Murdoc laughed.
‘That was the old Murdoc,’ he said. ‘Not any more. I’m finished with wars and fighting other people’s battles. Now I am fighting my own. I’m an old settled gentleman, Dominick, the paterfamilias, the chieftain of my clan, the benevolent despot. My muscles will get soft and my hair will grey and I will be at peace. All this peninsula, from here in the Beanna Beola, is me, and up to the Caol Shaile Ruadh where the river comes out of the Joyce country. This I will rule with peace and justice, and all the men in it. No more history for Murdoc. I’m a new man.’
‘It’s a great picture, Murdoc,’ said Dominick, ‘like the picture that a man would paint on a piece of canvas, but it is just as unreal. It is like the real thing, but somehow it’s not the same.’
‘You shrewd cynical devil,’ said Murdoc. ‘I will prove all this to you. You won’t know me. Wasn’t I peaceful and quiet with Coote? I cooed to him like a dove. Now I will charm people with my voice and with the good intentions of my heart Come, let us go back to the feasting. This is a night that will be remembered for ever in Connmaicnemara.’
He ran down the hillock. Dominick was too weary to run down after him, but he felt warm. The welcome of Murdoc was warm.
‘Tomorrow,’ said Murdoc, ‘I will bring you to the spot that I have chosen for you. There you can build your house with a new life and be ever at peace, I promise you. No more raids, alarms, or excursions. You will be my liege man and I will guarantee you peace and prosperity whatever may befall. You believe me, Dominick?’ He was holding out his hand Dominick took it and smiled.
‘I believe you, Murdoc,’ he said. ‘Your intentions are noble. I won’t forget.’
‘Good,’ said Murdoc as he strode back towards the courtyard There he set up a shout. ‘All is well,’ he roared at them. ‘ Commence the feast. Let no man close an eye until the dawn or be damned to him.’
Dominick walked with him into the square opening of the long house. It was a single-storey house built of coarse granite with great skill. It seemed as if it had been set into the ground from eternity. Inside torches were blazing on brackets and thick candles were lighted on the two long oak tables. At the far end of the room there was an elevation with one table stretching the breadth of the house, and at the longer end another table stretching the length of the house. There were rough benches to seat the feasters. On the floor there were spread fresh rushes and there were rush mats hanging on the walls to repel the dampness. In the very centre the roof showed a square opening, and under that a big fire was prepared of turf and timber, and as they entered it was lighted and it flamed and sent dancing shadows of the people on the walls. The place filled with thick smoke for a time and then it was sucked out as the flames roared in the fire. There were many people there. They set up a shout when Murdoc came in. There were barrels set around the walls and the men were dipping into them with wooden bowls and pewter mugs or crock cups. Murdoc headed up towards the top table.
As he went he called a man and he would say: ‘This man is Feilim O’Maoilfabhuill, Dominick MacMahon. Feilim is my brehon. He is a just judge.’ Dominick couldn’t remember all their names, the ollamh O’Canavan, and Mac Giolla Ganain, master of the horse, and Odo O Dubhain who was a gallowglass and a wonder with a battleaxe. There was the poet-ollamh Mac Cille Ceallaigh. There were O Connachtain, O Maolcomair, O Allmhurain, O Tuathail, O Faoilean, O hAngli, O Daingean. Oldish men with white whiskers and young men with glittering eyes, big men and small men all smelling of beer or wine or uisge beatha. Some of them looked at him with suspicion, some with friendliness, some with apathy, but he was Murdoc’s friend and they welcomed him somehow, however reluctantly, but they asked him no questions. They had their wives with them, or their daughters, dark-haired girls or fair-haired girls, all sunburned with gleaming teeth and bright eyes, well-built women, handsome girls, and all garrulous, because the place was a bedlam of sound. And Murdoc put him sitting beside him at his right hand and slapped his hand on the table and called for meat. And Dominick drank to get the taste of the smoking fire out of his throat and it was fiery stuff and he coughed after it, but it seemed to bring the scene into perspective.
