The White Horse Trick (9 page)

One of Aidan’s guards moved hastily to slip a folded blanket on to the seat that Donal chose. It wouldn’t do for his wet and dirty trousers to defile one of his brother’s cushions.

‘What’s this about, Aidan?’ said Donal.

‘Where have you been?’ said Aidan. ‘I sent for you an hour ago.’

‘I’ve been up the hill, that’s all,’ said Donal.

‘Still going up the hill every day?’ said Aidan. ‘That’s loyalty for you.’

Donal said nothing. An enamelled stove was kept lit in there day and night, and the place was so warm and dry that his clothes were already beginning to steam.

‘Have a drink?’ Aidan continued. It was a gesture of apparent generosity. Donal knew how fond his brother was of the poitín that his men made for him in the distillery
behind the castle. He also knew how short his supplies of it were, and the response Aidan required to his offer.

‘Bit early in the day for me,’ he said.

‘Pity,’ said Aidan. ‘But you won’t mind if I do, will you?’

‘Go ahead,’ said Donal.

Aidan did, pouring a generous slosh of the clear liquor into a crystal sherry glass. ‘So,’ he said, ‘I just wanted an update on our supply situation. Anything come through from the other side yet?’

‘Not yet,’ said Donal. ‘We’re organizing another party to go through today. This time we’ll send four men over with them.’

Aidan shook his head, and Donal saw his expression harden. It was a sign of approaching danger, and all too familiar to Donal. He had been exposed to these tantrums since Aidan was a toddler.

‘But it isn’t working, is it?’ he said.

‘Give it time,’ said Donal, hoping he sounded calmer than he felt.

‘How much time?’ said Aidan. ‘The first lot were sent through a month ago. What’s happened to them?’

‘You know how it is,’ said Donal. ‘I don’t have to explain to you about the way time works over there—’

Aidan’s temper erupted. ‘No. You don’t have to explain it to me. I’ve been stuffed with the family stories of Tír na n’Óg since I was a toddler. And I’ve been brushing up on it as well.’ He gestured towards a stack of books
on the coffee table, and Donal saw that they were collections of Irish fairy stories. ‘Doing a bit of research. And I’m still not sure I believe a single word of it.’

‘You know it’s true,’ said Donal. ‘You know as well as I do.’

‘Well, where are the results, then? Where’s the proof ? Where are my raiding parties?’

‘You just need to be patient,’ said Donal. ‘It could be a good while before—’

‘A good while?’ said Aidan. ‘What is that supposed to mean, a good while? I don’t know why I ever let you talk me into this ridiculous scheme. As far as I can tell, it might be ten years before those idiots come back with any loot. Or it might be fifty! We’ll all be dead before we see anything coming out of that grimy hole!’

‘Calm down, Aidan,’ said Donal. The goons, sitting on guard in each of the four corners of the room, stirred in readiness for trouble. No one else in the world would be allowed to address the commander-in-chief in such a way. ‘You know that people don’t always think straight when they get into Tír na n’Óg. They might have forgotten what they went over for. But I told the last three lads to round up the other parties and bring them back, and I’ll tell the next lot—’

Aidan shook his head. He emptied his glass and refilled it. ‘The next lot is going to be different,’ he said.

‘Different in what way?’ said Donal.

‘It will be bigger, for one thing. The biggest yet.’

Donal was thrilled to hear that, but he didn’t allow it to show. He nodded approvingly and waited.

‘Have you got much more of that junk left?’

Again Donal’s heart leaped. ‘Plenty of it,’ he said.

‘Pick out the best you have,’ said Aidan. ‘They can exchange it for supplies the same as the others. But they’re going to have another mission as well. One that will work far better.’ He smiled smugly. ‘Your idea was all right, but it was limited. I was way ahead of you, you know. I’ve been planning this for some time. It takes a great mind to come up with a truly brilliant idea.’

Donal held his breath. His brother’s ‘brilliant ideas’ had already caused death and misery to hundreds of innocent people.

‘And I’ll send plenty of your men along with them, too,’ Aidan continued. ‘As many as you can give me. I want at least forty civilians, more if we can spare them from the terraces, so we’ll need at least six soldiers, maybe ten.’

