The White Horse Trick (6 page)

‘All right,’ she said to him. ‘I’ll go if you will. But you might not be able to. We’ll have to see when we get back to where you came in. I’ll explain it all on the way.’

‘Thanks, Jenny,’ said JJ. ‘I knew you wouldn’t let me down.’

Aengus looked up from the muzzle of the gun and into the eyes of the man who was holding it. He was young and he looked more frightened than dangerous, but even so Aengus was taking no chances.

‘I don’t like guns,’ he said, and he turned the man into a . . . into a . . .

‘Oops . . .’ said Aengus Óg. He wasn’t at all sure what it was that he had turned the man into. In the heat of the moment, and with the blow to the head and the hard landing, he must have got muddled. What was it he had been thinking of?

He looked up. There were half a dozen people standing there; one woman and the rest of them men. The woman had a few pathetic bundles of sticks laid out on the ground in front of her. Two of the men were behind makeshift market stalls. One of the others had a gun, but the minute he saw Aengus looking at it he put it down, very carefully, on the ground.

‘That’s the idea,’ said Aengus.

Beside him, the terrible beast was snuffling around in
the road. It was rare for Aengus Óg and his kinsfolk to get their creatures mixed up, but it wasn’t unknown. When it happened, the fairies were inclined to forget it immediately, but the ploddies never did, and they hung on with absurd tenacity to their stories of mermaids and griffins and centaurs and minotaurs.

‘What did you do to him?’ the woman asked.

Aengus wasn’t entirely sure. The beast he had created was fantastically ugly, but he made himself examine it. There was a bit of sheep, certainly, and a bit of pig, but there were some other things he could see, too. A chicken’s beak. A goat’s horns. And very definitely something doglike in its manner.

‘I turned him into a . . . a shpigengog,’ said Aengus.

‘What’s a shpigengog?’ said the woman.

‘That is,’ said Aengus. ‘And I’ll do the same to the rest of you if anyone tries any funny business.’

Each and every one of them nodded solemnly. The man with the gun stepped further away from it, as though it were a nasty smell in the road and nothing to do with him.

‘All I want is some tobacco,’ Aengus went on. ‘Then I’ll leave you to carry on with whatever it is you’re doing.’ He looked at the two stalls, but nothing he saw made him hopeful. One of them had a pile of small turnips and a few blighted potatoes. The other had a gruesome collection of unidentifiable bits of animals, and a very old enamelled sign saying
MEAT TO PLEASE YOU
!

‘Tobacco?’ said the turnip man.

‘Tobacco?’ said the butcher.

‘Where have you been hiding this past twenty years?’ said the woman. Then she added hastily, ‘With respect, sir. With respect.’

‘We haven’t seen tobacco since the old world went down the plughole,’ said the butcher.

‘More’s the pity,’ said the turnip man.

It was just as Aengus had feared. The ploddy world appeared to have been knocked back into the Middle Ages. He looked gloomily from face to face, then down at the shpigengog, which was licking his shoe.

‘Get off,’ he said, but the ugly creature just wagged its bald tail and raised a friendly paw. Or was it a claw? Too much dog in it, anyway. He pushed it away with his knee, then bent and picked up the shotgun. The movement made his head spin. He didn’t feel very well at all, and wondered whether the bang on the head and the fall might actually have done him some damage.

‘Surely there must be some tobacco somewhere in this godforsaken world?’ he said.

‘I doubt it,’ said the turnip man. ‘They stopped growing it years ago. Droughts and floods in the places it did best. And even if there still were places where it could grow, who’s going to waste good land growing tobacco when they could be growing food?’

‘And how would they get it here anyway?’ the butcher chimed in. ‘There’s no shipping or aeroplanes
or nothing any more. Not since the End of Imports.’

‘All right, all right,’ said Aengus impatiently. ‘But surely there must be some left over. Someone must have kept some.’

His words were met with silence, and he got the impression that something was being hidden from him. He raised the shotgun experimentally, but it didn’t create the reaction he expected.

‘That thing isn’t loaded, by the way,’ said the butcher.

‘What’s the point in having it then?’ said Aengus.

‘Well, you didn’t know, did you? There are a lot of very hungry and dangerous people around these days, which is why we need protection. And luckily most of them don’t know, either.’

