“It seems a strange thing to be bragging of,” he said as he and Madra left Green’s Fine Furniture behind them.
“He certainly knows nothing about horses,” Madra said. “Did you see his nags? Like harrows they were, draped in moth-eaten hides. You’re well out of there.”
The next stable Madra found was attached to a hauling company near the docks. It was run by Cornelius Vanderhoof, who, like all Dutchmen, didn’t care which language a man spoke as long as he was willing to take a dollar in payment for ten hours of work.
“I’ve no need of a stableman,” he told Liam kindly enough. “I have two horse boys, and that’s all I need.”
“All boys are good for is to feed and water and muck out,” Liam said. “I’d care for them like children, I would.”
Mr. Vanderhoof shook his head. “Come back in May. I might have work for you, if you can handle a team.”
And so it went all the weary day. One livery stable proprietor had just hired someone. Another offered Liam fifty cents to shovel muck. Another shook his head before Liam even opened his mouth.
“It’s April,” he said. “Nobody will be hiring until summer. You’re Irish, right? Why not carry bricks or dig foundations like the rest of your countrymen?”
“I’m a horse trainer,” Liam said, hating the pleading note in his voice.
“I don’t care if you’re the king of County Down,” the livery man said. “Ostlers are a dime a dozen in these parts. You want to work with horses, take a train west.”
As they emerged from the livery stable, Madra broke the heavy silence. “It’s getting on toward dusk. Shall we be heading home?”
Liam looked at the heavy carts piled high with crates and boxes lumbering over the rutted streets, at the ragged, gray-faced men plodding homeward in the fading light, at the street children, dirty and barefoot, lingering by pushcarts in hopes of a dropped apple or an unwatched cabbage. His ears rang with the rumble of wheels, the squeak of unoiled axles, the shouting and swearing and laughter.
“I have no home,” he said. “Just now it seems to me I’ll never have a home again.”
He waited for Madra to call him a pitiful squinter or prescribe a pint or a song to clear his mind. But Madra just plodded down the street, head down and tail adroop, as tired and discouraged as Liam himself.
Being immortal, Folk do not commonly find time hanging heavy on their hands. A day is but an eyeblink in their lives; a month can pass in the drawing of a breath. The Pooka had never imagined being as aware of the arc of the sun across the sky or the length of time separating one meal from the next as he had been since his life had been linked to Liam’s.
Today had been a weary length indeed.
At first, the Pooka had simply been glad to be alive and reasonably well. Maeve’s charm itched, but it was a healing itch, and he felt some strength return to his limbs. He kept running up to railings and barrels and iron-shod wheels just to touch them and sniff them and prove once again that they had no power to hurt him.
The encounter with Ebenezer Green shook him. Had he been on his game, the Pooka would have nosed out what manner of man Green was before they’d even crossed the threshold.
But the Pooka was not on his game. A whole day on the town, and he hadn’t tricked so much as the price of a drink out of a living soul. The fear grew on him that Maeve’s charm had cured his iron-sickness at the expense of his magic. What he needed was something to knock him loose from the limited round of mortal concerns he’d been treading since Liam had freed him from the poacher’s trap. He needed a bet or a challenge or a trick. Something tried and true, for preference not too dangerous, that would put him on his mettle and bring Liam a bit of silver.
“Liam,” he said. “I have an idea. Tomorrow, as soon as it’s light, we’ll take ourselves up out of this sty to wherever it is the rich folk live. You shall sell me as a ratter for the best price you can get.”
“Shall I so?” asked Liam wearily. “And what if no man needs a ratter or will not buy an Irish one?”
“There’s always a man wants to buy a dog,” the Pooka said confidently.
Liam shook his head. “I will not, and there’s an end. What kind of man do you take me for, to sell a friend for silver money?”
“Oh, I’d not stay sold,” the Pooka assured him. “I’d run away and meet you at Maeve’s before the cat can lick her ear.”
“And if you can’t escape? What then? Will I steal you back again? It’s stark mad you are, Madra. The city’s gone to your head.”
The Pooka was charmed with his plan and argued it with cunning and passion. Yet Liam would not be moved. It was illegal, he said, immoral, and dangerous, and that was an end on it. All of which confirmed the Pooka in his opinion that Liam was no more suited for city life than a wild deer. Were the Pooka not there to look after him, he’d surely have been stripped of his savings and left to starve in a ditch before he’d so much as fully exhaled the ship’s air from his lungs.
A furious squeal interrupted the Pooka’s planning. Hackles rising, he turned to find himself nose to bristly snout with a big, ugly, foul-breathed sow.
A fight’s as good as a trick for clearing the mind.
The Pooka bared his teeth and growled. The sow’s amber eye glittered madly, and she wheeled and trotted back for the charge. The Pooka spared a glance at Liam, saw him surrounded by a handful of half-grown shoats, squealing and shoving at his legs. Liam was laying about him with his knapsack, cursing and trying to keep his feet in the mired street. If he were to fall, they’d trample him sure as taxes, and possibly eat him where he lay.
Fury rose in the Pooka’s breast, then, pure and mighty. Ducking the sow’s charge, he leaped into the melee around Liam, landing square on the largest of the shoats. The pig threw him off, but not before the Pooka had nipped a chunk out of its ear. Spitting that out, he fastened his teeth into the nearest ham. The shoat it belonged to squealed and bolted, leaving only four and their dam for the Pooka to fight.
He’d not endured a battle so furious since St. Patrick drove the snakes into the sea and the Fair Folk under hill. This fight he intended to win.
At home on his own turf, the Pooka would have made short work of the pigs. At home, even in his dog shape there, he was faster than a bee, mighty as a bull, and tireless as the tide. But weeks of iron-sickness and short commons, stuck in one shape like a chick in its shell, had sapped his strength.
The Pooka slipped in the slurry of mud and dung; a sharp trotter caught him a glancing blow. He felt the bright blood run burning down his flank, and a wave of pain and terror washed through and through him. Immortals cannot die, but they can be killed.
Instinct told the Pooka that he must shift to save himself. Fear whispered that he could not shift, that he’d lost the knack, that he’d been a dog so long, he’d forgotten what it felt like to have hooves or horns or two legs and a coat he could take off.
Seeing her enemy falter, the sow took heart and charged, squealing like a rusty hinge, her tusks aimed like twin spears straight at the Pooka’s soft belly.
Instinct triumphed.
Tossing his streaming mane, the Pooka screamed and aimed his heavy, unshod hooves at the sow’s spine. Quick as he was, she was quicker yet, scrambling out from under his feet at the last instant. The Pooka turned upon the shoats around Liam like an angry sea, striking with hoof and tooth.
The sow, seeing her shoats threatened, charged again, barreling toward the Pooka like a storm full of lightning. Wheeling, the Pooka reared again. This time, his hooves crushed the sow into the mud.
The Pooka stood over the bodies of his enemies and trumpeted his victory into the evening air.
An arm snaked across his withers and clung there. Liam’s voice, shaky with relief, breathed in his ear. “Oh, my heart, my beauty, my champion of champions. That was a battle to be put in songs, and I shall do so. Just as soon as my legs will bear me and my heart climbs down from my throat.”
The Pooka arched his neck proudly and pawed at the corpses piled at his feet. A shoat, recovering from its swoon, heaved up on its trotters and staggered away down the street, straight into the path of a bay gelding
