The White Horse Trick (17 page)

‘That’s the job,’ said Aengus. ‘Come on, JJ. Let’s go and find the old nag.’

Reluctantly JJ went with him. Aisling set out to join them, but the Dagda called her back.

‘I have a job for you as well, Mother of Ireland’s Woes.’

‘Oh, great,’ said Aisling sourly.

‘I want you to find all those ploddies that are wandering round as if they owned the place and bring them back up here.’

Jenny felt the second jolt and breathed a sigh of relief as she was reprieved from the sentence of death. She didn’t know what all the opening and closing meant, but she very much hoped that Aengus Óg hadn’t just gone to sleep somewhere and that help was on its way. She needed it badly. Two of Aidan’s other men were sitting in there with them now, but Aidan himself was keeping the gun to Donal’s head, not trusting anyone else to do it.

‘You might give me my men back now,’ Aidan said, gesturing towards the dogs and kittens.

‘I prefer them the way they are,’ she said.

Aidan said nothing, considering whether it was worth making an issue of it, and decided it wasn’t.

‘How long are we going to stay like this?’ said Donal.

‘Sorry, brother,’ said Aidan. ‘I hope you’re not taking it too personally.’

‘It feels pretty personal,’ said Donal, ‘having a loaded gun pressed into your head.’

‘It’s not, though,’ said Aidan. ‘You just happen to be a useful bargaining chip. I have four of them now, you see.
Four fairy children. That ought to make some impression on your grandfather, don’t you think, Jenny?’

‘Is that what we’re waiting for?’ said Jenny. ‘Do you really think the Dagda is going to come running over and wave his magic wand?’

‘I certainly hope so,’ said Aidan. ‘I’m already getting bored. And if I run out of patience, we’re going to have to think of something else, aren’t we?’

‘Like what?’ said Jenny.

‘Leave it with me,’ said Aidan. ‘I’ll come up with something.’

Crossing over into Tír na n’Óg had not caused Pup the same problems it had caused the others in his party. He had remembered who he was, what he was supposed to be doing, and that his brother had been kidnapped. But returning was quite different. After he emerged from the souterrain he stopped and sat on the bank, examining his gun and wondering how he’d come by it, and what he was supposed to do with it, and why.

The rain fell and the wind picked up, and eventually Pup had to get up and go in search of some kind of shelter. As soon as he did so, his feet put him on the path that led up the hill, and when the barracks came into view he remembered that they were his home. He couldn’t clearly recall where it was he had just come from, but he knew it was a better place than this was.

He was amazed by the reception he got. When the sentries at the gate saw him coming, they raced into the courtyard and raised the cry.

‘Pup’s home! They’re coming back from the other side! Pup has come home!’

By the time he went in, all the doors were open and men were streaming out of their quarters to greet him. He was inundated with questions.

‘What’s it like?’

‘Where are the others?’

‘What’s the food like?’

‘What have you brought back?’

‘Where’s the loot?’

The questions jogged his memory, and before long it all came back to him. He remembered his mother visiting the barracks to tell him his brother had been kidnapped, and how he tricked his way in and confronted the commander-in-chief. He remembered the execution order, and thinking that his life was over. But he had been rescued from that by the one person who had always made his life in the barracks worth living. So the soldiers got no answers, but only another question.

‘Where’s the general? I have to report to General Liddy.’

‘He’s up at the castle,’ Mooney told him. ‘But tell me this. Did you see Crowley over there? Did he get there safely?’

‘He did, sir,’ said Pup. ‘And he was delighted to find out it was all real after all. You should have seen his face.’

‘Well, I’m Colonel here now that Crowley’s gone,’ said Mooney. ‘You can report to me since the general isn’t here.’ But when he saw the disappointment in the young soldier’s face, he went on, ‘All right, then. Go up to the
castle and find him, then come back here and tell us all about your adventures.’

So Pup set out for Aidan’s castle. It wasn’t far, not much more than a couple of hundred metres, but the closer Pup got, the slower he went. What if the sentry at the gate didn’t send him to the general, but to the commander-in-chief? Would he remember him? Would he decide to have him shot by firing squad after all, particularly as he had returned from the mission emptyhanded and without the rest of his party?

