They had dropped a ship’s boat from the high deck to the water’s surface; the navigator didn’t want to bring his ship in farther. Streedagh’s strand was not a place that their Queen visited often; there was no trade for her there. Men had come down to the shore to help bring the ship’s boat onto the beach. Ineen no more than the others knew what it was that they had brought to shore, even when the men from the boat lifted a long wicker cradle of sorts, and something wrapped up within it which Ineen could not perceive. She started down along the path alone. The other women went to their houses and shut their doors, as they often did when something they didn’t understand came from the sea.
Lastly a large woman with wild wings of dark hair streaked in gray was helped by the others out of the boat; she gave a signal—a wave of a long arm—and the sailors lifted the wicker basket and started up toward the village. Now Ineen began to feel that this had something to do with her, was bringing whatever it was to her, and she felt no fear; she had not in a long time felt fear. She wrapped her shawl around her tightly and went to meet the strangers, who now made toward her.
The woman was now summoning her with her hands. When Ineen had come within calling distance, she cried in a louder voice than Ineen would have expected, and what she cried was Where is Ineen Fitzgerald?
“I am Ineen Fitzgerald,” she answered. The woman nodded, and called Ineen to draw closer and see: she bent to draw away the wrappings of the thing in the basket, and in wonder and certainty that it could be so, Ineen knew what she would see.
“Is he dead?” she asked in English.
The woman shook her head. “Not at this hour,” she said in Irish. “Not so much longer, perhaps.”
It was hard to see him as a living man, though he was nonetheless the man she had wedded and lived with. Hurt terribly. He was trying to speak, but a part of his jaw and face had been knocked away like the jaw of an old statue; he tried to rise but couldn’t, though his hand moved as though seeking. Seeking her. She knelt on the sand by him, and took his hand in both of hers. Only because of what she had done in the dozen years past, what she had seen of broken and half-made life, could she look at him and hold his hand in pity and solace.
“Cormac,” she whispered. His battered head turned toward her with great effort, but he couldn’t speak. She looked up at Queen Gráinne where she stood with her sailors.
“He begged us to bring him here,” she said, in an oddly gentle voice, almost a girl-child’s voice. “He has no family, certainly none that love him, or might be willing to take him in.”
“I am his wife,” Ineen said. “I must take him in.”
The sailors lifted the wicker cradle. Ineen went ahead and they followed her up to the house. Old women and children now came out and watched the procession pass, though they knew nothing of what had happened or who she led. When she opened the door to her house Gráinne said, “He must first be washed.”
For a moment Ineen’s soul refused the task, sorry she had spoken so quickly, saying that he was hers to care for. She had never loved him. She took a great black kettle and went to the small well she kept, and filled it. They had stirred the fire meanwhile, and she hung the kettle there. She bent to Cormac in the basket, and gently pulled away the sweated and filthy cloths that covered him. Queen Gráinne gave her no help until Ineen had water to warm the well-caulked wooden tub she’d brought and put before the fire: her great joy on cold nights. Then together, with the sailors looking on ready to put a hand in if needed, the two women with patient care took hold of the naked man and found where they might lift him, and they did, though he groaned piteously, and placed him in the tub. In something like shame he looked up at Ineen, and tried again to speak, failing again; and an awful pity, greater than for any malformed newborn, flooded her. She took cloths and washed him: his face, avoiding the shattered jaw. The twisted ropes of muscle. His breast seamed with wounds already becoming scars. The male parts she’d never seen nor touched.
Lifted from the tub, Cormac was wrapped in clean linen and placed on the bed, with what supports around him she could place. His eyes, unhurt, searched the room, her face, the sky out the window; but he couldn’t speak. Gráinne regarded him with a curious gentleness. He was a gunner, Gráinne told her; yet he was not a very good gunner. It was not a trade that he was suited for, but he loved the guns and knew them and tended to them, and those who knew them better taught him what there was to know about that craft. And yet, here is a strange thing: he never had fired one but once. He was as though shy to, or felt undeserving, she couldn’t tell.
