Enchanting Cold Blood

by Petya Lehmann

  After depositing the logs, the man came over to where he lay and stood looking down at him. Then, muttering something under his breath, he suddenly whipped out a knife from a sheath at his side and cut the rope that bound Hugh's arms and legs. This done, he picked him up as he might have done a baby and laid him down again on the ground, a little nearer to where he had been sitting. Having examined the hurt on his head, he put a sop of something wet and soothing to it and then returned to his attendance upon the fire. Hugh lay still and tried to remember what had befallen him, but his brain still swam, and his head caused him so much pain, that the mere attempt to think seemed like a new hurt.

  Gradually, however, as the wet rag soothed the pain, he began to get better. One by one, the incidents of the night rose up and detached themselves till they grew into a connected whole. He remembered his long wait in the water, while the O'Flahertys were preparing to depart; their search for him; the shouts, the blows of the oars, the rain of stones, the drawing off of the curaghs; Muredagh's murder of his nephew Eonach; the single stifled death-scream of the latter; the look of his body as it floated blackly upon the waves, one hand white above the surface; his own night-long wanderings; the spokes of naked feet converging round the fire. At this point, he had fallen asleep, so that his impressions became rather mixed. In the end, he once more gave up the effort of remembrance and lay still, waiting to see what the next stage of his adventures might have to show him.

  Meanwhile, the light was growing stronger every minute, the shadows stretching out and becoming lost. Lifting himself upon his elbow, he was able to observe that he was once more surrounded in all directions with yellow sand, spreading in a gentle slope to the sea and upwards again on either side until it rose into low cliffs to right and to left of him. At first, he could distinguish nothing very clearly, except what lay in the immediate foreground — the fire with the big man in the green cloak tending it. Little by little, he perceived that this was no solitary stretch of sand upon which he lay, but, on the contrary, a densely populated one. In every hollow and comparatively sheltered spot, men were lying thick as pilchards in a barrel, each with a cloak about him, and, for the most part, with some sort of bundle rolled pillow-fashion under his head. These men were not barefooted herdsmen either, but soldiers, for he could see the gleam of the weapons that lay beside them. Moreover, as he looked closer, he could perceive clearly that they were not even Irishmen. Not only were their clothes cut quite differently from any clothes he had ever seen before, but their faces, too, were different — browner, longer, with something hard and emphatic about them, which even sleep could not entirely wipe out. Then, as his eyes travelled round the space before him, he saw that in the deepest, and therefore the most sheltered, of all the hollows, a small leather tent had been erected, a tent originally apparently yellow in colour, but now weather-stained to the utmost point of weathering. Just inside the door of this tent, a pair of brown legs and sandalled feet stuck out — feet and legs which could belong to no one, Hugh thought, but a monk. Lest there should be any doubt on this point, a ray of sunlight at that moment lit up the interior, and he caught sight of the frocked form of their owner, lying doubled up and drugged with sleep in the inside, his feet, which had not found room there, lolling helplessly over the sand. Another monk, equally fast asleep, was just visible behind him, with the toes of another pair of brown sandalled feet showing at the entrance.

  These were all odd sights, and Hugh rubbed his eyes as he gazed from one thing to another — from the tent to the armed men, and from the armed men back to the sleeping monks — wondering what it might mean. Suddenly, his brain cleared, and he remembered everything. It was all natural enough, only he had forgotten. He must have been brought, of course, into the very place he had been trying all night to reach, into the camp of the Geraldines.* Those figures tumbled about together upon the sand before him, who could they be but the famous Italian and Spanish soldiers of Sir James Fitzmaurice, who had come to rescue Ireland and to sweep all the English into the sea? That tent, with its advanced guard of brown sandalled feet, whose, again, could it be but the tent of the illustrious doctor, the Pope's Legate? The illustrious doctor's name Hugh had forgotten for the moment, but it was the same, no doubt, about whom the begging friars had come to preach in western Connacht. The thing was all clear enough. What was not at all clear, and what still remained to be seen, was what sort of treatment he himself was likely to experience at their hands. There was nothing to be done, therefore, but to sit still and await events.

