Enchanting Cold Blood

by Petya Lehmann

  Hugh climbed to the spot, intending to question him about what he had seen. He found the seanchaí staring intently ahead of him — too intently to be safe to interrupt him. It was not at the shore he was staring, but right up over his head at a line of dark clouds which lay one beyond the other above the horizon. Apparently there was something about those clouds which displeased or alarmed him, for twice Hugh heard him utter an ejaculation of dismay, looking as he did so at the line overhead with an expression of intense and puzzled consternation. His own curiosity was aroused, and after hesitating a little, he ventured to ask what had happened, and why he was looking up at the sky like that.

  “It is something I do not like that I see up there, so it is, young stranger — something that I do not like at all, so I do not,” Maelcho answered, his eyes still on the sky. “It is the Wild Hunt, that is what it is,” he added, sinking his voice and glancing round as if afraid of being overheard. “Yes, up there, above the sea.” He lifted his hand and pointed to the line of clouds. “It is the worst thing a man can see, and this is the worst time of month to see it in, the worst and bad always. And it is in a strange place, a place I have never seen it in before, that it is; and we only just landed, and the moon a new one Tuesday last, and the little lady-girls with us and all!”

  Hugh stared up at the particular point indicated in astonishment. There was nothing to be seen there but clouds, and surely there were always clouds in the sky? What could the man mean? He remembered hearing of the Wild Hunt amongst the O'Flahertys, but had not attached any special meaning to the word. Looking closely at the line of clouds indicated, he then perceived that one portion of it was larger and darker than the rest, and that a number of smaller fragments seemed to be following it, one after the other, in a sort of procession. It really was rather like a hunt now that he came to look at it attentively. That big grey cloud in front might be a bull, say, or a lion — possibly a whale or a dragon. Those smaller detached clouds after it might be dogs or wolves, according as one liked to imagine. These last seemed to be hurrying fiercely along over the sky, as if trying with all their might to overtake the big one in front, stretching out bodiless limbs and opening bodiless mouths as they did so.

  Possibly, it was the excitement of his companion which impressed him, but certainly the whole thing seemed to have more semblance of reality about it than usual. It appeared to Hugh to be unlike anything he had ever seen before in the sky, to be, if not real, at least more like a painting than a mere accidental resemblance created out of mist and nothingness. He soon tired, however, of such an impractical subject of contemplation and was about to recur to the question of the new arrivals. He observed a peculiar gleam in the seanchaí's curious, greenish eyes, an odd, distracted, irresponsible air about his whole demeanour that made him feel that it would be wiser to forbear and put off his inquiries to a more convenient opportunity. People who looked like that were quite capable, he was aware, of suddenly seizing some inoffensive person, who disturbed them, by the shoulders and pitching them over head foremost into the sea.

  The sky had grown quite dark, and the whole phantom hunt had long melted into the ordinary meaninglessness of things celestial, before the seanchaí had left his perch or ceased to stare in the same eager, concentrated fashion at the space before him. At last, he went down and, squatting suddenly upon the floor, put his arms about his big knees and remained silent, if not asleep. Hugh, who had before this gone down and found some food, was now curled up in the most comfortable corner he could find and was beginning to drowse. The two little girls breathed softly in unison, wrapped in one another's arms. Their mother apparently slept, too, waking now and then to cough or moan. Little by little, as the night grew deeper, nearly all sounds ceased or rather melted into that general monotone of sound, which for want of a better word we call silence. The sea kept repeating over and over the same monotonous, old-world stories which it had been telling to the rocks and the sands ever since they first began to keep company together. As for the motley company of the invaders — Spaniards, Italians, Portuguese, and the rest — they, too, were by this time mostly asleep, rolled in their cloaks and beginning to dream that they were back in Naples, Granada, or Lisbon with their fortunes made, their pockets full of English gold, and their detestable Irish campaign a thing of the past.

  Chapter XIV.

