Besieged: Stories from the Iron Druid Chronicles(51)
I may have helped a bit, she says, answering me thoughts again. But it was still you who found him, and it was your choice to fight.
I want to shift to human so I might be able to talk, but I worry that it might slow me healing or make something worse if I do. I’d really like to know if other Druids had found Dubhlainn, seen what he was, and chose not to fight him. I needn’t have worried; the Morrigan read that in me mind as well.
Two others found him, knew him for a villain, and left him alone. They do not have much longer to live. The next time they fight—and I will make sure it’s soon—I will take them and eat their hearts, for they looked this evil in the eye and did nothing but let it pass them by and grow. But you, Eoghan, will have a long, productive life. I know this to be true. We will speak again, years hence, well before it is your time to move on. Harmony until then.
That was the only hint she ever gave me that she planned to park me arse on a time island later. She takes off after that, apparently only interested in his tiger eyes. I hoped she stowed Dubhlainn’s spirit somewhere dark.
It’s no small thing, killing another Druid and having a death goddess give ye an “attaboy!” I take a few days to heal and think over what it all means. I search Dubhlainn’s house, such as it is, and find that he’s been keeping souvenirs in that jewelry box: It’s full of finger bones. I haven’t trusted men in bogs ever since, nor any other hermit out in the wilderness.
I leave the tiger’s body for carrion and fly back north, bag of clothes gripped in me talons. On the way to the village, I figure I’ll only stay long enough to give them the news and assure them that the bogeyman is dead. They’re to give me no welcome after I tell them it was a Druid that had been feasting on them all this while. Even if they believe I’m nothing like Dubhlainn, every time they see me they will think of who and what they’ve lost, and that’s no way for any of us to live.
With me guts back in their proper place and me left eye healed up, I have no trouble seeing there’s a cattle raid in progress when I arrive—or, rather, a raid that’s nearly over, and failed to boot. The attackers have been routed and they’re scrambling away from the bodies of the fallen. The defenders aren’t keen on pursuing, but I’m keen to know where those attackers might hail from.
Ignoring the village for the moment, I fly ahead of the three men headed home and land in front of them, shifting to human so that they know right away I’m a Druid. They veer away to either side, terrified, but I hold up a hand and call out that I merely wish to talk, their safety guaranteed.
“Would I be right in thinking,” I asks them, “that your village could use a Druid on its side now? Because ye sure don’t have one, judging by what I saw back there.”
They admit I would have been most welcome a few minutes ago.
“If I’d been here a few minutes ago I would have been on the other side, and every fecking one o’ ye would be dead,” I says. “But I’m looking to move on and give help where it’s needed. So what do ye say? Will ye put up a Druid and let me teach and honor the gods below? I won’t come where I’m not welcome.”
They agree, and I tell them to wait while I say me farewells to the villagers and help them bury their dead as well as the dead raiders.
Saoirse screams and attacks me with her fists when I tell her Siobhan is dead—that they’re all dead, the livestock and children alike. I don’t blame her; there’s no one else to receive the rage she must set free before it gnaws away her insides. Some of the other parents who lost their children much earlier well up, shed some tears, but wind up thanking me, because at least now they know. But no one is sorry to see me go.
As I take me leave to join the three surviving raiders, I think that Dubhlainn was only half right: Gaia might not give a damn about human laws, but that doesn’t mean human laws are meaningless or serve no valid purpose. On the contrary, we can hardly serve Gaia and be stewards of the earth if we do not have law and civility.
The survivors lead me back to their village, on the eastern side of the bog, a wee poor place of half-starved citizens with hollow cheeks and haunted eyes. Unlike the other village, which was more prosperous, they are quite ready to accept help and instruction.
Some of them are wrecks when they hear that their fathers or brothers or husbands fell. One woman and her fire-headed son, however, are not sorry at all. They trade a look of relief, and maybe there’s a glimmer of hope in their expressions too. Whoever they lost, he must have been a shite father and husband. The purpling under the mother’s left eye tells me more than enough.
I meet the lad formally the next day. He’s seven, sharp as a knife’s point, and curious about everything. I can hardly finish a sentence without him asking me another question, and when I take him to task for it, he grins at me. “Sorry, Archdruid,” he says, even though I wasn’t one yet—he knew how to flatter and manipulate straightaway. “It’s just that I haven’t had anyone around who would answer me before.”
So that’s how I met Siodhachan ó Suileabháin and took him on as an apprentice. I’d buried his father back there and his life would have been shite, sure, and his whole village would have suffered too, if I hadn’t come along to help them through those lean times. His life would certainly have been much shorter, and I imagine the world would be much different without him swinging his cock around for two thousand years. But just different, mind: no way to know if it would be better or worse.