Seek the Fair Land

by Walter Macken

  ‘No man can live for ever,’ said Tom. ‘Come on, Dominick.’

  He walked off the rampart, on to the cobbled walk towards the steps that led down to the Ship Quay. Dominick followed him. He felt sad. He felt, after all, it is better to be out in the open. Murdoc was right about that.

  The seagulls were screaming over the river. The quay was crowded with people. Some of the soldiers and carriers were sitting on the barrels. There was a smell of fish and spilt wine and the fresh scouring sea. Dominick walked behind Tom, feeling as if he had a warhorse breaking a way through for him. They stood for a moment in the middle of the first quay. At the quay across from them, where the slave ship had loaded, he again noticed the swarthy man standing. He was squat and powerful-looking, and had big jowls working away chewing at the cylinder of black rolled tobacco. There was a soldier standing beside him. Presumably the man was ticking off in his mind how much the departing ship would bring him, hoping that too many of them wouldn’t die before they reached their destination. Whatever he was thinking about was interrupted. From a cleared space behind where the carriers were sitting and lolling and spitting there came a heavy round wine-cask that rolled down the incline towards where the swarthy one was standing. Silence descended over the quays. The cask rolled and rolled while hundreds of eyes watched it and then it caught the dark one just behind the knees. He threw up his hands. There was nothing he could do to save himself. He went head first into the tide. He disappeared in the water and the cask fell after him and then popped up again like a cork, dancing joyfully. All one could see of the man was the curious flat black hat he had worn, with a coloured ribbon around it that sailed off on the ebbing tide.

  And then the man’s head emerged from the water. He had a gleaming bald head. All around his pate the long black hair was lank. His mouth was open. He shouted. There was a dreadful look of fear and panic in his face before the tide pulled him under again, dragging him inexorably in the wake of his departing ship.

  He couldn’t swim.

  Not a soul moved. There was dead silence on the quay. He came up again farther down the estuary and he shouted. If he could see them, he must have been panic-stricken at the cold impersonal glances of the onlookers. They were looking at him even as they would look at a drowning rat. Dominick could see this.

  He couldn’t help what happened then. He kicked his way out of his heavy shoes, ran in his stockinged feet to the side of the ship near him, vaulted over the wooden side of it, ran across its holystoned decks, mounted the rail on the other side and jumped into the sea just ahead of where he judged the man to be.

  He found him, away down, and gripped his clothes and rose to feel the air on his face. Fortunately the man was half drowned. All the same he waved his arms, so Dominick hit him on the temple with his closed fist. Hit him with anger and frustration and annoyance at his own actions. The man went fairly limp. Dominick saw the side of the ship sliding past him, the current of the conquering river bringing him closer to it. He scrabbed at the side of it with a free hand and found no grip, and then a heavy rope hit him in the face and he grabbed that. He saw the tobacco-chewing faces above, hairy faces with coloured woollen caps on their heads. They threw another rope. He fixed it under the arms of the man as best he could. They pulled him free from the water like a wet cask. It must have been an accident that when they had him almost up they let the rope free again, so that he entered the water with a splash. This revived him. He shouted when he came free this time. So they hauled him all the way, and Dominick, catching his breath, swarmed up the rope and stood dripping on the deck.

  The man was on the deck. He was leaning on an elbow. He was being sick. The circle of sailors was looking curiously at Dominick.

  ‘Why did you do a thing like that?’ one asked.

  Dominick didn’t answer. How could he? He took off his shirt and began to wring the water out of it. The swarthy one was a bit better now. He struggled to his feet grasping the rail. Nobody helped him. He turned then and looked at the blank faces regarding him. His eyes shifted, moved to the face of Dominick, a thin face framed with long wet fair hair.

  ‘Friend,’ said he.

