At first there was nothing to be seen but another hallway, identical to the first, about a hundred yards long. They hurried down it, toward the unmarked door at its far end. Falera reached it first, pulled it open: darkness lay on the other side. They followed him.
Inside the door, as it closed behind them, they stopped. It was not truly dark; the lighting was simply dimmer than the hallway outside, and it took a moment for their eyes to get used to it. Harris and Smyth looked around them. They were standing in a long, long room, surprisingly high-ceilinged, that reached far off to the right and left of them, and was about a fifty feet wide where they stood. They had little time to tell anything more about it: for piled up on row after row of pallets, stretching away to right and left, lay something which mellowly reflected the lights in the ceiling in many soft bright patches of sheen and glimmer.
Gold. Gold. Gold by the acre....
“This way,” Falera said, heading off to the right. It was a moment before either Harris or Smyth could react, for the sheer presence of so much gold in this dimness made the place seem more like a church than a vault. There was a smell to it, a warm metallic scent, as if it were something alive. Slowly at first, then more swiftly, they made their way after Falera. The pallets had numbers stamped on them: they were only in the mid-100’s. Falera was well ahead, and shortly they caught up with him. The warm smell of the gold seemed to get stronger as they went. They walked for what seemed a dreadfully long time, though by Harris’s watch it was only three minutes.
“Pallet 254,” Falera said. Harris looked down, there to their left, and saw it: gold in a single layer, the bars labeled 999 FINE, and there among them one that had more than the bare words, but the eagle gripping the laurel wreath that encircled the swastika, and the registration number starting with DB14 stamped on it. He reached into his coverall for the soft leather bag he had had stowed inside it, unfolded it and reached down to the gold bar.
It took both hands to lift it, and two tries: the first time he pinned his index finger under the thing and blacked the nail, and swore as he got it up at last. Behind him, Falera was already leading Smyth further down to pallet 266. Smyth bent over the pallet, found another of the Nazi-stamped bars, picked it up more carefully and put it in his bag, then started on the second. Harris went along to pallet 268, where the last bar lay: he huffed and puffed as he carried the bag with the first one, not being able to do it two-handed because of the injured finger. At pallet 268 he stopped, found another of the bars with the eagle and wreath, lifted it and slipped it into the bag. The sound of gold striking gold was soft and final, like the door of an expensive car shutting.
Then he heard another sound: a long, slow, soft growl.
Harris saw the gleam of gold in the dimness: but the gold moved.
He fumbled inside his coverall for his gun, and swiftly looked around for Falera. Falera was nowhere to be seen.
“Come out, you bastard!” Harris shouted, as Smyth came up behind him. “Come out or we’ll waste you!”
“No,” said Falera’s voice softly, from somewhere deeper in the dimness, somewhere behind whatever it was that was golden, and moved: “no, whatever is wasted today, it will not be me.”
The gold moved again, and abruptly Harris saw the eyes looking at him and Smyth. They were golden too, and from the head in which they were set, that warm, metallic scent breathed thick. The eyes watched them, and they stood horrified as the slow shape clambered over pallet 270 and slipped toward them, deliberate-footed, heavy and huge.
Smyth pulled out his gun and shot the thing, most precisely, between the eyes.
The bullet whined away, making a dull clunk as it ricocheted into a gold bar somewhere else in the room. “Oh, no,” Falera’s voice said from behind the huge golden creature. “It takes a bit more than that to kill a felddrache. I should know.”
The long, low, lizardy shape stepped toward them, gleaming dully in the dim light, and Harris and Smyth stepped back.
“You wouldn’t have had much data about them, I suppose,” Falera’s soft, dry voice said. “They were all over Europe, once. Except Ireland, of course: the druids got rid of them, although Padraig took the credit, didn’t he? Never mind. They were everywhere, the drakes. A plague. It was a specialty of mine, killing them: I was much in demand. Of course I didn’t know back then what I found out later, that the drakes weren’t from here, originally, but from some other reality. That if you were exposed to their blood too often, there were side effects. A taste or so, and you might come to understand their tongue. More than that... and wounds wouldn’t take, the skin would harden, organs would regenerate. After that, if you still kept exposing yourself... long life. Surprisingly long.”