  A fortnight had passed. Sir James's Calais was steadily growing. The innocent little thyme-covered promontory, with its archaic circle of moss-grown stones, was assuming quite a military and responsible air. One ditch was already cut, another was in process of cutting; the bastions were half made; the drawbridge would be made whenever Heaven sent wood from Tralee or elsewhere. No supply of fresh water — not an unimportant matter for a fortress — had been found nearer or better than the scanty driblet which trickled over the cliff above Maelcho's shanty. A few other equally elemental drawbacks had presented themselves. Still, the Irish Calais was certainly growing. There was no question about that. The enemy, if he doubted it, had only to come and look.

  One difficulty, not provided for by any received treatises on fortification, was that the original heathen fort, which lay within and formed the nucleus of the newer one, was found to be badly “haunted.” So seriously was this the case, that after dusk began to fall, no one, by any threats or persuasions, could be got to approach the place, so appalling were the shrieks, so heart-rending the cries, as of creatures in the very article of death, which then issued from its enclosure. Even the Spaniards and Italians, who, whatever respect they might hold their own ghosts in, could scarcely be expected to care much about alien ones — to whom the wails of Irish spirits or the plaints of murdered Irishmen could hardly seem to be any great matter — even they complained quite as loudly as the rest. Indeed, the most singular feature of the visitation was that each man upon being questioned declared positively that the cries he heard were always uttered in his own tongue; that these were not Irish or English ghosts, but Spanish or Italian ones; that the shrieks were the shrieks of dying Spaniards, the appeals for pity the appeals of Italians in the act of being murdered. This was what so rang in their ears and was what made it perfectly impossible for any Christian man to approach the place.

  Whatever the nationality of the ghosts may have been, they were clearly very persistent ones. In vain, the Legate, with bell, book, and candle, twice made the entire circuit of the enclosure, commanding the demons in sonorous Latin to withdraw upon pain of his displeasure. In vain, the sacred banner was fastened to the top of the fort and remained there for a day and a night, flapping its sanctified folds against those pagan stones. Nothing proved of the slightest avail. No sooner did dusk fall than the shrieks and yells began afresh, dying away into groans and moans, of a nature to scare the very souls of all who heard them and in the end obliging the whole camp to be shifted back several hundred yards, so as to be a little beyond the infliction.

  Can ghosts, not yet made, but about to be made, project themselves forwards on to the scene of their own creation? The question might have been asked with some pertinence a short thirteen months later, when some forty score or more of Spaniards and Italians were slaughtered here by English hands in the very coldest of cold blood and laid out in two rows like newly-gaffed salmon upon the sands below.

  Ghostly shrieks by night and day and night alike the shouts and yells of Sir John of Desmond and his disorderly band of followers made the neighbourhood of the Fort of Gold anything but a pleasure-resort just then for peace-loving people! That energetic son of slaughter rode perpetually to and fro, and up, and down the country, harassing its inhabitants in all directions, sometimes in his brother's name, sometimes in his own name and against his brother, sometimes in the name of both of them together. He entirely declined to regard himself as under Sir James's orders. As a matter of course, his men equally refused to submit to any such unworthy constraint, and the reports of their eternal depredations made the reputation of the camp to stink even in the nostrils of those
least liable to be accused of any sordid stint of loyalty.

  Sir James did what one man could do, but the part was almost too big for one man's filling, even had that man been a Napoleon or an Alexander of Macedon. He had little or no support, either. Not only were his Spaniards few in number, but already they were beginning to get out of hand. Worse still, the Legate — who was supposed to be his especial sword, shield, and buckler, whose presence was held to shed a lustre as of St. Peter himself upon the camp — the Legate Saunders chose to throw all his weight into the opposite scale. Partly from personal irritation against Sir James, partly from an innate preference for the more unruly, he had vigorously espoused the side of Sir John of the Pikes' side and in all disputes gave his support to him rather than to the comparatively practical cousin. As for that hero's own views, to make ghosts of all whom he even suspected of being his enemies was to him the be-all and the end-all of the political campaign. Like the Mac-an-Iarlas in the West, so to him in the South, the rising presented itself simply as the proper occasion for wreaking old vengeances, washing clean old wrongs in newly spilt blood and generally making things uncomfortable for those he disliked.

