The White Horse Trick (14 page)

He couldn’t, though. Not yet. As long as he had breath, he had to keep going. Every poor wretch that he managed to send through was a life saved. And the other thing, the matter of what each one was taking with them, he sometimes thought was even more important. It was essential that someone, somewhere, even if it was only the fairy folk, should know that the human race had produced more than wars, catastrophes, and ultimately its own
slow and painful self-destruction. It had produced things of exquisite and lasting beauty as well. The contents of Donal’s container represented the ploddy equivalent of immortality.

Aisling and JJ arrived just in time to see the last soldier in the new party arrive through from the souterrain. He was a middle-aged man with red hair, shot through with silver. His face was lined by stress but his eyes were green and bright.

He dropped a heavy box on the ground and took a long deep breath. Pup ran up to greet him.

‘Colonel Crowley,’ he said. ‘Welcome to Tír na n’Óg.’

‘Hello, Pup,’ said the soldier. ‘Well, I’ll be damned. The old madman was right all along.’

‘Hey, you,’ said the Dagda, gesticulating to JJ. ‘Come over here.’

JJ went over and joined him on the cluttered bank of the rath.

‘What’s this?’ said the Dagda. ‘What’s Shakespeare?’

‘They’re plays,’ said JJ, watching him decant the complete works from a plastic box.

‘Plays?’ said the Dagda. ‘Is there tunes in them?’

‘Not exactly,’ said JJ, searching among the volumes for
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
. ‘But there’s one about fairies, if I can find it.’

The Dagda threw
Othello
over his shoulder. ‘But why?’ he said. ‘What are they doing bringing all this stuff over here?’

‘I don’t know,’ said JJ. ‘I suppose all immigrants like to bring their culture with them when they have to leave their own countries.’

‘Culture,’ the Dagda grumbled. ‘Is that what they call it?’

He paused to swear at another young ploddy who had the temerity to ask him – again! – if he was Aengus Óg, then made his way over to Aisling, who was trawling through a pile of old scores a few yards away.

‘Oh, this is wonderful,’ she said. ‘These must have belonged to a serious musician. See all these pencil marks? They’re really good notes.’

‘Notes?’ said the Dagda.

‘I mean, not musical notes. The black dots are the musical notes but the pencil marks are another kind of note. Reminders to the musician of how to interpret the piece.’

The Dagda gaped at her and she could see he was out of his depth.

‘I wish I could show you,’ she said. ‘I wish I had a piano.’

‘A piano?’ said the Dagda. ‘There’s one over there, look.’

‘That’s not a piano,’ said Aisling. She was working hard to prevent herself from laughing, because laughing at the king of the fairies was likely to have dire consequences.

‘It’s a piano corjun,’ said the Dagda. ‘Jenny said so. What’s the difference?’

‘Quite a lot, I’m afraid,’ said Aisling. ‘A piano is a huge thing.’

‘Bigger than that?’ said the Dagda, pointing at a double bass in an extremely muddy case.

‘Much bigger,’ said Aisling, and she was going to go on and explain what a piano looked like, but the Dagda had turned on a ploddy woman who was coming towards them. She hadn’t opened her mouth, but she had one of those pieces of paper in her hand.

‘No!’ the Dagda yelled. ‘I am not Aengus Óg. I am nothing like Aengus Óg. Go away! Go away!’

The woman wandered off, too disorientated to be much bothered by the verbal attack. She joined the other newcomers, who were spreading out in all directions, uphill and downhill, scouring Tír na n’Óg for the elusive Aengus Óg.

Donal walked back up the hill, on his way to report to his brother. He was pleased with the way the operation had gone, but disappointed to find that he didn’t feel like celebrating. There were always more problems ahead, no matter how many were solved in the short term. He found he was already missing Curly Crowley, partly for his companionship but also for the quiet authority he had over the men. Donal thought Mooney would provide that, but whether he would share the other, unspoken understandings remained to be seen. There were those in the army who considered that rounding up old and infirm people and bringing them back was a waste of time and resources. He knew that if they got into power, there would be a lot more quiet shootings and a lot fewer civilian mouths to feed.

By the time he reached Aidan’s castle the sun had burned off the white mist and was splitting the stones. The sound of running footsteps behind him made him stop and wheel round. A slight figure was coming up the hill behind him, and Donal’s heart soared out of darkness and into the light.

