Niall Williams - The Fall of Light

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.

From the town came those who knew what to expect. They had watched for the fires on the hill and slipped from the beds of husbands and wives to steal into that place where the spirits of the dead guaranteed the time of licentiousness and free pleasure against which the priests and pastors had vainly preached. For the townspeople were even wilder than the gypsies. Girls pulled their skirts high and dragged and pushed the men about, throwing off lovers and taking others in a giddy and mad rush, as though each had to be touched and tasted before that time of freedom was past and manner and decorum returned for another year.

In this way Finbar was pulled aside by one of the mer-girls of the sea and kissed hungrily on his lips. He tasted the salty girl almost before he saw her. In the firelight she flew him around so that she and he were one side golden and one side dark. Then she spun him away and out into the greater darkness and the tufted grass that grew by the cliffs. She held his hand and he climbed up into the fall of her hair and kissed her neck as they ran along. Then she slipped away in the dark. Finbar hurried after her. There was nowhere to go in the rising and falling undulations of the field that were like a calm sea. They chased and tumbled and she called him gypsy in Irish and laughed and threw her bare feet in the air and kicked as though treading deep water in the sea of the sky. Finbar held the calf of her leg and touched the skin and marvelled, and the girl turned into a fish there before him. She glimmered in the starlight and was slippery in his hands. She twisted about and was free of clothes and Finbar imagined her a salmon in the grass and he grappled her in his arms and she wriggled silvery and marvellous and beautiful.

The Samhain burned on. Cattle stolen or bartered in exchange for whispered prophecies to farmers desperate for love or fortune were slaughtered there. Though its blood was not fully drained, a beast was dragged heavily across the grass, spilling gore and scenting the night with fresh death as its head tilted with uprolled eyes of blind horror. A trail was left. Then the gypsies endeavoured to mount the animal on a crude and massive spit, and many attempts were in vain with the spiked end bursting and tearing through the flank of the beast with cries and jeers and curses and men falling about.

Teige left and went to the white pony. He told her the races would be tomorrow, for he knew that the gypsies would bring all the animals down to the sands to meet the ancestors who had raced there. Then the sports would begin.

“We won’t win,” Teige said, and stroked the pony.

The fires did not die out that night but were kept burning into the dawn. As the light rose, the sea seemed quickened and a white floor of surf lay all across the bay. Remnants of the night were scattered in the grass, wood and bones and fragments of clothing torn or discarded. When the gypsies stood into the morning, there was a strange communal shyness among them. They blinked at the light and studied the ground. When they heard that two of their horses had plunged over the cliff into the sea, their natural superstition caused them to suppose the white pony must be gone. Then Teige found her waiting beneath the wiry and back-combed shelter of hawthorn bushes and the men knew the day was to be theirs.