A Wizard Abroad

they shared one wall, and each one was a mirror image of the other.

And then even the housing estates started to give out. There was a last gasp of them as they passed through a town called Shankill, where the road had narrowed down to a single lane each way again. Shortly after that it curved off to the right, away from what looked like an even larger town. 'That's Bray,' Aunt Annie said. 'We do some of our shopping there. But this is officially County Wicklow, now: you're out of Dublin when you get near the Dargle.'

Nita hadn't noticed the river: it was hidden behind rows of little houses. 'That's Little Bray,' her aunt said. 'And now, here's Kilcroney.'

The road widened out abruptly into hill and forest, and two lanes on each side again. 'Everything has names,' Nita said.

'Every acre of this place has names,' her aunt said. 'Every town has 'townlands' around it, and every one of them has a different name. Almost every field, and every valley and hill.' She smiled. 'I rather like it.'

'I think I might too,' Nita said. A wizard could best do spells when everything in them was completely named: and it was always easier to use existing names than to coin new ones — which you had to do if no-one had previously named a thing or place, or if it didn't know its own name already. And the name you coined had to be right, otherwise the wizardry would backfire. 'There,' her aunt said, maneuvering around a couple of curves in the road. 'There's our mountain.'

Nita peered past her aunt, out towards the right. There was Great Sugarloaf. It looked very different from how it had looked from the air — sharper, more imposing, more dangerous. Heather did its best to grow up its sides, but the bare granite of the mountain's peak defeated it about two- thirds of the way up. Scree and boulders lay clear to see all about the mountain's bald head. The road ran past a service station where geese and a goat grazed behind a fence, watching the traffic; then through a shallow ravine that ran between two thickly-forested hills. Sunlight would fall down the middle of it at noon, Nita guessed, but at the moment the whole deep vale was in shadow. 'Glen of the Downs,' Aunt Annie said. 'We're almost home. That's a nice place to hike to, down there, where the picnic benches are.'

After a couple more miles down the dual carriageway, Aunt Annie turned off down a little lane. To Nita's eyes this road looked barely wide enough for one car, let alone two, but to her shock several other cars passed them, and Aunt Annie never even slowed down, though she crunched so far over on the left side of the road that the hedges scraped the doors.

'See that town down there on the left? That's Greystones,' said Aunt Annie. 'We do the best part of our shopping there. But here. .' She turned off down another lane, this one literally just wide enough to let one car through. In half a minute they came out in the graveled 'parking lot' in front of a little house. Around it, on all sides, fenced fields and farm buildings stretched. It was forty acres, Nita knew: her aunt's life savings had gone into the farm, her great love. 'Welcome to Ballyvolan,' her aunt said. 'Come on in and we' ll get you something to eat.' They did more than that. They gave her a place to stay which was uniquely her own, and Nita was very pleased.

They put her up, not in the house, but in a caravan out the back: a trailer, as she would have called it. She was getting the feeling that everything here had different names that she was going to have to get used to. But she was used to that; everything had different names in wizardry, too. yet it struck her as quite strange being here in this odd place where people she knew to be speaking English as their first language were nonetheless speaking it in accents so odd she couldn't make out more than one word in three. The accents came in all variations of thick, thin, light, impenetrable, lilting, dark; and people would run all their words together and talk very fast. Or very softly, so that Nita shortly began feeling as if she was shouting every time she opened her mouth.They gave her the caravan, and left her alone. 'You'll want to just fall over and sleep, I should think,' Aunt Annie said. 'Come in when you're ready and we'll feed you.' So Nita had unpacked her bag, and sat down on the little bed built into the side of the caravan. It was a good size for her. Its windows afforded a clear view of the path from the house, so that if she was to do a wizardry, she would have a few seconds to shut it down before anyone got close enough to see what was going on. There were cupboards and drawers, a shelf above the head of the bed, a little cupboard to hang things in, a table with a comfortable bench- seat to work at, and lights set in the walls here and there, and an electric heater to keep everything warm if it got cool at night.

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.

2. Cill Cumhaid / Kilquade

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 thingwas 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