Summer, 1854

 

Cloghaun to Kilrush

west coast of Ireland

 

 

 

 

 

It was two or three hours past sunset when Mary McCarthy walked into a small village on the west coast of Ireland.  She thought it was Cloghaun, perhaps five miles south of her former home, but she wasn't sure.  This was new country to her.

No lights showed in any of the houses, and several of them were vacant, doors and windows open or missing, gaping mouths in the corpses of homes.  None of the very few businesses were of the sort which sold food, so there would be few if any chances to steal something to eat in this village and she dare not show herself during the day.

The village was this way because of the great potato famine of the late1840s.  It was only five years past and Ireland was poorer by perhaps two million people, almost half of them dead of starvation.  The rest had flown away like wild geese, to Scotland, England, America, and the very ends of the Earth.

Her bare and callused feet felt little of the rough gravel that made up the road, nor did they or any other part of her feel cold despite the near-freezing wind coming from the ocean a few miles to the west.  Indeed, she enjoyed the carress of the wind and the smells it brought, of the salty sea and grass.

Mary had lived through the famine and it had hardened her soul, already tough, to hardest adamant.  It had also taught her to enjoy what little blessings came her way.  She'd had many of those, and larger ones too.  She and her family had all survived the famine, partly because they had been well-off by the standards of the area, partly because they had planted turnips and other crops to substitute for potatoes, and partly because their potato crops had miraculously escaped the blight.

And hadn't that aroused envy among her neighbors?  Some of them had muttered about witchcraft.

Mary ghosted into each empty house, seeing if by some odd chance anything had been left that she could use.  She was not surprised to find each abandoned house bare of everything but dust.

Except one.  A book lay in one corner of a room. 

Mary's eyesight had been fuzzy and poorly focussed before her death and especially bad at night.  Since her rebirth her eyes had improved, and more than humanly possible.  They focussed sharply now, and moonsliver [STET] and starlight lit the room as if the full moon was out.  Or as if lit by the sun just after sunset, for she saw colors in that eerie eye-bending way of twilight just at the edge of night.

Color vision was something impossible for ordinary humans even outside under the light of the full moon.  Walking toward the book she wondered how she saw so well in here.

The answer came to her between one step and the next.  She stopped to keep from falling over as her vision was replaced by another vision.  It was as if she was a bird aloft in an egg-shaped cavern, open on one side to light cast onto the opposite rounded wall.

But it was not a cavern.  It was one of her eyes.  Her strange other-sense was probing into her own body.  Even stranger, she understood what she was perceiving almost as if she'd once read a book about it.

At the rounded back of her eye was a wispy sheet of flesh made of the tiny cells that made up all flesh and blood and bone in her body.  The sheet contained two kinds of light-sensing cells.  One, for day, could see colors.  One, for night, could only see brightness.

Somehow Mary was making that sheet of flesh more sensitive.  At the same time she was letting more starlight in by opening the irises of her eyes much more than normal.

Then her regular vison returned.  She was back "outside" her body again.

She shook her head at the strangeness and bent to pick up the book, her body moving as smoothly and gracefully as that of a dancer or a warrior.  That was another mysterious aspect of the magical skills that had resurrected her.  Even as a girl she had never been as agile as this.

Her eldritch sight could not quite make out the print.  She left the house, whacking the book gently on the door jamb to remove the worst of the dust, and looked at the book again.

Perhaps the first and last thirds of the book were gone, the pages in between warped and stained by damp and time, but she could tell that it was a book of fairy tales.  Indeed, it was this very book that had helped her learn to read, something few of the older country people in Ireland could do in 1854, and fewer country women, a legacy of the many years when English law forbade education to the Irish.

Carefully she wiped off the book, slipped it into her makeshift pack, and vanished from the village as silently as she had come.

.

It was maybe midnight when Mary smelled chickens.

She was not sure where she was, just that she was aiming south for Duilin on the River Aille, with the coast road under her feet.  She was hoping to break into a store in Duilin and steal some food.  It was reportedly larger than Cloghaun.

She turned to look west toward the ocean, face into the wind.  There was a cottage that huddled a ways from the dirt road she trod.

The barnyard smell coming from the cottage made Mary's belly cramp.  She had finished all the bread and ham from home, and she desperately needed more food.  Her body had used up all her body fat and some of her muscle when it had cured her of death and old age while she lay in her grave.  Her slow and careful eating during the day had rebuilt some of the most-needed muscles in her body and restored much of what had been stolen from her bones.

Her conscience warred with her need and struck a compromise.  She made a promise to God -- I will only steal one.

She stripped off her heavy coat and laid it and her crude pack next to a stone that marked the path to the cottage.  Then she walked carefully up the path that led to the cottage, stopping frequently to look around, listen, and breath deeply.

