Forever

12.

That night, facing each other before the hearth, the father told his son their true names. They were O’Connors, not Carsons. Da’s true name was Fergus O’Connor. His son was Cormac Samuel O’Connor. The O’Connor name went all the way back through history, the father said, back before the settlers arrived from Scotland a century earlier, back before the Normans, back before Saint Patrick arrived with his lonely Christian God and before the Viking invasions, all the way back, in fact, to the arrival of the Celts.

“We’ve lived a long secret,” the father whispered, as they stared at the hearth and sampled the stew that they had made for the first time without the loving touch of Rebecca. Bran was out by the dark barn, in the company of the sleeping Thunder. To the boy, the stew had a strange, alien taste.

“Is it still a secret?” he said. “Our own true names?”

“Aye, among us it is. And will remain a secret, lad.”

“Why?”

“Because this is a country where religion can be dangerous. They will kill you for having one. Or for having the Old Religion, which to some is like having no religion at all.”

“You mean…”

“I mean that the name Carson was taken by my father to keep us alive. It was a mask, lad. A way to live, to work, to eat, to get educated. It will remain that way, perhaps for a long time, but I believe you must know all this, and say nothing to anyone but me.”

The boy tried to think of himself as Cormac but he still felt as if he were Robert. His legs and hands trembled. This was the most his father had ever said to him at one time, aside from talk of horses and iron. Cormac or Robert, he felt as if he had suddenly grown up.

“And where does the Samuel come from in my true name?”

“From your mother. Her true name was Rebecca Samuels. She wanted the name to live in you.”

“Do we have a religion?”

“Aye,” he whispered. “We call it the Old Religion.”

He was about to explain when they heard Bran barking. Then there was a knock on the door. Da looked at it warily and signaled with an open palm that the boy should be quiet. He stood up and went to the door. Bran was barking more fiercely.

“Who is it?”

They heard the muffled voice of the Rev. Robinson. Da opened the door.

“Yes?”

“May we come in?”

Behind Robinson stood three other men, their faces familiar from Sunday services. All wore dripping coats and fur hats. Bran still barked, making feints and passes at them, unnerving them.

“Of course,” Da said. “Do you want some tea?”

They stepped in, smelling of rain and the waxy sulphur of chapels. Da hushed Bran, telling him to remain outside. The dog growled with hostility and suspicion.

“No, thank you, Mister Carson. No time for tea. We’ll be brief.” The boy thought, in a secretly excited way: My father’s name is not Carson. His name is O’Connor. Fergus O’Connor. And I’m Cormac Samuel O’Connor. Not Robert Carson. He watched as the man he knew was Fergus O’Connor placed himself between his son and the visitors.

“Well?”

“We’re quite sorry about your wife, Mister Carson.”

“Thank you.”

“But we have a question for you,” Robinson said.

The boy’s father—His name is Fergus O’Connor—looked at the preacher in a blank way. He seemed to know the question before it was uttered.

“It’s about her burial, I suppose.”

Silence for a long moment. Her name was Rebecca Samuels. She was a Jew.

Robinson said: “She was not buried in our churchyard.”

Fergus O’Connor folded his arms across his chest.

“True?” the Rev. Robinson said.

“You know that’s true.”

“Where is she buried?”

“In the West,” Da said. “According to her wishes.”

The visitors looked at one another, as if the blacksmith had confirmed something for them.

“That leads to another question, Mister Carson.”

“Ask it,” he said, the muscles in his bare forearms moving. “Are you Catholics?”

“No.”

“You’re sure? Because it’s very suspicious that—”

“I told you that we’re not Catholics. You see us every Sunday at your chapel. You—”

“There are many hidden papists here,” one of the other men interrupted. “Full of treason, the lot of them.”

Cormac Samuel O’Connor moved around to the side, watching his father.

“I’ve answered your questions.”

“But I’d like—”

“Good night, Reverend Robinson.”

Fergus O’Connor unfolded his arms and opened the door. Then he bowed slightly, making Robinson’s face twitch. The faces of the other three knitted themselves into angry furrows.

“Try to stay dry,” Da said. “And don’t fear: I’ll control the dog.”

13.

Cormac Samuel O’Connor learned that he and his father were not unique. Everywhere, men and women changed their names and embraced strange gods in order to live. The Spanish did it, and the Muslims did it, and the Jews did it. In Spain, the Jews became conversos. Christians became Muslims and later, after the fall of Granada, Christians again. And so in Ireland, where Christians killed Christians during the wars of religion, Fergus O’Connor’s father changed his name, and the name of his children. And, many centuries earlier, so did the family of Rebecca Samuels. But such a conversion was always a lie told in order to live. It was the making of a mask. And sometimes, in order to survive, a mask was not enough. Sometimes a man must have a weapon.

14.

Late on the afternoon after the visit from the Rev. Robinson and his posse, Fergus O’Connor began to make the sword. He did this with Cormac’s help, describing each step in detail. While rain fell steadily from a dark sky, Bran sprawled on his belly, his eyes alert to danger or absorbed in watching the process. Thunder was led in from his stable to watch. The boy had seen John Carson make hundreds of sickles, and many knives, but he had never before made a sword. Now Fergus O’Connor was making a sword.

He went to work as if he had made hundreds. He began with three old iron horseshoes, laying them on the fired grate of the forge until they turned white, then lifting them with wide-mouthed tongs to the anvil. There he straightened them, lengthened them, braided them together. They formed the core of the sword. “They’ll make it light in weight,” Fergus O’Connor explained, “and easier to swing many times without tiring.” Then he melted the steel, flecked with iron, and applied it smoothly in three heats to the core, folding it over three times, welding again, dressing it with glancing hammer blows, molding it, packing the steel around the core, adding a groove down each side, forming a perfect point.

Between each welding heat he scoured the blade with a paste made of charcoal, the ashes of straw, and fine Lagan riverbank clay. He held it up with the clamps, examined it in a piercing way. “The danger,” he said, “is oxidation and scaling.” Then he covered it with a thicker paste, adding polishing-stone powder and salt. He stripped this off the edge, exactly one sixteenth of an inch, and returned the emerging sword to the fire. When it was cherry red, he withdrew it, wiped away the coating, and drowned it in oil so sizzling that Bran barked.

While the blade cooled, he made a sword guard from rolled-up bars of iron and steel, welding the roll together and then flattening it so that it would protect the hand. He used shears and chisel to shape it into an elegant metal flower.

All of this was done in a day, Fergus O’Connor working with a sense of urgency, glancing out at the road as if wary of being seen. When the sword had cooled but was not cold, he used a needle-pointed burin to etch two figures into the broadest part of the sword, just below the handle.

Two spirals, thin at the top, curling around, then widening at the bottom. Like sea serpents. One on each side. Matching the spiral earrings of Fergus O’Connor’s wife.

There was little traffic that day; the weather was too fierce. Da delicately sanded the etched markings, then passed the rough paper to his son for more sanding while showing him a hunk of white bone he had long saved, part of a wolf killed in the mountains.

“This will be the handle,” he said. “The grip. We’ll be finished by tonight.”

“It’s very beautiful, Da.”

“Aye,” he said, “but it’s not meant to do beautiful things.”

He told Cormac to go home and lay out the makings of dinner. He’d be home soon. Bran followed the boy back to the house and watched as he chopped onions and potatoes, and peered into jars of unlabeled spices, trying to remember what his mother had done on all those days when the two of them were here together. At one point, as he dropped the vegetables into a pot of water, Cormac Samuel O’Connor begin to shake.

Thinking: She’s gone.

Thinking: Da needs her. I need her. As do Bran and Thunder. The O’Connors need her. But she’s never coming back. She’ll never turn her head suddenly from this hearth, with her spiral earrings flashing.

And then he forced himself to stop.

Thinking: Not now, not ever. No tears. No sobbing. Now you’ve got to be a man.

Thinking: You are no longer little Robert Carson. Not Robby or Bobby or Rob. You are Cormac Samuel O’Connor, from the days before Saint Patrick. You’re the son of Fergus, not John.

When his father came home, he had the sword in his hand and smiled in a proud way. He whipped it in the air, making five or six cutting movements in a few seconds, and then smiled again, as if at himself. Cormac thought: He has a wonderful smile.

“We’re not done,” Fergus said. “But it’s what I wanted. Light and hard and tempered.”

They took turns polishing the blade, using a file crosswise on its flat sides, emery cloth for the fine edges. The boy could see his face in the polished steel and thought: You are Cormac. The cutting edge was like a razor. He glanced at his father, staring into the fire. And he is Fergus.

“Let’s eat,” Da said.

15.

Over the next few years, Cormac received three separate educations. All were happening at the same time, but in separate places. As young Robert Carson, he heard one version of the tale of the world at St. Edmund’s, the one about the civilizing glories of the British Empire. Jesus, of course, came first, the Redeemer of sinful Man, the son of God whose gospel of love was tempered by the vehemence of the Old Testament. But the mission of Jesus also explained the mission of Britain. With God’s blessing, he and his schoolmates were told, the British were expanding all over the earth. To America. To the Caribbean. To distant India. Taming barbarians. Bringing law to the lawless. Saving savages from the idol worship inflicted by the Whore of Babylon who ruled in Rome. They heard about brave Sir Francis Drake and his daring battles against the corrupt Spanish and treacherous French and even Cormac O’Connor, safe behind his Robert Carson mask, found those tales thrilling. He kept his questions about the moral point of the story to himself. Clearly, said the Rev. Robinson, God had chosen Britain to civilize and pacify the world, creating both a national duty and a personal mission for every God-fearing Protestant. And God had truly smiled on his blessed people. Hadn’t God created a monstrous storm to defeat the Spanish Armada? Hadn’t God helped the British build the greatest fleet of naval vessels in the world? This was all clear to the Rev. Robinson, although not quite so clear to the boy. The Rev. Robinson insisted that in Ireland, and particularly in the valiant North, fearless English armies (with help from the Dutch) had waged a righteous struggle to break the papal yoke, the tyranny of Rome, the Whore of Babylon, and in the process rescued Christianity itself.

“And the battle might never be fully won,” he said, turning to blow loudly into his soiled, pebbly handkerchief. “We each have the obligation of eternal vigilance! Watch the man next door!”

Cormac was certain that Robinson glanced at him while speaking these words, but he absorbed the glance in his newly chosen role of spy. This was a secret personal performance that transformed many of his days into exciting patrols of enemy territory. He covered himself so well that to all his schoolmates he remained young Robert Carson, gifted at writing and drawing, a poor fellow whose mother had died, but who was, like each of them, an heir to the grandeur of English civilization. There were no questions from his friends, no suspicions (uttered or suggested) that he might actually be Cormac O’Connor, son of Fergus. The Rev. Robinson might have had his suspicions about John Carson, but he never transferred them to the blacksmith’s son. If anything, after that first taming year when he used the Punisher so freely, Rev. Robinson seemed to approve Robert’s growing mastery of ritual speeches about the moral missions of English monarchs and the debased perfidy of the Catholic Spanish and French. Cormac had a good memory and as Robert Carson he had the ability to infuse his speeches with emotion. Without a plan, the boy was serving a partial apprenticeship as an actor.

This personal form of espionage required much discipline, because unlike his schoolmates, Cormac O’Connor was learning other histories. To begin with, Irish history. “Our present,” his father said, “is also our past.” They talked much about the Penal Laws, which still existed today, in their Ireland; the O’Connors were saved from their brutality by the success of their disguises, by being Carsons. But the vicious Penal Laws were destroying thousands of innocent Catholic men, women, and children, those without disguises, those too full of defiance and pride, and were rooted in the immediate past.

“They were imposed,” Fergus O’Connor explained, “only thirty years before your birth, Cormac, and are one reason why you’re called Robert and I’m called John. They are the creation of the kind of men who take, sell, and keep slaves.”

Under these laws (which Robert heard recited at St. Edmund’s too, as the rules of eternal vigilance), no Catholic could vote or hold public office. No Catholic could study science or go to a foreign university. Only Protestants could do such things. No Catholic could buy land or even lease it. No Catholic could take a land dispute to court. If a Catholic owned land from the time before the Penal Laws, he couldn’t leave it as in olden times to his oldest son; he must divide it among all his children, so that each plot would become smaller and smaller, and poverty would be guaranteed within three generations.

The most absurd of the Penal Laws stated that no Catholic could own a horse worth more than five pounds. Any Protestant could look at a Catholic’s horse, say it was worth six pounds, or thirty pounds, or a thousand pounds, and take it from him on the spot. The Catholic had no right to protest in court. In a country of great horses and fine horsemen, the intention was clear: to humiliate Catholic men, to break their hearts.

“If you can break a man’s heart,” Da said, “you can destroy his will.”

That was why they must remain Carsons to everyone they ever met. When they rode Thunder through country lanes or city streets, they must be Protestants. “Even poor Thunder must be a Protestant horse,” his father said, and laughed in a dark way. But he’d told his son that they were not Catholics either, so what did they have to fear? “Sick bastards,” Fergus O’Connor said. “In this country, they think that if you’re not Protestant then you must be Catholic, even if you’re not. It’s a sickness, a poison of the brain.”

And so Fergus began telling his son the longer story too, the one not told in school. They were part of that story, as the hidden grove was a defiant remnant of unconquered Ireland. Unconquered by either Rome or London. In the schoolroom at St. Edmund’s, the boy learned the names of English kings and English heroes. He read the Magna Carta. He recited English ideals. But as his father told him the story of Ireland, his mind also teemed with Celts and Vikings, informers and traitors, and murder after murder after murder.

As Fergus O’Connor ate greedily each evening (his manners grown coarser after the death of his wife), he sketched the history, relating the brutal story of Oliver Cromwell and the vast slaughters of unarmed Catholics, and then leaped backward in time to the arrival of Strongbow on May 1, 1170, as the result of the treachery of Irish nobles. He told his son about how “that bitch” Elizabeth I was really a heartless killer, and how her father, Henry VIII, encased in fat and pearls, was even worse, killing two of his six wives, along with thousands of Irishmen, while imposing his own version of Christianity on the islands. Such words always came from Fergus with a sense of growing outrage, as if each new telling of the tale drove fury through his blood. For Cormac, the Irish tales were like those in the Bible, full of heroism and cowardice and martyrdom—and, too often, exile. And in the Irish story, the result was always the same: the English stealing Ireland for themselves, acre by acre, for its wood and its crops and its cheap labor, and for its fine horses too, while insisting that this grand robbery was something noble.

Cormac heard his father explain how the unarmed Ulster Irish were beaten back off the good land into the rocky hills and the stony mountains, the good land handed to the likes of the whoremaster Chichesters, while poor Protestant settlers were brought from Scotland to work the land and pay rents to the English. “They were made into slaves,” Da said, “and thought they were free.” After a while, when the British perfected the use of religion as an excuse for cruelty and theft, the Irish began to think that being Catholic was the same as being Irish, which of course it wasn’t.

“The Irish were here before Jesus Christ was even born,” he said. “So were their gods.”

The evening monologues of Fergus O’Connor were in startling contrast to his silence when he was playing John Carson. The words came in streams, rising and falling, emphasized with his long fingers, or by hands balled into fists. Still, in all that he said to his son, he insisted there were men in Ireland who cared for true justice.

“There’s a fellow in Dublin, the Dean, they call him,” he said one night. “Jonathan Swift. You must read his Drapier’s Letters, son. I have them in a bound book, hidden out in the stable. He’s a man with justice in his heart. A Protestant, but an Irishman first. And you must begin reading the newspapers. The News-Letter here is run by fair men. The Dean writes for the Dublin Journal, and I have some of those hidden here too.”

“Why do you hide them, Da?”

