The White Horse Trick (18 page)

‘Wait there,’ said the sentry, and closed the panel.

Mooney and Pup waited. The rain blinded them and the gusts of wind made them stagger. But the sentry returned very soon, and opened the panel again.

‘Your orders are to round up replacements for the terrace work crews. Everything else as per usual.’

He closed the panel again. Mooney looked at Pup and
shook his head slowly. Then he knocked on the door again.

The panel was yanked open. ‘What now?’ said the sentry.

‘Can’t take orders from you, I’m afraid,’ said Mooney. ‘They have no validity unless they come from the general or the commander-in-chief himself.’

The goon slammed the panel so hard the whole door shook.

In Aidan’s quarters the tension was becoming unbearable. Donal was stiff from holding himself still, afraid that any attempt to relax might set off Aidan’s trigger-finger. Jenny was not faring much better. She kept trying to work up the courage to do some quick magic, and she watched Aidan for any sign that he was losing concentration. But there was none, and she was afraid to take a chance. If anything happened to Donal, she wouldn’t be able to live with herself.

Aidan was not one bit happy about the intrusion by Mooney, and when his sentry returned a second time, his mood became explosive.

‘What the hell does he want?’ he said.

‘Why don’t you go yourself ?’ said Donal. ‘He’ll accept orders from you.’

‘You must think I’m an idiot,’ said Aidan. ‘I’m not moving an inch until the Dagda gets here.’

‘And what if he doesn’t?’ said Jenny. ‘He might not,
you know. And then there’s the time difference. Even if Aengus has told him and he’s on his way, there’s no way of knowing when he’ll actually get here.’

Aidan took a swig of his drink. ‘Sit down,’ he said to Donal. ‘Just here, on the floor.’

Donal sat down, carefully and painfully, at Aidan’s feet. The muzzle of the gun never left the back of his head. With his free hand Aidan reached for paper and a pen. He plonked it in front of Donal.

‘Write something,’ he said. ‘Get the idiot off our backs.’

‘Like what?’ said Donal.

‘You’re the flaming general! You work it out!’

The gale was furious and the horse walked with its head low and its ears flattened. Its feet slid in the rubble that had once been the metalled surface of the Carron road. The rain made visibility poor, and JJ couldn’t see for more than a few metres in any direction, but it was enough to give him an idea of how much the place had changed. The hazel and whitethorn that had once made this lane so pleasant were all gone. Here and there a few brambles were moving into the space left by the trees, clinging low to the ground to survive the winds, but other than that the landscape was bare and bleak.

There was no evidence that anyone lived in the place at all, and JJ wondered whether the time thing had fooled them all again. Maybe he had come through much later than Aengus had come back, and everyone was already gone. There was just no way of knowing, and there was no possibility of turning back until he had at least found out. In any case, the horse had a mind of its own, and JJ had no intention of entering into another battle with it if it could be avoided. So, for the time being at least, he
decided to sit back and let the horse go where it wanted.

In some places the road disappeared completely, or turned into a rapid stream, and JJ found himself disorientated on more than one occasion. But he was not, he realized, dazed and bewildered in the way he had been the two previous times when he returned to his own world from Tír na n’Óg. He remembered exactly where he was and why he had come, and he remembered, anxiously, what it was he had been sent over to do. He supposed it was the horse that made the difference. As if it were a little piece of Tír na n’Óg, detached from it but still possessing its magical and timeless qualities.

How else, in fact, could JJ possibly be there, riding through a time in which he should have been long dead. The thought sent a shockwave through him and he looked at the ruined road in a completely different light. To touch it meant instant death, and his reaction to the thought was to grab the horse’s mane and grip its body with his legs. The horse responded with a patient sigh, as though it was well used to insecure riders, and JJ wondered how many times it had done this. Maybe it hadn’t just been Oisín. Maybe this was the horse’s regular job and it had carried dozens of ploddies over from Tír na n’Óg to revisit the land of their birth. And that possibility raised another uncomfortable question.

How many of those time tourists had the horse taken safely back?

Mooney and Pup waited, hunching their shoulders against the gale and trying to guess where the next windblown waterfall from the top of the containers was going to land. It was taking a lot longer this time for the sentry to come back, and Pup hoped that nothing was going wrong inside.

