Hugh O’Neill had passed, almost without noticing, from his twenties to his thirties; one by one the endless line of enemies and false friends and mad fools that he faced in the claiming of his heritage were bought off, or befriended, or exiled, or hanged. The sons of Shane. His uncle Turlough Luineach. Whatever policy they formed in London, for him or against, the black mirror was his adviser and spy in the struggles. When he contested with the mirror itself, he might refuse its instruction, and later be sorry he had. Sometimes when he looked in, it would say Strike now or lose all, and sometimes it would only look upon him; sometimes it wept or smiled, or said Power springs from the mind and the heart. But never was any sound heard, and it was as though Hugh thought or said these things to himself in his own mind, which made them not the less true or potent. If he could discern the meaning of what was said and act on it, it was likely to come out as predicted, and he would win. And in the spring of 1587 he returned to London for what he imagined to be the last time, summoned finally to be invested by the Queen with the title Earl of Tyrone. He was thirty-seven years old.
The face Hugh saw in the black mirror had never changed—at least it would seem always unchanged to him, white and small and bejeweled—but the woman of flesh was not young. The paint couldn’t cover the fine lines etched all around her eyes, nor the lines in the great bare skull above. He knelt before her, taking his hat from his head. “Cousin,” the Queen said, and held out her ringed hand for him to kiss. Torn between love and shame Hugh put his lips near to the proffered hand without touching it, and when he raised his eyes she was for a moment young again and serenely lovely.
“My cousin. My lord of Tyrone.”
The Council around him, bearded worthies, some white-headed now, nodded discreetly to one another and to the new Earl. Somehow—they knew not how—the Queen had conquered the heart of this rude Irishman. Those closest to him saw that there were tears in his eyes. He himself didn’t know why he wept: he was not a knight, come home with trophies; he was not returned home; what had been his had been taken from him, and now was merely given back, and what glory was there for him in that? He knew for sure that the nobles around him did not count his name with theirs.
At the dock when he came home again, with more gifts and purchases in the hold of his English ship than twenty ox-carts could bear away, he saw, among the O’Neill and O’Hagan men-at-arms and their brehons and wives come to greet him, the poet O’Mahon, like a withered leaf, leaning on a staff. Hugh O’Neill went to him, knelt and kissed the pale hand the poet held out to him. O’Mahon raised him, felt his big face and broad shoulders, the figured steel breastplate upon him.
Streets that had been silent and empty when, some years before, a young Irishman came home from that other island to which he had been carried away—they were not empty now: from street to street and house to house the news went that Hugh O’Neill was home again, and they came around his horse to touch his boot and lift their babes to see him; and now and then he must acknowledge them, and doff the black velvet cap he wore, with the white owl’s feather in its band.
“That promise given you was kept,” said O’Mahon.
“How, cousin?”
“You are to be the O’Neill, inaugurated at Tullahogue as your ancestors have ever been. You are Earl of Tyrone too, by the grant of the English: you gave them rule over all your lands and they gave that rule back to you just as though the lands were theirs to give, and added on a title, Earl.”
“How is that the keeping of a promise?” O’Neill asked.
“That is for them to know; yours to act and learn.” He touched Hugh’s arm and said, “Will you go on progress in this summer, cousin? The lands that owe you are wide.”
“I may do so. The weather looks to be fine.”
“I would be happy to go along with you, if I might. As far at least as to the long rath that rises beyond Dungannon.”
“Well then you shall. You will have a litter to carry you, if you like.”
“I can still ride,” the poet said with a smile. “And my own horse knows the way there.”
“What shall we do there?”
“I? Not a thing. But you: you might meet again your allies there, or perhaps their messenger or herald; and see what now they will say, not to a boy but to a man of years. And they may tell you of others, some greater than they, who are now waking from sleep, and their pale horses too.”
The new Earl felt a shudder, of awe or fear or something with no name; it passed, overwhelmed by a resistance that was also nameless.
They carried O’Mahon in a litter after all; it was clear he was near his end, and might fall even from a horse who knew the way. From Dublin in the south, people followed the fire-new Earl and his train of soldiers the ninety miles to Dungannon, sleeping rough and eating what the householders along the way brought out, who came to see the Great Earl of Tir-Oen pass by them, cheering if he lifted his hand to them, cheering if he didn’t. The company reached the tower in rain, and the old poet was cold and speechless when they lifted him from the litter and laid him on the couch from where often he had spoken his verses, sharp, potent, praiseful, witty. Everyone knew that more than one traitorous or worthless man had shrunk away and died from the force of young O’Mahon’s satire. Now the poet could hardly whisper, couldn’t cease shivering though wrapped in a heavy mantle. O’Neill brought him warmed wine with sugar, and meats that the old man turned away from. He lifted a hand to draw Hugh to him, so that his words faint almost as breath could be heard. Hugh put his hand beneath the poet’s head and raised him a little, so that he might have ease to speak.
