A Wizard Abroad, Page 3

  “There," her aunt said, maneuvering around a couple of curves in the road. "There's our mountain."

  Nita peered past her aunt, out towards the right. There was Great Sugarloaf. It looked very different from how it had looked from the air - sharper, more imposing, more dangerous. Heather did its best to grow up its sides, but the bare granite of the mountain's peak defeated it about two-thirds of the way up. Scree and boulders lay clear to see all about the mountain's bald head.

  The road ran past a service station where geese and a goat grazed behind a fence, watching the traffic; then through a shallow ravine that ran between two thickly-forested hills. Sunlight would fall down the middle of it at noon, Nita guessed, but at the moment the whole deep vale was in shadow. "Glen of the Downs," Aunt Annie said. "We're almost home. That's a nice place to hike to, down there, where the picnic benches are."

  After a couple more miles down the dual carriageway, Aunt Annie turned off down a little lane. To Nita's eyes this road looked barely wide enough for one car, let alone two, but to her shock several other cars passed them, and Aunt Annie never even slowed down, though she crunched so far over on the left side of the road that the hedges scraped the doors.

  "See that town down there on the left? That's Greystones," said Aunt Annie. "We do the best part of our shopping there. But here. . ." She turned off down another lane, this one literally just wide enough to let one car through. In half a minute they came out in the graveled 'parking lot' in front of a little house. Around it, on all sides, fenced fields and farm buildings stretched. It was forty acres, Nita knew: her aunt's life savings had gone into the farm, her great love.

  "Welcome to Ballyvolan," her aunt said. "Come on in and we"ll get you something to eat."

  They did more than that. They gave her a place to stay which was uniquely her own, and Nita was very pleased.

  They put her up, not in the house, but in a caravan out the back: a trailer, as she would have called it. She was getting the feeling that everything here had different names that she was going to have to get used to. But she was used to that; everything had different names in wizardry, too… yet it struck her as quite strange being here in this odd place where people she knew to be speaking English as their first language were nonetheless speaking it in accents so odd she couldn't make out more than one word in three. The accents came in all variations of thick, thin, light, impenetrable, lilting, dark; and people would run all their words together and talk very fast. Or very softly, so that Nita shortly began feeling as if she was shouting every time she opened her mouth.They gave her the caravan, and left her alone. “You'll want to just fall over and sleep, I should think," Aunt Annie said. "Come in when you're ready and we'll feed you." So Nita had unpacked her bag, and sat down on the little bed built into the side of the caravan. It was a good size for her. Its windows afforded a clear view of the path from the house, so that if she was to do a wizardry, she would have a few seconds to shut it down before anyone got close enough to see what was going on. There were cupboards and drawers, a shelf above the head of the bed, a little cupboard to hang things in, a table with a comfortable bench-seat to work at, and lights set in the walls here and there, and an electric heater to keep everything warm if it got cool at night.

  She leaned back on the bed with her manual in her hands, meaning to read through some of its Irish material before she dropped off. She never had a chance.

  Nita woke up to find it dark outside. Or not truly dark, but a very dark twilight. She glanced at her watch and saw that it was almost eleven at night. They had let her sleep, and she was ravenous. Boy, I must have needed that, she thought, and swung her" feet to the floor, stretching and scrubbing at her eyes.

  That was when she heard the sound: horses' hooves, right outside the door. That wasn't a surprise, except that they would be out there so late. Annie's farm was partly a livery stables, where people kept their horses because they didn't have stables of their own, or where they left them to be exercised and trained for shows. There were a couple of low voices, men's voices Nita thought, discussing something quietly. That was no surprise either: there were quite a few people working on Aunt Annie's farm - she had been introduced to a lot of them when she first arrived, and had forgotten most of their names. One of the people outside chuckled, said something inaudible.

  Nita snapped the bedside light on so that she wouldn't bash into things, and got up and opened the caravan door to look out and say hello.

  Except that no-one was there.

