticking one's tongue out every third word.

Translate faithfully what the boy is saying.

So, grudgingly, the mongrel allowed Niall to say his piece.

I believe it is a thunderbolt, sir. Our great god is said to forge the lightning high up in the Ballachan an t-Saoghail. He is also said to roll great stones around the sky to make the sound of thunder. As this great stone is made of metal, and therefore forged, and as it came down on us from the sky, I can only suppose us to be miserable sinners worthy of Holy Retribution.

These sentences reached the ear of the Reeve, via the ear and mouth of the mongrel, thus:

"One of their native superstitions, lord, is that lightning is made by the, ahem, great god On, high up in the Isikels Inverts, in the form of metal balls which he rolls about the sky. Their house has been recently demolished by such a lightning bolt, so they believe." The mongrel kicked the metal ball in disdainful disbelief.

The Reeve, like many men, had never seen the aftermath of a lightning strike. The theory seemed quite reasonable to him, except for one minor point.

Why, then, does it have the Royal arms emblazoned on one side?

The mongrel looked down. His eyes widened like hatching eggs. He bent and polished the smooth surface of the Thing with a grimy cuff, soiling it further by so doing. But the Reeve had now dismounted from his horse and stepped down between his guardsmen, removing one fist from its velvet glove and brushing away dirt from the pitted surface.

There, embossed into the surface of the still-warm metal - for it was, unmistakably, metal - was the figure of a bird of prey, sprawled on its back like a butterfly impaled upon a pin; the arms of the Hafocyning. And beneath that, an inscription in the language of the Old People. Church writing. Scholars' writing.

The Reeve suspected from the way in which the mongrel, the two Guard Constables and the entire family of peasants were clustering about him that he was the only person present who could read. Obligingly, he read aloud.

Please Return to Grand Wizard Suleiman Ibn Bint, Thaumaturge Royal, Initiate of the Temple Beyond the Abyss and Repository of Dark Things Man Was Not Meant to Know, Draconis Volvendum, Hafocynedom. Deposit Payable On Return.

Draconis Volvendum? The older guard captain scratched his head through his helmet - a task that took considerable skill. That's what the priests call Wyrmgyr, sir. The new Royal Domicile.

The Reeve nodded, and looked about him. Although the Thing puzzled him, he welcomed its arrival. The structure of the cottage looked too rotten to be easily combustible; even so, by this time, a crowd of ill-washed aboriginal humanity was gathering about it, no doubt expecting a roaring fire on which to warm their clammy palms.

Gradually, the Reeve interpreted events in a manner that suited his purpose. A wide, calculating grin spread across his features like dripping on a doorstep. He snapped his fingers, as if commanding a dog.

Translate, creature. And make sure all the hoyploy hear.

The halfbreed stood to attention. The Reeve dragged himself up to his full height, a luxury not normally allowed him by hoyploy ceilings.

As a result of nefarious and premeditated non-payment of taxes due to your On-appointed king, His Most Vengeful Majesty (who is, indeed, one with On almighty as you rightly surmise), has seen fit to strike you down with thunder. However! - Here the Reeve held up a finger - "His Most Merciful Majesty has spared your miserable lives and given you a chance to repay your debt to society. You are, according to this inscription, to transport this - this divine thunderbolt - back to its point of origin, whereupon His Majesty undertakes to render back payment for this service of two years' Land, Turnip and Pig Tax. Do I make myself clear?"

The faces of the five native occupants dropped, heavy as tithe dodgers into vats of heated oil. The story might even, the Reeve flattered himself, prove more effective than heated oil in deterring tithe dodging in future. The faces of the hoyploy outside were no less awe-stricken. It was plain that the Reeve had the audience in the palm of his mailed gauntlet. But he had not yet finished.

Let this be an example to all persistent evaders of the requirements of His Majesty. His Majesty’s wrath may strike at any time; and He will give no warning, just as the impious provide Him with no warning when they jealously withhold from him the taxes he requires to defend and police the kingdom. The Reeve spoke with a face of solemn venom, eyes burning out across the crowd and finding no eyes willing to lock gazes with his own. They all owed taxes. And unusually, today, they were all afraid.

The Reeve had no further problems filling his bags with native silver all around the houses.

***

Sir, the senior Guard Constable said as they left, winding up the unpaved trail across the mangy moorland grass-tussocks.

Yes?

