The White Horse Trick (25 page)

Sheltering in a waterlogged cave, Pup sat out the storm. And when, after three hungry days, it passed, he set out again to see how many survivors it had left in its wake. There weren’t many, but there were still enough to make his work worthwhile. For another two years he walked on, passing on his message by word of mouth when the last of his paper dissolved into mush. But as people became fewer, so too did the meals he was given in their houses,
and a time came when he realized that he could go on no longer, whether or not his work was done. So he guided himself by the sun and by the old signposts which still stood at some of the major crossroads, and eventually he got back to the Burren and Sliabh Carran.

Donal dreamed of supermarket shelves. Mile upon mile upon mile of food. In his dream he smelled hot bread. Then the scene changed and he was in Aidan’s grubby containers, walking along the rows, looking for something. It wasn’t there. There were goats and ravens in there, and there were storms and deluges raging in the corners, but the thing he was looking for was not there. Where had Aidan put it? Why couldn’t he find it? A little red Hohner accordion with twenty white buttons and one single black one.

The effects of the tornadoes were astonishing. The beacon was half its original size, its stones scattered across the mountain top. Further down, the castle and the barracks had been picked up and tossed down the hillside, the containers strewn around as if they were no heavier than cardboard boxes.

Pup sat at the foot of the stony steps and looked down on it all, the end of a civilization written clearly across the landscape. The only thing that hadn’t changed since he last saw the place was the huge white goat that stood a short distance away, watching him. Pup waved to it, and it stood
on its hind legs and waved back. It reminded him of something, and he knew it was time, at last, to go home. Just as an experiment, he decided to try going through the time skin right there, just where he was.

‘Pup!’ said Jenny, when she saw him walking towards her down the hillside. ‘Great to see you!’

He was ragged and hungry and battered and tired, but he had to admit that it was great to see her as well. She had been much older than he was last time they met, but she wasn’t now. She was just about right. He smiled, using muscles he’d forgotten he had.

Jenny smiled back. ‘I’m glad you waited behind,’ she said. ‘You needed the time to catch up.’

‘I’m glad, too,’ he said. There was a silence that threatened to become awkward, and Pup remembered just in time that there was someone else he wanted to see. ‘Where’s the general? I mean, your brother Donal. There’s something I have to tell him.’

Together they walked through a throng of people, in the middle of which JJ was trying to teach a soldier how to string a cello.

‘Is that the last of them now?’ said the Dagda, looking up from a page full of lines and black dots. If he recognized Pup, he gave no sign of it.

‘I think so,’ said Pup.

‘It had better be,’ said the Dagda.

They walked up to the container on the hill, where Donal was still dreaming his way through his past life. Jenny woke him gently and he sat up, one hand going instinctively to his side to protect the púca’s sticks.

‘Pup?’ he said. ‘Is that you?’

‘It is, General,’ said Pup.

‘But you’ve grown up. How long have I been asleep?’

‘No time at all,’ said Jenny. ‘Don’t worry so much.’

‘What have you been doing, then?’ said Donal. ‘Why did you stay behind?’

‘To finish what you started,’ said Pup. ‘To hand out all those messages you wrote. And a few more, besides.’

‘Ah, Pup,’ said Donal. ‘I always knew you had a heart of gold.’

‘And I have a message for you as well,’ said Pup. ‘Mikey says goodbye.’

‘Mikey?’ said Donal. ‘Is Mikey gone?’

‘I can’t answer that, General,’ said Pup. ‘I never saw Mikey at all. But it seems likely that he has. Everything’s gone, General. There’s nothing left of that old world at all.’

When the musicians and dancers gathered on the quay in Kinvara learned that the Dagda had come down from the mountain and was mingling with his people at the rath, they decided to go and take a look for themselves.

In Ireland, the second hurricane set in. It was closely followed by a third, but by then there was hardly anyone left alive to see it.

Aisling decided that the ploddies needed to learn the first principles of music. She set Jenny to teach some of the smaller children to sing. She herself was trying to round up the adults for dancing lessons, and she wanted Pup to help her, but Pup wasn’t going anywhere. He refused to join in with Jenny’s singing group but he wouldn’t leave it, either. All he wanted to do was lie on the grass, soak up the sunshine and keep half an eye on his darling girl.