“Because of the bloody injustice here, lad. Some writers expose the injustice, and just reading about it will make you a suspect. And whenever there’s trouble in Ulster, every suspect dies.”

“Are we suspects, Da?”

The older man paused for a long moment.

“I think we are,” he said.

16.

On Sundays, father and son trudged to St. Edmund’s to inhale the odors of an orderly piety. Each wore his mask. For a solemn hour, Fergus and Cormac O’Connor played John and Robert Carson. An hour later, all sermons absorbed, all visions of Hell behind them, they mounted Thunder and trotted into the glens behind the Black Mountain. There, beyond observation, Sunday after Sunday, with a kind of religious intensity, the father showed his son the power of the sword.

In one lesson he cut off a tree limb that was eight inches thick. Not chopping it or hacking at it like a butcher. Cutting it in a single stroke with his blacksmith’s arm and his perfect sword, like a knife cuts butter. More important than the sword’s strength and power, he said to his son, was the way it was used. He taught through example and drill how to unsheathe the sword in one whiplike motion. How to slash with it or stab with it. How to avoid the other man’s sword, his thrusts and swings. In their first lessons they used simple wooden poles, father making son repeat the motions over and over again until all his movements became swift and fluid. Then he handed his son the sword itself. The feel of it always awed the young man, at times even cowed him. Its power seemed to surge up his right arm in a liquid way. Sometimes the younger man’s exhausted arm would ache, but at such moments the father urged him to try even harder. Or to switch to his left hand.

“You don’t ever want to die,” he said, “because you’re tired. Or because you’ve been wounded in your fighting arm. Each arm must have equal strength. And one other thing: If you think you’ll get tired, then you will get tired. If you think you’ll lose, you will lose.”

Fergus showed Cormac the principles of balance, and the way to shift weight, sliding forward on one leg, not leaping but pushing on the back leg. He urged him to move side to side, never to stand straight in front of an opponent, chopping at him, but to use quickness and surprise to fool him, and then to finish him. He knew everything about sword fighting, and one Sunday Cormac asked his father where he learned what he knew.

“I was a soldier,” he said.

“You were?”

“Aye. When I was your age.”

“And where did you soldier?”

His eyebrows rose. “Why, in Ireland, of course.”

“Tell me about it.”

“No.”

“Why not, Da?”

“I did nothing more than did better men than I. ’Tis nothing to brag upon.”

“Did you fight the English?”

“Aye.”

“Did you… kill men?”

“Aye.”

“Many men?”

“Too many.”

Fergus turned the sword over in his hand, retreating into himself, then said: “We’d best be going. It’s almost dark.”

Back at the forge, they never displayed the sword in the open air, afraid that some spy might be watching. If they were indeed suspected of being Catholic, then a spy could be peering at them from the woods, and it was forbidden for a Catholic to possess a weapon of any kind. For a while, Fergus hid the sword behind a false panel in the tool shed, then he moved it to a slot he built into the rush matting of the roof. On days of hammering rain, when the woods were empty of curious strangers, they practiced reaching for it by standing on one of the three-legged stools, making a swift, fluid movement that ended with a slash of the air. One late night, Fergus designed a map case for the sword, with a wide fluted bell for the handle, equipped with a leather loop that could be slung upon a saddle horn. That was the way they carried it while traveling. Cormac O’Connor was learning that people and things were not always what they seemed to be.

In the forge, when Cormac was not sharing the work, his father made him lift hunks of iron and steel, working his biceps and shoulders and back, doing curls and thrusts, then lifting pig iron over his head, the weight always increasing. Cormac’s muscles grew harder and tauter, and in the dark Sunday forests the sword felt lighter. His father had him skip rope too, explaining that a swordsman needed legs with spring and power. And he established codes. Never use a sword on someone who can’t fight back. Don’t drink, ever, because drink makes the wits rust, and you can die without a fight. If you draw your sword, prepare to kill with it or to die.

“And tell none of these to any man,” he said. “He must never know what you’re thinking. That’s the business of yourself, lad.”

17.

Across two summers, Cormac became a Celt.

He was taken by his father to the sacred grove, passing through the talking trees, and placed in the care of Mary Morrigan. She was assisted by the men and the younger women. Each time his father left, Cormac hated the moment of separation, and so did Thunder and Bran, who were going back with Fergus. That first time (Cormac later thought of it as a first semester), the dog refused to move and Thunder tossed his head in protest. But Fergus growled his orders, and they obeyed in a sulking way, and off they went through the trees. When they were gone, the old woman took Cormac by the hand led him through the woods to the mouth of a cave on the slope of a hill. Here the young man slept on furs while becoming an Irishman.

Mary Morrigan taught him the Irish language, with its eighteen letters, starting with the words for man, fear, and woman, bean, and bread, aran, and water, uisce. She taught him how to say “I want.” And then she began talking in Irish to him, even though Cormac didn’t yet understand. Cormac was angered by this new stage. He thought: Why does she insist on speaking this language? It’s gone, destroyed. He thought: Why not just use English? But she calmed and fed him, and named the food in Irish, and the pots and the fire, and told him to sleep and then, in the morning, started over again. As he moved around the forest that surrounded the grove he understood that it was actually a village with trees separating and hiding the houses. About six hundred people were hiding there from the world. Beside one house there was a huge well, and all drew from it, using hand-carved wooden buckets. In another house were supplies of oats, available to all. Cormac didn’t see anyone using money. About a dozen horses, small and lean, were tied to trees with straw ropes (he never once hear them whinny). Pigs and chickens roamed freely. At a tanner’s, animals were skinned, their pelts hung on ropes to dry, while sweet, sickening odors rose from boiling pots. A metalsmith gave shape and beauty to shields and jewelry, and Cormac chatted in his broken Irish with a blacksmith who knew Fergus. Mary Morrigan introduced Cormac to the men and the women and the young people, and all of them spoke to him in Irish. He listened and nodded shyly and remained mute.

Then one morning Mary Morrigan asked him in Irish whether he had slept well and he answered her in Irish, “Yes, I’ve slept well.” The key had turned in the lock, the way he had climbed a magic ladder into arithmetic. By the end of summer, he was not simply speaking Irish, he was thinking in Irish. And, yes: dreaming.

“Good,” Mary Morrigan said that first morning after the key turned. “There’s much for you to know.”

She instructed him about the seasons, and the great feasts. Imbalc, with its sacred flame, and the white stones that were marked with your own sign and thrown in the fire, and how if your stone wasn’t there when the fire cooled then it had been consumed like food by the flames and you’d been blessed by the gods of fire. Beltane, on the first of May, when Cormac saw cattle driven between walls of flame, and a maypole dance, and then men and women falling down together in the woods. And though this had not happened to him, although he had lain down on the earth with no girl, he wanted to dance around the maypole with all of them, red-haired women and golden-haired girls, dark-haired and black (while rough-skinned Mary Morrigan whispered to him in Irish: “No, not you, not here, not yet”). Lughnasa in August: a great gathering of horses and cattle, to be traded and sold, with beef roasted for the tribe, and fires lighting up the night sky, mad dancing and much music and Mary Morrigan telling him that Ireland is a woman, is called by some the Dark Rosaleen, is always deep in the dark heart of the dance. Samhain in November: the harvest gathered, fruits and grains and great soups simmering in immense kettles while the music drifted through hills and over mountains and into caves and down into the Otherworld. They used that word a lot, as if it named a specific place. Cormac would hear more from Mary Morrigan about the Otherworld.

Across those years, he attended all of the feasts except Imbalc, because if he disappeared from St. Edmund’s in February, he might attract hard attention. In summer, many people scattered around Ireland, including the English and the Protestants; none went off in winter. Across those years, a new calendar was being added to his sense of time. The calendar of Ireland. Before Samhain, he and his father cleaned every speck of dust from the house, as was the custom, and followed another custom by leaving food for Cormac’s mother. When they returned to the house from their journeys to the forests or the town, the food was always gone.

All those great feasts revolved about the land and the sun and the marvelous gifts they granted to mortals. If the sun was not a god, what was? Who was? In the old days, Mary Morrigan said (and his father confirmed), the feasts were held under sun and moon on free, unfenced land, drawing men and women from all over Ireland. They were held now in the last unconquered forests of Ireland (the timber along the edges departing each month to build mansions in London or to be turned into ships for pirates and buccaneers who stole and looted for the English crown). The boy, becoming a man, becoming a Celt, saw that guile was essential to all his summer Irishmen. They needed the gift of deception as they traveled to the feasts on roads patrolled by British redcoats. Guile and deception, along with the ability to see and to hear and to connect their facts, because informers could be among them. The feasts were now held behind hidden pickets of men armed with swords and pikes, disguised as trees, allies of birds and deer and wolves, watching always for the English with their guns.

Cormac was never clear about his exact location, because none of the Irish made maps that could be found by their enemies (later he was certain that the grove was on the inland side of the Mountains of Mourne). What he did know was simple: He was in pure, untouched Ireland. They all spoke Irish. The jokes were Irish and the laughter was Irish and the gods were Irish, and so was the story, the legend, the binding tale. Along with one other immense thing. Beside the fire in the cave, on rainy summer nights, Mary Morrigan explained to him about the Otherworld.

“The Otherworld is beneath us,” she said, gesturing with a leathery hand, her palms flat with the ground beneath them.

The Otherworld was a place, as she described it, not a mere story or an abstract idea, and it was reachable through raised mounds called shees. Down there lived people called the Tuatha de Danaan, who had been in Ireland before the Celts, a race of poets and warriors who fought to maintain their place and then, after one final defeat, had retreated beneath the surface of the earth. Ever since, the Irish, when they died, had been following them into the earth. Hearing her descriptions, Cormac understood that the Otherworld was not like the ferocious Hell described by the Rev. Robinson, filled with flames, torture, screams, and horror. There was enchanted music down there, she said, and endless games, and eternal feasting. Nobody ever got ill in the Otherworld, and nobody fought, except for fun. There was no such thing as old age or even time. The future was the same as the past, and the present contained both. Or so said Mary Morrigan, as Cormac struggled to understand, and to imagine.

“Who gets in and who’s kept out?” he asked.

“The just are admitted, the unjust barred,” she said. “The Christians borrowed all that from us.”

“So my mother is there?”

“Aye.” She paused. “If you live a just life, you’ll see her there. Of that, there is no doubt. Sure, didn’t we help her into the Otherworld from this very spot?”

“Who else is barred?”

“Those who fail to avenge injustice,” she said. “For want of courage. For want of passion. If an unjust act is done in the family of a man or woman, it must be avenged. That is the rule.”

Another pause.

“And suicides,” she said. “Those who cannot live with the pain of the world and kill themselves are barred forever.”

On many smoky evenings, she told him tales of the Other-world. There was a very special, beautiful light down there too, she said, invented by the Tuatha de Danaan. A light never seen in this world. A light created by millions of emeralds embedded in the walls, a green, watery light that was both alluring and welcoming. The just people who came to the Otherworld were cared for by the Other People, which was what some called the Tuatha de Danaan. Sometimes the Other People emerged into our world from the emerald caves, disguised as fawns or birds or beautiful women, and lured our heroes back down into their secret world. Wasn’t the great Finn MacCool himself tempted? And the great Celtic warrior Cuchulain?

“Are the Other People angry with us?” Cormac asked. “Never. They’ve come to accept everything. They understand human weakness. But they can be rogues themselves. There are so many old people down there—those who’ve lived long lives—that they miss certain beautiful sounds and faces. That’s why they sometimes steal children. Once in a great while, for a joke, they’ll steal your food.”

“Do they marry and have their own children, the way we do?”

“Never. They can’t have children. That was part of the bargain with the gods. That’s one thing they gave up when they chose to live forever.”

“And do they live only in the shee?”

“No, Cormac. The shee is the entrance. That would be like trying to live in a doorway.”

The Otherworld, she explained, stretched everywhere. There was an entrance in the Cave of Cruachain, where it was possible during the feast of Samhain to enter the Otherworld. But no human should go before it was time. That was one reason for the rule against suicide. And there was a dark part of the Otherworld too, she said, ruled over by Donn, the lord of the bad Irish dead, full of immense serpents, red horsemen, the walls hung with severed heads. She didn’t dwell on this, and Cormac was pleased; it sounded too much like the Rev. Robinson’s Christian Hell.

“When your time arrives,” she said, “and you have lived your full portion, and added to decency in this world, then you too can live in the Otherworld. You can unite with all those you once loved here in the world. You can share the music, the feasting, and the emerald light. But,” she went on, “if you add to evil, if you defy time, you’ll find yourself in the land of Donn.”

Hearing these tales, Cormac looked differently at the land, imagining those who lived beneath him, including his mother and his two lost brothers, and he often ached to be with them. He also woke sometimes at night in a sweat and trembling, in the slippery grip of the enraged and punishing Donn. He wanted then to pray, to find the strength that Joseph found in the land of the Pharaohs, but he felt there was no god who would hear his prayers. He said his mother’s name and his father’s, Thunder’s name and Bran’s, and swore to whoever might hear him that he would avenge all injustices, starting with what had happened to his mother.

Most of the time he was free of nightmares. And in his waking hours, his head was full of other visions, exuberantly brimming with drama and magic. From leathery Mary Morrigan, he heard wondrous tales of Cuchulain and his great warrior rages. And of Finn MacCool and how he assumed the leadership of the Fianna by getting rid of the killer of his father. This wasn’t easy to do, for his father’s killer was smart and hard and vicious. But Finn was special. A druid gave him a crane bag containing a shield, a sword, a helmet, and a pigskin belt. A great bard allowed him to eat the Salmon of Knowledge, which gave him wisdom and the gift of poetry. With armor and poetry, Finn became the man who saved Tara. He was the man who married Sava, who had been magically transformed into a fawn and became human again at the sight of Finn, and who gave birth to their child, Usheen (which Cormac later learned was spelled Oisin). But Finn was not perfect. No god was perfect. No warrior or poet was perfect. And as he grew older, imperfect Finn made a terrible mistake: He fell in love with a woman named Grainne while he was still married to Sava. But there was a younger, shrewder rival for the love of Grainne, a man named Diarmuid. At this time, Finn’s wife prophesied that if Finn ever drank from a horn, he would die. After treacherously arranging for the death of Diarmuid, Finn went off, bursting with vanity and dishonor, to leap the River Boyne in one bound. But first, in his defiant arrogance, he sipped liquor from a horn. And then fell into the river and drowned.

“A fool,” said Mary Morrigan, telling him the story for the first time. “A great man was Finn MacCool, a hero. But also a bloody fool. You see the point? Love can do that to any one of us.”

“Has it done it to you?” Cormac asked.

She looked at him for a long time, then stared into the fire.

“Of course,” she said, but offered no details.

Cormac loved the story of the stupid end of Finn MacCool and believed it completely, and sometimes laughed out loud at the ending. He wished there were books in Irish so he could read these tales, but all were spoken by Mary Morrigan. More than all other tales, he was entranced by the story of Usheen. As told by Mary Morrigan, Usheen was the son of Finn and Sava, but he never knew his mother. She had come as a fawn from the Otherworld and was reclaimed after the birth of Usheen. But the boy was brought up among the Fianna and became one if its bravest warriors. Then he met a beautiful woman: Niave of the Golden Hair. She was the daughter of the king of Tir-na-Nog, the Land of the Ever Young. Usheen was entranced by her and followed her across distant seas to this magical land in the West. For a very long time, he was blissfully happy. There was an abundance of food and flowers, and weather that was an eternal springtime. But after several hundred years, during which he didn’t age a single day, Usheen got homesick, wanting desperately to see Ireland. Once again, stupidity played its part. Usheen had been warned upon arrival in Tir-na-Nog that if he ever again set foot upon the soil of Ireland, he would die. He ignored the warning, or deceived himself about its terms, thinking that if he went on horseback, and remained on his horse, he could avoid touching Irish soil and thus remain alive. He was prepared to live forever with Niave in Tir-na-Nog, but first he must rid himself of the aching longing for his first home, for his comrades in the Fianna, for the place where he once was a great warrior. So he set off on horseback for Ireland. And when he arrived, everything had changed.

