The country of the O’Donnells of Tyrconnell lay to the west and north of Hugh O’Neill’s Ulster strongholds, reaching from Malin Head, the northernmost point of the Irish island, and down to Donegal Bay. South of the bay lay the lands of the O’Connors of Sligo and the O’Malleys of Clew Bay; toward Galway Bay were the vast lands of the Burkes, and even farther south the lands of the O’Brien earls of Thomond. There were few fixed borders between these fiefdoms, and claims made on this or that stretch of ground or stand of forest had to be backed up with force until a settlement was made, sometimes after years of merry battling had passed, only to be challenged again later.
The present head of the clan was Aeodh Duvh O’Donnell—“Black Hugh,” Sir Hugh: his knighthood granted him by the Queen, to whom he had made obeisance; it was a fine honor to have got, but his real power was as the O’Donnell. The only one as great as himself now in the lands of the O’Donnells was another of high name: Fionnula MacDonnell of the Scots MacDonnells over the water, the daughter of a Scots laird and his Campbell wife, and called by all Ineen Duvh, “the dark girl”—wife to O’Donnell, mother of nine of his children, some of whom she loved, and some she didn’t, which could at times be fatal to them or their offspring if they claimed honors or titles that Ineen Duvh thought should go to another of the crowd, a daughter’s or a son’s son. The child of her own that she loved the best was Aeodh Rue, “Red Hugh”: red for his brilliant head of Scots red hair, red for the scatter of freckles across his open face—for the red of his sword, too, it would be said later, when he joined the Earl of Tyrone in the last war against the English colonials and the Queen’s armies.
He was a boy of fifteen when Hugh O’Neill, on a politic journey to Tyrconnell—a marriage agreement, to strengthen an alliance—became aware of him: watching him leap aboard a dappled pony without saddle or stirrups, ride against four of his younger brothers, tapping each with a slim wand that stood for a weapon, laughing and dodging away from them, only to turn the pony on them and with a piercing cry charge them again.
“A wraith,” O’Neill said. “Hardly he seems to be there. Yet he’s iron.”
“A fine son he’ll be to you,” said O’Donnell, gripping O’Neill’s shoulder. It had been agreed, with the assent of Ineen Duvh, that this Red Hugh would be married to a natural daughter of O’Neill’s, a child now being cared for by his elder sister, Siobhan, the Earl’s wife, alongside her own small sons.
“Siobhan,” Hugh O’Donnell said. “She’s happy with you?”
“I believe she is.”
“She’s well?”
“She is, and now with child again.”
“Pray for a son,” O’Donnell said, teasing. “If you pray.”
Hugh O’Neill didn’t think that a son of dark Siobhan needed praying for; he thought she had the power to decide, son or daughter, or both at once, and have it come to be. But he might pray, if he could, to have a son like that red-head, now lifted in triumph by his brothers like a king aloft.
The O’Donnells didn’t know, and the new-made Earl of Tyrone didn’t know, that the boy was just then being thought about in Dublin.
Sir John Perrot, the Lord Deputy, amid his council, had been asked what was to be done with the restive O’Donnells and their Ulster ally, the new Earl of Tyrone. Should an English army be sent to settle the matter? In response Sir John gazed at the ceiling, as though awaiting a thought to form in his mind, though in truth the thought had already been thought, only not yet spoken. “Perhaps there is another way,” he averred. “If your Honors will give me leave, I may have a spider’s trick to play, that might suppress clan O’Donnell’s stirrings.”
What sort of trick, the Council wanted to know, but Sir John would only ask that he be allowed to try what he had conceived, and if it failed, as was perhaps likely, the Council might then turn to military force, “and see what might be invented.” The Council voted to suspend the hearing sine die, and the Lord Deputy smiled upon them, hands across his great middle.
On an evening not long after, Sir John walked the Dublin wharves making inquiries, and settled upon a sea-captain named Skinner for his plan. A heavy purse persuaded Skinner to take some fifty soldiers up the coast and around by the west to Donegal, with a cargo of sherris sack and white wines of Spain, as though he had just come from that country.
