The Fall of Light (40 page)

Elizabeth opened her eyes. She opened them quickly and wide as if seeing a vision, though yet she did not seem to be seeing
at all. There was a brief hiatus, a frozen instant. Teige’s fingers touched her lips and her eyes turned to look at him. The
man beside her sighed like a sea cavern. None moved. Then very slowly Teige got up and her eyes followed him and he stepped
a step back from her and another and all the time she watched him. He came to the room door and reached and opened it and
already she was easing herself from the body that lay by her. Teige stepped outside into the corridor and turned and pressed
himself flat against the wall and tried to draw his breath.

“You’re mad.”

She closed the door. Her voice was a whisper and when he heard it he wanted to hear more.

“You will be killed. You know that?”

He said nothing. His eyes studied her.

“They will take you out in the fields somewhere and…” She stopped. Something in her wavered as though in a sudden warp of
heat.

Teige reached and kissed her mouth and laid his palm against the side of her neck. They stopped and she looked at him and
then kissed again and were one twisting shape among the shadows and the soft ghosts and silent dust that assembled there.

In the dawn when Clancy came to him, Teige was lying awake in the straw of the stable. Neither man spoke
but went at once as if by mute accord and brought out the horse and stood her briefly in the yard. The day was thickly clouded
as if there were no heavens. The air smelled cool and damp and flies were not yet abuzz. The
horse’s eyes studied with long, slow circumspection the horsecart in which she was to be loaded. She had never yet travelled
so, but it was the squire’s belief and shared with others of his kind that the exertion of the ride over to the east to the
stallion would weaken the possibility of a strong issue. So Clancy said. She must be loaded and brought. In the thin light
then Teige and Clancy set about it. A line was run from the horse’s halter on up the gangway and into the cart with high creels.
Clancy took this and led it through the top bar and waited for Teige to begin to coax her on. But the moment the horse felt
the tension on the line she pulled back with her head and took two steps backward and Clancy tugged at the rope harder and
called out a curse. The cobbles of the yard rang out with the sharp clopping of hooves. The fellow Pyle appeared with tousled
hair and looked at Teige with crooked grin. Clancy shouted to him to get behind her and urge her forward, which business he
set about in a manner wild and mad. But Teige already knew that it was hopeless. As if it travelled along the very rope, fear
reached every sinew of the horse. She backed and shook and twisted her head about, thrashing the rope line sideways, for all
the world as if she were some fabulous marine creature hooked on a fishing line descended from above in the realm of the gods.

“Stop, leave off,” Teige said. And the tension on the rope slackened and he undid it and let it fall to the ground. “Get off,
go away from there,” he told Pyle, and the youth scowled and scratched at his freckles and did not move back.

“Do it!” Clancy shouted.

“But I’m coming to—”

“Go away!” Clancy roared.

Pyle stepped back then and his eyes narrowed and then were lost beneath the falling fringe of his hair.

Teige turned the horse about then so she was headed in the direction opposite to the gangway. He stroked her neck and spoke
to her and felt the heat in her body. Then he ran his hand firmly down the length of her long face and stopped and with one
hand held there across her nose and the other flat against her flank, he coaxed her backward. She stepped a step and then
another. When her hoof reached the wooden planks she hesitated only for a moment, then clattered up backward with Teige holding
her so. She was loaded. Clancy
came about and swung up and closed the cart. He did not say anything to Teige.

“Am I not coming?” Pyle asked.

“You are not,” Clancy told him. “Do you think I want her maddened? You will clean out the stalls.” The fellow’s face crumpled
into a sour twist.

Clancy climbed up and sat beside Teige and they drove the cart away down the avenue.

In slow, rocking motion, the cart pulled by two black horses and labouring on all hills almost to the pace of walking, they
passed out through the town of Kilrush and eastward along the road to Ennis. They travelled past wild brown boglands and small
roadside cottages with doors open and dark, dim interiors whence the face of a man or woman peered like an animal frightened.
Blackbirds flew up and landed. Smaller birds there were none. Long tracts of the road were empty of all living. There were
many cottages ruined, thatch torn down or tumbled inward and standing now with roofs gaping, strange and sad in the aftermath
of famine. At a place where green fields opened to the south, Clancy passed Teige the reins and rummaged in a bag and brought
out hunks of bread and a stoppered jug of milk. They did not stop as they ate. The morning came up over them, the sky grey
and sunless. At the town of Ennis a shower of rain fell and stopped and then came again and continued falling. They passed
on, as if veiled within it. The backs of the horses shone. The road, softening beneath them, tuned the pitch of their clopping
a semitone lower.

At that town they drew the attention of many. Some who were stopped in doorways studied them like a show. Small children,
boys and girls alike, ran along in the rain and shouted and tried to hit with sticks the sides of the creels. Clancy swung
a short whip backhanded toward them in warning and Teige stood up and turned back and tried to soothe the horse. But soon
the children slowed of their own accord and stood in the rain and faded off, mucked and white-faced and melancholic as some
dwindling image whose meaning was potent but hard to fathom. The rain thickened. The road east took them out of the town and
soon they were again without company on the long brown ribbon bordered by green. The land was still and the cattle within
it stood in the falling rain. Berry bushes dripped in the
hedgerows. The flowers of the fuchsia hung and fell red and purple on the roadside.

