by Tim Severin
‘But the steward said that he had been in this land for several years, not just at this season.’
‘Then perhaps you were imagining your friend in the form of this man Ardal. It seems an appropriate name for the king’s champion. It means someone who has the courage of a bear.’
A berserker, I thought or was it because of the bear-claw necklace? And this thought distracted me from asking what the steward meant by a fuidir cinad o muir.
I never solved the mystery of Ardal because on the next celebration of Samhain I fell sick during the six-day walk to Cairpre. I developed a shivering fever, probably caught from too many damp days spent in Eochaid’s forest retreat during what was a very wet summer, even by Irish standards. Eochaid left me in the care of a roadside hospitaller, whose wife fed me – as he had instructed – on a monotonous diet of celery, raw and in watery broth. The cure worked, but it gave me a lasting dislike for the taste of that stringy vegetable.
TWENTY-ONE
I WAS NOW in my nineteenth year, and my situation in the company of a forest-dwelling brithem, offered little opportunity for contact with the opposite sex. My heartbreak over Orlaith had left its mark, and I often wondered what had become of her. A sense of guilt for what had happened made me question whether I would ever achieve a satisfactory relationship with a woman, and Eochaid’s attitude towards women only served to increase my confusion.
Eochaid regarded women as subject to their own particular standards. There was the day when two women appeared before him for judgement after one had stabbed the other with a kitchen knife, causing a deep gash. They were both wives of a minor ri, who had exercised his right to have more than one wife. When the two women were brought before Eochaid, he was told that the wounded woman was the first wife and that she had initiated the affray. She had attacked the new wife a few days after her husband had married for the second time.
‘How many days afterwards?’ Eochaid asked gently.
‘Two days later, when the new and younger wife first came into the home,’ came the reply.
‘Then culpability is shared equally,’ the brithem stated. ‘Custom states that a first wife has the right to inflict an injury on a new wife provided it is non-fatal and it is done in the first three days. Equally, the second wife has the right to retaliate, but she must limit herself to scratching with her nails, pulling the hair, or abusive language.’
An assault with words was, in brithem law, as serious as an attack with a weapon of metal or wood. ‘Language,’ Eochaid once said to me, ‘can be lethal. A tongue can have a sharper edge than the best-honed dagger. You can do more damage by inventing a clever and hurtful nickname for your enemy than by burning his house or destroying his crops.’ He then cited a whole catalogue of verbal offences, ranging from the spoken spells of witchcraft uttered in secret, through hurtful satire, to the jibes and insults which flew in a quarrel. Each and every one had its own value when it came to arbitration. ‘If the monks ever told you that the drui used spells and curses,’ he said to me on another occasion, ‘they were confusing it with the power of language. A drui who aspired to be a fili ollam, a master of words, was striving for the highest and most difficult discipline, to deploy words for praise or poetry, irony or ridicule.’
That was the day he told me about his own time as a monk. We were seated on a log outside his forest hut after returning from an expedition to net small fish in the stream, when a blackbird burst into full-throated song from somewhere in the bushes. Eochaid leaned back, closed his eyes for a moment to listen to the birdsong and then began to quote poetry,
‘I have a hut in the wood, none knows it but my Lord;
an ash tree this side, a hazel on the other,
a great tree on a mound encloses it.
The size of my hut, small yet not small, a place of familiar paths;
the she-bird in its dress of blackbird colour sings a melodious strain from its gable.’
He stopped, opened his eyes, and looked at me. ‘Do you know who composed those lines?’ he asked.
‘No,’ I answered. ‘Are they yours?’
‘I wish they were,’ he said. ‘They were spoken to me by a Christian hermit in his disert. He was living here, on this very same spot, when I first came across these woods. It is his hut which we now occupy. He was already an old man when I found him, old, but at peace with himself and the world. He had lived here for as long as he could remember, and he knew that his time would soon be over. I met him twice, for I came back a couple of years later to see how he was getting on and to bring him some store of food. He thanked me and rewarded me with the poem. The next time I came back he was dead. I found his corpse and buried him as he would have wished. But the poetry stayed echoing in my head, and I decided that I should go to the monastery where he had been trained, to visit the place where the power of such words is nurtured.’
