by John Crowley
In Easter week there appeared out of a silvery morning mist from the South a slow procession of horse and men on foot. Even if Hugh watching from the tower had not seen the red and gold banner of the Lord Deputy of Ireland shaken out suddenly by the rainy breeze, he would have known that these were English and not Irish, for the men were a neat, dark cross moving together smartly: a van, the flag in the center where the Lord Deputy rode flanked by men with long guns over their shoulders, and a rear guard with a shambling ox-drawn cart.
He climbed monkey-like down from the tower calling out the news, but the visitors had been seen already, and his uncle O’Quinn and the O’Hagan and Phelim were already mounting in the courtyard to ride and meet them. Hugh shouted at the horse-boys to bring his pony.
“You stay,” Phelim said, pulling on his gloves of English leather.
“I won’t,” Hugh said, and pushed the horse-boy: “Go on!”
Phelim’s horse began shaking his head and dancing away, and Phelim, pulling angrily at his bridle, commanded Hugh to obey; between the horse and Hugh disobeying him, he was getting red in the face, and Hugh was on the pony’s back, laughing, before Phelim could take any action against him. Turlough had watched all this without speaking; now he raised a hand to silence Phelim and drew Hugh to his side.
“They might as well see him now as later,” he said, and brushed back Hugh’s hair with an oddly gentle gesture.
The two groups, English and Irish, stood for a time some distance apart with a marshy stream running between them, while heralds met formally in the middle and carried greetings back and forth. Then the Lord Deputy, in a gesture of condescension, rode forward with only his standard-bearer, splashing across the water and waving a gloved hand to Phelim McTurlough; at that, McTurlough rode down to meet him half way, and leapt off his horse to take the Lord Deputy’s bridle and shake his hand.
Hugh, watching these careful approaches, began to feel less forward. He moved his pony back behind O’Quinn’s snorting bay. Sir Henry Sidney was huge: his mouth full of white teeth opened in a black beard that reached up nearly to his eyes, which were small and also black; his great thighs, in hose and high boots, made the slim sword that hung from his baldric look as harmless as a toy. His broad chest was enclosed in a breastplate like a tun; Hugh didn’t know its deep stomach was partly false, in the current fashion, but it looked big enough to hold him whole. Sir Henry raised an arm encased in a sleeve more dagged and gathered and complex than any garment Hugh had ever seen, and the squadron behind began to move up, and just then the Lord Deputy’s black eyes found Hugh.
In later years Hugh O’Neill would come to feel that there was within him a kind of treasure-chest or strong-box where were kept certain moments in his life, whole: some of them grand, some terrible, some oddly trivial, all perfect and complete with every sensation and feeling they had contained. Among the oldest which the box would hold was this one, when Phelim leading the Deputy’s horse brought him to Hugh, and the Deputy reached down a massive hand and took Hugh’s arm like a twig he might break, and spoke to him in English. All preserved: the huge black laughing head, the jingle of the horses’ trappings and the sharp odor of their fresh droppings, even the soft glitter of condensing dewdrops on the silver surface of Sir Henry’s armor. Dreaming or awake, in London, in Rome, this moment would now and again be taken out and shown him, and he would look into it as into a green and silver opal, and wonder.
The negotiations leading to Sir Henry’s taking Hugh O’Neill away with him to England as his ward went on for some days. Sir Henry was patient and careful: patient, while the O’Neills rehearsed again the long story of their wrongs at Shane’s hands; careful not to commit himself to more than he directly promised: that he would be a good friend to the Baron Dungannon, as he called Hugh, while at the same time intimating that large honors could come of it, chiefly the earldom of Tyrone, which since Conn’s death had remained in the Queen’s gift, unbestowed.
He gave to Hugh a little sheath knife with a small emerald of peculiar hue set in the ivory hilt; he told Hugh that the gem was taken from a Spanish treasure-ship sailing from Peru on the other side of the world. Hugh, excluded from their negotiations, would sit with the women and turn the little knife in his hands, wondering what could possibly be meant by the other side of the world. When it began to grow clear to him that he was meant to go to England with Sir Henry, he grew shy and silent, not daring even to ask what it would be like there. He tried to imagine England: he thought of a vast stone place, like the cathedral of Armagh multiplied over and over, where the sun did not shine.