With good winds and a following sea Skinner’s ship turned Malin Head in a day and a night, and on the next day drew into the deep cut of Lough Swilly, not a lake but a long inlet of the sea, and tied up at the O’Donnell fortress of Rathmullan. It might have happened that on this day the young Red Hugh had gone off with his cousins of the McSweeney clan to hunt or run races; but no, he was at the fortress with the McSweeney boys, and the mate called from the deck that they were welcome to come up. They were invited into the captain’s cabin, and given a taste of the sack, which was fine, and a glass of the Spanish wine too, and then a wine from a different bottle. A nor’wester was blowing up; the generous captain excused himself to see to his ship, and invited the boys to stay and drink; and by the time they had put their dizzy heads down upon the table, that nor’wester was pushing Skinner’s ship out of Swilly at twelve knots by the sand-glass, and the hatch, when they tried it, they found to be locked.
Two days later the ship came again into Dublin harbor. Under guard the young men were brought out, marched to Dublin Castle, and put in chains, condemned and talked at by judges in a language few of them knew at all. Your father shall keep the peace and aid the appointed officers of the Crown as instructed, or you, you here, will answer for it. They were taken to cells, the same that the Earl of Desmond had occupied: there was his sign, cut with a fragment of slate into a three-legged stool. They were shut up with a crowd of others, all children of one age or another, all of them offered up by their families as pledges to assure the Crown that their parents would do no evil, all of them in irons that were checked every day by a jailer.
The North was enraged by this trick, aggrieved, afraid. Tyrone sent appeals to every person of rank and power he could think of. He offered the government in Dublin a thousand pounds as ransom for the prisoners, to which Perrot responded that if offered two thousand he’d reject it. The boys were not to be ransomed; they were themselves ransom, did the Earl not understand this? At length Perrot released the McSweeney boys into the care of Ineen Duvh, who’d knelt before him on her old stiff knees and wept; the McSweeneys were of no value to him. But the O’Donnell boy was a treasure. Perrot wrote to the Queen that the having of Master O’Donnell, in respect he is come of the Scots and matched in marriage with the greatest in Ulster, will serve you of good purpose.
Sore at heart, Hugh O’Neill set out for the O’Donnell stronghold to give what comfort and make what plans he could, but he had hardly reached the old fort at Castlederg before he stopped. What good could he do in Donegal? He sent his guard to seek food and shelter, and sat in the pale sun on the fallen stones. He thought of Desmond, how he had lain immured in the Tower, and then in the damp precincts of Southwark. How many years had that been? Would Red Hugh spend his youth in chains?
There was only one person who could decide.
The obsidian mirror was blank in the sun; it was sometimes hard to tell if what he saw there was the familiar face, or merely lights chasing over the black surface. But he knew when he was spoken to: or perhaps he overheard words that were not spoken to him but to herself, Elizabeth, to which he could only listen. The wife of O’Donnell, the black witch of the Isles, she hates me. It was like a whistle in his ear, faint and vanishing. She has hated, ever hated me since the reiver Sorley Boye MacDonnell was defeated on Rathlin Island and every pirate child and mother, all of them her kin, were slain. And in justice too.
All that O’Neill knew of the happenings at Rathlin Island he had heard from Ineen Duvh.
She, the Queen’s whisper came again. She is a beast and a witch, and her issue, her brat, she will never see again. Who will say me nay.
He rose from the warm stone. He saw, not far off, his guard returning. He let the mirror on its chain fall within his shirt, where it lay against his breast. What was the value of his elevation by her hand, his nobilitation, his being charmed, if he had less power than some she hated? No: that boy and his brethren would not die in prison. She might see into Hugh O’Neill, his heart even, but she didn’t know all of him. No one did. He mounted, lifted a gloved hand, and pointed east, back toward Dungannon.
Then there came an end to all business and all matters high and low: an end to the reading of petitions and the bargaining over ransoms, the unresolvable disputes of clans at enmity, the knighting of eldest sons of English settlers with the Lord Deputy’s permission. Word from sources in Portugal and the Netherlands was that the Spanish fleet was on the seas, and in a week or a month from now England might no longer be England. A kind of stasis fell over Ireland, or at least over the minds and hearts of those who knew what turn the world was taking. Summoned to Dublin to face the charge that he was plotting with the MacMahons in Monaghan, Hugh O’Neill did not respond. What in this fast-turning world did MacMahon count for? Would Spain in victory return the island to its saints and its kings? Let Dublin wait to see who would be master before they insulted him with their demands.
