Infinite Devotion (26 page)

She seems to be picking up some Spanish.

I smile and say, “Hello,” back.

Upon seeing us talking, the captain shows up after escaping Urard and seeking refuge, pulls over a stool. She speaks to him.

“She said she came over here to warn you of the faerie folk,” he says, laughing greatly at the end.

Nora seems confused why he’s laughing so.

She repeats, “Fear-gortha, fear-gortha.”

The captain takes a deep breath. “Oh, now she’s telling me she needs to warn you when we travel later about something called the hungry grass. She says you have to make offerings while traveling, offerings to these here faire folk…” He gives me a crazy look and circles his hand around his ear. “So she says if you don’t, then these nasty buggers will make patches of ‘hungry grass’ that can trap and swallow men whole.”

She has such a serious and worried face, I get slightly scared it could be true.

She puts an oatcake in my hand, and the captain says, “She says to carry that in your pocket at all times to use as a charm of protection against them.”

Nora rests her hand on my shoulder, gives me a look of warning, and speaks again. As she talks, she uses her slender hands in a mesmerizing way to tell the story. I almost wonder if I hold her hands if she could still tell the story. Suddenly, the captain roars in laughter and breaks my eyes away from her hypnotic movements and enchanting words.

“These people are insane! She’s now warning you about the ‘little people’ who come up from the ground and play tricks and the ‘banshee’ that foretells your death if you hear her, all in white with glowing, red eyes! Woo-woooh!” he finishes in a high-pitched voice, making his eyes roll in his head.

Nora stares at him suspiciously and walks back to her people.

“Where are you going?” He turns to me. “The prettiest ones are always crazy.”

I leave the captain and decide to retire before Andres or Pepe. Pepe’s nowhere to be found, and Andres is holding Alvaro’s hands, spinning and jumping with the savages in merriment. I fall asleep quickly in the quiet of our room.

I’m walking up the crude stone steps of all different heights up to the turret. I look out across the dark night with hundreds upon hundreds of clear stars, when a wind blows across the hills and over the lake, causing the shining reflections of the moon to stir. It makes a whistling, eerie sound. The sound turns from a whistle and spins into a loud and mournful lament, and I look toward the sound. I turn around to the sea and see a glowing white woman with red-hot coals for eyes, glowing hotter and hotter as her moan rises to a horrible shriek that flashes out and hits me with great force.

I wake up with a shiver and see only Andres in the room, sleeping beside me. In the morning, he notices Pepe’s absent also.

“I wonder if he left us for good,” Andres says.

We walk out to the open circle and see there aren’t any savages anywhere.

Alvaro rests against the courtyard wall, picking his teeth with a straw and I ask, “Have they all left so soon?”

“Yep, they’re pretty quick. They’re off before I got up.” He reaches back with a yawn. “But it’s pretty nice to have this whole castle to ourselves.”

I realize Pepe must have gone with them after all. He must have woken up early and gone without saying good-bye.

“Let’s go up to the turret to look at them going up the mountain.” Andres heads up the stairs as I follow. We’re startled to see someone already up there. His back’s turned, but we know who it is.

“Pepe, you didn’t go with her?” Andres asks.

Pepe doesn’t turn, only shakes his head. He’s watching them make their way over the mountains with all their flocks, and we decide to leave him alone.

Andres fumes on the way down. “I’m glad he stayed, but he’s still not himself. I can’t wait for us to leave this place.”

Chapter 16

Everything’s quiet for a few days, when suddenly Bella alerts us. We run to the turrets to see men on horseback trotting calmly in a single line down the narrow path through the bog, with English banners and flags waving. Great disarray ensues once they realize they can’t go farther since the pathway ceased purposefully. Trying to turn, the horses are forced to step off the stones and into the bog. They all get stuck and whinny frantically, causing their embarrassed passengers to dismount and pull them out of the stubborn mud, many dropping their esteemed flags in the mud while doing so. We can still see them as they slink back a half mile on land to where more stable pasture fields lay, and they dismount to discuss their unusual situation.

Later that night, a band of brave men try to pull a cannon out to the shore of the lake, but it’s so wide it keeps falling off the path and gets stuck as the exhausted men have to keep prying it up with crowbars and pieces of wood. These mud-men give up halfway there and abandon the cannon. The next day, trumpets sound by the shore, and all rush to see what’s happening.

Two men stand on the hill. One shouts through a long voice trumpet that carries remarkably well over the lake up to us. He shouts a long monologue in what sounds like the tongue of the savages.

No one within the castle understands what he says, so the captain shouts in Spanish through his voice trumpet, “I can’t hear you from there! Come closer!”

We snicker at his attempt to get them within range. The captain shouts, “Speak in Spanish so we can understand the terms of your surrender!”

Every Spaniard snickers at his cheeky presumption. The trumpet’s passed to another man beside him, and then he speaks in English-accented Spanish.

“I am a messenger for our Lord Deputy, William FitzWilliam, ordained by Her Majesty the Queen.” He keeps pausing to take another large breath to yell out sentence by sentence. “We are under orders that all Spaniards who have crashed upon our shores, after assaulting England, are to be detained and tried. The traitorous MacClancy clan is harboring these enemies to the crown within these castle walls, and if they are not surrendered to us, we will attack without mercy or regard for Spaniard, Irishman, woman, or child.”

The captain yells, “Sounds like how you conduct business wherever you fight!”

Laughter erupts from the turret and carries across the lake without the aid of the trumpet.

This man then translates to a regal-looking man sitting straight on his white horse with a full body of armor, a short distance up the path. This must be FitzWilliam. He snaps something back angrily and kicks his horse to turn back, and the horse stumbles a bit on the high rocks on the side of the path, humiliating the rider in his haughty exit.

