Niall Williams - The Fall of Light

“We’ll not!” Teige said, and raised his chin and seemed momentarily a pugnacious other.

Tomas calmed them with the command to stay camped there by their horses while he went down the river to the town to get food.

“Don’t be acting fools while I’m gone. There’s only us now,” he said.

He left them in the darkness and rode away. The clouds blew eastward and the stars revealed themselves. In those days the night skies of that country were vast canopies of deepest blue, all the created stars glimmered there like the diadem of a king. There were none lost to surrounding light, for there was none, and the patterns of the constellations were each clear and perfect as though drawn by a great hand in the depths of the heavens. As the cold of the nighttime came around them, the younger Foley brothers huddled together. They put the pony and the horse in the gap of the wind and gained a small shelter from the air that was blowing from Norway. They watched the stars.

“Do you think our father is dead?” Finbar asked.

But none of them answered him. They sat there in the night. Teige thought of his mother, Emer, and looked in the darkness for the image of her face.

After a time Finan said: “Tell us one of the stories, Teige.”

“Yes, tell us one,” said Finbar.

And so, not to make the time move faster or slower, but to make it vanish altogether, to create the illusion that it did not exist and that all moments were the same, Teige told a story he had heard his mother tell. It told of the Queen Cassiopeia and her beautiful daughter, Andromeda. He spoke as they all spoke in Irish, and in that language the story seemed more ancient even than the versions of it first told in Mesopotamia or Greece.

“Who could say which of them was the loveliest? Cassiopeia or Andromeda?” he began. “Queen Cassiopeia was full of pride in her daughter and in herself and announced that they were lovelier even than the sea-nymphs, the Nereids.”

“The Nereids?” Finan had forgotten who they were.

“The fifty daughters of Nereus, the wise old man of the sea.”

“Fifty?” Finbar asked.

“Fifty.”

“O-ho!”

They watched the stars and imagined.

“The sea-nymphs were offended, they complained to Poseidon, god of the sea, who struck the waves with his trident and flooded the lands and called up the monster Cetus.”

“I love Cetus,” Finbar said.

“The king, the husband of Andromeda, was told that the only way he could save his queen was if he sacrificed his daughter to Cetus the monster. So Andromeda was chained to the rocks at Joppa.”

“She was eaten.”

“She was not,” Teige said.

“She was!”

“Stop it, Finbar!” shouted Finan, and punched the other, and the two of them fell to wrestling there and rolling over each other while Teige sat and waited. When they had stopped he told of how Perseus came and rescued Andromeda and took her for his wife, and made Cassiopeia jealous, and how Cassiopeia in her jealous fit helped arrange an attack on the married couple. How Perseus defeated the attack.

“Then Poseidon, the sea-god, hearing how the queen had plotted against her daughter, cast her into the heavens for all time.”

“Upside down,” Finbar said.

“Upside down,” said Teige.

The story ended, they huddled there beneath the stars that were the same stars since forever. And the longer they watched the skies, the clearer they could see the kings and queens and jealous lovers and sea-gods and drowned fathers and vanished mothers, and they forgot that they were cold. And after a while they could not tell whether they were in sleeping or waking dreams in that empty and merciless world where they were now alone.

Moments before dawn, Tomas returned without his boots from Limerick town. He dismounted his horse with a light jump, and when his brothers raised their heads and stared at him he swung his coat onto the ground and fell down upon it. His body was exhausted, but his spirit was elated.

“God!” he said, and astonished the others by rolling with himself there on the ground.

“Are you sick?” Finbar asked him.

But Tomas did not reply. He shouted out a cry of no language, raised his bare feet, and banged them on the ground. He let out another and wriggled in the mud.

His brothers did not dare to speak to him. They had never seen him in such an agitated state but erroneously supposed it was the loss of their father and the new responsibility of leading the family. They lay there beside the flowing river and watched hungrily while the dawn rose in ribbons pink and blue.

In the dark Tomas had ridden his horse into Limerick town with the intention of stealing something for his brothers to eat. But from the moment he arrived on the hardened mud of the side streets, his resolve weakened. At that stage in his life, it was the biggest town he had ever seen. Dimly in the distance he saw the bridge named Wellesley with its elegant arches. The high steeple of the ancient cathedral appeared above the rooftops, and across the river were the neat plantations and well-made fences of the land of the marquis of Lansdowne. He tied his horse and brushed the dirt off his clothes and walked into the night town. The smells of the outer streets were the smells of stout and whiskey and urine and cow dung. Cats and ragged dogs ran and stopped and sniffed at dark, muddied pieces of nothing. He passed on into the town. From rooms above him he heard men’s laughter and music of the piano. He was not sure where he was going. He was walking in the world for the first time without the shadow of his father. He let his hand rub along the fine stone of the buildings. He stood against one of them to let his back feel its perpendicularity and then looked upward to see the straight line it cut in the dark sky. He paused there and gathered himself and thought for the first time that they did not have to follow now their father’s plans. They could go anywhere. It would be up to him. We could come here, he thought. We could go anywhere. The country was suddenly big with possibility. He moved out of the shadows and walked the full length of the street that ran parallel to the wide river. At the far end of the town when he was about to cross and walk back the far side of the street, he saw the woman in the yellow dress.

She had bare arms in the cold night and a bracelet that glittered.

She was lovely. Her hair was high and pinned.

“Here I am,” she said. Her mouth was small and red, her eyes shining.

Tomas Foley had not known the company of women. He looked behind him in the street when the woman spoke, and when he saw there was no other imagined that the woman had spoken to him out of some distress.

“What is it?” he said.

And she laughed and covered her laugh.

“You’re a sweet one,” she said, and she moved to him and smiled.

“Are you all right?” he asked her.

She touched his face with fingers cool and soft, and his head spun.

“Kiss me,” she said. Then her arms were around him and she was kissing and biting at his lips. She ran her hands along his chest. His eyes rolled. His head swirled within the cloud of cheap honeysuckle water that was her scent. She ate at his neck and then said, “Come on, love,” and led him up the worn boards of a stairs to a room that was not far away. In that same astonishment, the same dumb innocence with which he later interpreted that simple act of economics to be the rare and absolute majesty of Love itself, Tomas found his clothes taken off and his body admired in the yellow candlelight.

The woman reversed the world he had imagined and told him he was a beauty. He stood there and she looked at him and saw the innocence that had once been hers and she asked him had he ever been with a woman.