A Wizard Abroad

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.'

'We don't have set mealtimes,' Aunt Annie said. 'My staff come in and get a snack when they can, and I tend to eat when I'm hungry. I was busy with the accounts for most of this evening — didn't notice I was hungry until just now. Unlike some,' she said, looking ruefully down at the floor around the cooker, which was suddenly littered with cats of various colours, 'who are hungry whether they've just eaten or not.'

Nita laughed and bent down to scratch the cats: the black-and-white cat again, and a marmalade- coloured cat with golden eyes, and a tiny delicate white-bibbed tabby, and another black-and-white cat of great dignity, who sat watching the others, and Nita and her aunt, unblinking. 'Bear,' Aunt Annie said, 'and Chessie, and Big Paws. All of you, out of here: you've had your dinners! Now where's the mustard got to?'

She turned away to find it. Under her breath, Nita said hurriedly in the wizards' Speech,'You all get out of here and I'll see if I can liberate something for you later… '

They sat looking thoughtful — since almost everything that thinks can recognize and understand the Speech — then one by one got up and strolled off. Big Paws went last, looking thoughtfully at Nita as he did so. Her aunt had found the mustard, and noticed the exodus. 'Huh,' she said. 'I guess they don't like the smell of the onions.'

'It's pretty strong,' Nita said, and started spreading mustard on bread.

When everything was ready, they sat down and ate. 'I hope you don't mind being a little on your own tomorrow,' Aunt Annie said. 'You hit us at kind of a busy time. There's going to be a hunt here in a few days, and we have to start getting ready for it.' 'You mean like a fox hunt?' Nita said.

'That's right. Some of the local farmers have been complaining about their chicken flocks being raided. Anyway, some of our horses are involved, so we have to have the vet in to certify them fit, and then the farrier is coming in tomorrow afternoon to do some re-shoeing. It's going to be pretty hectic. If you want to be around here, that's fine: or if you think you'll be bored, you might want to go down to Greystones — it's a pretty easy bike ride from here. Or take the bus over to Bray and look around.'

'OK,' Nita said. I'll see how I feel. I'm still pretty tired.'

'Traveling eastbound takes it out of you,' Aunt Annie said. 'It won't be so bad going back.' You said it, Nita thought.And the sooner the better. But she smiled anyway, and said, 'I hope not.' They finished eating, and cleared the table. 'If you want to watch TV late, you're going to be out of luck,' her aunt said. 'All but one of the TV stations shut down around midnight, and the one that's left mostly just shows old films. But if you feel inclined, go ahead.'

'Uh, thanks. I thought I might read for a while. After that I may just go to sleep again. I'm still rather tired.'

'That's fine. You make yourself completely at home.' Her aunt looked at Nita with an expression that had some of Big Paws' look about it. 'It must have been a bit of a wrench, just being shipped off like that.'

What did they tell you, I wonder? Nita thought. 'It was,' she said after a moment. 'But I'll cope.' Her aunt smiled. 'Typical of our side of the family,' she said. 'There's a long history of that. Well, if you get hungry or something later, just come on in and take what you need. Use the back door, though: I'm going to lock the front now, and turn in. I'll leave a light on for you in here. You know where everything is, the bathroom and so forth?' 'Yeah, Aunt Annie. Thanks.'

Her aunt headed off. Nita looked around the kitchen to see if there was anything else that needed cleaning up — her mother had drummed into her that she should make sure she returned hospitality by helping out in the kitchen: her aunt hated washing-up more than anything else, her mother had said. But there was nothing left to do.

Except something that needed a wizard to do it, and Nita set about that straightaway. She headed out the back door, out through a little archway into the concrete yard again. The only light was the one she had left on in the caravan, and it was dim. She paused outside the door. Even now, past midnight, the sky wasn't completely black. Nevertheless, it was blanketed with stars, much brighter than she was used to seeing them through the light pollution of the New York suburbs. And there was no sound here but the faintest breath of wind. Even the dual carriageway a mile away made no noise at all. It was as if everyone in this part of the country had gone to bed all at once. There was only one light visible, about a mile away across the fields: someone's house light. For someone who had always lived in places where the street had streetlights on all night, this utter darkness was a shock.

But the stars, she thought. The Milky Way was clearly visible, even bright. At home it was almost impossible to see it at all.At least there's been one thing worth seeing here. She shivered hard then, and ducked back into the caravan to get her jacket, and her manual. Once she had them she headed out across the concrete yard again, making for the log fence that separated the land immediately around Aunt Annie's house from the fields beyond it. The closest field was planted with something called oilseed rape — tall green plants with flowers at the top so extremely yellow that they had made Nita's eyes hurt to look at them in the sunshine that morning when she had arrived. The field beyond that was clean pasture, grassland being left fallow for this year. That was what Nita wanted, for there was a thick strip of woodland at the