The White Horse Trick (19 page)

Just a stone’s throw away, the barracks was buzzing with activity. Colonel Mooney was barking orders and men were jumping to carry them out, putting on their combat gear, packing emergency rations, and queuing, for the first time in years, to receive live ammunition.

Pup, along with one of the sergeants, was handing it out, and the men in the line took the opportunity to ask him, finally, what it was like in Tír na n’Óg.

‘Fantastic,’ he said. ‘I’m going back there as soon as I’ve sorted out a few things over here.’

‘What’s it like?’

‘The sun always shines. There are socks hanging off the trees. And people playing music. And no one worries about anything.’

‘I’m volunteering next time,’ said a young lad of about Pup’s age.

‘And me,’ said the squaddie behind him.

‘And me,’ said the next.

A lot of the guns in the army hadn’t worked for years and were just carried around for show. Some of the others
did work but the stores had no ammunition to fit them. But there were still eighty or so working weapons left in the barracks, and Colonel Mooney was busy identifying them and making sure they were put into the most reliable hands.

‘It may be necessary to use them,’ he told the chosen marksmen. ‘But no one is to fire without specific orders from a commanding officer.’

The men understood, and even the hardest of them would obey. Ammunition was in short supply and not to be wasted. But they were excited, too, and ready for action. No one other than the colonel and Pup yet knew what kind of action they were preparing for, but every soldier in the barracks had a keen sense of anticipation. Though no one dared say it, most of them had the feeling that this was the moment they had all been waiting for.

Aidan got one of his men to open the door into the courtyard. Outside it there was a grey-haired man on a large white horse.

Jenny had the best view through the door. ‘It’s JJ,’ she said.

‘Are you sure?’ said Aidan.

‘Positive,’ said Jenny.

Aidan removed the gun from Donal’s head. ‘Don’t anyone try anything,’ he said. ‘The gun’s in my pocket and it’s still aimed straight at you. Understand?’

Donal and Jenny nodded. Aidan stepped towards the
door and stood sideways on, keeping all angles covered.

‘Hello, Dad,’ he said. ‘You’re just about the last person I expected to see.’

JJ blinked. The fat man standing in the doorway was nearly bald and had hardly any teeth. He had no idea who he was, so he took a guess.

‘Aidan?’

‘Who else?’ said Aidan. ‘Welcome to my castle.’

JJ was speechless, stunned by what the passage of time had done to his son.

‘Why don’t you come in?’ Aidan went on. ‘My men will look after your horse for you.’

‘Ah, well, no,’ said JJ. ‘I can’t get off the horse, you see?’

‘You can’t get off?’ said Aidan.

‘Well, I can,’ said JJ, ‘but it wouldn’t be my preferred option.’

‘Ah,’ said Aidan. He had just been studying the literature, so the story of Oisín was fresh in his mind. ‘The white horse trick, eh?’

‘That’s the one,’ said JJ.

Aidan considered the situation. The rain was still sheeting down and there was no way he was going outside in it. There was only one other option. He stood back from the doorway.

‘Then you’d better bring it in with you, hadn’t you?’ he said.

* * *

Mooney divided the army into three sections and put a sergeant at the head of two of them. The first of them left the barracks by the rear entrance and went downhill towards the ring fort, then turned to their right and made for the old Carron road. The second squad went up the hill, bypassing the stony steps as though heading directly for the beacon. The third, which he was to lead himself, waited in the barracks. When the others were in position, they would play their part.

On top of the mountain the púca had returned from his foraging and was talking to Mikey’s ghost while he chewed the cud. The army sharpshooters had long since eliminated the herds of wild goats that once roamed the area, so the púca’s vigil up there had been as lonely as Mikey’s. Now that they had finally become friends, they found that they had a surprising amount in common.

As the first troops were leaving the barracks and JJ was trying to persuade the horse to go through Aidan’s narrow doorway, the ghost and the púca were discussing the demise of mankind. The púca maintained it was the fairy folk who had started the rot by charming the ploddies with their music and dancing and their sly, seductive ways. They had persuaded the people of Ireland to switch their allegiance from the púcas, who were nature gods, and worship the Dagda and Aengus instead. And as the people of Ireland had changed their religion once, there was nothing to stop them doing it again, and they were easy prey for the Christian missionaries when they came along. But when the worst god of all began to woo them, they
didn’t even realize that they were changing their religion again.

