by Tom O'Neill
He calmed down a little and appealed to the others, ‘Get her off me, get her off me, what is it, what is it, what ails this woman?’
‘Quiet woman!’ said one of the other men. He gave her a slight kick and said, ‘Quiet before the great Chief Brehon. And say your say calmly. We are here to listen.’
She looked up at the man who had kicked her and then back at Ó Rahille. She stopped the wailing abruptly and said, ‘Alms, great man, alms for a poor wretch who is in mourning.’
‘I am sorry but I have nothing to give you,’ said Ó Rahille.
‘Humble apologies ma’am,’ said another of the travellers, one who clearly was not that happy with the way all this was going. ‘What is your loss that grieves you so?’
‘Oh, kind sir,’ she said, ‘I have lost everything that has any meaning to me.’
‘Her mind it is she has lost, I’m afraid gentlemen. We can’t be detained by this,’ said Ó Rahille.
She looked at him again. The eyes had turned from amused to scathing.
‘We are most sorry for this, good lady,’ tried the more sensible brehon, who was becoming ever more worried. ‘Is there anything at all we can do to ease such a terrible pain?’
She immediately stood up and went over to Ó Rahille again. She touched his bag. ‘This man says he has nothing to give a poor person stretched out on the road in front of him.’
‘Just get her away from me,’ Ó Rahille said, reddening in the face and pulling his bag away from her.
Then she started laughing. She began to walk away from them, laughing, laughing and laughing. As she put distance between herself and them, Matha could already hear words bouncing from her mouth. The tone was scalding. And the only phrases he could make out before she faded into the distance, had the meter of dangerous satirical verse. The unfortunate person so honoured, he suspected was Chief Brehon Ó Rahille.
Matha now knew it really was time to round up Mac Cumhaill and he headed off at considerable speed back to Liath’s camp. Liath didn’t waste time either. She called a lanky hound that seemed to live under the eave of her cabin. All she said to him was, ‘Bring Mac Cumhaill.’ Matha didn’t ask how she or the hound knew what part of the long shores of the North West that Fionn would be found. But before night fell, the hound was back with Mac Cumhaill rushing in to ask Liath what was wrong. Liath pointed to Matha, sitting at the fire.
‘It’s getting so my heart sinks every time I see you,’ said Mac Cumhaill. ‘You are not bringing me good news, are you son?’
Matha arrived back in the lands of the Dróna accompanied by Mac Cumhaill and Conán, reaching it well before the slow-moving Circle of Wisdom. They observed from Clonmore woods as the company found a suitable river crossing. They were down to nineteen now. The man who had spoken with respect to the woman had apparently decided to leave. And Matha noticed that Ó Rahille seemed to have developed an itch. He was trying to reach down the back of his tunic and trying to scratch the soft soles of his feet. He was getting irritable and blaming the missing brehon.
The three observers moved quietly parallel to the track, keeping under cover of the trees, though it was hard for them to remain unnoticed what with Mac Cumhaill breaking down small trees and the roar of Conán’s curses as he tore his way through the sceachs.
A man working in a field stood up to look at the party as they approached one of the Dróna fortresses.
‘My good man,’ Ó Rahille said to him, ‘go and tell your chief that he has a visitation from Tara.’
The thin, dirty man squinted at them for a while unsmiling, then hid his hoe in some long grass in case one of his brothers would steal it. He went off slowly without a word. A few hours later a man came down from the fortress. Mac Cumhaill knew him as the Chief of the Dróna. He was also thin and squinty. He had sandy hair and a crooked lipless mouth. ‘Aye? Yez from Tara?’ he said, in a tone that wasn’t yet entirely lacking in caution. He scanned them further and said, ‘Where is the boss man, then?’
‘Can you call your chief, my good man?’ said Ó Rahille.
‘Where is the boss man?’ asked the Chief of the Dróna again.
‘The King is ... He is away. Somewhere. For this while back.’
