Fugitives! (25 page)

The building they were taken to had been severely damaged; it looked now like a cross between a barracks and a church. Their captors called it ‘The Priory’, which explained its mullioned windows and pointed arches. Once out of sight of the ship, they were lined up for inspection, and were surprised when the leader of the band turned with a tight little smile and said: ‘Welcome to Fanad. I am Domhnall MacSweeney – The MacSweeney, head of the clan – and I suspect you of illegal activity relating to the ship moored off my shore. Who are you and what are you doing in Rathmullan?’

They nudged Fion forward. ‘Sir, there is nothing illegal in our activity – and despite your rude welcome, I am happy give you our names.’ Fion then went on to explain how they had crossed Ireland to find Con, and had brought him here to Rathmullan to join his father who was, at this very moment, waiting for him on the boat moored in the bay outside. ‘Sir,’ he concluded, ‘my uncle remembers with gratitude your past support and friendship. I am sure he is expecting you to let us deliver Con
into his care. After this we will leave and will cause you no further trouble.’

‘Very pretty,’ said The MacSweeney. ‘But it is
I
, boy, who will judge on the value of past friendships. Hugh O’Neill has enough sons on board to hand him his cup. To me, however, you have a certain value. We hold this building – what’s left of it – for the English, and I wish to keep it. We built it as a priory a hundred years ago as a place of sanctuary.’ His face twisted into a bitter smile. ‘Then King Henry threw out our friars, and George Bingham wrecked it. All week I have turned a blind eye to the stream of nobles paddling out to that boat like a line of ducks. I think some small change is due to me. I too have to keep the bloody English off my back!’ He was almost shouting now. ‘The only thing the Prior ever needed to keep under lock and key was his wine. His wine cellar will keep you very nicely. Take them away!’

‘What did he mean, small change?’ asked Sinéad.

‘He means he will hand us all over to the English as a sop for letting the boat sail,’ said Fion.

‘He’s a bitter man,’ declared Sinéad.

It must have been midnight when they heard a clatter on the dungeon stairs. The door opened and the four occupants blinked in the light as men burst in carrying torches.

‘Bring the young lad,’ a voice called. One of them moved towards Sinéad. ‘No, no, not the dark one, the redhead. Put a gag in his mouth, we don’t want another whistle.’

Con didn’t fight against them even when he was manhandled up from the cellar with a lot less respect than the Prior’s wines. When he was marched through the great hall, heads turned as he passed, as people turn to watch a condemned man being taken to the gallows. Con sensed that something momentous was happening. He straightened his shoulders. There was a low murmur of approval, sympathy even. When they came to the winding stairs, he snapped.

‘Leave me, I won’t run away,’ so they let him walk freely until he emerged onto the leaded walkway behind improvised battlements on the priory roof.

At first Con could see little, but when they quenched the torches the whole sweep of the estuary appeared, and on it floated a ghostlike ship, silvery in the starlight. Its sails were full now, slanting across the wind, its wake was like a snail’s trail on the dark water. A light moved on the quarter-deck –
Father!

Hugh O’Neill leaned on the rail behind the helmsman, staring back down the ship’s wake … staring at all he was leaving behind: an island, a nation, a dream, and one small son.

CHAPTER 19

Kiss the Hag

n a height above the town, a shadowy figure stood watching the vanishing ship. He had seen the small figure on the priory walls.
So they have him still
. He looked up at the canopy of stars and noted the halo about the moon. Bad weather coming, but he had a duty to perform. He must compose, if only in his mind, a lament for the departure of Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone, and the noble shipload of chiefs who were going with him.

This would have to be a lament on a grand scale and in the ancient form, in which men are taller than trees, and women fairer than ever they were in life; where mountains rise up to the sky, and cattle and pigs multiply until you could walk across Ireland on their backs. Even as the phrases rolled over in his mind, he knew that they belonged to an older age. This was the end of his Ireland, the end of his culture, the Gaelic culture. O’Neill would never return, and poets like himself would fade and be gone.

