Caitríona

Thus Was the End of Their Feast
(1574)

Once the cattle were driven into our fort away from the wolves, we sat in lime-washed rooms as the stories of the great feats of the legendary Fianna were told. At night we would all gather as a clan, and I would be close to the centre as it was my duty to pour the ale into their golden cups and horns. The noble men and women would lie down as the harp played, their cloaks drawn around them, and the poet would tell the long, long stories that reached right into the past until we were not just ourselves but everyone who had gone before. The wolfhounds settled down with their long shaggy legs stretched out as the reed-and-butter candles lit the back of the hall. The fire burned in the middle of the great room, the roof open to the sky. We lay on beds of straw. The bards were as powerful as the kings in those old days, and they had been trained for years in the bardic schools. I had no schooling, but I knew the words to the stories and would whisper them, learning them from the old blind poet that the king always kept by his side. One story that hushed us all was the terrible tale of the great warrior-hero Cúchulainn's warp spasm. The poet would boom out:

'When the great Cúchulainn entered the warp spasm, he became a strange and terrible beast unlike anything ever seen. His whole being shook in a mighty fit and inside every organ and muscle twisted and pushed against his rippling skin and his elbows and knees and feet spun and twisted to the other side of his body until he was a spiral of angry brutishness. A killing machine.'

I was born to a family of churls. When you are on the bottom, you can see right up through the arsehole of the world, through the shit tunnels, the soggy intestines and past the tangles of guts, until the heart suddenly appears as a pulsating slippery mass of veiny pulp, then here are shuddering lungs - nothing is too special, it's all grotesque but functional. You know the thoughts of the kings and nobles because they speak out loud and you have to listen. Servants throughout time have always known everything before it happened. The nobles do not hide anything from us because they think we exist only for their convenience. They can't imagine that we have thoughts inside our heads. They never see us, but we see them. Strangely, the view is more revealing from the bottom than the top. The worms have no majesty, but they know the land better than the great elks. And we survived underground when they were hunted to their last end. For a churl, the world is revealed as it is, and we as we are - ravenous and calamitous.

From time to time, when a guest was at the feast, I was called on to tell a story. Because I had some fame as a servant who had met Henry VIII of England when I was a wee girl. That was many years ago. Truth was I had told it so many times I wondered if I had made half of it all up in my head, but I kept telling it.

I was an old crone, with nigh on three score years of serving and scrubbing and tending, and a few extra to atone for any of my shortcomings. My hair was long and grey, but I was still strong from all the work and had muscles as firm as many of the young whelps I had to train in. And the chief, Brian, trusted me to stand beside him and brim his cups at the feast.

We had lived our lives barely affected by Henry the King of England. He had concentrated on the south of the island, and we had little truck with that part, though we heard things were bad for other tribes. The English had their garrisons in Dublin, and they controlled some of the towns, but we had the countryside and that's where we preferred. The towns were full of plague and consumption, so we stuck to the forests and the glens and the mountainsides. Our nobility told us it was up to us to uphold the last bastion of Gaelic life and the old ways, just as it was up to the churls to empty the piss pots of the chieftains. I had worked for three different clans in my long life because of marriage and other circumstances and had been loyal and humble to those that kept me alive. I had two sons who worked as valets to our current chief. We at the bottom thought we hadn't much to lose - we were very wrong about that.

King Henry had a daughter who was even more rapacious than he, and she had an eye on us. The south was convulsing in rebellions against her, and she had laid parts of it to waste. There were so many ordinary peasants killed in the Desmond Rebellions that the land was turning back in on itself as if we'd never been. We heard they showed no mercy and would surround towns and move in to decimate all. We were told they had a habit of burning crops and ruining harvests, and starvation was one of their war methods.

