Free Red Sky in Morning by Paul Lynch

before him with the same face as the knifeman but thicker with age and bearded. Sam Tea’s the name and you’ve just met me brother. Apologies for the way he’s acting.
    All he had to do was push up.
    The man waved his hand as if to dismiss the incident and he put it to The Cutter to shake. The Cutter looked at the hand before him and took it reluctantly and nodded towards his empty cup. Sam prodded his brother and pointed to the empty drinks. In the palm of his hand he danced a few coins. Go on, he said. The youngster went scowling to the bar.
    Sam turned to The Cutter and nodded towards his brother. He’s half soused so he is and he donny speak so I do the talking for the both of us.
    The Cutter sat down. Looks to me like The Mute hears fine rightly.
    He hears what he wants to hear.
    The Mute arrived back and slapped three beers on the table and sat with his shoulder turned.
    Are you for sailing? Sam asked.
    The Cutter smiled. Was. Some fog out there.
    Across the table a gray-bearded man groused dead-eyed about the weather and the delays it had caused and the cost of a night’s lodgings to another who sat half listening, his eyes watery, smiling dumbly over fat glistening lips.
      
    T HE FURL AND GRASP of fog and then the road shortened before him. He followed till it met the Foyle and the road along the shore to Derry. Took him a while to realize he knew it. That one trip before with Jim. His brother’s laughter. That time they took a cart to Derry to flog a heap of spuds. A battered old horse they borrowed without asking. Must have been just fourteen. My poor brother. And he saw before him the rock of his jaw and the fierce living in his eyes.
    The air damp and the sea sullen behind mist. A silence unearthly but for his own footsteps and when he heard the cart coming behind him it was nearly on top of him and he watched the driver well-dressed trundle past his greeting hand. The next one he stopped, heard it coming sooner—an old horse driven by an old man with no words to say but for a tilt of his sandstone head to get on up and Coyle did so and sat behind grateful. He wrapped himself in the blanket and when they neared the walled city the old man stopped and motioned with his head towards his turning and Coyle squeezed the man’s shoulder in thanks. He hopped over the side and watched the old man and the horse disappear into the mist like an apparition from his mind that ceased to be.
    The start of the city marked by slack-shouldered buildings dim in the fog and he found the streets veiled and lifeless. Evening thickened and he buttoned his coat and adjusted his eyes to the gloom. He followed the road till he was on the quays and he saw the vague shape of the walls rising behind it, the fog lingering upon packet ships fixed lifeless to the docks, the water unheard and the ships silent but for the soughing of their beams. He neared a vessel and saw the figures of sailors smoking on deck, the strangled echoes of one of them laughing while beneath them shone candlelight from a lone berth window.
    A redbrick warehouse rose like standing shadow and he saw figures ghosting the mist, people huddling over the flames of barrel fires that danced dimly about the water’s edge. He walked among them and saw they were ship passengers not yet departed, their faces looming white and ragged out of the fog, countenances long and few were the words from their mouths. He saw a shawled woman sitting on her belongings and a child on a breast that hung limp and another child sitting nearby and he saw that they were alone. Men sat in circles, idle and heaped with drunken faces and he heard them talking in flat voices or there was no talk at all and he saw children sitting tired as if the fog had sapped them of their vitality.
    Gulls hee-hawed in the half-strangled sky and someone came towards him, pulled at his arm and began talking to him, and he saw it was a woman, a face wretched and toothless as she slurred her words whiskey