He said now. ‘Colonel Honnor of the Island tells me that priests have been escaping. Do you know about this?’
‘No,’ said Murdoc, ‘ I know nothing about this.’
‘And yet in your own holding,’ said Coote, ‘there is a priest called Sebastian. He has started a renewed activity over all the land. I have heard about him. I thought they were gone, these priests, but they are raising their heads again in the wild places. I want this Sebastian.’
‘I don’t know him,’ said Murdoc. ‘If I could I would not give him to you. If I did a thing like that my usefulness to you would be gone for ever. You have to find somebody else to hunt your priests.’
‘I will,’ said Coote, and then he signalled with his hands and the trumpets called again.
In the silence the Commissioner rose, groaning. He read from a paper. Murdoc was grinning. It was in English. Not ten people present would know what he was saying.
Coote said: ‘You will get one of your own to say all that in Irish.’
Murdoc thought over it. He shrugged. He signalled to his poet Mac Cille Ceallaigh. ‘ Tell them that,’ said Murdoc in Irish. ‘Twist it a bit so that it doesn’t sound as bad.’
The tall thin teacher twisted it.
In order to preserve peace in the land, so that people might go their peaceful ways, serving their lord and saving their crops and keeping their bellies full, to save them from being ground into the dust by the black ones, Murdoc had decided to take the Protestant oath. The people would know what value to place on it.
The people, some of them, grinned. Murdoc saw that Morogh Dubh and his soldiers. But others did not grin. The blank looks on their faces became even blanker. This sent a sharp sear through Murdoc’s chest. What am I about to do? It is nothing to me. It is a jumble of words that don’t mean anything. It is saying something I don’t believe on oath, so that I will be able to preserve a measure of freedom for all this land; so that I will rise and bring the people on the rise with me. There is no other way. If this is the only way, why shouldn’t I take it? What does it mean? It doesn’t mean anything.
‘Oh God,’ said Sebastian in a whisper, ‘the two things are not the same at all. Will the people be deceived?’
‘No,’ said Dominick hoarsely. ‘They won’t.’
The Commissioner was clearing his throat.
He handed the black Bible to Murdoc. Murdoc looked at it and held it in his hand.
The Commissioner handed him the long parchment
Murdoc looked at it. It was in English. Then he recited it, in a colourless voice. But he had a deep voice. It boomed its way over the land until it seemed to hit off the mountains. Sebastian wondered that the mountains didn’t fall.
‘I, Murdoc O’Flaherty, detest and abjure the authority of the Pope, as well in regard of the Church in general, as in regard of myself in particular. I condemn and anathematize the tenet that any reward is due to good works. I firmly believe and avow that no reverence is due to the Virgin Mary or to any other saint in Heaven; and that no petition or adoration can be addressed to them without idolatry. I assent that no worship or reverence is due to the sacrament of the Lord’s supper or the elements of bread and wine after consecration by whomsoever that consecration may be made I believe that there is no purgatory but that it is a Popish invention, so also is the tenet that the Pope can grant indulgences. I also firmly believe that neither the Pope nor any other priest can remit sins, as the priest raves, and all this, I swear …’
Going through his head as he said it, finding it a little difficult to at the English with which he was not that familiar, what Murdoc was thinking was of his boyhood. These things he was saying were the negation of all the things he had lisped long ago at the knee of a priest. The years had clouded them over in his mind, but now they came back to him. He could hear the childish voice in his brain that was his own, reciting them. Had he recited them mechanically? What old they mean to a child? Wasn’t it manhood that drove home the learned lessons of childhood? What had happened to him? In the welter of wars and blood and hunger and despair, why hadn’t they been driven home into his intelligence? But he wondered at this boyhood memory. The thought came into his head: if all these things are truly true, that I am denying now, then surely I am in trouble.
‘Say it in Irish now,’ said Coote.
Dominick had felt the hair rising on his head as the firm voice spoke the heresies. Sebastian had his hands over his ears.
Murdoc started slowly and haltingly to translate the parchment into the Irish tongue. He had read two sentences of the oath when a strange thing happened in front of their eyes.
The people melted away.
They just silently turned and melted from the courtyard. If they were blocked by the bodies of the horses they went under their bellies and out beyond them. They sought the darkness in the awesome silence. One moment the courtyard was jammed with their bodies and the next moment it was emptied of them as if they had been carried away by a magic mist.
The soldiers were bewildered. What were they to do? They looked to Coote. Did he want to stop them by force? He made no sign so they stood where they were and let the people go.
Dominick was shaking Sebastian’s shoulder.
‘Look! Look!’ he said.
Sebastian looked. He rose to his feet. Dominick stood beside him. In two minutes there was nobody at all in the courtyard but the group at the table and the few of Murdoc’s household who stood behind him.
Murdoc raised his head.
He looked at the emptiness before him. He could hear sound all right as men mounted their little horses and the hooves sounded on the sod. But no sound of a human voice arose to comfort him. He glanced sideways at Coote. Coote’s face was deathly pale and taut.
