On Epiphany morning in Dublin, the turnkey of the prison went on his rounds about the cells of criminals and hostages, to be certain of their chains. Some of the more honorable or highly valued prisoners had had their shackles removed on the night before so that they might have rest and attend to their prayers on the holy-day, which in Gaelic is called Nottlaic Stell or the Christmas of the Stars. He opened the thick door of the cell where the O’Donnell boy, Red Hugh, was kept, along with two sons of Shane O’Neill, Henry and Art, who had been put in with him as further pledges for good behavior on the part of Shane’s people.
The cell was empty. A thick rope of twisted silk had been tied to the bars of a window, but the bars were in place, as they had been; the turnkey’s eye followed the rope to where it went down into the privy and disappeared; baffled, he knelt to peer down into the shithole, but dawn had just broken and he could see nothing. But he knew now what had been done; he rose, ran or stumbled (an old man, he was) out and down to the guardroom, shouting that his prisoners had escaped.
Some guardsmen went back up to the cell, which was still empty; others went out and walked the walls to where the windows of the empty cell could be seen high up, and also the stone privy attached to the castle wall. The privy stuck out far enough so that what was voided there would not slime the wall, but it was after all nothing but a large pot without a bottom, and the wall was filthy; and now as day grew they could see the silk rope hanging out the hole, reaching toward the ditch or dry-moat around the castle. Nothing else.
The week before, on the third day of Christmas, a secretary of the Earl of Tyrone’s had come to the castle, and begged permission to bring to the Earl’s imprisoned kin some food and drink for the holy-day, and was allowed. The guard and the turnkey remembered now, that here was a bolt of white sarsenet silk among the gifts, and though the silk was famously light and strong they didn’t think about it then. There was no point, now, in cursing the Earl, or themselves, or the prisoners: it was the master of the prison, white-bearded and in his red coat, who had himself admitted the gifts of the jolly season. Soon he’d have to be told the result.
The boys were miles gone by then, out of the gates of the city, which were left open on the sacred night, and where a few of that O’Hagan sept who had fostered Hugh O’Neill in the long-ago waited in the snow to take the boys, two to a horse, toward the Wicklow Mountains. Laughing. Art O’Neill was not laughing: an eternally hungry young man, he’d managed to grow fat in prison, and could not get himself out of that privy once he’d got in it, and despite the desperate whisper-cries from the others below he could hardly move. When at last he squirmed down out of the loathsome hole and began to descend on the silk rope he lost his grip and fell to the ditch, hurting his leg, and had to helped out by the others and almost carried to the gate. His brother Henry, as soon as the O’Hagans appeared, kissed Art, bade farewell to Red Hugh, and went his own way.
Hugh O’Neill’s greatest friend among the English then resident in Ulster was Sir Garrett Moore, Viscount Moore, a wise and an honest man. From Dublin it was some forty miles to safety in the Moore stronghold, the ancient abbey of Mellifont. There was no road to follow in the deepening snow, not a goat-track or by-road. They were close to the way leading to the house—down a steep way into the cleft of Glenmalure, now impassable—when they gave up. They had hauled weeping Art along with them this far, but could take him no farther. They laid themselves down in the snow and a couple of the O’Hagans lay with them, wrapping their mantles around them, while another went on to get help. When men arrived at dawn the boys in their thin prison gowns were nearly dead; they tried to shake Art awake, make him drink warmed beer, but could not. The O’Donnell boy—wraith and iron—lived. He would be carried into Ulster when the roads opened; till then Hugh O’Neill saw to it that he was kept at Mellifont, to evade the searchers sent out from Dublin. He came from Dungannon to see the boy there, bringing warm clothes and a doctor, and found him still abed, though grinning in triumph; the Earl stayed the day, and held Red Hugh tight in his arms while the doctor prepared to amputate his two great-toes, frozen and black. “You won’t need them on horseback,” he said, and the young man buried his face in Hugh’s doublet and made not a sound while the doctor cut.
