Chapter 3

File

We saw signs of the fall. Of the havoc wrought far from our lands by the Engleis. Dishevelled bands of exiles travelling north on the slíghe. Fires beyond our borders and reports of silhouetted horsemen furtive on the hills. The Tiarna kept vigil, the kelt ever in his fist. Then the poet came, and his approach heralded destruction. That itinerant wizard. That unholy satirist. He signalled the reckoning, whether he knew it or not. He signalled the intrusion of the outside world. The small fruit of my existence bursting open, its rind splitting and wasps spilling from galls to crowd the opening and feed on the juice.

Lochru saw him first, late that next day. He came to fetch me from the monastery and bring me back to the Tiarna’s farmstead, the lad Fiachra with him leading a donkey, his eyes full of suspicion. On our return past the low meadow, we stopped to try our hand with the winter geese and saw the poet wandering at the edge of the bog that ran away eastwards from our borders.

‘There’s a crane yonder in the meadowland’, Lochru said in that archaic way he had of speaking, his dropsied face muffling his words and his snout pointing over the sedge. We lay on our bellies behind a crisping brace of fern. On the flat before us, a riot of geese clamoured and fouled the ground with their black excrement. Slings in our fists, we lay still, watching the birds rooting at the damp earth for whatever it is that gives them sustenance.

‘Crane?’ I whispered, and Lochru snorted, letting me know that my youth had betrayed me. That there was no crane. That there was something strange somewhere. Something out of place in the sloping scene before us. I said no more but studied the foreground where the great tumult of geese jostled. My eyes ranged farther, beyond the limits of the river, marked by a line of bulrush rising from the grass. And beyond that, a glistening wet ground, full of the swollen river overspill with willow and elder un-coppiced and growing wild. I saw nothing to remark upon. Lochru waited still, his satisfaction that his old eyes had seen what I could not competing with his mounting impatience.

Then I saw him, stooping as he moved slowly around the tree roots, navigating the edge of the wide bog. His head covered with a bolt of cloth which fell around his shoulders and, beneath, a green cloak skirting his knees. The colour of his cloak announced him as a man of status. A man that should be on the slíghe with a retinue and a horse, not travelling alone, slopping through the turf.

‘Exile?’ I whispered, remembering the Tiarna’s cousin, hounded into the wastes, fleeing from dispute before his eyes were cut from his head.

‘File’, said Lochru. Poet. A man to traverse boundaries. A man of twelve years’ learning who would know by heart the endless genealogies, the forms of praise and of redress. A man respected and feared who, if the words were with him, could raise up a tiarna in noble verse or destroy him with satire, break his power, throw doubt upon his legitimacy. If the skill was with him, his words could raise a blemish or even slander a man to the doors of death.

‘Stay low and watch’, Lochru said, ‘and tell me all that he does. Do not move or follow until the stranger has gone’.

Lochru surged forward in a swift but awkward movement, letting loose a stone from his sling before landing heavily on his knees, crying out with the effort. The geese erupted, taking flight in competing panic, brewing upwards in such a cacophony that my eyes rose with them, watching their combined bulk empty into the grey sky. When my gaze returned to scan the edge of the bog, I could no longer see the poet. At length, I picked out his stooped form behind a hummock. As the geese cleared, his distant, shaded face searched in our direction, looking for the source of the fright. Lochru stood up then with great effort, groaning and pressing on his knee to rise in the manner of a rheumatic man. He walked down the slope, towards the river, mumbling expressively to himself. Bending, he came up with a gander shivering in his hand. He made a great show of inspecting the bird before pulling its neck and hooking it under his belt, lustily clapping dirt from his hands. He turned, making his way back uphill towards the eaves of the Tiarna’s wood where Fiachra waited, cutting withies by the donkey.

The poet watched all of this from his hiding place. He watched as Lochru, with his uneven gait, made his way upslope through the furze bushes. Lochru played his part well, and from where I lay, I watched him re-join Fiachra, holding up the bird in triumph. The poet waited for a time, crouched low, waiting until he was satisfied there was no danger. He stood out from behind the heather and took up his labouring tread to the south. I watched until his slow progress took him from view.

When I reached the treeline, the withies were cut and piled up in great stacks beside where the donkey was tethered, waiting dourly. A fire smouldered under cover of the dark wood, and the goose was roasting on a sharpened ash rod with sprigs of smoking plumage sticking from the carelessly plucked skin. The light waned as I settled in beside the fire, and the time when our absence would be noted was approaching. Lochru took the bird from the spit, pulling it apart with his broad fingers, and he shared it out in three ways according to our status. We sat back from the fire swallowing hot gobbets of the flesh and gazing up at the small parcels of the dying day through the canopy above, savouring the moment as a breath of freedom.

