Varakite (eBook)

A Timecrack Adventure

William Long (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2022 | 1. Auflage
500 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
978-1-6678-1384-4 (ISBN)

Infos

The Great Famine, by 1849, has devastated Ireland and its hunger-stricken people. Their plight is made worse by the evictions imposed by the landlords, who send tenants to the workhouses and the roadside ditches, where many die from starvation and disease. Archie and Kristin travel through time and space to return Finbar the Guide to Donegal. They encounter Lord Castleforde, a landlord cursed as a Varakite, a creature that seeks humans to satisfy a hunger for energy. Kristin is abducted by Castleforde, who believes her to be the incarnation of his dead wife. Archie and his team join forces with the rebel Ribbonmen, in a desperate attempt to find her before she disappears with the Varakite.

William Long is a retired businessman based in N. Ireland. With a long and varied career in sales and marketing, running a business designing and promoting branded goods for high profile companies such as Coca Cola. One of his creations is the internationally famous Five Nations Rugby Championship tie, now regarded as a collector's item. After working for Union Carbide in Toronto, he left to explore the rest of Canada. He contracted to deliver a Volkswagen Beetle to a client in Vancouver, driving alone 3,500 miles to British Columbia. During his time there he teamed up with two others to explore more of the country and the USA. Another drive, involved 2,500 miles from Los Angeles to Miami Port, Florida, to deliver a Toyota Landcruiser for the movie producer, George Englund, who was shooting 'Dark of the Sun' in Jamaica. After enjoying a spell in Nassau, Bahamas, it was back to Toronto, before returning to N. Ireland. It was a two-year adventure he sees as a future writing project, He continued his travels with an interest in ancient cultures, exploring Mexico, Sri Lanka, Egypt, Spain, Portugal; including nearer home, Newgrange in Ireland. His interest in aviation and the cosmos, along with the possibility of other dimensions and new worlds, led to the idea of writing a series known as 'The Timecrack Adventures'.

---

There are three known parallel dimensions in the multiverse. Archie and his father have left Old Earth to live and work at Mount Tengi on New Earth in the second parallel. Archie is now in command of a Time Escort Group (TEG) that journeys through spacetime zones to other worlds to return timecrack travellers to their Points of Origin. It's on one such journey to Ireland during the time of the Great Famine in 1849, they return the Irishman, Finbar the Guide, to his home in Donegal. Shortly after they arrive, Archie and his girlfriend, Kristin, the mission artist, encounter Lord Castleforde, a ruthless landlord responsible for the evictions of starving tenants on land he has inherited from his late wife, Lady Jane. Castleforde suffers the curse of being a Varakite, a creature who can only survive by taking energy from other humans, which render him temporarily invisible. When he sees Kristin, he believes her to be the reincarnation of Lady Jane. He abducts her and takes her to the Red House estate, where she learns the terrible truth of what he intends to do with her. Archie's brother, Richard, who has the power to communicate telepathically with people in other worlds, arrives unexpectedly in Donegal from the third parallel universe. He joins Archie and the rebel Ribbonmen in their fight against Castleforde, and their attempt to rescue Kristin. Theta, known as the Widow Cassidy, was taken from Xantara also in the third parallel, by a strange blue cloud into the vortex of a timecrack, and landed in Donegal. She has settled into a farm and uses her skills as a herbalist and healer to help the people survive the cruel persecutions inflicted by Castleforde. Theta helps Archie and Richard, along with the Ribbonmen, to rescue Kristin during the destruction of the Red House. But Castleforde escapes to flee through a timecrack back to Amasia, Kristin's world in the second parallel. The adventure sees Castleforde continue his killings in Amasia. As a Varakite in his efforts to seek energy, he steals valuables from his victims in order to pay for his living expenses. Through his activities he meets the wealthy art collector who buys his spoils, Amelda Beck the Dragon Lady, and learns from her about the art works she buys from Kristin, now a famous artist with her own studio. They strike a bargain for Castleforde to obtain the priceless Immortal Wand she desires, in exchange for Beck to arrange a meeting with Kristin. It has come to the attention of Archie and Richard that the killings are taking place in the city of Sitanga, where Kristin is working on a mural at Beck's home. They suspect Lord Castleforde of being responsible for the murders and go to Sitanga to hunt him down and find Kristin. They are too late. A timecrack has swept Castleforde and Kristin into its swirling vortex, and returned them to Donegal. The story ends at the Red House - with a surprise for both Archie and Kristin.

