He carried nothing away with him but what little he had brought to that place, and the little that he had got there: among that little was the book of psalms she had given him. There was no reason for him to go in one direction or another, except that he would not go south or west into the lands where his brothers contested for the legacy of Earl Richard, their father: the Sassenach Earl he’d come to be called for his services to the English—the sassenach—in the Desmond wars. His father had had three wives and a number of concubines, all producing sons and daughters who almost all hated Earl Richard; the three eldest of the legitimate sons took the side of Fitzmaurice, the Jesuits, and Catholic Spain, and the father the side of the English, the Queen, and the new religion. Cormac would have despised his father if he had had the courage to despise. He was a small man who doubted his own bravery, tongue-tied in the few times he’d been alone in the Earl’s presence: the man seemed to him as hard and weathered as a standing stone, and as cold. How then could Cormac have thought that he could kill him?
It may be that his brothers were as afraid of their father as Cormac was, at least the ones who had joined together to fight him: John of the Shamrocks, Richard, Ulick. Cormac was the youngest, a bastard child raised among women, almost unknown to his father, and had not been part of their rebellion. When they brought him the gun, they praised him for qualities he did not see in himself—courage, steadfastness. He took their attentions and swallowed them down like sweetened wine, but he was more captivated by the weapon they put before him. Learn to use this, brother. He had seen hand-cannons fired, had heard brass culverins sound from Galway Castle on the Queen’s birthday, remembered the shiver of delight and terror it brought. This pistolet, as brother Richard named it, was a wheel lock gun, and the brothers argued over the use of it, but Cormac quickly saw what made it work, how the ridged wheel turned with the pulling of the trigger and scraped the flint that caused a spark that fired the powder. He stroked the long barrel, the silver chasing on it; held the curved handle that ended in a knob of ivory. It was he alone, the brothers said, who could go unsuspected before their father, holding this, and shoot him dead, for which all would be glad. He knew that he would go down to Hell if he did as he had been told to do, but he could not muster whatever strength it would have taken to deny his brothers, and for certain his father’s soul would go into the darkness farther and faster than his own; he would have time for penance, for rites of remorse, years of them if needed. Perhaps he would turn friar; safe then.
He learned the weapon in secret, his brother John bringing powder and lead; his father, gone off to Galway to treat with the English sheriff, couldn’t hear the hiss and bang of it in the yard though Cormac felt he might have, far away though he was. It was like possessing a being, a small animal of great power but no will; the will was his, Cormac’s, the gun the only dangerous thing he had ever tamed. When news came that his father was near home, Cormac went to the forecourt, the pistolet charged and primed, and stood to wait: exalted, huge with purpose, terrified. Outside, the Earl was cheered, the horses snorted, weapons were stacked, drink called for. Cormac raised the gun, holding it with both hands.
His father with his captains strode laughing through the door. The Earl, seeing Cormac, flung out his arms to stop the men around him, and without a moment’s pause he walked steadily toward his son as though to his dinner. With no word spoken he took the pistolet by the barrel and pulled it from his son’s hand. Fool, he said then. Begone out of my house. Go to the women. Never dare to look on me again.
By the end of that day he had set out for the north, out of the Burke lands: north, for no reason he knew. He had a purse of money that his disgusted brothers threw at him, a bag of clothes, a rosary, the ring that had been his mother’s. Past Maam Cross he turned to the sea, and when he reached it he kept it on his left, around Clew Bay and Achill Island and past Sligo, and so in a year’s time he came at last to Ben Bulben and to the friary where he was cared for, thence to Streedagh’s strand; and wherever he went from there, from Ineen Fitzgerald’s house and name, he would never turn back.
Now without his brothers’ purse—he’d doled the money out to himself with niggardly care, and it had sustained him a long while and was now all spent—he must beg, or at religious houses appeal for work, food, a pallet; his book of psalms and the one of Latin lessons were like licenses to beg at those doors, and he would spend as long as he could in an abbey or chapter-house. When winter came he summoned the courage to enter an Augustinian monastery at Murrisk and ask to be received into the order, as a novice. Admitted at least, he tended goats and cut peat and carried water in leather buckets to wash the flags of the church floor. He’d pray with the friars in Irish and in Latin, listen to the soft and tedious chant they wove all together; sometimes he wept.
