Charles de Lint - Forests of the Heart

Hunter gave her a blank look.

“You know,” she went on. “Spirits normally tied to some specific place. A valley, a well, a grove of trees. These—the ones I’m talking about—are ones who’ve strayed too far from their normal haunts. Without that connection to their native soil, they’ve all gone a little mad—the way the angels who sided with Lucifer did when they lost their connection to heaven.”

“Okay.”

Miki gave him a sad smile. “Christ, I know how this all sounds, and I don’t half believe it myself. But that’s not the point. They believe it, and so, apparently, does Donal.”

“But what exactly is it that they believe?”

Miki sighed and took a sip of her tea. Hunter had already finished his first cup and was working on his second. Eleven o’clock on a Monday morning, they pretty much had the place to themselves. Which was probably a good thing, considering where this conversation was going.

“What don’t they believe?” Miki said. “I listened to so much of this shite when we were staying with my Uncle Fergus that all I have to do is think about it and I can hear his bloody voice ranting away in my head. God’s truth, at the time it all sounded like adolescent boys deciding what they’d do if they ruled the world. You know, take a bit of this Roman lore, some of that Druidic ritual, a dash of Wagner and Yeats, mix it all together so that it works—in your own mind at any rate. I can’t recite all the details, in all their bloody confusion, but basically it boils down to a belief system that conveniently incorporates whatever they might find appealing or useful from a number of different folk traditions. Most of it comes from sources that have their origin in folklore from the British Isles and the Continent—myths, granny tales, fairy stories—but it becomes unrecognizable in their hands.”

“Such as?”

Miki stubbed out her cigarette and lit another. “Well, this business with the Summer King, for one. It’s an old belief, the idea that the ruler of a land is directly tied into its well-being. He sows his seed in the spring, lives high and mighty through the summer as the crop grows tall and green, then comes the harvest and he’s cut down with the rest of the yield, sleeping in his grave through the winter only to rise up again the following spring. But in the hands of Fergus and his lot it comes along with all sorts of made-up garbage that, in the end, lets them simply string up some poor, daft bugger—to give them personal luck and power, forget the welfare of the land, if such things ever did work.”

“You mean they kill him?”

Miki nodded. “Which makes for a Summer Fool, rather than a King, I’d think. Of course the poor sod never knows the truth until it’s too bloody late. And you can bet there’s no rising from the dead involved either. That dumb bugger’s dead and he’s not coming back.”

“How do you know all this stuff?”

“That’s the laugh, isn’t it? From my da’, the old drunkard. But I’ll give him this much: Even he turned his back on Uncle Fergus and his cronies. ‘A man can find enough ways to hurt himself on his own,’ I heard him tell Fergus once, ‘without turning to the likes of your hard men and their ugly magics.’ ”

Hunter shifted in his seat.

“Makes you uncomfortable?” Miki asked. “Calling it magic, I mean.”

“No, it’s just this bruise on my side. Doesn’t matter what position I’m in, it just starts to ache after I’ve sat still for too long.”

“That’s something else Donal owes us.”

“You don’t think he had anything to do with it, do you?”

Miki shrugged. “I don’t know him anymore, so I can’t say.”

Her voice was casual, but Hunter could see how much it pained her to say it.

“So why do you call it magic?” he asked. “You don’t believe in that kind of thing, do you?”

“If you’d asked me yesterday, I’d have said no. But right now?” Her gaze took on a distant look and for a moment Hunter thought he’d lost her again. But then she took another drag from her cigarette and focused on him once more. “Right now, I don’t know anymore.”

Hunter decided it was time to get back to her brother and what had started her off on this morbid line of thought which was so out of character for her.

“So,” he said. “You think these Gentry are planning to use Donal as their Summer King?”

“I know it,” Miki told him. “Why else would he paint his own face behind the Green Man’s mask?”

“But he knows the same stories you do.”

Miki nodded. “Except it’s like my cigs,” she said, holding up the cigarette she was smoking. “I know they’re going to kill me, but somehow I can’t believe that it’ll actually happen to me. Don’t ask me how it happened, but it seems Donal’s got himself convinced that he and the Gentry are working for the same cause: taking back a piece of the world for themselves because, well, the bloody world owes them, doesn’t it? It’s so pathetic, but I shouldn’t be surprised. It would take an Irishman to buy into such a cobblework of shite and pledge himself to their cause.”

“What does being Irish have to do with it?” Hunter asked.

“It’s that you’d have to be either drunk or mad, and we’re too good at both.”

“But—”

“Well, Ireland’s a peculiar place, isn’t it?” Miki said. “It seems to breed loyalties that grow all out of proportion to reality or common sense. Back home, a feud is as real today as it was a few hundred years ago. It doesn’t matter that all the original participants are long dead and gone. The descendants will continue with the hostilities until there’s no one left, on one side or the other.”

She lit another cigarette from the smoldering butt she’d been working on before adding, “It must be something in the air, or that comes up from the land itself.”

All Hunter could do was think of the former Yugoslavian Republic, or Rwanda, or any of the how many other places in the world where intolerance was the norm, genocide the solution.

“I think it’s an unfortunate part of human nature,” he said.

“Maybe so, but it also seems particularly Irish to me. What are we known for?”

“Before or after Riverdance?”

“Ha, ha. No, I’m serious.” She held up a hand and ticked them off. “Drinking, fighting, melancholy… and overwrought songs and novels concerning the three. It’s bloody pathetic, but you know, it’s not such a bloody lie, either. Christ knows I like a drink myself, and I’m just as liable to give someone a whack to settle a difference as talk it out.”

“I think you’re generalizing.”

“Well, of course I’m generalizing. But the thing with generalizing is that it holds a certain grain of truth, overall. Look at the peace process Blair’s negotiating. Everybody’s going, hurrah, but if you think Northern Ireland’s not still a bloody powderkeg waiting the tiniest spark to set it off, then I’ve got a bridge to sell you.”

There was nothing Hunter could add to that.

“Anyway,” Miki went on, “what seems to be happening here is, one, the Gentry plan to use Donal as their Summer King, and two, something to do with that—maybe the power they’ll accrue—is going to let them take the land here from its own genii loci.”

“That’s presupposing any of this is real,” Hunter said. “Summer Kings. Magical powers. Even the genii loci.”

Maybe especially them, he added to himself.

Miki nodded. She butted out her cigarette into the ashtray and for once didn’t immediately light another.

“I know it sounds mad. But there’s something else besides us in the world, don’t you think? And if there is, who’s to say what it’ll be like? You’ve seen the Gentry. They’re not just creepy, there’s something more to them.”