Seek the Fair Land

by Walter Macken

  ‘I don’t know whether I will or not,’ shouted Murdoc. ‘ It will depend. I have until tonight to decide. You go back to Sebastian. You get him to pray. If his God is right let Him strike me dead before I take the oath. Maybe I will suddenly be filled in here with a strong belief. I don’t know. Just that I know what I want, that’s all. I know how I am going about to get it, that’s all.’

  ‘The price will be very high, Murdoc, believe me,’ said Dominick.

  ‘I will pay the price if I have to, Dominick,’ said Murdoc. Then he looked out from him. He ran a little along the beach. Dominick looked after him. There was a sailing boat rounding the point. It seemed to be packed with men. There wasn’t much wind, but they were helping it on with oars.

  Murdoc was looking at the boat with shining eyes. He held his body straight, his hands on his hips.

  Dominick looked at him.

  He felt that Sebastian was standing beside him, even if he wasn’t. It’s no good, he told him, Murdoc is pregnant with dreams. I gave him no light.

  Murdoc was waving at the men in the boat.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  ‘I INTENDED to be here last night,’ said Coote. There was plenty of time to be here, but we were detained on the way.’

  ‘It’s a bad country for travelling,’ said Murdoc.

  ‘I don’t think it need be that bad,’ said Coote. ‘We were attacked on three occasions. We lost men.’

  ‘Iar-Connacht has always been a rough place,’ said Murdoc. ‘When I am travelimg through it myself I have to travel well protected.’

  The yellow-flecked eyes were looking at him calculatingly. Murdoc’s face was bland and inscrutable. There was excitement in his stomach. It was always the same way when he was with Coote, as if he was engaged on a dangerous and exciting pastime, which he was.

  ‘Where is Commissioner Bright?’ Coote asked.

  Murdoc’s eyes looked at the vaulted stone ceiling. ‘He is in the room upstairs,’ he said, ‘getting goose grease rubbed into his backside. He has a wonderful case of saddle-sore. The medical-ollamh is delighted with him.’

  They were in the part of the buildings known as the castle. It was a three-storeyed stone building, thatched with straw. The walls were thick and the windows narrow and it was a cold place in the winter time. The walls were hung with plaited rushes and there were rushes strewn on the floor. Behind Coote there was a big wood fire burning in the open fireplace, because even in high summer this room had to be heated. Coote was sitting on the only wooden chair, which had carved side pieces and a carved back. It was fashioned from black bog oak. There was an oak table in front of him on which his arms were resting, and his white hands were kneading one another. Murdoc sat across the table from him on a bench, lighted-torches guttered from brackets on the walls and a smoking fat-oil lamp was on the table between them. Sometimes as draughts blew down the stone stairway from the apartments above, the wick of the lamp swayed and threw thick smoke at their faces.

  ‘I will make Iar-Connacht safe for travelling, I assure you,’ said Coote.

  ‘You will be doing a good day’s work,’ said Murdoc politely.

  ‘There are many things about the place that don’t please me,’ said Coote. ‘The people are wild. They seem to be uncontrolled by their masters.’

  ‘Mountain people are difficult,’ said Murdoc.

  ‘Not when they are dead,’ said Coote.

  ‘You would want four armies to scour all the mountains,’ said Murdoc, ‘ and even then you couldn’t kill the wild ones,’

  ‘I was thinking that there are too many masters,’ said Coote.

  Here it is, thought Murdoc. He waited.

  ‘The loyalties are divided,’ said Coote. How can they be taught to serve three masters and an overlord?’

  ‘That’s a problem,’ said Murdoc.

  ‘Once,’ said Coote, ‘it was all one from the lake to the sea from here to here,’ He was drawing an imaginary map on the table with his fingers. ‘I think it might be more malleable that way. Do you?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Murdoc. ‘They are a difficult people. You yourselves were responsible. You broke up the clans. When the clans were one a chieftain had a hand of iron over a wide area. He was obeyed. Now you have them broken up into so many small clanships that people don’t know who they owe loyalty to. One claims this and the other claims that. There will always be disagreement and strife that way.’

  ‘You have done well,’ said Coote. Murdoc said nothing. ‘Can you see my vision? One tight-knit area, however wild and broken, with one lord owing obedience to one overlord. Did you think of that?’

