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.

De Flunkl sweats under his cloth tunic and daubs himself with a dock leaf, cupping the sweat in the fold of the leaf, and then licks it away to maintain the equilibrium of his internal humours. On the right, above them on the other side of the valley, the quadrants of fields have broken down into one another. Heifers, heavy sows and ewes, their lambs at their teat, laze along the way. The fields above them are untilled and unmanned in a quiet confusion. Pleasantly low-key chaos, idyllic almost, is everywhere.

All these animals, but especially the sheep, whose wool is particularly receptive to nature’s adhesives, like the entrapping filaments of spiders’ webs, are lightly dusted with pollen, turning them into a dull yellow parade of faded, tired beasts. The pollen-coating on their fur, skins and wool makes them appear very slightly further away, and more dead, than they actually are.

These broken fields are awash with June’s buttercups, glowing and bright in the sun. The whole upper side of the valley is a fractal legion of golden faces, a yellow multitude only occasionally punctured by tall clumps of thistles that look menacing and dark amongst so much golden shining.

Cattle, having broken down walls and burst through hedges, now freely mingle with squawking geese, going where they will. It is all very friendly, though earlier in the day the retinue had been overtaken by two escaped warring bulls that bucked and kicked and stampeded down the path in sideways bursts and kicks, stumbling and hurtling their horns against one another. They had met one of the bulls later in the morning on its side, along the path, a gash in its haunches, bawling sadly, its eyes raised towards them, baleful and confused, but it was toppled over by colic, not the horn that slashed it, its sides heaving and bursting with too much plenitude of rich grass, dark like the shade they are in, encompassed.

‘Noah’s vessel must have been a vehicle for great incestuous confusions and fornications,’ de Flunkl says to himself, almost happily, gazing at all the loose congregations of animals, and William of Roscrea gives, out of habit, his nodding assent.

Out of the forest, like another deeper echo or some auditory mirror, comes the tuneless humming la la la la, the perfect mimic to de Flunkl’s previous annoying humming.

Harold groans, beads of sweat blinding him, creating shards of light in his eyes like rainbows seen through a prism of crystal.

‘This,’ Harold says, ‘is no echo.’

‘Is this a bird?’ de Flunkl asks.

William of Roscrea is also blinded by a well of hot light from a gap between the heavy summer foliage, this absence made by a branch hanging solely from its sheath of bark that was, at some former point, struck by lightning. He blinks the glaring shine away and sees that four Gaels have run out of the woods, though maybe not, as they seem to always have been there from the steadfastness of their stance, the steadiness of their breaths. They hold the way ahead, which is also the higher ground.

Harold doesn’t know when this happened, nobody does. He drops his sack, and the procession comes to a halt.

An abrupt meeting – a gift from nature. The fox, far behind them, darts into the woods, the clatter of metal from inside the sack scaring it off, quelling its curiosity and alighting its self-preservation.

‘We wouldn’t have been warned if they wanted to take us,’ Harold says.

‘I know that,’ de Flunkl says. ‘Get the banner.’

The Gaels are all male, all bearded, all armed with spears. Their faces are sunburnt above their braided beards rounded off with beads. The front halves of their heads are shaved to the scalp and the hair behind grows long, beyond the shoulders. They have spirals painted onto their foreheads. Round their necks, hanging over their multi-coloured robes, are thin bronze chains that carry rudely carved wooden figurines, about the length of a hand, of circular women with no hair on their heads. Big-clitted women smiling little mysterious smiles out at the world, dragging the walls of their pussies apart, delighted with themselves. These little figurines are alien and puzzling, their facial features strangely sexless and vaguely surreal though non-threatening; their expansive vaginas twice as large as their already-oversized heads. That which lies beneath their heads, and above their gaping vulvas, is a minuscule torso; and de Flunkl is disgusted to see that not only are these little, wooden extra-terrestrial whores pulling their massive sexes apart, but that their long, apelike arms pass under their stretched legs at the knee to do so.

‘Ready yourselves,’ he remarks to Harold, who cocks his head absently, slanting his eyes so his nose becomes visible to himself, and wondering if these necklaces, merely, are literal representations of Gael women’s anatomy.

The Gaels, like their tokens, are also delighted with themselves. Untouched by the ravages of the sickness, they have become even more wandersome over the last three apocalyptic months, and their raiding, like their mourning and their weddings, is always strangely good-humoured. It is unsettling, their ways – good-humoured in times of strain and difficulty, ferocious in times of calm and mournful during feasts and while listening to musical refrains.

Saint John of Barrow, the fourth, the youngest and the least of the retinue, hitherto unmentioned, a quiet child with two missing front teeth and shocking green eyes, waves the black cloth over his head, back and forth, to signify that they are infected and to approach no closer and the four Gaels start calling to them in at least two different languages: Manx and Gaelic, and possibly there are smattered smidgeons of Catalan amongst their confusion of words.

