“Ma says they’re not around here, anyway. In a fair flutter, sure she says they were.” The boy’s voice went from subject to subject as though each was as familiar as the other. “She’s after making the dinner now.”
Liam nodded affectionately. “You go and help. Mind now. Attend to your business.”
“Yes, Granfer.” And the youngster vanished through the far door from which appetizing if mysterious scents emerged.
“He’s a scamp…. I feel a dire responsibility for him.” Liam sighed and drank again. “When his father — when his father died, it fairly broke Ma’s heart. That map,” he finished savagely.
Crane leaned forward. “Tell us about the Map Country.”
A relationship had been set up between these three people, the sharing of common experiences, within the space of an hour or two; Crane recognized that the fact went far beyond this past hour and extended to a knowledge of the map’s existence and a desire to possess it — or the knowledge it could bring. For Crane’s whole purpose was undergoing a change. All his original reasons for the search remained intact but the balance of importance had subtly shifted; no longer was he seeking the map for the map’s sake, or for Adele’s; no longer was he merely interested in rescuing Allan Gould. He sensed something else, something greater and more frightening even than he had imagined — in the finding of the map.
What Liam told him, at first, merely awoke old memories.
Forty years ago, when Liam had been a reckless youth full of Irish bounce and living in a land torn by rebellion and war, when Irishman ruthlessly sought out and murdered Irishman, in the time of the Troubles, he’d needed a map for some dark and devious purpose of his own and had turned up the map — The Map — in some odd little corner shop where it had mouldered for decades. Using it, he had stumbled into the Map Country.
As he said, with a lopsided smile: “It was a lucky thing I was carrying a Lee-Enfield .303 and a bag of grenades.”
Thinking back, trying to pierce the blank of childhood memory, Crane wondered what good rifle bullets and grenades would have been against the clanking monsters.
“That trip I cleared enough to set me up in life, find me a wife and a fine house, and give me, as I thought, no more worries.”
Polly and Crane exchanged looks. Here was the old treasure story being trotted out again.
Liam didn’t know it; but neither of them was interested in the treasure — if it existed. Liam was making a pitch without need.
Crane said: “So you found some treasure. Bully for you. But what about the Map Country?
You went back. What is it like?”
This time Liam was taken aback. He set his whisky down and stared at them. “You’re after buying the map, are ye not? And if that is so, why else but for the treasure?”
Crane said: “Your daughter married and you and your son-in-law went back into the Map Country for more money — or whatever the treasure may be. He was trapped there. Now you’ve come to the end of the money and need more. Am I right?”
Liam’s white head bowed. “Yes, son. That’s about the way of it.”
Polly clucked sympathetically.
Crane went on prodding. “You’ve come to the end of the cash and your grandson is too young to go in and you’re — you’re not too old, Liam,” he said, altering his attack as understanding came. “You’re scared!”
Liam did not answer. He sat hunched, the hand holding the whiskey glass tightening and relaxing, tightening and relaxing.
At last he said: “For forty years I’ve lived in the shadow of them. They seem to sense the map is somewhere hereabouts. I’ve never really understood them and sure isn’t that natural, weird unearthly beasties they be…? But I’ve beaten them so far and I’ll beat them still.” The conviction in his voice was dulled and chill. “I have to have money, enough to tide me over ’til — enough for Ma and the boy. I can’t last out much longer.”
“How about Sean?”
“A flea bite.” The fingers tightened and relaxed, tightened and relaxed. “Faith, haven’t I been the big man of these parts? You might understand, you with your factories and offices in England. Open-handed I was, joying in largesse, respected, envied, admired — the big feller himself.
And then came the thin gruel days, and the selling of pictures and statues and the pinching and scraping. And my pride turning in my guts like a sword….”
“And the Map Country—”
“Ah, the treasure trove, the pot of gold at the foot of the rainbow…” Liam lifted his head and looked up at them and the passion and sorrow in his ravaged face was a terrible thing to see.
“You don’t know what it’s like, living with the knowledge that a paladin’s fortune lies over the hill and you too scared to run across and fetch it.”
“I can imagine,” said Polly, softly.
“Colla and me went in just before the boy was born. I had some of the old wealth left; but Colla was mad to go, to bring back a fortune that would set his son among the highest in the land — or to buy a husband from the nobility for his daughter. Even then I didn’t really — So I took the submachine guns from the war and Colla the grenades. We loaded the truck well enough and started to run out; but they caught us. Colla… Colla…”
Polly said firmly: “Clanking monsters with arms?”
“Aye,” Liam said dispiritedly, recall draining him even of remembered fear. “Aye, I might have guessed you’d know. I don’t know how you know what you do; but you don’t know the whole truth and that’s a fact.” He wheezed spitefully. “But you don’t have the map. Don’t forget that.”
“So you want more money, Liam. And if you haven’t the courage to go into the Map Country yourself after it, you’re willing to sell the map in lieu. All right. How much?”
The tousle-haired boy, Colla Junior, put his head in the door. He had a gift for doing that with dramatic effect. “Dinner’s ready. Ma says she’ll flay you if you let it go cold.”
Liam rose slowly, rolling the whiskey glass between his hands and then swallowing the contents in one gulp. His blue eyes did not leave Crane’s face. “How much?” he repeated, and then turned abruptly, and made for the door.
Perforce, Crane and Polly followed.
Over dinner, a simple meal eaten in luxurious surroundings, nothing was said about the Map Country. Ma turned out to be a wispy, neat-figured woman with the penetrating blue eyes of her father. Her distant but polite manner did nothing to invite warmth of human contact; her aloofness from the world seemed to Crane to come from a personality blockage rather than a defect, as though she was perfectly happy to remain forever embedded within a certain circumscribed series of events — and he thought of his sister Adele….
To the watchful Crane Ma wore a perpetual air of listening, as though ready to start up at a sound.
He ate his meal in silence. Polly did the same. Ma and her son chatted desultorily about local tittle-tattle in which, surprisingly, Liam joined. He spoke with a grave and habitual authority about the things of the soil that are important to a man. There was no embarrassment here.
Crane felt a touch of sympathy with this family, given a head start in life by Liam and the treasure from the Map Country and then fallen on evil times, unable to continue with their standard of living and no man in the house to shoulder the responsibility and venture once again into that eerie other world beyond the mist. Clear evidence showed that in every room valuable items had been sold from the house. Despite Liam’s assertion that the loan had been a flea bite, how did these wholesale pawnings or sales tie in with the loan of money to Sean? Why didn’t Liam ask Sean to go into the Map Country?
The answer to that came as Liam laid down his knife and fork, looked across unwaveringly with those startling eyes, and said quietly: “One hundred thousand. Yes or no, Mister Crane?”