Condemned to Death

by Cora Harrison

  Michelóg shrugged his shoulders. ‘I couldn’t tell you, Brehon. The hay was there for him and a roof over his head and it was up to him to use it when he wanted. I’m not a man to probe into anyone else’s business.’

  ‘Did you take him across from Galway last Monday?’

  ‘Do you know, Brehon, I didn’t exchange a word with him since that very day that I was telling you about, in Galway. And you can ask the leather merchant there, if you want to know if I’m telling the truth about that conversation. He listened to every word that we said.’

  ‘And he was wearing a wig that day, I presume. So I’m surprised that you did not immediately recognize him when you saw the dead body.’ Mara rushed her two sentences together to prevent a denial and, as she expected, there was a short silence while he thought of what to say. When he did speak, what he said was unexpected.

  ‘To be honest with you, Brehon, everyone knew who it was once young Síle found him. A wig on, or a wig off, doesn’t make too much difference to a person that every man, woman or child had seen hanging around this place for almost a month. Everyone recognized him, but seeing as he was in that old boat belonging to Séan the Shark Slayer’s grandfather – well, no one wanted to have anything to do with it.’

  ‘And where is Séan’s grandfather now?’ Mara heard the irritation in her voice and mentally reproved herself for it. Nothing could be served by showing impatience and by allocating blame. The community had closed ranks – just like a herd of long-horned cows confronting a hungry wolf from the mountain, they had drawn together and presented a solid and unbroken front to her questions. There was, she noted, a slight look of triumph in Michelóg’s eyes. He would often have been excluded from the affairs of the fishermen. He allowed a long moment to elapse before answering her question and then pointed dramatically to the hillside where the little church stood.

  ‘Up there, Brehon, up there, he is buried under six foot of good earth.’

  Mara nodded at this, but lingered. Michelóg was enjoying his role and she might get some more useful information from him. This rock-solid wall of denials which had met her from the start of this enquiry seemed to have been coordinated in some way, but Michelóg was a farmer, not a fisherman, and he, though of the clan, did not have a close relationship with those who took their living from the sea.

  ‘So was it Setanta who thought it might be best to deny everything?’ she enquired, bending over to feel the knobbly surface of the tree bark. Where had it come from? she wondered. She had never seen a tree like that in her life and the heartwood exposed by Michelóg’s axe was a startling shade of bright orange. The westerly gale had perhaps carried it from one of the countries discovered by Christopher Columbus, that intrepid Italian explorer who had made Spain rich and had honoured the city of Galway with a visit at the time when Mara was four years old.

  ‘No, no, not Setanta; it was Fernandez who told them what to say,’ said Michelóg with an air of scorn for her naivety. ‘He said that we didn’t want any trouble. He just went from group to group when your young lad, Domhnall, is it? – well, when he set off, Fernandez arranged it all, told everyone to say nothing. The other scholars were down by the body, they didn’t hear a thing – watching the body, they were, and him stretched out in Séan’s grandfather’s boat, like on a bier.’

  He chuckled merrily to himself and then went into the house and came out with an enormous saw.

  ‘If you’ll excuse me, Brehon, if you’ve finished asking me questions, I’d better get on with this. The quicker I get to work on this, the easier my job will be.’

  ‘Just one more question, Michelóg,’ said Mara, refusing to be hurried. ‘Has there been much speculation about what brought an elderly gold merchant from Galway here to wander around the seashore and to sleep uncomfortably on a bed of hay in the loft of an old damp house?’ She laid a slight emphasis on the word ‘gold’, but his face remained blank.

  ‘I couldn’t tell you, Brehon. The folk around here are not too friendly to me. You know that yourself. They keep their counsel and I keep mine.’

  ‘And what did you, yourself, make of this strange notion. Did you think that he was looking for something?’

  He hesitated for a minute and she thought that he might be going to say something, but then he cast a quick glance over his shoulder, almost as though he thought he would be overheard, and picked up his saw and began to trim the bark from the trunk.

