Two ways led into the Ulster interior: in the east, a thin road came and went through a narrow pass, steep and wooded: the Gap of the North, also called the Moyry Pass. It climbed from Dundalk over the Black Bank to Armagh, passing by the White Cairn of Watching where ages ago the sentinels of the Ulaid kings had looked southward, and—some said—still did. The other way was from the west, by Sligo and Ballyshannon and along the southwest shore of the Lakes of Erne. At Enniskillen, a long island near where the two Lakes joined, a Maguire of times past had built a castle, never captured or surrendered (so the Maguires asserted). The English war against the Maguires and the North was widening, had been widening since Bingham’s disgrace at Tulsk, and now an English force was coming down from Sligo and could take Enniskillen.
O’Neill’s messengers brought reports to Dungannon: on the western lake, the English had floated a great barge, covered in hides and hurdles to ward off Irish shot and javelins, and large enough to carry a hundred men and women, English colonists, to Enniskillen. As it went south the barge had to stop constantly to clear boggy islands of their dense green cover so that it could pass. The commanders and the guardian troops rode and walked down along the shore, wading through the tangle of branching streams and passing right under the high two-towered castle. Farther on, where the Irish had driven long stakes into the river-bottom to stop boats, they stopped. No activity could be perceived at the castle, and after some days of watching, sappers with picks were sent to breach the barbican.
Gaels, though fearless in the open air, in bog, mud, scree, or forest, hate entrapment, even in strong castles; if besieged they surrender, or flee if they can, rather than sit inside walls and be fired on or blown up. When the English soldiery broke into the Enniskillen barbican they found only some sixty defenders inside, and those were quickly slain. The high fortress of the Maguires was in English hands.
Before the end of July, the Maguire lord of Fermanagh had raised a large force of his family’s fighters and their dependents to go with him, by ways known to Ulstermen, and recapture the castle. Red Hugh had ridden hard into Donegal to call up hundreds of Scots from among the MacDonnell redshanks that Gráinne O’Malley had years before ferried into Ulster—those ones she’d told old O’Donnell to put by till their time came, which in the eyes of O’Donnell’s son Red Hugh, was now. The Earl of Tyrone wrote a rapid scrawl to Dublin so they would know that the doings of Red Hugh and the Maguire had nothing to do with him, he had not heard of it, did not concern himself in it. Dark Man did promise to set out with a force of his own to join his lordship the Queen’s Deputy; but Pale Man couldn’t do that, and never intended to. Meantime Dark Man sent a force of shot and infantry to Maguire’s aid.
The ordered progress of an English army following its drums and trumpets—infantry here, horse there, supply-wagons protected on both sides, the sutlers and merchants who managed them, the camp-followers trailing behind—all of it was impossible on narrow Irish roads, no more than tracks worn deep by walkers and cattle. The Irish were at the English heels the whole of their hard journey northward, striking at laggard troops with swords, throwing javelins, then vanishing away. As they came near Enniskillen the commanders ordered the army into a narrow pass through bog and deadfall to where the Upper Erne fed into the Lower at a fording-place in the river.
In every true story there is a ford.
The cavalry was ordered to dismount and walk their horses, which made them useless till they could mount again. When they came near to the ford, a huge number—it seemed huge—of Irish caliver-men hidden amid the tangle of brush rose up as one and fired en masse on the English front. The calivers—nine-pound matchlock guns—threw one-ounce lead balls three hundred feet, and a good caliver-man could load and fire his weapon in less than a minute. As the English musketeers hurried to set up and fire their own heavier weapons blindly into the trees, a strange cry or scream began to be heard above the guns; it came from the rear, out of the air, a sound made by banshees or demons … no, it was Red Hugh’s Scots redshanks, brought in time, and coming on at a heedless run. Some wearing the old-time chain-mail of their grandfathers, some bearing the claymores of their fathers, they charged still screaming into the rear of the English train, felling soldiers and civilians alike. Maguire, from where he sat his horse on higher ground, shouted in glee, lifted his sword to call the Irish horse into the fray.
The only escape for the English was to toss away weapons and armor, abandon the wagons and horses, wade through the ford to the far bank, and try to reach another crossing-place farther up; those who reached it headed away north as fast as they could. They might have been pursued, harried as by hawks—but the abandoned baggage-train at the ford was of far greater interest to the redshanks. In no time they were contesting with one another for plunder, but there was plenty for all: the English soldiers and their officers and the camp-followers had all stowed their belongings—purses of money, clothes, prized possessions—into the wagons for safekeeping, expecting them to be guarded by soldiers who were now on the run toward Sligo with the sutlers, laborers, wives, children, merchants, and wounded men. Maguire’s captains tried to keep the provision wagons from plunder, but the men in their search for valuables turned out barrels containing the hard unleavened biscuit that was the staple of soldiers as of sailors; great amounts of it were thrown about and tipped into the ford, where it floated till it sank.
Maguire and O’Donnell, Dog and Fox, met at the ford and embraced, laughing.
“Now the world changes,” Maguire cried. “Now it runs backward to where it begins again!”
They would call this battle at the beginning-again of the world to come Béal Átha na mBriosgadh, the Battle of the Ford of the Biscuits, and it would enter history under that comical name. Enniskillen Castle was again—for the time being—Maguire’s. The Irish and their redshanks herded together all the disarmed English fighters they had taken prisoner and put them all to the sword, every one. Those waiting at Rathcrogan, at Caher on Black Head in Clare, in the spiral depths at Newgrange, at the Grianán Ailigh of Donegal: they all soon knew of this, and breathed in pleasure, and then were still again.