The White Horse Trick (10 page)

The top sock was blue with red stripes. Pup seemed excessively pleased with it and admired it from various angles before putting his wet boot back on.

‘So you see,’ he said, ‘there’s obviously a connection between my brother and the little girl, if they were both swapped over at birth. And I bet the other child, the third one, is the same.’

‘I bet you’re right, too,’ said Jenny. ‘I wonder what Aidan wants with them.’

Pup stood up. ‘That’s better,’ he said, walking a few steps out and back across the road. ‘It’s almost comfortable. Do you think there’s enough time for me to put socks on the other foot as well?’

‘Go ahead,’ said Jenny. ‘You needn’t have any worries about time in this place.’

With the thick padding of socks inside his enormous boots, Pup walked almost normally.

‘You’ve no idea how good that feels,’ he said to Jenny.

‘I’m glad to hear that,’ she said. ‘It means you can be comfortable even if you can’t go back to let your blisters heal.’

‘Why would I not be able to go back?’ he said.

‘You don’t listen, do you?’ said Jenny. ‘Didn’t I just tell you about Oisín and the white horse?’

‘What has that got to do with anything?’ said Pup. ‘It’s just a stupid old story. You don’t think it actually happened, do you? I don’t believe any of it.’

‘You will,’ said Jenny. ‘Just you wait.’

They turned right when they came to the New Line and then left, up the narrow path that, in JJ’s world, had been the gravel road that led to the Liddy house. On this side it wasn’t much more than a large hollowed-out boulder, but it was surrounded by some of the loveliest trees in the land. One of them was gone, stolen by the
púca, but there were a dozen or more of them still standing, tall and deep red. And beneath their shade Jenny and Pup came upon the third party of Aidan Liddy’s raiders.

This one looked altogether more serious. There were three soldiers. Two of them were healthy young men in the prime of life, and the third was a weedy child, even smaller than Pup. They were guarding fifteen or so hungry-looking people who ranged in age from about five years old to about eighty. Every adult had a brand-new rucksack and there were two dismantled wheelbarrows, and a pile of saws, axes and ropes. There was even a bright orange chain-saw, brand new, and a red plastic petrol container. Jenny wondered if it was the first power tool that had ever come into Tír na n’Óg.

When Pup saw the soldiers he stepped sideways into the shade of the hedgerow trees, and Jenny went on alone.

‘Welcome to Tír na n’Óg,’ she said as she reached them.

‘Thank you,’ said an old woman. ‘Thank you so much.’

‘It’s wonderful here,’ said an old man. ‘Have you heard these trees?’

He sang a long low note, and above their heads the red trees resonated with harmonious tones.

One of the soldiers stood up and approached. ‘We’re the firewood party,’ he said. ‘We’re going to need everyone out of this area when we start work.’

He was trying to sound authoritative, but he wasn’t succeeding.

‘Firewood, is it?’ said Jenny. ‘Well, I wouldn’t cut these trees down if I were you. My father wouldn’t like it and you’d be in all kinds of trouble. In fact, I don’t think you should cut any trees down at all until you’ve spoken to my father.’

‘We don’t need to speak to anyone,’ said the soldier. ‘This is a raid, and we only take orders from the commander-in-chief.’

‘I see,’ said Jenny.

‘And we intend to start work soon on preparing and cutting.’ She could hear the determination slipping out of his voice, word by word, and being replaced by a kind of idle contentment. ‘But we’re just taking a short R and R. Just to get our strength up. We’ll start work soon.’

He wandered off and settled himself down in a patch of sunlight on the side of the hill. Jenny didn’t think there was much danger of his cutting anything down, and from what she could see of the other two soldiers, they were in the same frame of mind.

‘What kind of a place is this, anyway?’ said the old man who had been singing to the trees.

Jenny was on the point of answering when rapid movement on the hillside above caught her eye. The approaching figure was unmistakable. He was tall and broad with a huge bushy beard and a heavy cloak. The Dagda, king of the fairies, never came down from his
lookout point on top of the mountain. And it seemed to Jenny unlikely that he was on his way to dance a set with the others down on the quayside.

So it probably meant trouble. Jenny gathered her courage and set off up the hill to meet him.

‘Who are these miserable people?’

The Dagda bellowed the words so loudly that Jenny flinched and backed away from him.

‘Calm down, Granddad,’ she said. ‘They’re not doing anybody any harm.’

