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it was unjust and deadly and was another in the long catalog
of
inequitable grief that was the family’s history. The twins, riding together bareback on the gray gelding, became wild in
     the chase. Rather than seek the silent protection of the darkness, they yahooed in the air and shrieked loudly enough to rouse
     the birds from the tops of the trees in the great wood. Soon there were blackbirds flying, scattering the last dead leaves
     from the oaks and filling the air with a fluttering falling that in the darkness traversed like flakes
of
feeling, wild and ungathered. The twins yelled out. Finbar rode on the rear of the horse and waved his arms wide like a demented
     bird. Tomas was tilted forward on the chestnut, his arm like a rag and eyes glittering with the broken pieces of Love as he
     led the way into the nowhere that the Foleys sought for new beginning.
    They rode forever. The pursuit was dogged, fueled with whiskey and the twisted righteousness of those who know themselves
     equally guilty. The bald figure of the law squeezed the flanks of his horse until white foam fell from its mouth. His men
     chased on, riding on a hotbed of lust, seeing in the capturing and killing of Tomas Foley a way to release what was twisting
     and burning inside of them. Howmany of them there were the Foleys did not know. The brothers surged on through the darkness, racing blindly through screes
     where the gorse and hawthorn prickled and clawed and made scarlet ribbons of blood across their cheeks and arms. They rode
     down to the river’s side and found at once their progress slowed by mud. Teige’s pony began to tire. Then in the water he
     saw the white gleam of the swan.
    “They’ll catch us,” Finbar said.
    “Feck, they won’t,” Tomas told them. His face was twisted in a mask of fury and guilt and remorse.
    They stopped in indecision.
    Then Teige said, “I’m not afraid of the river.”
    They tied the horses loosely to each other, and Teige spoke to them and told them they must fly like their horse ancestors
     into the darkness and lose the ones who were chasing them. Then he blew his scent into their quivering nostrils and smacked
     them free.
    The brothers stepped into the Shannon. Teige floated on one side of the swan and Tomas on the other. Then, with the twins
     flanking them and holding on tight, they moved out into the river and at once were borne away on the current.

7
    And we can leave them there a moment. The part of the story that is the courtship and marriage of Francis and
     Emer Foley is told on winter nights when stars flock into the sky. It is told by the old to the young in cautionary tones.
     Sometimes the courtship alone is told and seems a story out of arcadia. She was the daughter of a hedge-school master. His
     name was Marcus O’Suilleabhain. He was from the County Galway and had come eastward with his family when Emer was still a
     child. They lived in a place not far from Carlow. Sometimes there he taught her Latin and Greek and spoke in those languages
     with an ease and eloquence that made him seem a figure out of times antique. He was blue-eyed and wore a grey beard. His fingers
     were longand thin, as his daughter would tell, and by yellow candlelight he would sit in the evenings and dip ink and write words and
     say these out loud as he did so. He told his daughter stories in Irish and Latin both and made in this way obscure connection
     between times long distant and those of their living. He loved the fair-haired girl his only daughter for the semblance she
     was of her mother and for the high-spirited way she had and how she held her head back when she walked in the street as the
     daughter of the master. When she was not yet twelve years old, he first told her the legends of the stars. He sat with her
     and told her these, though her mother thought she should be at bread baking or other such things. Marcus O’Suilleabhain did
     not care. He had no sons. He had this beauty of a