‘Are you Aengus Óg?’ said the Dagda, pushing his hairy face between JJ and his book. ‘Are you Aengus Óg?’ he said to Pup, and to Aisling, and to one last bewildered ploddy who was approaching him with the same question. ‘So where is he then? And why should I bother whether he comes home or not?’

‘And where’s Jenny?’ said Pup, who had just noticed that she was gone.

The Dagda ignored him. ‘He’s been nothing but trouble since he was born, that son of mine. Meddling in ploddy affairs. Mixing with the riff-raff. Why can’t he stay at home and mind his own business?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Aisling to Pup. ‘Where is Jenny?’

‘And look at all this!’ the Dagda went on, regardless. ‘How much more of this nonsense do I have to put up with before he bothers himself to come home? We won’t be able to move for ploddies, pushing their pieces of paper into our faces.’

‘I shouldn’t worry,’ JJ began.

‘Shouldn’t worry?’ roared the Dagda. ‘Shouldn’t
worry? It’s fine for you to say I shouldn’t worry. You’re not the one with all the responsibility, are you? I mean, all you have to do is—’

He stopped, silenced by the sound of a plucked string, deep and resonant. He turned, and JJ did too. Aisling had taken one of the better cellos out of its case and was twisting its huge ebony pegs, tuning it up. The Dagda hurried over to investigate.

‘Nice one, Aisling,’ JJ whispered, and winked slyly at Pup.

Jenny threw her arms around Donal. He was wet and cold and his clothes smelled of wood smoke and mildew, but she couldn’t let him go. He hugged her back, feeling tension melt from his muscles and tendons, taking the first unconstricted breaths he had taken in decades. She smelled of grass and sunshine. She smelled of Tír na n’Óg.

‘What are you doing here?’ he said at last, stepping out of the hug to get a proper look at her.

‘I’m looking for Aengus,’ she said. ‘But I’m glad I found you instead.’

The skin of his face was grey and deeply lined but his eyes were unchanged. They were bright and clear and kind.

‘Oh, Jenny,’ he said. ‘You shouldn’t have come here. It’s a dreadful place now, nothing like it was when you were last here.’

‘I know,’ she said. ‘Pup has been telling me all about it.’

‘Pup?’ said Donal, his heart leaping again. ‘You met up with Pup over there?’

‘I did,’ she said. ‘And loads of others, too.’

‘Are they OK?’

‘They’re fine. A bit confused but fine.’

‘Then go back, Jenny. Go and help them settle in. Aengus is sure to go on home in his own good time.’

‘It’s not as simple as that, though,’ said Jenny. ‘The Dagda is cutting up rough about all those people that have been going through. And Pup says some children have been kidnapped.’

‘I heard that, too,’ said Donal. ‘But things like that happen all the time over here. People disappear. It’s the way things are these days. You can’t concern yourself with this world, Jenny. It’s too far gone.’

‘But I think they’re changelings,’ said Jenny. ‘It sounds like it, from what Pup said. They might be my brothers or sisters or cousins. I have to find out what’s happened to them.’

The mystery surrounding the children began to clear in Donal’s mind. ‘I don’t know where they are, Jen, but if it’s true that they’re changelings, I’m pretty sure that they’ll be safe.’

‘There’s only one place they’ll be safe, and that’s Tír na n’Óg,’ said Jenny. ‘I’m not going back without them.’

Donal looked at her again. She had the subtle beauty of her fairy blood, and something else as well. The robust health of a young woman raised in Ireland fifty years before, when food was plentiful and shelter was warm and dry. There was no one who looked like that now.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘I always told the folks that you could look after yourself. I suppose it’s as true now as it was then.’

‘Of course it is,’ said Jenny.

‘Then you may as well come along with me,’ said Donal. ‘I’d like to know what you make of our little brother now.’

JJ was trying to persuade Pup that it was too dangerous for him to go back to his own land. Pup heard about Oisín all over again, and about JJ’s own adventures in Tír na n’Óg, and soon he was being drawn back into forgetfulness, lolling on the grass, entirely absorbed in the stories. Behind them, further up the bank, Aisling had succeeded in tuning the cello and was plucking a few notes and trying to work out finger positions.

‘Give me a go, give me a go,’ said the Dagda, wrenching the cello away from her.

‘You really need to be sitting down,’ she said, and she lugged over a couple of the sturdier boxes and made a seat for him. He barely paused as he sat on it, nestling the cello’s neck against his shoulder, the fingers of his left hand stretching for notes. Already he was getting the hang of it, plucking the strings in turn, altering his fingering to get true notes.