The new Irish Protestants of Mayo complained that the Augustinians were spies, fractious, rebellious, and should be suppressed; instead the Crown leased the abbey and lands to an adventurer, naming a large figure of money for it. The friars were let to stay on, in quiet, but they dared not take in postulants. In winter Cormac knelt before the aged abbot and begged an exception be made for him; he wept; he had nothing, nowhere to go. The abbot gently elicited his history: that he had been pressed by his brothers to murder his father, and had agreed to do it, though he had failed; that he had been married, though the marriage had not been sanctified and was never consummated; that he had seen the Spanish come ashore at Streedagh beach and had not saved them, not one: all of which sounded now like lies to his own ears. The abbot lifted him to his feet, kissed his cheeks, blessed him. He told Cormac that when he had returned to his father’s house and begged his pardon, and received it; when he had comforted the wife he had abandoned; when he had done penance for these things, then he might come again, and ask again for entrance.
He set out again down the ragged coast, half-wondering what would happen if he reached his father’s house; or if he turned the other way, and sought out Ineen Fitzgerald and the unblessed child. Hardly noticing which way he did go or where he went, he came again to Clew Bay. Spring was yielding to summer: that he had apprehended. Even this stony earth put out hidden blossoms; Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed as one of these. He sat amid the new grasses, turned his face away from the giant mountain to the east whose name he did not know, as oppressive to his spirit as Ben Bulben had been, and looked out across the bay waters, a blessed blue now. He hadn’t eaten in two days. Perhaps on a day like this it would not be terrible to die.
Out on the bay then, in the humid air, he could see but not recognize a thing that seemed to rise up out of the water, huge and dragonish. It came closer and grew larger until Cormac could see that it was a man-made thing, was a sea-going vessel, a galley: the long oars rose, and in perfect accord reached back, went into the water, were pulled forward, and the ship moved ahead. Its single square sail bellied in an offshore breeze; now Cormac could perceive a red boar on it, seeming alive in the luffing of the sail. The craft passed amid the small islands of the shallow bay waters, the tall mast inclining a little this way then that, as though changing partners in a dance. What skill that must take, he thought. It wasn’t far from shore when it made a sharp turn, came about, seemingly intending to sail out of the harbor again, but instead it began to slide stern-forward toward land. And now ashore men were running toward where it would run up on the beach, and from the high decks of the galley others were preparing to heave coils of tarred rope out to them. He could see that a large board of strange shape had been pulled up with great effort and care out of the ship’s behind and laid down, even as the men on the beach ran into the water and made for the ropes that were thrown to them, which they put over their shoulders, turning again to the land. It seemed impossible, but they were pulling the galley up onto the beach, and men on the ship were calling and urging them on, the luffing sail too. Cormac, up on the meadow, could hear the grind of the ship’s bottom on the sand as it was beached. The oars had been shipped, and now the sail was furled.
Rope ladders were lowered from the ship, and a few men went down them with swift assurance, dropped into the water, and strode through the surf. Cormac had been so caught up in the spectacle of all this labor and skill he hadn’t noticed that beyond where he sat, ox-carts were coming through the witchgrass toward the beach. He stood, alarmed. The big creaking wagons were likely unable to stop in their plodding progress downward to the shore, the oxen goaded by men and women; Cormac went ahead of them to avoid being stepped on and trampled. On the beach the men from the boat hola’d and waved their hats to the carters.
One of the boatmen pointed to Cormac. After a moment’s conference, two were sent in his direction. He wondered if he should flee, if he might be suborned, or killed, though for no reason he could think of. He turned away, and when the two men came running he tried to run as well, but he was so weak that he soon fell and for a time lay panting, trying to get up. He felt arms take his arms; he was pulled to his feet.
“Who are you, fellow?”
“No one.”
“Of what name, what people?”
“None.” Could he say to them that he didn’t know who he was? It was so.
“Why do you sit here, watching the harbor, why did you run?”
“Why should I not? And I ran because I was threatened.”
“Spy?”
He couldn’t answer that; to say he was not a spy would make him one.
Those who had hold of him pushed him toward the beach and the ship, where the carts were drawn up now and being unloaded. What had they brought? Big hide pouches, laced with thongs at the tops, but leaking, darkening the leather.
Water. They were bringing water to the ship. Which stood upon the sea, with water for infinite miles. Staggering in the sand, propelled by his captors, he laughed. One of those handling him slapped his head. He was forced into the sea, colder than he had thought it would be, and made to take hold of the rope ladder that went up to the deck, which seemed as high up as a castle tower. He understood he was to climb but he could not; the disused cassock, too large and ragged at the hem, nearly all the clothing he owned, was now soaked and heavy as stone. The men pushing him from behind called up to the ship, in a language Cormac didn’t know; someone looked over the rail, then disappeared; reappeared with a rope, whose end he threw down. The men quickly and neatly tied it around Cormac’s breast under his arms, and when it was tight, they cried out to the one on the rail. So he went up: in part climbing, in part pulled, clinging in desperation to the ladder, until men above could take hold of him and drag him aboard, throw him down on the deck. He thought, looking up at the beards around him, red, brown, black, that perhaps he had alarmed them because his hair had been cut short and his beard shaved off when he served the monks. Then he knew nothing.