Eventually they heard his footsteps. The panel opened and a piece of paper was shoved through it. Mooney took it and squatted on his heels, creating a shelter with his body to enable him to keep the wind and rain from the note. He opened it.

You are in command, Colonel. Do what needs to be done.

Signed:

General Donal Liddy

‘Is it from the general?’ said Pup.

‘I think so,’ said Mooney.

‘What does it say?’

Mooney read it out loud.

‘Does it make sense to you?’ said Pup. ‘Do you know what needs to be done?’

‘I’m not sure, Pup,’ said Mooney. ‘I have an idea, but we’d better go back to the barracks and have a careful think about all this.’

The silence and tension settled back into the room when the sentry was gone. After another few minutes had passed, Jenny began to wonder whether, in fact, she was making the right decision. What if the time skin closed again and she couldn’t get back? Would Aidan really shoot Donal if she disappeared? She probably wouldn’t know either way in any case, and what she didn’t know couldn’t hurt her.

Donal didn’t look very happy anyway. He was very old, and maybe a quick death wouldn’t be such a bad thing for him. She couldn’t understand why everything always had to be so complicated in the land of the ploddies. It was all so much simpler at home.

So should she go or shouldn’t she? She came to her senses just in time. Of course she couldn’t. But she wished the Dagda would hurry up and get there. Or someone. Anyone. And soon.

In the strained silence, everyone could clearly hear when another knock came to the outside door of the castle. Everyone, even the goons, stiffened. It couldn’t be those soldiers again, could it? They wouldn’t have the neck, surely.

* * *

Outside the castle JJ waited for a reply to his knock. Rain was running off his saturated clothes and collecting in a puddle around the horse’s feet. It shifted restlessly.

A panel in the door flew open and a furious voice yelled, ‘What is it now?’

JJ cleared his throat. ‘It’s Aidan’s father,’ he called into the gloom beyond the barred window.

‘Whose father?’ said the sentry.

‘Aidan’s,’ said JJ. ‘Aidan Liddy.’

There was a stunned silence, and then the voice said, ‘Are you referring to our commander-in-chief?’

‘I suppose so,’ said JJ. ‘If that’s what he’s calling himself these days.’

There was another silence, and then the voice said, ‘Wait there.’

JJ waited. The horse turned its tail to the wind. The wind changed direction. The horse shifted away from it again. By the time the sentry came back JJ was several metres away from the door and couldn’t hear a thing he said. With a combination of bullying and pleading he succeeded in getting the horse up beside the castle again.

‘What?’ he shouted through the bars.

‘The commander-in-chief says he has no father,’ the sentry called back.

‘Oh, damn and blast him,’ said JJ. ‘Of course he has a father. Tell him I’m back from Tír na n’Óg to visit him and he better let me in before I drown!’

‘There’s definitely something fishy going on,’ said Colonel Mooney to Pup. ‘I don’t think I believe the general is ill.’

‘Nor do I,’ said Pup.

‘He didn’t send the first message anyway, the one to Colonel Crowley. He sent him through to Tír na n’Óg and promoted me himself, so there’s no way he would have sent that message. Unless it was a deliberate code in itself.’

‘Then what is he saying in the note? What does he want you to do?’

‘I think I know, Pup, but I’m not sure.’ Mooney led the way across the inundated parade ground to the container where he and the general had their private quarters. ‘If I’m in acting command then I’m entitled to use the general’s office,’ he said. ‘And we just might find some clue there to what’s going on.’

The stove was out in the little sitting room, and condensation was dripping on to the furniture. Mooney took a quick look around but there was nothing there apart from wet clothes hanging on their rail above the fire and a shelf of books, their pages all swollen from the damp
and stuck together. The door to Donal’s private room was secured with a padlock, but it was so ancient and rusty that it yielded to one good tug from Mooney. He slid the bolt across, and he and Pup went in.

