Chapter 42
Saturday morning. Mullins had been in bed only three hours when he was back up for a new day. Without pausing to rethink his plan, he had whisky first thing on an empty stomach. He was going to get drunk this morning and use this as his way to get through the fight he had agreed to with the Liberty Boys.
As he drank, he thought about his futile run of nights with no sign of the Dolocher anywhere. He let Cleaves drift into memory and focused on the day that he’d heard about Cleaves’s murder, remembering the nods and looks in his direction as he had made his way to work and how he knew the gory details before he knew who had been taken that night. He could hear a couple of children outside arguing about something trivial, and he thought of the love the children had for Cleaves and the time he gave to them with jokes and stories. This started to make him melancholy, so he tried to focus on the murder again. He saw images of bloodstained laneways, and then he saw Kate being attacked down by the boats and how lucky she was to escape, and this made him really angry. Mary Sommers’s bent and scarred body made itself visible now, and again the anger grew. He stood up and took hold of one of the large, heavy chairs in his room; he squeezed it, feeling the thickness and how satisfying it would be to smash it to pieces against the wall or even throw it through the window. He resisted this urge; he’d bought himself a lesson about the cost of such things when he thrashed his shop a while back.
He stormed out of the house and headed for Lord Muc’s place with red descending all around him, and he had no idea of the weather or people around him. He pushed through crowded choke points where sellers were gathered, and he pushed past the first layer of Lord Muc’s men, who were taken by surprise.
“Come on, let’s go!” Mullins shouted from outside the workshop where he had met Lord Muc the previous week.
Lord Muc appeared in the doorway and smiled at him.
“You’re keen.”
“Let’s go now and get this over with.”
“We can’t go now; there’ll be no one there if we do.”
“Can you not arrange it earlier, then?”
“That’s not the way we do things, blacksmith. It’s only an hour away, so you won’t have to wait long.”
Mullins was losing the worst of his fury now, and he felt a little tired and light-headed.
“Come in here and have some sausages,” Lord Muc said, and that sounded just about right to Mullins. He went inside, and the shed was warm with cooking and body heat. The smell of frying sausages was intoxicating, and he was handed a plate with three thick ones on it.
“That’ll be enough to see you through the battle today,” Lord Muc said as he bit a large chunk from one of his own. Mullins bit into one, and some fat splashed out and burned his lip. The men laughed, and Mullins gave them looks that silenced them all except their leader. “You’ve been drinking, I see,” Lord Muc said, giving him a once-over.
“So?”
“Nothing wrong with it, I suppose. Some men do that, but I find it dulls my senses and that I don’t enjoy what I am doing as much during the battle.”
“Well, I don’t plan to enjoy myself.”
“You feel that way now, but I promise you it will be a different story when I ask you after it.”
“I doubt it.” To change the subject, Mullins asked, “How long will this go on today, do you think?”
Lord Muc thought for a moment and then said, “They were humiliated the last time, and it was over in a flash, so they will be looking for both revenge and to save face. I imagine they will be fiercer than usual today, and it will go on a bit. We won’t surrender, and they are on home turf so they can’t surrender, so it could be all out today.” His men were nodding at this, some looking into the frying fire and seeming to realise that today’s battle was going to be a different one. “This could be a very sad day, blacksmith. You may be involved in the last battle between the Liberty Boys and the Ormonde Boys. If they lose badly enough today, it could be the end of them.” Lord Muc looked sad at the thought.
With half an hour to go, Lord Muc began to rally his men with mentions of the last battles and the wounds those still with them had received and invoking the names of the dead and crippled. Mullins had been given a top up on his drinks, and he found himself getting into the group frenzy as they filed out and onto the street to head to the north side of the River Liffey, where they would fight their enemies for perhaps the last time.
When they arrived at the site where the fight was to take place, the enemy was already there, and they were a sight to behold. They had taken a leaf from Lord Muc’s book and invoked the Dolocher themselves: they were covered in strange garments and wore crudely made pig headdresses as they taunted the Liberty Boys.
In Mullins’s current state of mind, this was a taunt too far: he was exhausted from prowling the streets at night looking for this beast, and he was drunk now and emotional, and even though the Ormonde Boys would have no of way of knowing that he was singlehandedly trying to catch the Dolocher every night for all of their benefit, he was furious at their insult. He looked at Lord Muc and, seeing that he was not ready to get going yet, Mullins made the decision to fly at them on his own.
“Bastards!” he shouted as he ran at them, towards the dead centre of them where the leader most likely was. As he ran, he was vaguely aware of Lord Muc shouting something at him, but Mullins was focused ahead, and he could see the look of shocked fear in the faces of those he was about to engage. They had never seen him before, and in full drunken, enraged flight, the blacksmith was breathtaking. He crashed into the front row of men with no weapon in his hands and sent many of them tumbling to the ground with his force. He felt searing heat at his shoulder and across his chest, and he knew that one or two of them had managed to cut him with their weapons as they tried to defend themselves.
Mullins’s velocity brought him to the ground and took another two down with him as he punched hard into their faces. He could hear the stampede of feet as the Liberty Boys joined the fight behind him. The two men he fell with were unconscious, and Mullins sat up and looked about him. There were weapons flashing in the light everywhere, and the tearing of flesh and costume was all around. Lord Muc slashed his huge boar tusks across the face and chest of a man who fell at his feet in agony, and then he was standing over Mullins.
“You should have waited for my go-ahead, blacksmith!” he said angrily as he lashed out at someone else who had approached him. Mullins didn’t say anything; he stood up, found a discarded club, and began to swing it around his head and bring it down on any of the people around him who wore pig costumes. Men were falling all around him, and the carnage was unbelievable. Mullins found himself stepping over people as he hunted down the last of the Dolochers, who were doing their best to avoid him while trying to fight off their Liberty Boy opposite numbers.
Soon and with bated breath, Mullins had to stop swinging the heavy club. As he dropped it to the ground, he noticed for the first time the blood and pulp on it that was God knew what part of the men he had waylaid. He looked around and saw some of the costumed men running away—very few, though, as the rest of them were either crawling around on the ground in agony, or else they were lying still and possibly dead.
Lord Muc was beside him now again, and they looked around the scene together.
“You looked like you enjoyed that, blacksmith; there was barely anything left for the rest of us today.”
Mullins looked at him, and he felt disgusted with himself. “I didn’t enjoy one second of that, and I won’t ever be doing it again,” he said.
“There mightn’t be a chance to do it again; that may very well be the end of the Ormonde Boys. A good few of those on the ground there will never be able to fight again,” Lord Muc said, nodding at the crumpled bodies in the mud.
“I’m going home,” Mullins said, trying not focus on what he had just done.
“Be careful on the way. The troops will have wind of this by now, and you could be stopped a
nywhere on the way back.”
“I don’t care,” Mullins said, and he walked back towards the river.
As he walked, he could feel now that his hands were shaking; he was ill in his stomach and felt like he was going to vomit. He kept seeing the eyes of the men, those terrified eyes, behind the Dolocher masks, and he heard again the cracking and crunching of bones as he smashed into one after the other. What had he done? Were any of those men dead?
He couldn't think properly; he had the sense that he had caught the Dolocher and had, in fact, killed it, and this whole ordeal was over. He thought of Kate, and he knew that the Dolocher being gone had something to do with her, but what? He was tired, and the cold was starting to come in on him. He had no idea what he had just done or what he was going to do. He walked.