Chapter 6 #14
A monstrous, shaggy beast is streaking over the hillside, bounding towards them.
It has appeared from the direction of the copse or the bog, and has masses of grey fur, enormous long legs, and a rag of tongue lolling from its mouth.
A dog, but larger than any she has ever seen before: it is a hound from Hell, and is coming for them at a sickening speed, its fearsome stride gobbling up the distance between them, fangs gleaming white in the sun.
A scream unfurls from Rose’s mouth, like a flag in a breeze.
She blunders blindly towards her sister, for she represents the only safety around, up one ridge, down another, up the second, then she hurls herself down the slope of the fort and Enda catches her, wrapping her arms around her, and still the hound comes, nearing the fort, leaping the first ring and then the second, and Rose is screaming and Enda is screaming, and Rose will always remember this, even when they are grown women and living apart, that Enda thrusts Rose behind her, she places herself between Rose and the Hellhound, she surrenders herself to the beast’s jaws.
Rose clutches Enda from behind, crying and sobbing, her eyes squeezed tight, waiting for death.
A taut and ominous pause. Rose tightens her grip around her sister’s waist. Is the animal crouching, readying itself to pounce? Will it tear them limb from limb? Will it rip out their throats, first Enda’s, then hers? She hears Enda’s heaving breaths, the hammering of her heart.
Suddenly, incongruously, her sister lets out a laugh.
“Look,” she says.
Rose opens her eyes a crack. She sees: the grass surrounding her dusty feet, a triangle of Enda’s brown skirt, and a set of four grey paws.
“I think he might be friendly after all.”
Rose peers out from behind her sister. The dog is before them, ears flat, tail whipping questioningly back and forth, head tilted to one side. His face, Rose sees, is extremely expressive, with tufts for eyebrows, anxious furrows on his forehead.
Rose steps out from behind Enda, all fear evaporated.
She moves towards the dog. He knows and she knows they won’t harm each other: there is an unspoken tether of trust weaving itself between them.
She stretches out her hand, her eyes locked on the dog’s, and clicks her tongue.
“Here,” she says to him, “here, boy. Where did you come from? We won’t hurt you. ”
The dog flicks up his ears as if listening out for some distant signal. He takes a wary step forward and sniffs Rose’s fingers. After a long moment of assessment, he anoints her wrist with a lick.
Rose turns towards her sister, face alight, hand buried in the dog’s fur, her mind already leaping ahead to the animal never leaving her side, even at night, where he will sleep alongside her, protecting her from robbers and thieves and nightmares; she will make him a blanket all of his own, she will feed him and brush him and he will never be hungry and she need never be alone again, and says, “We can keep him, can’t we? ”
Two miles north-by-north-east, Liam sits in a draughty schoolhouse, his feet tucked beneath his seat; on the desk before him are some lines in Latin.
He reads them to himself, syllable by syllable, hoping they will yield up their meaning, as an apple gives out its juice: Nascuntur et alio modo terrae ac repente in alio mari emergunt velut paria secum faciente natura quaeque hauserit hiatus alio loco reddente.
Father Joseph has told him that he looked out this passage specially for him. It will be difficult, he said, laying a hand to Liam’s shoulder, but it might well lie within your reach. Now let’s see if you’ll disappoint me or surprise me.
Liam presses his left hand to the page. The thought of disappointing the priest makes his stomach clench around its breakfast. He has to do this, he must. Nascuntur, he reads, et alio.
Around him, he hears the sighs and chalk-scratches of his classmates but he will not lift his head to see how they are faring: they have not been given a special passage in Latin and are working on their arithmetic.
Liam keeps his gaze on the lines. Nascuntur, he knows, is a word that means “arise” or “to be born,” and alio modo is “in another way.” But what kind of a sentence begins with “arise and in another way”?
Liam feels the prickle of sweat beneath his collar. It makes no sense. He is going to be a disappointment to Father Joseph, who will not be angry, but Liam can picture the dismay that will fill the eyes of the priest when he admits that he can’t prise the meaning out of the passage.
