A Game of Sorrows (25 page)

Upwards, away from the sea we went. The ground became difficult underfoot, bog and heather, and in time we entered woods once more, ancient woods of oak, hazel and willow. As I thrust my staff into the ground with every new step forward, I struggled to remember why I was here now, why I had come to seek out Finn O’Rahilly. My cousin was dead, and there was little in me that cared now for the poet’s ramblings or his curses. And yet his voice came clearer to my mind, the words pulling at me. ‘All these things will come to pass. Your grandson will soon lie with his fathers, in the cold chambers of the dead.’ Sean was dead and the curse was no longer rambling, no longer a malevolent retelling of what everyone already knew: what O’Rahilly had predicted had begun to come to pass. I had to set aside my resentments and my griefs, and accomplish what I had come here to do. I must summon my determination and marshal my thoughts: what did I know, and what must I ask?

My grandmother had gone to O’Rahilly, to hire him to declaim at Deirdre’s wedding. Maeve had insisted upon it, and, in the face of her own granddaughter’s protests, her will had won out. The poet had accused and insulted Maeve, my mother, Deirdre, dishonoured Murchadh’s name, derided his aspirations, humiliated his daughter. He had exposed Sean’s secrets and foretold his death, and it had come to pass. And yet he did not know about me. Who had paid him, who had put him up to all this, and what was their end?

We came, at length, to a clearing in the wood, and at the edge of the clearing was the ruin of an ancient church. For the first time in many miles, I looked about me properly. What I had thought to be random boulders and stones were not – they were set, carefully, in a circle at the entrance to the overgrown burial yard of the church, and at their centre stood a stone, upright, thin, that came almost to my shoulder, inscribed on it a simple cross.

‘What is this place?’ I said. The birds were no longer in song or sight, and the air had grown cold and still.

‘Kilcrue,’ he said at last. ‘The Cursing Circle.’

I put down my staff and walked towards the centre, to where the stone stood. The burial ground was so near and overgrown. I had never liked burial grounds. The place reeked of the knowledge of death: a once holy place that was holy no more. Unwittingly, I put my hand to my neck and felt for the coarse wood and moulded metal of the cross that hung there.

‘Tell me about the Cursing Circle,’ I said.

‘There is little I can tell you.’ I noticed he took care to keep outside the ring of stones. I was in too far now to do the same.

‘Tell me why it is so called.’

He thought out his words with care. ‘It is said that these places were used in pagan rituals in ancient times.’

‘What sort of rituals?’

He caught a breath, and spoke again, slowly. ‘It is said that the stone, the cross, before it became a cross, was perhaps an altar…’

A sacrificial altar. I felt the blood freeze in my veins. ‘And the name?’ I insisted. ‘What is the meaning of the name?’

‘It is the place of cursing, where curses are laid by the poets. It is the home of Finn O’Rahilly.’

The snap of a twig underfoot from the direction of the ruined church took my attention and I turned towards it to see Finn O’Rahilly, more gaunt than I had remembered, standing at the entrance to the circle. He looked at me and then at Stephen. ‘What trick is this, old priest? What game is this you seek to play me in?’

‘No trick, no game,’ answered the Franciscan. ‘Simply the man I told you wished to come.’

The poet stepped back, steadying his hand on a jutting rock and never taking his eyes from me. ‘This man is dead.’

I advanced a step towards him. ‘No, not dead. Death has not found me yet. I know it is a matter you take some interest in. What do you know of my cousin’s death?’

He held his ground this time, but more colour drained from his face. ‘You have no cousin.’

‘My name is Alexander Seaton, and I am the cousin of Sean O’Neill FitzGarrett and of his sister Deirdre. I was called to Ulster by my grandmother Maeve O’Neill to tell you that your curse has no truth in it. I am the son of Grainne Fitz-Garrett and my grandmother’s line will end not with Sean, but with me.’

He sat down, breathing heavily, on one of the flat stones of the outer circle. His knuckles were white as his fingers gripped the staff in his hand. ‘I was not told this.’

‘What were you told?’