The great old houses had crumbled into rubble. His comrades were dead. Tara was gone with the wind. The warriors, poets, and women he knew had vanished. He learned from strangers that almost three hundred years had passed since he left with Niave of the Golden Hair. He sobbed for all that was gone and turned his horse to return to his much-loved woman in Tir-na-Nog. Then he saw a famished woman on the road, apparently dying of thirst. Touched by pity, distracted by his sense of loss, he leaned over awkwardly to give her a drink, slipped from the horse, and landed hard on the earth of Ireland. Before the old woman’s horrified eyes, Usheen instantly withered into bone and skin, giving off the sweet, sickening odor of death and decay.

Cormac asked Mary Morrigan to tell him that story over and over again. Where was Tir-na-Nog? To the West. Was it an island? Yes, she said, it’s an island. But sometimes it’s under the sea, she said, and sometimes it’s in a far part of the Otherworld.

“Can it be in America?” Cormac asked.

She looked at him in a dubious way.

“Why do you ask that?”

“So many people are leaving Belfast for America,” he said. “Maybe—”

“No,” she said, her voice as old as tombs. “I don’t think it’s in America.”

18.

Then came the night near the end of his second summer in the Irish grove. Cormac noticed Mary Morrigan staring long and hard at the fire in a kind of absolute solitude. Her shawl was pulled tight against her lean, hard frame. He asked what was the matter. She didn’t answer. He waited. Over two years, she had taught him to wait. Finally her voice rose whispery and distant from someplace deep within her.

“A bad time is coming,” she said in Irish.

Her eyes remained fixed on the low orange flame spurting liquidly in and around the burning logs.

“There’ll be starving and wailing and killing,” she said. “You’ll hear the banshee cry in the night.”

She poked the fire with a blackened oak stick. The flame stirred. Sparks danced into the air but had no way to reach the stars through the roof of the cave.

“You’d best get ready,” she said. “It’s coming.”

Later, her words made him toss and shift beneath the thin muslin blanket in his place in the darker recesses of the cave. He kept thinking of Joseph and his brothers, the warning to the Pharaoh, the horrors of the bad time: the tale coming to him in his mother’s voice. The cave felt damper, colder. He knew Mary Morrigan’s prophecy was true; she didn’t lie. And that meant he must warn his father. Mary Morrigan would speak her truth to the tribe, but Cormac must tell his father. He was coming in the morning, to bring his son back to his life as Robert Carson, son of John. He knew his father would come for him, because whenever he said he would do something, he did it. He wondered whether Mary Morrigan would tell the tribe the tale of Joseph and his brothers. There were no Christians in this holy grove, and no Jews other than Cormac, and he was only half Jewish. These were the Irish. And Cormac was Irish, and a Jew, and he knew the tale. He thought: Shall I tell the tale of Joseph to Mary Morrigan? Shall I tell the Irish tribe? And what, after all, did she mean by her prophecy? Will plagues come first, arriving tonight as I fight against sleep? Will they start in the city of Belfast and follow John Carson into the forest? And will plagues be followed by locusts and boils and hunger?

All those calamities from the Christian Bible, spoken softly and carefully by his mother or bellowed by the Rev. Robinson: They were coming. They must have been what Mary Morrigan called the bad time. They must. But although Cormac knew the words of calamity, they didn’t put pictures in his head. What, after all, was a boil? What did a locust look like? His mother had tried to explain them to him. A boil, Rebecca Carson said, was a great shiny swelling on the body, pale yellow, bursting with disease. And a locust was an insect like a grasshopper that came in great clouds of its fellow creatures to eat the green off the face of the earth. Turning now in the damp, peat-smelling darkness of the cave, trying to convert words into vivid pictures, he wished his mother were there to describe them better to him. He wished she could rise from the place where she was buried, only a few hundred feet from this cave, emerge from the emerald light of the Otherworld, and explain to him what she knew and the truth of what she’d seen and whether it was like the truth of Mary Morrigan. And if the plagues and the boils and the locusts were real, if they were part of that bad time coming, he wanted his father to be safe from all the badness. And, yes, he thought: I want to be safe myself. I want to live a long time, to see what happens to everyone, to discover what happens to people I don’t yet know. Thinking, as he remembered the rules set by Mary Morrigan: I need to earn my way to the Otherworld. I need to build my courage. I need to forge my passion. I need to avenge all unjust acts committed against family and tribe. I must learn to live with the pain of the world until my time comes. Then I will see my mother. Then I will see my lost brothers. He fell asleep trying to imagine the sound of the banshee.

Then he was awake. An hour later, or three hours, he could not tell. The fire dozed, and in its light he saw the leathery face of Mary Morrigan very close to his own. Her grainy fingertips touched his cheek. She was kneeling beside him.

“You’re a good lad,” she whispered.

And then leaned down and kissed him.

She shuddered. So did he.

Then, with a wind rising beyond the cave mouth, rustling the trees before it, her hard, granular skin fell away, vanishing into the dark orangey air, and Cormac O’Connor was afraid. Looking down at him was a woman with an oval face framed by thick ringlets of black hair, eyes lustrous and hungry. He smelled pale roses. Her full lips widened into a serene smile. He touched her face. To see if it was real. And to still his trembling hand. Her skin remained the color of leather but was now smooth and pliant. Dark-skinned woman. Dark Rosaleen of the old, sad Celtic song. She moved his blanket aside and played with the bone buttons of his coarse blue shirt.

No words were spoken. She eased out of the ragged clothes of Mary Morrigan, naked now in the firelight, shifted above him and his tense, sweating body, and held in her dark smooth-skinned hand her smooth full dark-nippled breast, and offered it to his mouth. He took it. Hard-nippled brown-nippled dark-skinned woman. Suckling him. Dark-skinned woman with hair falling like a black flower from her head, as he tried to suck all she knew, all she was offering, all she could give him. Her soft smooth kneading hand, damp and cool as the dark air, found his bursting cock and slowly smoothly moistly firmly she began then to move him out of himself, out of that place, out of time, into the future.

19.

He told his father none of this, of course, when he came for Cormac in the morning. Nothing about the wetness and the tightness and the milky taste of Mary Morrigan, nothing about the scent of pale roses seeping from her flesh, nothing about the rising midnight wind and the whipping sound of trees and the long, deep stranger’s roar that had come from within him and the caress of hands and the taste of tongue and lips and hair: and nothing either about the dark, emptied sleep that followed.

From his place in the morning trees, he saw Fergus O’Connor, his fierce-limbed father, drive the cart into the grove, and the men of his Irish tribe rushing to greet him while Bran leaped from the seat and bounded forward to greet Cormac. The dog was jumping and leaping and licking his hands, his tail whipping the air, then gestured with his head for Cormac to follow him to Thunder. His father waved, signaling with his hands for Cormac to stay back for now, follow the dog, his face saying, Wait, son, I must do something first. Cormac understood. Following Bran to the horse, he looked around, but Mary Morrigan was nowhere in sight. He wondered if she’d told the men what had happened in the night (for in the time of feasts they spoke of all things) and then thought that she had not. And then wondered if it had happened at all, if it had only been a dream. Then, thinking: No, it was not a dream. I can smell her on me. The scent of pale roses.

Bran and Thunder broke his thoughts. The great horse was slick from the journey, his black coat streaked with white foam. Cormac loosened the harness, hugged Thunder’s massive head, and led him to the hidden stream, where all three drank together from the silky current. The water was the color of the sky.

Through the trees he could see the men now unloading crates from beneath a false bottom Fergus O’Connor had added to the cart, using one of his father’s tools to open each in an almost reverential way. Suddenly they were all holding new muskets. Then Fergus was showing them how the guns were used. This was what he needed to do first, Cormac thought, and he didn’t want me to be part of it. Men use muskets. And I’m not yet a man. Da must know that a bad time is coming.

The men moved into the forest with the guns, and Fergus came to fetch his son, to hug him, to drink sky-colored water with the boy and the horse and the dog. Then they all gathered with the others for a small feast of eggs and bread, bacon and vegetables, washed down with icy water from earthenware mugs. The other women brought the food, young women, golden-haired, long-gowned, their bodies hidden. In his mind, Cormac could see their breasts and bellies and hidden hair. But none were made of the stained dark skin of Mary Morrigan, who was still nowhere in sight. The men grew flushed and excited, skin reddening, nostrils flaring, but not because of the women. “Let them come now,” one said. “Let them come, and we’ll be ready for them.” Another said, “Aye, let them come, and we’ll fight them with their own weapons.” All talking abruptly, breathily in Irish, while Fergus said nothing. He had done his work, kept a promise to deliver the weapons; what was to happen with the guns was in the future. Cormac asked him where he’d gotten the guns. He answered that it didn’t matter. He said he hoped they’d never be used, that they would rust in their hiding places, because he hated the guns, which were mere machines.

“But we must be ready,” he said, “if the English come for us.”

Then they were leaving, Fergus exchanging somber embraces with the men and polite, grave nods with the women. Thunder was harnessed to the empty wagon. Cormac still could not see Mary Morrigan, and he ran through the trees to the cave, but she was not there. He felt that this was not right. Not right, after what had happened in the cave. Not right, to just go away without a word. All summer she’d been his teacher, of language and music and stories. And in the cave… He returned, breathless from running, to the cart. Bran hopped up between them and his father uttered a word in Irish and Thunder stepped off.

Then at last Cormac saw Mary Morrigan. She was high on the slope of the hill at the mouth of the cave. He stood up in the wagon and waved. She made a small, sad, finger-curling signal with her ancient hand, and then was lost behind a screen of trees. As he sat down, his mind filled with images of dark and pliant skin, the flesh of roses.

“It’s all right, son. She’ll be here when you come back.”

“I hope. Because she says that a bad time is coming.”

All the way home, they talked about what Mary Morrigan had told Cormac. “We must be ready, Da, ” Cormac said, and his father answered, “Aye.” The boy reminded him of his mother’s story, the tale of Joseph and his brothers and how the Pharaoh listened while the Hebrews did not. “Aye,” he said, “I remember it well.” Nodding, listening, his face heavy with memory. Rebecca seemed to be with them on those roads: Rebecca to the father, Ma to the son. Dark hair and sweet voice and still dead in the rain and mud of Belfast.

“Well,” Fergus O’Connor said, “if bad times are coming, we must prepare.”

“Would she know all this?” Cormac said. “Our Mary Morrigan?”

“Yes.”

“Suppose she’s wrong?”

“About such things, she’s never wrong.”

20.

At home that night, they began to prepare. Fergus made a list (as if dictated by his mother) of the tasks they’d share and the things they must store. Food most of all: potatoes, oats, corn, salted bacon, cooked beef, limes against the scurvy. And turf to keep the hearth alive.

“We’ll get through it,” Fergus said. “No matter what form it takes. Now, get ye to bed, for we have much to do on the morrow.”

In the dark room where the horse’s skull was buried in the mortar, Cormac thought of plagues and locusts and his mother, imagining Joseph’s face and the Pharaoh’s voice, and then saw in the blackness Mary Morrigan beside him, with her damp hands, her voice whispering Irish words in the light of a fire, her tight, fleshy cave enclosing him and her smooth skin pressed against him.

In the morning they began their tasks. Cormac rode Thunder to town on the first of many trips to buy candles, bacon, lime, biscuits. A produce wagon arrived late in the day with a special order of turf and another wagon brought sacks of oats. Together, father and son moved furniture to make room for the turf and the oat sacks against the inside walls of the house, and then ordered more. Every day, Da worked furiously in the forge, making horseshoes and sickles to earn money and handing some of the work to his son. At school, Robert Carson said nothing, as always; reticence had become his way, the truth of his thinking and of himself, buried in restrained talk of games or discussions of the stories in their schoolbooks.

One afternoon he did remind his friends about Joseph and his brothers, hoping they’d understand what he meant; but they discussed it only as a good story. The Rev. Robinson was teaching more quietly now, with fewer rants about Moloch and the Whore of Babylon (for he was older too), but Robert Carson said nothing to him about the bad time either. In truth, if boils and plagues did arrive, he would feel little sorrow if they went at the preacher. Perhaps he would emerge a humbler man, one who questioned his brutal God. The warning was Irish; the Irish would do what they must to survive.

Each evening now, after a hard and exhausting day in the forge, John Carson stood outside the house, looking for signs in the sky and the sea and the movement of birds. Inside, when they became Fergus and Cormac O’Connor, they talked beside the hearth. Fergus gave his son any news that might be connected to Mary Morrigan’s prophecy. Hints of bad times came from customers in the forge, from travelers with damaged axles, facts decoded from the oblique reports in newspapers. In Belfast and Derry, groups of men had been making midnight raids on certain houses, searching for disguised Catholics. The incidents seemed isolated. Fergus said he thought they were not. “They are signs,” he said, “and must be read correctly, like the tracks of wild animals.” He explained that these actions were caused by a kind of fever that would lie dormant for years and then suddenly erupt. A fever in the brain. A black fever in the heart. “Good men are taken away,” he said, “never to return.” Cormac asked if these raids were the bad time coming. His father nodded at that possibility.

“We must be very careful,” Fergus said. “Whatever you do, don’t speak Irish in public. Not a word. Give them no excuse. Create no suspicion. They are worse than fools. They are murderous fools.”

Sometimes they spoke of life and death, and how death came to every man. And how some forms of death were unacceptable. He didn’t mean the death of Rebecca. That was, when all was said and done, an accident. It was carelessness made deadly. But it was not murder.

“And murder?” Cormac asked. “What is to be done about murder?”

The older man gazed into the fire, his eyes smoky.

“In our tribe,” he said, “the murderer must be pursued to the ends of the earth. And his male children too. They must be brought to the end of the line.”

A pause.

“That’s very harsh, isn’t it, Da?”

“Aye,” he said. “But murder is harsh too.”

In the blue black hour before dawn one morning, Fergus woke his son, telling him to dress and follow him. He was carrying the map case and a small leather pouch tied with a leather thong. In the forge, Cormac watched as his father stuffed the matted sword into the case. He handed the boy a spade and took one for himself. They eased outside and flattened themselves against the shadowed side of the house, wary of being watched. Bran was with them, silent, so dark they could see only the whites of his eyes. They all paused, sorting the sounds of awakening birds and small animals in the darkness. Bran growled but didn’t bark. Then, as an inky cloud veiled the moon, they hurried across the open space to the hawthorn tree. Together, they removed a rectangle of sod and then dug a narrow, shallow trench. Fergus laid the leather bag down first and it made a dull clunking sound, so that Cormac knew it contained coins. Then Fergus placed the encased sword on top of the bag. The clouds passed, and in the sudden moonlight the leather bag was darker than Mary Morrigan’s skin. To Cormac, it looked, in fact, like a lumpy leather pillow for the sword, and for a moment he saw his mother again, lying in her piece of the Irish grove with the things beside her that she would take to the Otherworld.

But he also knew that this was not a burial; it was a preparation for this world. As they covered the bag and sword with heavy earth, Cormac longed for the sweet earth of Mary Morrigan’s cave and the taste of her earth-colored breasts and the scent of pale roses.

“If anything happens to me,” Fergus whispered, “come here and retrieve these, son, and take them on your journey.”

