Free The Fall of Light by Niall Williams Page B

power andcrouched low and put his head forward to hers and spoke to her as the wind rushed past them. They moved away from the river.
     They galloped out hard and fast away from the small trees and tangled bushes and into the broader light. The green of the
     land opened out before them and boy and pony raced into it, travelling with apparent fierce intent, so that to stray onlookers
     in that uncertain morning Teige Foley might have seemed a forsworn message bearer, a figure out of Old Testament times charging
     headlong upon a mission secret and imperative. Thin cattle in the fields lifted their heads to watch. The racing figure was
     there and then it was gone and the cattle lowered their heads to the poor grass once more. The road ran westward. They galloped
     on. They reached a small rise where again the river could be seen on the left, and suddenly, without the slightest slowing,
     from full speed the pony stopped short.
    Teige flew over her head. Briefly he saw the country from the vantage of a ghost riding a ghost horse. He felt the airiness
     of his mount, and it was momentarily pleasant and easy. He rode the air an instant, then began to turn head over heels, and
     then the knowledge of oncoming pain arrived somewhere in the front of his head and he saw the hard brown road and crashed
     down onto it. He landed and cried out and was saved breaking his neck only by his youth. He lay in the road and the pony stood
     and watched him. She studied him with implacable eyes of no regret, nor did she turn and run away.
    When he could speak Teige asked her what she was doing stopping like that. He looked around them to see if there was something
     that had startled her. But there was only the rolling green of that lumpy land. He said a curse in Irish and the pony lifted
     her nose as if to smell the words.
    The pain shot down through Teige’s left arm. He lay as flat as he could on his back in the road. He cried out loud and the
     pony turned half away and Teige called out to her to come to him. He had to call only a second time and the pony walked slowly
     down the road and he was able to pull himself up first by holding her hock and then the loose reins-rope, and then he was
     sitting on her back once more. His left arm ached and sent crimson blooms of pain travelling toward his neck and spine. He
     sat there atop the pony sharply aslant and tried to will the hurt into subsiding. They did not move. As though contrite, the
     pony waited for him perfectlystill. She watched the road where nothing visible was coming or going. Then Teige cried out for his mother.
    He cried out to her in the vanished world where she was gone whether living or dead and whence he longed for her now to reappear
     and take him from the pony and hold him in her white arms on that empty roadside so that a kind of goodness might be restored.
     He cried for her a second time, and she did not come. The landscape ached with his longing. Blackbirds like small priests
     walked in the silent fields.
    When he regained himself he slouched forward and patted the pony with the palm of his right hand. He whispered to her.
    “It’s all right,” he said. “You are fine,” he told her, “fine, girl. Yes, you are.”
    He felt the pain localize and he grew more lopsided to accommodate it, then he raised the reins and tried to coax the pony
     forward in a walk. They moved a short distance, then the pony snorted and twitched and he stopped her on the crest of the
     road and looked out at the country. To the south he could no longer see the river but could see the blue shadows of the mountains
     that he did not know were in Kerry. The clouds were heavy and slow and faintly purpled. He sat the pony and looked out for
     what she had seen as the weak sun climbed the sky behind them in a screen of cloud. Then he saw it. It was a man’s legs. They
     were trousered in brown cloth without shoes and lay angled out of the ditch not forty paces away.
    “Come on,” Teige