A Wizard Abroad, New Millennium Edition (9 page)

But it wasn’t there. Neither was anything else that had been around her. The farm was gone.

The contour of the land was still there—the way it had trended gently downhill past the farm buildings, and then up again toward the N11 dual carriageway and the hills on its far side. But there were no buildings, no houses that she could see. The road was gone. Or not gone: reduced to a rutted dirt track. And the smoke—

Nita looked around her in great confusion. There was a pillar of black smoke rising up off to one side, blown westward by the rising wind off the sea. Very faintly in this silence she could hear cries, shouts. Something white over there was burning. It was the little white church down the road, St. Patrick’s of Kilquade, with its one bell. She stood there in astonishment, hearing the cries on the wind, and then a terrible metallic note, made faint by the distance: the one bell blowing in the wind, then shattering with heat and the fall of the tower that housed it. A silence followed the noise... then faint laughter, and the sound of glass exploding outward in the force of the fire.

And a voice spoke, down by her feet. “Yes, they’ve been restless of late, those ghosts,” said Tualha, looking where Nita looked, at the smoke. “I thought I might find you here. It’s as I said, Shonaiula ní Cealodháin. The wind blows, and things get blown along in it. Bards and wizards alike. Why would you be here, otherwise? But better to be the wind than the straw, when the Carrion-Crow is on the wing. It always takes 
draiocht
 to set such situations to rights.”

Nita gulped and tried to get hold of herself. This was a wizardry, but not one of a kind she had ever experienced. Worldgating, travel between planets or dimensions, that she knew. But those required extensive and specific spelling. Nothing of the sort had happened here. She had simply turned around...and
been
here.

“Where are we?” she said softly. “How’d we get here?”

“You went
cliathánach,”
Tualha said. “‘Sideways,’ as I did. True, it’s not usually so easy. But that’s an indication that things are in the wind indeed.”

“Sideways,” Nita breathed. “Into the past—”

“Or the future,” Tualha said, “or the never-was. All those are here, inherent in the now. You know that.”

“Of course I know it,” Nita said. It was part of a wizard’s most basic knowledge that the physical world coexisted with hundreds of thousands of others, both like it and very unlike. No amount of merely physical travel would get you into any of them. But with the right wizardry, you didn’t have to move more than a step. “It shouldn’t be anything like this easy, though,” she said.

Tualha looked up at Nita with wide, bland eyes. “It’s easier here,” she said. “It always has been. But you’re right that it shouldn’t be
this
easy. There’s danger in it, both for the ‘daylight’ world and the others.”

Nita looked at the smoke, shaking her head. “What was it you said?...the wind blows, and things get blown along with it?”

Tualha said nothing. Nita stood there and thought how casually she’d said to her mother, 
If I go on call in Ireland, I go on call, and that’s it.

So it wasn’t really her mother’s idea that she come here, after all. Some one of the Powers that Be had sent her here to do a job. Nita knew that when she got back to the farmhouse—assuming she
did
get back to the farmhouse—when she opened her manual, she’d find she was on active status again. And here she was, without her partner, without her usual Senior wizards’ support—for their authority didn’t run here: Europe had its own Senior structures. Alone, and with a problem that she didn’t understand—

I’m going to have to get caught up on my reading, and
fast.

Tualha crouched and leaped at a bit of ash that the wind sailed past her. She missed it. Nita sighed. “How do we get back?” she said.

“You haven’t done this before?” Tualha said. “Where were you looking when it happened?”

“At the ocean.”

“Look back, then.”

Nita turned her back on the smoke and the cries and the brittle music of breaking glass, and looked out to the flat grey sea, willing things to be as they had been before.

“There you are, then,” Tualha said.

Nita turned again. There was the farm, the riding school, the farmhouse: and the field, full of its prosaic jumping equipment, all decals and slightly peeling paint. “But indeed,” Tualha said, “it’s as I told you. Something must change. Get about it, young wizard, before it gets about us.”

