The White Horse Trick (13 page)

‘You going through yourself then, Donal?’ said Curly, gesturing towards the box.

‘Not me,’ said Donal.

‘You know this is madness, don’t you?’ said Curly.

‘Trust me,’ said Donal. ‘Madness or not, you’ll thank me for it soon.’

‘Thank you?’ said Curly. ‘Why should I thank you?’

‘Because you’re going through with them.’ Donal offered him the box but Curly didn’t take it.

‘No way, Donal,’ he said. ‘I’m not going into that hole.’

‘Take the box, Crowley,’ said Donal. ‘That’s an order.’

For a long, long moment the two men stared at each other, and the rising mist shifted around them like a silent observer. Then Curly turned and saw that there were living observers there as well; some of the younger men who had been helping to guard the line. It was a critical moment. If he refused to obey the general’s order, then the entire command structure would be undermined. Either that or he would have to make a challenge and take over the army himself. He locked eyes with Donal again, considering it. Then he looked away, and something inside him seemed to give. It was as though, in that moment, he acknowledged his illness and his exhaustion, and resigned himself to whatever fate was in store for him. He reached for the box and took it.

‘Very well, sir,’ he said.

Aengus Óg stood up and stretched. The storm clouds were trundling away inland, wagging their squally tails behind them. Above his head the sky was blue and clear, and the sun was already pricking the skin of his face with its sharp rays. It felt good, after the battering he had taken.

He looked in all directions across the turlough, but a steamy mist was beginning to rise and he could see no sign of the chestnut mare. He was sure she’d had the sense to find her own way home – not that he really cared much either way. He regretted the loss of the apples, though. He could have murdered a good crisp one now.

But at least he would soon have his tobacco. In a burst of enthusiasm he launched himself into a glossy black beating of wings and climbed into the promise of the sky.

Donal stood and watched Curly Crowley, the last of the straggling line, disappear into the hole in the ground. It hurt him to part from his closest friend in such a way and, not for the first time, he hoped he was doing the right thing. The older he got, the more dreamlike his memories
became. The raven that appeared from nowhere and turned into a man. The same man, Aengus Óg, turning Mikey into a pig. The púca, growing to an immense size, punching his fist into the ground, pulling it out with a tree in it. A red tree so that his father could make f iddles as good as the old Italian masters.

Could any of it really have happened, or was he suffering from some kind of terrible delusion? It all seemed absurd, but then, so did all his other memories of those days. Shops piled high with every kind of thing imaginable. Warm, dry motor cars speeding from place to place. Aeroplanes that could take people from one side of the planet to the other in twenty-four hours. And food. All that food. Amazing, delicious things from other worlds. Bananas, oranges, pineapples. Meals you could get ready made, just for the effort of going out and buying them. Anything you wanted, all year round. And had there really been mobile phones? Surely it had never been possible to stand in the middle of an Irish field and talk to someone in America or China without even a wire connecting you? From Donal’s perspective now, the possibility of a land without time didn’t seem any more unlikely than these other kinds of magic.

The púca was definitely real, and so was Mikey’s ghost. Unless he really had gone mad, he was talking to them just that morning. And if they were real, then the rest probably was as well. He had to keep believing in what he was doing, otherwise he might not find the strength to go
on. He had to believe that the hundred people he had just sent down that muddy hole were going to find themselves in a better place.

That sound came again, that slow beating of wings. He looked up, but the mist was too thick for him to see the sky. The sound receded, then came again, lower this time, closer. The raven burst out of the mist, barely above the level of his head. It banked hard and circled him, and again he had that unsettling sense of recognition. He shook his head and turned away. Anything was possible, in the end, but for the time being Donal preferred to believe that he was imagining things. It was a bird, that was all.

The Dagda’s compassionate expression was rapidly changing to one of bewildered concern as the ploddy boy proved as incapable of singing as he was of playing the whistle.

‘Is he having a game with me?’ he asked Jenny plaintively.

‘I don’t think so,’ said Jenny.

