Enchanting Cold Blood

by Petya Lehmann

  It was a small earthen rath,* and at its base lay the mouth of a tunnel or narrow underground passage, dating back from the most primitive times and still used by the villagers as a storehouse or a refuge in case of need. It had proved cruelly faithless to that last office, now when the need had been so desperately great. Such of the women and children of the village had crowded in here. Stones had been rolled to the mouth of the tunnel, and an attempt made further to conceal the entrance with bushes, but the pitiful ruse had been detected only too easily. The stones had been pulled away, the bushes fired; more bushes and more piles of wet sods had been heaped on, and all who had not rushed out at the first surprise, had perished in the suffocating smoke.

  (* A circular enclosure surrounded by an earthen wall, used as a dwelling and stronghold in former times in Ireland.)

  Volumes of black smoke still hung over the place and were slowly issuing from the entrance as the kern made his way into it, covering his mouth with his hands so as to be able to breathe. The sight that met his eyes might well have scared a soul far less terrified, far less already saturated with horror than his. The dead lay in a heap just inside the entrance, women and children together, so huddled as to defy recognition. Those whom he had come to seek were not amongst these first victims, and it was not until, at imminent risk of suffocation, he had penetrated some distance further from the entrance that at last he came upon them.

  A sort of rough partition of stone crossed this inner part of the tunnel, and it was behind this partition that they lay. The two little girls were side by side, their mother lay a little in advance of them, as if she had rushed forward suddenly and then fallen back, suffocated by the smoke. To the children at least death seemed to have been very kind. There was nothing to show that they had even awakened before the end came. They lay in a perfectly easy attitude, their two little faces turned towards one another, just as they had lain on the morning when Maelcho saw them last. They were both dead, but they were not distorted, nor disfigured, nor even blackened in the slightest degree. Duagh o' Cadhla stood and gazed at them, his eyes starting out of his head, his brain awhirl with terror and confused horror. To him it was the inconceivable that had happened. Sorely the heavens, he thought, must be falling in; sorely the world itself most have turned topsy-turvy, and all things be coming to an end, before such a sight as this could be seen? Before the wife and the children of one of the great House of Desmond, — Geraldines themselves of the purest blood-— could be seen huddled in the same ruin, caught by the same fate, slain by the same brutal hands, as the wives and the children of mere peasants and herdsmen?

  But there they lay, the mother and the children, all three of them, stone dead before his eyes. There was only one thing therefore left to be done, only one last office for any faithful adherent of the great house to perform. Duagh o' Cadhla took the children up one by one in his arms, shaking from head to foot as he did so, and carried them to the entrance, handling them with awe and wrapping them round with such poor wearing weeds as he could find lying about; then he went back for their mother. When, breathless and half stifled, he had got his burdens through the smoke to the entrance, he paused a minute to recover himself. Starting again, he carried them round to the back of the rath, where the ground was softer, and where it was possible for him to dig a grave. With great difficulty, he contrived to scoop one out large enough to contain all three side by side, the two children to the right, their mother to the left. Having laid them in it, he levelled the ground, taking care to conceal as far as possible all traces of what he had done, but keeping the bearings, so as to know the spot again if he was called upon to do so. After this, tottering like a very old man and hardly believing in the reality of what he himself had just done, he went back to where Maelcho was lying.

  The seanchaí lay just as he had left him. Was he really dead; out and out dead, this time, Duagh wondered. The need to fly was in his bones, was in his very soul, and he could resist it no longer. That the place he was then in was probably as safe as any that he could find, seeing that the destroyers were not at all likely to turn back upon their own tracks, was a consideration he was quite incapable of reflecting upon. Leaving Maelcho lying by himself upon the grass, he simply took to his heels and ran, and ran.

  Chapter XXXII.