Her sense of smell improved quickly under her wish for such improvement.  It told her that there were humans in the house, sheep in the field beyond guarded by a dog, and pigs and chickens in the wretched stone shack that was the tiny barn.  Another dog slept within, guarding the farm animals.

Mary almost retched at the various odors of excrement and urine that her extra-sensitive nose brought to her.  But she clamped a stern incorporeal hand on her reactions and continued on, her knife extended a bit forward and ready for whatever came.  Nerves on edge, she prayed that if what came at her was human she could leash her reflexes quickly enough to keep from killing them.

As she walked, without conscious thought, she calmed her racketing heart and released adrenaline and sugar into her blood at a careful rate.  Her teenaged muscles grew even more strong and supple, her reaction speed dropped below the threshold of what was humanly possible.  Wishing for more sensitive feet caused her body to leach callus from the soles of her feet till she felt every tiny pebble and grass blade under them.  She walked with legs flexed, touching the balls of her feet to the earth first, her body automatically taking on an even  smoother flowing motion.

Someone seeing her now might have mistaken her for a legendary blood-drinker or cat lady and fled screaming, or crept silently away.  Nor would they have been far wrong.

The door to the barn was on the west side, the side closest to the house.  Mary could hear the breathing of the dog just inside it.  When she walked around to the door, the ocean breeze would be at her back, sending her scent straight to the dog.

In her extrahuman state she could move fast enough to silence it temporarily with one hand before cutting its throat with her other hand to silence it permanently.  Yet she hesitated.

She liked dogs and this one was only doing its duty.  Its loss would make this poor farm poorer.  It might even cause its people the grief of losing a friend.

She decided on a more dangerous course, available to her because of what she was beginning to think of as her witch powers.  She thought she could take on the scent of one of the cottage-dwellers.  Mary's nose told her that there was a young teenaged girl in the house.  She would be the easiest, since Mary was closest to her in age and sex.

Mary retreated to the back side of the barn and sat with her back against it.   She relaxed, focused her attention on the smell of the young girl, and sought to match her own scent to the girl's.

Minutes, then most of an hour, passed.  The world slept on, though an owl hooted in the distance and presumably mice froze at the sound, then scurried about their business.

The scent glands at the base of the hairs in Mary's underpits and on her crotch and head slowly changed till the scent they exuded finally -- Mary thought -- matched that of the young girl's.

She took a deep, steadying breath, stood, and stepped around the corner of the barn.  There she stood for a few minutes in the full wind off the ocean.  She also swirled her head from side to side, fluffed her dress to more quickly sweep away her own scent and release that of her counterfeit scent from her clothing.

Then she flowed to the front of the barn and stood in front of its door, waiting tensely to see what the dog would do, ready to pounce and kill it should it seem ready to raise the alarm.

The dog continued to sleep.  Her ruse had worked.

Slowly Mary opened the barn door and slipped within to stand near the dog.  It stirred in its sleep.  She knelt and put her hand on its head, thinking to it Sleep my friend, sleep, sleep.  She had always been able to calm animals this way, though she had always before talked out loud.  Would it work now?  Well enough?

Apparently so; it settled more firmly into sleep.  Relieved,  she slowly lifted her hand.  Its tail wagged slightly but the dog stayed asleep.

Carefully Mary stood up and advanced on the chickens roosting on poles laid crossways in the cracks between two sides of the barn.  With her enhanced eyesight she studied them.  Two or three of them ruffled their feathers and shifted their weight, perhaps vaguely sensing the presence of a predator.

Plucking one from its perch and wringing its neck would not work.  Even her extranatural speed could not prevent it from flapping its wings.  It took a while for a chicken to die even headless.

Suppose she woke one up, carefully enough not to alarm it.  It would take it head from beneath its wing and lift it to look around.  If she was ready, perhaps as fast and strong as she was she could strike its head off with her knife, which was heavy and quite sharp, before it became alarmed.  It would be dead before it knew there was danger and started flapping around.

That was chancy too.  When it woke with her looming before it it likely would panic and set off the alarm.

Mary was annoyed with herself, she who took pride in always planning important actions beforehand.  She was acting with the impulsiveness of a teenager.  Like the teenager that her body had become.  Maybe her body was over-ruling her head.

One more strategem suggested itself.  Acting on it, she slowly extended her hand, not wanting the rustle of her clothes or the moving air from her hand to alert the chicken.  And as her hand neared the chicken's head, her guess became a certainty.

She could send the chicken further into sleep with a touch, just as she had made the dog near the door sleep more deeply.  She repeated that performance and the chicken sagged and would have fallen from its perch if Mary had not quickly and carefully cradled it in her hands.