Between the storms the scorching sun beat down. It melted the last of the Greenland ice and the seas rose even higher, inundating
coastal areas all around the world. In South America and Indonesia, horrendous droughts finally put an end to the last of the rain forests, and lightning strikes set them ablaze. The smoke from them shrouded half the planet.

Aengus and JJ were in negotiations over the lion-head fiddle. JJ was happy to give it to him, but Aengus insisted on paying him for it. The problem was, JJ couldn’t think of anything at all that he wanted.

‘Dad,’ Jenny called. They both turned their heads. ‘Is Pup my brother?’

‘How should I know?’ said Aengus. He sat down on the grass and took out his pipe. ‘Where did you find him?’

‘He just appeared like all the others,’ said Jenny. ‘But you must have a way of knowing.’

Aengus peered hard at Pup, who was listening anxiously. ‘You don’t look much like each other. I shouldn’t think you’re related.’

‘That’s not good enough, Dad,’ said Jenny.

Aengus poured tobacco dust into his pipe and regarded it gloomily.

The great deserts that had formed around the equator spread further north and south, creating an arid band of ferocious temperatures around the middle of the globe. At the poles the storms raged on.

‘Why does it matter, anyway?’ said Aengus.

‘You know perfectly well why it matters!’ said Jenny, trying to conceal a rising blush.

‘Oh, I see,’ said Aengus. ‘You two are—’

‘No we’re not!’ Jenny snapped.

‘But we might be,’ said Pup, blushing as well.

Aeons and aeons passed away.

Aengus Óg lit his pipe, which flared up in his face. The children in the singing group held their noses because of the smell of singed hair.

‘Give it up, Dad,’ said Jenny.

‘I think I might have to,’ said Aengus, waving his hand to divert the hot smoke away from his eyes.

And slowly, slowly, slowly, the oceans absorbed carbon from the atmosphere.

‘But anyway,’ Aengus went on, ‘I can see the predicament you two are in. You’re thinking you might like to make a little visit over to the other side for a while?’

Jenny and Pup both coloured again, and looked everywhere except at each other. Aengus poked an elbow through the time skin, like someone testing the temperature of a baby’s bathwater.

And the Earth’s atmosphere cooled. The storms brought snow instead of rain, and ice began to form again at the poles. It spread
outwards, glaciers formed, blizzards forged ahead of them and paved their way towards the equator.

Aengus whipped his elbow straight back and rubbed it hard.

‘I wouldn’t go back there just yet, anyway,’ he said. ‘It’s a wee bit cold.’

The glaciers lifted the stones of the beacon, and the dented remains of Aidan’s warehouses, and the broken walls of the Liddy house, and the caravan that had been hidden inside them.

‘Where were you born?’ he asked Pup.

‘Not far from Carron,’ he said. ‘Between there and Liddy’s castle.’

‘And what kind of house was it?’

‘An old one,’ said Pup. ‘I mean a really old one. Built out of stone, not blocks.’

‘Hmm,’ said Aengus. ‘Not enough information.’

The glaciers powered on, scouring all mankind’s ruined hopes and vanities from the face of the land and depositing them deep beneath the oceans.

‘What did your mother look like?’ said Aengus.

‘She’s here,’ said Pup. ‘That’s her over there.’ He pointed to a crowd of people who had gathered to listen
to Donal. He was playing ‘The Cow That Ate the Blanket’ on his old button box.

And then the seas themselves froze over.

‘The one beside the girl with the frizzy red hair,’ said Pup. ‘The girl is my sister.’

‘Oh,’ said Aengus. ‘I see who she is now. No. That’s not her. I definitely didn’t leave my baby with her. I’ve never seen her before in my life.’

And for a time the Earth became a quiet place, muffled in snow and ice, and nothing but blizzards and gods moved across its round white face.

‘And anyway,’ Aengus went on, ‘now that I come to think about it, my baby was another girl.’

Beneath the surface the Earth’s crust creaked and shifted. Land masses split apart and new continents were formed, and collided with each other. Mountain ranges reared up into the clouds. The last remains of the old human cities were ground into sand and buried deep inside brand-new land masses.

Pup and Jenny leaped to their feet and embraced.

‘Come to think of it,’ said Aengus, ‘I wonder where she is.’