“I understand.”

Fergus didn’t say where that journey might take him, but it would surely be away from their small piece of Ireland. In silence, they fitted the sod perfectly upon the trench, tamped it down, returned the spades to the forge, and went to prepare breakfast. They were sure they hadn’t been seen. If they had, Bran would have warned them. As they reached the house, a morning wind blew hard off the sea.

One evening a week later, with the days edging toward Christmas, Bran began barking loudly in his deepest baritone, and there was a fierce hammering at their door. Bran told them: This is danger. Fergus dropped his newspaper and pointed at his son.

“Get ye in your room,” he ordered, “and stay there.”

“Da, I’m sixteen, I—”

“Now,” he said.

Cormac did as he was told, leaving the bedroom door open a few inches so that he could see what was happening. The main room was illuminated by only one candle and the low, dull fire of the hearth. Cormac’s heart was fluttery. Bran kept barking. Fergus placed one stool on top of another, leaving three blunt legs facing the roof. Those legs were now the height of his anvil, within reach of his hand. The knocking on the door was harder, muffled voices louder. Carefully, Fergus opened the door, holding Bran by his leather collar. Cormac glimpsed gaunt, pale faces and the flickering of torches.

“What do you want?” Fergus said.

“We want to search this house,” said a hard, burred voice. The speaker moved closer to Fergus, and Cormac could see the man: short, bull-necked, the apparent leader.

“Why?” Fergus said.

“We’ve reason to believe you’re a papist. A hidden Catholic. A Catholic with a Protestant mask.”

“You’re wrong,” Fergus said, and chuckled.

“You’re lying, mister,” the bull-necked man said.

“That, I’m not,” Fergus said, his voice darkening.

“We’ll see to that. We’re going to search this papist hole. Step aside.”

Cormac saw his father’s fingers curl around a leg of the stool. “If you take one step into this house,” Fergus said, “I’ll break your bloody head.”

The bull-necked man stared at Fergus for a long moment. Cormac knew what he was seeing: eyes as cold and gray as steel. Squatting in the darkness, Cormac reached under his bed for the length of iron he used for his exercises, and remembered the horse’s skull buried in the wall of this room long ago. He thought: Give me what I need, horse.

“We’ll see about that,” the bull-necked man said, as if by talking tough he could ease his own doubts. He turned slightly, eyes on Fergus but speaking into the torches. He said dramatically: “Billy?”

A taller man, younger, with a hat pulled tight over his eyebrows, stepped into the doorway to the side of the bull-necked man. He was nervously holding a pistol in his left hand, pointing the long silvered barrel at Fergus. Cormac’s father didn’t move.

“You’re breaking the law,” Fergus said calmly. “Just pointing that pistol at me is a crime.”

“ ’Tis a far worse crime to be a secret papist,” the bull-necked man said. “Your crime is treason.”

Now Cormac could see the pistol and the forearm but not the face. The man was stepping back to take aim. Cormac slipped out of the bedroom, gripping the iron bar, moving quietly along the wall toward the door. His father’s attention was focused on the men, and on controlling the angry Bran.

“You’re all very brave and sure,” Fergus said, “when you’re holding that gun on a man.”

“We’re following God’s orders, papist.”

“Sure, God wouldn’t have the likes of you pathetic bastards doing his work,” Fergus said.

Cormac thought: He must sense that I’m approaching the door, out of the sight of the men, but he won’t move his eyes my way. I’m sure he isn’t blinking.

“If you’ve naught to fear, let us in,” the bull-necked man said, a tremor of uncertainty in his voice. “We’ll know in two minutes if this house is fouled by the Whore of Babylon.”

“Now I understand,” Fergus said. “You’re an expert on whores.”

“Stand aside,” the man said angrily, “or you’re a dead man.”

“Ach, go home, will ye? Go home and hammer your wives—if you’re tough enough.”

“Billy!”

The unseen Billy cocked the hammer, and then Cormac swung the iron bar, pivoting on his left foot, hurling all his weight into the blow. Billy’s hand must have splintered into many pieces (Cormac thought) because he screamed and screamed, the way an injured baby screams, over and over, his voice fading into the darkness. The gun fell with a clattering sound, and Fergus placed a foot on it, gesturing to his son with an open hand without ever taking his eyes off the group of gaunt Christians. Cormac tossed him the iron bar. He squatted and with one blow smashed the pistol. Then he stood and kicked the pieces across the threshold. The men looked whiter and gaunter now, their eyes as tentative as the flames of their torches. The bull-necked man was wide-eyed. Out behind the others, Billy the gunman was whimpering.

“You can pick up those pieces, you bloody idiots,” Fergus O’Connor said. “They’ll fit right well now up your arses.”

Then he slammed the door shut, flipped the latch, released the furious Bran, winked at his son, and smiled.

“Thank you, lad,” he said.

As the enraged Bran barked and leaped and scraped paws against the door, they could hear God’s messengers murmuring and talking outside, their voices rising and falling like jangled music. They must have known (Cormac thought) that the house with its stone and plaster and slate roof was immune to fire from outside. But they didn’t sound interested in storming the doors to charge into the house with their torches. The sound of Billy’s voice moved above and through the other voices, a whimpering and groaning thread of pain. And then they went away.

Fergus O’Connor exhaled. So did his son. “They’ll be back,” the father said.

21.

But on this, Fergus O’Connor was wrong. The gaunt men didn’t come back. What came instead was the killer wind.

It arrived on the evening of December 27, 1739, while all the good Ulster Christians were still exulting over the birth of their various Christs. Father and son were reading by the light of candles. Fergus was again absorbed in The Drapier’s Letters, by the Dean. Cormac was reading the poems of Alexander Pope, borrowed from school before it closed for Christmas. He was copying some of Pope’s verses into a folio book, using a new reed pen and ink his father gave him as the season’s gift. In the margins of his precious green notebook, Cormac doodled faces he remembered (Robinson, or the gaunt night visitors) and images provoked by the poetry (hills and streams and ruined castles). From time to time, his father told him to listen to a few sentences from the Dean. Or asked his son to show him the sketches or recite some lines from Pope.

“If some of our more neighborly eejits ever saw that book of yours,” he said with a laugh, “they’d be sure it was written by the Pope in Rome.” He smiled. “And there was a Pope Alexander, you know. A right bastard he was, at that.”

Then, in the pause after talking, they could hear a whine, distant at first, thin, then widening and growing louder, and Bran was up and alert, growling in baritone counterpoint to the whine, baffled because there was not yet anything to smell. Fergus laid the Dean on the floor beside him, went to the top door, cracked it an inch, and then was shoved back two feet by the wind. He braced himself and slammed the door shut. They latched the shutters on the windows and gazed at the roof, which had begun to tremble.

“A gale,” Fergus said, trying to hide his alarm. “From the east. The worst I’ve ever heard.”

For an hour, Cormac imagined the wind coming all the way from Russia, across Germany and France, gathering ice in the Alps, adding more force over chilly England, driving with all its arctic strength to Ireland. Nothing could stop it. No king could demand it to halt, no soldier could shoot it. They heard Thunder whinnying in the stable, the high-pitched panic of a trapped animal. At first they did nothing, waiting for the wind to die. But the wind did not die. And then Fergus could stand it no more. He donned his heaviest coat and pulled a wool cap down tight upon his brow.

“Stay here,” he ordered.

“I’ll go with you.”

“No, you’ve got to be ready to find me if—”

And he was gone, with Cormac’s weight shoved against the double doors, pushing hard to latch them shut behind him. Cormac heard huge branches being torn from trees, thumping as they landed, and the deep, throaty sound of the wind under the high-pitched whine, and something clattering off the roof: branches, slates, bricks. The wind drove down the chimney, forcing smoke into the room, and the windows shook and rattled and made cracking sounds as the punishing wind shifted and whipsawed and turned upon itself. Cormac no longer heard Thunder’s anguished voice. Bran paced, prowled, made nervous circles. Head up. Alert. Pausing to smell and listen at both the east door and the west.

Finally there was a hammering at the doors, and Cormac opened the inner one. His father’s face was raw and scraped. His hat was gone, his eyes wide. But he had Thunder by the harness. He unlatched the bottom door and tried pulling the horse into the house, urging him: “Come in, Thunder. Come with us. Come in.” In the roar and the whine, the great horse refused to cross the threshold. Cormac thought: This is not his world. His world is the barn and the fields and the forest. The horse backed up. Cormac joined his father, hauling on the reins. Useless. The wind roared past them into the house, extinguishing candles, knocking over pots and chairs and rattling the dishes on the sideboard.

“Hold him,” Fergus said, and while Cormac held the taut reins, his father rushed into the darkness past the whinnying, frantic Thunder.

Thunder winced, his eyes widened in pain, he made a twisting sound in his chest and rose with hooves pawing at the air, and then Cormac pulled hard on the reins, forcing the horse’s head down low, and with an iron stomping of hooves, a shuddering churning movement, the horse entered the dark human house. Father and son dropped the reins and hurled their weight against the doors until they closed. Fergus jammed the latches shut. Cormac could see dimly in the light of the hearth; he found a candle and lit it from an ember. An aura of light rose from the flame, and Cormac could see his father still at the door, his butt pressed against it, legs stiff, facing his muddied boots, until he straightened up, flattened his shoulders against the door, and slid to the floor.

“Glory be to God,” he said in Irish.

And then he laughed and switched to English.

“Glory be to bloody God.”

Cormac squatted to face him.

“Can I get you something, Da?”

“A spot of tea, Your Worship,” Fergus said, in an English accent.

“Righto, Your Lordship. But shall I first show the king to his bed?”

Fergus looked past his son at Thunder, stood up slowly, and they both laughed.

“How did you get him to come in?”

“Squeezed his balls until my hands hurt.”

He guffawed and so did his son. Thunder whinnied, as if demanding an explanation, or lamenting the condition of his balls. Bran looked baffled; the rules of the world had abruptly changed. The two humans bent over laughing until the tears came. All the while the wind was howling as it arrived from Siberia.

The wind howled all that night and through the next day. And when the wind began its retreat, the cold remained. For seven weeks, the temperatures stayed below zero. On the first day, father and son stepped outside and their eyes flooded and Cormac’s lashes stuck together. They found the stream frozen and the well a deep block of ice. They took Thunder with them, the two of them riding him, great clouds of steam rising from his nose and mouth. Everywhere, trees were uprooted. At least a dozen houses were smashed flat. The steeple of St. Edmund’s was jammed like a spear into an iced thicket twenty feet from the church, and there was no sign of the Rev. Robinson or anyone else. On the bald, distant hills they saw three frozen horses lying on their sides. When they returned home, Thunder bent easily under the doorframe.

The cold went on and on, and they set some routines: the dog and horse released each morning to relieve themselves, to be followed by Fergus and Cormac. The outhouse blew over on the first night of wind, so Da fashioned a harness to go around Cormac’s waist, to be strapped around an alder tree if the wind blew too fiercely. When Fergus gripped a tree, nothing could blow him over. They made jokes about shite freezing into cordwood before it left your arse and the miracle of pissing icicles.

They learned from a passing coach that the ink had frozen on the presses of the News-Letter. All schools were closed. Churches had locked their doors. In Belfast, ships were frozen to the quays. You could ride a horse across the iced surface of the River Lagan. When the weather warmed slightly in the third week, snow fell for eighteen hours, and began to melt the next day, and then the Siberian wind came howling more angrily than ever, as if showing its contempt for all of them, and the wet snow froze into giant hard-packed drifts. Six weeks into 1740, the odd traveler told them of destroyed crops and dead cattle and horses all over the north of Ireland. Within a week, food had begun to run out, because people had not been warned, had not heard Mary Morrigan speak about the bad times that were coming, had not understood the story of Joseph and his brothers. Fergus and Cormac O’Connor were among the lucky ones, for they had food. But as more reports of starvation came to them, Cormac began to feel guilty about having what might save the lives of others, and he told his father so.

“There’s nothing to be done,” Fergus said. “If we give out all we have, it’d be gone in two days. Then there’d be nobody left to bury the dead. Or tell their story.”

“But who will feed them?”

“When there’s this many starvin’, only a government can feed them. But they won’t. Not this lot. The whoremonger Chichesters are happy and warm in London, burning Irish logs in their fires and eating Irish beef. They know how great—for them—is the news from Ireland. The more Irishmen that die, son, the more land for the landlords when it’s over.”

He was right (Cormac thought), but his son was still angry, and struggling with guilt, and trying to bury both feelings in hard labor. They took axes to the stream and broke off large splinters of ice and filled pots with them and boiled them at the hearth for water. They rationed their food and the oats. Thunder gave off much heat, so they could be stingy with the turf, and at night the horse settled against the western wall, and Bran huddled beside him. As the stack of turf lowered and the merciless cold continued, they embraced Bran’s intelligence and soon all four of them huddled together in the nights, covered with coats and blankets.

Cormac used the green notebook as a diary and made sketches of what he saw when he rode Thunder through the cold. The notebook filled (his script now smaller to save space and often cruder because he was forced to write and draw with gloved hands) as more and more reports arrived about the general calamity and the indifference of London. Soon there was talk of famine. Just as there had been in Egypt and Israel. Corn stalks had been burned black by the great wind. Grass died everywhere, turning pastures the color of blood. Many shops in Belfast were closed because there was nothing to sell. Cormac wondered in his green notebook about the fate of the fishmonger and the butcher and about his friends and even the Rev. Robinson. The mud of Belfast must be like brick now. He was careful about some of his thoughts, since he did not want the notebook to turn into evidence. He did not, for example, record his feelings about the Rev. Robinson. Would the good reverend find a way to blame the Vatican for the Irish disaster? Of course. It was God’s will, wasn’t it? God’s harsh lesson about sin. Cormac wished God, if he did exist, would just show up and speak plainly.

One February day, it was warm again, and the snow melted away. But still, it did not end. That night the cold returned, driven by a brutal wind, freezing the earth into iron. Two mornings later, Cormac was riding west alone on Thunder, in search of wood to feed the forge and food to feed himself and his father, because at last they were running out of both. The frozen trees resisted his ax, and he settled for stray fallen branches that he lashed to the saddle. There was no food. Anywhere. Fields and woods were littered with the corpses of cows, wolves, sheep, and horses, some of them stripped of flesh, many of them wedged beneath fallen trees that had provided no true shelter. Some villages were blocked by red-coated soldiers who warned Cormac that everyone left alive was dying of fever and dysentery.

“There’s no water since the snow melted,” a soldier told him. “At least they could melt the bloody snow. Now the wells are frozen like fecking rocks and the fecking streams are dry. ’Tis a pity. They’re even drinking piss.”

On the way home, Cormac saw the body of a coatless young girl in a stiff blue dress. She was about nine. Her face was black. A dark blue hand was bent across her brow. She was shoeless. He tried to imagine what had driven her into the cold without coat or shoes, and then imagined both being ripped from her corpse by foragers among the dead. And what had driven her into the cold at all? He imagined a brutal father or a dead family or the fear of ghosts in some ruined cottage. He wondered too where the Other People were and whether they were huddled together in the Otherworld for warmth the way he and his father and Thunder and Bran huddled each night in their house. That dead girl might have been looking desperately for the door to the Otherworld, where she would be warm in the place of emerald light.

Suddenly Cormac wanted the warmth of a woman. Tight and wet and warm in a cave that smelled of peat. There before him was a girl who would never be a woman, and the earth was so frozen that he couldn’t even bury her. He rode hard for home.

22.

