The White Horse Trick (12 page)

It was a poor haul. Half a dozen chickens, drenched and skeletal, tied in pairs by their feet, too weak and shocked even to flap. A sack of oats, all hairy and green with sprouts. Three baskets of potatoes, all of them stinking of blight, and a few buckets of slimy carrots and turnips. It was as well for these people that they had been
captured and dragged from their homes. They wouldn’t have held out for much longer on those pathetic stores.

Donal smiled to himself. He knew they would be terrified now, huddled together in one of the lock-up containers, convinced that they were facing a fate worse than death in Aidan’s labour camps. But they would soon be in a much, much better place, if everything went according to plan.

Donal had to concentrate to prevent himself from running. He couldn’t believe that he was being given this opportunity to send the entire dispirited workforce through to safety in one fell swoop. And ten of the most deserving from his army as well.

His spirits sank slightly at the thought, remembering the rumblings of mutiny that morning. It would have to be dealt with somehow. Nothing could get in the way of his plan.

The fish finally found the shore and Aengus walked up through the shallows and sat down on a rock. The storm was still raging, throwing punches from every direction. Whichever way Aengus turned, it still managed to hit him in the face. He was not a happy camper. The most obvious thing for him to do was go home – just slip through the time skin into the sunshine and leave the storm to take swings at thin air. But there was, he now saw, a fatal flaw in that course of action.

He had been lucky when he did it before, but he might not be so lucky again. From what he was hearing, tobacco was hard, perhaps even impossible, to come by. As it was, he might, just might, find there was still some left in Aidan Liddy’s monstrous metal castle, but if he left and went home, there was a very high likelihood that this ridiculous world would do its stupid time thing and go running off without him. So even if he came straight back again, thirty years might go speeding past while he was gone. Or more. A hundred. A thousand. And then what would his chances be of finding his favourite brand? Zero, that was what.

Aengus raged against the day he had taken up the filthy habit. It had seemed quite harmless when he first tried it. A new fad, brought across from America or England or somewhere. Great craic, it was, puffing away like a dragon. But it wasn’t so much fun when the stuff got its nasty claws into you. When you found it wasn’t you that was running the habit but the habit that was running you.

Not that there was any danger of him dying from it. First sign of a smoker’s cough and he could go back home and stay there. He wouldn’t get better but he wouldn’t get worse, like some of the poor ploddies did who had nowhere else to go. What bothered him, though, was the extent of his desperation. He was horrified by how dependent he had become on the damned stuff. On this trip he had already been knocked out of the sky, faced guns and got soaked to the skin. Now he was sitting in the storm to end all storms, and if he wanted time to stay put, he had no choice but to wait it out. Was he really prepared to endure all that for the sake of his flaming pipe?

The answer, unfortunately, was yes.

When Jenny next looked up, she saw that Pup was lying on the bank nearby. His eyes were closed but she didn’t think he was asleep. He seemed to be as enchanted by the Dagda’s music as she had been, and she was pleased to see it. Even at rest like that, the hardships of his young life were apparent in the gaunt lines and unhealthy colour of his face. The world he had come from was clearly very different from the one she had left.

She picked out a high D whistle and joined in with her grandfather. They played a set of reels, and afterwards the Dagda said, ‘Isn’t it great? That one is all high and whistly and this one is deep.’

‘Yeah,’ said Jenny. ‘But they’re in the same key so they go together. High D and low D.’

‘I know that,’ said the Dagda, though he didn’t. ‘And did a ploddy make these?’

‘Yes,’ said Jenny, deciding against going into the details of factories and manufacturing. ‘A ploddy made them.’

‘Hard to believe,’ said the Dagda. He began another tune and Jenny played along. She noticed that the Dagda’s
eye kept straying towards Pup, who was still flat on his back on the grass. When the set of tunes ended, he leaned over and prodded him with the long whistle. Pup sat up.

‘You,’ said the Dagda. ‘There are loads of whistles here. Start up a tune, why don’t you?’

‘I can’t,’ said Pup. ‘I don’t know how.’

‘Pick something else then,’ said the Dagda, waving the whistle at the instruments spread out among the bags and boxes on the bank. ‘What’s that thing over there, Jenny?’

‘It’s another kind of accordion,’ said Jenny. ‘A piano accordion.’

