Rainbow's End (4 page)

‘He’s outside somewhere,’ Roisin shouted. ‘I’ll go after him.’

‘We’re all goin’, but kape together,’ Fidelma said. She gathered Roisin and Sorcha close to her and Maura, who was twelve, caught a fold of her skirt and, clutching each other, the four of them fought their way out into the open.

‘Where’ll we go, Grainne?’

‘The pigsty,’ Grainne screamed back. The sty was an extension of the house really, but it had no joining door for Paddy had closed it off years since. The fire would not go through a stone wall two foot thick, surely? She guessed that the roof would have gone, but the walls would stand . . . it would be a better refuge than the farmhouse with the fire raging, wouldn’t it? ‘Fid, if it isn’t safe, make for the cavern. Go on, hurry! I’ll bring Dadda.’

She crawled over to her father and caught hold of him by the shoulders. He groaned and his eyelids fluttered but he did not wake even when she tugged him slowly across the floor and out into the wild and spiteful wind. She looked around her; there was no sign of the children but when she bent to the task of moving her father once more she felt something warm nudge against her and glanced round, hoping to see one of her brothers or sisters.

It wasn’t a child, however, it was Tinker. He was wild-eyed, shivering, but he whined softly when Grainne said his name and as she began to pull her father across the yard – anything to get him away from the burning building – the dog followed her, limping along on three legs with the fourth held at an odd angle. I hope to God it’s not broken, Grainne thought, dismayed. Tinker was invaluable to them, they relied on the dog’s intelligence and obedience in many ways. He hunted for his own food, which was a saving, of course, but he also brought rabbits home when times were hard, and when the sheep wandered too far Paddy Feeney only had to tell Tinker to ‘Fetch ’em out!’ and off he’d go and come back with the flock, driving them proudly before him. ‘He’s me extry leg,’ Paddy would joke. ‘And me daughters is me extry arms.’

But where should she take her father and the dog? It was terrifying out here; ordinary, everyday objects became deadly missiles, picked up by the wind and hurled with all its force at anyone fool enough to be in the way. Looking around her, Grainne saw that the children were no longer in sight. She began to tow her father towards the pigsty. Then stopped. The wooden half-door had gone, completely disappeared, and most of one wall. A second glance showed her that the empty sty, for the pigs had clearly fled, was actually rocking as the wind howled around it.

Another glance around failed to find her sisters or brothers, so Grainne got her father round the waist and staggered with him across to the big old bramble patch which grew against the old stone wall which divided the yard from the trees. Inch by painful inch, doubled up against the force of the shouting wind, she half dragged, half carried him across the uneven ground. When they reached the brambles, she let go of him and she and the dog forced themselves into the hollow in the middle of the briars which Grainne had never thought to enter, though she had known of its existence since the first time she lost a broody hen within it. Having ensured that there was room for them, she crawled out again and dragged the still inanimate body of her father back into the strange shelter. She made a couple of vain attempts to bring him back to consciousness – it worried her that there was a big, dark lump on his right temple and a trickle of blood ran from it – then, feeling she had done her best for him, she told Tinker to stay with the master and set out to look for her brothers and sisters.

An hour later, or maybe two, she crawled back into the brambles. She had searched and called but against the terrible howling of the wind she could not have heard an answer had there been one. And she had seen nothing, save for objects bowling along the ground or hurtling through the air too fast for recognition. But she had managed to untangle from a stone wall a precious blanket, only a little burnt at one edge. This she carried back with her and when she reached her father and the dog, she put the blanket over all three of them and settled down to get what sleep she could. And so exhausted and frightened was she that she did sleep at last.

All night long the worst and most destructive storm in living memory raged. And towards dawn the inevitable happened. The sea, tossed into a frenzy of turbulence by the wind, backed up. Even as the roaring of the wind began to die down a little, the roaring of the sea took over. The stream which ran no more than a few hundred yards from the Feeneys’ home came surging over its banks, the water tumultuous enough to destroy a good deal of what lay in its path.

