The New Policeman (19 page)

“Hello, Father,” said Aengus.

“Who’s the ploddy?”

“His name is J.J.,” said Aengus. “But he’s not all ploddy. There’s a bit of magic in him, isn’t there, J.J.? He’s a great fiddle player.”

“Hmm,” said the Dagda, and turned his face toward the sea.

“Father,” said Aengus, a little timidly, it seemed to J.J., “we have a bit of a problem.”

The Dagda threw back his head in a theatrical gesture and let out an equally theatrical roar of laughter. “A bit of a problem?” he said. “We’re all dying, and he calls it a bit of a problem?”

“Dying?” said J.J.

“That’s a bit melodramatic, isn’t it?” said Aengus.

“Of course we’re dying,” the Dagda bellowed. “Just as surely as that poor dog there is dying!”

Bran had only just caught up with them, and J.J. had to admit that she didn’t look good. She collapsed at his feet and lay straight over on her side in the grass, her tongue lolling out of the side of her mouth. She was panting rapidly.

“A thing is happening that has never happened,” the Dagda went on. “Our sun is falling out of our sky. We are dying even as we speak.”

“Well, you look all right to me,” said J.J.

Aengus grimaced at him, and the Dagda glared at them both.

“He has a point, though,” Aengus said. “You call our world the land of eternal youth. What we call your world is…well…”

“What?” said J.J.

“We call it the land of the dying.”

“That’s nice of you,” said J.J. “Anything has to be better than ploddyland, anyway.”

“You are dying from the moment you are born,” said the Dagda.

“That may be true,” said J.J., “but it isn’t the way we choose to look at it.”

“It’s true all the same,” said the Dagda. “And now your filthy time is contaminating—” He broke off and made a sweeping gesture over the plain. “All this. All that is left of us.”

There was a silence, broken only by an exhausted groan from the dog.

“All that is left of you?” said J.J.

The Dagda looked out to sea. Aengus put a hand on J.J.’s arm. “Did you not notice?” he said. “How few of us there are?”

J.J.
had
noticed, sort of. He just hadn’t registered it. All those empty roads and empty fields and empty houses.

“What happened?” he said.

“You see the beacon?” Aengus indicated the heap of stones. In J.J.’s world, the hill had a little path up one side where people had walked to the top. He’d once had a picnic up there with some of his Dublin cousins. But here there was no path. The stones had an
untouched look about them, as though they had just been put there.

“I thought it was a burial mound,” he said.

“It may be, in your world,” said Aengus. “But not here.” He glanced at the Dagda and took a deep breath as though he was beginning a long story. But it wasn’t so long.

“When we set out to do battle with your people, hundreds, maybe thousands of years ago now, each of our warriors brought a stone up the mountain and left it here. When the war was over, the ones who survived came back and took their stones away.”

J.J. stared at the hill. “So all those people…” The scale of it was incomprehensible. If he had to count all those stones it would take him a year.

“All dead,” said Aengus.

J.J. looked at the Dagda. Tears were running into his beard.

“But what about the women?” said J.J.

“Our women are warriors, too,” said Aengus.

A mile away beyond the hill of stones, on the neighboring peak, J.J. could see its sister beacon. Farther still, he could just make out the tip of a third one. If it existed in his own world, he had never
noticed it before. Were there more of them here? Did they line the whole coast of Ireland, awaiting forever the return of the dead souls that had built them?

“Why do you stay here?” he asked the Dagda. “You must know that they’ll never come back now.”

The Dagda fixed his green gaze on J.J. “I was their commander,” he said. “It is not right that I should return and they should not.” He turned away and looked out to sea again. “How can I leave them?”

J.J. looked down at Bran. She had recovered a little of her strength and was lying on her belly, her head resting on her outstretched paws. Her eyes were fixed on his face as though she expected something from him.

“I won’t let your people die,” he said quietly. “If it’s the last thing I do, I’ll find the leak and stop it.”