At dinner one night Sir Henry saw him loitering at the door of the hall, peeking in. He raised his cup and called to him. “Come, my young lord,” he said, and the Irish smiled and laughed at the compliment, though Hugh, whose English was uncertain, wasn’t sure they weren’t mocking him. Hands urged him forward, and rather than be pushed before Sir Henry, Hugh stood as tall as he could, his hand on the little knife at his belt, and walked up before the vast man.
“My lord, are you content to go to England with me?”
“I am, if my uncles send me.”
“Well, so they do. You will see the Queen there.” Hugh answered nothing to this, quite unable to picture the Queen. Sir Henry put a huge hand on Hugh’s shoulder, where it lay like a stone weight. “I have a son near you in age. Well, something younger. His name is Philip.”
“Phelim?”
“Philip. Philip is an English name. Come, shall we go tomorrow?” Sir Henry looked around, his black eyes smiling at his hosts. Hugh was being teased: tomorrow was fixed.
“Tomorrow is too soon,” Hugh said, attempting a big voice of Phelim’s but feeling only sudden terror. Laughter around him made him snap his head around to see who mocked him. Shame overcame terror. “If it please your lordship, we will go. Tomorrow. To England.” They cheered at that, and Sir Henry’s head bobbed slowly up and down like an ox’s.
Hugh bowed and turned away, suppressing until he reached the door of the hall a desire to run. Once past the door, though, he fled, out of the castle, down the muddy street between the outbuildings, past the lounging guards, out into the gray night fields over which slow banks of mist lay undulating. Without stopping he ran along a beaten way up through the damp hissing grass to where a riven oak thrust up, had thrust up for as long as anyone knew, like a tensed black arm and gnarled hand.
Near the oak, almost hidden in the grass, were broken straight lines of worn mossy stones that marked where once a monastic house had stood; a hummocky sunken place had been its cellar. It was here that Hugh had killed, almost by accident, his first rabbit. He had not been thinking, that day, about hunting, but only sitting on a stone with his face tilted upward into the sun thinking of nothing, his javelin across his lap. When he opened his eyes, the sunlit ground was a coruscating darkness, except for the brown shape of the rabbit in the center of vision, near enough almost to touch. Since then he had felt the place was lucky for him, though he wouldn’t have ventured there at night; now he found himself there, almost before he had decided on it, almost before the voices and faces in the hall had settled out of consciousness. He had nearly reached the oak when he saw that someone sat on the old stones.
“Who is it there?” said the man, without turning to look. “Is it Hugh O’Neill?”
“It is,” said Hugh, wondering how blind O’Mahon nearly always knew who was approaching him.
“Come up, then, Hugh.” Still not turning to him—why should he? and yet it was unsettling—O’Mahon touched the stone beside him. “Sit. Do you have iron about you, cousin?”
“I have a knife.”
“Take it off, will you? And put it a distance away.”
He did as he was told, sticking the little knife in a spiky tree-stump some paces off; somehow the poet’s gentle tone brooked neither resistance nor reply.
“Tomorrow,” O’Mahon said
when Hugh sat next to him again, “you go to England.”
“Yes.” Hugh felt ashamed here to admit it, even though it had been in no sense his choice; he didn’t even like to hear the poet say the place’s name.
“It’s well you came here, then. For there are certain . . . personages who wished to say farewell to you. And give you a commandment. And a promise.”
The poet wasn’t smiling; his face was lean and composed behind a thin fair beard nearly transparent. His bald eyes, as though filled with milk and water, looked not so much blind as simply unused: baby’s eyes. “Behind you,” he went on, and Hugh looked quickly around, “in the old cellar there, lives one who will come forth in a moment, only you ought not to speak to him.”
The cellar-place was obscure; any of its humps, which seemed to shift vaguely in the darkness, might have been someone.