“Dying, cousin,” was what he said.
“I forbid it,” Hugh said. “We must have our poet.”
“You will have,” O’Mahon whispered. “A bard will arise from beyond this clan, and will defeat in song all others; that will be the one, and it may be the last one, that the septs of the O’Neills will know.”
Saying all that had exhausted the man, and Hugh lowered his head again upon the couch. “The last?” he said.
“That may be.” He moved his hand to again draw Hugh close. His breath had a faint sweetness. “But this is certain. That bard will be a woman.”
“A woman?” He had not heard of any woman poet or bard in this land, though women sing the caoine, the keening for the dead, and would for O’Mahon.
“A woman. There have been such, though not for a long course of years now. Their song praised the kings who honored them, but they mocked those who refused them their right to sing.”
“Who will she be, what will she sing?”
“She’ll sing what she knows. She may be a bard fierce in satire, as Labercham, whose words could kill. Or like her who sang dying Diarmuid to sleep. And whether she sing long or not for long, whether she choose a successor or cannot, she will never be forgotten. I will be. She will not.”
“You will not.”
O’Mahon smiled then, as though pleased to be told this yet amused to hear it. He let go of Hugh’s hand, the lids closed over his blind eyes. He spoke no words after that.
The women of the castle had washed O’Mahon’s body and wrapped it in white linen. He was carried out then by Hugh O’Neill; his aged uncle Phelim; the O’Neill brehon, with whom the poet had often played chess though unable to see the pieces; and two men of the O’Hagans. They bore his litter the ten miles, following Hugh’s piper, resting at each milestone, to the lake’s shore at Machaire Grianáin, or Machery as the English called it, followed by the people of Dungannon Castle, the women keening without pause, passing the high cries from one group to another. There by the shore men had woven a narrow boat of thick willow withies. There was a priest of the clan to say words that O’Mahon would not have minded said, nor much cared to hear; his gods were before the priest’s god. The bearers laid down the litter and lifted the body in their hands to place it in the boat, which was hardly a boat, and hardly needed to be one. This was near where the Blackwater River runs fast into the great lake, Lough Neagh, so the little boat once launched would be carried out over the lake by the current until it sank, which would not be long at all since large stones and dry tinder and hollow reeds filled with gunpowder had been placed around the last of O’Mahon, and were set afire as the boat was pushed out. It went out bravely, and for a time it kept on, and then it took on water; soon the fire was extinguished and the boat began to go down beneath the gray surface. The men beat their weapons on their shields, and the women sang the shrill descants of the caoine as though their own sons had been taken from them.
The men and the women and the priest and the mounted fighters returned to Dungannon at evening along the way they had come, following Hugh. At a juncture of ways still a distance from the castle he stopped, and called forward his piper, who was also the chief of the household kerne.
“Bring the people home,” he said. “I have a thing I must do alone, along this way.”
The piper, walking backward a few steps so that the people could see, began to play, drawing the line of folk with him. Hugh turned onto the faint track and went through the heather and along a stream, until near dark he could see from this new vantage the rath that O’Mahon had twice led him to, where he had received the gift he carried. A gift and a promise. Gifts have reasons for the giver and the receiver; promises made are kept or broken, or they bring a thing different from the thing promised. It was their promise to Hugh, O’Mahon said, that had been kept; but Hugh did not know how to see that it was so.
The rath was pale, almost vanishing in the rising mist and the evening. He rode closer to it than he had gone with O’Mahon, not knowing what he meant by coming here now alone, without interpretation. Though grass had grown over the sides and top of it, it was clear now to him that the walls were scarped as straight and high as dirt could be without falling into rubble. He saw now as he had not before that it was set about in places with great stones, uncut and lumpish, but remarkable—stones so large were uncommon on the Ulster plain, and to move them to this place would have been great labor. The being that he had first seen, the one like a mounted prince, would not do such labor, nor the silvery warriors he had seen gathered in the twilight. The black being from the ground, though, who had lifted the stone that became a chest—he and his like might do it. Doctor Dee in England had told him that the Druids of Ireland had lifted and tossed across the sea the great stones that stood on Salisbury plain. If they could do that it would have been easy for them to make a dwelling-place of earth and guardian stones, into which folk could go at need: folk not like himself nor anyone now alive. They might long remain hidden within it, they might change in nature there, and issue forth when they chose, or were called.