They were collecting heads among the southern tribes, putting them in bags and bringing them up to Dublin to stick on spikes. We were wary of the English, but we could see our nobles were strong and the clans powerful. We had no choice but to put our trust in our betters. We got word, after their first failure to conquer us, that a second expedition had set off from Liverpool led by Walter Devereux, the bastard Earl of Essex. He came with a thousand men ready to fight us for our land. The English had a silly system whereby the first son got all, this produced an overabundance of highly educated but impoverished nobles who had to go out from England to the beyonds of the Earth and grab their wealth. So, we were plagued by the illegitimate sires of the English as well the second or third sons who stood to inherit nothing.

The foreign queen, Elizabeth, had told them to come to take what had been ours since the beginning of human time. As if we were only insects living in the grasses, she granted Devereaux the vast lands of Clandeboye, all the glens of Antrim, the Route and the island of Rathlin, and everything from the sea west to the River Bann and Lough Neagh. They said he mortgaged his estates in England and that got him ten thousand pounds; the queen then paid half the cost of his thousand soldiers.

Brian, our chief, was the first who saw the invading force. He felt it was wise to see what this Earl of Essex was up to. To fight him outright would have meant defeat, we all knew that. So instead he invited him to a meeting. I was serving them food when Essex slapped him on the shoulder and promised they could work together. My sons and I listened as Brian told his foster son that he was pleased he had solved the English problem.

'They're easily mollified. Essex will move on and bother another clan.'

Aengus, the foster son, bit his lip. 'I hear nothing but disaster from the south. They have destroyed so much. I don't know if submission works.'

'We can't fight them,' Brian said. 'We don't have their cannons; we don't have their guns or their numbers.'

'We're too busy fighting each other clan to clan.' Aengus pulled his cloak around his shoulders as if suddenly feeling a chill. 'They're ruled by one queen for the whole land.'

'That can never happen here. We are not like the English.' Brian shook his head. 'They know we are strong. This is the Gaelic heart of Ireland. We are warriors. They won't dare molest us.'

Then Essex quickly showed his hand and stole ten thousand of our tribe's cattle, using his soldiers to herd them to Carrickfergus. Brian was furious but not daunted - it was our land, after all, our cattle - and so he bribed the Guards at Carrickfergus and easily got the cattle back.

Meanwhile, the English soldiers didn't like our wild Gaelic Ulster and wanted to go home to their pies and their ale. I watched them sit in their piteous misery in the damp glens, shaking at the thought of what was surrounding them in the impenetrable spirit-ruled forests. They were as poor as we were and had no skin in the game. Some of them muttered that they should have tried their luck in the new worlds that had been discovered. Some of them began sneaking off back to England, and Essex hanged those wretches he caught. They left us to cut them down and bury them in this alien soil; without any fanfare they fertilized our land. His Queen Elizabeth announced that he was now Governor of Ulster, and we scoffed at this, as we could see he governed nothing. Essex came back and approached Brian once more. They came to another agreement.

'I am Governor of Ulster,' he told Brian. 'The Queen has told me.'

'You can't just declare that and believe it is now true,' Brian said. 'This is not England. You have no rights here except as a guest.'

Brian was worried enough. He had seen the chiefs down south conned out of their land and legacy but thought he could keep him contained, and so they put the business of the stolen cattle behind them and declared a truce. Aengus said he couldn't be trusted after stealing the cattle, but Brian surmised that he could continue being chief of his own tribe and pay some tithes to the man declaring himself governor.

To celebrate the agreement, Brian invited Essex and his thousand men to a grand feast. We worked hard to get the food and wine ready. Cattle and pigs were slaughtered and roasted on big fires; we cooked carrots, onions, turnips and parsnips seasoned with wild garlic. There were ample salmon, mackerel and trout on silver plates, and fresh bread and honey.

Three days and nights in Belfast Castle they toasted the English Earl and the Irish King. There was harp music and dances and a grand show of all we had. In between pouring mead and serving up the cuts of beef, I listened to the poets recite the feats of Cúchulainn. These stories I had heard since I was a wee gersha, and I knew them off by heart. As usual, I was called on...