And he saw Columba coming in the opening, and she had a different dress on her. The Claddagh fisherwoman was left behind, and however she had managed it with her borrowed dress, she looked very different. She looked like a lady (what is a lady?). She was taller in it and her fine rounded shoulders were bare, and her flesh was white and pink and there was powder on her sunburned face. She had her long black waving hair hanging loose with a kind of gold ribbon tied around it at her forehead and then twisted around it as far as it fell on her back, so that the gold ribbon glittered and her black hair shone and she looked very good and her eyes glued themselves to Murdoc’s and stayed there. He went to meet her and brought her with him and put her sitting at his left hand, and Dominick felt sad. (Why am I sad? We are here and we are safe. A new life is opening for us. But he thought for a minute that Columba looked like his Eibhlin. Just for a moment, but it couldn’t be, because Eibhlin would have eyes only for him.) And Murdoc roared, ‘Let the feasting begin.’ And all of them sat down and big hot quarters of roasted oxen were laid in front of them that they could cut off pieces with their knives, and there was boiled mutton in a great dish, steaming, and there were sea fish on platters and speckled trout and salmon on platters too, and all the time there were attendants who filled an empty mug the minute the bottom of it appeared.
He looked for his children, thinking of them. He stood up and saw them and sat down, satisfied again. They were at the long table below. There were other children with them and the grey-haired woman was attending them. So he could go back to his eating and drinking. He was doing one because he was hungry and he was doing the other because he was feeling depressed. He couldn’t understand this.
The night was always a mystery to him. Not the bits he remembered but the bits he forgot. He was conscious of Murdoc and Columba and they were like two intertwined nerves. He could almost feel their emotions. He could see their pauses as their hands touched when they reached for meat, how reluctant they were to break the touching of themselves.
There was rejoicing too. Men sang long verses of songs. And the poet-ollamh or the ollamh or the medical-ollamh spoke. There were poems and songs, and to his hazing brain the words beat in, that it was all the history of the O’Flahertys. They spoke and sang about the Muinntir Murchadha, the descendants of the kings, of their great chieftains who owned the land of Moy Seola until they were driven out by the De Burgos and carved a better land for themselves from Iar-Connacht – from Loc Orbsen to the sea. There were tales of battles and treachery and blood flowing freely, of the eyes of kings gouged out so that they could not reign; for no maimed king could reign. Murdoc of the Horse and Morogh of the Battleaxe, and long lists of all their sub-chieftains, from old times, so that every man there could see the high station he once owned in the land. It made them fiery. The songs of battle made them rise sometimes and shout at the top of their lungs, great war-cries that had come down to them, and Odo, the man who was great with the axe, leaped to his feet and had a double-headed battleaxe in his hand and he swung it as if it was a feather, until its flashing blades seemed like fire in the light of the torches, and then he fell under it and they laughed. He was drunk.
They were all drunk, including Dominick. Murdoc is trying to make a little kingdom, he thought, with his judges and his teachers and his master of the horse and his master of the battleaxes and his standard-bearer and his poets, and what were they now? The great tribe that had owned Gnomore and Gnobeg and Baile na hlnse and Connmaicnemara, with all its seas and islands and inlets and the great lake of Orbsen, was no more. It was split into little petty holdings, poverty-stricken in comparison with the great time; rutted up into little pieces that would be like a pool broken by the throwing of flints into a calm surface.
He was on his feet and Murdoc himself called for a hearing for him. Oh, the thi
ngs he said. He wanted a toast to the little men who had fallen, he cried, all the little unknown names, the little men with children, and sons of widows dragged to wars that were not of their making so that fat-bellied poets could write about their murderers. How about that, friends? Who destroyed Ireland? The O’Flahertys and the rest of the clans destroyed Ireland. They would rather be raping a woman or stealing a cow than fighting to make their country safe from the invader. Always it was that way. When great men rose up and joined in battle for their freedom, afterwards the victor or the vanquished would have to fight his way back through his own country to get to the safety of his home. Who would write great poems about the little men slaughtered on battlefields not of their own choosing or making; who died so that their chieftain could have more cattle or more women?