‘Mammon,’ said Mikey, sending the púca a single grim image.

‘Exactly,’ said the púca. ‘The great god of money. Sly one, that. The poor old ploddies lined up in their millions to sell their souls to him and had no idea what they were doing.’

‘True, true,’ Mikey thought. He found that the púca, who could read all kinds of winds and trends, understood his method of communication even better than Donal did. In fact, if he spoke a sentence in his mind, the púca seemed able to hear it. ‘We were a hopeless lot, but you have to give us credit for some things.’

‘Really?’ said the púca, who had no time at all for the human race. ‘Like what?’

‘Well, we fought some terrible wars and did some unspeakable things to each other, but we created some pretty good peacetimes as well. We can be good neighbours as well as good enemies.’

‘I suppose so,’ said the púca, ‘for what it’s worth.’

‘And then there are the sciences and the arts.’

‘Not too impressed by the sciences,’ said the púca. ‘Your technologies were responsible for most of this.’ He made a vague gesture across the plain, which Mikey took to imply the state of the world. ‘But tell me what you mean by the arts.’

‘You know,’ said Mikey. ‘Music. Poetry. Literature. Fine
art. Things that bypass all the day-to-day strivings and squabblings and speak directly from soul to soul.’

The púca yawned and belched up a fresh mouthful of cud.

‘As a matter of fact,’ Mikey went on, ‘my good friend Donal has a bit of a problem in that regard.’ He explained about the cultural treasures Donal had gathered, and the problems of getting them through to Tír na n’Óg.

The púca folded his goat feet beneath him, closed his eyes and chewed on implacably. He appeared to have gone to sleep, but when Mikey finished talking he opened his eyes again, took a moment or two to stare into the middle distance and read the winds, then left.

By the time JJ and the white horse were inside, there was no room to swing a cat, not even one of the ginger kittens. Aidan ordered the two goons who were still human to move some of the furniture back against the walls, and then wait outside. He was confident about keeping control now. JJ’s arrival had added a second weapon to his armoury.

Donal went up to JJ, who leaned down as far as he could to hug him. They were both wet, but Donal was at least warm and wet. JJ was so cold his fingertips were blue.

‘Well, isn’t this nice?’ Aidan said. ‘A regular family reunion. All we need now is Mum.’

‘And Hazel,’ said Jenny.

‘And Sally,’ said Donal.

‘Any word from either of them?’ said JJ. ‘Sally and Hazel, I mean, not Mum.’

Donal shook his head. His oldest sister, Hazel, had still been in Cork when he had last heard from her, and his younger one, Sally, had joined up with like-minded people to build an eco-village in County Mayo. They had all kept
in contact until the world changed so radically, but there were no phones or letters or emails now and, short of making journeys that would be extremely arduous and even more dangerous, there was no way for Donal to know whether they were alive or dead.

The living room had turned into a menagerie. The kittens had overcome their anxieties and were chasing each other over the furniture. The dogs were hogging the rug in front of the fire, and now there was this horse, which looked much bigger in the confined space than it had out in the open.

‘So what’s on your mind, Dad?’ said Aidan. ‘Or more to the point, what’s on the Dagda’s mind? Did he send you over with a message?’

‘Erm . . .’ JJ was having difficulty settling in. It was partly the terror of being on the horse in someone’s living room, and partly the shock of seeing his two sons transformed, overnight as far as he was concerned, into old men. He had to concentrate very hard before he could remember what he was doing there. ‘Not exactly a message as such,’ he said.

‘No?’ said Aidan.

‘No,’ said JJ. ‘More like a kind of a job.’

He sighed. He had hoped to come up with some ideas on the way but he’d had no luck. Aidan was what? Around sixty, he supposed. He was as fat and soft as the two dogs snoring on the hearthrug, but he was still Aidan, and JJ knew he would have no more influence over him now
than he’d had when he was a child. Aisling ought to have come instead. Aisling had ways of dealing with him – at least she had when he was small. He wished she was there with him now. The horse could probably have carried the two of them. He hoped and prayed that he would get to see her again, and fondly imagined that she was sitting staring into space on one of the grassy slopes of Tír na n’Óg, thinking the same thoughts about him.

