Darling Jim

by Christian Moerk

  “Gentle ladies, brave gentlemen, and honored guests to this fair establishment,” said the handsome fella sitting on a high chair back near the toilets. He was wearing the same leather jacket and had his hair slicked back to reveal the face I hadn’t been able to forget since that same morning. “My name is Jim Quick, even though I’ve been called worse and sometimes better. Tonight I have been bid, in the ageless storytelling tradition of the seanchaí, to favor you all with a tale of love, of danger, and of sorrow.”

  The last we’d seen of that kind in town had been at least sixty, fat, and wore a manky old beard for a costume. The audience had consisted of two drunks. This was better.

  Cheers went up from the already lubricated crowd. “Tell it, boy!” cried a trawler captain still wearing his smock. “Woo-hoo!” yelled some English girl, pulled her T-shirt up about halfway, and got a better response for it than the fisherman.

  And me? I just gawked at Jim. I couldn’t help it.

  “We seanchaí are an old fraternity of tellers, but there are only a handful of us left now. So we subsist on the kindness of strangers,” he continued, blinking those amber eyes at men and women alike and getting no glum stares back. Without raising his voice, he had everyone listening. “It’s a long tale, and I can only offer you the first chapter tonight. I will be continuing in other towns. But if, when I’m done, you feel you warmed to what you heard, don’t hesitate to see my man over there for a consideration.” Jim pointed past the bar, where an Asian-looking guy with a hangman’s face stood nursing a glass of soda water while covering his face ever so slightly with the collar of an upturned cowboy jacket.

  “Are you all right?” asked Aoife, because my face had gone slack.

  “She’s fine,” said Róisín, and patted my hand with too much sisterly deliberation. “She just got what she came for, I think.”

  I was too wrapped up in Jim to reach around and smack her one. And I wasn’t alone. Bronagh the eager rookie had red spots on her cheeks. Each time we saw her in that spanking-new Garda uniform of hers, it was hard to imagine we’d played with her since before we knew the words for “Ah, shut up, Bronagh, yer full of it.” She had always policed us around the playground, so I suppose a desk at the cop shop down the street shouldn’t have surprised me. She bit her fingernails as she watched Jim enjoying the spotlight. Little Mary Catherine Cremin’s mother, all two hundred pounds of her, had even stopped eating chips with melted cheese on them to stare at the figure up there in the lone spotlight. The only noise was the humming from the fish tank by the door.

  In whatever time I may have left, I’ll always recall the hush that preceded Jim’s story that night. For, in a sense, it was the last moment of peace the three of us would know.

  Jim rose from his stool, took off his jacket, and stared into the smoke-filled crowd. His hands weaved back and forth like a magician’s, and he leaned into the light.

  “Close your eyes and imagine a family brought down by evil,” he began. “A castle once stood five towers high and more, not far from this very spot where we’re all joined today,” Jim intoned, in a level voice reaching even the back of the room.

  “Nobody knows when it was built, because when it finally tumbled, no stone remained to tell the tale. It could have loomed right on the other side of the parking lot, or across the fields to the east of here. The old ones who entrusted me with its secrets said only that for hundreds of years it had never been conquered, whether by foreign invaders or traitors inside its moss-covered granite walls. Its gate was sturdy oak, painted black as if the wall itself had a perpetually open mouth, ready to swallow wayward travelers. Whenever it opened, trumpet blasts signaled for man and beast alike to make way, and smartly. Because it meant that men of the Ua Eitirsceoil clan were about to ride past, weapons clanking against their horses’ flanks.”

  “Did the castle have a name?” asked Bronagh, forgetting her newly poured pint entirely. Her cleft chin rested on her uniform, as if she were shy. But her eyes blazed with anything but self-doubt. He could have read the fucking phone book to her, and she would have listened.

  Jim allowed Bronagh to break the spell, but only for a moment. A few of the patrons glared at her, and she covered by playing with the zipper on her jacket. Jim reached for his own beer, took a deliberately long sip, and nodded. A forelock of black hair fell across his brow. I noticed Aoife blinking in acknowledgment, getting the scent of a man who was unlike most others. Again, I felt a stab of jealousy. And the story had barely begun.

