The Blind Astronomer's Daughter

by John Pipkin

  A red crescent rises under the press of his finger, and the splinter slips from his calf and he stops the trickle of blood with a thumbprint of dirt. Low clouds sweep over the horizon in the north, and he feels a soft buffeting at his ears, the far-off rumbling of cannon fire or thunder or the crashing of waves. It is a good omen, the men say, to hear the sky grumble its assent. In everything the women see auguries of success: in the low swoop of sparrows bringing God’s grace, in the hot sun sure to blind the soldiers on the walls, in the arrangement of stones and the hue of sky and field. Finn is not convinced. He does not share in their hopefulness, but he cannot turn away. Some ballast at his center has shifted. In the night, only half-sleeping, he imagined that he and Caroline had set sail on a small vessel tossed by a vast indifferent sea, and when he woke to hard-packed soil he half-believed that she was already gone. He can see now what a terrible mistake it was to lure her back to Inistioge, how he had heaped new errors upon the old. If only the pike in his hands could project the column of fire it was made to attract, he would brand a message in the clouds and urge her not to wait for him. He would remind her of the coins hidden at the forge and tell her that she must buy passage on any ship soon to depart. And he would promise to find her, wherever she went, just as he had before.

  The days since he left her have dissolved one into the next. He finds blood on his shirt, traces the crusted seams of cuts on his face and tender bruises along his shoulders. His hands are swollen and raw from clutching the pikestaff. Black dirt cakes the blade and he does not scrape it clean, does not want to uncover what lies beneath. The firing of a gun demands no accounting of where its charge lands, but to wield a pike is another thing, for a man cannot deny the horrible intimacy when the blade hits its mark. Men he does not recognize clap his shoulders and offer him drink and tell him he fought well at New Ross. But he cannot remember what he has done—the thrust, the tug of muscle and the hard strike of bone, the jerk and scream—and where memory and imagination fail together, there remains only the continuous orbit of thought unmoored. He has seen it in the eyes of the dying, this whirl of reason pestering itself to the end.

  He recalls only fragments of how they entered New Ross, streets black with smoke and ringing with the clash of sword and pike and the final reports of guns dropped and forgotten and the howl of the fires churning through buildings. He ran blindly until he struck his knee against the gaping mouth of a cannon and he braced for the flash and roar, but the gun proved unmanned, and the fear and relief was like a scalding pitcher poured over his scalp. He dived into the billowing smoke, tripping over soldiers sprawled on the cobbles in blue and red coats, and he swung his pike and moved forward to where the darkness was complete, certain that there must be an end to it. For a moment the smoke cleared and he saw a man on the walls trailing a green banner with a golden harp at its center, and the banner flying for the span of a single breath before the man grabbed his chest and fell.

  They seized New Ross, then lost it, then gained it again and burned the better part of it to the foundations, only to be pushed out once more when new soldiers arrived in black coats trimmed in red. Finn followed the United Irishmen as they fled New Ross and retreated to Corbet Hill. They watched the soldiers bring out cartloads of bodies and dump them into the River Barrow, and they watched the bodies float and the waters darken and after a while they stopped tallying the carts. There would be no proper counting. The dead lay everywhere, unnumbered as dim stars on a dark night, but Finn heard the whispered guesses: two thousand United Irishmen dead in the streets, another thousand heaped at Three Bullet Gate. Together they heard the cries of men wounded and dying in the fires they had set. And they heard grim stories: that the captured had been executed in the night, that anyone thought to have aided the cause dangled at the end of a rope, that the loyalists of New Ross walked the smoke-filled streets dispatching the injured with gunstock and club, that pigs fed from the staved skulls of Catholic and Protestant alike. In the morning, pale ghosts drifted over the hill, and Finn wept from the sting of powdered quicklime poured over the unreckoned.

  Some men called for vengeance and some spoke of returning to their homes. Those with families wondered aloud if they could expect some measure of mercy. Men deserted in the night only to return the next morning. There was no slipping away unnoticed. The roads were thick with loyalists, they said. Any man who tried to run off now was as good as dead. Bagenal Harvey led the survivors east to the camp at Carrickbyrne, and on the way Finn opened his eyes to find that he had dozed on his feet and had been carried along in the flow of the great mass of men.