There were only three on the deck of the Richard, she told Ineen, the ship you see out there now. And one was his favorite, as though they were his kids or his scholars, and he a tutor, and the favored one was a black iron one, the oldest, bound in iron straps to keep it whole. Now what was to happen then was my fault, if you must needs have me to blame …
The navigator and the cannoneers and Gráinne in the galley’s boat had slipped between the Spanish ships at Kinsale harbor and to the besieged town, to do trading business, to acquire necessities, including powder, if any could be had. On the galley the rowers had lifted their oars and were sleeping or doing nothing at all; the Richard rocked gently at anchor in calm water, as close in as the navigators dared bring her. Cormac on the little gun-deck looked toward the rampart that guarded the port, trying to determine what ships those were at the docks, Spanish or English, but his eyesight wasn’t good enough to make them out. He could, though, see the rocky outcrops that guarded the port on the left and right, and the number of harbor seals that lay there in the sun, and hear them too: what Ineen had called their song, though it sounded like no song to him. She had sought the seals, and also shunned them; seemed to hate them, and yet always watched them. When they put up their heads they seemed to be human, peering about and sounding, then collapsing again on their fellows. He loathed them, though he didn’t know why.
He put his hand on the black mortero, warmed by the sun. He racked it leftward, so that it pointed at the rocks. For a time he only watched, feeling some enmity from the dark shapeless animals, and laughing that he felt it. He remembered following Ineen across the beach, well behind her, watching her watch, her shawl drawn over her growing belly.
Damn them anyway.
The iron balls that the mortero threw weighed some twenty pounds, just at the limit that Cormac could lift. He wrestled a ball from the stores into the carrier and brought it to the gun-deck, an effort that almost made him give up, but he managed to lift the ball and ram it deep into the cannon’s mouth.
The powder chamber—the beer-mug shaped vessel—went in last, and the match-cord he’d light went into it. He felt a huge elation, as though he had set out to commit a mortal sin that could not be punished. He framed the view toward the seal-rocks in the square of his thumbs and forefingers, as the cannoneers did, sighting along the barrel. Yes, it was right. He got the flint and steel and struck them, shedding sparks into a char-cloth and when the cloth began to smoke he set it in the tinder. He got a small flame going and with it lit a splinter of wood.
Now. Now. His heart was hammering but his hands were steady. He put his bit of burning wood to the match.
At that moment a big wave on its way into the harbor, the third evil wave, rose beneath the Richard. The ship was lifted and turned away from the rocks and toward the town. Cormac lost his footing and fell, clambered up, reaching for the sparking match, but it was too late; the cannon belched, arching backward in its frame, heaving the iron ball high in the air; at its height it fell toward the ramparts of the port. He lost sight of its impact. The seals had left the rocks for the water. The world stood motionless. Then a cannon from the ramparts fired, in answer to the perceived attack. Cormac saw the puff, and a moment after heard the blast, and then saw the ball coming toward the Richard at impossible speed with perfect aim. He should have dropped to the deck, or thrown himself down the gangway, but he did neither; he only stared frozen at the oncoming ball. It had a face: a face he had seen in a book, a head of Medusa, fierce and wild, hair of tangled snakes. As it revolved toward the ship, ridden by its cannon angel, her mouth wide in rage or delight, it split into pieces. Stone balls do. And the rain of fragments large and small scattered across the decks, tearing at the mast, the decking, the ropes and barrels, and everywhere in the body of Cormac Burke.
He was near to death when they returned, Gráinne told Ineen. They had no doctor, only their own small skills. They had had to leave that harbor before the English blockade sent out battleships to sink the Richard. How it was he lived, Gráinne couldn’t tell; but when he could speak—he’d not be able to for long, as the wounds to his face and jaw began to close—he asked to be brought here. And now here he was. Gráinne told Ineen how she had loved him, for his mildness and for his griefs, and Ineen would see (she said) that he was still a man, for all that he had suffered and all that he had lost.
She stood then, with great effort, an old woman with aches in all her parts. She blessed Ineen in a few words; and with her men she turned down the lane and to the ship’s boat where her crew waited, and to the now repaired Richard, to make for Clew Bay and home.