One eyebrow was raised and a curious look now came across the face of the gentleman of the Dróna. Mac Cumhaill knew that in that one moment, the calculating brain inside that narrow head had made a judgement and was sniffing an opportunity. Now there was certain to be trouble ahead.
The man started to walk back towards the fortress. Ó Rahille was getting frustrated at this stage. He decided to use his tricks, though he had really only intended to use them in front of the assembled clan for maximum effect.
He pulled out a grey object from his bag. It looked like a large blackberry. He pulled some kind of a needle out of it and flung it aimlessly. It rolled on the grass after the chief who turned around thinking the group were hurling stones at him. He came back to inspect whether it might be of use to him. As he picked it up a very big noise and flame came from it. Everyone looking on was surprised. That included Mac Cumhaill, who had rarely seen anything as colourful in all his travels. It included the brehons and wise men who were now deserting Ó Rahille in numbers. It included the other Dróna who were emerging from the fortress and fields. It included Ó Rahille, who looked like he hadn’t expected the thing to work. It didn’t include the Chief of the Dróna. Unfortunately for him, he was now spread in small pieces around the patch of onions next to the path.
Mac Cumhaill emerged from the bushes. Ó Rahille looked at him with a mixture of relief and consternation.
‘You may need a few more of them,’ he said to Ó Rahille, pointing to the gathering masses of Dróna that were approaching with rocks, sickles, pitch forks, clubs and axes in their hoary hands.
Ó Rahille looked down for his bag. It was gone. They saw a girl running off with it faster than a hare. ‘Welcome to Dróna country,’ said Conán, stepping forward too.
Mac Cumhaill and Conán faced into the mob. ‘Good people, what happened here was an accident,’ said Mac Cumhaill, not thinking for a moment that they would accept this – but he had to try. ‘This man is a guest of Cormac. Recompense, if any is due, can be discussed with Cormac. Upon his return.’
It turned out that the Dróna, like their chief, weren’t all that interested in justice. The man whose parts were now nourishing the onions had obviously not engendered great love among his own. Their taste for revenge was smothered by their pleasure at hearing that Cormac was absent.
The canny Dróna knew immediately that they weren’t being told the whole truth. They assumed, therefore, that Cormac was either sick or already dead. Either way, they were calculating that this meant the country was heading into a period of mayhem as there was no obvious successor and there would certainly be contenders. Such periods were like harvest time for people of their sort. Their elders taught that periods of change provide the cloak under which boundaries could be redrawn and old scores fixed. The Dróna were hard working people at harvest time.
The only art they ever tried to study was how far you could push other clans without finally provoking them into a violent backlash. They nearly always got that wrong. Consequently, they had a lot of experience in fighting and were as wicked as pine martens in close combat.
‘Very well, we will wait,’ said a shrewd middle-aged man among them, with not a line of truthfulness on his wrinkled face. ‘As soon as Cormac is back, send us a message so we can go to see how far he is prepared to go to fix us up for the loss of this fine bucko, our beloved chief.’
One of the things that Ó Rahille didn’t understand was that in those times, fine and noble though they might have been, enemies were waiting on every wind, waiting for a smell of weakness in the land. Once the delicate balance broke, there were people outside and inside ready to take their chances.
By this stage however, Ó Rahille couldn’t have even thought about making such an observation. He was now overcome with i
tching. Red blotches were breaking out on his face and arms. For the first time since landing, he was lost for words. Mac Cumhaill left Conán and Matha watching the Dróna fort while he took the soft visitor up in his arms and ran back to Tara with him. He put him in a room and told Liath to give him a bath and some milk of docks to put on his skin and to guard him so he couldn’t get out to make more mischief.
Then he came back to sit with Conán and Matha who were still watching the gates of the Dróna camp. He had not for a minute believed the Dróna assurances and was surprised they had not emerged the moment darkness had fallen. They waited another while and still nothing. ‘Maybe it was wrong to distrust them on this occasion?’ said Matha. Conán and Mac Cumhaill both laughed.