Then, early one blue morning, Cormac came awake beside Thunder. He felt a dampness on his brow and he could see light through the cracks of the door and his breath didn’t make steam when he exhaled. Bran sensed the change too and started shaking himself, and then they were all up. Fergus said nothing, as if afraid this was an illusion. He opened the door, and Bran dashed outside, leaping and rolling, with Thunder after him, bumping the doorjamb like some large younger brother, shaking his great black body, testing the earth with his hooves. Fergus stood with a blanket draped over his shoulder. An immense brightness was coming from the sea. They heard a bird sing.

“We’ve come through it,” Fergus said.

And so they had.

In late morning, with the doors and windows open to air out the horse-smelling house, Fergus hitched Thunder to the cart and told Cormac to join him and explained to Bran that he must stay behind. “There’s smoke coming from the chimney,” he told the dog, “and that’s good. We don’t want strangers believing there’s nobody at home. So you must stay inside, Bran, and bark your head off if anyone comes.” The dog listened unhappily but accepted his duty. He went inside, and Fergus locked the door behind him. Then they started west.

“We need a wagonload of wood,” Fergus told his son. “We need food. There’s only one place to find both.”

For hours they traveled to the secret country of the Irish. Death was everywhere: more dead cattle, more dead humans, more dead wolves. They crossed a stream and saw a dead swan wedged in ice against boulders. They arrived at the grove before dark. Whistles and howls echoed through the cold-stripped forest, and then words in Irish and Fergus answered and then the guards appeared, wrapped in thick furs, thinner, grimier. They nodded and smiled and moved father and son forward into the sacred grove. They saw a huge cauldron on a mound of burning logs, with smoke and steam and sparks rising into the dark air.

“You see, Cormac,” Fergus said. “It’s a time to rejoice.”

And so it was.

The women were smiling in their furs and woolen shawls, and dogs barked, as if demanding news of Bran, and someone was playing pipes in the darkness beyond the fire, and Cormac could hear the steady beat of a drum. Then Mary Morrigan appeared, her eyes welling with tears. She had been right; a terrible time had come. As predicted. But she said nothing now about her prophecy, took no vain comfort in the proofs offered by so much desolation. It was enough that her own part of the Irish tribe had been warned, and had survived. She was thinner now in Cormac’s eyes, frailer, as if the seven arctic weeks had reduced her to bone and gristle. She gripped Cormac’s hands in her callused fingers and he wondered where that other woman had gone, the woman who was also Mary Morrigan, the woman with the soft flesh and gripping wetness. He thought: Perhaps this Mary Morrigan, withered and dark, was only a mask for the other, her face and body and clothes worn the way he and his father wore their Protestant masks in the world beyond the grove.

But Cormac could not ask those questions, and they might never be answered if he did. Mary Morrigan slipped away, to preside over the chanting and the drum and the thin bird voice of the flute moving through the darkness as if trying to be joyful. They sat at the fire and ate boiled beef while Fergus listened to the terrible accounting. Seventeen Irish men dead, twenty-six women, thirteen children, along with nine horses, eleven cows, fifteen sheep, and twenty-one dogs. All pigs had survived. At least two of the women had died from some English disease they picked up in Belfast while foraging for food. After their deaths, it was decided that nobody could go again to the city until the terrible time had passed. The bodies of the dead had all been burned to protect the living. Fergus and Cormac listened to all of this in silence. Cormac wondered which of the Irish he’d known in his Celtic summers were now dead, and thought that it was unfair that he was alive and they were dead.

“Perhaps now the dying is over for a while,” Fergus said in Irish.

“Perhaps,” said Mary Morrigan, staring into the fire.

That night Fergus and Cormac slept with some of the other men in a hut made of rough logs. Cormac longed for the cave of Mary Morrigan but remained beside his father and the other men, more than a dozen of them, along with some dogs and a cow, while distant singing, full of lament and mourning, drifted through the midnight grove.

They rose early to a damp, fog-bound morning. The air was warmer, the earth still spiky with ice. Their cart was already piled with firewood and sacks of oats. They embraced each of the Irish who were not already out foraging. Mary Morrigan, one of a group of women, waved a small farewell. And then they started back. For a long time, Fergus was silent.

“Too much death,” he said after a while. “Too much death. Too much death…”

Cormac wanted to console him, but he knew it wouldn’t help to say that he was alive and Thunder was alive and Bran was alive and Mary Morrigan was alive.

“Well,” Cormac did say, “maybe they’ve all gone to the Other-world. Where it’s warm, Da, where they want for naught.”

“Maybe,” he said, without conviction. “I hope…”

They rode for hours, saying little, with Thunder’s hooves clip-clopping on the frozen path, his hot breath making white clouds and his breathing as steady as a clock. Fergus had wrapped his face in a dark blue scarf, and Cormac buried his own face in the collars of his coat. His mind, thrummed by the rhythm of horse and loaded cart, eased into a dark, private cave with a fire burning low and his face hot with flesh and hair.

Then Thunder slowed.

Cormac was alert, his heart moving faster. Thinking: Something is not right. Thinking: Thunder should not be moving slower. Not yet. He knows the way. And we’re at least six miles from home.

But the clip-clop, clip-clop became something else.

Clip.

Clop.

Fergus was fully alert, his eyes wide, pulling the scarf down to his chin. He glanced back. There was nothing behind them. But the road ahead curved to the left and then vanished behind a hill. Cormac thought: Whatever danger Thunder senses, it lies beyond that curve.

“Get ready to run,” Fergus said.

They moved slowly around the curve.

Clip.

Clop.

Clip.

And there in front of them were six men on horses, one holding the gathered reins of two horses without riders. They were stretched across the road, blocking the way, as still as death. Each of the men was armed with a pistol. Fergus and Cormac knew two of them. One was Patch, his bald head covered with a fur hat. The other was the Earl of Warren.

Fergus tugged on the reins, and Thunder stopped about thirty feet from the fence of men on horseback. Nobody moved.

There were dense brown thickets on each side of the road, and a drainage ditch to Cormac’s right, its surface frozen.

“Are you looking for the road to Rome?” the earl said, smiling in an amused way while the others laughed. His abrupt English accent was sharp and hurting, with an odd feminine pitch to its tone, as if squeezed by the cold. Cormac remembered the day of his mother’s death in the mud of Belfast, when the earl’s voice was uncertain and trembling. That voice was gone. After the brutal Siberian winter, he seemed harder now, dressed for command in a long black coat, heavy wool scarf, broad-brimmed hat, high polished boots. He did not seem to remember Cormac. The boy who had once flailed at him so bitterly was now a young man of sixteen.

Fergus whispered again to Cormac that he must prepare to run. The young man’s heart thumped in fear and anger.

“I won’t run,” he said.

“You’ll run if I say so,” Fergus insisted, not moving his lips.

The earl nudged his gray stallion with his knees, and the horse moved forward. Thunder shuddered and tensed, as if challenged. Cormac saw Patch jam his pistol into his belt and slide a musket from his saddlebag.

“You must run,” Fergus whispered in Irish. “If you don’t, there will be no witness, and nobody to avenge what might happen.”

“Is that Latin you’re speaking, my proud blacksmith?” the earl said. “Listen, Patch, listen to them talk Latin. Can’t manage the King’s English, but listen to them spout the old Latin.”

Fergus said nothing. Cormac could feel tension coming off him like bristles.

“That’s a lovely horse you’ve got there,” the earl said. As he came closer, Cormac noticed for the first time that the earl had a diamond cemented into his right bicuspid, worn like a badge of fashion.

Fergus stared at the earl.

“I’d say he’s worth about eight pounds,” the earl said. He turned to Patch. “Don’t you think, Patch? About eight pounds’ worth?”

“At least, milord,” Patch said, grinning. “P’raps more, sir.” The earl looked at Fergus for a long, calculating moment. His doughy face was very still.

“I want the horse,” the earl said.

“The horse is not for sale,” Fergus said.

“Is that so?” the earl said.

“Yes.”

“My good man, I don’t think you understand me. I want that horse.”

The diamond glittered when he smiled.

“You see, this blasted famine has killed a lot of horses. Including many of my horses. So we’re buying horses. And that horse, dear fellow, looks to be worth at least eight pounds.”

He gestured with the pistol in a weary manner while he talked, his gun hand flopping loosely. Then, with a sigh, he slipped the pistol into his belt, as if deciding that even two Irishmen must understand that they had no way to resist. He took some coins from his coat pocket and slapped them together. Cormac wondered if he was about to do his juggling act. Patch and the others seemed impatient. Then, coming closer, the earl adopted a harder tone.

“And since it’s well known that you’re a papist, and since the law of this land clearly states that no papist can own a horse worth more than five pounds, and since—”

“I know the law,” Fergus said. “It does not apply to me. I’m not a Catholic.”

“Of course, what else would you say? But we have reason to believe otherwise, don’t we, Patch?” Cormac heard the coins slapping. “And, of course, sir, you can always go to argue your case in the assizes.” He turned to his men. “You lot, unhitch the horse, and Patch, you—”

And then Fergus shoved Cormac off the seat and said, “Run!”

Cormac hit the frozen ground and rolled into the iced ditch and what he saw, rolling and hurting and flopping on the brown drainage ice, were a series of jagged moments: Patch’s horse bucking in fear, and his father’s face in fierce resistance, and the earl moving to the right, and Thunder rearing: huge; enraged, striking at the earl, at his horse’s gray head, blood suddenly spouting from the horse’s split brow, and the earl wide-eyed, and a last glance at Cormac from his father.

And then Patch fired the musket.

“No, you fecking idiot!” the earl screamed. “Don’t—”

The noise of the shot echoed in the emptiness. Birds rose and cawed and beat their wings. Horses whinnied.

Then Cormac glimpsed his father sprawled back awkwardly in the seat of the cart. His eyes were wide, staring at the sky. His body made the effort to rise, but a great crimson stain seeped from his chest. His scarf was slippery with blood. All of this glimpsed in seconds. And punctuated by the thin, panicky voice of the earl.

“God damn it all!”

“He’s twitching, milord,” Patch said.

“Then finish him off, you bloody fool! And find his son! He’s a fecking witness. And we can’t—”

Then, as Cormac rolled into the thicket, frantic, panicky, terrified, enraged, pushing belly-flat under the needles of the briar, as Bran always did, he looked back, and saw the earl’s extended arm, his finger pointing, and then Patch gripping a pistol, and heard a smaller explosion as another ball was buried in his father’s body. And the earl’s voice: “The horse, Patch, calm the bloody horse! And take the oats and the firewood too, and—where’s that other one? The young one. Find him!”

Cormac had rolled into a frozen creek, screened from the road by dense walls of trees, and was up now and running.

23.

The following hours assumed the feeling of a dream. He was running and falling and wailing in rage and running again. Avoiding all roads, hamlets, and farmhouses. At one point, he bent over in pain as if a knife had been shoved into his side. And when the pain was gone, and the world was silent, he rolled his body into a ball and cried. In the cold silence of the bruised Irish twilight, he saw his father at the forge, muscles like cables in his arms, and heard his laugh when he was happy, and remembered the way he struggled for control when Rebecca died. Thinking: They’ve killed him. Shot him down on a road to get his horse. The bastards. The dirty, cowardly bastards. Now only I am left. And he heard his father talking: In our tribe, the murderer must be pursued to the ends of the earth. And his male children too.… He listened for the sounds of horses, for Patch and the other men, for the thin, panicky voice of the earl. Nothing. And heard Mary Morrigan speaking to him: If an unjust act is done in the family of a man or woman, it must be avenged. That is the rule.… He rose then in a crouch, sheltered now by the seeping darkness. Thinking: I have my tasks now. Things I must do, or live, and die, in shame.

It was dark when he reached the O’Connor part of the world. He huddled under the bridge that the carriages crossed on the road to Dublin. Now his grief and rage were replaced by fear. He trembled with that fear, afraid the earl and his men were waiting for him. His bowels loosened. He dropped his trousers, hoping he would shit out all his fear. Then was newly afraid that the stench would betray him by drifting to the nostrils of ambushers. But as he paused in the silence, Cormac felt better. Colder. In something like control, with the clarity of emptiness.

His fear didn’t vanish. But the mixture of overlapping fears worked within him like fuel. Fear, and its brother, rage. He was sure they would try to get away with everything. The killing itself. The theft of Thunder. And if the horse appeared in the earl’s stable, he could merely say that he bought it from a passing Irishman. How was he to know the passing Irishman was a bandit and a horse thief?

Except that a witness was still alive: Cormac himself. They would try to find him and kill him too. Then nobody would be left to tell the tale. Or to settle the account. He thought: I need to kill them first. And there was something else: He must stay alive to make certain there was a proper end to this story. The rules of the tribe moved through him in the voices of his father and Mary Morrigan. But now it was Cormac’s story. He was a Celt. He must honor the code of his tribe. To do so, he must live. For as long as it would take. He told himself: I must use my fear to stay alive. If I die now, in these cold woods and dark fields, then this long day will be only another brief chapter in the story of the Earl of Warren. And I will never be allowed to pass into the Otherworld, to join again with my people.

Away off he heard dogs barking, but none of the voices belonged to Bran. Cormac was afraid to call to him, afraid of revealing his presence to anyone who might be watching. He fought down an image of the dog with his throat cut. There was no moon. And although a wind was blowing from the sea, there were no leaves to rustle on the nude trees. He listened. He heard no human voices. Before him was an emptiness. He waited, trying not to breathe. But as his eyes adjusted to the dark, he could see the house better. The doors were open. The half door. The full door. Crouching low, he scurried toward the house that had been their home.

His father’s legs were jutting across the threshold.

Now he didn’t care who might be watching. He rushed toward his father in the darkness and fell across his bloodied chest and wept as he had never wept before. The blood of Fergus was wet, but his body was like ice. His blood was on Cormac now, on his shirt and fingers, and he sucked the blood off his hands, his father’s blood, his own blood: and again heard him say Run! And again heard him say, We’re Irish.

And then, his mouth slippery with his father’s blood and his hands sticky, there in the moonless soundless dogless motherless fatherless night, Cormac knew what he must do.

He stepped past the body into the dark house. There was no light, no ember or spark from the hearth, and he could feel in every bone one more bitter truth: The soul was gone from the house. The Earl of Warren had killed it. In the darkness, nothing was where it was supposed to be, where it had been since the beginning of Cormac’s remembering. He moved now like a thief in a stranger’s house. Then, rolling on the floor under his foot, he felt a candle. He found matches scattered on the floor like twigs and lit the candle.

The house had been savaged. Chairs, crockery, pots: All were smashed into bits. Curtains and clothes had been sliced with knives. The beds were slashed, the floor littered with straw and goose-down stuffing. He smelled urine and saw a puddle against the western wall. The secret house of the O’Connors, that masked house of the Carsons, was mutilated and dead.

He didn’t care now if the house was being watched. Let them come, he thought. I’ll die fighting. He placed the candle in an iron bucket and then started dragging ruined furniture to the center of the room. He stuffed the mound with newspapers and the slashed pages of books. With the disemboweled Alexander Pope. With the assassinated Jonathan Swift. He found loose pages ripped from his green notebook and then the gutted book itself and added them to the pile. When the pile was two feet off the floor, he returned to the corpse of Fergus O’Connor.

Cormac reached under his father’s armpits and dragged him into the house. Grunting and heaving, breaking pieces of wood beneath his feet, afraid now of time and the arrival of strangers, he hauled the corpse to the top of the pile. His father’s icy muscled arms flopped to the sides. His wide, startled eyes faced the ceiling he had made with so much skill and love. Cormac folded his arms across his chest and closed his cold eyelids.