Eochaid had enrolled at the monastery as a novice and within months was its star pupil. No one knew his brithem background. He had shaved his head completely to remove his distinctive tonsure, telling the monks he had suffered from a case of ringworm. With his phenomenal trained memory, book learning came easily to him and he quickly absorbed the writings of the early Christian authors. ‘Jerome, Cyprian, Origen and Gregory the Great . . . they were men of acute perception,’ he said. ‘Their scholarship and conviction impressed me profoundly. Yet, I came to the conclusion that much of what they wrote was a retelling of the far earlier truths, the ones in which I had already been schooled. So in the end I decided that I would prefer to stay with the Old Ways and left the monastery. But at least I had learned why the Christianity has taken hold so easily among our people.’
‘Why is that?’ I asked.
‘The priests and monks build cleverly on well-laid foundations,’ he answered, ‘Samhain, our Festival of the Dead, becomes the eve of their All Saints’ Day; Beltane, which for us is the reawakening of life and celebrated with new fire, is turned into Easter even with the lighting of their Paschal Fire; our Brigid the exalted one, of whom I am a particular adherent, for she brings healing, poetry and learning, has been transmuted into a Christian saint. The list goes on and on. Sometimes I wonder if this means that the Old Ways are really still flourishing beneath the surface, and I could have stayed a monk and still worshipped the Gods in a different guise.’
‘Didn’t anyone at the monastery ask after the hermit who lived here? After all, he had been one of them.’
‘As I warned you, the monks can be harsh towards people who abandon their way of life. They had a nickname for him. They called him Suibhne Geilt, after the “Mad Sweeney” who was driven insane by a curse from a Christian priest. He spent the rest of his life living among the trees and composing poetry until he was killed by a swineherd. Yet, such is the power of words that I have a suspicion that Mad Sweeney’s verses will be remembered longer than the men who mocked him.’
On the eve of my third Samhain in Eochaid’s company he announced that, instead of going to Cairpre that year, he would travel east to the burial place of Tlachtga, daughter of the famed drui Mog Ruth. A distinguished drui in her own right, Tlachtga had been renowned for the subtlety of her judgements, and it was custom that those brithemain who were adepts in arbitration should assemble at her tomb every fifth year to discuss the more intricate cases they had heard since their last conclave and agree on common judgements for the future. The hill of Tlachtga lies only a half-day’s travel from the seat of the High King at Tara, so it is here that the High King of Ireland also comes to celebrate the Samhain feast. ‘It is one of the great gatherings in the land,’ Eochaid told me, ‘so perhaps Adamnan the Timid might be better advised to stay away. Equally, it might be a chance for you to learn whether you should begin using Diarmid as your alias.’ It was an old joke of his. With his usual keen observation he had noted how I kept glancing at the younger women whenever we went to the settlements. In legend Diarmid carried on his forehead a ‘love spot’, a mark placed there by a mysterious
maiden which caused women to fall madly and instantly in love with the handsome young man.
The great gathering at the foot of the hill of Tlachtga was a spectacle that surpassed anything I had anticipated. The bustle and flamboyance of the Irish who came to the High King’s festivities made a lively impression. There were several thousand participants, and they arrived in their kin groups, with each chieftain trying to impress his equals. Their retinues swaggered through the crowds, flaunting the expensive finger rings, torcs and brooches which their leaders had awarded them. By regulation long-bladed and long-handled weapons had to be set aside during the festivities, but daggers were permitted and were worn to show off their workmanship or decoration. There were displays of horses and hounds, and even a few chariots came bouncing and swaying in behind their teams of shaggy war ponies; the wheels of these old-fashioned contraptions were brightly painted in contrasting colours so as they spun they looked like children’s toys. In the presence of the Irish, wherever there are horses and dogs in any number, there will be racing and contests and gaming. By the time Eochaid and I arrived, a wide circle of wooden posts had been driven in the ground to create a race track, where crowds of spectators jostled each morning and afternoon to watch the contests.
