The Fall of Light Read Online Free PDF Page B

surged with people,
     and then Tomas Foley leapt through the window and shattered the glass and arrived bleeding in the street.

6
    In the emptiness of that same day, Teige conversed with the swan. He knew the various mythologies of the swan
     that had been passed to him in the form of stories told by his mother. He knew of the daughters of Lir who had been banished
     into swanhood on Lough Ern for nine hundred years. He knew the tale of Leda and the swan that was Zeus, and the sons of God,
     the twins who were stars, Castor and Polydeuces. So he realized that the transformation of his father into the white bird
     that sailed by the shore of the river was neither unique norfearful. It was almost fitting, he thought. For his father would have taken a kind of natural pride in at last becoming part
     of legend. So, while the twins hunted for sloeberries in the woods, Teige came down to the riverside and told the swan in
     plain Irish that he was sorry for what had happened to him.
    “I knew we should not have crossed the river,” he said. “I was not afraid of it, but I knew. As you know now,” he added. “Let
     that be the end of it between us.”
    Wind made the river into waves that lapped softly. The swan did not sail away. It stayed while Teige fed it the heads and
     tails of trout.
    “Where is my mother?” he asked, but heard only the slow soft lapping of the waters.
    “I suppose there are advantages in being a swan,” Finan said when they had returned with berries.
    “Indeed there are,” his twin agreed, but could not think of any until Teige told them.
    “For him there’s no time now. He’s in the everlasting.”
    “Here?”
    “Yes, here, and anywhere he chooses to go. He can swim into the past or the future and be a swan there.”
    “But not a man again?”
    “No,” Teige said, and they three sat and pondered this and watched the inscrutable eye of the swan and the way its feathers
     ruffled sometimes when there seemed no breeze.
    The darkness that night was deep and damp and starless. It painted the woods at their back into the sky and made the river
     before them into a black slickness that licked the air. The brothers waited for Tomas in the half-sleep of those who know
     trouble is on its way. The world turned with them lying but not sleeping beside their horses in the wetness of the night.
     They listened to Teige tell them the story of Orpheus and the Underworld. Then afterwards they listened to the wind in the
     woods and heard there the voices of ghosts and fairies and other spirits who had nowhere else to be. They heard them and shuddered
     in the fear that a hand might reach out and arrive on their shoulders at any moment, and that it would be not the hand of
     agent or landlord, but the inviting gesture into the Underworld of the dreamless Dead.
    So, when they heard the first hoofbeats they did not move. They were huddled together in a grey blanket. Their eyes were wide.
     Though their horses neighed and moved about and beat at the ground with the smell of terror that was coming, and though soon
     the rider shouted out to them, still they did not move from the paralysis of fear. It was not until Tomas had ridden to within
     twenty feet
of
the bank of the river that Teige knew they were in reality.
    The eldest brother’s arm was dangling limply from his shoulder socket. He was slumped forward and his face was bloodied.
    “Quickly, now,” he said, “we have a few moments, no more. They are behind me.”
    The Foleys were used to flight. It was a family habit from the time before their great-grandfather. The twins were on their
     horses the moment they stood up. Teige ran to the river’s edge. He called some words to the swan, then came back and he too
     was on his pony and they were racing into the darkness.
    They stayed ahead of their pursuers, riding with the abandon of the lawless. The younger brothers did not even know why they
     were being chased but supposed that whatever the reason