I stood there at the edge of the wild sea staring out at the black figure and the yellow, both intermittently vanishing behind high spumes of frothy water. And I began rationalizing my body’s refusal to move forward: I could be of no help, I would only be risking myself and adding to everyone’s troubles, Keig was twice as strong as I was. And yet I wished with all my heart that I was advancing into that treacherous, powerful, dazing sea.
I looked round. Most of the others had seen what was happening, and some of them had come down to the water’s edge. I turned and stumbled towards Donald, the nearest of them, with some thought of forming a human chain, though even this in these conditions would be dangerous enough.
But suddenly a ragged cheer went up from higher on the little beach. It was swept instantly away by the wind. But I knew what it must mean. I turned to the sea again.
Keig, with that limp yellow burden draped across his oak-tree frame, had found a sandbar and was staggering clear of the surf. Still clasped in his right hand there was, I saw now, his axe.
Part Three
1
So we came to Oceana again. Fifteen men, with only the clothes we stood up in, wet to the skin, battered by the sea, standing in a bemused huddle on the small strip of beach set between the two jagged piles of granite that had nearly been the end of us. Ahead were the cliffs, 150-feet piles of split and savage rock, and beyond these were the mountains, reaching up eventually to close on three thousand feet at the summits, bare and hard, but offering at least plenty of places to hide. And all we had for arms to conduct the struggle we had come to the island to undertake was Keig’s axe.
But Keig at least was not bemused for long. He gave the cliffs an appraising look, glanced sharply at Ascough to make sure he had recovered and spoke.
‘Come on. If the Keepers have got a watch-point anywhere, we’ll likely have them on our tails soon enough.’
The cliffs were by no means a hard climb, thanks to the giant cracks that split them, and as soon as we got above sea-level we found the wind, though strong, was no longer cold. There were even early signs of spring, little hard buds on the tufts of sea-thrift we grasped to haul ourselves up and, when we reached the top, green new grass among the brown clumps that were all the soil would support.
My spirits rose.
Well, I thought, we’re here. And that’s more than we managed two years ago. Keig may have cut things fine, but he got us to the island. Perhaps I had been wrong to blame him. No doubt the weather was worse than forecast. He had not been so foolhardy after all.
It was so good, after escaping from that sea, simply to be alive that if I had any doubts I stifled them with a will. The sun broke through, and, as we marched upwards past huge blocks of sparkling grey rock, I started to feel decidedly warm. I stopped and began to hoist my voluminous sticky oilskins over my head. The others, one by one, followed my example.
But just at the moment that Keig’s head, topped now by a round cap which Margaret had knitted for him out of some Oceana wool of the same orangey red as the countrywomen’s shawls, had disappeared under his black oilskin shroud there came from behind a tall crag ahead the rapid gallop of running feet.
I stood stupid and stock-still. Some of the others, in an irregular line behind me, flung themselves flat on the sandy ground. Keig, I think, tore apart his oilskin in an attempt to free his axe-arm. A sense of flat panic seemed to hold us all.
Then, square in the middle of the sandy path ahead where it meandered round the towering corner of the crag, there appeared, snorting and magnificent, a mountain ram.
It took me several seconds to take in what it was I was looking at. When I did, the utter absurdity of the sight sent a splutter of uncontrollable laughter up into my still fear-constricted throat. I sat down backwards, plump, on the soft sandy earth.
In a few moments the ram was joined by a small group of ewes, more docile-looking but as hardy. They stood in a cluster behind while the ram regarded us all with restrained hostility.
We might have stood like this for ever, except that Keig broke the silence with a low urgent whisper.
‘Quick. There’ll be a shepherd. Get hidden.’
But we were not fast enough. A few of us did scramble behind rocks, but before the whole lot of us had anything like time enough to disperse the shepherd came round the corner of the crag, all as unsuspecting as his ram before him.
