The Grey Horse

by MacAvoy, R. A. ;

  The horse tried to rear.

  “It’s just as hard on my own pride, my friend,” answered Anraí sharply, in a voice filled with phlegm. “Hand me the knife now.”

  The grey horse gave a convulsion that shook the oak posts, so deeply sunk into stone. The front straps broke, and it rose up screaming, not as the furious chestnut had screamed, but very like a man.

  It stood, and seemed to dwindle, and then toppled over in confusion. It shouted, “By heaven, man! Look what you are about!” And then there was no horse there.

  Donncha’s jaw fell open. He stumbled back. Anraí lost his breath entirely.

  There was no grey horse, but the chute was not empty. Tangled in leather and with rope twisted around his head and neck, lay a man in a báinín shirt and canvas trousers. He had a cap on his head. He was very clean. Donncha took two looks at him and ran out of the barn.

  Anraí could not have said which was the stronger emotion. Shock, that his horse could turn into something other than a horse, or anger and grief that it should not be a horse any longer. The man tied in the chute twisted and looked up at him with the horse’s wide brown eyes. He pointed with a manicured hand at the knife that Anraí still held, and he giggled uncertainly.

  Anraí let the knife drop to the stones and put both hands against his chest, for he felt a horrible cold pain spreading. It was as though a horse had kicked him over the heart. It was his heart, he knew. He fell to his knees and lay upon the pedal of the clippers.

  Six inches from his face was that of the man who was a horse. The dark eyes stared at Anraí’s grey skin and at the rictus of pain that spread over his face. They blinked.

  “The halter, man. Anraí! Anraíson of Thurlaigh, take the halter off or I cannot help. Reach one hand!”

  The words were slow and overpronounced, more in the manner of Kerry than Connemara. Or pronounced in an antique manner. Anraíbarely heard them and did not understand much of what he heard. But he did make out that the young man there did not want a halter around his neck, as indeed who did? He reached a numbing arm over and pawed at it, and the twisted rope fell apart into the straw it was.

  In another moment the bound man was free and wiggling out of the clipping chute. Anraíwas picked up easily and squeezed. He dimly saw the two human hands pressed over his heart, while the man spoke words he could not understand. Not speaking to Anraí

  Warmth returned, and the gripping pain receded. Anraí could move his hands, and he put them around the strong arms that circled him. “You were … my horse?”

  The fellow pushed his cap back, letting silver hair slide down his forehead. He was not at all old: no older than Anraí’s perfect, Spanish horse, but even his eyelashes were silver around the dark eyes that had no white in them. “I am Ruairí MacEibhir, and my mother’s name was Gaoth. And it might be I still am your horse, Anraí Ó Reachtaire.”

  Anraí took a deep breath, which hurt. “Why would that be? I don’t remember paying a penny out for you. Nor signing a bill of hire with you, nor …” He winced.

  Ruairí MacEibhir had a pleasant smile, which grew wider. “None of these, but only an unexpected rope at the top of a mountain. But as it seems I’ve almost killed you here, in your own barn, it may be I owe you something.” He put his ear to Anraí’s chest, listening.

  Anraí was angry, in a weak way. He shoved the fellow away, or tried to. “I don’t need pity now, from an unchristian creature that lives to play tricks on people.” He tried to rise and failed.

  Ruairí picked Anraí up in his two arms. “Are we arguing already, Anraí? It’s no wonder I remained a horse until now. You were much kinder to me that way.” He went out into the rain, guarding Anraí’s head against it with his own, and took the old man in to Áine.

  Chapter Four

  Tadhg Ó Murchú, or The Priest of the Parish

  Ruairí MacEibhir stood beside the white-quilted bed and watched Áine pull off her husband’s boots. She had paid no more attention to him than to give him an initial, confused glance when he entered bearing Anraí, and to show him to the bedroom. He stood with his legs braced and his hands in commodious trouser pockets. His tam was pulled far forward over his face.

  The room was as white as the counterpane on the bed, under the soot-darkened beams of the roof. Against one wall stood a bureau of black bog wood, bearing a sock darner and a statue of the Virgin, which mine, as a young woman, had painted herself. The clothes press was also dark and had a door that slid along the wall, like the barn door.

