Chapter 115: The Sound of the Hunt

Mary Flannery stood up at the back of the court with her hair in a plait and her hands at her sides and she did not say a word. She came down the aisle between the benches and the whole of the gallery turned round and watched her come and Cormac stood in the doorway with his coat half off and did not move.

She stopped in front of him.

“There is a thing about you,” she said, “that I have been carrying since 1994 and that I did not know I was carrying. I was nineteen years old and you were a boy on a boat and you were kind to me and then there was a thing that happened in a room in Killybegs that I have never been able to explain to a living soul.” She put her hand up to her throat. “I have had a mark on my neck since I was nineteen and I have been told my whole life that it was a birthmark and that it was nothing and that I was not to talk about it. And there is a thing about that which is worse than a lie. I believed it. I have been a fisherman’s wife for twenty years and I have never shifted and I have never been in a pack and I have been a woman with a mark on her neck and a thing she could not explain.”

Cormac put his coat down on the bench.

“There is a thing about the mark,” he said. “It was made in 1994 by a wolf called Korkut and it was made with a false marking and it was broken in the same night. And there is a thing about a false bond that I did not know until Friday. A false bond that is broken with a false marking can be mended. It takes a healer and a wolf of the blood and a night of a full moon.”

Mary looked at him.

“And there is a thing about me,” she said. “I shifted on Friday night in a room in this building with a stone floor and a wolf on the door and I did not know what was happening to me and there was a woman with a plait who sat with me and told me to breathe. And she said a thing that I have been thinking about since. She said, there is a wolf in this building who is the other end of that mark and he is going to be in that court on Monday and you are going to want to be in the room when he is.” She put her hand out. “I am Mary Flannery and I am the heir of Maeve and I have been in Killybegs all my life and I do not know what a pack is. But I know what a mark is and I know what it is to have one that does not make sense.”

Cormac took her hand.

The whole gallery was silent.

And then the woman with black hair struck the table with the flat of her hand and said, “The court is in session.”

The whole room sat down.

“There is a thing about this afternoon,” she said, “that the court is going to say before any wolf in this room says another word. The healer of Dún Aonghasa died in this building at half past one and the court has been in a room since two o’clock and it has heard the whole of what the wolf Ronan wrote in his book and it has read the last page of it. And there is a thing about the last page that the whole of this room is going to hear. It is not in the hand of a healer. It is in the hand of a woman called Siobhan and it was written in the winter of 1996 and it was given to the healer to keep.”

The whole room went quiet.

“Read it,” my sister said from the front row.

The woman with black hair read it.

“I am Siobhan, daughter of Maeve’s daughter, and I am writing this in the room above the hall in the winter of 1996 and there is a wolf on the stairs. I have made a claim and I have lost it and I have been put in a boathouse and I have been taken out of it and I am going north. And there is a thing I have to write down before I go. The claim I made in March was not a claim for the seat. It was a claim for the noise. The seat was never mine and it was never going to be mine and I knew it when I made the claim and I knew it when the two wolves held me down. The seat is my sister’s. Not the sister in Dublin. The daughter. The child I gave to Deirdre in 1979 and who was taken to Killybegs and who is called Mary. She is the heir of Maeve and she is the next of the blood and there is not a wolf in this village who knows she exists. And there is a thing about my sister in Dublin that I have to write down and that I have never said to her. She is not the heir and she is not a claimant and she has never been a claimant. She is a wolf who has been told she is nothing her whole life and who is going to come to this village and find out what she is. And when she finds out what she is she is going to do the thing I could not do. She is going to put it back together.”

The whole room was silent.

“Then there is a thing about the afternoon,” the woman with black hair said, “that the court is going to say and then it is going to do the thing a court does. The claim of the line of Maeve is open and the court is going to set aside the seat of Dún Aonghasa and it is going to declare the heir and it is going to put the whole of it in a file.” She put her hand flat on the table. “But there is a thing about a court in Galway and a village on the west coast. A court can set aside a seat. It cannot put a village back together. And there is a wolf in this building who has been in that village for a month and who has been told by a dying man that the village is the thing that matters.”

The whole room turned round and looked at me.

And then, from the corridor outside, there was a sound that was not a door and not a voice. It was a horn. It was a hunting horn and it came up the stairs from the street and the whole of the room went to the windows.

The quay was full of men.

There were fourteen of them and they had dogs and they had lamps and they had long cases and one of them had a horn at his belt and one of them was Owen and he was not with them. They were standing in a line along the wall and the dogs were straining at the leads and the whole of the quay was filling up with the sound of it.

The woman with black hair turned round.

“There is a thing about that horn,” she said. “The court has heard it before. It is a hunting horn and it is blown by the men of Sligo and there is not a wolf in this building who does not know what it means. It means a hunt has been called and a hunt that is called on a city quay is a hunt that has been called by a wolf who does not have the right to call it.”

The whole room was silent.

And then the door at the back of the court opened and a man came in with a paper in his hand and said, “There is a woman at the door of this building and she says she is the Alpha of Dún Aonghasa and she has called a hunt.”

Mairéad came into the room with her silver hair down and her black coat on and a wolf on either side of her and a paper in her hand.

“There is a thing about this afternoon,” she said, “that the whole of this room is going to hear before it does another thing. I have called a hunt on the quay of Galway and I have called it under the charter of Dún Aonghasa and there is not a wolf in this room who can say I have not got the right. A wolf who has been declared a rogue and who is in a territory that is not her own and who has been in a hall with a book and a file is a wolf who can be hunted by the Alpha of the pack she has been taken from.” She put the paper on the table. “And there is a thing about the paper. It is signed by me and it is countersigned by the Keeper of the Rolls and it is dated this morning.”

The woman with black hair picked up the paper and looked at it.

“The Keeper of the Rolls is suspended,” she said.

“The Keeper of the Rolls is in a room on the floor below this court with a wolf on the door,” Mairéad said, “and there is a thing about a wolf on a door that no one in this building has thought of. He can open the door.”

The whole room went up.

And then the lights went out.