‘And Mac Murchada dead’, said Lochru, repeating the news that was on all lips.

Fiachra did not speak, and I filled the silence.

‘A tyrant, they say, though the Tiarna liked him well enough’.

‘True’, Lochru said. ‘Raided with him into Osraige in the days of Toirdelach. And Mac Murchada never came here seeking vengeance with his foreign mercenaries’. Fiacra spoke up hotly.

‘They say his body rotted around him while he still drew breath. A great putrescence coming out of him’. He looked to me, his dark eyes glinting. ‘A curse, surely, for bringing the foreigner’.

‘But will his foreigner soldiers leave now that the old bear is dead?’ Lochru said, his fingers thick within the gnarl of his beard.

‘Ask this one’, Fiacra said, his regard sly and lips glazed with grease as he tossed a bone in my direction, ‘the worst foreigner of them all’.

‘They say at the monastery that King Henri is come to Yrlande to lay his hand on Mac Murchada’s land’. I said this to stop Fiacra’s windpipe. ‘And that there is a man with him—de Lacy—to whom Míde has been promised’. Lochru erupted in a high, brash laugh.

‘Haah—now Christendom’s most powerful king comes to claim our lands. Well, lads, will I live to see such wrongness?’

‘He will sweep this way surely, and who is there to stop him?’ I said.

‘And you and your father will be there to welcome them with arms wide, having buried knives in all of our backs’, Fiacra said with vehemence. ‘But the foreigners have not heard of our own king—Ua Conor, and his war-dog Ua Ruairc. They will be sent back over the sea with spears in their backs’.

‘So that is our choice—Ua Ruairc of Breifni or the Engleis?’ Lochru said loudly, casting his eyes upwards. Fiacra spat into the leaf litter as Lochru laughed. And that settled the matter. Not a word was spoken of the poet.

We struck our small camp, burying the embers and hiding the plumage. Lochru loaded the donkey, stacking the withies high, and Fiacra and I tied bushels to our backs, carrying yet more on our heads. We walked on, joining the small bóthar beyond the meadow, and Lochru came alongside me as I took a turn leading the donkey. He spoke in a low tone.

‘What did you see of the file?’

‘I saw him stay low while you retrieved the goose. He watched you return to the wood, and then he continued on his way, looking back now and then to see that none had paid him heed’. Lochru nodded and said no more.

‘Why do you say he is a poet?’ I asked after a time, and Lochru, tiring under his load, replied sharply.

‘Because I am old and have seen many things’.

‘Will you tell the Tiarna?’ I asked.

‘Was there welcome at the hostel of the quicken-tree?’ he countered.

I fell quiet, and we walked farther in silence, each feeling the weight of his load as the donkey tired, with his hooves catching at times on the rough stones of the bóthar. I worked over Lochru’s words as we went. There was indeed welcome at the hostel of the quicken-tree for Finn and his Fianna. A welcome which proved false and treacherous.

We arrived at the Tiarna’s farmstead before sunset, clattering across the wide boards of the tóchar in the high field. The manor looked well, laid out below in the setting sun. Deep shadows from the palisade around the Tiarna’s house striping the fields, smoke rising from the thatch of the mead hall and, further downslope, from the kiln, which was working hard to dry out the harvest. Mangach leading cattle up from the crooked meadow, Mór and her women bringing water from the river to prepare the evening meal.

We descended, grateful of the sloping ground, and brought our load to the shack beside the gate into the Tiarna’s compound. Erc stood guarding the gate.

‘Bring the withies in and leave them by the rampart’, he said roughly, ushering us into the space beyond the gate.

It was rare to be so close to the Tiarna’s house, and I took the opportunity to steal glances here and there to see what we might observe. For most, the Tiarna was a figure beyond comprehension. A man of learning and of power who inhabited a realm as different to ours as the realm of the clouds to the earth.

When the Tiarna appeared at his door, wrapped in a brat of fine red weave, Tuar his ollamh at his elbow and both speaking easily, with their hands describing some distant plans over the river land, Lochru and Fiacra sought to dissolve into the shadows, bending in upon themselves with a kind of fearful deference.

