Ronan Boyle and the Bridge of Riddles Read online

  Lily the wolfhound led the way through the forest, sniffing and occasionally marking certain spots with her scent. Captain de Valera pulled a small piece of chalk from her belt and drew arrows on some of the currywood trees, pointing back the way we had come.

  “Sometimes, the trick’s not getting into Tir Na Nog, Boyle,” she said, “but rather remembering how to get out.”

  The ground in the Forest of Adair is made of soft, spongelike peat—which is five thousand years of decomposed plant material packed into a lovely mush. It’s a delight to walk upon. But in certain spots one must watch out for fastpeat. Fastpeat looks exactly like normal peat, so there’s no way to watch out for it, which is what I just told you to do. Apologies for that. The only way to know you’ve stepped in fastpeat is that you’ve just sunk deep into the ground and will likely soon die from drowning.

  Luckily for me, one moment later as I sank to my chest into the peat and yelped like a confused billy goat, Captain de Valera caught me by linking her shillelagh with mine.

  “Precisely why I said to keep your shillelagh ready,” said the captain as she pulled me out. Lily grabbed hold of my jumpsuit in her teeth and helped her yank me up.

  I caught my breath and vowed that I would be more careful. But since there’s no way to look out for fastpeat, there was no way I could keep this vow. As it turned out, I would fall into fastpeat two more times—Captain de Valera would fall one time, and Lily one time, too—before we finally arrived at the bluffs.

  The bluffs loom over a chasm, several hundred feet straight down. The bottom of the canyon far below looked like a river, but on closer inspection it was actually a vast swath of four-leaf clovers undulating in the wind—so much bright green clover that it created the illusion of water, rippling with a current. Across the chasm, in the sky, was a tornado of hundreds of rainbows twisting and swirling together. Even in Tir Na Nog rainbows always point toward leprechauns and their pots of gold, so when you have an entire city full of leprechauns, it’s bound to have a violent rainbow storm swirling above it.

  “Nogbottom,” said the captain, pointing to the multicolored typhoon. “We’ll have to cross that bridge to get to the town itself.” And her finger drew a line from the town to the ruins of what looked like an ancient stone aqueduct.

  “But . . . how?” I asked, as the bridge was clearly broken in the middle, providing no pathway to the other side of the chasm.

  “It’s the Bridge of Riddles, guarded by a far darrig whose name we have never guessed,” said the captain. “If we can answer one of his riddles, the bridge will be complete for a moment. Then we run for it.”

  A moment later, Lily, the captain, and I arrived at the keeper’s house below the Bridge of Riddles. Sure enough, a far darrig whose name nobody has ever guessed was just finishing his lunch, which seemed to be some sort of potato and leek pie with onions, white truffles, and tarragon. It smelled delicious.

  “Give us a minute, luvs,” said the far darrig as he wiped his rat snout with a napkin. He rose from his comfy chair in the keeper’s house and tucked his tail back into his britches. He refastened his belt and put his hat back on, groaning and stretching his tiny little body. Far darrigs tend to look like red wombats, with stubby little tusks that jut up from an underbite that they all seem to share. This one’s body was almost a perfect circle, and under his snout his fur was brushed into a mustache. He wrapped the unfinished portion of his amazing-smelling pie in the napkin and waddled toward us. “Three euros fifty for the riddle, please,” he said. “Each.”

  “Do we pay for the dog as well?” I asked as the captain counted some money from yet another pouch on her crowded utility belt.

  “No, just for the beefies,” said the far darrig, using a derogatory name for humans that many faerie folk use. As the story goes, “beefies” is slang for humans because we smell so much like meat to faerie folk, but the real meaning of the term dates back to the time when Ireland was under British control, and the Queen’s Patrolmen of Tir Na Nog were a division of the Yeomen Warders—the guardians of the Tower of London. These Yeoman Warders, even today, are called Beefeaters, and that is the real reason that we humans have this nickname amongst faerie folk.

  Captain de Valera handed him ten euros, and he took what seemed like forever to make change, squinting at the coins.

  “Let’s see, let’s see,” mumbled the far darrig. “A riddle to keep the beefies out of Nogbottom.” He flipped through a giant, dusty tome of riddles with his stubby claws. “Ah, here’s a gem,” he said as he closed the book and locked it.

