The White Horse Trick (3 page)

‘Well?’ said the commander. ‘This better be good.’

‘What’s this about kidnapping children?’ said the general. ‘What are you up to this time?’

‘I’m working on a plan, as it happens,’ said the commander. ‘I’ll let you in on it if and when you need to know. Until then it’s none of your business.’

‘It’s my business when it causes problems in the army,’ said the general. ‘You can’t just go shooting my soldiers. I’ll have a mutiny on my hands.’

The commander-in-chief stepped up close and pushed a finger into the other man’s chest. ‘If you have problems with control, then maybe I’ll have to find someone who doesn’t,’ he said.

Quietly but firmly, the general pushed the finger aside. ‘You could do that,’ he said. ‘Or for once in your life you could try thinking outside the box.’

‘Oh?’ said the commander, with heavy sarcasm. ‘Please enlighten me.’

‘I have a much, much better idea of what to do with that soldier,’ said the general. ‘In fact, I’ve come up with an idea that could solve all our problems in one fell swoop.’

‘All our problems?’ said the commander, grinning in disbelief.

‘Most of them anyway,’ said the general. ‘We have too many mouths to feed and not enough to put in them. I’ve thought of a way we can make the old and the sick productive. We’ll all benefit from it. It’ll be all winners and no losers. And best of all, no more bony old corpses to dispose of.’

‘Really?’ said the commander-in-chief. ‘Sounds way too good to be true. You’d better sit down and tell me all about it.’

So the general did, and the commander listened carefully, uncharacteristically quiet. His silence continued long after the general had finished, and when he finally did speak, his voice was full of disdain.

‘Ridiculous,’ he said. ‘It’s a childish fantasy.’

‘I don’t agree,’ said the general.

‘Well, even if worked, which I don’t think it will, how do you intend to pay for it? Didn’t you ever discover that there’s no such thing as a free lunch?’

‘Indeed,’ said the general. ‘And I don’t expect to get anything for nothing. I have it all worked out, and I know exactly what I’m going to offer in exchange.’

It was not unknown for people to stumble across the time skin into Tír na n’Óg, but Jenny had never heard of so many people coming in at once. There were seven of them altogether, and they stood looking around them in the middle of the main street.

All of them were wet through and covered in mud, as if they had just crawled up out of a ditch. Six of them were old, or if not old, then exhausted and worn out. They were emaciated. Their clothes were drab, mud-coloured, patched and re-patched. They stared around with disbelieving eyes, entirely lost and bewildered. But the seventh was quite different. He was young, just a boy, and very small. He was dressed in camouflage fatigues and enormous brown boots. And across his shoulder, the business end pointing skywards, was a very serious piece of weaponry.

It made Jenny nervous, and when the boy walked towards her, she had to work hard to control her inclination to turn him into something less harmful. There was, she realized, no immediate danger. She
would have plenty of time to act if things got rough.

‘Where’s the stuff?’ he said.

‘Stuff ?’ said Jenny. ‘What stuff?’

‘Stuff,’ he said. ‘We’re here to get supplies. We can pay for anything we take. We brought—’ He stopped, as if he wasn’t entirely sure what they had brought. Then he went on, ‘Where are the shops and the pubs?’

Jenny gestured towards the low, dark building beside them. It wasn’t exactly a shop, but in the other Kinvara, where Jenny had once lived, it had been Fallons’ supermarket. All seven of the newcomers looked through the glassless windows at the gloomy interior, where dusty, rickety old shelves held nothing but a few sprouting potatoes and wilted cabbages. A furious roar came from within and made everyone jump, including Jenny. The boy got a grip on his gun and turned it round, but he still kept the muzzle pointing towards the sky. There was another yell from inside the shop.

‘What the hell is happening over there?’

Aengus Óg appeared in the doorway. He, too, was soaked to the skin but, unlike the others, he wasn’t muddy.

‘And who the hell are you lot?’ he bellowed at the strangers.

They reversed rapidly towards the other side of the street, all except the boy, who stood his ground. Jenny noticed his fingers tightening around the stock of the rifle.

‘Calm down, Daddy,’ she said.

Aengus turned his wild gaze on Jenny, and it was as well that she was his favourite daughter, because he was angry enough to cause some serious havoc.