Sir...is it true?

This irritated the Reeve. Is what true?

That our King can call down thunder on the ungodly.

The Reeve paused and mused. It may well be, Constable. It may well be. Who can say? The Hafocyning is a mighty force, and his hand is everywhere. But, even if he were not intentionally responsible for the destruction of that peasant's hovel, we have managed to cobble some good out of it. Those poor simpletons back there now truly believe themselves to have been struck at at a range of over one hundred miles by the wrath of the Hafocyning.

And they weren't? Sir? The Guard Constable's brows knit tight in a frantic effort to understand.

The Reeve was dubious. The Hafocyning is everywhere, Constable; but I doubt very much that, even were it possible for him to hurl thunderbolts from high places, he would concern himself personally with the affairs of Waepsnaest peasants. No, I thnk that, if this was a coordinated act at all, it proceeded from the hand of a very minor official.

There. That's got him thinking. The Reeve, who was himself a Very Minor Official, gloated silently and soldiered on ahead as the Guard Constable's face fell, probably into introspective fear for the paltry amount of tithing he had himself neglected. Let them fear the great king Rollo. Let them fear.

The the Constable piped up again.

Sir?

What is it now?

If His Majesty can do that, sir, why doesn't he do it to Locianleas the bandit?

The Reeve was unflustered. Because the lower on his belly a man crawls, the less likely he is to be struck by lightning, Constable.

But the natives hold this Locianleas in great esteem, sir. There's talk that he's their king.

These people never had kings, Constable. Robber chieftains, wizard priests, yes. But kings are appointed by On. Do you deny this?

The Guard Constable swallowed. "I'm sure I only meant a king among them, sir. A king appointed not by On, but by the Enemy of Man. He grew adventurous in his rambling. After all, sir, what creature but comes from the Inimicus can have no face?"

The Reeve giddied his horse up to the front of the party, where he presented the first and foremost target for such as Locianleas; but no longer having to talk to the Guard Constable made the risk worthwhile.

III: SOMETHING IN THE TREES

Numerous members of the MacMungo family had gathered round the MacCoinneach household after the Royal Reeve's departure. The head of the MacMungo household had over twenty-seven children from three successive wives, and as a result, that household was the poorest in all Ballahan Bochd. The children were well known to sustain themselves on rats and beetles, and were allowed inside many of the more well-to-do establishments as pest exterminators. There, they would cast about the walls, picking out mice and spiders with their teeth and fingernails. When they came of age, meanwhile, the girls of the MacMungo clan were reputed to earn food for the family in a different way.

Also present, and sitting blond as new-mown hay on the top of a Division wall drumming his leather-shod feet against it, was Singleton, only child of an only child of an only child, and thus the richest inheritor in the settlement. The Singletons were universally abhorred for having taken a Ceannfodar name. They even claimed Ceannfodar ancestry; it was whispered that they were little better than the MacMungos, and that the births of single children only to the family in each generation were something more than blind chance. That Singleton wives miscarried with greater frequency than was natural with folk who ate so well and healthily. That no midwife was ever present at each inevitable miscarriage. And that old Singleton kept a knife, long, well-honed, and gleaming, in one corner of his house, which no man had ever seen him use, but which they had occasionally seen him wiping clean of blood in the early hours outside the house, muttering for forgiveness from the Gods, shortly before he announced the arrival of another stillborn infant.

In any case, young Singleton was the third in line in such a dynasty, and now sat on the wall of the MacCoinneach yard, whacking his expensive heels against the masonry.

So, the Reeve finally caught up with you! he said brightly. Think yourselves lucky he didn't wall your brothers in and pile bonfires round the walls. Ha! Roast MacCoinneach! That would have been a delicacy for the MacMungos! He waved a hand around at the MacMungo infants, some of whom fixed Niall with their gaze and began to drool.

Out of here now, Iain said slowly, Or I will Divide you into the brothers you should by right have had, and feed you to the MacMungos.

The MacMungos slavered eagerly at this, and shuffled closer. The young Singleton was unmoved, however, and merely smiled beatifically at Iain. Then, like a downpour out of a cloudless sky, he suddenly burst into tears.

Papa! Papa! The hoyploy ruined my shoes, Papa!

