‘She means yes,’ said Cull. ‘She’s pleased to see you.’
‘I’m away,’ said Grace and headed the mule towards the track. Cull scrambled onto the second mule – wherever Grace O’Malley went he was going with her – and leaned down to pull Barbary up in front of him.
Sylvestris stopped her. ‘All right, we’ll do it,’ he said, ‘but you’ve got to come back.’
‘I’m going to come back.’
‘I mean it. It’s not for me, not for you, but the Order. They’ve had too much to bear, and they love you. You shouldn’t be going. If you got killed, they wouldn’t survive it. They’ve been abandoned too often.’ He was speaking with an authority that weighted her down.
She looked around at the faces turned to hers. Only Sylvestris was trying to stop her going because the others had no hope that she would stay; their faces were set in the endurance she had grown up with, among children whose idea of normality was the abnormal. They had no expectation that life held anything other than what they could filch from it; it bore no rights for them and they didn’t even know that it should. She and Tadg and Sylvestris and Ballybeg Abbey had been the only blessing they’d received after the massacre, but the very nature of the blessing had taught them to put up with its loss. They could bear it, she thought, they could bear anything. But I’ll be damned if they have to.
‘Whatever happens,’ she said, ‘I’ll be back.’
Chapter Thirty
Even Grace O’Malley was incapable of urging speed out of a mule that was against it; Cull’s and Barbary’s hastened itself enough to catch up its companion once it had gained the hilltop, but after that both animals settled down into the heavy amble of their normal pace. Tibbot and his army had disappeared into the mist and rain and Grace had become resigned to mulish inevitability; apart from rousing herself to kick her mount from time to time, she rode in preoccupied silence.
‘Why is she chasing after Tibbot?’ Barbary asked over her shoulder. ‘Didn’t they come in on the same ship?’
‘They did, but it’s a long story.’ He told it to her, his body protecting her back from the wind and his breath coming strong into her ear with the syllables of great names of clans and chieftains she remembered from her childhood. Dermot O’Connor of the O’Connor Don of Roscommon, O’Connor Sligo, the MacWilliam, the Bourkes of Mayo, the Bourkes of Clanrickard, the MacJordans, MacDonnells, Clandonnells, the complexity of interbred, interwarring septs whose age-old battles had turned more monstrous under English interference.
Grace’s old friend and fellow prisoner, Red Hugh O’Donnell, had gone in strength into Connaught to lead the Irish resistance against the English. ‘He’s the great young man, Barbary, hasty and headstrong but the greatness has come upon him these last years with the influence from the O’Neill, and Herself gave him recognition for it. But he decided to force through the election of the MacWilliam which has caused such discord among the clans these years, and the one he chose for the title was Theobald, son of Walter. Well, Barbary, as you know, Tibbot of the Ships has always laid claim to the MacWilliamship, and he was not pleased. He went to the Saxons and they promoted him to be a captain in the Saxon queen’s pay, for they are crafty in playing one man against another.’
She shifted, not just because riding a bony mule without a saddle in driving rain was uncomfortable, though it was, but because Cull’s voice had fallen into rhythm with the mule’s pace and achieved the sing-song quality of the reciters from her childhood retelling the old myths. He couldn’t bear what he was saying so he was distancing himself from its immediacy by speaking of it as if it had happened to the long dead. And he’s right, she thought. These are my people, relatives of mine, alive now, and they are the past. He was recounting the destruction of Connaught and she was hearing the destruction of Ireland.
‘Herself was not pleased either and she upbraided the O’Donnell, but she stuck with him.’ For a moment Cull dropped into his everyday voice. ‘I know she plays the battleaxe, Barbary, but she is the wise one nevertheless. She has been to Spain and to the African coast and she went to England with you and met the Saxon queen, and so she went to Tibbot and said there would be time enough to fight over the MacWilliamship when they had driven out the Saxons and they would not drive out the Saxons by fighting among themselves. “We are wolves in a trap,” she told him, “and if we have to gnaw off our own leg to get out we must not gnaw each other’s.”’