The first Grainne knew of it was when she was woken by Tinker whining and nuzzling against her. She sat up and felt the ground soggy beneath her fingers. Tinker whined again, then barked urgently. Blinking, Grainne forced her head and shoulders out of the briars and looked around her. In the pale grey dawn light a sea of turbulent water surrounded her, gleaming like pewter beneath the unquiet and cloudy sky. Really frightened now, Grainne wriggled back into the briar patch and once more tried to rouse her father. ‘Dadda, wake up! We’ll be drowned, else! Come on, Dadda, there’s a flood and the wind’s still howlin’ . . . oh Jesus, Mary an’ Joseph, let me dadda wake!’

Outside the briar patch Tinker barked again. Imperatively. Grainne wrapped her father in the now very damp blanket and, using it like a sort of sledge, towed him out of the bushes and into the open. She glanced towards the house. The water washed around it, but the fire seemed to have been extinguished – perhaps it had burned itself out? She towed her father to the ruins and stopped, aghast. The house was burnt out, empty. Any furniture which had withstood the hurricane had been swallowed up by the fire and a quick glance around her showed that the smoke-stained walls were all that remained. There were no pigs, no hens, no potato clamp, no turf pile and, worst of all, no children, no Fidelma.

It took Grainne the best part of an hour to settle her father in a corner of what had once been the pigsty. She roofed it with planks from the donkey’s stable, which had collapsed entirely, and to keep Paddy from the encroaching water she built up a sort of platform from the loose stones which she found piled against the front of the house. From the look of them they had been blown along the plateau until the building stopped their progress, but Grainne didn’t waste time wondering how they had got there, she just used them and was thankful.

At this point her father actually came round, or at least he half opened his eyes and mumbled something.

Grainne bent nearer. ‘Dadda? Oh, thank God, you’re alive!’

‘Water,’ Paddy said suddenly, the word coming out quite strongly. ‘Water!’

‘Indeed, there’s plenty of that,’ Grainne told him, and looked around her for something to carry water in, then found a battered tin scoop which had once been used to fetch flour and oatmeal out of their sacks. She went outside and got some water, then held the scoop to her father’s lips.

He supped, then spat. ‘’Tis salt!’ he said. ‘Oh, ’tis salt!’

‘I’ll get fresh,’ Grainne promised, leaving the shelter once more. Tinker would have accompanied her, but she turned him back. ‘No, Tink, stay wit’ Dadda.’

The Feeneys had no well because the stream was near enough to use and so far as Grainne could remember there was no other source of water . . . but then she remembered the little brooks which ran off the plateau in wet weather – they wouldn’t be salt, surely? It was just the backing-up of the sea which had caused this.

She would have to cross the stream to get at the little brooks, though. It wasn’t a deep stream, but would the flood water have made it dangerous to cross? She stood, up to her knees in water, for a moment, staring out, then took a deep breath and began to walk into the flood.

And it was all right. It reached her waist in the centre but she kept walking steadily and once free of what had been the stream bed she only had to remember what the terrain was like, with its ridges, hollows and rifts, to choose a safe route.

And the water in the tiny brooks was fresh! She filled her scoop and returned by the way she had come, though she nearly lost her precious cargo once, when her foot found an unexpected hollow.

However, she recovered without spilling more than a drop and presently was able to hold the scoop to her father’s mouth and watch him eagerly empty it. ‘There, Dadda,’ she said as he lay back again. ‘Now I’ll find the rest of the childer and then we’ll try to get help. I wonder how the O’Hares and the Caseys have fared?’

She wondered most of all about how the McBrides had fared, of course, and William in particular, but did not mention it; her father had worries enough right now, she concluded, but she did wonder why William had not come to them the previous evening. She hoped desperately that the hurricane had not caught him in the open, on his way to them, but trusted to his knowledge of the countryside and his natural good sense to have saved him had that been the case. And anyway, with her brothers and sisters missing, she had work to do.

‘Take care,’ her father whispered as she bent to creep out of the shelter. ‘Safe home, Grainne.’