She wasn’t though. She was busy trying to follow her own orders from the Dagda, even though her heart wasn’t in it. She had no desire to see those wretched people sent back through the souterrain to whatever dreadful fate lay in store for them on the other side. But there was no future in disobeying the Dagda. He would have his way in Tír na n’Óg no matter what anyone said or did, and Aisling passing her existence as a toad would be of no benefit to anyone.

So she was trying her best to round up the ploddies, but she was not having much success. The ones she found, even the soldiers, were all very pleasant and cheerful, and they all listened politely to her instructions. Most of them even set out in roughly the right direction. But again and again she encountered the same people, wandering around with the same dazed and delighted expressions. All of them remembered meeting her before but none of them remembered where it was they were supposed to be going.

* * *

‘The thing is,’ JJ said to Aidan, ‘you have to stop it.’ It sounded as pathetic to JJ as it did to the others, but once it was out of his mouth he couldn’t put it back.

‘Stop what, Daddy?’ said Aidan. He sounded as if butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth, but everyone there knew him well enough to hear the bitter sarcasm behind his words.

‘All this nasty business of bullying people and stealing their food and making them into slaves and stuff.’

‘Oh, Dad!’ said Aidan. ‘Who have you been listening to? It’s not true at all. You never did understand the way the world works, did you? Too much of that fairy blood in your veins.’

At that moment JJ was wishing he could disappear through the time skin and regretting that he didn’t have more fairy blood, but he said nothing, and Aidan went on, ‘Someone has to take charge, you know. You can’t have a society without some kind of government. What you don’t realize is that I’m protecting all those poor unfortunate people. I have their best interests at heart, even if they don’t always realize it.’

‘How do you work that out?’ said Jenny.

‘Protection, Jenny, that’s what. It’s your brother’s department mainly. The presence of our army stops other gangs from moving in and taking over the area. And they would be worse, you can be sure. In some parts of the
country, those raiders have been through and left no one alive behind them.’

‘Hang on, though,’ said JJ. ‘That doesn’t account for the way you’ve been treating your own people.’

‘But you’ve got it all wrong,’ said Aidan, and again he had that saccharine tone in his voice. ‘It’s amazing how people manage to distort the truth. It’s all very simple, you see. All governments impose some kind of taxation. Even you must understand that.’

‘Well, yes,’ said JJ, ‘but—’

‘And we collect our taxes in kind instead of in cash. Food instead of money. That’s all.’

‘Yes, but—’

‘And if some of our poorer citizens find themselves in difficulties, then it’s our duty to help them out, wouldn’t you say?’

‘Yes, but—’

‘Unfortunately we can’t afford unemployment benefit like they did in your day. As you can see, our world has changed a lot. But we can’t just abandon them, can we?’

‘No, but—’

‘No. So we find useful work for them on government projects instead. Full employment, see? Every single citizen housed and fed. I know it isn’t perfect, but things are very different now. Look at what we’re having to deal with.’

He paused for dramatic effect, but the storm failed to respond to his cue. The wind had dropped again.

And it made conditions just perfect for Colonel Mooney’s advance parties.

On two sides of the castle, soldiers were scaling the walls. They worked efficiently and in absolute silence, standing on each other’s shoulders to make a human ladder and hoisting the smallest boys to the top. Once up there, they tied ropes to the crane lugs and dropped them back down for the others to climb up. Everyone stayed on their bellies, well out of sight of the courtyard. Still shrouded in their waterproof hoods, the goons on guard below hadn’t the first idea that there was anything going on.

‘Anyway,’ Aidan was saying, ‘all this just goes to show you why we need the Dagda’s help so badly. I was hoping that he’d pay us a personal visit, but apparently he doesn’t think we’re worth the effort.’

All three of the others became aware of the warning signs entering Aidan’s face and voice. They had lived with him for long enough to know when one of his tantrums was coming on and they all, with the possible exception of Jenny, feared the mayhem he could wreak.