He looked at those of us still unhidden. He was a short wiry man of perhaps fifty or fifty-five, deeply tanned, wearing a short dark-wool jacket and leggings with a shapeless hat on his head. His lean face was distinguished by a small purposeful moustache.
He was the first to speak.
‘So it was a boat I saw out there,’ he said.
He looked round. It was almost certain that he could see at least some of the men behind the rocks and for all he knew half a dozen guns were trained on his heart. But he spoke without a sign of disquiet.
‘How many of you are there then?’
Keig stood up.
‘Fifteen all told,’ he replied.
‘And you landed by boat?’
‘We did. But she’s wrecked.’
‘You all got ashore?’ the shepherd asked with quick concern.
‘Yes,’ Keig said. ‘No one was lost.’
‘Then your boat was wrecked close on the shore?’
‘It was.’
The shepherd’s face took on a look of quick gravity. He was a very typical man of those Parts, as I had known them from the days when I had come to the mountains for long summer holidays. They were a decidedly different sort from the townspeople of Lesneven and the tenant farmers of the rich inland wolds of the island. Where the latter were stolid and self-concerned, the mountain-men were notably quick-minded, quick to see the ins and outs of a situation, quick to see how others felt, quick to feel themselves. I had always wondered how two such different types could have come from the same original stock, but the harsh life of the mountains is an effective teacher.
‘You’d better come with me then,’ the shepherd said. ‘There’s a Keepers’ watch-point up on Trigorrey. They’ll likely have seen your boat, or they’ll see wreckage.’
And without another word he began hut-hutting at his sheep to drive them back the way they had come. It was noticeable that he never even asked us directly if we had come to fight Mylchraine. That was assumed. It told me, and Keig too I have no doubt, a good deal about the state of the country, a good deal that was comforting to unarmed and helpless men.
We followed the shepherd and his active, hardy, dark-haired flock over a distance of some four or five miles till we came in sight of a small grey stone house sitting snugly in a cleft between two gaunt crags with a small clear stream running alongside it. Soft blue wood smoke was being tugged away from its square chimney by the boisterous wind and a line of bright fresh washing fluttered and danced in the little garden between the house and the stream.
At the sound of the baaing of the sheep a well set-up woman of much the same age as the shepherd, plumpish and grey-haired, wearing a wide white apron and with the usual orangey-red shawl over her shoulders, came out of the cottage’s solid-looking backdoor.
‘Brought some visitors,’ the shepherd called down to her.
She smiled in answer but said nothing, watching us in silence as we clambered down the slope to the neat gate in the stone wall round the house’s well-kept garden.
There’s plenty of you, then,’ she said at last. ‘Aiming to give that Mr Mylchraine a bloody nose, I s’pose.’
Once more I noted the quick mind of the mountain-people, and the matter-of-course opposition to Mylchraine.
‘Come in, come on in,’ the shepherd said. ‘We don’t generally sit but the two of us to table, but it’d be a bad day when we couldn’t find a bite of bread and cheese for as many as wanted.’
And go in we did, and crowd round the broad well-scrubbed whitewood table in the kitchen while the shepherd’s wife put floury loaves on to i
t and a big hunk of goat’s cheese.
‘And you’ll take some heather wine,’ the shepherd said, ducking his head into a low cupboard built into the stout stone walls of the kitchen itself.
He gave a short sharp laugh as he stood up again clasping a long black bottle with the cork protruding from its top.
‘It isn’t the whiskey they’re all so pleased with theirselves drinking down below,’ he said. ‘But it’s a good wet nonetheless.’
I remembered then hearing that expression ‘down below’ in my boyhood. It was used by the mountain-men, with a Particular rasp of contempt, for anyone living the fatter life of the wolds and towns. And I was interested, too, in what the shepherd had said about whiskey. It confirmed my observations during my short stay in Lesneven two years before.
‘So they drink more whiskey everywhere down there now, do they, than when I was a boy?’ I asked.
The shepherd sized me up.