Arise and in another way—what? He reads the words again, and takes in an unsteady breath.
It’s no good: the sentence has slammed its door in his face.
Liam feels panic swarming like ants over his skin.
The priest has singled him out for praise; he says, often, that he has high hopes for Liam, that he envisages marvellous things ahead.
Liam wants whatever it is that Father Joseph sees for him—he wants it desperately.
He wants, more than anything, to be able to live up to what plans the priest might be making for his future.
By coincidence, his father, ten miles or so away, is also staring down in dismay at a page of written words.
Tomás is standing in a field station of the redcoat surveyors, just over the county border.
He is holding a sheet of paper upon which are written the details of his next commission: the map of a remote island off the west coast.
They leave next month, the paper informs him, and Tomás cannot believe this has come so soon, so hard on the heels of his last commission.
He wants nothing more than to stay in his cottage, on his land, with his wife and his children and his animals.
Every fibre of his being revolts at the thought of setting out with these soldiers, to live alongside them in tents, to eat their food and have to endure their jokes and banter.
The journey, Tomás can see, will be long and the task arduous.
Tomás raises his head, struck by a cheering thought: he will take Liam with him.
It will be good for the boy to set himself to some work, to get back to his apprenticeship.
The child is always at his books and, Tomás thinks, with a dart of unease, is far too much in the thrall of that priest. This trip will be a good opportunity for Tomás to have his son to himself again, working alongside each other, like before.
The division will set out before winter closes in, the sergeant tells him, and they’ll be lucky to be back by spring. Tomás nods, folding the piece of paper and sliding it into his pocket.
His daughters, Enda and Rose, are walking slowly along a ridge, up and over the drumlin where Tomás stood a few months ago, the wolfhound in step beside them.
They are discussing the best way to ask their parents about the dog and how they must—no, need to—keep him, and they are putting off the moment, just in case the answer is no, because neither of them could bear that: the dog chose them, it found them, it belongs with them.
In his schoolroom, Liam struggles on, hope waning.
He has found no crack, no entry into the Latin lines: they elude him.
He has raised his head to seek Father Joseph’s aid but the priest stands looking out of the window, his back to them, and Liam is unable to call out to him, for he can’t trust his voice.
His palms are slick and cold, and then suddenly, from nowhere, he recalls something Enda said to him, when he had been labouring over a different translation, back when they were living in the Lanes.
Find the verb, she’d said to him, across the kitchen table, always start with the verb because it is the key that unlocks the whole sense.
What do you mean? Liam had said to her, and without looking up from her own page, Enda had replied: The verb gives the sentence its purpose, its motion, so if you work out what it’s doing, how it interacts with all the other words, everything will fall into place.
Liam passes his tongue over his dry lips.
Verb, he tells himself, where is the verb?
And then he sees it is the very first word: nascuntur, from the infinitive nascor, which means “to be born” or “to spring forth.” Something is being born.
But what? His eyes slide backwards, forwards, backwards again and pause on terrae.
Which means “land.” It is, he sees, a sentence about land, about the earth. Land is being born or formed.
Joy invades him and he has to prevent himself from leaping to his feet.
“Lands are also formed…in another way,” he tries, then returns to find the next verb, and the next, and they appear before him, like stepping-stones leading to a far bank: emergunt, faciente, hauserit, reddente.
He grips his pen, thinking, thinking. What would Enda do here?
How would she navigate her way through this?
And at the thought of his sister, the lines start to break over his head, like a wave.
In a kind of ecstasy, he dips his nib into the inkwell, flattens the page—for Father Joseph has given him the privilege of a pen, no slate and chalk for him, and Liam feels his work must always live up to this—and writes: “Lands are also formed in another way, suddenly emerging in a different sea, as if nature were compensating the earth for its losses, restoring in one place what it has swallowed up in another.”