Aisling went looking for a bow. The one that had been with the cello was useless. All the hair had been eaten away, whether by insects or by time there was no way of
knowing. She found the same thing in each of the three cello cases, so she went over to JJ and asked him if she could borrow one of his fiddle bows. He opened the case and picked one out for her.

‘But you went back,’ Pup was saying to him, ‘and only a month had passed by.’

‘I was lucky,’ said JJ. ‘I might not have been.’

‘Well, it can’t be much later over there,’ said Pup. ‘Colonel Crowley and the others who just came through don’t look any older than they did when I left.’

‘That doesn’t mean anything,’ said JJ. He was just about to start explaining all over again that in the blink of an eye or the dancing of a set a whole century could pass on the other side, but it all seemed like too much effort.

‘In any case,’ he finished up, ‘you don’t need to worry about Jenny. She can look after herself.’

‘That’s beside the point,’ Pup began, but their conversation was interrupted by a cry from Aisling.

‘Look, everyone!’

JJ turned to see the Dagda, his great-grandfather, draw the bow across the cello strings. Laboriously but tunefully he began to pick out the notes of ‘Breeches Full of Stitches’.

The goon on the gate looked suspiciously at Jenny as Donal brought her into the castle, but he allowed her through. Above their heads the raven flew in big, lazy circles, so high that they weren’t aware of his presence. But he was aware of theirs, and he was very curious to know what they were doing.

‘This place is amazing,’ she said. ‘How did he get all these lorries piled on top of each other?’

‘He hired a big crane on caterpillar tracks,’ said Donal. ‘It was about forty years ago he built it. Got it all finished inside a fortnight.’

‘And what’s in them all?’ she said.

‘Just about anything you can think of,’ he said.

There were more goons in the inner courtyard and Donal noticed a bottle of sunscreen doing the rounds. Nothing but the best for Aidan’s men. It was a long time since any had been issued to the regular troops, and a lot of them were suffering badly because of it.

Jenny took in her surroundings. There were other people inside the castle as well, taking advantage of the
change in the weather. Women were hanging out washing and chopping vegetables outside the kitchen. A boy was pulling a protesting chicken from a wire coop. The raven, still unnoticed, had begun to descend silently.

‘Who’s the girl?’ said a beefy guard who stood outside the door of Aidan’s private complex, looking at Jenny with entirely the wrong kind of interest.

‘She’s the commander-in-chief’s sister,’ said Donal. ‘If you know what’s good for you, you’ll keep your filthy eyes off her.’

The guard looked doubtful, but he complied. He slid the hatch off a small grille on the door and called through it. ‘General Liddy and . . . and guest.’

‘Two minutes,’ a voice came back.

Jenny and Donal leaned against the wall beside Aidan’s door.

‘How have you been?’ she asked him.

It was too big a question, and Donal was at a loss. He shrugged.

‘Married? Children?’ Jenny asked.

Donal shook his head. He had never married, because he had been in no hurry when he was a young man, and now no one got married unless Aidan decided they would. A lot of women lived within the castle compound. They were responsible for running the castle kitchen and laundry, and nearly all of them were the wives and daughters of Aidan’s private guards. There were a few children there as well, and the thought of them made
Donal feel a momentary self-pity. He would love to have had children. He would have been a far better father than he was a soldier.

‘No family,’ he said. ‘Unless you count the army.’

There was the sound of heavy bolts being drawn and the door was opened by another of Aidan’s men. Donal and Jenny slipped inside, and just as they did so, the huge raven dropped from the skies and swooped in through the gap above their heads.

Inside Aidan Liddy’s custom-built container home, all hell broke loose. The goon who had opened the door reacted too slowly to the sudden appearance of the enormous black bird and slammed the door shut after it had come in. In any case, by the time he realized his mistake, the bird was no longer a bird, but a tall, fair-haired man.

What came next happened too fast for Donal to see, and he had to piece it all together afterwards. Because suddenly the room was full of guns, all pointing at Aengus, and just as suddenly the guns were falling to the floor because the four goons had been transformed into two kittens and two Doberman Pinscher dogs. The fifth gun – Aidan Liddy’s own pistol – was dropped voluntarily as he first put his hands up over his head, then changed his mind and lunged for a massive bunch of keys that was lying on the table.