The Pirate Queen

by The Pirate Queen (retail) (epub)

  ‘Twelve. Thrust home your last wad with three strokes. Thirteen. Gauge your piece.’

  Now. ‘FIRE!’

  The tower rocked. Motes of centuries-old dust and mortar wafted out of the walls and hung in the slants of fight. They’d got the range first go. ‘Are we holed?’ Barbary screeched. Answering shouts in the negative came from all floors; the walls were over six feet thick, but they wouldn’t stand too many hits like that. At least the door on the tower’s south side was angled where shot couldn’t reach it from the shore.

  She heard her name and dashed into Grace’s room where her grandmother was using a poker on the fire. Keeroge, still bleeding badly from his throat, had collapsed on her bed. ‘Get the grissets,’ Grace said to her. ‘And you, Keeroge, on your feet: you’re not dead yet.’ Glad to know it, Keeroge hauled himself up by the bedpost. Before he could think, Grace swung on him and thrust the red end of the poker into the wound in his neck. ‘You be well now,’ she said. Barbary looked at Keeroge, fallen back on the bed, groaning but grateful. If Grace, having cauterised his throat, said he would be well, he’d be well. Grace glanced at her granddaughter. ‘Will you go for them grissets?’

  Whatever grissets were, they’d be in the undercroft – Grace pointed in that direction. Cull was retrieving them from a corner, shallow, iron vessels for melting things – grease for candles, resin for torches, lead for terror. They rattled in his arms as the tower shook from another explosion. He saw her panic. ‘Not to worry now. It worked lovely when we poured it on the Joyces at Corrib. Hen’s Castle that was.’

  Oh God Almighty, they’d done this before. She staggered back up the steps, clattering grissets into what rooms she passed, swearing, promising God, male or female, she’d abandon piracy, take up good works, tapestry…

  Grace was at her door. ‘Ready, me darlins?’ Her deep voice echoed back and forth across the tower as another shot hit it, but even that wasn’t as shocking as the endearment. Her grandmother didn’t think they’d get out of this.

  ‘Ready, Granuaile.’ ‘Ready.’ ‘Ready.’ ‘Ready.’ ‘Ready. ‘Ready.’

  ‘Hold the damn thing still, girl.’ Dreadful, grey, bubbling liquid tipped into her grisset. She was so frightened. ‘Take it to the window. Steady now.’ She scarcely dare walk, she certainly didn’t breathe; she imagined it over her legs, eating into her flesh, the pain…

  The narrow window had a peculiarly shaped outer sill, thin at its juncture and widening out, like a fan. It had been manufactured for this. She rested the other end of the grisset on it. Having pictured what it would do to her, she knew what it would do to the men below. Could she do it?

  ‘Hullo the tower.’ English-accentuated Irish echoed thinly over the lake from where someone was calling to them. She dragged her eyes away from the thick, soft, silver bubbles for one second; fifty yards out on the water a grandly dressed man was standing up in a boat. ‘You are under bombardment,’ he was saying, in case they hadn’t noticed. ‘Surrender in the name of Queen Elizabeth. You will receive a fair trial.’

  ‘Is that the bastard who’s been stealing my beeves?’ came Grace O’Malley’s voice behind her.

  She managed to say: ‘It’s Bingham.’ He’d scared her when she’d first seen him; he scared her now. Lord Lieutenant of Connaught, he’d come himself.

  ‘That’s your man.’ Grace’s hand went under the grisset and tipped it. Barbary saw the molten lead pour into the sill, fan out into a sheet, disappear. She heard the hiss and the screams. Men came into her view from under the walls, scrambling into boats, throwing themselves into the water. It wouldn’t be any good, cold air, cold water, it would just cool the metal’s exterior; where it was against the skin it would go on burning. Helmets welded to living tissue.

  ‘Now we go,’ said Grace cheerfully. She had Keeroge’s arm round her neck as she made for the steps.

  ‘Where’s the Kishta?’ shouted Barbary at her.

  ‘Down me boot,’ Grace shouted back. Barbary had the snaphaunce down hers.