  ‘I didn’t think anything, Brehon. I’m too busy minding my own affairs for thinking about other people’s.’ Once again, he cast a look over his shoulder and when Mara left him and walked back onto the road, she understood why. She could hear the sound of a stone hammer and guessed that Brendan was mending the stone wall that stood between his land and Michelóg’s holding. In the pauses, it would have been possible for him to overhear the conversation on this morning when no wind blew and the sound of the waves was muted by the mist.

  There was no doubt that Michelóg, the farmer, was an outsider in this community, and that he was at odds with the others of the neighbourhood who took their living from the sea, rather than from the land. No one would be sorry, she thought, if the blame for this secret and unlawful killing could be shifted onto his shoulders – and Michelóg himself knew that feeling.

  That was, she thought, why he had been so open with her and why he had pointed the finger at Fernandez as the coordinator of the blank response to her questions. But what about Brendan? He and his sister were the ones that went to and from Galway almost daily. If anyone had ferried the gold merchant to Fanore on that Monday of his death, then the chances were that it was one of the samphire-gatherers who brought him – and, probably, the arrangement would be that they would take him back again on the following morning.

  But no one had missed him, apparently. Surely someone would have gone to see whether he was all right? The body did not turn up on the beach for three more days.

  Twelve

  Bretha Comaithchesa

  (Judgements of the Neighbourhood)

  When it comes to assessing the extent of the damage inflicted by trespassing cattle the Brehon’s judgement as to the harm done is assisted by the evidence of a neighbour of good standing who is respected by all and whose knowledge of the land and of the possibilities of either recovery or permanent harm to a piece of pasture is well known.

  It was, thought Mara, as she walked in the direction of the tapping on stone, surprising that Brendan had no cows at all on his land. Admittedly his acreage was small and the land was even nearer to the sea than Michelóg’s, but then from time immemorial his family had owned the seashore rights and that meant, as well as laying claim to anything washed down from the mountain and onto the strand, Brendan could graze his cows there and let them eat the seaweed from the rocks and no one could deny him those rights. She put the question to him when she arrived at the boundary wall and saw him blink with surprise.

  ‘You know, Brehon, I never did get on well with cows; I don’t like them much at all,’ he said after a moment. ‘It’s a chancy sort of business. You wouldn’t believe the amount of illness cattle get and then you reckon on having six calves born and then next thing you find is that one of the cows was barren, one miscarried and the rest of them all had bull calves which are not worth the same at all as little heifers. And then they slip and slide on the stones and break legs – at least mine did. I had no luck with them at all so in the end I could see how Etain was doing well with samphire so I joined with her and we started to go to Galway market and then to the inns and now it’s all going well.’

  ‘So you didn’t mind Michelóg grazing his cattle on the foreshore?’

  Brendan’s face darkened. ‘I didn’t like it,’ he said bluntly. ‘I never gave him permission to do so; I just didn’t want any trouble with him – he’d knock you down as soon as look at you, a very handy man with the fists and the stick, too; so I thought to myself, well, it’s not doing me any harm and I didn’t think it would cause trouble b
ecause the rest of the people around here were just in the fishing line and it didn’t matter to them, then, though a few complained about the cows fouling the seaweed, but when it came to letting that vicious bull of his stalk up and down the strand and frighten the life out of the children, well then I had to go to law and he has his knife stuck in me ever since – so as to say,’ he added hastily.

  ‘I remember the case,’ said Mara. She remembered now that Ardal O’Lochlainn had been called in to assess damage and had been rather dismissive about the amount of harm that cows could do on those sandy dunes, as compared with the heavier richer land of the valleys between the mountains, where Mara’s land and Ardal’s own land were situated. She had imposed a fine on Michelóg, though, because of the bull affair, and had banned him from allowing his cows onto the foreshore again, recommending Brendan to keep his walls in good order.

