The White Horse Trick (8 page)

Aengus thought quickly. He was leaning back against the road, and as he straightened up he surreptitiously scooped a few pieces of gravel into his right hand and stuck them into his trouser pocket. When he pulled his hand out again, the gravel had changed into shining coins, silver and gold. The woman’s sullen expression vanished and her eyes were suddenly bright and eager.

‘What’ll you give me for them?’ she asked.

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Aengus said. ‘The lot, if you like. But you have to guess my name first, don’t forget.’

The light went out of her eyes as quickly as it had come. ‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘How many tries do I get?’

‘As many as you like. And I’ll give you a clue to start off with. It’s not Rumpelstiltskin. It’s something nice and
strong that can’t be shortened to anything stupid like Mick or Paddy or Jim.’

The woman looked him full in the face, appraising him carefully and, so Aengus thought, liking what she saw. He noticed that her pistol hand had relaxed on her knee and the gun was no longer pointing at him.

‘John,’ she said.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Too common.’

‘Hmm,’ she said, finally relaxing and warming to the game. ‘A fine, handsome fella like yourself must have a fine, handsome name.’

‘Exactly,’ said Aengus. ‘Now you have the right idea.’

‘Lionel!’ she said.

‘Lionel? Where did you get Lionel from?’

‘OK. Not Lionel. I know. Cormac.’

‘Not bad,’ said Aengus. ‘Not bad at all.’ He thought about that for a moment, but eventually he shook his head. ‘No. It’s not Cormac.’

‘Finn, then,’ said the woman. ‘It has to be Finn.’

Finn was perfect. A good, strong Irish name. No way of shortening it.

‘Spot on,’ said Aengus. ‘You’re clever as well as beautiful. And might I ask what your own name is?’

‘Maureen,’ she said. ‘Maureen Ryan.’ She reached out her hand and Aengus went to shake it, but she pulled it away again. ‘The money,’ she said. ‘The money for the apples.’

‘Oh, yes.’ He reached into his pocket and produced
the coins again, still shining, still silver and gold. He tipped them into her outstretched hand and she examined them closely before breaking into a broad smile and handing him the basket of apples. If gods could feel guilty, Aengus might have then. With the passage of time – maybe hours and maybe days – those coins would revert to what they were made from. A few bits of grit from a Gort road. But then, it turned out that the young woman was not above a bit of trickery herself. When Aengus inspected his purchase he saw that the apples on the top were beautifully round and fresh, but the ones underneath were misshapen and scabby.

Seeing him looking at them, Maureen Ryan stood up and said perkily, ‘Perhaps you’d walk a bit of the road with me, since I don’t have to go into town after all.’

Aengus looked up from the apples, from which a distinct smell of decay was beginning to rise. He had to remind himself that he didn’t want them in the first place and that he had got himself an excellent name from the transaction. It would have taken him hours to come up with such a good one himself. And now she was offering him an opportunity for a bit more f lirting.

‘Why not?’ he said.

Jenny and Pup walked on towards the hills.

‘Is that thing loaded?’ Jenny asked, nodding towards the rifle.

‘Sometimes,’ said Pup.

‘Now?’ she said.

He didn’t answer. She decided it was time to broach the matter.

‘You were lucky back there,’ she said.

‘Back where?’

‘Back in the town. When my father saw you with that gun.’

‘Why?’ he said, and he had a smug expression on his face. ‘What could he have done to me?’

‘We have powers you know nothing about,’ said Jenny. ‘That thing would be useless to you if my father had stayed around much longer. You’re lucky he needed a smoke.’

‘Huh,’ said Pup, and Jenny was very tempted to give him a demonstration of her abilities, but just then they turned a corner in the road and he spotted the white horse that lived there, forever grazing in a field beside the road.
It raised its head and watched them, a wistful look in its eye.

Pup stopped dead. ‘What is that thing?’ he said.

‘It’s a horse,’ she said. ‘Surely you’ve seen a horse before?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘I’ve heard about them all right, but I’ve never seen one before.’

‘Don’t people use them over on your side? Now there are no cars any more?’

‘They used to,’ said Pup. ‘But then they ran out of cows and pigs and sheep to eat, and they ate the horses.’

‘That’s crazy,’ said Jenny. ‘How could they eat their own horses?’