It was too good to be true. Fifty people sent into Tír na n’Óg meant fifty souls rescued from the living hell that life had become on this side. And even better than that, it meant another fifty loads of Donal’s hoarded treasures sent across with them, to where they would be safe for ever. But Donal knew better than to show too much enthusiasm. So he took some time to think and gave the appearance of carefully weighing up the possibilities. Finally he said, ‘I can’t see any objections to that plan.’

‘Ah,’ said Aidan, ‘but you haven’t asked me what
I’m sending them in for this time, have you?’

Donal’s heart sank. He knew there had to be a catch.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I haven’t.’

His brother could hardly contain his excitement, and Donal saw that smug smile again, and was deeply suspicious of it.

‘Guess,’ Aidan said.

Donal swallowed his irritation and reminded himself, as he did every day, how important it was to stay on the right side of Aidan.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Firewood again?’

‘Nope,’ said Aidan. ‘Not firewood.’

Donal looked around for clues. There was that pile of books and papers on the coffee table. What had he been researching there? The poitín bottle standing among them looked almost empty.

‘Booze?’ he said.

‘Not booze,’ said Aidan.

‘Cattle then?’ said Donal. ‘Sheep? Devaney’s poor old goat?’

Aidan shook his head and pulled a piece of folded paper from his pocket. He waved it in the air between them. ‘Aengus Óg,’ he announced.

Donal couldn’t believe his ears. ‘Did you say Aengus Óg?’

‘I did,’ said Aidan grandly. ‘I’m sending as many people as we can spare to track down Aengus and send him over to me.’

Donal had the sense to hold his tongue. He was quite certain now that Curly Crowley was right and his brother had completely lost his marbles. He needed to stay calm. He needed time to think the thing through properly. The safety of fifty people was at stake, and fifty more loads from his precious collection.

‘It’s an amazing idea,’ he managed to say. ‘But I thought you just said you didn’t believe in the stories.’

‘I said I wasn’t sure,’ said Aidan. ‘But I’m a gambler. Everything you see around you got here as a result of my gambling.’

Donal had heard his brother gloating about his gambling successes a thousand times, but he swallowed his irritation and said nothing.

‘It’s a gut instinct, see,’ Aidan went on, ‘and my gut instincts are hardly ever wrong.’

He handed Donal the piece of paper. Donal opened it. The writing was awkward and childish, but carefully done.

Aengus Óg. I have some important matters to discuss with you. Please come and meet me at my residence, at a time which suits you.

Aidan Liddy,

The Castle,

The Stony Steps,

The Burren,

Ireland

Donal tried to smile, but discovered his jaws had locked. ‘Erm,’ he said.

‘Brilliant, isn’t it?’ said Aidan. ‘What’s the point in sending people over there to import all that stuff when we can just send for Aengus and get it made here?’

Donal gaped at him. ‘Get it made?’

Aidan tapped the side of his nose with a forefinger. The smugness had gone and he was now grinning like an idiot. He gestured again towards the pile of books on the coffee table. ‘Halls of gold and all that jazz,’ he said. ‘Banquets fit for kings. But where does it all come from, eh?’

Donal had a feeling he wasn’t expected to reply, and he was right.

‘They make it!’ Aidan said triumphantly. ‘Everyone knows that. Did you ever hear of fairies ploughing the land and slaving over grinders or chopping carrots or sweating over cooking fires? No! If they want a feast fit for a king, then,
bing!
they magic one out of thin air, see? And if they can do that, what can’t they do?
Bing!
Storm-proof glasshouses.
Bing!
Terraces that don’t get washed away.
Bing!
Spuds that don’t get blight. Everything we need, see? Just at the wave of Aengus’s hand.’

Donal concentrated on breathing. He was still speechless. Aidan reached over and took the note back from him.

‘Brilliant, eh?’ he said. ‘Every person in our new raiding party is going to have a copy of this. And as well as looking for stuff to bring back, they’re all going to
go looking for Aengus. The first one to find him gives him this.’

Donal didn’t much like the sound of that. When he was nine years old he had seen Aengus turn old Mikey into a pig, and on that occasion he had been trying to be helpful. If he saw a copy of Aidan’s message, there was no telling what he might do to the unsuspecting soul who handed it to him. But he supposed that one out of fifty was pretty good odds, and worth the benefit to the other forty-nine. He would not try and dissuade his brother from the plan.

