Gunpowder is easily made. Great quantities of gunpowder are not.
First, wood is cut and burned—willow or alder were thought best, and throughout the English island stands of those trees were disappearing as the demand for powder increased, but in Ireland the willow was plentiful; all that kept it from the Irish powder-mills was the willow-tree’s tendency, in legend, to pull up its shallow roots and go walking in the night, following the lost traveller or the midnight reiver and wrapping him tight in its withies. When cut safely by day, the willow’s and the alder’s limbs and trunks were burned under a cover of ash or sand to keep them from the air; they had to sleep until, still bearing the likeness of the trees they had been, they had turned entirely to black carbon.
Next came sulfur, foul-smelling brimstone, plentiful in Hell but harder to acquire on earth: great jugs of water drawn from sulfurous springs was let to evaporate, leaving the crystal behind.
One element remained, rarest and most peculiar: saltpeter, niter. It accumulated, glittering palely, on the walls of caves; crystals of saltpeter flowered on the droppings of beasts, and in sewers too. Those who gathered it there (horrid trade) were employed by Crown contractors—saltpetermen, who came with warrants to scrape the walls of privies and stone barns and oversaw the boiling and refining of what they got.
The mills where gunpowder was made were built in a peculiar way: tall, thick stone walls and light, thin wooden roofs. If mishandled powder went off—which it did, commonly—the roof would be blown away but the building would stand. There were just such powder-mills now in the west of Ulster, in the Blue Stack mountains, where the English officials did not go, and in the Antrim hills. Those boys who’d learned to shoot with hunting guns given them by the Earl long ago had been taught how to make a low-grade powder from charcoal and sulfur and the saltpeter scraped from Ulster walls and styes—they were full masters of the art now, and trained up others. The soft smoke of the mountains that settled at evening in the glens did not all come from cottages and farms. The booms echoing in the valleys weren’t the sound of dead heroes underground, playing at bowls.
But dank caves and smelly privies weren’t enough: Hugh O’Neill needed the barrels of saltpeter that came by ship, in the long galleys of the pirate Gráinne O’Malley, negotiated for by Dom Pedro Blanco, purchased with O’Neill’s silver, put aboard at Malta or Tripoli and hidden or disguised in the holds until the Richard or the Moon drew into a sheltered Donegal harbor or at Rathlin Island, where the goods were handed over to Pedro and his crew. Of gunpowder as of men, there was always a supply, always spent.
“This is Clontibret church, and the road from Newry. All this is Monaghan town. This is the strong fort, where the garrison is. The garrison has not been supplied in weeks. The English must relieve the fort or let their soldiers starve.”
Three men—O’Neill, Maguire, Red Hugh—looked down on the map that O’Neill had spread before them, on which houses and hedges and a large church and the gates of the town were drawn and colored. Tiny soldiers in colored coats, horsemen with a forest of lances, an absurdly outsized cannon, laborers digging ditches. The Earl for a moment felt the vertigo that had come over him that day when he’d looked down like a flying bird on the earth shown in Doctor Dee’s map in Mortlake.
Maguire, who like the Fox had become a fine cavalry leader without much interest in shot, had moved east from Enniskillen into Monaghan and taken Monaghan town. His war on the English and Bingham was his own: whatever he’d sworn before the Queen’s officers and bishops he privately renounced, without saying so to the Earl of Tyrone or to Red Hugh O’Donnell, who hardly needed to be told.
O’Neill’s spiall had made him aware that troops were being gathered at last to go out from Newry, under Sir Henry Bagenal, to relieve their desperate garrison. O’Neill could almost see them crossing the map in columns, the drums and the red jackets.
“Maguire riders out of Fermanagh can hold the garrison there easily,” Maguire said, waving a hand at the map as though to brush away the fort. “Not more than three hours to reach it, once mounted.”
“Why is it good to take the garrison?” Hugh O’Neill asked. “The English occupying the fort there are helpless, without provender, arms, powder, or shot.”
“Because,” said Red Hugh, “Dublin is on the march, the Marshal at its head. So you say, Uncle.”
“And so it is. But not every quandary can be settled by men on horseback.”