There was a sound of movement from behind the Singleton cottage next door, and a mountain of meat clad in pigskin and wool and surmounted by a puffing, red-faced head, crowned with a rich thatch of straw-blond hair like leaves round the top of an apple, lurched out of the Singletons' gate and up to Singleton Junior. Iain knew at that moment that he had been tricked.

The young Singleton bawled and pointed at its self-damaged leather heels.

Singleton Senior’s face grew purple with financial disembarrassment. He grabbed the young Singleton's shoe in his huge fist, not caring for the fact that the rest of the Singleton came with it yelping, and held it up to Iain like a chewed slipper to a dog.

Do you realize, peasant, how much a shoe of this grandeur and haute couture costs?

Iain stood his ground before the huge, sun-eclipsing figure. He had wrestled pigs in his time, but pigs were tubular. Singleton Senior was so well-fed as to be nearly spherical; he offered no purchase for grappling. And, not for the first time in his life, Iain wished he had a father capable of sticking up for him, as Singleton had.

He scuffed them up against the wall himself, said Iain. Liam and Niall saw him.

Singleton Senior smiled and nodded his head in mock-agreement. Oh, did they? And what use is the testimony of two halfbreeds anyway?

At this, Liam nearly went for the Old Singleton like a terrier at a bull, but Iain held him back, this involving diving on him and holding him down by twisting various appendages and pummelling him for his own good.

He's too big for you, said Iain, as Liam attempted to bite through his forearm. Can't you see that's what he wants you to do?

That had, indeed, been Singleton Senior’s original intention; for now, however, he seemed content to smile and admire the chaos he had created.

Such primitive creatures, said the elder Singleton. Son; you see before you the reason why we Ceannfodar are the rulers of Hafocynedom.

At that moment, the elder Singleton's straw-blond hair parted company with his head and flew through the air like a leaping squirrel. Singleton senior rushed a hand to his scalp, feeling for golden Ceannfodar locks, finding only a bald patch sparsely scattered with the mud-brown hair of an Daradaoine.

His hair lay circling like a drowned rat in a pool of pig urine. Niall, who had taken the wig clean off Singleton's head like the top off an egg with well-placed stone, stood giggling on a coping-stone two walls away, totally inaccessible for purposes of vengeance.

The Singleton, reluctant to put on his Ceannfodar wig again, but unprepared to suffer further assaults upon his dignity, snatched the still clean wig off his son's head and placed it on his own. Ignoring the howls of his wigless offspring, he took up his own soiled toupée between finger and thumb and went his way between the buildings, head held high and face determinedly solemn amid the bitten-back laughter of his neighbours. There were no taunts or gibes, however; many of those neighbours might soon be seeking work on the Singleton estate, a high-walled field a whole twenty-five yards square.

Iain waited until Liam's face had reverted to its normal sickly pallid colour, then stood up off him, very carefully.

Do we need to go to Wyrmgyr, mother? said Niall.

I suppose someone must go. It's a Royal Command. But who'll look after Rollo if we all go? He'll be eaten by MacMungos.

At the mention of Rollo, Iain slapped his forehead, swore by a minor deity he was able to get away with in front of his mother and pelted off down the lane to retrieve his unaccompanied porker.

And who’ll look after father if mother goes, thought Iain? I can’t get father to do anything he doesn’t want, like drinking fresh water after he’s been on a drunk, for has not the Great God said, obey thy father and thy mother? And who’ll look after Iain and Niall if I go? Who’ll look after mother if mother goes? Who’ll cook the meals if mother goes -

In mid-thought and -pelt, Iain tripped over Rollo II, who was placidly returning to the homestead, having sat on his haunches sniffing the air at the city limits to make sure that the yellow-haired, two-headed creatures with metal skins had departed, and that there was no chance of a fatted pig, or fatted boar, being slaughtered.

***

When Iain and Rollo returned to the household, Coinn was arguing that he wasn't going to no Royal Demesne for nobody, and that if the King wanted to pay him for having broken his roof with rocks, the King could come to him and do it. Mother MacCoinneach, whilst standing on a chair borrowed from the family next door and repairing the roof with sticks and slates, was arguing that the change would do him good, beonna, and that he might even get a personal audience with His Majesty. Liam and Niall, meanwhile, were busy prising the Thing out of the mud and rushes with inquisitive interest.

- NOT going to no Imperial Purlieus and DONE WITH IT -

Iain's mother nodded to Iain.

