You—you will make no terms with the spirits of fire and earth and air and water. You have made the Darkness your enemy. We—we exchange civilities with the world beyond.
WAR
When there was a rumour of war with France a while ago, I met a poor Sligo woman, a soldier’s widow, that I know, and I read her a sentence out of a letter I had just had from London: ‘The people here are mad for war, but France seems inclined to take things peacefully,’ or some like sentence. Her mind ran a good deal on war, which she imagined partly from what she had heard from soldiers, and partly from tradition of the rebellion of ’98, but the word London doubled her interest, for she knew there were a great many people in London, and she herself had once lived in ‘a congested district.’ ‘There are too many over one another in London. They are getting tired of the world. It is killed they want to be. It will be no matter; but sure the French want nothing but peace and quietness. The people here don’t mind the war coming. They could not be worse than they are. They may as well die soldierly before God. Sure they will get quarters in heaven.’ Then she began to say that it would be a hard thing to see children tossed about on bayonets, and I knew her mind was running on traditions of the great rebellion. She said presently, ‘I never knew a man that was in a battle that liked to speak of it after. They’d sooner be throwing hay down from a hayrick.’ She told me how she and her neighbours used to be sitting over the fire when she was a girl, talking of the war that was coming, and now she was afraid it was coming again, for she had dreamed that all the bay was ‘stranded and covered with seaweed.’ I asked her if it was in the Fenian times that she had been so much afraid of war coming. But she cried out, ‘Never had I such fun and pleasure as in the Fenian times. I was in a house where some of the officers used to be staying, and in the daytime I would be walking after the soldiers’ band, and at night I’d be going down to the end of the garden watching a soldier, with his red coat on him, drilling the Fenians in the field behind the house. One night the boys tied the liver of an old horse, that had been dead three weeks, to the knocker, and I found it when I opened the door in the morning.’ And presently our talk of war shifted, as it had a way of doing, to the battle of the Black Pig, which seems to her a battle between Ireland and England, but to me an Armageddon which shall quench all things in the Ancestral Darkness again, and from this to sayings about war and vengeance. ‘Do you know,’ she said, ‘what the curse of the Four Fathers is? They put the man-child on the spear, and somebody said to them, “You will be cursed in the fourth generation after you,” and that is why disease or anything always comes in the fourth generation.’
1902.
THE QUEEN AND THE FOOL
I have heard one Hearne, a witch-doctor, who is on the border of Clare and Galway, say that in ‘every household’ of faery ‘there is a queen and a fool,’ and that if you are ‘touched’ by either you never recover, though you may from the touch of any other in faery. He said of the fool that he was ‘maybe the wisest of all,’ and spoke of him as dressed like one of ‘the mummers that used to be going about the country.’ Since then a friend has gathered me some few stories of him, and I have heard that he is known, too, in the highlands. I remember seeing a long, lank, ragged man sitting by the hearth in the cottage of an old miller not far from where I am now writing, and being told that he was a fool; and I find from the stories that my friend has gathered that he is believed to go to faery in his sleep; but whether he becomes an Amadán-na-Breena, a fool of the forth, and is attached to a household there, I cannot tell. It was an old woman that I know well, and who has been in faery herself, that spoke of him. She said, ‘There are fools amongst them, and the fools we see, like that Amadán of Ballylee, go away with them at night, and so do the woman fools that we call Oinseachs (apes).’ A woman who is related to the witch-doctor on the border of Clare, and who can cure people and cattle by spells, said, ‘There are some cures I can’t do. I can’t help any one that has got a stroke from the queen or the fool of the forth. I knew of a woman that saw the queen one time, and she looked like any Christian. I never heard of any that saw the fool but one woman that was walking near Gort, and she called out, “There’s the fool of the forth coming after me.” So her friends that were with her called out, though they could see nothing, and I suppose he went away at that, for she got no harm. He was like a big strong man, she said, and half naked, and that is all she said about him. I have never seen any myself, but I am a cousin of Hearne, and my uncle was away twenty-one years.’ The wife of the old miller said, ‘It is said they are mostly good neighbours, but the stroke of the fool is what there is no cure for; any one that gets that is gone. The Amadán-na-Breena we call him!’ And an old woman who lives in the Bog of Kiltartan, and is very poor, said, ‘It is true enough, there is no cure for the stroke of the Amadán-na-Breena. There was an old man I knew long ago, he had a tape, and he could tell what diseases you had with measuring you; and he knew many things, and he said to me one time, “What month of the year is the worst?” and I said, “The month of May, of course.” “It is not,” he said; “but the month of June, for that’s the month that the Amadán gives his stroke!” They say he looks like any other man, but he’s leathan (wide), and not smart. I knew a boy one time got a great fright, for a lamb looked over the wall at him with a beard on it, and he knew it was the Amadán, for it was the month of June. And they brought him to that man I was telling about, that had the tape, and when he saw him he said, “Send for the priest, and get a Mass said over him.” And so they did, and what would you say but he’s living yet and has a family! A certain Regan said, “They, the other sort of people, might be passing you close here and they might touch you. But any that gets the touch of the Amadán-na-Breena is done for.” It’s true enough that it’s in the month of June he’s most likely to give the touch. I knew one that got it, and he told me about it himself. He was a boy I knew well, and he told me that one night a gentleman came to him, that had been his landlord, and that was dead. And he told him to come along with him, for he wanted him to fight another man. And when he went he found two great troops of them, and the other troop had a living man with them too, and he was put to fight him. And they had a great fight, and he got the better of the other man, and then the troop on his side gave a great shout, and he was left home again. But about three years after that he was cutting bushes in a wood and he saw the Amadán coming at him. He had a big vessel in his arms, and it was shining, so that the boy could see nothing else; but he put it behind his back then and came running, and the boy said he looked wild and wide, like the side of the hill. And the boy ran, and he threw the vessel after him, and it broke with a great noise, and whatever came out of it, his head was gone there and then. He lived for a while after, and used to tell us many things, but his wits were gone. He thought they mightn’t have liked him to beat the other man, and he used to be afraid something would come on him.’ And an old woman in a Galway workhouse, who had some little knowledge of Queen Maive, said the other day, ‘The Amadán-na-Breena changes his shape every two days. Sometimes he comes like a youngster, and then he’ll come like the worst of beasts, trying to give the touch he used to be. I heard it said of late he was shot, but I think myself it would be hard to shoot him.’