‘They got stolen, mostly,’ said Pup. ‘But you should try being hungry some time. You’d eat anything if you were left with no choice.’

‘Well, no one’s eating this one,’ said Jenny. She went over to the wall and the horse came up to talk to her. Pup was nervous, hanging back, but eventually he found the courage to come up beside her.

‘Not just any old horse, this one,’ she said.

‘What’s special about it?’ said Pup.

‘Remember the story of Oisín?’

‘No. Who’s Oisín?’

So Jenny told him the story, because it was one that every ploddy who came to Tír na n’Óg needed to know.

‘Oisín married a fairy woman and went to live with her. After a while he decided he wanted to go back home
and see his friends and neighbours again. His wife’s people told him he could only go if he rode the white horse they gave him, and stayed on its back the whole time. So he set off, and when he arrived home he found that three hundred years had passed and he didn’t know anyone there any longer. But he was OK as long as he stayed on the white horse.’

‘Was it this white horse?’ said Pup.

‘Spot on,’ said Jenny. ‘The very same one.’

‘So it worked, then. They got back OK?’

‘Afraid not,’ said Jenny. ‘The horse did, but Oisín had a bit of an accident on the way. He passed some men who were trying to move a big rock in a field and they asked him for his help. So he leaned off the horse to help them move it and he lost his balance and fell.’

Pup studied the height of the horse. ‘That must have been sore.’

‘A bit worse than that,’ said Jenny. ‘He turned to dust. His life had all passed away in his own land while he was in Tír na n’Óg, you see. That’s why it might not be possible for you to go back, Pup. There’s no way of knowing on this side how much time is passing over there. It might be only hours since you left there or it might be a hundred years.’

‘Huh,’ said Pup, in the same dismissive tone he had used when Jenny mentioned the fairy powers.

‘You’ll see,’ she said, setting out on the road again.

Around the next bend they saw another group of
thin, ragged people making their way towards them. This time there were two soldiers with them. Before Jenny had time to speak, Pup dived into the hedgerow and disappeared. Jenny waited where she was, but these new people were wandering towards her so slowly she decided to go ahead and meet them. Pup would have to look after himself.

All of them, even the soldiers, looked lost and bewildered.

‘Welcome to Tír na n’Óg,’ said Jenny. ‘Make yourselves at home.’

‘Where did you say we were?’ said one of the soldiers.

‘Tír na n’Óg,’ said Jenny. ‘The land of eternal youth.’

There were about eight of the wet, muddy people, and all of them gazed at her blankly. The soldiers did, too, and Jenny noticed that both of them looked nearly as thin and worn out as the people they were guarding. Her scrutiny clearly made them uncomfortable, because one of them made a visible effort to pull himself together, and said, ‘Where will we find supplies?’

‘Oh,’ said Jenny. ‘You’re looking for stuff, too, are you?’

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Have the others been along?’

‘They have,’ she said. ‘And they’re all getting on fine. The best thing you can do is carry on down this road until you come to the village. Then look for JJ. He’ll tell you what to do.’

‘JJ who?’ said the soldier.

He had nasty sores around his mouth and Jenny tried
hard not to look at them. ‘Just JJ,’ she said. ‘There’s only one JJ.’

‘And he’ll tell us where the stuff is?’

‘If there’s stuff to be had, then JJ is the man to tell you where to find it,’ said Jenny.

A flicker of something keen and greedy crossed the soldier’s face, then melted away again, replaced by the familiar dazed expression. But it worried Jenny, and she began to wonder if she was taking all this soldier business less seriously than she ought to. She stood aside and let the weary group shuffle past her, and then, when the soldiers drew level, she turned them, one after the other, into sheepdogs.

She was disappointed by the reaction she got, or didn’t get, to her magic. The people in the raiding party were all so dazed that they didn’t turn round, even when the guns clattered noisily to the ground. And when Pup caught up with her, it was clear that he had been keeping himself hidden behind the hedge and had seen nothing. Jenny didn’t bother to tell him. It would just sound like showing off, and he probably wouldn’t believe her anyway.

Aengus and Maureen began walking along the road together, and Maureen chatted happily, clinking her coins together in her pocket like a primitive percussion instrument. But before they had covered a mile of the road her mood began to change.

