The news had reached Dungannon days before that the Spanish fleet had been driven into the North Sea, with the English ships in pursuit; they seemed to be in process to round Scotland and make for open ocean, to return that way to Spain. Before they could make away, the storm arose that drove them relentlessly onto the western coast of Ireland, to be battered to pieces on the Donegal shore in heavy seas. O’Neill and old Hugh O’Donnell sent as many as they could of their followers to the coast and set out themselves with a force of gallowglass, knowing now they would not reach the coast themselves in time to stop the killing. Rescue who can be rescued, they commanded those who went ahead. If the guns can be saved hide them, if they cannot be saved, then delay the English who come to kill the Spanish as best you can, to the limit of your strength. And yet they were soon to hear from those who returned that Gráinne O’Malley and her crews had gone down to the beaches of Clare Island and pulled Spanish crewmen washed half-dead ashore from the wreck of the Gran-Grin, and that the Dowdary O’Malleys, for no reason O’Neill could fathom, had beaten many of them to death with clubs—like seals, his messengers said.
“They can’t be saved,” O’Donnell cried into the wind. “It’s too late.”
“Some can,” O’Neill said. “We must.”
They had ridden farther west a ways and O’Donnell had fallen behind. Hugh turned back to where the older man had stopped.
“My lord,” O’Donnell said. “If a few can be gathered up. I wish to offer some of them, to the number thirty or more, to the Lord Deputy Perrot at Dublin.”
“Hostages in exchange for your son’s freedom.”
“Yes.”
“You know that if the Lord Deputy agrees, he will take your hostages and then kill them all. If he agrees. Or pretends to.”
“No, no,” O’Donnell cried, a plea.
O’Neill took the older man’s bridle. “Those Spanish men. What would we do if one day, we, like they, had to seek refuge in a land not our own? If we betray them to the English and to Bingham and Perrot to hang them or knock their brains out we will in our turn go down into the darkness forever.”
The two stood side by side looking each into the other’s face. Then O’Donnell turned his horse to the way they had been going. They rode on together through the slackening storm, their horses seeking purchase on the mud-slick way, their gallowglass on ahead carrying sputtering torches. Hopeless. Not long thereafter they called a halt, signaled to the men ahead to turn back; there was nothing they could do, they would come too late. O’Neill felt his heart fill with rage, at the English, at his fellow Irishmen. What would it mean to win their land for them, what would it mean to lead such ones, where would it end? The English murdered for policy; they cared nothing for those they slew, but they knew why they did it. Was he himself one of them, was he like his folk, or was he himself alone? Rabbit or hunter, pursuer or pursued? Look not on their suffering but on me. It might be that in youth he had been made one of them, the English, and he should deal in Spanish heads as markers in the game, the one game, and get what he could for them. Yet he could not.
“We’ll free your son,” he cried. “He and all of them. I pledge my life on it. What’s begun now will not end, no not when you and I are dead—not ever, if that is what’s to be. Stay with me, sir, and we will go together.”
Torches came toward them as they stood there. Running men, the torchbearers they had sent on ahead now returning, crying out: Men approaching, men marching together, Spanish men. Dawn had begun to break, gray and cloaked in storm, but when O’Neill and O’Donnell rode forward they began to see the Spanish sailors and soldiers coming toward them, some holding up others, some signaling for help or to plead for mercy—what did they know of what would become of them? Hugh O’Neill raised his hand, calling for his bodyguards to slow to a walk, not to terrify the Spanish.
“Where have they come from?” O’Donnell asked of no one. “They cannot have come from Donegal. All those were killed, we’ve had the news.”
“They’re alive, for all that,” O’Neill said, and in a gesture he rarely used, he crossed himself: Could they be dead after all, and walking the night away? No: for now he saw among them, with long strides making his way ahead of the stumbling sailors and soldiers, that courier of Gráinne’s, the one who years ago had carried to Gráinne Hugh O’Neill’s plan to end the life of Shane.
“The walking man!” he cried aloud. “Who are these?”
The courier reached Hugh’s horse, and stood by its head, one hand curled against his hip, looking up: that faint smile that told nothing. “These are all that were rescued from the great-ship Gran-Grin,” he said. “My lady sent out galleys, sent men to the beaches from Killybegs inlet to Clew Bay, to bring in every one that escaped drowning.”
O’Donnell leaned from his saddle. “We had news that they were all killed by the O’Malleys. Sworded and flung into the sea, clubbed to death like seals.”
The courier acknowledged O’Donnell, nodding as though to confirm what he said. “Yes. So it is said, and so it will be said. Now and hereafter. And likely no one will go to seek for them in the sands or in the bay waters; if they do, only a few will be found. These are the many remaining.”
“She lied,” Hugh O’Neill said, laughing. “Queen Gráinne lied!”
“She would have you know that you must get these out of sight and sound, and not speak of them even to your own people, so far as you can. These are men that do not exist.”
“Does she mean us to return them to Spain?”
The courier only shook his head slightly, as though he had no answer to make to that; but then he said: “This number of them are yours to care for, my lord.” He tilted his head a degree sidewise with the same absence of deference that Hugh O’Neill remembered. Then he backed away courteously from the riders, turned, and started along the track they had come. In a moment he couldn’t be seen.
“How did that fellow know which way to take through Ulster?” O’Donnell said. “The best way is not the shortest.”
Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone, felt without touching it the small flint, safe in his clothes. “He was guided, perhaps. Or told.”
“Guided? Or told? By whom was he?”
Hugh laughed. “Day’s come,” he said, and turned his horse.
O’Neill had spoken truth: of the men from the Spanish ships who came ashore and were rounded up by the English forces sent out for the purpose, the nobles were saved to be ransomed, the rest were delivered to Dublin to be killed, or were killed on the spot by the easiest means. The sailors and soldiers that the Earl of Tyrone preserved were later said to have come, in all, to some two thousand, but in stories of war the numbers of the defeated, or of the victorious, will multiply with each telling. Most of those he took in charge he got to safety in Scotland, others to the northern peninsula of Inishowen, to which he brought a great herd of cattle for their sustenance, because he could. Still others would become men of Ulster, and few knew of their presence in the highlands and mountains; they tended sheep, they fished in the lakes, they drove cattle. One, neither soldier nor sailor, would serve Hugh O’Neill for years as secretary, trainer of his soldiers, translator, and adviser: Pedro Blanco.
That the Spanish were darker-complexioned than those around them, that some few were darker even than that, were blackamoors to the Irish, seemed not to rouse any great scorn or laughter or fear; in ten years’ time they had become as unremarkable as stones. Soldiers now weaponless, sailors who’d never again go on the sea, they learned a new tongue; some married, and some who married and some who didn’t fathered children in numbers. They prayed at Mass in their old language and in a Latin not like their neighbors’, but at Easter Irish priests placed the Communion wafer on their tongues the same. Only when they were called to war at last, given arms and armor from the hidden stores of the Earl of Ulster and the Lord of Tyrconnell and ordered to the south for the last battle, did they inspire fear as they went: dressed in white, as they had when they were seamen, daghaidhe duvh, dark of face, they would seem as they moved over the land to be of that black tribe of the O’Donahues that cast no shadow. Yet they went in hope to join their old ships, that were sailing again for Ireland from Spain: to join the fight against the English on Ireland’s behalf, and on the side of those who had saved them.