  Getting to the boats was dreadful. The saker couldn’t bear on them, but musket fire could, and not all the English had retired to the shore; some were in boats shooting at them. Every part of the tower’s side was being dimpled from the musket balls smacking into the stone. Scrambling down the rope ladder after Grace – she was in practice – Barbary was still thinking how Will would have loathed the sloppiness of the soldiers’ aim when she saw Haverel, above her, claw at his back, wheel away from the doorway and drop onto the rock with a thump that incorporated the crack of bones. Grace pulled him down into her boat with another bump. Mooch was standing in its stern, and he went down, spreadeagled, still trying to protect his captain with his body .

  There were some English lying on the plinth around them, a few still screaming. One corpse impeding the steps to the boats had a completely silvered head. Gawk kicked it out of the way, and it rolled, leaving some of its face sticking to the rock.

  Other crewmen were lowering themselves from the window on the other side of the tower. They came running round to the boats. Barbary got into a tiny curragh with Molly, Gawk and Kitterdy Two. They were rowing through the noise of firing, shouts, splashing. Oarsmen all, they heaved and the boats shot away from the tower, heading for cover in the rushes and trees of the opposite shore. Only her boat was going slowly; she saw water sloshing around her feet. ‘Mother of God, we’re holed,’ Molly shouted. ‘By damn I hate swimming.’

  But swimming they were now. It was cold, it was like a pursuit nightmare, effort, panting, getting nowhere. Shots spurted sprays of water around them, then they could hear the creak of oars getting closer. For a second she hoped and feared it was Grace coming back for them, but heard English: ‘Grab them.’

  A boathook stabbed her back and she was dragged by her shirt to a boat’s gunwale. Somebody gripped her hands. They’d got Molly. And Kitterdy Two. Gawk was away, or drowned. There was a moment of complete lucidity as she saw the far side of the lake and the flotilla of Irish curraghs nearing it fast. Other boats, English, were after them, but unless they’d got soldiers stationed over there, Grace and her men had escaped. Thank God. Somebody else’s hand was on her head and pushing her under, once, twice. ‘Drown, you young cunt. You killed Tanner.’

  The weight of the hand was removed. ‘If anybody,’ said Bingham’s voice, still beautifully precise, ‘if anybody kills one of these men, he will take his place on the end of the rope. I intend the walls of Galway to display one body per yard at Epiphany. There will be no gaps.’

  It was not a voice you doubted. She kept losing consciousness. She heard grinding as the boat’s prow met lakeside pebbles. There was some surreptitious prisoner-kicking when they were hauled ashore and along a track. Behind Bingham’s back, Barbary stumbled and a neatly placed boot cracked two of her ribs.

  There were carts waiting, already full of men, women and children with their hands and feet bound. Bingham’s expedition had made a good haul. Soldiers tied Barbary’s hands and feet and chucked her into one of the carts. She managed to roll out of the way as Molly then Kitterdy Two were thrown in after her.

  Orders were given, whips cracked and the carts began to move. Kitterdy Two snuggled himself comfortable and spat out some teeth. ‘Isn’t it grand to be taken by the English now,’ he said. ‘The bloody Joyces would have made us walk.’

  Chapter Eighteen

  Inscribed into the ancient lintel over the west gate of Galway were the words: ‘From the fury of the O’Flaherties, good Lord deliver us.’

  Other peoples at other times had begged God for deliverance from other plagues – Huns, Goths, Norsemen, plague itself – but the O’Flaherty clan was Galway’s particular terror. Without the pirating O’Flaherties and their allied O’Malleys, the port of Galway, or so Galway reckoned, could have ruled the world. Even with them it hadn’t done so badly; virtually a city-state, so great was its trading prowess that there had been centuries during which whole tracks of Europe believed Galway to be the
name of the country and Ireland one of its cities.

  Staggering between Kitterdy Two and Molly, Barbary was too tired to raise her head and see that the city she was entering wanted delivery from her fury, though, for all her exhaustion, fury was what she felt. It was the only thing that stopped her collapsing from fear. Galway was to be the place of her execution and the execution of the hundred or so people with whom she had made the terrible journey from Lough Mask. As the crow flew, it was about twenty-five miles, but the crow hadn’t wound along Lough Mask with exhausted, injured companions, nor skirted Lough Corrib, nor suffered the skirmishing as fellow crows tried unsuccessfully to rescue it. It had taken a freezing, mostly foodless, often waterless, week.

