by Clio Gray
‘Made a decision?’ Greta asked without preamble.
Fergus looked up sharply, unaware that Malloy and Greta had approached, Fergus hesitating only a moment before he spoke, an audible tremor to his voice.
‘I’m staying,’ he said and Mick Malloy chuckled from somewhere deep in his throat, a noise more like a raven’s caw than anything else, setting Fergus’s nerves on edge.
‘Very good, Scotsman,’ Malloy said, ‘and I’d ask a favour of you for Greta before we go in for the push.’
Fergus hauled himself to standing.
‘Anything,’ he said, attempting a smile at Greta that did not come out well.
‘Folks here ain’t that good with reading,’ Malloy went on, ‘and Greta gathered a few broadsheets on her travels. Would be a great help to her if you took some of ‘em to the men, read out the good bits, give ‘em a bit of encouragement before we head on in.’
His words were so casual that Fergus found himself nodding; the fact that they would be going into a pitched battle any moment receding into the background now he’d a task to do.
‘Alright, of course,’ Fergus said, Greta shoving a bundle of papers into his hand.
‘Thanks,’ she said, her face covered in muck and fire-soot, directing him towards one part of the camp. ‘And they’ll maybe want you to write some letters,’ she added, giving him a pencil and a sheaf of dirty paper. ‘Just in case, like.’
Fergus did as he was bid, and Greta was right. Most of the men weren’t that interested in the news sheets he was bringing them but quite a few wanted letters they could carry in their jackets in case they never made it out. They were all of a kind, all addressed to wives, sons, fathers; all minimal, all stating the bare bones of what needed saying – that they loved them, that they were fighting for the cause they all believed in, that they would try to get home if they possibly could.
The few who had no family were in the main more interested in having actual news stories read out to them. Fergus picking carefully for the good, avoiding the bad. A short while in he was brought up short by a tiny article coming under the heading of Lloyd’s Register of Ships that Fergus almost passed over.
‘Oh my God,’ he whispered, a name jagging itself off the page like a splinter. He struggled to focus on the tiny print marching across the paper like a colony of ants and had to use a shaking finger to keep his eyes going in a straight line. But the name was there all the same, and it cut him to the quick.
‘Lost, the Collybuckie, departed from Port Glasgow and thence to Aberdeen and Hull and for the Continent. Caught thereafter in a storm off the coast of Holland. Said the captain, James Ferguson, from Vlissingen, ‘We lost several passengers and crew, but thanks to God’s Grace, and the villagers of the peninsular of Walcheren, and also to the Servants of the Sick who bide there, a great many more of us were saved than would otherwise have been done. My personal thanks must go to one Brother Joachim who was so instrumental in bringing me back to health after I was found, and who is even now caring for one of our passengers who did not fare so well as I did.’
Fergus read these lines several times over and felt sick, and then was sick, spewing up the viscous coffee made from ground acorns he’d been given earlier and the pieces of bread from the night before that were too hard and stale for his stomach to assimilate. It was impossible for him to believe that Golo and Ruan might be dead, that he was the only link left in the chain. The article gave hope, for obviously very few of either crew or passengers had been lost, but dread was rubbing through his bones and grinding at his heart. He took a few steps in one direction and then another, clutching the paper to his chest, trying to shake off the fear.
Time now to write his own letters, time now to put down everything he had so far encountered in Ireland in black and white. If, God forbid, neither Ruan nor Golo were still alive then someone somewhere might be caring enough of their cause to take up cudgels on their behalf, make sure all they’d worked for did not come to nought. He moved away from Malloy’s soldiers and began to scribble his scrappy and paltry messages, hoping he’d got everything into them that needed saying.
Once done, he sought out Greta, his head a massed confusion like a thicket of brambles grown wild. He was committed to the fight, but if anything happened to him he needed these letters delivered. Greta was nowhere to be seen as he picked his way through the silent simmering crowds of prostrate men back up to the old log he’d slept next to. Still no Greta, only the burly outline of Mick Malloy standing with his back to Fergus and his men, gazing through his glass at the town of New Ross.