It was Maytime, the flowering trees were as though white with snow. Red goosefoot was appearing, “prostrate” as the gardeners say: low to the ground and spreading fast, as though leading the march toward Monaghan. When he had got near the town, Sir Henry Bagenal could see that forces of the Earl, his brother-in-law, were moving alongside his own troops, but at a distance. Just as the Irish shot and cavalry turned at a signal and came down upon him, Bagenal saw his sister’s husband amid the Irish fighters, on a tall black horse, unmistakable in black graven armor.
In fact the Earl of Tyrone had not been at the fight for the Monaghan garrison. What the Marshal saw was another man, or no man at all but a vision, a shadow. The Earl that day was at home, spider at a web’s center tugging at his spectral lines, some strong, others not so. Through the cold winter, alone at Dungannon, he had written his endless letters to the Council, to the Marshal, to the Queen’s council in London; went early to the bed he’d shared with Mabel, hidden within the rich hangings, never warm enough; played chess against himself before the fire.
“Tell me that I am wrong to go out,” he’d said to long-faced Pedro Blanco.
“I will not say your Lordship is wrong nor right,” Dom Pedro said. “As to that, your heart and hand will tell you. I am here but to aid the both.” His mournful countenance seemed to lay before the Earl all the promises he’d made over many years, to the Queen, to the Lord Marshal, to the council in Dublin. Could a man simply smash such things, as though they were clay pots badly thrown?
Out in the yard there was shouting, his own people hallooing. From the gate Hugh saw two young riders racing toward the castle, and when they came close they leapt off almost before the horses had ceased running. The people waiting there for the sun to rise pointed them to the gate, and took their lathered beasts to water and rest.
The English were assembling to depart with drums and trumpets next morning from the Monaghan garrison they had just retaken, the young men said. But look you, they are to go a different way back to Newry … Listening to them tumble over one another’s speech it became clear to O’Neill that the English would take the old road that passed around the church at Clontibret. There was time, if O’Neill moved quickly, to line the Newry road on both sides with Irish shot and pikemen—a gantlet that the English would be forced to run. He sent Pedro Blanco to wake the O’Hagans sleeping in the yard; they must alert their fighters, assemble O’Neill adherents from every village and farm, see that they were armed and gathered at a place he named. The time was short, the prize real. He went to his armory, explaining to the two young messengers as he unlocked the doors that one of them must return to Monaghan, and tell Maguire and O’Donnell this and this, and here for them were banners showing the red hand of Ulster that no one would challenge. Now go!
The Ulster horse and shot were gathered and on the move before noon, and would be in Clontibret while the sun still stood high, even before the slow-moving English army reached that church. Hugh on his own best horse would set out soon. In the dim armory he had found the jack-of-plate that was sent him as a wedding gift by Sir Christopher Hatton, the Queen’s “dancing chancellor”—not a man the Earl of Tyrone had expected a present from. It was a doublet of heavy canvas, within which were sewn overlapping steel plates, like the scales of a fish. As his hand reached for it on the wooden form that held it up, like a beheaded torso, he heard words spoken: Will you don Sir Christopher’s gift, and dance on my grave one day? He paused, hand on this garment, as though warned, or mocked. His body servants, who had tracked their lord to the place, now took it from the frame themselves, and fitted it to him without a word. We’ll talk of graves, Hugh replied in thought, when this day’s done.
What amazed Sir Henry Bagenal as he rode by Clontibret church at the head of his soldiers wasn’t the Irish forces hedging him in along the road, massed in good order as though by an English commander, but how many were wearing red coats. Red! The Queen’s own color! For each troop, their horses lifting their heads and nodding in readiness, there was a banner: the red hand of Ulster. For a mad moment Sir Henry thought it possible that these red-jackets were a force of the Queen’s, whether Irish or English, and ready to join him; then they stirred in masses, the shot raised their weapons, the pikemen came on following their pipers, the cavalry beat the earth, and the Marshal realized that he was hemmed in and had no retreat.
