C. E. Murphy - No Dominion - A Garrison Report

I couldn’t think what he was talking about, not for a long minute or two. All that came outta my mouth was, “You were spyin’ on me?” in a voice that sounded like a sullen kid’s.

“I could hardly allow you to revisit your life without my presence nearby. I had no wish to explain myself to Joanne if something should go wrong. Though lovers be lost, you said to her.”

Air exploded outta me in a sigh. “Yeah. Dylan Thomas. He said—well, he said love was stronger than death, ‘cept he said it better. I guess that’s what poets do.”

“Hold tight to his wisdom, my friend. There is no greater power, and I have known many powers in my time.”

That was a little funny. Just enough funny ta start filling up the hole in my heart. I’d had a long time to mourn Annie already, after all, an’ I was sitting across from a fella who was promising me that in the end, she’d gone into the light. It wasn’t the ending I’d been hoping for, but at the back of my head I’d always known I wasn’t gonna get that one. Even if my older memories were a mess, I trusted the ones since her death. I didn’t really figure time had been gonna rewrite itself and give me those years back with her. I let that hope go, real careful-like, then let some of that laughter come up and smooth things over a little. “You tellin’ me love conquers all, Horns?”

“I am.”

There wasn’t a trace of humor in the horned god’s eyes, an’ my own kinda fell away for another minute. My girl, my other girl, Joanne, she was out there, an’ sometimes I was pretty certain it was love that was getting her through the day. Truth was, for the past year and some, a lotta that love had been mine. Joanne needed somebody to love her, warts and all, as much as I’d been wanting someone to love again. It wasn’t ever gonna be like Annie, but I didn’t want it to be. Jo needed somethin’ different from me, just like I needed somethin’ different from her. I guessed there were worse things to think than believin’ that love conquered all.

“All right. All right, then. I guess…I guess we did all right, then. She’s…Annie, I mean. She’s…she’s all right? Guess if I’ve learned anything this last year, I’ve learned the wheel keeps coming around. Annie’s back on the merry-go-round, right? She’s gonna get another chance, somewhere down the road? Old soul born to new parents? That’s how it works, ain’t it?”

“That is how it works, and I will guide her to her resting place when her incarnation is ended. You’ve done well, Master Muldoon. You have made space for hope, and that is never a bad thing.”

“Okay. All right. So we go home now.” I was pushing an awful lot of thoughts an’ emotions back, knowing they were gonna come back to be dealt with later. But I’d left Jo bouncing around through the wrong end of time, an’ I hated ta think what kinda trouble she was getting in without me. “You figured out how to get us home yet? Back ta Jo, I mean?”

Cernunnos’s lip curled. “Best you first trade your steed with one of the others. Yours has ridden a long while with us now, but she will not know Joanne’s pull, when it comes. The others have met her in and out of time.”

Regret caught me harder’n I expected as I slid off Imelda’s back an’ patted her neck. “You’re a good girl, sweetheart. Hope I see you again.”

She put her forehead against mine an’ drooled down my shirt. I figured that was her way of saying she hoped so too, and patted her a couple more times before walking away. The rider on the brown mare—I knew his name, but there was something about the Hunt that made usin’ it seem rude—he dismounted an’ handed me the reins on his way to Imelda. I swung up on the mare, patted her neck too, and watched the big bearded fella ride Imelda toward the stars.

Then I looked at the house. It was starting to get that faded look, while the Hunt was getting more real around me. There was a faint trace of light through one of the dark windows, saying somebody at the back of the house was home. “I’m still in there, ain’t I? Holden’ her, and remembering…rememberin’ somethin’ that ain’t quite real. Why do I remember her dying at the hospital, Horns? What the hell’d he do to me?”

“All he could.” Cernunnos turned the stallion away from the house while he was talkin’, and the Hunt followed him into the sky, the boy on his right an’ me at his left. “I once said to Joanne that perhaps the past I remembered best, you had not come to Tara with her.”

“Yeah. I remember that. So?” I looked back once more, not sure what I was hoping to see. It wasn’t there, anyway: just a quiet ol’ house fulla memories that I had to leave behind. Or maybe that was what I was looking for after all, ‘cause after a few seconds I felt something go outta me, some kinda regret I’d been holding on to, and then I started listenin’ to Horns again.

“That past is no longer the one I remember best. Now in almost all memories, you came to Tara and we fought together at Knocknaree.”

“Sure, buddy, ‘cause that’s what happened.”

“Now it is what happened. Then…” Horns shrugged, making the thick muscles in his neck flex in an ugly way. “You remember her death in a hospital because then, in those other times when you did not come to Tara, that is where she died.”

“But you’re saying I always came to Tara.” I was giving myself a headache, an’ from Horns’s expression, I thought he was getting one too.

“Time opens and closes on itself, Master Muldoon. It does not like loose ends. Your memory of her death in a hospital is—”

“An oxbow lake.” I said it quick as I could, not wanting to lose the idea. “It’s something that happened an’ got cut out, yeah? It’s maybe the one in a hundred path, and the other ninety nine went this way?”

“Yes.” He lowered his big head like he’d been carrying its weight too long and I’d just lightened it a little. “You know by now that mortal minds dismiss and explain magic away even at the best of times. The Devourer caught you at the worst of them, and stole away what you had chosen to accept. The rest of it is what is necessary, nothing more. A filling of empty spaces with memories that make sense, regardless of their truth. Her death in a hospital would make sense, and is the easiest path to lying to you. You remember both deaths now because you have been at the eye of the storm, and from the eye, we see clearly.”

“It happened and it didn’t. We changed it an’ the first way got cut out, but it’s still hanging around main’ an extra ripple in the current. This was easier ta understand when it was Jo messin’ with time, not myself, Horns.”

“Joanne has never walked so closely along her own path. This is more complex than what she has done.”

“But she’s the shaman!”

“And you the mortal man. Don’t discount the power in an ordinary life, Master Muldoon.”

I thought of Annie the same way I always did the past few years, with an ache an’ a squeeze in my heart, an’ I said, “Don’t reckon there’s much chance of that,” more to myself than Horns. We’d ridden toward the stars while we were talking, but not so high as we’d gone before. The wind was soft an’ warm, an’ the path we followed was made of moonlight streaming across the clouds. We were moving faster than sense could make, already going ‘round the curve of the world. Heading back to Ireland, so we’d be closer to where we’d left Jo.

I was about to ask Horns how we were gonna find her when the sword on my hip lit up blue an’ started to fade.

Horns snarled, “Do not let it go,” and grabbed hold of my horse’s reins as hard as I grabbed onto the sword. The sky flickered around us once an’ shut off, like we were moving through the space of a heartbeat. The Hunt disappeared, all ‘cept me an’ Horns, an’ in the next heartbeat we were somewhere else. The sky up above was blue, an’ down below was the ruins of a castle on the tallest hill for miles. Then it all went black again, another in-between heartbeat, an’ when we came out it was sunset at that same castle, except it wasn’t fallen-down an’ the whole world’s horizons were too close.