  (* The FitzGeralds are an Hiberno-Norman dynasty and Peers of Ireland.)

  While he had been making these discoveries, the man in the green cloak had been busily mixing up a mess of something that looked like stirabout* in a small pot over the fire, stirring it from time to time and tasting it, with all the airs of a professional cook. It was not made of oatmeal, Hugh perceived, but of some round brown objects which the man took from a bag beside him. Looking at him more closely, Hugh saw that below his green cloak he wore the usual long-sleeved Irish shirt, with kilt and trews, over the latter of which a pair of big Spanish boots were pulled, which, wrinkling round his knees, added not a little to his bulk. His face seemed to have been once upon a time fair, but was now so darkened by sun and so beaten about by weather, as to be almost black, or rather chocolate colour — the colour of a peat bog. Out of this peat-coloured face a pair of extremely light and extremely prominent eyes shone in a dancing, glittering fashion, much as two pools might have shone out of a dark bog. For the rest, the man's face was chiefly noticeable for the largeness and looseness of his lips, which seemed to be never for an instant at rest. At that moment, he was talking to himself, or rather to the wood, which, being damp, refused to light properly. The words Hugh caught were in Irish, but even without that indication he would not have had the slightest doubt as to his nationality.

  (* A kind of porridge.)

  This man was the famous Maelcho! His unmistakable insanity; his fidelity, sane or insane, to his master; his tale-telling, by which be could chain the wildest audiences hour after hour spell-bound upon his lips — all these various gifts and achievements had made up such a body of tradition as no other man of that generation, perhaps for several preceding ones, had attained to. Feats which not Goliath could have accomplished single-handed — prodigious slaughters, whole armies put to flight, herds of cattle captured, towns and villages carried by storm — were gravely related of him, and believed, moreover, from one end of Ireland to the other. Even the doings of his master, Sir James Fitzmaurice, paled beside those of his still more notable seanchaí. When, ten years earlier, Sir James had stood out single-handed against the whole power of the Government of the day, it was always Maelcho who was popularly believed to have made the feat possible; Maelcho who had outwitted the foe, covered their own retreat, made good their biding-places, and, moreover, by his spells had brought ruin and confusion amongst their pursuers. In his native forests of South Waterford, these legends especially had grown up and had spread thence, little by little, over the whole surrounding country, swelling and drawing to themselves a crowd of half-forgotten tales, in which the deeds of men centuries dead and gone were confounded with those of the hero of the hour. These tales, or a hasty mental selection of them, flew now through Hugh's mind, quite enough to scare him as he realised that he was in the power, literally under the very shadow, of this same terrible Maelcho! Aghast, he remained gazing upwards, too terrified to speak or move. Maelcho, the son of Murglas! Maelcho, the scourge of the Sassenach! Maelcho, with whose name every colonist woman throughout Munster scared her children! If this were he, then indeed was his own doom fixed beyond reprieve!

  To his surprise, finding him dumb, the big man presently retired with a placid nod to his cooking. A still clearer proof of his amiable intentions was given a minute later.

  “Then it is not sorry you will be to be eating something, I am thinking, young stranger?” came to Hugh's ears in tones like distant thunde
r. “Not at all sorry, I am thinking. And it is these you may eat, so it is, therefore take them!”

  A dozen of the brown objects he was cooking were here flung at Hugh, one after the other, in a shower. They were hot from the embers and burnt his hands shrewdly, but he accepted them as he would have accepted cockatrices or red-hot fire-balls coming from such a quarter. Inside he found they were full of a white flouriness, which smelt deliciously, and which he promptly proceeded to convey to his mouth. The man in the green cloak nodded his head approvingly, grinning from ear to ear with a smile which was upon the same scale as the rest of him, and which had the effect of wrinkling his brown face into a succession of chocolate-coloured puckers.

