He stopped and stared at her, he was so swathed in mud it was impossible to tell what he was wearing, or if he was wearing anything. ‘Where were the bloody Spanish?’ he asked. Then he turned to run after the others.
The hills on the opposite bank were sprouting men along their skyline, lots of them, becoming an avalanche of sliding, falling bodies funnelling down to the ferry. Cull looked anxiously at the partly severed rope: ‘God help it hold for the poor devils.’ There was no time to do anything about it, the raft was pulled back to the opposite shore where at least one hundred men jammed themselves onto it. No faulty rope was going to stand up under weights like that for long. ‘Tie her up when she’s in,’ Grace told Cull. ‘We’ll lash it.’ Barbary was amazed at their self-possession, that they had the wit to be sensible in this flood of irrationality.
The second ferry-load came ashore, eyes showing white through masks of mud with the fixed stare of stampeding animals. Cull and Grace grabbed the ferry’s painters and hitched them to their bollards while Barbary guarded the stanchion. One man raised his dagger to the fraying rope, and she stepped in front of him. For a moment she thought he would bring the knife down anyway, but he shrieked at her and ran off. On the other side of the river men were already trying to tug the ferry back, hampering Cull as he worked on the jerking rope. Their shouts came through the rain in ferocious pleading and swearing. Some were stripping off their boots and armour and diving into the river, and being swept away. ‘Hurry, hurry, Cull.’ There was no sign of the first man who’d fallen into the river; downstream was empty except for a small tree dwindling into the distance, twisting with the curl of the current. Cull’s steady hands worked with the care of the one-speed craftsman, but men were drowning. Eventually he was ready: ‘I’ll be doing it again after the next trip if they overload,’ he said. ‘She’ll not hold for hundreds.’
Grace unhitched the ferry and stepped aboard. Barbary joined her. It’d need two to restrain this stampede; it would need an army. Even so, she had to fight the impulse not to approach whatever terror was chasing these men.
They had to fight to get off the ferry on the other side against the press of men getting on it and then struggle to try and stop the excess. Barbary screamed at them, ‘The rope’s fraying. Not so many,’ grabbing at muddy arms that slipped through her clutch or shook her away. Grace was laying about her with the flat of the cutlass. ‘Stand off, you bastards. Wait.’ Both of them might have been gnats dancing up and down; Barbary was pushed down into the mud and a man’s boot crushed her hand in his eagerness to get aboard. She crawled out of the way, hauled herself up and stood watching. It was hopeless. The men kept glancing up the hill behind them, but only more like themselves came pouring over it.
So this was a rout, this touch from the horned god that blinded men’s eyes and screamed into their ears, turning them into sobbing, panting animals who’d lost the power of reason. Time and again they silted up around her as Cull held the ferry back to work on the rope, and she was lost in a jostling crowd of terror. She shook them, shouted at them: ‘Wait, wait. Have you seen the O’Hagan?’ but they were stupid with horror and dumb. Some asked her back: ‘Where were the Spanish?’
There were wounded being not so much helped as pulled along, yelling as broken bones were bumped, but in as great a panic as the rest that they might be left behind. Some trailed blood. A corpse still had its arms around the shoulders of two comrades who were unaware they were rushing a dead man onto the ferry.
These men scattering like quail had been soldiers only a while ago; some were veterans wearing the O’Neill’s red-handed badge of Ulster. On their own ground they had outwitted and outfought the best that Elizabeth could send against them; enduring homelessness and starvation, they had remained undefeated. But that was on their own ground, and they’d stepped out of it.
There were riders on the hilltop lashing out with their swords at the men who still poured over the drop. She caught hold of Grace and began to drag her towards the ferry, as terrified as those around her. ‘The English cavalry.’
Grace shook her head. ‘Irish,’ she said, ‘trying to stop them.’
Barbary looked back up and saw one of the running men go down under a slash from an officer’s sword. It made no difference to the stampede, it was just another man killed and this time by his own side. Leave them alone, leave them alone. It’s over, they can’t fight, they won’t. They’re beaten. They weren’t meant for this. Nobody was meant for this. Leave them alone.