‘How did you get so wet?’ she asked him.

‘High tide on the other side.’ He looked back into the dark interior of the shop. ‘Very, very high tide.’

‘Ah,’ said Jenny smugly. ‘It’s really happening, then. I told you it would.’

‘What?’ said Aengus. ‘What did you tell me would happen?’

‘Global warming,’ she said. ‘I read it in the winds of change before I came over.’ She had also read about it in the newspapers and heard everyone around her talking about it, but she saw no reason to tell Aengus that. ‘I told you all about it. The Greenland ice melting. Sea levels rising. Remember?’

‘Oh, that stuff,’ said Aengus sourly. ‘End of ploddy existence and all that. It’s all very well, but where am I supposed to go to get my tobacco now that Fallons’ is gone?’

Jenny shrugged. ‘Try Gort,’ she said.

‘Gort?’ said Aengus Óg. ‘Gort!?’

Jenny remembered the stories she had heard about how Aengus had been stationed in Gort when he was a policeman, long before she was born. It clearly didn’t fill him with happy memories.

‘Have you got a better idea?’ she said.

If he had, Aengus Óg didn’t share it. He turned his
attention back to the newcomers. ‘Who are these people? What do they think they’re doing here?’

No one answered. Aengus looked at the boy soldier. ‘Is that thing a gun?’ he said.

‘Don’t worry about it, Daddy,’ said Jenny. ‘I’ll take care of things here.’

There was an explosion of salt water and black feathers, and Aengus Óg, in the form of a raven, flew up above the rooftops and set off in the direction of Gort.

In the main street of Kinvara there was a long, long silence. The boy watched the raven until it was out of sight. The others watched Jenny fearfully, as though they expected that she, too, might turn into something nasty. She toyed with the idea briefly, but these people were too pathetic to play games with. She found she almost felt sorry for them.

One of the old women turned to the others and spoke for the first time. ‘I told you. We’ve died and gone to hell.’

It was the boy soldier who answered her. ‘It doesn’t look like hell to me,’ he said. ‘It looks more like heaven.’

‘How would you know?’ said the old woman. ‘What would you know of heaven or hell at your age? People don’t turn into ravens in heaven, I can tell you that much.’

‘But look around you,’ the boy said. ‘The sun is shining. Everyone is healthy and happy. It feels peaceful and safe, doesn’t it?’

‘But none of this can be here,’ she said. ‘I told you that
already. This place is like Kinvara was in the old days, but we all know Kinvara isn’t there any more.’

‘Well, it is here,’ said Jenny, deciding it was time to get involved. ‘It always has been and it always will be. The only new and surprising thing here is you people. So why don’t you start at the beginning and tell me how you got here?’

‘We met a man with a beard,’ said the boy soldier. ‘He was out on the hillside looking for a goat. He told us to come this way and we’d find the stuff.’

‘That’d be Devaney,’ said Jenny. ‘But how did you get into Tír na n’Óg in the first place?’

‘Tír na n’Óg?’ said the boy. ‘Is that where we are?’

‘It is,’ said Jenny. ‘So what are you doing here?’

‘We were sent,’ said the boy. ‘We’re running out of everything. If we don’t get new supplies soon, we’ll all be finished.’

The general looked over his gathered army. It seemed to him that every day the men were more dispirited, but when he called them to attention, they made some kind of an effort at least, standing a bit straighter, pulling their heels together, shouldering weapons.

He walked along the rows. The soldiers were in desperately bad shape. Many of them were ill: coughing or sneezing or running temperatures. Their uniforms were rotting on their backs, their boots letting in water, and there was only one waterproof jacket for every three men. None of it was their fault. It wasn’t his, either.

‘Present arms!’

They did. The general retraced his steps, checking the rifles for cleanliness and safety. Some of them were worn out or broken, and others were useless because there was no ammunition left to fit them, but all the soldiers carried them anyway, because the people they aimed them at were unlikely to know which ones were working and which ones weren’t.

When he had completed his inspection and arrived
back where he started, the general stood up on a concrete block and addressed the army.

‘A-Troop on terrace duty.’

There was a moan so faint that it could barely be heard, and it certainly couldn’t be identified as coming from any one individual. The general ignored it.

