Even in the North of Ireland the English fever of land-taking was felt: the tug of shared blood, shared histories, the network of clan and family connections pulled taut. There was no reason to suppose that Englishmen desiring land on easy terms and urged on by their Queen and her lords would not in time break into Ulster and Tyrconnell, through the Gap of the North at Lough Neagh or the Gap of Erne in the lakes of the west; and if that were to happen, the lords of the North had better conduct themselves with sassenach deliberation and greater cooperation than they of the South had done. Bind your friends to you with chains of iron: Turlough Luineach had said that to the boy Hugh in the long-ago, before the world had changed. In their long galleys Gráinne O’Malley and the O’Malleys brought a thousand Scots redshank mercenaries to Clare Island and thence into Ulster. Put them by, Gráinne told the Lord of Tyrconnell, their time will come.
Hugh O’Neill had contracted a good marriage, with Siobhan O’Donnell of the Tyrconnell O’Donnells, to be consummated when she was of age, a year from then. The event when it came was grand and wild and lasted days, with no priest to read Latin, but a brehon binding the pair in the first degree of the ten degrees of marriage that could be applied. There were more O’Donnells than O’Neills present at the handfasting and then the days of feasting; everyone knew why, and looked upon the young man and his long-limbed wife with hope and trust. Still handfast—tied together at the wrist—they were taken to their chamber and the door shut on them, though the noise of revel and celebration below could still be heard. They lay together, nearly strangers still, and told each other tales of their childhoods; Siobhan had had brothers in plenty, to teach her to ride and shoot the crossbow.
“And you had none,” she said, in pity.
“I had brothers,” he answered, though he wished not to grieve her by an account of them, murdered by his uncle Shane. “Foster-brothers. O’Hagan boys, older than me.”
“No brothers of your flesh,” Siobhan said, pretending to ponder; she knew well enough what Hugh had not said. “Then you shall have sons instead.” And with her free hand she reached within Hugh’s wedding-garment and took hold.
Hugh wasn’t called upon by the Queen to go to the South and fight Fitzmaurice’s rebellion, though he feared he would be. He occupied himself not with Desmond or the wars of the Desmonds but with his new wife, soon pregnant and fat, and with … hunting. Into the glens of Antrim he brought men skilled with guns (Fubún on the gray foreign gun, O’Mahon had said long ago, but this was now, not then). He lived with his hunters out in shooting brakes, all sleeping outdoors in any weather, wrapped in their mantles; they brought home the skins of wolves and the carcasses of red deer, giving the meat to O’Neill followers or to anyone who asked. Wherever they went, Hugh would inquire of men and boys what weapons they were good at using, and after they named javelins and bows and the battle-axe he would bring out a long gun, and his hunters would explain the use of it, and let one or another of them take it and try it. The handiest of them Hugh would reward with a coin or other gift, and perhaps even the gun itself. Keep it safe, he’d say, smiling. Those who kept the guns knew well enough why they were given them, and if not, they would be instructed by others. Some learned themselves to make a coarse gunpowder from saltpeter, sulfur, and willow ash, and to cast round shot from molten lead. That was wisdom the mirror would never give Hugh and that the flint could not know: When the time came for him to lead men against English soldiery he would not lead hordes of screaming gallowglass against trained infantry with guns. His own shot would wheel on command, and march in step, and lay fire.
When the time came. If it came.
As soon as the winter rains were past and the green springing again, when men and horses could once more move, Dublin sent word to the O’Neills and the other Northern lords: intercepted letters showed that James Fitzmaurice Fitzgerald had been rousing Catholic support and seeking aid in Spain and France, and was expected to return, most likely putting ashore at Dingle Bay, bringing with him Papal and Spanish troops aboard Spanish great-ships, with Papal gold to pay them, and three thousand stand of arms, with powder and lead. Once a Spanish military government was established in Munster (so Fitzmaurice declared in his screeds), the Geraldines, the Butlers, the Burkes, all of them and their dependents, would be guaranteed in their ancient possession of their lands, and the heretics, which was the coming term now for any and all Englishmen in Ireland, would be uprooted and scattered. With this information in hand, reliable enough, the Council in London let the Earl of Tyrone and the Lord of Tyrconnell and chiefs of all clans know that every true liegeman of the Queen should be ready to oppose the Pope and Spain, their armies and their assassins, their lies and their tricks. A note in Henry Sidney’s hand appended to Hugh’s letter (how well Hugh O’Neill had come to know that hand) demanded that Hugh come to Dublin in all haste, bringing with him what forces he could muster, to go south and meet this threat.