She left the farm behind, retrieved her property, and walked off down the dirt road.  Perhaps a mile away she walked eastward a hundred yards or so and plucked the bird's head from its neck with a single powerful twist.  While it flopped its life away she walked parallel to the road, letting it hang by its legs and bleed itself out.  This way the prevailing west wind from the ocean would blow the blood scent away from the road and anyone traveling on it with dogs.

Rejoining the road, she walked till perhaps three hours before dawn, when she sought out a row of bushes well off the road and made herself a little camping area.  Her ability to dissolve living things at a touch made it easy to make herself a bed of small, leafy branches "cut" from the bushes.

As she fell easily into sleep she reflected that she had risen from the grave just twenty-four hours ago.

.

The sun peeking through the bushes and striking her on one eye woke her.  Mary stood up an stretched, looking around, breathing deeply the cool moist air of morning.  The sky was gloriously blue, the land to the east covered with brilliant greenery and rising to distant grey hills.  To the west the land dropped to bathe in indigo ocean.  The Arain islands were somewhere out there but she saw no trace of them -- unless those low-lying clouds on the horizon hovered over them.

Mary made herself ready for the day, gutted and stripped the chicken of its feathers, and impaled the body on a sharpened stake.  She was very careful when lighting the fire not to waste the match.  She had only taken a half-empty box of matches from her home, leaving the full box for her family.

As the chicken cooked grease dripped from it, the drops of grease making sputtering blue sparks as they caught alight in the fire.  Mary ate each scrap of meat that she could, pulling it off the carcass as soon as it cooked, opening up the body cavity for further cooking.  She ate the chicken liver with great relish, and she could feel her body making use of much-needed nourishment only available in the liver.

After eating, sitting cross-legged, Mary closed her eyes and focussed on her hands.  When her hands warmed and seemed to fray into many tiny fingers and then wisps of smoke, she sank her hands into the earth before her.

The tiny grains of earth barely visible to her physical eyes were the size of gravel or even larger to her witch sight.  She could then break up the "glue" between the grains of earth by picking at it with her esoteric "fingers."  The earth became a very fine dust.  This let her quickly dig a hole where she could bury the remains of the chicken.

Only after she did that did she realize that there had been another way to hide the evidence.  She could have simply dissolved the bones.

Around noon she crossed onto the rocky upland that several miles further on ended in the cliffs of Mohr.  She left the road at one place and walked to the edge of the cliff plunging down into the sea.  Without any land or vegetation to slow the breeze the wind rushed past her, making her heavy coat flap.  For a moment she felt chilled before her skin thickened itself and changed blood-flow patterns and she grew comfortable again.

Looking north along the curve of the coast from the heights of the cliff she could see the islands of Arain.  They were like grey-green foam at the place where the deep blue of the water met the lighter blue of the sky.  Frowning and sharpening her gaze she turned her eyes into weak binoculars but could not get enough detail to really see anything.

Looking south along the coast she thought she could see a seaside village just at the horizon.  She wondered if it was Duilin, or Doolin as the English would say, where the Aille River met the ocean.  She returned to the road and continued south.

An hour or so later a strong west wind began to push at her body.  Low clouds began to rush over her.  Following them was a grey sweep of rain.

There was no shelter anywhere near on this rocky part of the coast, so Mary took off her coat, made sure her matches were at the center of her makeshift pack, and folded the coat as tightly around her pack as she could.  She hunched over it, squeezing it tightly against her belly, and continued walking.

The rain came as a great rush of wetted dust.  Mary turned her upper body away from the rain and sharp drops struck her back like pebbles.  Her skin automatically toughened to a leather hardness and the pain almost instantly went away, but she was quickly drenched.

Before her death the wind and water would have chilled her dangerously at this time of year, mid-April.  Now her skin automatically adjusted and she only felt a pleasant coolness.  If she hadn't had to keep her pack dry she would have leaned back and let the rain wash her clean.

An hour later the rain was gone and the sun was back.  She opened her coat from around her pack and flapped it in the breeze to try to dry it out a bit.  Then, thinking about her ability to dissolve things, she closed her eyes and extended her witch sight into the clothing.  It took a little careful experimenting and the accidental destruction of a small strip of cloth, but she eventually was able to disperse all the water in her coat as a fine mist, quickly whipped away by the wind.  The pack was only slightly dampened on the outside and everything inside -- including the matches -- was dry.

Perhaps two hours before sunset the rocky road lifted sharply then began to tilt downhill.  She stopped at the peak and looked down into a long green valley.  It swept from gently rolling green hills to the east toward the ocean to her right.  This was the Aille River valley.

It was just past sunset when Mary, following the road downhill,  neared the river's edge and the village of Roadford.  She was not ready to meet people, so she turned left off the road and hopped a low briar-covered stone fence.  She walked further inland then angled southward through uneven grassy pasture land till she came to the river.  The last few hundred feet was through a low forest running along the river bank.

