by John Crowley
They formed and reformed in the dark, their steeds turning in place, their lances like saplings in wind: as though impatient for him to cry out to them in supplication, or call them to his side.
The commandment, Hugh thought. But he could say nothing to them, not with his voice, not in his heart; and soon the border of night and day was closed, and he could see them no more.
In Munster where the world began the old Norman earls of Desmond and Kildare and Ormond had risen again, resisting the English adventurers whose papers and patents said they owned the lands that those families had held for time out of mind. The earls acknowledged no power higher than themselves except the Pope. Hugh O’Neill kept as far from the quarrel in the south as he could; he told himself that his work was to make himself pre-eminent here, Lord of the North.
But the obsidian mirror judged him and found him wanting. You are a cold friend to her who loves you and will soon do you great good: the Queen looked out at him, her white face framed in a stiff ruff. Eyes he saw in dreams too. When the English gathered an army at Dublin under old and weary Henry Sidney, Hugh rode south with him, bringing fighters of his own, feeding them from the plunder of Desmond villages and fields. Any town or village that Sidney invested and would not surrender was put to the sword, the leaders beheaded and their heads impaled on stakes across the land. The earls and their followers burned the standing grain in the fields to keep Sidney’s army from the provender, and then in the spring Sidney’s soldiers burned it as it sprung green, to keep it from them. The people ate cresses, and when they had none they died, and others ate their flesh, and the flesh of their dead babes. And the Queen spoke to O’Neill’s heart and said Look not on their suffering but on me.
But the flint in his pocket had its say as well.
He kept on with Sir Henry—but he went his own way. He avoided pitched battles and retributions; he largely occupied himself in Munster not with fighting but with . . . hunting. He brought along with him on his hunts men with guns (Fubun on the grey foreign gun O’Mahon had said long ago, but this was now, not then). Wherever he went, wherever men had lost their lands, he would ask the men and boys what weapons they were good at using, and after they named spears and bows and the pike he would bring out a gun, and explain the use of it, and let one or another of them take it and try it. The handiest of them he’d reward with a coin or other gift, and perhaps even the gun itself. Keep it safe he’d say, smiling.
That was wisdom the mirror would never give him and the flint could not know: When the time came for him to lead men against English soldiers—if it did come—he would not lead hordes of screaming gallowglass against trained infantry with guns. His army would wheel on command, and march in step, and lay fire. When the time came.
In Dungannon again he began to build himself that fine house in the English style, where wardrobes held his velvet English suits and hats, his rugs and bedclothes made from who knew what. When he could get no lead for the roofs of his house, Burghley saw to it that a shipment of many tons of sheet lead were sent to him; it lay for years in the pine woods at Dungannon until a different use for it was found, in a different world. He fell in love, not for the first or the last time, but this time providentially: she was Mabel Bagenal, daughter of Sir Nicholas Bagenal, officer of the Queen’s Council in Dublin—Bagenal resisted the match, not wanting an Irish chieftain for a son-in-law and thinking Mabel could do better: but when Hugh O’Neill rode into Dublin in his velvets and his lined cloak with a hundred retainers around him, her heart was won. And the power in the black mirror was glad of it.
The morning after the wedding night Mabel discovered it on its gold chain on his breast and tried to take it off, but he wouldn’t let her; he only turned it to her and asked her what she saw. The third soul ever to look in. She studied it, brow knit, and said she saw herself, but dimly.
Himself was never what Hugh O’Neill saw there. “It was a gift,” he said. “From a wise man in England. To keep me safe, he said.”
Mabel Bagenal looked into her husband’s face, which seemed to seek itself in the black mirror, though she was wrong about that; and she said, “May God will that it do so.”
In the same spring Doctor John Dee and his wife, Jane, and their many children left for the Continent with trunkloads of books, an astronomer’s staff, bottles of remedy for every ill, a cradleboard for the newest, and in a velvet bag a small orb of quartz crystal with a flaw like a lost star not quite at its center. In a cold room in a high tower in the golden city in the middle of the Emperor’s land of Bohemia he placed the stone in its frame carved with the names and sigilla that his angelic informants had given to him.
There was war in heaven, and therefore war under the earth, and soon enough on the lands and seas of all the empires and kingdoms of men.
It would engulf the States and Empires of Europe; even the Sultan might be drawn in. If Spain claimed Great Atlantis for her own, then Atlantis too would be in play, and Francis Drake’s license as a privateer would be traded for the chain of an Admiral of the Ocean Sea, and Walter Raleigh given one too. The heavenly powers that aid the true Christian faith, the armed angelic hosts, would go into battle. They would be opposed by other powers great and small, powers that take the side of the old faith. The creatures of the middle realm, of earth and water, hills and trees, shy and self-protective, would surely fight with the old religion: not because they loved the Pope or even knew of him, but only because they hated change. There was little harm they could do, though much annoyance. But in the contested Irish Isle where Spain would be welcomed, there were other powers: warriors who appeared and disappeared after sudden slaughter, bright swords and spears that made no sound. Were they men, had they once been men, were they but empty casques and breastplates? They could be captured, sometimes, imprisoned if you knew the spells, but never for long. It is useless to hang us, they would say to their jailers, we cannot die.