  Its name was for many years referred to by locals in hushed tones as Dún an Bhaintrigh, the Fort of the Widower. The ruler, King Stiofán, had been mourning the death of his wife, which is why the gate was as black as the shroud they buried her in when she was only nineteen, her body broken from bearing twin sons. The king still ruled the fortress, the fields, and the forests beyond, though he was nearing three score and ten years of age. But even the wolves who sometimes felt brave enough to probe the outer defenses knew to steer clear when the wizened king walked the parapets, his beard reaching nearly to the ground and a tattered shred of black cloth held before him like a relic. His howling outdid the predators of the impenetrable forest in pain and ferocity. Because it was just his wisdom that had been dulled by age. His sorrow and love had been preserved inside his heart as if left underneath everlasting snow. He had no mortal cares of his own any longer. Even his most loyal warriors grumbled that the castle might soon fall, now that there was nothing to rally behind but shadows of glory past.

  His sons, Euan and Ned, eventually grew into manhood, in the nick of time to defend their home and their ailing father. For the war that had consumed the rest of Ireland now stood on the borders of Munster and, with it, West Cork.

  The year was 1177, and the victorious Norman and English armies had been sweeping through much of Ulster, Leinster, and Connacht for seven years already. Leinster’s king, Dermot Mac-Murrough, had lit the fuse around 1168, when he was thrown out of his castle and forced to go begging for help across the Irish Sea. The Welsh-Norman Lord Richard de Clare, the second Earl of Pembroke, whom everybody called Strongbow, was more than willing to lend a hand and helped reconquer vast parts of the lost territories.

  The Norman invasion had begun.

  It didn’t end there, of course. Because power is as stable as a forest fire.

  Local feuds soon erupted, and the newly empowered Irish warlords became a real danger to the English masters who had backed them. For the next two hundred years, battles raged, both between Irish kings and Normans and among the Irish themselves. Maps were redrawn. Allegiances shifted faster than the tide. And only the fiercest and the smartest still raised their flags around the high councils each evening after battle.

  Through it all, no invading force ever penetrated the walls of Dún an Bhaintrigh.

  “I want a suit of armor and a sword, Father,” demanded Ned upon his seventeenth birthday, when the forces of the Norman Lord Miles de Cogan rolled across the landscape in eastern Cork, exacting tribute and brooking no opposition. Soon, they would be at the black gates, preparing to rend them asunder. De Cogan had archers from Wales and cavalry from France. His troops were well fed and armed, and his hair perfectly groomed. He had no fear whatever, except that he was too late to be granted an earldom somewhere beautiful after victory was won.

  Ned, always more headstrong than his more timid brother, Euan, got his wish, mostly because his father only answered unseen ghosts rather than him. So at dawn, Ned rode out to meet the invader, all five feet six inches of him. But lest you get the wrong idea, Ned didn’t burn with a desire for glory. He merely wanted to preserve the castle, and knew the forest better than the Normans, as they should soon learn. His red mane and already fearsome physique looked magnificent upon his father’s black steed, and a trail of the Ua Eitirsceoil clan’s best horsemen behind him made the rain-soaked earth shudder and shake as they rode into the forest.

  But someone stayed behind inside the castle walls.
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br />   Twin brotherhood doesn’t mean twin courage. Euan had hid inside his bedroom when the head yeoman came around calling all able-bodied men to arms. He sat there still, fists clenched, watching his brother’s flag whipping in the wind, unable to move, hating his own fear more than his brother’s ability to shake off similar feelings of dread. When he finally emerged on the ramparts upon the afternoon, even the washerwomen turned their backs on him when he pretended that he had slept through the call to arms. His own father, momentarily awakened from the blurry images of the past, stared at him without a word. Then he bowed his head in shame and walked past, not reacting to Euan’s excuses as he tried to follow.

  As evening fell, the clanging of broadswords could be heard beyond the oak trees in the far distance. Whatever Ned had found wasn’t yielding.

