The Grey Horse

by MacAvoy, R. A. ;

  “Who are you?” repeated the boy, flat voiced, though his body shivered.

  Ruairí paused for a few heartbeats. He looked at his hands and then up at the stars, which shone in his silky hair. “I am the son of Granite and of Wind. Among these people and in this year I am called Ruairí, which is a good name. I have other names, too.” He spoke softly, as though he were talking to himself.

  “I am the horse that bore you over your first jump, a Thóibín. I am the hauler of the stones for the walls hereabout. I eat the paltry grass and the flowers and I wade in the sea. I steal men and women, if I might love them, and I carry them off. I am the púca, and my riders come off me different people than they went on.” Then Ruairí giggled like a girl. “Or that is the idea. I would be a more formidable fairy if I were more clever.

  “I am broad back and bone, stones and flowers, long work and green idleness. New things come slowly to me, but I have been here a very long time and I have seen too much change to be bothered anymore.” He dropped his gaze from the heavens and touched one gentle finger to Toby’s chest.

  “I am Connemara, Toby Blondell. The country where you were born. So I am mother and father to you and I will call you my son.”

  Toby stared, half in astonishment and half in distrust, at the white and black face below his.

  “And I say to you that you are bone out of my stones and blood out of my little rivers and bogs. I name you prince of this kingdom in which I am the sleepy, old high king. It cannot be taken from you.”

  All this while Toby had sat silent while Ruairí spoke, and he was silent now as the stars ran like watercolors over his blinking eyes. Ruairí’s words, which he only half understood, made his eyes smart, and once he had time to think of them, he suspected he might cry outright again. He wrapped his knees in his arms and rubbed his eyes against the knuckles of his thumbs.

  With his vision so disarrayed, he was not certain what sat before him, white and shining under moonlight. “Can you teach me to be a púca, too?” he asked.

  Ruairí’s white teeth shone like a glimpse of the moon. “Only a púca can be a púca. It is not such a great destiny, my friend. I don’t think you would be happy swatting flies for days on end, with your mouth against the soil.”

  Toby sighed, though his shivering had almost stopped. “It’s better than being a boy and going to school.”

  Ruairí gave this full consideration, as he scooted his seat over the wet soil until he was behind the boy, and he put one of his canvas-covered legs to either side of him. He chafed the thin, cold arms. “It may be so. And if you like, my son, I will hide you in the mountains where they cannot find you until you are grown.”

  Toby twisted around until he was face to face with Ruairí. “You would do that?”

  Ruairí smiled again. “I never quite lie, boy. I will do it; it is your choice. But for the space of ten years, you must shun the company of men and women and remain with the cows and horses. I will teach you the names of the grasses and herbs, both in Gaelic and in an older language, and you can try to teach me them in English. But good luck to you in that endeavor…”

  Toby broke in, “Shun the company … for ten years? That’s …” His working mouth sought for a word to describe a thing that was both ill-advised and completely impossible, but he didn’t know one, either in Gaelic or English. “I can’t sit on a bare hill for ten years. I wanted to go to Mám Cross and fit in as one of the locals.”

  Now it was Ruairí’s turn to be incredulous. “And pass as one of them? Never, a Thóibín. Even I can’t pass as a native here, and I have had the language for fifteen hundred years. Don’t gawp at me, I said fifteen hundred. But the tongue changes too fast for me, and you can’t change fast enough in a few months …”

  “You’re that old?”

  “I was born on the day that the Welshman Pádraig landed for the second time on Irish shores.”

  Toby used Ruairí’s large shoulder as a brace by which to scrape himself around so that he could look the fairy in the eyes without straining. “If you are that old, Ruairí, you ought to be very wise by now.”

  It looked as though Ruairí would be offended, but then he burst out laughing. “Ah, but then I’ve never been to school, you see. I hadn’t the advantages.”

  At the Blondell household James and Hermione kept vigil, and most of the servants did the same. There was a lot of weeping belowstairs and some in the library, where the Blondells were picking over the last of a midnight supper.

