by Diane Duane
“Okay, I guess,” Nita said. “I didn’t sleep that well on the plane.”
“Sure I never do myself,” the man said, pulling the passport out of the reader. “Keep hearing things all the time. Coming to see relatives for a while, are you? Isn’t that grand. So, a nice clean passport then. Where do you want the stamp, love? First page? Or save that for something more interesting?”
Nita thought of the first time she had cleared “passport” formalities at the Crossings, and illogically warmed to the man, who reminded her strongly of the being who’d first welcomed her there (though that one had had a lot more eyes… to say nothing of the tentacles and the feathers). “Let that be the first one, please,” she said.
The immigration officer stamped the passport with relish, and handed the passport back. “You’re very welcome in Ireland, pet. Khayd mil’fallcha.”
At least that was what it sounded like, though Nita those words spelled out about twenty times between here and the jetway, on ads and posters and airport art: céad mile fáilte, “a hundred thousand welcomes.” “Thank you,” she said, and along with Deirdre walked out toward baggage claim.
It was a complicated route, up escalators and down again, and Nita found herself being glad of having someone to walk her through it just this once. But finally they got into the huge room full of long carousel piers, found the one for Nita’s flight, picked up her bag, and rolled it out through the right customs channel, past a bored uniformed guy at a desk and through more frosted glass doors—
“Nita!”
And there, waiting out beyond the railing that kept people meeting incoming passengers from gathering right around the doors, was her aunt Annie: a tall silver-haired lady, big about the shoulders and a little broad in the beam, with a friendly face with pale grey-blue eyes, her hair tied back in a short ponytail behind. Nita grinned. After spending your life with people you know, and then having to spend a whole day with people you didn’t know, the sight of her was a pleasure. Nita’s aunt hurried over to her and gave her a big hug, then showed Deirdre her driver’s license, signed the clipboard Deirdre held out for her. “Thanks so much for taking care of her!” she said as Deirdre said goodbye to Nita and headed off. “Now how was your flight, lovey? Did you do okay?”
“I did fine, Aunt Annie. But I’m real tired... I wouldn’t mind going home.”
“That’s the plan, sweetheart. You come right out here, the car’s in the parking structure right outside.” She pushed the cart out through the arrivals area and onto a crosswalk that led into a big white-painted parking structure.
The morning was holding fresh and fine. Little white clouds were flying past in a blue sky; Nita put her arms around herself and hugged herself in surprise at the cold. “Mom told me it might be chilly, and I didn’t believe her. It’s July!”
They paused outside for a moment at a machine by the doors, where Aunt Annie paid for her parking. “This is one of the cooler days we’ve been having lately,” she said, leading Nita through the doors and around to the elevators. “Don’t worry, though; the weatherpeople say it’s going to get warm again tomorrow. Up in the 70’s…”
“‘Warm,’” Nita said, wondering at a place where 70 degrees would be thought of as warm. It had been in the 90’s on the Island when she left.
“We haven’t had much rain, either,” said her aunt. “It’s been a dry summer, and they’re talking about it turning into a drought if it doesn’t rain this week or next.” She laughed a little as she came up to a white Toyota and opened its trunk. “Kind of a joke around here. Only in Ireland is it a drought if it doesn’t rain for a month…”
They drove out of the parking garage and down to the ticket booths where Aunt Annie shoved the ticket into another machine that would let them out. Nita spent most of this period starting to get used to the weirdness of sitting on the driver’s side and adjusting to the fact that her aunt was driving on the left side of the road. It was one thing to know about it in the abstract, but actually doing it was peculiar. “So tell me,” Aunt Annie said, “how are your folks?”
Nita started telling her, with only half her mind on the business; the rest of her was busy looking at the scenery as they came out onto the M1 freeway heading south toward Dublin, and past it to Wicklow. AN LÁR, said one sign: and under that it said DUBLIN: 8. “What’s ‘An Lár’?” Nita said.
“That’s Irish for ‘to the city center,’” said her Aunt. “Home’s about 15 miles south of Dublin...it’ll take us about an hour to get down there and home. At least we don’t have to go through the city any more, the way we used to before they got the ring road and the dual carriageway finished. Do you want to stop in town for lunch? Are you hungry?”
“Nnnnnno,” Nita said, “I think I’d rather just go fall down and have a sleep. I didn’t rest that well on the plane.”
Her aunt nodded. “No problem with that...you take your time and get rid of your jet lag. The country won’t be going anywhere while you get caught up on your sleep.”
And so they headed south. Nita was surprised to see how much the area looked like suburban New York, except that—except— Nita found that she kept saying “except” about every thirty seconds. Things looked more or less the same, and then she’d see something completely weird that she didn’t understand at all. The signs on the motorway, half in Irish and half in English, were a constant fascination. It was a very peculiar-looking language, with a lot of peculiar combinations of letters and small letters in front of capital letters at the beginnings of words, something she’d never seen before. And the pronunciations—She tried pronouncing a few words and phrases, the last one being Baile atha Cliath, and her aunt howled with laughter and coached her. “No, no! If you try to pronounce Irish the way it looks, you’ll go crazy. That one’s pronounced ‘bally ah-cleeah.’ ‘Dublin city.’”
Nita nodded and went on with a brief version of how things were at home, while looking at more of the signs they passed. There was something vaguely familiar about the language, for all the weirdness of its spelling. She let that pass for the moment, though, as they swung around the circumference of the six-lane M50 “ring road” and closer to the Wicklow Mountains. The green slopes of them rose surprisingly close to the motorway as the M50 ended and turned into another smaller motorway. “We’re getting close now,” Aunt Annie said: “we stay on the N11 until we’re almost home. Fortunately this is the pretty way, now.”
