The Fall of Light (13 page)

By the fire Finan sat. His twin was gone to see the mer-girls that had come up from the town and were queuing now to learn
of their lovers. Finan drank the sharp and bitter whiskey that burned the back of his throat. His eyes were glass. In the
smoke and wavering of the heat he saw images of faces distorted. He thought he saw demons and blinked and screwed up his eyes
and drank some more. A small fellow dared by others then announced he would attempt to dive face-first through the fire. He
was wiry and thin and held up his arms that were like sticks. He was with another, a broad figure with scars on his face.
Some tried weakly to dissuade him, but many others urged him on. His companion said he would take any bet that his friend
could not do it. There ensued then a rapid and heated calling of wagers, and in bizarre fashion gypsies and men argued as
to what would constitute a failed attempt. If the man was burned in the face, one said. If he was scarred, but not if he was
singed. If his clothes were alight, it was all right. They considered this and other elements of the dive there amidst the
crackling and spitting of the burning logs while the sea roared not
far distant. The night sky turned its stars. Men swayed as if at sea and held aloft glimmering glass bottles. They cried out
and drank toasts of little sense to the thin fellow who would face the fire.

In this wagering Finan took the side of the diver. He thought the attempt brave and foolish both and yet was touched with
admiration for it. Then, when the gypsies and others there were ready, the thin man seemed to swallow a clarifying reality,
for he stood back and said he had changed his mind. Bedlam broke loose. One pushed another, and accusations and sharp words
flew out on the air. Then the companion of the thin fellow turned on his friend and cursed him for being a coward, and these
two wrestled and fought by the fire. The other men and the gypsies watched them, for in their fighting seemed released some
long and bitter enmity which had survived like an aged thorn beneath the skin. The thin man was small and young, and his manner
of fighting was full of quick kicks and smacks, darts and shimmies. But he was worse for drink, and his blows flew wildly
in the smoky air. He spun his arms about and was like loosened machinery coming asunder. He spat and said he didn’t have to
jump if he didn’t want to. And it was clear to all that these were fellows who conspired to win money at gatherings such as
this, and that in his way the thin man had reneged and his companion was shamed. Still on their feet, they grappled and wrestled.
The young man swung at the older and missed. Then the man with the scars on his face reached back and shot the full of his
fist onto the other’s nose. There was a crunch and stuff flew and the fellow fell backward. His hands came up to his face
and caught the blood running there. The other stepped forward again and delivered into his stomach another blow. The fellow
fell to his knees. Then the bigger man leaned down and with two hands picked up his victim and lifted him full into the air
and said the wager was still on, for he would pitch the chicken face-first across the fire. He walked with the fellow in his
arms and the blood dripping. He came to the edge of the fire and was so deciding the manner best suited to fling his companion
when Finan Foley leapt at him and knocked him to the ground.

It was an action rapid and unconsidered. The man crashed into the side of the fire and sent aloft a scattering of sparks while
his friend squirmed free. Finan hit the big man with his right fist, and the fellow’s
neck snapped back. Then he hit him again. He felt the pain rush down the length of his own arm, and as he did he was shouting
out words that none there understood, and seemed to be fighting a mortal enemy against whom he had many deep and long unspoken
grievances. He struck another blow. He hit the man and did not know he was dead, and the fire made of his face a twisted mask
of red and brassy orange. Then the thin fellow was wailing out something and knocking him over and pulling at his dead companion
and the gypsies were coming forward to ensure that Finan was not harmed. He was dragged back through the crowd and brought
quickly away and taken to a caravan where he went inside and lay down and the world thumped in his head and he realized with
horror the monstrousness of what he had done.

In the days following, more tribes of gypsies arrived in the town of Kilkee. They brought their horses and ponies
and made camps in random fashion on the grass that oversaw the sea. Soon there were scattered clusters of caravans dotted
about the fields that ringed the town. The day of the races was not announced, and Teige could not discover when it would
be. He did not see Finan or know where he was hiding, and when he saw Finbar it was always in the company of a group of gypsies
and his manner did not invite conversation. Teige had already decided that the moment the races were over he would ride back
into Limerick alone if necessary to find his brother, then go east to search for his mother. He wanted the race to take place
at once, but when he asked the gypsies about it he always received the same reply, that it would happen when it was ready.
There was no date set and time itself seemed an antiquated and overly formal invention so that days and nights rose and fell
and the gypsies might sometime sleep until noon or after and sometimes be risen and walking about the town in the predawn
like spectres come to visit. They showed no
anxiety but rather now that they had camped by the ocean they took the arrival and gathering of tribes like a medicine of
the spirit. Their hearts were lifted to see so many like themselves, and the buoyancy of their mood grew daily. It was the
year’s end in the gypsy calendar, and the festive nights of ribaldry, of renewed friendships and fierce rivalries, revealed
it as such. There were knifings and fistfights on the night strand. The constabulary adopted a policy of indifference and
left the gypsies to their own affairs. Of the three officers in the town, two of them had previously booked annual leave.