  James Blondell had a glass of Madeira in front of him, and the rest of the bottle was set beside. He wanted to finish this glass at a gulp and fill it again and again until his hands would not obey him, but he was also in terror that they would bring in to him the body of his son and find him dead drunk. So he stared at the glass with its dark-oak liquid, and occasionally he made honey-brown swirls along the sides.

  His wife drank tea with a shaking hand. “Hermie,” he said. “If you keep drinking that stuff, you’ll never get to bed.”

  “I’m not going to go to bed, James.” Her voice was in excellent control. Delagardie. “I’m going to wait for Toby.”

  “He’s undoubtedly asleep himself, holed up somewhere. With locals or in a barn. It’s not cold out tonight,” he added, though he felt that part, at least, was a complete falsehood. He had been out searching until eleven and had seen his breath under the starlight.

  Hermione stared out of the tall library window. She spoke to it, as though she were speaking directly to James’s face. “I don’t think you take Mr. Grover seriously enough in this matter, my dear. He expects we will either receive a ransom note, or … or …”

  James, who was sitting behind her, stood up. He placed the glass on the end table and walked toward his wife. She lifted her head but continued to stare into the window.

  He felt it hard, this one more rejection: that his wife of fifteen years refused to meet his eyes. She blamed him that much.

  But then his own eyes strayed to the window, and Blondell noticed that the lamplight had turned the surface to black glass. A looking glass. As he gazed straight into it it showed him Hermione’s face perfectly, and she must have been looking at him all along. Indeed, now that he was beside her, she turned her head as much as she could in the wingback chair and reached for his hand.

  He kissed the side of the Delagardie nose. “Oh, Hermie! Sometimes I misunderstand you so!”

  “And I, you, James.” She lowered her lips to his hand, thinking how it reminded her of her son’s short-fingered, child’s hand. “But about Mr. Grover…”

  James Blondell groaned. He felt very embarrassed about Mr. Grover, who was at this moment in the sleeping part of the household, preparing for another day of nosing out nationalists and driving the people of Carraroe further away from Blondell. He had expected more subtlety out of a Crown man, and more intelligence. “Mr. Grover is a detective, darling, and he interprets everything that happens in terms of his calling.”

  Hermie sniffed and dropped his hand. Blondell froze in place, with his hand over her lap, because he was listening. He stood.

  “I hear doors. Feet.” He threw open the library door and leaned out into the passage. Hermione remained in her chair, with her eyes closed and her back braced against bad news.

  Along the passage came Toby, with a shirt of báinín over his clothes and roped with a bridle rein at the hips. This outfit turned his slight figure into that of a medieval serf. He marched firmly and alone. With difficulty, he looked James Blondell in the eyes.

  “I have come back, Father, and I am prepared to do whatever it is you want of …” Here his mother’s voiceless shriek broke his concentration.

  “Oh, Mother,” he said. “I’m sorry. I …” and he bowed his head for her coming.

  Her hugs and her cries and reproaches were everything he had expected and he endured them, knowing they were deserved. His father stood over the scene and observed it, missing nothing in his son’s expression. When Toby had the opp
ortunity to look at his father again, he found Blondell’s face very peaceful, and Toby’s father nodded to Toby and smiled.

  “Who brought you home?” he asked, and Toby told him.

  So Ruairí was brought in and made to tell where he had found him and how they had returned all that way to the estate. He spoke, of course, in Gaelic. Toby noticed that Ruairí never lied, quite.

  Hermione didn’t understand more than five words, but she smiled graciously and stroked Toby’s hair. Blondell shook Ruairí’s hand very honestly and thanked him in both Irish and English. He did not offer him money, but instead invited him for dinner.

  When he had departed, Hermione sank back into her chair and wiped her nose on a hankie. She gave a little laugh and a moue, pointing at the Aubusson carpet. “My, that ploughboy had dirty brogues.”

