For want of an option, I thanked him, and sought out a corner for myself in the ruined church. Much of the roof had gone, and what little remained was of old thatch. When the elements were at their worst there can have been few places of true shelter in the shell of the building, but the corner by the hearth protected me from the advances of the east wind, and the night was dry. It was almost dark. I lit the candle I had found in the niche, and lay down amongst the rushes, wishing I had Sean’s heavy mantle about me now. I flinched as a bat swooped down from a rotting beam above my head and swept out into the night. I had never liked the creatures. I had always had a terror that they would entangle themselves in my hair. I was glad now of my monk’s hood and pulled it up about me. Other creatures scuttled around me, in the rushes, across the stone floor. The noises of the wood seemed to come closer as evening advanced further into night.
O’Rahilly himself sat in the doorway, looking outwards beyond the clearing into the darkness of the wood. I wondered what he was seeing, what he was remembering, the young boy who had sought sanctuary and training with the last of the poets when Phelim was in his prime and my mother in her bloom; what he had known before the cause was lost and the heroes fled, what trials had brought him here, to cling to the last remnants of his dignity in this desolate place. I wondered if he had ever had a family, loved a woman … For a while I had thought he might be sleeping, but his eyes were open, and every so often his lips moved in some silent speech. The last remnant of his race.
‘Tell me a poem,’ I said into the silence.
He did not move and so I asked him again.
‘Why do you want to hear a poem?’
‘Because I want to know the art of it, the life. I want to know what my forefathers knew, all those generations that will be lost now, in me.’
‘Hear then “The Downfall of the Gael”.’ And the same low, clear, powerful voice that I had heard on the night of my grandfather’s wake went out into the night.
As his voice carried to me, the faces of my family – of those who were dead and gone and those who were now left, in distress and abandoned to fear – came before me. The face of the pilgrims Stephen, and Michael, came before me; Deirdre, with her vision of death; Murchadh and his sons came before me, with Maeve leading their decimated hopes and empty dreams. The memory of myself and Andrew, in our desperate flight to Dunluce, came to me with such force that I had to remind myself that that night was past. I wished I had never spoken.
After a moment, O’Rahilly came back into the church and went to a chest out of which he lifted some garment I could not see. Without so much as turning his head to look at me, he then went out of the door and walked through the circle, crossing himself as he passed the centre stone, and out into the woods. I laid my head down upon the rushes and prayed for that lost man and his lost brothers, and it was all I could do not to forget my religion and ask God’s mercy on those of my blood, of this race, who had gone to Him before me.
I closed my eyes and wished for sleep. If it came, it came only lightly, for there was not one moment when I was not aware of the rustling and scuttling of creatures on the ground, the beating and swooping of things in the air, and the creaking of the trees in the wind. And then, into it all, came a sound I had never heard before, but knew; a sound that should not have been in these woods: a howling. I stood up cautiously and quietly snuffed out the candle, which had burnt very low. Hardly daring to breathe, I pressed myself as far back against the wall of the church as I could, and waited. A cloud passed from the face of the moon at the top of the trees, and I watched in a kind of terror as the wolf slowly crossed the circle, pausing at the centre to sniff the air. It howled once again and, looking for a long moment in the direction of the church, walked on, in search of its brothers.
I did not sleep after that, but stood at the edge of the burial ground keeping watch for I knew not what. The bats swirled from tree to tree, an owl hooted somewhere in the woods. I was startled by a movement amongst the stones of the burial ground, but it was nothing more than a solitary fox. I tried to turn my mind from thoughts of what might have happened in this place before the Christianity of Patrick had claimed it for God, but the more I tried to find consolation amongst the scriptures I had by heart, the more my mind ran to the powers of the Devil, to the foul and dreadful deeds committed in his name, to the paganism, the baals, celebrated wherever the light of the gospel did not shine. My mind ran to what Sean had said, long ago now, it seemed, but in truth not so long ago, as I had mocked the superstitions of his people, of my people. He had told me of the attempt made on his life as he rode alone at night, and of his fear then, of the powers of darkness and the spirits of the world beyond, and I had scorned them. ‘These forces may have retreated from your land,’ he had said, ‘but they have a home yet in ours, and they are not ready to be vanquished.’ I wished I could have told him now that I understood.
Where Finn O’Rahilly had gone, and if he had encountered the wolf, I did not know. He had had no light with him, taken no staff for travelling, no food or drink that I could see. As my eyes became more accustomed to the darkness, and my ears to the natural sounds of the night, my body began to relax a little, and I could see perhaps how a man for whom the world has little further use might eke out his days in a place such as this. But surely that fate would not be mine; surely my grandmother’s madness could not take hold in the minds of reasonable men? I wondered if Finn O’Rahilly had gone to report me to the authorities – whatever authorities there were that would take the word of one such as he – but I saw that the pouch of money lay still on the ground, unopened, where he had left it.