“And beyond, from that rath”—O’Mahon pointed with certainty, though he didn’t look, toward the broad ancient tumulus riding blackly like a whale above the white shoals of mist—“now comes out a certain prince, and to him also you should not speak.”
Hugh’s heart had turned small and hard and beat painfully. He tried to say Sidhe but the word would not be said. He looked from the cellar to the rath to the cellar again—and there a certain tussock darker than the rest grew arms and hands and began with slow patience to pull itself out of the earth. Then a sound as of a great stamping animal came from ahead of him, and, turning, he saw that out of the dark featureless rath something was proceeding toward him, something like a huge windblown cloak or a quickly oaring boat with a black luffing sail or a stampeding caparisoned horse. He felt a chill shiver up his back. At a sound behind him he turned again, to see a little thick black man, now fully out of the earth, glaring dourly at him (the glints of his eyes all that could be seen of his face) and staggering toward him under the weight of a black chest he carried in his stringy, rooty arms.
An owl hooted, quite near Hugh; he flung his head around and saw it, all white, gliding silently ahead of the Prince who proceeded toward Hugh, of whom and whose steed Hugh could still make nothing but that they were vast, and were perhaps one being, except that now he perceived gray hands holding reins or a bridle, and a circlet of gold where a brow might be. The white owl swept near Hugh’s head, and with a silent wingbeat climbed to a perch in the riven oak.
There was a clap as of thunder behind him. The little black man had set down his chest. Now he glared up at the Prince before him and shook his head slowly, truculently; his huge black hat was like a tussock of grass, but there nodded in it, Hugh saw, a white feather delicate as snow. Beside Hugh, O’Mahon sat unchanged, his hands resting on his knees; but then he raised his head, for the Prince had drawn a sword.
It was as though an unseen hand manipulated a bright bar of moonlight; it had neither hilt nor point, but it was doubtless a sword. The Prince who bore it was furious, that was certain too: he thrust the sword down imperiously at the little man, who cried out with a shriek like gale-tormented branches rubbing, and stamped his feet; but, though resisting, his hands pulled open the lid of his chest. Hugh could see that there was nothing inside but limitless darkness. The little man thrust an arm deep inside and drew out something; then, approaching with deep reluctance only as near as he had to, he held it out to Hugh.
Hugh took it; it was deathly cold. There was the sound of a heavy cape snapped, and when Hugh turned to look, the Prince was already away down the dark air, gathering in his stormy hugeness as he went. The owl sailed after him. As it went away, a white feather fell, and floated zigzag down toward Hugh.
Behind Hugh, a dark hummock in the cellar place had for a moment beneath it the glint of angry eyes, and then did not anymore.
Ahead of him, across the fields, a brown mousing owl swept low over the silvery grass.
Hugh had in his hands a rudely carven flint, growing warm from his hand’s heat, and a white owl’s feather.
“The flint is the commandment,” O’Mahon said, as if nothing extraordinary at all had happened, “and the feather is the promise.”
“What does the commandment mean?”
“I don’t know.”
They sat a time in silence. The moon, amber as old whiskey, appeared between the white-fringed hem of the clouds and the gray heads of the eastern mountains. “Will I ever return?” Hugh asked, though he could almost not speak for the painful stone in his throat.
“Yes.”
Hugh was shivering now. If Sir Henry had known how late into the night he had sat out of doors, he would have been alarmed; the night air, especially in Ireland, was well known to be pernicious.
“Goodbye, then, cousin,” Hugh said.
“Goodbye, Hugh O’Neill.” O’Mahon smiled. “If they give you a velvet hat to wear, in England, your white feather will look fine in it.”
Sir Henry Sidney, though he would not have said it to the Irish, was quite clear in his dispatches to the Council why he took up Hugh O’Neill. Not only was it policy for the English to support the weaker man in any quarrel between Irish dynasts, and thus prevent the growth of any overmighty subject; it also seemed to Sir Henry that, like an eyas falcon, a young Irish lord if taken early enough might later come more willingly to the English wrist. Said otherwise: he was bringing Hugh to England as he might the cub of a beast to a bright and well-ordered menagerie, to tame him.