The river's edge was sandy and rocky and she stopped just inside the trees to look at the water.  By now the sun was well down and she had to use her night sight, so everything had a twilight cast.  The river seemed to be perhaps two hundred feet across, edged on the opposite side by another strip of forest.  It flowed smoothly here.  And in it must be fish.

She had no fish line or fish hooks, nor money to buy them in Rockford even if she dared to be seen there.

Bears, she recalled, were supposed to stand in water and scoop passing fish out onto the bank.  She looked doubtfully at the water.  In the twilight luminance of her night sight she could see no fish in the water.  Did fish sleep at night?  Perhaps.  And if she could find their resting places, maybe she could catch them there.

Mary heaved a big sigh.  She was too tired to try that.  She was going to sleep hungry tonight.

She turned back into the wood, remembering the low bushes she had pushed through at the further edge of the strip forest.  There she made herself a cozy little nest of dried leaves and cut branches and burrowed into it like a wild animal.

She tossed and turned like a human, however, her hunger bothering her more than usual.  Finally she gave her stomach a stern warning to be quiet and was surprised when the cramps instantly went away.  A handy ability, that ‑‑ as long as one didn't overdo it.

.

Mary slept till first light.  Leaving her meager belongings just inside the forest, she wandered along the rivers' edge clad only in a dress.

The day was clear and bright, the air cool.  There were lily pads floating at the river's edge, round leaves like plates and saucers resting on the water.  They grew up and down the river as far as she could see.

Near the water she tucked her dress-bottom up under her belt and walked cautiously into the shallows, her toes squishing into the mud at the bottom of the river.  She ripped up one of the round, fleshy leaves and examined it.  Were lily pads edible?

She swished the six-inch round leaf in the water to clean it and nibbled its edge.  It was not particularly tasty but did not taste unpleasant.  She did not swallow but let the juice stand in her mouth, trying to decide if it was poisonous or not.

Edible, her deep body knowledge told her, but not terribly nutritious.  Mary swallowed a small mouthful of the pulp and waited to see if her stomach agreed.  It did, so she began to eat the leaf.  It filled her stomach quite nicely, stilling the hunger pangs that had awakened when Mary did.

She reached down to pull up a second leaf and instantly forgot it as a brown fish darted out from under a leaf and disappeared into the deeper water.  So!  This was where the fish were hiding.

She leaned over, poised to snatch a second fish if it appeared.  It did not.  Maybe they needed to be scared out from under the floating leaves.

Mary threw the remnant of the lily pad about six feet to her left, upstream.  Several fish darted out of hiding and she snatched at one, then another, missing them even with her superhuman speed.  They were fast!

Mary pulled up another round leaf and waded upstream a little way, going slowly and trying not to roil the water.  There she slowed and stopped to stand perfectly still.  After a few minutes she threw the leaf upstream again and poised to snatch at the fish.  This time she actually touched one slippery side before they all vanished.

Mary had a lot of patience when she wanted  to exercise it.  The next hour or so required much of that quality.  She improved to where she was sometimes able to guess just when fish would appear in the water in front of her and have her hands there to receive them.

When she had snatched/slapped a third fish up onto the river bank she abandoned the water to make a little firepit just inside the tree-line with stones from the river's edge.  Then she gathered wood for a fire.  She used a precious match getting the fire started and nursed it carefully till it was burning well.

She narrowed an invisible finger to paper thinness, invoked the dissolution action, and stroked it across the body of a fish just behind the fish's head.  The finger sliced through the flesh as if it were air and the fish head plopped to the ground.

She cut off the heads of the other two fish.  She also cut off the fins and flensed the smooth brown skin away with her esoteric knife.

The fish were utterly delicious despite her lack of salt.  Finished,  she dissolved the remains with her esoteric hands, piled a few dry branches onto the fire, and retired to her burrow in the bushes to sleep.

Late that afternoon she woke and examined the fire pit.  As she had hoped a few coals covered with white ash remained hot enough to restart the fire with some twigs and dead leaves without using another match.  She fished again, ate and slept again.

.

The next day Mary fished and caught her now-customary three fish very quickly.  Cleaning up after the meal, she decided on a full-body bath.  Immersing herself to get her hair completely clean she found that she could hold her breath longer than she expected.  Over the next few days she learned to stay underwater more than a half hour.  The time varied by how often she breathed deeply before immersing herself, and how active she was under the water.

She had not gone swimming since she was a child but she became as agile in water as she was on land.  She put on weight, most of it muscle, and her body began to round out, making her seem more like fourteen years old physically.  She'd had her first period at twelve or so, so she wondered when ‑‑ or if ‑‑ her period would return.