A constriction began in his throat, but then, unbidden, a sudden thought crossed his mind:
Perhaps there is something I can save out of
this.
He looked down at the priory.
Four new seeds to plant if I can get them out of there. I even have an apprentice!
He smiled.
Perhaps we won’t fade, after all, perhaps we will just change.
The lights had all gone out in the tower below.
Now, how on earth can I get them out?

In the pitch dark of the Prior’s wine cellar they waited anxiously for Con’s return.

‘It’s not dawn yet, is it?’ Sinéad asked.

‘No, more like midnight,’ answered Séamus. ‘Why?’

‘It’s just that they take prisoners to be executed at dawn. They wouldn’t hurt Con, surely? That MacSweeney – he’s so cold!’ Sinéad shivered.

Half an hour passed, then there were sounds of steps on the stairs again. The door opened, throwing a mat of yellow light onto the broken flags of the dungeon floor and Con’s small form stumbled on to it. With a mocking, ‘Sleep well, son’, the guard closed the door and Con was left to shuffle cautiously to his place on the cold, stone shelf that once held barrels and now served the children as a bed. Sinéad slid along the shelf towards him.

‘Well?’ one of the boys asked from the darkness.

‘He’s gone,’ was all Con could whisper.

Sinéad reached out and found, first an arm, and then his hand. He resisted, but after a moment he slid towards her; he rested his head against her shoulder for a moment, and sniffed. ‘You smell of Aoife.’ She smiled; it wasn’t exactly a compliment, but if it comforted him … She imagined the two of them, from four years
old, curled up together like pups in that big family bed. She put an arm around him and pulled him towards her.

The guard who opened the door in the morning jabbed a torch into the bracket on the wall and glared at them.

‘Looks as if the chief intends to keep you alive for a bit, after all,’ he said, putting down a basket. ‘Fresh bread and hard-boiled eggs,’ he announced, ‘better’n I get!’ He scratched his head. ‘Now, what was I to tell you? Oh yes. There will be a clan gathering tonight. The usual humble fare: roasted ox that’s been hanging for a week – ripe as a peach it is – a fat pig, and a couple of last year’s lambs. Followed by the usual blather, music and song, a fight or two, perhaps – and if we get really bored, a hanging! The chief’ll decide on your fate then.’ He eyed the children. ‘Eat up, scrub up, and shut up, that’s my advice. That way you’ll be clean for the feast – or the hanging!’ He chuckled. ‘There’s water’n soap in the corner, and a bucket for soil. If you want anything more, ask Calum. That’s him whistling – he’d drive a saint to drink.’

The whistling was getting closer and there was the sound of steps on the stairs. They expected a young man, but Calum looked to be about the same age as the chief. He was carrying their packs which he now dropped on the floor at the door. They had obviously been gone through, but otherwise looked intact.

‘Don’t mind Ronan,’ he said, ‘he was just trying to cheer you up – in his own way. I’ll be looking after you.’ He reached up and unlatched some shutters high in their prison wall; weak
morning light filtered down through an iron grille. ‘Don’t forget your breakfast.’ Then he went out, bolted the door, and his whistling receded.

‘The Ronan one – he didn’t mean it about the hanging, did he?’ wondered Sinéad.

‘I think that was his idea of a joke,’ said Fion. ‘But the bread smells good. Perhaps the chief will be in a better mood now that the boat’s gone. A lot of these MacSweeneys are still Gallowglasses at heart – you’d have to be half-mad to swear to die before you surrender, like Gallowglasses do, and you’d have to be equally mad to get on the wrong side of them. We’ll just have to lie low–’

There was a sudden eruption from the bench where Séamus had been sitting. ‘Lie low? Aren’t we even going to try to escape? Where’s my pack? Look in your packs, everyone,’ he commanded as he tore his open. ‘Have they left us any weapons? I’m not going to rot here, Gallowglasses or not.’ They caught his mood and searched thoroughly, but there wasn’t as much as a penknife between them. Séamus threw his pack down in disgust. ‘Here, Fion, give me a leg-up. Let’s look at the grille up there; it looks rusted through to me.’ Fion cupped his hands for Séamus’s foot, and heaved as he sprang. For a moment Séamus hung, swinging from the grille, and sending down a shower of rust, but it didn’t move an inch. He dropped back to the ground and bent forward to brush the rust out of his hair. ‘Those bars must be an inch thick,’ he said in disgust. ‘Damn it, how did we get ourselves into this pickle?’