‘Did she?’ Barbary looked towards the vulture’s shape of her grandmother sitting stolidly on its mule, the fur collar of her cloak drawn up.
‘She is a doorful of woman,’ said Cull, and relapsed into his sing-song. ‘And she went on working for the O’Donnell. But Tibbot is clever only for himself and he played the old game, drawing his pay from the Saxons the whiles ambushing the enemies of the O’Neill when the O’Neill told him to. And when the O’Neill sent word that he would be obliged if Tibbot would bring an army to help him fight in this great deciding battle to drive the Saxon out of our land, Tibbot agreed and he hired his mother to transport him. Old as she was, she said she would fight alongside him, and so would I have done, and others. But, Barbary, this morning when the fleet was still asleep after the voyage, and it was a difficult one, Tibbot took his men and stole all our curraghs and came ashore. And when we discovered it Granuaile said: “I am of the opinion he has gone to fight for the Saxon and not the O’Neill and I must go after him, so launch the bloody washtub.” And the rest you know.’
‘Will he? Fight for the English?’
‘He will fight for whoever he thinks will win.’
In between darker cloud the sky was an unhealthy mustard and the rain was varying between merely falling down and bursts of such violent intensity that it seemed to be commanded by a god who’d become deranged.
‘I think Herself is Noah,’ said Cull.
‘What?’ The entire world was hissing.
‘Noah,’ shouted Cull. ‘She has brought all her people with her because she could not let them stay behind to starve, and she says if the Saxons are winning she will be leaving Connaught. But I think she heard the voice of God telling her the second Flood was at hand, and here it is.’
He was probably right. The mules’ hooves were sinking into ground that had reached saturation point and the surplus lay in sheets as big as lakes, so that raindrops hit and bounced up again in a blur of dancing water that reached the mules’ withers.
‘Do I see something?’ Cull yelled at Grace and pointed. Barbary shielded her eyes to look but the wet on her eyelashes distorted her vision. They had been travelling for what seemed like hours, relying on Cull’s sense of navigation to keep them going north. Grace nodded and kicked her mule again, hopelessly; with her weight on its back it was having difficulty pulling its legs out of the mud at all. ‘I saw something,’ Barbary heard Cull mutter. ‘It was the Tibbot’s foolish hat.’
If it was, they didn’t see it again until they reached the hill above the Bandon and worked their way west along, watching for the ferry point. Barbary’s eyes were on the opposite hill, looking for signs of battle, but there was nothing.
‘There he is,’ shouted Cull. They were still some way above the ferry and along from it, but a large cluster of men stood on the far side, helping to pull the last load of Tibbot’s men across. There was no mistaking Tibbot’s hat, although its feathers were flattened down onto his shoulder, and no mistaking the grandiloquent wave of his sword as, without waiting, he led his way up the hill opposite theirs. They couldn’t catch him now, and Grace didn’t try. She sat on her mule and watched.
‘Where are the Irish lines?’ Cull asked Barbary.
To the left.’
The men had assembled now at the top of the hill, a hunched little group at this distance, all concentrated on the matchstick figure of their leader. A last mustard glow from the miserable sun came through a lessening in the cloud behind them, and they could see him caper in it as he addressed his men. Then he wheeled and march
ed off, with his men loping behind him. To the right. Tibbot of the Ships was throwing in with the English.
The most shocking sound Barbary ever heard came from Grace’s mouth then. In it was none of the hatred and rising madness of the MacSheehy howl, it was a linear wail of despair, piercing enough to travel the winds of the river to the sea reaches, issuing from a fissure in the past and widening into the future. It went on and on, the ullagone, the song of grief, not for herself, not for her son, not for anything except an unlocalised, undirected agony for the human condition.
The strange thing about it was that it was not strange; apart from the surprising source from which it came, it seemed natural, assimilating itself into the rain and the grey-green, wet-streaked, desolate country as if it had been expected. Even after Grace had closed her mouth, the water in the air and ground appeared to go on vibrating from it.
