Диана Дуэйн - A Wizard Abroad

Nita wandered back the way she had 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-coloured. Nita smelled smoke again, and idly half-turned to look over her shoulder, towards the farrier's furnace.

And was rather shocked not to see it there at all. or anything else. The farm was gone.

The contour of the land was still there — the way it trended gently downhill past the farm buildings, and then up again toward the 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. .

She looked around her in great confusion. There was a pillar of black smoke rising up off to one side, blown westward by the rising wind 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 outwards in the force of the fire. And a voice spoke, down by her feet. "Yes, they have 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 ni Cealodhain. 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 draoiceacht 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 planes, 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 did we get here?"

"You went cliathanach," 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. You know that." "Of course I know it," Nita said, a bit irritable with the shock of everything. 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. The right wizardry, though, and you had to move no more than a step. "It shouldn't be anything like this easy, though," she said.

Tualha looked up at her with wide, bland eyes. "It is 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 had said to her mother, I go on call in Ireland, I go on call, and that's it. It was not her mother's idea that she come here, after all. One of the Powers that Be had sent her here to do a job. She knew that when she got back to the farmhouse — if she got back to the farmhouse and opened her manual, she would 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. .She was going to have to catch up on her reading. 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, before it gets about us."

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.

She caught the bus in, a green double-decker that stopped at the end of her aunt's road, and climbed up to the second floor of the bus. There was no-one at all there, so she went straight forward to take the seat right at the front, its window looking directly forwards and four meters down on to the ground. It was interesting to ride along little country lanes and look right down on to the sheep and the hedges and the potholes from such a height.

But she didn't let it distract her for very long. The section in the wizard's manual on Ireland was quite lengthy. This was not a surprise to her, since at the moment the section on the United States was quite short. most likely since she wasn't there. The manual tended to have as much information as you needed on any particular subject, and simply waited for you to look for it. She immediately found that she had been correct to be a little suspicious of Tualha's numbers. The things she had 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 Aunt Annie saying yesterday that as far as she knew, the only times cats were concerned about were their mealtimes.

In any case, the manual told her of the formation of Ireland, some four hundred million years earlier; of the pushing up of the great chain of mountains that it shared with Newfoundland, and with the Pyrenees. A hundred and fifty million years later, the continental plate on which Ireland stood began to move so that the great island that had been both England and Ireland was flooded and split, and the ice came down and tore at it.

It just explained the science of it, of course. A wizard knows to look further than mere science for explanations. The world was made, and none of these things happen by accident. It was made by the Powers: not created in some abstract sense, but made, stone by stone, as an artist makes, or a cook, or a craftsman — with interest and care. The One, the only name that 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 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. A misjudgement? A miscalculation? Nita thought not. She thought she saw here the interference of her old enemy, the Lone Power, the one which (for good or evil) invented death, and later went through the world seeing what It could destroy or warp.