Exit Unicorns (Exit Unicorns Series) (18 page)

“Why are ye carryin’ a knife?” Pat asked through gritted teeth.

“Habit,” was the terse reply.

Because the whale had beached on its side, it made a near to impossible task slightly less impossible. The skin, generally tough and oily, was dried by days in the sun and more susceptible to the knife. There was a small cracking noise as Casey split it and then there was a good eight inches of blubber to breach. It leaked an oily, heavy smell that lingered hard in the nostrils. He cut in a long arcing strip just beneath where he’d gauged the ribcage’s end, hands slicked with whale oil and then, as he hit the hard shoal of bone, a black ooze of blood.

“Jaysus Christ,” he yelled, leaping back before the worst of it pooled in the sand. “Pat come help me will ye, this was yer godforsaken romantic notion.”

“Yer goin’ to have to cut a triangle in the flesh or we’ll never get to the heart,” Pat said and then took the knife and with the precision of a surgeon, cut a perfect triangle beneath the massive ribcage. It took an hour to reach the organ cavity by which time both brothers were soaked with an aromatic variety of oil, blood and sweat.

“It’s there,” Casey said at long last, arm completely disappearing up into the cut. Pat in turn felt and shook his head.

“That’s the liver, go left.”

“Is the liver not a life sustaining organ?” Casey said irritably, the original romance of the idea buried in the ruination of his shirt, pants and scent.

“It has,” Pat’s face was grim, his arm submerged up to the shoulder, “to be the heart.”

And the heart it was, though it took another fifteen minutes and a great deal of dexterity on Pat’s part to emerge with a three inch width of it, jagged and torn in his hand. He looked purely pagan, bloody tissue held aloft, face spattered with blood and oil. It might have been a thousand years ago and he painted with the viscera of his enemy, part of the barbarian horde that terrorized Europe. The words that came from his lips completely incongruous with the portrait he presented. “Will I take it in then?”

“I’ll come with ye,” Casey said pulling his shirt off over his head.

“No, I’ll do it,” Pamela stepped forward, “It was me that wanted him back in the ocean.”

The brothers looked at her in twin consternation, brows furrowed in disapproval so identical that she had to smother a laugh.

“Ye have no bathing suit,” Casey said as if indeed that settled the entire matter right there.

“Nor have you,” she said pointedly. “Besides there’s no one else about and it’s not as if the two of you haven’t seen all I own before.” So saying she stepped, in one easy movement, out of her dress. Two throats cleared in unison, two dark sets of eyes appealed the heavens for rescue and found a cheerfully blue sky with no salvation written in its blameless hue.

“Right then,” Casey said tightly, face still carefully averted, “let’s get this done.”

The boys ran into the sea as if the pair of them were on fire, Pamela close on their heels.

The Irish Sea was not by any means a hospitable body of water and uninclined to treat intruders gently. The cold knocked the wind out of a body immediately, the current had a savage pull to it and even the strongest of swimmers was advised to go gently. Pat and Casey cut through the icy green waves cleanly, Pamela, used to warmer waters, struggled to keep up, extremities at first tingling and then disturbingly numb. Her throat and lungs burned with the chill, breath forming just above the surface of the water. The boys had struck out in a diagonal, northeast line, swimming straight and true as if they were possessed of internal compasses, while she cut a wavering and exhausted line behind them. Close to, the water was black, not green, black and unholy as the waters of hell itself.

Casey and Pat had stopped ahead of her some ways, treading water, though they appeared from a distance to catch and ride the cusp of the small, choppy, white-crested waves like sprites.

“Are ye alright?” Casey called when she’d struggled some distance further.

“Fine,” she shouted back gamely only to take in a mouthful of freezing saltwater. By the time she finished sputtering and wiping the salt out of her eyes Casey was beside her.

“I think we’d best head back for shore,” he said and struck out at an easy pace that she could match without difficulty. When they were close to shore she turned back to find that Pat was only an indistinct blur on the horizon.

“How far will he go?” she asked through chattering teeth as they crawled out of the water.

“As far as the limits of his strength will take him.”

“That’s crazy, he could drown out there.” She found a warm patch of sand and proceeded to wring the water from her hair.

