by Diane Duane
There was a slight commotion at the door as Mrs. Smyth came in under the archway. “Hey Doris, how they cuttin’?” someone shouted. Doris Smyth looked at the speaker and said something clear and carrying in Irish that provoked a roar of approval from the listeners, and caused the person who had asked the question to be genially pummeled.
Behind Mrs. Smyth, someone else came in; a short man in a long overcoat and plaid scarf. At sight of him, many of the wizards in the room called, “Johnny!” or “Shaun!,” and there was a general stir of approval through the back room. Nita bent over to her Aunt Annie and said, “Who’s that?”
“Shaun O’Driscoll,” said Aunt Annie. “Or Johnny, some people call him. He’s the Area Senior for Western Europe.”
“Wow,” Nita said, never having seen so high-ranked a wizard before. Area Seniors answered only to Regional Seniors, and Regionals to Earth’s Planetary Wizard. When she thought of the Senior in charge of all wizards from Shannon to Moscow and Oslo to Gibraltar, she had imagined someone more imposing—not a little man with thinning hair and (as he took his coat off) a tweed three-piece suit. He didn’t look very old. He had a fierce-looking mustache, and his eyes were very cool; he looked around the room and returned all the greetings without ever quite smiling. It was the kind of effect, Nita thought, that made you want to try to get him to smile. It would be worth seeing when it happened, for his face was otherwise a nest of laugh-lines.
Doris and Johnny were fetched pints by another of the gathered wizards, and people started settling down, leaning against the walls when they ran out of seats. Johnny didn’t sit, but stood in the middle of the room, waiting for them to settle, like a teacher with a big unruly class.
“Thanks for coming,” he said. “I know this was short notice, but we’ve had some serious problems crop up in the past few days, and there was no way to hope to manage them except by requiring an intervention meeting.”
There were some heads turned at this, and some murmuring under breath among the assembled wizards. “I know that wasn’t the way it was announced,” Johnny said, “but we turn out to have less time for this discussion than was originally thought when the original texts and emails went out last night. We’ve had serious transitional leakages all over the island, with some sympathetic transitionals on mainland Europe; and this condition has to be contained as quickly as possible. There have been echoes and ripples as far away as China and Peru.”
More stirring at this. “Anyway,” Johnny said, “I want to thank those of you who were in the middle of other assignments and found them changed, or who were off active and were suddenly reactivated. The Powers that Be may not thank you until later, but I like to do it early. I also want to welcome those of you who have come unusual distances, including Nita Callahan. Stand up, honey.”
Nita flushed fiercely, and hoped it didn’t show too much in the pub’s dimmish light. She stood up.
“Nita has been reassigned here temporarily courtesy of North American Regional. She has blood affinities with this area, and was recently involved in the New York incursion and the Hudson Canyon intervention in June, and more recently, with the Reconfiguration; Dairine Callahan is her sister.”
There was a stir at this which surprised Nita somewhat. She nodded, smiled a little uncertainly at Johnny; he gestured her to sit down. “We’re glad to have you,” he said. “Bear with us: we do things a little differently here than you’re used to, and if you think of anything that seems useful during this discussion, don’t hesitate to sing out.”
Huh, Nita thought, sitting down. And, Reassigned courtesy of North American Regional? Who’s that? Not Tom and Carl. Someone—or something—further in, or higher up? But she put the thought aside for the moment.
“Over the past four nights we’ve had ‘sideways’ leakages in twenty-nine out of thirty-two counties,” Johnny said, “and how Monaghan, Wexford and Westmeath were missed is a mystery to us, especially since Westmeath contains the Hill of Tara. In the thirty-three counties, about ninety wizards have experienced timeslides, live remembrances of the so-called ‘mythological’ period, ‘solid’ remembrances that returned interactions, viewings of extradimensional objects without doing the wizardries required for such viewings, and even physical intervention by nonphysical entities or creatures not native to this reality, including physical attacks on occasion. One of us met Cúchullain in warp spasm, which is enough to turn anyone’s hair: that it happened in the middle of the Square shopping center in Tallaght didn’t help, either. The Brown Bull of Cooley was seen crossing the M18 motorway north of Shannon; then it wandered down onto the Iarnrod Éireann main line and caused a derailment, though fortunately neither the train drivers nor any of the other people on the train saw it, and by great good luck no one was hurt. Possibly most to the point, there was an earthquake in the fields north of Naas, at the old site of the Battle of Moytura.”
More stirring over this, and some anxious looks. Johnny made quiet-down gestures. “Fortunately it was only about three point one on the Richter scale, and nothing came of it but some broken china and a power failure down in Kildare town. The Lia Fáil is still managing to hold this island in one place and one piece, no matter what the politicians say. But how long it can hold matters so stable is a good question. Much of its old virtue is gone, as you know. Another such attack will certainly be more effective, on both natural and supernatural levels.”