‘They will not be diverted. They can see we aren’t infected,’ William says.

‘What are they saying?’ de Flunkl asks.

‘The one on the right is questioning the legitimacy of our eldest sons.’

‘Tell them to go back to their mountains, and to take their skinny sheep and phlegmatic wives with them,’ de Flunkl says.

‘My Lord, they have the higher ground.’

‘Translate, miscegenist,’ de Flunkl says and William does so, and one of the Gaels, the eldest, whose vermillion cape is folded in on itself and squirming as though it is alive, talks back in that queer guttural language de Flunkl knows to be mountain Gaelic. It sounds like the sheep the Gaels and peasants live in such close proximity with, and he speculates whether some foul Gaelic crossbreeding accounts for the choking sound of their r’s.

‘He says they have presents for us.’

‘Tell them,’ de Flunkl says, ‘these heathen sons of bitches that marry their own slaves and who, without papal recommendation, propagate with their own nieces, and who have never seen a looking glass save the ones made by the pools of blood their women leave when they menstruate shamelessly in public. Tell these hairy sodomites that give their mothers and sisters control over them with their barbaric courts they can only hold in shanty huts. Tell them that they will have to kill us if they are exacting a toll because this is not their highway, this is not their path, this is not their country, this is not their valley. It is the king’s land, guarded by much deeds, held by esteemed Christian men with mighty forces and many grateful dependents.’

William, looking at his master out of the corner of his eye, translates perhaps eight words from his statement. It seems much too short a translation for de Flunkl’s liking, but nevertheless the man with the crawling, bustling, demonic cape answers.

‘He says they are Christians, and that he was just talking to the king yesterday and that he said it is most definitely their land.’

‘Dubious claimants, I’d say,’ de Flunkl says, looking like he is adding some large figure in his head.

‘I think they have their own ones.’

‘Oh, I see. Tell them if they are Christians they shall render unto Caesar, but also tell them that they’re not. And also say they’ll forfeit their tongues for questioning orders with such speechifying.’

After another bout of the Gaelic tongue, which de Flunkl now is suspicious of because it all seems very amicable, William says, ‘He tells me that they definitely are Christians and that’s why they’re all alive, and that we’re not proper Christians and that’s why all our society is being destroyed.’

‘Ask them what those things are round their necks,’ Harold calls out, from behind, as he lets one of the horses nuzzle his open palm. ‘They’re very strange.’

‘That is a good question,’ de Flunkl concurs. ‘What are those slight bitches round the neck?’

‘I want to know, too,’ Saint John says, speaking for the first time since dawn, munching on a fistful of grass to remove the mank dust that has whistled and drifted through the gap in his teeth and accumulated in his mouth from letting his jaw hang slack while breathing so heavily along the trek.

Harold looks at the sky during a lengthy conversation in which two of the Gaels talk over one another, while William’s lips move silently in delayed comprehension. A batch of swallows disrupt the trees at head height, bursting out of it all at once like sweat from pores, and they are above their heads, warbling, arcing high over the valley like the curve of the world, and then they are gone.

‘Well,’ William of Roscrea says finally, the sweat on his back turning cold from inaction, his tunic sticking to him, ‘he says because we, he means you and I, or our people, are engaged in eliminating the family, which I suppose does mean his tribe, maybe, and do place youth as an attribute to be eternally guarded and envious of – I suppose when he speaks of he, he means his tribe, or the McMurroughs, or all of them, I’m not certain at all – and because we do not claim our children as our own if they are out of the strictest bonds of wedlock, but yet engage in much licentious freedoms with infected, unpropertied French whores, often infamous for their pestilential barrenness and knotty wombs, our mode of attraction has become warped, and that which we find attractive has become some non-fertile thing, because our women are applauded for their lack of fertility and dying in birth, for that does free up much bonds and property, and the applause does stretch to their unvirile lack of voracity regarding marital duties that they, our women, can only regard with trauma and revulsion. Therefore the women we find attractive are non-fertile, thin, childish and white, amorphous androgynes, strange weakling beasts who die of minor fevers or get caught in drizzly showers and then tremble to death in the autumns and dark solstices from the dampness within their clothes; women who cannot compose poetry or turn backwards calves in the womb or participate in any land disputes, or even cross rivers or small hills without pausing to take breath or to die, and because our women cannot give birth without dying themselves, they claim that these unlively properties do stretch to our menfolk and that, of course, it is impossible for us, with such a sickly culture as we do possess, to appreciate such a fine and beautiful passage as the woman round his neck does display, which has been carved for him by his own lively wife, so why bother explaining their healing properties when a beautiful woman in an eternal prime, which is the age of all women if their souls be strong, could only scare our kind?

