‘Are you saying that this guy is that Turlow?’
‘No, Turlow is the name passed down from father to son. This Turlow is said to be the direct descendant of the original Turlow. He is The Turlow. It is his name and his title.’
‘So am I supposed to be impressed?’
‘It is very impressive.’
‘Did you hear him keep calling Essa “Princess”?’
‘Essa is a princess,’ Araf said, looking confused.
‘Yeah, but it’s the way he said it. And now that I think of it, he called me a Faerie.’
A little buzz started on the other side of the room which caused me to turn. Mom and Dahy had just entered and were making a beeline to our table.
Araf stood, so I did too. Mom gave me a hug and asked after my head.
‘I’m fine thanks.’
‘Are you sure?’ She held my face in both of her hands and looked deep into my eyes.
‘I’m sure, Mom.’
‘Good, because we have work to do.’
The next couple of days were exhausting. The Land is a magnificent and beautiful place but it is seldom restful. I spent my time equally between rebuilding walls, training new recruits in sword-fighting and, most taxing of all, deciphering and filing old manuscripts, read with Mom’s magic paperclip.
There were only two of Mom’s amber reader thingies, so ten of us rotated in twenty-four-hour shifts. It meant that I did four hours reading every twenty hours, resulting in my stint getting four hours later every day. My first couple of shifts were mostly spent trying to get my written Gaelic back up to speed. Dad had made me learn how to read, write and conjugate ancient Gaelic but it wasn’t the language I read my comic books in and the stuff I was reading could hardly be called page-turners. My first thrilling manuscript was a contract and shipping manifest between the Elves and the Vinelands. It took me all of the four hours to figure out that it was a barter agreement where the Elves would provide wood for barrels and Fingal (who was Essa’s grandfather) would pay in wine. From the amount of wine it seemed to me that the timber industry is a pretty lucrative business. I guess it’s hard work when you have to ask permission from the trees if you want to cut them down. I had an image of an elf kneeling in front of a tree with an axe, saying, ‘Please, I’m desperate for a drink?’
When I finally figured out that the piece of parchment I was studying didn’t contain anything that would help us with Dad’s condition I would place it in an envelope and label it so that in the future it could be transcribed into a new book. Not a job I will be volunteering for.
It wasn’t just the grammar that was proving taxing but the actual reading of a manuscript required immense concentration. The paperclip thingy sensed the page you were looking at as long as you were focused, but if you were reading, say, a scintillating essay on seed germination and you happened to let your mind wander, the page you were reading would fade into all of the other pages in the book, producing thousands of words on one page. Since there was no way to find your way back to the page you were reading, you would have to go back to the beginning.
After my first session I staggered back to my tent and blissfully closed the eyes that I had been afraid to even blink for the last four hours. Not even the blinding headache could keep me from falling asleep, but I didn’t nap long. Dahy woke me and, despite my protests, dragged me out to the training fields and put me in charge of teaching sword-fighting to a group of helpless recruits. As soon as the old man was out of sight I told my charges to take the rest of the day off and I crawled back to bed. The next day Dahy warned me that if I did that again I would be cleaning latrines and I had a suspicion that he meant it.
My second reading session started promisingly enough when I found what I thought was going to be an interesting essay on banta stick manufacture. After I don’t know how many pages, I figured out it could have easily been condensed to this one sentence without losing anything: ‘Get some good wood and make a stick out of it.’ By the end, my head hurt worse than when Essa hit me with one of those sticks.
I periodically saw Essa but we didn’t speak to one another. I was desperate for some alone time with her but I was so busy, and when I wasn’t busy, I was exhausted. When I did see her she was always with The Turlow. The closest I got was an uncomfortable lunch where the royal couple sat behind me at a table just within hearing distance. I couldn’t make out much but every time I heard him say ‘Princess’ I felt like returning my lunch back onto my plate.
After about a week’s worth of reading sessions I was starting to believe that 99 per cent of the books that were in the old library were about farming. I ploughed through endless manuscripts explaining crop rotation, plough manufacture, planting timetables and even one about delineating soil types by taste. I filed that under the heading of ‘Eating Dirt’. I got mildly excited when I found a scrap entitled ‘Leprechaun Genealogy’ but it was literally just a list of names. I filed that as ‘A Short History of Short People’.
I started screening my reading material so as to keep my sanity. I’m sure Araf would find a paper on ‘Planting Row Orientation According to Crop and Season’ fascinating but it just made me want to hold my breath and bang my head against the floor. When no one was looking I scanned my new manuscripts for key terms. I’d clip the reader on a sliver of paper and if I saw any words like: seed, or soil, or yield, I would slip the piece under the bottom of the pile. I prayed to the gods that I wouldn’t still be doing this by the time we got down to that fragment again.
The reading eventually got easier, partly because I got better at it but mostly because Mom invented a Shadowbookmark that held your page if your mind wandered. But it was the sword-fight teaching that became the highlight of my day. In the beginning my students were pretty much in awe of me, even after seeing me get popped in the temple by Essa. They all wanted to know about the Battle of the Twins of Macha and how I chopped Cialtie’s hand off and the Army of the Red Hand and what the Real World was like. I spent a lot of the first couple of days just talking to them, especially when Dahy wasn’t around, but then I really started to get into teaching. A lot of these kids were just bad, so I had to reach back into my memories to the basics that Dad had taught me when I was a kid. Back when I thought it was really cool being taught sword-fighting, as opposed to when I was a teenager and I thought Dad was a borderline lunatic. I found that the nice thing about teaching is that it makes you realise that a lot of the stuff you think you do by instinct and without thinking, is actually a well-honed skill. Dishing out all of this stuff to eager students, who were improving, made me appreciate my father even more and it gave me strength when I had to go back to the reading sessions.
I was usually so tired at night that I didn’t have the energy to kick Brendan out of my tent – so we became roommates. He spent most of his days under the tutelage of Spideog. When no one else but me could hear, he made fun of his master’s mystical ravings, but he listened and adopted every drop of archery advice he was given. When he wasn’t talking about arrows and trajectories or how sore his arms and fingers were, he quizzed me on our progress towards finding a cure for Oisin. He never talked about his daughter. I suspected that the reason he had thrown himself so fully into training was to give himself something else to think about.
Mom gently kicked me awake at four in the morning. It was my shift in the reading room. Since Mom had the stint before me we saw each other every day at changeover. We didn’t say much. I didn’t ask her if she found anything ’cause I knew if she did, she would tell me. She looked tired as she handed me an envelope that had my handwriting on it. Inside it was a fragment of a document I had read the morning before about the cross-pollination of grape plants. I had entitled it, ‘Everything will be Vine in the Morning’.
‘Is that a joke?’ she asked.
‘Well, it was supposed to be but obviously it didn’t work on you.’
She gave me that patronising mother look.
‘Sorry, Mom, I’m just trying to keep my sanity in there.’
‘I know, son,’ she said as she cupped my cheek in her palm. ‘Just have a little thought of the poor people who are going to have to sort this paperwork out after us.’
‘OK,’ I said, kissing her on the cheek, ‘get some rest, you look beat.’
It was still dark when Mom and I got outside. The November air stung my cheeks as I walked her back to her tent. She promised me she would sleep and not sit up all night working and worrying. Then I turned and took a deep cold breath and steeled myself for an early morning adventure in dull literature. It was as bad as being back at school – worse actually; I didn’t have Sally’s notes to borrow here. As I groped in the dark towards the always lit reading room, a flicker of light caught my eye. As I got closer I saw it was the unmistakable glow of Lamprog light. My heart skipped a beat as I saw the only girl I know that travels with a firefly. As she heard me approach she