He opened his mouth to answer and then thought the better of it. The silence was heavy in the stillness of the circle. Stephen spoke to me in a low voice. ‘I have brought you here as I promised I would, but now I must go. I have business to attend to tonight that will not keep. I will return in the morning and bring you to Bonamargy. Use your time well. Master your anger and use your mind more than your tongue to draw out of him what you need. And remember the contents of your purse.’

I had not bargained for this. I did not greatly like the knowledge that I was in this priest’s power, or that I had left Andrew Boyd to the mercy of his companions.

‘Wait but half an hour and I will come with you; it cannot take longer to find out what this man knows. I have no desire to spend the night in this godless place.’

‘Have you no faith, then?’ he asked.

‘I have faith in my God,’ I said, ‘but there are forces at work here that come from a darkness I do not comprehend.’

‘Then you must pray for the strength to withstand them, and I will pray that also for you.’ He said no more, and reminding me again that he would return for me the next morning, he disappeared into the trees.

A wind had got up, and the coldness of it whistled through the branches and around the stones that encircled me. Finn O’Rahilly had risen to his feet.

‘Do you stay?’ he said.

‘I have no choice. I do not know this country in the light, never mind the darkness. I will trespass on your hospitality this one night. I have no greater wish to be here than you have to have me here. Tell me what I need to know, show me a corner where I might lie, and I will trouble you no more.’

He stared at me levelly with his startling blue eyes.

‘You have been sent to me that I might lift the curse on your family?’

‘That is what my grandmother wishes – although the worst of it has already come to pass. Yet it might comfort her and my still-living cousin to know the curse to be lifted, so mumble what words you must, that I may not lie to them when I tell them you have done what they begged for with their purses to do.’

He glanced for a moment at the pouch I had now set at my feet, then returned his gaze to me. ‘You think the worst has come to pass? How little you know this place, or the people whom you claim as yours.’

‘I claim no one,’ I said. ‘I have been claimed, but those who had a right to do so have almost all gone. When I am finished my business here with you, I too will be gone from this country.’

‘As if you had never been.’

‘As if I had never been.’

He seemed a little reassured by this thought and sat down again on the rock. He motioned towards another, and I sat down and waited. There was a great stillness about him, as if an hour, a day, passed here like this would be as nothing. It was clear he would give me no help: I must begin myself.

‘My grandmother and my cousin Deirdre came to you here, did they not?’

He nodded.

‘Who else came?’

‘No one.’

‘My grandmother wished you to give a blessing at Deirdre’s wedding, but Deirdre was against it.’

Again he nodded.

‘Why did she not want it?’

‘They did not argue of it before me. Your cousin may not like our ways, the ways of your grandmother, and of me, but she knows them well and respects them, although she does not fully understand their power. She would not dishonour your grandmother or me by arguing about it openly before me.’

‘And yet you know she did not want it?’

He smiled slowly. ‘I have spent long years in study of words and of people. You must know a person before you can know the words you must use for them. Ever since I was a child, I have watched people. I watched your uncle, Phelim, your mother too. And when she came here, I watched your cousin. I watched her eyes and the small movements of her face and her body. She did not want what your grandmother wanted. She thinks she can take the road of the new English, and find her place in Ireland. She is wrong. I tried to tell her she was wrong…’

‘And so my grandmother paid you to do her bidding – to do what?’

‘To tell the glories of her family through the generations, to extol her lineage above others, to assert its claims for supremacy in Ulster, to bless this new union that it might further those ends.’

‘And of the Blackstones? What were you to say of them?’

‘The English ones?’

‘The family of the groom,’ I said, flatly.

‘They were not to be mentioned at all.’

‘But the oration you made was something quite different.’

‘There are times when the duty of the poet is to point out the errors of his patron, to set him on the right path, to give warning to others that they might not …’

‘That may well be,’ I broke in, ‘but that is not what happened at Deirdre’s wedding. You were paid by someone to …’

He was on his feet. ‘Do not insult me.’

‘I do not insult you. You know the truth better than I. You have sold the dignity of your calling. My mother schooled me well enough in the understanding of the exalted place of the poets, the years of training required, the honour you were accorded in noble households. Where is your honour to be found now?’ I threw the pouch at him. ‘At the bottom of a greasy purse.’

