6: Baile Átha Cliath / Dublin
The next morning, when Nita came into the kitchen, Aunt Annie was sitting at the kitchen table with her mobile, one of the house’s wireless phone handsets, a little netbook laptop, and a pile of the ubiquitous scribbled-on sticky notes. She looked up from the laptop as Nita came in and said, “Want to go into town?”
“Bray?”
“No, Dublin—”
The house phone rang again. It had been doing that all morning: Nita had been able to hear it even out in the trailer. Aunt Annie sighed, picked it up, hit the button. “Ballyvolan—”Nita went off to get herself a cup of tea.
After a while Aunt Annie hung up and looked over at Nita. “We’ll be meeting at a pub in town tonight,” she said, starting to punch a number into her mobile. “This should be fun for you; you haven’t been in a pub yet.”
Nita blinked at that. “Am I allowed?”
“Oh, yes, it’s not like bars in the States.” She finished dialing, put the phone to her ear. “You can’t drink, of course, but you can be in a pub all right, as long as you’re over a certain age and it’s earlyish. Different pubs have different policies. But you’ll have no problems.” To the mobile she said, “Doris? Anne. Johnny says tonight at nine, in the Long Hall. Will you call Shaun and Mairéad? —Right. Yes, we are. Right. Bye.”
“How are we going in?” Nita said. “Driving?”
“No, we’ll take the DART train in from Greystones,” Aunt Annie said. “Doris will give us a ride back; we’re more or less on her way. Have your breakfast and we’ll go. We can slouch around and do tourist things.” Aunt Annie smiled at her. “I think I owe you that much, after the other night...”
Nita grinned back and went to get her jacket.
It turned out that she didn’t need it, for the day turned surprisingly warm, up in the eighties now. She and Aunt Annie drove down to Greystones, stuck the car in the DART’s park-and-drive lot, and then went to stand on the platform, looking out toward Greystones’ south beach. Down there dogs ran and barked, and there were even a few people in the water, which astonished Nita; it was some of the coldest water she’d ever tried to swim in and immediately bounced out of with her teeth chattering. Most of the people were out in the sun on the sand, turning very pink.
“Most of the time you can tell right away in the summer when someone’s from Ireland,” Aunt Annie said, “especially when the sun’s been out. It doesn’t seem to occur to people here to use sunblock, since they see the sun so rarely...They all turn into lobsters, the poor things.” She shook her head. “Not this year, though. People are actually getting tans.”
Nita looked toward the green DART train that was moving up to the platform from the holding tracks. “Global warming?” she said.
Aunt Annie just shook her head. “Who can say? —Take one of the right-hand seats,” she said. “You’ll get a better view of the water as we go in.”
Nita did. The train pulled out, and Nita looked out at the north beach as they passed it; more sunbathers, someone riding a horse at the gallop.
“Aunt Annie,” she said, “you know something—Why didn’t I see your name when I went through the manual and looked in the wizards’ directory?”
“Confidentiality,” her aunt said. “I wasn’t ‘out’ to you yet. The manual senses such things.” She looked at Nita thoughtfully. “I suppose I really should have anticipated it; my kids came out nonwizardly, after all. But anyway, I was looking at the manual this morning... You’ve been busy.”
“Yeah, you could say that.” Nita smiled.
Aunt Annie smiled. “Not unusual. Things quiet down a lot after the first five or ten years or so. I remember when I first got my manual, I had about three years when I hardly had a moment to myself. Then things got calm when I went off to college.”
“Did you have a partner?”
The train went abruptly darkish, lit only by the feeble ceiling lights, as it passed into the tunnel bored through Bray Head. “I did for a while,” she said. “But she and I parted company eventually.” She caught Nita’s shocked look. “It happens sometimes. You grow apart...or one partner finds something more important than the magic...or you start disagreeing about how to work.”
Nita shook her head, shocked. She couldn’t imagine not agreeing with Kit on a plan or course of action within a matter of seconds; and indeed, there’d been times when if they hadn’t been able to agree that fast, they would have been dead. “Do you still talk?” she said.
“Oh, sure, pretty often. We’re friendly enough.” The train burst out into the light again, revealing the beach on the other side of Bray Head, and the iron-railed Promenade with its hotels and arcade. “Don’t worry,” said Aunt Annie. “I think maybe you and your partner have been through enough trouble together that you’ll be working together for a long while.”
They pulled into Bray station; the DART stopped long enough to pick up passengers from other main line trains, and then headed out again. About half an hour later, the train slid into Tara Street station. Nita and her aunt got out and made their way through the orange-tiled exterior, beneath the skylights and down the escalator, and out into the streets of Dublin.