The Dagda turned back to him. “My fool of a son might be right for once,” he said. “Perhaps there is a bit of the sidhe in you after all. Take out that fiddle and play a tune for me.” He turned his face toward the beacon. “And for them.”

J.J. took out the fiddle and tightened the bow. He had played in some of the top competitions in Ireland and had been heard by some of the best traditional
musicians the country had ever produced. But no challenge had been as great as this one: to play for the lost tribes of Tír na n’Óg and their warrior king.

As he lifted the instrument to his shoulder, J.J. knew that his mind would not be a match for this occasion. He had learned, in his years of playing, how it could get in the way if it tried to interfere with the music. He closed it down, felt his soul respond and send his fingers and his bow to the strings. He had played the slow air once through before he knew what it was that he was playing and remembered how it had come down to him, through his mother and his grandmother. There was no doubt in him now, as he played it through again, that the other J.J. Liddy, his great-grandfather, had learned it from the sidhe and knew that he had learned it from them. He might have been playing it now, for all J.J. could tell, because he had never played it like that himself before. And when he came to the end of it, he surprised himself even more, by bursting into a fast, driving reel, and then a second one after it. He had no idea what either of them were called, but he could tell by the smile that slowly dawned on the Dagda’s hairy face that he had made good choices. He finished with a flourish and waited expectantly for the Dagda’s reaction. But the
king of Tír na n’Óg had turned his smile upon his son.

“You’re bad news, Aengus Óg,” he said. “With all your coming and going, indulging your little fantasies. You’re trouble to any poor woman who ever set eyes on you and you’re worse trouble to any woman or man who was fool enough to put their trust in you. But you did a thing today that I will not forget in all this dirty time I’m going to be dying in. You brought the right boy with you when you came up the hill.”

“I may have, Father,” said Aengus, and J.J. saw the familiar flash of anger in his eyes. “But if I did, it wasn’t to have him stand here playing tunes for you and your rattling heap of rocks!”

The Dagda let out a roar and whipped a short but lethal-looking sword out from beneath his cloak. “I’ll teach you to talk to your father like that!”

“No need,” said Aengus. “But that looks like the kind of a useful thing that might take a dog’s hind leg off easily enough. Let you hold the end with the teeth and I’ll just borrow—”

“That dog is dying!” the Dagda yelled.

“We’re all dying, Father. You told us so yourself just two minutes ago. But if we knew where the leak was, we might stop dying.”

The Dagda let his arm fall, but he didn’t put the sword away. He turned and looked out over the sea once more.

“Father?” said Aengus, his voice concerned, the mischief vanished as quickly as it had appeared. The Dagda made no reply.

“You know, don’t you?” said Aengus. “Of course you do. You control the time skin. You know every inch of it. How could you not feel the leak?”

The Dagda continued to stare silently out over the plain.

“It’s no good, Father,” said Aengus. “It’s way too late for you to go down with the ship. You led them to their deaths and there’s nothing you can do to change that. Taking yourself and the rest of us with them won’t make it any better.”

“What was the war about?” said J.J.

Aengus, with difficulty, drew his attention away from his father. “Gods,” he said.

“Gods?”

“If you should ever meet me in your world, J.J., don’t call me by my name, understand?”

“Why?” said J.J.

“He’s afraid you’ll blow his cover,” said the Dagda.

“I’m afraid that the ploddies will jump to the
wrong conclusions, like they always do,” said Aengus. “And start talking about gods walking on the earth. That was what the war was about. Christianity came to Ireland and the ploddies started taking to it. Dad didn’t like it. Maintained that he was the god of Ireland. The rest is…” He waved his arm at the hill of stones.

J.J. stared at it, trying to take in the full implications of what Aengus had said. A breeze blew up from the sea, cold and fresh. It swayed the Dagda’s cloak romantically, but Aengus clearly wasn’t impressed.

“Stop it, Dad.”

The breeze dropped.