  Dominick had sea water in his mouth. He gathered it and spat it out. Then he walked away. The man called after him, ‘Friend,’ but Dominick didn’t regard him. He leaped on to the quay, worked his feet into his shoes and still wringing his shirt joined Tom Tarpy. Tom was looking at him curiously. Dominick dropped his eyes. He couldn’t do anything else. ‘ Come on,’ said Tom and walked towards the Strand Gate. Dominick followed after him. As they neared the gate, he was conscious of the group of carriers to the left from where the cask had come rolling. From that group, so soft as to be all the more offensive, a very dirty word was thrown at him, in Irish. He stopped and looked, his jaws tight. They were regarding him blankly but storing up the memory of him. Tom turned. ‘ No more of that,’ he said. ‘ He’s my friend.’ Tom looked at them and then walked on. They came through the gate into the horse market. There were a lot of horses. Most of them were panniered, having woven baskets on each side of them, carrying turf, firewood, some vegetables or bags of uncrushed meal. It was a packed place, but there was little loud talk. He knew that feeling well now, the lack of talk, the fear that was everywhere. But men had to live, to sell what they could and hope for the best.

  Tom walked through the market elbowing his way rudely, slapping a horse on the flanks to get it out of the way. When he got through the market, he walked into Earl’s Street, and near the ruins of the De Burgo castle, turned left into Red Earl’s Lane. Past the castle there were rows of two-storey houses, built of limestone like most of the others. At a door here, Tom shot a bolt and walked down steps to the tavern.

  Light came into the place from two half-circular windows on the street. There were shelves with the light glinting off bottles, saffron-coloured jars, barrels. Here Tom faced him.

  ‘Why?’ he asked. ‘In the name of God why? They have been trying to injure that fellow for a year. You know what he is?’

  ‘You knew it was going to happen?’ Dominick asked. ‘Was that why we were on the rampart, giving Jake a drink?’

  ‘What made you do it?’ Tom asked.

  ‘I wish I knew,’ said Dominick. Suddenly he felt angry. ‘But of course I know. It’s that Sebastian. That’s who it was. Just as if he was there beside me, whispering into my ear. You haven’t been with Sebastian as long as I have. He sort of grows on you. He doesn’t say anything, but he impels his ideas into your brain, without saying anything. You know Sebastian.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Tom. ‘You accept everything. Even if you are being turned into a slave. You accept that. That’s God’s will. If everyone went on that way where would the world be, will you tell me that?’

  Dominick’s anger drained away.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Maybe we’d be all better off to accept things as they befall. Maybe then there would be none of this cruelty.’

  ‘Yes, but the trouble is,’ said Tom, ‘that you have to get the other fellow thinking that way too. If you don’t you will be wiped out. You shouldn’t have done that. Hell was waiting for that fellow.’

  ‘What’s his name?’ Dominick asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Tom. ‘I wouldn’t pronounce it. Wouldn’t it be like dung on the tongue?’ He went behind the counter. ‘Here’s some clothes for you. They’re rough, but they’ll be better than your own. You want to see Coote, don’t you? Well, you can carry the tribute. You want to see the lowest form of life outside of privy beetles, don’t you? Well, come and see Coote. Where’s that Sebastian now?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Dominick, taking off his breeches. ‘ He took the children with him. They are good for deceit, he said. How could any man suspect a priest with a child in each hand?’

  ‘He takes too many chances, he won’t survive,’ said Tom. ‘But he might as well. Sometimes it might be better to be dead than alive. There seems to be no hope for us, dammit, no hop
e.’

  ‘There is always hope,’ said Dominick.

  ‘You come and see Coote,’ said Tom, ‘and you’ll see what I mean.’

  Dominick pulled on the coarse breeches and the canvas shirt. He tied the breeches with a piece of rope. Tom handed him a rough hat. ‘Wear this,’ he said. ‘It’ll dim the bright look of you. And keep your mouth shut, and your eyes open.’

  When he was ready, Tom hefted a big jar on his shoulder and they went out into the lane again. He shot the heavy bolt on the door. They walked in the dust of the lane. When it rained it was like a swamp. They emerged into the street of the quays and then turned right, over the Crosse Street, and into the welter and confusion that was Market Street.

  ‘Now for the Lord President of Connacht,’ said Tom, grunting.