Then he blew out the candle and hurried into the night. There was still no moon. No sounds. No Bran. In the barn, where the anvil lay toppled on its side, Cormac piled mounds of wood against the walls and throughout the tool room. His father’s tools were scattered and some were gone, plunder for the true bandits who worked for the earl. But Cormac found what he was looking for: a spade. At the base of the hawthorn tree, he began to dig in the icy earth until his spade bumped against the lumpy leather bag and the case that held the sword. He slung both over his shoulder and ran to the house. Above him, clouds were moving more swiftly. He could see the dangerous shimmer of the emerging moon. On the doorstep, lying like a small animal, was his father’s fur hat. He lifted it. Then pulled it onto his head.

In the dark interior, he faced the pyre.

“Good-bye, my father,” he said out loud. “I shall not forget the man you were and what they did to you. And I will see you in the Otherworld.”

He scratched a match against stone and smelled sulphur. Then he lit the newspapers and the torn, crumpled pages of the books. Flames exploded from the dry wood. His father lay dark and still upon the orange mound, and Cormac backed out through the Western door. In the barn, he ignited the bundles of wood and paper, thinking: Nobody else will ever live or work in these two buildings. They will vanish from this earth, as my mother vanished, as my father does now. I will go away, but I will not vanish. He felt the last of his fear rising out of the fire, the sparks scattering into the sky. He ran toward the dark, distant hills.

From the slope of the first hill, he could see the buildings burning like torches. He was certain that the torches were gripped by those who were escorting his father to the Otherworld.

24.

He awoke in the stale, dry straw of an abandoned barn. From the barn’s murky interior, he saw a small farmhouse, its chimney toppled, one shutter banging in the breeze, the sagging carcass of a cow propped against a stone wall. In the dim light before dawn, there were no signs of human beings. He stripped the rush matting from the sword and clenched the wolf-bone grip, turning it over, running a finger over the smooth finish of the blade. He could feel it speaking to him: Go, it said. Go and do what must be done.

Then Cormac opened the leather satchel, loosening its long thongs. The interior smelled of earth. He removed sixteen gold pieces, his mother’s spiral earrings, and a new leather-bound copy of The Drapier’s Letters. Nothing more. He thought: This is my inheritance. My father is speaking to me. He is saying that all I might need in the fearful world is money, a memory of my mother, and the Dean. Oh, my father…

Cormac opened his shirt and used the bag’s leather thongs to tie the satchel across his stomach. Then he pulled his father’s fur hat tightly onto his head, gripped the sword, and took a deep breath.

For a few minutes, his stomach gnawed by hunger, he foraged in the barn. He found some stray oats for the vanished cows and horses, and gobbled them down. They were not enough. His stomach growled and contracted, but there was no other food. He thought of boiling straw but saw no water. He stared out the door at the farmhouse. Nothing stirred. No smoke drifted from the chimney. Holding the sword, he sprinted to the house. He used the sword to gently prod the door. It was open. He slipped inside.

Three bodies were lying in one another’s arms on the bricks in front of the hearth. A man, a woman, and a child. The flesh of their faces and hands was white as snow and falling away like paper exposed to wind and rain. The child looked a hundred years old. The man’s skeletal hand gripped a Bible. The woman’s eyes were shut tight against the certain darkness. The shutter banged: ka-tock, ka-tock-tock. Something scurried in the darkness, unseen, tiny, with nails like hooks. Cormac backed out, his skin pebbling, and turned in flight to the woods.

He walked in a wide arc around Belfast. By late afternoon, he was exhausted, his legs heavy, his stomach screaming, his throat parched. He saw patches of virgin snow in the blackened woods and chopped off pieces and ate them. He sucked bark torn from a tree. Then he saw a long, low building, once white but grayed now by weather and famine, with two farmers going in and out and tendrils of blue smoke rising from a chimney. From behind a low stone wall, he watched for a long time. Then the smoke disappeared, and the men came out of the main door and trudged together to a road that would take them home. Cormac could hear their voices for a while after they were out of sight, and then heard nothing except the wind in the trees. When the sky darkened, he sprinted to the door. It was locked. He kicked at it in fury, once, twice, paused, then again, harder, and the door burst open.

A dairy.

With butter churns and cheese vats and four cows in stalls, mooing and swishing their tails.

A vision of heaven. The air was heavy with the aroma of food and animals. Two scrawny cows stared at him from a stall, and he found a small kitchen area, with a counter and a cold teapot and a wooden box that held two loaves of bread. They were hard as rocks, food for animals now. But he sliced them with the sword and shoved the pieces into the fresh butter and chomped them, gobbled them, his hands trembling. He could not risk a fire to make tea, but he grabbed hunks of cheese and shoved them into his mouth. He grunted. He felt the food make a move, rising, demanding escape, but held it down. He made sounds that were neither Irish nor English. No meal had ever tasted better.

When he was gorged, he stood there for a long while, holding the edge of a table, belching, panting, feeling the great wads of food filling his emptiness. He went outside and relieved himself as a fine rain started to fall, cold and laced with sleet. Inside again, he ate one final wedge of cheese and then fell upon one of the rough tables and went to sleep in the mooing, tail-swishing darkness.

Hours later, he was wakened by the sound of rain hammering on the roof. A blanket of rough burlap hung on a peg beside the stalls. The cows didn’t seem to mind that Cormac took it for himself; he thought they looked pleased to have his company. He cut a hole in the center of the burlap and pulled it over his father’s fur hat so that it hung across his shoulders. It hid the lump of his leather satchel. It concealed the sword. He thought: I have donned my cow shit–smelling burlap armor.

Then he closed the door behind him and ran into the driving rain.

25.

Around midnight, out past Carrickfergus, Cormac reached the edge of the estate of the Earl of Warren. He was about six miles from Belfast. The cold rain was falling steadily as he moved through the trees, peering at the property. Two white-brick gateposts marked the entrance; a freshly painted golden arch above them was marked with the same W that was emblazoned on the black coach. But there was no fence to the sides of the gateposts and no guards. The estate was not finished, the gate new. Through the rain, in the distance, he could see a big house, painted white, two stories high. The windows on the ground floor were a dim orange from candles or gas lamps burning on the inside. Off to the left was a large stable with a fenced corral behind it and cleared fields moving to the horizon. Cormac angled through the woods and then trudged across a soaked field toward the stable. Watching, remembering. He had arrived at his destination; he must know how to leave.

Thunder picked up his scent through the rain and whinnied in greeting. Once, twice. Like a signal. The whinnying stopped as Cormac came closer to the barn. Thinking: I would know that voice anywhere (for it is a voice). Thunder is alive. Here. My father’s horse. My horse now.

The barn door was unlocked and he slipped inside, leaving the door ajar behind him. A way in, a way out. A lamp burned dimly to the right, and in the light he saw Thunder. There were a dozen stalls, filled with horses and piles of hay, but Thunder was alone in his own small jail. Some of its slats were hanging loose from his resistance. Cormac turned down the wick of the lamp and went to his horse. He opened the stall’s gate, and the horse nuzzled him in a wet, frantic way while he ran a hand over his coat and felt the welts from a whip. More than a dozen small ridges of flayed horseflesh, some of them open. Thunder didn’t care. He bounced. He shuddered in joy. He shook his great mane. Other horses made soft pleading sounds.

Then Cormac heard a voice behind him.

“I say, what’s this?”

The man was small and wiry, holding a whale-oil lantern. Cormac recognized his face from the road where his father was killed. He gripped the sword.

“I’ve come for my horse,“ Cormac said. “And for the Earl of Warren. You understand why. You were there, you bastard.”

The small man shook his head and smiled a toothless grin and gazed out through the open door. Thunder stomped at the earth, warning of danger.

“Ach, sure, you’re too late, lad,” the small man said in a soft, reasonable way. “Sure, the earl’s gone off. To America, they say. I suspect—”

He suddenly whirled with a pistol in his hand. Cormac swung at him with the sword. The way his father had taught him: short, quick.

The small man’s pistol hand came off with the pistol in it. Blood spurted, and he tried to scream in a shocked way. The lantern fell. Cormac picked up the pistol and smashed the butt into the small man’s nose. He fell to his knees, blood streaming now from his nose, staring wide-eyed at the pumping blood from his wrist, gripping his forearm to try to stop the flow, gazing at his lost hand, at the door, at Cormac. Stunned. Wordless. Cormac kicked him in the face, and he fell over on his side, with the blood still pumping. Thunder whinnied again, ready to leave, but Cormac wasn’t finished. He jammed the pistol into his belt, beneath the shit-smelling poncho, and then moved from stall to stall, releasing the other horses from the Earl of Warren’s wooden cells. Cormac thought: Maybe they’re each worth more than five pounds. Maybe each will find its way home.

Finally he picked up the lantern and went to the door. Horses raced past him into the rainy night, clumping and breathing hard. Thunder waited. Cormac hurled the lantern into a pile of straw. It burst into flames.

Then he mounted Thunder, without a saddle, and they raced around the corral with the frantic horses, who were plunging now through a gap in the corral fence into the Irish night. They rode to the big house. When Cormac glanced back, he saw the handless man crawling out of the burning stable.

The big house was built in the style of many others in Ireland: to create an image of power. About twenty marble steps rose from the earth to a gallery framed by Doric columns. Cormac raced toward the house, urging Thunder up the rain-slick stairs, his steel shoes clattering.

The front doors burst open, and four alarmed men came out. They were led by Patch, who was barefoot in a long gray night-shirt and carrying a shotgun. He was the only man with a weapon. And he wasn’t wearing his patch. One eye socket was a black hole; the other glittered. Patchless Patch.

He started to say something.

Cormac cut off his head.

Which bounced and rolled down the marble stairs. For a moment the headless body stood upright. Then it fell chest down. Without urging, Thunder pounced upon the body, stomping at it, while the other men scattered into the rain. Cormac took the pistol from his belt and fired a shot after them. Thinking: That will bring out the earl. The men ran into the rain-drowned darkness.

For a long, blurry moment, the world seemed red. Red house, not white. Red blood mixing with lashing red rain. Then the red was gone, and Cormac urged Thunder into the house, through the open doors, to find the earl.

The rooms on the first floor were empty of furniture or paintings. The fireplaces were cold. Piles of lumber were stacked against walls. The earl clearly had not yet furnished his grand mansion. An uncarpeted staircase rose to the second floor, with a chandelier hanging in the stairwell. None of the candles were lit, but the device glittered with crystal and cut glass. Up they went. Horse and rider.

Before them were a dozen doors, some of them open. In one, a table was covered with whiskey bottles and jugs and fancy glasses, obviously the lounge where Patch and his men had been drinking earlier in the night. Cormac dismounted and kicked open the other doors. Empty. He arrived at one near the end of the hall where an oil lamp was burning on a side table. He flipped the latch and entered a kind of suite. Dressers and an armoire and dozens of mirrors. A second door leading to a bedroom. Someone was under the covers of the canopied bed.

“Come out of there,” Cormac said, gripping the sword. There was no movement.

“Come out or I’ll chop you to pieces.”

The covers came down. A woman’s face appeared. Red-haired, pale, trembling, about fifteen. Irish.

“Who the hell are you?” he said.

“M’name’s Bridget.”

“Are you the earl’s whore?”

She turned her head, her eyes wet.

“Aye,” she said.

She turned to gaze at Cormac.

“I had no choice, sir. Didn’t me own father sell me to him during the great cold?”

She buried her face in the pillow, a picture of shame. Cormac didn’t trust the image he was given. And he knew the earl was gone, headed for other parts until any talk of murder had drifted away, or until Patch and his men had hunted down the only witness.

“And where is the great earl?”

She turned to him again.

“Away,” she said. “Left for America for a while, says he. Two days ago. A boat out of Galway, he said to me. That’s what he says, of course. That’s what he told me. He could be in Dublin, for all I know. He could be in London. But I think maybe ’tis America.”

There were plates beside her bed and an empty wineglass and a piece of bread. Cormac came closer and took the piece of bread.

“I should kill you,” he said. “Whorin’ for that English bastard.”

“Then you’d better kill me father too,” she said angrily. “He put me in this bed.”

She looked weepy again. He lifted a half-eaten chop from a plate and gnawed at the bone.

“Would you like to have me?” she whispered.

She rose like an offering to a sitting position, showing him one full, rosy breast above the line of her nightgown. Yes, he thought, I’d like to have you. Yes, I’d like to slide into those smooth sheets and enter your body. Nipples. Hair. Wetness. Sleep.

“I can’t,” Cormac said. “I must go. And you should too. Now. Get dressed, pack, and go home. Before they come back.”

“You mean Patch?”

“Patch is dead.”

“I don’t believe it. Not Patch.”

“His head is out there on the steps,” Cormac said. “I put it there.”

She moaned. Cormac started to leave but then felt pity for the girl. If the men came back with a platoon of redcoats, they’d probably kill her too.

“Get ready now, woman,” he said, “and I’ll take you into the forest. You’ve got ten minutes. Then I’m burning this place to the ground.”

He took the reins and led Thunder to the staircase and then down to the door. Awkwardly, delicately, the horse afraid of slipping on the stairs made by men. Cormac told the horse to wait. Then he took the stairs two at a time, reached over, and cut the four chains that held the chandelier to the ceiling. It fell with a ferocious crash, scattering glass and crystal over the oak steps. Thunder pawed the wooden floor, as if saying to Cormac: You’re taking too much time. Outside, the rain was still falling. Cormac saw Patch’s legs jutting awkwardly and naked above the marble steps, aimed at the front doors. He found dry matches in one dead fireplace and went through the main floor, making small piles of wood, chopping planks into kindling with the sword. Thinking: Our house is gone, the home of the O’Connors, and now it’s your turn. Thinking: Patch’s men must be nearing Belfast now, or at a guard post, alerting the militia. Thinking: Hurry.

Suddenly Bridget was coming down the stairs, leathery boots clicking on oak, dodging around the smashed chandelier. She was dressed in a long, fancy dark blue coat, a fur hat, leather boots and gloves, and carrying a velvet bag about three feet long. The wages of sin. She looked smaller than she had in bed. Her eyes were jittery with fear, made worse when she glimpsed the headless body of Patch. Cormac boosted her onto Thunder’s back and handed up her bag, which was light and must have contained clothes.

Then Cormac went back inside to the piles of wood. If the Earl of Warren did come back to his grand mansion, he would find only ashes.

26.

They rode and rode into the gray morning light, into rain, into hills; finally, as the rain faded off, into forest again. They were heading west. He thought: There is blood on my sword, from the small man in the stable, from the severed neck of Patch. I’m now a different man. I am sixteen and I have killed. What’s more, killing Patch was too easy, too final, too personal. And too savage.

Cormac barely knew Patch and had killed him as easily as Patch had killed his father, and with about as much feeling. Thinking: No, that’s not true, I did have feeling. Before I cut off his head, there was true rage. Rage is a feeling. But when it was over and his bald, one-eyed head was rolling down those marble steps like a fruit that had fallen off a wagon, I didn’t feel what I wanted to feel. I wanted to feel clean. I wanted to feel that I’d closed a small circle. Now, riding to the West, to where the dead go, to where the sun sets into the ocean sea, I don’t feel either emotion. I’ve closed no circle. I’m not clean.

And what of this young woman, the earl’s whore, who said her name was Bridget Riley? She was behind him on Thunder’s bare back, gripping Cormac’s waist with her small pale hands. Her bag was strapped across her shoulders, her weight thus disproportionate to her size. He could feel her hands on his stomach. He could feel through all the layers of wool and shit-smelling burlap her hard breasts upon his back. He felt her breath on his neck. While they rode on, pressed together, he listened to her whispered tale, her story entering him like the warm breath from her mouth.