  Blondell glanced down at the mud, and his jaw clenched in happy belligerence as he messed Toby’s hair, which Hermione had straightened. “Maybe he’ll scrape them when he comes to dinner Sunday,” he said. But they were both too weary to make an argument out of it.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Consequences

  It was the next day that Ruiarí caught Eibhlín hiding under a tall gorse bush by a culvert on the Cois Fhairrge Road. It was a corner of her red petticoat that alerted him, as well as the sound of her breathing.

  He leaped the culvert with surprising lightness and crept down the back on the other side of the blooming gorse bush, bent low away from the thorns. Her back was to him, and she was watching up the road through the dead lower branches of the bush.

  Ruairí put his hands very lightly over her shoulders. She gasped and then turned to him, her pretty face radiant.

  “God to you, Eibhlín,” he said, as a good Christian ought, and at the sight and sound of him, her mouth went from a smile to a shock of fright. She sprang back from him, impaling herself upon the thorns of the trunk itself, and her eyes filled with painful tears.

  “Rory MacEibhir, what do you mean by this?”

  He laughed at her and didn’t draw back an inch. “A man might be curious, seeing something so odd as Eibhlín NíStandún squatting in a ditch, and not to pee.”

  Again Eibhlín gasped, this time in anger, and she raised her hand to slap his face. Ruairí did not move, but she laid her hand down again. “I … I had a cramp in the leg, that’s all.”

  He made no answer and did not look obviously disbelieving, so she pulled herself away from the gorse: first petticoat, then tangled hair, and lastly the shawl that had suffered most from the contact. Ruairí helped her with the thorns and she made no objection, though she was stiff as the gorse bush itself beside him. “Now you must leave me to rest, for I wouldn’t have you seen here in this concealment,” she announced firmly.

  “I know it. The people around here don’t like to see a young man and woman together under a bush!” He grinned and backed out awkwardly, with much waggling of his hind end. Once standing on the bank of the stream, he leaped up to road-level easily and stood looking down at her, a dark outline against blue sky. She hugged the corners of her shawl and turned away.

  “Eibhlín,” he called down again. “I know that a foal lives well on milk and grass and has no need of a father at all. We are not all so lucky. Be careful.”

  By the time she turned to him in both fury and fear, he was gone. No sound.

  It had been hard work, even with all the help, but it was complete. Ruairí sat himself on a rock beside his black king and surveyed his house, trying to pretend he had never seen it before. “It is handsome, isn’t it? Not so lovely as a hilltop at night, nor so comforting as beech trees, but after the manner of its kind, very handsome.”

  The king, who had been in and out of it, up the stairs and down, gave him a supportive snort.

  “It has floors and a ceiling and all the walls are painted. There are doors that open and close, and glass in the windows, for the birds to strike their heads against. Now only two things remain …”

  The king lifted his head at the sound of hooves coming down the road, a few acres behind them. He was like a dog that way, lacking only a growl.

  “… to persuade the stream of the hill behind to dip under and send us a tap into the kitchen, and to persuade Máire my queen to come and dwell in it. Either or both of these might have been done more profitably before the house was built. But that thinking is for clever folks.”

  The pony gave out a whinny like trumpets and stamped his round hoof on the sod. Ruairí turned his head only as much as necessary, to see who was coming.

  It was the little man with the tall hat, bouncing along on—of all mounts—that chestnut filly which had spent the winter and spring in Anraí’s barn. He was making rough work of it, too, for she was still a willful girl, though that was no excuse for bouncing. Not on a Thoroughbred.

  Ruairí sat and watched him pick his way over the boggy ground, with reins so short the filly could not see to place her feet. Instead, he leaned heavily over her right side and squinted at the soil himself.

  Ruairí MacEibhir greeted him composedly. He straightened as he yanked the filly to a star-gazing halt, but he did not dismount. “Mister Blondell tells me that you speak decent English.”

  It was hard on the neck to look up so far as the man’s face, and the sun was behind him, so Ruairí merely looked at the horse’s belly. “I make my wants known,” he said, stroking the ground as though it were an animal as he spoke. “Sometimes.”