There was a man on his feet coming towards him shaking his fist, shouting ‘Sassenach! Sassenach!’ And Murdoc was on his feet shouting: ‘This man is my friend. He is under my protection. He who lays a hand on him lays a hand on me!’
‘I am as good a man as any here,’ the little, fiery, drunken Dormnick was shouting. ‘ My people before me were big but they are not free from guilt. It only required us to depart from our own sins and be one people. Who then could have stood against us? Would the pale-faced hypocrites who now raped our land from shore to shore be able to resist us if we were one? But we weren’t one. We didn’t care what happened across the river or across the lake or across the mountain as long as there were plenty of our own women to rape; plenty of our own children to kill, plenty of our own cattle to run off with, and while we were doing that, killing and slaughtering the humble flower of our nation, we were opening every door to our own destruction. That’s why I say: To hell with the O’Flahertys! To hell with the O’Neills! To hell with the O’Donnells! To hell with every tribe that ever rutted and enslaved our land! That’s why I drink to the little splotches of blood where true men died not knowing what they died for, hoping it was for the good …’
The place was smothered, engulfed, exploding with sound. Greasy knives were waving in the air. Where it might have ended, who knows, if Dominick’s overstuffed stomach and overdrunk brain didn’t take that occasion to revolt, and he, red in the face with anger and drink keeled over, slid from the table, and lay like a dead man at Murdoc’s feet.
Murdoc was laughing. That was why they became silent and went back to their places.
He bent. He had to get on one knee because he was not too steady himself and he lifted Dominick into his arms and he walked with him towards the door. ‘Throw him to the dogs,’ he was advised. He shook his head. ‘He is a better man than you,’ he answered. ‘Who knows what food is in his words, even if they are too late?’
He walked with him into the fresh air. It seemed very fresh after the thick foetid atmosphere of the hot box inside. Walked with him outside the courtyard, and towards the hillock where they had viewed the mountains, and he placed him there on the cool stones. And Dominick groaned.
Murdoc felt the presence of Columba beside him. He stood. They could barely see the man stretched at their feet.
‘He’s a very fiery little man,’ said Columba.
Murdoc chuckled.
‘He’s a very strange man,’ he said. ‘ Sometimes he has the sense of a philosopher, and at other times he has the rashness of a child. He is a good man. He will be of great benefit to the community.’
‘If they don’t kill him first,’ said Columba.
‘They won’t,’ said Murdoc. ‘All men admire courage.’
‘As I do,’ said Columba. ‘I have seen a lot of it in the last week, more than in a lifetime.’
He caught her arm.
‘You will grow with us too,’ he said. ‘You will become part of us. Is that so?’
‘Yes,’ she said ‘ I will become part of you.’
And Dominick groaned again, and became partly sensible and wondered if his children were asleep and hoped they hadn’t seen their father drinking, because, he thought groaning again, Mary Ann will give me hell.
Chapter Twenty-One
YOU STAND on a rocky plateau with a high mountain at your back and a long small lake at your feet and as you look north you find the heavy mountains of the O’Maille’s meeting your gaze, bluely and unflinchingly, with the harbour of Caol Shaile Ruadh at the feet of them. And if you shift your eyes along the winding length of the fjord-like place you will be confronted by the Devil’s Mother, the vanguard of the mountains of Partry, who seems to be shaking a club at you. And at your right hand across a great boggy plain the Mamturc mountains are supporting you, and at your back you will be ever conscious of the bens of Beanna Beola. So here, enclosed by five mountain ranges, surely sufficient protection for any man of good will, you can build your house.
For you haven’t long. It is June and the sun is shining, but the sun will not always shine and soon autumn will be here and the winds will be cold from the mountains and the sea, and after that the winter will be on top of you and if your house is not built and snug by then you will be surely in trouble.