  Lord Lieutenant Bingham rode ahead to the city on the first day, leaving the prisoners to an escort which had observed his strictures that they should be delivered to Galway alive, though carelessly. Nobody had been beaten to death, but some of the men had been kicked to within an inch of it. Their cloaks, always highly prized by poorly dressed English soldiery, were taken away the moment Bingham’s back disappeared into the distance. So were their boots. The carts had been cleared to make room for the badly wounded and the slower-moving women and children, while Molly and Kitterdy Two made the journey on bare feet. Barbary kept her boots only because they were too small for any of the soldiers, but she lost her good woollen cap. A halter round her neck joined her by rope with the two galleymen and six others, one of whom persisted in falling down and nearly strangling the rest every half mile. The child prisoners wandered beside the file like frightened calves following their mothers to the slaughterhouse. There had been some raping of the women.

  There were odd moments of compassion as well. A boy whose foot turned septic from a thorn was piggy-backed by a soldier for two days on end. When the wits of an elderly MacJordan woman began to wander from the effect of the cold, a sergeant took off his own, stolen, cloak and wrapped her in it. ‘There you are, Granny. Snugasabuginarug.’

  Apart from the fact that their bodies were going to decorate Galway’s walls, the prisoners had little in common. Keeping her ears open, Barbary learned that Bingham’s advance into Connaught had actually been a punitive expedition against the Bourkes, just recently risen against him. With uncharacteristic inefficiency, he had underestimated the distance from Galway to Bourke territory. Probably he had been misled by the fact that when Connaught men talked about ‘a mile’ they referred to a measurement twice the distance of an English mile. By the time he’d reached Lough Mask his line of supply and communication was dangerously stretched. Catching Grace O’Malley in residence at Hag’s Castle had been an unexpected stroke of luck, about the only one he’d had. And since Herself had managed to evade him, he was left with what he regarded as three unimportant O’Malley kern – one of them a mere boy – a rag-tag collection from various clans who’d tried to impede his progress, hill shepherds, and families he’d taken by surprise.

  He’ll trine us, thought Barbary angrily, because he’s got to get some fun out of the business.

  The only common denominator to the prisoners was their courage. Barbary was astounded by it, and made angrier at their oppressors. Poor, bewildered, frightened, they were nevertheless in the hands of Gauls, a species for whom they had as great a contempt as Bingham did for them, and they would not give the satisfaction of showing fear. Fathers and mothers hushed children who cried, telling them to remember they were a MacJordan, a Joyce, an O’Connor, and limped on through the nightmare with the endurance of a superior people who, as they died, would be gathered to the bosom of a superior God.

  And, if you had to march with broken ribs, every breath painful, shivering with cold and terror, there were no better companions to do it with than the two galleymen, Kitterdy Two and Molly, though even they infuriated her at times with their perpetual pretence that they were in luxury. ‘Isn’t it grand to be walking now, instead of pulling a bloody oar.’ ‘Sure, and I always wanted to see Galway from the inside.’ Because the siege of Hag’s Castle had caused such casualties among their companions, the soldiers were particularly hostile to the only three prisoners captured from it, but Barbary escaped much of their attention because Kitterdy and Molly drew it on themselves, putting their own bodies between her and the attacks. She tried to regulate her calls of nature to when it was dark, but as the connecting rope was never taken off their necks, the whole of her group was aware of when they had to be made. ‘One squats, we all squat,’ Molly said, and all the men crouched with Barbary, facing away, while Molly and Kitterdy Two loudly discussed the beauty of the night. She was grateful to them, but her temper grew with the humiliation.

  It was an impressive city, Galway, tightly walled to landward, tunnelled by bridges, partly islanded by the branches of its river. Its grey, merchant-endowed buildings and churches were saved from solidity by the thin, sea-washed light of the giant bay, beyond which lay the Atlantic. The fortune it was making confirmed its citizens’ good sense in having stayed loyal to the English Crown during the Desmond Wars and other local difficulties. Most of them were Catholic but happy to be as much a part of the English Pale as their rival, Dublin, over the opposite side of Ireland. Galway knew which side its bread was buttered. It was a city with its head screwed on. Except at Christmas.

