Tualha stopped, panting a little. Nita made a list in her head. “That’s, let’s see,” she said, “six invasions. If you count the Tuatha.”
“It’s all invasions,” said Tualha, “from the land’s point of view.”
Nita thought about that. “You may have something there. So then who threw the Tuatha out?”
Tualha laughed at her. “Sure you’re joking me,” she said. “They’re still here.”
“Say what?”
A leaf went by Tualha on the breeze. She tried to grab it, missed spectacularly, fell off the fence, and came down on the ground so hard that Nita could hear the breath go out of her in a squeak.
Nita couldn’t help it any more: she burst out laughing. “I’m sorry, I really am,” she said, “but I think you need some practice.”
Tualha was already sitting up and washing. After a few moments of this she looked at Nita scathingly. “When you’re a cat-bard,” she said, “you get to choose. You get to be fast, or you get to be smart. And no offense, but I prefer smart. Not sure what you prefer, Shonaiula ni Cealodháin,” she muttered, and scuttered off.
Nita chuckled, then got up and made her way back the way Tualha had gone, through the areaway between the riding school and the stable. As she went she noticed a sort of burning smell, and put her head quickly into the stable-block to make sure that something flammable hadn’t fallen into the hay. She couldn’t see anything but one of the grooms leading out a chestnut horse.
Out in the concreted yard, she found the source of the burning. There was a small pickup truck out there, and a square steel box about two feet on a side had been unloaded from it. It’s a forge, Nita thought, as the little woman standing by it pulled at a cord hanging out of one side, and pulled at it again, and again, like someone trying to start a lawn mower.
The comparison was apt, since a moment later a compressor stuttered and then roared to life. That pushes air into it, Nita thought, and then—The woman standing by the compressor now went around to one side of the portable forge and applied a blowtorch to an aperture there. How about that, Nita thought. Portable horseshoeing—
Nita went down to have a look as the chestnut horse was led up to the forge to be reshoed. The woman standing by the forge had to be about sixty. She was of medium height, with short close-cropped white hair and little wire-rimmed glasses, wearing jeans and boots and a T-shirt. Her face was very lined and very cheerful, and her accent was lighter than a lot of them Nita had heard so far: in fact, she sounded like an American who had been here for a long time. “Oh, you again is it,” she said to the chestnut as the groom led it up and fastened its reins to a loop on the back of the pickup truck’s tailgate. “We’ll do better than we did last time.” And then the farrier looked up as Nita wandered over. “And you’ll be Miz Callahan’s niece, won’t you.”
“That’s right,” Nita said, and put her hand out to shake. She was getting used to the ritual by now, and was becoming relieved that no one was in a position to offer her any tea.
The farrier held up her hands in apology: they were covered with honest grime. “Sorry,” she said. “I’m Biddy Ó Dálaigh. How are you settling in?”
“Pretty well, thanks.”
“Have you seen this done before?”
“Only on TV,” Nita said. “And never out of the back of a truck.”
Biddy laughed. “Makes it easier to get a day’s work done,” she said, rooting around in a box in the truck and coming out with a horseshoe. She looked critically from it to the horse’s feet, then bent down to push it into the aperture of the furnace-box. “Used to be all the farms had their own farriers. No one can afford it now, though. So I go to my work, instead of people bringing it to me.”
Nita leaned against the truck to watch. “You must travel a lot.”
Biddy nodded and walked around to the front of the horse, stroking it and whistling to it softly between her teeth. “All over the county,” she said. “A lot of horse shows and such.” With her back to the horse’s nose, she picked up its right forefoot and curled it around and under, grasping it between her knees. With a claw-ended tool like the nail-pulling end of a hammer, Biddy went around the horse’s hoof loosening the nails and prying them up one by one: then changed her leverage and knocked the shoe completely up and off. With another tool, a smaller one with a sharp point, Biddy started trimming down the rough edges of the hoof.
“Tell Derval,” Biddy said to Aisling, the blond groom who’d been handling the chestnut, “that he won’t be needing the orthopedic any more; the hoof’s cleared up.”
Nita was surprised. “Orthopedic horseshoes?” she said.
“Oh yes,” Biddy said. “Horses get problems with their feet the same as people do. Tango here’s been wearing a booster until this hoof grew back in straight—he hurt the foot a few months ago, and that can make the hoof go crooked. It’s just an overdeveloped toenail, after all.” She patted Tango as she got up. “We’re all better now, though, aren’t we, my lad? And you’ll have a nice run tomorrow.” She reached into the truck and came up with a pair of tongs.
“He’s in the hunt?” Nita said.
Biddy nodded. “He belongs to Jim McAllister up on the Hill.” She rooted around in the forge, stirring and rearranging the coals in it. Nita peered into the opening of it.
“Lava rocks?” she said.
“Oh aye, like what you get for barbecues. They work as well as charcoal unless you’re doing dropforging or some such.”
She turned her attention back to the hoof, scraping its edges a bit more. Then Biddy picked up the tongs again. “Here we go, now,” she said, and took hold of the hoof again. With her free hand she plucked the horseshoe out of the furnace and slapped it hard against the hoof, exactly where she wanted it. There was a billow of smoke, and a stink like burned hair or nails.
Nita waved the smoke away. “Foul, isn’t it,” Biddy said, untroubled. After removing the shoe from the hoof briefly and dunking it in a bucket of cold water, she replaced the shoe, dropped the tongs, took a hammer out of another belt loop, reached into a pocket for nails, and began tapping them in with great skill, each nail halfway in with one tap, all the way in with the next.
Nita watched Biddy do Tango’s other three shoes. Then another horse was led out, and Nita turned away: this kind of thing was interesting enough, once. Maybe I’ll go down to Greystones, she thought. Aunt Annie had told her that the bike was out in the shed behind the riding school, if she wanted to use it and no one else had it. Or maybe I won’t. It was strange, having nowhere familiar to go, and no one familiar to go with. Being at loose ends was not a sensation she was very used to: but she didn’t feel quite bold enough at the moment to just go charging off into a strange town. I wouldn’t mind if Kit was here, though...
Nita wandered back the way she’d come, back to the field where the jumping equipment lay around. She climbed over the fence and walked out into the field to look at it all; the odd barber-striped poles, the jumps and steps and stiles, some painted with brand names or names of local shops.
The wind began to rise. From this field, which stood at the top of a gentle rise, you could see the ocean. Nita stood there and gazed at it for a while. The brightness it had worn this morning, under full sunlight, was gone. Now, with the sun behind a cloud, it was just a flat silvery expanse, dull and pewter-colored. Nita smelled smoke again, and idly half-turned to look over her shoulder, toward the farrier’s furnace…
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 wi
nd 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.”
3: Bri Cualann / Bray
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.