  This is the riddle the unnamed far darrig gave us, as best I remember it:

  I always trot, yet make no sound,

  when babies come, the da gets round,

  and though I’m equine through and through,

  you’ll find me in the deepest blue.

  The riddle hung there in the air for a moment. I tried to make sense of the words as best I could. Da is how Irish people say “dad,” so this was a major clue. Sometimes, when I’m in a spot like this, as I often was in primary school, I picture my memories as card catalogs, like those you would find in a library. In my imagination, I opened drawer after drawer, trying to remember an animal where the male carries the baby in its stomach. It was right on the tip of my tongue.

  Perhaps not quite on the tip of my tongue, as several moments passed. You may have already figured the riddle out.

  When I finally reached the drawer in my mind labeled S, it came to me, plain as day. “Seahorse!” I yelped out with delirious joy. “The horse that does not trot, lives in the ocean blue, and the male of the species carries the babies in its belly!”

  Captain de Valera shot me a rare smile, knowing that my answer was correct. I wanted to hug her, but I knew that she was my superior officer and that would have been enormously awkward, and so I did not.

  “Off you go, then,” said the far darrig as he climbed a little ladder and put the weight of his body on a rusted lever, riding it down to the floor and landing with a thud.

  There was a massive scraping and groaning as the bridgekeeper’s house started to tremble below our feet. Lily barked—directing our attention up to the bridge itself, which was reassembling before our eyes. The stones rolled, slid, and stacked themselves up, like watching a film of its destruction in reverse. In a moment, it was complete.

  “Well, that’s the strangest thing I’ve seen today,” I said, staring like a buffoon at the bridge and rubbing the sweaty steam off the lenses of my glasses.

  “You might want to wait on that decision. The night is young,” said Captain de Valera as she ran across the bridge and into Nogbottom.

  I took a deep breath. I was about to cross over into Nogbottom, the second-largest city of leprechauns. A city that I would later read about in my training manuals as one of the top five most dangerous places in Tir Na Nog.

  Lily barked, calling me along.

  And off I went.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  NOGBOTTOM

  I ran along the Bridge of Riddles as fast as my spindly legs could carry me. To my surprise, Lily, the captain, and myself arrived on the other side of it at eight P.M. on Friday night, despite the fact that we had left the bridgekeeper’s house on Wednesday in the wee hours of the night.

  The time and weather in the land of the faerie folk are deliberately confusing. For example, in Nogbottom, it is always Friday night at eight P.M. The time does not change, ever.

  “Why?” you ask. Because that’s how the leprechauns like it. Leprechauns love the naughty, carefree feeling that passes over a town on a Friday night at eight P.M., and since there are no clocks or calendars in Tir Na Nog, long ago the wee folk cast a spell over Nogbottom to keep it in a perpetual state that feels like Friday night at eight. In Oifigtown, the capital city of Tir Na Nog and the seat of the leprechaun royal family, it is always a snowy November Monday morning at eleven A.M., as this is the time and type of day that faerie folk will be the most productive.
r />   Being that it was such a warm summer Friday night, the street was bustling with leprechauns riding by on pigs and peacocks with saddles, and even some fancy-dressed tiny men and women riding around on large rabbits. Others, including clurichauns and red men, were tumbling in and out of one of Nogbottom’s five hundred pubs. Yes, having only a population of two thousand faerie folk, Nogbottom somehow has five hundred pubs. That’s one pub for every four inhabitants. Leprechauns love to sip glasses of stout and porter—but they really go to the pubs to show off their shoes. In Tir Na Nog it’s considered rude if you don’t put your feet up on the table.

  I watched over my shoulder as the Bridge of Riddles crumbled back down into its half-ruined state.

  Now we were stranded in this strange town. The street we stood upon was lined on both sides with wooden, leprechaun-sized buildings that appeared to be a thousand years old (they are much older). A tipsy clurichaun rode by me on a pig and shoved me aggressively with his little shoulder.

  “Watch yerself, ya daft beefie,” he belched at me.

  Lily responded to the little man with a bark that blew him right off his pig. “Knocked off me pig” is a popular expression in faerie slang, because it happens so often. Pigs do not like being ridden, and the wee folk drink far too much.