It was a fascinating combination of old and new, and Nita was rather bewildered by it all at first. There were tiny cobbled alleys that seemed not to have been repaved in a hundred years, or maybe two, right next to broad streets roaring with traffic and alive with lights and people shopping; old, old churches caught in the middle of shiny new shopping centers; shouting, cheerfully messy street markets in the shadow of big department stores: broad Georgian boulevards adorned with sudden sleek additions like the Millennium Spire, a slender four-hundred foot spike of brushed and shining chrome that speared the local sky.
“It takes a little while to get used to,” her aunt said, as they crossed the street south of O’Connell Bridge and headed down past the stately fronts of Trinity College and the Bank of Ireland, on the way to the pedestrian precinct at Grafton Street. “If you come from one of the big cities in the States, Dublin can seem very small at first, caught in a time warp. Even though it’s got its own buzz, it still seems slower by comparison to, say, New York or LA. Later, though…” She chuckled. “You wonder how you ever put up with a place where people are in such a hurry all the time.” She smiled.
They turned left at the corner of Grafton Street, heading for the National Museum. It was next to the Dáil, the Irish houses of parliament, and Aunt Annie clearly knew her way around it. Once inside she led Nita down a flight of stairs, past a sign that said TREASURY. “There are a lot of gorgeous things here,” she said, “but this is probably the most famous of them.”
They stopped in front of a glass case that was thicker than any of the others scattered around the big room. No one else was nearby. Nita moved close to look at it. The cup inside it sat on a big lucite pedestal; a bright spotlight was trained on it from above. Nita thought this might have been unnecessary… since she suspected it might be able to glow by itself.
“The Ardagh Chalice,” her aunt said softly. Nita looked at it; not just with the eyes, but with a wizard’s senses, and looked as hard as she could. The chalice was about two feet high and a foot wide, mostly gold, with elaborate and beautiful spiral patterns worked on its sides in silver, and ornamented with rubies and topazes. The jewels were lovely enough, but Nita had more of an eye for the engraved and inlaid “knotwork” ornamentation on the sides. They were spell diagrams in a very antique style, and though they looked simple, that was an illusion created by the extreme skill of whoever had designed them. They were subtle, and potentially of huge power; but they were quiescent, emptied of their virtue.
“It’s not really very old,” Nita said.
“The physical aspects of it, no.” Her aunt looked at it. “This chalice was made in the second century.”
“Not the Holy Grail, then,” Nita said.
Her aunt smiled slightly. “No. And yes. The Treasures might have been made
by gods, but they were made of mortal matter...and matter passes. The problem is, of course, that the power put in them—the soul of the Treasures, more or less—is as immortal as the powers that made them. The soul passes on when the envelope wears out—‘reincarnates,’ finds another ‘body’ that’s suitable. This cup was a vessel, for a while. But not any more, I think. Do you feel anything different?”
Nita looked at the cup again, longer this time. Finally she said, “I don’t know. It’s as if...if you knew how to shake this awake, this ‘soul,’ you might do it. But you’d have to know how.”
Her aunt nodded. “We may have to figure out how. —Come see the Sword.”
They went up a flight of stairs, through another room or two. The room they finally stopped in was full of ancient gold work: torcs and stickpins and necklaces and bracelets of gold, beads and bangles, carved plates of gold linked together. “It used to be mined in Wicklow,” her aunt said, “not too far from us. But by the fourth century most of it was gone. Anyway, this is worth more than any of them, if you ask me.”
The central case held the sword. It lay there very plain against red velvet; long and lean, shaped like a willow leaf, with no gold or jewel anywhere about it—a plain bronze blade, notched, scraped, somewhat withered-looking. Nita bent close to it, feeling with all of her. “Now this is old,” she said.
“Older than the cup,” said Aunt Annie. “Bronze age, at least.”
Nita nodded. There was a faint feeling of purpose still in the old bronze, like a memory impressed on matter by a mind now gone: like the ghosts in Aunt Annie’s back yard, a tape still replaying and very faintly to be heard. But there was no vigor in it, only recollection: wistful, mournful, feeble… “It might have been the real Sword once,” Nita said. “But it’s almost forgotten. It’s not nearly as much there as the Cup. You’re going to have trouble waking it up… if anybody even can.”
Her aunt nodded. “That’s what I think too.”
Nita shook her head. “And there’s nothing else in the building that’s even this much awake…” She sighed. “So we’ve got the Stone, and maybe the Cup, and something that might work for the Sword, but probably won’t...and no Spear.”
“That about sums it up, yes. The wizards around the country will be looking for other swords that might work better. But the spirit of the Spear Luin seems to have passed completely. Either no ‘body’ was strong enough to contain it...or it was just too powerful to be contained any more in a universe that had no suitable envelope for it, and it passed out entirely.”
Nita rather thought that it had passed. Spears were symbols of the element of Fire, and fire was the most uncontainable of the five elements, next to plasma. Nita began to worry. Three of the Treasures would not be enough, to judge from what the Sidhe had hinted. But she was fresh out of ideas about what to do.
She looked at her aunt. “Are we done here?”