The next morning, Nita did what she usually did when she was confused—the thing that had made her a wizard in the first place. She went to the library.

The bus that stopped at the end of her aunt’s road was a green double-decker of a kind Nita had only so far ever seen in movies. She got in, paid the fare, and climbed straight up the spiral stair about halfway back to the bus’s second floor. No one else was up there at all, so Nita went straight forward to take the very first seat up front, its window looking directly forward and twelve feet down onto the ground. It was interesting to ride along little country lanes and look right down onto the sheep and the hedges and the potholes from such a height. But she didn’t let it distract her for long, as she had reading to do.

The section in the Wizard’s manual on Ireland had become quite long, just as the one on the United States was quite short. This came as no surprise, as Nita had seen the manual do this before as regarded general subjects; it expanded dynamically to offer whatever wizardly information you might want to research. And she’d also seen it do this on trips to other planets. It was just novel to see it happen on Earth.

She started paging through the Irish history section and immediately found that she had been correct to be a little suspicious of Tualha’s numbers. The things she discussed as happening four hundred thousand years before had apparently actually happened four hundred
million
years before. This didn’t surprise Nita either; she remembered her Aunt Annie saying yesterday that as far as she knew, the only times cats were really concerned about were their mealtimes.
Maybe she was speaking rhetorically or something.

In any case, the manual told her of the formation of Ireland, some four hundred million years earlier; of the upthrust of the great chain of mountains that it shared with Newfoundland and the Pyrenees. A hundred and fifty million years later, Greenland began to move away from the ancient European continent, tearing a huge gap in what was to become the northern Atlantic. The great island that had been both England and Ireland was flooded, as the waters of other seas flowed into the gap, and then split. Then the ice came down and tore at it, leaving the deep ragged glacial valleys of the western Irish coast that Nita had seen when she flew in.

That was just the science of it, of course. Science may accurately reveal the details about concrete occurrences, the “whats” and “hows” of life: but a wizard knows to look further than science for the “whys.” And wizards knew that the world was
made:
not created in some disinterested abstract sense, like an assembly line of natural forces stamping out parts, but made, stone by stone, as an artist makes, or a craftsman, or a cook… with interest, and care. The One—the only name wizards have for that Power which was senior to the Powers that Be, and everything else—like a good manager had delegated many of its functions to the first-made creatures, the Powers, which some people in the past had called gods, and others had called angels. The Powers made different parts of the world, and became associated with them simply because they loved them, as people who make things tend to love what they’ve made.

But something had gone wrong in Ireland’s making. Someone had been—it was tempting to say “interfering.” The manual said nothing specific about this: it tended to let one draw one’s own conclusions on the more complex ethical issues. But several times, the Makers had begun to make the island; and several times, something had gone wrong. Cataclysms, a glacial movement that happened too quickly, a continental plate ramming another faster than had been intended. Misjudgments? Miscalculations? Nita thought not. She thought she saw here the interference of her (and every wizard’s) old enemy, the Lone Power, the one who (for good or evil) had invented death, and since then had been wandering through all the worlds seeing what It could destroy or warp.

It seemed that the bright Powers, the Makers and Builders, hadn’t suspected the flaws inserted in their building by the Lone Power’s working. So Ireland had come undone several times, and had had to be patched. Indeed, the top part of it had only been welded on about two hundred and fifty million years after the original complex began to be formed—after other land that should have been Ireland was drowned beneath the sea.

So then, Nita thought.
Two or three attempts to make, frustrated two or three times by the Lone Power...and then, as Tualha said, the One got impatient.
Or maybe impatience was an inaccurate reaction to attribute to the Power that conceived the whole universe at its beginning, and through to its end. The One’s great intent, along with that of the wizards and the Powers that Be, who do Its will, is to preserve energy—to keep things running for as long as they can be made to run, with what’s available...and not to waste anything unnecessarily. But when it was plain that building here was being actively hindered, a new group of Makers came into the world to shape Ireland: greater Powers, more senior, more central, than those who had worked here before. They would set it right.