It took a little while to get pretty, as the roadsides were crowded with small housing developments— “estates,” her aunt called them—where houses sited by themselves seemed to be the exception rather than the rule. Rather, two houses were usually built squished together so that they shared one wall, and each one was a mirror image of the other. There were a lot of these estates on their left, eastward, much more crowded together now near the exit for what looked like a largish town, to judge by the traffic. “Bray’s down that way,” Aunt Annie said. “We do some of our shopping there. And now you’re officially in County Wicklow. You’re out of Dublin when you get near the Dargle, and we just went over on that last bridge.” Nita hadn’t even noticed them crossing the river. “And now here’s Kilcroney...”
The housing estates were already giving way to single houses, and fewer and fewer of these as the road began wandering through hills and forested country again. “Everything’s got names…” Nita said.
“Every acre of this place has names,” her aunt said. “Every town has ‘townlands’ around it, and every one of them has a different name. Almost every field, and every valley and hill.” She smiled. “I kind of like it.”
“I think I might too,” Nita said. A wizard could best do spells when everything in them was completely and accurately named. It was always easier to use existing names than to coin new ones—which you had to do if no one had previously named a thing or place, or if it didn’t know its own name already. And the name you coined had to be right, otherwise the wizardry would backfire.
Hous
es became very few indeed now, and they were passing through farmland as well as among forested hills. There were fields full of some bright yellow flower— “Rape seed,” Aunt Annie said. “They grow it for oil. Canola, I think they call it in the States.” Other fields were planted in other crops, or were just empty, covered with grass. In one of these, to Nita’s astonishment and delight, shaggy horses wandered around casually grazing, right by the side of the road. “Aunt Annie, whose are those?”
“Oh, the tinker ponies? They belong to traveling people, usually. The travelers ,leave them where they can get some grass, if the grass where their caravans are is grazed down already. Look there.” She pointed off to one side.
Nita looked, expecting to see some kind of a barrel-shaped, brightly-colored wagon. Instead there was just a trailer parked off to one side of the road, with no car hitched to it. There were clothes laid over the nearby hedge in the sun: laundry, Nita realized. As they passed, she got just a glimpse of a small fire burning near the trailer, and several small children sitting or crouching around it, feeding it sticks. Then the car swept by.
“Are they campers?” Nita said.
“No. In the old days people would’ve called them gypsies. Not correct, either politically or otherwise. Some of them say they’re descended from Roma people. Others are Irish but raised in a traveling lifestyle… for generations, some of them. They simply don’t like to live in houses, in one place; they’d rather move around and be free. We see a fair number of them down by us.”
Nita filed this with about fifty other things she was going to have to ask more about at her leisure. “There now,” Aunt Annie said as she negotiated a curve in the road. “There’s our mountain.”
Nita peered past her aunt, out toward the right. There was Sugarloaf. It looked much different than it had 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.
Shortly the road ran past a service station where geese and a goat grazed behind a fence, watching the traffic; then through a shallow ravine 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 of miles Aunt Annie bore left into a little one-way circle road, a roundabout, and exited that onto a road that to Nita’s eyes looked barely wide enough for one car, let alone two. To her shock, several other oncoming cars went by them and Aunt Annie never even slowed down, though she drove so far over on the left side of the road that the hedge scraped the doors. The road began to trend downward, so that the gently sloping valley beneath it was visible, and beyond that, the sea, with the sun on it, blinding.
“See that town way 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 that was uniquely her own, and Nita was very pleased.
“They” were the crowd of people who worked for Aunt Annie: a confusing ten-or-fifteen-strong throng of young and middle-aged men and women whose names Nita tried to remember, but quickly lost track of in the confusion. They put her up, not in the house, but in a caravan out in the back: a trailer, as she would have called it. Nita 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. It’s going to take months to get everything straight, she thought. And then thought immediately, Not that I want to be ‘months’ here. Six weeks’ll be plenty!
But all the same, the sheer difference of everything was beginning to get to her. She had been to other planets and spoken to alien creatures in their own languages, but nothing had yet struck her as quite as strange as being here in this odd place where everything she knew was called something strange; and where people she knew to be speaking English as their first language were nonetheless speaking it in accents so thick she couldn’t make out more than one word in three.
None of the accents were what she had always thought of as the typical Irish brogue, either. Evidently there was no such thing; the word “brogue” turned out to come from an old scornful Irish word that meant “tongue-tied,” and had originally been used to describe people who couldn’t speak Irish. And the accents surrounding her 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.
At any rate, shortly Nita was left alone in the caravan. “You’ll want to crash and burn, I should think,” Aunt Annie said. “You 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 trailer. It was a good size for her. Its windows afforded a clear view of the path from the house, so that if she was doing a wizardry, she had 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 closet 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 more 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—in this part of the world it stayed light a really long time in the summer. Everybody had let her sleep, as promised, 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, since Annie’s farm was partly a boarding stable, 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. What was a little surprising was that people were out there this late.
She could hear a couple of low voices, men’s voices Nita thought, discussing something quietly. That was no surprise either: these were probably some of the horde of helpers from this afternoon. One of the people outside chuckled, sighed, 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.
“Uh…” she said. “Hello?”
Nothing. And there was no way anyone could have left so quickly.
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 blond wood 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?”
