David Farland - Beyond the Gate

The stranger set the brake on his wagon and greeted her. “Damn it, Maggie, you look too damned much like your mother.”

She studied him. Since he spoke so familiarly, she thought she should know him, but she’d never seen his likeness before. “I’ll thank you to speak more reverently of the departed, Mr.…?”

“Thomas Flynn. Your uncle.”

Maggie glared at him, trying to consider what to say. Her mother had been dead for three years. Her father and brothers had all drowned a year and a half before that. And in all of that time she’d not seen so much as a whisker of Thomas Flynn’s beard nor got a single message expressing his sympathy.

“That’s right,” Thomas said, “your only kin has come to call. You can close your mouth now.”

From across the street, the blacksmith cracked a huge smile that barely showed through his bushy black beard. “Will you be giving us a song, Thomas?” he called.

In answer, Thomas reached behind him and pulled out the rosewood case for his lute, stood, and shook it over his head. “I’ll give you many songs in the days to come!” he shouted, and his coat opened. Beneath it, Maggie could see a beautiful plum-colored shirt tied with a gold belt, pants that were forest green. His outfit was slightly festive, slightly dignified, and slightly absurd-as befitting a minstrel. Indeed, she realized now that he had been striving to draw a crowd by shouting for her from the streets. He was a man of wide repute, a satirist with some reputation for having a quick wit and, as they say in County Morgan, “a tongue sharp enough to slice through bones.”

Such folk were always good for songs and tales of faraway lands, mixed with a fair amount of political commentary so burning hot that you could use it to scald the hair off a pig.

Maggie said, “We’ve heard of you-even in this little backwater. Everyone knows Thomas Flynn, who goes about aping the great men of the world.”

“Aping great men? Oh, heaven forbid! I’d never ape a truly great man.” Thomas grinned, removing his hat to show a full head of close-cropped hair. “They’re too strange and fine a thing. But, now, for those who call themselves ‘great,’ but who are in fact deceivers-those men I will not spare. For through my aping I can sometimes prove that those who call themselves ‘great’ are nothing more than great apes.”

“So why have you favored us with your presence, Uncle Thomas?” Maggie said in a tone that flatly admitted she wanted to be rid of him quickly.

“Oh, it’s worried about you that I am, darlin’. Rumors. I’ve been hearing disconcerting things, Maggie. Rumor says you plan to marry a man named Gallen O’Day, even after he prayed to the devil and got your village priest murdered.”

“Och, and what would you know of it?” Maggie asked. There was far more to the story than she ever planned to tell her uncle-or to anyone else.

“I’m only repeating the tales that I’ve heard on the road,” Thomas answered, “tales everyone is telling nowadays.

“Some say that Gallen called upon the devils, unleashing them on the town, and others say that the demons came of their own accord and that Gallen struggled against them until God’s angels came to fight beside him. In the last two weeks, every person in twelve counties has worn out their jaws yapping about it.”

“Sure, and I suppose you don’t believe such stories?” Maggie challenged, unwilling to so much as venture an opinion about the recent happenings. “So you’ve come to write a song to mock the good folks of Clere-and my beau Gallen, too, I imagine.”

“Ah,” Thomas said, looking around at the folks in town. “I’ve seen no proof that the accounts are anything more than fables. Why, I just drove forty miles from Baille Sean, and I spotted nothing more menacing than an old red fox that was slinking from pine to pine, hunting partridges. If there be green-skinned demons about, I’ve had no sight of them. And as for the tales of angels or fairy folk with flaming arrows, I’ve seen no flames at all except in my own campfire. If I were called to write a song right now, I’m afraid that I’d have to damn you all as liars.”

“I’m not surprised that you saw nothing in the woods,” Maggie said. “The militia says the roads are clear.”

“And I’m not surprised that I saw nothing, neither. Little surprises me anymore. In fact, the only thing that surprises me more than the human facility for prevarication is some people’s nearly equal facility for staring a known liar in the face and believing every fantastic word he utters. That’s a fair part of why I had to come-to see if there’s any truth to this gossip about demons and angels and fairy folks in the woods.”

Maggie half closed her right eye, stared up at him. Out behind the inn, a sheep bleated. The same damned sheep she’d had penned out back for two weeks, waiting for slaughter. But since word of the goings-on in Clere had spread, no one had dared the roads, and the inn had remained empty, except for locals who came to drink and exchange theories on what had happened.

Maggie smiled faintly. “There’s some truth in those tales, Uncle Thomas. Satan himself came marching up that road not two weeks ago, parading at the head of a band of demons. And they heartlessly murdered Father Heany and John Mahoney-but those demons were never conjured by Gallen O’Day.” She watched his face for reaction. “And angels came that snowy night and drove the demons from town, and one of them fought at Gallen’s side-the angel Gabriel-that part is true.

“But now Gallen’s enemies-cutthroats and thieves all-have been telling tales on him, naming him a consort of the devil, hoping to discredit him.”

Thomas scratched behind his ear, and Maggie tried to imagine what he was thinking. Maggie knew that he wasn’t a simple man. He’d never heard a tale that featured demons walking in broad daylight, or angels fighting with magic arrows. But everyone within fifty miles swore that it happened, and the tales were stranger than any lies these unimaginative folks could conjure.

He looked about at the crowd that had gathered. “Well,” he said. “I suppose that there’s more than one song in such a tale, so I’ll have to stay a couple of days at the least. You wouldn’t mind preparing a good room for an old man, and maybe heating up a mug of rum for me to wrap my cold fingers around.”

“I’d like to see the color of your money first,” Maggie said, giving him no quarter.

Thomas raised an eyebrow, fumbled under his coat and muttered, “Och, so you’re a frugal lass, are you? Generous as a tax collector. Well, I like that in a woman, so long as she’s my niece.” Thomas pulled out a rather large purse and jingled it. Maggie could hear heavy coins-gold maybe-in that purse. Only a fool would display so much money in public, Maggie thought. So her uncle was ostentatious as well as cantankerous. And with so much of a purse, she wouldn’t be able to toss him out on the streets any time soon.

Thomas grabbed his lute and climbed down from the wagon, and Danny the stable boy was forced to suffer the indignity of tending the horse of a man who’d abused him.

Thomas stumped into the common room of the inn, looked about. The inn was built inside an ancient house-pine that had a girth of some sixty feet. The rooms rose up through three stories. Like all house-pines, over the years this one had grown a bit musty, and the walls creaked as the wind blew in the pine’s upper branches. The smell of pipe smoke and hard liquor filled the air. The windows were large and open, covered with new white curtains that Maggie had made the week before. The common room featured six small tables, and chairs set in a circle around a fireplace. A small bar separated the kitchen door from the common room. The bar had two barrels on tap-one of beer and one of rum. The ale, whiskey, and wine were stored in back this time of year.