  ‘Very little,’ said Murdoc, lying. ‘ It has not been easy here. It has taken them a time to accept me. I think they do now.’

  ‘Could you get the others over the vast area of Iar-Connacht to accept you in the same way?’

  Murdoc thought about it. ‘It might be done but it’s a terrible burden,’ he said. ‘It would require time and force. But it could be done. But would it be good?’

  ‘It would be good,’ said Coote, ‘I would see to that. If you gave me allegiance. It would have to be somebody I could trust. I think I can trust, you, Murdoc, or can I?’

  ‘I think you might be able to trust me,’ said Murdoc, ‘if by pleasing you I am pleasing myself, and also pleasing the people, who are my people.’

  ‘You might be kinder to them than I will be,’ said Coote. ‘If I have to, I will banish them off the face of the earth. I won’t leave one of them alive. I will grind them into their own rocks.’

  There was a flush on his cheeks. His hand was clenched.

  ‘I don’t think you would live long enough to accomplish that,’ said Murdoc.

  Coote looked at him coldly.

  ‘Will you take the oath?’ he asked.

  ‘You tell me what advantage there is to me in taking the oath,’ Murdoc was leaning back. ‘Is it going to make things easier for me, do you think?’

  ‘There is no other way,’ said Coote. ‘I know you. You would go far along a road to better yourself, Murdoc. You have a grasping and ambitious nature. You are like myself. Make no mistake about it. We are here to stay, if it takes a thousand years, but no man will ever be a leader in this land any more unless he has the right religion. I promise you that. It’s that or nothing. With it, everything. Power, wealth, influence, or poverty. There is no choice for you, except exile, or holing like a wolf in your mountains with a small band of men. You can live like a wolf or you can live like a king. You can go on or you can be obliterated. You can take your choice.’

  The door behind them opened and Columba came in. She was carrying wine on a silver platter.

  Murdoc kept his eyes on Coote. He saw him looking up casually and then he saw the widening of the eyes in recognition, and the hardening of the muscles around the thin lips. Murdoc was pleased. Why do I like this? he wondered. It was like taunting a tiger.

  ‘Thank you, Columba,’ he said then. ‘ You know Sir Charles.’

  Columba was looking at Coote. Her face was stony. He had wiped all expression out of his face.

  ‘Will you be staying the night with us, sir?’ Columba asked. ‘Will I prepare apartments for you?’

  ‘No,’ said Coote. ‘I will be staying with my men, in the open,’ Murdoc grinned. ‘I am glad to see you safe, Mistress Dorsi. I myself am keeping your house warm for you.’

  ‘You are beating the air,’ said Columba. ‘I no longer need my house.’ She left the platter on the table in front of them. ‘If you need me, Murdoc,’ she said, ‘I will be within call. We will sup in the long house.’

  She closed the door softly after her. Coote was looking at Murdoc who was pouring wine into the goblets.

  ‘You like to play with fire?’ he asked him. Murdoc looked up at him from under heavy eyebrows.

  ‘If I am your man,’ said Murdoc, ‘I am your man for my own reasons. You cannot extinguish liberty. You can circumscribe freedom. Which is better for your p
urpose? A man who is a man, or a doll who is a lackey?’

  ‘I find it hard to forgive insults,’ said Coote. ‘I have always found it hard to forgive. Don’t play with the fire too often, or you might be burnt.’

  The clattering footsteps came down the stairs behind him. The heavy form of the Commissioner came into view. He was a very fat man amply covered with flesh in all directions, puffing and blowing loudly like a seal on a rock. He was walking with his legs spread out. It was difficult for him to keep the flesh of his thighs apart, he was so fat.

  ‘Ah,’ he said as he came into the room. ‘I am burning. I am on fire. Never again, Sir Charles, will you persuade me to saddle into this wild and barbarous land.’

  The medical-ollamh came down behind him. He was a thin man with a big nose. He was rubbing his hands on his clothes.

  ‘You fixed up our friend, Domhnall?’ Murdoc asked in Irish.

  ‘I rubbed all the skin off the fat fool,’ said Domhnall. ‘He is a mountain of flesh. The creature won’t be able to sit down for a week.’

  ‘You were pleased with the lotions, Commissioner?’ Murdoc asked.