Aengus threw the gun away from him in disgust. It clattered on to the cracked and crumbling pavement and the shpigengog lumbered happily off in pursuit.

‘You’re hiding something from me,’ he said. ‘Someone, somewhere, has some tobacco, don’t they?’

There was another long silence, during which the beast dropped the shotgun, now covered in drool, at Aengus’s feet. Way, way too much dog. He did his best to ignore it.

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Out with it. Or do the rest of you want to have a go at being one of these things?’

He trusted that no one would say yes. He was pretty sure he couldn’t do it again even if he tried. But everyone looked at the shpigengog and there was a general anxious
clearing of throats before they all began speaking at once.

‘There’s only himself.’

‘But you would have thought of that.’

‘I doubt he’d still have any after all this time.’

‘Who?’ said Aengus.

‘He might – you never know.’

‘He’d never part with it, though.’

‘He might, if you had something good to barter against it.’

‘What?’ said Aengus.

‘I wouldn’t go up there, no matter what I was after.’

‘Nor me. I wouldn’t go within a mile of the place.’

‘Stop!’ said Aengus. ‘What are you all talking about?’

‘Himself,’ said the butcher. ‘The container man.’

‘Container man?’ said Aengus. ‘What container man?’

The shpigengog picked up the shotgun in its beak and dropped it on Aengus’s foot. It did nothing to improve his mood.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘Let’s start again, shall we? Let’s all pretend I’ve been away in fairyland for fifty years and I haven’t a clue what’s going on here. You tell me there is someone who might, just might, have some tobacco. Now, who is he and where is he to be found?’

The shpigengog picked up the gun again and this time swung it around, clouting Aengus hard on the shin. Before he could react the woman blurted out, ‘Commander Liddy. It’s Commander Liddy that might have some.’

‘Liddy?’ said Aengus. ‘And which Liddy would that be?’

‘Aidan,’ said the woman. ‘Commander Aidan Liddy. He’s the only person left in the county that has any kind of stuff left from the old days, but it won’t be easy to get anything off him.’

‘Aidan?’ said Aengus. ‘JJ’s son Aidan?’ He laughed. ‘Sure he’s only a little fella.’

He put out a hand at the level of his thigh to demonstrate the height Aidan had been when he had last seen him. The shpigengog licked it.

Aengus was, he knew, approaching a state of apoplectic rage. The only cure for it was tobacco. What he needed to do was to find out how to get some before he visited some painful and permanent revenge upon these idiot ploddies. So he took several long, deep breaths, then he turned the shpigengog back into a man. There was a cheer from the rest of the gathering, but Aengus was slightly concerned. Something wasn’t quite right.

‘What happened?’ said the man.

‘I visited a rare privilege upon you,’ said Aengus. ‘No one in the history of the world has ever seen the inner workings of a shpigengog’s mind.’ He inspected him closely as he spoke. Had his ears always been that shape? he wondered. And had they always been there, so close to the top of his head?

‘A what?’ said the man.

His fingers looked very peculiar as well. Aengus decided to keep talking.

‘And no one ever will again, if I can help it. But listen to me now. This Aidan Liddy. I know what you’re going to tell me. He’s all grown up while my back was turned, isn’t that it?’

He was met with six blank stares.

‘Never mind,’ he said. ‘Just tell me where the little creep lives.’

Over the years, Donal’s feet had worn a track between the barracks and the beacon at the top of Sliabh Carran. It was a long time since he had kept any cattle up there – the last of those skinny beasts had been eaten long ago – but he still came up nearly every day to talk to Mikey.

By the time he was halfway up the stony steps his clothes were waterlogged, so he was carrying nearly a stone of extra weight. It happened to him most days and he was well used to it, but that didn’t mean it ever got any easier.

