“Heh! I never thought of it that way.” I smiled. “But now that you’ve clarified my thinking, I wonder why they don’t list those amenities in real estate ads. It seems criminally negligent.”
“I care, buddy. I believe you to be remarkably wise.”
I laughed. “Perhaps when we are safely settled elsewhere.”
“I cannot promise you, Oberon,” I said, regret tingeing my voice, and I could tell he was disappointed. “But, look, it is good to have a dream so long as you do not let it gnaw at the substance of your present. I have seen men consumed by their dreams, and it is a sour business. If you cling too tightly to a dream—a poodle bitch or a personal sausage chef or whatever—then you miss the felicity of your heart beating and the smell of the grass growing and the sounds lizards make when you run through the neighborhood with your friend. Your dream should be like a favorite old bone that you savor and cherish and chew upon gently. Then, rather than stealing from you a wasted sigh or the life of an idle hour, it nourishes you, and you become strangely contented by nostalgia for a possible future, so juicy with possibility and redolent of sautéed garlic and decadent slabs of bacon that you feel full when you’ve eaten nothing. And then, one fine day when the sun smiles upon your snout, when the time is right, you bite down hard. The dream is yours. And then you chew on the next one.”
Oberon chuffed, his version of human laughter.
Chapter 6
Here is how you know someone has had a good idea: Other people freely admit to their friends that said idea has changed their lives. Most people today will grant that fire and the wheel are the big two. After that, any attempts to rank the greatest ideas of all time are going to draw lots of argument. You’ll have zealots pimping this god or that on the one hand, scientists pimping Darwin on the other, and then practical people pointing at written language and saying, look, fellas, the reason those ideas have gone viral is because someone figured out how to write them down.
On Saturday night, the day after my return from Asgard, I heard about a new life-changing invention (for some): the salad spinner.
“I seriously love my salad spinner,” Granuaile confided. “It’s changed my life.” She said this in her kitchen, where she was busy making me the dinner she owed me for guessing wrong about Ratatosk’s size and the ability to enter Asgard via Yggdrasil.
“Excuse me for just a moment,” I said, and I exited the kitchen for the living room, where her laptop had access to Wi-Fi in the building. I Googled “salad spinner changed my life” and got more than six thousand hits. There was also a Salad Spinner Appreciation Society on Facebook. It wasn’t what I’d call a cultural revolution, but it had potential, and I was willing to find out more. I returned to the kitchen and said, “Sorry about that. Please explain how your salad spinner has changed your life.”
“Oh.” Granuaile’s eyes flicked down, perhaps with a shade of embarrassment. “Well, when you wash lettuce it’s tough to get the leaves dry without wasting paper towels and spending all your time patting them dry. If you just leave them wet, then your dressing dilutes and alters the taste you’re aiming for. Oil and water don’t mix, right? But now,” and her voice deepened into a mockery of a Nitro Funny Car drag-race commercial on the radio, “I can use the raw unbridled power of a SALAD SPINNERRR!” Her voice rose at the end of the sentence in maniacal excitement. Her hand plunged down to the handle of her spinner and she worked it furiously, continuing in the same frenzied voice. “SEE the centrifugal force work its MAGIC on the WATERRR! Red leaf, green leaf, spinach, or arugula, it DOESN’T MATTERRR! Just put your wet greens in the spinner and crank that mother ’til ALL the moisture’s GONE! SUPER! DRY! SALAD!” Here Granuaile balled her fists at her sides and thrust her hips forward lewdly. “GET SOME!”
That was when I lost it. Up to that point my mouth was hanging open in shock, but when she whipped out the pelvic thrust for nothing more than a salad, well, that brought on an epic fit of the giggles. Her performance began looping in my mind’s eye, and the absurdity of it kept tickling me so that I couldn’t stop. Paroxysms shook me until I fell off my chair, and that made it worse. Tears came to my eyes and I gasped for breath as I slapped the wood laminate of her floor. Granuaile’s face turned bright red and she sank down laughing too, laughing both at herself and at my reaction.
Eventually we got around to eating that salad, but not before our stomachs ached from extended merriment. It was succulence itself: spinach and red leaf lettuce tossed with jicama, white onion, mandarin oranges, and candied walnut pieces. The dressing was a homemade citrus vinaigrette.
This, however, was merely a side. Chef Granuaile MacTiernan set a broiled orange roughy fillet on top of a wild-rice pilaf, then placed on top of that a flash-broiled portobello mushroom that had been marinated in a Beaujolais red wine. Several spears of lightly salted asparagus drizzled with olive oil complemented the fish, and a bottle of pinot noir from the Santa Cruz Mountains did all those snooty and delicious things in our mouths that wine connoisseurs go on about.
“Outstanding,” I said, chewing appreciatively. “Truly fantastic.”
“I always settle accounts,” Granuaile said, and quirked an eyebrow at me.
“That’s good to know. I’m the same way. There are a lot of people who would like to settle accounts with me, however, and we should probably speak of it.”
“All right,” she said. She narrowed her eyes and pointed her fork at me, jabbing it forward to punctuate her words. “But if you’re going to try to convince me to give up being a Druid again, you can forget it.”
