If there was a little challenge in her voice, Ronan didn’t rise to it. “Could I?” he said. “I knew it was a timeslide. Would I have been changing history? Did I have any choice?”
“Damn straight you did,” Nita said, again under her breath.
Ronan heard it. He looked up from under his brows at her, that familiar scowl. “That’s as may be. What could I do? Seeing them waving their arms and trying to get off, and knowing they would drown if they tried it, in that water.” He looked away again, as if slightly embarrassed. “Sure nothing came of it anyway. They were marooned there; no one ever came after them. They settled down there, and married the people there, some of them. I’m related to them, for all I know.”
Nita smiled slightly. “You didn’t know that no one would come after them, though. Suppose you had changed history? Suppose you’d just saved the lives of the people who were going to report back to Rome and bring in the conquerors?”
Ronan drank his drink and looked away. Nita reached out and patted his arm—a casual enough gesture, she did it with Kit all the time, but as she did it to Ronan, the shock of it, the closeness of actually touching him, ran up the arm like fire and half wilted her. “Never mind,” she said, trying to get some control back. After all, the point of each wizard’s Ordeal was always a private thing: that Ronan should share this much of it with her was more than he had to do. “You want another of those?” she said. “What did you call it?”
“A St. Clements. ‘Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St. Clements—’” He burst out laughing at Nita’s uncomprehending look. “Don’t know that one, I take it. Not on ‘America’s Top 40.’”
Nita knew when she was being made fun of, and knew when not to take it seriously: her heart warmed that he liked her enough to do it at all. “Eat turf and die, Paddy,” she said, and got up, feeling in her pocket for change.
She got Ronan’s drink, and when she got back, found her own waiting for her, and rather to her surprise, Johnny was sitting in her seat and chatting with Ronan. “Here,” Johnny said, and got up; “I was holding it for you. Listen, dear, I have a message for you. Tom and Carl send their best.”
“You know them? How are they?!” Nita said, sitting right up. “Are they okay? It was them, then!”
“They’re fine. I consult with them fairly often, especially Tom: he’s a consultant to the North American Regional group for compositional spelling. What was ‘them’?”
“I mean, it was them who sent me on assignment. They, I mean.”
Johnny smiled very slightly, and all his wrinkles deepened. “Ahh...no. Not even a Regional Senior or a Planetary can actually put a wizard on active assignment. No matter how certain we are that the world’s ending.” He shot a humorous look at Ronan, and Ronan looked like he was tempted to try to pull his head down inside his black turtleneck. “Those decisions are made higher up. I might have mentioned North American Regional, but there are more than humans involved in that. Never mind for now. I take it Doris had a talk with you about our local problems.” Nita opened her mouth to answer, and was startled by a sudden shout from up front. “LAST ORDERS NOW, TEN MINUTES GENTLEMEN, LAST ORDERS PLEASE—!”
Johnny laughed at the look her face must have been wearing. “The pubs close at eleven-thirty this time of year,” he said. “Anyway, Doris says she told you the ropes.”
“If you mean she told me not even to sneeze in the Speech,” Nita said, “yes.”
Johnny laughed under his breath. “It must seem hard. Believe me, it’s for the best… and there’ll be enough magic around here for anybody, come the end of the month, if things keep going the way they’ve been going. We’ll be in touch with you, of course.”
“Johnny,” Ronan said suddenly, “this may be out of turn—”
“Knowing you, my lad,” Johnny said, “probably.”
“Johnny—Look, it’s nothing personal,” Ronan said, glancing at Nita and blushing furiously again. “But why can’t this be handled locally? Why do we need blow-ins?”
Nita went red too, with annoyance. She thought of about six different cutting things to say, and kept her mouth shut on them all.
But Johnny simply looked mildly surprised. “Self-sufficiency, is it?” he said. “Have you fallen for that one? It’s an illusion, Ro. Why do we ‘need’ the help of the Tuatha de Danaan? Why do we need the Powers that Be? Or even the Lone Power?—for that One has a function in the universe, too. You know that. The whole lot of us are interconnected, and there’s no way we can get away from it, or any one group of us solve even the littlest problem entirely by ourselves. This matter is being handled locally. It’s being handled on Earth. Next thing you’ll be asking me what the Northern Irish wizards are doing here.” His eyebrows went up and down. “You’ve been listening to too many politicians. —Better apologize to her before she turns you into a soggy beermat,” Johnny said, patted Nita on the shoulder, and moved on.
“TIME NOW GENTLEMEN, TIME NOW, TAKE THOSE GLASSES AWAY CHARLIE!” Jack was shouting from the front of the pub. Nita did her best to keep her face still. She had gone quite hot and tight inside, and was holding onto herself hard; controlling her emotions had never been her strongest suit, and she had no desire to say something stupid here, where she was a guest and could make her aunt look bad. Besides, I’m a wizard among wizards. It should take more than some provincial punk with a chip on his shoulder to get me annoyed—!