Gráinne O’Malley in her tiny cabin at the stern—more tent than cabin, an arched frame of bent wood covered with hides—sorted through the pitiful things in the woven bag that the sailors had taken from the young man they had dragged aboard. One coarse linen shirt, once fine. Four English pence. Two books, one of psalms, the other Latin lessons. Her watchful crew called him a spy; but a spy who carried nothing but these few things would be a very poor one. Where was his short knife, his pistol, his lockpicks? His papers in secret writing, and his tools for making them?
She rose slowly. Her hips had begun to ache when she went to sea these days. She forgot the ache when she sat, only to feel it again when she stood. She called from her cabin—heard the length of the ship, it was always said of her commands—to bring the fellow before her. She sat again, and picked up her long clay pipe, to fill it. When the flap of hide was pulled aside and the fellow was pushed in, she shuddered, for no reason; he was slight, frightened, all alone. She beckoned him to come in. He took two steps within. The curtain was let fall behind him, and he started at that.
“Sit,” she said, and pointed to a stool. It was an odd thing, but in the time since he had appeared in the doorway he had not blinked once. But he didn’t seem afraid. “Do you know me?” she said.
“I know who you are. All on this coast know your name.”
“I don’t know yours,” she said. “Will you tell it me?”
“I am called Cormac.”
She waited a moment. “Cormacs are many.” She watched him look around himself, as if help were somewhere near, or escape. With a small tongs she took a bright coal from a burner near her, and with it lit the tobacco in her pipe. She laughed to see this Cormac’s face at what he saw. She drew strongly and exhaled a blue cloud.
“That land-taker Raleigh,” she said, “thinks he was the first to use a pipe, with leaves of America. But the Turks had it long ago, from the Portingales, sailing from Brazil.”
“I am of the Burkes of Galway,” Cormac said. “Cormac Burke my name.”
“A Burke you are! Why, of what family, what sept?”
Cormac’s throat seized at this question, which the woman before him—it was clear—thought would be easy to answer. “Of Clanricarde,” he said at last.
“A child of that Earl,” she said, her eyes wide. She set aside her pipe.
He could hide no more. “Yes,” he said. “A child of Earl Richard, but not of his wedded wife.”
She said nothing to this, though her look had altered. She studied him head to foot.
“You are a priest, by your clothing,” she said then. “And a lettered man.”
“Not a priest. I was an abbey servant.”
“What abbey?”
“An Augustinian house, at Murrisk, or Murrask, I don’t know which; I did not need to know.”
The Queen softened at that, grinned widely, clapped her hands together. “Why that is a house supported by our own family,” she said. “Yes, for centuries!” She’d stood by now, taller than himself, her heavy skirts making her huge around as well. A little cry or moan of pity came from her, she lifted him from the stool where he sat, and wrapped her long arms around him. Smothered in her bosom he heard her say You are of our family, now and to come. When she released him she still held him by the shoulders. “Do you not know that my husband, and my son by him, are of the Burkes?” She drew from within her bosom a chain with a medal, lifted it to his face. A miniature painting of a man, too dim to tell much. “Richard,” she said. “My beloved husband. Richard-an-Ihrain Burke. Here on the reverse our son Tibbott-ne-Long. Mayo Burkes, but as good as Burkes anywhere.”
She turned and sat again, seeming to Cormac to be in some pain. That he was here before this person seemed to be impossible, and though anyone might say It can’t be, it’s but a dream, it wasn’t and he didn’t think it was; he didn’t dream a dream, the world and the day did, and he was in it.
The Queen’s eyes—so deep, changeful, hungry—were wet, he thought. “Your father,” she said at last, “poor man, is dead. Did you know that?”
He could make no answer. He lived again the moment when his father had come into the house, had seen his bastard son with the gun lifted. “I,” he said, “I…”
“Dead these several years. Poor man.”
He couldn’t tell if the poor man she meant was he, or his father, or both of them. “Who then is the Earl now?” he asked.
“His sons battled a year for the name and title,” Gráinne said, “and Ulick won. How is it you know nothing of these things?”
At last, from hunger, shame, ignorance, and deprivation, he lifted his head and wept. Not for his father, as Gráinne would think, but for himself, who knew nothing and no one, had long lived in a foul dream not his own, unable to wake. The Queen folded her hands in her lap and waited for the tears to cease.