‘C-Troop to Tubber for tax collection. D-Troop on castle guard. B-Troop to Carron under the command of Colonel Crowley, to bring back any remaining people from the settlement there. And I’m going to want four volunteers to accompany those people on a raiding party through the old fort when they get here.’

There was a sudden and total silence. All the coughs and the running noses and itching heads and feet were suddenly forgotten, and not one soldier moved a muscle.

‘Come on,’ said the general. ‘Four volunteers.’

The men were so quiet that everyone could clearly hear the rats on the rubbish tip, rummaging among the empty cans.

‘Right, then,’ he went on. ‘Since there are no volunteers I will pick the men.’

He began to walk along the lines again. The youngest or the oldest? The fittest or the frailest? He had been bothered by the same problem the last time and the time before. He knew he hadn’t planned his campaign well. He ought to have sent the raiding parties through much closer together, instead of leaving so much time between them, before the men began to realize that the first lot might not
be coming back. So should he pick the most reliable men or the least reliable? The ones he liked best or the ones he liked least? It was going to be a hard decision, but there was no one who could make it except him.

There was a whipping noise in the air above and he looked up. A massive raven flew low over their heads, quite clearly looking down at the men gathered there below it. The general held his breath. There were plenty of ravens up there in the mountains – they were one of the few species that were doing well out of the changing weather patterns. But there was something disturbingly different about this one.

‘Dismissed,’ he said to the army. ‘Get ready for your operations. We’ll sort out the volunteers later.’

The men ambled off through the rain towards their quarters, but the general stayed where he was. The raven had circled and was coming in again, right over his head. It had a knowing look, and he was struck by a powerful sense of recognition that he couldn’t quite bring himself to accept. A raven was a raven, after all. Just a bird.

Under normal circumstances it was, anyway.

Aengus Óg was pondering over a sense of recognition as well. He had seen that tall old man somewhere before, but he couldn’t for the life of him remember when or where. That was one of the problems with ploddies. They didn’t stay the same. One day they were young and full of future, and the next time you saw them they had one foot in the grave.

But the mystery ploddy was of little interest compared to the other things Aengus was seeing as he flew overhead. This world always changed between his visits, but he had never before seen changes as drastic as these. The most astonishing one was the complete disappearance of Kinvara. It had vanished beneath the waves, along with the outlying townlands of Aughinish, Doorus, Mountscribe, Croshua, Moy and Funshin. The sea now covered the plain all the way up to the hills, and it was as though the little town and its surrounding farms had never been.

And the sea itself looked different, too. It had carved a new coastline for itself at the foot of Sliabh Carran; new cliffs, a whole set of small rocky islands, where miserable
seabirds crouched. The remains of boats and fishing nets were strewn about all over the place, and there was no sign of any new ones out on the sea. It gave Aengus the impression that the love-hate relationship between the ocean and the fishermen who lived their lives upon it was over, once and for all, and that the sea had definitively won. And although it was calm just then, the water had a dark and brooding aspect, which made him think that it wouldn’t be calm for long.

There were changes on the land as well. JJ Liddy’s house, which Aengus had been visiting for generations, was abandoned and roof less, nothing remaining but the shells of a few of the old rooms, all filled with ivy and brambles. Some of the other houses in the foothills were still standing, but only just. Ropes and sandbags held their roofs on. Hay sheds and barns had lost their corrugated iron and all that remained were the girders, rapidly being eaten away by rust. There were no trees anywhere. Even the hazel scrub was gone, as if grazed to the ground by some huge and voracious ruminant. The Carron road was washed to rubble and there wasn’t a motor vehicle to be seen.

And then, in the middle of it all, there was this extraordinary thing. Aengus flew over the castle and the barracks again, uncertain of what it was he was seeing. It looked like something made out of building blocks by a child, except that the blocks were massive, each one of them big enough for four sets to dance in. Somehow they
had been piled up on top of each other and made into walls. But how? And why?

He circled the complex again, flew close to the tall ploddy for one last look, then went on his way towards Gort. But the whole thing with the sea and the boats and the tumbledown houses gave him a very bad feeling. It gave him a feeling of dread that weighed down his glossy black wings, because it didn’t look at all like the kind of world where he would be likely to find a packet of his favourite tobacco.