‘No harm?’ said the Dagda. ‘No harm? Millions of ploddies pouring into my kingdom and you tell me they’re doing no harm?’

‘There aren’t millions,’ said Jenny. ‘I’d say there are no more than fifty of them.’

‘Fifty ploddies is fifty ploddies too many,’ said the Dagda. ‘And what makes you think it will stop at fifty? No, you’ll see. They’ll keep coming. There’s something going on over there in Ireland. I can smell it.’

‘You’re right, there, Grandfather,’ said Jenny. ‘They’re in the middle of a catastrophe. People can’t grow enough food to survive and the army is stealing everything they have. And for some reason—’

The Dagda interrupted her. ‘That’s not my problem! They needn’t think they can just come in here and
take over and treat the place like a rubbish tip.’

‘A rubbish tip?’ said Jenny. ‘They’re not treating the place like a rubbish tip.’

‘Oh, aren’t they?’ said the Dagda. ‘You haven’t seen what I’ve seen, then. Come here. Come on. Wait till you see.’

Jenny followed him up the hill towards the old rath. Like its counterpart on the other side, all that could be seen was the weathered, grassy remains of a circular earthen bank. But inside it was a series of underground chambers; one of the last remaining places where ploddies could still cross in and out of Tír na n’Óg. And as they approached it, Jenny could see that the Dagda appeared to be right. On the bank of the rath was an untidy sprawl of old cardboard boxes, plastic bin-bags and canvas cases in a variety of odd shapes.

‘See?’ he said. ‘Look at that. The nerve of them, bringing in all that junk and dumping it there!’

Jenny looked back. She could see Pup standing beside an ash tree, following at a distance. She shook her head at him firmly. It was not the right moment to be introducing any kind of ploddy to her grandfather. The Dagda stood with his legs planted firmly apart, his cloak thrown over his shoulder, his hands on his hips.

‘I’m not having it,’ he said. ‘Go and fetch them and tell them to take it all back!’

‘Wait a minute,’ Jenny said. There was something in amongst the scattered jumble that looked familiar. A small
square black bag with shoulder straps. She ran up to it and looked more closely.

‘What are you looking at?’ said the Dagda, coming up behind her.

‘I think I know what it is,’ she said, tugging at the buckles and zips. ‘I think it’s Donal’s.’

‘Who’s Donal?’ said the Dagda.

‘My brother,’ said Jenny. ‘My ploddy brother when I was growing up.’ She pulled out the old ‘black dot’ accordion and displayed it triumphantly to her grandfather. ‘It is. Look!’

He looked at it blankly.

‘It’s his accordion,’ said Jenny. ‘You know what an accordion is?’

‘Of course I do!’ said the Dagda, who refused to admit that he didn’t know everything. Jenny had never learned to play the box, but she was able to get a few notes out of it, and the Dagda stared at her in amazement.

‘It makes music,’ he said.

‘In the right hands it does,’ said Jenny, and she missed Donal and wished he was there to play the old box.

‘Let me have a go,’ said the Dagda.

Jenny handed it to him, and he pushed and pulled at the bellows a few times and fingered the buttons. But he soon lost interest and practically dropped it in his excitement to explore the rest of the things assembled on the bank. He went straight for the biggest case, unzipped it and pulled out a cello. It was a cheap
modern one but it was all set up and ready to play.

The Dagda laughed at it. ‘Who’d play a fiddle that size?’ he said. ‘Was it made for a giant?’

‘It’s a cello, Granddad,’ said Jenny. She hadn’t thought about it before, but now she realized that centuries, perhaps even millennia must have passed on the other side of the time skin since her grandfather had been across.

‘I know that,’ he was saying. ‘I know it’s a cello.’

‘They use them in orchestras,’ said Jenny. ‘They have a big, deep sound.’

‘I know that,’ said the Dagda again. ‘It’s a cello and it makes a big deep sound in a norcrystal.’ But he had already lost interest in it and now he was upending a black plastic rubbish bag. Books spilled out. He had seen books before.

‘Stories!’ he snorted. ‘Do they think we haven’t enough stories of our own?’

Jenny began gathering the books into piles, looking at their spines as she went along.

‘This is all poetry,’ she said. ‘Yeats. Plath. Eliot. You might like this one, Granddad. It’s Gerard Manley Hopkins.’

But the Dagda had already moved on. He was like a small child on Christmas morning, emptying boxes and opening cases, continually throwing things aside in anticipation of something more exciting.