‘I’m not,’ said Pup. ‘We never had any instruments or anything. They weren’t allowed. The commander-in-chief hates music. He banned it, and if his soldiers ever heard anyone playing or singing, they were arrested.’

‘Never mind, never mind,’ said the Dagda. ‘It’s never too late to learn. Try again now, come on.’

He hummed a line of ‘Breeches Full of Stitches’ and the boy sang something after him that bore no resemblance to it at all. Or to any kind of music, for that matter. The Dagda looked over his head at Jenny. She shrugged. She wasn’t exactly worried but something was bothering her, and it was more than the fact that Pup was tone deaf. There was some reason that she had come up here. Pup
might remember, if the Dagda ever left him alone for a minute, but she certainly couldn’t.

She sighed and, since she couldn’t play her nice new whistle with Pup making all that racket, she went back to sorting through the stuff the Dagda had strewn across the grassy bank. Jenny didn’t have a tidy disposition and she had never had any interest in accumulating stuff, but there was something disrespectful in the Dagda’s treatment of the things and it made her slightly uncomfortable. So she put books and sheet music back into boxes, glancing through them as she did so. She put instruments back into cases. There were one or two she hadn’t seen before, but most of them were ploddy basics and nothing to write home about. It wasn’t until she came back round to Donal’s accordion that the obvious question came to her.

Why? She could see why Donal might want to send his box through. She hoped it meant that he would soon be coming through after it and would play it. But what about all the other stuff ? If Pup was anything to go by, and if what he said about music being banned was true, then the ploddies who had brought it through didn’t know how to use it.

A movement inside the banks of the rath caught her eye and she turned to look. There were more of them coming, pouring out of the rath with boxes and bags and stacks and cases and pictures. What on earth was it all about?

Jenny stood up to get a better view of them. Like the
last ones, they were extremely muddy, and most of them looked severely undernourished. One by one they emerged with their loads, squinting in the sunshine, bearing the dazed expressions of the newly-arrived in Tír na n’Óg. Ten came through, then ten more. A soldier, two soldiers, then more civilians. And more.

‘Granddad?’ said Jenny. The Dagda was still engaged with Pup, reduced now to trying to get him to replicate one steady tone at a time. He didn’t look up.

The first of the new immigrants had arrived at the bank and were adding their loads to the piles there. Behind them there were still more coming up out of the hole in the ground, like a nest of maggots waking up from a long hibernation. Most of the soldiers with this lot, Jenny noticed, looked pretty infirm, and one of them in particular caught her eye, because his face was covered with awful sores, red raw and bleeding. He stood at the edge of the hole, gazed out at the countryside around him, and broke into a broad grin.

The Dagda had seen them now, and he and Pup were on their feet. Pup was waving in delight at people he recognized, but the Dagda’s face was moving through expressions so rapidly that Jenny couldn’t keep up with what he was feeling. There was panic first, then fury, then curiosity, then fury again, and it still wasn’t clear which of them he would settle upon.

‘Excuse me.’ A small child was tugging at her sleeve. ‘Are you Angit?’

‘What?’ said Jenny.

The child handed her a crumpled piece of paper, and she was halfway through reading it when she heard a furious roar from her grandfather. Evidently someone had asked him the same question.

‘Me?’ he was yelling. ‘Me? How could you mistake me for that egregious fool? Do I look like an idiot?’

Jenny glanced back at the piece of paper. Aengus. That was what she was supposed to be doing. Finding Aengus and the kidnapped changelings, and getting them all back home. She looked back at Pup. He was shaking hands with one of the soldiers and had the look of a new boy in school showing off to an even newer one.

The Dagda was still roaring. ‘Who are you people anyway? What makes you think you can come here and insult people? And why did you bring all that rubbish with you?’

They were still coming: more and more and more. Jenny had lost count.

‘What’s in those boxes anyway?’ the Dagda was roaring, in the same tone of voice. ‘Show me that!’

She had to get Aengus back soon. The Dagda wasn’t going to put up with much more of this. But as long as people were still coming through, there was no way she could get Pup out with her. It would be like trying to drive the wrong way down a busy one-way street. There was nothing for it but to go ahead without him. He had surely forgotten, in any case. He was happy here. He probably wouldn’t even notice she had gone.