She discovered that she did not need her witch hands to dry off her body.  When she wanted it an esoteric skin covered her all over.  At a thought water on her physical skin flashed into mist.  With her esoteric skin and her instantly adaptable actual skin it was not long before she spent most of her time without clothes.

She quickly learned to attend to esoteric or visual images as easily as she re-focussed her eyes from near to far objects.  Soon she no longer needed to close her eyes to attend to her esoteric sight.

She also learned one day that she could control the color of her skin when she lazed in the sun.  She was wishing that the sun would burn her freckled skin brown instead of it's usual peeling redness, and found her wish coming true.  Experimenting, she found that she could turn her skin so brown it appeared black.  And when she wished to lighten her skin she could leach away the color till she was as white as an albino.

Getting rid of her freckles was easy, but getting them back was not.  But she managed it.  Some people considered freckles ugly.  Mary had always liked them.

Mary also discovered one day that she could control the growth of her flame-colored hair.  It was then just two or three inches long.  Overnight she forced it to grow down past her shoulders, but the hair was frail and brittle.  She cut it close to her skull and let it begin growing again, at a more natural speed.

Perhaps six weeks went by.  Her period did not return.  Apparently once a woman's period stopped it could not be brought back even by magic -- or whatever this power was that she now had.

.

One day Mary heard a shot off in the distance, then a second.  She froze, then slowly drew back into the trees and behind one of them, looking around its side.  She stayed that way for a long time, apparently utterly immobile.   Actually she was automatically tensing and relaxing various muscle throughout her body to keep herself supple.

After a time two men bearing rifles crunched along the rocky riverside, bearing a dead deer slung below a pole that rested on their shoulders.  It was a doe, she saw.  That annoyed her.  Didn't these idiots know female deer should be spared to breed more deer?

After they had disappeared around a bend of the river, and for some time thereafter, Mary waited.  They did not return.

Mary was tired of fish.  She had found more plants to eat, including one with frilly lime-colored leaves and an almost vinegary, burning taste that was useful for flavoring.  But even with that she still missed salt, and her esoteric body knowledge told her that her body needed it.

A deer's blood would have salt, Mary mused.  She went to the place where the men had trod, crouched to sniff the ground, and memorized their scent.

She took off at a quick trot back along the men's path, her eyes scanning the forest line for a clue to where the men had exited the forest.  She found it when she lost the scent and had to backtrack to where the scent picked up again.

Following the men's path in the forest was not easy, but she managed it.  Finally she found where they had killed the deer.  Of course, the herd had long since fled.

Eventually she tracked the deer down, grazing in a meadow a few miles away.

A herd of deer was not just a random gathering, she quickly saw.  The breeding females and the young stayed in the center, the grown males surrounded them, and two or three males at the edge acted as sentinels.

After watching them for a time, Mary picked out two likely prey.  Both were older and one might even be lame.  They would be easier for her to catch.  Neither looked sickly, however, nor very old, so catching them would not be easy.

Mary examined the way the thigh-high grass in the meadow moved in the wind.  The wind was not strong, at least down here where the surrounding trees blocked off most of its force.  It was strong enough, however, to show its direction.

Mary faded back into the trees a hundred yards or more, then made a large circle around the herd to a point where she would be downwind of the herd.  Back at the trees' edge, she watched the herd long enough to decide on her target -- the lame one.  It was closest to the downwind side.

She went down onto her knees then her belly and began to crawl very slowly toward the herd through the high grass.  At first the grass cut her naked skin and the twigs bruised her knees and elbows and scratched her belly.  Quickly her skin adjusted, become leather-like wherever it was exposed to harm.

Periodically she stopped and carefully lifted her head just enough to ensure the situation had not materially changed.  Once she corrected her course as her target wandered further to one side.

At last her latest look-see told her that she was in position.  She leaped up and ran toward the deer she had selected.  It was warned somehow and flashed into motion.  It was very fast, despite its limp.  It pulled away from her.

Mary bared her teeth and a hissing growl came from between her lips.  Anger flared like fire in her.  It was not going to get away!

She leaned even further forward as she pounded along.  Her muscles changed, the bones in her legs lengthened slightly, and the joints in her knees, ankles, and toes adjusted, subtly changing attachment angles.  Her heart increased in size and efficiency, the chemical pathways governing her metabolism became more efficient.

Mary quickly neared the deer, a tigress in human form.  She made a great leap, landed on the deer's back, clamped her legs around the barrel of its body just behind its forelegs, grabbed one antler with one hand and from the other hand extended her invisible witch hand, shaped into a single claw a foot long and less than a razor's thickness.  She leaned forward to reach under the deer and sliced the witch claw through its throat.