  At Carrickbyrne they waited for others to arrive, and there was no singing then, no pipes or drums. They listened quietly to stories of reprisals swift and bitter. In nearby Scullabogue, when the United Irishmen heard what had happened in New Ross, they set fire to a barn crowded with Protestant families. And Finn heard in the retelling how an infant had crawled from the barn and was thrown back into the flames, and he knew then that there would be no end to it. The loyalists of Enniscorthy would seek revenge for Scullabogue. Bagenal Harvey issued new orders. He offered a reward for the names of the men who had set fire to the barn; he said they must not shrink from virtue, even in these desperate times, but his demands were met with laughter and dangerous talk.

  Bagenal Harvey has lost his courage.

  He’s a Protestant after all, is Harvey, himself a landlord, with coins in his pocket.

  A man with so much to lose cannot lead those with naught.

  And so Harvey gave over his command to a priest, Father Philip Roche, a huge man much admired by all—and no less, they said, for the fact that the bishop in Wexford rebuked him for his love of drink. Father Roche brought them to their feet with prayers and revelations and led them east to join the armies massing near Enniscorthy. The fight is but beginning, Father Roche told them, Enniscorthy will give us Wexford, and from Wexford we march to Arklow and then to Dublin!

  On the way to Vinegar Hill, Finn saw men hopping slow, arms thrown over shoulders, legs braced with sticks and tied with rags stained red, and others with the sleeves of their shirts torn into strips to sling broken arms or wrap the insults visited upon their heads. He saw a young boy perched on his father’s shoulders, and the boy’s periled forearm gashed from wrist to elbow, and behind them a young girl pulled along by her mother, pale and hollow-eyed. There was nothing Finn could do to remedy these injuries, and as they marched he could not rid his thoughts of the infant crawling from the burning barn in Scullabogue and he pictured Caroline—still Siobhan—whimpering in the smoldering hay.

  The encampment on Vinegar Hill was no different from the others, families gathered around fires and men planting their pikes in the earth until the slope seemed wooded with steel-crowned trees. Below the hill, soldiers in red and blue stood at the gates of Enniscorthy in numbers that a man might count upon one hand. The very young and very old arrived from nearby towns—Scarawalsh and Ballymackessy and Oulart—and from the fields and woods in between, and they climbed Vinegar Hill and begged the United Irishmen to protect them from the yeomen and Orangemen and mercenaries in colorful uniforms never seen before, and all of them sweeping through the country with Scullabogue upon their lips.

  And now they wait together. The pikemen sharpen their blades on stones and reassure one another that they have the advantage. Far better to look down upon one’s enemy than to crane one’s neck and find them above. When the time comes they will charge into they waiting guns and they will dodge the bullets and run between the cannons and leap upon the soldiers struggling to reload, just as they did at New Ross. At the bottom of the hill, army will clash with army and the Brotherhood will carry the day, for they are quick, and crafty, and lethal with the pike. And they wait and watch the doomed soldiers ready their weapons. More soldiers in red coats arrive from the east and from the north and from the west and drag their heavy guns and fill their cannons with burlap sacks of heavy shot made for the sinking of ships, but i
t will not be enough to stop the United Irishmen, ten thousand strong.

  On the hill the singing and dancing resume, and the passing of bottles as well, and in the noise Finn hears the rhythmic clank of steel on steel. He grabs his pike and pulls himself to standing. He follows the sound over the curve of the hill and comes to a square arrangement of stones where a blacksmith is repairing bent pike heads and forging new ones from the scraps of the old. Finn offers to help and he hammers through the night and when there are no more pikes to mend he heats the broken blades and fashions a crude hook and a shallow triangle and fixes a hoop of metal to a short length of wood. He runs the blacksmith’s knife over the bottom of his jacket and tears away strips of cloth and he carries what he has made through the camp. He helps a man with an injured leg slip his ankle through the metal hoop and he ties the wooden splint to his thigh. He finds a young man with a scarred nose healed in the shape of a chewed acorn and he shows him how to hang the tin triangle in place, but the young man hands it back to him and says he has no need of it. The hook Finn brings to a thickset woman stirring a pot of gray stew and he fits it to the stump of her wrist. He promises to make her something better after the fighting is done. She smiles and says it is improvement enough, and she tells him how her great-grandfather had once been a lord in Wicklow with many fields in his demesne near the waterfall at Powerscourt. And the gray stew tastes of dirt and rancid fat but it fills the emptiness that Finn has carried with him from Carrickbyrne.

