Cormac used the green notebook as a diary and made sketches of what he saw when he rode Thunder through the cold. The notebook filled (his script now smaller to save space and often cruder because he was forced to write and draw with gloved hands) as more and more reports arrived about the general calamity and the indifference of London. Soon there was talk of famine. Just as there had been in Egypt and Israel. Corn stalks had been burned black by the great wind. Grass died everywhere, turning pastures the color of blood. Many shops in Belfast were closed because there was nothing to sell. Cormac wondered in his green notebook about the fate of the fishmonger and the butcher and about his friends and even the Rev. Robinson. The mud of Belfast must be like brick now. He was careful about some of his thoughts, since he did not want the notebook to turn into evidence. He did not, for example, record his feelings about the Rev. Robinson. Would the good reverend find a way to blame the Vatican for the Irish disaster? Of course. It was God’s will, wasn’t it? God’s harsh lesson about sin. Cormac wished God, if he did exist, would just show up and speak plainly.
One February day, it was warm again, and the snow melted away. But still, it did not end. That night the cold returned, driven by a brutal wind, freezing the earth into iron. Two mornings later, Cormac was riding west alone on Thunder, in search of wood to feed the forge and food to feed himself and his father, because at last they were running out of both. The frozen trees resisted his ax, and he settled for stray fallen branches that he lashed to the saddle. There was no food. Anywhere. Fields and woods were littered with the corpses of cows, wolves, sheep, and horses, some of them stripped of flesh, many of them wedged beneath fallen trees that had provided no true shelter. Some villages were blocked by red-coated soldiers who warned Cormac that everyone left alive was dying of fever and dysentery.
“There’s no water since the snow melted,” a soldier told him. “At least they could melt the bloody snow. Now the wells are frozen like fecking rocks and the fecking streams are dry. ’Tis a pity. They’re even drinking piss.”
On the way home, Cormac saw the body of a coatless young girl in a stiff blue dress. She was about nine. Her face was black. A dark blue hand was bent across her brow. She was shoeless. He tried to imagine what had driven her into the cold without coat or shoes, and then imagined both being ripped from her corpse by foragers among the dead. And what had driven her into the cold at all? He imagined a brutal father or a dead family or the fear of ghosts in some ruined cottage. He wondered too where the Other People were and whether they were huddled together in the Otherworld for warmth the way he and his father and Thunder and Bran huddled each night in their house. That dead girl might have been looking desperately for the door to the Otherworld, where she would be warm in the place of emerald light.
Suddenly Cormac wanted the warmth of a woman. Tight and wet and warm in a cave that smelled of peat. There before him was a girl who would never be a woman, and the earth was so frozen that he couldn’t even bury her. He rode hard for home.
22.
Then, early one blue morning, Cormac came awake beside Thunder. He felt a dampness on his brow and he could see light through the cracks of the door and his breath didn’t make steam when he exhaled. Bran sensed the change too and started shaking himself, and then they were all up. Fergus said nothing, as if afraid this was an illusion. He opened the door, and Bran dashed outside, leaping and rolling, with Thunder after him, bumping the doorjamb like some large younger brother, shaking his great black body, testing the earth with his hooves. Fergus stood with a blanket draped over his shoulder. An immense brightness was coming from the sea. They heard a bird sing.
“We’ve come through it,” Fergus said.
And so they had.
In late morning, with the doors and windows open to air out the horse-smelling house, Fergus hitched Thunder to the cart and told Cormac to join him and explained to Bran that he must stay behind. “There’s smoke coming from the chimney,” he told the dog, “and that’s good. We don’t want strangers believing there’s nobody at home. So you must stay inside, Bran, and bark your head off if anyone comes.” The dog listened unhappily but accepted his duty. He went inside, and Fergus locked the door behind him. Then they started west.
“We need a wagonload of wood,” Fergus told his son. “We need food. There’s only one place to find both.”
For hours they traveled to the secret country of the Irish. Death was everywhere: more dead cattle, more dead humans, more dead wolves. They crossed a stream and saw a dead swan wedged in ice against boulders. They arrived at the grove before dark. Whistles and howls echoed through the cold-stripped forest, and then words in Irish and Fergus answered and then the guards appeared, wrapped in thick furs, thinner, grimier. They nodded and smiled and moved father and son forward into the sacred grove. They saw a huge cauldron on a mound of burning logs, with smoke and steam and sparks rising into the dark air.
“You see, Cormac,” Fergus said. “It’s a time to rejoice.”
And so it was.
The women were smiling in their furs and woolen shawls, and dogs barked, as if demanding news of Bran, and someone was playing pipes in the darkness beyond the fire, and Cormac could hear the steady beat of a drum. Then Mary Morrigan appeared, her eyes welling with tears. She had been right; a terrible time had come. As predicted. But she said nothing now about her prophecy, took no vain comfort in the proofs offered by so much desolation. It was enough that her own part of the Irish tribe had been warned, and had survived. She was thinner now in Cormac’s eyes, frailer, as if the seven arctic weeks had reduced her to bone and gristle. She gripped Cormac’s hands in her callused fingers and he wondered where that other woman had gone, the woman who was also Mary Morrigan, the woman with the soft flesh and gripping wetness. He thought: Perhaps this Mary Morrigan, withered and dark, was only a mask for the other, her face and body and clothes worn the way he and his father wore their Protestant masks in the world beyond the grove.
But Cormac could not ask those questions, and they might never be answered if he did. Mary Morrigan slipped away, to preside over the chanting and the drum and the thin bird voice of the flute moving through the darkness as if trying to be joyful. They sat at the fire and ate boiled beef while Fergus listened to the terrible accounting. Seventeen Irish men dead, twenty-six women, thirteen children, along with nine horses, eleven cows, fifteen sheep, and twenty-one dogs. All pigs had survived. At least two of the women had died from some English disease they picked up in Belfast while foraging for food. After their deaths, it was decided that nobody could go again to the city until the terrible time had passed. The bodies of the dead had all been burned to protect the living. Fergus and Cormac listened to all of this in silence. Cormac wondered which of the Irish he’d known in his Celtic summers were now dead, and thought that it was unfair that he was alive and they were dead.
“Perhaps now the dying is over for a while,” Fergus said in Irish.
“Perhaps,” said Mary Morrigan, staring into the fire.
That night Fergus and Cormac slept with some of the other men in a hut made of rough logs. Cormac longed for the cave of Mary Morrigan but remained beside his father and the other men, more than a dozen of them, along with some dogs and a cow, while distant singing, full of lament and mourning, drifted through the midnight grove.
They rose early to a damp, fog-bound morning. The air was warmer, the earth still spiky with ice. Their cart was already piled with firewood and sacks of oats. They embraced each of the Irish who were not already out foraging. Mary Morrigan, one of a group of women, waved a small farewell. And then they started back. For a long time, Fergus was silent.