Cover

NOBBER

Oisín Fagan

Dedication

For Yanina and Santiago

Osprey de Flunkl …

Osprey de Flunkl, who wants everything he sees and whom you will call Sir, in a retinue of four, moves through a valley at a tired pace that all his men have conspired with him to make appear leisurely. De Flunkl, a young man in his late teens who leads the procession, is singing la la la la la tunelessly. Due to the yawning dimensions of the valley that contains him, these superfluous noises are, in a lessened form, returned to him in lagging echoes. Behind him, his serving man, Harold Tuite, carries his gear for him in a brown sack, across his back. This man is all crooked and bent over with the heavy sack, which, he feels, is weighted down with the sins they all filled it with in Trim. The sin is that oldest one, that of property, and de Flunkl has made off with much of it, abetted by his serving men and the advantage of the deepest sickness.

They have been travelling for three days. Yesterday, they were in Trim. Now they are moving towards Nobber in an attempt to accrue some more sins, but please, see them as though from above.

A young fox follows them, darting behind tall clumps of grass at a distance. Bluebells, nettles, strange strains of French hollyhocks, clearly imported, but how they came upon a place so remote is only to be wondered at. A thrush lands on a foxglove, tipping it over with its weight. It opens its beak to them, and chirrups, insanely, its little black eyes vacant. An ocean of nettles ripples in the wind. They smell sweet and dusty. What they have left behind them is the dark blue of the Wicklow Mountains, the outline imprinted against scant, dreamish clouds, giving them definition and shaping them. There is a hardwood forest on their left that creeps upwards with the valley at a gentle slope. This throws total shade on them. Underneath the nettles that occasionally, as though they are making love, form complex symbiotic knots to catch their legs, hidden, are middle-aged trees’ dead stumps, fresh and raw, still bleeding sap from recent hacked amputations, and for this the procession has had to dismount so as not to break the two horses’ legs and, now, the last man in line, William of Roscrea, leads the bridle of the first, and the other follows of its own will, occasionally dragging its sensitive, black nose through the tall grass.