Princes of Ireland

  He listened. Everything was quiet. Yet in the very silence, there seemed to be a significance, a message being carried by a messenger still far away, like a cloud that is hidden over the horizon. Goibniu was a hardheaded man; he was not given to foolish moods or fantasies. But he could not deny that, now and again as he had walked across the island landscape, he had experienced the sensation of knowing things he could not explain. He waited. There it was again, that echo, like a dream half remembered. Something strange, it seemed to him, was going to happen at Carmun.

  He shrugged. It might mean nothing, but one shouldn’t ignore these things. His eye travelled along the southern horizon. He’d go down to Carmun then, at Lughnasa. When had he last gone south? The previous year, collecting gold in the mountains below Dubh Linn. He smiled. Goibniu loved gold.

  Then he frowned. The memory of that journey reminded him of something else. He’d crossed by the Ford of Hurdles. There had been a big fellow there. Fergus. He nodded thoughtfully. That big fellow owed him a debt—to the value of a score of cattle. A debt that was long overdue. The chief was in danger of annoying him. He wondered if Fergus was going to the festival.

  Deirdre had not enjoyed the journey to Carmun. They had set off from Dubh Linn at dawn with a light, misty rain falling. The party wasn’t large: just Deirdre, her father, her brothers, the bard, and the smaller of the British slaves. The men rode horses: she and the slave drove in the cart. The horses were short and stocky—in a later age they would have been called ponies—but sure-footed and sturdy. They would cover most of the distance by nightfall and arrive the following day.

  The rain didn’t bother her. It was the kind that the people of the island disregarded. If you’d asked Fergus he would just have said, “It’s a soft day.” For the journey, she was dressed simply—a wool dress with a tartan pattern, a light cloak pinned at the shoulder, and a pair of leather sandals. Her father was similarly dressed in a belted tunic and cloak. Like most of the men on the island, his long legs were bare.

  For a while, they went in silence. They crossed the ford. Long ago, so the story was, the hurdles had been laid down on the orders of a legendary seer. However that might be, as the chief who controlled the territory, Fergus maintained it now. Each hurdle consisted of a wattle raft held in place with stakes and weighted with heavy stones—solid enough, though they could be washed away if the river flooded. At the far end, where the bridgeway passed over boggy ground, the cart broke some of the wattle that had rotted. “That’ll have to be seen to,” her father muttered absently; but she had wondered how many weeks would pass before he got round to it.

  Once across, they had turned westwards, following the line of the Liffey upstream. Willows grew on the riverbanks. On the dry ground, as in much of the island forest, ash trees and fine oaks abounded. Dair they called the oak tree in Celtic, and sometimes a settlement made in an oakwood clearing was called Daire—it sounded, approximately, “Derry.” As they went through the forest track, the rain had ceased and the sun appeared. They crossed a large clearing. And it was only after the track had led them back into the woods again that Deirdre spoke.

  “So what sort of a husband am I to have?”

  “We’ll see. Someone who can meet the conditions.”

  “And what are they?”

  “Such as are appropriate for the only daughter of this family. Your husband will be marrying the great-granddaughter of Fergus the warrior. Nuadu of the Silver Hand himself used to speak to him. Don’t forget that.”

  How could she forget? Hadn’t he been telling her since before she could walk? Nuadu of the Silver Hand, the cloudmaker. In Britain, where he was depicted like the Roman Neptune, they had built a great shrine to him by the western river Severn. But on the western island, he was adopted as one of the Tuatha De Danaan—and the kings of that part of the island even claimed him as their ancestor. Nuadu had taken a personal liking to her great-grandfather. Her future husband would have to reckon with that, and all the rest of the family heritage. She glanced sidelong at her father.

  “Perhaps I’ll refuse,” she said. By the ancient laws of the island, a woman was free to choose her husband—and to divorce him later if she wanted. In theory, therefore, her father couldn’t compel Deirdre to marry someone, though he would doubtless make it unpleasant for her if she refused ever to marry at all.

