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hand grips and bits of wheel hubs. Celtic ones; Irish. Thomas used to say that charioteers still raced along the road on nights of the new moon. He said they went straight through the gates and hedges as if they weren’t there, all around the lake from one side to the other and back again. He said that if you heard them you should lie down and close your eyes and pray to Saint Patrick. He said he had heard them himself one time, coming back across the fields from the mart in Ennis with Jackie Flynn. But Jackie Flynn got annoyed if he was asked about it, so Gerard could never get the truth.
    Not that he didn’t know what the truth was. He was sure that Thomas didn’t believe the stories himself, but felt under some sort of ancestral compulsion to hand them down to anyone who would listen. A chill went through him and he looked out over the lake to where the island stood, bull-like, in its own early-morning shadow. Gods. Fairies. He had never been able to work out which was which, or whether they were the same things, or who it was that had been banished to live under the ground when the Milesians had come to rule the surface of the land.
    He had come to the end of the field. He looked across into the next one, but there was no reason to go any further. Martina couldn’t have anyway, unless she had jumped the cob over the hedge. He turned and started back the way he had come. Surely to God the girl had turned up at home by now. She was probably sitting at the range, drinking a hot cup of tea. Maybe she had hurt her leg. Or her head; got a knock, perhaps. On the road.
    He broke into a run. Why was he out here, wandering around the fields when he hadn’t even thought of phoning the hospital?
    As soon as the others had gone, Trish thought of it. Her brother had died of tetanus when he was seventeen and she had been a realist ever since when it came to life and death. She had no problem imagining Martina in a hospital bed; comatose, brain-damaged. She parked Aine in front of the television in the cottage while she phoned; first Ennis, then Limerick, and finally the Galway Regional. Martina wasn’t in any of them.
    Brigid turned off the metalled road and drove up a long, gently curving boirin which ran between green, sloping meadows and on up into the grey crags where the winterage lay. She drove slowly, watching carefully, finding no clues. Grass grew in between the stony tyre-tracks and Martina was in the habit of cantering all the way up. It was the main reason that she was always so willing to ride up there to check on the cattle. Brigid tried to imagine the thrill of it, of speeding along the track on horseback, but she failed. It had never appealed to her. She admired the horses from a distance but had always been afraid to get too close.
    The track narrowed as she got higher, but remained passable for the Kadett right up to the end. There was a space to turn, a gate, and on the other side of it, a concrete water trough fed by a trickling spring. Other than that there was nothing. Just rock. As Brigid got out of the car the sun appeared over the easternmost hills, casting sudden shadows, creating contrast. Brigid opened the gate and went through it and past the dribbling trough. A cattle-path led on upwards, winding among the spurs and faults of the grey crags. The going was awkward enough, and Brigid was fairly certain that Martina always left Specks tied to the gate when she walked in to look at the cattle. The limestone was flaky and criss-crossed with grikes, some a few inches deep, others twenty feet or more, their dark depths concealed by ferns and mosses that grew on their walls, far beneath Brigid’s feet. Even where a thin covering of soil allowed for the growth of coarse grass there could be holes. Brigid had always considered the shoes she wore to be sensible, but now she wasn’t so sure. The heels were not high but they were narrow and unstable. Already her ankles were beginning to tire.
    She walked on,