When it released them, Cull and Barbary ran to her grandmother. Grace’s eyes were quite empty. She took a deep breath and said: ‘That’s that then. We’ll have to be spending the night in that sean-tigh down there.’
Barbary walked alongside her as Cull led the two mules down the slope towards the ferryman’s hut, patting her like someone trying to shape back together an ornament that had fractured.
‘We’ll need to be leaving early in the morning,’ Grace went on. ‘There is a lot to do before we catch the tide.’
‘Oh Granuaile.’ Barbary did some more patting. ‘Because Tibbot has joined them it doesn’t mean the English are going to win.’
Grace looked offended. ‘Do you take him for a fool? He would not have joined them if they were not going to win. If he cannot be the MacWilliam, he will be a lord among the Saxons.’ If it hadn’t been for the ullagone still ringing in her ears, Barbary would have thought Grace was proud of him.
It was getting dark as they reached the ferryman’s hut and the wind was getting up. The traditional courtesy of the Irish had again left dry sticks and logs by the hut’s central fireplace, though some of them had been wetted by rain forcing itself through the louvre in the roof. Cull hobbled the mules under the most sheltering tree he could find, and came in to get a fire going. The draught roared it upwards so that after a while they could take off their cloaks and boots and begin drying. The two women spread out their skirts. Barbary had long, stinging weals on the inside of her thighs where they had rubbed raw on the ride. Grace put her empty pipe in her mouth and sucked it.
They sat round the fire, hardly able to see one another for steam from their clothes and the smoke being tossed back into the hut by a burst of draught. They kept the door open so that they could breathe, but they would have kept it open anyway; it faced the river and gave them a pathetic illusion of being in touch with what was happening on the hills beyond it.
The wind hit the back of the hut with a force that made it rock, lifting the river into waves that lashed the opposite bank in white spray. There was a flash of light and, seconds later, a grumble of thunder. Oh, for God’s sake, thought Barbary, this is ridiculous. The Upright God was getting carried away by his own theatricals, like some off-stage manager in a playhouse shaking a sheet of tin. It was all there, the blasted heath, the battle lines waiting for the charge, it didn’t need thunder as well. You’re overdoing it. Then she thought: the Irish are bound to win now; this sort of drama’s just up their alley.
Why did they have to fight at all? Cut out the middlemen, all those husbands and fathers and sons, valuable and beautiful middlemen, like O’Hagan, and just have Mountjoy and the O’Neill playing chess for it, or dice, and charge admission. Grand prize: Ireland. If wet, indoors.
It was a long night. In the early hours it became impossible to think as the Upright God showed what he could do when he got down to it, stabbing lightning into the river and hills with a frequency that displayed the three of them to each other in ghastly flickers. The thunder cracked so loud that they flinched. When it moved away to position itself over the battlefield, the comparative silence it left them in had to be filled by talking. At least, Barbary and Cull talked; Grace stayed silent. ‘Why are you leaving Connaught?’ Barbary asked her, and then, to Cull: ‘Why’s Herself leaving?’
Cull said reluctantly, ‘There is no Connaught. There’s a place where if something grows, Saxons or Irish cut it down, if a man builds a cottage, somebody burns it, if a calf is born, it is eaten as it leaves the womb. We are chased from island to island; if we land, the Saxons kills us, if we sail, they sail after us. A fleet, she says, but we’ve only the Grace of God and two ships else left to us.’ His mouth widened again into the terrible baby’s grimace. ‘They even killed Kitterdy Two’s aunt.’
‘Oh no.’ Extra, tiny tragedies were almost unbearable.
He nodded. ‘Even though it is bad luck, they eat the seals. And the seals come to be killed when they are called, for they are not used to being killed by men.’ He leaned over and took her hand. ‘Don’t cry now, maybe Herself will return to Connaught one day. Tell us what happened to you. Herself sent some of the O’Malleys to find you, but they did not come back.’
She told them, at greater length than she had told Cuckold Dick and O’Hagan, in order to fill up the silence that was preluding dawn. ‘I’ll have to wait here tomorrow. For my husband.’