So, the town became for a time a gypsy island. Men and women continued to visit the fortune-tellers and story makers by night.
They paid for the gypsy whiskey and grew wild-eyed, watching men who could eat fire or swallow gold coins and find them again
in the shells of their ears. They heard the stories of the animal called elephant and imagined him there on their own beach
loaded with a mountain of seaweed, or miraculously unsinking tramping slowly across their bogs with the fuel for the winter.
The children of the town suffered enlarged imaginations. They watched the exotic visitors with awe and dreamed of running
away with them to far places that were not rainy and cold and poor and where kings and queens were glorious and beautiful
and not the ones of which they had heard. They spread stories among themselves of the gypsies’ scars and magic, and these
stories in turn grew other stories and became wilder and more ferocious with each telling, and the gypsies became pirates,
vagabond thieves, or daring circus figures tumbled down from a high wire in the sky.

While the days passed, Teige rode the white pony on the strand of Doonbeg out of sight of the other gypsies. The pony ran
well there, and Teige spoke to her and stood her on the sands and let them both look a long time at the breaking of the waves.
The sea was slow mesmerism. The farther out he looked, the farther it seemed to go until it did not seem to be moving at all
but was a steady line of grey without wave or wimple. He rode there in the nights too and liked the empty tumbling of the
world beneath the stars.

“It’s like a rim of iron,” he told the silent pony, “where the world ends.”

In the darkness he watched it. The wind blew the sand in ribbons.

After a long time Teige spoke. “Once,” he said in a whisper, “Jason met a clever shipwright called Argus.”

The pony stood on the shore. It was an empty arc of pale light.

“And this shipwright had from Mount Pelion got tall pines, and of these built a fifty-oared ship so strong that it could stand
all winds and waves, and so light that it could be carried on the shoulders of its crew.”

He stopped and thought of that magical craft and tried to think of nothing else.

“This ship was named the
Argo.
In it were assembled the best and the bravest, the sons of gods and men, who were known as the Argonauts.” He watched the
sea and the night sky. The waves sighed.

“And all were bound on a far course,” he told the pony, “to the distant eastern shores, where they must tear free the Golden
Fleece.”

Clouds moved and the stars came and went again. “On a far course,” he said again, then said no more, the story stopped, its
words gone in the wind.

And in that night the horses sensed the turning of the year and whinnied along their ranks and dragged hooves
against the packed mud like creatures pawing for freedom. It was the beginning of
Samhain,
the time of dying and resurrection in the antique spirit world of that place, and the ghosts of horses dead passed in along
the seashore and made those living flick their ears and roll their eyes in the dark. Teige rose from his bed and walked out
among them and ran his hand on the fevered flesh of the frightened animals. The night was cool and the sky charged with stars.
The traffic of spirits was such that the horses would not quieten, though Teige spoke to them in a soft voice and tried to
make the very nighttime calm with his presence. He knew it was the time of ghosts. He knew the tradition and belief of their
coming from all graves on those nights and revelling in wild
abandon before taking some back with them to the kingdom of the dead. He thought of his father’s spirit and wondered where
it was, and in the still air of that night when he could not hush the horses he stood back and let them stamp and noise and
grow accustomed to the strangeness. From caravans came the shadowy figures of gypsies drawn from their beds by the same presences
that had disturbed the horses. Tousled, soft-shouldered figures, they ducked about in the dark as though expecting to encounter
some flying debris, the blown souls of the vanished. Soon there was a small gathering. One of them began to hum and another
took it up and then it was general, a kind of windy low notes in the pipes of their throats. They shambled around, crisscrossing
in the darkness and humming like things without language. The sound was not unsettling, though, and Teige without reason or
understanding joined in. And the horses stilled and listened. The small breaths of the wind carried the humming off into the
fields about. The gypsies looked into the sky, and sometime here and there one of them made gestures in the air, waving their
arms in a way that Teige could not interpret either as welcome or defence. Elihah, the oldest of them, came out and was brought
across the grass by two of the younger gypsies bearing lanterns. When they stepped from his side he stood a moment by himself
as though balancing one final time on the threshold between life and death. He then spoke words aloud that Teige did not understand
and the gypsies brought him the lanterns and he threw them down in a pile of gathered branches and a fire sprang up. The
Samhain
had begun.

Within minutes the old man was gone and the other gypsies were about. Fires were lit and horses were released and ran wild
off down the field into the dark. Across the bay other fires now burned with small tongues of light. From each camp around
the town the same custom-worn and time-honoured gestures were taking place. It was as if a bell had tolled or a preternatural
announcement had taken place. For though it was without clocks or even the rising of the sun, the moment of the spirits’ resurrection
and return seemed unanimously agreed. The gypsies’ mood rose with the heat of the fire and soon they were singing and there
were some who leapt in ragged trousers and bare chests by the flames and yahooed with wild ferocity. Women came out dressed
in bright skirts with hoops in their ears, and though
they had slept only a few hours, they danced flamboyantly with different partners. They held up their skirts to show their
legs and stamped in the muddy grass, laughing full-mouthed in the dance of the dead. Teige was pulled in by one such woman
and spun to music of drum and whistle. He flew about in her arms and watched his brother Finbar do the same. The place was
swept into a festive mood. The stars turned in the sky and the sea fell in sighs, exhausted.