  "Huh," she said.

  She went out through the little concrete yard to the front of the house, where the front door was open, as Aunt Annie had told her it almost always was except when everyone had gone to bed. Her aunt was in the big quarry-tiled kitchen, making a cup of tea.

  "So there you are!" she said. "Did you sleep well? Do you want a cuppa?"

  "What? Oh, right. Yes, please," Nita said, and sat down in one of the chairs drawn up around the big pine table. One of the cats, a black-and-white creature, jumped into her lap: she had forgotten its name too in the general blur of arrival. "Hi there," she said to it, stroking it.

  "Milk? Sugar?"

  "Just sugar, please," Nita said. "Aunt Annie, who were those people out there with the horses?"

  Her aunt looked at her. "People with the horses? All the staff have gone home. At least I thought they did."

  "No, I heard them. The hooves were right outside my door, but when I looked, they'd gone away. Didn't take them long," she added.

  Aunt Annie looked at her again as she came over and put Nita's teacup down. Her expression was rather different this time. "Oh," she said. 'You mean the ghosts."

  Nita stared.

  "Welcome to Ireland," said her aunt.

  2.

  Cill Cumhaid Kilquade

  Nita sat back and blinked a little. Her aunt stirred her tea and said, "Do ghosts bother you?"

  "Not particularly," Nita said, wondering just how to deal with this line of enquiry. Wizards knew that very few ghosts had anything to do with people's souls hanging around somewhere. Most apparitions, especially ones that repeated, tended to be caused by a kind of 'tape recording' that violent emotion could make on matter under certain circumstances, impressing its energy into the molecular structure of physical things. Over long periods of time the 'recording' would fade away, but in the meantime it would replay every now and then, for good reasons or no reason, and upset the people who happened to see it. And if they happened to believe that such a thing was caused by human souls, the effects would get steadily worse, fed by the emotions of the living.

  Nita knew all this, certainly. But how much of it could she safely tell her aunt? And how to get it across without sounding like she knew more than a fourteen-year-old should?

  “Good," her aunt was saying. She drank her tea and looked at Nita across the table with those cool blue-grey eyes. “Did you hear the church bells, earlier?"

  "Uh, no. I must have been asleep."

  "We have a little church down the road," Aunt Annie said. "About three hundred years ago, after the English killed their King - Charles the First, it was - his "replacement", an English general named Oliver Cromwell, came through here." Her aunt took another long drink of tea. "He and his army went up and down this country throwing out the Irish landowners and installing English ones in their places. He sacked cities and burned houses and churches - ours was one - and got himself quite a name for unnecessary cruelty." Aunt Annie looked out the kitchen window, into the near-dark, watching the apple trees out the back move slightly in the wind. "I think what you heard was, well, a reminder of some soldiers of his, who were camped here on guard late at night. You can hear the horses, and you can hear the soldiers talking, though you usually can't make out what they're saying."

  "As if they were in the next room," Nita said.

  "That's right. The memory just reasserts itself every now and then; other people have heard it happening. It's usually pretty low-key." She looked
at Nita keenly.

  Nita shrugged in agreement. "They didn't bother me. They didn't seem particularly, well, "ghostly". No going "Ooooooo" or trying to scare anyone."

  "That's right," her aunt said, sounding relieved. "Are you hungry?"

  "I could eat a cow," Nita said, suspecting that in this household it would be wiser not to offer to eat horses.

  "I've got some beefburgers," her aunt said, getting up, "and some chicken…"

  Nita got up to help, and to poke around the kitchen a little. All the appliances were about half the size she was used to. She wondered whether this was her aunt's preference, or whether most of the cookers and refrigerators sold here were like that, for on the drive in she had kept getting a feeling that everything was a bit smaller than usual, had been scaled down somewhat. The rooms in her aunt's house were smaller than she was used to, as well, reinforcing the impression. "So have you got other ghosts," Nita said, "or are those all?"