They tried. Nita saw, between the data in the manual and what Tualha told her, that just as the One had scaled up its response, so had the Lone Power. The Fomori had been growing more powerful each time they had been challenged. Each time they were put down, they came back more powerful yet. And then came the first battle of Moytura.

The version that Tualha had given Nita turned out to be much romanticized. Moytura wasn’t just a single battle, but a great strife of forces over many centuries, as mountains were raised and thrown down and river valleys carved and choked; and all the while the ice rose and fell. You could still see the evidence in places in Ireland—rock more warped and twisted than could be explained by any mere geological uprising or subsidence; places where fires had fallen and melted the stone in ways that geologists could make nothing of. Nita could make something of them, though. The weapons used to wage war in heaven had been brought to bear on Ireland, and the battle had gone on for a good while.

And then—
Nita turned a page over, scanning down it. She was beginning to get the drift of this. Here was the arrival of Lugh of the Long Reach. She thought she knew this particular power, for she’d met it once or twice. A young warrior, fierce, kindly, a little humorous, liable to travel in disguise: a power known by many names in many places and times. Michael, Athene, Thor—it was the One’s Champion, one of the greatest of all created beings, and definitely a Power to be reckoned with. As Lugh, that Power had come and poured Its virtue into the great Treasures that the Tuatha de Danaan had brought from the Four Cities.

Then he and the Tuatha had gone out with those weapons against Balor of the Evil Eye.
Who was he?
Nita thought.
The Lone Power Itself? Or some poor creature that It corrupted and inhabited?
That, too, was a favorite tactic. Either way, Balor had wielded cruel dominion over the humans of the island, and his twisted creatures the Fomori, and other, lesser powers, for thousands of years. But then came the second battle, as Tualha had said, and all that changed. War came from Heaven to Earth with a vengeance. The Champion, in the form of Lugh, struck Balor down.

Nita turned another page over and saw why Tualha had laughed at her so. Certainly it was laughable, the idea that anyone could just
throw out
ten of the senior Powers that Be. But something had happened. After putting down Balor, the Powers involved had gotten busy finishing Ireland. They raised the mountains and smoothed them down, made the plains and the forests and lakes. And they fell more completely in love with the beautiful, marred place than any of their more junior predecessors had.

This was commoner in the Old World, Nita read, than in the new. In places like North America, where the native human peoples had stories not of specific gods, but instead about heroes and the One, it indicated that the Makers of that place had gone away, well-satisfied with their work. In some places in the world, though, the satisfaction took longer—places like Greece and Rome. Their Makers loved them too much to leave for a long while, though finally they did let go. But there were still a few places in the world where the Powers had
never
really let go… and this was one of them.

Maybe this is why Ireland has always been kind of unsettled,
Nita thought.
The Powers won’t move out and let the new tenants be there by themselves. Us—
For like most other wizards, Nita knew quite well that the good Powers might indeed be good, but that didn’t necessarily make them safe. Even the best of the Powers that Be could be blunted by too much commerce with humans and physical reality.

Nita read that the Tuatha de Danaan, as the Irish had come to call the Builder-powers, had never left. And when the human people, the “Milesians,” came at last, the Powers struck a bargain with them, agreeing to relinquish the lands and vanish into the hills. At least, that was how it looked to the humans. They knew that some hills in Ireland, at the four great feasts of the year, became more than just hills. At such times nonphysical aspects of the world became solider, realer; and mere physical reality, if it was wise, would stay out of the way of what was older, stronger, harder, by far. But the humans weren’t clear on the details of what had really happened when the Tuatha “vanished.” Unable to bear leaving Ireland, they’d merely gone
sideways,
making their way to an Ireland just one world over—or two, or five: one just a little bit closer to the depths of Reality, where, as Nita knew, lay Timeheart.