Glorious Dead

“For I parted then with valiant men…”

- The Foggy Dew, An Irish Revolutionary Song

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Far out into the hills, pipes began to call their lingering, mournful dirge. It bounced and echoed, harmonizing with itself as the piper played. In perfect time, the call and response of the pipes and the hills melded and blended together until the pipes themselves were lost in their own echoes. Until the very hills and valleys seemed to sing a lament of their own.

Other pipes joined the song. Their high, keening voices rising up and carrying echoes of their own in their wakes. To the people who heard the songs within songs within songs, images seemed to conjure before their eyes. Images of armed lines of marching men, in squadrons passing by.

But these were not legions of the living. They wore no uniforms, bore no ranks, and their steps were out of synch. Not a rabble, not by half. Nor yet were they soldiers.

To the eyes of those who could see them, the ghosts marched in rank, falling in and out of step. Their faces shadowed. And all who imagined the battalions of faceless dead, likewise, imagined that they could see the faces of sons, husbands, lovers, and friends by the score.

Slowly fading, the echoes of the pipes took the ghosts of the dead with them. Drawing them away from the world of the sun and the living, guiding them into the endless unknown. That tradition was old, the wordless elegy of the hills; the pipes that all but wept at the end of their song.

It began again before the last memories of its sounds had faded. But the imagined figures of the dead did not return. The second playing was not for them, but rather for those they left behind. To remind them of the sacrifice and courage of those who were now gone. And to give some solace to the listeners whose questions will never be answered.

Faces began to emerge from houses. Peeking out around curtains and through the cracks in doors. Each one listening to the piping lament. Each one trying, and failing, to count the pipes that boasted their liberation across the hills and through the valleys. Though none could dare to believe it.

Until the bells began to ring.

The invader had ordered that the bells be rung as before. That, despite their making illegal all forms of faith and service, nothing be changed. The bells in their towers had always rung, and so the invader declared that it must be so again. Yet from the day of conquest to the fading of the second lament from the hills, they had remained steadfastly silent.

Priests and bellringers had, in their quiet way, refused this conquest. An act of rebellion undeserving of comparison to those remembered by the pipes, unless one were to ask the dead for their opinion.

One and all the ghosts would answer, despite what they might have felt had they continued to draw breath under a sun that finally shone again on the free fields of home, that any defiance was enough. Refusing to pour wine for an invader, refusing their bed, their language, or even to smile at them in the street, was itself an act of courage. The ghosts of the dead gladly made space in their ranks for the old woman who swore at the soldiers. They welcomed among them the child gunned down for spitting at the conqueror’s feet. Among also them were included those killed for refusing to so much as ring a bell when ordered.

In death all defiance is equal, if one were to ask the dead.

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This is part 4 of 4 of a series of related but not sequential vignettes. I hope you enjoyed :)

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4