A Wizard Abroad, New Millennium Edition (12 page)

The kitchen was in havoc. A lot of the riders who were picking up their horses from the stable had come in for “a quick cup of tea.” Nita was learning that there was no such thing in Ireland as a quick cup of tea. What you got was several cups of tea, taking no less than half an hour, during which any interesting local news was passed on. “A quick cup of tea” might happen at any hour of the day or night, include any number of people, male or female, and always turned into a raging gossip session with hilarious laughter and recriminations.

But finally the demands for tea trailed off, and the kitchen began to clear out. The people who were in the hunt were impressively dressed, all red coats and black caps and beige riding britches and black shiny boots. They were discussing the course they would ride—apparently a mean one, from Calary Upper behind Sugarloaf, down through various farmers’ lands, straight down to Newcastle. The thing that was most confusing everybody was that, quite suddenly, there were no foxes anywhere. Some people were blaming hunt protesters or overzealous shooting by local farmers; others blamed the weather, crop dusting, sunspots, global warming. Nita grinned outright, and had another cup of tea. She was beginning to really like tea.

“Well, that’s all we’ll see of them,” said her Aunt Annie, pouring herself a cup as well and then flopping down in one of the kitchen chairs in thinly disguised relief.

“I thought the hunt was coming through here,” Nita said.

“Oh, they will, but that’s not until this afternoon.”

“No foxes, huh?” Nita said, in great satisfaction.

“Not a one.” Her aunt looked over at her and said, “Personally, I can’t say that I’m exactly broken-hearted.”

“Me either,” said Nita.

“Doesn’t matter. They’ll hunt to a drag—it’s just an old fox skin that leaves a scent for the dogs: they drag it along the ground. They’ll have a good time.”

Nita nodded and went back to her reading, half-thinking of going down to Bray again that afternoon, to see if maybe Ronan or Majella were around. Then she talked herself out of it. It was too nice a day and the sun was hot; there was no reason to go into a smelly town and strangle yourself on the bus fumes and traffic.
I’ll put down a towel down outside,
Nita thought,
and lie out in the sun, and pretend it’s the beach.
She already missed the beaches back home: she knew the water here was way too cold for her to enjoy swimming in it.

…So that was what she did. And so it was, about two-fifteen, that she first the cry of the hounds. She got up and pulled a T-shirt on over her bathing suit, put the manual in the trailer, and went to lean on the fence by the back field and see what she could see. She almost missed the first horseman who went by about a half mile away across the field; thundering through the pasture, just a guy on a horse with a long rope dragging behind him, and something dragging at the end of the rope.

There was a long pause. And then the note of the hounds came belling up over the fields, followed by the hounds themselves, woofing, lolloping, yipping. Then, over the rise behind them, came a thunderous crowd of horses of all kinds: chestnut, brown, dapple, black, galloping over the hill. A horn went
tarantara!,
and the riders hallooed at the sound of it and came riding after the hounds.

It took them about a minute and a half to go by. There were about fifty people, all in their red jackets and their beige breeches and not-so-black boots. Then they were gone. The sounds of the hounds and the horses’ hooves faded away over the next hill, south of the potato field, and were gone. Nita listened to the last cries fade out, then went back to lie in the sun.

It was about three hours later when the horses started coming back to the farm, some of them trucked in by trailer from Newcastle. There was much talk of rides and falls and jumps and water barriers, and a lot of other stuff that Nita didn’t particularly understand. But everyone seemed to have had a good time. Nita was very glad that it had been able to happen without any foxes being ripped up.

Dinnertime that evening was replaced by a marathon “little cup of tea,” as the grooms from the stables got together with the stablemanager and the trainers. It was at least eleven-thirty or twelve before the last of them left, having been given wine and whiskey and (apparently) just about everything else that Aunt Annie had in the house.

Nita came in from the trailer, having had enough of the horsey talk about eight, and helped her aunt do the dishes, or at least rinse them and put them in the dishwasher. “There’s that done with for this year,” said her aunt. She rolled her eyes at the ceiling. “The way they eat!”

“Yeah. You need anything else, Aunt Annie?”

“No, I think we’re okay for the night. You ready to turn in?”

“I’m going to have a little walk first.”

“Okay. Just watch out for those holes in the pasture. It’s pretty torn up out there, what with the neighbor’s cows.”

“Right.”

Nita got her jacket and went out into the evening. It was twelve-thirty by now, but it still wasn’t fully dark; in fact it was beginning, in the northeast, to think about slowly brightening again. Nita cast an eye up at the sky. There was a canopy of thin cloud, enough to obscure all but the very brightest stars, and the occasional planet. Jupiter was high, and the Moon.

She wandered out into the pasture, into the total dark and the quiet, and just stood there and listened. It was the first time she had really felt relaxed since she had come here. She was beginning to feel a little more in control of things: she had done enough reading to at least be able to go and see some more senior wizard and tell him or her what she thought the problem was that had gotten her put on active status, and to be able to discuss it in terms that made some kind of sense to someone who lived here and was familiar with this kind of situation. In the great quiet she heard birds crying, somewhere a long way away.
A rookery, maybe?
She’d heard that creaky, cawing sound a couple of times now, when the rooks were settled down for the night in a tree and some late noise disturbed them.

Nita stood there under the stars, waiting for the silence to resume. It didn’t resume. The noise got louder.

More rooks. Or no—what was
that?

Then the hair stood straight up all over Nita as she heard the howl.

There are no wolves in Ireland!
she told herself. The wolfhounds had been bred specifically to deal with them, and there hadn’t been wolves in Ireland since the late 1700’s sometime.