It was the great action that John Dee in Prague had seen coming to be, the thing that his angel informants had shown in play, now real and at hand. A century ago a mathematician and astronomer calling himself Regiomontanus had constructed a chart of the heavens for this year of Our Lord 1588: all the conjunctions, the oppositions, the occupants of the twelve houses throughout that year. Two eclipses of the Moon seemed certain, foreboding: one in March, one more in August. Jupiter, Saturn, and Mars would hang for weeks poisonously conjoined in Jupiter’s own domicile, the sign of Leo. Post mille exactos a partu virginis, Regiomontanus wrote in a lengthy Latin poem to accompany his chart: A thousand years after the birth of the Virgin, then five hundred eighty-eight more. Why had the German mathematician chosen 1588 for his investigations? What angel had whispered in his ear that states would totter, mountains tumble, stars fall from their circuits in that future year, which had now become this year? John Dee had studied the hundred-year-old accounts, redone the arithmetic, drawn his own charts: as to the stars he found no flaw. But what consequences might come from the heavens thus arrayed, so disordered and queer, was impossible to say. Rather: it was easy to say, and impossible to know.
Doctor Dee served two royal masters. Neither the Queen of England nor the Holy Roman Emperor disbelieved in the warnings of the stars and planets; both were sure that if the stars did prognosticate, it was the fates of princes that they foretold. Both rulers supposed that Doctor John Dee had ways to learn what was to come, whether by study or some other means. Of the two rulers, it was the Queen who was the braver—she whose fortunes were governed by the inconstant Moon, the Moon that would suffer its second eclipse in the first degrees of her own sign of Virgo. “We defy augury,” she said, a phrase that the court and the City repeated for years. Everyone knew it was treason to predict the death of a monarch, whether on good grounds or none. Pamphlet-writers who could learnedly dispute or dismiss the dire oncoming events were put to work by the Queen’s Council even as weird evidence mounted up.
“You have heard of the stone that came out of the ground in England,” the Holy Roman Emperor, Rudolf II, said to John Dee.
He had sent for the Englishman, whom he was sure knew many things he had yet to reveal. For weeks the Emperor had not issued from the royal apartments in his vast Hradschin palace, not even so far as the offices of state, where great decisions awaited him. He had decided not to decide. It was safest, given what loomed ahead, to sit still, and take no steps of any gravity at all.
“That information has reached me, Your Imperial Majesty.” From the clutch of papers in the Emperor’s hands, it was clear to the Doctor that he intended to read the news to him anyway.
“A slab of marble,” the Emperor said. “Buried for centuries in the foundation of an ancient abbey.”
Glastonbury, the Doctor wanted to say, but he had not been asked.
“The ground heaved, as in a spasm, an earthquake. This stone was thrown up, brought forth.”
The Doctor nodded.
“On that never-before-seen marble,” the Emperor continued, “as though cut or burned upon it, were words: Post mille exactos a partu virginis annos. The very words of Regiomontanus.” The Emperor’s sad-dog eyes were wide. “The very words.” He flourished the papers at the Doctor, who took it as a sign that he was now to speak. He knew every square yard of Glastonbury. He was not afraid of a stone.
“The stars speak,” he said. “We cannot always hear their converse. And we do not know their language. Like a man in the market or court of a foreign city, the wisest can only make suppositions: What is this? What that?”
The Emperor goggled at him for a moment. “Well? What does it mean?”
The first wind bears in the time, a golden angel child had said to John Dee, with careless certainty. And the second bears it away again. “Your Imperial Highness. It is well known that the movements of the stars have long been your study. If permitted I will take up this prophecy that has swept the world, and, with Your Grace, show where it is certain and where not.”
The Emperor turned away, letting fall his papers, and went to Mercator’s great globe on its stand. His finger traced the path from Lisbon and the Spanish ports to the English isles. “Spain’s warships are on the sea. The Spanish Ambassador has revealed it to me. The English Queen can fall. The Catholic Church could be restored.”
“She is ruled by the Moon,” Doctor Dee said. “The Moon may suffer, but she cannot die.”
The Emperor Rudolf was the grandson of Emperor Charles, once sovereign over half the world. “He says there will come the fall of empires. Certain, or not?”
John Dee thought of England, of his Queen, who might be in chains by the next full Moon. Empires contain kingdoms, kingdoms contain lands, lands contain duchies, duchies cities towns and houses. Empires are many: there are the great and the small, the visible and the invisible. “It may be that our Regiomontanus, Master Kingsmount, was certain,” he said to Rudolf. “But he doesn’t then say which empires, or how many.”