It finally dawned on Mac Cumhaill that he’d been outfoxed by the Dróna, having forgotten they never left anywhere by the front door when there was a back way as convenient. They went quickly into the dead chief’s homestead and found only women and children. The women threw scalding water at them and refused to say anything about where the men were gone. But they saw the tracks at the back fence and squeezed under it the same way the Dróna men had done, possibly an hour before – heading in the direction of Baile Ceinnselaigh, judging by the footprints.
The Ceinnselaigh were a quiet people. They were fond of music and timid about fighting so as a result their lands were much smaller than they had been in times past. Whenever the Dróna would make an encroachment, the Ceinnselaigh would say things like, ‘Well sure, maybe it was the will of Daghda and may our ill luck will follow the land they’ve taken.’
By the time Conán and Mac Cumhaill caught up with the Dróna tribe, they were already chasing families from their cabins on the western part of the Ceinnselaigh lands.
‘Go on out of this!’ they were shouting. ‘The auld King is dead, Daghda rot his soul, and there’s no law in the land now only the law of the strongest! And there’ll be no mercy, only what we show! And that won’t be much for anyone that stays behind!’
Matha had been sent to Tara to call for help. Mac Cumhaill knew that there was one thing would put the fear of Daghda and Mórrígan into these otherwise fearless rogues.
When Matha returned with Liath and a small group of her men, they found a standoff. Mac Cumhaill and Conán were swinging swords. And the Dróna were throwing stones and taunting them from a safe distance. Conán was swearing. An old Dróna woman was walking in the middle tormenting him, ‘What are you going to do? Decapitate our sons? In a quarrel over a few feet of wet ground and granite? Great heroes indeed!’
They were right of course. Neither Mac Cumhaill nor Conán wanted to go any nearer to these people. They knew what would happen. They would be hit with axes and clubs by these nifty little fighters and eventually a sword would start swinging in anger and heads would roll. There was no way to come out looking good out of a skirmish that involved decapitating farmers.
Liath on the other hand had skills that matched the occasion admirably. As did the men she had brought with her. These were all men she had trained in a brand of combat that had been honed over generations in her family. When the Dróna saw her they laughed. ‘Mac Cumhaill, you are sending a slip of a girlfriend to do your fighting.’
‘That I am, my friends,’ Mac Cumhaill laughed back, ‘and welcome. We’ll see how well you have learned your stick fighting, stoning, kicking and biting now.’
Liath didn’t need any bidding. She had thrown down her sword once she saw it was only a bunch of fractious vegetable growers she was facing. She and her ten men went forward like terriers. Within a minute they were among the Dróna. There was howling and yelping.
Matha took the spectacle as a consolation for having stayed so long out of his home valley. He had never seen anything like it. Liath’s men were impressive but nothing compared to herself. She was fast and furious. She rained blows and kicks in every direction, never missing her target and never hitting it softly. She was shouting and screaming and jumping. No weapons, just her feet and her fists. All that impatience unleashed. The Dróna left the scene within five minutes, leaving a splattering of their clan blood behind to dampen the Ceinnselaigh ground.
The easy-going Ceinnselaigh of course didn’t want any vengeance. Their chief said, ‘Well, they’ve done a bit of damage, but sure what about it. There won’t be a word about it by Bealtaine.’ Then he gave a bold little smile and looked at Liath, ‘Anyway, I don’t think they’ll be gracing us with their company again anytime soon.’
Back in Tara, they found Ó Rahille worse. He was covered all over in hives and was so busy scratching himself he couldn’t even think of eating, let alone making wise proclamations. Matha started to feel sorry for him.
‘What happened to the man?’ asked Dreoilín, when Matha asked if he knew of a cure.
Matha said there was no sign of him having gotten stung or eaten any fruit on the road, though it had started there. Then he remembered the woman. It was immediately after meeting her that the itching had started. When he described the woman, Conán laughed.