  The small man had a large head, to fit his hat. His hair hung in two curled sideburns of dark fox color, and his chin was shaven so that it shined like the beaver. “Don’t have anything to do with your time, hey?” he said, as the filly shook her head and made the bit rattle. He yanked again.

  Ruairí stood up. He put his finger into the horse’s mouth, between the corners of her lip and the bit, and he whispered nonsense to her. Her ewe neck lowered in relief. It occurred to him that Blondell didn’t mount this fellow on the filly out of his great friendship with him. Ruairí grinned and stroked the nervous chestnut brow. “I’m a little tired this morning, because I was up half the night taking Toby home. And I was looking at my new house.”

  The small man glanced up at the tall, curved wall of stone, roofed in slate and with the morning sun glinting on each new window. He had not connected the structure with the man in báinín and canvas, squatting on a stone in front of it. “That’s yours? I took you for a native.”

  Now Ruairí looked straight at him, regardless of the sun. “I am. No one more so.”

  Thinking he had made a mistake in words, the man added “I mean a Papist. A Catholic.”

  “I am that, too. I could hardly forget my baptism so soon.”

  Confusion in the hazel eyes gelled into suspicion, mixed with a good dose of rancor. “This I have to see,” he said, and put heels to the filly’s side.

  Part of the horse’s problem, besides the poor quality of her rider, was that she was in season, and so young as to scarcely know what that meant. But as she passed the black king she knew very well that the pony was a stallion, and he knew everything about her he needed to know. He made a suggestion she found outrageous and delicious and her response was a single squeal and a hop that left her rider crumpled on the ground at her shoulder. This was so frightening she ran away, dragging the reins, and the black king would have gone with her, but for Ruairí’s restraining presence.

  He stepped over to the man on the ground, not hurrying very much, and lifted his head and shoulders off the wet, boggy soil. The tall, shining hat was a loss, and he tossed it aside. “Too bad,” he said. “She isn’t a bad horse; her gaits are grand, but she’s very green.”

  Grover came to his feet, his teeth chattering in anger. “And you’re not, I guess!”

  The fairy lowered his white lashes half over his strange eyes. “Green? Not by many, many seasons of experience,” he said in puzzlement.

  “That’s not what I meant by ‘green’ and you know it.”

&nbs
p; “I do?” He laughed at the little madman and leaned indolently on his pony’s shoulder.

  “Damn well you do.” Grover looked about him for his hat, and went partway to picking it up before he lost hope of it. “I know very well you made the beast do that to me, by what you put in her mouth.”

  “Then you know more than I do, man. What I put in her mouth was a finger, to save her from those torturing hands of yours. And I’m thinking we should go find her now, before she breaks her breedy neck with those reins, rather than …”

  “I’m sure you would rather, Mister MacEibhir. But I am a servant of the Crown, and I am not going to chase crazy horses up the mountains when I see my work before me.” And he made for the front door of Ruairí’s house, limping as he went.

  With a last look at the road down which the filly had disappeared, Ruairí followed Grover. With a last, regretful sniff of the air, the black king followed Ruairí.

  At the front door, which was of oak with a little pane of glass, Grover stopped and whistled. “This is almost a manor.”

  “It is as big as Seán Standún’s house outside An Cheathrú Rúa,” said Ruairí equably. “I had to make it so, so that his daughter would not feel too close here.”

  Grover gave him another hard look. “John Stanton’s house I have already been to. He’s a respectable man and has an excuse for a house this size.” He put his hand on the long latch, and since there was no lock on the door, it opened to him.

  “You are not welcome within,” said Ruairí, still very calm.

  “I don’t have to be welcome with such as you,” answered Grover, stepping into the white hall. “Agent of the Crown.”

  He walked up and down in the house and to and fro within it. He opened every door, including that of the pantry, which was already dusty. “Good carpentry,” he grunted.

  At last he came out into the sun again, where Ruairí was waiting. “All right. Where did you get the money for this sort of construction?”