On the summer morning that Cillian found the Bog Girl, he was driving the Peatmax toward a copse of trees at the bog’s western edge, pushing the dried peat into black ridges. Now industrial harvesters rode over the drained bogs, combing the earth into even geometries. Gods wore crowns of starry asphodels, floating above the purple heather. In the Iron Age, these bogs were portals to distant worlds, wilder realms. Two thousand years later, peat had swallowed the remains of their pastures. Neolithic farmers were the first to clear the island’s woods. Cillian, his mother, and several thousand others lived on the island, part of the archipelago known to older generations as the Four Horsemen. Nobody gives much thought to the fuel’s mortuary origins. Once cut, the peat becomes turf, and many locals on this green island off the coast of northern Europe still heat their homes with this peculiar energy source. Growth is impossible, and Death cannot complete her lean work. Sphagnum mosses wrap around fur, wood, skin, casting their spell of chemical protection, preserving them whole. The bottom is a breathless place-cold, acidic, anaerobic-with no oxygen to decompose the willow branches or the small, still faces of the foxes interred there. Peat is harvested from bogs, watery mires where the earth yawns open. The intimation was clear: what the thin, strange boy lacked in muscle power he made up for in proximity to the work site. When that didn’t work, he pointed to his bedroom window, a quarter mile away, on the misty periphery of the cutaway bog, where the undrained water still sparkled between the larch trees. How did Cillian persuade Bos Ardee to hire him? The boy had lyingly laid claim to many qualities: strength, maturity, experience. “Th-th-th,” he’d said, accepting the job. He had celery-green eyes and a stutter that had been corrected at the state’s expense it resurfaced whenever he got nervous. His name was Cillian Eddowis, he was fifteen years old, and he was illegally employed by Bos Ardee. He young turf-cutter fell hard for his first girlfriend while operating heavy machinery in the peatlands.
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