‘More stories,’ he said, tipping out the contents of a box.

‘No. That’s music.’

The Dagda stopped, a shiny brass French horn in his hand. ‘Music?’ he said. ‘Have you gone mad? How could that be music?’

‘It’s music written down,’ said Jenny, retrieving the scattered books and stacking them.

‘You can’t write down music,’ said the Dagda. ‘That’s like saying you can read dancing!’

‘This isn’t your kind of music, Granddad,’ said Jenny. ‘This is Bach, look? And this is Scriabin, and Mozart and Britten.’

He was still staring at her as if she had two heads.

‘I can’t read it,’ she said, ‘but my mum can. Aisling, I mean. She used to play this kind of stuff on the piano.’

But the Dagda had lost interest and had gone back to trawling through boxes and bags. The place really was beginning to look like a tip now. ‘Like I said, it’s all rubbish. Monster fiddles and norcrystals and corjuns. We don’t need any of this stuff. We have our own music and stories. I don’t want any more ploddies or their ploddy rubbish.’

‘But I keep trying to tell you,’ said Jenny. ‘It’s not rubbish.’

‘I don’t care,’ said the Dagda. ‘Enough is enough. Tír na n’Óg is not going to become a refugee camp! I’m going to seal the time skin and that’ll be an end to it.’

Jenny knew he could do it. He had done it before, on at least one occasion, and she didn’t want him to do it now. There was too much she needed to know about the
changeling children and who had kidnapped them, and about her brother Donal and why he had become the general of an army.

‘Oh no, Granddad,’ she said. ‘You can’t do that.’

‘Why not?’ said the Dagda. ‘Why shouldn’t I?’

‘Because . . .’ said Jenny, searching desperately for a reason good enough to dissuade him. And finding one. ‘Because Aengus Óg is still over there. He went to get tobacco. You can’t shut out your own son.’

‘Aengus Óg?’ said the Dagda, and the colour rose in his cheeks. ‘Why is it that my omadaun son is always, always in the wrong place at the wrong time?’

The very same omadaun son was riding through the pouring rain, and had arrived at a place where floods came up over what was left of the road. Maureen Ryan made a tolerably good chestnut mare. She wasn’t very tall and she was a bit on the lean side, but she seemed to have no problem carrying Aengus’s weight, which was all that mattered to him.

They had come about three miles so far. As he rode across the landscape, Aengus had come to understand how it was that the woman in Gort was able to make it worth her while to sell those pathetic bundles of sticks. It was as though a gigantic swarm of locusts had swept across the county and stripped it bare. There wasn’t a tree or a bush or a thicket of scrub to be seen. Even the hedgerows had been cut to the ground. The poor miserable ploddies had taken the lot and burned it.

He was pleased to discover that the mare didn’t seem to mind at all about going into the water. She went in up to her fetlocks, then to her knees, then to her belly. Aengus drew up his feet to keep them clear of the surface,
then gave up and dropped them in. The rain was still coming down in buckets and he couldn’t get any wetter than he already was. For a while he quite enjoyed it, sloshing along through the turlough, trailing his feet. But then, without warning, the mare lost her footing and plunged into deep water. Aengus clung to her mane with one hand and the apple basket with the other. She lunged and floundered, searching for firm footing under the water. Eventually she found it and hauled herself up, with Aengus still somehow on board and clinging on for all he was worth.

She stood trembling, blowing hard. She was still up to her belly in water, and Aengus couldn’t see what she was standing on now, or what lay ahead or behind.

‘Not your fault,’ he said to her. ‘It’s the council that’s to blame, I suppose. They never did look after the roads properly.’

The mare snorted.

‘Oh, that’d be right,’ Aengus said. ‘No councils any more with all that’s going on. Still and all, you’d think somebody ought to do it.’

He kicked her on and she moved cautiously forward, but she seemed very uncertain of her footing now, and Aengus began to wonder whether they were actually following the road at all. There was no evidence of it. Any walls there might have been were submerged beneath the turlough, and the hedgerows that would have been markers in times gone by were history now. Gone up in
smoke. There was no kind of landmark anywhere, other than the occasional rocky or grassy hump that broke the surface here and there. And the rain was falling so heavily that Aengus couldn’t even make out the distant hills he was heading for. He and the mare were lost and alone on the endless flooded plain, and neither of them had the faintest idea what to do.