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He thought them dogs, then wolves, then giant cats. Then he saw they were three black foxes, black as the night, with white tips to their tails and eyes that smoked like sulfur.

And he struck the harp in a panic, and all that would come out of it was a scream, the very one you can hear a fox give out in the country on a frosty autumn night, the cry that makes the hair stand up on your head.

No one else was there with Colum. His muse, he noted, had deserted him, as sometimes, in the worst extremity, they do.

It seemed to him that after all the royal lord in the castle had sent him here to punish him for his impertinent song, and Goldehair herself, she had been glad enough to see him off. And all the while, those three black, long-furred things ran nearer and nearer up the hill, and they screeched as the harp had done, a cry like the Devil himself, and Colum’s hands were made of wood, and his throat shut.

“It was plain fear woke me up,” he said, as we drank the dreamwhisky in his house, “So I believe. I could no more have stayed there in that mystic horror—be it sleep or truth—than held myself down in a pool to drown.”

“Yet,” I said, “she gave you your hundred years.”

“I’ll tell you,” he said, “I was no harper, no poet. Speir-Bhan though that one was, she went to the wrong fellow, so she did.And for that, I think, they let me wake, and gave me a present for my trouble. But you,” he added to me, “now you have the means.”

“What means?” I said.

“Is it not,” said Colum, sad and resigned, “that you can play and sing a little?”

I scoffed. I said, pointedly, “But the Speir-Bhan is the muse of male poets and bards. And all the heroes are men.”

“There is Maeve,” said my great-grandfather, “riding on her raids in her chariot. There is the nun, Cair, who sang like the angels on her isle.”

In my dream, the magpie was on the roof again. I heard what it said now. “Give it up! Give it up!”

So giving up, as Colum did, I woke.

THE FLAT IS IN BRANCH ROAD, ten minutes walk from the last stop of the underground train at Russell Park Station.

I work in English London four days a week, a dull job to do with filing papers, making and taking calls, and preparing coffee for my betters. It pays enough to keep the flat, and leaves me free on Thursday night till Monday morning. Those between-times then, I go to play in the clubs and pubs—by which I mean play music. It isn’t a harp I carry, but my guitar, shiny brown as a new-baked bun. The name I use for myself on these occasions, is Neeve, which should be spelled Niamh, nor is it my given name. But there we are.

This life of mine is curious. It feels like a stopgap, a bridge. As if one day something will change. But I’ve passed my thirty-ninth birthday, and nothing has, so perhaps it never will.

It was Thursday night, and I was coming home on the tube from London, deep in the hollow underground that catacombs below all the city and half its suburbs.

I was sitting there with my bag of groceries, reading my paper and thinking how the world was going to hell in a hurry, just as it always has been, since the Year 0. Then the lights flickered, as they do, and there in the tunnel, also as they do, the train halted. As I say, that happens. There was a small crowd left on the train, for we were still five stops from the end of the line. The visiting tourists take a stalling tube in their stride, used to the efficiencies of the New York subway and the Paris Metro, but we locals look about, uneasy, distrusting what is indigenously ours.

After a moment, the train started up again with a cranking hiss. That was when the old woman came staggering between the seats and sat herself down beside me. I thought she was drunk, she smelled of liquor, I thought. I have some sympathy. In my bag there waited for me, with the bread, cheese, and fruit, a green bottle of gin. On the other hand, when she turned her face to me and spoke, I deeply regretted she was there, let alone drunk and there, and myself her chosen victim.

“It’s cleaner they are now, the filthy worms.”

I smiled, and