‘Thanks for tonight. Thanks for everything.’
‘Ye want me to drive ye down to Shannon after mass?’
‘Thanks, but it’s probably best on my own.’
‘Well, see you Monday, then,’ said Pete, setting off down the hill. His lights burned down the hedges and disappeared.
Scully opened the door. There was still some life in the fire. He heaped on some more turf and a few chunks of coal and stirred it back to brightness. Room by room he went through the place, trying to imagine them all in it, but he was too tired and drunk perhaps, for the images skidded away from him as he straightened a rug here, stood a chair there, then finally went to bed upstairs in sheets that smelled of factories and shops and sunnier places.
Eleven
SCULLY WOKE SOMETIME IN THE night, his throat raw and dry. He heaved himself out of his bed into the cold and stumped downstairs for a glass of water. Cattle bellowed from Brereton’s sheds down beyond the castle. At the sink he saw that the sky had cleared and there were stars out. A misshapen moon hung high and bright in the black. Down at the castle there were lights. He stood there naked and shivering by the window, watching them move through the trees. Kids, he guessed, local teenagers playing up on a Saturday night. He drank his water and placed the glass in the sink. He wondered if Jimmy Brereton knew. It couldn’t hurt to take a look.
By the door he slipped on his greatcoat, walked into his gum-boots and pulled a scarf about himself. The hard, icy air hit him flat in the face as he stepped outside into the night. The luminous dial on his watch said three in the morning.
Scully went cautiously down the field in the darkness. There was no wind, only a sharp mist rising from the ground. Down there through the trees — no, beyond the trees, right down in the valley — lights were moving. As he climbed the stile at the edge of his field, Scully saw how the lights snaked; they were a procession. He cocked his head for the sounds of revelry, but heard nothing except the sound of Jimmy Brereton’s cows.
Scully crossed the road and climbed through the wall where the ash wood met the road. He picked his way over fallen branches, crunching through the frosty detritus with his own breath like a beacon before him. The great shadow of the castle reached out beyond the trees, silent, blank, still. With frozen grass snapping at his bare shins, he crossed the courtyard beside the ruins of the pumphouse, now just dark, reeling blocks at the corner of his vision, and came to the brow of the decline to see the romping melée of burning torches turn in across the fields and come circling beneath the bare oak beneath the castle steps. Torches. Yes, they were flames he saw travelling high off the ground. Now Scully heard the thud of feet, and as the lights passed beneath the old tree, he saw the glistening, steaming bodies of horses, he saw the bearded faces of men. Staffs. A lank standard. The breaking mud rose before them like a bow wave.
Ripping through blackberry and nettle, Scully bolted for the cover of a crumbling wall. The cold had reached his balls now, they felt brittle as Christmas baubles between his thighs. He pulled the coat harder about himself and peered through a gap in the stones. Down there, in the gently sloping field beneath the castle steps, the horsemen had assembled. There were about twenty of them in fancy dress. They were wildhaired, cloaked and highbooted. Two of them wore spattered grey chestplates and rags across their brows. Scully heard the horses snorting and heaving for wind. They shot out columns of steam and rattled metallic shudders. With firelight in the dark balls of their eyes, the riders looked up at the keep, and Scully tried to think, to find his way ahead of all this. He shook with cold. Out in the valley there were no more lights, no floods burning in the yards of local farms, no handy sign of life. He watched and waited, mesmerized. He saw weapons now, scars and blood, the restless twitching of reins. He saw the sheen of sweat along the horses’ flanks and the united gaze of the horsemen. They looked a mercenary lot, fierce and stoic. In all his life he’d never seen men like these. From where he crouched he couldn’t quite see the front of the castle keep, whether or not a light showed, if a door was ajar, or if someone was up there.
Around the ruined yard wall he crawled on his hands and knees till he could clamber across a mossy pile of rubble and make the cover of the blackthorn hedge hard up against the forecourt itself, but halfway to the hedge Scully put a foot down a hole and staggered and lost his balance completely. He tumbled and crashed and cursed down the slope, and when he came to a halt, smarting with pain and fright, he was out in the open, plain as midday. There was no use running. He figured it was just as well to stand and show himself in the weird light of the sputtering torches. He pulled himself upright, feeling the soft mud shift beneath the broken surface, but the riders sat unmoved from their fixed stations of expectation. Each of them was saddled, tense, eyes upcast to the keep where no light shone and no figure moved. Almost out of politeness he cleared his throat and kicked a couple of stones together to get their attention, but it felt as though he didn’t exist.
With arms held high, he stumbled down onto the muddy grass into the strong smell of horses. Closer there was a sourer scent, the stink of unwashed men. At the sudden splash of piss from a horse in the rear, Scully grunted in fright but not a man stirred. Their torches crackled, flames rigid in the still air, giving off the reek of pitch. With his pulse like an animal trapped beneath his skin, Scully moved between the riders, all but touching the heaving, rancid flanks of their mounts. Some of the horses had black, congealed wounds on their chests, and they looked as tired and cold and dazed as their riders. Some were boys, their scrawny legs bare and stippled with gooseflesh. And how they craned their necks, these riders. It was as though any moment some great and terrible event would explode upon them, as if something, someone up there could set them in motion. The sky was a comfortless blanket on them. The ground was mired and trodden. Shit stood in vaporous cakes between hoofs. The castle keep rose as a cudgel before them. He felt himself craning, waiting, almost failing to breathe. A horse shook its mane and Scully felt the mist of sweat against his cheek. His feet took root in the ground as they continued to wait and he waited with them. It was true, he knew it, something was about to happen.
But the awful stillness went on.
‘Is anybody there?’ Scully cried out toward the keep, his voice breaking with the strain of it. He was gasping with cold now and feeling the earth suck at him, drawing him into the fecund mire. ‘Is anyone here, then? Anyone at all?’
No head turned. Nothing stirred in the yawning dark of the keep and its broken wings. The ivy feeding off the ancient stones glittered with firelight. The crooked hewn steps of the castle approach stood bare of everything except rabbit pellets but the riders waited on undeterred. Scully’s skin hurt now. His eyes felt blistered. The air in his lungs scorched him and the buttons of his greatcoat burned all down his body. His legs stiffened and he was suddenly afraid of being swallowed up by the earth. It would kill him to stay any longer, but he stood transfixed, unable to imagine a cold worse than this, unable to convince himself to move. You’ll die, he told himself, you’ll die if you don’t go. He
heard his heart creaking in his chest. Like a man outside himself he saw his body move. He was a man trying to fly and the earth and the cold tore like a curtain as he pulled the coat about himself and ran.
• • •
AT THE TOP OF THE hill, quaking at his own door and sobbing with cold and fright, he turned again and saw the lights that burned patient as nature itself, burning as stars through the trees.