Look now: the swirl of winds within the stone, the sense (not the sound) of heavenly laughter, and the clouds parted to show as though from a sea-bird’s eye the western coast of Ireland, and on the sea little dots that were big-bellied ships, the great red crosses on their sails.
A flotilla in the North Sea, and in St. George’s Channel, come to make Philip King of England. And to make the Virgin Queen his bride, old now and barren though she be. In the stone the tiny ships rocked on the main like mock ships in a masque or a children’s show. An angel finger pointed to them, and John Dee heard a whisper: That is not far off from now.
Hugh O’Neill had passed almost without noticing from his twenties to his thirties; one by one the endless line of enemies and false friends and mad fools that he faced in the claiming of his heritage were bought off, or befriended, or exiled, or hanged. The black mirror was his adviser and his ruler in these contests. When he contested with the mirror itself, he might deny it, and later be sorry he had. Sometimes when he looked in it would say Strike now or lose all and sometimes it would only look upon him; sometimes it wept or smiled, or said Power springs from the mind and the heart. But never was any sound heard, and it was as though Hugh thought or said these things in his own mind, which made them not the less true or potent. If he could discern the meaning of what was said and act on it, it would come out as predicted, and he would win. And in the spring of 1587 he returned to London to be invested at last by the Queen with the title Earl of Tyrone.
He knelt before her, sweeping his hat and its white feather from his head. “Cousin,” the Queen said, and held out her ringed hand for him to kiss.
The face Hugh saw in the black mirror had never changed—at least it would seem always unchanged to him, white and small and bejewelled—but the woman of flesh was not young. The paint couldn’t cover the fine lines etched all around her eyes, nor the lines in the great bare skull above. Torn between love and shame Hugh put his lips near to the proffered hand without touching it, and when he raised his eyes again she
was young again and serenely lovely. “My cousin,” she said. “My lord of Tyrone.”
At the dock when he came home again, with more gifts and purchases in his English ship than twenty ox-carts could bear, he saw, among the O’Neill and O’Donnell men-at-arms and their brehons and wives come to greet him, the poet O’Mahon, like a withered leaf, leaning on a staff. Hugh O’Neill went to him, knelt and kissed the white hand the poet held out to him. O’Mahon raised him, felt his big face and broad shoulders, the figured steel breastplate upon him.
“That promise given you was kept,” said O’Mahon.
“How, cousin?”
“You are the O’Neill, inaugurated at Tullahogue as your ancestors have ever been. You are Earl of Tyrone too, by the grant of the English: you gave them all your lands and they gave them back to you just as though the lands were theirs to give, and added on a title, Earl.”
“How is that the keeping of a promise?” O’Neill asked.
“That is for them to know; yours to act and learn.” He touched Hugh’s arm and said: “Will you go on progress in this summer, cousin? The lands that owe you are wide.”
“I may do so. The weather looks to be fine.”
“I would be happy to go along with you, if I might. As far at least as to the old fort at Dungannon.”
“Well, then you shall. You will have a litter to carry you, if you like.”
“I can still ride,” the poet said with a smile. “And my own horse knows the way there.”
“What shall we do there?”
“I? Not a thing. But you: you will meet again your allies there, or perhaps their messenger or herald; and see what now they will say. And they will tell you of the others, some greater than they, who are now waking from sleep, and their pale horses too.”
The streets that had been silent and empty when, some years before, a young Irishman came home from that other island to which he had been carried away—they were not still now: from street to street and house to house the news went that Hugh O’Neill was home again, and they came around his horse to touch his boot and lift their babes to see him; and now and then he must acknowledge them, and doff the black velvet cap he wore, with the white owl’s feather in its band.
Two enemies, the Queen of England and the old ones under the hills, had acted to make Hugh O’Neill great. He had become what they had conspired to make him, and what now was he to do? When he tried to take the black mirror from around his neck he found that he could not: he had the strength, it was a flimsy chain that carried it, he could snap it with a thumb and finger, but he couldn’t do it.
Hugh O’Neill, Lord of the North, stood at the center of time, which was not different from the time of his own span. There are five directions to the world around: there is North, and South, and East, and West. And the fifth direction lies amid them. It points to the fifth kingdom, the only realm where he or any man ever stands: Here.
Well, let it be. What was he but a battleground where armies and their generals tore him in two for their own reasons? There was no knowing how the world would roll from here where he stood. Let it be.
The Queen was dead, and John Dee was dying. His books and alchemical ware and even the gifts that the Queen had given him had been sold for bread: his long toil for her meant nothing to the new Scots king, who feared magic above all things. It was all gone but this small stone of moleskin-colored quartz, that had come to have a spiritual creature caught in it: an angel, he had long believed, but now he doubted. The war she had shown him had paused, like a storm’s eye passing, and a calm had fallen over the half part of the world: it would not last.