“Johnny,” said one of the wizards sitting back by the wall, a handsome little dark-haired woman with a sharp face, “these transitional leakages, are we sure that something else isn’t causing them? Something European?”
Johnny shook his head. “I’d prefer to blame Local Europe myself, Morgan, but we’re out of luck on this one. All indications point back at us.”
“Then what are we going to do?”
Johnny looked grim. “We’re going to have to recreate Moytura, I think. Unless someone else can think of something better.”
Half the room started muttering to the other half. Johnny waited for it to settle down. “Recreate Moytura with what?” said the Northern-based wizard Nita had been talking to, the guy in the leather jacket.
“Good question,” Johnny said. “Two of the Four Treasures are still with us, though diminished, as you know. In their present state, they’re too diminished to be of any use. But the ‘souls’ of those Treasures are still in the world, or the Worlds, somewhere. We are going to have to recall those souls to suitable envelopes, and then take them out into battle against the Lone Power. We know that with them, we have a chance. Without them—” He shrugged.
Relative silence fell for a few moments. “Who does the ‘going into battle’ bit?” said another voice from somewhere against the back wall.
“Lacking one of the Powers that Be, probably Doris and I to lead,” Johnny said. “And all of you we can get together in one place.”
“Where are you going to get ‘suitable envelopes’, then?” said another voice.
“We’ll try to use the old ones,” Doris said. “They’ve worked before: with a little coercion, they’ll work again...or we hope so. The Lia Fáil is still working; the Ardagh Chalice we think we can reawaken.”
“Don’t you think the Museum will miss it?” said the wizard in the leather jacket.
Doris smiled slightly. “Not if a wizardry that looks and weighs exactly the same is sitting in the museum case,” she said. “If the Taoiseach can borrow the Chalice just to show it off to the visiting EU politicians at one of his Dublin Castle dinner parties, I think we might take the loan of it for a night or so, for something important, and not feel too guilty afterwards. But everything depends on the circumstances, and the power of the ritual used to call the Cup’s soul back. Which is what we’re going to have to work on. It’s not just warriors we’re going to need to make this work, but poets. Where is Charles, by the way?”
“He just Tweeted. Stuck in traffic,” said someone from the bar side of the room.
Johnny grinned. “Ah
, the ‘real world.’ But at least Liam and Mairéad and Nigel are here. I’ll be wanting to talk to you three afterwards. The rest of you: I want you all to talk to your area supervisors about your schedules for the next two weeks. Any one of you may have to drop everything at a moment’s notice and lend a hand. Also, given the seriousness of the situation, travel restrictions on teleportation are off for the duration. Just use your judgment, and be very careful about the overlays!”
More chatter erupted. In the middle of it, someone said, “But Johnny, wait a tick! Isn’t this going to make things worse?”
Johnny waved for relative quiet. The room settled a little. “How do you mean?” he said.
“If you’re going to call back the souls of the Treasures—if you can,” said the speaker, a tall dignified-looking wizard with silver hair, “isn’t the land going to get even more awake and aware than it already is? I mean, the Treasures are the land, in some ways. At least that’s what we were always told: four of the five Elements, in their most personified forms. Air and water and earth and fire are going to wake up more than ever, until the situation is resolved and everything is laid to rest again.”
Johnny nodded slowly. The room got quiet as people looked at his expression. “Yes,” he said after a while. “It’s going to get much worse. Which makes it to our advantage to get the situation resolved, as you say, as quickly as possible. Otherwise first Ireland, then the rest of Europe, and eventually all the other continents, are going to be overrun with the past happening again, and the dead walking, and all kinds of other inconveniences. If we can’t stop this, then the barriers between present and past will break down everywhere, and the physical world will be progressively overrun by the nonphysical: all the myths, and truths that became myth, all the dreams and nightmares, all the more central and more peripheral realities, will superimpose themselves on this one...inextricably.”
“For how long?” said a small voice out of the hush.
“If that level of imposition ever takes hold fully,” Johnny said, “I don’t see how the process could ever be reversed.”
Silence, broken only by the noise of cheerful conversation in the frontmost, nonwizardly part of the pub. “Right,” said the silver-haired wizard again. “But in the meantime, while you seniors are intervening, Ireland’s dreams and nightmares are going to keep coming true—even more than they have been—and the past will keep happening, and the dead and the undead and the immortal will walk. And ‘other inconveniences.’”
“That’s exactly right, Richard,” Johnny said.
There was another long silence. Then a voice said, “I need another pint.”
A chorus of other voices went up in agreement. Nita noticed that her Coke was long gone, and she was very thirsty.
“I’ll get you another,” her Aunt Annie said, and got up. “Anybody else? Nuala? Orla? Hi, Jim—” She moved off.