  Then he waits with the others and watches the clouds gather ahead of the slant smear of distant rain, and he thinks that next he will fashion a hinge for the man he has seen whose arm hangs oddly from the elbow. And there are other injuries he might tend to before the fighting begins again, for it does not seem that it will ever come. The soldiers in red will surely not charge uphill, and the United Irishmen are in no hurry to spend their own advantage. Father Roche walks among the men, tells them to give thanks to God for the victory sure to be theirs. He assures them that every new day is a victory in itself, that the Holy Spirit will protect them from the cannons at the bottom of the hill and the bullets will pass straight through them. The roads become thick with soldiers in red, arriving from all sides, emerging from the trees as if the woods were haunted.

  And then at dawn’s first whisper it begins at last. Most of the men are not even awake to witness the start. Finn is watching red clouds tremble in the east and thinks he hears a blast of thunder but the sound comes from below. The men scramble and grab their pikes and wait for the foolish soldiers to charge the hill. The sun has not yet breached the horizon when the first bombs drop from the half-lit sky, but they fall near the hill’s bottom, as if only meant to signal the coming assault. The pike hums in Finn’s hands. The pikemen stand elbow to elbow low on the slope and they shout oaths that no one shall cross the line. They bare their teeth and point their blades and wait for the assault. But no soldiers come. The cannons fling shells at the bottom of the hill and gouge craters in the earth, and in the silence that follows there is no charge from below, and among the waiting pikemen there is confusion, for how can they fight an enemy who refuses to attack?

  The bombardment resumes—the roar and whistle and the fiery landings—and the guns continue until it seems impossible that any army might have so limitless a supply of powder. The ripping explosions land a little higher on the hill this time and the men next to Finn take a step back. They call to each other and squat in the dirt and wait for the infantry below to level their bayonets and begin their march. They cannot believe the insanity of soldiers who would choose to charge uphill, and they praise God and good fortune; they lick their fingers and wet their blades and they wait. The cannons fire again and hot shards of iron land closer this time, and the men call out that surely the cavalry will soon be upon them, and they shout for the pikemen with ten-foot staffs to come forward and wait for the advance. The morning light flashes over the sabers of the horsemen below, waiting behind the cannons, but they do not leave the line. There is another pause as the soldiers in red coats feed their cannons and point them toward the waiting pikemen, and the big guns cough again and the side of the hill explodes in a spray of rocks and grass.

  Children sheltering beneath clumsy tents of animal skins and blankets begin to wail as if they alone can see the horror to come. Finn and the other pikemen take another step back and wait for Father Roche to give the command to charge, but the order of battle is already reversed. Bombs fill the air with a thick fog of atomized soil, and those who made their campfires near the bottom are running toward them now, stumbling forward and tripping over those ahead. Some who fall do not get up.

  Another line of cannons erupts, but this time no explosions follow, for what falls from the sky is a great swarm of grapeshot and chains that sound like flung coins and they tear into the backs of the fleeing crowd. The man next to Finn fires his musket and screams as he does so, as if to hurry the bullet along. The people running toward them wave their arms and point at the top of the hill. Shrapnel rains from the morning sky and everyone is running now, up and across the hill, looking for cover where there is none to be had. And next the black canisters begin to fall, curiosities from another world, and they wait clicking in the dirt until the cursed mechanism triggers the eruption of fire and birdshot, a wicked application of science and anger.

