The Riders

Fifty-eight

RAIN, GREAT UNRAVELLING SHEETMETAL SWATHES of rain fell as the old Transit slushed through the tunnels of hawthorn, through miry bends, past rows of poplars, of larch and oak. Curtains of mud rose at every turn and the wipers juddered across the glass. Through grey little towns of cold-pressed council houses they went, and onto pebblecast bungalows and mongrel Spanish haciendas with asphalt turnarounds in the strange pure green of land. They passed roadside camps of travellers whose miserable donkeys stood tethered to other people’s fences in the rain, and everywhere there were ruins choked with blackberry and ivy, fallen walls, tilted crosses and mounds like buried cysts in the earth. Rain.

No one spoke. The three of them sucked carefully on the mints they’d been sharing since Dublin and rubbed at the misting screen with their mittened knuckles.

Peter Keneally steered carefully. It was like transporting bone china. He winced at every rut in the roads of the Republic and cast sideways glances at the two of them there up beside him. They were hollow-cheeked, you could say. Subdued. The little one’s scars were like silky patches of sunlight. She had a queer notch in the front of her hair, right there at his elbow. The face of a saint, by God. Now and then the bush of her hair rested on his arm and he felt like singing. Scully had cut himself shaving, which was no surprise the way his hands shook. His eyes were bloodshot, raw as meatballs, and his clothes were clearly not his own. He looked like he’d seen the Devil, but he had a wan sort of smile on his face when they came into familiar country.

In the flat-bottomed valley before the long rise to the Leap, even before the road widened for the scarecrow of a tree that stood as a hindrance to traffic, Scully was pulling off his seatbelt and leaning over to touch his arm. Peter geared down.

Billie watched him get down into the hard icy rain where the van stopped, right there beside the funny tree with the bits of stuff in it. His hair flattened, his shoulders ran with water, but he didn’t seem to hurry. The wipers slushed across in front of her and she watched him reach out for something in the boughs.

‘Aw, now,’ said the man beside her.

She saw the rag in her father’s hands, watched it fall limp to the mud at his feet. She sucked her mint.

Out in the rain Scully held onto the tree wondering how it could happen, how it was that you stop asking yourself, asking friends, asking God the question.

Fifty-nine

IT WAS THE FIRST NIGHT of the year. Scully woke suddenly, kept his eyes closed and listened to the startling silence of the house. The quiet was so complete that he heard his own heartbeat, his breath loud as a factory. He opened his eyes involuntarily and saw, upon the boards of the floor, a curious light. It ran up the wall as well, like muted moonlight. Then he saw the empty impressed pillow beside him and swung out of bed completely, his naked skin shrinking against the cold.

Scully rushed to Billie’s room and slapped on the light. The little bed was open and unmade. Her boots and papers lay spread on the floor, her toys lined up neatly. Down the stairs he felt his knees popping against the strain and he stumbled into the kitchen and the living room to find them empty and their fireplaces dead. He stormed upstairs again to check his bed once more and that’s when he passed the uncurtained gable window and saw the world transformed beyond it. He rubbed it clear. A small dark figure trailed down through the bright miracle of the snow, and beyond the wood, beyond his own breath misting up the glass, he saw the lights coming from across the valley and the mountains that stood spectral and white in the cold distance.

• • •

BAREFOOT HE WENT with nothing but a bathrobe about him. The snow was soft and clean and cold enough to stop the pain in his feet after a while. He broke through to stones and gnarled sticks that snagged up in the ash wood, but he felt nothing. The sky was a mere soup bowl above him, his breath a pillar of smoke that led him on in Billie’s footprints.

He found her by the old pumphouse in the castle grounds. Its ruined walls were rebuilt with snow, and snow joined it to hedges that looked solid as stone, a new settlement overnight. She was fully dressed and still, her black Wellingtons gleaming in the light of the riders’ torches as they stood bleakly before the keep. She turned and saw him, smiled uncertainly.

Billie looked at his bare feet, his shivering body as he pushed forward down the slope to the men and their tired horses. Their little fires crackled on the end of their sticks, and steam jetted from the horses’ nostrils and you could see their streaming sides and tarry maps of blood. Some of the men were only boys, and there were women too, here and there, their round dirty faces shining in the firelight, upturned eyes big as money. Scully went down among them, putting his hands up against the horses and talking, saying things she couldn’t hear. Questions, it sounded like.

Billie saw axes and spears and bandaged limbs but she was not afraid. The riders’ hair was white with snow, and it stood like cake frosting on their shoulders and down the manes of their horses. Their shields and leggings were spattered with mud and snow and the shiver of bridles and bits rattled across her like the chittering of her teeth.

He looked like one of them, she saw it now — it was like swallowing a stone to realise it. With his wild hair and arms, his big eyes streaming in the firelight turned up like theirs to the empty windows of the castle, he was almost one of them. Waiting, battered, disappointed. Except for his pink scrubbed living skin. That and the terry-cloth robe.

Scully smelled them, the riders and their horses. He recognized the blood and shit and sweat and fear of them, and he looked with them into the dead heart of the castle keep whose wings were bound east and west with snow-ghosted ash trees and ivy, whose rooks did not stir, whose light did not show and whose answer did not come. He knew them now and he saw that they would be here every night seen and unseen, patient, dogged faithful in all weathers and all worlds, waiting for something promised, something that was plainly their due, but he knew that as surely as he felt Billie tugging on him, curling her fingers in his and pulling him easily away, that he would not be among them and must never be, in life or death.

It was only when they were high on the hill, two figures black against the snow, in the shadow of their house, that Scully’s feet began to hurt.