Flint and Mirror Read online

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  But I know that all things that happen are not due to chance and happenstance alone but are brought about by intelligences who have constraints—but who have wills as well.

  prologue

  CONFITEOR

  Everyone agreed: it had grown colder in Rome in these latter days.

  The damp chill of winter lasted longer, the great stone houses and palaces of the noble rioni remained cold when spring came. The churches were colder still. The warm blue Italian skies of former times blazed as ever in innumerable paintings, but were less true now. In truth the whole world had grown colder, from China to Brazil, but Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone, didn’t know that; his own land—which he had not seen in a decade—was still green, still warm, in his mind. England, yes, had been cold: when as a boy he had dwelt there, he had gone with his fosterers the Sidneys and walked out on the frozen Thames river, hard as granite, where buildings and arcades of ice had been put up, lit at night by candles and cressets that seemed to shiver in the cold; sleighs flitted past as on a broad highway, drawn by horses with studded shoes, casting off a glitter of ice with every step.

  How long ago that was.

  The apartments in the Palazzo Salviati that the Pope had provided to the Earl were furnished with charcoal braziers, but the tall windows weren’t glazed, and the Earl refused to batten the shutters at nightfall. He slept through the night wrapped in the rugs of his couch, sitting up, his head propped on pillows like a sick man. A naked sword within hand’s reach. He thought that on any night he might be murdered by agents of one or another of the powers he had striven with, or betrayed, or failed. The King of Spain’s son. The English Crown. His own clan and liegemen. Sanctissimus himself, or his cardinals for the matter of that: they might soon tire of the Earl’s endless pleas for money and arms whereby he might return to Ireland, of his plotting when in vino plenus with his fellow exiles—this one brooding on vengeance, that one mad for justice—who might themselves hate him secretly. A pillow over his face as he slept. But the great and beautiful ones, the legions of earth and air, whom most of all he had failed and who had failed him in turn—they could not reach him here to punish or to harm: could no more leave that island than he could return to it.

  But it was summer now, a blessing; on waking he felt it, this long day breaking, somehow suddenly. His bedchamber door was rapped on lightly and opened; his attendants brought a basin of water for him to wash in, white towels for his hands and face. He rose, pushing aside the bedclothes and standing up with an old man’s groan, naked. Would his lordship break his fast, he was asked, or attend Mass first? The Earl looked down on himself, the red curls of his breast gone gray, the scars and welts where no hair grew. The land that was himself, in all its history. Was he well or ill? He could not say. He would hear Mass, he said. He was helped into the long wadded coat that the Romans wear at morning, vestaglia, robe de chambre, and took the hands of the men on either side of him while he put his feet, twisted and knuckly and seeming not his own, into velvet slippers. He drank the posset given him. He thought of turning back to bed. He belted the robe, thanked his attendants, who stepped away backward from him bowing and out the door, a thing which always charmed him. With a great yawn, a gulp of morning, he awoke entirely at last.

  * * *

  The Salviati palace contained a small chapel where each morning the Archbishop said Mass, as he was required by canon law to do, and wished to do. His daily congregation was small: the palace’s serving nuns, a superannuated monsignor, the Archbishop’s secretary. And the Earl of Tyrone, taking a gilded chair at a prie-dieu between the two rows of benches. When the Archbishop entered, followed by his server, he touched O’Neill on his shoulder as he passed, smiling, looking toward the Mass vessels and the Gospel open on the altar.

  Peter Lombard, Archbishop of Armagh in Ulster, had never entered his See. He had been a bright Munster boy, sent off to Oxford and then the Continent to study; earned a doctorate at the Catholic college of Louvain in Belgium. When he came to Rome he so impressed Pope Clement VII that he ascended quickly through several appointments and soon was made Archbishop. He was the obvious choice for Armagh, but though he was anointed and given the ring and crozier he could never reach his seat in Ulster; couldn’t be shepherd to his flock, couldn’t marry or bury, couldn’t say a High Mass for them on holy-days. Catholic clergy in Ireland were being imprisoned, exiled, hanged, and butchered. He would have gone to Ireland anyway but the Holy Father forbade it, and instead made Peter his Domestic Prelate, with a good income attached. The Irish exiles in Rome were made his concern. Like his friend Hugh O’Neill, he would never leave Rome, nor ever stand again on Irish soil.

  I will go unto the altar of God, he said, hands lifted to the standing crucifix on the altar. And in the soft Latin of the Italian church the server answered: To God who gave joy to my youth. The Earl whispered in concert with the priest, he in Irish, the priest in Latin: Why do you turn me away, why am I made to go on in sorrow, while my enemy afflicts me? How many times in how many ages had that question been asked, the Earl wondered, and how often gone unanswered. He felt his tears arise, as they did often now, at small things, at nothing.

  Midway in the Mass the Archbishop raised the circle of bread that had become transformed, bread into body; then wine into blood. The nuns rose and in a line, gray ghosts, approached the rail to partake. Panis angelicus. On this day the Earl would not. He could not; he had not confessed, had not done his penance, his sins had not been forgiven.

