Condemned to Death

by Cora Harrison

  ‘The chances are strong that he did so, Brehon. Otherwise his death is hard to explain.’

  Mara agreed with him, but said nothing, allowing the others to have their say. After a few minutes she produced from her satchel the rough sketch map that she had made the night before, handing it to Cormac, as the youngest scholar, and telling him to take it round to the others.

  ‘Say nothing until everyone has had a good chance to look at it,’ she told them. ‘And then, I think, we should be able to discuss where I went wrong but also where it is likely that something could have been washed out by the river when it was in flood after the storm of the other night.’ She could see herself that she had exaggerated one curve of the river and had omitted another.

  ‘I think you did very well,’ said Art politely.

  ‘It’s difficult to remember everything,’ said Slevin, ‘but …’

  ‘Yes, go on,’ said Mara and listened with an appearance of gratitude as one by one they pointed out her mistakes. Some she had not seen herself and she thanked and praised them, taking care that her voice bore no trace of condescension.

  ‘There’s one place that I think it might be,’ said Domhnall, pointing up the hill to where there was a flash of yellow. ‘Just up by those flowers there’s a group of rocks.’

  ‘Couldn’t be there,’ said Cormac immediately. ‘The river doesn’t go near it.’

  ‘It did the other night; the flood has completely gone down now. Shall we go up there, Brehon?’ Slevin was eager to start and Mara thought that the place Domhnall had picked was a good one. They climbed up alongside the river, now tamed to its channel and flowing demurely downhill on its bed of stones.

  The rocks themselves were a disappointment, though. The sheltered side, away from the sea, was covered in flowers as intricately woven as a wall carpet, with scarlet pimpernel, mauve storksbill, and large clumps of yellow wall pepper. Could these fragile blossoms have withstood the onslaught of the mountain stream only five nights ago? Mara was inclined to agree with Cormac when he said scornfully, ‘See; I told you it couldn’t come over as far as that.’

  Slevin searched around in a half-hearted way, more out of loyalty to his friend than with any real conviction. Mara set the others to look afterwards but was not surprised when they all returned to her shortly with downcast expressions. The trouble with the young, she thought, was that they expected results instantly. It was one of her hardest tasks as a teacher to keep their spirits up and break down the work into manageable parts. It was no good handing a seven-year-old a book filled with over three hundred triads and telling him that he had three months to memorize them. On the other hand, three of these three-line aphorisms a night were an easy task and with the mixed ages in her school, the triads were being continuously chanted by someone or other during the education of a scholar.

  ‘What we’re looking for, I suppose,’ she said cheerfully, ‘is a sort of cave that might have been blocked at one stage by a slab of stone, but in recent years, perhaps the slab has been swept away, and now, whenever there is a rainstorm, or perhaps only sometimes when there is a rainstorm, the water enters the cave. I think,’ she went on, ‘we should split up. Cormac and Cael and Cian, cross over the river up there where there are some big stepping stones, and then go straight up towards the mountain. Finbar and Art, will you go down from here. Slevin and Domhnall, go over to the other side of the river and go back down to the beach, and I will go upwards from here.’

  They did as she told them and she waited where she was for a minute, listening to their eager voices, and wondering, trying to edge her way into the mind of that elderly goldsmith from Galway City who had taken the venture, had asked a fisherman to take him across the bay and towards those sands where treasures had turned up from time to time. She tried to imagine what he had done. He had, perhaps, left one of the fishermen with the boat moored against the makeshift pier, had gone out onto the sands, had looked upwards, just as she had done today, had wondered about the occurrence of various treasures, whether they were necklets, bracelets, brooches or rings, but all of them swept down onto the sands and brought to him by a fisherman who was abroad early and whose eye had been caught by the glint of gold on sands that were not gold, but were coloured a dark orange by the ridge of black limestone which bisected them.