Hugh folded the paper in his hands and folded it again. He was called upon to go down into Munster, where the world began (as O’Mahon the poet had taught him); tortured Munster, green and fruitful, land of death. The O’Neills were of the North, Leath Cuinn, the “half of Conn” in the division of the island by the sons of Mil in the beginning, as O’Mahon had sung; the South was the Leath Mogha, the “half of Mug.” The North was the higher, the half of kings, of the head; the South of labor, of rich harvests, provision of all things. It was said that the Kindly Ones of Munster were all of the female sex; it was where Annan gave birth to gods, where Áine bore a leaping son to an Earl of Desmond. Desmond’s wife, Eleanor, golden countess, who against all reckoning had made friends with the Queen, who had gathered the moneys that could redeem her husband when he was imprisoned in faraway London, and was now again mistress of the great square castle at Askeaton, where every young squire who came to serve Desmond fell in love with her. So it was said.
It wasn’t true that Hugh O’Neill was afraid of women, though now at twenty-five years of age he knew they could make him reckless. He had been a boy not long returned from England when he married a first wife, a daughter of his uncle Phelim, but that marriage had been quickly dissolved—the brehon had ruled the marriage was within the forbidden degree of relationship. He’d not told Siobhan of that, but her relatives likely had. The girl would remain in Hugh’s memory as a smiling sun-browned child gathering flowers on a mild spring day, following him and walking with him, talking of nothing or not talking at all, until they fell together in the shade of the rowans. Even now a fleeting image of her might wake him, erect and bereft beside his sturdy Siobhan of the O’Donnells, mother of strong sons.
Yes, he thought it best for him that he stay to the north of the Eiscir Riada, the low broken range of sandy eskers running from Dublin to Galway that marks the boundary dividing the halves of Ireland, of Conn and of Mug. But the obsidian mirror judged him and found him wanting. You are a cold friend to her who loves you and will soon do you great good: the Queen looked out at him, clearer now than she had lately been, her white face framed in a stiff ruff. How far away she was, to be so near. Why was he always made to feel shame at what he heard, like a child who’d done his work badly or skipped away? He hadn’t done so. Were all her followers, the rich and proud men, young and old, were they all shamed by her as he was, and if not why was it different with him? For the first time he thought that no matter what the Doctor had told him, he could remove this thing from him in an instant, and with it her hand upon him.
He returned it to his breast.
That day he began to call in his bonnaght mercenaries and his gallowglass, to the smallest number he could bring that would meet the Lord Deputy’s demand.
“I will tell you something of James Fitzmaurice, this Captain of Desmond,” Henry Sidney said to Hugh as they rode together out of Dublin city. “Though perhaps you have heard all you need to know.”
Hugh said nothing in reply; he had not been asked a question; he had lived long enough in Sir Henry’s company to know when to keep his peace.
“He is a slight man,” Sidney said thoughtfully, as though consulting an inward file. “But a brave one. A hero to every poor cottager and kern. Tireless, able to sit a saddle daylong. Mad with his own opinions, as being a Papist.” He shifted in his seat, as though to make clear he was too old for this campaigning. “We had him once at sword’s point, on his knees before us, in the rain, in a church burned for no reason we knew and smelling of wetted ashes—a foul odor. Sir John Perrot was the Lord President of Munster, which was then a new title. He held a sword to Fitzmaurice’s bared breast, and might in a moment have ended his rebellion—a thing I myself could not have done. And he himself did not.”
“Why did he not?” Hugh asked. He needn’t ask why Sidney could not; he believed he knew the man.
“Fear of the Queen’s judgment.” He turned to smile at Hugh. “The wind in London was blowing from a new quarter. Pardon was bruited for the southern lords if the Captain of Desmond were shunned. Fitzmaurice confessed his crimes and his sins there and then, and in good English too. And Sir John lowered his sword. Fitzmaurice went to Dublin prison.”
He laughed lightly then, shook his head as at a memory. “I will tell you a thing about Sir John, our Lord President of Munster.” He cleared his throat and spat. “He is said—for the most part by himself, in confidence, a confidence that no one keeps—to be the bastard son of old King Harry.”
“It may be that there are many of whom that has been said.”
