‘I don’t know, Brehon,’ said Enda. ‘Aidan was fooling around and he was … pretending … well, he was making a lot of noise and then Moylan whispered in my ear, “He’s coming!” and we heard a sort of panting sound and the ladder was pulled up and a stone was slammed down over the hole. We couldn’t reach the hole without the ladder so we thought we’d find another way out …’
Mara nodded. ‘Yes, I know the rest of it. Go to bed now, Enda.’
‘We did do the task that you set us, Brehon,’ said Enda. He had turned away, but now he looked back at Mara. ‘We questioned everyone that we could find. Not many people knew Oscar O’Connor – he’s a stranger here. No one could remember seeing him go down the mountain.’
After Enda had left, she stayed for a while in the garden, turning things over in her mind. Was it Oscar O’Connor, or was it someone else who had trapped the boys in the cave? She walked thoughtfully down the road to the law school. Fachtnan came to the gate to meet her.
‘Brehon,’ he said, ‘Aidan and Moylan told me that Enda saved them. He stayed standing in the water and made them climb on his shoulders. By the time that Moylan got up on the ledge Enda was up to his neck in water; Moylan said it was a miracle that he managed to get on to the ledge. And then the water level fell so Enda told them to stay because the waters would go down completely in an hour or so. He did behave well, Brehon,’ finished Fachtnan earnestly.
‘Thank you,’ said Mara. He had told her what she wanted to know. She had made the right decision. Enda would turn out well. He was straight, honest and courageous. He would make a good Brehon once he had learned to control the impetuosity of youth.
‘Good night, Fachtnan,’ she said, thinking how he had never given her any anxiety. ‘What would I do without you?’ she added affectionately, but her eyes were on the tall, burly figure of the king coming to join them.
‘My lord,’ she said, ‘you will need your supper. Will you be safe in my house, or should we eat in the guest house?’
‘We have a whole army standing around with nothing to do,’ he said impatiently. ‘Let’s go into your house. I can smell the salmon roasting.’
‘I’ve not thanked you for coming to my aid,’ said Mara.
‘You can thank Finn O’Connor for that,’ said Turlough in an undertone as they walked side by side. ‘If his place hadn’t been so uncomfortable I’d be still there, but even with my boots on the hob I was cold, and the food … Anyway, I must make the most of your company. I have to leave at dawn tomorrow. I’ve been away from Thomond for too long. I get uneasy wondering what that lad of mine is up to when I’m not around to keep an eye on him. He’ll turn everything English if I’m not careful.’
‘Everyone will be up early,’ said Mara. ‘The scholars are all going to Fanore with Cumhal to gather seaweed and it looks as if most of the young people of the Burren are going to join them.’
‘So you’ll have a peaceful day,’ said Turlough.
‘I’ll have a busy day,’ said Mara resolutely.
EIGHTEEN
CRITH GABLACH (RANKS IN SOCIETY)
A bóaire has an honour price of five séts. He has land sufficient to graze twelve cows. He has a house of twenty-seven feet and an outhouse of fifteen feet, a kiln for limestone, a barn, a pigsty, a calf-pen and a sheep-pen. He has a half share in a plough team and a share in a mill.
The bóaire must pay the rent of one milch cow per year to his lord. At the death of his lord he must take part in the digging of the lord’s gravemound, pay a death levy and attend the commemorative feast.
THE PARTY FOR FANORE had left over an hour before Muiris arrived at Cahermacnaghten. Mara had decided that a man like Muiris would be more likely to tell his story in relaxed surroundings so she planned to interview him in her garden. She was serenely pruning a rose when she saw his low-statured, squat figure cross the fields and stand hesitating at the gate to the law school.
‘I’m over here, Muiris,’ she called. ‘I’m giving myself a little holiday for an hour or so. I’ve lots of judgements to write up, but the day is so beautifully hot that I couldn’t resist a little gardening in the cool of the morning. Come over and have a cup of ale with me.’
Without waiting for a reply she went into the kitchen of her house and came back with a wooden platter of oatcakes and two foaming cups of light ale.