She told of how her father was widowed when her sixth sister was born and how there wasn’t ever enough to eat and how the Siberian cold came and how the father (tearful, gruff, almost wordless) sold her to the earl for two sacks of oats and three bushels of potatoes. The price of one young Irish woman. She talked about a boy she had loved when she was thirteen (long ago, for she was sixteen now), Richard, his name was, Richard Murphy, and how she had let him have his way (her voice trailing into forest cold) and how he had gone to America and how he promised he would send for her and never did. She told Cormac that she had lost all faith in the Christian God and his commandments (for how could he love us if he sent away the people we loved and let so many others die?) and then had begun to go with other young men (not many of them in that forlorn region) and some older men too (with their wives at home and she in the woods or a wagon with the poteen-smelling farmers) and finally some Englishmen from the barracks (challenging even the old Irish gods with her blasphemy) and how after all of that (and all of them) she had never found one who was like the one who went away to America. Richard, his name was. Richard Murphy.

That was when Bridget Riley began to feel like a whore. Not from opening her thighs. From opening her heart and having nothing enter. And so she didn’t even mind when the earl bought her for oats and potatoes, because (she thought) maybe her sisters would survive the long starvation and maybe one of the horses would live and maybe her father too. And after all, she’d be warm and she’d be fed.

“I didn’t love him, and most of the time didn’t even like him,” she said. “But sometimes he made me laugh. Sometimes he made wicked remarks. Sometimes he would sing some music-hall song, and act it out. Sometimes he juggled with dinner rolls.”

He felt anger make a move, remembering the earl as he juggled outside the public house in Belfast, then tried to picture him juggling for Bridget Riley. He heard his father’s voice: They say he has charm.… He said nothing and the anger seeped away. They paused beside a frozen stream and he chopped a hole in the ice and they knelt down to drink. Together above the water, they smelled of perfume and cow shit and fresh sweat, soap and pine and dirt. Her face was flushed, her hands raw from the cold.

She opened the wide bag and lifted out a small bundle of men’s clothes and told him to get rid of what he was wearing since the English soldiers would be looking for someone dressed in burlap and smelling of cow shit. She giggled when she said these things and laughed out loud when he replied that he could never wear clothes that were worn by the Earl of Warren. Her voice turned angry and she told him that he had no choice, if he wanted to live.

“You’ve murdered one man, and possibly two,” she said. “Surely to God, the earl’s men want you dead. And just as sure, they’ve told the soldiers. They’ll all be after you and happy to hang your Irish bones from a tree limb. If they don’t burn you instead, nice and slow. Don’t make it easy for them.”

She paused then and added in a solemn voice: “Besides, they didn’t belong to the earl. He was a bigger man than you.”

Cormac surrendered to her logic (and his growing fear), stripped off his own clothes, and donned the new ones, including a long black overcoat. She smiled up at him and told him he was now a fine figure of a man. And while he shoved aside some rocks and hid his old clothes, she dug deeper into the bag and brought out two small loaves of bread and some salted pork and a few figs, and said that she wished they could have a spot of tea, but that was, of course, impossible.

They ate in silence, while Thunder took long drafts of water from the hole gouged in the icy stream. Bridget Riley seemed lost in her own thoughts, her eyes unfocused, chewing steadily. For a moment, he felt that he must protect her, that he must first help her get back to her home place before he went off on his own journey. Then he saw himself taking her with him. If the earl had gone to America, they could go to America. There he would keep his vows to the Irish tribe. And free Bridget Riley from the man who had bought her for two sacks of oats and three bushels of potatoes.

It was almost dark in the empty world, and they watched the sky change and black clouds race and the moon begin its climb. She touched his cheek. He touched her hair. Then she was standing above him, her body blocking the moon, looking around their little thicket (as if trying to remember each naked tree). She shook her head. “We’d best go,” she said. “Before it’s too late.”

He could not tell what she was thinking as they resumed the ride through the empty land, heading for the West. Is she afraid of feeling anything for me? Are some other feelings moving in her? She seems much older now than when I saw her in the silky bed in Carrickfergus. Older than I am. Old as caves. She shows a hard face to me, and then feeds me and warms me and clothes me. The earl’s possession. The earl’s woman. And she seemed able to read his thoughts.

“Sure, he’s already gone,” Bridget said.

As if she knew that he was seething with the unseen presence of the earl.

“Then I’ll find another ship,” he said.

Her voice was weary.

“For God’s sake, get off it,” she said. “Stay where you belong. Find yourself a woman and a house and—Jaysus, why do you care for him anyways?”

And so, moving under the arc of the moon, he told Bridget Riley the bare bones of his story, and how the earl and Patch had taken the horse, this horse, and killed his father, and how he must avenge that act, no matter what it took. She listened and then breathed out heavily, making a small puff of steam.

“You’re terribly bloody young,” she said. “Aren’t you?”

He didn’t reply. But she talked then in a casual way, as if discussing someone she had read about in the News-Letter. The earl had long spoken of going to New York, but surely not to stay forever. Just to open a branch of his business. “Which is, of course, the slave business,” she said. “Aye,” Cormac said. “I know.” The earl would rave sometimes about the fortunes to be made in America, she said, and how foolish it was to pay strangers a commission to handle his New York business when he could make money at both ends of the trade. “He needs New York,” she said. “It’s a growing market, after all.” He could feel her nodding behind him, bumping against his shoulder. “Now I understand better why he left so quickly,” she said, and then told him even more.

“I was home—if you can call it home—the night he killed your father,” she said. “I just didn’t know it at the time.”

She told him how the earl came back to his unfinished mansion that night (Thunder whipped and shoved by eight men into his stall), his eyes jittery, ignoring her for the brandy snifter, running his hands through his hair. He slept only three hours and then rose in a colder mood. He had his manservant pack some bags and load the black coach. He told Patch to guard the house and say nothing to anyone who came calling. Then he and the manservant (a Londoner named Marley) took the coach to Belfast.

“He never said good-bye, the cold bastard,” she said. “He told me I’d be taken care of, to stay where I was, and if he was delayed in New York, he’d send for me. Bloody liar that he is.” She paused. “The last thing I heard him say was to Patch: ‘Get rid of that bloody horse.’ ”

He might have been telling her a tale, she said, when he mentioned New York. He could have gone to London or France. But he was probably on his way to America.

“If you want him badly,” she said, “you’ll have to cross an ocean.”

They arrived at last at a crossroads. Off to the left, back from the road a hundred yards, there was a collapsed church. The stone walls remained standing, but the roof was gone, another victim of the long winter.

“I know the way from here,” Bridget Riley said abruptly, backing away from Cormac, prepared to slide to the ground. She was ready to walk miles to what might only be a place of death. Dead father. Dead hearth. He thought: I’ve just begun to know her.

“Please stay with me,” he said.

“I can’t,” she said. “You have something in your head, Cormac, that’s more important to you than I am. You’ve got America. You’ve got murder.”

“I can manage both,” he said.

“Sure, you’d just lie with me and leave me,” she said, and laughed. “Another Irish bastard.” She smiled. “Better I leave you when it’s me doin’ the leavin’.”

She eased herself down off the horse and gazed at the road that hooked back north. A few streaks of reddish dawn appeared to the east.

“Let’s rest a bit before you go,” Cormac said. “I can build a fire.”

Her face went blank, then tight.

“I’d best be going,” she said.

She ran her fingers along Thunder’s mane, slung her bag over a shoulder, looked at Cormac, and smiled. Then she turned. He slipped off the horse and grabbed her hand. She pulled it away from him and walked off. He watched her get smaller as she climbed a rise. She waved a hand in farewell but did not turn her head. Then she was gone.

27.

In the grove, fed and warmed by a fire, Cormac told his story to the men. There was much fury about the killing of Fergus, but no tears. Their huge hands clenched spears and muskets, eyes first blazing and then going dead, cursing the earl, cursing the English. They told Cormac that he’d done the right thing, laying his father on a blazing pyre, properly helping his passage to the Otherworld, where they’d be certain to meet again. And he should not worry: They would track down the men who worked for Patch (for they had their own men in Belfast and every other town) and kill them. They asked Cormac to describe those men again and again, and at his urging brought forth paper and charcoal for him to draw their faces from memory. They knew at least two of the faces; the men with those faces would surely not survive.

He told them too about the gold coins his father had buried for him, and the earrings and the copy of the Dean’s book. He told them about the sword and showed it to them, and they examined it with almost religious reverence. They listened as Cormac spoke and murmured in Irish and spit out bitter words, and then they stood and sipped from goblets and shook themselves loose in the night air, and then once more admired Cormac’s sword, hefting it and saying that Fergus of the Connor was a great maker of swords, like his father and his father before him and the many Connor fathers all the way back to the years before the conquest. As Cormac finished eating and talking around the fire, one man began to croon a sad tune and the others joined him, and when they were done it had become a song of resistance and defiance and ultimate triumph.

While they talked and sang, the women worked on Thunder’s wounds, rubbing them with an oily unguent that smelled of spring mint. They promised Cormac (when he strolled away from the fire, looking for Mary Morrigan and not seeing her, and afraid to ask after her) that if Bran was alive (they were sure he was) and made his way here to the grove (he knew the way), they would care for him for the rest of his life and then make certain that he eventually joined Fergus O’Connor in the Other-world. They giggled at Cormac’s new clothes, which were baggy and wrinkled but at least (one woman said) not hairy with the skins of wolves. Then the women retreated. The men sat with Cormac in silence, and then one of them, burly and red-haired and named Fintan of the Hills, said: “You must go to find the earl.”

“Aye.”

“You must hunt him to the ends of the earth.”

“Aye.”

“You must erase all of the men of his line.”

Another said, “Until no man lives that carries his seed.”

“Aye.”

“And, of course,” said Fintan of the Hills, “you will have to go to America.”

The question was how and when. Not all were sure about the location of America, except that it was over the sea to the west. A grizzled older man just back from the western coast said that a ship was leaving from Galway in two days’ time, bound for America and specifically for New York. Not Canada. Not Jamaica (he said, as if reciting a litany). Not Charleston or Philadelphia. Saying the names of places in a language that was as foreign as the places. This ship’s bound for New York, he said. The voyage took eight weeks (he’d heard this from one of his men in Galway City, but the others couldn’t believe a voyage could last for eight weeks, unless it was a voyage to the moon). The grizzled man said that if Cormac left on Thunder before the morning light, he might arrive in Galway in time to board the ship. All agreed he must try. So did Cormac.

They explained the roads and the hazards. None, not even the grizzled man, knew the price of the passage. They did know Galway. They described a city with white houses and Spanish women (for Galway traded with Catholic Spain even if Belfast did not) and a wide road through the town leading directly to the quays. He was warned: There was some risk. English soldiers could be waiting to arrest him at the ship if word had spread to the ports about the killing of Patch. The earl’s own men could be waiting too. Cormac must pause and look hard at what stood before his eyes, and read the signs of danger. But there might be greater risk in staying, both for Cormac and for the tribe. All these possibilities were minor. There was one dominant reason for departure: the debt of honor that could only be satisfied in New York. Cormac Samuel O’Connor must satisfy his father’s spirit by killing the man who had killed him.

And so it was agreed that Cormac should sleep a few hours and then hurry to Galway. In the town, he could release Thunder and someone (one of their men) would make certain that the horse found his way back. The horse, they said (as his father always said), knows the way.

Excited, sad, angry, feeling very young and very old, anxious to leave and desperate to stay, Cormac went off to sleep in Mary Morrigan’s cave. He hoped she would be there. He heard a lone horse move off through the forest, vanishing into the west. In the cave, as his eyes adjusted, he saw Mary Morrigan huddled under her mound of furs, her head turned away from the smoldering fire. He undressed in silence, feeling awkward, strange, altered: and finally curled beside her. Her body was cold as stone. Her eyes were closed. He thought: She’s dead. He touched her face and then kissed her withered lips. This time there was no change. Tears leaked from her shut eyes.

“Don’t,” she whispered. “You smell of a whore.”

The scent of Bridget Riley was on his skin, put there by their long ride together, intensified by the heat of the cave. She must have also smelled the remnants of his desire. He rose, shivering in the cold, and retreated to a mound of pelts and burrowed into them and tried to sleep. Behind him was the blank wall of the back of the cave, furry with damp. He could see the mound near the fire that he knew was Mary Morrigan. Sleep was broken by jagged images of the past three days: his father taking the steel ball in the chest; fire rising from a pyre; the head of Patch bouncing on steps; Bridget Riley’s red lips and white teeth and one bared breast; his father again (laughing); Mary Morrigan’s cold neck; his father (urging him to run); the horses galloping for freedom; his father staring at black clouds; icy rain; barns; the smell of shit; Da.

Then nothing.

He wakened to a fluttering noise and a thin, high-pitched wail and reached for the sword. In the dim light above the guttering fire, he saw a shiny crow beating its wings. Darting forward. Darting back. Beating glossy black wings against the smoke-tinged air. While the high-pitched wail filled the cave, louder and louder. It was not the wind, because nothing stirred except the crow. He didn’t move. It was surely the banshee.

Then, from the bundle, the other Mary Morrigan rose in her nakedness, full-breasted, round-bellied, hair falling in the dim rosy light. She started walking toward Cormac, but her eyes didn’t see him. She was smiling. Following the crow. His heart froze. He could say no words. She walked past him, her hips swiveling, going to the blank back wall of the cave.

The crow vanished first.

Into and through the rock.

And then Mary Morrigan turned, gave him a small mute wave, walked straight at the wall, and vanished.

Cormac lay very still in the emptiness. The high-pitched wail was gone too, leaving a loud silence. Her clothes made a formless pile beside the fire. He knew where she had gone, and now it was time for him to begin his own journey. He dressed quickly.

28.

The world was windless and thick with fog. Thunder bent into the task of taking Cormac to Galway, head lowered, great muscles straining on the rising slopes, then relaxing as they descended into depressions in the land. The horse seemed to know that an irreversible choice had been made. For Cormac. For him. A decision based on blood. And though Cormac whispered to him in Irish and English, he seemed to know that he had no say in the matter. They kept moving west and south to Galway City.

Sometimes they heard men talking in the fog, the sound amplified by the stillness. The words were never distinct. Each time, Thunder paused, alert and silent, until the loud blurred voices faded. The fog thickened. Cormac felt them climbing, then descending, but saw nothing through the fog. Away off: the sound of rushing water. A stream coursing over rocks. But Thunder stopped and wouldn’t move. Cormac nudged him, ordered him to go ahead now, we have little time, horse. He did so carefully, his ears alert, not so much showing fear as an immense reluctance. Finally they pushed through tattered fog and saw the stream and Cormac knew why Thunder wanted to avoid this crossing.

The stream was thick with corpses. Almost two dozen of them. Jammed against boulders to form a human weir. The glistening current had ripped flesh from exposed hands and arms and faces and washed bones to an ivory white. A dozen fleshless skulls grinned up at them, the scoured heads jutting from shredded clothes. The arms of one corpse were wrapped around the remains of a child whose body still carried strips of blue flesh. Like the family in the farmhouse. Cormac thought: When was that? Two weeks ago? A month? Five years?

A dozen yards downstream, the smashed timbers of a raft were jammed against rocks. He thought: They must have been fleeing to the sea, to a town, to houses, to fish, to a place, another place, someplace better than the place they’d left. He thought: They were full of prayers and fear. And then came the heart-stopping moment, the careening raft turning the bend and ramming against those boulders. Destroying heads and bodies and drowning the rest. He thought: Here they are before us: nameless and lifeless, from no place anymore, arrived at a final place whose name they never learned. The weather is surely warmer now than on the day they died. Smell them. Smell the sweet, corrupt stench that can’t be cleaned by the rushing stream. Not now. Not for a hundred years.