For safety’s sake Jenny went through in the shape of a hare, and it was as well that she did because she popped up two paces from a soldier’s boot. He yelled and ran at her, readying his rifle to shoot, but she was never in any real danger. In the blink of an eye she was out of his sight, hidden by the strange, warm, white mist.

She heard him swearing and telling someone else what he’d seen. She could hear other things, too: the shuffle of many feet, the fearful pleading of a young child, a man’s voice saying, ‘Go on, down you go. Keep moving. Close up the line, there.’

Surely there couldn’t be even more people going in? How many was that going to make? Jenny edged closer to the entrance to the souterrain, moving slowly and taking cover among the grey rocks. It was true. There were as many still on this side as had emerged in Tír na n’Óg. One by one they were slithering into the muddy mouth of the souterrain, passing their boxes and bags through to unseen pairs of hands ahead of them and then following them in. Children screamed in fear. Women pleaded with the
soldiers. One man dropped the boxes he was carrying and made a run for it, but the soldiers had him within two strides and he was manhandled up to the head of the line and pushed down into the hole. Jenny had to admit that it looked terrifying from this angle. She could well imagine the horror of being shoved into that darkness, and the difficulty in believing that there was really another world on the other side.

When the last of them had gone down, the small group of soldiers that remained stood around the hole, looking in. None of them said anything. One of them was very old, and Jenny thought there was something familiar about his face. He looked a bit like JJ. With a dreadful shock she realized who it was. Her brother, the closest in age to her when she was growing up, had turned into an old, old man.

She crouched behind the rock, her mind reeling. She knew that it happened – she’d seen the effects of it on JJ and Aisling. But that was different somehow. They had been her parents. They were supposed to get old and grey. But Donal was – had been – two years younger than she was. She sat up on her haunches and looked at him again. He was not only old, he was thin and wasted. As she watched, he shifted his weight from foot to foot and made a grimace of pain, which he tried to hide from the soldiers standing around.

Three more of them appeared, rifles first, up out of the hole. They were covered in mud from head to foot.

‘All gone through?’ said Donal.

‘All through, sir,’ one said. ‘Both chambers empty.’

‘Good,’ said Donal. ‘Mooney? You’re promoted to Colonel, as of now.’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Mooney. ‘Thank you, sir.’

‘Dismissed, then, all of you. Make your way back to the barracks and await further orders.’

There was a loud swishing sound and a huge raven flew low through the mist and passed above their heads. The soldiers ducked and one raised the muzzle of his rifle. Donal put a hand on it and pushed it down.

‘Don’t waste ammo,’ he said.

In any case, the raven was already gone, vanished into the steamy whiteness. Jenny had recognized Aengus, because gods and their godlings always know each other, whatever form they might take. She was tempted to turn raven herself and follow him but, for the moment at least, there was enough going on here to keep her interest.

The soldiers strode off up the hill and were soon lost in the mist, but Donal stayed for a while at the old fort. The excitement and his displays of authority had exhausted him, and he was beginning to fear that he might not have the energy, mental or physical, to stay the distance and do all that he had to do. If he could only get his brother out of the way, things would be so much easier. Not for the first time, he considered murdering Aidan. He was in a position to do it. He was the only person in the
world who had unrestricted access to the commander-in-chief and could be alone with him. The trouble was, he would never get out again. The goons would have him before he was through Aidan’s door, and it would be curtains for him. And if that happened, the likelihood was that one of them would take over from Aidan, and they might turn out to be even worse than he was.

In any case, Donal knew he couldn’t do it. Murder was not in his nature, any more than being in control of an army was. Some of the things he’d had to do still gave him nightmares. He had gone against his own deepest principles and he could never forgive himself for that. But there was one place where he might at least be able to forget. His longing for Tír na n’Óg intensified. The mouth of the souterrain began to exert an attraction that was almost physical. Why not just go through and be done with it? Regret was one of those feelings that were said not to exist in Tír na n’Óg, wasn’t it?