Textauszug

Chapter 4

The Evictions

The Widow Cassidy stared at what was left of the Connolly’s scalpeen, the lean-to, in the ditch at the side of the road, now lying empty. Built from the remains of the cabin the landlord’s agent and his crowbar gang had pulled apart two weeks earlier, there was little of it left after last night’s heavy rain.

A wild Atlantic storm had been raging along the Donegal coast for the better half of the past week, before continuing its passage over the Derryveagh Mountains and across Lough Veagh, towards her own home below Lough Gartan. The rain had stopped now, the dark clouds drifting apart to allow watery beams of morning sunlight to fall on someone further down the roadside, revealing the wide-open eye sockets of a starving woman looking up at her from the ditch.

‘Mary, you poor thing,’ the widow cried. She left the jaunting car and scurried to the edge of the ditch as the woman’s head fell forward onto a stick-thin, bony outstretched arm. Kneeling down, she pulled a coarse woven bag from her shoulder and lifted out one of several oatmeal and cabbage cakes she had baked earlier that morning and held it near the woman’s mouth. ‘Here, try and take a bite from this, Mary. I added some yarrow to help with the sickness.’

The widow placed her hand under the woman’s chin and raised it to the cake, but a nibble was all she could manage before dropping her head back onto her arm.

‘You must try and eat something,’ said the widow, reaching into her bag for a small bottle. ‘Look, I have some buttermilk for you …’

A hand touched her shoulder. ‘Leave it with me, I’ll give it to her,’ said a voice.

Startled, she almost dropped the bottle, turning to the face the man standing behind her. ‘Joseph Breen! I didn’t hear you on the road.’

‘There is little enough of me left to hear, Widow Cassidy.’

They spoke in Irish; there was little use for English in these parts.

Breen, by nature a big man, muscular and well-suited to his work as a tenant-labourer, was only a shadow of the figure he had once been. Threadbare coat and trousers draped loosely on wasted flesh and brittle bones, with bare feet hardly covered by dirty strips of ragged leather, all told of the misery of his existence. He leaned on a length of wood he had salvaged from the ruins of the cabin, to add to the lean-to in the ditch. Stony grey eyes behind strands of wispy brown hair gazed at her as if she might be a ghost floating in front of him. She knew him from the townland of Casheltown, on a visit to attend to a sick child a few weeks earlier. She was shocked by his appearance.

‘I didn’t know if there was anyone left,’ said the widow, ‘but I brought a little food, just in case.’

‘The workhouse turned us away. There’s no room, they say; no praties or oats to spare, only God’s mercy, and there’s not much of that, as you can see.’ He looked down at Mary in the ditch. ‘We had hoped to stay with the Connollys ... Mary’s sister, but now ...’

‘You can’t stay here, Joseph, the weather is against you.’

He shook his head sadly, ‘Where will we go? Mary has the fever; she can’t walk a step.’

‘John Doohan, next to my farm, has the horse and cart. I will send him before dark and you will come to me,’ said the widow. Before he could protest, she waved a hand in front of him. ‘Say no more about it, but tell me this, is there anyone else here?’

He dropped the wood and took the bottle of buttermilk to kneel beside Mary, hoping she might take a sip. He said: ‘The Connollys are gone, only Kathleen is left in the workhouse, God bless her. I don’t know about the others ... perhaps the fever took them as well.’

She nodded and left him the bag with the rest of the cakes. ‘Take what you need, Joseph. Doohan will be with you later.’

Theta Cassidy left the jaunting car on the road and made her way along the dirt path to the ruins of the four cabins that once made up the clachan. The Crowbar Brigade, brought from outside the county – men unknown to the local community to ensure they would not be subject to revenge attacks – had done their work well, with only a few remaining stones to show where the walls of the Connolly cabin once stood. She recalled the grim faces of the men with the battering ram as they attacked the grey stone walls. Others followed by hauling on a rope thrown around the main beam that supported the thatched roof, pulling it down from the gable ends that still stood upright. They dragged the beam past the ruins of the three dwellings they had already brought down, throwing it into the ditch along with the other beams to quash any hopes that the cottiers’ cabins would ever be rebuilt.