‘I need to speak to Greta urgently,’ Fergus said, grabbing impetuously at Malloy’s shoulder as several church bells began to chime in the surrounding villages.
‘Gone,’ Mick said brusquely, brushing Fergus off like a wasp from a plate. ‘Sent her off a couple of minutes back. If you’ve changed your mind, Scotsman, then you’re too late. We’re about to move.’
He turned then and pushed a hand hard at Fergus’s chest where he was still clutching his batch of broadsheets.
‘Jesus, man! Don’t you know anything?’ Malloy sounded exasperated, kept jabbing at Fergus with a calloused finger, perhaps not so sanguine about the coming battle as he’d first seemed. ‘Get that lot buried beneath a load of leaves or branches. You want to tell everyone where we’ve been? Jesus!’ Malloy repeated, shaking his head. ‘Just get it done, then join the boys and tag yourself onto the lines.’
Malloy stomped away, barking out quiet orders to his men who had stood up at the sound of the bells and were loading their few muskets, taking up the shafts of their huge pikes in their strong hands, leaning the weight of them against their strong shoulders. Fergus looked quickly about him, spied the log. It took all his strength to roll it but he managed, thrusting the bundle of papers into the hollow beneath before releasing it, sparing time only to rip out the little paragraph on the wreck of the Collybuckie and scribbling a few words in the margin before tucking the paper into his pouch alongside ring and khipu.
Brother Joachim/Walcheren. Grimalkin/Deventer. Golo Eck & Ruan Peat/Loch Eck, Scotland.
Not much, but enough of an aide memoire in case his precious letters never got delivered, or he suffered some blow to the head that rendered him incapable of reasonable thought. And then a miracle happened. Greta emerged from the trees and appeared at his side.
‘You looking for me?’ she asked casually. ‘Thought you might change your mind. Thought I’d better hang out a few minutes more for when you did.’
Fergus slipped back on his heels in his surprise, sprawling into the mud.
‘Greta. Oh thank God!’ Fergus scrabbled, blessing every inch of the girl who had so fortuitously materialised at his side.
‘So, coming with?’ Greta asked, raising a knowing eyebrow. Fergus righted himself, trying to muster some dignity.
‘Actually no,’ he said, brushing ineffectually at the mud on his clothes. ‘No. I’m going to stay and fight.’
Greta took a step back and studied Fergus with interest.
‘Really?’ she asked, as if Fergus had said the most surprising thing she’d ever heard.
‘Really,’ Fergus confirmed, his head in a scramble, still teetering on the brink, knowing here was escape if only he chose to take it but, seeing Greta, knowing what she’d been doing the last few years, hearing the scepticism in her voice, he did the only thing he could.
‘I’m sticking in with the others,’ he said boldly. ‘But will you do something for me before I go?’
Greta’s smile wavered and she looked at Fergus with something approaching concern.
‘You do know this means fighting, right? I mean real down and dirty fighting? I know Mick thinks it’s going to be a pushover and he’s usually right, but even so…’
‘Just do this for me,’ Fergus said, taking his letters, holding them out to Greta. ‘Just take them. If you can get them to someone who can send them on then so be it. If not, you’ve lost nothing.’
Greta took the letters and looked at them.
‘Ain’t no people nor places I’ve ever heard of,’ she said.
‘I know that,’ Fergus said. ‘But please. If anyone can get them where they’re meant to go then it’s you…’
He got no further, Greta melting away into the trees as a burly hand shot out of nowhere and took Fergus by his collar.
‘C’mere, you,’ the man said, forcibly dragging Fergus into the lines getting ready to march from their glade, a pitchfork shoved into Fergus’s hands once he was stood back upon his feet.
‘Can’t ‘ave you going into battle without summat,’ the man said, almost kindly. Fergus stared in disbelief at the paucity of the weapon he was to fight with, sweat prickling his skin, legs shaking as Malloy’s voice rang out into the dawn.
‘Men to the ready! You know what to do. Get to the gates, those who’ve been tasked. The rest to the square. Time’s up, lads. Let’s give those bastards a good thrashing!’