  And this was a magnificent wall that he was working on, watched by a golden brown blob of an active, square-tailed wren. It was one of the ancient shore walls, large round boulders piled line upon line, with each smoothly curved stone bridging the gap beneath it and then the whole wall capped, at waist-high level, with a series of oval slabs. In the morning mist, the stones were dripping and coloured dark grey, with just glimpses of the orange sand showing in the spaces between the smoothed outlines, but on a sunny day it would gleam a pristine silver-white.

  Brendan, frustrated perhaps by his inability to get to Galway in the thick mist, was building a stile here so that, as he explained to Mara, he could easily take the heavy baskets of dripping samphire over the wall to the pathway without knocking the stones and then load them straight onto the cart, avoiding having to drag the heavy weight across the sand and rooting up the superficial coating of marram grass.

  Mara admired the workmanship. He was using the squared-off oblong slabs of black limestone from the beach and like every native of the Burren he had an instinctive appreciation of which stone he needed next, as with only a glance he selected one from the pile on the grass verge – the largest and longest was already in position, well settled with a few taps of the stone-worker’s hammer, and then came the next, just the length of a man’s foot shorter than the first, then another – this one, a little too short, had a small piece tucked behind it and then the top stone, by now the stile was three-quarters the height of the wall so Brendan took off one of the stones, balancing its massive weight with ease and replaced it with a finger-thick slab that could be stepped over with ease and then he turned to Mara with a grin.

  ‘Well, that’s done and all to do again on the other side,’ he said.

  ‘And it will be there for your sons and your grandsons and your great-grandsons that come after you,’ said Mara looking at the perfection and solidity of the work.

  ‘Etain’s son before mine,’ said Brendan. ‘There’ll be a baby in Cathair Róis by the feast of Imbolc.’

  ‘That’s lovely,’ said Mara warmly. The priests were trying to call the first of February St Brigid’s Day, but on the Burren it was still known as Imbolc and was one of the four great festivals in the Celtic calendar. ‘Fernandez and she must be delighted,’ she finished and hoped that this business of the gold merchant was not going to mar the happiness of the young couple. She watched him for a few minutes as he worked on steadily, checking the stability of the steps, selecting and then inserting a few small stones from the pile beside him underneath the massive slabs. For a moment she envied him. It was a simpler and easier way of life than trying to tread a path through the labyrinth of the human mind and human emotions. And then she smiled to herself as she remembered the huge intellectual satisfaction of her work. She would, she knew, not willingly swap places with anyone in the three kingdoms. To a certain extent, she thought, she also built walls, as she balanced the relationships between neighbours, sometimes inserting the small stones of conversation, compliments and understanding, but all the time relying on the massive solidity of the law to provide the framework for peace in the kingdom.

  ‘Look,’ he said, breaking into her thoughts and he pointed over her head so she turned and looked. The heavy dark cliff-edge of the mountain that towered above the River Caher was beginning to emerge from the mist and there was a faint brightening in the sky.

  ‘Etain will be able to get to Galway after all,’ he said with satisfaction.

  ‘And you?’ asked Mara. She was unwilling to delay a man who wished to seize the tide, but he shook his head. ‘Not me, I’ve started so I’ll finish. This is my task for the day, that and making a proper path up from the beach through our land. There are plenty of slabs lying around and I can bed them down into the sand. And then we can roll up the baskets on a turf barrow and carry them across the wall and load them onto the cart – easier when they can go by boat, of course, but the winter is long and the sea has its storms. And I enjoy building things.’

  If Séanín was not needed to go and fetch her overnight linen she would have offered him as an assistant. Perhaps the boy could stay overnight in one of the scholars’ tents and then help on the morrow. Brendan was obviously a past master with stone building and a skill like he possessed was always a useful one on the Burren. The work on her own farm, with the hay already saved and the turf drawn, had slackened off and wouldn’t gather pace again until the oats ripened. In any case, Cumhal and Séanín were at odds with each other – Cumhal preferred the quieter and more respectful boys, so Séanín might learn more readily from the younger and more easy-going Brendan.

