It was harder. Things were dead quiet now despite the rain hammering down all around him so hard he could barely see through the fall of it—though Ronan’s own little water-shell was doing its level best to stay still because he’d asked it to. Carefully and slowly he said the first phrase of the arc, which had seventeen syllables and was all about the actual coordinates of the flat bit at the top of Bray Head—and gasped. He said the second phrase, which was mercifully shorter and had to do with local shifts in the gravitational constant and matter density—and gasped. He said the third one, which (he suddenly understood) was several significant portions of his own name, and was therefore surprisingly easy to say—though a couple parts of it made him blush.
Then he said the fourth phrase, and this one was really heavy lifting and had to do with the speed of the Earth’s rotation and how much that speed was going to change between the time Ronan said the last word of the spell and the time he arrived at his destination. Ronan was desperate for deep breaths of air now, but there was only one word left, the actuator of the spell, seven syllables long—one for each node of the symbol that finished the spell, a complicated Celtic-knot-looking thing. Ronan found that he was shaking all over with fine muscle tremors as if he’d just had a run round the school track. He locked his knees and clenched his fists and got those last syllables out—
And something squeezed the air out of his lungs so hard that for a moment Ronan was blind. Then the pressure let up again. Ronan gasped, opened his eyes—
And gasped yet again, because he was on top of Bray Head. And then the wind hit him and he had to concentrate on bracing himself until the gust let up for a moment and he could look around.
***
It took Ronan half a minute or so to finish getting his breath back, time he spent checking out the stony, muddy spot where he stood. The big cross they’d put up here on a concrete pedestal in the nineteen-fifties was missing. Well, that was hardly a surprise. But as he scanned around him through the blowing curtains of rain, Ronan saw that as far as Bray went, absolutely everything else he knew was missing too.
The landscape itself was almost exactly as it should be, from the rounded crests of the Wicklow Mountains to the southward, to the peaks of Sugarloaf and Little Sugarloaf behind him to the west, right around to the low soft rises and slopes of the Dublin Mountains northward and the bumpy crescent leading up the coast to Dun Laoghaire and out to sea. But they were all there was.
If things weren’t already strange enough in the wake of the last day’s events, this would have shaken him badly. But Ronan had had enough time to slide into a mindset where, since the impossible clearly was possible at the moment, he might as well roll with it. Since I got here from home, he thought, stands to reason there ought to be a way to get back home from here.
Immediately he understood the answer by way of the Speech itself: Not until you’ve passed through whatever test is to come.
“Well, okay,” Ronan said under his breath. After all, he did say ‘Ordeal…’ “So let’s see what that’s going to be.”
Assuming, of course, that the storm was going to let him get on with it. Because people’ve nearly been killed in these mountains when they got caught out in weather that wasn’t even this bad… Ronan turned to seaward and was glad he was protected by the shell of water he was already wearing from the water that would have been lashing him otherwise. Out eastward, for as far as he could seen, slate-dark decks of solid cloud lowered over the sea from horizon to horizon, turning the day into a premature twilight lit only by incessant flickers of lightning up inside the cloud. The mutter and rumble of thunder was almost constant, most of it well out to sea at the moment but some rumbles getting closer, and quickly. The sea itself was in tumult, big waves plunging in toward the coastline. Ronan wasn’t expert at judging sea heights—he wasn’t into sailing—but the swells looked tall and ugly.
Have to feel sorry for whoever’s gonna get hit by this, he thought. Anybody living by this water is gonna be in big trouble real soon now…
He looked out to his left, trying to get a glimpse of the thatched lodges near where he’d arrived, but then was distracted by the realization that there was a much bigger settlement much closer. Just down below him on the northern side of the Head, near its foot, was a cluster of such lodges, arranged in a rough double circle. The village—for the settlement was big enough to be considered one—was right where the southern end of the Seafront promenade would be, in Ronan’s own time. Here, though, instead of a broad sandy beach, the little ring-village faced a stony shore that reached further out into the water than the modern Seafront did; and among the stones was a deep round little harbor that looked like someone had dug it clean out of the shoreline with an ice cream scoop. Maybe, I don’t know, a hundred people live down there? More?
There was no telling. Sensibly, in weather like this, everybody was inside, and smoke curled sluggishly out of a few of the lodges’ roof-vents, only to be instantly beaten down out of the air by the relentless rain. There were some small oval-looking boats nearby, but they’d all been dragged up way up onto the shingled beach and lay there upside down, lumps that were already half covered with waterborne sand.
Won’t be enough, Ronan thought, shaking his head. The water’ll be up around those soon… drag them away, smash them up. And what happened to the boats would probably happen to the houses too.