A soft roar rose from the crowd in acknowledgement. No going back now and Fergus fell into step with the rest, hands gripping at his pitchfork. Everything else fractured and slipped away so he hardly noticed where he was going or how he was getting there, nothing about this scenario seeming real. Surely he, Fergus Murtagh, secretary and scholar, could not possibly be going into battle – a real live battle – from which he might never return.
‘Jesus and Mary, protect me; Jesus and Mary protect me…’
He whispered the words in time with his marching away from the oak copse and down the short hill and along a muddy lane, everyone jostling as ten men abreast were forced into five, other lines of men diverging away to east and west, starting to jog now, levelling their pikes. Fergus pushed along with one lot through the east gate of the town, running through the streets, more men splintering away to left and right as they went, disappearing down ginnels and lanes, not an English soldier in sight.
‘First gate taken!’ shouted a scrawny boy who ran up beside Fergus, shoving him out of the way to reach the man in command of Fergus’s section, the news spreading quickly, passing from mouth to mouth, man to man, the mood swiftly becoming buoyant and excited, especially when another shout reached them:
‘Second gate taken!’
The cry was up, Fergus pulled along by the victorious crowd into the square at the centre of New Ross, everyone bundling and tumbling in together so that it seemed less like a battle than a badly planned day out at a fair. Malloy himself suddenly appeared, hoisted onto the top of the pump at the centre of the square, kept aloft by men on either side.
‘Third gate!’ Malloy shouted in triumph. ‘Third gate secured!’
Fergus closed his eyes. If this was fighting, it was a doddle.
‘Thank God,’ he breathed. ‘Thank God.’
All gone to plan. Only one gate left to take and the town was secured, everyone locked safely inside its walls, any actual hand-to-hand carried out by other men in other places, enemy routed, only thing left being victory parades or whatever the United Irish did to celebrate a town brought under their command. Fergus’s heart began to calm, his mind to settle like leaves after a storm. It was all going to be alright.
Until suddenly it wasn’t, until suddenly other men in proper uniforms began spilling like angry hornets from every side street and ginnel into the square, emptying their guns into whoever was standing closest. Malloy suddenly tipped from the top of the pump as he began yelling, getting his men into a defensive circle. Fergus’s bladder emptied of its own accord as he levelled his pitchfork like the men around him were doing with their eleven foot long pikestaffs.
Following their example he began jabbing randomly and without conscious thought into the maelstrom of absurdity that had overtaken him. Elation and horror surged through his veins when he actually hit hard enough to get his pitchfork into an enemy chest. The ensuing spurt of blood was immediate and shocking but not enough to stop him bracing his boot against the fallen man’s ribcage, feeling the scrape of enemy bones against the tines as he pulled his pitchfork free, nothing in his head but the raw need for survival and the conviction that he did not want to die, not here, and not like this.
The world Ruan encountered after leaving Walcheren was unlike anything he’d seen. There were no mountains, not even hillocks, only the flat rolling out of a land that seemed to have been constructed entirely of straight lines. The waterways had no curves or meanders, the upbuilt banks on either side wide and flat enough to take a walkway, each carefully lined with trees to form an orderly corridor along which people walked in their square-toed clogs, or rode within their square-boarded wagons. The only height in this flat and waterlogged landscape came from the windmills, composed of more straight lines.
He wasn’t happy to have Caro hopping along beside him, and early doors they’d made a tacit pact that neither would speak to the other unless it was absolutely necessary, and it seemed it wasn’t necessary at all. Ruan had a few coins with him but he begrudged spending them, especially on Caro, so they spent their nights sleeping rough. The weather was in their favour, warm and balmy, little wind once they’d cleared the peninsula and come inland sufficiently to escape the fog that rolled in from the sea the first two nights when all they could see were the tops of the trees that marked out the lanes beside the waterways they were following. Some of these had lamps strung on lines between the trees and Ruan took some pleasure – when he encountered them – in forcing Caro to keep pace as Ruan chose to walk on into the night because of them. He was hoping Caro would give up the ghost and flit himself off to Vlissingen before they left the peninsula, but Caro was made of sterner stuff. Nor had Joachim entirely abandoned Caro to Ruan’s less than robust sense of care, explaining in detail the contract of indenture he and the Abbot had drawn up that was levied in Caro’s favour. Joachim had taken the unusual step of giving Caro his own copy of this contract, and a personal letter from Joachim himself.