  “Then it is good food, so it is, very good and sweet,” he remarked complacently. “And it is the right food and the best in the world for growing girls, little girls, that cannot eat hard food, hard, tough beef food, only fit for fighting men's gizzards!”

  This statement, remote as it seemed from anything he could see or imagine around him, Hugh received with the same reverence that he had received the recent shower of hot food. If submission would mollify this giant, he was quite ready to be as submissive as heart could desire.

  Suddenly his fears revived, for his captor had again scrambled to his feet, with more agility than might have been expected from his bulk, and now stood staring apparently right at him. He was not, however, really looking at him, as Hugh, to his relief, presently perceived, but at some object a little way above his head. Glancing in the same direction to see what that object was, he perceived that close to one of the cliffs or banks of sand a second brown leather tent had been pitched, and that beside it, against the very bank itself, a cloak or piece of cloth had been pegged down, covering apparently some hollow or recess dug out of the bank. With another sudden bound, the big man snatched up the pot he had been mixing and motioning Hugh to take up a keg of milk, which stood on the ground between them, started across the sand for this point.

  Hugh obeyed, though his head still swam and his limbs hardly seemed to belong to him. Keeping close at his leader's heels, he presently found himself stopping in front of the cloth pegged against the bank. Here the big man squatted down upon his heels on the sand and with his fingers began gently scratching upon the cloth. Then, having waited a moment or two, he began chirping softly, in a wheedling, sing-song fashion, such as a man might use to a child or to some very favourite animal.

  Apparently, the signal was understood, for the next minute a corner of the cloth was let down, and two little heads appeared at the opening, just as a pair of birds' heads might have come out of a cage or nest. They were not birds' heads, though, but children's heads — a fair one and a dark one — two little girls' heads, with round daisy faces, sweet half-closed eyes and sleep-ruffled hair; two small red mouths being promptly opened, and four small hands being equally promptly stretched out to take the food extended to them.

  Hugh opened his own mouth and stared his hardest. Children! Girls! — as the big man had just said! What could have brought them to such a place and at such a time? Who in the world had buried them there like sand martens in the bank? With his head full of the tales about Maelcho the seanchaí, he suddenly remembered that accusation of ogre-like doings which was one of those most frequently brought against him. Was it true? Was he really an ogre? And if so, was he keeping these children there in the sand to devour them at his leisure? Hugh's sturdy sense of probabilities recoiled instinctively before the notion, and he hesitated about believing it without a little further evidence.

  Certainly the ogre, if ogre he were, was at present looking after his victims with remarkable assiduity. Squatted on his big heels beside the bank, he was feeding them with the best mixed bits of the stirabout, imploring them, almost with tears, to go on eating. When he could induce them to eat no more, with his huge brown hands, which looked like a pair of seal's flippers, he busied himself in straightening their sleeping quarters, arranging their clothes and even smoothing down their hair, tumbled as it was by sleep and the various accidents of their very singular hiding-place.

  Under these circumstances, Hugh's first ideas of cannibalism began to subside. The big man appeared to regard these two little creatures in the hole with a perfectly abject and idiotic devotion. When his ministrations were at last over, he remained squatting before them like a dog, gazing at them with all the worship of a savage before two life-sized idols of his tribe; his eyes glistening, his loose lips quivering, his whole face creased and wrinkled into puckers of absolute adoration. Upon so practical minded a young man as Hugh Gaynard, such an unreasonable exhibition of devotion had the effect of producing a comfortable sense of superiority, which went far to diminish the terror which the name of the formidable seanchaí had at first awakened. Could this really be the man of whom he had heard so much?

  Chapter XII.