  And so he had come ashore, had looked upwards; perhaps, like herself, he had already worked out that the Caher River, rather than the ocean, had been the source of the treasure which had spilled onto the beach after nights of wind, thunder, lightning and above all rainstorms, nights of flooding when the mountain streams turned into cascades.

  But where was the source of the treasure hoard? Where had those people long past, the people, who, like herself, lived by the Brehon law, and had worshipped, not the God of the Nazarene, but the sun god, people who had robbed the mountain streams of their gold and had fashioned tributes to their god, necklets to be worn around the throats of great warriors, bracelets for their wrists, rings for their fingers, and brooches to pin their cloaks back against their mighty shoulders.

  But the mountains, she thought as he looked upwards, were full of rocks, of boulders, and here and there the rain-filled streams had hollowed out caves from the soft limestone. She began to climb up. The eager voices of her seven law scholars reached her and she wished that, like them, she could hope for the best.

  But there was an immensity of stone above here. Mountains of limestone that seemed to reach up to the blue sky; and beneath the mountains there were cliffs of rocks and the limestone everywhere could be dissolved by rainwater and caves hollowed out beneath and between the outcrops of rock. It would be, she thought, like searching for a needle in a haystack. If they ever found it – well, that would just be a matter of chance.

  And then, as she was thinking this, her attention was caught by the patch of sea bindweed, just a few feet above where she stood. She had never seen it elsewhere but it was a common plant around the sand dunes, the pink flowers forming a pretty contrast to the bright green spade-shaped leaves. However, there was something about this particular clump, where the faint, translucent green of the centre was almost turned into gold by the glare of the sun overhead, and the five white lines that striped the pale pink, horn-shaped flower seemed to be directing attention to that centre point. Mara climbed up and bent down to examine the blooms. Yes, the white lines were indeed directing her attention and as she bent over one of the flowers she saw that the sun had drawn sparks from its centre. In a moment her hand went down and it touched not the cool, pollen-dusted centre of the plant, but something that was warm with the sun and hard and smooth. She picked it out and held it up where it gleamed with the colour that only comes from the true and precious metal. It was made from gold and had its warmth and its colour.

  Mara held the object to the bright light that came from sun and sea. There was no mistaking it. She held in her hand a small gold ring. In a moment, and instinctively, her fingers went to her mouth and she summoned her scholars with a shrill whistle, which would have appalled Brigid if she heard it and realized that it came from the Brehon of the Burren.

  Domhnall and Slevin were the first to reach her and they immediately realized the significance of the object that she held. It was, she thought, the purity of the shape and the lack of any other ornamentation which marked it out as a possession of one of the ancient ancestors of the Celts. They had worshipped gold and had distained to add trumpery ornaments to dilute its purity.

  ‘It must have come from somewhere near here.’ This was Domhnall’s first reaction. Before the other scholars arrived, he and Slevin began the search, methodically turning over stones and using their young muscles to move slabs aside.

  Cormac, impatient of this slow work, climbed swiftly up the steep bed of the stream, accompanied by Art and Finbar.

  ‘We’ve found something!’ His voice floated back after about five minutes and Slevin scowled. ‘He should keep his voice down,’ he said crossly. ‘Doesn’t he
know that this is law-school business?’ Nevertheless both he and Domhnall began to climb swiftly up to where the others were standing. Mara followed, thinking wryly that she was beginning to get a little old for this climbing up rocky, boulder bestrewn paths.

  Cormac’s face was shining with triumph and Mara was touched to see how Domhnall expressed admiration of the find, interrupting Slevin’s homily about secrecy with enthusiastic appreciation of the small, slab-covered cavity. It did, indeed, look like the sort of place where a hoard of gold could have been concealed.

  ‘Found anything inside it?’ gasped Cael. Cormac shook his head.

  ‘Not yet,’ he said briefly, bending down to pluck some moss from the stones beneath the slab, while Finbar industriously combed through the sand with his fingers. Art did not seem too hopeful, but stared out to sea as though he wished that he were out there with his father and the other fishermen.