Galleys like those of the O’Malley concern were moved over the sea by the labor of thirty or fifty oarsmen (the great galleys of Venice and the Turk carried a hundred or more). They were stuffed with armed men, who when the galley slid up alongside a merchantman or other sail, would throw grappling-irons on ropes over the rail, board and overwhelm the crews and sea-soldiers. The oarsmen, laboring daylong, required great amounts of two things: bread and water. The bread was biscuit, hard, dry, and (unless seas came in and wetted it) deathless: just the same after a year’s storage, and no better. Oarsmen consumed it and whatever else could be carried that wouldn’t spoil: salt herring, hake, salt cod, early apples, onions, ling, turbot, salmon smoked, but herring above all. And they drank water, in whatever amounts they needed and called for.
“Why bring on so much water?” Cormac asked. Queen Gráinne had brought him out to stand on the high deck. “When water is all around.”
“You don’t know?” Gráinne asked in amazement. “What, have you never been at sea? Never been in the sea?”
He chose not to answer.
“Sea water can’t be drunk. It’s salty. It will kill you to drink much of it, kill you dead and in great anguish.”
The crew came and went around them where they stood; beneath the deck the oarsmen on their benches could be glimpsed, their oars now lifted, at rest. The tide had turned; the master and the navigator watched the rising water gently lift the Richard from the sands. The lateen sail with the sign of the red boar—heraldic beast of the Burkes—was raised again, and an offshore wind filled it, and the rudder—that strange board—was let down. Because of its shallow draft and thin keel, it rode out onto the bay waters as though by itself. Once out in wider water the master called for the oars to be unshipped, and to the pounding of a great drum and a piper’s shriek, the Richard made for open sea, skirting Clare Island, the lady that guarded the entrance to the bay. The fisher-people of the island in their boats waved and called but they couldn’t be heard. Cormac Burke, elated and terrified, his soul ventilated by the wind of the galley’s passage, could almost not resist taking Gráinne O’Malley’s hand where they stood together at the rail. He now wore old clothes of her son’s she had found. He had been fed what the crew had been fed. He was not meant to die.
For self-defense, and to overawe the defenses of a harbor or a roundship, the Richard carried a small array of long guns in the bow (tall ships could set their guns on a deck below, but a galley had no room for that). Here was a black wrought-iron verso bound in iron rings, two small cast-bronze Spanish morteretes that flung scattershot, and a long half-cannon also of bronze, the biggest of the four and set in the center, like a tall man with smaller friends around him. They were mounted on swivels, to raise and lower them and swing port to starboard when needed. The bronze half-cannon was covered with raised decoration, twisting dragons and sea-monsters, coats of arms, asterisks. Cormac, rushing back and forth along the crowded gangway between the oarsmen’s benches on Queen Gráinne’s errands, couldn’t help stopping to regard them, all asleep, awaiting their time to be awakened. The cannoneer and his gunners tended to them as to favored children, wiping them with oiled rags for the salt, counting over the stone balls and the iron balls in their different stacks. The kegs of powder that would bring them to life were brought up only when an encounter was imminent.
Cormac’s fascination with the guns was clear to the gunners, who allowed him up to watch. He kept his hands clasped behind him, unworthy to touch them. He listened, trying to pierce the gunners’ thick language by mere attention, watching their gestures. He knew—the Queen had told him—that the guns were of most use to overawe and threaten, and out of many voyages the Richard had only fired at a ship twice. Three times. Maybe it had been four, but always and only when it appeared that the roundship they planned to board and discuss terms with had flung open its gun-deck portals and like the snouts of black pigs the guns had poked out. Then the Richard would fall back, allow the prey to fly ahead: but only till the groaning oarsman brought the galley up to the roundship’s unarmed stern, and the cannoneer let fly, one, three, five, and the bronze-man last with the largest ball, splintering timbers. Rather than take the chance of being sent to the bottom, the ship would cease to run, and when the galley came up alongside her again and the armed pirates had clambered over the rails, then Queen Gráinne with two pistols in her belt would be heaved up and on board the ship, to call a halt to murdering, and invite the captain to a conference.
How Cormac longed to see it.
The Richard and other ships of the O’Malleys rarely went far out; high seas could swamp a low-lying galley, the storms of the open Atlantic were fierce, the necessity of more provisions left less room for anything else. The masters and navigators were skilled and wise enough in home waters, but lacked the seamanship that could take a galley out to India or to Atlantis in the west, and safe home again. They knew the tides and could read the age of the Moon, they could calculate to a fine degree the currents at harbors they knew well—but unlike the broad, smooth, nearly tideless Mediterranean where the great galleys of Venice and the Ottoman Empire could range and hunt at will, the Atlantic galleys stayed close to the known world: the Channel and the Isles, the Irish Sea, down the Bay of Biscay and the coast of Brittany.
