by Diane Duane
So then, Nita thought. Two or three attempts to make, frustrated two or three times by the Lone Power...and then, as Tualha said, the One got impatient. Or maybe impatience was an inaccurate reaction to attribute to the Power that conceived the whole universe at its beginning, and through to its end. The One’s great intent, along with that of the wizards and the Powers that Be, who do Its will, is to preserve energy—to keep things running for as long as they can be made to run, with what’s available...and not to waste anything unnecessarily. But when it was plain that building here was being actively hindered, a new group of Makers came into the world to shape Ireland: greater Powers, more senior, more central, than those who had worked here before. They would set it right.
They tried. Nita saw, between the data in the manual and what Tualha told her, that just as the One had scaled up its response, so had the Lone Power. The Fomori had been growing more powerful each time they had been challenged. Each time they were put down, they came back more powerful yet. And then came the first battle of Moytura.
The version that Tualha had given Nita turned out to be much romanticized. Moytura wasn’t just a single battle, but a great strife of forces over many centuries, as mountains were raised and thrown down and river valleys carved and choked; and all the while the ice rose and fell. You could still see the evidence in places in Ireland—rock more warped and twisted than could be explained by any mere geological uprising or subsidence; places where fires had fallen and melted the stone in ways that geologists could make nothing of. Nita could make something of them, though. The weapons used to wage war in heaven had been brought to bear on Ireland, and the battle had gone on for a good while.
And then— Nita turned a page over, scanning down it. She was beginning to get the drift of this. Here was the arrival of Lugh of the Long Reach. She thought she knew this particular power, for she’d met it once or twice. A young warrior, fierce, kindly, a little humorous, liable to travel in disguise: a power known by many names in many places and times. Michael, Athene, Thor—it was the One’s Champion, one of the greatest of all created beings, and definitely a Power to be reckoned with. As Lugh, that Power had come and poured Its virtue into the great Treasures that the Tuatha de Danaan had brought from the Four Cities.
Then he and the Tuatha had gone out with those weapons against Balor of the Evil Eye. Who was he? Nita thought. The Lone Power Itself? Or some poor creature that It corrupted and inhabited? That, too, was a favorite tactic. Either way, Balor had wielded cruel dominion over the humans of the island, and his twisted creatures the Fomori, and other, lesser powers, for thousands of years. But then came the second battle, as Tualha had said, and all that changed. War came from Heaven to Earth with a vengeance. The Champion, in the form of Lugh, struck Balor down.
Nita turned another page over and saw why Tualha had laughed at her so. Certainly it was laughable, the idea that anyone could just throw out ten of the senior Powers that Be. But something had happened. After putting down Balor, the Powers involved had gotten busy finishing Ireland. They raised the mountains and smoothed them down, made the plains and the forests and lakes. And they fell more completely in love with the beautiful, marred place than any of their more junior predecessors had.
This was commoner in the Old World, Nita read, than in the new. In places like North America, where the native human peoples had stories not of specific gods, but instead about heroes and the One, it indicated that the Makers of that place had gone away, well-satisfied with their work. In some places in the world, though, the satisfaction took longer—places like Greece and Rome. Their Makers loved them too much to leave for a long while, though finally they did let go. But there were still a few places in the world where the Powers had never really let go… and this was one of them.
Maybe this is why Ireland has always been kind of unsettled, Nita thought. The Powers won’t move out and let the new tenants be there by themselves. Us— For like most other wizards, Nita knew quite well that the good Powers might indeed be good, but that didn’t necessarily make them safe. Even the best of the Powers that Be could be blunted by too much commerce with humans and physical reality.
Nita read that the Tuatha de Danaan, as the Irish had come to call the Builder-powers, had never left. And when the human people, the “Milesians,” came at last, the Powers struck a bargain with them, agreeing to relinquish the lands and vanish into the hills. At least, that was how it looked to the humans. They knew that some hills in Ireland, at the four great feasts of the year, became more than just hills. At such times nonphysical aspects of the world became solider, realer; and mere physical reality, if it was wise, would stay out of the way of what was older, stronger, harder, by far. But the humans weren’t clear on the details of what had really happened when the Tuatha “vanished.” Unable to bear leaving Ireland, they’d merely gone sideways, making their way to an Ireland just one world over—or two, or five: one just a little bit closer to the depths of Reality, where, as Nita knew, lay Timeheart.
She sighed and closed the manual on one finger for a moment, gazing out across the fields on either side of the hedgerows at the thought of the place. She’d experienced Timeheart several times, for brief periods. She had seen it look like a city, like the ocean, like the depths of space. But regardless of your personal viewpoint, it was always a place where the physical universe was as it would have been had the Lone Power taken exception to the way creation was going so far, and gone out of Its way to invent something that the other Powers had not intended: entropy… death. Timeheart cast its own bright shadows into the less central dimension surrounding it, and the local Powers, taking advantage of this, had simply moved into that universe nearest to Timeheart which to them looked most like Ireland.