From the townlands below the Derryveagh Mountains, between the lakes of Lough Veagh and Lough Gartan, the people had come to bear witness against the landlord and his agent. The men and the children standing still and mute as they watched the destruction of the last cabin, while the women screeched threats of damnation, issuing angry curses against all who had brought such misfortune to the cottiers. Their wailing, like the piteous cry of the banshee, pierced the air as the landlord’s agent yelled at the Crowbar Brigade to finish the job, while warning the tenants to be off the land before nightfall.

It had been a dreadful scene to witness, but there was nothing neither she nor anyone else could have done to prevent the evictions, not while the sheriff and the armed police kept them at bay. Even then, what could be done once the eviction notices had been served? The landlord and his agent had the power of the law behind them and the cottiers had to leave. The little group of four cabins had stood on the same piece of ground for as long as anyone could remember, but now they were levelled, there was little likelihood of people occupying this land again, thought the widow.

Her arms crossed, she clutched her elbows tightly, but it wasn’t the cool morning air that sent a shiver down her spine, but anger and shame at the memory of the eviction of the Connolly family. With the father and two little girls now dead from the fever, the mother left in the workhouse with the same sickness and not expected to survive, there was little to remember them by. Only an old kettle, a stool missing a leg, and a few pieces of broken crockery were left among the stones. What furniture they had possessed had already been sold to pay for food before the eviction. The other cottiers had taken whatever bits and pieces they could find to build a shelter in the ditch, but now they were gone, nowhere to be seen.

There was little hope for Mary Breen’s sister, Kathleen Connolly, living her last days in the workhouse. When she died it would be as if the family had never existed in this bleak landscape.

Ireland had experienced earlier famines, with her people suffering unspeakable misery through starvation and the fever, but the land had eventually recovered in the following seasons. This time though, there had been no respite from the potato blight since 1845 when the farmers first became aware of the stench from the rotten, slimy pockets of putrid potatoes lying in the fields. Travellers from the length and breadth of Ireland told of the horror of the Great Famine that swept through the land, killing tens of thousands of people and sending thousands more on the coffin-ships to America.

She had stood with the tenants from the townlands on this very spot, each one wondering if they might be next in line for the notice to leave their home. They had watched as the Connollys were forced out of their cabin, weak with hunger and hardly able to protest at their eviction, with only the hope that the workhouse would be open to them.

The cruel image lingered with her as she turned away from the ruins. Returning to her farmhouse along the road that led towards Gartan, she wondered if more could have been done to help the cottiers, but there was little enough help anyone could offer against the landlord’s determination to see the people driven off the land, and even less against the lack of compassion shown by the agent towards the sick and the dying.

Her thoughts drifted to the world she had left behind, and the memory of how her own family had suffered at the hands of another equally cruel oppressor.

In her own land, in the east of Xantara, Lord Pakal had ordered his soldiers to find and take her father, Philus the leader of the Sensitives, a well-known healer and diviner to the people of Orkan, to the tower cells of the city fortress. Along with her young brother, Damon, who had also been taken, they were questioned and tortured to reveal the secrets of the Ancient Order of Sensitives. Both had refused to answer Pakal’s questions, until, finally, in a fit of madness, he had them hanged as a warning to others in the ancient Order.

In a rage, at losing the most important member of the Sensitives, Pakal had ordered that all heretics and members of their families who professed magical or mysterious powers must be found and questioned. Fortunately, Theta had been with her mother tending the herb gardens when Philus was captured. She did not know why Pakal had wanted her father so desperately, but later that night, when she received word of what had happened to him and Damon, she knew they would have to flee the city.

When Pakal realised they had not been taken, he demanded that all of Orkan be searched until they were...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 8.4.2022
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Fantasy / Science Fiction ► Science Fiction
• ISBN-10: 1-6678-1384-6 / 1667813846
• ISBN-13: 978-1-6678-1384-4 / 9781667813844