He sat down beside the path. The rain had stopped temporarily but the wind was growing stronger by the minute, and Pup had a sudden clear memory of the calm warmth of Tír na n’Óg and wondered why he had bothered to come back. His brother. It was because his brother had been kidnapped. But what could he do about it? Confronting Commander Liddy had led nowhere, and he still had no better ideas.

He was on the point of returning to the barracks when a pair of the commander-in-chief’s guards emerged from the castle and came in his direction. It would look bad to get up and run now, so he stood in the path and waited.

‘What are you doing there, soldier boy?’ one of them asked.

‘I’m on my way to report to General Liddy, sir,’ said Pup.

‘Oh, are you?’ said the goon. ‘Well, the general is
indisposed just now. He’s not feeling too good. And since you’re here you can save us a trip to the barracks.’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Pup.

‘The general sent us with a message for Colonel Crowley. He says he’s unwell and, until he gets orders to the contrary, Colonel Crowley is to take charge of the army.’

Pup opened his mouth to speak, then closed it again.

‘Got that?’ said the goon.

‘Yes, sir,’ said Pup.

‘Off you go then,’ said the goon. ‘Quickly. There’s a big storm on the way.’ And they both turned and went back towards their warm, comfortable quarters in the castle.

JJ leaned on the gate and watched as Aengus tacked up the white horse. He didn’t seem to be entirely sure which bit of leather went where, but the horse was clearly delighted to get some attention and stood waiting patiently while Aengus worked it all out. It dropped its head into the bridle, opened its mouth for the bit, made no objection when Aengus tugged at its ears and forelock and put a finger in its eye while he was reaching for the throat-lash. In fact, JJ had the impression that the horse would have tacked itself up if it could have.

But none of that made him feel any more confident about his upcoming mission or his prospects of success. Leaving aside the very real possibility of falling off and being reduced to a clatter of mouldy old bones, there was also the small matter of what he was supposed to do when he got there. He had never had any success in imposing discipline on his youngest son and he held out no hope that anything would have changed in the twenty-five years or so that had passed over there since he had last seen him. The very notion of telling Aidan to get his act together
and stop causing trouble was absurd. The whole mission was a wild-goose chase, and an extremely dangerous one at that.

But what alternative did he have? There was no opposing the Dagda on his home turf, and there was no hiding from him either. And although he hadn’t been threatened with any specific sanctions, he could imagine a whole variety of unpleasant destinies if he refused to follow orders.

‘That should do it,’ said Aengus, patting the horse on the shoulder and leading it forward. ‘Up you get.’

JJ was not a rider. A weekend at a trekking centre in Donegal with his oldest daughter, Hazel, was the extent of his experience. He remembered the bit about putting your foot in the stirrup and hauling yourself aboard, but he didn’t remember the bit where the saddle slid sideways and you landed on your rear end in the grass.

‘Oops,’ said Aengus. ‘Girth isn’t tight enough.’

JJ stood up and brushed himself down. There were no bones broken, but all the same, it was not the kind of start he might have hoped for.

The goons were right. There was another storm on the way, and by the time Pup had covered the short distance back to the barracks it was already blowing at full strength. Rain was hitting the containers sideways on, and forcing its way through cracks and rusted seals.

The other men were eagerly awaiting his return.

‘You were quick,’ said Colonel Mooney. ‘Did you see the general?’

‘No, sir,’ said Pup. ‘But I have a message. Can I give it to you in private?’

‘All right, Pup.’

Now that Mooney was promoted to Colonel, he had moved into Crowley’s cramped quarters beside Donal’s. As soon as the door was closed behind them, Pup said, ‘There’s something wrong, sir.’

‘Go on,’ said Mooney.

‘I met two of the commander-in-chief’s men. They said the general was ill and they were bringing a message from him.’

‘A message for me?’

‘That’s the thing, sir,’ said Pup. ‘It wasn’t. It was a message for Colonel Crowley and it was about taking command of the army until the general came back. But it couldn’t have been from him, could it, sir? Because he knows that Colonel Crowley has gone to Tír na n’Óg. He knows you’re the colonel now.’

