Prince of Hazel and Oak. John Lenahan

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СКАЧАТЬ have a hell of a candle bill,’ Brendan quipped.

      ‘These are Leprechaun candles. They last for years.’

      ‘Of course they do, silly me.’

      As we entered the room we saw a woman sitting cross-legged on a stool at the foot of the bed. Her head was covered with an intricate gold-flecked veil that played weird tricks with the candlelight. Her arms were outstretched at her sides and she was chanting in Ogham. I couldn’t see her face but I knew from the voice who it was. She stopped chanting when we entered the room.

      ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to disturb you.’

      ‘I am a difficult woman to disturb, Prince Conor,’ Fand said without moving, ‘it is I who will be disturbing you. Shall I leave?’

      ‘No, please go on; Dad can use all the help he can get.’

      Fand continued her chanting in a voice so low we could hardly hear. I motioned for Brendan to come closer to the bed and I pulled the sheet back from Dad’s chest revealing his right arm and his attached runehand.

      ‘What did you do to him?’ Brendan said in an accusing tone.

      ‘Oh give it up, Brendan, I didn’t do anything to him,’ I said, trying to whisper. I explained about Dad’s hand being reattached during the Choosing ceremony in the Chamber of Runes and how Mom and Fand sealed him in this amber shell to stop his hand from killing him.

      ‘So he’s in some kind of magical suspended animation?’

      ‘That’s about right,’ I said as quietly as I could, hoping Brendan would follow suit.

      He didn’t; he started to chuckle and then laugh out loud. ‘Oh boy!’ he said with no intention of being remotely quiet. ‘I’m going to quit the police force when I wake up. I think I’m going to write science fiction movies.’

      ‘Brendan, could you keep your voice down.’

      ‘Why? I’m proud of myself. Who’d have thought I had such a vivid imagination? Or maybe I should write detective novels. I’ll call my first one, The Strange Case of the Father Who Was Turned into a Paperweight.’ He rapped his knuckles on Dad’s solid forehead.

      I grabbed his wrist and said, ‘Don’t do that.’

      ‘Don’t do what – this?’ He thumped on Dad’s forehead again like he was knocking on a door.

      That’s when I hit him. It was more of a forceful push than a punch but I knew it hurt. Brendan staggered back and held his chest.

      ‘You want a piece of me, O’Neil?’ he shouted. ‘All right then, let’s do it. Can you fight without a stick? Come on, man-to-man.’

      I know I shouldn’t have done it, there in my father’s sick room, but I raised my dukes and squared up to him. I was sick and tired of his I can do anything in a dream attitude.

      We were about a nanosecond away from going for each other’s throats when Fand broke the atmosphere of blood lust. ‘I stated before that I was a difficult woman to disturb,’ she said in a voice that reminded us that she was a queen, ‘but you two have succeeded.’

      Brendan and I both turned and pretty much stood at attention as she lifted the veil from her head. Brendan let loose a gasp, and said, ‘Oh my God.’

      Fand stood and walked towards him. ‘You are the traveller from the Real World?’

      ‘Yes, ma’am,’ he replied respectfully.

      ‘You look as though you have seen a ghost.’

      ‘Not a ghost, ma’am; for a moment I thought you were my mother.’

      ‘Your mother?’

      ‘Yes, you look remarkably like her, here I’ll show you.’ Brendan reached for his back pocket then remembered he was wearing new clothes and rummaged around in the pouch of his tunic until he produced an old leather wallet. ‘I have a picture of her with my daughter.’ Brendan pulled bits of paper out of his wallet looking increasingly confused. He went through everything a second time and then held a blank piece of paper in his hands repeatedly looking at its front and back. ‘I don’t understand it.’

      ‘What’s the matter?’ I asked.

      ‘Well, this is the photograph. Look, I wrote the date on the back, but the picture is – gone.’

      I took the photo from him and it was indeed blank, not even the ghost of an image remained. ‘I think I know what happened,’ I said. ‘Real World technology often doesn’t work here. Electric watches and guns don’t work, so I imagine photography doesn’t either.’

      ‘You mean I’m stuck in this dream without a picture of my own daughter?’

      ‘Dream?’ Fand said.

      ‘Brendan here thinks this is all a long dream and that any second he is going to wake up in his bed.’

      ‘I see. Well, maybe you are right, Brendan. Who can tell what is real and what is illusion? This may be a realm inside a dream but that is not what you think, is it? You think you are still back in the Real World and soon you shall awake – is that not so?’

      Brendan nodded but I could see his resolve weakening.

      ‘I am sorry, Brendan, as seductive as that thought must seem – it is not so. It is true you are in a different world but there is only one reality. What was your vocation in the Real World?’

      ‘I was … I am … a detective.’

      Fand looked confused. Brendan tried a couple of times to describe his job using words like ‘perpetrator’ and ‘arrest’. Finally he changed his wording to ‘I find evildoers and punish them.’

      Fand nodded. ‘You seek the truth?’

      Brendan thought for a bit and then smiled. ‘I suppose I do.’

      ‘Like a Druid.’

      ‘Now you not only look like my mother but you sound like her.’

      ‘Oh, how so?’

      ‘That’s just the kind of voodoo crap my mother used to spout.’

      ‘Conor has taught me the meaning of “crap” but what is voodoo?’

      ‘OK, not voodoo, but she was always brewing herbs into potions to ward off colds or a rash or evil spirits, and when she wasn’t doing that she was dancing naked around a fire or hugging a tree.’

      ‘It sounds as if I would like her,’ Fand said.

      ‘Maybe you would. I don’t get along with her very well.’

      Fand answered that statement with a knowing smile – she had experience with a difficult mother; her mother had been responsible for the near extinction of her entire race.

      ‘Let me see the … What did you call it – photo?’

      Brendan СКАЧАТЬ