  So passed the warm, moist days of July 1579, and the year began to get a trifle older and colder, and with every day that passed the deadly months of the winter and spring of 1579-1580 stole nearer and nearer — the worst, bloodiest, most disastrous months that Ireland in her already long history had perhaps yet been called upon to face.

  On the whole, the country just then was rather quiet than otherwise. The Shan O'Neill rising had been stamped out, with much effusion of blood, thirteen years before, and its leader's head might still with a little careful scrutiny have been discovered upon a remote spike of Dublin Castle, looking something like a mop, something like the last joint of a winter-worn bulrush, as you scanned it from below. Sir Henry Sidney, the strongest deputy England had sent to Ireland for a generation, had, at his own entreaty, recently been allowed to return home, where arrest for debt, slights of various kinds, and his sovereign's studied disfavour had proved his natural and appropriate reward for having served her only too energetically and very much too exclusively.

  In England, the news of this new invasion had so far produced singularly little commotion. Her Grace's ministers were accustomed to being told that a Spanish descent either just had or just was about to take place and were able to accept the intelligence with a fair show of philosophy. The Anjou marriage was just then the topic of the hour. Even in Ireland, the official mind seems to have at first been only very slightly perturbed over the matter. The President of Munster was away, and Henry Davells, recently appointed Commissioner to the province, was an easy-going man and an old friend of the Desmonds, who was inclined to take even the turbulent Sir John under his protection.

  Accompanied by Arthur Garter, the Provost-Marshal* of the province, he did ride in person to visit the elder Desmond for the purpose of pointing out to him that it was neither becoming nor desirable that a portion, however small, of her Grace's territory should be allowed to be seized by the troops of another monarch. No aid was forthcoming, although if expressions of loyalty and of abhorrence for his brother and cousin's proceedings would have satisfied Davells, those he was ready to produce to the utmost point of prodigality.

  (* Head of the military police.)

  Hugh Gaynard had been sent that particular afternoon to some little distance from the rebel camp in search of wild strawberries, wood-sorrel, water-cresses — possibly of roe's eggs or other undiscoverable dainties, which the imagination of the seanchaí had conjured up as likely to please his charges. He was on his way back to his taskmaster when his attention was arrested by the sound of horses' hoofs, which were clearly not those of Sir John's shoeless garrons. Looking behind him, he saw two riders approaching him at a dignified trot over the sands.

  They were riders of such an utterly different type from any that he had seen since the almost forgotten days of his boyhood, that involuntarily he stood still and remained eagerly waiting till they should pass by. One of them was a broad elderly man, with a square-clipped grey beard, an aspect at once genial and authoritative, and a suit of riding-clothes a good deal the worse for wear. The other was a much younger man, with a modishly-trimmed beard cut to an acute point; high boots, trunk hose, and a riding-coat of cinnabar-coloured cloth, over which rose an elaborately-pleated ruff, such as might have come straight from the hands of a Hampton Court or Whitehall washerwoman. Half a score of well-mounted serving men followed these two, their own horses' shining with the excess of grooming.

  A great outcry arose inside the rebel camp the instant they were perceived. Swords were drawn, the Spaniards rushing to pick up their guns. A small shower of bullets began to pepper the sand and to scatter the petals of the pansies. The visitors, however, kept just beyond range of fire. For overtaking them with the sorry garrons, which were all the horses the camp afforded, the invaders might just as well have tried to overtake one of the white-bosomed clouds which were at that moment sailing seaward before a brisk south-easterly breeze. The elder of the two leaders turned round in his saddle once or twice with an air of exasperating calm. Hugh, who had remained all the time at the same spot, long remembered that vision of stout dignity and easy, unquestioning self-importance, riding its well-groomed horse over the golden carpeting of pansies.

  Chapter XV.

  Hardly had the visitors disappeared round the nearest headland before Sir John of the Pikes and his men came galloping up from the opposite side, with all those curvetings and arm-wavings, those shoutings and yellings, those fascinating pike-brandishings and tail-switchings, which were apt to make that warrior's arrivals and departures so singularly effective. When he learned who had been there and had departed again without let or hindrance, fire, thunder, and fury flowed from his lips in a mingled torrent of objurgations. The unhappy garrons, were rapidly set right upon that point. Spurs were stuck remorselessly into their sides; whips brandished over their heads; pikes flashed; bare arms waved in the air. In another five minutes, away went Sir John and his tatterdemalions in full cry, helter-skelter, across the sands in the direction of Tralee.