Murdoc’s voice trailed off into silence. Just the meat sizzling over the fires. Like I will be after this, he thought.
This brought his eyebrow up. It brought back the recklessness into his heart. He had known what would happen. But it was a game worth playing. He would come well out of it yet. The game was only beginning.
‘We will go and eat now,’ he said to Coote, ‘even if most of the guests have departed.’
‘It’s that priest,’ said Coote. ‘ I want that priest.’
Out of his sight the priest watched him. He stood very tall on the mound. He felt tall. His face was turned to the clear sky. Dominick felt the relief that was in him, a surging gust of it, then he left him and went towards the fields where he had left the horses. He knew that his children would be there.
The bonfires, unfed, were dying under the stars.
Chapter Twenty-Six
IT WASN’T a very tall mountain. It was only about eleven hundred feet high. The side near the sea was almost inaccessible. The side going down towards the land with the lake below it was sloping and could be climbed even by the old people in an hour.
The top of the mountain was bowl-shaped, rock-littered, with good green grass holding a miniature lake with rushes around it like the pupil of a concave eye. It was an amphitheatre made by God and on this September day it was amply filled. Overhead the sky was blue and decorated with oddly shaped clouds that fled majestically before a moderate wind.
Father Sebastian, having wrapped the sacred vessels in linen and heavy canvas, and secreted them in the deep crevice behind the white rock on which he had celebrated Mass, turned, still in his vestments, and prepared to address his flock. The vestments he was wearing now were much better than the ones he had made long ago himself in that wood. If he had a church he could nearly have worn them there without exciting comment. If he had a church!
He said: ‘Many of you here now, under the sky, have never seen Mass celebrated in a church. It is only God who knows when any of you at all will be able to attend the Mass when it is celebrated in a church. But the important thing is not the church, but the Mass and what it means.’
He listened to them clearing their throats. Some of them were kneeling on one knee with
their hats between their knee and the damp ground. Some of them were squatting on stones. Some of the older women were sitting back on their legs, with the rosary beads in their hard hands. He could pick out their faces. He knew all of them. They were a hard-working people, with hard bodies. His eyes drifted over their faces. They were divided in the sense that on his left-hand side were the women and the girls and on his right-hand side were the men and the boys, and between them was the small calm lake, unruffled, and reflecting the blue of the sky and the scudding of the clouds. The O’Callanans, the O’Feichins, the O’Balbhains, the O’Colgans, the O’Dughans, and the MacMahons. He looked at Dominick who was standing with his legs spread and his hands held in front of him. What a different Dominick this was from the urgent, bitter and bewildered young man, so deadly intent on survival, his heart raw, his emotions ready to burst into flame like a prepared fire! He was controlled now. He had lost his litheness, the muscles and flesh had built up on his body. He still had an aura of quiet power about him. Always dependable if you needed help, Sebastian thought, almost indomitable, having made himself one of the people with whom he had cast his lot.
‘The future depends on you,’ he said. ‘It is not an easy future. You will not hold your faith easily. Like a granite rock throws off the water you will have to throw off persecution. It is easy enough to fight and conquer persecution, but it is not as easy to conquer the inducements of the easy road. You will be offered these. Don’t take them. They are for the weak and the wavering. It is not an easy thing to have to climb a mountain to hear Mass. God knows how long it will be before Mass can be taken from the desolate places into the heart of the towns and villages.
‘They will kill your priests. They have killed many. They will kill many more. They have left not even a memory of them. They are gone like insects you would crush to extinction under your boot. But dead, they are not dead, and their blood and the blood of the people who died with them will win freedom for you in the end, whenever that will be.
‘When they kill the priests they will be depriving you of many of the sacraments. You mustn’t ever despair. You will hold rosary beads in your fingers when all else is gone, and you will be holding on to the hand of Our Lady; each of the five decades is a finger of the Blessed Virgin, whether the beads be made of gold or silver or horn or hardened bread. They can kill everything but the flame in your heart. That is something they must never put out, and they never will if you keep holding her hand.’
Dominick thought that Sebastian was very thin. He was very fine, very worn. There was no spare flesh at all on him. His face under the beard was thin and gaunt so that he seemed to consist of more teeth and eyes than he should. And his beard was grey. But he never stopped going. How many miles a day did he travel in this wild and mountainous land, mostly on foot because a horseman was too conspicuous nowadays when more and more the soldiers had taken to patrolling from the Cliogain garrison? It was over a year since Mass had last been celebrated in a house. What Sebastian wanted was somebody to abduct him and lock him in a room and feed him like you would a cow in a byre.
‘Since I have come to know you,’ Sebastian went on, ‘I have come to love you. You are part of your own land. Who can rip the heart out of a mountain? That’s what you are and that’s what you must remain, mountains of faith, strong, strong, no matter what your leaders may do; no matter what material compulsion makes them turn their backs on the real heritage and on the faith of you, their people; and when I am gone, I do not want you to weep for me, but to rejoice for me and pray that another will take ray place who will be stronger and better than I.’