The odd little phrase, which her father had used all her life to anyone undertaking any sort of journey, brought tears to Grainne’s eyes. She was beginning to realise that the hurricane was not just an ordinary natural disaster, like a drought or a bad crop. It was something which would affect their lives far more deeply. But she did not intend to let her father see her tears. Time enough for grieving, now she had work to do, her brothers and sisters to find.

Once outside in the windy and rapidly brightening day, Grainne stared around her; there
must
be more than she had thought left to them, there simply must! But the harder she stared the worse their plight seemed. The stone walls of the farmhouse were there still but everything else had gone; the pigs, the front of their sty, the donkey and his leaning plank stable, the very hens and the loud-voiced cockerel had vanished as if they had never been. And the careful piling up of the dry-stone walls which separated field from field had gone too, though at least, Grainne saw thankfully, the wind had dropped stones all over the landscape which could be used to construct new walls. And though she strained her eyes not a human figure was in sight. The only bright spot, in fact, was that the flood was beginning to ebb; she could see the entire yard now, so she should be able to get over the stream easily enough.

The cavern she had advised Fidelma to run to was on the far side of the swollen stream. It was a natural limestone cave with a narrow entrance which widened out once you got inside to a large, downward-sloping cave. When you stood in the cave mouth you could hear, far below you, the swish and chuckle of an underground river making its way along through the impenetrable dark, but though she and Fidelma had often talked of exploring, they had never done so. At times of drought Paddy had threatened to go down with a bucket, but droughts in Ireland rarely last long and the rain had always come again before he had a chance to put his threat into execution.

She forded the stream, considerably heartened to feel how the tug of the water had lessened since her last foray into it, and began to climb from ledge to ledge, glancing around her as she did so. The sheep would be all right, they must be all right . . . sheep would surely have the sense to take shelter, to lie down, to resist . . .

She glanced back towards the flood and saw something bobbing along on the current. A sheep. Two, three . . . more! She had forgotten that a soaked sheep simply can’t protect itself in water, it becomes waterlogged quickly and drowns.

But the cow would be all right, she was a sturdy animal . . . the calf was a heifer and worth a deal of money. Let the cow and the calf be all right, dear God, Grainne started to pray, then remembered her brothers and sisters. How could she pray for a cow and its calf when her own relatives were missing?

Grainne stumbled on towards the cave. As she got nearer and saw no one, she was suddenly filled with terror. The underground river! If the sea had backed up there, too . . . she broke into a run.

Reaching the cave mouth, she bent down and put her head and shoulders into the darkness, then went right inside because whilst she was in the entrance her body blocked most of the light so that she could see nothing. ‘Fidelma!’ she shouted, and heard her voice echo eerily round the rocks. ‘Fidelma . . . are you there?’

No one answered. But when Grainne stopped shouting and looked carefully around her, she knew that her sisters had been here. The floor was dry and sandy, and footprints scuffed the lighter end of the cave. Grainne could even see where they had sat, had made a sort of nest for themselves.

And she could see the footprints leading into the back of the cave, where it narrowed once more into a deep, downward-sloping passage. Footprints which only went one way and did not come out again.

Grainne stood at the mouth of the passageway for some time, calling gently, but there was no response and she was too wary to try to explore further. She had no candle or means of getting a light so she could see nothing, and if the passage simply ended in a huge drop to the unseen river below then she would be mad to try. Common sense told her that she would not help the family’s desperate situation by getting killed too.

Presently she left the cavern and, with a heavy heart, decided to go next to the McBrides’ farm to ask for help. After all, she and William were promised to one another – he would help her even if his family would not.

So Grainne set out on the long walk. She had never seen the McBride farmhouse but knew it was not on the Burren but on the gentler land, and she assumed that because the McBrides were rich, the house would probably be undamaged, unlike the cabins inhabited by the O’Hares and Caseys, which were poor structures of sods and mud and thatched with straw, unlikely to stand against such weather. Besides, she must know what had happened to William. People of means, furthermore, were likelier to be able to assist others than peasants who would have their work cut out to help themselves.