The deer gave a great leap and re-doubled its efforts.  But it was dying.  It staggered forward several steps, faltered, began to fall.  Mary leaped clear, ran a few steps to catch her balance, and crouched.  Looking about, she saw the rest of the herd disappearing from the meadow.

Her victim was now kneeling on its forelegs, blood gushing from its throat.  Mary leaped to drink the blood.  It gushed down her throat, hot and rich with salt and other nutrients.

The deer feel onto its side.  Mary fell with it, lips locked to the neck wound, sucking at the wound.

The blood diminished, quit flowing, the deer gave a great shudder all along its body length, and died, its great eyes forever stilled and staring, excrement coming from its rear, a last breath making the blood bubble at his wounded throat.

Mary looked at the beautiful animal.  Great sadness swept over her.  She felt the sticky blood on her face and front and her stomach rebelled.  But she'd had a will of steel before her death, and now she had magic as well to help her control herself.  Her emotions calmed, her stomach quieted and worked to digest what she had drunk.

It was not much, her esoteric senses told her.  Most of the deer's blood had been wasted.  She laughed a little, ruefully.  She wasn't a very good dearg-dur, the legendary Irish blood-drinker.

However, sitting back on her haunches, taking stock of her body and its functioning, she decided that she made a pretty good bean-chat ‑‑ woman-cat.

.

Mary hunted the deer several times more, doing a better job, bringing a rope she wove out of tree-bark to hang a slaughtered deer by its heels to better bleed it and remove its entrails.  A farmer's wife, she was no stranger to slaughtering an animal.

.

One day Mary looked at the sun in the sky and knew.  It was July.  It was time for her to continue her journey.

The big city Ennis was to her south and east a day or two away.  It would be big enough for her to get lost in and offer opportunities.  But big cities had much more crime than small ones and were filthy, with excrement lying on the streets.  People got sick easier, died easier.  She wanted something a little smaller and cleaner, though still much larger than the little villages near her former home.

A few days south she would come to the River Shannon.  It ran all the way from the middle of Ireland to the Atlantic, becoming so wide that it was miles across before emptying into the ocean.  Dozens of cities lay on or near the river's shores.  Ennis itself was not that far from the Shannon.  The huge city of Limerick, further inland, was actually on it.

The city she had heard most about was Kilrush, from a cousin who had once lived there.  It sounded like the best compromise of small size and larger opportunities.

She spent several days preparing for the trip, smoking meat, cleaning her clothes as best she could -- no more living naked like an animal -- and preparing to pack.  This time everything would go into a proper pack made of deerskin, with straps for her shoulders.  In it would go her old possessions plus several more that she had made, such as a new set of shoes.  It had been easy to make them, carrying as she did -- thanks to her witch hands -- knives and needles of perfect, unwearing sharpness.

She swam the Aille River the next morning, balancing her pack on her head, dried herself magically, and dressed.  Angling west she came across the coast road and began to jog steadily south.  As she ran she -- as she did such nowadays, automatically and without more than a passing thought -- reconfigured her body to make it a better running machine.  Soon she was running with a smooth, graceful motion that would have appeared to an onlooker more like dancing.

Mile after mile passed at a pace faster than any ordinary human could muster, certainly not for long.  But for Mary this was a leisurely jog, and she had plenty of time to enjoy the beautiful July day and a pelting shower that felt like a benediction to her body, warm as it was from sun and the sugar her body burned.  She crossed several rivers on on old stone bridges and refilled the water bottles she had made out of deer hide.

At mid-day she came to the village of Miltown Malbay and slowed to a decorous walk.  She got a few curious glances but spoke to no one, nor did anyone speak to her as she passed through the village.

Toward nightfall she passed the small coastal fishing village of Quilty and turned onto the road that struck south and a bit east, cutting across the peninsula that stuck out into the ocean.  Tomorrow would see her in Kilrush, she thought.

Just past noon the next day she walked sedately through the tiny village of Creegh -- though she did not know its name.  From a shabby tavern trouble followed her.

.

Perhaps twenty minutes past the village she looked back to see if she was far enough away to begin running again.  She saw three horsemen approaching.  She faced forward and continued at her slow pace.

When she heard the clip-clop of the horse's hooves on the packed earth of the road she courteously curved toward the verge of the road to let them pass her.

They did not.  One slowed down beside her to match her pace.  The two others came up behind her and one of them rode off the road to her other side.  Then he angled his horse toward her, forcing her onto the center of the road.

"Good day, fair lady," said the man who had forced her to change her path.

Mary glanced at him.  His dress and the tack of his horse told of money and his attitude spoke of arrogant assurance.  From his speech she judged him some petty English nobility.  He was a handsome man, taller than most as best as she could judge a man in a saddle, with dark brown ringlets, a round face, and laughing brown eyes.  The horse was a sleek dark brown, obviously expensive.