‘I just thought I would have a walk since it’s such a great morning,’ he said, coming in the garden gate. ‘The young people got off all right.’
‘They did indeed.’ She smiled inwardly. With the whole farm to look after, Muiris goes for a walk, she thought cynically, but aloud she said, ‘What a handsome boy your Felim is! I suppose the marriage will be soon. I’m sorry that I couldn’t get a better contract for you. That bride price of thirty cows must be quite a worry.’
‘Well, you explained the position, Brehon, and I understand. Since the bride’s father is a taoiseach and has an honour price of ten séts, and I am a bóaire so I have an honour price of only five séts, then we have to supply most of the cattle.’
There was an immense degree of satisfaction and pride in his voice. He had been a servant boy, then an ócaire, and now he was a bóaire, a highly respected member of the community; his son was about to marry the daughter of a taoiseach and he, Muiris O’Heynes, was in a position to supply the young couple with their means of livelihood.
‘I suppose we will soon be drawing up a contract for Aoife’s marriage,’ said Mara genially. She took a sip of her ale and then went back to cutting the dead blossoms from her rose. It was just perfect this year, growing in pink clusters around the entrance to the little hazel wood at the side of the house. Within the wood the flowers of the lily of the valley and the lacy-leaved sweet cicely glowed white on the green mossy ground beneath the small trees, and the hazels framed a glimpse of blue sky beyond.
‘You have a great flower garden here, Brehon,’ he said, taking his cup of ale and looking all around at the roses, the orchids, gentians and the sweet-scented herbs. He sat on the stone seat and sipped the drink meditatively.
‘It’s beautiful on a morning like this, isn’t it,’ said Mara. ‘Sometimes it’s my despair, but mostly I get great pleasure out of it.’
‘I’d like to make a garden for Áine like that,’ said Muiris, biting into a piece of oatcake. ‘Once I get Felim off my hands, and perhaps young Aengus too, we’ll be able to draw breath. She’s had to work too hard, there’s no doubt about it.’ He swallowed a mouthful of ale and stared over the garden.
‘You’ve built up a great farm, though,’ said Mara softly, willing the conversation to go on and the man to relax and tell what he had come to tell.
‘It’s not as good as I would want it to be, but of course I started from nothing,’ continued Muiris, ‘or at least, I had one cow and her calf. Finn, Ardal and Donogh’s father, gave them to me. I was only sixteen years old at the time and Finn’s cattleman had given up with this cow. He just could not pull the calf and the cow was dying anyway, so he left her. I went in and worked on her for two hours by myself and the calf was born alive. I stayed with the cow, propping her up and feeding her every few minutes; I stayed there all night and all the following day. The next day the cow got to her feet and began to suckle her calf. Finn gave the two of them to me. He said that without me they would both be dead. He was a very fair man, Finn, very generous. I owe everything to him.’
Mara looked at him with friendly interest. She poured out some more ale from the jug and this time Muiris took a long drink.
‘That’s good ale,’ he said.
‘Brigid makes it, Cumhal’s wife, you know. She makes it for the lads and I drink some. I prefer wine myself, but not for breakfast.’ She waited, anxious and tense, but trying to appear relaxed and receptive. Muiris was obviously finding it hard to come to the point of his visit, but Mara feared that saying the wrong word at this moment might silence the man.
‘How old were you when you came to Finn?’ she asked. ‘Wer
e you fostered by him?’
‘No,’ said Muiris bitterly. ‘I was not fostered. Nobody ever cared enough about me to have me fostered or anything else. I was just a slave and a drudge in the house; something for my father to kick when the dog ran away; the only one of his family to live beyond a few months. It would probably have been better for my mother if I had died too because it added to her torment to watch me being ill-treated.’
They sat in silence for a few minutes. In the distance the cuckoo called, and from the woodland garden another answered, his stammered notes like an echo of the first. The sun was getting higher in the sky now and its heat was drawing a fragrance from the flowers. As Muiris continued, Mara was all the time conscious of the terrible incongruity of this gracious perfumed setting for his ugly story of harsh brutality.