  Euan finally grabbed one of the last horses left in the pen and rode through the gates, furiously slashing at thin air with a sword at least two sizes too big for him. When his brother had trained with at least three of his father’s biggest soldiers each day, Euan had preferred to spend his time putting on disguises and visiting pubs in the local towns. He’d bring his lute and strum it any time he saw a pretty dress. Townsfolk knew who he was, of course, and looked the other way, even if he hadn’t bothered pretending to be something common, like a minstrel. But sometimes, girls came back down from Dún an Bhaintrigh late the next day with tales only their eyes revealed. Euan had forced them to do things they’d never find absolution for in church.

  The sky had lowered itself almost to the point of touching the tree crowns, Euan felt, and blue-black clouds were sending bolts of lightning down so close to his horse’s mane that he could smell the singed hairs. He whipped the scared animal on.

  As Euan entered the forest, the sounds of battle changed. Screams and cries for mercy faded. A more primeval, and patient, chorus began to rise.

  Now he heard what sounded like whispers and creaking noises, as if the trees themselves turned to stare at him as he followed the hoofprints, barely visible even when carrying a torch. Amber points of light floated in pairs just beyond the trees, making him dizzy. He knew the wolves in his father’s parish had multiplied since the wars, now that all swords were pointed at Norman throats, not theirs. Sometimes it felt to Euan as if the beasts knew the humans had left them alone and therefore had less fear of their weapons. A low steady growl followed him all the way to a clearing he knew by heart; he and his brother had often played there, dueling with wooden swords until one cried out in pain—usually Euan himself.

  It was there that Euan now saw a sight that made his previous anger pale in comparison to what he felt clawing at his smooth throat.

  Ned had lured the enemy cavalry into a trap.

  He had sent out a small probe of horsemen, hoping to draw the largest part of the invader’s force into a place from which they could not escape. Unaware of the land’s many dark places, the Normans had taken the bait and soon found their horses surrounded on all sides by trees and stuck to their bellies in fresh Irish mud. Welsh archers, disoriented underneath the low black canopy, began firing at their own officers by mistake. Ned’s foot soldiers made short work of them all, sticking the horses in the belly where they stood and leaving no quarter for their riders as soon as their handmade Parisian cuirasses hit the ground. The forest groaned louder now, and blood was sucked into the bog faster than rainwater.

  Euan waited. If he showed himself now, his earlier hesitation would mark him forever as a coward. He dismounted, crept low to the grass, and watched his brother swivel around on his father’s great horse, taking down a lanky Welsh colonel of infantry before he had a chance to draw his weapon. The man shielded his pale gray eyes even as Ned gored him. Ned wiped his blade, wheeled around, and looked for more prey.

  Then, God smiled on cowardice.

  “Prince Ned!” A cry went up from an Irish vassal. “They’re trying to flank us!”

  A small group of Welsh archers had broken through the forest on the far left side, their tunics ripped to ribbons by the thorns but their voices undaunted. They screamed like banshees as they cut a bloody swath through the victorious Irish horsemen.

  And exactly then is when Euan rose and seized his one and only chance.

  Because with their backs turned, nobody was watching his corner of the battlefield. Besides, most of the torches were flickering and dying faster than the soldiers. Euan snuck up on his brother’s horse and hacked at its hind legs. In the chaos and tumult, nobody heard the keening when the animal fell, crushing the rider underneath.

  Ned lay with both legs and most of his body trapped. His eyes rolled around in his head as he tried to comprehend what had happened. Euan approached cautiously, scanning the battlefield. Ned’s men were massing for a counterattack, torches illuminating them like hundreds of giants against the leaves, but they were still disoriented by the ferocity of the Welsh surprise.

  “Br-brother?” Ned mumbled, gasping for air, recognizing the figure bent over him.

  “Yes,” said Euan, and mounted his own horse. He tightened the straps on his armor and put his good kidskin gloves back on. Then he reached down and took his brother’s shield. A painted ship with three furled sails shone on its steel.

  “You will be damned for all time,” Ned said, his eyes burning gold in the light.

