Dr. Rookwood and the Lucht Siúlta, part three

Two Years Ago, West Ireland

part one
part two

Hands were on his shoulders, pulling him up and over onto his back and rolling a wave of nausea up against the back of his eyes. "Wait, wait!" he sputtered haplessly. He squinted up at the eldest gypsy through crooked glasses, ashamed to be surprised at the lack of malice.

"Oi, gadje," the lead Traveller said.

Josiah worried his bottom lip for a moment, then went for broke. "Josiah," he said, touching his chest first, then extending his hand to shake.

The gypsy's face broke into a relaxed grin and he clasped the linguist's hand to help him up. "Sho-sye!"

All in all, they were just as welcoming as the villagers in the gaeltaecht had been, maybe a bit moreso. After the wizened old camp mother had finished patching up the knot on his head and had given him some kind of herbal something for the dizziness, he was pressed into dinner, had to refuse several offers of drink. When the ragged looking musical instruments came out, he'd put up his hands against dancing with a shy-looking girl with wavy dark hair and big golden-brown eyes. She pouted, he relented, and halfway through the song, she had to laughingly walk him back to the stump he'd been using as a seat because the world wouldn't stop spinning around and he'd stepped on her feet too many times to be cute.

Josiah was in danger of thinking movies weren't romanticised after all, and that gypsy camps really were just as fun-loving and relaxed as the stories made them out to be. Once the party died down a little and some of the brothers went off to play cards, the mother and some of the girls fairly cooed over him, grilling him about his family and what he was doing in Ireland in a stilted, heavily accented Irish-English mix.

"Oh, no..." he murmured, frowning a little as he understood the question. "My mother's passed on. Ah... Mother?" He mimed cradling a baby, and the shy girl he'd danced with pursed her lips in thought for a moment before murmuring, "Nadram." He was getting the hang of this canorous language. "My, ah, nadram... she's..." He crossed his arms over his chest in what he hoped was a meaningful way.

"Ah," breathed the girl. "Tarsp. Yer nadram's tarsp..."

Josiah swallowed. "Nadram's... tarsp," he echoed hollowly.

The old woman made a disapproving sound. Her daughter, or maybe her daughter's daughter, batted at her. "Husha, karbug..." she murmured. "Sho-sye's in shliuchter." She smiled at him, and then repeated, "Learner, yes?"

Oh. Scholar. Shliuchter. More of that inversion stuff. "Yes, scholar."

"Yer nad's shib? Sho-sye," she explained, touching his chest. "Rabeen," she continued, gesturing to herself. She pointedly didn't introduce the old woman, casting her a glare before smiling back at him. "Yer nad?"

"Oh. Alma Dooley."

That seemed to spark some heated discussion, and the other girls just watched in undisguised amusement as his would-be tutor rattled at the older woman. He hadn't meant to cause anything, and he had no idea what was going on. And his head ached. But the lucht siúlta were sort of known to be linguistically stingy, in academic circles, and this was a great opportunity. He had a willing teacher, and even if the lump on his noggin had come from one of the gypsies, they'd taken him in and seen to his owie, and that was good enough for him. After a few minutes, the girl turned back to him, all smiles. "Yer our one," she announced, looking pleased. "A Dooley's alwas wulcome." She spoke better English than she'd let on. They probably all did. Cripes. Just making fun of him. He sighed and grinned and relaxed. "Stye wi' us fer a night," she invited. "'N tak ya ham on morrah."

Take him home tomorrow, he worked out. Gosh, did he even want to go? One look at the "karbug" was enough to tell him he didn't actually have a choice. Pleasant people or not, they'd developed their own language and customs specifically to keep themselves separate from rooters, gadje, like him. He nodded.

"Hey," he said, snagging her sleeve as she stood up. "Did your boys really steal a pig?" It was a risk.

Rabeen twisted her mouth up at him and looked disappointed. "Dey deserved it, misser Sho-sye." And then she stalked off, her mood considerably darker.

Damn. He'd been hoping Aodh was wrong about the gypsies.

They'd let him stare into the bonfire for a couple of hours before pulling him fully clothed to his borrowed bunk, among the lads. They slept six to a trailer, including him, and though he couldn't usually fall asleep quickly in strange places, though he was worried about the whole pig thing, and though he was sort of worried that his continued dizzyness and slight nausea meant he had a concussion and shouldn't sleep - though /all/ of that, he dropped off before most of the others even started snoring. That concussion stuff was just old wives' tales anyway, right...?

He woke up to the sound of his own name being called, from just beyond the camp's unmarked boundary. ... Aodh? What time was it? His watch glowed briefly in the dark when he touched it. Four am. Barely three hours' sleep. And wow did his head ache. Lights swam before his eyes while they tried to get used to the dark.

"Misser Sho-sye," said a voice near his ear. One of the lads took his arm and sat him up.

"Wass goin'on," he slurred, rubbing at his face. In the scant moonlight that made it through the lace curtains on the window, he could see the gleam of the lad's grin.

"S'a fight!"

part four
part five