They passed on. In the pallid light of that afternoon they came to the place where the stallion was at stud. When they passed
through the gateway the mare lifted her head and neighed and moved about in the narrow confines of the cart.

“Stop here,” Teige said. They were the first words he had spoken in some hours. Clancy did as he was told. The cart stopped
and Teige got down and walked along by the side of it and spoke up to the mare. Then he went on ahead into the yard and across
to the stable, where already the stallion was turning and making long, ratcheted sounds to be released. There was a man there
with eyes he opened wide every second, as if a reverse of blinking. Teige looked in at the stallion.

“You’ll take him out? And be able to hold him?” he asked the man.

The fellow widened his eyes. “I will.”

“Wait until I say. I’ll close over the gate.”

Teige went then and brought out the mare on a line and told Clancy to shut the gate between her and the stallion. And when
this was done he called up to the other and told him to bring out the stallion, and soon both horses were frisking on lines
either side of the shut gate. He backed the mare then to the gate and held her there and let the stallion approach and take
the smell of her and raise his head as if savouring it and twist it about thrice in the heavy rain air. He came to her and
his nostrils widened and his sex rose and he pressed and angered at the gate impatiently, and still the man held him. The
mare did not kick back as was her won’t.

“Let her through to him now!” the man called. “I won’t be able to hold him.”

“No, hold him, wait. Wait.”

Teige took the mare then and turned her away and walked her in a small muddy circle there where she could see the stallion.
He held her back when she would have stepped forward. The rain ran on his face.

“Now, now open the gate,” he called, and Clancy stepped across and did so and the stallion came forward, pulling the man with
the wide eyes like some minor nuisance. Then the two horses passed alongside each other and the mare tried to bite and her
teeth showed in the air and each neighed aloud and Teige called out for the ropes to
be loosened. Then, with the men standing muted about them in the pouring rain, and holding the long lines limp, the stallion
mounted the mare and became briefly a thing colossal, high and muscled and shuddering as if with the charged currency of the
earth itself.

In moments it was over. The men came to and sharply reined the horses apart and with swift economy of movement brought each
back to the places of their confinement. The mare was backed up the platform and it was raised with a clatter and shut. The
stallion, subdued and dull-eyed, was led inside the stable and the door bolted. Clancy went off to the house with the other
man and performed what matters of business were required. Teige waited. He looked at the mare, tranquil now, her coat damply
matted, and the coupling already passed like some figment into the deeps of her memory. If there was such, Teige thought.
If it’s not just of then, done, and then gone. The rain fell. He waited. No sound came from either horse.

When at last Clancy came out he had the flushed cheeks of strong whiskey and his eyes were brightened like glass polished.
He climbed up on the cart and told Teige he was good, by God, he was good, and they would stop and get a drink to celebrate.
They would, so they would. He clucked at the horses and they wheeled about and out of there. A short time later they came
to the town of Killaloe on the banks of the river. The rain stopped then and the place hung in sorry wet aftermath like a
child half-drowned. Clancy looked along the street for a place suitable to their needs. No sooner had he found one than there
appeared a small boy ready to hold the horses and keep all safe while the men went inside. Teige and Clancy got down, and
Clancy gave the boy something. Already there was a little cluster of some too proud to be called beggars who assembled to
beg there. They stood in the men’s way with no menace, but urgent persistence. Their begrimed hands opened, palm upward like
rough petals. Their clothes steamed a strong sour odour that was the perfume of rain and sweat and poverty. They offered prayers
and blessings and intercession with saints of all name and manner and appeals to the Virgin herself for the cause of the good
travellers. As if wading in murk, Clancy raised his arms above them and tried to move forward. He saw the doorway where he
was headed and pushed toward it, parting the beggars and telling them he had nothing for them. He did not look back at Teige
behind him. He did not see how they gathered about the younger man, and how Teige stopped there.

Teige stopped and his mouth opened and he felt himself weaken as though a surfeit of air had arrived in his lungs or he were
suddenly out of his element. His hand outstretched was taken by one of the hands offered to him. Others joined this and took
him gently. He near staggered but did not and yet seemed almost asway as he came forward. His expression was of one caught
and transported in revelation even there on the grey wet street of that town. The look of his eyes must have bespoken something
or resembled a beam, for the little crowd followed the gaze and turned and saw at whom he was staring.

It was a woman, one amongst them, who hung back and waited on the side of the street. She was wrapped in a shawl and stood
with patience and a faraway look. She did not turn her face to see Teige coming to her. She did not lift her eyes from the
scene infinite in distance upon which her mind gazed. He came to her and the little crowd of the others came with him. Some
held his sleeve, others the hem of his jacket, but none said anything now. Dreamlike, as if the moment did not exist but must
be lived anyway, Teige reached the woman and stood before her, and a cry escaped from deep in his throat and seemed to buckle
him. For he fell down onto his knees and then reached up and touched the face of the blind woman who was his mother.

And some time then in the darkness of the night many miles away, Finbar Foley woke and felt the left side
of his body was dead. Beneath the covers he reached across himself and with his right arm made short, tapping motions as if
to gently awaken the part that was numb. When this failed his actions grew more urgent, and Cait woke in the bed beside him
to find him beating at his left breast with his fist.