  There was no doubt that Cormac’s find would have been a good hiding place, far away enough from the stream to give an illusion of safety to whoever buried the treasure, and yet not so far as to make it impossible that an unusual flood could, perhaps, have penetrated the hiding place. However, hopes soon began to fade.

  ‘It’s no good,’ said Domhnall, eventually after they had spent about twenty minutes minutely exploring inside and outside the small cavern. ‘Either the murderer found the gold and removed all of it, or else we are in the wrong place. I think we should go on searching.’

  ‘Let’s search until the shadow from that tall rock moves over to that clump of pansies,’ said Mara pointing over to where the yellow flowers, with their distinctive violet markings, were profusely growing beside a rabbit track, leading to one of the innumerable burrows in the soft sand between the boulders. She sat down for a short rest, speculating about the last hours of the goldsmith and about that map which Ardal O’Lochlainn had seen him handle.

  She would allow them to go on searching, but she was beginning to lose hope of finding anything more. No doubt it made sense to think that the murderer removed the hoard of gold; that formed a good motive for the crime. Tomorrow, she thought, she would have to begin a systematic questioning of the fishermen and their wives. She and Brigid would bring over the satchels belonging to the scholars so that each was equipped with pens, penknives, ink and small sheets of vellum and would be able to take down the details.

  ‘Art, could you name me the ten families who are here at the moment,’ she said when the time was up and they straggled back looking disappointed. She waited until all were seated on various rocks or clumps of marram grass around her. ‘There will be twelve all together, of course,’ she said before he could gather his thoughts. ‘There is Brendan the samphire-gatherer, and his two sisters. And then, of course, there is Fernandez – perhaps I should say Fernandez and Etain.’

  ‘Well, there’s Muiris the Bridge, and then there’s Roderic of the Rocks and Séan the Shark Slayer …’ began Art and Mara smiled. The clan custom of bestowing nicknames to distinguish individual members made the fishermen and their families easy to remember. She remembered Séan the Shark Slayer, a large, powerfully built man, with a wide grin and enormous hands. He had wielded a pickaxe very effectively when finishing off the grave for the goldsmith from Galway.

  It would be a small matter for someone of his stature to inflict a fatal blow on the skull of an elderly man.

  Eight

  Muirbretha

  (Sea Judgements)

  Any judge who hears matters to do with the sea has to be well-versed in sea judgements, has to have knowledge of great depths, and be learned in three topics: in the ownership of flotsam, the ownership of jetsam and the ownership of goods carried off by the stream and either deposited downstream or carried out to sea.

  Brigid was delighted to be invited to visit Fanore again. Cormac had announced the decision, not just to her, but to the women and children who were tending the fire and they set up a great cheer, which pleased the housekeeper immensely. While she, Séanín and Mara were riding home through the mountain pass, she was pondering over various dishes that they could bring and was delighted to hear that the cart was to be brought the following day. Séanín won her approval by suggesting a shoulder of pork and that, she thought, with some roasted onions, carrots and parsnips would make a fine meal for those unfortunate enough to be confined to fish for most of their lives.

  ‘Put some meat on the bones of those poor children,’ she said, approving of her own plans. Mara had thought the children all looked very well, lean, brown-faced and agile, but she did not contradict Brigid.

  ‘You ride ahead, Séanín, and tell Eileen to have the bread on the griddle so that it’s ready when we come,’ commanded Brigid and waited until the boy was well ahead of them both before saying to Mara: ‘Finbar doesn’t look well, not well at all.’

  ‘I know,’ said Mara with a sigh. ‘I suppose you’ve heard.’

  Brigid didn’t bother replying to that. Of course she had heard. She knew everything that was to be known about the business of the law school; she had been employed there at Cahermacnaghten since she was fourteen years old.

  ‘You couldn’t give him another chance,’ she said tentatively.

  ‘I can’t, Brigid, it’s against the rules. In any case, it’s going to get harder and harder for him as he grows older. The work will get far too difficult.’