  Ruairí looked at all of this with mild eyes.

  Áine pulled the clothes off the patient, hauled the covers down to his feet and over, and beat an already shapeless pillow into greater softness. As she worked she whispered constantly, a steady stream of endearments and comforts. She called Anraí her love and her cavalier, her jewel, and life’s long trust, things that might comfort a man of any age and through any sickness. But Áine uttered these sweetnesses in a whisper that Ruairí doubted Anraí could hear at all. He wondered if he should tell her as much, and he scratched his ear with a large-boned hand.

  “I’ll have to send Donncha for the priest,” she said at last, much more clearly.

  Anraí, whom the weariness of pain had made passive, opened his eyes in alarm. “I’m not so far gone, woman!”

  Giving his pillow one more vigorous, almost bellicose blow of the fist, she turned away from Anraí. “You can’t deny your danger, Anraí Ó Reachtaire! What if you should find yourself squatting at the foot of God’s holy throne this very night, with all your sins crawling over you like lice on the shorn sheep? Besides, there’s people in this very parish who have had the sacrament three times and more, and they’re as healthy as the next fellow.”

  Anraí opened his mouth in rebuttal, but closed it again. He found himself looking at Ruairí MacEibhir’s face.

  Squarish, but not heavy to look at. Strong jaw, but with a delicate sort of chin. Not so long a nose as some men’s. Wide, surprised-seeming eyes, all black inside, so you couldn’t tell what he was looking at. Clean shaven and trimmed like a man for his own wedding, with only the neat black and silver ends of the hair slipping out from under the tam. It was a pleasant enough face, and save for the eyes, as ordinary as soda cake.

  “I can go for the priest,” said Ruairí. “Most likely faster than Donncha, even if we could find him. But you must tell me where the priest lives.”

  Áine blinked. “Forgive me, but are you such a stranger to the parish that you don’t know where Tadhg Ó Murchú lives? Surely you’re no foreigner.”

  Ruairí nodded, using his neck as well as his head. “That’s true enough. But I’ve … been a while away.”

  “That man is my horse!” said Anraí from the bed, in a shaky, accusatory voice. He tried to point.

  Áine shared a speaking glance with the young man and sent him for both the priest and the doctor.

  Ten minutes later, while Áine was filling a hot-water bottle from the kettle on the turf stove, Donncha walked into the kitchen. “Áine NíAnluain, I think I’m a sick man.” He lowered himself onto a rush-seated chair and hid his swart face in both hands. “Perhaps only mad. I don’t know.”

  Áine did not raise her head from her pouring. “Unless, you are very sick or very mad, Donncha, I haven’t the time for it, with Anraí in the room behind us, after having a heart attack.”

  Donncha’s eyes were red rimmed, like a hound’s, and he showed the red all around them in his astonishment. “A heart attack?” He sat in this knowledge, breathing in and out of his open mouth. “Then perhaps I’m not mad after all, but merely a coward.”

  He reflected further, in silence.

  “A terrible coward.”

  Tadhg Ó Murchú the priest, was a small man and very dark. The roundness of his face owed nothing to fat, and he had two catlike cheekbones and a prominent cleft in his chin, which gave him a knobbly appearance, like that of raw Connemara fields.

  When he heard a wagon being driven a
t speed into his yard, he was in the study speaking with a visitor, and although it was not a confessional visit, still he closed the study door behind himself before, going-to greet the newcomer.

  “Anraí Ó Reachtaire desires the priest and the doctor,” announced the driver, not rising from his seat. “For the sake of his heart.”

  Ó Murchú stepped out onto the muddy gravel. He saw the man black, against the striped, setting sun. He did not recognize either the shape or the face. He laughed at the phrase. “For the sake of his heart? You mean because his heart has gone out on him, I imagine. Two minutes.”

  They drove into increasing darkness, until the tail of the horse before them could not be made out. Ó Murchú kept his great hollow crucifix firmly on his lap, gripped with the one hand he did not need for holding on to the gig.

  “We’re going fast,” he remarked.

  “Indeed we are,” replied the driver, and at that minute a stone flung the right wheel up off the road. The priest came down an instant after the wheel and the candles of beeswax stored in the stem of the crucifix rattled loudly.