Harris finally saw where Falera was standing, pulled his own gun and shot him, too, in the head. Falera staggered a bit with the impact, but immediately straightened and laughed. Harris emptied the clip, but the shots went wide, or else Falera simply shook himself and stood upright again, behind the huge golden dragon that still stepped slowly toward them.
“They could die, though,” Falera said. “So many of them did. At first, when I started work, it was a blessing. But later, when there were almost none left...I realized they had to be preserved: they were part of our history, no matter how terrible a one. They were a deadly intelligence, but an intelligence nonetheless...and who knew whether there were any more of them back where they came from? Who dares stamp out utterly a species that some God made? I found I couldn’t do it. ...This last one, who lived down in the mountains south of Chur...I protected him as long as I could. It was always a problem: they crave gold as they crave blood. But finally, after many, many years, I found a way to turn that to our advantage. And the banks don’t mind one having one more secret to keep. —External security, mechanical security, can always be beaten—but not instinct, not the drache’s chief urge. Gold to guard...blood to drink. They don’t have to eat often... just every now and then. Often enough for the bank’s purposes, and their own...for nothing satisfies them like a nice fresh thief. —Fear,” Falera added as if an afterthought, “improves the flavor for them. It’s the sudden rush of hormones, I suspect.”
Harris and Smyth cowered toward each other. Smyth emptied his own pistol at the dragon: Harris turned and fled desperately for the doorway through which they had entered the vaults.
“It’s locked itself again, of course,” Falera said calmly, as the dragon advanced. “I have my own way out: for security personnel, there’s always a back door. But as for you—you didn’t even watch the screen to make sure of the times I was inputting. So sure of yourself, and yet so easily distracted by a little criticism.” There was humor in the voice now. “You just don’t think things through, do you?”
Smyth screamed. Harris began hammering on the door. But there was no point in it. Shortly thereafter, it having dealt with Smyth, a kind of gold which Harris had not sought came seeking him, and trod him under foot, and tore away at the choicest flesh, so that blood spattered its own golden hide and the gold piled up around.
Silence fell after a while. “You’re going to have to clean those up,” Falera said.
“Later, Gieri,” said the slow, growling voice.
Harris was not quite gone yet: though it would only be a matter of minutes now, since the dragon had bitten his leg off above the knee, and what shock had not yet managed, the hemorrhage from the femoral artery would shortly complete. “Gieri...” he whispered.
“It would have been ‘George’, in the English,” Falera said.
And there was silence again: and nothing else but the gleam of gold.
The Irish Thing can hardly avoid being part of the “ground of being” of someone who’s lived in Ireland for nearly a quarter-century. That familiarity, though, with the way things really are here (insofar as anyone, “blow-in” or native, can ever tell what’s really going on in this island…) can make the inhabitant a little impatient with the perceptions of outsiders: particularly those who think Ir
eland is some kind of theme park that should be preserved to match its overflow into the last couple of centuries’ popular culture. I have actually stood in Dublin Airport and heard fellow Americans complaining that Ireland has broadband: as if it’s somehow polluting the cultural purity of the place. (I saw another American look around absolutely without irony or humor intended and say, disbelieving, “I thought it was supposed to be thatched.” The airport. Was supposed. To be thatched.)
…Yeah. So you will understand that when I was invited to participate in an anthology called Emerald Magic: Great Tales of Irish Fantasy, before I decided what story I wanted to write, I asked casually if I could see a list of the other contributors. When I saw the list, it was as I thought: only one of them (our former neighbor Morgan Llewellyn) had ever lived here. One of them (the excellent Tanith Lee) might have at least been here. And I knew in my bones what way everyone else would be going with their stories: the Celtic twilight, thatch everywhere, the soft green countryside, the old school Ireland and the old-school myths of a century or so back. I immediately thought, Somebody’s got to actually get into Dublin, where a third of the damn population lives! Somebody’s got to at least spend a little time in the here and now. …I’m going urban on this one.