The ferry went, came back, went, came back. How long she and Grace had been on this bank she couldn’t remember. Time and again they tried to help one of the wounded and were pushed away. The river was a barrier against the English and the men’s eyes were fixed on the opposite bank like souls in hell glimpsing water. Nothing was going to keep them from it.
Perhaps because they’d come from a farther part of the battlefield, the men coming down the hill now were quietened by a tiredness that anaesthetised panic. They asked the same question: ‘Where were the Spanish?’ The same uniforms were distorted with the same mud, but they stood without complaint as they waited for the ferry while Cull worked on the rope again. Barbary noticed they avoided looking at her and Grace, even at each other; they slumped and rubbed their faces like shy girls. One boy, no older than Sylvestris, went past her with his face buried in his hands.
Christ, wasn’t it enough that they’d been beaten? Why did they have to feel ashamed? ‘You lost,’ she told the boy on impulse. ‘It’s no crime, you just lost.’ But he shook his covered head and joined the others.
Her word echoed back at her: ‘Lost.’ Absorbed in separate tragedies, she’d forgotten what they accumulated into. Was Ireland lost?
Three hours. It wasn’t possible to obliterate the freedom of an entire race in three hours. They’d regroup or whatever it was that shattered armies did. But more was needed than to collect these men together; unless it was possible to stick broken souls back in place one by one, Ireland had died in three hours.
She turned to her grandmother for help and saw a bowed woman leaning on a cutlass stuck in the ground as a crutch, her head quivering with the palsy of the very old.
Barbary ran along the bank and up the hill, dodging weary horses and riders who told her to get out of the way. She had to find O’Hagan. In this total disintegration, she must find her husband. She clung onto stirrups and boots. ‘Have you seen O’Hagan? Please, have you seen O’Hagan?’ She was a woman who hadn’t been there; they treated her like an outsider trying to intrude on the exclusivity of their misery. Most of them pushed her away, one of them kicked out his boot and sent her back into the mud. She struggled up and ran on to the next horse. ‘Have you seen O’Hagan?’
She was looking into the face of the O’Neill. The shape she knew so well was there but nothing else. The man was dead. He was breathing, and holding the reins of his horse and considering the sight down at the ferry, but he was dead. If she could have brought him back so that he could take O’Hagan away from her again, she would have done it in that moment. Now that she saw the shell, she comprehended for the first time the greatness that had inhabited it. Not a good man, sometimes not a nice one, all his chicanery had been to provide the cement that had stuck one brick to another in the colossal edifice he had created from nothing. That he’d built it on too ancient, too rotten foundations hadn’t been his fault, they’d been all he’d had to build on.
In the course of his masonry he had become Ireland and Ireland had become him and now they were both dead. He was hatless so that raindrops fell off his nose and drenched his beard. His eyes were the driest things about him, gazing like stones into the rest of his life in which he had been left nothing to do but save it.
The O’Donnell rode beside him, the one vivid man in the landscape because he was angry. He was shouting, she’d heard him from a distance over and over again: ‘I’ll go to Spain, so I will. I’ll have a new army and an explanation from the bastard Philip if it ki
lls me.’ She watched them both go down the hill, O’Donnell still shouting.
More men went past and then a thin figure leading a horse. He scooped her into one arm as he went by and she trotted beside him, wiping the mud from his face with her hands. She asked the same inadequate question he’d asked her on their wedding day. ‘Was it bad?’
‘No,’ he said reasonably. ‘No, not bad. A thousand dead, maybe, but we’d anticipated more if we’d won the day.’
‘Where were the Spanish?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe they didn’t hear us. It doesn’t matter. They’d have made no difference.’
‘What about the English? Are they coming after us?’
He was still reasonable. ‘I don’t expect so. They were harrying towards the north when last I saw them. You see, we tired them out by running away so fast. It’s a grand new strategy. Have so many of us run, the enemy kills himself trying to catch us.’
‘Stop it. Stop it. What happened? O’Hagan, look at me.’