Strong as he was, the young O’Donnell was severely weakened; the Earl took him no farther than his castle at Dungannon, where Siobhan would feed him and cheer him: his oldest sibling, more the age of a mother to him than a sister. She embraced them both, and in her arms Hugh O’Neill felt the weakness that had nearly killed her in giving birth to a daughter in the fall: the midwives shaking their heads over her, something gone wrong they couldn’t heal. As soon as the men were seated and food and drink put before them she slipped away to her bed.
“She’s not well,” Red Hugh said, a whisper.
“She is not. No doctor seems able to lift the weakness from her. Nor lift her sorrow neither.”
The boy watched the door that Siobhan had gone out by. “Will she die?” he asked.
O’Neill covered the younger man’s hand with his own. “We will all die,” he said. “Which is no comfort. Sons and daughters, they are comfort.” O’Neill supposed the boy knew of the plan that old O’Donnell (and more importantly his wife) had agreed to—that he should in time marry O’Neill’s natural daughter Rose, a child without a mother, beloved of all and raised by Siobhan. Such a match would seal again the pact between the families. Old Hugh was unwell; it seemed certain that he’d yield his place to his son, who would then be named the O’Donnell, no matter his youth. Every O’Donnell knew of the prophecy that when two men named Hugh ruled in turn the house of O’Donnell, the second will be a god-like prince who will rule for nine years, and pass into the Other Lands a savior of his country and people. Hugh O’Neill did not believe in prophecy—he thought he did not—but it was hard not to hope that this one had some truth. Red Hugh was asleep now; for a time O’Neill watched him, how his restless eyes moved beneath the thin lids (what did he watch, while O’Neill watched him?), and now and again his arms trembled slightly. Never at rest, not even now. O’Neill felt for the gold chain within his leathers and drew it out.
She was there.
I have been told a foolish story of a bolt of sarsenet, he heard. A trick in a poor play that no one believes. There was no answering her; there never had been and would not be till the end of all. Think you I know not the escape was by practice of money? I know there was a corruption made, a jewel worth five hundred pounds to the Lord Deputy, who loves lucre more than he loves his Queen. Take your boy where you may, it will end soon enough for him.
No, there was no reason to think the Queen did not know what she spoke of. But the Queen could die, and would; he himself could die, surely. We will all die, he had said to Red Hugh. But he was beginning to think that Red Hugh could never die.
From the far part of the house the women had raised a moan, a keening.
Hugh O’Neill was widely known for his fits of weeping. When he felt wronged, misunderstood, challenged unfairly, tears might begin to spring from his eyes; it never stopped the flow of his words. He wept in pleading for his rights and his ancient privileges, for his clan and for allies threatened or arrested or sent to be hanged, while those he bargained with watched in embarrassment or contempt. He wept when he was in the right, and wept when in the wrong. He had not wept often as a child, faced with wonders that he could only accept, threats that he didn’t know how to meet: a fierce courage was the response. And young or old he never wept at hearing of deaths: for tears had no power over death, and could win no reprieve. Yet he wept beside Siobhan, whom he’d thought nothing could conquer.
While she could still speak, she begged him that when she was gone he would take no other wife: and what could he say to her but promise he would not? She took his hands and put her face in his palms and he felt the heat of her skin. Daylong he watched. When she wept, or tried to, he wept too. And all through the last of her days the pain would arise in his heart: not alone for her dying, not for the promise he had made to her, but because he knew that when she was in her grave and gone to the country of the fathers, the time would come, and not long, when he would marry again. He knew who that new wife would be, if she could be won. He knew, but only he; Siobhan would never know of it, not unless her spirit were to return to haunt and harry him for his faithlessness.
In May in Tyrconnell, with the approval of Ineen Duvh, old O’Donnell at last resigned his title in favor of his son. By then that son was steady enough on his damaged feet; he’d always be happier, though, astride one or another of his beautiful horses, roan and black, who seemed to love him just as his young kinsmen loved him. No one laughed or grinned at Red Hugh, walking as unsteadily as a tipsy man. Who’d have thought that the thumbs of the feet mattered so much?
Even before he was fully accepted as the O’Donnell, in his own name he had sent messengers to the families of Tyrconnell, calling them to an assembly, which without much talk—talk being unprofitable now—elected Red Hugh to the leadership his father had held.
