"The Spanish Armada, built high like towers and castles, rallied into the form of a crescent whose horns were at least seven miles distant, coming slowly on, and though under full sail, yet as the winds labored and the ocean sighed under the burden of it..."

William Camden
1551 - 1623

Everyone who knows the story of that doomed Armada, knows that what fearful storms began, Francis Drake, with his brilliant mind and swift ships, finished. Only a handful of the great galleons survived, mastless, riddled with shot, to limp northward off the coast of Scotland and the west coast of Ireland. Fewer still returned to Spain.

The "Black Irish" they call the descendants of those few Spaniards who, against all odds, survived to drag themselves ashore in Ireland.

The "Wild Red Devil" they called the Arab stallion - never having seen his like before - that appeared in their land at that same time in history.

At dawn they saw him here, at dusk there, fading in and out of the mists of that misty Isle with only the thunder of his swift receding hooves and the prints he left behind to show they had not dreamed what they saw. And he became a legend again as he had been before, in Spain. A legend in a land of legends.

He was a creature of unbelievable beauty this horse, the gift of a tribesman to a Sultan to a King.

On the day the Armada set sail from Spain, the crowds gathered to wish their ships Godspeed fell silent when, to the fanfare of trumpets, the great Arabian horse was led before them. Then, when it was learned that it was he, Almustaq, who would carry the flag bearer of Spain onto English soil and lead the invading army to victory over the Protestant queen, wild cheering broke out.

Some who saw him that day said it was the sun, turning his rich chestnut coat to flame and playing on the thick ropes of muscle flowing beneath like liquid power, that gave him his aura of unearthly brilliance.

Others said, no, it was the small perfect head with the wide-spaced eyes and the narrow muzzle that made him unique. That and his carriage. The arch of his neck. The sweep and furl of mane and tail. The elegant walk that turned to a sideways dance on legs as fine and clean and sculptured as a dancer’s. As if, they said, the horse himself knew of his mission and was proud to be the chosen one.

Whatever it was, none who saw him that day ever forgot him.

Four weeks the horse was to live, imprisoned in a space scarcely larger than himself, in the stinking, airless, rat-infested hold of one of the galleons before it broke apart beneath him.

Twenty-eight terrible days they were of heaving seas and total darkness and roaring cannons and shouting, dying men. Days of sickness and hunger and thirst and pain. Days of fear and outrage and humiliation. At the end of them, the common horses and mules surrounding Almustaq were dead and he, his life flickering at every breath, nearly so.

But by then he was past hearing the sounds of battle and death, was no longer terrorized by the smell of burning and smoke that seeped down to his quarters. Drifting in and out of consciousness, he thought himself free again, racing unfettered across the hot sands of his desert birthplace, glorying in his youth and the inexhaustible strength of his limbs.

So he dreamed until there came a new sound above the shriek of the wind and the shouts of the crew. A terrifying sound that wrenched him back to consciousness, the hair of his hide on end with fear. A rumbling, moaning roar it was that grew in momentum, even as he listened, until it became a scream, and then the ship beneath him shuddered and broke apart, the seas moved in, and the scream was silenced.

Like a wild thing Almustaq fought that new terror: the thundering torrent of frigid water that engulfed him, filling his eyes and mouth and nostrils with its stinging salt. And yet, as he struggled, it came to him that he was buoyant, that the partitions that had imprisoned him for so long were gone. He knew too that the terrible pain in his eyes was not from salt alone, but from light as well. And he understood that the churning waters were not the enemy he had thought, but a friend.

A friend whose strength, if not opposed, would carry him away from the tomb he had lived in and set him free. So he stopped his fight, harbored his strength, and let himself become one with it. He let the towering cliffs of water take him as they willed, knowing they would ultimately carry him free of the jagged, splintered wood, the snarl of rope and sail, the lifeless corpses of man and beast that choked and moved with the seas around him.

His instinct was correct for in time the shriek of the wind lessened and the seas calmed themselves. With still more time, a full moon climbed the sky and he was alone on a calm sea.

All that night the great horse swam, knowing instinctively the direction of the land, perhaps smelling it, and when he grew tired, he rested, allowing the water to support him.

Daylight came slowly, softly, and his eyes adjusted with it and there was no more pain. The sun, appearing only at intervals throughout that day, was on its downward path before he saw the land he had known was there. It was dusk before he felt the first nudge of rock beneath his hooves and dark before he pulled himself out of the water and floundered, as awkwardly as on the day of his birth, across the jagged rocks at the water’s edge.

He didn’t - couldn’t - go far. Only a few feet above the tide line to the base of a rise where his trembling legs splayed beneath him and groaning, he fell to his side. Blackness, as black as the hold of the doomed ship, overcame him and he was still for the first time since his hellish journey began.