  Meanwhile, it was now broad daylight, and the whole camp was stirring and humming like a bee-hive. The sun had swung out clear and bright, hanging suspended seemingly between white balloon-like clouds, peering one above the other, as if to see what lay below them. The huddled-up figures, some finishing their last snatches of sleep, some rousing themselves, yawning, blinking, and grumbling — these Spaniards, Italians, Portuguese — these groups of desperadoes, drawn together almost at haphazard, wearers of half a dozen uniforms, speakers of as many tongues; mercenaries, adventurers, bandits, irregulars of all sorts and kinds; unused to act together, unable in many cases even to communicate; tossed out here upon the sand; their retreat cut off — for already their ships had been destroyed — without commissariat, without proper preparations for defending themselves, without organised arrangements of any sort! A dozen unlucky English sailors might have been seen in one of these puckers of sand, who had been caught at sea and brought ashore with ropes round their necks, by way of hint of what awaited them, when their captors had done with them. Another group was made up of the townsfolk of Dingle, retained as pledges for the good behaviour of their fellows. There were also camp followers, and local idlers of all sorts from the country round. There were Dr. Saunders and his monks in their own particular tent. There was Sir James's wife, who had accompanied her husband and was lying sick from exposure and the miseries of the voyage, without a creature of her own sex to look after her. There were his two little daisy-faced daughters in their sandy hole, under the charge of their big, brown-faced nursery-maid. Altogether, a more varied and a more unlooked-for combination of humanity has rarely perhaps greeted a sun upon its uprising!

  Meanwhile, no matter how uncomfortable or disturbing may be their prospects, people must get up, and people must eat their breakfasts. It was now nearly seven o'clock, and Sir James Fitzmaurice and the Legate had come out of their respective quarters and were standing together upon a little knoll, with the sea behind them, the land they had come so far to deliver stretching in all its faint greys and greens before them. The knight's face was exceedingly long as he gazed, but the churchman's face was longer still. This Irish enterprise of theirs looked bigger, there was no doubt of that, now that it was upon them — staring down into their very eyes — than it had done in Rome, Madrid, or elsewhere; bigger, grimmer, more formidable altogether. Details, which had been comfortably slurred over then, rose up now, one by one, in all their nakedness.

  Saunders was in one respect the happier man of the two, for he had a grievance, and he was a man to whom a grievance under all circumstances was very dear. It had been made clear to him, or so he maintained, by all who professed to be acquainted with Ireland, and especially by Sir James himself, that many things would go well, which it was now quite clear were likely to go very ill indeed. That the Earl of Desmond,* to begin with, would receive them upon their arrival with open arms, would shelter them in his castles, would minister to their necessities, above all, would lend them that tower of strength which the mere name of Desmond was known to afford in Munster. Now it appeared that, on the contrary, the Earl of Desmond had by no m
eans made up his mind what he was going to do in the matter. At first, he had absolutely refused to see them, and even when he had at last done so, it had been with immeasurable precautions, lest Henry Davells, the Commissioner of Munster, or, worse still, Sir William Pelham, its President, might hear of his having done so, and his own safety become compromised. Nor had the interview been the least productive of any satisfactory result. That the Earl was intensely jealous of his cousin, Sir James, was clear from the first moment and showed in every word and gesture. This in itself Saunders would have cared little about, as his own policy had always been to set his associates one against the other, that so his own influence might be paramount. But the yellow, peevish face, the helpless talk, the whole aspect and bearing of the great Earl and Palatine had filled him with nothing short of consternation. So crippled was this Desmond, as to be unable to sit upon a horse; so broken in courage, that his wife appeared the better man and more valiant soldier of the two; so filled with dread of England and her terrible mistress, that his tongue seemed to cleave to his jaw, and his lips to be literally incapable of utterance when he spoke of them; so blind to the irrevocableness of the steps already taken, that he exhausted himself in appeals to his allies to go away, only go away at once, and leave him and the country in peace. Yet, in spite of all this and through all this miserable irresolution, the inordinate pride of the Desmond — the belief in himself as the great hereditary chieftain, beside whom even kings and princes were but as equals — rose up visibly at every word. It was not a combination likely to impress favourably so keen a judge of men and leaders as was the Legate Saunders.

  (* Gerald FitzGerald, 15th Earl of Desmond /c. 1533 – 1583/.)