  ‘If you wish, Séanín could work with you tomorrow, Brendan,’ she said. ‘I’d offer him to you this afternoon if I didn’t need him to go across to the law school – but tomorrow he could spend the day with you.’

  He thanked her so cordially for her offer of a helper that she seized the opportunity of the warmth between them and said in a friendly way, ‘Brendan, tell me, why was everyone so secretive about the identity of the goldsmith? You must all have known him, wig or no wig, and everyone must have been wondering for the last couple of weeks what on earth he was doing here, pottering around and then sleeping on a load of hay in that old house down by the shore.’

  She could have sworn that the steps he had built going up to the stile were as firm and as solid as the steps in the Brehon’s house at Cahermacnaghten, and the wall behind them had probably been in place for hundreds of years, but he seemed to move, almost to stumble and then he shouted, ‘Stand back, Brehon!’ and one of the smaller rounded stones tumbled from the wall and fell almost at her feet.

  It took him quite a few minutes before he rebuilt the wall and by then, she reckoned, he had a story ready. He was, she thought, observing him narrowly, extremely uneasy, and her question had brought sweat to his brow, which had not been there when he was handling the enormous slabs of stone – all of them at least the thickness of a man’s foot.

  ‘Well, it’s like this, Brehon,’ he said with a false air of confidentiality. ‘This man was searching for something and no one quite knew what he was about. You could say that he was causing trouble between neighbours. No one knew if he was working with someone around here or if he was working for himself. And then when he was found dead, well, no one liked to point the finger. And when it came down to it, I suppose,’ he said, throwing his hands wide open in a gesture of candour, ‘when it came down to it, there were people around here who guessed what he was looking for. They’ve been rumours, you see, Brehon.’

  ‘Pieces of gold had been found.’ Mara had found on many occasions that a statement worked better than a question.

  ‘Not by me,’ said Brendan quickly. ‘Not up early enough in the morning; but there have been rumours. Someone would be in the money. A pair of oars here, a fancy gown from Galway there …’ He let the sentence tail out and nipped neatly through the gap in his wall and began to build up the steps of the stile on the other side. ‘People don’t always let neighbours know of good fortune, Brehon, but, of course, envy begins to creep in and causes bad blood.’

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p; ‘And Fernandez thought that it might be best if no one admitted to knowing who he was, and that he would be just an unknown corpse washed up on the beach.’

  He made no reply to this, just bowed his head and looked uncomfortable, so she reverted to the questions about the treasure hunt.

  ‘And if a fisherman coming down to beach early one morning, or even returning on a moonlit night, caught a glint of gold and found that he had a bracelet or a ring, or a brooch, would he know what to do with it?’

  ‘That would be an easy matter, Brehon. Don’t they say that the streets of Galway City are paved in gold? That would be the first place that they would take it – and easy enough it would be to go there by boat, without causing any talk – the fish market there is open to all.’

  ‘So during the last few years fishermen have been finding things here on Fanore – nothing too big, that would have been noticed – and they have been secretly selling their finds to the gold merchant at Galway – and there was only the one man there, and that was Niall Martin, so quite a few would know him. And Niall Martin puts two and two together, then he starts to come over here, coming in the evening, staying the night in an old house and then returning on the following morning.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Brendan, ‘and I can tell you, Brehon, there have been a lot of wasted footsteps on the strand and up on the dunes, just the way that your own scholars have been searching for the last few days.’

  He laughed merrily at the thought and then stopped, tilting his head to one side. The sounds of blows came clearly through the still, damp air.

  ‘What is he at, at all, this morning? He sounds like he’s breaking his house down.’

  ‘Michelóg, you mean?’ asked Mara. ‘When I passed by there he was chopping an enormous tree trunk – one that came in on the tide. Not a tree that you would find anywhere around here; came from across the ocean, I’d say,’ she added hastily, remembering that she was speaking to a man who held rights over everything found on the beach that had not come from ‘beyond the ninth wave’.