  “If we were to turn over …” Ó Murchú began again. “If we were to break our suffering necks—God between us and disaster—why then we wouldn’t make it to old Anraí’s bedside at all, would we?”

  “Right enough, Priest of the Parish,” replied the driver, and continued down the road in the same style. At last, with the priest’s angry eye on him, he added, “We’ll come to no grief. Not while I am driving and a horse is pulling. This red imp has a turn of speed, and as he’s no worse fast than slow, we might as well use him at his best.”

  Ó Murchú sighed, unconvinced. It was now pitch black in the road and he wondered how even the horse could see.

  “You’re a Kerryman?” Ó Murchú hazarded.

  Ruairí looked at him long before answering. “How could you tell?”

  “Because of your speech, man. It is old-fashioned. You hold on to your words a long time, and pronounce them finely. Though I’d have thought only a Connemara man would have such poor manners with a priest. You haven’t even told me the name of the man who holds my life in his hands.”

  The driver laughed heartily and reached out his solid left arm. For a moment the priest thought that he was either going to be hugged or throttled, but it was only that they were approaching a sharp turn.

  “My name is Ruairí MacEibhir.”

  Now it was Ó Murchú’s turn to laugh, but he smothered the desire. “Rory son of Granite? That is the perfect name for a Connemara crofter. It’s too bad you’re from Kerry, where the stone is rich lime.”

  “My name is Ruairí MacEibhir,” the driver repeated. “And my mother’s name was Gaoth.” (“Gwee”, or “wind” in Irish.) “I am Anraí’s new horseman.”

  “Then God help him,” murmured the priest, as the stallion bucked in the traces.

  The doctor was not to be found in his home at Ros an Mhíl, for he was tending a man who had lost a hand to rot from the wound of a fish spine, so Father Ó Murchú left word for him to follow when he returned.

  “The horse knows his way well,” said the priest, as the gig swayed from darkness into darkness.

  “I don’t know why he should,” replied Ruairí. “It’s not his home we’re going to, and until today, he has never pulled a chariot of any sort. This is James Blondell’s crazy red stallion we have here.”

  Ó Murchú held tighter to his equipage. “I believe you are not a man of the truth,” he said shortly. “I have an unhappy gift in that respect. I always know.”

  The unseen man on the seat next to him snorted, and at that moment the stallion decided to leap up into the air and come down sideways. Ruairí held Father Ó Murchú to the seat. “Indeed, for a man dedicated to God you have a hard attitude on you. It is the squire’s red stallion, as a glimpse of his narrow hinder and thin tail should tell you. Donncha will identify the beast for you.”

  Ó Murchú waited for the trouble with the horse to be sorted out before he replied. “I didn’t mean necessarily about the horse. I mean you have the flavor of a lying man about you.”

  “Is it that you doubt that Anraí is sick or that my name is Ruairí and my father’s name was Eibhir? For I’ve said nothing more to you than these things, and I swear upon my mother’s name that they are both true.”

  Ó Murchú could not choke back a laugh. “Then you swear upon the wind!” But his words broke off sharply, for they had come around the bulk of Knockduff much sooner than he had believed possible, and there were the lantern outside the door of Ó Reachtaire’s house and a votive candle in each of the two lower windows.

  “The mad brute does have a turn of speed,” Father Ó Murchú murmured.

  Ruairí MacEibhir sat himself down in the kitchen next to Donncha and regarded the man across the light of a white candle. Donncha showed his ridge of broken teeth and gripped the deal top of the table. “God’s blessing, it is you.”

  Ruairí grinned back at him, black-eyed. He stamped one heavy-shod foot on the floor. “How I scared you, MacSiadhail!”

  Donncha’s own, droop-lidded eyes shot sparks. “No more than I frightened you, Fairy Man, with that great knife in my hand.”

  Ruairí smiled more broadly, exposing two rows of perfect, boxy, ivory teeth. “Grant you that! I had no idea the old man was so dissatisfied with me. He seemed to like my looks well enough.”