  Then peace fell upon the camp.

  The little girls argued with Maelcho.

  “If you do not tell us a story at once, it is beaten you are going to be,” the elder one exclaimed indignantly. “Yes, beaten hard by both of us, hard, honey-man!” they cried simultaneously, whereupon four small fists began pummelling vigorously at his chest, a punishment which, to judge by the expression of his face, gave the most exquisite satisfaction to the victim.

  “All the tales are done and told, lady-girls; all the good tales are done and told! There are no more left! All over! all over!” and the seanchaí threw up his hands impressively.

  “Then it is a lie you are telling us, a big, black lie! yes, a lie as big as yourself, honey-man! How can the tales be all done, when we can say a number of them ourselves — when we know all about the good giant King Finn, who slept with his head on one bank of the Shannon, and his feet on the other, and who caught the big trout and salmon as they ran past him in his mouth; only he let the little trout, and the little red and blue pinkeens escape because they were still so young! Tell us that tale, Maelcho, honey-man.”

  “Lady-girls, the good giants have all gone away from poor old Ireland. There are none left now but wicked giants; giants that yawn in the darkness and make the caves; giants as big and as black as the bogs; wicked black giants, and Féar Gortach, the big white Hunger-man, who comes when the little children have nothing to eat. The lady-girls do not want to hear about Féar Gortach — no, no, I am sure they don't! It is he that sleeps across the top of the dead fir-trees, and when he dreams, his bones rattle, and when he wakes up, he reaches down a long white hand, like a fork out of the trees, and picks up everything he sees — the poor men and the poor women, and the little little children, and the young rabbits out of their holes, and the small unfledged wood-pigeons
from their nests, and eats them all up there on the top of the trees, and drops their bones about the wood, so that it seems as if the sky was raining white sticks. No, no, the lady-girls would never like to hear about such things as those.”

  In spite of this discouraging assurance, over which the children began to look extremely grave, Maelcho presently embarked upon a long meandering recital about three good young men, who went forth to seek their fortunes and in process of time conquered the whole world.

  From his nook beside the fire, Hugh Gaynard listened to all this dreamily, his comfort rather enhanced by the big booming voice, also by that sense of his own superiority which such exhibitions were apt to awaken in his mind. Sir James Fitzmaurice had come into the hut while the tale was going on and was talking on the other side of the partition in a low voice to his wife. It had grown nearly dusk by this time, the sides of the cliff shutting out what little light was left, so that the ledge was chiefly lit by the reflections striking up from the sea. A play of interlaced light and shade kept flitting over the camomile flowers and small fat torts of samphire and sea-pink; the thud from below came up in a lazy comfortable boom. The drift-fire crackled; the gusts of wind examined each of the crevices carefully; the children and their big bearded nursery-maid chattered comfortably together in the dimness.

  Suddenly, a succession of yells, as if all the witches of Endor and demons of Tophet had met and were making arrangements for a Sabbath, sounded from the sands below, yells which grew louder and louder, too, every moment and were evidently coming nearer. Sir James went hastily to the door of the hut and stood looking out from there, his brow puckered into folds of acute disturbance. Like a shot, he started forward and ran down the steep path leading to the shore. He had not gone many yards before he was met, and nearly driven backwards, by a charge from below. In front of the crowd towered a tall dark figure, with a couple of daggers held out at arm's length and brandished one in each hand. Behind him came other figures, equally melodramatic and equally pleasing; grinning faces, which seemed to be all teeth, filled the pathway from side to side. Face behind face, head behind head, arm over arm, tipped here and there with pikes and other appropriate finishes. The whole pathway was choked with the rash and the tumult. In another moment they would have been upon the ledge. Sir James, however, hemmed the way resolutely and after a short but violent struggle succeeded in diverting the rush into another path, and thence once more to the sands below.