Nita sat there feeling somewhat shaky. “Hey, you’re white as a sheet,” said a voice by her. She looked up: it was Ronan.
She smiled faintly at him as he sat down, and did her best to control herself. He looked, if possible, even cuter than he had previously. Black leather suited him, and so did this subdued lighting. “Thanks loads,” she said. “And none of this bothers you?”
“Sounds pretty bad, yeah,” Ronan said. But he looked and sounded remarkably unconcerned. “But don’t worry about auld Shaun there, he just likes to sound like doom and destruction all the time. Comes of being Area Senior; they all sound like the world’s ending half the time.”
Probably because it is, Nita thought. It was only the sheer number of wizards in the world, and the sacrifices they kept making from week to week, that kept civilization on an even keel; or so it seemed to her. “Look, can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
“I’m just curious.” She had had a look at Ronan’s profile after meeting him, and her curiosity had been piqued by something she’d seen there. “Was your Ordeal particularly rough?”
He looked peculiarly at her. “Almost got me killed, if that’s what you mean.”
“So will crossing O’Connell Street,” Nita said. “Never mind… I don’t know what I mean. I mean, it seemed to me that my Ordeal was pretty awful. I was just curious whether I was an exception, or whether everyone had that bad a time. My sister did, but she’s not exactly a normal case. And I haven’t had that many chances to discuss it with other wizards.”
Ronan looked thoughtful and took a drink of his orange-and-lemon drink. “I got timeslid,” he said.
Nita shrugged slightly. “We bought a timeslide from our local Seniors for ours,” she said.
“I didn’t buy mine,” Ronan said. “I got it.” He took another drink. “One day I took the Oath—the next I was walking up Vevay Road, you know, at the top of Bray up by the McDonald’s we passed? Well, it stopped being Vevay Road. It was just a dirt track with some thatched huts down near where the school would be, at the bottom of the hill, and it was raining cats and dogs. Thunder and lightning.”
Nita shivered: she disliked being caught out in the rain. “What did you do?”
“I went up Bray Head,” Ronan said, and then laughed short and harsh a himself, as if in retrospect, he didn’t believe his own craziness. “I wanted to see where everything was, you know? It was a mess. You know how the sea gets during a storm. Well, maybe you don’t—”
“I live on Long Island,” Nita said. “We get high-force gales on the Great South Bay, when the hurricanes come through. The whole sea’s one big whitecap, spray’s so thick in the air you can’t see—”
“Like that. But driving inland,” Ronan said. “Between the rain and the spray, there was almost no difference between being in the water and on the land. Well, I saw the boat come in, straight for the rocks. Little thing.” He saw Nita’s blank look and said, “Romans.”
That made her raise her eyebrows. In the library she’d seen the Roman coins that had been found at the base of Bray Head, and a reconstruction of the archaeological site, with their bones. “They were going to try to set up a colony, weren’t they?” she said.
Ronan nodded. Nita watched him. She remembered that afternoon in the chicken place in Bray, and the vehemence of Ronan’s feelings about colonizers of any kind. But at the moment, Ronan just sat, and flushed a little, and looked away from Nita as he said, “Well, they were going to get killed, weren’t they? Them and their little boat and all, in that sea. An RNLI lifeboat couldn’t have stood it, let alone that little smack. So I ‘took the sea in.’”
Nita stared at him. What Ronan was describing was temporary but complete control of a pure element: using the wizardly Speech to describe every molecule of an object or area so completely and accurately that for a short period you became it. Control was barely the word for it. It became as much part of you as your body...for a while. Then came the backlash: for human beings are not really meant to have more than one physical body at a time. You might find the association impossible to break—and have to spend the rest of your life coexisting with what you had described: which would surely drive you insane. Or the strain of the wizardry itself might kill you. An adult wizard, full of experience, might have done such a wizardry once… and no other wizardry, ever again. A young wizard, on Ordeal, or soon after, could have done it and lived… maybe. It was a good question whether his head would ever be entirely right again.
But here sat Ronan, still blushing slightly, and said, “It wasn’t much of it I had to take, just the sea around Bray Head. The lads in the boat jumped ship and made it ashore. I couldn’t save the boat, it went all to pieces when I lost control. I must have passed out up there—the timeslide came undone after a while, and some tourists doing the cliff walk from the Greystones side found me slipping down the rocks on the seaward side, and called the Guards. I spent a few days in the hospital.” He shrugged, then laughed. “Hypothermia, they called it. Too true—but they never knew from what.”
“Wow,” Nita said under her breath
, almost lost in admiration of him. She was starting to blush, but she ignored it as she looked at him again. “But you knew,” she said. “That there was just the one boat. The Romans never made it here except for those people. Britain was giving them too much trouble. You could have let them go under.”
