The Fall of Light Read Free Page B

from Norway. They watched the stars.
    “Do you think our father is dead?” Finbar asked.
    But none of them answered him. They sat there in the night. Teige thought of his mother, Emer, and looked in the darkness
     for the image of her face.
    After a time Finan said: “Tell us one of the stories, Teige.”
    “Yes, tell us one,” said Finbar.
    And so, not to make the time move faster or slower, but to make it vanish altogether, to create the illusion that it did not
     exist and that all moments were the same, Teige told a story he had heard his mother tell. It told of the Queen Cassiopeia
     and her beautiful daughter, Andromeda. He spoke as they all spoke in Irish, and in that language the story seemed more ancient
     even than the versions of it first told in Mesopotamia or Greece.
    “Who could say which of them was the loveliest? Cassiopeia or Andromeda?” he began. “Queen Cassiopeia was full of pride in
     her daughter and in herself and announced that they were lovelier even than the sea-nymphs, the Nereids.”
    “The Nereids?” Finan had forgotten who they were.
    “The fifty daughters of Nereus, the wise old man of the sea.”
    “Fifty?” Finbar asked.
    “Fifty.”
    “O-ho!”
    They watched the stars and imagined.
    “The sea-nymphs were offended, they complained to Poseidon, god of the sea, who struck the waves with his trident and flooded
     the lands and called up the monster Cetus.”
    “I love Cetus,” Finbar said.
    “The king, the husband of Andromeda, was told that the only way he could save his queen was if he sacrificed his daughter
     to Cetus the monster. So Andromeda was chained to the rocks at Joppa.”
    “She was eaten.”
    “She was not,” Teige said.
    “She was!”
    “Stop it, Finbar!” shouted Finan, and punched the other, and the two of them fell to wrestling there and rolling over each
     other while Teige sat and waited. When they had stopped he told of how Perseus came and rescued Andromeda and took her for
     his wife, and madeCassiopeia jealous, and how Cassiopeia in her jealous fit helped arrange an attack on the married couple. How Perseus defeated
     the attack.
    “Then Poseidon, the sea-god, hearing how the queen had plotted against her daughter, cast her into the heavens for all time.”
    “Upside down,” Finbar said.
    “Upside down,” said Teige.
    The story ended, they huddled there beneath the stars that were the same stars since forever. And the longer they watched
     the skies, the clearer they could see the kings and queens and jealous lovers and sea-gods and drowned fathers and vanished
     mothers, and they forgot that they were cold. And after a while they could not tell whether they were in sleeping or waking
     dreams in that empty and merciless world where they were now alone.

3
    Moments before dawn, Tomas returned without his boots from Limerick town. He dismounted his horse with a light
     jump, and when his brothers raised their heads and stared at him he swung his coat onto the ground and fell down upon it.
     His body was exhausted, but his spirit was elated.
    “God!” he said, and astonished the others by rolling with himself there on the ground.
    “Are you sick?” Finbar asked him.
    But Tomas did not reply. He shouted out a cry of no language, raised his bare feet, and banged them on the ground. He let
     out another and wriggled in the mud.
    His brothers did not dare to speak to him. They had never seen him in such an agitated state but erroneously supposed it was
     the loss of their father and the new responsibility of leading the family. They lay there beside the flowing river and watched
     hungrily while the dawn rose in ribbons pink and blue.
    In the dark Tomas had ridden his horse into Limerick town with the intention of stealing something for his brothers to eat.
     But from the moment he arrived on the hardened mud of the side streets, his resolve weakened. At that stage in his life, it
     was the biggest town he had ever seen. Dimly in the distance he