But much coming and going had forged a link, broadening the road between this world and that one from a little track into a highway that it was easy to stumble onto. All of Ireland had become a place where one could suddenly go sideways. This to-ing and fro-ing of the greater and lesser Powers between Ireland that was, and their version of Ireland—Tir na nOg, as they called it, the Land of the Ever-Young—was, in the long run, dangerous. But it wasn’t a thing you could just stop: at least, Nita couldn’t.
True, I went sideways, and it didn’t kill me. But I’m a wizard. If that kind of thing started happening to regular people, though—people in the street who were standing waiting for a bus, and suddenly found themselves in the middle of a Viking invasion, or something worse… Nita shuddered at the thought.
The problem with being sent somewhere by the Powers that Be to do a job was that, frequently, they left it to you to find out what the job was. So Nita now turned her attention to the manual again and flipped through it to the directory pages. There she paged along to her own listing and saw that, yes indeed, she was on active status, and her aunt’s address was listed. There was also an address for a senior wizard listed there, with an asterisk and a note saying, “Consult in case of emergency.”
if they’ve left me on my own on this one, Nita thought, I guess I have to assume an emergency of some kind is what it is. And it must be something that having Kit along wouldn’t help. Though that was a thought that made her a little uneasy. Were the Powers trying to break up their partnership? Or on the other hand, was this just the kind of solo work that even a partnered wizard had to do every now and then? Either way, she was hardly going to refuse the commission. She shut the manual again and put it away as the bus bounced into Bray.
It wasn’t all that big a town, its main street about half the length of the main street at home; and as usual, everything continued to look small and cramped and a little worn-out by Nita’s standards. She berated herself inwardly. Just because you’re used to everything looking slick and neat and new, doesn’t mean that it has to be that way here. Aunt Annie had mentioned to Nita that though Ireland had been doing pretty well economically in previous years, they were now caught in the same worldwide economic crunch as everyone else—in fact, a wo
rse one than most—and there just wasn’t the money to spend on things that Nita took for granted. So don’t be judging everything you see…
She got off in the middle of town, across from the big Catholic church, and had a look around. There was a sign there that said Leabhlair poblachta, public library. Nita grinned at the sight of it. Finding libraries had never been one of her problems.
The library was two buildings—one older, which had been a schoolhouse once, a big square granite-built building, very solid and dependable-looking, all on one story; and the newer annex, built in the same stone but a slightly more modern style. Nita spent a happy two or three hours there, browsing among the books and augmenting what she found with Internet searches on the library’s computers.
The books by themselves were a revelation. Nita had had no idea there was so much written in the Irish language—so many poems, so many poets; humor, cartoon books, all kinds of neat things. And structurally the language looked, and occasionally sounded, a lot like the Speech in places. But she tried not to be distracted from what she was there for.
She picked out several large books on Irish mythology, and began going through them in hopes of correlating what Tualha had told her with what she had seen in the manual. Mostly she found confirmation for Tualha’s version—the terrible eye of Balor that burnt everything it saw—and many strange tales of the old “gods and goddesses,” the greater and lesser Powers that Be. As usual, the Powers had their jobs divided up. Among many others, there were Govan the smith and beer-brewer, Diancecht the great physician of the gods, and Brigid of the Fires, who was heavily into multitasking as hearth-goddess and beast-goddess, artificer and miracle-worker. And there were bard-gods and carpenter-gods, builders, charioteers, cooks and warriors; a surprisingly widely-distributed community of Powers that had apparently gone sideways to settle together.
There were also tales of the “little people.” Nita had to smile at that. Worldgating, especially the parts of the science that had to do with hyperstring behavior, did odd things to the density and refractive index of air. Something close, seen through air whose structure was disturbed by wizardry, might seem far away, or small. But this was an effect of local optical and hyperdimensional physics, not magic. The “little people” were little only to human perceptions, and only occasionally.
And then there were the stories of the saints. Bridget, for example. When those stories came to Ireland, so many miracles attended the saints that Nita seriously wondered whether what the legends were just new versions of the tales about the Powers, transferred to the saints to make them “respectable” in the new religion. Saint Bridget’s stories in particular were interesting, though there was ongoing confusion (even among nonwizardly scholars) over whether they were happening to the old Goddess in disguise, or the new, mortal saint. Her miracles seemed to be of a friendly, homey sort, more practical than spectacular. She fixed broken things and fed people, and she said that her great wish was that everyone should be in Heaven with God and the angels, and should have a nice meal and a drink.