Aengus went on. “If you’re so determined to share the fate of your warriors, there’s nothing to stop you. All you have to do is go over to the other side. But you don’t have the right to drag us all with you. If you know where the leak is, you have to tell us.”

The Dagda turned to J.J. “I enjoyed your playing, young lad. I hope you’ll come back and play for me again sometime.”

It was a regal dismissal. J.J. picked up the fiddle case.

“Dad,” said Aengus.

“With or without my amadán son,” said the Dagda.

“Where is it, Dad?”

The Dagda looked long and hard at Aengus, then sighed deeply. “I don’t know exactly. But it’s near here. I can feel it leeching the life from my bones. I can smell it.”

“How near?” said Aengus.

“Very near,” said the Dagda. “Beneath my feet.”

Aengus let out a long sigh of relief. “Right,” he said. “Let’s go and see if we can find it.”

He walked away from his father and the hill of stones. J.J. followed, and Bran struggled to her feet and hobbled along behind them.

THE MOUNTAIN TOP

Trad

4

“He gets up my nose,” said Aengus. They were climbing back down the jagged corner of the mountain. Bran, unsteadier than ever, was slithering and tumbling down behind them. “It’s guilt, you know, that has him up there. It’s his fault that we were all but wiped out. Him and his stupid conviction that he’s a god.”

“I don’t know about that,” said J.J. “It seems to me that someone who can open and close gates in the sea and the sky can’t be far off being a god. Who’s going to do it when—if—he dies?”

“If he dies the rest of us won’t be far behind him,” said Aengus.

“I don’t see why you’re so pessimistic,” said J.J. “We might be ploddies and all, but we’ve been managing to
live with time for thousands and thousands of years. We have children and our children have children and that way we keep going. If you can’t get rid of the time, can’t you just do the same thing?”

“I’ve thought about that,” said Aengus. “I can’t see it happening, though. We’ve no experience of your kind of life. Even when we’re growing up in your world, we don’t make a great fist of it. Read the stories and you’ll see. We’re feckless, dreamy children; we live in a world of our own. And once we get here, well, you can see for yourself. We play music, we dance, we stroll about in the sunshine.”

“You could learn, couldn’t you?”

“Learn to be like you? We’ve never had to do anything. We don’t know how to grow food or farm cattle or make a living of any kind. We don’t know how to look after ourselves, let alone our children.”

“You could get people to teach you,” said J.J. “I’d help. And I’m sure Anne Korff would.”

Aengus nodded. “I know. But there’s more to it than that.”

He said nothing more, and J.J. sensed a reluctance in him. “Go on,” he said at last.

Aengus glanced at him. “We’ve watched you over the centuries,” he said. “If this goes on, we’ll start
getting hungry. When we stop being hungry, we’ll start getting greedy. Can you see us, J.J.? Enslaved by time, driven by greed? Destroying the land that we love? Even if our bloodlines survived, our spirit wouldn’t. Industry isn’t in our nature, you know? Those future generations would bear no resemblance to us.”

“Would it have to be like that?” said J.J. “Couldn’t there be another way?”

“If there is,” said Aengus, “you haven’t found it.”

At the edge of the hazel woods, they stopped to let Bran catch up. She was failing badly. J.J. wished there was something he could do for her.

The sun had sunk considerably since J.J. had last observed it, and the light was taking on a golden tinge. He looked out over the placid green plain.

“What did the Dagda mean when he accused you of indulging your little fantasies?” he asked Aengus.

Aengus spat derisively. “I’ve been going over to your side to have a look around, that’s all. The trouble is, it’s not always easy to remember what you’re doing there.”

“Anne Korff said something like that,” said J.J. “Why is that?”

“Don’t know,” said Aengus. “Something to do with
the time shock to the brain, I suppose. You can wind up being a bit vague about things.” He shook his head. “Bit rich, though, him accusing me of indulging fantasies. I’m not the one with the god complex!”