He wouldn’t. He shrugged his shoulders. ‘We weren’t ready for it. Not the bloody tercios or the treelessness or disciplined cavalry on open ground. They charged, our men tried to fight – and didn’t. It was like watching knitting unravelling. Somebody took a thread and ran it back and forth along the rows and the stitches all came out. All came out, all of them. We tried to stop them, God help us, and killed a few, but they trampled us down.’ He doubled up, retching. She knelt down beside him and held him. He wiped his mouth. ‘The whole bloody world waiting for the rebirth of Ireland and we have an abortion.’
She put his arm around her shoulders and helped him up. ‘Come along, pigsney. One foot, that’s right. And the next. I love you so much.’ She got him down to the ferry which had already gone over. Grace had crossed with it. She was standing by the ferryman’s hut watching the O’Neill and the O’Donnell riding away from her up the bank. The O’Donnell was still shouting.
Jesus, let me pick them all up and tell them they’re wonderful and it will all come right. They wouldn’t believe her and it wasn’t going to be all right. If the Upright God had been a good God He would either have let them get rid of their despair through victory, or killed every last one of them; instead He’d created the perfect balance of hatred, tamping it into the soil and the air so that treading it, breathing it, English and Irish would forever poison themselves.
‘Isn’t there any hope?’
‘No.’
Cull was bringing the ferry over for them. There were very few on their side of the river now, one load would do it. The hills had become exhausted of men and high up above them two buzzards were circling in the lessening rain.
‘Hello, Cull,’ O’Hagan said.
‘My lord.’
They crossed in silence except for the rush of the river.
As they landed, O’Hagan looked back once more and, with a violence that made them jump, drew his sword and cut through the ropes holding the ferry to the stanchion. The raft became another piece of jetsam, dragging its rope out of the stanchion on the far side and floating free, turning round on an eddy in a pirouette like a clumsy dancer performing totally for his own pleasure. The river assumed a nakedness and though Barbary was in no mood for symbolism she thought that however many ferries or bridges would be laid across it in the future, the barrier it formed now would never be mentally crossed again.
A new breeze brought the far-away, long drawn out yelping of seagulls. ‘They’re laughing,’ said O’Hagan. ‘Mother of God, listen to them laugh.’
‘It’s seagulls,’ she told him. ‘You’re imagining it.’
‘By God I am,’ he said. ‘I always will.’
What was wrong with them all? They’d escaped with their lives, and instead of thanking their God and getting on with living, they acted like men who wanted to change places with the corpses they’d left behind. They invented honour and chivalry, shame and disgrace, and worshipped these concepts as if they were realities. At the age of seven she’d known more of how the world turned.
Well, she would get him away and make him glad he’d survived.
O’Hagan was kissing Grace O’Malley’s hand. ‘We’re for Inishannon,’ he said. ‘Will you come with us, Granuaile?’
Grace shook her head.
‘Goodbye, then.’
‘But you’re coming with us,’ said Barbary. ‘You’re coming with me. Grace has her fleet in the bay, and the Order are on board. You said you’d meet me by the boat, it was arranged.’ He was turning away from her, and she turned him back, babbling.
He didn’t understand. ‘Woman, I’m not leaving him now. Neither of us, we can’t leave him now. He’s defeated. Don’t you see your man’s defeated?’
‘He’s dead.’ She grabbed the sleeves of his doublet with both fists. ‘He’s dead, he’s dead, he’s dead.’
‘It doesn’t matter. If he’s going into hell, we’re not leaving him to go down alone. He needs us. He needs me and I need you.’ He tucked his arm through hers, as if they’d made up a quarrel. ‘Come along now.’
‘No.’ She dragged away from him, ‘No, I can’t leave the Order. I promised.’
‘Grace will look after them.’
‘No. They’re my children.’
‘They’re not really yours.’ He said it as if she’d been playing some game for which time was now up.
‘They are. They’re yours as well. You said.’ Her voice was puny with despair. ‘They’re alive and the O’Neill’s dead.’
