Chapter 4

Tiarna

I entered the Tiarna’s house, and at first, my eyes refused to see through the dimness. The warmth washed over me, the smell of broth, thick on the air. When my eyes adjusted to the firelight, I could see that the walls were high and decorated with hanging shields and axes, an adze, an auger, a saw, all suggesting a lustre in the low, red light. Around the edges of the room were benches draped with skins and rich cloths. On the women’s side of the house, a kneading trough, iron vessels, a washing bucket. Naked children raced and shrieked around the wooden bath while Gormflaith, the Tiarna’s wife, nursed a baby as her ladies spun wool together. The Tiarna’s favoured hounds lounged on the rushes by the fire in the centre of the room, ears twitching and nostrils flaring as the smell of meat rose from the hanging cauldron.

And from the shadows, amongst the women, Conn’s eyes suddenly staring from where he had been playing with the younger children. His face hot with embarrassment and outrage, compromised by my presence. His veneer of strength and manhood not yet fixed within the safe confines of this place.

‘Here, giolla’, the Tiarna called from beyond the fire. I approached, and the Tiarna’s household guard Donchad stepped out from inside the door, a warding presence by my side. ‘Do you play, giolla?’ he said mockingly, as giolla is what they call a kind of squire to the high born. He motioned to a board marked with squares set in a bench and, beside the board, a broken cup containing two bone dice. His mocking was twofold, as only the nobility were permitted to play such games. I chose not to respond.

‘This is a game that trains the mind for politics, for battle, for the reading of other men and their wants, their workings, their weakness’.

‘My father speaks of such things’, I said to push back gently.

‘Of course, as he would’, the Tiarna said, thinking on this briefly, rolling the dice and moving the whittled gaming pieces on the board. And then he looked at me with some intensity, preparing to read my reaction. ‘Tell me, why would a poet come to me when it is known that I maintain my own file’, he said, gesturing to Tuar, ‘when my family has been served and lauded for generations by the masters of the Ua Dalaigh? Why would a file, hungry for his livelihood or seeking a new horse in payment, come to me and my house, where there is surely a surfeit of poetry? And then, seeking to win acclaim by the verse he must so fully believe to be superior in all ways to that of the poets of this land, why then steal away and not announce himself?’

The Tiarna stared as he spoke, seeking to unsettle me, and I wondered, under that gaze, what oracles he had read in my face.

I replied carefully so that my meaning would be understood but not explicitly stated. ‘Perhaps he is waiting for a praiseworthy event to occur. An act of bravery and daring worthy of commemorating in verse. Perhaps he intends to arrive once this act has been carried out so as to disguise foreknowledge’.

I could feel Conn’s stare on the back of my neck, willing me dead for speaking so freely. The Tiarna’s eyes finally released me as he looked to Tuar significantly. In Latin, he said, ‘Does the slave speak to me of our táin? Of our coming raid to the north? How could that be, as only my captains know of this’. Tuar played the game.

‘Surely not, Tiarna’.

Of course I had heard of it, such secrets unable to be kept by the straining youths of the household, bent on winning honour, dreaming aloud of great deeds to come and their own place within them.

‘A secret told to more than one is difficult to keep’, I replied in Latin.

‘Your thinking is sound, but it must go deeper’, the Tiarna said. At that moment, he looked up at me again, his bright eyes amused and dangerous. ‘Why, for example, would I allow you and your kind to eat my fowl without sanction?’ Sharp, icy veins of fear travelled my spine as he watched his words worm into me. I faltered in that warm, smoke-filled place, intoxicated by sudden guilt. By my sudden and inescapable visibility. By my nakedness in front of such inquisition. Sights of the room came to me as powerful visions, amplified by fear and the overpowering sense of the momentous. The surety that, regardless of what I was to answer, the past would be burned by it. Would be no more. And I was dazzled, as my eyes sought escape from his insistence, in glimpses of the beautiful looped chains on his hounds. The painted shields on his walls. I answered.

‘I would suggest that the Tiarna knew the value of such secret pursuits in expelling the energies of youth with no more than the loss of a winter fowl to himself’.