Sometimes just two riders settled a personal challenge by racing their mounts. More often it was a general match with an honour prize to the winner, a wild stampede of a score of lathered, sweating horses thundering round the course, urged on by the shouts of the crowd and the flailing whips of their riders, usually skinny young lads. On my second day at Tlachtga I also came across an event which, to an outsider, might have seemed like a mock battle. Two squads of wild-looking men were milling together and striking at one another with flat clubs. Occasionally a man fell to the ground, bleeding from a head blow, and it seemed that the fighters were hitting out with unrestrained viciousness. Yet, the object of their attention was only a small hard ball which each side was trying to propel into the opponents’ territory and then through an open mark. The blows to the head were accidental, or allegedly so. The reason for my fascination was that I had seen a similar sport being played – though with less riot and fervour – by my youthful companions in Iceland and I had once played it myself.
I was standing on the sidelines, watching the contest closely and trying to detect the differences from the Icelandic version of the game, when I received a shattering blow on the back of my own head. It must have been a harder stroke than anything being dealt on the games field because everything went dark.
I awoke to the familiar sensation of lying on the ground with my wrists tied together. This time the pain was not as bad as it had been after the battle of Clontarf because my bonds were leather straps, not iron manacles. But the other difference was more serious. When I opened my eyes, I knew my captor: I found myself looking up into the face of the treasurer of St Ciaran’s.
Brother Mariannus was gazing down at me with an expression in which distaste matched satisfaction. ‘What made you think you would get away with it?’ he asked. I shook my head groggily. I had a violent headache and could feel the large bruise swelling up where someone had struck me with a weapon. I wondered if I had been hit with a games stick. A clout on the head with a heavy crozier would have done the job just as well. Then I remembered Eochaid. While I was watching the Irish at their sports, he had gone in search of other brithemain and he probably did not know what had happened to me. He had important business to attend to and when I failed to show up would probably surmise that I had departed in search of strong drink or female diversion. I had left my cloak and travelling satchel in the hut where we were staying, but he might even think that I had taken the chance to part company with him altogether.
‘You’ll discover that it’s both a sin and a crime to steal Church property,’ the treasurer was saying grimly, ‘I doubt you have any respect for the moral consequences of the sin, but the criminal repercussions will have more impact on someone of your base character.’
We were in a tent, and two of the monastery servants were standing over me. I wondered which of them had hit me on the head. The younger man had the stolid gaze of an underling who would do unquestioningly as he was told, but the older servant looked as if he was positively enjoying seeing me in trouble.
‘My men will take you back to the monastery, where you will be tried and receive punishment. You’ll start out tomorrow,’ Brother Mariannus went on. ‘I presume that you have disposed of the property you stole, so you can expect the maximum penalty. Would you not agree, Abb?’
I turned my head to see who else was in the tent, and there, standing with his hands clasped behind his back and looking out of the tent flap as if he wished to have nothing to do with this sordid matter of theft and absconding from his rule, was Abb Aidan. The sight of him brought to mind something that Eochaid had once explained to me about the laws of the Christians. The monastery abbs, he said, had created most of their statutes and regulations as ways of raising money locally. Shrewdly they had adopted the brithem principle that whenever a rule was broken, then the transgressors had to pay a fine. So their cana, as they called their laws, were only valid within the territories the abbs controlled. Farther afield, Eochaid had stated, it was not monastery law which applied, but the king’s law.
‘I claim my right to trial before the king’s marshal,’ I said. ‘Here at Tlachtga I am not subject to the cana of St Ciaran’s. I am outside the monastery’s jurisdiction. More than that, I have the right to protection from the king’s law because I am a foreigner, a fact acknowledged when I was first interviewed for admission into the community at St Ciaran’s.’