  "Nope, that's it." Her aunt chuckled a bit and pulled out a frying pan. "You want more, though, you won't have far to go. This country is thick with them. Old memories. Everything here has a long memory… longer than it should have, maybe." She sighed and went rooting in a drawer for a few moments. "There's a lot of history in Ireland," Aunt Annie said. "A lot of bad experiences and bad feelings. It's a problem sometimes." She came up with a spatula. "Do you want onions?"

  "Yes, please," Nita said. Her aunt came up with a knife and handed it to Nita, then found an onion in a bin by the door and put it on the worktop. "Hope you don't mind crying a little," she said.

  "No problem."

  They puttered about the kitchen together, talking about this and that: family gossip, mostly. Aunt Annie was Nita's father's eldest sister, married once about twenty-five years ago, and divorced about five years later. Her ex-husband was typically referred to in Nita's family as 'that waste of time', but no-one at home had ever been too forthcoming about just why he was a waste, and Nita had decided it was none of her business. Aunt Annie had three kids, two sons and a daughter, all grown up now and moved out: two of them lived in the States, one in Ireland. Nita had met her two male cousins a couple of years ago, when she was very young, and only dimly remembered Todd and Alec as big, dark-haired, booming shapes that gave her endless piggyback rides.

  At any rate, her aunt had moved with her kids to Ireland after the divorce, and had busied herself with becoming a successful farmer and stable-manager. Now she had other people to manage her stables for her: she saw to the finances of the farm, kept an eye on the function of the riding school that also was based on her land, and otherwise lived the life of a moderately well-to-do countrywoman.

  They fried up beefburgers and onions. There were no rolls: her aunt took down a loaf of bread and cut thickish slices from it for both of them. "Didn't you have any dinner?" Nita said. "It's way past time."

  “We don't have set mealtimes," Aunt Annie said. 'My staff come in and get a snack when they can, and I tend to eat when I'm hungry. I was busy with the accounts for most of this evening - didn't notice I was hungry until just now. Unlike some," she said, looking ruefully down at the floor around the cooker, which was suddenly littered with cats of various colours, “who are hungry whether they've just eaten or not."

  Nita laughed and bent down to scratch the cats: the black-and-white cat again, and a marmalade-coloured cat with golden eyes, and a tiny delicate white-bibbed tabby, and another black-and-white cat of great dignity, who sat watching the others, and Nita and her aunt, unblinking. “Bear," Aunt Annie said, “and Chessie, and Big Paws. All of you, out of here: you've had your dinners! Now where's the mustard got to?"

  She turned away to find it. Under her breath, Nita said hurriedly in the wizards' Speech, “You all get out of here and I'll see if I can liberate something for you later… "

  They sat looking thoughtful - since almost everything that thinks can recognize and understand the Speech - then one by one got up and strolled off. Big Paws went last, looking thoughtfully at Nita as he did so. Her aunt had found the mustard, and noticed the exodus. “Huh," she said. “I guess they don't like the smell of the onions."

  “It's pretty strong," Nita said, and started spreading mustard on bread.

  When everything was ready, they sat down and ate. 'I hope you don't mind being a little on your own tomorrow," Aunt Annie said. “You hit us at kind of a busy time. There's going to be a hunt here in a few days, and we have to start getting ready for it."

  “You mean like a fox hunt?" Nita said.

  “That's right. Some of the local farmers have been complaining about their chicken flocks being raided. Anyway, some of our horses are involved, so we have to have the vet in to certify them fit, and then the farrier is coming in tomorrow afternoon to do some re-shoeing. It's going to be pretty hectic. If you want to be around here, that's fine: or if you think you'll be bored, you might want to go down to Greystones - it's a pretty easy bike ride from here. Or take the bus over to Bray and look around."

  “OK," Nita said. I'll see how I feel… I'm still pretty tired."

  “Traveling eastbound takes it out of you," Aunt Annie said. “It won't be so bad going back."