‘It was my fault, riding ahead.’ Con’s voice sounded small.

Sinéad turned on him. ‘No, Con, it was not your fault! We all rode down that hill like mad things. We’re all to blame. The only
one who showed any sense was Haystacks. I wonder if he got away? Surely if they’d caught him they’d have brought him down here. You’re right, Séamus, we mustn’t give up, and the best thing is for us to be prepared. What did grouchy Ronan say? “Eat up, scrub up, and shut up?” I’m going to scrub up first. You gentlemen can start breakfast – but leave me my share.’

They washed in turns, and Sinéad blessed her boy’s-length hair – at least she could comb it. Hearing Calum whistling outside, they called for more water, and got it. He had just put down the bucket when he caught sight of Sinéad and blinked: ‘Hey laddie, where’d you get that pretty face?’ With a shock she realised she’d parted her wet fringe like a girl. She blew him a raspberry and hastily tousled her hair again.

They had no knives, so all the food had to be broken up by hand. As Sinéad cracked an egg, she remembered the last cooked meal she’d had, that memorable stew in the herdsmen’s camp, with Aoife watching every spoonful. ‘I wish I could have a bowlful of that stew Aoife gave me at the O’Brolchain’s,’ she said wistfully.

Con looked up, an anxious look on his face: ‘You didn’t eat it, did you?’ Then he shook his head. ‘You know, Sinéad, that stew was the self-same stew I was given the day I arrived with them three years ago. You see, each day, we throw in whatever comes to hand – a fist-full of oats, a hat-full of barley, bits of cow, chunks of deer, gobbets of sheep, wild boar, hedgehogs – prickles off, if we have time – badgers, squirrels … let me think: snails, frogs …’

‘Ah go on with you!’ laughed Sinéad. ‘Why don’t you tell the others about the crab-apples and the English scouts?’

As the day wore on they ran out of stories to tell and listened
instead to the wind rising outside.

‘How do you get to Spain?’ Con asked, glancing anxiously up at the tossing branches they could see through the grille.

‘They will sail down the length of Ireland and then south across the Bay of Biscay,’ Fion replied. They looked at each other; they all knew about the Bay of Biscay, birthplace of storms, and wondered about Uncle Hugh’s boat, battling with wind and wave.

As the light outside faded, the roar of the clan gathering upstairs grew until eventually it drowned out the sound of the wind. Calum and Ronan came in, carrying a length of chain.

‘Stand close together and put one foot forward,’ Ronan ordered. The two then clamped ankle-rings around the children’s legs, and linked these onto the chain. ‘This little fella here could nearly step out of his ring!’ Calum observed. ‘Don’t disgrace me by running away, son, will you?’ Con told him it would be a pleasure, and blinked at the smell of strong drink off him. ‘Carry the chain between you as you walk,’ the man ordered.

Off they went in a line up the steep flight of stairs from their dungeon, through a pointed church-like arch, and into a hall already thronged with men. To their left was a high table, with a canopied chair for the chief. They were to sit at a side table looking diagonally across at the chief’s chair. They had to shuffle in, in front of their bench, on account of their chains. The air was full of the smell of damp clothing, smoking torches, and the more welcome smell of food, much of which was already set out on the tables
where the feasters would soon help themselves. Only the high table had servers. Two tall, longhaired Gallowglass warriors in padded jerkins and bright mail stood on each side of the chief’s chair, their fearsome battleaxes flashing as they moved. The seated men had beakers of mead to hand, the few ladies held glasses of wine.