Cormac heard his father explain how the unarmed Ulster Irish were beaten back off the good land into the rocky hills and the stony mountains, the good land handed to the likes of the whoremaster Chichesters, while poor Protestant settlers were brought from Scotland to work the land and pay rents to the English. “They were made into slaves,” Da said, “and thought they were free.” After a while, when the British perfected the use of religion as an excuse for cruelty and theft, the Irish began to think that being Catholic was the same as being Irish, which of course it wasn’t.
“The Irish were here before Jesus Christ was even born,” he said. “So were their gods.”
The evening monologues of Fergus O’Connor were in startling contrast to his silence when he was playing John Carson. The words came in streams, rising and falling, emphasized with his long fingers, or by hands balled into fists. Still, in all that he said to his son, he insisted there were men in Ireland who cared for true justice.
“There’s a fellow in Dublin, the Dean, they call him,” he said one night. “Jonathan Swift. You must read his Drapier’s Letters, son. I have them in a bound book, hidden out in the stable. He’s a man with justice in his heart. A Protestant, but an Irishman first. And you must begin reading the newspapers. The News-Letter here is run by fair men. The Dean writes for the Dublin Journal, and I have some of those hidden here too.”
“Why do you hide them, Da?”
“Because of the bloody injustice here, lad. Some writers expose the injustice, and just reading about it will make you a suspect. And whenever there’s trouble in Ulster, every suspect dies.”
“Are we suspects, Da?”
The older man paused for a long moment.
“I think we are,” he said.
16.
On Sundays, father and son trudged to St. Edmund’s to inhale the odors of an orderly piety. Each wore his mask. For a solemn hour, Fergus and Cormac O’Connor played John and Robert Carson. An hour later, all sermons absorbed, all visions of Hell behind them, they mounted Thunder and trotted into the glens behind the Black Mountain. There, beyond observation, Sunday after Sunday, with a kind of religious intensity, the father showed his son the power of the sword.
In one lesson he cut off a tree limb that was eight inches thick. Not chopping it or hacking at it like a butcher. Cutting it in a single stroke with his blacksmith’s arm and his perfect sword, like a knife cuts butter. More important than the sword’s strength and power, he said to his son, was the way it was used. He taught through example and drill how to unsheathe the sword in one whiplike motion. How to slash with it or stab with it. How to avoid the other man’s sword, his thrusts and swings. In their first lessons they used simple wooden poles, father making son repeat the motions over and over again until all his movements became swift and fluid. Then he handed his son the sword itself. The feel of it always awed the young man, at times even cowed him. Its power seemed to surge up his right arm in a liquid way. Sometimes the younger man’s exhausted arm would ache, but at such moments the father urged him to try even harder. Or to switch to his left hand.
“You don’t ever want to die,” he said, “because you’re tired. Or because you’ve been wounded in your fighting arm. Each arm must have equal strength. And one other thing: If you think you’ll get tired, then you will get tired. If you think you’ll lose, you will lose.”
Fergus showed Cormac the principles of balance, and the way to shift weight, sliding forward on one leg, not leaping but pushing on the back leg. He urged him to move side to side, never to stand straight in front of an opponent, chopping at him, but to use quickness and surprise to fool him, and then to finish him. He knew everything about sword fighting, and one Sunday Cormac asked his father where he learned what he knew.
“I was a soldier,” he said.
“You were?”
“Aye. When I was your age.”
“And where did you soldier?”
His eyebrows rose. “Why, in Ireland, of course.”
“Tell me about it.”
“No.”
“Why not, Da?”
“I did nothing more than did better men than I. ’Tis nothing to brag upon.”
“Did you fight the English?”
“Aye.”
“Did you… kill men?”
“Aye.”
“Many men?”
“Too many.”
Fergus turned the sword over in his hand, retreating into himself, then said: “We’d best be going. It’s almost dark.”
Back at the forge, they never displayed the sword in the open air, afraid that some spy might be watching. If they were indeed suspected of being Catholic, then a spy could be peering at them from the woods, and it was forbidden for a Catholic to possess a weapon of any kind. For a while, Fergus hid the sword behind a false panel in the tool shed, then he moved it to a slot he built into the rush matting of the roof. On days of hammering rain, when the woods were empty of curious strangers, they practiced reaching for it by standing on one of the three-legged stools, making a swift, fluid movement that ended with a slash of the air. One late night, Fergus designed a map case for the sword, with a wide fluted bell for the handle, equipped with a leather loop that could be slung upon a saddle horn. That was the way they carried it while traveling. Cormac O’Connor was learning that people and things were not always what they seemed to be.
In the forge, when Cormac was not sharing the work, his father made him lift hunks of iron and steel, working his biceps and shoulders and back, doing curls and thrusts, then lifting pig iron over his head, the weight always increasing. Cormac’s muscles grew harder and tauter, and in the dark Sunday forests the sword felt lighter. His father had him skip rope too, explaining that a swordsman needed legs with spring and power. And he established codes. Never use a sword on someone who can’t fight back. Don’t drink, ever, because drink makes the wits rust, and you can die without a fight. If you draw your sword, prepare to kill with it or to die.
“And tell none of these to any man,” he said. “He must never know what you’re thinking. That’s the business of yourself, lad.”
17.
Across two summers, Cormac became a Celt.
He was taken by his father to the sacred grove, passing through the talking trees, and placed in the care of Mary Morrigan. She was assisted by the men and the younger women. Each time his father left, Cormac hated the moment of separation, and so did Thunder and Bran, who were going back with Fergus. That first time (Cormac later thought of it as a first semester), the dog refused to move and Thunder tossed his head in protest. But Fergus growled his orders, and they obeyed in a sulking way, and off they went through the trees. When they were gone, the old woman took Cormac by the hand led him through the woods to the mouth of a cave on the slope of a hill. Here the young man slept on furs while becoming an Irishman.