“He was then very fat, and still is,” Sir Henry said. “Indeed, fatter than the old King. Horses fail beneath him; on long journeys he must have a string of them so that none go lame from long carrying of him. Sometime past, I believe, he began trusting to mules instead.
“Now, with Fitzmaurice in chains, Sir John—likely weary of the chase—bethought himself of a way to cancel rebellion at a stroke. What he did, Hugh, was to challenge Fitzmaurice to a duel—single combat. As knights did of old, or as our young men play at doing to please the Queen and her ladies at Hampton Court.”
“And was the challenge accepted?” Hugh in fact had heard something of this weird event, though not the outcome. Uncelebrated in song.
“It was. Fitzmaurice took up the gauntlet, though I think none was thrown down but in words. Now, as I heard the tale—mark you, the tale has flourished as the green bay tree since it occurred—the two agreed to forego the steeds and the armor and the long lance of Sir Gawain and his like, for Irish horses and Irish broadswords.”
“Ah,” Hugh said thoughtfully. “By what you say, an Irish hob might have had some trouble bearing King Harry’s son.”
Sidney shrugged. “Well, the terms were set so.”
“And they fought?”
“On the appointed day, the Geraldine was to be paroled from prison. Sir John appeared early in stout Irish breeches at the field of honor—a bare hilltop. There he waited for the Captain. It began to rain. Sir John grew weary, and—likely—hungry for his dinner. He was of a mind to cast away his cursed Irish short sword when a messenger appears. Not on horse but walking, hatless. And he gives the Lord President a letter, from Fitzmaurice, still in his cell. Were I to kill him this day, the letter read—I have heard Sir John himself recite it—the Queen of England will send another Perrot or his like. But if he kill me there is none in Ireland that can succeed me or to command as I do, therefore I will not willingly fight with him, and so tell him from me.
Hugh, still pondering what he had just been told (a messenger appears, walking, hatless), failed to respond to Sir Henry in amusement or amazement as he might have. “Yes,” he said. “Strange.” They had now reached the eskers marking the long border of North and South. He touched the gold-mounted mirror on its chain, and envisioned the flint he had in his leathers. He felt nothing of the fear he had expected here.
“The end of it,” Sir Henry said, “was that not a week later, by means no one has discovered, Fitzmaurice escaped from Dublin prison and fled to France.”
“From where he has now returned.”
“Madder, fiercer, more bloody-minded.”
They were silent a time, maneuvering their men and carts through the sandhills. The captains called a halt. “Tell me of your son Philip,” Hugh said, one leg lifted to rest upon the saddle so that he could rub the sore calf. “Is he well?”
Sidney nodded with care, looking far off. “He is well. He has been sent by the Queen to the Netherlands, there to fight with the Dutch Protestant army against Spain. Gone with our prayers.”
“Does he still write his poetry?”
Sir Henry Sidney was still, seeming not to have heard. Hugh raised his face to the clouded sky. “It is coming on to rain,” he said.
Ten years before this day the Munster lords under Desmond leadership first rebelled against the Crown. The half of Mug is the land of farmers, and beneath farmers serfs, and though they alone grew the food that all classes ate, they were the ones who were most devastated in that war. Any Munster town or village that Sidney invested and would not surrender was put to the sword; Sidney had declared that any Irishman found in arms would be hanged, the leaders beheaded, and their heads impaled on stakes across the land. The great Earls and their followers issued from their strongholds to burn the English towns and houses, and the standing grain in the fields; they killed the animals to keep the Queen’s army from taking them. Then in the spring the English soldiers burned the green crop as it sprung, to keep it from the Irish. The people ate cresses when there was nothing left, and when they had none they died, and others ate their flesh, and the flesh of their dead babes: so it was reported by the poet and landholder Edmund Spenser, though the Queen would not believe it could be so, that souls in her keeping (for she saw them as in her keeping) could do such things.
That had all happened when Hugh O’Neill was not long returned from England and Penshurst to Ireland and Ulster, before Shane’s death. The land that Hugh O’Neill crossed now in Sir Henry’s company—the land from which he had been told all good things come to be—was a wasteland still, from which nothing could come, no providing, no life; his horse stumbled over bones to which rags of cloth adhered, the bones of children, their mothers too. Death laid upon death. Hugh and his stolid gallowglass and his boys with heavy muskets they hardly knew how to use fell back from Sidney’s fast-moving English pikemen and trained shot. Sir Henry had told him, without passion and without regret, as though recounting a long-ago tour, that at Castlemayer and Glanmire on the borders of Cork he had razed castles and burned fields, killed stock and left it to rot, and marked the land with hanging trees. In his tent that night the Queen spoke to O’Neill’s lagging heart and said Look not on their suffering but on me.
