Dublin (17 page)

  The first day Conall left her in the dolmen shelter up on the promontory. He went along the shore but had no luck. The second day he came back smiling. He had found an old widow woman living alone in a hut by the shoreline. Telling her he was a single druid seeking greater solitude, he had explained his needs and she was glad to provide them: a bit of food when he came for it, and the use of the small curragh that had belonged to her husband, who had been a fisherman.

  Late that night, and quite unseen, Conall and Deirdre came down to the shore and set out in the curragh, upon a still and starlit sea, for the little island with the cleft rock that lay below the headland Deirdre loved. No one, she hoped, would find them there.

II

  For a year the search continued. Spies from the High King watched the harbours; on several occasions they also secretly watched Fergus and his rath in case he was concealing his daughter; but each time they returned to report: "No sign."

  And for a year Finbarr travelled.

  Day by day the pattern was unchanging-Finbarr, with Cuchulainn bounding along beside, rode first. The two chiefs followed behind. Sometimes they took winding tracks; sometimes they would journey along one of the island's great slige highways. It might be a broad cattle drove across the upland pastures, a pathway cut through the forest, or a stout wooden track through a bog, but whatever the terrain, the three riders pushed ahead relentlessly. They asked at every farmstead; they questioned the boatmen at every river.

  Even in the great wildernesses of the island's interior, it was hard for people to move amongst the tribal territories without encountering anybody. Someone must have seen them. But after the sighting reported by the king's men down in Munster, they seemed to have vanished completely.

  It was a grim time. The failure of the harvest the year before was a serious matter. It had not brought starvation to the land, so far.

  The chiefs of each territory usually saw to that. There was still milk and meat, vegetables and berries. As they led their people out onto the communal grazing lands, they knew that despite the failure of the crops at the farmsteads, they could still live in the manner of their distant ancestors before the raising of crops had come to supplement the tribe's resources. But hardship there was. Oatmeal, bread, and ale, too, with the destruction of the barley, were all in short supply. In most cases on the farmsteads, Finbarr noticed, the chiefs had been ruthless in keeping back grain for sowing. It was as well, he thought, that the land of the island was rich, and that the chiefs had good authority. But if the people looked to their chiefs, and the chiefs to their kings, then the focal point of all their hopes was, more than ever, on the High King and his favour with the gods.

  Just after Lughnasa, the rain began to fall. Not the usual rain that might be expected in the warm, wet coastal regions of ocean- bordered Munster, but driving storms and howling winds, day after day without ceasing. This year, too, it was clear the harvest would b e ruined. And seeing this terrible evidence of the gods' displeasure, though Finbarr loved his friend, he could not help wondering if Conall's humiliation of the High King might not be the cause.

  Fair weather or foul, they searched the coasts and hills of Munster; they scoured Leinster; they went up into Ulster. Sometimes they found shelter at a farmstead; sometimes they slept in the open and heard the howling of wolves. They crossed the rich pasturelands where great earthwork walls and ditches marked the divisions between the lands of one tribe and another; they ventured into the dark bogs where people lived in brannog settlements built on wooden platforms in the water. Everywhere they asked, and everywhere the answer was the same: "We have not seen them here."

  Once, just once, Finbarr had a feeling that they might be close. It was on the eastern coast, just above the Liffey's bay. There, by a deserted strand of beach, he had met an old woman and asked if she had seen any strangers.

  "Only the druid," she had said, "who lives on the island."

  "Has he companions?" Finbarr had asked.

  "He has not. None at all. He lives alone."

  Yet an instinct might have made him go out to the place, but for his two companions, who called to him:

  "Finbarr, come on. He is not here." And so they departed.

  At last they had come to Connacht, with its mountains and lakes and wild coastline. They do well, he thought, to call it the land of the druids. And thinking of his friend's lonely spirit, it seemed to him that this was where he might be. So for months they searched, but there was not a whisper of him. Until one day as they were standing on the great, sheer cliffs of Moher, staring out at the wild ocean in which somewhere, it was said, lay the Isles of the Blessed where the spirits of the great warriors went to their eternal rest-and Finbarr was just wondering whether perhaps his friend might have died and his spirit gone out there-one of his two companions spoke.

  "It is time to return, Finbarr."

  "I cannot," he replied. "I have not found him."

  "Come with us," said the other. "You can do no more." And he realised that it was a year since they had set out.

  Sometimes it seemed to Conall that he had never been happy before. His life with Deirdre had been a revelation to them both. It had not taken her long to become, in their lovemaking, even more adventurous than he. Often she would take the initiative, straddling him, controlling him, or making him lie still while she explored new ways to give him pleasure or arouse him again. As her slim body entwined with his, it was hardly surprising that Conall, for so long beset by doubts and inner tensions, should have learned what it was to feel very happy indeed.

  Their life on the island worked surprisingly well.

  The late- summer rains had not troubled them. The cleft in the cliff provided protection as well as concealment and there, above the tiny cove and beach, Conall used branches from the island's small supply of trees to build a cabin of mud and wattle that would certainly see them through the mild winter. The widow was glad to supply Conall with simple food which he could supplement by periodic trips inland where, as a wandering druid, he could purchase supplies without difficulty. On the island he could catch fish and he also planted beans and peas. Two other necessities were dealt with in the following way. To collect water for drinking, he found several places where rainwater ran off the rock face and dug three good-sized pits which he lined. For boiling vegetables or meat, which he was sometimes able to obtain, he constructed another, much smaller pit. Filling this with water, he would then transfer stones, heated red-hot in the fire, into the pit, which would bring the water to the boil and maintain at that heat for some time. Those boiling pits were a speciality of the island people and were as effective as they were simple.