His health was not good. He suffered terribly from rheumatism and arthritis, and the constant damp conditions meant he never got any relief from the pain. Occasionally he managed to wheedle some aspirins out of his brother, but these days Aidan was less and less inclined to be generous, even though he had plenty left in storage. So Donal just had to put up with it, and waged a constant battle against pain and exhaustion. It was wearing him out. He would have to go soon – follow his parents into retirement in Tír na n’Óg, but the trouble was, his work on this
side was nowhere near completed yet. It was one aspect of that work, a private dream he had, that kept him bound in with his brother and made him an unwilling accomplice in his despotic schemes. Because not all of those old lorry bodies were filled with Aidan’s stockpiles. One of them, in the special ‘dry’ wall of the castle, belonged to him. And although he had made a start in sorting it out, he still had a very long way to go.

The turnip man told Aengus that Commander Liddy lived in the steel castle underneath the stony steps on Sliabh Carran. Aengus remembered the enormous circular thing he had flown over. So that was what it was. The headquarters of a tyrant.

He fingered the empty pipe in his pocket. ‘And you’re sure he’ll have some tobacco?’

‘No,’ said the turnip man. ‘But if anyone does, he does. He has practically everything up there, stashed away in his storehouses.’

‘So people say, anyway,’ said the butcher sourly.

The shpigengog man was examining his fingers, and an expression of alarm was rapidly spreading across his face. It was definitely time for Aengus to make himself scarce, but as he turned to leave, the woman called out after him.

‘Excuse me. Do you mind if I ask your name?’

Aengus stopped. Why hadn’t he thought of that before? He did not, on his visits to this world, go by his own name. Like most gods he was vain and lived under the
impression that everyone would recognize him the instant they heard his name. He preferred to travel incognito and keep his powers a secret. So each time he came he invented a new name for himself. But this time he hadn’t. He’d only planned to nip over for some tobacco, after all. He’d had no idea his shopping trip was going to turn into such an ordeal.

He searched his mind for a suitable name, but he couldn’t even remember what he had called himself last time, when he had been a policeman. It was useless. The shpigengog man was showing the butcher his misshapen hands. Aengus turned back to the woman, met her gaze forcefully and said, ‘Yes. As a matter of fact I do.’

He walked rapidly away through the rain, down the wet high street. He was soaked to the skin, still in the shirtsleeves that were all he ever needed in Tír na n’Óg. Everything about this place made him nervous. The expanse of foaming water where the bridge used to be. The dark windows of the dilapidated houses, behind which shadows occasionally moved. He itched to duck into a doorway and turn back into a raven again, but he was afraid of what might happen if he did. His head was still spinning from the red man’s well-aimed boot, and the episode with the shpigengog had given him a bad fright. What if he got it wrong and turned himself into something as dreadful as that? And what if he turned himself back and came out all wrong, the way the man had?

Nor could he get home. If he crossed the time skin here, he would land in the bedlam of the leprechauns’ insane market. So he was left with no alternative but to walk out of Gort just the way he was. When he got clear of the town boundaries, he could decide what to do next.

The swollen river was a frothing torrent surging across the road, but the citizens of Gort had constructed a pontoon of blue plastic barrels, tethered to the buildings on either side. It juddered continuously as Aengus went across, and the water slopped up over his feet, but when he reached the other side he had to give a moment’s grudging respect to ploddy ingenuity.

At the town square he turned left. The sun came out abruptly, sending up a blinding glare from the wet road and creating spectacular rainbows over the rooftops. It was suddenly incredibly hot, and within minutes the rainbows were lost in a fug of steam which rose from everything that was wet, including himself. His skin crawled as he walked on between ruined buildings that loomed like ghosts of themselves through the white mist.

He hated this town. Always had, always would.

The driving rain was so dense that Donal was quite close to the beacon before he was able to see it, and as soon as he got his first glimpse of the top of it, he could tell that there was something terribly wrong. There was a white shape that had never been there before. It was a thing that shouldn’t be up there, that couldn’t be up there, but that was, beyond a shadow of a doubt, up there now. It was the púca.

Donal stopped in his tracks. In a habit born of long practice, he turned his head to one side to observe the huge pile of stones out of the corner of his eye. Mikey was there, his ghostly outline clear and strong against the sodden sky. But it was impossible. He and the púca were immortal enemies. How could they be sitting together like that as if they were the best of friends? Donal was still trying to decide whether it was safe to go on or not when his presence was noticed. The púca came bounding down the steep side of the beacon and danced over to him, tossing his horns like a kid in spring sunshine.