  ‘He’s got beautiful handwriting and draws wonderful pictures,’ said Brigid wistfully.

  ‘That’s true,’ said Mara with a sigh.

  ‘Cormac says that his father won’t have him back in his own household so he is going to ask the King for money to set Finbar up as a fisherman,’ said Brigid with approval.

  ‘I’m not sure that it’s so easy to become a fisherman,’ said Mara wryly. Her son had an optimistic temperament, but it was hard enough for the existing fishermen to make a living without having an untrained boy suddenly entering the business. However, Brigid was right about Finbar’s nice handwriting and his ability to draw little sketches was admired by all of the scholars. There was, after all, a wider world out there than one of farmers and fishermen, with a few professionals such as lawyers, physicians, and craftsmen such as blacksmiths and carpenters. All of these professions and crafts required that a boy should start to learn them at a young age, but then there were people like her son-in-law who had started something completely new when he was already a grown man and who had made a wonderful success of buying goods made by others and selling them into different markets, both at home and abroad in France and Spain. She wished now that she had discussed the matter with Oisín and then an idea suddenly came to her and she nodded with satisfaction.

  Mara was a busy woman with a school to run, the laws and justice of a kingdom to administer, two households and a farm with numerous servants – it was always satisfying to her when two different problems might be solved with one expedition. She thought back to the time when she had gone to Galway City, in the time of the notorious Mayor Lynch – it must have been in the February of 1512, more than nine years previously, she thought.

  And now the long-buried Mayor Lynch’s brother-in-law, Valentine Blake, held the position of mayor in that city. For old times’ sake, she was sure that he could help her in the two matters which now troubled her. A visit to Galway was an essential. She would go there on Monday morning.

  Early on Sunday the cart was loaded with all of Brigid’s belongings, the half-cooked shoulder of pork in its cauldron with its tasty vegetables grouped around it and pots containing Brigid’s famous sauces, a small casket of wine and a larger one of ale, some firewood in case all the driftwood had been used up, and a basket filled with the scholars’ favourite honey cakes. Séanín was to accompany them, on condition, according to Brigid, that he did not get above himself, and he loaded the cart with great goodwill and then came back to carry out the satchels from the school house and place them carefully into a box at the back of the cart. He harnessed the big carthorse in a competent way
and Mara thought approvingly that he was a bright boy who could well be an understudy for Cumhal as a farm manager, if Cumhal ever consented to think of retirement.

  The fishing boats were all moored by the pier when they arrived. Some of the fishermen were dozing on the warm sand of the upper beach, while others were busy packing the smoked fish into wooden barrels. The air was full of the complicated smells and scents of driftwood, seaweed and the crisp aromatic smoke from hazel shells collected the autumn before from the thousands of hazel bushes that grew everywhere on the Burren.

  ‘Brings me back, that does,’ said Brigid, sniffing the air hungrily. ‘We used to do that when I was a girl, save all the hazel shells from the nuts that we ate during the winter and then use them to smoke the mackerel in the summer. My mother used to leave a small barrel by the fireplace and into it would go every single hazel shell – or else there would be trouble.’

  ‘Taste one, Brehon,’ said Setanta, listening to the reminiscence with a smile. ‘Cliona swears that it’s the best of all, better even than smoked with seaweed.’

  Mara took the mackerel, proffered on an enormous scallop shell, and shared it with Brigid. It did taste delicious, she thought, and the hazelnut shells lent a sweet nuttiness to the fish.

  ‘Mind you, nowadays, I’d think that they would be better using apple wood – that’s what I use to smoke our ham,’ said Brigid in an undertone to Mara. Her tone was slightly sad and Mara understood that, like lots of things, the memory of the past was more potent for Brigid than the taste of the present.

  ‘Wait until they taste your pork,’ returned Mara and this had the double effect of allowing her not to take sides on the issue of what was the best method of smoking mackerel, and also of getting Brigid away from herself and the scholars and on to her preparations.