‘You’d be a boy some twenty or thirty years ago,’ he answered. ‘And I can tell you this: in those days whiskey was still a treat. People had a bottle at Christmas and thought theirselves lucky. Now, they can’t do without it.’
I thought then that, weak and defenceless though we were, it was time we had come to Oceana.
We left after about an hour in that solid stone-walled kitchen with its dark wood dresser lined with gleaming white plates, its three or four hams hanging, black-skinned, from the ceiling, its long glinting cooking range with the small square of orange heat glowing through vertical bars and the big round black stock-pot on top, occasional wisps of savoury steam coming from the edge of its lid. The shepherd’s upstanding wife stood at the door in her calf-length white apron to see us off, smilingly pleased with herself in the knowledge that with no notice at all she had fed well fifteen hungry men.
‘She bakes a good loaf,’ the shepherd conceded when Keig formally thanked her. ‘We ought to have had bairns round that table of ours.’
‘You and your bairns,’ his wife answered, with the friendly contempt of an old quarrel being given a bit of an airing. ‘If we’ve had no bairns, we’ve had no bairns. And maybe it was for the best.’
The shepherd looked up at his square gale-resisting house for a moment.
‘I’d have liked to think a son of mine would live here, all the same,’ he said. ‘But come on now, we’ve a fair way to go before you’re safely stowed.’
He had promised to show us the way to a cluster of caves some way north of his house. They were in an almost inaccessible glen where it was most unlikely that we should be spotted by the patrols of Keepers who from time to time came through the mountains.
Keig and he had discussed the situation at some length, and it had been arranged that we would lie up in this hiding-place for as long as was needed for the shepherd to pass the word round his distant neighbours and bring us in some of the local lads who would be only too willing to join a rebel band. And they might, we hoped, bring along a shotgun or two, though these were now hard to come by as there was nothing the Keepers apparently liked better than seizing on the spot any they laid eyes on.
We made our way along almost indiscernible sheep tracks under the shepherd’s guidance, climbing to a height where heather replaced the grudging grass and from which occasional enormous views out over the green and white-flecked Atlantic could be had. Considering how much at a disadvantage we basically were, it was extraordinary how pleasant it all was. Our clothes were dry now and we had food in our stomachs, the sun shone every now and again and the wind was enlivening. Fred Quiddie started up a song, an extremely ribald one, and the time shot by till we reached the glen.
The place was obviously ideal for our purpose. There was no proper path to it at all and to get into it you had to push through a little thicket of birch bushes growing between two clumps of jagged granite. Once through, you came out into the small sheltered glen with a stream twisting along its length almost hidden in the deep gully it had made for itself. The caves—there were three of them, one large and the two others a good deal smaller—were inconspicuous, being only clefts in the side of the glen at their entrances, though wide enough inside. We ought to be snug here for months, I thought, if need be.
Keig thanked the shepherd again and he left us, calling vigorously to his dark grey sheep which he had driven along with us the whole way. We had promised that some of us would come and see him shortly after dawn the next day, by which time he might have some news for us.
And so we spent our first day back in Oceana. And more and more pleasant, paradoxically, it all seemed. Sheltered in our glen even from the tugging wind and warmed by the occasional short spells of sunshine, we were as comfortable as could be. We tidied ourselves up and washed in the ice-chill water of the dark enclosed streamlet—Keig rubbed his unshaven chin pretty crossly, but a razor was one amenity we did lack—we sat about, we talked, some of us even played a game of tag.
It was all very different from anything I had imagined our early hours on the island would be like. I had not had any very concrete expectations, though I had seen myself as almost certainly firing a rifle, or a pistol—I had never been able quite to make up my mind which of our varied armoury best suited my talents—but now every blessed weapon we possessed, bar the axe, was down among the rocks and turbulent currents of the sea’s edge. Yet here we were, relaxing.