He glanced upriver where the figures who’d gone on were dwindling into the mist. He didn’t have time for this. ‘Listen to me. It’s for my honour. He is my foster-brother, and there is no greater loyalty than that.’
‘There is.’ She was screaming. ‘You’ve made it all up, these traditions, these rules, but they’re not real. Your loyalty’s children. It’s what we were put here for, to look after life. These things you play about at, they don’t matter. Wars and rituals… all the time you’re wasting children. You fought as well as you could, but you’ve lost. Let it go. Please, O’Hagan, please. Come with me.’ She was dragging him so hard towards the ferryman’s hut that he was pulled a little way and then stopped to look back. She put up her hands and turned his head to hers. ‘Don’t look at him.’ The deadness of O’Neill would go on down the generations, always dividing, into infinity, while on Grace O’Malley’s ship was the untidy mixture of breeds that was the only reasonable answer to the whole mess.
He had to come with her. She tried to quieten her voice. ‘We’ve given most of our lives to the O’Neill, he can spare us what’s left.’ She would die if she lost him again. He was the one rope left holding the saker from going over the cliff.
‘You’re my wife,’ he said. ‘I want you to come with me.’
I want it too, she thought. Being with you for the rest of my life is all I want, even if it means being hunted; maybe there’d even be romance in playing outlaws, they could love each other at least, and when they were dead people would make legends about them. In the end that was what he and the O’Neill and the O’Donnell wanted, to have their names live on in stories. There would be no romance in going back to her children and taking up the burden again, there was no material for legend in keeping children clean and fed. Even when she’d been telling him how important children were, she hadn’t really felt it, the words had come down through some chain of command that was older and stronger than she was.
‘O’Flaherty,’ he said, and she remembered every moment when he’d called her that. ‘I’m sworn to him. I have to go.’
‘You’re sworn to me,’ she said.
‘Are you coming or not?’
She opened her mouth to say yes. More than anything in her life she wanted to say yes. She said: ‘No.’
‘Well,’ he said, ‘I tell you what.’ And she knew she’d lost him. ‘You go on now with the children. Send me a message when you get to where you’re going. But I have to go with him at this minute.’
; He loved her as much as he could. It was in his face that he was in pain. He would sit with the O’Neill by a fire when they had a pause from the pursuit, and somebody would sing a love song and he would feel the pain again. But not enough.
She said: ‘I’ll leave word where we’re going in the hut in the cove. When the O’Neill’s dead, will you come after me?’
‘You’re the pulse of my heart,’ he said, ‘but you don’t need me like he does. You don’t need anybody. Do you remember me telling you?’
She remembered. ‘Will you come after me?’
‘Yes.’
‘Take care of yourself.’
‘Take care of yourself.’
The mud from his face was on hers, the mud from her dress where she’d fallen down was on his cuirass. He took his horse’s reins and walked away, after the O’Neill. He wouldn’t look back, there was no point in waiting.
On the ride over the headland she considered dying. It was an attractive option. She couldn’t remember any more why she hadn’t gone with him. She was heading in the wrong direction and she couldn’t remember the reason. She didn’t feel Cull’s body behind hers on the mule. She didn’t know if Grace rode beside her. Time passed and they were looking down over a bay in which the Grace of God and two other ships were anchored close inshore on a full tide.
‘The wind’s changed,’ said Grace.
‘Has it?’
‘Pull yourself together, for the sake of God.’
‘Will you give me directions for him, Grandmother?’
‘I will. Now sniff the wind, girl.’
Like a dog she did as she was told, a cold, easterly wind. From England. Mountjoy would get his tobacco. One curragh had been left on the beach for them. ‘Where are we going?’ He might change his mind, even now.
‘Will you listen to the woman. Hear me. Barbary. We’re going where the wind takes us. We’re going west.’
‘Tell me the course so I can write it and he can see it.’ Grace told her the course and she scored the directions over the lintel of the hut with Grace’s knife, making them deeper and deeper until Grace pulled her away. ‘We’ll miss the tide.’
The Pirate Queen Page 77