A Game of Sorrows Read Online Free PDF Page B

husband? Perhaps, who can tell? He has little enough to him. I do not know why she married him – I had thought her eyes were turned elsewhere. Perhaps it was to spite our grandmother.’ He mused a moment on this and then brought himself back to the point. ‘Anyhow, the dreary feast eventually approached its end and it was time for the one thing they had not been able to prevent: the poet’s blessing. Now, Alexander, I know that this is not a land of poets, but ours is, or was. I am not talking here of men who compose pretty sonnets.’
    ‘I know that.’ My mother had spoken often of the poets, learned men who spent years in their training and were greatly honoured. Like the castes of genealogists, doctors, lawmen, their knowledge passed down their families for generations in the service and under the patronage of the powerful. Their word could legitimise, glorify a leader and his line or cast his name for ever into the ashes.
    ‘This man’s name is Finn O’Rahilly, the last of a long line of poets who served the O’Dohertys of Inishowen. He claims to remember our parents, your mother and my father, but he can have been little more than a scrap of a thing in the days when they travelled in those parts. He was still hardly more than a child when Sir Cahir O’Doherty’s rebellion was crushed, but he found refuge in Donegal and had some schooling amongst the last of the poets there. Finn O’Rahilly lives in the hills above the north coast, making some sort of living as a hireling poet for those who would keep to the old customs. My grandmother sought him out herself, and hired him to declaim at Deirdre’s wedding, much against my sister’s own wishes and those of the Blackstones.’ He paused, remembering. ‘And such a declamation was never heard at any wedding in my lifetime.’
    ‘What do you mean?’
    ‘He gave no blessing, but a curse. He damned Maeve for her own marriage outside the blood of the pure Irish, and your mother and my sister for theirs; he taunted her with the loss of her children; he told her our grandfather would soon be dead, and myself also, and that Deirdre’s marriage would be barren. There would be no great rising of the O’Neills from the line of our grandmother, for her line would end before her own eyes. He …’
    ‘Stop!’ I said. ‘You begin to lose me. What “great rising” are you talking of?’
    He looked at his servant, who shrugged his shoulders, and then he looked at me.
    ‘You know that the land of Ireland is under the control of the English Crown?’
    ‘I know,’ I said, ‘that the king has striven to bring peace and civility to that …’
    But this time it was he who stopped me, waving his hand as if to dismiss an importunate dog. ‘Spare me that, for the love of all that’s holy. To be preached civility by brutes without culture, with no notion of hospitality and with the manners of the sty, is too much in my homeland. I will not hear it in the mouth of my own cousin.’
    ‘I only meant …’
    ‘What? You have no notion of the slaughters and barbarity perpetrated on our people in the name of civility. The burning of crops, the starvation, the massacres of women and children that sent men half-mad with grief.’ He turned away as if he did not trust himself to master his passions.
    ‘I am sorry,’ I said. ‘Go on.’
    He took a moment to compose himself. ‘The tale I have to tell you is one that requires subtlety, but I have little of that. Hear me out, and I shall tell you in fewer words and less time than is needful, for time is short tonight.’
    I nodded my acquiescence and he continued. ‘The last of Ireland to submit to the English was Ulster. The Old English – our grandfather’s race – have held the garrison at Carrickfergus for centuries past, and there are many Scots and some English settled in Antrim and Down, but as to the rest, it was, until twenty years ago, the preserve of the Gaelic Irish, much of it under the control of the