Pete Hamill - Forever

“You see, Cormac,” Fergus said. “It’s a time to rejoice.”

And so it was.

The women were smiling in their furs and woolen shawls, and dogs barked, as if demanding news of Bran, and someone was playing pipes in the darkness beyond the fire, and Cormac could hear the steady beat of a drum. Then Mary Morrigan appeared, her eyes welling with tears. She had been right; a terrible time had come. As predicted. But she said nothing now about her prophecy, took no vain comfort in the proofs offered by so much desolation. It was enough that her own part of the Irish tribe had been warned, and had survived. She was thinner now in Cormac’s eyes, frailer, as if the seven arctic weeks had reduced her to bone and gristle. She gripped Cormac’s hands in her callused fingers and he wondered where that other woman had gone, the woman who was also Mary Morrigan, the woman with the soft flesh and gripping wetness. He thought: Perhaps this Mary Morrigan, withered and dark, was only a mask for the other, her face and body and clothes worn the way he and his father wore their Protestant masks in the world beyond the grove.

But Cormac could not ask those questions, and they might never be answered if he did. Mary Morrigan slipped away, to preside over the chanting and the drum and the thin bird voice of the flute moving through the darkness as if trying to be joyful. They sat at the fire and ate boiled beef while Fergus listened to the terrible accounting. Seventeen Irish men dead, twenty-six women, thirteen children, along with nine horses, eleven cows, fifteen sheep, and twenty-one dogs. All pigs had survived. At least two of the women had died from some English disease they picked up in Belfast while foraging for food. After their deaths, it was decided that nobody could go again to the city until the terrible time had passed. The bodies of the dead had all been burned to protect the living. Fergus and Cormac listened to all of this in silence. Cormac wondered which of the Irish he’d known in his Celtic summers were now dead, and thought that it was unfair that he was alive and they were dead.

“Perhaps now the dying is over for a while,” Fergus said in Irish.

“Perhaps,” said Mary Morrigan, staring into the fire.

That night Fergus and Cormac slept with some of the other men in a hut made of rough logs. Cormac longed for the cave of Mary Morrigan but remained beside his father and the other men, more than a dozen of them, along with some dogs and a cow, while distant singing, full of lament and mourning, drifted through the midnight grove.

They rose early to a damp, fog-bound morning. The air was warmer, the earth still spiky with ice. Their cart was already piled with firewood and sacks of oats. They embraced each of the Irish who were not already out foraging. Mary Morrigan, one of a group of women, waved a small farewell. And then they started back. For a long time, Fergus was silent.

“Too much death,” he said after a while. “Too much death. Too much death…”

Cormac wanted to console him, but he knew it wouldn’t help to say that he was alive and Thunder was alive and Bran was alive and Mary Morrigan was alive.

“Well,” Cormac did say, “maybe they’ve all gone to the Other-world. Where it’s warm, Da, where they want for naught.”

“Maybe,” he said, without conviction. “I hope…”

They rode for hours, saying little, with Thunder’s hooves clip-clopping on the frozen path, his hot breath making white clouds and his breathing as steady as a clock. Fergus had wrapped his face in a dark blue scarf, and Cormac buried his own face in the collars of his coat. His mind, thrummed by the rhythm of horse and loaded cart, eased into a dark, private cave with a fire burning low and his face hot with flesh and hair.

Then Thunder slowed.

Cormac was alert, his heart moving faster. Thinking: Something is not right. Thinking: Thunder should not be moving slower. Not yet. He knows the way. And we’re at least six miles from home.

But the clip-clop, clip-clop became something else.

Clip.

Clop.

Fergus was fully alert, his eyes wide, pulling the scarf down to his chin. He glanced back. There was nothing behind them. But the road ahead curved to the left and then vanished behind a hill. Cormac thought: Whatever danger Thunder senses, it lies beyond that curve.

“Get ready to run,” Fergus said.

They moved slowly around the curve.

Clip.

Clop.

Clip.

And there in front of them were six men on horses, one holding the gathered reins of two horses without riders. They were stretched across the road, blocking the way, as still as death. Each of the men was armed with a pistol. Fergus and Cormac knew two of them. One was Patch, his bald head covered with a fur hat. The other was the Earl of Warren.

Fergus tugged on the reins, and Thunder stopped about thirty feet from the fence of men on horseback. Nobody moved.

There were dense brown thickets on each side of the road, and a drainage ditch to Cormac’s right, its surface frozen.

“Are you looking for the road to Rome?” the earl said, smiling in an amused way while the others laughed. His abrupt English accent was sharp and hurting, with an odd feminine pitch to its tone, as if squeezed by the cold. Cormac remembered the day of his mother’s death in the mud of Belfast, when the earl’s voice was uncertain and trembling. That voice was gone. After the brutal Siberian winter, he seemed harder now, dressed for command in a long black coat, heavy wool scarf, broad-brimmed hat, high polished boots. He did not seem to remember Cormac. The boy who had once flailed at him so bitterly was now a young man of sixteen.

Fergus whispered again to Cormac that he must prepare to run. The young man’s heart thumped in fear and anger.

“I won’t run,” he said.

“You’ll run if I say so,” Fergus insisted, not moving his lips.

The earl nudged his gray stallion with his knees, and the horse moved forward. Thunder shuddered and tensed, as if challenged. Cormac saw Patch jam his pistol into his belt and slide a musket from his saddlebag.

“You must run,” Fergus whispered in Irish. “If you don’t, there will be no witness, and nobody to avenge what might happen.”

“Is that Latin you’re speaking, my proud blacksmith?” the earl said. “Listen, Patch, listen to them talk Latin. Can’t manage the King’s English, but listen to them spout the old Latin.”

Fergus said nothing. Cormac could feel tension coming off him like bristles.

“That’s a lovely horse you’ve got there,” the earl said. As he came closer, Cormac noticed for the first time that the earl had a diamond cemented into his right bicuspid, worn like a badge of fashion.

Fergus stared at the earl.

“I’d say he’s worth about eight pounds,” the earl said. He turned to Patch. “Don’t you think, Patch? About eight pounds’ worth?”

“At least, milord,” Patch said, grinning. “P’raps more, sir.” The earl looked at Fergus for a long, calculating moment. His doughy face was very still.

“I want the horse,” the earl said.

“The horse is not for sale,” Fergus said.

“Is that so?” the earl said.

“Yes.”

“My good man, I don’t think you under stand me. I want that horse.”

The diamond glittered when he smiled.

“You see, this blasted famine has killed a lot of horses. Including many of my horses. So we’re buying horses. And that horse, dear fellow, looks to be worth at least eight pounds.”

He gestured with the pistol in a weary manner while he talked, his gun hand flopping loosely. Then, with a sigh, he slipped the pistol into his belt, as if deciding that even two Irishmen must understand that they had no way to resist. He took some coins from his coat pocket and slapped them together. Cormac wondered if he was about to do his juggling act. Patch and the others seemed impatient. Then, coming closer, the earl adopted a harder tone.