“Look, Nita,” Ronan said. He sounded slightly desperate. “I didn’t—”
“You bet you didn’t,” she said. And shut herself up: and then lost it again. “Look,” she said, her voice low but fierce, “do you think this was my idea? Do you think I wouldn’t rather be back home with my partner taking care of business, than messing around in this dumb little place where you can’t even twitch without permission? Do you think I don’t have better things to do? ‘Blow-ins,’” she said bitterly, and picked up her drink and began to drink the whole thing at once, to shut herself up. At least she couldn’t say what she was thinking while she was drinking something.
Unfortunately, it was the wrong drink. In the middle of the second swallow she spluttered in shock at the alcoholic black-bread taste of it, and from beside her Aunt Annie said, “You’re going to get us thrown out of here, you know that? Here, have a napkin.”
Nita gasped and choked and took the napkin gratefully, and began mopping Guinness off herself and the table. Ronan was leaning against the wall and laughing—soundlessly, but so hard that he was turning twice as red as he had been. Furious, Nita felt around in her head for the small simple spell that would dump his own drink in his lap: then remembered where she was, and in rapid succession first shoved the sodden napkin down the neck of his turtleneck, and while Ronan was fumbling for it, knocked his glass sideways with her elbow. “Oops,” she said in utter innocence, as it went all over him.
“COME ON NOW GENTS, TIME NOW, TIME, HAVE YOU NO HOMES TO GO TO? YOU TOO LADIES, NO OFFENSE MEANT,” Jack shouted from the front of the pub. The conversations were getting louder, if anything. Ronan sat and stared at his lap, and just as he lifted his eyes to Nita’s, Johnny went by and patted him on the shoulder, and said, “I told you she was going to turn you into a soggy beermat. No one ever listens to me. ‘Night, Annie, call me in the morning…” And he was away.
“I guess we’d better go,” Aunt Annie said, as the lights began flashing on and off to remind people that it was time to drink up and get out. “Doris is waiting. Ronan, do you need a ride home?”
“No thank you, Mrs. Callahan,” he said, “I came in with Barry.”
“Right, then. Come on, Nita, let’s call it a night.”
Nita got up, and looked down at Ronan. He was gazing back at her with an expression she couldn’t interpret. Not anger, not amusement—what was it? She refused to waste her time trying to figure it out. “Keep your pants dry,” she said to him, trying desperately to keep her face straight, and losing it again. Gratefully she followed Mrs. Smyth and Aunt Anni
e out, grinning to herself.
Blow-ins. Hah.
She grinned all the way home...and wasn’t quite sure why.
7: Slieve na Chulainn / Great Sugarloaf Mountain
“What’s going on?” Kit said the next afternoon. “How are things going with the Treasures?”
They were sitting around the kitchen table, looking at the papers. “Well,” Nita’s aunt said, “Doris and a couple of the other Seniors are going to go in tonight and lift the Ardagh Chalice. They’ll leave a perfect copy in its place. They think they have a guess at how to make it wake up. Apparently whatever they did with the Stone worked better than they thought; it seems your friend Tom is quite an asset,” she said to Nita. “They were able to wake it up on the first try, using the spell he wrote for them.”
Nita nodded. “He says it’s because he used to write so many commercials.”
Aunt Annie chuckled. “Well, anyway, it’s awake. As you’ll have noticed, the land is getting, uh, restive...more than it was, anyway.”
“Are they going to bring the stone here? Or somewhere special?” said Kit.
“Oh, no...there’s no need for that. The Stone is the earth of Ireland, some ways; anywhere there is earth of Ireland, the Stone is there in essence. The same way that the Cup is the water of Ireland, and all wells and pools; the Sword is the air of Ireland, the Spear is the fire. The Treasures exist in essence in all the things they represent. But when they’re awake, they co-exist many times more powerfully than before. They themselves become weapons of considerable power; and the earth and air and water and fire themselves become weapons that we can turn to our advantage. We sincerely hope.” She took a drink of her tea.
“What about the Sword?” Kit said.
“It’s hard to say,” said Annie. “The Cup is more awake than any of the envelopes they’re thinking about using for the Sword; so they’re going to try the spell on the Chalice first, and see how the reanimation works on that. If it does, they’ll move on and try it on the sword in the Museum.”
“And the Spear?” Kit said.
Aunt Annie shook her head. “No news. There are a lot of spears and pikes and whatnot lying around, but none of them seem ever to have been the Spear Luin. Which is a problem, for Luin was the weapon that overthrew Balor. The others were basically support for it.”
Kit shrugged. “Well, something’ll turn up. Something always does.”