Hence the following.
Herself
I met the leprechaun for the first and last time in the conveyor-sushi bar behind Brown Thomas. It was the “holy hour”, between three and four, when the chefs go upstairs for their own lunch, and everything goes quiet, and the brushed stainless-steel conveyor gets barer and barer.
The leprechaun had been smart and had ordered his yasai-kakiage just before three. He sat there now eating it with a morose expression, drinking sake and looking out the Clarendon Street picture windows at the pale daylight that slid down between the high buildings on either side.
While I’d seen any number of leprechauns in the street since I moved here—our family always had the Sight—I’d never found myself so close to one. I would have loved to talk to him, but just because you can see the Old People is no automatic guarantee of intimacy: they’re jealous of their privacy, and can be more than just rude if they felt you were intruding. I weighed a number of possible opening lines, discarded them all, and finally said, “Can I borrow your soy sauce? I’ve run out.”
He handed me the little square pitcher in front of his place-setting and picked up another piece of yasai-kakiage. I poured shoyu into the little saucer they give you, mixed some green wasabi horseradish with it, and dunked in a piece of tuna sashimi.
“You’re not supposed to do that,” he said.
“Sorry?”
“Mix them like that.” He gestured with his chin at the wasabi. “You’re supposed to just take it separately.”
I nodded. “I’m a philistine,” I said.
“So are we all these days,” the leprechaun said, and looked even more morose. He signaled the obi-clad waitress, as she passed, for another sake. “Precious little culture left in this town any more. Nothing but money, and people scrabbling for it.”
It would hardly have been the first time I’d heard that sentiment coming from a Dubliner, but it hadn’t occurred to me that one of the Old People thought the same way. I’d have thought they were above such things. “Do you work in town?” I said.
He nodded. The waitress came back, swapped him a full flask of sake for his empty one, left again.
“Shoes?” I said.
He laughed, a brief bitter crack of a sound. “Have you ever tried to cobble a Nike?” he said.
I shook my head. It wasn’t something I’d had to try lately, though I’d had enough job worries of my own. The Dublin journalistic grind is not a simple one to navigate. I had gone from features editor to sub-features editor at one of the CityWatch magazines, always being hurled from scandal to scandal—they would keep publishing badly-concealed ads for the less discreet of the massage parlors and lap-dancing joints over by Leeson Street.
“That line of work’s all done now,” he said. “Planned obsolescence… it runs straight to the heart of things. People don’t want shoes that last years. They want shoes that maybe last a year. My folk, we couldn’t do that. Against our religion.”
I didn’t say anything, not knowing if it would be wise. I did some interviewing for the magazine I worked for, and had learned to appreciate the sound of a subject that the speaker didn’t want you to follow up on.
“It’s the death of craftsmanship,” the leprechaun said. “Nike and all the other big conglomerates, they’d sooner have slave labor in Malaysia than honest supernatural assistance from a first-world country with good tax breaks…” He drank some sake. “No, we’re all in information technology now, or high-end manufacturing, computers and so on. It’s the only place left for skilled hand-workers to go. My clan was all out in Galway once: they’re all in Fingal now, for the work. Damn made-up county, nothing real about it but freeways and housing developments. Name me a single hero-feat that was ever done in Fingal!”
“I got from Independent Pizza to the airport once in less than half an hour,” I said: and it was all I could think of. It didn’t count, and we both knew it. All the same, he laughed.