‘Do not presume to cite me your mother on honour. A whore who abandoned Ireland at the first opportunity. What would she know of noble households, she who rolled in her servant’s bed?’

His last words dropped like stones onto the carpet of fallen leaves around us, and lay there heavy and still. A bolt of coldness ran through my body.

‘What are you saying?’

‘Ask those who remember. I can tell you no more.’

What was he saying? My father had never been a servant. He had been a craftsman, and a soldier. I had not been born until a year after she had returned with him to Banff.

‘Are you trying to say I am not my father’s son?’ I said.

‘Is your name truly Seaton? That was the name of the man they said she left with, so you are probably his son.’

Disgust with the poet swamped me; I was growing tired of puzzles and riddles, of things that claimed to be other than what they seemed. I wanted to root out the knowledge I had come for and leave. Remembering the words of the Franciscan, ‘Master your anger,’ I swallowed down the rising bile. ‘Who paid you to curse my family?’

‘I was honouring a patron, I was …’

‘Enough of honour. You were paid. Who did it, and to what end?’

He shook his head. ‘You think that I do not know that I am degenerate from my forefathers? Do you think I would be here in this desolate place, selling my talent and my worth, if I could have the place of my forefathers? We are persecuted by the English, who fear our power over the minds of the people, we are made destitute by the destitution and banishment of our lords, those who once feted us, we are abandoned by those who remain and do not give us succour for fear of falling out of favour with the English masters at whose knees they crawl. So I scrape what living I can with my words and my mind, for I have not been taught any other. But I have my honour and I will not betray my patron to you.’

‘You betrayed my grandmother.’

‘I spoke only the truth.’

‘For a murderer,’ I said. ‘My cousin is dead and you foretold it.’

‘He would have been dead soon enough anyway. Look about you. Look at this country. Listen to what is said. Watch. There will be death. But I tell you this: the person who had me curse your cousin will not be the person who murdered him.’

‘How do you know this?’

‘I told you, I watch people, and I know love.’

I called from my memory the images of the night of my grandfather’s wake. I sought out the poet, as he ate, drank, as he stood to declaim our family’s fall. Who had he watched, where had his gaze landed? Faces, faces, faces, all around. But my mind had been taken up entirely with his words, and my memory would not tell me that he had looked on any of them.

His voice broke into my searching. ‘You must forget this now. You must learn the lesson of the Cursing Circle: it has no end.’

There was no more to be had from him and I got up in dejection, leaving the money pouch on the ground beside him. I could hear the steady crinkle and splash of a stream running nearby and sought it out, to slake my thirst. The nuts were just bursting from an overhanging hazel and I took them gratefully, with brambles from the bushes. I looked around me for somewhere I might find good shelter and lay my head for the night, but all was damp or jagged underfoot, and would afford me little comfort. I made my way back to the clearing, where Finn O’Rahilly still sat as I had left him, the pouch untouched at his feet.

‘My home is in the church,’ he said, indicating the ruin from which he had emerged. ‘You may spend the night there; there are clean rushes in the corner of the east wall; you will be dry and warm by the hearth. You would not be the first visitor to take rest here before returning to the world. There is a candle and flint in a niche above the bedding. I will not disturb you.’

For want of an option, I thanked him, and sought out a corner for myself in the ruined church. Much of the roof had gone, and what little remained was of old thatch. When the elements were at their worst there can have been few places of true shelter in the shell of the building, but the corner by the hearth protected me from the advances of the east wind, and the night was dry. It was almost dark. I lit the candle I had found in the niche, and lay down amongst the rushes, wishing I had Sean’s heavy mantle about me now. I flinched as a bat swooped down from a rotting beam above my head and swept out into the night. I had never liked the creatures. I had always had a terror that they would entangle themselves in my hair. I was glad now of my monk’s hood and pulled it up about me. Other creatures scuttled around me, in the rushes, across the stone floor. The noises of the wood seemed to come closer as evening advanced further into night.