  “Only God and fortune know,” answered Euan, and rode his horse over his one and only twin brother until its hooves had stopped Ned’s breathing. Then he turned his attention to the Ua Eitirsceoil cavalry and galloped, full-bore, out into their vanguard. The sight of his red hair whipping around, and of his brother’s shield held aloft, roused the troops, and they quickly surged to fill the gap the Welsh had opened. The Irish yeomanry used their short swords to check the enemy advance, showing even less mercy than before. It was over in minutes.

  Moments later, even the trees were quiet.

  The Irish celebrated their victory, most praising Prince Euan’s timely arrival, now that their beloved leader had suffered such a dishonorable death, probably brought about by a callow Frenchman. The enemy retreated and sought other lands to conquer. Dún an Bhaintrigh still stood against any foe.

  Now began Euan’s reign.

  He made sure, upon his triumphant return, to have his father bestow upon Ned a hero’s funeral. Euan even delivered a fitting eulogy that touched upon “the warrior spirit that cost Ned his life.” When his father, racked with yet another loved one to mourn, followed Ned to the grave less than a month later, the eulogy was markedly shorter and less heartfelt. Euan had turned his father’s quarters into a bordello within a day, making his soldiers round up a sampling of young women from the surrounding countryside to celebrate his victory and rapid ascendancy to the throne. Servants looked the other way. And the stories of his peculiar tastes spread even wider each time a young woman came walking back down the hill with her eyes cast down.

  Sometimes, it was whispered, they never came home at all.

  More than anything, though, King Euan soon found a passion far greater than preying on women.

  He had begun to venture ever deeper into the forest in search of wolves.

  Within a year, he had more than a hundred grayback heads on pikes in the Great Hall where his father had once overseen the annual flower festival. Now, hunters his family would never have deigned to look at in public drank the castle’s mead barrels dry. Clad in black leather skins, they bragged about the day’s hunt and compared kills. In thanks, one of them even fashioned a hollowed-out wolf’s head for Euan as a present. He accepted it with genuine tears in his eyes and pulled it down over his head. It fit almost too well, making the twin sets of eyes reflect the low candlelight. He wore it all night, even to bed with three girls barely old enough to know why they had been brought to his chambers. And in the morning, he baptized his family’s home to fit his newest passion.

  Dún an Bhaintrigh was no longer a fitting name, he decided, now that the widower had died. Henceforth, the castle with the
black gate would forever come to be known as Dún an Fhaoil. For what had a better ring to it than Fort of the Wolf? He struck his family’s age-old nautical crest from the castle’s banners and shields and replaced it with a fearsome wolf leaping through a forest clearing, a sign of his own good fortune and ferocious human appetites.

  King Euan lived almost three more years this way.

  Until God finally decided to frown on cowardice and treachery.

  Euan was riding on the outskirts of his land with just a small escort. He felt glorious. His servants, trailing a mile or two behind him because they picked up his kills, already had three magnificent graybacks and two of their young in leather nets. He spurred his horse on, picking a trail leading into a part of the forest he didn’t recognize. Fear welled up in him for the first time in years, but he fought to quell it. It was only three upon the afternoon, but the shade beneath the trees seemed to have solid form. The groaning, twisting sound he had heard years earlier, right before he found his brother’s war party, now writhed out of every branch.

  “Superstition,” he cried aloud to the trees, which didn’t answer. “Old fairy tales!” His guard shouted his name far behind. And he held his tongue. If he couldn’t conquer this childish fear of the dark, how could he hope to rule all of Cork? Or, perhaps, to retake all of Munster one day and drive the Normans back into the waves? He rode on alone, and the nervous voices behind him were soon swallowed up by the leaves. He turned around a bend and saw he wasn’t alone.

  A wolf sat on the path before him.

  It seemed to wait patiently, as a human might have. Euan’s horse became spooked, and threw him to the ground before it whinnied and galloped off in a panic. Euan quickly drew his sword and scrambled to his feet. His wolf helmet had fallen off his head and tumbled limply toward its living namesake, still sitting perfectly immobile, as if waiting for a sign.

  “Are you real?” Euan finally dared to ask, panting for breath.