‘Play that, then,’ said the Dagda. ‘Play the piano corjun.’

‘I can’t,’ said Pup. ‘I can’t play anything. I never learned.’

The Dagda looked at him in total disbelief. The boy might as well have said he’d never learned to breathe. Jenny looked on, thinking it best to stay out of it.

‘Well, dance then,’ said the Dagda, fitting his fingers to the holes in the whistle. ‘Will you have a reel or a hornpipe?’

‘I can’t dance either,’ said Pup.

‘How can you not dance?’ said the Dagda. ‘You have legs, haven’t you?’

‘I never learned,’ said Pup.

The Dagda looked affronted, and Jenny was afraid
he might do something terrible to Pup.

‘It’s true, Granddad,’ she said. ‘He’s not making it up.’

The Dagda looked amazed, then decisive.

‘Well,’ he said. ‘We’ll have to do something about this, won’t we?’

Donal hunched up his collar and ran for the barracks as fast as his aching legs would carry him. He was drenched again by the time he got there but he didn’t even notice. He was preoccupied with bin-bags, hoping against hope that Aidan would release another few rolls of them from his supplies. If the weather didn’t change, they’d be needed to protect the loads of treasure on their way into Tír na n’Óg.

He thought he knew how to persuade Aidan. The notes he had spent all afternoon writing would need protecting as well, or they would disintegrate before they got as far as the souterrain beneath the ring fort. So he would need some of those little resealable bags as well, and if he was opening the container anyway . . .

‘Sergeant Mooney!’ Donal roared, with an exuberance that he hadn’t experienced since he was a child. A sleepy young man appeared at one of the bunkroom doors in his shirtsleeves and socks.

‘Where’s your uniform, man?’ Donal bellowed.

Mooney disappeared and returned a moment later, his
jacket on, his boots unlaced. He had never heard his general give orders with such authority.

‘Go to the terraces and bring all the gardeners back here,’ Donal went on.

‘What, now, sir?’

‘Yes, now!’

‘But there are still four hours of daylight,’ Mooney said.

‘This is not a discussion!’ Donal roared at him. ‘Tell the guards there that the commander-in-chief has given the order. And get them all back here pronto, understood?’

The sergeant saluted and raced off, his laces whipping around his ankles.

Donal shouted again. ‘Colonel Crowley!’

Crowley was already in his doorway, his uniform buttoned and his boots laced. He regarded Donal with a shrewd curiosity.

‘Assemble the men,’ Donal said. ‘I want to see every single one of them in the mess hall in fifteen minutes.’

Curly saluted, and Donal set off back to the castle, his mind still fixed on the matter of plastic bags.

Aengus sat on his rock and glowered. He knew that there were better ways for him to sit out this storm. The salmon would be far more comfortable, lolling in the shallows, and even a hare might be able to crawl into a hole or a crevice and get away from the wind. But he had worked himself into far too bad a temper to do anything as sensible as that, and with every minute that passed, every gust of wind that doubled him over, every stinging shower that drove into his eyes, his mood darkened even more.

Pup sat on the grass, the whistle in his hand, trying his best to understand what the Dagda was showing him.

‘It’s just a simple polka,’ the Dagda said. ‘Simplest polka there is. “Breeches Full of Stitches”, it’s called. Everyone starts out with this one. Come on, try again.’

Pup put the whistle to his mouth.

‘That’s it,’ said the Dagda. ‘Don’t bite it. Now. All six fingers over the holes. And blow. And now four fingers. No no, not those four!’

Jenny sighed and looked out across the plain. There
were two figures making their way along the Moy road, strolling arm in arm. Aisling. And JJ had come with her.

‘Two!’ the Dagda was saying. ‘Can’t you even count? This one and this one. Now blow.’

Jenny tried to remember why it was that Aisling was coming up here. And that reminded her that she had been on her way somewhere as well. With Pup. Where was it they had been going?

‘No no no no no!’ said the Dagda. ‘Look, let’s try something different, shall we? Let’s sing it first so you know what it’s supposed to sound like.’

‘Sing?’ said Pup.

‘Yes, sing,’ said the Dagda. ‘La-la-la la-la. You know. Sing?’

Pup was shaking his head.

‘You can’t be serious,’ said the Dagda. ‘You’re not telling me you don’t know how to sing.’

