John Lenahan - Prince of Hazel and Oak

‘Why?’

‘I have known Essa a long time, my friend – she is not the forgiving type.’

Mom apparently had administered first aid and chewed out Essa for trying to take my head off. You know how she gets when someone attacks her little bear cub. She also had given me some sort of meds that knocked me out for the whole night – so I was surprised when sunshine blinded me as I opened the door. Morning in the Hazellands was a busy place. Imps and Leprechauns were clearing away rubble and rebuilding walls, while others were drilling or practising archery with Spideog.

I’ve started to realise that Araf only gets chatty when he is nervous or really happy. This morning he was still euphoric about his time with his fellow farmer Imps in the Field, so I pretended to be interested and asked him about his day digging in dirt. That kept him talking until we got our food and found a quiet table in the canteen.

‘So who is he?’

‘Who?’

‘You know who, the Banshee who is engaged to Essa.’

‘He is Turlow,’ Araf ht="0%"›

‘So who is he then?’

‘He’s Turlow.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘He is The Turlow?’

‘Araf, it doesn’t matter how many different articles you use before saying Turlow, it doesn’t explain anything.’

‘Have you never heard the story about Eriu and her sisters?’

A spark flickered in my deep memory. Dad told me something about this when we were in the Rowan forest but there was so much going on and so much to remember. ‘Remind me.’

Araf sighed like I was a schoolboy who hadn’t done his homework. ‘Eriu was the first. She discovered The Land. She either found or created the first oak and maybe did the same for the Leprechauns. Then she sent for her two sisters Banbha and Fodla. Fodla,’ Araf said as he touched his forehead in a semi-religious gesture, ‘created or found the Imps and the Orchardlands.’

‘What does this have to do with The Turlow?’

‘Banbha was different from her sisters – darker. She created or, depending on what you believe, found the Yewlands. Then she travelled to the Otherworld, killed the Banshee King and convinced his son, Turlow, to come with her to defend Tir na Nog’s shores. That is how the Banshees came to The Land.’

‘Are you saying that this guy is that Turlow?’

‘No, Turlow is the name passed down from father to son. This Turlow is said to be the direct descendant of the original Turlow. He is The Turlow. It is his name and his title.’

‘So am I supposed to be impressed?’

‘It is very impressive.’

‘Did you hear him keep calling Essa “Princess”?’

‘Essa is a princess,’ Araf said, looking confused.

‘Yeah, but it’s the way he said it. And now that I think of it, he called me a Faerie.’

A little buzz started on the other side of the room which caused me to turn. Mom and Dahy had just entered and were making a beeline to our table.

Araf stood, so I did too. Mom gave me a hug and asked after my head.

‘I’m fine thanks.’

‘Are you sure?’ She held my face in both of her hands and looked deep into my eyes.

‘I’m sure, Mom.’

‘Good, because we have work to do.’

The next couple of days were exhausting. The Land is a magnificent and beautiful place but it is seldom restful. I spent my time equally between rebuilding walls, training new recruits in sword-fighting and, most taxing of all, deciphering and filing old manuscripts, read with Mom’s magic paperclip.

There were only two of Mom’s amber reader thingies, so ten of us rotated in twenty-four-hour shifts. It meant that I did four hours reading every twenty hours, resulting in my stint getting four hours later every day. My first couple of shifts were mostly spent trying to get my written Gaelic back up to speed. Dad had made me learn how to read, write and conjugate ancient Gaelic but it wasn’t the language I read my comic books in and the stuff I was reading could hardly be called page-turners. My first thrilling manuscript was a contract and shipping manifest between the Elves and the Vinelands. It took me all of the four hours to figure out that it was a barter agreement where the Elves would provide wood for barrels and Fingal (who was Essa’s grandfather) would pay in wine. From the amount of wine it seemed to me that the timber industry is a pretty lucrative business. I guess it’s hard work when you have to ask permission from the trees if you want to cut them down. I had an image of an elf kneeling in front of a tree with an axe, saying, ‘Please, I’m desperate for a drink?’

When I finally figured out that the piece of parchment I was studying didn’t contain anything that would help us with Dad’s condition I would place it in an envelope and label it so that in the future it could be transcribed into a new book. Not a job I will be volunteering for.

It wasn’t just the grammar that was proving taxing but the actual reading of a manuscript required immense concentration. The paperclip thingy sensed the page you were looking at as long as you were focused, but if you were reading, say, a scintillating essay on seed germination and you happened to let your mind wander, the page you were reading would fade into all of the other pages in the book, producing thousands of words on one page. Since there was no way to find your way back to the page you were reading, you would have to go back to the beginning.

After my first session I staggered back to my tent and blissfully closed the eyes that I had been afraid to even blink for the last four hours. Not even the blinding headache could keep me from falling asleep, but I didn’t nap long. Dahy woke me and, despite my protests, dragged me out to the training fields and put me in charge of teaching sword-fighting to a group of helpless recruits. As soon as the old man was out of sight I told my charges to take the rest of the day off and I crawled back to bed. The next day Dahy warned me that if I did that again I would be cleaning latrines and I had a suspicion that he meant it.

My second reading session started promisingly enough when I found what I thought was going to be an interesting essay on banta stick manufacture. After I don’t know how many pages, I figured out it could have easily been condensed to this one sentence without losing anything: ‘Get some good wood and make a stick out of it.’ By the end, my head hurt worse than when Essa hit me with one of those sticks.

I periodically saw Essa but we didn’t speak to one another. I was desperate for some alone time with her but I was so busy, and when I wasn’t busy, I was exhausted. When I did see her she was always with The Turlow. The closest I got was an uncomfortable lunch where the royal couple sat behind me at a table just within hearing distance. I couldn’t make out much but every time I heard him say ‘Princess’ I felt like returning my lunch back onto my plate.

After about a week’s worth of reading sessions I was starting to believe that 99 per cent of the books that were in the old library were about farming. I ploughed through endless manuscripts explaining crop rotation, plough manufacture, planting timetables and even one about delineating soil types by taste. I filed that under the heading of ‘Eating Dirt’. I got mildly excited when I found a scrap entitled ‘Leprechaun Genealogy’ but it was literally just a list of names. I filed that as ‘A Short History of Short People’.

I started screening my reading material so as to keep my sanity. I’m sure Araf would find a paper on ‘Planting Row Orientation According to Crop and Season’ fascinating but it just made me want to hold my breath and bang my head against the floor. When no one was looking I scanned my new manuscripts for key terms. I’d clip the reader on a sliver of paper and if I saw any words like: seed, or soil, or yield, I would slip the piece under the bottom of the pile. I prayed to the gods that I wouldn’t still be doing this by the time we got down to that fragment again.