Nita found a whole lot more pertinent material, and did her best to digest it. Eventually, though, digestion came up to be seriously considered, since she hadn’t had any breakfast. It had partly come about due to nerves. When she’d awakened Nita had felt afraid to hang around the farm for long, lest she should look at some common thing and abruptly find herself back in time, or sideways in it. I’m really no safer here, though, Nita thought as she stepped out of the library, looking up and down the little road which ran parallel to Bray’s main street. This calm-looking landscape with its brownstone houses ranged across the way, and the truck unloading groceries for the supermarket around the corner, and the people all double-parked on the yellow lines, all this could shift in a moment. Without so much as a second’s warning she might find herself outside the stone age encampment that was here once long ago: or the little row of wattled huts that the Romans came visiting once, and never left—their bones and coins had been found down by Bray Head. Or she might find herself in the middle of the great eighteenth-century spa town that people from Britain had sought out for their vacations, promenading up and down the fine seafront, a second Brighton…
Well, it could happen anywhere, and there’s no escape… so I might as well go get lunch. Nita made her way up to the main street and looked around for somewhere that looked promising. There were some tea shops, but at the moment she felt like she’d already had enough tea for a lifetime. However, near a the bridge that ran over the part of the Dargle River that ran through the town, there was a place with a sign that said AMERICAN STYLE FRIED CHICKEN. Hmm, Nita thought, her mouth watering as she made for it, we’ll see about that.
She went in. As she ordered, she saw a few heads turn among the kids who were sitting there: probably at her accent. She smiled. You’d be staring a lot harder if you knew what I was really here for…
She got herself a Coke and settled down to wait for her chicken to be ready, gazing idly over at the kids sitting at the other table. They were stealing glances back at her, boys and girls together: a little casual, a little shy, a little hostile… and in that way, they resembled a lot of the kids she knew from school back home. They did dress differently, though. Black seemed to be a big favorite here at the moment, and big heavyish boots. In fact the preferred look in general was decidedly on the punk side: tight torn jeans, or just tight jeans, or very tight short skirts, all black again; and black leather seemed popular. Nita felt a little out of place in her layered V-necks and jeans and little fleece vest, but she grinned back at the other kids and paid attention to her Coke again.
A couple of minutes later, two of them came over to her, and Nita looked up, trying not to look too freaked: this wasn’t a time to let her shyness get the better of her. One of the two locals was a boy, very tall, with very shaggy dark hair, a long nose, dark eyes set very close together, and a big wide mouth that could have been very funny or very cruel depending on the mood of its owner. The girl could have been his twin, except that she was shorter, and her hair was marvelously teased and ratted out into a great black mane. At least, parts of it were black; some were stunningly purple, or pink. She was wearing a khaki T-shirt with a wonderfully torn and beaten-up leather jacket over it: black again, black jeans and those big heavy boots which Nita was becoming rather envious of.
“You a Yank?” said the boy. It wasn’t entirely a question. There was something potentially a little angry on the edge of it.
“Somebody has to be,” Nita said, paying no attention to the potential anger. “Wanna sit down?”
They looked at her and shuffled for a moment. “You staying in town?”
“No, I’m out in Kilquade.”
“Relatives?”
“Yeah. Annie Callahan. She’s my aunt.”
“Woooaaa!” said the boy in a tone of voice that was only slightly mocking and only slightly impressed. “Rich relatives, huh?”
“I don’t know if rich is exactly the right word,” Nita said.
“You here looking for your roots?” the girl said.
Nita looked at her hair, looked at the girl’s. “Still attached to them, as far as I can tell. Though finding them around here doesn’t seem to be a big problem.”
There was a burst of laughter over this. “Come on and sit with us,” the guy said. “I’m Ronan. This is Majella.”
“Sure.”
Nita went with them. She was rapidly introduced to the others, who seemed to alternate between being extremely interested in her, and faintly scornful. The scorn seemed to be because she was an American, because they thought Nita had a lot of money, because they thought Nita thought she was cooler than they were, and because America (they thought) had caused the economic trouble that was making life harder for them and everyone in the world right now. The admiration seemed to be because she was American, because they thought everything was cheaper and better and cooler in America, because they thought she had a lot of money, and because th
ey thought she could download all the movies and music on Earth for practically nothing.
It took a while for them to run down, particularly on that last subject. “Uh,” Nita said finally, “it’s not so much like that. Broadband’s pretty expensive for us. Ours has a cap. And my folks won’t let me download much of anything unless my schoolwork’s really good.”
There was a general groan of agreement over this. “There’s no escape,” said Ronan.
More detailed introductions ensued. Most of the kids lived in Bray. One of them lived as far out as Greystones, but said she took the bus in “for the crack.” Nita blinked until she discovered that they didn’t mean crack, but craic, which sounded the same but was a local word for good conversation or a good time. Nita was immediately instructed about all the local clubbing opportunities and “discos,” which turned out to be not mirror-ball-adorned buildings, but dances that various pubs or hotels held at the weekends. “The non-alco ones are good value for money,” said Majella. “And better if you don’t feel like people throwin’ up on your shoes,” said little blond Eva sitting by her. “Depends on the DJ of course,” said Eamonn, who was sitting by Ronan: and immediately the conversation veered into an enthusiastic discussion of what they would wear and who they would go with.