  It was the middle of the night before Maelcho again came back to himself. He did not miss Duagh, or so much as remember that he had ever been there. As for what had gone before, that also had faded, but not with equal completeness. Through the darkness of his mind, as through the darkness of the night about him, dim lights seemed to be piercing; dim figures appeared now and then to pass; lurid figures, terrible figures, but all too broken and confused for him to know how far they were real or not. Happily, the physical needs were just then overpoweringly imperative. He was parched with thirst. Getting to his feet, he managed in a staggering fashion to crawl a little way to where the sound of running water guided him. Here he drank long and deeply, then finding some fragments of food in the bag which he carried at his waist, he ate them, and soon afterwards sank again into a heavy swoon-like sleep.

  When he next awoke, the darkness was beginning to yield to the dawn. His long resuscitating sleep, or perhaps his own extraordinary strength and vitality, had restored him to pretty much the same state as he had been in a few days before. The hurry of the start had prevented the soldiers from making sure that he was dead. The blow on his head was the worst of the injuries he had received. This was now a source rather of added mental confusion, than of any likelihood of death. Getting upon his feet, he found that in a feeble tottering fashion he could manage to keep erect. With the inborn instinct of the vagrant, he turned immediately towards the open country. The result was that before it had grown light enough for him to see where he was, and before any tell-tale illumination could awaken memory through the channel of his eyes, he was already some distance from the scene of this latest tragedy.

  The wave of slaughter had flowed a good long way south by this time. For hours, he met with no single living creature, only dead ones; dead men, dead women, even dead animals. About the middle of the day, he came to what had evidently been a good-sized village, some of the walls of which were still standing. Here quite a little crowd of people were gathered and were squatting in a circle upon the ground, beside the fragments of what two days before had been their homes. They were mere fragments themselves, for that matter, the remnants of perhaps three or four dozen families, who had by some accident escaped, when the rest had perished. There were a few men, a considerable number of children and boys, and perhaps half a dozen young women, but the greater number were very old ones, haggard and terrible to look at, in their utter hopeless misery. One of them however was a gentle-faced old woman, the grandmother seemingly of a whole troop, all of whom she appeared to haye survived, for she was quite alone. Every time she looked at one particular heap, a little to the left of the village, her mouth twitched, and over the poor little wrinkled face there passed a piteous expression of misery, dumb, uncomplaining, uncomprehending.

  There they sat, crouched together upon the black earth. One or two of the women kept muttering to themselves, or to their nearest neighbours, but the men with one accord remained absolutely silent; vacant misery stamped upon every face.

  Maelcho sat down amongst them and remained there with them for several hours, he did not know why, for he had never seen any of them before. He simply sat on, feeling for the moment as though this charred village had been his home also; as if he belonged to it and had by its ruin been made house-less like the rest. At last, he got up and wandered away once more by himself, no one heeding him, no one asking why he had come, or where he was going. He could not have told in any case, for he had not the slightest idea. He was simply carried along, as a leaf is carried in some irresistible gale. He remembered nothing; he had no thoughts and no object; he simply wandered, as a wild beast prowls, from the sheer animal necessity of moving.

  That night he l
ay in a dry ditch, half filled with withered bracken. Next day, still without any definite purpose, he crossed over the Slieve Mish mountains and got down to the sea on the other side, sleeping in a pucker of sand upon the north side of Castlemaine harbour. From his lair beside the edge of the water, he could see a long irregular line of detached fires, telling of the villages then in course of being burnt, which stretched away, far as the eye could reach, along both sides of Dingle Bay. Now and then, one of those dull red dots would shoot up for a while and blaze merrily; then it would sink again into a red heart of flame, like some small and nearly extinct volcano. Towards morning, he was roused by a wild stampede of frightened creatures — men, women, children, animals. Presently, they disappeared again round the nearest projecting spur of coast, and he saw them no more.

  Chapter XXXIII.