Ships of any sort in the Channel were considered by the O’Malleys to be theirs to stop and search, as though they possessed the badges of Crown servants or tax-collectors who could seal a cargo and extract a payment before graciously allowing the ship to pass on. They knew well enough not to interfere with the great-ships of the Hanseatic League bearing grain and timber to London, but small trade was stopped or pursued if convenient. Almost every ship that was stopped made its payment; they were aware of what would happen if they didn’t; they knew not to say the word “pirate” in any language they knew, for honor was as precious to the boarders as gold, or almost.
But the two ships that the Richard encountered that spring were in no category known to the O’Malleys. They were galleys, like Queen Gráinne’s, though they differed in details; when the Richard slid with its smooth grace around one of them, Gráinne herself was at the bow to study them, salute them too if she thought good. A white puff appeared at the other’s bow, and then came a noise, and then a ball whizzing overhead: not aimed to harm, only to warn, and to state a distance to be kept. But Gráinne was outraged, and the only thing for it was to respond. The gunners and the cannoneer called for the stone balls, thirty pounds apiece, and the powder and the breech chambers; the chambers—looking to Cormac much like beer-mugs—had already been filled with powder, and now placed with care in the breeches of the five guns. Cormac, almost mad with excitement, helped bring up the shot, saw it loaded into the muzzles. The great sweeps of the oars swung the Richard around even as the foreign ship also maneuvered to fire again, or evade fire, and Cormac, leaning the way the ship leaned, didn’t see the first of the Richard’s guns fired—the iron verso—but the sound shook and deafened him. The stone ball could be seen, flying in a long arc, but falling short: a thousand yards was the farthest such a gun could throw.
The two foreign ships were closing now, and the sun was setting. The second galley sent a ball at the Richard, and Cormac stood frozen at the rail watching it come near: but what he saw as it came on was not a black Moon, or a hole in the sky, or his own death: it was a face. A cloud of white-gray hair around it, eyes huge and mouth open to shriek. A woman’s face. And as it flew over his head he saw—he thought he saw, he knew he saw the face change from fierce rage to laughter, to joy.
The gunners beside him had seen it too, raised their hands to it as it came, and cried out, even as it tore a rent in their sail, flew on and fell into the sea.
Now the faster of the foreign galleys was so near that the sailors aboard it could be clearly seen. Moors! the cannoneer cried. Barbary men! What do they do here? A powder chamber went into the half-cannon, the bronze-man. The hissing fuse reached the powder and the ball was flung out with a sound so vast that Cormac felt blown apart, though he remained at the rail clinging on. The sailors on the Barbary pirates’ ship could be seen pointing to the oncoming ball, their dark faces open, their white teeth. Did they now see what the Richard had seen? The ball struck amidships, and gilded wood and armed men flew into the air, oars were dropped and entangled with those still deployed.
The second, farther-off galley turned neatly, leaning half-over in its hurry, and made away. The first, damaged, sat still for a time, but then turned as best it could and was off as well. Should they follow, the master wanted to know. But the Queen raised a hand: they would not follow. When she turned to face them she seemed stunned and delighted. “Did you see?” she cried out. And the gunners and the master each flung up a hand. They had all seen. She put a hand on Cormac’s shoulder, and he went with her, aiding her, down the gangway toward the tent in the stern.
“What was it?” he asked. “What did we see?”
“A cannon angel,” Gráinne said. “They in the other ship saw one too, and today the one they saw was the stronger one.”
“They ride the cannon-balls,” she said to Cormac seated again on his stool beside her. “Or they impel them, no one knows which.”
“Why do they?”
“No one knows that at all. Sailors believe that they seek out the faithless, the unbelievers, and guide the balls they ride toward them, to sink their ships. But the faithful bearing Christ’s cross on the bow see them coming too. It may be that they do it as children ride down hillsides in a cart, as fast as ever they can, and sometimes tip over and all fall out and laugh.” She lifted her clay pipe from the bowl where it resided. “For the joy of it only,” she said smiling. “Children of God, His firstborn, and they are let to do as they like.”
Cormac thought: demons. For the first time in weeks he saw in his mind Ineen Fitzgerald’s face and furious eyes, saying monstrous.
“They will ride the stone balls,” the Queen mused. “But they love the iron ones better. I know not why.”