Fantasy fiction; Ireland -- Social life and customs -- Fiction; Mythology, Celtic -- Fiction
Then Costello turned towards the piper Duallach Daly, and taking him
about the waist lifted him out of the saddle and hurled him against a
grey rock that rose up out of the river, so that he fell lifeless into
the deep place, and the waters swept over the tongue which God had made
bitter, that there might be a story in men's ears in after time. Then
plunging his spurs into the horse, he rode away furiously toward the
north-west, along the edge of the river, and did not pause until he came
to another and smoother ford, and saw the rising moon mirrored in the
water. He paused for a moment irresolute, and then rode into the ford
and on over the Ox Mountains, and down towards the sea; his eyes almost
continually resting upon the moon which glimmered in the dimness like
a great white rose hung on the lattice of some boundless and phantasmal
world. But now his horse, long dark with sweat and breathing hard, for
he kept spurring it to an extreme speed, fell heavily, hurling him into
the grass at the roadside. He tried to make it stand up, and failing in
this, went on alone towards the moonlight; and came to the sea and saw a
schooner lying there at anchor. Now that he could go no further because
of the sea, he found that he was very tired and the night very cold,
and went into a shebeen close to the shore and threw himself down upon
a bench. The room was full of Spanish and Irish sailors who had just
smuggled a cargo of wine and ale, and were waiting a favourable wind to
set out again. A Spaniard offered him a drink in bad Gaelic. He drank it
greedily and began talking wildly and rapidly.
For some three weeks the wind blew inshore or with too great violence,
and the sailors stayed drinking and talking and playing cards, and
Costello stayed with them, sleeping upon a bench in the shebeen, and
drinking and talking and playing more than any. He soon lost what little
money he had, and then his horse, which some one had brought from
the mountain boreen, to a Spaniard, who sold it to a farmer from the
mountains, and then his long cloak and his spurs and his boots of soft
leather. At last a gentle wind blew towards Spain, and the crew rowed
out to their schooner, singing Gaelic and Spanish songs, and lifted
the anchor, and in a little while the white sails had dropped under the
horizon. Then Costello turned homeward, his life gaping before him, and
walked all day, coming in the early evening to the road that went from
near Lough Gara to the southern edge of Lough Cay. Here he overtook a
great crowd of peasants and farmers, who were walking very slowly after
two priests and a group of well-dressed persons, certain of whom were
carrying a coffin. He stopped an old man and asked whose burying it was
and whose people they were, and the old man answered: 'It is the burying
of Oona, Dermott's daughter, and we are the Namaras and the Dermotts and
their following, and you are Tumaus Costello who murdered her.'
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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