The White Horse Trick (4 page)

The conversation with the wet people had turned out to be very unsettling. Or, if Jenny were to be completely honest with herself, not so much unsettling as intriguing and delicious. The rise in sea levels had been predicted, and so had the storms and the heavy rainfall and the occasional ferocious droughts. What hadn’t been so well predicted, at least by the time Jenny had finished growing and come to live in Tír na n’Óg, was the social consequences of the changing climate.

From what the wet people said, they were devastating. As the rising sea drove them from their homes, the people of Kinvara and the surrounding townlands made for the hills. Some of them were lucky and moved into old houses or were given a piece of land by a good-hearted farmer, where they managed to construct some kind of rough habitation for themselves. Others, mainly the late-comers, were not so lucky. They had to find what shelter they could among the rocks and the scrubland. Very few of these people survived.

It wasn’t only small places like Kinvara that were
affected. Dublin was deluged as well, and countless major cities around the world. International trade had collapsed, supermarkets had closed, governments had lost control and dissolved. Looting and gang warfare took over in the cities, and in the country areas, new warlords arose and introduced their own violent forms of government. But now there was nothing left to loot or raid, and that was why the muddy people had been sent through the souterrain to collect supplies. They needed them desperately, not just for the castle, but for the hundreds of people who were dependent upon it.

‘What kind of supplies are you looking for?’ Jenny asked the boy soldier.

‘All kinds,’ he said. ‘Anything you can eat or drink. Livestock. Firewood. All the basic necessities.’

‘I see,’ said Jenny. ‘Well, why don’t you people just relax here in the sunshine for a while and I’ll go and talk to my father about it.’

‘Your father?’ said the old woman. ‘I thought he had just turned himself into a raven and flown away.’

‘Oh, he has,’ said Jenny. ‘But I have another father as well, and he may be more use to you. I won’t be long.’

The wretched little raiding party watched her as she ambled away down the main street, clearly not in any hurry at all. Nothing here made any sense to them, but unaccountably they found that they were not worried about it. In fact, when they thought about it, they found that they were no longer worried about anything at all.

As Aengus Óg had feared, Gort did not look promising. It was a long way inland and the sea hadn’t reached it, but parts of it were flooded all the same. The river that ran through the centre of the town had burst its banks and, judging by the ruinous state of the inundated buildings on either side, it was a regular, if not permanent, condition.

On the outskirts of the town there was another kind of flood, caused by saturation of the land by heavy rain. When Aengus had last been there, hundreds of new houses were being built around the town. They were all in ruins now, some of them undermined by floods and others just fallen down. The only part of the town that appeared to be intact was the higher end of the main street. Everything else – including, he was delighted to see, the Garda station where he had once been stationed – was either derelict or submerged.

Even the bit that had survived did not look good. The cheerful shop-fronts that Aengus remembered, with their bright signs and colourful window displays, had disappeared. All he could see from above was a tiny group
of dingy market stalls in the middle of the road. He was on the point of descending to get a better look when a sudden powerful squall hit him side on. He beat his wings furiously and regained his balance in the air, but he wasn’t out of danger yet. Another gust hit him and almost knocked him out of the sky. He flapped desperately and turned his back to the wind, which caught him up and drove him ahead of it at a hundred miles an hour across the ruined town and in the direction of Loughrea.

Aengus now saw the weakness in his plan. He had often become a raven – it was the best way of covering distance at speed – but he had never flown in storm conditions before. The weather in Tír na n’Óg was perpetually perfect and on this side he had, he supposed, always been lucky. The trouble was, he only knew the basics of flying and none of the advanced stuff. Like, was it safer to fly against the wind, at the risk of exhausting himself, or to let its unpredictable currents carry him along, at the risk of being dashed into a tree or a hillside? Luckily for him, he didn’t have to work it out. He had a third option, unavailable to the average raven. He took it, and burst through the time skin into the bright calm of Tír na n’Óg’s eternal sunshine.