  In this way, not knowing where he was going, he reached the town of Dingle. The few inhabitants who had been there when he had last passed it had by this time fled. The soldiers too had all gone, there being nothing left for them to do there. The little town had become a mere wreck. The English favourers, which included most of its well-to-do inhabitants, had been previously driven away by Sir John of Desmond; the poorer ones — churls, fishermen, herdsmen, and so forth — had been slain almost to a man by Pelham and Ormond. Every better house had been gutted by the first; every cabin burnt by the latter. Now the calm of blackened walls and absolute ruin had settled down upon everything. No one remained to be killed, nor was there a single burnable thing left to burn.

  Maelcho wandered in and out of the houses, up and down restlessly, as though seeking for someone. A dim idea had been growing up lately in his mind, a sort of half realisation of what had really happened. It kept flitting in and out of it like a ghost, sometimes disappearing completely and then suddenly reappearing. Now for a moment he saw the whole scene, just as he had seen it with his actual eyesight — the cave full of black smoke, the huddled dead, everything — then it would fade again, and everything would become a complete blank. His mind kept fighting it off and refusing to listen to it; striking it violently aside, as he might have struck some messenger, who had insisted upon bringing him evil tidings. It was a lie, he told himself, a bad, lying dream, such as he had often had. They were alive; he was looking for them; looking for them everywhere; and if only he looked long enough and close enough, he should find them yet.

  With this idea in his mind, he kept wandering in and out of all the houses, aimlessly, yet persistently, looking about him. At last, he stopped upon the threshold of a house, the door of which stood wide open. The rafters hung in blackened confusion above his head, and through the holes in the roof, the clear cold sky of March shone down, a pale remote-looking blue. Like every other house in Dingle, it had been gutted thoroughly. The wind swept within it as freely as it did without, but the walls happened to be still solid and unbroken. It seemed to have been a decent little abode. There were remnants of furniture lying about, and in one corner there even stood a black oak spinning wheel, which by some miracle had escaped the flames, and from which there still hung a long hank of dark blue wool. It looked as if the spinner had dropped it from her hands at the instant when she sprang up to make her escape.

  Maelcho looked at all these things carefully; at the broken roof, at the burnt furniture, but especially, at the spinning wheel. Ever since he had set foot in Dingle, his lips had been perpetually forming themselves round a single word, the word 'marbh'.* It was the only word he had uttered since he had pronounced his own name to Duagh o' Cadhla four days before. Now as he stood, there it rose again to his lips, as if of its own accord, and he kept on repeating it over and over aloud. Marbh! Marbh! Marbh! What did it mean though, and who was it that was dead? he asked himself suddenly. Was it — could it be — they? No, no, it was not, it was not, he cried passionately; it was not they! He knew that it was not! Sitting down upon the doorstep, he put his arms about his knees and thrust his fingers deep into his ears, shutting his eyes at the same time, as if thereby to cut off every possible channel by which that thought could steal into him.

  (* Dead.)

  Suddenly, as he sat there, he heard a new voice; a voice it seemed this time really outside of him. He took his fingers out of his ears and listened intently. It was not a single voice, he then perceived, but many voices, only they were all uttering the same word. It was his own word, too, that they were uttering, 'Marbh! Marbh! Marbh!' over and over in chorus. It echoed up and down the deserted streets; it came back to him in broken reverberations from the roofs. He sat up and gazed about him, his eyes wide with terror. Suddenly, he heard another voice; a voice different from the rest; a voice that seemed to be coming from higher up, as if someone were standing upon a housetop and proclaiming a message from there. “Not dead, only seeming to be dead.” It grew louder and louder, this new voice; it appeared to Maelcho to be shouting into his ears, like some great brazen trumpet. He could hear every word distinctly and could take in the meaning of each. His mind seemed to spring up to meet the news. He was still straining every nerve to hear it; still filling himself with the good tidings, when — suddenly as it had begun — the voice ceased, and there was nothing more to be heard. The silence seemed to return instantly. It appeared to fall down and to crush everything, as a roof might fall and crush those who stood below it. Maelcho remained sitting upon the doorstep, turning his head to right and left, expecting every minute to hear something further. There was nothing further however to hear. No matter, he said to himself, he knew what it meant; he knew everything! His mind seemed for the moment to have come back to him, clearer than before, his perceptions to be brighter and more vigorous than they had ever been. Suddenly, the thought of the hut upon the cliff flew back into his mind. It had been on the edge of it several times before, but he had always pushed it away, with an instinctive feeling that he did not want to think about that; that he did not mean to go there. Now on the contrary, something seemed to tell him that that was the right place to go to. There was where he would find them; there and nowhere else. Leaping to his feet, he flung a single hasty glance around him, as if to make sure of where he was. Then he started away, out of Dingle, straight across the deserted peninsula, in the direction of Smerwick Bay.

