‘You took pictures too?’
She nods. ‘For reference. For my poems.’
I lean forward. ‘When did you start having visions?’
‘When I was fifteen. I was brought down to the docks to see the past.’ She raises an eyebrow. ‘Let me guess, you saw that bloody ship too?’
‘TheTitanic?’
‘My mother had the gift – she was a singer. She never met her granda Patrick, but she would always bring me down to the shipyard hoping she’d see a vision of him from before he left…’
‘Did she?’
A sigh, her eyes gaze past me. ‘Never. We saw the ship. We saw people on the deck, but never him.’ She drains her cup. ‘It’s become a bit of a tradition since then. I brought your daddy down too, to pay our respects to Patrick and that big coffin of a ship he helped build.’
‘I think I saw it too. On the ferry over.’
Her eyes narrow. ‘But you forgot?’
I nod. ‘That was my first vision, but I’m nearly seventeen. Why didn’t I see them earlier? You said you started seeing them at fifteen?’
‘Well, it varies. Plus, it only seems to work in Ireland.’
I frown. ‘So if I’d never come here, I’d not have my powers. And if I left, I wouldn’t have them any more?’ A thought drops into my head. ‘Is that why Dad left?’
Nanny Bet’s eyelids flicker. ‘This power is an awful burden, Michael. Terrible things happened in this place. We don’t talk about the Troubles here for a reason. Your father and I lived through it like everyone else, but then we kept having to relive it. We had to see the bombs that tore lives apart. People shot, tortured. Families grieving. This city is infested with the ghostsof misery, and your father saw them everywhere. He got the visions young, too young.’ She clears her throat. ‘It changed him. He couldn’t live here.’
‘Was it hard to see him go?’
‘It broke my heart, but he had to leave. I told him that.’
‘You let him go?’
A pause. A nod. ‘I made him. He had to get away from the visions. I think it was the same for my great-granda Patrick. He was born not long after the famine. My heart breaks at the thought of what he would’ve seen. I didn’t want my son to go through that too. Once he was away from here at university he was able to make art for himself, not for them. He travelled the world and showed people the pain that is happening now. Not dredging up the horrors of the past.’
I ball my hands into fists. ‘Except he was still miserable. He wasn’t happy at all. He drank and…’ I dig my nails into my palms. ‘Leaving didn’t work.’
She nods. ‘It didn’t work for Patrick, either. She won’t let us know peace.’
‘She?’
‘The Nightmare Queen, the Queen of the Slain, the battle furies. So many awful names.’
I shiver. I’ve been haunted, maybe even hunted, by this goddess for the last week, but I know so little about her. ‘What does she want from us?’
‘To tell stories of death and war. That’s our purpose.’ She smiles then. ‘In ancient times, poets, the filí, held one of the most important positions in Irish society. They were second only to the kings and queens. The filí would tell the stories of the deeds of their people. They were gifted prophecy from the gods themselves, and could crumble a kingdom with the truth and power of their words. All the filí were feared and respected, but none more so than us: the filí báis, death poets of the Morrigan.Our ancestors made a blood vow with her. Her essence runs through our veins.
‘We’re sworn from birth to tell her stories. For millennia we’ve seen the past and told the tales. We sang the songs and carried her words on the wind long before pen was put to paper. We’ve been storytellers, bards, painters, poets, writers and photographers of death. We make people feel what we saw.’
Excitement buzzes in my chest. That’s what I did for Meg at the docks. She was transported by my words to see what I saw. Me, Dad, Nanny Bet, all our ancestors – we had a purpose, and we’re artists. ‘But why? Why do we do it.’
She exhales. ‘Death and war, son. We were tasked to strike fear, awe and courage into the hearts of the Irish. But I think under it all she wants the world to know who she is, what the Tuatha Dé Danann were. When people here turned from the old ways, they wanted their stories to carry on.’ She looks at the sky. ‘The vanity of gods!’
A crow caws from the garden fence and I flinch.
She glares at it.
‘Are the crows watching you, Michael?’