This is going to be a good house, because this house is going to last for ever. So you knock the trees in the small wood half way up your mountain and you haul them down with the little grey horse you have bought and first you build a crude shelter against the hill with rough stone walls and a roof of boughs and scraws, and here you sleep when the last light is gone from the sky, and you rise when the first light appears in the sky, and you take time for one meal at the end of the day and one to fortify yourself in the early morning.
You make a platform on wooden runners that will travel easily over the soft lands and you search for limestone. You will find very little of it, but what you find you bring back and you build a kiln and here you burn your stone until it is white and can be beaten into a powder. And you search for marl or dobe clay and from the shore of the lake below you get your sand, and then you start erecting the walls of your house out of what you can quarry: rough granite and the left-overs of the limestone, and slaty sandstone and this you build on the solid rock under your feet and you bind the thick walls with the mortar you make, and with the help of the little willing horse hauling, and your son guiding the horse and your daughter cooking and foraging and asking questions and criticizing your work, the walls of that house begin to rise. It will be a good long solid house, and what’s more it will have a chimney, not like those other places with the hole in the roof, where the rain and the wind can enter and blind your eyes with the blown-back smoke. And the chimney will start one-third of the way from the end gable so that the wanned rocks will throw out heat before and behind it and when the house is hipped, you trim the great larch beams and light a big fire and scorch them in it so that they will be free from the worms and the beetles of decay.
So you raise your roof and bind cross-beams of scorched wood across the sloping upright ones and-then you cut thick deep scraws from the top of the bog and you cover your roof from end to end with the scraws; and having done that, you can move from your crude shelter and take possession of the house, because it is getting late in the year and already the evening winds are cold and when the rain falls it seems always to be driven by a poking wind that searches you out wherever you are to persecute you.
You have had no hand from any man for this. Because you are a stranger in this land, and you talked too freely at one time, there is none to come and help you build your house. Sometimes they will pass by and walk around looking and saying little, particularly that Odo of the battleaxe, who is a huge gaunt man, with an unfriendly face and about eleven children, for each time he comes and fishes the lake below for the white trout or the salmon – for he is the fisherman for Murdoc – he seems to bring a different one with him, and they are all sons, louts and dumb thicks, according to your daughter who likes to be friendly with them, but they shy away from her as if she had a disease. But you get your straw for money, from a man called Awley O’Daigean, who has a place down near Sal Roc wher
e he attends a new planter who has taken a house there near the sea, since no Irishman is permitted to own land or house within one mile of the sea around the whole coastline of Connacht.
So from him you get your wheaten straw. And you arrange it into neat bundles and bit by bit you pierce it into the underlying screws and then you fashion a net with a wide mesh and you lace that over the whole of your thatch and you tie the net down with ropes to pegs that are jutting from your wall, so that you can say, ‘Let the wind blow now, or the rain storm. I have built my house upon a rock and it is only God can shift it.’
Dominick sat on the rung of the crude ladder stuffing mortar near the place where the thatch joined the chimney. He paused for a few minutes to look around him. It was a cold day. He had to wear a coat with the collar of it turned up around his neck, for the wind was keen. The great stretches of bog around him were golden, because the sedge was turning. The wind was riffling it and it looked under the pale sun like miles of gold cloth with a brown background, that would be fit wearing for a king. But it was false because they said when the sedge is gold the belly of the beast is rumbling. That was the time when cattle had to be moved lower down to the grass lands to eat. He saw his daughter now, away down beyond the lake, and Peter with her. They were coming back with the precious cow. He thought the cow would have to be bedded down in the house with them at night soon, because otherwise the hungry wolves coming down from the mountains would get her. Later he would have to build a shelter against the house for her. Then he would have to burn and clear a few acres of ground and prepare it for spring sowing. Also he would have to purchase some sheep, maybe a pig or two, another cow, and his money was low. He thought that by this time next year they would have to live on what they could grow, and maybe that was no bad thing.
Seek the Fair Land Page 22