  Chapter Thirteen

  A V-SHAPED block of buildings with its base resting on the Crosse Street, and pointing straight up to the big arch of the Great Gate Tower, held on each side of it the packed marketplace. There were stalls and baskets. It was mainly country women, dressed ungainly in heavy wool and frieze, who offered eggs and butter and vegetables for sale. There were pedlars with ribbons and pins and little dolls and furbelows that women wear, their portable stalls hung around their necks. There was a lot of colour in the market-place, a lot of shouting, and a lot of smells, not all of them nice, just the whiff passing of the spiced little cakes and sweet titbits of the vendors. Dominick noticed that it was mainly the poorer people who were buying and selling. There was no sign of silk or fine worsted or lace or clean white linen.

  And all the time Tom was talking. It was a good town, he was saying, even if it was owned by the tribes and very few men could get a wedge in with them. But even if they were proud tyrants and monopolizers they built the town and made it big and wealthy, so that little men could live in it and make a living and bring up their families, and have enough to fill their bellies, and to look to a future. Now it was gone. It would never be the same again, never. The present people would do all they could to destroy it. Weren’t they at war with the world as well? So no more Spanish ships, no more French ships. What could get in now would be carried in a pucaun and leave space over for ten men.

  So, farewell to the marble halls. Their owners were fled and the marble was defaced with the hooves of horses and the depredations of the soldiers. All the people flocking in from the north, south, east, and west, bringing nothing with them but the clothes on their backs, and as the great mansions were emptied they crept into them, ten, twenty to a room, living in squalor, dulling the polish of the marble, soiling the bedrooms where great ladies once lolled on satin sheets and listened to songs sung by gay blades in silk pantaloons.

  He was angry, pushing his way through the throng, a deceptively tall man who looked short owing to his great bulk. Dominick was following him, listening and using his eyes, watching brown-faced country girls, their beauty hidden under the weight of wool and the heavy scarfs around their heads and faces. Old women with lined brave faces, as if they had been carved out of the solid earth, the people who had learned to put up with things, to accept things, so that they would survive and leave generations after them who would also survive, mounting in numbers and resolution. That’s it, he thought, Sebastian is right. It’s a matter of patience. Take the blows, if they kill you, leave two of you afterwards to make more to survive, who will live patiently and absorb by sheer patience the people who were killing them yesterday, so that later they, the killers, will in future generations be killed by fresh killers, will die out and the ones who took what the Lord sent will of necessity be the victors. Why did he see this so clearly, looking at the faces of the country people?

  ‘Don’t be destitute, but be poor,’ that’s what Tom was saying. ‘Have nothing to give away, but enough to remain alive. That’s the plot. If you are destitute you will end up in the Barbadoes, and if you are poor they can’t take anything away from you, not even your life.’ Funny that they should have both been thinking on the same lines walking through the market-place. Because, he supposed, that’s where the real people are in the world, in the market-places, the small people who cannot flee; who must put up with what is happening to them, of necessity.

  There was a great crowd around the Market Cross in front of St Nicholas’ Church.

  The sellers here were different. The sellers were soldiers. There was one soldier doing all the offering. He was a big man with very white teeth. The whole place was well surrounded with people. He was holding up things for sale, crying, ‘What am I bid for this? What am I bid for this? Do I hear sixpence? Do I hear one shilling?’ Few of the people around him understood what he was saying, but they knew what he was offering. There were brass candlesticks, and china vases, and brass ornaments, and decorated combs.

  ‘They have scraped them of all their money,’ Tom told him. ‘Now they are down to the bones.’ Dominick had watched the Saturday collections. They would raid the big house, with the people, father, mother, children, looking shabbier as each week passed, saying: ‘We cannot pay the tribute today. Give us until next week and we will pay all.’ That was the permit to the soldiers to enter the great houses, to search them from floor to cellar. The soldiers enjoyed it. If there was no money they took kind. You would see them emerging with a beautifully carved table or a set of chairs, or huge damask hangings, or pewter tankards, or silver tankards, or oil paintings. Oh, they enjoyed the raids all right. But worse than that, Dominick thought, were the onlookers on the street outside the houses, poor people, who watched their once wealthy neighbours being reduced to this. Some of them took pleasure in it, you could see that, and many a back room, many a noisome tenement place, was decorated with a brass-bound mirror or a foreign comb or a painted fan.