He got up and wandered off to look for her, leaving
his smouldering pipe abandoned on the grass.

Jenny tested the time skin again. ‘Not yet,’ she said to Pup.

And then, as it had done countless times throughout its long, long history, the Earth began to warm up again. The púca watched patiently for the first sign of life. It began with tiny organisms that had hibernated deep beneath the sea’s icy crust. In the warming waters, they started to multiply, mutate and evolve.

While Aengus Óg was looking for his daughter, a fairy woman by the name of Meadbh caught his eye. He caught hers as well. Something in the air, no doubt about it. He made his way through the crowds towards her.

Once the basic building work had been done, the púca came into his element. Seaweed was thrown up on to the beaches and mutated into rudimentary land plants. With a bit of help from the goat god, these became grasses and legumes, then shrubs and trees, and they marched inland as the ice receded and established themselves into forests and tundras, covering every landmass with a thick fur of vegetation.

Whatever the thing was that was in the air, it was contagious. Throughout the assembled orchestra couples were forming, among the ploddies as well as the fairies. The Dagda looked on benignly.

‘It’s the music, of course,’ he said, to no one in
particular. ‘It always brings people together.’ He caught Drowsy Maggie’s eye and gave her a wink. ‘A set!’ he roared to Donal.’ “Miss McCleod’s Reel”!’

But the bit the púca loved best was still to come. It began with the small, cold-blooded things that crept out of the shallows and found they enjoyed the sensation of warm sand beneath their flippers. The púca helped them develop lungs to breathe air, then coaxed them further inland to his grassy plains and forests. They needed awkward things like noses and eyes and claws, and he helped them with those as well, and once the basic equipment was safely up and running, he really went to town. This time round the birds and beasts were going to be better than ever. Not too big – that was a mistake he had made before and learned from – but brighter and more beautiful than anything that lovely Mother Earth had ever known before.

JJ and Devaney joined Donal to play for the set, but it wasn’t until Aisling joined in on the piano that the yips and cheers began to rise up from the watching ploddies. One by one, timidly to begin with and then with more confidence, they began to try and imitate the dancing of the fairies. The Dagda, teamed up with Maggie, spun her round so fast that she got dizzy.

‘They’re getting the picture at last!’ he said. ‘We’ll have the orchrista up and running in no time now.’

But suddenly, mid bar, the music stopped.

‘What’s going on?’ said Aengus, who was partnering
Meadbh in the same set as his father. He looked over at the musicians and saw that the púca had arrived in their midst, and that Donal was handing him something that looked like a bundle of kindling.

‘That cloven-hoofed vandal!’ said Aengus. ‘How dare he gate-crash our party!’

He began to make his way over, but the crowd was thick, and by the time he got there the púca had taken his sticks and gone.

‘What was that all about?’ he said to Donal.

‘Just some bits and pieces he asked me to mind for him,’ said Donal.

‘What kind of bits and pieces?’ said Aengus.

‘Gardening stuff,’ said Donal, who didn’t want to give the púca’s secrets away entirely.

‘Gardening stuff, is it?’ said Aengus. ‘Hmm. I wonder . . .’

Taking a chance, he plunged his whole arm through the time skin, and it came out warm and dry. A broad smile spread across his face. To Aisling’s horror, he sprang up on top of her precious piano and called out over the assembled dancers, ‘Come on in, lads. The weather’s lovely!’

It was millions of years since any of them had gone through the time skin, and all their clothes had long since passed their degrade-by date. But the fairies were masters of glamour, and a hastily snatched fig leaf or two quickly had them covered, each of them according to their preferred fashion. In any case, despite the amorous nature of their intentions, they found that there were far more interesting things to be looking at than each other.

Because the púca had created a paradise on Earth. Brilliant flowers hung in multicoloured chains from the branches of tall, elegant trees. In the canopy far above their heads, radiant birds fluttered and sang, purple and orange and red. Lovely animals peered down from the trees with large, kind eyes. Spotted bears and striped wallabies fed from bushes that were laden with ripe fruit, and beside them fruit-eating lizards and snakes dangled lazily from the branches. And there were other beasts, too, unknown and unimagined, which jumped and swung and climbed through the forest, each one more beautiful than the last. They all watched the fairies curiously, but none of them
were worried by the sudden appearance of this new kind of creature in their midst.