  No one came near them. There was no reason why they should. The nearby headland was deserted. On the main shore opposite, there was no one but the widow. A little farther up the coast there was a much larger island opposite an inlet. Nobody lived on the island, and the few fishermen by the inlet only occasionally went out to it.

  Even if anyone had thought of venturing in their direction, Conall had taken care to tell the old woman that he wanted to be alone, and she had no doubt passed this information on to the fishermen at the inlet. Druids who lived as hermits were not unknown; and it would be a foolhardy person indeed who risked a druid's curse by disturbing him when he wanted to be left alone.

  The only thing, for the time being, that concerned Conall was that their island was so small. There was a beach to walk around, a grassy headland to climb, and a few trees, but that, and some rock pools, was all. Wouldn't Deirdre grow restless?

  Surprisingly, it did not seem so. She appeared to be content. But several times, on moonlit nights, he had taken her in the curragh across to the headland, and they had climbed up to the top and from there they had gazed together not only northwards, at their little refuge, but southwards across the whole sweeping bay past Dubh Linn and the Liffey's estuary to the southern headland and the silent, volcanic shapes of the Wicklow Mountains stretching down the coast, bathed in the silver moonlight.

  "It is a pity you cannot visit them," he had remarked the first time, gesturing towards her family's rath, dimly visible above the estuary.

  "It does not matter," she said. "I have you." And he hoped that it was true.

  Yet as the months went on, in addition to his happiness with Deirdre, Conall was surprised to discover another profound contentment. For if he had always supposed that the company of a woman would somehow interfere with the contemplative thoughts that occupied his mind, so far this had not proved to be the case. Quite the reverse in fact. Partly it was the silence of the place; certainly the fact that she instinctively understood that he needed to be left alone with his thoughts; and perhaps also, more than he realised himself, the fact that he was now free of his old identity. But whatever the causes, in the rhythm of their life he found a sense of peace, of freshness and renewal. His disguise, indeed, had become a new reality; for effectively he had now become a druid. Each day, in his mind, he would go over the vast stock of knowledge he already possessed. Each morning and evening he would watch the sea and listen to the waves.

  And sometimes, losing his sense of personal identity entirely, he would stand in a trance and, like the poet Amairgen, quietly recite: "I am the Wind on the Sea, I am the Ocean Wave."

  So autumn passed into a mild winter, and winter into spring. Then, in late spring, Deirdre told him she was pregnant.

  By the midsummer after Finbarr's return, it seemed the harvest would be a good one. In the little fields by farmsteads all over the island, the grain was ripening.

  The weather was fine. Lughnasa came and immediately afterwards, the High King began a tour of Leinster.

  He was encamped near the Slieve Bloom

  Mountains when the great darkness fell.

  Larine would always remember how it began. He had noticed the long banks of cloud along the horizon at sunset, but it was not until he awoke in the middle of the night that he noticed that the stars had been snuffed out. Then the night ended, but it still remained dark. "The dawn," men called it afterwards, "which was no dawn." All morning the sky remained not grey but black. Then it turned brown.

  Then it rained.

  It was not a storm; it was a downpour. But unlike any downpour that he had seen before, it lasted seven days. Every stream became a torrent, every riverbank a lake. Swans floated across the meadows; and in the fields, turned into muddy swamps, stood only the crushed and sodden stalks of harvest's ruin. The High King went north into Ulster.

  It was early September when he sent for Larine.

  The druid found him subdued.

  "Three harvests lost, Larine." He shook his head. "It's myself they blame." He relapsed into silence.

  "What is it you wish?"

  "When Conall shamed me…" the king began heavily, then sighed. "The Dagda, they say, punishes kings who are mocked. Is it true?"

  "I do not know."

  "I must find him, Larine. But it isn't easy. My men failed. Finbarr failed. None of the druids or the filidh can tell me where he is." It had been a source of profound relief to the druid that the High King had not killed Finbarr for his failure as he had threatened. Larine had had the chance to question them closely, especially Finbarr, after their return, on the course their travels had taken and the places they had searched; but though he had considered carefully, he had not so far received any definite sense of where his friend Conall might be.

  The High King looked up bleakly from under his heavy eyebrows. "Can you tell me, Larine?"

  "I will try," the druid promised, and went away to prepare himself.

  He had to wait a day or two, for the days in the druid's calendar were clearly marked as lucky or unlucky for rituals of this kind. But as soon as the time was propitious, he got ready.

  The holy men of the Celtic world used many methods to see into the future. "Imbas" they called it: divining. The salmon, it was said, could impart wisdom and prophecy to some. Ravens could speak, if you knew what spells to use and how to listen. Even ordinary men, sometimes, could hear voices from the sea.

  But the method particularly favoured by the initiated class made use of the act of chewing.

  Some druids achieved powers of vision simply by chewing their thumb; but this was only a quick substitute for the proper method which was a version of one of the most ancient ceremonies known to man: the taking of a sacred meal.

  Upon the day, Larine got up, washed himself carefully, and put on his druid's cloak of feathers. Next, he spent some little time in prayer, attempting to empty his mind of anything that might interfere with his receiving whatever message the gods were pleased to send him. Then he went to the small hut where, the night before, he had prepared everything in readiness. Two other druids were guarding the entrance to ensure that nobody disturbed the sacred rite.

  Inside the hut was bare except for a small table and three stands. On one stand was a little figure of the sun god, the Dagda; on another, the goddess Maeve, patroness of royal Tara; and on the third, Nuadu of the Silver Hand. On the table, on a silver dish, were three strips of meat. This might be the flesh of pig, dog, or other animal, and Larine had chosen dog. At a nod from him, the two druids outside drew the door at the entrance closed and after standing in silent prayer a few moments longer, Larine went to the dish. Taking one of the strips of meat, he chewed it carefully, showed it to one of the gods, and placed it behind the door.