  * * *

  Hugh O’Neill attended divine service most mornings; in the evenings, if he did not engage in visionary plots and plans with other old Irishmen like himself, he sat with the Archbishop in his chambers, for the Archbishop, author of the huge De regno Hiberniæ sanctorum insula commentarius, his account of the saints and defenders of the Irish realm, wished to compile the intimate knowledge that Hugh O’Neill had of the events of the last Irish defense against the heretic. He was the Earl’s historian; he put questions and wrote down what Hugh answered, when he could answer: the names and clans of old companions, the course of battles lost or won, the years and months and days of them; the letters of supplication or refusal, the oaths sworn and broken. The voice of the old Queen: Hugh would not tell the Archbishop how it was that he had come to hear that voice, and spoke instead of a sort of sense he had had, or a sensitivity to the procession of events: that he could know them at a distance, or in a time yet to come.

  On Fridays he was a penitent: the Archbishop was his confessor, sat alone knee to knee with the Earl, his face turned away and his hand at times hiding his eyes, listening without speaking, unless what he heard needed explication or inqui
ry. In their tall cages the Archbishop’s turtle-doves moaned, flitting pointlessly, gifts of the new Pope, Paul V. Here too Hugh was allowed a chair, was not made to lower himself to his knees, from which posture (he had said to the Archbishop) he might never rise again. And with head lowered, he confessed. Bless me, Father, for I have sinned, in thought, word, and deed.

  A week’s sins could be told in the tenth part of an hour; the old Earl had few of what the priest called Occasions of Sin now. Hugh O’Neill’s confessions were not of present peccata but of the sins of his whole lived life, not so different from the history the Archbishop was writing, except that in the written history the crimes that the Earl acknowledged were excluded, whereas in confession they were probed and totted up with care. The nightly history-telling began at the beginning of Hugh’s coming of age and went toward the end, to these rooms in Rome; the Friday confessions, however, had started at the end—the end of all the wars and all the battles in the wars and the things done in the battles and after them—and went backward, toward the beginning. Each week the Earl and his confessor turned back a little further, seeking what must be honestly spoken of now, all that he should have done and did not do, what he did and should not have done. Hugh O’Neill had never been an observant son of the Church; when it was advantageous he would enter a church, or kneel with his captains before a hunted priest in the wilderness for a blessing, but what things he had done as a warrior, as a leader, as the O’Neill and the champion of Ireland’s and his own clan’s rights and freedoms—those he would not have called sins; and even now in the face of the Archbishop’s gentle questioning he sometimes resisted. When he could say no more, baffled by himself, and they had reached a place to stop, they arose together and exchanged a kiss of peace.

  In the course of the years of exile, the Earl’s and the Archbishop’s, these two histories of Hugh O’Neill—of his acts and of his soul—reached the moment in his life where they crossed, like two riders each headed for the other’s starting point: as one went toward the end, to matters hardest to speak of, so full of failures and defeats, the other reached the years of youth and childhood, when he went unschooled in grace and sin, and mostly learned to do things, to ride and run and throw the javelin, wrestle and brag, wake and sleep in the green world.

  one

  FLINT AND MIRROR

  RATH

  It was in the spring that his fosterers the O’Hagans brought Hugh O’Neill to the castle at Dungannon. It was a great progress in the boy Hugh’s eyes, twenty or thirty horses jingling with brass trappings, carts bearing gifts for his O’Neill uncles at Dungannon, red cattle lowing in the van, gallowglass and archers and women in bright scarves, O’Hagans and McMahons and their dependents. And he knew that he, but ten years old, was the center of that progress, on a dappled pony, with a new mantle wrapped around his skinny body and a new ring on his finger.

  He kept seeming to recognize the environs of the castle, and scanned the horizon for it, and questioned his cousin Phelim, who had come to fetch him to Dungannon, how far it was every hour until Phelim grew annoyed and told him to ask next when he saw it. When at last he did see it, a fugitive sun was just then looking out, and sunshine glanced off the wet, lime-washed walls of its palisades and made it seem bright and near and dim and far at once, heart-catching, for to Hugh the stone tower and its clay and thatch outbuildings were all the castles he had ever heard of in songs. He kicked his pony hard, and though Phelim and the laughing women called to him and reached out to keep him, he raced on, up the long muddy track that rose up to a knoll where now a knot of riders were gathering, their javelins high and slim and black against the sun: his uncles and cousins O’Neill, who when they saw the pony called and cheered him on.

  Through the next weeks he was made much of, and it excited him; he ran everywhere, an undersized, red-headed imp, his stringy legs pink with cold and his high voice too loud. Everywhere the big hands of his uncles touched him and petted him, and they laughed at his extravagances and his stories, and when he killed a rabbit they praised him and held him aloft among them as though it had been twenty stags. At night he slept among them, rolled in among their great odorous shaggy shapes where they lay around the open turf fire that burned in the center of the hall. Sleepless and alert long into the night he watched the smoke ascend to the opening in the roof and listened to his uncles and cousins snoring and talking and breaking wind after their ale.