For it was all to do again now: the pacifications, the uprootings of the ignorant and the immovable, like digging out boulders; the insult to true religion, the serpentine advancement of the Roman church. The hapless Earl of Desmond at Askeaton was worshipped as a god; rumors of two Spanish tercios, six thousand pike-and-halberd soldiers and mounted arquebusiers sailing from La Coruña inflamed the rebels and alarmed the settlers. Fitzmaurice had arrived from France as predicted, with a huge banner blessed by the Pope, picturing the bloodied head of Christ encircled in thorns, which could be unfolded and uplifted on stakes and then, before the sheriffs or the Lord President could confiscate it, would disappear and appear elsewhere, to cries of Papa Abú: Victory to the Pope. The Earl of Desmond, Fitzmaurice’s elder, wrote to the English deputy in Cork city that I and my own are ready to venture our lives in Her Majesty’s quarrel, that we may prevent the traitorous attempts of the said James. But what officer of the Crown could trust the Earl of Desmond?
Hugh O’Neill and his company were ordered to Smerwick harbor where the Spanish and Papal forces were said to be coming ashore. Hugh’s force went that way at a run, but Earl Gerald had arrived sooner, and had seemingly done nothing to keep Fitzmaurice’s rebels from taking the town and the Dun an Oir, the Golden Fort, high above it. Leaving his own fighters and captains outside the town walls, Hugh mounted to the fort and sought for the Earl. It was strange that he was surrounded as he went by Fitzmaurice’s armed men, the very ones he had been ordered to put to flight, but who looked on him as a likely ally—an Irish lord, a child of the True Church. It was as though he had no substance, or was only substance and nothing else. He found Desmond on the battlements, seated cross-legged on a stone bench, face upward in the pale sunlight, seeming the same as he had been.
“What would you have me do, my lord?” Hugh asked.
Desmond looked up at him smiling, as at a stranger. “Nothing,” he said.
“Nothing?”
“There were no tercios aboard any foreign ship,” Desmond said, lifting a hand toward the harbor, a gesture Hugh O’Neill remembered from the night and Southwark. “Not any ones that came ashore. No horses neither. Priests and friars, in crowds. Cousin James has gone out to the country to find allies, to get horses too, and will take all those he finds. Farmers and wagoneers must give up their sole possession for their country’s and their religion’s sake, about which the poor men know little and care less. So I have been told.”
Without other order, Hugh O’Neill waited, impatient and annoyed, and spent the length of the day seeking places for his troop and food and drink for them. He’d soon learn that the engagement would soon enough be over without his putting a hand in: a carter whose horse Fitzmaurice had commandeered had gone and complained to his lord, a Burke and a Protestant, who thereupon gathered armed followers and stopped James and his band at a ford: always a ford, men on either side opposed. Give up my fellow’s horse, the Burke cried. Papa Abú! James answered. The blessed image was raised, and all his troop cried Papa Abú! The Burke called back God save the Queen and the Devil take James Fitzmaurice! At that James plunged into the river and one of Burke’s men shot him midstream in the breast with a musket. It was said that James was still strong enough to ride for Burke, turning aside the reloading musketeer and driving his sword through Burke’s neck. Then he tumbled from his horse and died. He had been in Ireland a hundred days and a day.
So Earl Desmond was right that there was nothing to do here now, though Sidney and the Court continually demanded that Desmond do something; why had he been given his freedom if he wouldn’t keep his pledges? The crowd of James Fitzmaurice’s people who had sequestered themselves in the Golden Fort at Smerwick remained there waiting for the promised Spanish forces to evade English pursuit and come in, seizing meantime what they could of provisions from the town, kneeling to hear the priests and the Jesuits declaim. Enough, the Earl of Desmond decided: he had done his duty as best he could. He gathered his own few fighters, bade farewell to Hugh, and went home to Askeaton and Eleanor.
Hugh O’Neill, wandering knight, and his companions later came very close to the ford where James was killed. Hugh had sought for the place, but the thick woods around kept him from it, and he turned his force for home. Later he was told that James’s head, by his own instructions given to his chief men, was cut from his body and carried away by his followers, no one knew to where, nor knows now.