The man speaks again across the lake. “You leave us no choice than to vanquish you!”

“Good luck to you in your vanquishing, Deputy!” the captain yells out, and laughter again carries over the lake, and the man turns to walk back stiffly in his armor with the other man carrying flags.

The soldiers’ numbers accumulate in the fields; the news of seventeen hundred may have been an understatement. Alvaro busies us by having us bring up stone after stone up to the turrets from the stockpile in the circle. It’s backbreaking work, but they say that this can be as important as having a cannon if the English make their way to the castle by boat. We feel important, then, dragging each one up, and if they are especially heavy, we take them together. I’m holding a heavy one with Pepe, and we can hardy talk with the strain, but I try. “Are you feeling better?”

“I realized if we keep the castle that Nessa would come back, so it’s made me stronger.”

I can’t believe it; he’s still thinking of her, even when we faced death together. As soon as I get Andres alone, I tell him what he said.

Andres only looks sad. “He’s changed. He’s not the Pepe we knew.”

Trumpets ring out with Bella barking at the unusual sound, and we return to the turrets again to see archers lined up with flaming crossbows. The order is called, and they all let loose. We duck at the whipping sound that carries across when they release, but are relieved as most fall in the lake as others hit weakly against the lower, rough castle walls. We all cheer at the failed assault, giving us confidence in MacClancy’s claims.

Hours later, another attempt is made. Three longboats are brought forward, carried over the heads of the soldiers. They put them in the lake and half take out their oars while the other half holds muskets pointed at the castle. A knot rises in my throat as they start right for the castle, but midway a strong current hits them that spins the boat and makes it impossible to stay still, let alone move toward the castle. All three boats end up on the far shore. We all cheer again, invincible now.

We celebrate that night with double rations of oaten bread and butter. The captain says a prayer, and we listen and dance to Alvaro’s new Irish music he’s picked up. We awake to more trumpeting and hear in Spanish, “Traitors to the crown, we give you one more chance to surrender.”

The captain and company laugh heartily at this. “Only if you promise to treat us under the same ‘fair’ terms of surrender and promise of ‘safe’ passage as those Spaniards you promised before! No! We know you, and you’re a traitor to man and God! We would rather die with bullets or starve slowly before we die in your whore of a queen’s noose!”

The men standing behind the trumpeters get so angry at the captain’s words that they let loose their muskets without command. Some musket balls make it across the lake but again hit the wall without damage. The Spaniards laugh again as Pepe fills with courage and pulls his pants down, mooning the shore, causing even more laughter to erupt. The man speaking to us motions angrily back up the hill, and we all gasp as we see two half-naked men with arms and legs tied being dragged by four men down the path.

One Englishman shouts, “If you surrender now, we will pardon these fellow fish-eaters.”

The captain says nothing but looks on with great concern.

“No response?” The Englishman pulls one man forward and holds him up in front of him and rips off the gag.

The prisoner screams out in a raspy, tortured Spanish voice, “
Go Santiago
!”

Furious at his defiance when he hoped for a plea, the man holding him cuts with his saber clear across his throat. We see the blood spray from our great distance as the Spanish man slumps to the rocks, and the Englishman gives him a kick into the bog. The captain almost leaps off the tower toward him. “Go Santiago” is our war cry. My eyes fill with tears at the bravery of that man. They choose not to take off the other prisoner’s gag and casually slice his throat from behind also. He joins his countryman in the bog.

The Englishman shouts, “We will save all of our executions from now on for your enjoyment until you agree to our terms of surrender!” and they walk off and over the hill.

The captain gathers all of the religious relics, Spanish and savage alike, and passes them around to each of us. He lifts the largest wooden cross and holds it above his head. “We offer up prayer to you for those Spanish sacrificed upon this shore. We pray for their souls to go directly to heaven and hope you assist us in our plight so that their sacrifices are not in vain.”

“Amen,” we follow somberly.

There’s no merriment that night. Before the purple light of dawn has faded, we’re startled awake by screaming from our lookout. Again we rush to the turret facing their shore, all groggy with our blankets draped over us. Expecting to see something terrible, I’m surprised to see the sky filled with fat snowflakes.

“How long has this been falling?’ The captain asks, bewildered.

“Only started twenty minutes ago. When it started covering everything, I thought I should get you!”

“Only twenty minutes and it’s coating the ground already!” He gives a cheer and says, “What luck, what luck!”

We stay up there under our blankets wrapped around our heads. The wind’s blowing fiercely, and the snowflakes fall, crisscrossing one another, causing our eyes to go in and out of focus. Andres keeps sticking his little tongue out, trying to get the large flakes that would drift near him, tempting him. The snow is knee-deep within hours, with no sign of relenting. Bella disappears in the snow and begins tunneling through, popping up here and there with her head covered in snow.

Alvaro perks up at something. “Captain, there’s definite movement.”

We all stand and watch. The English have packed up their tents, and every man is on his horse. The men farthest away from us leave first, and we watch as they all ready to retreat, ending the siege.

The captain, seeing the Lord Deputy leave his warm tent and getting help on his horse, screams out, “
Go Santiago
!”

All of us jump up and scream it with him again. “
Go Santiago
!”

The Lord Deputy looks our way but, just as quickly and pompously, kicks his horse to follow the procession off MacClancy’s land. We throw off our blankets and embrace in clumsy groups, jumping and still yelling, “
Go Santiago
!” while tears stream down our faces.

The captain then turns to us and says, “Eight fire ships may have scattered one hundred thirty ships, but eleven Spanish soldiers scattered seventeen hundred Englishmen!”