Hunger woke him. A hunger fiercer than any he had ever known. Stiff, weak, on hooves nearly destroyed by weeks of standing in his own waste, he staggered up the small incline he had slept beside and found a mist-shrouded, green land before him. The short, wet grass there was sweet to his taste, but he was too weak to eat more than a few mouthfuls before his legs buckled and he slept again.

Many weeks he lived in this manner: sleeping and eating, eating and sleeping. Slowly his body healed and his strength returned. As more time still passed, he left the coast and wandered inland, following only his instincts and his whims. And as he grew stronger he discovered anew the exhilaration of his limbs moving fast and sure beneath him, felt again the sting in his eyes and the wind at his head that came with his own speed, and he gloried in his freedom.

He was too fast, too intelligent, too wary of a trust betrayed to ever allow man near him again. He wanted no part of them and for the remaining twenty-eight years that he lived, evaded their every futile attempt to trap him.

His offspring numbered in the dozens, his descendants in the hundreds. Dandelion was one of them, but, of course, she didn’t know that...

CHAPTER ONE

A bold and demanding creature was Dandelion, in the early days of her life. She thought the small field she lived in at the side of McCree’s cottage the center of the world and herself the most important being alive.

She thought her mother a personal possession and took it hard when, a few days after her birth, McCree came at dawn and took her away to work. Dandelion screamed her anger and resentment at their retreating backs, cried her terror and abandonment, flung her small self at the gate, and not a bit of good did it do her. She saw chickens stop their scratchings in the dust to listen to her racket; heard the windows and doors of the cottage slam shut, but her mother, strange looking between the shafts of a cart, disappeared round a turn in the lane and Dandelion was alone.

A long time she kept at her protests, until her body bruised and bled and her eyes and nose streamed... Until she wore herself out and slept...

Of course her mother came back. Smelling of rain and sweat and tiredness, and then it was her that carried on. From a long way off Dandelion heard her calling, the sound of her cries mingling with the rumble of her cart bouncing over rough ground, the urgent thud of her hooves and McCree’s shouts telling her to whoa then... To calm herself... Did she think he’d let harm come to her foal? But the old mare didn’t listen to a word of it and only hurried the more, rounding the last bend like she was young again, like she was running the Grand National, with McCree, red in the face, running at her side, trying to get ahead of her to open the gate to the foal before she crashed through it, cart and all.

In her ignorance Dandelion thought she had her mother back to herself again, thought the whole terrible episode a mistake on the part of McCree, who didn’t know any better, and she was happy again.

The errors in her thinking became apparent the next dawn when McCree came back and took her mother away again, and the next dawn after that too, and every dawn thereafter, except Sundays when she was given the rest she’d earned. It took Dandelion that long to understand that her mother didn’t belong to her at all. Her mother belonged to McCree.

They’d been together a long time, the two of them. Twenty-eight years since he’d walked the sixty-odd miles to the Dublin Horse Fair, five years of savings in his pocket, to look for the horse he’d carried in his head ever since he could remember. He’d spotted her at once. But he was a suspicious man, McCree, and terrified of being taken for a fool, so he’d feigned indifference and taken himself off to look at others, not thinking it right a man should go to THE DUBLIN HORSE FAIR and buy the first horse he set eyes upon. But he’d watched her out of the corners of his eyes even while going through the motions of examining others and then, afraid that others might see in her what he did, hurried back and paid out his money.

The horse was a Clydesdale, and she didn’t come cheap. McCree put his money on her clean legs and cool feet, her great height, the breadth of her chest and the power in her hind quarters. He also put it on the lively intelligence shining in her eyes, her long confident stride, and the feeling that she was his horse.

So they set off then, a young man and a young horse, going to make of his rock-strewn acres a profitable farm. And because the hedgerows they passed between were white with daisies, and the star on his horse’s forehead looked like one too, he called her Daisy.

Heads together, like a courting couple on a Sunday afternoon, they covered the distance back to his farm in deep conversation, though never a sound passed between them. By the time they arrived, Daisy knew the whole of McCree’s life and his dreams as well. She knew, without ever laying eyes on them, the lay of his lands, the rocks and trees that were to be cleared, the walls that were to be built. She knew she would plow his fields and bring in his harvests and when she was done with that, then she would do the same for their high and mighty neighbor, Lord Harrington - who owned the racing stables - and thereby earn McCree good money besides.

Every third year she was to be mated, and her foals - from such a superior mare - would fetch a fine price. It was Daisy’s job then to make McCree a prosperous man. And this she did.