His gaze remained on me, and I could not say in those moments what else was passing in the room, in the compound, in the world, as he channelled something into me through those impassive brown eyes. Finally, as all sound subsided and even the hounds seemed to hang on his word, he made his pronouncement.

‘There may be some truth in what they say of you. You are changed’. He laughed lightly then, seeing the fear on my face. ‘You may stand where you are, giolla. If there is no poet found, know with certainty that I will teach you humility by beating you from here to the river until your ribs show through your skin’.

His eyes returned to the gaming board and the pieces there arrayed like fallen rondels at the foot of a lathe.

‘If you are proved true, you will ride with us on our táin to the north, and you will share in the dangers and the rewards’. He spoke to Donchad. ‘Take a horse and ride out to see if you can spy this mover on the fringes. Do not alert him to your presence if it may be helped, and return to us with news’.

The tall warrior was gone without the hint of a question, though he cannot have thanked me for being sent into the night as the smells of the evening meal were filling the house. The Tiarna was silent then a long time, and he and Tuar resumed their play, leaving me to stand by and watch, trying to order the moves, to understand the rules. Trying to allay my fears of what tidings would return with Donchad and whether he would search with purpose or wait in the woods for a time before coming back to the warmth and food to watch me flogged.

After the passage of some play, the Tiarna spoke. ‘So Mac Murchada is dead and the Sasanach King thinks to keep what was promised him’.

‘Ua Conor will set them running’, Tuar replied grimly, his hand hovering uncertainly over the game board.

‘You speak the language of the Sasanach?’ he asked me.

‘Yes’, I replied.

The Tiarna looked down to his board and rolled the dice out of the cup.

To Tuar he said, ‘Stammering with foreign lips and strange tongues will God speak to his people’.

And to me, ‘Ask your father what he knows of this King Henri and also of the Earl of Pembroke, FitzGerald and FitzStephen. Remember these names. There is also a man come with the King, an older man of some reputation. De Lacy. Ask your father above all of de Lacy’.

I nodded assent, and once again they fell silent. As I stood, alone and on trial, I was visited by my mother. Her spirit shuffling around the fringe of the house where the sloping roof swept towards the floor. She inhabited, as she often did, the form of a bird. This time, the strange figure of the Tiarna’s crane standing on one leg, its clipped wings folded sadly, drawing no interest from man or child. She tilted her head in sympathy and showed me the glassy depth of a black eye. I stood my vigil in her company, waiting into the interminable night. Greenwood hissing on the fire. A last and lonely wasp butting the thatch. A ball of sackcloth plugging a hole. The unfamiliar heat and smoke of a wealthy household lulling me into a comfortable haze. Low talk and the clack of gaming pieces moving from one square to another.

It was late when Donchad returned.

‘You found him, then?’ the Tiarna said, and the warrior nodded. My legs almost buckled with relief.

‘I followed him to the hurdle ford at the edge of the túath, and there I watched him move down out of the treeline to meet with a man and his retainer on the slíghe’.

‘A Gael?’ the Tiarna asked.

‘A foreigner on a horse. And his retainer was a Gael. If I were forced to it, I would say that it was a son of your enemy Ua Ragallaig of Bréifne’.

The moon had fallen low over the treeline when I was given my leave of the great house. My breath clouded around me, and I stumbled in the dark downslope towards the mill-race, passing Donchad’s steaming horse in its paddock. I followed along the watercourse until it brought me to the mill-house, where I joined Father’s drowsing form on the rushes and flour dust in the small space around the grindstone. I told him of the long day’s events, and those of the day before, speaking to his broad back. He listened to it all silently. The cairn, the kelt, the monastery, the rite, the poet and the interview with the Tiarna. I awaited no reply. Like the Tiarna’s, Father’s thoughts moved slowly, cycling through the significance of each small element, attempting to trace future events and predict their effect on us. The following day we would labour at the mill, stooped over the juddering wheel, feeding the grain into the funnel, hearing the heads pop, the white marrow spreading across the rough face of the stone. I would hear what he had to say then. And it would bring me no warmth.