“It’s his nature; it’ll be the only way that he feels he’s done the whale any honor.”

“And if he doesn’t know the limits of his strength?”

“I’ll go get him,” Casey said easily, casting her a sidelong glance as he toweled off with his ruined shirt. “Do ye not feel any shame?” His voice was curious not condemning, as if he found her puzzling.

“If you are referring to my lack of clothes, no I don’t. Do you?”

“No, but I figure that’s normal for a man. I’ve never known a woman or girl who didn’t make a big fuss over it. The Church an’ their mams tell them to keep hidden from the time they are wee an’ they never seem to shake the impulse to do so.”

“I didn’t have a mother and church was a once a year occasion for Christmas; there was never anything to make me feel ashamed.”

“Well that’s good, though I’ll not say as I don’t find it damned disconcertin’.” He smiled a sweet, wide grin that made her blush. She’d never been as aware of the physical proximity of another human being as she was of this man. His heighth and breadth, the deep lines that furrowed his knuckles, the fine hairs on his arms. How the crisp edge of his rolled up cuffs so white against the flesh of his forearm actually made her weak and dizzy. The way everything he did had a sharp edge to it, a physicality that was deeply erotic, as if he would waste neither word, nor movement, nor emotion. An intelligence tempering the brutality that would be his wont if not carefully and firmly channeled. He could hardly have been more different from Jamie on the surface, Jamie who was her ideal, precious and held tight against disillusion. Therefore it stood to reason that she should not find this man so damnably attractive and yet, oh and yet...

She closed her eyes, salt-rimed lashes pressing down against flushed cheeks and reached for her dress which was placed gently in her hand. So he knew then and was likely embarrassed by that which she could not keep secret.

“Pat’s turned back. I’m just goin’ down the shore a ways to be certain I can keep a clear eye on him.”

She nodded, not trusting herself to actual speech.

She managed the rest of the day fairly well. Pat came back to shore, exhausted and blue from cold and when he’d warmed sufficiently, they ate their lunch while Casey went out of his way to be charming. Her past considered, it was a form of behavior she found somewhat humiliating, it had been done as a salve over naked feeling before. She understood the play in all its acts now, and didn’t particularly want a part.

Devlin Murphy had the face of a dissipated choirboy and the voice of a gelded angel. Over the years, his throat, having seen a river of whiskey and the smoke of thousands of tobacco fires, had begun to slip from a pure gold registry into the cooler tones of silver, mellowed and sweetened by the earthier base notes of bronze. Regardless of its place on the chart of precious metals though it was a voice heaven sent that sat in the base of its listener’s spine and spread tendrils of ether into the blood and cells and bone.

He had at one time been an actual choirboy, possessed of cherubic curls, melting blue eyes and a voice that was surely meant for Gabriel. Beautiful enough in his youth to make priests, who still recalled the echoes of the flesh, pray for long hours on very hard floors. He was famous for a variety of reasons; a homegrown boy from the meanest part of Belfast, he had made it his primary occupation in life to record through music the entire history of the Republican movement. Among the favorites were a ballad about the Rising called
‘The Best
of Intentions’
, a long narrative song sung in two parts about the slaying of Michael Collins called
‘The Mouth of Flowers’
and ‘
The Lord of Cork’
a lament for Terence MacSwiney who’d died on hunger strike whilst serving as the mayor of Cork. He was internationally known, internationally loved and still chose to make his home in Belfast. It was this last that made him most beloved to his Irish audience.

Pamela, having been deprived of said dulcet tones all her life, was completely entranced. Devlin, a notorious womanizer with a nose for beauty, had spotted her by the end of his third song and proceeded, to the dismay of her escorts, to sing her a song ripe with double entendres. As he slithered his way into the ending of the tune, he espied something or someone of equal interest to her it seemed for his gaze, tenderly drunk, had lit on an aspect near her own and sobered swiftly.