  Men had made offers for her in the past. But after her mother’s death, with Deirdre running the household and acting as a mother to her brothers, the business of her marriage had been put to one side. The last occasion that she knew of had taken place one day when she had been out walking. On her return, her brothers had told her that a man had been asking for her. But the rest of the conversation had not been encouraging.

  Ronan and Rian: two years and four years her juniors. Perhaps they were no worse than other boys their age. But they could certainly exasperate her.

  “He came by while you were out,” Ronan said.

  “What sort of man?”

  “Oh, just a man. Like father. Younger. He was travelling somewhere.”

  “And?”

  “They got talking.”

  “And? What did father say?”

  “He was just—you know—talking.” Ronan looked at Rian.

  “We didn’t listen much,” added Rian. “But I think he made an offer for you.”

  She looked at them. They weren’t being evasive. Just being themselves. Two gangling youths without a thought to share between them. Like a pair of large puppies. Show them a hare and they’d chase it. That was about the only thing that would excite them. Hopeless.

  What would they do without her, she wondered?

  “Would you be sorry if I left you to get married?” she had suddenly asked.

  They had looked at each other again.

  “You’ll be going sooner or later,” said Ronan.

  “We’d be all right,” said Rian. “You could come to visit us,” he had added, encouragingly, as an afterthought.

  “You’re very kind,” she said, with bitter irony, but they didn’t see it. There was no use, she supposed, in expecting gratitude from boys of that age.

  When she had questioned her father about it later, he had been terse.

  “He didn’t offer enough.” The marriage of a daughter was a careful negotiation. On the one hand, a handsome young woman of noble blood was a valuable asset to any family. But the man who married her would have to pay the bride price, of which her father would receive a share. That was the custom of the island.

  And now, with his affairs in the state they were, Fergus had evidently decided he must sell her. She knew she shouldn’t be surprised. That was the way things were. But even so, she couldn’t help feeling a little hurt and betrayed. After all that I have done for him since my mother died, is that really what I am to him? she wondered. Just like one of the cattle, to be kept as long as needed, and then sold? She had thought he loved her. And indeed, she reflected, he probably did. Instead of feeling sorry for herself, she should be feeling sorry for him, and try to help him by finding a suitable man.

  She was good-looking. She had heard people say she was beautiful. Not that she was so special. She was sure there must be dozens of other girls on the island with soft golden hair, a red and generous mouth with good white teeth like hers. Her cheeks, as the saying was, had the delicate colour of foxgloves. She had pretty little breasts, too, she had always considered. But the most striking feature she possessed was her eyes, which were the strangest and most beautiful green. “I don’t know where they come from,” her father had told her, “though they say there was a woman with magical eyes somewhere in my mother’s family.” No one else in the family or anywhere near Dubh Linn had eyes like that. They might not be magical—she certainly didn’t think she had any special powers—but they were much admired. Men had been fascinated by them ever since she was a child. So she’d always felt confident that, when the time came, she’d be able to find a good man.

  But she
wasn’t in a hurry. She was still only seventeen. She’d never met anyone she wanted to marry; and in all likelihood, marriage would take her far from the quiet estuary at Dubh Linn, which she loved. And whatever her father’s problems with his debts, she wasn’t sure she should go away at the moment, leaving her father and her brothers without a woman to run the house.

  The festival of Lughnasa was a traditional occasion for match-making. But she didn’t think she wanted a husband. Not this year.

  The rest of the day had passed quietly. She asked no more questions, because there was no point. Her father at least seemed cheerful: that was something to be grateful for. Perhaps, with luck, he wouldn’t become involved in any quarrels, and would fail to find her an acceptable suitor. Then they could all return home safely and in peace.

  Late in the morning they came to a hamlet in a clearing where her father knew the people; but for once he did not stop to talk. And soon after that, as the Liffey curved away to the south, the track began to rise from the narrowing river plain onto higher ground, taking them westwards. It was towards noon, reaching a break in the trees, that they came out onto a broad shelf of peaty heath, dotted with gorse bushes.