‘My father was a small farmer, an ócaire,’ said Muiris, ‘but he had ambitions to better himself.’ He gave a wry smile. ‘I am a bit like him, I suppose. He worked from morning to night. I worked and my mother worked. She was never allowed a minute to rest, to look after herself. She was kicked out of her bed a day after giving birth to yet another dead child, so that she could carry on with the work. He wanted more sons in the way a man would want more asses, in order to share the burden of the work, but my mother had no strength left in her. We had no proper feeding; he was a big man and he liked his food so whatever was available he took. My mother and I were half starved most of the time.’ Muiris stopped and looked down at his stunted body. ‘You see the size I am and yet I had the best of food from the time I came to Finn at fourteen years old, but you never make up what is missing during the early growing time.’
‘No, you don’t,’ agreed Mara, sensing that the man needed to feel her sympathy. ‘What fine sons you have, though. They will all be big men,’ she added.
Muiris’s face lit up. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘they’ve had to work hard, poor lads, but it has all been for them. I would never see them go short. My father wasn’t like that; it was all for him. My mother and I were like slaves and it was like that from the day that I could walk until I was about thirteen.’
He stopped, gazing with unseeing eyes at a pair of goldfinches that twisted and spiralled their way around the garden. His right fist was clenched and his mouth tight. Mara said nothing, just waited.
‘Oddly enough, it was a hot day like this,’ said Muiris, drawing a deep breath and staring over the fields. ‘I can never hear the cuckoo call without thinking about it. I was picking the stones out the field above the house and building a wall, when I heard my mother scream. I stopped and then I heard her scream again and it was worse than the first time. I went to go down to her, but then I stopped myself. I always made it worse and she always asked me not to. It would only end in the two of us getting beaten and he was worse to her when I was around, just as if he wanted to show me that he could do what he liked. So I did nothing; that is something that I will remember for the rest of my life. I did nothing and he killed her.
‘When I came back at noon, my mother was lying on the floor and she was dying. Just when I reached her she opened her eyes and tried to say something, and then … then she died. On the ground beside her was an iron bar and it had blood on it. I picked it up and went looking for him. He was drawing water from the well. He was bending down, pulling up the bucket, and I came up behind and I hit him as hard as I could. I was very strong. Even though I was so small, I was very strong. I hit him so hard that I killed him.’
The skylark began to sing now, its voice high and sweet. The swallows swooped in and out of the open stable door and a blackbird rooted among the dead leaves under the holly hedge. Mara moved her hand across the small thyme leaves that grew next to the stone seat and released the sharp, spicy fragrance into the air. Muiris turned to look at her.
‘Well, you can imagine that I didn’t know what to do with myself then.’ His voice was flat now, all emotion burned out by the constant recalling of events over a period of nearly forty years. ‘I didn’t know what to do with myself and I just sat there on the ground. Then one of my father’s brothers came. I told him what had happened. He was a man like my father; a brutal, angry man and he would not believe me. He said that my mother probably died by striking her head on the floor and that the only blood on that iron bar was my father’s. He chained me up, like a dog, and gathered all of the kin-group. It was a cold night when they came. They lit a fire outside the yard where I was chained; there were too many of them to fit in the house and they wanted me to listen. There was no Brehon there, nobody but the kin-group. They decided that I was guilty of fingal because I had slain my own kin.’
Muiris picked up his ale and once again took a long drink. ‘I often wonder why they did not put me to death that time,’ he said. ‘You would think that they would. It was the only revenge that they could take. I could not pay any blood price. I had nothing.’
‘They could not do that,’ said Mara quietly. ‘If they had done so, they also would have been guilty of fingal. The killing of a blood relation, of a member of the kin-group, is classed as fingal, no matter what crime needs to be avenged.’
‘Well, that explains it then,’ said Muiris in a matter-of-fact voice. ‘They didn’t kill me, but they did condemn me to death. God Himself saved me.