‘This will be a great help,’ she said, jingling the coins one last time, ‘but I can’t see anything saving us in the long run. Not unless the weather gets better, and there’s no sign of that happening, is there?’

‘It’s not too bad just now,’ Aengus said. The sun was still out, the sticky, steamy mist had burned away and he was at last drying out quite rapidly.

‘I don’t mean today,’ she said. ‘I mean the rain and the storms and the droughts and the way you can hardly grow food any more. Do you know that we have some of the last apple trees in the whole area? Everybody else’s have died or been cut down for firewood. But they won’t be enough to keep us alive with things the way they are. Some people say we’ll only last a few more years, if that.’

The change in her tone irritated Aengus. He liked
happy women, not miserable ones, and he had no intention of staying around and listening to a torrent of woes.

‘You’ve only yourselves to blame,’ he said.

‘What?’ she said. ‘What do you mean by that?’

‘Well, it’s not as if you didn’t see it coming, is it? You could have stopped it happening if you had put your heads together and come up with a plan. But you weren’t prepared to give anything up, were you? Your cars and your central heating and your aeroplane trips around the world!’

‘Aeroplane trips?’ The young woman was practically shrieking now. ‘What are you on about? I’ve never seen an aeroplane in my life. It wasn’t me. My generation never had anything – how can you not know that? It was our grandparents that ruined everything, not us.’

The apple basket was growing heavy and Aengus was half inclined to give it back to her and make a run for it. He couldn’t take much more of this ploddy hysteria, but there was no sign of the woman calming down.

‘Don’t you feel the same? Don’t you hate your grandparents for what they did to us? Using up everything in the world and ruining the climate and leaving us in this mess? How can you say we had it coming? We never did anything to deserve it!’

He hadn’t meant her in person. He meant ploddies in general – her entire restless, ambitious, acquisitive race. But if he tried to explain all that, he would have to reveal who
he was and why he and his people were different, and it was all far, far too complicated.

In any event, he was beginning to devise a better plan. His head was a lot clearer now and the coins he’d created had worked out fine. But he still wasn’t ready to risk becoming a raven again. What he needed was a bit more practice first.

‘How much further is it to your house?’ he asked.

‘Oh, not that far,’ she said. ‘A couple of miles perhaps.’

‘Thing is,’ he said, ‘it’s a bit further to where I’m going and I’m finding it quite tiring carrying all these apples.’

‘I’m not giving you your money back,’ she said. ‘You bought them fair and square.’

‘Oh, I did,’ said Aengus. ‘That wasn’t what I had in mind at all. It just occurred to me that you might come with me to Liddy’s castle.’

‘Liddy’s castle?’ said Maureen. Her face paled, as though he had just asked her to accompany him to the gates of hell. ‘What would I want to go there for?’

‘Just for the ride,’ he said. ‘Because we’d both get there much quicker if you were a horse.’

As Donal returned to the barracks he was met by another of Aidan’s guards. The man looked cold and bad-tempered, as though he had been waiting to deliver his message for quite some time.

‘Boss wants you,’ he said.

‘I’ll be in when I’ve dried off and had a cup of tea,’ said Donal.

He predicted the response he would get to this and he wasn’t wrong.

‘Now, General. The boss wants you now.’

Donal sighed and followed the goon to the castle. He was tired and wet and depressed and he had no desire to know what new schemes his brother had come up with to make everyone’s life more miserable. But there was no sense in trying to thwart him. It would only mean more trouble in the future.

Aidan Liddy’s living quarters were like a museum displaying the final days of consumerism. His large sitting room had three leather sofas, their patches discreetly hidden beneath fat cushions. The floor was carpeted and
the insulated walls were hung with beer adverts and posters of football teams. A polished sideboard held glass candlesticks and a bowl of shiny plastic fruit. In one corner was a television that still worked. It was more than fifteen years since there had been any broadcasts for it to receive, but there was a DVD player and discs stacked in twin piles that almost reached the ceiling. All the electrics, including the lights, ran from a small generator outside, powered by stockpiled diesel. It was in no danger of running out of fuel just yet, even though other things – more important things – were.

‘Hello, Donal,’ Aidan said. ‘Make yourself at home.’