The fight went on as the sun sank. Hugh O’Neill, arriving late, took command, racing from one stand to another, urging, cursing, pressing fighters forward, calling them back. One brave English cornet, making out the Earl amid the smoke and the noise, spurred his horse into a run at him. Hugh turned to avoid the horse, and they both went down, grappling. The cornet, crying Traitor, Traitor, began stabbing and stabbing at Hugh’s breast with a short sword, unable to draw blood. Two O’Cahan men ran to the Earl, crying out; they attacked the cornet and cut and wrenched off the arm he stabbed with, and Hugh O’Neill ran his knife into the man’s groin.
As night came on the Earl withdrew his exhausted forces, and Bagenal was able to make camp. He hadn’t seen the real Earl in the midst of the battle, nor the man in the black graven armor either. But he had seen an Irish force fighting in ordered ranks, at the command of officers, with seemingly limitless powder and shot. The Marshal was not a fool. He knew very well he had suffered a defeat there by Clontibret church, and he saw no reason why the same outcome might not occur again. In darkness his forces withdrew toward Newry, harried all along the way by flying squads of Irish fighters. When at last he returned home he found that while he was fighting at Clontibret his sister Mabel, Countess of Tyrone, had died. She had been dying since the day she arrived at this house in flight from her husband. Still and cold she lay now awaiting her brother, her hands wrapped in the glass beads of her rosary as in shackles, Niamh by her weeping without words. He dismissed the child, lay down by his sister in his filthy clothes and wept until at last he could sleep. For days and nights after, his lands around Newry town were burned by O’Neill raiders. His Irish tenants dispersed, many of them running after O’Neill’s captains and calling for weapons.
Beneath the jack-of-plate and shirt that his body-servants removed from him with care, stopping when he groaned aloud, Hugh O’Neill was badly bruised: the Englishman’s sword-point had not broken the skin, but a mass of purple and black spread across his chest and stomach where it struck and hammered the steel plates against him. Almost too stiff to walk, he leaned upon his servants and was helped to his bed. He wouldn’t allow them to put him in it, and sent them away. On the wall by the bed was one of the fine large mirrors that Mabel had bought, along with the other extravagances that he had rejoiced to see her enjoy. What he saw of himself in it now was so hideous that he laughed, and when he laughed he groaned in pain. He thought then of the lesser, or greater, mirror that he had never removed since Doctor Dee had first hung it around his neck. Had it got lost at Clontibret church? No, it was there, hiding in the hair of his battered breast.
And she was there in it. The black mirror was an infinite lightless hole, but he heard her speak. You have crossed me in every way you could, he heard her say, and it has now lost you my good favor. You have cost me fortune upon fortune by your rebellious acts. I have dropped gold continuously on that island’s earth like a stream of piss, and got me nothing but treason in return. You are stiff-necked, my lord Earl, and without good reason to be so. You must bend or you will break.
How badly he wanted to speak to her, to tell her what her counselors and officials had done to him, to him and his family and his tenants and his allies, all the dead, the boys Red Hugh O’Donnell and Art O’Neill locked for years in Dublin prison for no crime, all of which she cared nothing for. Virgin and mother, she had never aided him except when it aided her; she had never heard him. He had sworn to Dublin, to the Council in London, to the Queen herself, that if he were made President of Ulster, he would serve her with all his heart and all his power, and keep her peace in the North. And she had spurned him coldly, gazing silent and motionless from the mirror like a great hooded serpent. She would not grant him a provincial presidency or any other position which would give him authority to govern Ulster. Whatever her Council offered was only a further demand: Hugh knew that before he asked, and before he asked again. In the tall silvered mirror on the wall, beyond the grotesque image of himself in pain, he saw a different face: the dim retreating face of Mabel, his Countess, in her satins and her coronet, and he knew that this day she was dead. With a sudden gesture he had thought he could never make, he took hold of the gold-chased stone and with one tug broke the chain. Crying aloud he flung the thing to the wall and heard its clatter, like a tiny cry in answer. He turned away, his heart racing.
The Earl of Tyrone had put away the Queen. There was nothing left to ask for, no one to obey. Pale Man and Dark Man must now become not two but one. All along the only true allies the single man had were the invisible ones he had known since childhood. He must put all his faith in them, and believe his faith was enough. It was all he had.
I am myself alone. Whatever came now, the O’Neill was out.