It was a tiny space. The general’s narrow bed took up most of the far wall, and a short rail at the foot of it held his few clothes on hangers. A heated pipe ran along the near wall, fed by a boiler in the stove, and above it was a plank, narrow and warped. It was covered with candlestumps and melted wax, and Donal had obviously been using it as a desk. At one end stood five unopened boxes of resealable plastic bags and a cup of ballpoint pens. In the middle, protected from the damp by a larger plastic bag, was all that existed of the general’s paperwork. Mooney opened the bag. There was an A4 pad, nearly used up, and beneath its top leaf was a stack of handwritten pages.

It didn’t take Mooney long to ascertain that there was nothing there in the way of military secrets. Each of the pages was a neatly torn half of A4, and all of them were exactly the same. He handed the top one to Pup. Pup could read, but not very well.

‘What does it say?’

Mooney picked up another one and read it aloud.

‘
If you cannot stand it any more, there is a way out of this world. Go to the old fairy fort below Aidan Liddy’s castle and down into the hole you will find in it. Go through two underground chambers, and when you come to the far wall,
keep going. It is not a real wall. You will find yourself in a world far better than this one and you will be safe there for ever, provided you mind your manners.

‘Trust me. All I have written is true. And if you are reading this note for a second time, then it probably means you have nothing left to lose.’

Pup turned his page over. On the other side, and on every one of the two hundred or so other notes, was a beautifully drawn map of the area, with the beacon marked in red, the Liddy castle in blue, and the circular outline of the fairy fort in green.

Colonel Mooney gathered up the notes again and put everything back in the bag, exactly as he had found it. ‘You know,’ he said to Pup, ‘if I had come across these a few hours earlier, I would have been convinced that the general was completely insane. But you tell me it’s all true?’

‘Oh, it is, sir. I swear on my mother’s life.’

‘And I believe you,’ said Mooney. He flattened the bag to push any remaining air out of it before he sealed it. Then he turned his back to the narrow desk and leaned against it thoughtfully. Eventually he said, ‘You know what I think, Pup?’

‘No, sir,’ said Pup. ‘What do you think?’

‘I think it’s time we went and found out what has really happened to our general.’

The sentry was gone a long time and the horse turned and kept turning, shook its head and stamped its big feet restlessly. JJ could get no wetter but he was getting colder, and some of the gusts of wind were so strong they threatened to knock him off the horse. He was in a foul temper by the time the sentry returned, and his mood wasn’t improved when the man came out with a mouthful of gobbledygook.

‘The commander-in-chief says if you’re his father, what did the cat eat and what did the cow eat?’

‘What?’ said JJ. ‘What did you say?’

‘He wants to know what did the cat eat and what did the cow eat?’

‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ said JJ. ‘I’m getting blown away out here. Can’t you just open the flaming door?’

‘Not till you give me the answer,’ said the goon smugly.

The horse turned round again and a blast of wind hit it so hard that it was driven against the side of the castle, trapping JJ’s leg.

‘Mice,’ he yelled desperately. ‘Mice and silage!’

But into the silence that met his words, a tune arrived and began to play itself inside his head.

‘No, wait, wait,’ he called out. ‘That’s not right.’ The tune in his head played on, and now he remembered its name. And it made sense. Aidan had always hated the music that the rest of his family loved, but he couldn’t avoid hearing the tunes, and their names as well. And what better way of getting JJ to identify himself than by asking him the names of some old family favourites?

‘It’s a candle,’ he said. ‘“The Cat That Ate the Candle”. And the other one’s a tune as well. “The Cow . . .” What was it? “The Cow That Ate the Blanket”, that’s it! So that’s his answer. A candle and a blanket.’

The sentry didn’t answer, but there was an odd creaking sound from somewhere near the door. The white horse started walking backwards again and JJ swore at it and tugged furiously on the reins, with absolutely no results. Then he saw why, and he felt guilty and slightly stupid, because the horse had far sharper senses than he had and was getting out of the way of the end of a container that was being opened just beside them. He had given the right answer and the goon was letting down the drawbridge.

When it reached the ground, the horse stepped on to it. JJ looked down the length of the container and saw a heavy mesh gate at the other end being raised like a portcullis. He urged the horse forward, but it refused to
move until the gate was fully raised, then it dashed forward and out the other end before either exit could close and trap it inside. JJ appreciated the logic of it, but he wished the horse would let him make at least some of the decisions. At the other end it stopped again, and this time JJ pulled firmly on the reins and pretended it was his idea.