  You said it, Nita thought. And the sooner the better. But she smiled anyway, and said, “I hope not."

  They finished eating, and cleared the table. “If you want to watch TV late, you're going to be out of luck," her aunt said. “All but one of the TV stations shut down around midnight, and the one that's left mostly just shows old films. But if you feel inclined, go ahead."

  “Uh, thanks. I thought I might read for a while. After that I may just go to sleep again… I'm still rather tired."

  'That's fine. You make yourself completely at home." Her aunt looked at Nita with an expression that had some of Big Paws' look about it. “It must have been a bit of a wrench, just being shipped off like that."

  What did they tell you, I wonder? Nita thought. “It was," she said after a moment. “But I'll cope."

  Her aunt smiled. 'Typical of our side of the family," she said. “There's a long history of that. Well, if you get hungry or something later, just come on in and take what you need. Use the back door, though: I'm going to lock the front now, and turn in. I'll leave a light on for you in here. You know where everything is, the bathroom and so forth?"

  “Yeah, Aunt Annie. Thanks."

  Her aunt headed off. Nita looked around the kitchen to see if there was anything else that needed cleaning up - her mother had drummed into her that she should make sure she returned hospitality by helping out in the kitchen: her aunt hated washing-up more than anything else, her mother had said. But there was nothing left to do.

  Except something that needed a wizard to do it, and Nita set about that straightaway.

  She headed out the back door, out through a little archway into the concrete yard again. The only light was the one she had left on in the caravan, and it was dim. She paused outside the door. Even now, past midnight, the sky wasn't completely black. Nevertheless, it was blanketed with stars, much brighter than she was used to seeing them through the light pollution of the New York suburbs. And there was no sound here but the faintest breath of wind. Even the dual carriageway a mile away made no noise at all. It was as if everyone in this part of the country had gone to bed all at once. There was only one light visible, about a mile away across the fields: someone's house light. For someone who had always lived in places where the street had streetlights on all night, this utter darkness was a shock.

  But the stars, she thought. The Milky Way was clearly visible, even bright. At home it was almost impossible to see it at all. At least there's been one thing worth seeing here.

  She shivered hard then, and ducked back into the caravan to get her jacket, and her manual.

  Once she had them she headed out across the concrete yard again, making for the log fence that separated the land immediately around Aunt Annie's house from the fields beyond it. The closest field was planted with something ca
lled oilseed rape -tall green plants with flowers at the top so extremely yellow that they had made Nita's eyes hurt to look at them in the sunshine that morning when she had arrived. The field beyond that was clean pasture, grassland being left fallow for this year. That was what Nita wanted, for there was a thick strip of woodland at the far side of it.

  She made her way through the oilseed rape, enjoying the fragrance of it, and on to the next fence. This was barbed wire: she climbed one of the fenceposts carefully, so as not to tear anything. Cautiously, for the ground over here wasn't as even as it had been in the rape field, Nita made her way into the centre of the field, and opened her manual.

  She said the two words that would make the pages generate enough light to read by, though not enough to mess up her night vision. Normally she wouldn't have needed the manual for this spell, which was more a matter of simple conversation than anything else; but she didn't know the name she needed to call, and had to look it up. The manual's index was straightforward as usual. “Canidae," she said under her breath. “Here we go."

  The spell was a calling, but the kind that was a request, not a demand. She hoped there would be someone to respond. She recited the standard setup, the request for the Universe to hear. Then, “Ai mathrara," she said in the Speech, “if any hear, let them speak to me; for there's need."

  And then she put the book down and sat there in the quiet, and waited.

  It seemed to take a long time before she heard the soft sound of something rustling in the grass, about a hundred meters away. Normally she would never have heard it, except that her ears were sharpened by sitting in this total silence. The noise stopped.

  “Mathrara," she said then, very quietly, “if that's you, then I'm here."

  Another rustling, another silence.

  “You speak it with an accent," said a voice in a series of short, soft barks, “but well enough. Let me see you."