They were looking at one another.
Why did I say that? Sebastian wondered. I feel sad. I want a great church around me; to hear the voice of the people echoing off the vaulted roof. The sunshine seemed pale. The smell of the heather was not the smell of incense.
Dualta’s brother Cormac was lying on the rim, looking down at the priest addressing the people. There always had to be somebody watching. But Cormac was careless. He hadn’t seen the soldiers debouching at the bottom of the mountain for the last hour. He couldn’t see the other side of the mountain where from the first light the boats had landed and the men had set out in the early light to assault the side of the mountain that was supposed to be inaccessible. Besides, even if Cormac had been looking towards the lake he mightn’t have seen them, because they moved very cautiously, in a military operation, seeking every fold, of which there were many, in the smooth-looking deceptive side of the hill.
Cormac heard a scuffle, all right, but then it was too late. A bog-stained hand was clapped over his mouth and he was rolled from the rim and a soldier was kneeling on his chest. He had a knife in his hand and Cormac knew that he would use it if he moved. Cormac didn’t move, but all the same the soldier feared the savage and despairing look that flashed in his eyes. He waved and was joined by two silent men who tied a dirty rag over the young man’s face, turned him and tied his hands behind his back. Then one of them stood and waved, and the whole side of the hills seemed to suddenly come alive with soldiers who moved quietly and very cautiously towards the rim. On the other side, Coote himself led them. They had to scramble up steep gullies where the mountain streams ran as cold as ice, crawl on their bellies over wet moss-covered rocks where they sank to the elbows in the brown bog slime of the crevices. At one of two places they had to use ropes. They were wet from head to foot. Their faces were streaked with the brown bog dirt. They carried swords slung around their necks, hanging over their backs so that they would not ring against stone and cry out against them. Some of them wore muskets on their backs. Others of them had pistols in their belts.
If they faltered it was not for long, as the cold white-faced Coote looked towards the straggling ones.
Coote was the first to push his head over the rim between the two rocks. He gazed at the opposite side. The watcher was gone.
He allowed himself to feel satisfaction. It was a successful military operation. He took pride in it. He had been arranging it for over a year. If it was galling to think that he had to set up an operation like this to conquer over one priest, it was a great satisfaction to know that it was on the point of being successful. By his careful planning, the soldiers had come around by sea when he had received the final information. They had landed at the island and had struck out from there. The ones attacking the mountain from the land side rode the useful mountain horses instead of their own heavy and more cumbersome war steeds.
Yes, he told himself, as he got to his feet and waved his arm, it was an operation of which he could indeed be proud, and its culmination would be a lesson, one which those primitive savages would never forget. Did they think he could not conquer the mountains? Did they think that a man like him would not go down to hell itself if he had to?
Sebastian saw him, standing tall up there in front of his eyes. So that is why I felt sad, he thought. Is that why I could not shake off this numbing feeling?
The people saw his eyes and they turned to look. Suddenly the whole rim on that side was covered with standing soldiers with drawn swords or pointing muskets. It was the instinct of the young to run, and they ran, towards the other rim, but up from there rose the bodies of other soldiers, so they halted and turned back.
The men in the place moved instinctively into a circle encompassing in their swift movement the women and the girls and the priest at the altar. Any of them that had weapons drew them, but they were pitifully meagre – a few knives, a few swords – and the men without them bent to the littered ground and chose for themselves a heavy pointed rock.
But Sebastian was talking.
‘You must not resist,’ he said, in a clear calm voice. ‘This has happened. If God had not wanted it to happen, it couldn’t have done so. His purpose is in it. You hear. You must drop the stones. You must put away your weapons. You must give them no chance or reason to kill you. I ask you to do this!’ It was an appeal.
Dominick dropped his
stone. Other stones fell to the ground. The soldiers moved in from the rim and came down towards them. There was a great silence in the bowl of the mountain. Nothing you could hear except heavy breathing and the sound of the soldiers’ sodden boots hitting on the rocks.
Sebastian moved through his protectors. He had to force his way first before they reluctantly opened to let him pass. He was wearing white vestments. He stood out from them and faced Coote. Coote was walking like an animal with ponderous grace. His clothes were stained and his hands and face were stained, but his eyes were glittering. He could have wished that the people would have resisted, but he didn’t mind. He was in a good mood, this mood of eminent satisfaction. He stopped in front of Sebastian. He wondered that such a scrawny tall thin fellow could have caused him such trouble, but this bearded fanatic had caused him trouble, setting up waves of resistance like a stone thrown into a calm pond.
‘You want me,’ said Sebastian.
‘I want you,’ said Coote.
‘You will let the people go free,’ said Sebastian.
‘You can make no terms,’ said Coote. ‘There are no terms. Their punishment will differ from yours, but you will all share it.’
‘You won’t reflect,’ said Sebastian, ‘that for what you do to a priest your sin is very great?’
‘My reward is very great,’ said Coote. ‘In heaven and on earth.’
Seek the Fair Land Page 29