‘The other, the younger,’ William says, his throat parched and his voice quavering from the length of his spiel, ‘seems to disagree somewhat and says that these enormous lower regions, stretched wide as the valley we are currently shaded by, do not ward off evil or sickness, but welcome it, embracing and holding it inside themselves, smilingly, and that women do not eat the evil of the world by their mouths, but digest it by the healthy internal fluids of their hidden regions that they can call forth at will, that attract evil diseases, and, but only incidentally, weak Norman men from Dublin and Kilkenny both, with their promising smells, but then that once inside they are eaten by the goodness of their women, held there until unleashed through the incarnation of the weak children they bear who will die without our – yours and mine – unnatural and interfering surgeries that give life to those who should die.’

‘I suppose,’ de Flunkl says, ‘it is rare to converse with such leisure and with no busyness in such an indiscriminate manner with such people, and in such a place. Though the surmise was confusedly told, I feel, momentarily, almost relieved from my ambitions and fears, but ask the eldest, I presume him the eldest, if he does truly believe those bald sluts round his neck have protected him from the sickness that does not even respect merchantry, or the king’s cousins, or God’s appointed clergymen?’

William of Roscrea sighs, his mouth dry from his long, complicated, but artful interpretation, and looks behind himself.

Harold is leaning sleepily off his horse, unafraid of death from these Gaels after this last spring, feeling it would be a good, pleasant way to go, by a spear or a sword, rather than what he witnessed in his own household, his wife and his young daughter now in a mass grave, sewn up in sacks and hurled down without prayer or service, though he did say a-one, even if he didn’t know which two sacks in the pile below him he was directing his praying towards.

‘I have heard,’ Harold says softly to Saint John so as to distract himself, ‘a Gael has a way about himself of soliloquying so much, with such an incessant flatness in the voice, that the listener is provoked into falling asleep on the very spot he stands, and that the Gael does do this so as to make his murdering all the easier.’

Saint John of Barrow does not answer. The stupid child is on his hunkers hungrily eating an entire troop of mushrooms indiscriminately off the path, not listening to the translations. Harold Tuite wants to warn the childish boy away from the ugly fungi, but a wave of tiredness and sadness overcomes him and, besides, the Gaels have begun to speak again.

Once the Gael, in turn, is finished speaking, William of Roscrea is silent for a while.

‘Well?’ de Flunkl asks.

William sees that his master’s hands are trembling, and have been for some time, the scant muscles in his light-haired forearms every now and again spasming in large uncontrollable flickers that remind him of the sudden leaps of a fire.

‘He says he is a Christian and that God is good,’ William says, ‘as is shown by the highly discriminate depletion of our populace, but that he is still a Christian so he does not believe in it, or in the magical properties of any tokens that do not relate to the blood of Christ, but that it functions all the same, and until its operations have been disproven, which they have not yet been, he shall continue to wear it, out of not only respect for his women, but also out of the shrewd practicality so famously belonging to his people that he ventures even we would not deny – his practicality, that is – if we have ever had the great fortune to trade with a Gael.’

De Flunkl looks at the Gael’s cape, which is now bulging and becoming more hectic and bustling, twisting and animated in movement, so much so that Harold momentarily believes he sees a demon’s features pressed up against the material, trying to escape.

‘This is a strangely rational madman,’ de Flunkl remarks, ‘a hybrid hermaphrodite of wantonness perhaps, but one in sound control of his faculties. Tell them we shall readily spare them, and receive their gifts.’

William of Roscrea and the Gaels sally back and forth. Eyebrows creased, William of Roscrea says, ‘I am told that I have a wonderful facility for the earth’s native language and for that reason I am to stand behind a tree.’

‘Well, do it, so,’ de Flunkl says, and William of Roscrea strides over to an ash tree and leans his face against its coolness.

The Gael with the tumultuous cape drops one of his arms into its folds, grunts and withdraws his hand with a young rat hanging off his thumb, Gael’s blood seeping down its black eyes. It thrashes its body and long tail around, as though kicking from a noose. The Gael rips it off with his other hand, sucking at the torn skin, and hurls the rat at the procession. It whistles by with a squeak, landing in the grass behind them, where it rights itself and scurries off into the woods.

‘What is this?’ de Flunkl asks.

The other Gaels are in a circle around the caped Gael, lifting fistfuls of rats out of the folds and throwing them down at them. One large rat sails by de Flunkl’s shoulder and hits Saint John in the face. He holds his cheek and keeps chewing mushrooms. Another slaps Harold in the leg, rustling his breeches. It lands on its back, scrambles away.

‘What power do they believe these creatures possess over us?’ Harold asks, watching the rats fly through the air.

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