  Chapter XXXIV.

  The further he went in this direction, the quicker his pace grew, till it was like the long loping gallop of a wolf. Now and then, he threw up his head and gazed around him at the blasted landscape, but without any thought in connection with it beyond the desire to reach the end of his road as soon as possible. There was no one to question or to stop him, for the country was a mere desert.

  After a couple of hours, he reached the shores of Smerwick Bay, coming out nearly opposite to the Fort of Gold, at the spot where the camp of the invaders had been pitched. Sir James's unhappy Irish Calais remained just as he had left it. The ditches half cut, the bastions half made, the drawbridge unfinished. It stood naked now to the sea and sky. The Spaniards who had worked at it were gone, most of them by this time dead, and it stood there, a ruin around a ruin, waiting, with something of an air of conscious suspense, for that more startling and world-renowned tragedy of which it was shortly to be the theatre.

  Maelcho passed it at the same long loping gallop and hastened on till he reached the cliff. Here he got upon the same narrow track along which he had gone the day that Hugh Gaynard first fell in with the Geraldines, and again, as on that day, he paused where a projecting knoll jutted out and glanced down at what lay below.

  It looked just as it had looked then, only that there were a few more traces of recent habitation. The little shanty on its weed-covered bracket stood just as he had left it six months before. The voice of the sea came up in the same hoarse chorus to his ear; the stream trickled over the brink and slipped, choking and gurgling, through the shingle to the shore, the gulls shrieked and hovered. He stood and stared at it all with widely distended eyes; eyes in which hope and hungry expectation were beginning to burn. />
  Suddenly, he started forward at a run and did not pause again until he stood upon the ledge itself. Nothing seemed to have been touched here either since he left. Bits of driftwood lay about, mixed up with scattered moss, spars, and shells, which he had himself collected for the children. He looked first at one thing, and then at another; carefully, inquiringly; his nostrils expanding as a dog's do, when it comes home and looks for a hand to be put out to welcome it. At last, he went up to the door, opened it a little way and peeped in, peering first to the right hand and then to the left. Perhaps they were sleeping, or perhaps they were round the corner, waiting to pounce out upon him and thump him lovingly with their soft little hands. He had dreamt that they were dead, but, thank Heaven, it was only a dream. He knew better now, he knew that it was only a dream, one of his old, wicked, lying dreams. They were not dead, they were alive, and he should see them soon.

  He stood still; that look of crazed expectation deepening upon his face as he remained there. At last, he began to speak, at first quite low, under his breath, in a tender, entreating whisper — “Girls! Lady-girls! Eh, my little lady-girls!” He waited a minute; no answer; then whispered again and waited; still no answer; then louder and louder, and after that louder and louder still, till the whole cliff rang with his voice; rang and rang with his entreaty to be answered. Then he waited again. Silence! Utter, absolute silence.

  Suddenly, he started and looked behind him. Something was tapping there, tapping against the wall behind the partition, something which sounded exactly like the touch of small impatient fingers. Of course, they were there; they always tapped there when they awoke and wanted him to come to them! With a bound, he was across the floor and had darted behind the partition. Nothing! absolutely nothing. Still it went on, that soft sound, so like the sound of tapping fingers. Outside! Yes, outside! Again he rushed across the floor, through the door, round the corner of the hut; his arms open, his big body stumbling against everything it encountered, his lips trembling, his whole face lit up with hope and eager expectation.