He was silently laughing at her, and her temper flared, but she kept a rein on it.  "Good day to you, sir."

"Where are you going?"

"To my home over the hill."

He made a show of standing in his stirrups and shading his eyes under the hat he wore.  There was an emerald feather stuck in its sweat band.  "Oh, goodness.  I suspect you of a fib, fair lady.  I see no cottage ahead.  And as I know this country well, I'm sure there is none."

"I think she's afraid of us," the man on her other side said, a cruel smile on his face.  He was much of piece as the first one, she saw.  Perhaps a brother or cousin.

"No!" replied the first.  "Why, how could she think that of us!  We only want to be her friends."

"I have all the friends I need," replied Mary shortly.

"Oh, but we're going to be even closer than friends."  This was from the man behind Mary.  She stopped and turned to look at him.  He was younger and blond and his horse was not so good.  A poor cousin of the other two, perhaps?  Trying to match them in wit and other ways.

It was obvious that they were going to rape her.  She had other plans, however.  They did not include gettting her clothes bloody, so she needed to get out of her clothes without alarming them.  And she needed to get them off their horses.  Their mounts multiplied their effectiveness.

Mary glanced at the first man.  He was the leader.  She smiled at him and spoke.

"Well, now, I would be friendlier if I thought you might have some coin about you."

"Oh, yes, fair lady.  We do indeed 'have some coin about us.'"

"Then let us get to it.  Over there."

The direction of her nod was off to the side of the road up ahead where three trees made a pleasant shade.  She began walking again, stepping around the leader's horse off the road, angling toward the trees.  Then, looking playfully back over her shoulder, she laughed and broke into a run toward the trees.

It took a few moments for them to react.  It was the leader who first laughed and kneed his horse into a run.  He paced beside her for the little distance to the tree.

Under the shade Mary slipped off her pack and laid it next to a tree.  Then she began disrobing.

By that time the leader was off his horse, had hitched it to a branch of one tree, and was enjoying the show.  The other two caught up and ground-reined their horses.  The leader scowled at them and they hastily hitched their horses the same way.

Ah, yes, Mary thought.  When she started screaming they did not want their animals able to run away.

The leader was the first to reach Mary as she stood completely naked, hands on hips.  The wind swirled her bright red shoulder-length hair around her face and ruffled the russet pubic hair between her legs.  The wind was from him to her, and she could smell the cruelty on him.  There was no doubt they were going to do terrible things to her, then kill her.

 She let her lips draw back from her teeth, let her smile edge toward a snarl.  She looked him full in the eyes and he checked, beginning to understand that he had make a mistake.

But the understanding came too late.  Mary casually grasped one of his wrists and lifted his arm to a better position for a cut.  He pulled away, but only succeeded in pulling her a bit toward him.  Mary had ramped up her strength in the run from the road to superhuman levels.

She extended her invisible witch knife to a foot length and a razor's width.  With one flick of her free arm she cut his arm completely in two at the elbow.

Blood gushed.  Freed from her grasp he stumbled back, staring in shock at his arm.  Before his first scream Mary had leaped around him and sliced off the head of his brother/cousin with one lightning-swift back stroke.

As that body began to fountain blood Mary turned toward the blond man.  He apparently had quick reflexes -- and a gun.  He leveled it at her and cocked it and pulled the trigger.

Mary had seen the gun and was already letting herself fall sideways.  The ball struck her off-center.  She felt a tremendous blow and stumbled to one knee.  Blood bloomed from her side, but she got to her feet and snarled at him.  As she was setting herself to run at him, he jerked his horse's reins loose from their anchor and swung astride his horse, kicking it into a gallop, laying low over his horse's neck.

Mary cursed herself for over-confidence and launched herself after him.  She was slower than usual, because part of her was repairing her wound and part of her was carefully metering her strength.

Even so she gained on him within a few yards.  Rather than leap atop the horse as she would have done unwounded, she grabbed his nearest ankle and jerked.  He screamed and tried to hold onto the horse, but her weight was too much for him.  He fell off the horse and lay stunned.  She leaped atop him and struck his head off, her strike misjudging and slicing deep into the earth below his neck.

Then Mary sat down, panting, then lay down on her back, holding her side.

Her body had already blocked both bleeding and pain.  Mary turned her witch-sight into her body and examined the damage.  One intestine was pierced and its contents was mingling with the rest of her body.  She encysted that area for further work and turned her attention to blood conduits.  The several dozen veins and arteries began to grow whole and smooth as she turned her attention elsewhere.

Next she told her body to repair tissue damage and began urging it to push out the pistol ball.  That would happen over several hours or days.

