Диана Дуэйн - A Wizard Abroad

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.

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."