The thought gave Ronan the shivers, dry though he was. He’d seen some seriously bad weather in his time. Bray, being on the coast, had caught some of the worst of the storms that came in from the European side of things when he was little. And everybody learned about Hurricane Charlie in 1986, when the river Dargle broke its banks and flooded half of Bray, killing people and causing millions of pounds’ worth of damage that took years to repair. He remembered being shown ancient film and video footage of the chaos: Main Street under water, people paddling kayaks past parked cars, water cascading down over the DART tracks and past them, ripping up the Seafront’s structures and dumping them in shattered fragments out on the beach. Now he looked out at that sea, where the wind was whipping the surface of the water into sharp scary-looking waves with whitecapped tops already almost hidden by clouds of blown foam, and he thought, This really looks like it’s going to be worse than that. Better get a last look at all this, because pretty soon there won’t be anything left…
Ronan gazed down sadly, thinking about that history unit in school, a few years back, and the way it had transformed the glamorized bright-colored Irish-myths landscape of his childhood into something more sober and difficult… and with a lot of mysteries buried in it that didn’t have anything to do with stories of gods and fantastic creatures. He cast his mind back to what the historians down at the Iron Age village in Waterford had told them about life in Ireland back then. Those people had had a hard life, but an interesting one. There’d been trade with Wales, trade with places even further off—
Now, though, looking down at the double ring of lodges by its tiny harbor, into his mind by way of the Speech came flowing a great rush of knowledge that hadn’t come from that school trip, from the hasty talk of raths and cashels and stone ring-forts. He wasn’t just being told: he was being shown.
In a rush of sudden vision like a timelapse sequence in a documentary he saw for himself the wakes of little square-sailed ships making their way across from Wales and then running up and down the Irish coast, putting in at what natural harbors existed. He saw armed explorers go inland, seeking out the locals, contacting their leaders. He knew, without needing to see it, that money was changing hands: the trade with the Lands Outside was being built up as he watched. At first it was in dogs, then in cattle, later in horses: he saw them being led down to the boats and put aboard.
But slowly the cargoes changed. Ronan started to see lines of people going down to those boats, being put into them, and not returning. Then he realized with horror what the new cargoes were, and why so many fewer people were bothering to farm t
he inhabited lands any more. They had found a more profitable sort of merchandise. The Irish had discovered the slave trade.
Ronan had taken only brief note when it came up in his history class of the so-called “Irish Dark Age”, a time between the second century before Christ and the fourth century after—when the pollen record in the bogs showed that suddenly people seemed to be doing a lot less agriculture, and no one was sure why. It was a mystery (one of his teachers last term had said) why this stagnation or decline in the ancient Irish Iron Age way of life should come at the same time as those centuries when the Roman Empire was at its peak—busily dominating southern Britain and starting to consider the opportunities that the next island over might hold.
It hadn’t made much sense when Ronan had heard about it first. It seemed to him then that if nothing else, trade between the islands of Britain and Ireland night have done better, not worse. More people, eating better, living better, more people, more farming, yeah? Should have been a cycle.
But it wasn’t. And now Ronan understood what there hadn’t been proof of, because there hadn’t been any writing about it, or any that had survived. People weren’t farming as much any more because, instead, they were starting to raid each other’s settlements, taking their food… then enslaving their former neighbors, selling them on, and living off the proceeds.
Ronan’s mouth worked in disgust as the storm rose around him. The slavery thing. He had always hated it, and had been shocked to learn when he was small how Saint Patrick himself was a slave brought from Wales to Ireland. That was generally no news: everybody got taught about it in religion class. But that the Irish might be selling their own people into slavery—that definitely wasn’t something you were taught in school. Ronan could just imagine Seamus’s face, and his response, if someone told him about that.
Yet here it was, and it had been going on for a while. Not all the time, of course. Some of the stuff the wizardry showed him being traded through that little scraped-out port was gold and pottery and rough iron weaponry, and even baskets of puppies: wolfhounds, Ronan thought. Or their ancestors. But again and again those lines of twenty or thirty or fifty people chained together were prodded down to the water by men with spears, and packed cruelly tight into those little square-sailed boats like so much mobile merchandise.
Ronan’s gut clenched at the sight of it, and he started to get angry. He looked away, out toward the roiling water, and could feel the size and power of the storm churning in toward him from out there. It would hit this coast and wipe out every one of these little settlements that might have been built next to the sea to take advantage not just of the fishing, but the business opportunities. It would kill the chieftains and the servants, the householders and yes, the slaves; and all their cows and dogs and cats and everything right down to the rats and mice… everything that lived there. Yes, the inland villages would probably survive. But there would be flooding and famine in a place where the weather and the climate were probably precarious enough already.
So let it happen, said something in the back of his head: a thought, a voice. If they’re part of the slave trade, maybe they deserve this. Walk away.
If you walk away, said another thought, another voice, who knows how history will be changed?
Or how it won’t be? said another. Maybe this is the place where the trade stops, if you let this happen.
Ronan was having trouble telling whether these were his own thoughts or whether the Shoulder Angel and the Shoulder Devil were back again.
Whether they were or not, they were both annoying. “Doesn’t make sense,” Ronan said under his breath. “Even if these guys all die, people inland are still probably going to do it…”
But if everyone here dies, it’ll be a lot harder for them to carry on. The harbors will have to be rebuilt, new traders recruited—people who know how to sail in the open sea, who’re willing to relocate here. Maybe it’ll be too much trouble.