‘My friend,’ said Mac Cumhaill, turning to Ó Rahille, ‘you went out on the road to preach wisdom, yet you hadn’t the wisdom to pass the most basic test.’
Ó Rahille was hardly listening to him.
‘A woman laid out on the road in front of you in great distress and you refused her alms and didn’t offer her a bite, a drink, or even any words of comfort.’
‘That makes two women who have saved your bacon in one day,’ said Conán.
Ó Rahille stopped scratching for a moment and looked at them.
‘Liath you know about,’ Diarmuid explained. ‘The other woman, by the sounds of her, was Treasa Ní Domhnaill. She is the chief poet in our little country. She is the one who could have imparted more wisdom and entertainment to you than all of the fools you had with you. But you walked past her and failed her test.’
‘But she just looked like a mourning widow and I thought, I thought ... How was I supposed to know she was in some way important?’ complained Ó Rahille.
‘Widow indeed!’ said Mac Cumhaill, who considered Ní Domhnaill a close and prickly friend. ‘The only thing Treasa mourns for is the dearth of wisdom and good humour in people that she meets.’
‘And this was her cruel punishment?’ cried Ó Rahille. ‘Persecution worse than flames? How does that make you say she saved me?’
‘She didn’t kill you, did she?’ said Conán, laughing more. ‘With the verse she composed for you as you pushed her away, she only gave you a rash. You would need to thank her for her mercy next time you see her.’
‘What kind of world is it that you come from?’ asked Liath, looking at Ó Rahille curiously now. ‘You have survived to have grey hair and yet you say a bit of a rash is the worst thing has ever troubled you? Are we to believe you’ve never experienced a bellyful of hunger, a head full of thunder, or limbs that collapse out from under you through fever or injury?’
‘When the Dróna come to extract the honour price of their dead chief from him,’ said Conán, ‘I am afraid our friend here may gain some experience in other forms of torment.’
‘What are you on about now?’ Ó Rahille stopped scratching for a minute and looked with alarm at the smiling bearded giant.
‘Oh I’m afraid Conán is correct,’ said Diarmuid sombrely, joining in the entertainment. ‘No matter how little honour there was in that fragmented man, the Dróna aren’t the kind of people to go light when calculating reparations owed to them.’
‘Curses on all of you, you bloody barbarians, I don’t need to endure this ignorant mocking,’ said Ó Rahille in a squeaky voice as he disappeared entirely in front of their eyes.
Though nobody devoted a lot of thought to where he had gone, it was assumed he had made his way back to the world he had come from. Nor was it known whether he ever found a cure for the rash once he got there.
The next day the weather calmed and the little people delivered Cormac safely back to land. When he returned
to Tara it took him a few days to get out of his depression at resuming his chores, after a fleadh to end all fleadhs. Only after a week did he remember to ask about the visitor who had amused him slightly.
‘He went on about his travels,’ was all Mac Cumhaill thought it necessary to say.
‘Grand,’ said Cormac. ‘It was getting time for him to go, right enough.’
Matha moved over closer to Dreoilín and asked if he could spend some time with him.
‘You can and welcome,’ Dreoilín said. ‘But you have already spent more time with me than you know.’
‘I think that if I am with you, it may come to me how to unfold the hills.’
‘Why don’t you go back there now,’ said Dreoilín, ‘and look again. The disappearance of your valley had nothing to do with your bad neighbour. He doesn’t have those kinds of powers. Only you do. And you’ll see it now if you are ready to.’
Matha was confused and excited at the same time. He had been back many times to check that things had not changed. He couldn’t accept that he hadn’t wished it enough. Yet somehow he was certain of what Dreoilín had said. He was ready now and his home would be there.
Chapter 8
TRAPPED
It was cloudy and moonless as Dark picked his way home. But dry. He wasn’t particularly concentrating on where he was stepping.