Well, Iain, it looks like your father's made up his mind. Be a good lad and run off to Wyrmgyr with Liam and Niall and settle our back taxes with the King, will you?

Iain imagined this to be his mother's way of shaming his father into going himself. He knew full well, though (and took a certain male Daradaoine pride in knowing) that his father had no shame and was therefore immune to such arguments. All the same, he still blinked like a bullfrog. Wyrmgyr was a world away. What?

His mother's voice dropped. I've spent the last ten minutes telling him to go, and I think I've got him fairly well dead set against going by now. You know he can't be trusted out any further than Ballachan Briste. There's houses on the way to the Eastern Range that could swallow him up and spit him out bare naked of his soul. But I know if I send you, you'll come back..

But who'll look after Liam and Niall?

You will. They're going with you. Iain's mother looked to make sure Coinn was still stomping about the floor refusing to go anywhere near any Regal Palatinate. Moving to the hearth, she slid aside a stone and uncovered three pieces of silver, worn thin as flowers of Honesty by handling and clipping here on the outskirts of the Empire, and pressed them into his hand.

Iain's mother had been, in her youth, as strong and beautiful as a diamond; Iain even remembered his father having seemed straighter and stronger and more sober beside her. Now, like every woman of Ballachan Bochda, her eyes were lined and her hands and elbows grown tough as graters from continual scrubbing. But her eyes were still bright and hard as ever, and they could still cut straight into his soul.

You understand, Iain?

I understand, ma.

And another thing, Iain love. If Liam and Niall get a chance to prentice themselves or put themselves into service with the Ceannfodar, make sure they go. I don't want them to have to come back here. I'll wake the two of them tomorrow at dawn, when you normally go out to feed Rollo. She cast a glance at Coinn, whose rantings were slowly beginning to decelerate. He'll sleep all through tomorrow, by the look of him.

Iain was surprised. He smells of ale right enough. But I haven’t seen him touch a drop all day.

He’s been out drinking with that Aonghas again, out on the moors. They drink when they’re out on the moors. Sneak out so their wives can’t see them. You will too, one day.

I will not too, thought Iain as his mother hugged him and set to work tidying the house as though everything were normal. Over in the rush-strewn darkness, Niall and Liam were playing marbles. Niall was shooting with the family’s single glass marble, and Liam was using the Thing. Niall had tricked his elder brother into greedily choosing the Thing, which would be capable of hitting any target by simple virtue of damage radius once on the move, but which, as Niall was now pointing out, was incapable of being flicked with a single finger, as the rules demanded.

Behind Iain, under the hole in the roof, his father had already begun to drone: No son of mine’s going to toady in no Imperial Presence when I can go in his place -

***

The sun, rising in the East, had the Walls of the World, the mountains no man had ever scaled, to struggle over before it could cast an eye down on the huddled settlement of Ballachan Bochda. Another hour or so was needed before it had heaved itself high enough into the sky to peer straight down into those narrow passages closed in upon themselves like the convolutions of a tortured mind. The sun could never ooze out of a fiery horizon, like a drop of metal in a foundry, to the Ballachanners; Ballachan Bochda's morning streets and fields were at first blue and dark as coral catacombs, then almost instantaneously bright cages of dark and shadow, as if someone had lit a powderkeg in heaven.

It was during that blue, cold morning, when everything was the same colour and the air lay heavy and miasmal over the intermixed streams and bogs and middens of the settlement, that Iain was woken by the cold of the three silver pieces under his hand. They were good coins, Chancellerie ones. He could feel the outstretched wings of the Hawk That Always Watched, that saw all men from afar and drop bombs on those who had not paid their taxes, stamped into their surfaces, just as it was into the Thing. His mother must have saved long and hard to amass a secret fortune like this. Five such coins would have bought the year's taxes off the Ceannfodar Reeve.

Iain's mother was already awake and whispering to Liam and Niall. They were sitting wide-eyed listening to her as she talked in a matter-of-fact manner, as if a journey over a hundred miles to see the King were something to be undertaken every day before breakfast. At the third whispering of Wyrmgyr, however, Niall broke down and began bawling, threw himself across the chamber onto the sleeping figure of his father, and with an astonishingly hereditary vocabulary began exclaiming WON'T go to no King's Court! But his father did not wake, and merely filled the chamber with a louder drunken snoring than before. Iain knew that, when he finally did wake, his mother would have to send Iain to the midwives - no, go to the midwives herself now - for a foul-smelling concoction to relieve the drunken pains in Coinn’s belly. All at once, despite his fear of the anger of Lug, Iain hated his father - hated his stinking potions, hated his drunken snoring, hated the fact that he had been man enough to sire three sons instead of one. And he rose up from his father as the man snored like a great empty aleskin flapping in the wind, and went outside into the cold watery dawn.