When he had come as close as he dared he dismounted. The border of day and night, O’Mahon had said. Hugh stood at the distance he had stood in childhood, and again when he’d returned from England at first. He searched within his coat for the flint, and for a moment thought he had lost it, but no, it was there as ever, and taking it he felt its eagerness to be held. He knew in his inmost soul that it could bring forth those hosts, but nothing on earth would cause him to use it so. Not now, perhaps never. If he awoke the island—how he would, or if he could, he knew no answers to that—and in that day called upon them, would they leave their feasting and dancing and come forth, would they agree to be commanded by him? He was descended from kings that, in the tales, once did command that folk, or dealt with them as comrades, at least for a time. Kings and heroes in that time could be brought down by an error, a little, little error. A stone kicked from the path, a stone that was not a stone; a flying bird pierced by an arrow-shot, a bird that was not a bird. The living folk in this day stayed indoors at night and smoored their fires, never threw their dirty foot-washing water out the door, never plucked the flower they knew not to pluck nor shot a javelin or flung a stone at a forbidden animal. When the Moon was full and golden in the night sky they knelt on the ground and prayed to her, prayed their prayers to Mary Ever Virgin, as they had for a thousand years. What error lay ahead for the Earl of Tyrone to make? A wrong word spoken; a wrong marriage made?
The bard to come, a woman—would she sing of him? What song? Would it kill him or give him life? She might not come for a hundred years, by which time he himself would be with O’Mahon and the so many others of his line whose bones lay on Lough Neagh’s bottom. Or on a plain unburied, with men of flesh and bone and blood that he had led into death. He stood till darkness was full, but no persons appeared, no commandment was made or answered, no duties laid. He mounted, and turned for home.
Some thousands of years before that day—no one can say for certain how long before—other warriors and leaders first came from Spain into Ireland. They were people called Gaedhal or Gael because their ancestor in the days of Moses was Gaedhal Glas. When this Gaedhal was a child Moses cured him of the bite of a serpent—and he prophesied, look you, that no serpent or other poisonous thing would infest the green western Island that his far-off posterity would one day inhabit.
The Gael wandered for hundreds of years before they came into Spain, following their leader Mil or Milesius, and after they had long lived there they heard of the beautiful island to the north: the Isle of Destiny, foretold by Moses. Mil’s uncle Ith was first sent to find that land, to return them a report upon it. But the Tuatha De Danann, the great wizard-people of the island, suspecting his purpose, killed Ith. It was the first death of the wars of the Milesians and the Tuatha De Danann.
When Mil was dead in Spain, his eight sons, with their mother, Scota, and their families and followers, set out for that isle; but when they attempted to land at a place in the South the Tuatha De raised a great storm that drove them away, which they could do and have done in other times. The Milesian poet Amergin prayed a prayer for them: I pray that they reach the land of Eirinn, those who ride upon the vast and fruitful sea; that they come to live everywhere upon her plains, her mountains, and her valleys, in her forests that drop nuts and all fruits, upon her rivers and her cataracts, upon her lakes and her great waters and her spring-abounding hills: and that kings may rise from them at Tara.
In time they did reach Eirinn, and fought the Tuatha De Danann until at last a peace was made whereby the Milesians took the land under the sky and the stars for their part, and the Tuatha the land beneath the earth and in the hollow hills for theirs. And the lands of the children of Mil under the sky were divided into fourths, north, east, south, and west: and a fifth part lay in their hearts always, wherever they went, no matter how far away.
Everyone knows these things. Fathers taught their children the tale, with many details of weapons and combats, trials and riddles. But Hugh O’Neill had had no father to teach him: not tales of the Other Lands, not his prayers, not how to fight nor how to die. He didn’t grieve for his father, but he grieved for his father’s absence from him. Alone, he had felt doubled, torn in two by himself; but on this day he felt himself a Fachen: sad warrior of one eye, one leg to run on, one withered arm to fight with, a half-person who learned to seem a whole man to others, while knowing always that he was not. In his thirty-seventh year Hugh, Earl of Tyrone, remained as afraid within as when he was a boy in England. He never dreamed: but within him, before and behind, a kind of night was always present, darkness visible: each day he woke to it, and each night retired knowing he would meet it again: perhaps, on one future night, to meet at last himself.