“I have been recalled,” Sir Henry Sidney told Hugh O’Neill. “My service to the Queen and Council is no longer wanted.” It was painful to Hugh that he had known this would come about, that a letter from the Queen would reach Sir Henry after Fitzmaurice was dead: he had been told of it.
“Three times has Her Majesty sent me as her Deputy to Ireland,” he said to Hugh. “Each time I returned a thousand pounds to the worse than when I went, and this return is no different.”
They parted at the port of Cork harbor: Hugh to return to Ulster with the small remaining force he had brought to face the Queen’s Catholic enemies, Sir Henry to take ship for Dublin. When the Lord Deputy’s affairs there were settled, he would travel to London and make his reports to the Council: admitting his failures, presenting his assessments, and putting before them all that he knew that might be of use to the next man who would be named Lord Deputy; hoping (he didn’t say) that the man would be wealthy, and thus not come home a beggar. He’d accept from the Queen the quiet post of President of the Welsh Marches, lived at Ludlow Castle in Wales until he surrendered that post as well, and returned to Penshurst; he tended to his lands, he read, he saw his daughter married; he waited for Philip to return from fighting with the Protestant forces in the Netherlands, and died not long before his son, Hugh’s childhood friend, poet and soldier, was killed on the field of battle at Zutphen, fighting for the Netherlandish Protestants.
Hugh chose to return from Munster a different way than the way he had come: it was becoming a custom of his, to return by a new route, and learn of things he had not before seen. Despite his travels his knowledge of the Irish island was meager, and whatever his place in the world, whether made by himself or granted by others, he should know what earth lay beneath his feet. Most of his remaining fighters, the O’Hagans, the gallowglass and their chiefs, would go home along the familiar roads to Dublin and then to Drogheda, Dundalk, and by the Gap of the North into Ulster; there would be some chance of provender that way, less the way Hugh would go. With a handful of men mounted and on foot, he set out toward the road to Limerick, then turned from it when another road seemed to take them a better way to the west and north; but that way was lost at the end of day, and at morning they chose a different way again, now riding in tight formation, looking this way and that. The road never ceased entirely, but there was hardly a farmstead where they might ask for direction. Desolation was everywhere. Every man or child they saw and hailed ran to hide. But then two boys astride one horse came near them, red-headed and fox-eyed, reminding Hugh of Siobhan’s young brother. Could they guide the troop as far as the border of Roscommon? The boys clearly didn’t know that name. North, said Hugh. And yes, they said they could, nodded grinning at each other and then at Hugh, and he understood that they were twins: a wonderful and strange thing.
The two went ahead on their old horse, with no saddle or bridle; the day seemed to last forever, the sun beclouded but unwilling to sink. Was it an omen? He couldn’t tell. He asked the boys for the names of places, of old ruined towers and standing stones, rivers and fords, and some they knew; but names seemed of little interest to them. When darkness at last came, arising from the dark path more than falling, the boys began pointing to the west, and saying a name in their local speech. Hugh listened and made out a word, the name of a lake: Lough Gur. Desmond’s castle on a lake island. He’d have liked to see it; was it far, he asked the boys, but he couldn’t make sense of their answer. Earl Gerald was likely at Askeaton now, but Lough Gur was the more ancient place. He kept on, following the pale horse in the darkness. He’d have to stop soon, but the men with him wanted not to dismount; they didn’t like this Munster land; they’d seen too much murder, and done enough themselves.
It was nearly dark now. The boys were far ahead, yet Hugh could sense that they were still leading them; his company followed, up a swell in the ground to the east, toward a black hill whose edge was drawn on the still-pale sky. A glow that way might be the rising of the Moon. The horsemen were silent. Then there appeared far off a sparkle of moving lights on the hillside, a few at first and then more, proceeding around the hill’s bare top, a gold chain for its throat; but then more coming from high up, where a larger fire had been built, sparks rising. Ahead of Hugh the boys could be seen returning to him.
“What is it?” Hugh called to them. “What are the lights? Who carries them?” The boys laughed and pointed to the dancing fires that seemed held by no one. The men around Hugh tried to still their mounts, who didn’t like the smell of smoke. Faery, one cried.
“No,” said the twins, laughing. “Only folk! It is St. John’s eve, did you not know?”
The hill was crowded now with torches of straw, and voices and song could be heard. The twins were singing, words whose meaning Hugh couldn’t discern; the Moon now was half-risen in her fullness, and the songs ran through the people, one song lighting another. Hugh, as though granted the knowledge by the fires and the Moon, cried to the boys: “What is the name of this place? Is it Knockainey Hill?”
“Knock Áine!” they called. “Blessed Áine!” The mounted men around Hugh were laughing now, some of them, others crossing themselves and kissing the knuckle of their right-hand’s long finger to ward off any evil. Still the Moon went on rising, Áine’s Moon, and the songs turned to cries and ululations, and Hugh remembered the Earl of Desmond telling of his ancestor, Geároid Iarla, the first Geraldine earl that ever was, who stole the Goddess Áine’s cloak where she bathed, and had a son borne to him by her, a leaping son who left the earth a gray goose. Hugh called to the boys, wanting to reward them, to learn more: but they only waved back as they rode their old horse away into the crowd of boys and girls bearing St. John’s fire.
