Seek the Fair Land

by Walter Macken

  Dominick started to pull the line towards him. He could see the golden gleam of the struggling fish as he came into the shallower water. He pointed then, and Peter plunged in until the water was to his knees. Dominick kept the strain on the fish and eased him in until he was in front of Peter. Peter crouched, his palms held together, then suddenly darted them down and scooped with them, and much water and a still struggling fish came out of the lake and hit Dominick in the face. The fish rebounded off him. He shouted, startled, but had enough good sense, although half-blinded with the water, to bend down, catch the fish by the tail and throw him farther up on the shore. He was a good fish. He had a small head and a fat body, and he was beautifully speckled with a deep golden sheen on his belly.

  Pedro was still in the water. He was laughing. He was bending his body up and down. Dominick spluttered again, a bit exaggerated for his benefit, shook his fist at him, and their freeing the fish from the hook hit his head on a stone until his struggling ended. He held him up. ‘Look, Pedro,’ he said, ‘isn’t he lovely?’ Pedro looked at him and started to come ashore rubbing his stomach. The line was twisted into a million tangles. Dominick freed it and floated it again and had hardly walked six yards when another trout struck him. Pedro gleefully took to the water again, but before he could scoop this one, Dominick, trusting to the strength of his home-made tackle, switched him on to the shore where the fish floundered most ignominiously. This was a good fish too but it wasn’t as heavy as the first one.

  ‘It will do for the ladies,’ said Dominick. ‘They have delicate appetites.’ He won another silent laugh from his son, who, while Dominick gathered and rolled his line around the board, stuck a forked branch through the gills of the fish. They set off back from the shore. They had to break their way through thick alder bushes, willow, and beech scrub before they came into the peace of the woods, where tall, branchless trees reared high over their heads. The ground was like a thick carpet with the long years of fallen leaves and pine needles and rotted branches, with short green grass, smothered in the shade, and wide stretches of a tiny purple-blossomed flower. It was very peaceful, Dominick thought, and for the first time for a long while his heart was light. He had climbed a tree earlier in the morning and on that great body of water, with its many tree-covered islands, he had seen no sign of a boat or smoke, or a single human being. The island was large, but it held no humans, no animals. It seemed to be just a sanctuary for birds, who were scolding them since they landed last night, and very daring in their approach. Because there is no human being near us, therefore we can relax and afford to be happy, he thought. What a terrible reflection! Where man is, there you have to be afraid again; you have to be on your guard constantly. Why couldn’t we be like the birds, who fly and search for food, and go to sleep and wake up and start the day over again? That must have been the way man was meant to live too. Like the birds, is it? Then how about their fear? Fear of hawks, or eagles, or rats, or bigger birds? Enough of that now, stick to your first thought and hold on to your happiness.

  Peter had run ahead of him as they laboured up a steep incline. He had reached the top and was standing there waving the fish whose still fresh colours flashed in the sun. Then he was gone and Dominick plodded after him.

  He reached the top of the incline and looked below. There was a natural sandy bay down there, sheltered by trees. There was an oval-shaped beach of white sand. The water was glassy calm because the wind was shut off from it. The sun was higher than the trees now, and shone blindingly on the sand. He could see Mary Ann standing up with her hands behind her back and the woman squatting down blowing at a smoking fire, and Peter flying towards them with a fish waving over his head. The red skirt of the woman made a splash of brilliant colour on the sand. For a moment as he paused, he thought, if she were Eibhlin, she would turn and come walking towards me, or even running, and there would be true happiness then to look into his eyes and watch her laughter. Then he sighed and put the thought out of his head and came down to them.

  The woman was on her knees, blowing at the wood fire. Her cheeks were red from her efforts, and her forehead and chin were black with wood ashes. She looked very exasperated.

  ‘It’s no good, Daddy,’ said Mary Ann. ‘ I’m afraid she’s useless.’

  But the woman was determined.

  ‘I’m going to light this cursed fire,’ she said, ‘if I have to blow myself inside out.’

  ‘But if you never lit a fire in your life,’ Mary Ann asked in a maddeningly reasonable way. ‘how are you going to light this one? I’m hungry.’