I shook my head with a rueful grin. “You don’t have all the information yet.” She’d already heard about Ratatosk and Yggdrasil and I’d shared the general look of the plane with her, but I hadn’t explained what really happened other than that I’d successfully stolen an apple. Now I recounted everything.
“So Hugin and Munin are looking for you right now?” she asked after I’d finished.
“As we speak, no doubt. The only reason they haven’t found me already is that they don’t know what to look for. But if Odin ever suspects it was a Druid that slew the Norns and his favorite horsie, he’ll make noise around Tír na nÓg and then they’ll find me quickly, because everyone there knows where I am now. I have to move.”
“Of course you do, but”—her face clouded—“that means I have to move too.”
“Right.” I nodded. “And change your name. And cut off all contact with your family and friends to protect them. Unless you like having a family and friends. Then you should give up this dream of being a Druid and live happily ever after.”
Granuaile slammed her fork down. “Damn it, sensei, I’m not giving that up, I told you!”
“How will your loved ones take this, Granuaile? Look at it from their perspective for a moment. To them it’s going to look like I’ve kidnapped you or that you’ve joined a cult.”
“Well … it kind of is a cult, isn’t it?” she joked.
I chuckled. “I suppose. A very tiny one—here we all are. You can shave your head if you like for verisimilitude.”
Granuaile’s jaw dropped. “I thought you liked my hair.”
Oh, damn. She’d noticed. There’s no winning this, change the subject.…
“You never answered my questi
on. Aren’t your parents going to worry? You won’t be able to contact them often, if at all.”
She shrugged and puffed a soft dismissal past her lips. “I don’t talk to them much as it is. They’re divorced. Dad is always on a dig somewhere in the cradle of civilization, and Mom is busy raising her new family in bloody Kansas.” The way she spat out Kansas led me to believe she did not consider it the cradle of civilization. “I let them know I wanted my independence early on and they gave it to me.”
“They seem to have set you up well,” I remarked, flicking my eyes around.
“Oh, yeah. How does a barmaid afford a condo like this, right? Well, it’s paid for by dinosaurs. Mom’s new husband is an oily oil man. So greasy he looks like he sleeps in a jar of Vaseline. He has one clump of hair that he’s grown really long, and he combs it over pathetically to try to cover up his shiny bald head. I despise him and he loathes me. When I said I wanted to attend ASU, he was only too happy to pay all the bills so long as I agreed to stay out here.”
I sighed and closed my eyes. Clearly she wasn’t going to miss much of her old life. I’d gone and caught myself an ideal candidate for Druidry. Still, it was best to be thorough, and I still had a couple of disincentives to offer her.
“Granuaile. Did I ever tell you what happened to my last apprentice?”
“No, but I think you’re probably going to tell me he died horribly.”
“Tragically, yes. Cut down by Moors in the kingdom of Galicia in 997. He was only a couple months away from getting his tattoos and becoming a full Druid. He was utterly vulnerable, you see. Utterly defenseless. And that’s what you’re going to be for twelve more years. There aren’t many shortcuts we can take. This isn’t like the movies where you can just feel the Force or learn everything you need to know in a three-minute montage, or those novels where the young hero masters advanced swordplay in a couple of months of lessons on the trail. And all that time you’ll be a target in a way I never was, in a way Cíbran never was.”
“Cíbran was your apprentice?”
“Yes. I trained him in secret. The locals all thought I was a staunch Christian, the rock of the neighborhood, and never suspected for a moment what I truly was. And back when I was in training, before Christianity, it was perfectly safe to be a Druid. Best possible thing that could happen to a lad, in fact. But you’re not in that situation. I’m currently a high-value target, and I’m going to be the gods’ most wanted after this next trip to Asgard, no matter how it turns out. If things don’t go well, you’re almost certainly going down with me. You could be throwing away your whole life.”
Granuaile pressed her lips together and smiled tightly. “Nope, you’re not scaring me away. Correct me if I’m wrong, but so far the score is Atticus 5, gods 0.”
“That’s a poor analogy. If they score one, I’m dead and they win.”
“Whatever.” She held up a hand. “My point is that you kick ass, and it reminds me of something I’ve been meaning to ask you: How did the Romans ever manage to wipe out the Druids? You can travel to different planes, camouflage yourselves, shape-shift, and fight without ever getting tired—so what happened?”
“Caesar and Minerva,” I said. “That’s what happened.” Granuaile said nothing. She picked up her wineglass and took a sip, raising her eyebrows expectantly, waiting for me to elaborate.
“There was more to it than that,” I admitted. “I think there were vampires behind it too. But what I know for certain is that Caesar tromped through Gaul, burning all the sacred groves, and that effectively prevented most Druids from shifting planes and escaping easily. We didn’t have the freedom to use any healthy forest we wanted at the time—that became my project afterward. The fires didn’t simply burn the wood, you see, they burned away the tethers to Tír na nÓg. It left all the continental Druids stranded here on this plane. Once that was accomplished, Minerva screwed us over by giving Roman scouts the ability to see through our camouflage, and then they could chase us down. The ability to fight without tiring doesn’t help when a cohort of legionnaires surrounds you and thrusts their spears from every direction. And that’s what they did, make no mistake. It was a systematic slaughter. Some tried to fly away in their bird forms, but they were shot down by archers.”