‘How ill is he?’ said Mooney.

‘I don’t know, sir. But he’d need to be very bad indeed to forget something like that, wouldn’t he?’

‘You’re right,’ said Mooney. ‘I wonder what’s going on.’

‘I wonder, too, sir,’ said Pup.

The horse set out along the road at a jaunty but not particularly rapid pace. This suited JJ just fine. He was in no rush to get to the next bit – the dangerous bit – and a mile or two on this side would give him a chance to get used to being in the saddle.

But the horse had other ideas. Without warning, it turned off the road into a field, accelerated into a canter and burst through the time skin. JJ wasn’t even given the chance to gasp. Luckily for him, his subconscious mind had grasped what had happened immediately and had firmly closed his mouth. Because it took a full two seconds for him to understand that he was underwater. The horse had gone from beneath him and he was floating, but he was still holding on to something – the reins, of course – and between his fists he could feel the long mane streaming. He grabbed a handful of it and clung on for all he was worth.

His head broke the surface and he sucked in air, but it was full of water, too, and he coughed and hacked as, beneath the waves, the powerful swimming of the horse
towed him along. He could just make out the white shape of its ears and nose breaking the surface, but its body was far beneath him and he had no contact with it at all.

What frightened him more than anything was that the air above him had almost as much water in it as the sea below. There was a mighty wind blowing, full of rain, and it was churning the surface of the sea into a boiling froth of white-caps and flying spume. He was being towed helplessly through a breathless nightmare and it had to be hell. He was certain that the stupid horse had got it all wrong. This had definitely not happened to Oisín. The horse in Oisín’s story might have come up out of the sea, but there was nothing in it that he could remember about conditions like these.

It felt to JJ as though he would never be released from this torment. Time, the tyrant of all tyrants, had him in its grip again and would never let him go. But eventually he felt the horse’s feet touch solid ground and its back rose up beneath him, collecting him neatly into the saddle. It waded up through the shallows and JJ felt his nerves begin to unfrazzle. But there were more dangerous times to come, and the first one was when the horse suddenly stopped and turned into a road drill. That was what it felt like to JJ anyway, as it planted its four feet and shook itself violently. He lost his stirrups instantly, and was seized by a sudden panic, convinced that the horse was trying to get him off. But it didn’t go on for long, and when it finished, he realized that it had just been shaking the water off itself.
At least, that’s what he thought it had been trying to do.

The next crisis came when he and the horse had a disagreement about which way to go. Once he felt secure enough to look around properly, JJ got a glimpse of the shapes of the hills and realized where he was. The sea level had already begun to rise before he retired to Tír na n’Óg, but it had got a lot higher now. It had eaten away at the foot of Sliabh Carran and created brand-new cliffs that stretched away to his right and left. But here, just where they had emerged, there was a slipway. A few boats had been dragged out, high above the reach of the waves, but they were all rotten and full of holes, and it was clear they hadn’t been used for a long time. If there were regular storms like the one that was churning up the surface of the sea now, JJ guessed that people had given up trying to catch fish, from this point at any rate.

The slipway met the sea at the end of what had once been the old Carron-to-Kinvara road. JJ would have liked to veer off to the right across country and see what had become of his old house, but the horse had other ideas. It set off along the remains of the old road – clearly the going there was more to its liking. JJ found the courage to pull on the rein to turn the horse’s head and even to give it a couple of kicks, but when it tossed its head and started going backwards, he chickened out and let it have its own way. He was in enough trouble as it was, and there was no sense in trying to make more of it.

Colonel Mooney went up to the castle and brought Pup along with him. At the small door to the laneway they knocked, and a sentry pulled back a sliding panel and peered out at them through a barred window.

‘What do you want?’ he said.

‘To see General Liddy,’ said Mooney. ‘I’m his second-in-command. I’ve come to clarify orders for tomorrow’s manoeuvres.’

‘General Liddy is indisposed,’ said the sentry. ‘I thought you had been informed.’

‘I have,’ said Mooney, ‘but there are some issues I need to discuss with him. Perhaps I might be allowed to visit his bedside, just briefly.’