  Donncha chuckled, more at ease now, but he kept the body of the table between the stranger and himself. “Surely he does, Fairy Man, but he knows where the money comes from and what sort of horse brings it in. That sweet red songbird in the barn, now …”

  Ruairí nodded. He picked the white length of the candle out of its candle holder and held it wrapped in his hands, so that they glowed. Big hands and square, but not fleshy. Donncha stared, thinking that he had manicured those hands. “You’ll have no trouble with him these next few days. Tonight he ran over twenty miles with Áine’s gig behind him, and he’s soft from confinement. Indeed, half his madness is confinement, though he’ll never be sane.”

  Silently Donncha repeated Ruairí’s words, a phrase behind. Then he cried, “The red stallion? Blondell’s stakes-winning Thoroughbred? You harnessed that ugly devil up to the gig and flung off into the night with him? Fairy Man …”

  The violence of Ruairí’s mirth drove the candle flame licking over his face, where the two eyes were blind pools. “Not fairy, Donncha. Kerryman. The good Father Ó Murchú knows me to be from Kerry.”

  Donncha did not understand the joke. “He does?”

  “He does! Even as he knows me for a lying man. Though I am not, Donncha, unless it is a lie not to say all you know.”

  “It’s the path of wisdom, and our own employer should study it more closely,” said the man, continuing, “so tell me why you have come to trouble his failing years. And my own prime.”

  Ruairí shot a canny glance over the candle flame and bobbed the white end of the candle in front of his nose. “If you must know, colleague, I am here by the seaside paying court to the queen of heaven.”

  “The queen … Mary the Virgin?”

  “Forfend!” The candle slipped and the smell of burning hair spread around the table, Ruairí MacEibhir cursed, patted his damaged forelock, and returned the candle to its holder. “Don’t be silly, Donncha. I mean the daughter of Seán Standún, of course.”

  When the priest left him, Anraí had Ruairí brought to his room. In actuality, he could not convince Áine to call him in, as she wanted her husband to sleep, so he was reduced to shouting down the stairs for him, but Ruairí MacEibhir entered the pale room as decorously as though ushered by deacons. He carried his tam and ran the brim in circles between his hands.

  Anraí looked dwarfed by the bed, but his eyes glistened. “She’s giving you poitín out there?”

  The question was uttered sharply, but it brought a smile to Ruairí’s lips. “It’s government whiskey, I think.”

  “Worse and worse. That’
s because of the priest, although it’s as strange a measure as any I’ve heard, with Tadhg Ó Murchú being as green a man as …” His voice trailed away. “Damn, I’m tired.”

  “I know it,” said Ruairí. “And you have no need to talk to me tonight. In the morning …”

  “To hell with that!” Anraí’s face sharpened to boniness. “Before I sleep tonight, in this bed or in purgatory, I must know who you are.”

  “Ruairí MacEibhir…”

  “Right. So you said. And are you a Christian man?”

  “Not at all,” said Ruairí, still smiling kindly.

  Anraí lifted his head. “Human man at all, then?”

  “I am not.” He tossed his cap on the bed, and it landed on Anraí’s stomach. “But I’m a pretty good horse, aren’t I? The son of your heart, of so you said.”

  Anraí looked not at the brown eyes but at the cap. His head sank down. “If you knew me better, my lad, you would not try to endear yourself to me with a likeness to my son.” He closed his eyes. “Why do you come bothering me, almost to death like this, creature?”

  Ruairí stepped very quietly close enough to pick up his cap again. He left his hand resting on the covers. “Annaí son of Thurlaigh Ó Reachtaire, the damage I did you was inadvertent, and occurred only after your attempted violence upon myself.”

  Anraí found the impossible eyes six inches from his own. “You talk like a lawyer,” he whispered, and then, remembering, he tried to laugh. “Oh dear God, what rubbish!”

  In another moment he was serious again. “What do you want here?”

  “Here, Anraí? Do you mean in your house, or on the earth itself? I come to this land and I go from it to the Other Place, according to whim.” His mouth spread for a laugh, and then tightened again. “I’m not certain the whim is my own. Say I am like the rain: unreliable, except that you know it will show up again.

  “But if you are asking why I am right here, in your house, then I must remind you that I didn’t come here by choice.” Ruairí raised his face to the black window and then looked over the room again. “But I think I could not have chosen better. I want to be in your service for a while, Anraí. And I am valuable; there is no better horseman remaining on the whole island than I.”