Read Twixt Firelight and Water for Free Online Page B

monsters and warrior women, he never talked about what might have become of his kin since he last saw them.
     
    ‘I don’t want to know, Aisha,’ he said, reading my thoughts on my face. ‘Every time I got news, in those first years after I left, it was bad news. My brothers dying, one after another, all uselessly. The borders shrinking; war and madness. Besides, I like the sun. It’s always raining in those parts. And I’d miss Mercedes and the little ones.’ After a moment he added, ‘I suppose Conor may be still alive — your druid uncle. It’s been a long time. And my nephew may still be chieftain at Sevenwaters; he was only a lad when my eldest brother died. But they’ll be strangers to you, despite the tie of blood.’
     
    It was hard to think of my father’s family as strangers. They were in the most enthralling of his stories, the one that told of a disaster that had nearly destroyed them all. It included a wicked stepmother — when I thought of Mercedes, this made me laugh, for my father’s rosy-cheeked, smiling young wife was as far from that figure as I could imagine — and a transformation wrought by magic, six brothers turned into swans and saved only by their sister’s courage and endurance. My father had been one of them. I knew those boys from the inside out. I knew the intensity of their anguish; I felt their terror; I understood their guilt. I knew them up till the point when the ordeal was over and my father, Padriac, who was the youngest of them, decided to walk away from Sevenwaters and never look back. And yet they were not real. They were characters in a story, like Cu Chulainn the great hero, or Emer who was turned into a fly. The notion of meeting them in the flesh felt very strange. They would be old now. But perhaps they were like Father. I only had to look into his eyes to see the boy there, the same who had once splinted the legs and salved the wounds of injured creatures in Erin, and who still did it here in Xixón, far from the shores of home.
     
    ‘You must miss it sometimes,’ I said. ‘You must miss them.’
     
    ‘My life is rich, Aisha,’ said Father, patting his son rhythmically on the back. Luis was hungry; the rattle of pots and pans from the cooking area told me Mercedes was preparing a meal. ‘I’ve made my home wherever I travelled. And you are your mother’s daughter, my dear. A restless soul; an adventurer. So go, and go with my blessing. When you come back, I’ll be ready to hear the tale.’
     
    * * * *
     
    I owed it to both of them, to Father who had always trusted me, no matter how wild an adventure I attempted, and to Mother who had perished at sea while working as his first mate, to go ahead with the plan that had sprung from nowhere. Two months later, I was stepping off the Sofia in Dublin, where my general appearance caused bystanders to gawk and whisper behind their hands. What went relatively unremarked in Galicia was clearly the height of exoticism in this city of wheat-fair, pale-skinned Norsemen and slight, dark Irish. I’d offered to give Fernando a hand with the unloading, but he’d declined, saying I’d only attract crowds that would get in his way. So I wished him well and headed off on my own, telling him I’d pick up a lift home when next he made landfall here.
     
    There were one or two incidents by the wayside. Not every traveller in Erin is respectful of womenfolk, but I’d had plenty of practice at fending off advances of various kinds; there were years and years of dented skulls and bruised privates behind me. At a wayside inn I arm-wrestled a local farmer for a jug of ale and ended up sharing it with him and his friends. I didn’t talk any more than I needed to. Demonstrating my fluent Irish would only mean all sorts of questions, and idle curiosity bored me. With Father’s map in my head and a sailor’s sense of direction — I’d captained the Sofia for Fernando more than once — I headed north to Sevenwaters.
     
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