Thunder abruptly became his own navigator, jerking to his left, moving upstream a few hundred yards from the bodies and their rotting odor. He crossed at a broad, shallow place where boulders had been ground by the years into pebbles. On the far side, Cormac dismounted and they drank from the icy water. Cormac paused at first, afraid, wondering if there were other corpses upstream, poisoning the rushing waters. But Thunder took deep drafts, and he trusted the horse’s judgment and his knowledge and followed his example. Slaked, exhausted, he opened a coarse canvas bag and fed Thunder some oats.

Then he untied the thongs of the leathery sack his father had hidden for him. He fingered his mother’s spiral earrings, remembering her voice and her smile. He hefted The Drapier’s Letters, thinking it would be fitting, a kind of prayer, to read some lines of Swift as a way of remembering his father. He pushed open the clasp. And stopped. Folded in the pages were sixteen one-pound notes, ornate with the printing of the Bank of England, and a folded letter. The letter was addressed to Cormac and was written in his father’s careful hand. My Son,

If you should read this Letter, then I shall be gone to the Otherworld. I have left here for you these Objects that I hope will be of assistance in your own Journey. I can give you Money and Gold but cannot give you what you will need most. That is, a belief in Justice and Work. I think you have a Love for both and will not let that Love die. I think you know that the Tyranny of those who stole Ireland will eventually be defeated no matter how many of the Irish they kill. As long as one Irishman remains alive, singing in Irish, they have lost. In your life, I hope you will never oppress the Weak, that you will oppose Human Bondage in all its guises, that you will bend your Knee to no man. Be kind. Find a good Woman and love her. And thank you, my Son. You have made my life a great Happiness. Your Father

Struggling for control, Cormac pressed his father’s words to his trembling heart. Read them again. Saw his face, his sinewy arms; heard his voice; pictured him sitting alone at night to write these words (as if knowing he might never get to speak them); saw him hammering iron; saw him gently taking Rebecca’s elbow as they left a church that was not their own. Cormac wanted to speak one final time to him.

Then he and Thunder were on the move again, the letter and the banknotes folded into Cormac’s shirt, the heavy coins in his pocket, the Dean and the earrings back in their satchel, the forest dark, a road below them to the left (the wheels of a coach making a far-off screeching sound), and he kept whispering to Thunder. “On to Galway, great heart. On to the town of white houses and Spanish women. On to the sea, Thunder. To the ships.” On horseback, he drowsed into a jagged sleep. Hours passed. Mary Morrigan took his hand and led him to the blank wall. His mother stood on the road to Belfast, dressed in a coat of many colors. His father laughed and shaped red iron.

He snapped awake to the barking of a dog. Once, twice. Far off. Perhaps miles away in the smothering fog. The barking stopped as quickly as it started. They were on a true road now, not a forest trail, in a thick yellow fog, all signs of the wider world erased. He could see the ground, with its gashed ruts and a few white-painted stones on the sides, and it was going to the west.

A hint of a breeze. The road rose. The fog lightened. Farmhouses emerged silently in the distance, and he could hear the lowing of unseen cows. Then again, suddenly, from somewhere behind them, much closer this time, the barking. Thunder stopped, turned his head. Cormac followed his glance.

And then, racing from the fog, came Bran.

He barked and yipped and ran in a mad circle around them until Cormac leaped down beside him and hugged him and growled to him, saying his name again and again, Bran, Bran, Bran, and rolled with him on the lumpy earth of the frozen road. Finally the dog was exhausted and flopped on his back while Cormac scraped the caked mud off his filthy belly with his finger-nails. Bran was thin. He was scratched from thorns and bramble. But he was delirious with joy. He ate greedily from the oats in Cormac’s palm while Thunder nuzzled them, breathing warm air upon them, until Cormac gave the horse some oats too.

Then, in the distance, coming fast but still unseen, they heard galloping hooves and squealing wheels. Cormac stood, leaped onto Thunder’s back, and unsheathed the sword. Thinking: It’s too late to turn and run. He angled Thunder so that his sword hand couldn’t be seen. He hoped, for a moment, that the hoof-beats and wheels belonged to the Earl of Warren. In his black coach. With his diamond tooth and emblazoned W. Thinking: Then I’ll have no need to reach Galway and sail to America. I’ll kill him here. On this Irish road. In this Irish fog.

But it was not the Earl of Warren. Visible, as if plowing through the fog, was a royal mail coach pulled by two bony horses. A teamster sat high on the seat. A bearded fat man was beside him, cradling a musket. They seemed startled to see Cormac, Thunder, and Bran (who was barking fiercely), but they were not afraid (for there were two of them and one had that musket). They slowed and stopped. The man with the musket raised it in an agitated way and then lowered it again. Cormac thought: He must recognize that if I were a highwayman, I would have to be a very strange one indeed. Even the great Dick Turpin, hero of schoolyard songs, did not bring a dog with him to rob mail coaches. Still, the two men peered anxiously about them, as if looking for possible accomplices.

“Is this the road to Galway City, sir?” Cormac said, trying his best to sound as innocent and needy as a lost boy.

“ ’Tis.”

“How far would it be now?”

“Dunno, in this fog. Maybe six hours?”

“Are the ships sailing? For America, I mean.”

“There’s one at dawn. If you hurry, you might make it, lad.” The driver abruptly whipped his team and they rolled on, taking no chances on Cormac’s apparent innocence. Cormac sheathed the sword and nudged Thunder toward Galway, with Bran moving beside them on the gullied road, the horse careful not to move quicker than the dog could run. They rode for miles, the fog relentless, but the world growing warmer. They came to a bridge over a small running stream and Bran darted down the bank and plunged in, twisting and shaking as he cleaned the dirt from his coat. They all took long drinks and then returned to the road, going up a steep incline. At the top of a ridge, they could smell the sea.

29.

They couldn’t actually see the ocean, but its immense, full presence was somewhere before them. Cormac worried about the hour (for it remained dark), and the day, and whether the ship had already hauled its anchor and unfurled its sails. Hurry, Thunder. Hurry. The sky slowly brightened beyond the fog. Cormac took dried beef from the pouch and ripped a piece off with his teeth and tossed some bits to Bran, who leaped and took them before they hit the ground. Through the fog, he heard a breeze combing unseen trees, and they were climbing again on the empty road, and the breeze was louder, smelling now of salt and the dark Atlantic. The road twisted and climbed and then peaked, and suddenly the fog was gone and below them they could see the great wide bay and the city of Galway.

They paused and gazed down upon it, at red tile rooftops and a few steeples and the battlements of a castle and all the houses white as salt. Limestone houses. Mortar houses. Smoke rose from chimneys, and here the morning breeze was a wind, the smoke streaming horizontally, the fog blown south. Away off, Cormac could see the masts of ships.

“We’d best hurry,” he said, and Thunder set off, moving downhill on dirt roads and then into streets covered with mashed straw mixed with mud and then onto cobblestones. Bran was anxious now: in a strange place with strange odors and (Cormac was sure) detecting the odor of farewell. They found a main street whose name kept changing—from Williamsgate to Williams Street to High Middle Street—and he saw buildings bearing coats of arms, and morning shops beginning to open, and gargoyles grinning from the sides of one gloomy church. Three wagons moved slowly toward them, the first drover yawning. The wagons were empty, their dawn business already done.

“The ship for America?” Cormac shouted. “Has it sailed?”

“Not yet. It’s the Fury you want. But if you’re needin’ her, you’d best hurry.”

He urged Thunder on with his knees, but the street traffic was thicker now: horses with riders, carts and wagons and a few coaches, and people hurrying from narrow lanes toward the shops.

More traffic blocked their way, carts, horses, wagons, and Thunder picked up Cormac’s anxiety (the Fury, we need the Fury, get to the Fury) and tried to go around and was shouted at (fecking horse, big bloody horse, get back, fecker), and then a burly redhaired teamster tried to grab his reins and Thunder shook him off and another wagon came from a side lane and up that lane Cormac saw a flash of scarlet. Jesus. Brit soldiers. A toothless old man placed himself in front of Thunder.

“Ye feckin’ eejit, ye can’t go this way!”

“I’m going anyway,” Cormac shouted.

One wagon moved and there was a narrow space and Thunder plunged toward it and passed through and then began to gallop. Free of the jam, free to run. And he ran. It was two long blocks to the quays, and he ran the run of his life, hooves clattering on stone, Bran barking, women jumping to the side, and Thunder dodging carts and carriages and panicky horses, running for the water, for the ship, for America: and then they were out on the pier.

At the far end a three-masted ship was easing away from the pier. An English flag. Sails unfurling. Ropes cast off. The Fury.

“Run,” Cormac screamed. “Run, Thunder, run, run, run.”

And Thunder kept running, his hooves hammering the timbers of the pier, running full out, head low, running for the Fury.

Men looked up at them with alarmed faces.

And Cormac’s heart began to wither.

The Fury was now about fifteen feet away from the pier head. Thunder didn’t care.

At the end of the pier, at the end of his frantic gallop, at the end of Ireland, Thunder leaped.

Rose.

Soared.

They were suspended high above water.

Flying.

There was a human roar.

And then Thunder came down hard and splay-legged on the planked deck, skidding in a sliding, scattering rush, then pivoting somehow to avoid going off on the far side. Cormac spilled out of the saddle to the deck. The passengers shouted like an audience at a circus. Cormac got to his feet, grabbing the sword case from the saddle. Thunder snorted and shuddered, at once defiant and afraid, his ankles intact, his eyes blazing, backing up, prepared to fight.

“What in the name of Sweet Jesus is this?”

Cormac turned to the face of an enraged man, his skin and red beard merging into a kind of hairy fire. He had pushed through the astonished passengers.

Cormac said, “You’re going to New York and—”

“We board at the bloody quay! Not after we’ve hauled anchor and not on bloody horseback! Who in the hell are you, anyway?”

“Martin O’Donovan’s my name,” Cormac said, making up the name on the spot, not knowing if his own name was on some list for immediate arrest.

“Well, I’m Tom Clark and I’m the first mate, and I never bloody well heard of you.”

He glanced at Thunder, then back at Cormac.

“My father’s dying in New York,” Cormac said, compounding his lies. “I need to get there, please, Mr. Clark. I’ve got the fare.”

“Not with this bloody horse on board you’re not—as fine a bloody horse as he is. We’ve got enough trouble carryin’ our fourteen niggers without adding a horse.”

He ran rough, covetous fingers along the side of Thunder’s head, but the horse jerked away as if touched with hot pokers. Clark came closer. Thunder backed up, pawed the deck, snorted at the first mate, then dashed for the railing and leaped into the sea.

Another roar, shouts from crew members, and Clark was astonished.

“Jesus bloody Christ!” he said, peering down at Thunder, who was moving in the sea. “Are yiz part of some circus?”

“No, sir,” Cormac said. “I just have to get to America and I’m told the fare is three pounds.”

“I should let you keep your money and drop you in the bloody bay,” Clark said.

Then his attention shifted as the ship itself seemed to pause, water sloshing at its hull, reluctant to depart. Tom Clark barked orders to men in the rigging and marched aft. Cormac thought: I’ve made it. I’m on the Fury. I’m about to sail the ocean sea.

Down at the aft end of the ship, passengers were shouting across the harbor water at the shore. Cormac pushed in among them as the ship suddenly began moving with purpose. People were waving from the receding shore. Men, women, and children in long, dark clothes formed small, shrinking, wedgelike silhouettes against the gray morning sky. Beside Cormac, men were weeping and calling names. Good-bye, Ma. Good-bye, Eileen. So long, son. Then he saw Thunder’s head bobbing in the water, slick and black as a seal, swimming relentlessly for the shore. And off to the right of those who were waving their farewells, he saw Bran. He was on a spit of sand, among scattered rocks, barking and pacing and darting into the water. Thunder was aimed at him like a black spear, until he seemed to stop, his legs finding land below the water, and he hauled himself up in a bent, exhausted way. Bran danced around the horse, and then, as the ship moved out of the bay, they turned together to face the strange, cold, receding sea creature with its billowing sails, and to face Cormac. They were still as statues and watched him go until he could see them no longer.

Good-bye, Thunder. Good-bye, Bran. And good-bye, Ireland.

30.

Cormac searched for order in the shouting and tumult of the open deck. Clark directed him in an annoyed way to a man called Blifil. He was the purser. A pale, dusty man with dandruff on the shoulders of his crumpled serge jacket. He explained in a mournful, dubious voice that for a late arrival, there were, hum, only two choices: a cabin berth, which was of course too expensive for the likes of an Irish lad in his teens, and, hum, a plank belowdecks with the indentured Irish. He was shocked when Cormac (or Martin O’Donovan) presented him with three one-pound notes for the cabin berth. “I’ve saved for three years, sir,” Cormac said shyly. “I might as well splurge.” Blifil shrugged, pocketed the money, made a check mark and a scribble in a book, and led Martin O’Donovan to his cabin. It was on the main deck, to the right of a passageway leading to the captain’s quarters, and Blifil said he must share it, hum, with a Mister, hum, Partridge, yes, Partridge, about whom he told Cormac nothing. Blifil opened the door with a key, told him to, hum, guard it with his, hum, life, since there were thieves everywhere, see, and then hurried away in a bent shuffle.

When Cormac entered the gloom of the cabin, a heavy middle-aged man was sleeping deeply on his cot (to the left), fully dressed, one booted leg trailing on the floor. This must be Mr. Partridge. A second cot was to the right. Cormac stared at the sleeping man. His round belly rose and fell slowly, as if tied to the slow roll and fall of the Fury. His breath was phlegmy. His hair was thinning. His double chin needed a scrape with a razor. The leg on the floor seemed to be guarding a worn leather bag that was jammed under the cot.

The sight of Partridge (exhausted, collapsed, a huge breathing softness) made Cormac drowsy. He fell upon the empty cot, turned his back to the bulkhead, hugged his few possessions, and, while the ship rocked as gently as an immense cradle, fell into a deep sleep.

He awoke in the dark. Mr. Partridge was gone. In the dim light from a porthole Cormac found an oil lantern on a small table, but he had nothing to light it with. Beside the lantern there was a bowl of water. He sniffed, to be sure it wasn’t urine, then splashed his face. He hid the sword case and his small bag under the cot and went out, locking the door behind him, shoving the key deep into a trouser pocket. He still felt the presence of Ireland, although he could no longer see its shores. From all sides of the open deck there was a hum of conversation, lamps moving and bobbing, men laughing. In the center of the deck stood a kind of caged barnyard holding chickens and pigs, and past it dozens of sailors were smoking from clay pipes, while a few passengers lolled against bulkheads. None were distinguishable; they were simply figures in the darkness. The sea made a swishing sound as the Fury cut its path west.

Suddenly they entered a bank of fog. And through the fog Cormac could see the sheer cliffs of a small mountain rising at least three hundred feet out of the sea. It was covered with a golden mesh.

A voice beside him said, “Jesus Christ, what’s that?”

It was his cabinmate, Mr. Partridge, his jaw slack as he stared in awe. Plummy English accent. Intense stance as he gazed at the sea. First Mate Clark appeared at his side, and all three stared at a gold-meshed mountain rising from the sea.

“It’s on no map,” Clark said in a hushed voice. “They live inside it.” His voice softened. “You know, the Other People. Sometimes it’s here, and sometimes it’s not….”

The Englishman looked at him, then laughed out loud.

“What other people?”

Cormac stepped away from them because he knew what Clark meant. He peered at the gold mesh, the small black sea mountain. High on the summit there was a woman. Completely alone. Waving farewell. When the ship came closer on a hard angle in order to pass to the vast ocean, he could see the woman more clearly.

Mary Morrigan.