  Nogbottom is surrounded by bluffs on all sides, so the residents of the town have had to build their buildings up toward the perpetual rainbow storm in the sky above. The irregular-shaped structures that line the street were stacked up fourteen stories tall. To you or me, this is only about fifty-six feet, as one floor of a leprechaun building is only four feet high. Little makeshift rope bridges and ladders connected the upper stories to each other like a tiny skyway.

  I gazed up and saw many leprechauns darting back and forth between the upper apartments, hanging laundry, gilding their shoes, courting fair leprechaun maidens—the everyday things that the wee folk do. I patted Lily’s head. Not to comfort her, but to comfort myself.

  Captain de Valera tapped me on the shoulder with her shillelagh and gestured toward a brightly lit theater a few blocks up the street. The venue was named Opera Supreme Magnifico, and it was one of over two dozen theaters in Nogbottom’s Left End.

  Leprechauns live for thousands of years, and as a result they have developed a very specific theatrical style for their own tastes. Leprechauns love sad musicals—the sadder the better for them. The average leprechaun musical playing in the Left End has a running time of five days—the first act is usually four days, then a huge lunch, then a much shorter second act that is just one day. If you lived to be thousands of years old, five-day musicals would make perfect sense.1

  We headed into the bustling Left End, where little carriages zipped by and actors and poets hustled about on their way to their engagements. At little stalls all around, merchants sold trinkets, shoe polish, pipes, and paper baskets full of fried unicorn-and-chips. The greasy smoke made the air thick with its pungent aroma. (Unicorn-and-chips is a popular dish in Nogbottom, because leprechauns love to think that they’re eating their natural enemy—the unicorn—but I’ve seen several reports that one hundred percent of the unicorn meat sold in Nogbottom is actually made from pumpkin filling mixed with chili powder and beets. A leprechaun could no sooner catch a unicorn than you or I could catch an aircraft carrier.)

  We stepped carefully through the diminutive crowds so as not to crush anybody. A tiny man in a velvet fourteen-piece suit rode by on a stout female Yorkshire terrier. The captain explained to me that this was a messenger of Raghnall, King of Tir Na Nog, from the capital in Oifigtown. Only the royal family and their messengers are allowed to ride on Yorkshire terriers, the most loyal and attractive dog in either our world or Tir Na Nog.

  Lucky for our noses, leprechauns are very comfortable in Nogbottom, so nobody was musking. Although with the food stalls all around and the hideous pipe smoke, I’m not sure I would have even noticed if they were.

  Certainly, nobody was happy to see two human garda officers and a massive wolfhound heading through town, but I should point out: The presence of the Garda Special Unit of Tir Na Nog in the land of faerie folk is entirely legal, and we are protected through three different accords with our respective governments, just the same as the W.G. patrols are protected in the human Republic of Ireland.

  (Note: W.G. is an abbreviation of wee gaiscíoch, or “little warriors.” THE W.G. ARE THE VERY CORRUPT POLICE FORCE OF THE FAERIE FOLK, COMMONLY CALLED THE WEEGEES. If you are ever stopped and questioned by the weegees—RUN! RUN AS FAST AS YOU CAN. THE WEEGEES, AS OF THE TIME I AM WRITING THIS, HAVE SEVERAL HUMAN PRISONERS IN THEIR PRISON CALLED THE GAOL WHO HAVE NOT BEEN CHARGED WITH A CRIME OR EVEN ALLOWED A PHONE CALL TO THE HUMAN REALM. The weegees have zero regard for the law. For example, in 2001, after a scathing report from Amnesty International, the Special Unit stopped carrying brass shillelaghs, which can cause fatal injuries. The weegees, and only the weegees, still carry them to this day—no comment.)

  As we moved up the cobblestone street, Captain de Valera filled me in on the facts of the case so far.

  “The suspect Wee Glen is a recidivist and a registered actor in the Thespians’ Guild, which is less of a union, more of a gang,” she said, opening her notebook and showing me a mug shot accompanied by the charcoal rubbing of a small, spectacular shoe with the Triskelion pattern. “The pay for theatrical work in Nogbottom isn’t what it used to be. Most of the ridiculously inflated ticket prices go to the clurichauns who scalp tickets, so a lot of the wee actors have turned to the quick money in crime and poetry.”