But that howl came shuddering out of the night again, and several others behind it; followed by yips and barks. And the sound of hooves. Not many sets of them, but just one, a long way off. One rider, one horse, galloping.
What in the worlds—?

Nita strained to see in the moonlight. It was hard. Through this thin cloud, the Moon was only at first quarter, and it was hard to see anything but a vague bloom of light over the cropland, black where it struck trees and hedgerows, the dimmest silver where it struck anything else. The hoofbeats got louder; and the howls got louder too.

Hurriedly Nita said the first six words of a spell that had proved very handy to her in other times and places. It was a simple force-field spell that made a sort of shell around the wizard who spoke it. Blows went sideways from it; physical force stopped at it and just slid off. One word would release it if she needed it—and she had a feeling she would.

In the dark, not too far away, she saw something moving. There were spells that would augment a wizard’s vision, but she didn’t have any of them prepared at the moment, and didn’t have time to do any one of them from scratch. She didn’t have her manual. She could just begin to see the faint silvering of moonlight on the big thing galloping toward her.

It was not a horse. No horse ever foaled was that tall. This creature went by a tree she knew the height of, at the edge of the field, and then by a fencepost that she knew was only six feet high. The top of the post came just below the creature’s shoulder as the massive four-footed shape sprinted toward her. Not a horse, not with those antlers, six feet across at least; not with that skull a yard and a half long. And no horse had such a voice, trumpeting, desperate, a sound like the night being torn edge to edge.

She’d seen its picture in one of the books in the library. It was an elk, but not any elk that walked the earth these days; an old Irish elk, extinct since the ice came down. It went by her like a piece of stormy night, the breath like a blast of fog out of it as it went. It shook the ground as it ran, and its feet went deep into the soft pasture, spurning up great sods of grass. It flew on past and gave her never a look, making a great roaring belling sound, a trumpeting noise almost like an elephant’s.

And behind it, in a howling pack, came the wolves.

They were not normal wolves. All the wolfhounds in Ireland could not have done anything about these. These were the wolves that had hunted the Irish elk when they still walked this part of the world. They were four feet high at the shoulder, easily, judging by the fence post as they came past it. They were rough-coated, their eyes huge and dark except when the Moon glinted on the head of one or another thrown up to howl as it ran. A faint mist of light clung to them that had nothing to do with the mist on the field, or the moonlight. Their teeth were longer than a regular wolf’s; their feet were bigger, their claws were longer. Their tails were shorter, their heads were heavier and more brutish. They were dire-wolves, the wolves of the Stone Age or earlier,
Canis lupus dirus,
and they were after the elk, their old familiar prey.

It suddenly occurred to Nita that there would be someone following behind this pack, as there had been this morning... that single set of hoofbeats, growing louder. And she did
not
want to meet that someone.

The wolves tore toward her. There were about twenty of them. More than half of them held the main course that they had been running, on the elk’s track: the rest saw or scented her, she had no idea which, and angled toward her. Nita said the sixth word of the spell, felt the shield wink into place around her. Hurriedly she said the first eighteen words of another spell she knew, one she was very reluctant to use—but she had no weapon-spell handy that was less dangerous, and frankly if it came down to a choice between her dying and the wolves, the wolves were out of luck.
If they can be killed at all! Are they even real?...

Nita braced herself as best she could, and waited. The first wolf hit her shield—and didn’t bounce; it knocked her down. Nita got a horrible glance of fangs trying desperately to break through to her—failing for the moment—

In shock she fumbled for the last word of the killing spell, couldn’t remember it. Those fangs knocked against the shield, right in front of her face, bending it in toward her—

That was when hooves came down out of nowhere and broke the wolf’s head, and kicked its body aside, and smashed its spine into the ground. There was an immediate flurry of other wolves fastening themselves to the great dark shape that was rearing above Nita, smashing at more of them with its hooves. It had bought her the second she needed; she remembered the nineteenth word. She said it.

The sound that followed was not one Nita enjoyed, but the spell worked, even though the shield hadn’t. These creatures were flesh and blood enough that when you suddenly took all the cell membranes from between their cells, the result was emphatic. Briefly, it rained blood.

Nita looked at another of the wolves near her, said the nineteenth word. It turned in mid-leap, and showered down in gore. She said the nineteenth word again, and again, and she kept saying it, having no weapon more merciful, until there was nothing near her but a sickly, black, wet patch in the field, gleaming dully in the moonlight...and the Irish elk, standing with its head down, panting, looking at her out of great, dumb, understanding eyes.

Nita let the shield spell go, staggered to her feet, and tottered over to the elk. Its flanks and shoulders were torn where the dire-wolves’ teeth had met.
“Brother,”
she said in the Speech,
“let me see to those before you go.”

Hurry,
said the elk.
The loss of the pack has slowed him. But he’s coming.

He,
Nita thought, and broke out in a cold sweat.

Fortunately there was plenty of blood around, blood being what you needed for almost all the healing spells. Nita had some experience with those. She called her manual to her, and hurriedly it came, finding a shortcut through local space and leaping into her hand. Nita started turning pages, not worrying where the blood went that she was smeared with. “Here,” she said, and began reading the quickest of the healing spells, a forced adhesion that caused the damaged tissue to at least hold together long enough for the knitting process to start. The spell was little more than wizardly crazy glue, but Nita was satisfied that the elk’s body would be able to manage the rest of the business itself; the wounds weren’t too serious.

It took about three minutes’ recitation before the last of the wounds shut itself. The elk stood there shivering in all its limbs, as if expecting something to immediately come after it out of the night. Nita was shivering too; the healer always partook of the suffering of the healed—that was part of the price paid.