  Suddenly the woman sat back on her heels and started laughing. Her eyes were closed, her throat was working.

  ‘She’s right’ she said then. ‘ May the devil blast it. You do it Dominick.’ She lay back on the sand. Dominick bent over the ill-assorted sticks and started to rearrange them.

  ‘What’s a gentlewoman, Daddy?’ Mary Ann asked him.

  Dominick thought over that one. He answered between puffs that brought the greedy yellow flames licking at the wood.

  ‘A gentlewoman,’ he said, ‘ is a woman who is gentle, who learns to have good manners, to be courteous to others, to be kind to servants.’

  ‘But she doesn’t do any work, that’s it’ said Mary Ann. ‘Columba is a gentlewoman,’ she says. ‘Can you sew, Columba?’

  ‘Not very well, Mary Ann,’ she answered.

  ‘Can you gut a rabbit?’ asked Mary Ann.

  ‘Certainly not how horrible!’ said Columba.

  ‘You can’t grind corn or bake a cake or sew a cut or make a dress or put leather on a shoe, lots of other things you can’t do. What’s the use of being a gentlewoman?’

  ‘You have a fearful daughter,’ said Columba.

  ‘She’s like a nauseating purgative,’ agreed Dominick.

  ‘Gentlewomen decorate the world, Mary Ann,’ said Columba. ‘When their husbands come home tired from work or war, they are there to greet them with, soft hands and rustling silk garments, and sweetly smelling flesh. They are there to titillate their tired palates with tasty dishes made from ingredients brought from far-off lands.’

  ‘But they don’t even cook the dainty dishes,’ said Mary Ann.

  ‘Certainly not.’ said Columba. ‘That’s what servants are for. Would you keep a dog and bark yourself? Wouldn’t you like to be a gentlewoman, Mary Ann?’

  ‘And do nothing all day, except wait for a man to come home? What would you be doing-while you were waiting?’

  ‘My goodness,’ said Columba, ‘millions of things: polishing your fingernails, bathing, studying a little Latin, a little Greek, reading a little literature, visiting friends or having them visit you, using the switch on the backside of a lazy maid, finding out things about your neighbours, walking on the green, watching young men at bowling or jousting, or letting them hold your hand for a little as they picked up your fallen handkerchief, listening to love songs on the lute in the evenings. My dear Mary Ann, the day is far too short for the doings of a gentlewoman.’

  ‘It’s no wonder you can’t light a fire.’ said Mary Ann. ‘That’s all I can say. It seems to me that gentlewomen are just no use.’

  ‘Talking about gutting, Man,’ said Dominick, ‘how about, cleaning the fish?’

  ‘All right, Daddy,’ said Mary Ann, picking them up and walking towards the water. Peter took a knife from his belt and followed her. Mary Ann turned on the way. Mary Ann would always turn on the way, Dominick thought with a grin. ‘I just don’t want to be a gentlewoman,’ she said.

  ‘You won’t’ Dominick shouted at her. ‘Never fear.’

  Columba leaned on her elbows.

  ‘As she stands now,’ said Columba, ‘Mary Ann knows far more than I do. Did you long for war to come?’

  ‘God forbid,’ said Dominick.

  ‘I did,’ she said. ‘ I was so bored. Mary Ann is right, you know. Times I would just be fit to burst with the things I was doing. They were nothing, nothing. War was excitement the sie
ge was an excitement.’

  ‘Did you love your husband?’ Dominick asked.

  ‘No, I did not,’ she said. ‘ It was a business arrangement. Something to do with my father’s ships and Walter’s connections in France or Spain or somewhere. When you belong to the tribes they have you married before you are born.’

  ‘You are a spirited young woman,’ he said. ‘You could revolt.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘They have you conditioned. Besides, no one else attracted me. They all seemed to be out of the same mould, smelling of ships or spices or tobacco or wine. That’s all they had in their veins, commerce and profits and guilds and watery blood and pride. I tell you Murdoc was the first man I ever saw in my whole life.’