If everyone here dies, maybe the inward trade will stop forever too… and the slave boy who’ll grow up to be Saint Patrick will never arrive. What happens to history here then?
Ronan stood there feeling the wind picking up. It too seemed to have voices in it—increasingly angry ones. Something was whipping it up, lashing it from behind the way a jockey lashes a horse, whipping it toward the shore. If I don’t do something, Ronan thought, we’re going to have… I don’t know… a tsunami or something come through here.
It was strange that the thought But what can I do about this? never even occurred to him. For the moment he knew he could do almost anything he could think of… anything he could decide to do. It might cost him, of course, the way even the spell to get up here had cost him. But he knew he could change what was going to happen here.
Ronan swallowed as the roar of the wind past him started slowly to scale up toward a scream. He had little time to figure out what his next move should be. But what he’d said to Pidge now acquired an unexpected edge. ‘Do you want me to stop and run a referendum…?’
He could see the way the water was starting to pile up into huge waves out there. Okay, maybe not a tsunami, Ronan thought, maybe you need an earthquake for that. But that’s not natural, what’s coming. This is going to flood way inland and scrape everything off the shore for miles.
And so what? said one of the voices. If this storm doesn’t do it, some other one will. You going to stay here for the rest of your life interfering with the weather? Nothing you do can matter here in the long run.
It sounded very sensible. But that line of reasoning reminded Ronan of the issue of where he was, and when he was, and how he was going to get back… if he was. The wizardry had made it plain to him that there was no way out for him, no way back, except through this problem and out the other side… one way or another.
And Pidge had told him that sometimes people didn’t come back.
Ronan gazed down at the little double ring of thatched lodges there by the foot of the Head, looking so crude, so primitive. From one possible viewpoint, this moment was so long ago. And his world was what it was: how could what happened here possibly matter to his world of computers and satellite TV and comfortable houses? That was the reality: the present, even the future. This was the past, savage and deadly even without bad weather—full of disease and danger and, yes, evil. Maybe it was better gone…
He was a breath from turning away and trying to figure out a way to get himself out of this when unexpectedly Ronan saw something moving down among the lodges. It was a little dot, almost black against the paler shingle and sand, and it was running away at top speed out into the wet and the wind. Straight for one of the boats it ran, and plowed right into the sand around it, and fell over.
The next moment, out from behind one of the lodges came running something that was almost a stick figure—boy or girl, Ronan couldn’t tell—wrapped in uneven muddy-colored clothes that the rain and spray instantly plastered against the child who wore them. The thin little shape with long dark hair flapping and whipping around its face went pelting barefoot across the stones and sand, hopping a little because the stones hurt, making straight for the little black shape that had righted itself after running into the sand and was now cocking its leg against the half-buried boat, peeing against it.
It was a puppy. It finished peeing and then ran in a little circle of relief, giving the child who’d run out after it into the storm a chance to grab it, pick it up, and run back toward the lodges. The puppy was wriggling in the child’s arms and trying to lick the face of the one who carried it. And a second later they were behind one of the inner lodges again, blocked away from Ronan’s sight.
Just like that, his perception of what he’d been seeing flipped right around.
It’s just people down there, Ronan thought. And of course some of them are kids. There’s no possible way any of this is their fault. And whatever else might be going on with the grownups, some of them are innocent too. …And more: even if they were involved in the trade,
which seemed likely enough, how did he know that some of the people down there didn’t hate the idea of selling people to make a living, but thought they didn’t have a choice? Even if they were wrong, did they deserve to die for it?
For maybe long enough for three or four long breaths Ronan just stood there, half blind to the vista, hardly noticing the way the lightning in the clouds above was starting to flicker faster and brighter or the way the angry voice of the thunder rolled.
Okay, he said silently, because in this wind there wasn’t any point in saying anything out loud: he wouldn’t be able to hear himself even if he shouted. You know what? It’s not my business to figure out who deserves to die. That’s all shite. This is about life, yeah? Let’s just keep all these people alive and let them sort out the details themselves. This is their time, not mine. If there’s going to be history, fine, let them be the ones who make it. But they can’t do that if they’re dead!
***
The wind really started to scream now, and the wind was pushing at him, shoving him with intent, knowing he’d made his mind up. There was so much water in the air that Ronan could hardly see.
Except he had wizardry to see with; and the water itself seemed to be a little on his side. Right, Ronan thought, and glanced around him as he had a sudden nervous thought about how high up he was, and how exposed. First of all, I’d really like not to be hit by lightning right now…
The Speech showed him the spell: three interlocking spell circles surrounding him, with seven word-syllables glowing hot among them. Good, Ronan thought. Thanks for that. And he started to say them.
It was easier this time—a lot easier, not least because the spells were very different in type. Within a few seconds Ronan could feel, if not see, the grounding wizardry closing around him, ready to redirect any incoming lightning into the stones and soil of the Head. Okay, he thought. That’s a start. Now then…