It bellows suddenly, a sound of pain, betrayal, fury. Then it lunges, its head thrusting forward with the weight and power of a wrecking ball. Anto gets his huge arm in the way and is flung towards the dry-stone walls of the field from which the monster emerged.
His clothes shred against the frosty ground. He’s bleeding everywhere. But just as Nabil would have wanted, he rolls immediately on to his feet, facing the poor beast.
It staggers after him, leaving a dark river behind it. More fluid leaks from sad, fist-sized eyes.
‘Boy,’ somebody says. Karim, he thinks. She’s speaking calmly and quietly. ‘Be so kind as to get out of the way. Slowly, yes? No sudden movements. Just … step aside and we’ll do the rest.’
‘No,’ he says. Instead of getting out of the way, he walks towards the bull, his big arm held in front, but not as a threat. He wants to show it something. I’m you. I’m like you.
‘Boy!’ Karim’s voice has anger in it. Menace too. ‘We’ll have to shoot. By Crom, I mean it!’ And she does. All his senses are hyper-aware. He can hear even the sounds of rifle stocks fitting into shoulders. The shifting of leather straps.
The monster pauses to consider Anto’s arm, caught between goring him and turning aside. Its eyes, its huge eyes, are pools of pain and madness and fading hope.
Then, like an enormous sack, it simply settles to the ground, emitting a long, slow moan. Even now, it clings to life. One eye swivels to follow Anto as he kneels next to the head.
‘I’m sorry,’ he says, stroking it. ‘I’m so, so sorry.’
In the field behind him, one of the women laughs. ‘By all the saints! If he wants a pet, let him get himself a dog.’
They take him back in the only working truck, leaving most of the soldiers to start walking.
‘Never get in our way again!’ Karim says. ‘I ought to break your darling little face for you.’ She looks like she could. Like she’s had practice. Then she snorts. ‘You’re shivering. Corless, give him your jacket.’
‘But he’s still bleeding!’
‘That, my dear, is why he’s not getting mine. Now hand it over.’
Corless opens his mouth to object further, but then he slides across to place the jacket around the boy’s shoulders himself. ‘I hate Meath,’ he grumbles. ‘It always goes to pot up here.’
The jacket is warm enough to smother the shivers. Anto thinks it strange that the only two sergeants he’s ever met have been women. Taaft and Karim. Both quite short; both harsh of tongue. But Karim’s manner is a necessary shell, he thinks, that surrounds a core of genuine love. It also serves to keep the madness of her visit to the Grey Land at bay, and maybe also the sadness from the loss of her children. Taaft’s cynicism, he suspects, is all real.
But for now, all Anto wants to talk about is the bull. ‘How … how did it get that way? Are animals Called too?’
It’s Ryan who answers. ‘It was grazing, that’s all, lad.’ He shrugs his narrow shoulders, careful not to brush his wing stubs against the back of the bench. ‘There must have been a Fairy Fort in those fields. Maybe nobody recognized it because it blended in with the landscape. Or maybe the farmers here didn’t report it during the surveys. Probably trying to keep their land from confiscation.’
‘But … but if there was a Fairy Fort there, other animals must have eaten the grass too at some stage.’
‘Sure. I suppose so,’ Ryan twitches, biting his lips with small, straight teeth. ‘I mean, yeah, Crom knows a lot of animals must have been exposed. But it’s all very random. The one thing I can tell you is this: we get sent out every single month now. I mean, it used to be only once or twice a year.’
Corless nods. ‘Well, you’d know why it’s increasing if you read the Testimonies.’
‘Oh!’ Ryan waves his skinny hands, ‘You shouldn’t read those, my friend. They always make you de-pressed.’
‘Well, if you’d read them, Ryan, you’d see how the Sídhe keep boasting about the two worlds getting closer all the time. And if you ask me, the closer they get, the more the evil of the Grey Land leaks into Ireland to mess it up. That’s what I think.’
‘But the bull wasn’t evil,’ says Anto. ‘He didn’t want to hurt anyone. He was just afraid.’
‘I don’t want to hurt anyone either,’ says Corless. ‘But you shouldn’t have protected it. We’re at war, lad. We’re clinging on for our lives.’ And then, bizarrely, the big man ruffles Anto’s hair.
‘Rest assured, my dears,’ says Karim. ‘Next time that child indulges his sweet nature, it will be my pleasure to put a bump in that perfect nose of his. But I still don’t know why he was sent here. I don’t think even our great captain knows. It’s all too ridiculous.’
‘Anto’s brave though,’ says Ryan. He never seems to look at Karim directly. ‘You gotta give him that, Sergeant. Standing between the squad and its prey.’
‘Brave is no use to me,’ she says, ‘if he hasn’t got the pluck to hurt a fly.’
Anto hangs his head. He wants their admiration, longs to boast about the Sídhe he killed when he thought Nessa had died. But his whole body convulses with revulsion at the thought of it. He closes his eyes, looking for an image of Nessa to help him relax for the rest of the journey.
The Professor
Nessa wakes to the smell of stale teeth, a weight on her chest.
A face presses right up against hers. ‘I could hurt you,’ says a squeaky voice. A white tongue moistens cracked lips and for a moment it’s as though Nessa is in the Grey Land again, with one of its creatures perched on her belly. A head-butt might be the best thing now, the easiest way out, except she has no room to swing back. And her arms are pinned at the wrist.
‘But you’re right, sweetie,’ the stranger says. A woman. ‘Why would I fight you?’ She climbs away from Nessa. ‘You and Annie’s going to be best friends, aren’t we?’
‘You’re … you’re Annie?’
The woman grins, and squeezes a pair of ample breasts. ‘Well, I’m hardly Jeremy or Michael with these beauties, am I?’ She’s about forty years old and Nessa spots three separate gaps in her teeth. Her every breath comes with a slight wheeze.
‘They brought me in an hour ago. You slept so sweet, baby, and they told me to turn out the light, but I didn’t.’
‘What … what time is it?’ asks Nessa in English. This woman comes from an era when almost no Sídhe was spoken in the country, when the enemy’s language was still being pieced together and barely three in a hundred teenagers made it to adulthood.
‘We’re to share everything, you and Annie. We’re to be best friends.’
Best friends? Nessa wants to laugh at the thought. Her best friend is Megan – was Megan. A red-headed terror. An absolute joy to be around. Or she would have been, if Nessa hadn’t spent half her time worrying what she might do next. At school Nessa never said anything bad about anybody. She didn’t have to, because Megan always got in there first, her tongue like a whip soaked in acid. But funny too; she was always funny.