For that reason, and despite his wife’s doubts, he set Hugh O’Neill companion to his own son Philip; and for the same reason he requested his son-in-law, the Earl of Leicester, to be Hugh’s patron at court. “A boy poor in goods,” he wrote Leicester, “and full feebly friended.”
The Earl of Leicester, in conversation with the Queen, turned a nice simile, comparing his new Irish client to the grafted fruit-trees the Earl’s gardeners made: by care and close binding, the hardy Irish apple might be given English roots, though born in Irish soil; and once having them, could not then be separated from them.
“Pray sir, then,” the Queen said smiling, “his fruits be good.”
“With good husbandry, Madame,” Leicester said, “his fruits will be to your Majesty’s taste.” And he brought forward the boy, ten years old, his proud hair deep red, almost the color of the morocco-leather binding of a little prayer-book the Queen held in her left hand. Across his pale face and upturned nose the freckles were thick, and faintly green; his eyes were emeralds. Two things the Queen loved were red hair and jewels; she put out her long ringed hand and brushed Hugh’s hair.
“Our cousin of Ireland,” she said.
He didn’t dare raise his red-lashed eyes to her after he had made the courtesy that the Earl had carefully instructed him in; while they talked about him above his head in a courtly southern English he couldn’t follow, he looked at the Queen’s dress.
She seemed in fact to be wearing several. As though she were some fabulous many-walled fort, mined and breached, through the slashings and partings of her outer dress another could be seen, and where that was opened there was another, and lace beneath that. The outer wall was all jeweled, beaded with tiny seed-pearls as though with dew, worked and embroidered in many patterns of leaf, vine, flower. On her petticoat were pictured monsters of the sea, snorting seahorses and leviathans with mouths like portcullises. And on the outer garment’s inner side, turned out to reveal them, were a hundred disembodied eyes and ears. Hugh could believe that with those eyes and ears the Queen could see and hear, so that even as he looked at her clothing, her clothing observed him. He raised his eyes to her white face framed in stiff lace, her hair dressed in pearls and silver.
Hugh saw then that the power of the Queen resided in her dress. She was bound up in it as magically as the children of Lir were bound up in the forms of swans. The willowy, long-legged courtiers, gartered and wearing slim English swords, moved as in a dance in circles and waves around her when she moved. When she left the chamber (she d
id not speak to Hugh again, but her quick, bird eye lighted on him once), she drew her ladies-in-waiting after her as though she caught up rustling fallen leaves in her train.
Later the Earl told Hugh that the Queen had a thousand such gowns and petticoats and farthingales, each more elaborate than the last.
A screen carved with figures in relief—nymphs and satyrs, grape-clusters, incongruous armorial bearings picked out in gold leaf—had concealed the Queen’s chief counselor, Sir William Cecil, Lord Burghley, and Doctor John Dee, her consulting physician and astrologer, from the chamber where the Queen had held audience. But through the piercings of the screen they could see and hear.
“That boy,” Burghley had said softly. “The red-headed one.”
“Yes,” Doctor Dee replied. “The Irish boy.”
“Sir Henry Sidney is his patron. He has been brought to be schooled in English ways. There have been others. Her gracious majesty believes she can win their hearts and their loyalty. They do learn manners and graces, but they return to their island, and their brutish natures well up again. There is no way to keep them bound to us in those fastnesses.”
“I know not for certain,” said Doctor Dee, combing his great beard with his fingers, “but it may be that there are ways.”
“Doctissime vir,” said Burghley. “If there are ways let us use them.”
A light snow lay on the roads and cottages when Philip Sidney, Sir Henry’s son, and Hugh O’Neill went from the Sidneys’ house of Penshurst in Kent up to Mortlake to visit John Dee. There was a jouncing, canopied cart filled with rugs and cushions but the boys preferred to ride with the attendants, until the cold pinched them too deeply through the fine thin gloves and hose they wore. Hugh, careful now in matters of dress, would not have said that his English clothes were useless for keeping out cold compared to a shaggy Waterford mantle with a fur hood; but he seemed to be always cold and comfortless, somehow naked, in breeches and short cloaks.