Cull hit himself on his forehead with the heel of his hand. ‘And I have the whiskey in my pack to drink you joy.’ He rummaged and passed round a leather bottle. Grace O’Malley stirred herself and lifted the bottle to Barbary before she drank. ‘Here’s to your man and to you, Barbary Clampett, O’Flaherty, O’Malley, O’Hagan. Maybe we’ll wait with you till he comes.’
It was amazingly comforting. She thought: Clampett, O’Flaherty, O’Malley, Betty, O’Hagan. It was fitting that the mother of so many, variably parented children should have so many racially varied names. I am an Anglo-Irish relation, she thought, and took another swig from the bottle. If ever there was a time to get drunk, it was now.
Grace O’Malley sobered her up: ‘Something’s happening.’
They crowded into the doorway. There was still lightning across the hills beyond the river, as well as some far-off thunder, but there was an impression of other light, the diffusion from thousands of glow-worms, and a noise that lost its distinction in the wind.
Somewhere out there men bent their backs to the wind and applied match to their fire pots and swore as the priming powder blew out of their muskets and calivers. Disciplined against the natural instinct to run away, they were running forward to meet the enemy, so frightened that some of them were evacuating their bowels as they ran, or micturating without knowing it. Horses were neighing to the cavalry drums as they cantered towards pikes that would disembowel them and hedgehogs on which they would hang, screaming, until they died. Arms, fetlocks, heads, tails were disintegrating in explosions from cannon.
Miles away, three people in a doorway saw the pretty twinkling of glow-worms and heard a fitful thrumming.
It was useless to watch it and when the sun came up, miserable apology for a dawn though it was, it leached away the distinction between light and dark and made the glow-worms fade out, but they stayed where they were. The fluctuating murmur that came from the hills was overlaid by thunder. Tucked down in the pocket of Kinsale, would Don Aguila have heard the guns, or was the wind taking the sound away from him? The impulse to go and see was overwhelming. ‘I’m going across the river.’
Grace’s hand gripped hers. ‘You’ll not.’
No, it was stupid; there would be no chance of finding O’Hagan among the thousands of men who were struggling out there. She didn’t want to join in on either side any more; she just wanted O’Hagan not to be killed, none of them to be killed. Grace’s son was there somewhere, her own husband, the O’Neill, Red Hugh, men she had met at Elizabeth’s court, men who had fought with Rob perhaps. Among the Spanish there might even be relatives of Don Howsyourfather, or Don Howsyourfather himself. All trying to kill each other. Wait, just wait with the rest of the wor
ld, to see if this part of it will assume a different complexion. Wait for one of the balancing scales to go down.
‘How long’s it been going on?’
‘Three hours about.’
There was a change. The morning had become marginally brighter and very much colder, the rain was coming straight down instead of at a slant. The battle sounds came more clearly, but they contained no drums or trumpets, only yelling.
A group of men appeared on the opposite skyline, running along the hill and straight over towards the river, not stopping at the slope but hurling themselves down it, clinging onto bushes to break their tumbles, dropping like clusters of plums. The first dozen to reach the ferry immediately began to haul it across and the men behind them had to jump to get aboard. Their weight rocked the raft, tipping some of them backwards still holding on to others. Those who couldn’t get back on grabbed the planking and allowed themselves to be dragged through the water. One couldn’t reach, and was swept downriver by the current.
Every man on the ferry was hauling to make it cross faster. It was fearful, not because the three figures watching them approach felt in danger but because the fear generated by the men themselves was infectious. They had no object that would imperil the women and Cull, they weren’t going to anywhere for anything, just from. Sobbing with effort, swearing, they bumped the ferry against the landing stage buffer and scrambled ashore. They took no more notice of the three than if they’d been a cluster of trees. Without pausing they turned upriver to go running along the bank. One man had stayed behind and began hacking at the rope going through the stanchion pulley.
Grace drew her cutlass. ‘Leave it,’ she said. ‘For the others.’
The Pirate Queen Page 76