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“Yes,” She said, and Her voice rumbled against the buildings. “Yes, that’ll do nicely—”

In Her hands, as She walked up O’Connell Street, the Tiger writhed and splashed and yowled desperately to get away. But there was no escape. Slowly it was borne up the street, shoulder high to Herself, spitting and clawing in terror, until She stood right across from the GPO, just in front of the Millennium Spire. Slowly She lifted the Tiger up over Her head.

“So you would kill Old Ireland?”Anna Livia said. “You would kill yourself, for without Old Ireland, you wouldn’t be.And as we brought you about . . .”

In one hard gesture She brought the Tiger down.

“So we can end you,” She said, “or the badness in you . . . if we have the sense.”

She turned and made Her way back to O’Connell Bridge. Traffic was in an uproar, and Gardai were rushing in every direction.No one noticed a guy and a few leprechauns and a little slender man in turn-of-the-century clothes standing there by the water, watching the huge woman’s shape that eased down into it again . . . if they saw that last at all.

“Not dead yet, boys,” She said, as She subsided gently into the water; “not dead yet.” She threw a last loving glance at Joyce.

He took his hat back from the Eldest Leprechaun and tipped it to Herself.

The waters closed over Her again. Joyce, or his ghost, vanished as She did. Overhead, we glanced up at the sound of swans’wings, heavy and dangerous, beating their way down the air over the river.

And then I looked back over my shoulder, north up O’Connell Street, and had to grin. There, at the top of the Spire, impaled like a limp hors d’oeuvre on a cocktail stick, and not burning at all bright—hung something green.

Speir-Bhan

BY TANITH LEE

This I offer to the memory of my mother,

my unmet grandfather and great-grandfather—who never, so far as I ever heard, reneged on any bargain.

I

This story, if that’s what it is, is written in two voices. Both are mine.My blood is mixed, fire with water, earth with air.

I WAS NEVER in Ireland, though from there I came.

The answer to this riddle is simple enough. I am mostly Irish, genetically and in my blood, but was born in another country.

My mother it was who had the Irish strand. Her eyes were dark green—I have never seen elsewhere eyes so dark and so green, save sometimes now, with those who wear colored contact lenses.

She it was who told me of that land where, too, she’d never gone. O’Moore was her maiden name. She said the weather there was “soft”—which meant it rained, but a rain so fine and often warm, a sort of mist, accustomed as the air. They came from the Ghost Coast, the O’Moores of my mother’s tribe, the haunted west of Ireland, where the rocks steep into the sea, harder than hearts. My mother’s father had a Spanish name, Ricardo. She used to speak of him lovingly. His father, her grandfather, was a gallant man called Colum. He lived to be over a hundred, and died in his hundred and first year from a chill, caught while escorting his new wife, a young lady of forty-five, to the theatre in Dublin. Ah the soft weather then wasn’t always kind.

Ireland is the land of green—emerald as her eyes,my mother. She has gone now, to other greener golden lands under the hollow hills. But one day, searching through her things some years after her death, I found my great-grandfather Colum’s book. It wasn’t any diary, or perhaps it was. It seemed the book of a practical man who is a poet, and cares for a drink, the book of a canny liar who will tell stories, or it is the book of one who speaks the truth. All of which, with arrogant pride and some reticence, I might say also of myself, saving the book and my gender.

There arrived a night when, having found his book, I met my great-grandfather Colum, for the first, in a dream. He was a tall, thin man, who seemed in his sixties, so probably he was about eighty, for at ninety-nine I had heard, he had looked ten years his younger.

“So you found it then,” he said.

“So I did.”

“Where was that?”

“In