I watched the Tiarna, however, with those darting glances which are the currency of the bondsman. In the same language, with glances and the faint constriction of my eyes, I told Lochru that now was his time to approach the Tiarna and tell him of the poet on the margins. Lochru’s eyes refused sternly, urging me to walk on. I looked back at the Tiarna and Tuar, sharing, as they spoke, something steaming from a wooden cup.

When your life is not your own, you learn to move with apology. Low head, the lightest of steps. Not meeting another’s eye. That is how to blend in to the skyline. That is how to live with the least resistance and allow those larger than you to determine your course. I was satisfied with this no longer, and, though I had not yet recognised it, I longed to provoke change. To make something happen.

When Erc turned his back, I dropped the bushel of withies I had been carrying, broke from the others and walked towards the Tiarna in an arcing line which skirted the darker places alongside outbuildings and thatched awnings. I was as invisible to them as the children playing with straw figures by the pig house.

‘A thiarna uasal’, I said, which is their respectful address, used from one man of quality to another. They both looked down at me as if I had materialised from the empty evening. The Tiarna’s voice trailed into silence, and Tuar’s mouth fell some way open, the deep revolutions of their converse broken.

Anger blazed across Tuar’s face, though the Tiarna seemed on the verge of laughter.

‘Forgive me, Tiarna, I have seen something that might be of consequence to you’.

Before I could say more, a blow brought me to my knees as Erc clapped his open hand onto the back of my neck, forcing me to the ground. I tried to raise my head, but Erc held me so that my gaze could not rise above the Tiarna’s knee.

‘You are not at your monastery now, Sasanach’, Erc said. ‘Show some humility’.

‘Let him be, Erc’, the Tiarna said. ‘The boy has travelled far with word. He comes to us all the way from the distant willow coppice’.

All three men laughed at the Tiarna’s wit, and, seeing the wisdom in this, I laughed too. Erc’s fingers squeezed discreetly at my neck.

‘Please do share with me your tidings, Alberagh’, he said, for that is how they say my name. This was the first utterance of it, however, that I had heard from one of such importance. It spurred me on at precisely the moment that I flagged. It gave me a substance I had not previously felt.

‘A poet, beyond the river’.

‘A poet beyond the river’, he repeated slowly, and I heard the cryptic sound of these words carried back to me. ‘Are these the tidings we have so anticipated from one that has been to the underworld and back?’ he said, still jovial, though sharing a glance with Tuar. ‘And what manner of poet would you say, and why is this of interest to me?’

The mocking had stopped, and the Tiarna motioned for Erc to step off and let me stand.

Three glories of speech: steadiness, wisdom, brevity.

‘By his attire and his aspect was he a poet. By the twist in his hair and the feathers on his mantle. By the fork in his beard was he a poet’.

‘Even so. What is that to me? He is not of my retinue’.

‘Perhaps he is not. Though perhaps he means to be’, I said significantly. He was silent at this and stood back against the low doorway. He looked again to Tuar and spoke to him in Latin, saying, ‘What of this?’

Tuar replied in the same language, saying, ‘The speech of Rome is no foil to this lad. He can follow us quite well no doubt’.

‘Is this so, boy?’ the Tiarna said in Latin, yet maintaining his aspect, facing towards Tuar and not letting it be seen that he addressed me.

‘Ita vero’, I said—it is true.

‘Of course’, he said, ‘you have been receiving Milesius’ favours’. This was said with a hint of scorn. I replied carefully.

‘I speak with the monk and heed what he would teach’.

‘Heed what he would teach’, the Tiarna repeated slowly, the amusement draining from his face. ‘I can see perhaps that you have been spared the rod, boy. There is humility lacking’.

He let the silence stretch out after this. Full of the spectre of violence, looming in the space between us like smoke, flecked with ember, rising upwards in front of moonlit skies. Then he lowered his hand to his neckline, bringing forth the kelt from where it hung, bound by its end to a cord, and by this act, the menace was dispelled.

‘Come in kelt-bringer’, he said, inviting me across his sill as if it were as natural a command as ‘clean out the ashes’ or ‘bring me in water’. I did not look to Tuar for his expression but kept my eyes down. So it was that I crossed the threshold into the house of Mánus Óg Mac Murchad Máel Sechlainn. Though I did not look behind, I knew that there would be bushels of withies cast down to the earth with ferocity, with incredulity, with amazement, as Fiacra, Lochru and Erc watched me dip and disappear through the low door frame, extinguished like a taper touched to water.