  ‘Pleased! Far from it,’ said the Commissioner. ‘The fellow agonized my scald. But it is easing. It is easing. How will I get home, that’s what I want to know?’

  ‘You can go by sea,’ said Coote shortly.

  ‘Thank you, Domhnall,’ said Murdoc.

  ‘A pity it wasn’t the other one,’ said Domhnall, going. ‘ We could have rubbed poison into him.’

  ‘Will you take the oath now?’ Coote asked.

  ‘What is your hurry?’ Murdoc asked.

  ‘I knew about the feast day,’ said Coote. ‘ I wanted to be here in the light of the day. This must not be done in a corner. You must do it openly. It is my hope that what you do today, the rest of the people will do tomorrow.’

  ‘How little you know them after all,’ said Murdoc. ‘The people are still here. There is a feast set for the long house tonight. If I do this thing, I do it with an understanding. Is that true? A wide understanding.’

  ‘There are three others in Iar-Connacht,’ said Coote. ‘ They will not conform. Their fate is on their own heads. We have an understanding. We both know what it is.’

  Murdoc drank back the wine. He rubbed his mouth with the back of his hand.

  ‘Come on then,’ he said. ‘Let us get on with it.’

  Darkness had fallen outside, and seven bonfires were blazing in the field out from the courtyard. In the courtyard itself the meat was being roasted.

  Around the bonfires the young people were dancing. It was a wild dancing. Around some of the fires the elbow pipes were squealing their fast dances and the young people were sweating and cavorting, some of them loudly hurrooing, turning and twisting and joining hands and separating and coming together again with nearly all their limbs in motion and their bare feet making no sound on the ragged short grass that was being danced and shuffled out of existence.

  Around one of the fires there was a flute wailing plaintively and the people were seated on the ground and a man was standing, a tall man with his face to the sky. He was singing a very plaintive love song and his adam’s apple was moving convulsively in his throat.

  Some of the young people would fall out of the dance, and hand in hand pull themselves away from the light of the fire into the shadows, and they would lie on the ground facing one another, their breathing as fast as the dance that had exhausted them.

  From one of these Servragh O’Feichin came his hand clasping the hand of Mary Ann. He was breathing hard, and so was Mary Ann. She was very pleased with the abandon of the dancing. She thought it was good for people to abandon themselves like that. It took away the vapours and the labours of the house. She hoped that Dualta had seen her dancing with Servragh and that he took note of Servragh pulling her back into the shadows and sitting on the ground with her, because Servragh was the fair-haired young champion who had been opposing Dualta in the hurling game.

  ‘You are a brave dancer, Mary Ann,’ Servragh said. He was still holding her hand. He was lying on the ground on his hip, a free hand supporting his head. Mary Ann was lying flat. Her chest was rising and falling.

  ‘I’m really no good at it,’ said Mary Ann practically. ‘All I was doing was jumping.’

  ‘You can jump like a young deer,’ he said. Mary Ann giggled.

  ‘Did I say something funny?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ said Mary Ann. ‘It was the picture was funny.’

  ‘Why are your hands stained?’ he asked. He was examining the one he was holding.

  ‘That’s from dying wool,’ said Mary Ann.

  ‘Oh, lucky wool,’ said Servragh.

  That interested Mary Ann. She sat up.

  ‘Why would the wool be lucky?’ she said. ‘ I would say that it is the poor sheep who is unlucky to lose it.’ He sighed.

  ‘I was being poetic, Mary Ann,’ he said. ‘The thought of the lucky wool being handled by these beautiful soft hands moved me.’

  ‘They are not soft,’ said Mary Ann. ‘ They are damn hard from all the work I do,’ She took her hand away from him, began to feel the callouses on the palms. He sat up too. He put his hand on her hair.

  ‘Man,’ he said, ‘your hair is as soft as a mist.’

  Mary Ann laughed.

  ‘No, it’s not. Be practical, Servragh. It’s hard hair. It has to be. I haven’t time to be doing things with it.’

  ‘Have you no softness in you at all?’ he asked her.

  ‘I think so,’ said Mary Ann. ‘But all these things you are saying are second-hand. You got them from poems.’

  ‘I didn’t get this from poems,’ said Servragh, and with his hard young hands he grasped her shoulders, turned her and bending her back to the ground, kissed her violently.