  “There,” her father pointed to an object a short way ahead, “that’s where we’ll rest.”

  The midday sun was pleasantly warm as they sat on the grass and ate the light meal she had brought for them. Her father drank a little ale to wash down his bread.

  The place he had chosen was a small earthwork ring beside a single standing stone. These stones, either single or in groups, were a regular feature of the landscape—placed there, it was assumed, by ancestral figures or by the gods. This one stood quite alone, about the height of a man, looking out over a wooded plain that stretched away, westwards, to the horizon. In the great silence under the August sun, the old grey stone seemed, to Deirdre, to be friendly. After they had eaten, and while the horses grazed nearby, they stretched out in the sun to rest a little while. The quiet snoring of her father soon told her that he was taking a nap, and it was not long before Deirdre dozed off herself.

  She awoke suddenly. She must have slept awhile, she realised, as the sun had shifted its position. She was still in that hazy condition of having been jolted through the veils of sleep into a too bright consciousness. As she glanced at the sun hanging over the great plain, she experienced a curious vision. It was as if the sun were a spoked wheel, like that of a war chariot, strange and menacing. She shook her head to dispel the last mists of sleep and told herself not be foolish.

  But for the rest of that day, and while she lay trying to sleep that night, she was unable to rid herself of a vague sense of disquiet.

  It had been late morning when Goibniu arrived. His single, all-seeing eye surveyed the scene.

  Lughnasa: a month after the summer solstice, the celebration of the coming harvest, a festival where marriages were arranged. He liked its patron god—Lugh the Shining One, Lugh of the Long Arm, the magician master of every craft, the brave warrior, the healer.

  People were arriving at Carmun from every direction: chiefs, warriors, athletes from tribes all over the island. How many tribes were there, he wondered. Perhaps a hundred and fifty. Some were large, ruled by powerful clans; some were lesser, ruled by affiliated septs; some hardly more than a group of families, probably sharing a common ancestor, but who proudly called themselves a tribe and had a chief. It was easy, on an island which nature had divided by mountain and bog into huge numbers of small territories, for each tribe to have lands of its own in the centre of which there was usually a sacred ancestral site, often as not marked by an ash tree.

  And who exactly were these tribes? Where had they come from, these Sons of Mil who had sent the legendary Tuatha De Danaan under the hills? Goibniu knew that the conquering tribes had come to the western island centuries ago from neighbouring Britain and from across the sea to the south. The people of the western island were part of a great patchwork of tribes, whose culture and language, called Celtic, stretched across much of north-western Europe. With their swords of iron, splendid war chariots, and magnificent metalwork, their druid priests and poets, the Celtic tribes had long been feared and admired. As the Roman Empire had spread northwards and across to Britain, the main centres of each tribal territory had usually become a Roman military centre or market town and the Celtic gods of the local tribe likewise put on Roman clothes. Thus in Gaul, for instance, the Celtic god Lugh, whose festival this was, had given his name to the city of Lugdunum, which would one day become transmuted to Lyon. And the tribes in turn had gradually become Roman, even losing their old language and speaking Latin instead.

  Except on the outer fringes. In the northern and western parts of Britain, which the Romans largely left alone, the former tongues and tribal customs had continued. Above all, in the western neighbour island across the sea, where the Romans came to trade but not to conquer, the old Celtic culture, in all its richness, remained intact. The Romans were not always certain what to call these various people. In northern Britain, which the Romans called Alba, lived the ancient tribes of Picts. When colonisers from the Celtic western island sailed over and established settlements in Alba, gradually pushing the Picts back towards the northern British interior, the Romans referred to these Celtic settlers as Scotti, or Scots. But the Celtic tribes of the western island did not call themselves by that Roman name. They knew who they were, ever since they had come to the island and encountered a friendly goddess there. They were the people of Eriu.