Nothing happened. We saw no one. A pair of sentries posted at the top of the glen where they could see for miles in all directions never had anything to report. Keig spent a lot of time with Donald studying a map which he had had in the inner pocket of his jacket, the same tight brightish brown jacket he had worn ever since he paid his last clandestine visit to his own home on the Kernel. Laid out carefully on a flattish rock, the sodden paper had dried out pretty well and Donald, if unable to prevent himself indulging in a welter of sea-terms, had at least managed to locate our position fairly accurately and to identify Trigorrey and one or two of the other peaks we could see. And there was really nothing else to locate, not a village, not a road, not even a river of respectable size. We were miles from nowhere.
Only one tiny incident marked out the whole of that day and our remarkably comfortable night on bracken beds inside the caves. And that came late in the afternoon. It was the sudden thump of a distant explosion. For a few moments it put us all into a flurry, but the lookouts had absolutely nothing to report. They had seen no flash, they could see no smoke. We remained a little uneasy for an hour or so, but when dusk came it was generally concluded that the noise must have been some quarrying in the far distance. A fair amount of unofficial chance quarrying always had taken place in the mountains when there was a house or barn to be built, and this seemed a likely and convincing explanation.
At dawn next day Keig woke me.
‘We’re going to pick up the news,’ he said. ‘I want you to come with me and we’ll take young Cannell.’
Cannell was a mountain-man. Keig had recruited him in Dublin after he had had a furious row with a group of other exiles. He was quick-tempered but cheerful, and young, not much more than twenty.
I sat up and groped for my jacket which I had put under my head as a pillow. A pale light was showing at the slit-like mouth of the cave. I heaved myself to my feet and staggered out. The morning air was cold indeed. I scrabbled into my jacket and in a moment or two Keig followed me out of the cave with Cannell, who was looking a good deal less sleep-bemused than I felt.
‘We’ll be off then,’ Keig said. He gave us one of his rare smiles. ‘We’ll be lucky. We’ll get a fine old breakfast at the house.’
We loped along at a fast pace back in the direction we had come from the day before. The trip, which had taken two hours the first time, went much more quickly and it was a little more than an hour after we had started out when we rounded the crag above the house.
The sight that met our eyes came to me like a brutal slap across the face.
The house was in ruins. The whole square solid structure w
as just a heap of ignominious rubble. Fragments of stone lay all around the neat garden of yesterday. Even the surrounding wall had been knocked down.
We knew at once what had happened. The explosion we had heard as a dull and distant thump the day before. The house had been callously and utterly destroyed. And there could be no doubt either about why. It must be the work of Mylchraine’s Keepers. Somehow they had discovered that we were on the island and that the shepherd had aided us. And they had systematically exacted this price.
And the shepherd and his wife? I began to run towards the ruins. But Keig halted me.
They may have been made to say we were coming back,’ he whispered. ‘Stay still.’
Cautiously we all three dropped into cover. Lying still behind a clutter of scree on the steep slope of the mountain above the remains of the house, everything around us seemed terribly quiet. The birds had sung their early song as we had been leaving the glen and now in the morning air, hardly warmed as yet though the sun was shining from an almost cloudless sky, they uttered only occasional twitters. After a little I could make out from some distance away the baaing of sheep. No doubt this was the shepherd’s flock. They sounded, though perhaps I was being fanciful, disturbed and uneasy still. They would in all probability have been grazing just outside the garden wall when the Keepers had been there, as they had grazed yesterday while we had been in the house, and the explosion would have scared them badly.
Bit by bit my ears began to take in more and more sounds in the quiet. I could even hear the tiny tricklings of the stream and then the whirring of insects in the tufty grass round about. And finally from across the distant other side of the stone-littered garden out of our direct sight I thought I caught a stifled moaning. I whispered to Keig about it.
He heaved himself up on to his elbows, cocked his head to one side and listened intently.
‘I think you’re right,’ he murmured at last. ‘We’ll go and see, but keep low.’
So laboriously we made our way in a circuit round the remains of the shattered house. I remembered our weekend training sessions in the Dublin Mountains. Little had I thought it would be in circumstances like this that we would first benefit by them.
The Strong Man Page 14