The next song, launched rapidly and with no remnant of the sozzled bard, was an onslaught. Irish pipes, Irish fiddle played to the farthest reaches of their keeper’s talents, lit the air with fire and rebellion, recalling every uprising, every wrong, every drop of blood shed on Irish ground. It was a call to arms. At the apex of the music that shot and sundered the night, Devlin Murphy, former choirboy and defiler of priestly dreams, rose and tipping back a headful of lusty yellow curls howled into the night. It pierced the air, took aim at the stars, drowned the pipes, washed away the fiddle and sat sharp and primitive in the marrow of all who heard it.

“Now some of yez will have heard the tale I am about to tell before an’ some of yez will not,” Devlin’s voice had taken on an incantatory swing, his eyes fixing them to the ground with the force of hammered quartzite. “’Tis the tale of a black eyed boy,” his voice had lowered to a whisper, his eyes narrowed, one nicotine stained finger sweeping across his audience, “an’ the love he one time lost.”

“Christ have mercy,” Casey’s groan was heartfelt, “he’s seen us.”

“What’s going on?” Pamela whispered to Pat who sat scrunched against her right-hand side.

“’The Black Eyed Boy’ is a poem—”

“Callin’ it a poem is flattery,” Casey interjected.

“Written,” Pat continued unperturbed, “by Devlin’s grandda’—”

“A man of absolutely no talent,” Casey supplied.

“In honor of
our
granddad Brendan, who—”

“Was not so much honored as entirely humiliated by this particular bit of music.”

“Nevertheless it was a well-intentioned piece of work even if Devlin’s grandda’, whose name was also Devlin by the way, was a bit left of center.”

“Left of center?” Casey snorted, causing the people ahead of them to turn round and glare at him. “The man was stark ravin’ mad, thought he was the king’s own musician in the court of Finn MacCool. Ran naked down the lanes with nothin’ but ribbons in his hair half his life.”

“Don’t exaggerate; he only did that on Sundays for religious reasons.”

“So now runnin’ about in the altogether with roses an’ lace in yer hair is an accepted Christian practice?” Casey said bitingly.

“Why did he write a poem about your grandfather?” Pamela hastily asked.

“He thought,” Casey drew his eyebrows together for emphasis, “that grandda’
was
Finn MacCool.”

“Hush, the song is startin’,” Pat said as the musical lead up began its winding down into words. The pipes and fiddle had hushed to a soft moan when Devlin’s voice hissed like a rush of velvet into the atmosphere:

A black-eyed boy
Came he down
From Carrickmore
And Callagmaghtown.
The way was dark
The night uncertain
When God’s finger
Drew nigh the curtain,
Revealed He fire
Through that door,
And the moon sat shivering
On a foreign shore,
Aye, the moon sat shivering
On a foreign shore...

The song wound on through a tale of war, defeat, love found and love lost, the tale of a black-eyed boy who near to died for the love of a redheaded girl. By the end of it, Pat’s jaw was slack and Casey’s face a stark white.

“What in the name of Christ was that?” he asked no one in particular as the song ended in an eruption of clapping and cheering.

“I have no idea, it sure an’ hell wasn’t his grandda’s version though,” Pat said, “that one began with ‘
there was a boy named Finny MacCool’
an’ suffice it to say the rest is not fit for a lady’s ears.”

“Ye’ll perhaps have noticed,” Devlin began, putting out his hands to still the applause, “that my wee song has been re-vamped somewhat an’ given a more serious tone, an’ though,” he smiled with cream coddling charm, “I’d like to take credit for the revisions I must bestow credit where credit is due, this new an’ may I say masterful version was compliments of our great poet, the last revolutionary to wield a pen, Mr. Jack Stuart. Many of yez will have no doubt heard the rumor that Jack was to be here tonight,” he paused as the expected gasp rose from the audience, “an’ though I am loathe to disappoint such a fine bunch as yerselves, I must sadly an’ with regret announce that Jack was detained in Paris an’ could not be here.” There was a great deflation of lungs and stomachs as disappointment sat down heavy on the shoulders of all assembled. To have been a part of history, to have been the first people to know whom Jack Stuart actually was, to have that hope dangled in one’s face and snatched back just as fast, well it was perhaps more indignity than even Devlin Murphy could cure. There were mutters and murmurs as Devlin inclined his head to one side and held up a hand once more.