It broke the ice. We were there for a few hours at least, chatting. The belt started up again while we talked, and some more people drifted in; and still we talked while the light outside faded through twilight to sodium-vapor streetlight after sunset. The leprechaun turned out not to be one of those more-culchie-than-thou types, all peat and poitín, but an urbanite—clued-in and streetwise, but also well read. He knew where the hot clubs were, but he could also quote Schopenhauer as readily as he could Seamus Heaney; and as for culture, he told me several things about Luciano Pavarotti’s last visit to Dublin that made me blink. He was, in short, yet another of that classic type, the genuine Dublin character. When you live here, it’s hard to go more than a few days before meeting one. But you don’t routinely meet “Dublin characters” who saw the Vikings land.
I ordered more sake, and paused. Slipping into a seat around the corner of the sushi bar from us was someone at first sight more fairy-tale looking than the leprechaun: a baby-teen, maybe thirteen if that, in red velvet hooded sweatshirt and fake wolf-claw wristlet. Little Red Riding Hood squirmed her blue-jeaned, tanga-briefed self in the seat as she began picking at some fried tofu. The leprechaun glanced at her, glanced back at me again, the look extremely ironic. By contrast, he was conservatism itself, just a short guy with hair you’d mistake for sixties-length, in tweeds and extremely well-made shoes.
“She’d have been a nice morsel for one of the Greys in my day,” he said under his breath, and laughed again, not entirely a pleasant sound. “Before the wolfhounds did for them, and ‘turncoat’ men ran with the wolfpacks, getting off on the beast-mind and the blood feast… Just look at all that puppy fat.” His grin was feral. “But I shouldn’t complain. She pays my salary. I bet her daddy and mammy buy her a new computer every year.” He scowled.
“Do you really miss the shoes that much?” I said.
It was a mistake. His eyes blazed as he took a plate of the spiced soba noodles, another of the green plates, the least expensive sushi. He didn’t have a single blue or gold or silver plate in his “used” stack. “Don’t get me started,” he said. “Nike, Adidas, whoever: we would have worked with them. We would have worked with them! Work is what we live for; good work, well done, they could have had a labor force like the world never saw. We could have shod the planet.”
The leprechaun chewed. “But no,” he said. “A decent wage was too much for them. Why should we pay you minimum wage, they say, when we can get the work for almost nothing from these poor starving mortals over in Indonesia or wherever, who’re grateful for a penny a day? And so they gave us their back.”
He poured himself more sake, drank. “We were to be here for you, from the beginning of things,” he said more softly; “we were to help you have the things you needed when you couldn’t have them
otherwise. But your people have made us redundant. Spiritually redundant as well as fiscally. So now, as we can’t earn, neither can we spend. ‘And who of late,’“ he said sadly into his sake, “‘for cleanliness, finds sixpence in her shoe?’”
“Bad times,” I said, looking past the Mercedeses and the BMWs and the ladies walking past the sushi bar toward the “signature” restaurants further down the road, where you couldn’t get out the door at the end of the night for less than three hundred Euro for just a couple of you and wine.
“Bad times,” the leprechaun said.
“And it’s hard to find a decent pint,” I said.
His eyes glittered, and I kept my smile to myself. Any Dubliner is glad to tell a stranger, or somebody with my Manhattan accent, where the best pint is. Sometimes they’re even right. Sometimes it’s even someplace I haven’t already heard of. I don’t drink the Black Stuff myself, especially since there’s better stout to be found than Uncle Arthur’s overchilled product in the Porterhouse brewpub in Parliament Street; but that’s not the point.
His eyes slid sideways to betray the great secret, whose betrayal is always joy. “You know Great Saint Georges Street?”
“Yeah.” It was a few blocks away.
“The Long Hall,” he said. “Good place. The wizards drink there too.”
“Really,” I said.
“That’s where most of us go now.” There was a silent capital on the “u” that I nodded at. “We go down there Tuesdays and Thursdays, in the back, for a pint. And the wakes,” he said. His look went dark. “A lot of wakes lately…”
“Suicide?” I said softly. Irish males have had a fairly high suicide level of late, something no one understands with the economy booming the way it’s been, and somehow I wouldn’t have been surprised to find the trend had spread to the Old Ones.