What he saw now wasn’t what he had seen, the armies of emperors and kings, nor the towers of Heaven and their hosts. He saw only long stony beaches, and knew it was the western coast of Ireland; and there where the Spanish ships had once been shivered on the rocks, other ships were being built, like no ships men sailed, ships made out of the time of another age, silvered like driftwood, with sails as of cobweb; and the ones building and now boarding and pushing them out to sea were as silvery, and as fine. Defeated; in flight. They sailed to the West, to the Fortunate Isles, to coasts and faraway hills they had never seen. The voice at John Dee’s inner ear said, This is to come. We know not when. Well, let it be. And as he bent over the glowing stone the empowered soul within him spoke to him in vatic mode, and told him that when the end did come, and after it had long passed, the real powers that had fought these wars would be forgotten, and so would he, and only the merely human kings and queens and halberdiers and priests and townsmen remembered.
Anosognosia
for Paul Park
CLOV: Do you believe in the life to come?
HAMM: Mine was always that.
—Samuel Beckett, Endgame
In the last week of May in 1959, a high-school student, John C., made a misstep at the top of the stairs of the family house on Ponader Drive in South Bend, Indiana. Perhaps it was a yellow Ticonderoga pencil that caused it, lying crosswise on the floor at the top of the steps, and perhaps he stepped on it in such a way that it rolled under his foot and threw his leg out over the first step or over the first and the second steps, whereupon he fell turning head over heels, or more exactly heels over head, to the bottom. He must have struck his head very hard at some place on the way down—on a step, on a banister, on the floor at the bottom of the stairs—for he lay there inert, his legs twisted on the lowest stairs, shoulders and head on the floor.
His initial cry of amazement and horror, and the noise of his falling, brought his mother from the kitchen, where she had been pondering dinner and sipping a glass of inexpensive sherry. According to her later account she tried to wake him, listened to his heart—which seemed to be beating in normal fashion, unlike her own—and then, being a doctor’s wife and knowing the basics of first aid, did not attempt to move him but called the operator (dropping the new Princess phone that sat on a table in the hall at first and fumbling the earpiece in desperate hurry) and asked for an ambulance. Then she called her husband at the college infirmary where he worked, and knelt on the floor beside her son and held his hand, which she thought surely couldn’t count as moving the patient. He had a pulse, fast but not wild or irregular. They two were alone in the house.
John C. was still unconscious when the ambulance arrived, and when his father arrived very soon after. He remained unconscious—a state that was described as a coma but which didn’t meet all the criteria for such a diagnosis—for three days; he was given intravenous fluids, and his temperature, heart rate, and blood pressure were monitored. Whatever injury he had suffered internally didn’t appear outwardly; a scratch on his cheek from something, a bump on the back of his head that soon resolved. His parents sat with him, singly or together; his four sisters came from school to sit in turn by his bed, and the eldest and most pious of them got them all to say the rosary there for his recovery.
It was his mother who was beside him when he opened his eyes, took a huge breath, and lifted his hands from the bedclothes as though they stung, or perhaps in preparation to arise. He didn’t do that, though, only looked around cautiously and then at his stricken mother, sitting forward in her chair waiting in awful suspense for what he’d say, if he could say anything at all.
Are you all right? she said, conscious of the fatuity.
I am, he said. I am all right. Then he closed his eyes again.
Within the hour he was alert again and speaking almost normally, with what appeared to be a great and deliberate caution but making perfect sense; he observed his mother’s face with an intensity of attention that was unsettling—as though he were trying to remember who she was, she said later, but actually it seemed to her that he knew very well who she was and it was himself he didn’t quite recognize.
What could only be understood as lingering side effects of his apparent coma remained for weeks. Though he recognized his hous
e and his room, they seemed at the same time strange to him; he’d touch in wonderment or curiosity the surfaces of his books, the tools in the kitchen, the clothes in his closet (being the only boy in the family he had a room of his own). Sometimes he’d laugh aloud coming upon some ordinary item, as though astonished to find it existed, or as though an old acquaintance unseen for years had suddenly appeared before him. He didn’t talk much, though he had been the most voluble person in a talkative and lively household; he sat among them in silence but obviously enjoying their company and their attention, the extravagant jokes they made about an event that it was now all right to laugh about. At times he could be overcome by a sort of vertigo or paralysis, apparently overwhelmed by the sensation of the world entering his consciousness, and have to lie down alone for a time. Once, standing over a pile of his many drawings for imaginary productions of classic plays—he aimed, or had aimed, to be a stage designer—he actually fainted, slumped will-less to the floor; but he recovered quickly.
Yet it couldn’t be denied that almost all the time he was well. A kind of wonderful elation, even, seemed sometimes to possess him; he gazed at the world with open eyes and swallowed it all down. He was happy. It was evident; very happy, divinely happy.
As the small oddities that accompanied his return diminished, a larger change in him appeared. He was, or was rapidly becoming, a different person than he had been. Not only was his way of speaking odd, his way of thinking was also. Dreamy, inventive, intensely inward, sometimes goofily cheerful; bookish, a show-off where literature and arcane knowledge were the matter; careless of his person (as the sort of books he chose to read might put it), vague and clumsy outside the realms where he felt secure but alone: that was how he had been. Now he was not describable in those terms. If he’d gone off on a journey to another world during his days unconscious, he’d returned, estranged, but with gifts and weapons he hadn’t had before.