Their mother had given them three dumplings of suet each, a knife, a needle and thread, a length of string, and a flask of strong spirit - ‘to be used in tending wounds’, she said severely. She had even made a form of leather pouch for carrying the Thing in, made to be slung over Iain’s shoulder. As she said goodbye, it was impossible to tell in the half-light whether she was crying, but she dabbed at her eyes with a rag, and Iain could not believe that she would do such a thing purely for effect.

Back in the darkness of the MacCoinneach demesne, Coinn still snored stentorianly.

***

Niall had refused, with bitten-lipped stubbornness, to say goodbye to his mother, though Liam had done so tearfully. Only Iain had said goodbye both to his mother and to Rollo, who had suddenly erupted over the house yard's low Division wall, resting his trotters on the copestones, and grunted the only cheery farewell of the day.

The amount of quiet organization of which Iain's mother was capable never ceased to amaze him. In between the Reeve's arrival yesterday and daybreak this morning, she had arranged with a local peddler, Ulick MacUlick of Ballachan Briste, to take them under his protection between Ballachan Bochda and the Ceannfodar town of Epelyfig at the foot of the Western Range.

Peddlers were not trusted in Ballachan Bochda. They treated with Ceannfodar, and - even worse - with the populations of other Daradaoine settlements, and they could not trace their lineage. They travelled in small, narrow ox-drawn wagons along the dirt tracks that were the only feature of the high Daradaoinetachd, and returned with news and goods from parts of the High Country a day's walk away and further. They travelled to unimaginably exotic locations like Ballachan Briste, which old Daradaoine who had lived a hundred years ago and more had made their capital for this whole province. Later on, of course, the Ceannfodar had made it theirs.

Ulick MacUlick was waiting in a small hoop-roofed wagon, covered with wolf furs to ward off canine marauders, and drawn by a collared heifer of a disposition so placid that apoplectic whipping was needed to decelerate the wagon every time it descended the steep hill into Ballachan Bochda. Ulick's own disposition was less placid. He was a tiny, red-faced little man, and the heat of his rage in chastising his ox and his son Rollo seemed to beam like a small angry sun set on his shoulders. Iain, however, had been taught by his mother that truly dangerous faces, the faces of men who would do him harm, were of a paler colour; red faces were merely angry, and could be safely ignored. Ulick's face was also known to be red with shame from the nagging of his far more dangerous wife, Beasag.

Ah. So there you are, said MacUlick. A giant, a dwarf and a black bastard with green eyes, eh? Travelling companions? More likely to break one rock over my head, another on my knees, and eat my dog into the bargain. Iain stood heavily on Liam's toe as his younger brother shifted homicidally onto his front foot. Walk up behind the caravan, and keep your distance when we pass anyone respectable.

***

Towards midday, MacUlick's caravan was lost in a heaving sea of brown. Occasional trees clawed up out of the landscape, like dead hands scrabbling out of graves, only to slump beneath the punishing wind and bend their branches back earthwards, as if the sight of what lay above discouraged them and made them yearn for the cold ground once again.

Liam meanwhile, occupied his time in conversation.

Brother.

Yes?

You know...what happened to you a while back, with things starting to grow, and your voice starting to change, and all...

Iain sighed. Fathers were supposed to do this sort of thing. Consequently, nobody had done it for Iain, and it had come as a terrible shock. Yes...

D'you think it could be happening to me?

It happens to everybody, little brother, said Iain grimly, and then added, as an afterthought, except for girls, of course.

What happens to the girls? said Liam.

Iain scratched his head. Something even worse, so I've heard, that involves bleeding and an increased propensity to bite at certain phases of the Moon.

Liam took this in. He walked awhile in silence, but Iain knew he was going to open his mouth again.

Did your voice change, and start to go all quavery?

Iain nodded. He hadn't, however noticed Liam's voice dropping deeper. If anything, the reverse was the case. It was growing more girlish and tinkly by the day.

"And things started to grow on you. And you began