Queens' Play Read Free Page A

enquiries about him beforehand.’
    ‘So I could, then; but who would answer me? The fellow lives in a bog and devil the person has laid eyes on him from one end of the country to the other. I heard from a friend of a cousin of a cousin,’ said Mr. Ballagh on a little wave of wine-coloured confidence, ‘thathe was wild for a true-bred ollave who could talk in French for him, and here I am.’
    The O’LiamRoe had no French. That he had English was a welcome surprise. France, from the lowest of motives, had entertained not a few of the powerful leaders of her downtrodden neighbour, and had sweated over their plots and counterplots in Gaelic and Latin. ‘What’s an ollave?’ asked Mr. Stewart.
    Master Ballagh recited. ‘A hired ollave is a sweet-stringed timpan, and a sign, so they say, that the master of the house is a grand, wealthy fellow, and him for ever reading books. An ollave of the highest grade is professor, singer, poet, all in the one. His songs and tales are of battles and voyages, of tragedies and adventures, of cattle raids and preyings, of forays, hostings, courtships and elopements, hidings and destructions, sieges and feasts and slaughters; and you’d rather listen to a man killing a pig than hear half of them through. I,’ said Mr. Ballagh bitterly, ‘am an ollave of the highest grade.’
    ‘Well, you’re wasting your time here,’ Robin Stewart pointed out. ‘You should be getting grand money for all yon, surely. And what made you take up poetry anyway, for heaven’s sake?’
    ‘Grand money, is it; and everyone forced by legislation to speak the English?’ snarled Mr. Ballagh. He calmed down. ‘The O’Coffey, who ran the bardic school near my home, had a hurley team would make your mouth water and the blood come out at your ears. I was the fifteenth child, and the nippiest, so why should I object to what my father and The O’Coffey might arrange? The fifteenth. And the nippiest …’
    Master Thady Boy Ballagh smoothed the doubtful black of his pourpoint, flicked the limp grey frills of his cuff, and wrapped the stained folds of his robe over his knees. ‘Hand me that bottle, will you?’
    And by then it was too late. The squall was already coming, a streaming blemish over the water, and lying over before it the
Gouden Roos
, a three-masted galliasse caught with every rag on the yards. For a moment still,
La Sauvée
slid peacefully along. Claret flowed from the leather down Master Ballagh’s throat. Stewart, his arms folded, watched O’LiamRoe’s head bob and the fifty blades rise, catch the red sun and fall into glassy green shadow.
    They rose again, but this time the shadow remained. The whole galley disappeared from the sun in the fair blue waters of the English Channel as a thousand tons of galliasse drove at them broadside on.
    She was Flemish and foul-bottomed, her sheets paid out on a lee helm so that the westerly squall had caught her and was spinning her leeward on top of them, hurled on by wind pressure on sides, sailsand gear. Then the wind caught
La Sauvée
too. Master Ballagh’s bottle fell from his hand; the chairs in the poop slid, and the galley heeled, her shrouds whining and the long lattice of her shells spiked and quilled along its 150 feet by the oars, clenched, thrashing or rattling loose. The shadow of the galliasse darkened and the captain jumped, shouting, on the gangway. The oarsmen on the starboard side were on their feet. Spray hissed and then clattered on the bared benches, and for a moment the stentorian voice of O’LiamRoe, sliding with twenty others in the mess of pennants and tenting around the open holds, was heard bellowing: ‘The key! The key for the leg irons, ye clod of a Derry-born bladder-worm!’
    Stewart, out and gripping the handrail, heard that, and saw that the galliasse, white faces fringing the prow castle, was close-hauling at last, pulling the sheets hard in and bringing up the tiller to head her into the wind. She was a heavy ship,