“I wish I had your confidence,” Aunt Annie said, getting up to pour herself another cup.
“Something has to turn up,” Kit said. “We’re here.”
Nita gave him a look. “Something’s always turned up before,” she said. “This is not a lot like before...”
Kit shrugged again. “Listen, if I can’t keep your spirits up, you won’t do good work.”
“How can my spirits be other than wonderful when I have this to look at?” she said, pushing the paper at him.
The Wicklow People had come out that morning, and the usual details of the fortunes and misfortunes of Wicklow people overseas, or the failure of the county council to do something about an urgent local problem, or the accusations of one of the local political parties about the purported bad behavior of one of the others, had been forced off the front pages. Other people besides Nita had been having problems.
SILLY SEASON COMES TO NORTH WICKLOW, said the headline. Underneath it was the beginning of a three-page feature story concerning the bizarre occurrences in the county that week. The trouble had started in the country. A farmer had claimed that a dinosaur—a small one, but still plainly a dinosaur—had been eating his sheep. These claims had been greeted with amusement by his neighbors, some of whom had suggested that he had, in the local way of putting it, “drink taken.”
The Gardaí declined comment on this business, as they did about the reports of rocks rolling uphill at Ballywaltrim, or the problem incurred by the dairy cattle farmer over by Kilmacanogue, who claimed his Guernsey herd was stolen—driven away across the dual carriageway by a man who said he was Finn MacCumhal, and was entitled to take any cattle that their owner was not strong enough to defend in battle. There were a chorus of noisy protests to Bray Urban District Council and Wicklow County Council about this—some people insisting that the local psychiatric hospital needed to look into its security.
Matters were no better anywhere else in Ireland. There were reports from all over of people’s lives being suddenly turned topsy-turvy by the appearance of ancient heroes, ancient villains, and ancient monsters, with which Ireland was well supplied. Several people dug up buried treasures after being told where to find them by kindly ghosts; unicorns were seen in Avonmore Forest Park: merfolk were heard singing off Howth. The Gardaí had no comment on these matters, either.
They were perusing these accounts when Johnny O’Driscoll arrived. Nita put the newspaper aside and introduced Kit to him. “You’re very welcome,” Johnny said to him. “Your friend here will have warned you about the overlays, though.”
“She mentioned, yes.”
“Well, be careful. We have enough problems at the moment.” Nita poured a cup of tea for Johnny; he took it, drank it with a thankful air, and said, “Everyone else I’ve talked to this morning has had a problem, so I might as well hear yours, too. What happened to you yesterday?”
“Nothing really,” Nita said. “But I had a really interesting chat with a fox the day before.” And she described her meeting with the dog-fox, and the information he had given her.
Johnny looked thoughtful at that. “I have to say,” he said, “that I’d suspected for some time that at least one of the Bright Powers was in the area, in human form. I had no solid confirmation. Normally, if one of Them is going to be in the area on business, the manuals give warning of it: or the Knowledge does, depending on which you use. But there’s been no such warning. Then again, this situation’s not normal. —Anyway, I had other indications. Interesting to hear them confirmed.”
Nita glanced over at Kit. “Why would They hide?” she said.
“To keep the other side from knowing that they’re here. Except that the other side seems to know already, so that reason doesn’t work in this case.” He shook his head. “I don’t know. The Powers are frequently beyond our ability to explain...but there’s nothing strange about that. They’re the next major level of creation up from us, after all. Should a rock expect to be able to explain a human being?”
“We have enough trouble with that ourselves,” Kit said.
“Just so. Anyway, whatever Power it is doubtless has good reasons for wanting to stay hidden. I wouldn’t want to break Its cover prematurely.”
Kit and Nita looked at each other.
“Meanwhile,” Johnny said, “Anne, if it’s all right with you, Doris will be stopping in this afternoon with what she’s picked up. The Enniskerry area is too badly overlaid for her to keep it up there for a few minutes without the place remembering all kinds of things that are better not roused. Down here things are a little cleaner; you and I can do something to suppress those memories about the church and Cromwell’s people.”
“No problem,” said Aunt Annie. “We’ll put it in the back office.”
“Fine. Your staff don’t usually go in there?”
“Only my secretary. I can ask her not to.”
“Fine. These Treasures are proving a little more dangerous than we thought. Harry, who went up to do the work on the Stone, did it all right...but I think he’s probably not going to be worth much of anything for the next few days. We have to be very careful that we don’t let people spend too long near these things. If you show me where you want to put it, I’ll build a warding for that room, and see that it doesn’t do anyone any damage.”
“But how can these be hurting people?” Nita said. “They’re good!”
“Oh, absolutely,” Johnny said. “There are probably no more powerful forces for good on the planet...except for human beings, naturally. But just because they’re good, doesn’t mean they’re safe.” br />