  That there was a reason, perhaps not a good one and kept secret from him, why on this visit he should be put first ahead of older cousins, given first choice from the thick stews in which lumps of butter dissolved, and listened to when he spoke, Hugh felt but could not have said. Now and again he caught one or another of the men regarding him steadily, sadly, as though he were to be pitied; and again, a woman would sometimes, in the middle of some brag he was making, fold him in her arms and hug him hard. He was in a story whose plot he didn’t know, and it made him the more restless and wild. Once when running into the hall he caught his uncle Turlough Luineach and a woman of his having an argument, he shouting at her to leave these matters to men; when she saw Hugh, the woman came to him, pulled his mantle around him and brushed leaves and burrs from it. “Will they have him dressed up in an English suit then for the rest of his life?” she said over her shoulder to Turlough Luineach, who was drinking angrily by the fire.

  “His grandfather Conn had a suit of English clothes,” Turlough said into his cup. “A fine suit of black velvet, I remember, with gold buttons and a black velvet hat. With a white plume in it!” he shouted, and Hugh couldn’t tell if he was angry at the woman, or Hugh, or himself. The woman began crying; she drew her scarf over her face and left the hall. Turlough glanced once at Hugh, and spat into the fire.

  Nights they sat in the light of the fire and the great reeking candle of reeds and butter, drinking Dungannon beer and Spanish wine and talking. Their talk was one subject only: the O’Neills. Whatever else came up in talk or song related to that long history, whether it was the strangeness—stupidity or guile, either could be argued—of the English colonials; or the raids and counter-raids of neighboring clans; or stories out of the far past. Hugh couldn’t always tell, and perhaps his elders weren’t always sure, what of the story had happened a thousand years ago and what of it was happening now. Heroes rose up and raided, slew their enemies, and carried off their cattle and their women; O’Neills were crowned ard Rí, High King, at Tara. There was mention of their ancestor Niall of the Nine Hostages and of the high king Julius Caesar; of Brian Boru and Cuchulain, who lived long ago, and of the King of Spain’s daughter, yet to come; of Shane O’Neill, now living, and his fierce Scots redshanks. Hugh’s grandfather Conn had been an Ò Neill, the O’Neill, head of his clan and its septs; but he had let the English dub him Earl of Tyrone. There had always been an O’Neill, invested at the crowning stone at Tullahogue to the sound of St. Patrick’s bell; but Conn O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone, had knelt before King Harry over the sea, and had promised to plant corn, and learn English. And when he lay dying he said that a man was a fool to trust the English.

  Within the tangled histories, each strand bright and clear and beaded with unforgotten incident but inextricably bound up with every other, Hugh could perceive his own story: how his grandfather had never settled the succession of his title of an Ò Neill; how Hugh’s uncle Shane had risen up and slain his own half-brother Matthew, who was Conn’s bastard son and Hugh’s father, and now Shane called himself the O’Neill and claimed all Ulster for his own, and raided his cousins’ lands whenever he chose with his six fierce sons; how he, Hugh, had true claim to what Shane had usurped. Sometimes all this was as clear to him as the branchings of a winter-naked tree against the sky; sometimes not. The English … there was the confusion. Like a cinder in his eye, they baffled his clear sight.

  Turlough Luineach tells with relish: “Then comes up Sir Henry Sidney with all his power, and Shane? Can Shane stand against him? He cannot! It’s as much as he can do to save
his own skin. And that only by leaping into the Blackwater and swimming away. I’ll drink the Lord Deputy’s health for that, a good friend to Conn’s true heir…”

  Or, “What do they ask?” a brehon, a lawgiver, states. “You bend a knee to the Queen, and offer all your lands. She takes them and gives you the title Earl—and all your lands back again. Surrender and regrant,” he said in English: “You are then as her urragh, but nothing has changed…”

  “And they are sworn then to help you against your enemies,” says Turlough.

  “No,” says another, “you against theirs, even if it be a man sworn to you or your own kinsman whom they’ve taken a hatred to. Conn was right: a man is a fool to trust them.”

  “Think of Earl Desmond, imprisoned now in London, who trusted them.”

  “Desmond is a thing of theirs. He is a Norman, he has their blood. Not the O’Neills.”

  “Fubún,” says the blind poet O’Mahon in a quiet high voice that stills them all:

  Fubún on the gray foreign gun,

  Fubún on the golden chain;

  Fubún on the court that talks English,

  Fubún on the denial of Mary’s son.

  Hugh listens, turning from one speaker to the other, frightened by the poet’s potent curse. He feels the attention of the O’Neills on him.

  * * *

  “In Ireland there are five kingdoms,” O’Mahon the poet said. “One in each of the five directions. There was a time when each of the kingdoms had her king, and a court, and a castle-seat with lime-washed towers; battlements of spears, and armies young and laughing.”