  Captain de Valera flashed her badge as we ducked into the lobby of the Opera Supreme Magnifico. The ceiling was vaulted and painted with lavish scenes from famous musicals, but it was intended for leprechaun height, so both the captain and I had to crouch as we questioned the strange wee woman who was working in the box office.

  Her parents must have been one leprechaun and one faerie, for she had leprechaun features but also enormous eyes, wings on her shoulders, and hooves where her feet would be. She was chained to the box office desk with an old lead padlock. This was not unusual. If you want faerie folk to do any kind of bookkeeping or accounting work, or basically any work other than mischief, poetry, making shoes, or theatrical acting, you must literally chain them to the desk, as paperwork and tedious things are so against the nature of the wee folk that they will run or fly away.

  “Captain de Valera and Cadet Boyle of the Special Unit, ma’am,” said the captain to the wee woman.

  The wee woman jumped, spilling gold coins in every direction and letting her pipe fall from her mouth onto her desk with a hot splatter of ashes.

  “You beefies can’t just come in here with your hound and start intimidating me,” said the wee woman. “I’ve got me rights.”

  Lily was sniffing around the lobby. To the small woman, Lily would look like a grizzly bear.

  “We’re looking for Wee Glen,” said the captain, “wanted for a robbery in Killarney.”

  “Wee Glen with the Gorgeous Ears or Wee Glen, Whose Voice Is Like a Feather Tickling a Cello on a Summer Afternoon?”

  “With the Gorgeous Ears,” I chimed in, stretching to my full height and bonking my head on the ceiling like the daft beefie that I am.

  “Well, tough luck. I never heard of him,” said the wee woman indignantly, finding her pipe and shoving it back into her mouth as if to end the conversation with this gesture.

  “You can’t have never heard of him. You just told me his name,” I said, getting aggressive myself and twirling my hemlock shillelagh as if I were handy with it, which you know I was not yet.

  My bluff was more effective than I expected. The little woman squirmed and held up her creepy little webbed fingers in protest.

  “I’m not telling you beefies where that devil is. Not under any circumstances,” she said loudly as she picked up a pencil and jotted something down as fast as she could. She passed the paper to the captain and whispered so no one could overhear,
her voice trembling, “Wee Glen broke my heart. Left me at the altar in the Forest of Adair in a wedding dress that cost a pretty penny and that I no longer fit into because I have been eating my feelings.”

  And then the wee woman started to weep. Captain de Valera, who was generally not good with emotional witnesses, patted her solemnly on the wing to comfort her. The wee woman’s pipe hung slack from her lip as she sobbed.

  “Also, me mum made me special shoes for the day,” she sniffled, putting her little fish-scale-covered legs up on the desk to show the most lavish set of tiny horseshoes that had been nailed onto her hooves. They were solid platinum and encrusted with jewels that spelled out LOVE on one hoof and OATH on the other.

  It was a pitiful sight indeed. Captain de Valera did her best to comfort the little woman, brushing the strange feathers that made up her bouffant hairstyle.

  “I’ve found a jeweler in Oifigtown who can change them to read LOVE GOATS, or LOVE OAFS, but that’s the best he can do. I should go with OAFS, I suppose, since that’s my lot in life and I’m frightened of goats,” said the wee woman, blowing her nose loudly and disgustingly into her sleeve.

  “Thank you for your help, and sorry for your troubles,” said the captain as she slipped me the piece of paper that the wee woman had given her.

  On it was scribbled the name of a notorious Nogbottom establishment called Bob and Thing’s Famous Pickle Parlor. Captain de Valera rolled both her green and her brown eye up simultaneously in disgust.

  “The Pickle Parlor is the rock bottom of this town. Nothing but lowlifes. Stay on your toes, Boyle,” she said.

  Our journey to Bob and Thing’s Famous Pickle Parlor took Lily, the captain, and me from the Left End all the way to the far side of Nogbottom, which, it turns out, is about a three-minute walk.

  Bob and Thing’s Famous Pickle Parlor exists outside of the very few laws of Nogbottom, because it lies below the city limits, as one must ride an ancient hand-crank lift (made from an old pickle barrel) down one of the outer bluffs to the tunnel that leads into the parlor, which is in a cavernous rathskeller below the city.