Many years later, in the Palazzo Salviati in Rome, Hugh O’Neill traversed those plains and woods of Munster again with Peter Lombard, Archbishop and Confessor, a Waterford boy and still a man of Munster in his mind and thought. It was cool in the palace; the two sat together as they had so many nights, Hugh talking, reluctantly now as the remembered years came near to the last. What was of interest to the cleric was as a thorn to the Earl, an unplucked thorn in his hand.
“Desmond,” the Archbishop said. “How was it he came to the rescue of Mother Church in that island? He despised Fitzmaurice.”
Hugh looked up to the dim angels on the ceiling. “I cannot tell,” he said. “He had proved himself a Catholic by his failure to stop his cousin James, no matter that a Protestant, a Burke, had murdered James well before Desmond could act. The English commander Sidney and his soldiery roamed through Munster as wolves among the sheep, invading Desmond’s towns and castles, and even though they surrendered, all those found within were killed. Catholic lords and chiefs of the clans were coming in to the English for pardons, renouncing their faith so that their lives at least might be spared.”
“Was not his castle at Askeaton invested?” the Archbishop asked him. “And the Abbey there desecrated, the Mass vessels stolen, the pictured glass of the windows smashed?”
“All that,” the Earl responded. “But also the graves of the Fitzgeralds were broken into, and the dead thrown out. The tomb of Joan Fitzgerald Butler too, the old Earl’s wife, and her bones scattered as well.”
“Unholy,” Lombard said.
For some moments they sat silent, feeling the moving airs in the chamber.
“There was famine in the land then.”
“There was, and it worsened. In time only soldiers could eat, and they had little enough.”
“Wolves were seen in the streets of Dublin, seeking whom they may devour.”
“I was told how Earl Desmond went out,” Hugh said. “It was October, as it is now. The English, and Tom Butler too it was said, offered to Desmond that he might escape a proclamation of treason, already drawn up, if he would agree to come to England and live there peacefully. Think of that.”
“England, land of heresy,” Peter said. “Where so many Catholic saints were made by the headsman and the stake.”
“Desmond could then barely stand. He was helped up upon a white horse, and the sword of the Desmonds put in his hand. I was told of this.”
“I wonder,” Peter asked the air, “was he perhaps spoken to by an angel?”
Again Hugh O’Neill raised his eyes to the darkening heaven of the ceiling, the gray angels vanishing. “I wouldn’t think,” he said, “that an angel would have spoken to Gerald Fitzgerald. It would have not been to that angel’s profit then.”
“Yet when at last Desmond went out, the West arose.” The priest knew this history from letters and from the tales of exiles. The fear the New English colonials felt, which was felt by the English army too, was surely God-sent. “The four horsemen of the world’s end rode the land,” the Archbishop said. “The hanging-trees bore much fruit. The Spanish sent ships and men, but too few. Too-cautious Philip, may he rest in peace.”
Hugh felt the priest’s gaze on himself. Why had he not joined the cause, Peter asked, without asking. What had kept him from it? Why did they in the counties believe he would, that he would soon crown himself at Tara, a Catholic King, and so make the world new? Hugh O’Neill knew why he did not do those things—he knew, now, in what powerful hands he had been held, powers that he would escape from only long after that time of upheaval: and by then it was all too late to change the course of things, Time turning like a great-ship into a wind blowing from a wrong quarter.
“But at the end Desmond was alone, hidden in the Glanageenty woods in Kerry,” said the Earl. “It’s there that the clan Moriarty, never followers of Desmond, found him, in a mean cabin. Bound him, dragged him out to set him upon a horse to bring him in; when they found he was too weak even to walk or ride they cut his head off, and carried it away for the reward. All this I have heard from those who knew of it, who saw it, that head.”
The Archbishop crossed himself. “Had it all so quickly come to nothing, then?”
The Earl arose, stiff with long sitting, lifting himself with the arms of the chair. “There is nothing that comes to nothing,” he said. “Unless all things do.”
He left the priest with an embrace and a blessing and went to his bed, followed by his ever-present pair of young servants, whom Hugh thought were twins. They helped him to undress, don his linen shirt, and recline on his couch; they put his old mantle around him, exchanging a look, perhaps of amusement. When he declared he was now comfortable, they backed away bowing and out his chamber door, which they shut soundlessly.
Toward morning he awoke, or perhaps he wasn’t awake, but feeling himself to be not where he was. In darkness, but not a darkness here and now. A great black hill before him that rose sharply, one that he knew was not the one he’d seen, Knockainey, asleep and low. And yet this high crag was that hill, he had no doubt of that. And as his spirit observed it, he saw or had knowledge of a being climbing upward, swift, without effort, stepping from stone to stone. His lank gray hair streamed behind him like a nun’s veil, his lean carven face pointed ahead. White as old bones. Hugh knew the man; he thought he was that man. Healed, or unhurt; all in one piece; holding, as a guide, a shard of flint that his thumb knew. The mountain regarded his ascent to a place where a gate or door appeared, two columns and a lintel of granite, deep dark within. And there were beings there, the Old Ones, the kings of Munster, Geároid Iarla, and beyond in the hill’s heart, there was the Moon’s child and mother, Áine Cli, Áine of the light, hastening to bring him in.