Liberty or Death

Liberty or Death part I

© Copyright David Cook 2015

Horror came to Uaimh Tyrell.

It was a poor village, as it had been in Tudor times, and had never expanded like neighbouring Blackwater or Skreen. Richard Tyrell had been a buanadha, an Irish mercenary, who had fought for Hugh O'Neill during the Nine Years War against Queen Elizabeth's English troops. It was Tyrell that led Spanish mercenaries sent from Phillip II to assist the Irish uprising en-route to Ulster, and the meeting place was in one of the dark coastal caves that gave the village its name.

It lay along the east coast of Wexford about six miles north of the town bearing the same name as the county. A stream named Banna, meaning 'goddess', flowed out to sea through a gully to a shingle beach where fishing boats worked the deep waves. The rest of the villagers herded sheep on the hills and farmed the land. Uaimh Tyrell was a collection of thatched huts huddled around a small stone church where Father Ciarán prayed to the bones of Saint Brigid. The Saint had visited the original village church before founding the great abbey at Kildare sometime in the fifth century. The converted church in her name was given the sacred bones when she was exhumed in order to prevent Viking invaders plundering them from the convent many years later. Her head was taken to Lisbon, her remains were scattered, and the four bones that kept in the hamlet's church were from her hands. Uaimh Tyrell was once a sacred place.

'They're not the bones from her hands,' Lochlann the Elder would say to anyone that enquired. 'Father Ciarán is a pious soul, but the man's mad! Utterly mad! They're the bones from a red fox! By the love of God, he prays to a fox!'

The bones were small, thin and ochre-brown in colour, and could have come from a red deer, or indeed a fox, but the elderly Father Ciarán would have none of it. He made his daily prayers to them underneath a Saint Brigid's cross, a cross-shaped symbol made from tied rushes containing a woven square in the centre and tied off ends. The children of the village had made this one for the Saint's day, and Ciarán proudly hung it above the open box containing her consecrated bones.

The village was a place of worship, fish, cattle, rain and wind-swept hills. Where dreams were wished for and prayers rarely answered.

And on this day the redcoats came.

The first thing Ciarán heard was the sound of the cockerels crowing loudly in alarm, horses hooves thumping the ground like distant peals of thunder, growing instead of dying, and young Dónall's dog barking madly. Then there were screams that split the morning air; sounds that chilled his heart. His pulse quickened. He opened the church door and instantly a pair of scarred hands shoved him violently back inside the nave.

'Get back, you bible-humping turd!' a man spat at him, a great drip of spittle fell from thick lips to glisten on his coat. 'Back with you!'

Father Ciarán tripped on his cassock and landed on the hard stone floor. Three men, dressed in the red coat of the military, stepped over him; steel spurs jingled with each step. Their looming shadows reached the far wall to touch the altar.

'Please,' the priest begged, 'this is a house of God.'

'Better start reciting your prayers then, you piece of filth,' said the thick-lipped one, giving a lupine grin. He had immense shoulders, and powerfully-built arms and legs.

Manic prickles raced across Ciarán's skin. 'Why have you come here? What do you want?'

None of them answered. Next to the muscular one, the other two looked of the same mould; rough of face and of a similar age. They were cavalrymen who wore topped black leather boots, white breeches, black bicorn hats with a tall black plume and their single-breasted red jackets were faced black. Ciarán had not seen these men before, but they were fellow Irishmen and served the Crown. They also carried carbines, which were still hooked to their white shoulder belts with a clip, but it was the long straight-bladed swords that gave them the fearsome edge to their appearance. These men were killers.