Brother Mariannus glowered at me. ‘Who taught you anything about the law, you impudent puppy . . .’ he began.
‘No, he’s right,’ Abb Aidan interrupted. ‘Under the law he is entitled to a hearing before the king’s marshal, though that will not make any difference to the verdict.’ I felt a faint stir of satisfaction. I had judged the abb correctly. He was such a stickler for custom and correctness that I had avoided being transported back to St Ciaran’s and within range of Brother Cainnech, whom I knew was my real foe.
‘Take him outside and tie him up securely, feet as well as hands, to make sure he doesn’t disappear a second time,’ Abb Aidan ordered and then, addressing the treasurer, ‘Brother Mariannus, I would be obliged if you would contact the officials of the royal household and ask if the case of Thorgils or Thurgeis, known sometimes as Thangbrand, can be heard at the first opportunity, on a charge of theft of Church property.’
So, late the next day, I found myself at a legal hearing once again. But this time I was not an observer. I was the accused. The trial was held in the mead hall of the local ri, a modest building that could scarcely hold more than a hundred spectators, and which that afternoon was far from full. Of course, the High King himself was not there. He was represented by his marshal, a bored-looking man in late middle age, with a sleek, round face, straggling moustache and large brown eyes. He reminded me of a tired seal. He had not expected an extra case to be brought before him so late in the day and wanted it to be dealt with quickly. I was pushed into the centre of the hall and made to stand facing the marshal. He sat at a plain wooden table and on his right was a scribe, a priest, making notes on a wax tablet. Farther around the circle from the penman were about a dozen men, some seated, others standing. They were clearly clerics, though I could not tell whether they were there as advisers, jury, prosecutors, or merely onlookers. Opposite to them, and fewer in number, were a group of brithemain. Among them, to my relief, I could see Eochaid. He was standing in the rear of the group and made no sign that he knew me.
The proceedings went briskly. The treasurer recounted the charges against me, how I had joined the monastery, how I had betrayed their trust and generosity, how I had disappeared one night, and the next day the library was found broken into and several holy and precious ornaments to a Gospel book had been torn from their mountings. Earlier some pag
es had gone missing from an important manuscript, and I was suspected of being responsible for that theft as well.
‘Has any of the stolen material been recovered?’ the marshal asked without much interest.
‘No, none of it. The culprit disappeared without trace, though we looked for him widely and carefully. It was only yesterday, after an interval of two years, that he was seen here at the festival by one of our people and recognised.’
‘What penalty are you seeking?’ the marshall enquired.
‘The just penalty – the penalty for aggravated theft. A death penalty.’
‘Would you consider some sort of arbitration and a payment of compensation if that could be arranged?’ The question came from the marshal’s left, from one of the brithemain. The question had been addressed to the treasurer and I saw several of the Christians stir and come alert. Their hostility was obvious.
‘No,’ replied the treasurer crisply. ‘How could the wretch possibly pay compensation? He has no family to stand surety for him, he is a foreigner, and he is obviously destitute. In his entire life he could never repay the sum that the loss represents to the monastery.’
‘If he is so destitute, would it not be appropriate to forgive a pauper for his crime? Isn’t that what you preach – forgiveness of sins?’
The treasurer glared at the brithem. ‘Our Holy Bible teaches us that he who absolves a crime is himself a wrongdoer,’ he retorted. To the marshal’s left I saw the churchmen nod their agreement. They looked thoroughly pleased with the treasurer’s response. No one asked me a single question. Indeed they barely glanced at me. I knew why. The word of a runaway novice counted for nothing against the word of a senior monk, particularly someone with the status of the treasurer. Under both Church law and brithem custom, the value of testimony depends on the individual’s rank, so whatever I said was of no import. If the treasurer stated I was the culprit, then it was useless for me to deny it. For my defence to be effective, I needed someone of equal or superior status to the treasurer to speak for me, and there was no one there who appeared willing to act on my behalf. As I had known from the beginning, it was not a question of whether I was innocent or guilty, but of what my sentence would be.