“I think so. Want to go over to Grafton Street?”
“Sounds good.”
***
They spent the afternoon doing, as her aunt had promised, touristy things; wandering around the shopping center at Saint Stephen’s Green, having tea in the Shelbourne Hotel, listening to the street performers playing on pipes and banjos and occasionally spoons. They walked over O’Connell Bridge to look up the Liffey at the Halfpenny Bridge’s graceful curve, one of the trademarks of Dublin; and browsed through the shops on the south side of the Halfpenny Bridge in the Temple Bar area, Dublin’s so-called “Left Bank.” They went up to have a closer look at the Spire, and at the General Post Office, still sporting its bullet holes from the Irish Rising; then down to the street market in Moore Street, where people stood around carts and kiosks full of food and toys and casual clothing, and shouted their wares.
About seven o’clock, Aunt Annie said, “Dinner?” Nita agreed happily, and they went off to have a very New Yorkish pizza in a little restaurant in South Anne Street. Then they walked a few blocks westward in the city, in the general direction of Dublin Castle, to the pub where that night’s meeting would take place.
The Long Hall was a handsome place, fronted in beveled glass and stained glass, all arranged so that people standing inside, in front of the windows, couldn’t quite be seen from outside. The glass in the top windows was clear, showing the beautiful carved and painted plaster ceiling, and the gas fixtures still hanging from it. Some of them had been converted for electricity, some hadn’t. As they went in, Nita gazed admiringly at the huge polished hardwood bar, and the antique mirrors, reaching nine feet up from the back of the bar to the ceiling, on the wall behind it. Carved wood and beveled glass and brass railings were everywhere. So were many cheerful people, drinking, but talking more. The place was filled with the subdued roar of a hundred conversations.
“We’re in the back room. Hi, Jack,” said Aunt Annie to one of the men behind the bar. He was busy filling a glass with the creamy-dark Guinness from one of the arched taps at the bar: he nodded to Aunt Annie, didn’t say anything.
“Jack Mourne,” Aunt Annie said to Nita, as they made their way through a low carved archway into the back room. “He owns the place.”
“Does he know what’s going on?”
“I should think he does: he’s one of the Area Specialists. What would you like to drink, hon?”
“Can I get a Coke?”
“No problem. Be right back.”
Nita found herself a seat at a small round wooden table with ornate iron legs, and waited, fidgeting a little self-consciously. She had never been in a bar by herself, though Aunt Annie seemed to think that this wasn’t quite the same. She might have a point, though, Nita thought. Here, the drinking looked almost incidental. People were shouting at each other across the back room, chatting, arguing, laughing, pointing, hollering.
“Here you go,” Aunt Annie said, sitting down next to Nita with a relieved look. She handed Nita her drink and sipped briefly at her pint. “Perfect,” she said. “Jack pulls the best pint in this part of town.”
“Aunt Annie,” Nita said, “if this is a wizard’s meeting—how are you going to keep the regular people out of here?”
“Spell on the back-room archway,” Aunt Annie said. “Look closely at the carving when you go to the rear ladies’ room. Nonwizards hit it and decide they don’t feel like going back there after all—on normal nights, Jack just takes the spell finial off: that little carved flower in the lower right-hand corner. Probably no one could hear us through all this din anyway, but there are voice-scramblers on regardless. Jack makes anything wizardly come out sounding like an argument about football. “ Aunt Annie chuckled. “Nice scrambler spell, that: took him a while to write. But he’s one of our best writers. You need a custom spell in this part of the world, it’s Jack you come to, or Marie Shaughnessy down in Arklow, or Charles Redpath up north in Belfast.”
“Then all these people back here are wizards?” Nita said, looking around her in astonishment. She had never been in such a large gathering of fellow practitioners of the Art before.
“Oh yes. All that could come at short notice, of course. Relax a while; we can’t do anything until Doris and Johnny get here.”
So Nita drank her Coke and listened to the accents around her, and chatted every now and then with the people who came up to her aunt to say hello. If she’d been mired in Irish accents before, the situation now got much worse: she heard about twenty more from as many different people, no two of them the same, and some very odd indeed. In addition, there were a lot of people from Northern Ireland down for this meeting, and their accents astounded her. They sounded more like New Yorkers than anything else, though more nasal.
The Northerners all seemed very open, friendly people, which to Nita seemed a little strange at first: seeing what most Americans saw of Northern Ireland from the news, she half-expected them to be a bit unhappy or nervous, as if afraid a bomb might still suddenly go off under them even though there’d been peace up there for a while now. But they all seemed perfe
ctly cheerful. One man in his late forties, a jocund man in a leather jacket covered with patches, told Nita he’d never seen a bomb or been within fifty miles of one, nor had anybody he knew. The peaceful small-town life he described seemed hard to reconcile with all the old news shots Nita had seen of taped-off, shattered buildings, and the people with ski masks and rifles.