She supposed he’d die soon. She fed him with a spoon, like a babe: milk and gruel, mashed greens and apples, pushed in past the broken teeth; water from a cup she held for him that ran down over his wispy beard and chin. He needed her help to stand, to reach the privy. When she left him to go about her rounds in the village, she might come home to find he’d wet the shirt he’d been dressed in. Like all such labor it seemed both useless and endless. But in time he began to heal a little. He would sit and try to close his hands and open them, over and over, until he could grasp and lift a spoon, a cup—at last a pen. The women who came to Ineen’s house credited this to his being a priest, which they assumed he was because he could read and write; if Ineen said he was not a priest, they nodded, and went on treating him as one. In time they began to come to ask him to write for them: a letter to a landlord or to an official from whom they hoped to receive justice or avoid ill treatment; to a son or husband in prison, who might have the letter read to him. In exchange they brought bread or fish, or a small coin, which he’d refuse. He still couldn’t be understood when he spoke, though Ineen had come to know what he meant. He sat in a chair now like any man, though he struggled to rise from it. And she knew that though he had not died quickly as she supposed he would, still he was failing; the deep hurts would not pass.
She asked him at last: Why had he fired on the town that day? What had he thought? Were they the pirates’ enemies? He twisted in his seat, the ropes of his throat tautened, and he made his mouth say Seals. She studied him in wonder; his eyes searched hers as though for understanding. Word by word she drew the story out of him, appalled and sorry.
And so the seals were spared, she said then, and she could almost see that he laughed, or would if he could.
Dark was rising. She put her hands together, still regarding him, and then she took his crumpled ones in hers, and told him what she never had, what he had no right to hear: of Sorley and her unresistance, her yielding, her desire and her choice; of the son she bore, more his than hers; of her grieving for that monstrous child. How she still grieved: now, this day.
The firelight colored his face, and she saw that though he had sat as stiff and constricted as ever the tears fell from his eyes and down his ruined face, and he made a sound that was pity and anguish, and would not draw his hands away from hers.
When he was dying from the cannon-ball fragments buried in him, when the stone had stopped his guts from working his food, his lungs from taking and releasing breath; when he ceased to speak and couldn’t rise from the bed she had laid him in, which had been her own bed, the one she and Sorley had been in together on the night of the ships when everything began, then she went for the priest: the same priest that had raised her from the stone floor of the tumbledown church. She rang the little abbey bell until she was answered, and the young priest was found; and when he had assembled his sacred things, without words she took his hand—the others were shocked to see that—and pulled him with her toward the hill paths and the stone house. And when Cormac had whispered his confession to the priest and been blessed—his lips and his ears and his eyes anointed, his poor hands too—and the circle of bread given him, he ceased to move and then to breathe at all, and the taut strings that had held him rigid slackened and let him rest.
He was buried beside her father, where there was a place that would have been for her, but she no longer cared where she would be laid. She put into the place his book of Latin lessons and his book of psalms, and he was closed up with them.
After that nothing more happened.
Only this: when she was old and alone and had ceased her service to the women who bore children, when the whole of the island that lay beyond Streedagh’s strand was as though skinned and burned of living things by the armies, and the dead lay unburied as they had before, as Time knew they would: on a night as she lay in her bed, hers again, under a thick mantle in the cold, the fire low, she woke to the door-latch lifted and dropped: someone in the house. The Moon was down; she could see nothing of the being come perhaps to murder her, but she felt no fear. A slight, sleek figure it seemed, neither tall nor short, but dark as though dressed in dark, close things, jacketeen and hose. She had heard from many people, many women, how a dark figure might come to you at the last, to bear you away, either to a place of rest or to another place, and she had only partly believed them, but now she did for a moment, and then again did not. It was not Death in her house. She dared to lift herself in the bed, to meet the one who stood now at the bed’s end, but she didn’t dare to speak or question him.
It is I. Spoken in a soft voice that would not frighten her. She wasn’t frightened. Sorley, she said or thought.
Not he.
Then she knew who he must be, though it wasn’t possible that it could be he; and she knew that Sorley was dead. She told him without speech that he must not kill her, because of who she was, and who he was: it would be a greater sin than any that she and his father had done. He came closer to her, and the face that she could now see, she knew: Sorley’s constant faint smile. As though this one could know her thoughts just as Sorley had, smiling and setting them aside. My father was a great lord in our country, he said. And so therefore am I.
The ash fell in the fireplace, making a small burst of sparks, and she saw him clearly. He put out his long dark hand, a hand without the web between the fingers, as Sorley had told her: a man upon the land. Come, Mother. Take my hand. We’ll go to where your mother is, for I know the place.
And she took his hand, and rose and went with him where he would go.