“But surely some of you escaped.”
“Oh, aye. Druidry struggled on, especially in Ireland, because it was isolated from the Romans. But then Saint Patrick came along, you know, spreading Catholicism. Lots of lads looked at twelve years of hard study and responsibility, weighed it against the instant acceptance and fellowship of the Christians, and chose the easier faith. And then it was just a matter of attrition. None of the other Druids knew the herblore of Airmid, and they eventually died of old age, if the Romans didn’t get them. And one day, the last Druid except for me died without leaving behind a trained Druid to take his place. I couldn’t tell you precisely when it happened, but it was most likely the sixth or seventh century.”
Granuaile put down her glass and leaned forward. “But you should have destroyed them all! You had the power of the whole earth at your command! You see how things are bound together. Why couldn’t you, you know …” She faltered, making lame gestures of something breaking apart with her hands.
“Go ahead and ask. Every initiate does at some point.”
“Well, can’t you break the bonds holding together someone’s aorta, for example? Or cause an aneurysm in the brain? Pull out all the iron in the blood?”
“I can’t because of this,” I said, holding up my tattooed right arm and pointing at it with my left hand. “I know you can’t read what these bindings mean yet, but there’s a condition woven into these knots. As soon as you attempt to use any of the earth’s energy to directly harm or kill a living creature—any creature, mind you, not just a human—you’re dead. The only reason the earth grants Druids her power is that we’re pledged to protect her life. So if a rhino charges me, I’m not bursting its heart. I’m getting out of the way.”
Granuaile stared at me. “That makes no sense.”
“Of course it does.”
“You just told me how you bound the Norns together and chopped off their heads.”
“I bound their clothes together—they happened to be wearing them at the time. I performed no magic directly on their bodies. I killed them with my sword.”
“That’s not protecting life!”
“I was protecting my own.”
“But you told me Aenghus Óg used magic to take over Fagles’s mind!” She was referring to a binding placed on the Tempe police detective who’d shot me six weeks ago. Since the Tuatha Dé Danann were bound to the earth like me, they had to follow the same rule.
“He did. But that binding didn’t directly harm Fagles. Fagles was killed by the Phoenix police.”
“But didn’t he make Fagles shoot you? Wasn’t that harming you?”
“The magic was directed at Fagles, not at me. And Fagles shot me with a completely ordinary, nonmagical gun.”
Granuaile tapped her fingernail on the table. “These are really hair-thin distinctions.”
“Yes, and they’re the sort that Aenghus Óg knew very well.”
“Why bother making them? I mean, the earth has to be aware that you’re using her power to strengthen your sword arm or make you jump higher and so on.”
“Yes. I’m using the power to compete. To prove myself worthy of living another day. Competition, strife, and predation are natural and encouraged by the earth. I still have to be smarter than the other guy, more skilled than the other guy to survive. I can’t simply fix everything by melting people’s brains.”
“Wait. You mess around with skin cells all the time. You give people wedgies by binding the cotton of their underwear with the skin high up on their backs. You started a slap fight between two cops in front of Satyrn.”
“No damage was done. The skin never broke. No harm, no foul.”
“All right, then, what about the demons? You used Cold Fire o
n them.”
“They’re not living creatures of the earth; they’re spirits from hell that take on a corporeal form here. But I have to warn you not to try anything standard on them. They are bound together differently than the flora and fauna of earth, so no Druidic magic works except for Cold Fire. It’s better just to hack them up. That unbinds them from their corporeal form quite well.”
Granuaile puffed an errant lock of hair away from her face and then tucked it behind her ear, thinking through the implications. “Does this tabu extend to healing?”
“Not in so many words, but in practice, yes. Messing around with tissues and organs is vastly complicated. It’s too easy to make a mistake and do more harm than good, and then you’re dead. That’s why I never go there with other people; I use magic to heal only myself, because there’s no prohibition against screwing yourself up and I know my body extremely well.”
“Ah, so that’s why you only use herblore for your healing.”
I nodded. “That’s right. You can perform bindings on harvested plants and the chemicals in them all you want. It’s slower than directly healing someone, but it’s safer all around. You can’t trespass against the prohibition to do no direct magical harm, and it keeps your abilities secret. If people wonder why your teas or poultices are so effective, you can plausibly point to your unique recipes or fresh ingredients or something else, and magic is never an issue.”
“Are you positive that you’re the last Druid alive today?”
I waggled the flat of my hand in the air in a sorta-kinda motion. “The Tuatha Dé Danann are technically Druids because they’re all tattooed like I am. They can do whatever I can do and then some. Best not to call them Druids, though. They like to think of themselves as gods.” I grinned sardonically. “Druids are lesser beings, you see. But so far as such lesser beings are concerned, I do believe I’m the last one walking the earth. Unless you want to count all the happy hippie neo-Druids who do seem to love the earth but lack any real magic.”