  There is nowhere to go but up, toward the table of flat rock which seems already to hold as many people as can possibly be squeezed onto it. Finn hears a call for retreat and he runs with the others. A shirtless man clutching his trousers at the waist falls directly in front of him, and the blood is pouring thick before he reaches the ground. And next Finn comes upon a woman making slow progress, a girl and boy each hugging her knees, and Finn takes hold of the girl, as light as the air, and he slings her under his arm and urges the woman to run. He hears her panting behind him and when they near the top he puts the girl down and he tells the woman to keep going, for it seems that they might flee down the other side and head into the trees. But when he looks around he sees there is nowhere they might run where bombs are not falling. Artillery and soldiers surround the hill now, and within moments the bombardment commences on all sides. The barrage does not fall blindly but follows their flight, sweeping up the hillside with intent, biting and snarling, corralling them into a tight circle where the slow-ticking canisters might better do their work.

  It is all a great disorder, and Finn realizes how foolish he has been, to think that any device of wires and steel might offer fit remedy to the bodies twisting like smoke in the dirt. There is no medicine or appliance to answer this. No man can hope to revitalize the ropes of flesh and muscle spilling through groping fingers.

  The roar and blast from the cannons blister the air and they are running in a circus of panic. Clouds low and dark reach from the horizon and the women begin crying out for rain, as if this might bring the bombardment to an end, and the thought catches on and more voices are raised, pleading with the clouds, for in this desperate hour they can think of nothing else but to look to the sky for deliverance. Through the din a drum sounds and order emerges. The pikemen ready themselves to charge and they do not wait for the command. They raise their pikes and run down the hill through the bombardment, and Finn runs after them, his galvanic pike humming in his hands. The slope is long and the guns do not rest and half of the pikemen disappear in the flash and roar, but Finn continues through the buzz and whistle of grapeshot and chains and musket balls. They run toward a narrow space where no bullets fly and they reach the cannons and swing their pikes. Finn follows in their wake and once they are behind the cannons they jab at the soldiers loading their muskets, and they slash at the horsemen whose swords are too short to match the reach of the pikes. And Finn is seized with the madness of it, the screams of horses and men cut down and run through, and the choking fog of spent gunpowder and seething iron, action giving no quarter to thought.

  They run through the gate and into the narrow lanes of En
niscorthy where there are no cannons and the pikemen are everywhere slashing furiously at the soldiers in red coats who wield their muskets upended like clubs. And then Enniscorthy is burning and it seems like New Ross again as the streets fill with men and smoke. Outside the walls the guns roar and the shells and grapeshot and chains continue to fall upon Vinegar Hill though now it is mostly the old and the wounded and children and women who remain on the slopes. Finn swings his pike with the others and the soldiers fall back and still more men crowd into the streets until no man can raise a gun or a blade. They push and kick, swing elbows and fists and scream curses.

  And in this pandemonium Finn does not feel it happen, cannot name the precise moment when the shard enters his thigh. It is the fierce sting afterward, hot like the blast of the forge, that makes him reach down, and the brilliance of the blood on his hand tells him that the wound is deep. He falls to one knee and pulls himself to the side of the lane. The ground shudders under the roar of the cannons, and he feels, too, a rumble of thunder that is not part of their fight. He presses the welling of blood and finds something hard beneath his fingers. He bites his lip, probes the ragged gash, and feels the pointed shard buried too deep to remove, a hot thing now part of him.

  Thick smoke rolls through the streets of Enniscorthy as fires leap across thatched eaves, and again he feels in his chest the echo of distant thunder and he tries to stand but already the leg will accept no weight and the blood keeps coming. He crawls into a doorway, rips a piece of cloth from his shirt, and stuffs this into the wound, and he wishes he had not told Caroline to wait for him. He imagines soldiers filling the streets of Inistioge and bombarding the hill at New Park and the observatory coming apart in splinters and all of it set aflame. He promised her that he would return. From out of the smoke a soldier lunges at him with his bayonet but before the blade can reach its mark the soldier clutches his head and drops to the street. The sky rumbles again and Finn thinks of the little man in Edinburgh, rubbing wool and amber until the dead frog leapt from the table, and he holds onto the pike tightly and runs his finger along the copper wire twisted around the staff. He must get back onto Vinegar Hill. He crawls from doorway to doorway while the fighting continues around him, and as he makes his way to the gate the thunder grows louder, urging him on.