JJ was sitting on a beer barrel. He had his fiddle out but there were no tunes, because Devaney had not come back with the goat. Jenny perched on the edge of the table between JJ and her ploddy mother, Aisling. Her fairy mother, Drowsy Maggie, was sitting at the other side of the table, dozing over her fiddle.

‘Some people have arrived,’ Jenny said.

‘What kind of people?’ said JJ.

Jenny thought for a moment, then said, ‘Wet people. And a soldier boy.’

JJ scratched his head. ‘A soldier boy?’

Jenny watched him thinking, amazed by his white hair and the way he and Aisling had got smaller since she used to live with them. Well, not smaller exactly, but slighter. For the first eleven years of her life she had believed that JJ was her father and Aisling was her mother. And even when she discovered the truth – that she was a fairy changeling sent to the ploddy world to grow up – she had decided to stay on with the Liddys until she was old enough to come and live in Tír na n’Óg. That time had
come when she was nearly seventeen, and the parting with the Liddys had been a sorrowful one. But they had all known, even then, that they would probably meet again.

No time passed in Tír na n’Óg, so Jenny was still sixteen, going on seventeen, and that’s the way she would stay, unless and until she decided to return to the other side of the time skin for a spell. But over there JJ and Aisling had continued to grow older, and the demands of family and other worldly preoccupations had kept them busy until they were both nearly seventy. By then the effects of climate change were already well under way and there was nothing anyone could do to stop it happening. The best thing for all concerned was for them to get out and leave the farm and the house to the next generation.

It wasn’t a sudden decision. Jenny had known that JJ and Aisling planned to retire to Tír na n’Óg. But even so, nothing had prepared her for the shock of seeing how much they had both aged, and she was still having trouble getting used to it.

‘So what are they doing here, these wet people?’ said Aisling.

‘Well, that’s the thing,’ said Jenny. ‘They’re looking for stuff.’

‘Stuff? What kind of stuff?’

‘Provisions,’ said Jenny. ‘They’re running out of things to eat on the other side. And firewood, and clothes. Everything, apparently. So they’ve been sent over to get all that kind of stuff and take it back with them.’

‘The nerve of them,’ said JJ.

‘Well,’ said Jenny, ‘it’s not quite as simple as that.’

‘How come?’ said JJ.

‘It wasn’t their idea, you see. They were sent, under strict orders. That’s why the soldier boy is with them, to make sure they do what they’re told.’

‘So who sent them?’ said Aisling, and there was something in the tone of her voice that told Jenny she wasn’t too keen on hearing the answer.

‘General Liddy did,’ she said.

‘General Liddy?’ said JJ. ‘Oh, no. It has to be Aidan, doesn’t it? Calling himself a general now, is he?’

‘Afraid not, Dad,’ said Jenny. ‘That’s what I thought, too. But the soldier boy is quite certain about it. General Liddy’s first name isn’t Aidan. It’s Donal.’

Never in his wildest dreams had Donal Liddy imagined he would become a military officer. But then, never in his wildest dreams had he imagined the world he now found himself living in. Much as he disliked his brother Aidan, he had to give him credit for his foresight. Because Aidan had imagined this world, and he had set himself up to be its most powerful man. He had started early, when most people were still in denial about what was happening, and he had done it in the most ingenious of ways. He had spotted opportunities where no one else had, and he had invested and gambled his way into a small fortune by the time he was twenty-five. And then he had set out to spend it.

One of the first things he had done was to buy dozens of road-transport containers when the scarcity of oil made them too expensive to cart around the roads any longer. His castle, up on the hillside above the farm, was made from them. They were stacked four high in an unbroken circular wall, practically impenetrable to anyone who wasn’t invited inside. The army barracks, just a couple of
hundred metres from the castle, was built from them as well. Some of the containers had been converted into living quarters and others into storage rooms. They were inelegant heaps of rust by now but they continued to serve their purpose.

In a partitioned corner of one of them, Donal Liddy was huddled over a tiny pot-bellied stove. His second-in-command was huddled there, too, wheezing and coughing and, from time to time, spitting dark phlegm into the firebox. Donal was worried about the colonel’s health, which had recently begun to deteriorate rapidly. There were no medicines for the kind of illness he had, and if he followed the usual pattern, he would not last much more than a few months.

