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there to liven them up a bit. Only Susan didn't seem to need it. She was pulling the most amazing faces in
the moonlight.
When Moira had a full cassette recorded, rewound, and ready to play, Red clicked it on and motioned
that they should retreat.
When they reached his tree, Moira finally dared to take out an earplug.
"I'm afraid you're late for work," he said apologetically.
She shrugged. "It was a crappy job anyway. I only stayed for the music."
He nodded. "Aye. Strangely enough, that's what we think caused the portal here. Some Khoisan shaman
did it with his music, back in prehistory. He blocked the Node too. And left his mark on the place you
call the Curragh of Kildare. It resists being destroyed, all of it."
He gestured at the cellphone. "There is reception up the path. Call in sick. I've ways of making them
believe."
"And those . . . dancers? The tape will end soon. Some of them have still got guns."
He laughed. "Aye. Don't you worry your head about them. Or the elven corpse. I've a mind to teach
them a firm lesson. I'll deal with them just as soon as I've taken down the telephone wire that I used to
knock our brave lord off his elvensteed. It's ashamed I am to admit it, but I stole it off the lines along the
road margin."
Moira didn't think that any of them would forget this lesson . . . ever.
* * *
It was Monday, some four days later, and the Curragh was closed on Mondays. Moira had found her
way sensibly armed with a couple of six-packs to Rúadan's tree in the forest reserve.
"Were you really a king?" she asked, after the second beer.
He shrugged. "It was a little bitty place. You could spit across it. And I never had much taste for
kingship. I always preferred music, beer, and a few laughs to court and ceremony."
"Rúadan Mac Parthalón . . ." she mused, quizzically. "That's what you said your name was originally. I
looked it up. Parthalón was the leader of the original settlers in Ireland."
He took a pull of his beer. "Oh, aye. I've been around a while. But times have changed and so have I. I
was never a great power, or too keen on the use of power, so I've pretty much given up interfering in the
ways of humans. I've learned to fiddle. I learned to smoke. I enjoy a bit of malicious mischief now and
again."
She looked at him, remembering the brief glimpse of the thing behind the Node. It had been both evil
and terrifying . . . and trying very hard to get through. "You're a liar, Rúadan."
He nodded cheerfully. "Indeed. But the truth would spoil my image."
UNNATURAL HISTORY
Sarah A. Hoyt
Sarah A. Hoyt has published three novels Ill Met by Moonlight, All Night Awake, and Any Man
So Daring in a series which undertakes a magical recreation of Shakespeare's life. She's also
published over three dozen short stories, in magazines that include Analog, Asimov's, and Weird
Tales. She's currently working in collaboration with Eric Flint on a time-travel adventure novel
for Baen Books.
Dissy first saw the man within the stone in the junk room of the Denver Natural History Museum.
She volunteered at the museum on weekends and for a couple of hours after her work at a local
telecom. Being freshly out of college, untrained and at least in the eyes of the curators much too
young to be trusted with anything important, she got to escort groups of children around the exhibits
during operating hours, and after hours she got to catalogue, label, and look for unlikely treasures in the
museum's junk room.
The room was huge, twice as large as most of the other storage rooms in the museum, and it looked
exactly like the junk drawers or basements of most houses where a family has lived for any length of time.
Into that room went all the donations that the museum had no idea what else to do with.
There was a man in Ellicot who was fully convinced that every pebble picked up from his yard was a
dinosaur bone. And an old maiden lady in Greeley who routinely sent in broken Barbies and pieces of
pottery carefully labeled as Neanderthal axes orHomo habilis tools. And the museum kept them all, on
shelves and cupboards or just on the floor, thrown in more or less haphazardly until someone like Dissy
could be sent to look through them. Because you never know and one of the pebbles might very well,
one day, turn out to be part of a mastodon bone. And the broken crockery might be some rare
nineteenth-century pattern of interest to anthropologists.
Mostly, it was a lot like looking through yard sale goods, or the donation bin at Salvation Army. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]