Over the years she threw her might and willing heart into every task set her so that, seeing her at it, people joked and said it looked as though she planned to inherit the place herself some day, such was her pride in her work. Neighboring farmers, seeing this great capacity for labor and her even disposition, put in bids for her foals before they were even born.

Like the good soul she was, Daisy worked as well in summer’s heat as winter’s cold. She never fell sick, never went lame and never, in all her years of giving, asked anything for herself except the peace and freedom of her field at the end of a day.

All of the plans then, the dreams shared on the road from Dublin, came to be fulfilled with one exception: in her thirtieth year Daisy was to give birth to her last foal and that one, unlike the others, would not be sold off, but kept, a proud heir to the kingdom they had created.

McCree turned deaf ears to every offer coming his way when that time came and Daisy’s condition became apparent. "This one’s for me," he told them all. "The best is always last and it’s keeping it for meself I am."

He was more excited at the prospect of that final birth than at any of its predecessors (or even his own dozen children), and he lavished Daisy with every care and attention. Still, he worked her to the end, knowing the birth would go easier for her if he did.

It was plowing they worked at the day of the birth, both of them taking pride in the arrow-straight furrows furling up from the plow’s blade to fill the damp air around them with the good clean smell of fresh turned earth. The smell that meant spring to both of them.

McCree was worried, yet trusting Daisy to tell him when her time came. "What about it then, me darling?" he asked each time they came to the end of the field beside the low stone farm buildings. "Will ye be after doing another there and back?"

And time after time, Daisy’s reply was to turn the mud-weighted plow back into the field and the stinging, wind-driven rain that bruised her eyes until they swelled like over-ripe plums. "It’s spring, isn’t it?" she’d be saying by her actions. "And who to plow if not meself?"

It was mid-afternoon then before she turned away from her work and stood waiting for the plow to be unhitched and her harness removed.

She was preoccupied then, intent on herself like a person with an appointment to keep, wanting only her own field and the privacy of the old, low-hanging trees there. The trees that had sheltered and watched over all her births.

McCree left her then, put on a show of seeing to other matters, knowing better than to attend her. But a hundred times and more he walked between cottage and barn pretending indifference to what went on beneath the trees, though worried half sick just the same. In between times he shouted at his wife and clouted any child foolish enough to get in his way. And when supper time came he pushed his plate aside unfinished, though as a rule he liked his food, McCree.

Daisy had taught him to stay away with the birth of her first. He’d hovered then, him and the young veterinarian he’d brought up from the village to protect his investment, and she’d cramped the foal in the whole of a night, not wanting him there, begging with her wheeling and fretting to be left alone to see to matters in her own way.

It was late in the night then and raining hard before McCree guessed enough time had passed for the youngster to have been born. From a long way off Daisy and her foal heard his footsteps approach. Purposeful, defiant almost, they sounded at first. Diffident, squelching on tiptoe across the wet soggy earth, they sounded as they drew close.

Slowly, murmuring endearments that only Daisy understood, McCree approached, a lantern held high over his head. He saw to the mare first, feeding her the mash he’d brought with him, assuring himself all was well before turning eagerly to the foal.

"And what have you brought me this time, me darling?" he called back to Daisy, kneeling at the side of the foal. "A pale one it is to be sure! Not your own grand coloring at all, me darling, nor that of its sire neither."

His confident chatter died away as the foal struggled to its feet. "Small it is," he muttered. "The smallest of the lot. Too small for me purposes I’m thinking... And a filly besides... And your last a grand big colt. The biggest in the county now..."

He fell silent altogether as he studied the foal’s face, and it was a long time before he said at the end of a groan, "Mother of God, will you be looking at the eyes on it! Further apart than any I’ve ever seen and bulging besides. And the muzzle on it! Narrow as a hound’s and yet the nostrils big as trumpets! Sure and it’s a face to frighten the devil himself!"

He was sick and black with disappointment, the culmination of his grand plan shattered by the appearance of the foal. Wearily he set it aside and went to Daisy’s head. "You did your best, me darling," he consoled. "Sure and ‘twas the greed in me that did us in. I should of let it be three years ago and kept the last fine fellow you gave me. Well... There’s nothing to be done about it now. It’s a runt we’re after dealing with and we’ll have to make the best of it, though how it’s to be done I’m not knowing."

He picked up his lantern and turned away still muttering. "A poor pale runt of a thing it is and none to blame but meself. Not fit for me carts nor me plow nor anything else. Not worth a tinker’s curse!" In his despair he kicked at a clump of wild flowers. "If the truth be told, it’s no more use to me than these blamed dandelions and it’s meself as says so!"

End of sampler The complete novel consists of 17 Chapters. © Sheelagh Mawe. All Rights Reserved.