And what if, by any chance, it worked? Donal didn’t even dare to contemplate that possibility. They would just have to cross that bridge when they came to it.

‘Why did you hide from them?’ Jenny asked Pup as they continued on their way.

‘The soldiers?’ said Pup. ‘I don’t want them to see me going back empty-handed. I might get court-martialled for that. Tough business, you know, being in the army.’

‘So what made you want to join up?’

‘Want?’ said Pup. ‘Since when did anyone get to do what they want?’

‘I thought everybody did,’ said Jenny. ‘They did when I was there anyway.’

She told him about the sixteen years she had spent in his world, using ploddy time in order to grow up. She remembered that there were occasions when she couldn’t do exactly what she wanted, but she was fairly sure that most people got to choose what kind of career they wanted to follow.

But as she spoke she realized that things had obviously changed a whole lot over there now. Her brother Donal had wanted to be a farmer and a musician, but now, apparently, he was the general of an army. Jenny hoped that
he would still be alive when she got there. She had no way of knowing how much time was passing on the other side as she and Pup strolled along beneath the sun.

‘It was join the army or starve,’ Pup said. ‘My family was struggling. Every year that passed, our bit of land produced less food. The rain washed away the soil and the crops along with it, and the slugs ate half of what was left. Then, every few years, there would be a drought that would go on for months and there would be no way of growing anything at all when that happened. We were up against the wall, living hand to mouth. So when I was ten I crept out one night and went to the barracks, and General Liddy let me join up.’

‘Ten?’ said Jenny.

‘Some of us are even younger,’ said Pup. ‘Some families send their young boys because there’s no way they can feed them.’

A blackthorn tree sat on a tight bend in the road, and in its branches a dozen or more odd socks were hanging. Pup stopped and stared at them. ‘What are they doing there?’ he asked.

‘It’s a long story,’ said Jenny. ‘Some things leak through from your world into this one.’

‘Socks?’ said Pup.

‘Among other things,’ said Jenny.

‘So who do they belong to?’ said Pup.

Jenny shrugged. ‘Do you ever see your family now?’ she said.

Pup began selecting socks from the blackthorn tree. ‘No,’ he said. ‘We’re not allowed to leave the barracks except on sorties. But I saw my mother twice since I left home. The first time was a week after I joined up. She came to the barracks to try and get me to go home again, but I wouldn’t go. And the second time was a few days ago. She came looking for my brother after he was kidnapped. She thought he’d been taken to join the army, but he hadn’t. The general wouldn’t do a thing like that.’

‘But Aidan would.’

‘Obviously. It must have been his men that took Billy, because it wasn’t anyone from the army. And there’s no way his men would have kidnapped them without him knowing all about it.’

‘Them?’ said Jenny. ‘Was there more than one?’

Pup sat down on a wall and began taking off his boot. ‘Three that we know of,’ he said. ‘Two boys and a girl.’

‘And no one knows why? Or where they were taken?’

‘No,’ said Pup. He peeled off his wet sock and Jenny saw the blisters underneath, burst open and red raw. ‘But there is one strange coincidence. The girl who was kidnapped has a brother who is in my troop, and he told me a story about her one day. Apparently her mother went a bit mad when the girl was a baby. One morning she went out to feed the hens and left the baby asleep inside. When she came back in, she started saying the baby wasn’t hers, that someone had changed it for a different one.’

Jenny listened in silence. The story was an old one and very familiar. Perhaps the woman really had gone mad and imagined it all, but Jenny doubted it. After all, she herself had been exchanged for a ploddy baby. In her case both sets of parents had agreed to it, but that was very unusual. In the past the people of Tír na n’Óg had just swapped their babies whenever an opportunity arose, and now it sounded as if it had started happening again. She wondered whose baby it might have been. It wasn’t always easy to keep track of the comings and goings of the fairy folk.

Pup was pulling on socks, one on top of the other. ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘the strange thing is that I overheard my mother telling a friend that the very same thing happened to her. I was a lot younger then, and I was up in the loft in bed and she didn’t know I was listening. She said the baby was swapped while she was out weeding the cabbages, only a few yards from the house. She said she thought she was losing her mind, but my father agreed with her that it wasn’t the same baby.’

‘It probably wasn’t,’ said Jenny.