Donal wasn’t sure that he could do without Curly Crowley. He had been the first officer Donal appointed when Aidan put him in charge of the army twenty-five years ago. Crowley had been a young man then, in his early twenties, but his abilities had already been evident. Within a very short time Donal had come to depend upon him to keep discipline, especially when, as sometimes happened, he himself ran out of conviction and his authority failed.

But it wasn’t just that. Despite the horrors and hardships he had seen, Curly Crowley had retained his humanity. There were many others in the army who, unfortunately, had not, and if a time ever came when those men took command, the miserable survivors in Aidan’s
region were in for an even harder time than they were having now. So Donal worried about Crowley, and gave him as little to do as he could get away with. It made no difference, though. It was the conditions that were killing him, not the work.

The storm rising around them sucked hard at the chimney and hammered the steel walls.

‘You can hardly blame them for not wanting to volunteer,’ said Crowley. ‘If anyone had come back, it would be different. But they have no idea what will happen to them when they go down into that hole. Nor do I, when it comes to it.’

Donal shook water from his woollen hat and drew his chair closer to the stove. Above their heads, rain thundered on the steel roof. From the adjoining containers they could hear soldiers grumbling as they got themselves ready to go out, and arguing about whose turn it was to wear the waterproofs. Aidan had stockpiles of new ones somewhere in his warehouse containers and had promised to release supplies to the army, but he was becoming increasingly miserly as time went on, and there was still no sign of them.

‘We’re soldiers, Crowley,’ said Donal. ‘It’s not our place to question orders that come down from above.’

‘I know that,’ said Crowley, ‘but—’

‘But there are no buts. We’re soldiers and there are no buts.’

He reached for some sticks to add to the fire, then
hesitated. It hurt him to burn them. There was almost nothing left now of the hazel scrub that had once occupied all the forgotten corners of the Burren. Since the End of Imports there had been no oil or coal or gas, and firewood had become the main source of fuel. There was still turf, further inland, but those areas were under the control of other warlords. In the past, Donal and his army had made several successful raids and transported good loads of it back to the castle. But those days were gone. The gruelling effects of bad weather and poor nutrition had taken their toll, and the army was no longer capable of any missions as ambitious as that.

And nor, he had to admit, was he. He was sixty-seven last time he remembered to check what year it was. In his father’s time sixty-seven was still young, and a man might expect to live for another ten or even twenty years. But in these hard days sixty-seven was old. Few people reached such an age. And with every year that passed Donal felt the cold and damp drilling further into his bones and sapping his remaining strength. He looked at the hazel sticks in his hand and was amazed at how strongly their colour and texture reminded him of his younger days and his visits to the peaceful, magical hazel woods. Reluctantly he surrendered them to the fire.

‘No buts, then,’ Curly was saying. ‘I think your brother has lost his marbles.’

Donal looked up, deeply shocked. For any soldier to speak of his commander-in-chief like that was
mutinous. But for anyone at all to speak of Aidan Liddy like that indicated a powerful death wish. Donal cleared his throat.

‘Did I hear you correctly, Colonel?’

‘Oh, come on, Donal,’ said Crowley. ‘Let’s stop playing these ridiculous games for once. We go back much too far for that.’

It was true. No one knew better than Crowley how Donal ran things and why he operated in the way he did. He knew him through and through. If he hadn’t, he would never have dared to speak to him the way he did.

‘Look what he’s doing,’ he went on. ‘Sending people down into a hole in the ground and telling them to come back loaded with loot. I could understand it if he was just trying to get rid of a few superfluous old folk, but why does he want to send our men with them?’

Donal had to admit that, from his perspective, Crowley had a point. He wanted to tell him that the whole scheme had been his idea, and not his brother’s. And he wanted to tell him how much he longed to go down into that hole himself and never come back. But the time wasn’t right, not yet. There were still things to be done. And in any case, he was sure Crowley wouldn’t believe him.