  ‘No man is perfect,’ he said. ‘Remember that.’

  ‘Who wants perfection?’ she asked scornfully. ‘It’s so boring.’

  ‘Listen,’ he said. This is not an adventure we are engaged in. It is real.’

  ‘That’s why I like it’ she said. ‘ I like to feel that I am in danger. I like to feel the people around me are in danger. Doesn’t it add a little spice to life?’

  ‘I thought you got too much of the spices,’ he said.

  She laughed.

  ‘I don’t know what I want,’ she said. ‘I was spoiled. I don’t know. I never felt I was living. I never thought the people around me were anything but – well, puppet people. Somebody was always pulling somebody else on a string.’

  ‘What you are going into now,’ he said, ‘is real. It’s more real than you think. It’s something you have never been reared for. This life that you will have to live now will be against all the principles of your upbringing.’

  ‘Welcome! Welcome! Welcome!’ she said, her hands held clenched to her breast.

  He said no more.

  It was still pleasant. They ate the fish with their fingers. The flesh of the fish was pink and it tasted good. Later they raised and launched the boat and set out on the long pull towards the mountains.

  Dominick’s muscles were no longer hurting. His hands had hardened. He could row and look around him without the breath being tight in his chest. The wind was on their right, so if anything it assisted the pulling of the boat. They were jolly. Mary Ann sang a song in her thin treble voice, and Columba sang too in a husky throaty way. They were odd songs. They were in English. Mary Ann said they were pale songs, all about lovers and things. They lacked blood, Mary Ann said. Columba said Mary Ann’s Irish songs were too sad for a bright day. Behind him Dominick would hear Peter thumping the side of the boat with the flat of his hand to indicate something that moved him to joy. He would look around then. One time, when they had left the real width of the lake and were going up the narrow place towards the gap between the hills, on rocky land built high out of the water they saw a great stag, an Irish deer. They passed under him, looking up at him towering on his peak. They could see the white under his neck and down into his chest. He remained there unmoving until they called and whistled and hurrooed, and finally he moved away disdainfully, leaving the high prominence bare and lonely. Dominick was sorry they had sent him away.

  As they moved farther down, they came where there were mountains on each side of them. The ones on the left were bare and bleak and rocky, lonely-looking and frightening. Their slopes were wooded below, and high over their gleaming rocky heads on two occasions they saw the eagles soaring with ease. On the right of them the mountains were more verdant, green almost all the way to the tops of them, with patches of deep woods, dark green splotches on their sides, and grazing mountain sheep peppered all over them as if somebody had shaken them from a blanket.

  No house to be seen. No sign of a human being. No smoke rising to the sky. It was very lonely. And yet Dominick had the feeling that they were being watched, that every mountain peak had a pair of eyes, every crevice in the hills, all the deep gullies cut into the sides of the mountain like black wounds.

  And they felt small in their little boat on the water in this immensity, alien intruders in a place that had been here before man, would be here when he was gone, and could only be conquered by a cataclysm.

  They passed the ruins of a castle on an island. Once it had towered to the sky, but it had been unroofed and its battlements destroyed, and its stones thrown down, and through the slotted windows you could see the black burned beams and baulks and indeed smell its destruction as you passed by.

  Acres and acres of rushes opened before them and they worked their way through these until they were on the gently flowing depths of a broad river. It twisted and wound lazily with the mountains towering over their heads, closing them in and then opening up again as it meandered into a great valley, where its deeps gave way to shallows of yellow piled gravel and rocks. Some parts of it they barely scraped by, and finally they had to stop where the river became a stream, a bare trickle of water, and their heavy sturdy boat could go no more. So Dominick landed on a gravel bed and held the boat steady while the rest of them alighted.

  They were on a heather-covered shore, with stretches of low alder bushes kept dwarfed by the winds that would sweep down the valley. Ahead of them a blunt hill rose towering and black as if to bar any further progress.