She could have reached inside and dissolved the ball into dust, but it was lead and she could taste -- if that was the right word -- that lead was a poison.

She fixed several problems and put several more on hold and slowly stood, looking back toward the trees, switching her eyesight to binocular mode.  The one whose arm she had amputated apparently had tried to apply a tourniquet.  He had been evil but he had been hardy of spirit as well as body.  But not enough; he was dead.

Mary sighed.  Perhaps she should have felt triumphant.  She could only feel a bit depressed.  Possibly all three men had possessed admirable qualities in plenty, but corrupted by their taste for cruelty.  She had no doubt that she had spared other people harm by killing them, but she could not feel good about her deed.

Her body was trembling very slightly.  Her deep body wisdom told her this was because she had used up so much of her energy store.  That was also part of the reason for her depression.

Mary searched the body of the blond man whom she had chased.  She found a small purse of coins and poured them into her pocket, dissolving the purse into dust.  It could be recognized but coins were anonymous.  There was nothing else of value to her.

His horse was grazing a ways down the road.  She gathered up its reins after a bit of soft talking and led it back to the trees.  She had to sweet-talk it a bit before it let her tether it but only a bit.  Obviously these horses were not strangers to the odor of blood.

The other two men had more money, the leader quite a bit plus two expensive-looking rings on his fingers.  She left the rings alone; they might be identifiable.

She also found a fair amount of food and several wine bottles in the saddle bags of the three men.  She immediately sat down and ate an enormous meal of bread and cheese and dried meat, washing it down with an entire bottle of wine.  The wine made her pleasantly tipsy for a few minutes, before she instructed her body to burn the alcohol into energy.

The wine was a big help; it replenished the water in her body.  Using large amounts of energy always heated her up and made her sweat tremendously.  She finished the second bottle, burning the alcohol before it could affect her.

The food helped, too.  By the time she finished eating her strength was back.

What to do with the bodies and the horses?  The bodies were easiest; she dissolved the bodies to powder, clothes and belts and such also.  She only dissolved the outside of metal objects, which was harder to dissolve, just enough to make them unidentifiable if found.  Then she threw them far away from the road, in several directions.

The horses, however, she hated to kill.  Riding the leader's horse, she led the other horses down the road a few miles until she came onto an intersection with an eastward road.  It looked at least as well traveled as the road running south, so she took the animals a mile or so eastward.  There she removed all tack and dissolved it, then frightened the animals so that they galloped eastward.

If she was lucky whoever found them would keep them and say nothing.  In any case, by the time anyone raised a cry for the dead men she believed she would be lost in the crowd in Kilrush.

And even if they found her, who would believe a fourteen-year-old girl could kill three strong, armed men?

.

Midmorning of the next day Mary came to the top of a gentle rise where a space had been cleared long ago.  A stone church had once stood there.  The church had long since fallen on hard times and, indeed, almost fallen.  Left were only grey hand-sized stones stacked atop one another, a part of it curving to suggest an arch.  She slipped off her pack and let it rest on the ground, stretched her back.

She had little attention for the church, however.  For the down side of the hill dropped slowly into a deep valley -- so slowly that only the long sweep of the land kept the valley below from looking perfectly flat.

The valley cradled the deep-blue Shannon River, which was so wide here that the opposite side was almost lost in the distance.  Only a faded green strip at the horizon showed that there was another side.

Closer in, perhaps a mile from the shore, was a large island.  With her telescopic sight Mary could make out several structures on the island.

The land in the valley was green with trees and grass in both directions, the edge of the river twisting and turning until lost in the distance.

At the end of the road she stood upon she could see scattered along the river's edge white blocks of houses, looking like toys at this distance.  Some of them must be several stories tall!

Visible at the river bank were also several ships, their masts looking like sticks thrusting skyward.  Some of the ships seemed to have two or even three masts.  One ship was moving up the Shannon.  It had three masts and several billowing white sails on each, plus a triangular sail reaching far forward, tied to the needle nose of the ship.

Around the town she could see the square plots of cultivated land and smaller structures which must be individual homes.  There seemed to be a lot of land under cultivation, and with this rich soil the crops should be rich as well.  Perhaps her cousin's estimation of near a thousand people living in Kilrush was not a brag after all.

It was here that Mary would make her fortune -- though she laughed to think that it might be a very small fortune!  Enough, at least, to buy some books.  If so she would think herself rich indeed.

And mayhap there would be strange music, and people who would talk about science and medicine and poetry and far lands.  People interested in the life of the mind, who could challenge her mind, good before death and since being reborn sharpened to a rapier's point by her magic.

Aye, great hopes.  But first she must find a home, however temporary.

Mary McCarthy settled her pack on her shoulders and set off down the hill.