  As he watched the Celtic tribesmen approaching the festival, however, Goibniu’s stare was cool. Was he one of them? Partly, no doubt. But just as up at those strange old mounds above the Boyne he felt a nameless sense of belonging, at these great Celtic gatherings he could not help an instinctive sensation that he was somehow alien, that he came from some other tribe who had been in this land since long before. Perhaps the Sons of Mil had conquered his people, but he still knew how to make use of them.

  His single eye continued to move over the scene, separating, with knifelike precision, the colourful groups into different categories: important, not important; useful, irrelevant; owing him something, or owed a favour. By a large cart he saw two magnificent young champions, arms thick as tree trunks, tattooed—the two sons of Cas, son of Donn. Wealthy. To be cultivated. Some way off stood two druids and an old bard. The old man, Goibniu was aware, had a dangerous tongue, but he had a few pieces of gossip to keep the old man happy. Over to the left he saw Fann, daughter of the great chief Ross: a proud woman. But Goibniu knew that she had slept with one of the sons of Cas, which her husband did not. Knowledge is power. You never knew when such information could be used to secure a piece of future business. Mostly though, as his eye scanned the crowd, what Goibniu noticed were the people who owed him something.

  Stately, plump Diarmait: nine cows, three cloaks, three pairs of boots, a gold torc to wear round his neck. Culann: ten pieces of gold. Roth Mac Roth: one piece of gold. Art: a sheep. They all borrowed, all were in his power. Good. Then he saw Fergus.

  The tall fellow from Dubh Linn, who owed him the price of twenty cows. Fine girl with him: she must be his daughter. That was interesting. He moved towards them.

  Deirdre had also been watching the crowds. The clans and septs were still swinging in from all parts of Leinster. It was certainly an impressive sight. Meanwhile, a curious exchange was taking place between her father and a merchant. It concerned the chief’s magnificent golden torc.

  It was the custom on the island that, if you had given your jewellery away as security for a loan, you should be able to borrow it back for the great festivals, so that you should not be dishonoured. A kindly dispensation. If Fergus was embarrassed as he retrieved the splendid gold neck ring from the merchant, he certainly did not show it. Indeed, he solemnly took the heirloom from the other man, as though they were performing a ceremony. He had just placed it round his neck when Goibniu arrived.

  Whatever the smith thought of Fe
rgus, one couldn’t fault his politeness. Goibniu addressed him with all the high-flown courtesy he would have used to the king himself.

  “May good be with you, Fergus, son of Fergus. The torc of your noble ancestors looks well upon you.”

  Fergus eyed him cautiously. He hadn’t expected the smith to be down at Carmun.

  “What is it, Goibniu,” he asked somewhat sharply, “that you want?”

  “That is easy to tell,” said Goibniu, pleasantly. “I wished only to remind you of your promise to me, before last winter, of the price of twenty cows.”

  Deirdre looked at her father anxiously. She knew nothing of this debt. Was this going to be the start of a quarrel? So far, the chief’s face remained impassive.

  “It is true,” Fergus conceded. “You are owed it.” But then, in a lower voice. “It’s a hard thing you’re asking, just now. Especially at the festival.”

  For it was another pleasant custom of the festival that Goibniu could not actually enforce his debt during the proceedings.

  “You’ll be wanting to deal with the matter when the festival is over, perhaps,” suggested the smith.

  “Not a doubt of it,” said Fergus.

  During this exchange, Deirdre had continued to watch her father closely. Was he hiding his anger? Was this the calm before the storm? Goibniu was a man with many important friends. Perhaps that was keeping her father in check. She hoped it would continue to do so.

  Goibniu nodded slowly. Then his single eye rested on Deirdre.

  “You have a beautiful daughter, Fergus,” he remarked. “She has wonderful eyes. Will you be offering her in marriage at the festival?”

  “It is in my mind,” said Fergus.

  “It will be a fortunate man, indeed, who wins her,” the smith continued. “Don’t dishonour her beauty, or your noble name, by accepting anything but the highest bride price.” He paused. “I wish I were a bard,” he said, with a polite nod towards Deirdre, “so that I could compose a poem about her beauty.”