  It seemed to them as they stood there, lonely and lost, that there hadn’t been a sinner place foot on this piece of ground since the beginning of time, when right in front of them from a low rise emerged the head and shoulders of a man and another one and another one and another one and then many of them and then they stood tall, and they were very tall, they looked like giants standing on their hill regarding the strangers, and they were armed men and they weren’t Murdoc’s men and there were no pleasant looks on their faces and no greetings, in their armed hands.

  We are back with the people again, Dominick thought resignedly, as he watched their leader approach menacingly.

  Chapter Nineteen

  HE WAS a very big man. He was half naked. He wore trousers and soft cowhide boots of untanned leather. They had been cut from the hide of a red and white cow. The hair was not worn off them yet. He had a mop of brown curly hair and a fair generous moustache. He wore a knife in his belt as well as a sword His arms were huge. They were burnt by the sun like his chest and the muscles were leaping in them. He had a good square face. It could contain kindness, Dominick thought, as he watched him coming towards them, and then the rhyme came into his head about ‘Beware of that man though he be your brother whose hair and moustache differ in colour’, and he couldn’t help it. He had to laugh.

  If he had discharged a musket he couldn’t have had a greater effect. The man stopped still and furrows gathered between his eyes, and his lips tightened over big white teeth.

  ‘What do you find to laugh at, little man?’ he asked in Irish. He had a deep voice rumbling from his chest.

  I can hardly tell him why, Dominick thought. It’s too subtle even for myself.

  ‘I laugh,’ he said, ‘at the sight of big men like you overpowering a few small people like us. It would only take one of you.’

  ‘You are a foreigner?’ the man asked.

  ‘If being born and living in your own country is being a foreigner,’ said Dominick, ‘I’m a foreigner. I’m an Irishman.’

  ‘Irish, English, what’s the difference? Did you get permission to come into this land?’

  ‘Are you of Murdoc O’Flaherty?’ Dominick asked. The man paused and then spat. ‘ I see you are not.’ conceded Dominick. ‘ Well, he invited us into this land.’

  ‘He has a right to invite you into his own land, maybe,’ said the man, ‘but this is our land. This is the country of the Joyces. You were not invited here.’

  ‘Are the Joyces such savages,’ asked Dominick, getting a little angry, ‘ that they menace every fellow countryman that passes through their land?’

  ‘The Joyces are not savages,’ the other said. ‘ They are a civilized race who know what belongs to them and intend to keep it that way. There are too many people creeping into t
he land of the Joyces like wolves and taking possession of what doesn’t belong to them. What clan are you of?’

  ‘I’m of the Clan of Ireland,’ said Dominick.

  ‘Be more particular,’ the other said, sliding a sword from its scabbard and waving it suggestively.

  ‘My name is MacMahon,’ said Dominick.

  ‘A fairly evil name,’ said the other. ‘ We have heard of many of that tribe who came raiding into us from the north.’

  ‘Wake up,’ said Dominick. ‘We are in the Seventeenth century. There is a black cloud over our land. It encompasses the whole lot of us. It doesn’t just wave over the Joyces or the MacMahons. It is over the whole land. That’s what makes us brothers. That’s what should make us one clan, not a bunch of uncivilized cattle-raiders.’

  ‘This is our land,’ said the other. He was becoming heated too. ‘And we intend to hold it against all comers, every stone and blade of grass in it. We’ve seen it happen. Drive them into Connacht at whose expense, ask me? At our expense. To take what belongs to us. They can come, you hear, but they are not going to stay. They’ll go the way they came. You came on our river, without permission. Do you know the penalty for that?’

  ‘No,’ said Dominick. ‘ Please tell me.’

  ‘We kill the males and ravish the females,’ he said. His eyes moved past Dominick to where Columba stood holding Mary Ann’s hand.

  ‘And do you roast the children on spits,’ Dominick asked, ‘to see if they have Irish fat in them? You listen to me! We have travelled a long way. It has been to us like walking on the way to Calvary, only we thought that at the end there would be no cross, but peace from the hands of our fellow countrymen. We expected nothing from the beasts of Cromwell, and we got nothing. We expected more from our own kind, but how were we to know that they were as bad as the others? Civilized. You’re not civilized. If you had a tail you’d be swinging off a tree. Do you hear that?’