  Nobody in Ireland celebrated Christmas like Galway. At Christmas Galwegians transformed from respectable, hard-working men and women into debauchees, compared with whom Bacchus was an old sobersides. At Christmas they loved everybody, except O’Flaherties, and everybody loved them. Foreigners had been known to leave their own festal family firesides to keep Christmas in Galway and totter through the alcohol fumes from open door to open door until they could totter no more. By the time the Twelve Days were over, Galway had a civic hangover in which pale, suffering shades bemoaned their wounds, their damaged property, their empty cellars, and vowed not to do it again. Until next time.

  Laws had been passed to stop the hospitality to other Irish: ‘At Christmas, Easter, nor no feast else… on pain to forfeit £5; that neither O nor Mac shall strut nor swagger through the streets of Galway.’ Lord Lieutenant Bingham had issued strictures against it. Laws and Bingham, especially Puritan Bingham who sullied proud walls with corpses, had no effect. For 353 days of the year Galway paid its taxes to the English Crown and cheered the English queen, but at Christmas England could go stuff itself: Galway was revelling.

  A line of drunken dancers came down the street, weaving under and between the roped prisoners as if they were festal poles. Barbary’s sense of reality, which was slipping in any case, lurched at the sight of their faces: twenty or so Lady Sidneys from Penshurst waltzed around her. Then she realised. The ancient Irish custom to feast in masks was alive and well in Galway. A male reveller lunged a leather bottle of whiskey at Barbary. ‘Have a dram, my bucko, and bugger Bingham.’ She grabbed it, drank, and passed it on to Kitterdy Two. ‘Got anything to eat?’ But he danced away.

  The streets were almost warm from the flambeaux on the walls of nearly every house, lighting up decorations of bay, ivy and holly as thick as hedges. Singing, music and chatter came through the windows with a smell of food. Nobody showed surprise at the prisoners – Galway had seen thousands of rebels brought to book – but there was general consensus that this wasn’t the time for them. ‘The pity of it at Christmas. Will you look at the wee ones,’ and from one house came a shower of loaves and sweetmeats which the children fell on like wolves.

  When they passed through the entrance to the courtyard behind the landward gate, warmth fell away. There were some people in it, but for Barbary and the others the flares stuck into the cobbles lit up only the stacks of wooden biers on which bodies were taken to the burial pits, and the empty nooses on the gallows stretching the length of the east and west walls. ‘Ah, and they’ve put up the decorations for us,’ said Molly.

  ‘Shut up,’ whispered Barbary, ‘shut up, shut up.’ The terror of strangling on the rope – she’d seen it take
minutes for an Order victim to die – threatened to consume her. And this wouldn’t be like the grand executions she’d heard about in the Tower of London where elegant men and women were allowed last well-chosen words to an admiring crowd, with priests for their confession, ceremony, ritual, a clean axe. This finish would be ugly and anonymous, in a courtyard smelling of urine and her body one of a hundred thrown into a lime pit after.

  Their sergeant grumbled as he herded them into a corner. ‘If he thinks I’m hanging you lot tonight with my back, he’s got another think coming. I’m entitled to me Christmas, same as him. He can order you up easy enough, oh yes, but he don’t have to lift you down.’

  ‘He’, Lord Lieutenant Sir Richard Bingham, was on a dais at the far end of the courtyard surrounded by dignitaries with whom he was arguing or, rather, who were arguing with him. The raised voices and the acoustics of the echoing courtyard brought the occasional sentence to her. ‘…Cannot be allowed… barbarous… they’re too young…’

  Centre stage, standing alone in the expanse of cobbles, the obvious subject of the contention, were three boys. The eldest was about fourteen, the two youngest no older than nine and seven.

  ‘God help us,’ said Kitterdy Two. ‘It’s the Bourke lads he took as hostage. He’s never going to hang them.’

  Ulick Bourke, son of the Blind Abbot, Richard, son of Shane Bourke, and William, son of Meyler Oge Bourke, were dressed like young English gentlemen. The eldest was bearing himself gallantly, but the two little boys were holding hands and one of them was crying.

  Molly was watching the argument on the dais. ‘Who’s that in the fine blue cloak, now. Don’t I know him?’ Nobody bothered to answer him; nobody cared. Molly called over to the gatekeeper: ‘Would you have the kindness to tell me the name of the gentleman in the blue cloak?’

  ‘Friend of yours?’ The gatekeeper was Galway Irish, and unhappy at being on duty at Christmas. ‘Fat good he’ll do ye. That’s the newly created Baron of Waterford. Another bloody Munsterman raised above his station.’