  Mary Ann thought: This is the first time I have ever been kissed. Do I like it? No, I do not. He was hurting her lips, pressing them against her teeth, and he was leaning his full weight on her chest. So she pressed her hands against him and pushed him violently and he fell away from her. She stood up. She was wiping her lips with the back of her hand. She stamped her foot.

  ‘You animal,’ said Mary Ann. ‘Why did you do that?’

  He was indignant. ‘If you don’t want love,’ he asked with reason, ‘why did you seek me out and dance with me and come with me into the shadows?’

  There was a loud blast of six trumpets. They swelled from the courtyard over all the feasting and dancing and singing. They brought down a silence over the land and stopped everybody from what they were doing at the moment. All you could hear was fee sizzling and burning of the wood on the fires.

  Suddenly the people realized that they were surrounded by horsemen. On all sides of them, closing them into a wide circle, herding them like cattle into a ring and gradually compressing them towards the courtyard. Sound ceased. Many hands moved to belts, to feel for weapons that weren’t there, hovering a moment, feeling naked, and then moving where they were being moved, with a shrug of their shoulders. The soldiers had no weapons in their hands. They just sat tiredly and impassively, and dust-covered, on their big horses and used the bodies of the horses to get the people into the ring.

  Dominick and Sebastian were lying behind the rocky mound where they had met before. They had been looking down at the colourful scene below them, at the blazing light of the fire that shone on the reds and blues and the white clothes of the women and girls; that illumined their teeth and their red lips and the flashing of their legs as they danced; on the bronzed and bearded faces of the men, and the dear skin of the young ones. It had been an odd wild view of a colourful, moving, ever moving and milling mass, against a crab-apple-green sky.

  They had watched all this and then they had seen in the distance the reflected light on the buckles and the weapons of the horsemen who had gathered in a sinister ring far out and then had closed in at the call of the trumpets.

  Sebastian’s hand was hurting Dominick’s arm. />
  ‘He is going to do it Dominick,’ he said. ‘Coote has been with him over an hour.’

  ‘Maybe he won’t,’ said Dominick. ‘Maybe he won’t.’ Not having much hope, thinking, of the change that had come over Murdoc, trying to remember the Murdoc they had sheltered from death in Drogheda so long ago. He wasn’t the same man.

  ‘Look at him now,’ said Sebastian.

  Murdoc was moving, into the firelight of the courtyard out from the door of the long house. The place was lighted like day when the sun was red. Two men had placed a table in front and to this table came waddling the large fat Commissioner. A bench was placed for him and he sat painfully at it and arranged his documents and a thick book, and felt in his pocket and brought out small spectacles with wire frames which he fitted over his short nose.

  Murdoc stood beside him. He was tall. He made Coote who stood beside him look small, if he wasn’t. Murdoc has put on flesh, Dominick thought, noticing for the first time the swell of his waist and the beginning of jowls that were visible in the firelight. One of his eyebrows was cocked. That was Murdoc when he was going to do something daring, a sort of cynical twist of his face, as if he was laughing at his own foolishness.

  ‘I’m afraid, Dominick,’ said Sebastian.

  Sebastian had his problem.

  Was it his duty here and now to go down and address the people? To say: This man is turning his back on his fathers. He is turning his back on his God. He is opening the doors of hell for himself in eternity here and in the hereafter. Let him not be your master. Let none of you, for the love of Almighty God and the men who have died for you, follow his example. What would happen if he did this? He himself would die, almost straight away. That would be easy, but would it do any good? There was nobody at the moment to replace him. Who would baptize the children and bring comfort to the dying and the Holy Eucharist to the living if he gratified this handy desire for martyrdom?

  No, he couldn’t do that. He groaned and buried his face in the earth. Dominick left him alone, watching. Behind Murdoc was his household, his gallowglasses, the big fighting men, and his teachers and the people who subsisted on him. What would they do? Coote was looking coldly at the faces of the hostile people. He knew they were hostile because their faces were devoid of expression. At times like this he got a tingling in the nerves. They tingled right down to the tips of his fingers and his toes. When he felt this, he knew that he could satisfy it by violence. He would like to mount a horse and with his men behind him, he would swing a sword, because that was the only satisfying, personal way to impose death, to feel the sharp steel cutting into bone and sinew and having the red blood gush along the back of his hand.