  ‘They are not that badly off, you watch.’ Tom was saying. ‘Some of them have it salted down somewhere like herrings in a barrel. They have bought their way from this town half way over Connacht – castles, mansions, and broad acres, for the rainy day. They won’t be separated from them. If they have to save them by changing their religion, by becoming apostates, they themselves won’t do that, but they’ll make the lunatics of the family turn. They will dart and twist, but they will survive. Don’t mistake that.’

  The choice of the day,’ the soldier was saying. ‘ Look at this, ladies. Why not decorate your smelly bodies with this poem in silk?’ He was holding up a silk gown, light blue in colour with red roses imprinted over the blue. ‘Warm,’ he said, ‘ warm,’ holding it up to his coarse face. ‘Still warm from the body of a beautiful girl,’ His soldiers laughed. ‘And warmer still are these,’ bending down and bringing up in his other hand very fine linen underwear. ‘Hot from the owner,’ he shouted, holding them up. There was a laugh from the crowd. They didn’t know what he was saying, but underwear in any age would make a sinner laugh. ‘Scilling!’ a voice called from the crowd. ‘Oh, no,’ he said, ‘ make it two sailings, three sailings, four scillings, five sailings. The pretty lady wouldn’t pay the tribute, so we had to strip her with our own hands.’

  ‘Come on,’ said Tom. And Dominick followed him. Now he felt fierce, mad with anger, burning with hate.

  ‘Sometimes you don’t feel it’s worth it.’ Tom was saying. ‘Sometimes you feel like hitting back, but if you do that how will you survive? I am a man in the middle. I am the owner of a tavern. My father before me owned it and his father before him, back for five generations. So, by fair means and a few crooked means, I have become a man in the middle. And that’s a dangerous place to be sometimes. The rich ones clap me on the back and talk of Good Tom; and the poor clap me on the back and owe me money for drink. A man in the middle, and a man now in the middle of High Middle Street. Here, you take this now.’

  Dominick took the yellow jar and put it on his shoulder. They were at the four corners where High Middle Street, Little Gate Street, Great Gate Street and Skinner’s Street met, and on the other side from them Lynch’s Castle loomed, a grey stone building, rising to fo
ur storeys with a pointed roof, topped by a flag that waved invitingly in the hot breeze. There were soldiers guarding each side of it, with crossed pikes, holding the entrance. They crossed the street towards them. The street had been paved, but it was now rutted from wheels and sharp hooves and neglect.

  The soldiers didn’t move.

  ‘You know me,’ said Tom. ‘I would be obliged if you wouldn’t let me in. Then the Lord President of Connacht wouldn’t get his weekly brandy and I would be saved that much.’

  They pulled back the pikes.

  ‘Pass, friend,’ one said, grinning. Tom went in and Dominick followed him, his head lowered.

  The two soldiers looked after them and they exchanged a remark and laughed.

  At the same time, on the west side of the river, on the road leading from the castle of Rahune, into the suburbs of Fathai Beg, crossing the Balls Bridge river and entering the rough approach between the thatched houses towards the drawbridge of the west bridge fortifications that pointed like a blunt arrow to the wild lands from where they had come, twelve horsemen moved towards the town at a slow jogtrot.

  They were very big men riding small horses. But the small horses, the capaillini, were very sturdy, and they had proudly shaped heads. They had long tails, some fawn-coloured, some very white-coloured and some jet black. Their manes were the same colours as their tails, but their bodies were a mixture of fawn or light-grey or dark-grey or brown and black. They were well-fed horses with slim legs.

  They needed to be well fed to carry the men on their backs. Even in the heat they wore brown short cloaks, with the hoods thrown back, tied around their necks with leather thongs. They wore linen shirts dyed saffron. Some of them were bare to the elbow, some of them right to the shoulder, and their arms for the most part were brown and hairy and leaping with muscle as they gripped the rope reins leading to the leather bridle of the small horses. They sat on no saddles. Their hair was long. Most of them were black-haired, but some of them were brown and one or two of them very fair. Their long hair wasn’t neat. It was tangled, and some of them had it tied back behind their ears. But all of them had one thing in common, the thick drooping Irish moustache, the forbidden crombheal, which they wore, blatantly, luxuriously, and fiercely.