That wasn’t all that the young man did. As soon as he could stand and ride, he gathered his brothers and a number of his followers, and in arms they confronted the English garrison at Donegal city, and ordered the troops to leave the North for Connaught, where if anywhere they belonged. It might have been the cock-sureness with which Red Hugh stood before the officers of the garrison, or the troubles it seemed certain would be heaped on them if they defied these youths, but they did order a departure soon enough, to the cheers of the town. Not long after, Red Hugh repaid his uncle O’Neill by going on the offensive with his crew against old Turlough Luineach O’Neill. They raided Turlough’s people and their holdings, overran Turlough’s ramshackle fort at Strabane and burned it down, and then the old man had had enough: he wrote a shaky letter to Dublin, stating his retirement from all his claims to the O’Neill titles, and his plan to seek balm for his soul at a house of religion. This last he did not do, but the way was open now for the Earl of Tyrone to be named the O’Neill at the Stone of the Kings at Tullahogue. It was Red Hugh’s gift to the man who had brought him out of prison, so that he would not die there of despair. The day of the election would be the day that began at sunset on the summer solstice.
From Dungannon to Tullahogue was but a morning’s ride, but in the days before his naming Hugh O’Neill had ordered a shelter for himself put up amid the others raised in the fields around the great stone throne all but buried in the mound of earth on which it stood or sat in the center of the encircling raths. There Hugh lay awake all that short night. When the morning-star arose in the green sky he had the chip of flint in his hand, held so tight it had marked his palm. Would the Kindly Ones approve him, would the souls of the old Ulster heroes not groan at his presumption? He thought of Shane, who had usurped the name and rights, and how he’d died. Where now were the gallowglass who would in time come around him in a closed place, and remove him from this office forever? He started then, and reached for a weapon: the tent-flap was softly drawn aside.
Red Hugh. Without a greeting he came and sat upon the couch’s end. The sleeping armed men around O’Neill didn’t stir. Red Hugh put his hand on the hand that held the flint. “Tell me,” he said. “How long has it been since there was a High King in Ireland?”
O’Neill put down the short sword he had seized. “I cannot tell. When the Norman English came, half a thousand years ago? Some called themselves kings.”
“None was ard Rí.”
“None commanded all the others. None was called High King.” He wondered if that was so; the tales he was told in his childhood, the songs of the bards and the genealogies of the brehons, were somewhere in his memory, not to be sought for but returning to him at odd times as though by their own choosing.
Red Hugh released O’Neill’s hand. “I am glad to be with you on this day,” he said, with his big grin. “And will be glad on other and greater days.” He rose then and, like a servant, backed bowing away and out of the dew-damp tent. Sounds of piping and drums, coming closer.
When O’Neill appeared, having drunk herbed wine and had the saffron robe put around him by his closest relatives, and an ancient sword of the O’Neills put in his wide belt, he came forth to the cheers of the O’Hagans and the clashing of weapons that would follow him on the way to the Stone. Some were already a bit drunk. These were the men, or the sons of the men, who had fostered him in the beginning of his conscious life; his own two sons were now in houses of the O’Hagans. In ancient times the clan O’Hagan had produced the brehons that gave laws to the O’Neill’s, and on this day they had tasks to do that by right they alone could do, and had always done, in the making of an Ò Neill. When Hugh stepped up to the stone seat, to the crying of the pipes and the dueling genealogies shouted out by ancient men who never forgot a word, he saw that among the O’Hagans were men and women he had known when they were young and he a child, now with hair turning white, beards long. He would not weep, could not laugh, with the great love he felt for them all. The talking done, the eldest of these elder O’Hagans came before him with the slim white wand that signified, in its littleness and weakness, the great power of the O’Neill: the same wand that had been given before to Hugh’s uncle Shane, and before him to Conn his grandfather. Hugh O’Neill, descendant of Niall of the Nine Hostages, took the wand and raised it, and the people gathered around made a soft high moan of wonder and assent. And in the blaze of noon Hugh O’Neill saw that, beyond the ranks of his kinsmen and his fighters, others were there, vague in the shimmer of the sun: some old and crowned, some young and armed with long lances as though of silver sunlight; and white-haired children, naked or clothed in pale nothing: all looking on him in calm assessment, without judgment.