‘I never learned,’ said Pup.

Jenny feared the Dagda might be goaded into inflicting some dreadful retribution on Pup for his musical ignorance, but his reaction could not have been more different. His bearded face melted into a picture of compassion and Jenny thought she could see the filmy beginnings of a tear in his eye.

‘You poor, poor child,’ he said. ‘But how did it happen? How could you have possibly been so deprived?’

It was more like half an hour before all the men, including the stragglers from B-Troop and the guards from the terraces, were assembled. Donal left Sergeant Mooney and a handful of younger men standing watch over the frightened ‘gardeners’ and the captives from Carron. As an afterthought, he ordered Colonel Crowley to join them. Curly gave Donal a hard look.

‘Something going on you don’t want me to know?’ he said quietly as Donal passed him.

‘You have your orders, Colonel,’ said Donal. ‘I presume you are not questioning them.’

The mess hall was the largest covered space in the whole complex. It was made from four containers, their adjoining walls removed and the open edges welded together. Here the men crowded in for their meals, eating from rickety chairs and tables cobbled together from old pallets. Some of them were lounging in these now, creating an irritating creaking chorus that was louder than the storm outside. Normally Donal’s pep talks were accompanied by this noise, but he decided that this one would not be.

‘Attention!’ he roared.

The men got to their feet and stood straight.

‘Right,’ said Donal. ‘I told you this morning that I wanted four men for a mission. Well, that has changed. I now want nine.’

There was silence, and the men expected a renewed round of pleading and badgering for volunteers. But this time was different. Donal walked along the stiff rows, peering into the faces of the older men or the ones who looked exceptionally ill. One man, barely more than a boy, had dreadful skin cancer caused by the vicious sun that came out between the storms. He wasn’t long for this world. Donal put him at the top of his mental list. Three times he strolled along the lines, adding names, removing them, adding them back again. Eventually his mind was made up.

‘If your name is called, step forward.’ He barked out the nine names that had made it on to his final list. The lucky ones, even if they didn’t know it.

‘What’s it for, sir?’ one of them said.

‘Silence in the ranks!’ Donal snapped. ‘This operation has been run along sloppy lines for far too long and there’ll be no more of it. This is an army, and orders are to be obeyed and not questioned. Anyone who doesn’t like it has the option of a free transfer to the terrace construction works.’ He paused for effect, noticing as he did so that there was an almost total silence. The storm had abated.

‘Any takers?’

There were none. The men had all served their turn standing guard over those deadly, futile works. That was closer than any of them wanted to be.

‘Right,’ said Donal. ‘Let’s go.’

By the time they left the barracks, the puddles were already warming up and the rising steam was affecting visibility. In conditions like that it would be easy for a prisoner to slip away unnoticed, and Donal ordered Crowley and Mooney and their group of young soldiers to come along on guard duty as far as the ring fort.

There was no need now for any of the bags. Donal went ahead and opened up his own container in the castle. In closely guarded pairs, the messengers were brought in and loaded up, according to their capacity, with books or pictures, music or instruments. Even the smallest children took something – a block of manuscript paper, a box of oil paints, a clarinet or a roll of prints.

Aidan was there as well, personally handing out the messages one by one and leaving no one, whether soldier or prisoner, in any doubt about what they were expected to do. When the last person had been given their load, Donal surveyed the empty space in his container. It was disappointingly small. His boxes and crates were packed tightly from floor to ceiling, and every chink and gap between them was plugged with an unframed picture or a small, bubble-wrapped sculpture. There were things stowed away in the back that he could never hope to get into Tír na n’Óg, and he sometimes wondered what he
had been thinking of when he brought them here. But even without those particular things, there was still four or five times more in the container than had been taken out. It was proving to be a much bigger operation than he had expected. And how many more people, being realistic, was Aidan likely to allow through? None, unless he got some results pretty soon.

He set one last box aside, then locked up the container. At the back of the queue, Curly Crowley was standing guard, his rifle shouldered, his eyes hard and bright and sceptical. When the last in the long line had collected their load and their message and begun the march down the hill, Donal joined him. He was carrying the heavy box which, if he remembered rightly, contained coffee-table books full of photographs – reminders of landscapes and civilizations going or already gone. They walked down towards the ring fort together.