Niall Williams - The Fall of Light

There were shadows on the bed. The darkness was jumbled with shapes and shades, tones grey and pewter. Teige stood, strange like a creature incorporeal. He waited, attendant on some discovery and incipient disaster, and with the passing of each moment could not quite believe that none came. Slowly the shadows assembled and were the shapes of a man and woman sleeping. He moved a step closer and could see her then where she lay with the man’s arm outstretched across her, a pale raised line like the weal of a scar. Teige moved again and this time knelt down on one knee and was close enough now to be enveloped in the smells of her. Her face in sleep was calm and very beautiful and Teige studied it then without haste or anxiety, as if the progress of all time had since ceased and such perusal were his business eternal. Then she moved and the man’s arm moved and she pressed her head back and angled in the pillow and showed the line of her neck that was fine and white like a fabulous bird’s and Teige reached and touched it.

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.