‘They dragged me down to the beach and put me in a small boat with no oars, and they launched me out to sea. There was a strong south-east wind blowing. I was out of sight of the land in a few minutes. I didn’t care much, I think, though it’s hard to remember exactly what I was like before the fever came over me. I can just remember the terrible thirst and drinking the sea water and then drinking it again until I spewed up my guts and lay on the floor of the boat and hoped I would die.’
Mara stared at him, appalled. This was a punishment that was frequently used in the old days for the crime of fingal – not so often these days, though not unknown – but certainly never for a thirteen-year-old boy. She reached over, took his hand but then released it. He was a self-contained, proud and reserved man; he might not welcome her sympathy.
‘I don’t know how long I was in that boat,’ continued Muiris, hardly seeming to notice her gesture, ‘but I do remember how I was rescued. The wind changed, you see – it must have been after a few days – the wind changed to the west and it started to rain and the rain cooled my fever. I lay there with my mouth open and drop by drop the rain went into my mouth and down my throat, and, of course, the wind was no longer blowing me out to sea, but in towards the shore and I was washed up on a sandy beach. It was the beach at Fanore, but of course I didn’t know that then.
‘It was still very windy, but the rain stopped and the sun came out and I lay there on the sand and I looked up and there was a man bending over me. I had never seen a man as big as that before; they are all small men where I came from, though not as small as me, and this man’s hair was like the sun itself – well, I don’t know whether you remember Finn, before his hair went grey, but you know Ardal. Finn was like him to look at, anyway, although he was a kinder, softer sort of man, I think. He took me home with him. He put me in his own bed, he fed and tended me as if he was my mother. When I was well again, I lived in his house like one of his sons. Everything I did around the farm, I did because I wanted to do it. He never asked anything of me. He was a prince among men.’
Muiris stopped. That scene from all those years ago was as fresh in his mind as if it had been yesterday. He got up from his seat and walked down the garden, stopping to stare intently at the velvet blue of the tiny gentians. He stayed there for a long time. When he returned Mara could see the glint of unshed tears in his eyes. The horror of his father’s brutality, of his mother’s death and of his own ill-treatment had not drawn from him this emotion, only the memory of Finn’s simple kindness. It was a few long minutes before he spoke, but by then his voice was dry and under control.
‘But you know this story, Brehon?’
‘No,’ said Mara. She was conscious that her eyes,
also, were wet. She wiped them on a soft linen handkerchief from her pouch. It was true that she had not known the story. The bald details were there in her father’s notes; the boy’s crime and the decision of the O’Lochlainn to care for him, that had all been there; but not the true and terrible story.
Muiris turned to look at her. ‘Well, perhaps your father knew,’ he said. ‘Someone must have known. I told no one, except Áine, and Finn told me that he would tell no one. Not even Ardal or Donogh know. They were young at the time.’
‘Why do you say that someone knew?’ asked Mara, though she knew what was coming next.
‘Because Colman knew,’ said Muiris. ‘He told me that he had found out about it at the law school.’
‘Yes,’ said Mara. ‘The O’Lochlainn would have had to tell the Brehon, as the king’s representative, about the new arrival on the Burren. My father would have written it down. I hadn’t read it myself, but Colman must have. And he blackmailed you?’
‘Yes,’ said Muiris.
‘He broke his oath,’ said Mara bitterly. ‘Every law student swears an oath every year at the beginning of the Michaelmas term never to reveal anything learned within these walls.’
‘He came to me just after the marriage contract for Felim was signed. He said that he knew the whole story. He said that if I did not pay him six ounces of silver then he would tell everyone, including Felim’s bride and her father. I would be disgraced and the marriage would not take place. No one would want his daughter to marry the son of a man who had killed his own father,’ he ended simply, and Mara knew that he was right. This was the sin of sins in Gaelic society. As young Shane had recited only so recently: The wisdom texts say that it strikes at the heart of society. Muiris would have been ostracized and his family would have suffered with him.
‘So you paid?’
‘Yes, I paid. I sold a few cows and paid him and I thought that would be the end of the matter.’
My Lady Judge Page 22