‘If you can stick it out to Deventer,’ Joachim told Caro, ‘then I want you to present your copy of the contract, along with my letter, to Hendrik Grimalkin. He’s the man I’m sending you both to. Hendrik is my son – was my son, still is my son – and he’s a good man, Caro. He’ll see you right.’
And so Caro stuck it out, not that Ruan was making it easy. Ruan was taller and stronger and made certain to keep his pace a little faster than Caro found comfortable, so that by the end of every day Caro had to take a sudden sprint – just when he was most tired – as Ruan ducked himself out of view a couple hundred yards ahead to bivouac beneath some hedge or barn for their night’s rest, and no companionable fires or chats once they bedded themselves down.
The one thing that surprised Caro was that each and every night Ruan would take out Golo’s book, Behemoths, and other Wonders of the Deep, and read through its pages until there was no more light by which to see. Caro didn’t know why Ruan did this. He hoped it was for the same reason Caro would have done, and that Ruan was missing Golo. He hoped this because a glimmer of his former optimism was threading its way back into his bones, because if Ruan really did miss Golo then maybe he wasn’t bad through and through, and maybe one day Caro would wake up to find that Ruan had turned into Golo, and then everything would be as alright as Caro had always hoped it would.
The town of New Ross thundered and thrashed with the clash of metal on metal and boots on the ground and muskets blasting, yells and screams from every side, the shouting of orders and counter orders. Every citizen still in abode barricaded themselves into home and hearth, hands held against their ears. Malloy’s men were corralled inside the square, victim to better armed men, better strategists who despite being far fewer in number had out-thought them to a humiliating degree.
Red jackets were waiting for the moment to pour in through the fourth unsecured gate at the other end of town in a fast and predetermined order designed to trap the rebels in the centre of New Ross before opening fire. First line down on one knee letting rip while the li
ne behind them took aim, first line falling back to reload while the second took over; a murderous wave that was terrifying and deafening, rolling on like an unstoppable tide, cutting down Malloy’s men who were standing behind the huge length of their pikes that were useless against an enemy armed such as this; the smoke from English muskets so thick that the men in the square soon began to choke, unable to see properly, pikes levelled but no idea who they were levelled at, everyone panicking, unable to understand how their victory had so suddenly spiralled into obvious defeat.
‘Hold fast!’ Malloy was shouting at his ruined lines of men, all of them forgetting how to keep formation, the outer circle already shot down and bleeding out onto the streets making it more difficult for the ones behind them to attack. Malloy kept up his shouting, tried to keep his men in order, reposition them so that those with pikes were on the outside, charging into the streets and ginnels with their weapons held horizontal and dangerous. He saw his men tripping and falling over one other, skidding and slithering on the blood and guts of the comrades who’d already had their stomachs, arms, necks and brains blown off or out. The stench of sweat and fear and gunpowder was in his nose, in his throat, so much smoke his eyes were burning. Only one garrison of English against his three thousand men, but pikes and pitchforks could not face down massed English muskets, and certainly not when more were coming on behind.
‘Retreat!’ Malloy shouted. ‘Everyone retreat!’
The order couldn’t come soon enough for Fergus, who was pulled back with the rest like a pebble on an ebbing tide, the only reason any of them getting out at all being that the first gate they’d taken was still secured. Barely one hour after they came in the Irish were stumbling back out again, scrambling and running for their lives, abandoning the cumbersome pikes that kept tripping them up. They were useless now, dropped alongside their useless dead as the survivors ran for the hills, Fergus with them, clutching at his chest, two ribs broken. The pain was desperate and sharp but not as desperate and sharp as his need to get away.