Condemned to Death

by Cora Harrison

  She wondered whether to abandon her plan and to go down to the beach to join him, but decided against it. There was something about that hunched back and the bent head which showed that he did not want company. There was nothing more that she could say, which she had not said already. No one could alter the fact that this boy’s father had disowned him for something which was not his fault. In her reports she had always emphasized to the Brehon of Cloyne that Finbar worked as hard as he could; the ability was just not there. She felt impatient with the man. He, like she, must know that only the exceptionally clever scholars, those blessed with excellent brains and retentive memories and powers of logic, reasoning and understanding, eventually managed to qualify after the long and arduous years of study. There was no disgrace in not making the grade. Better to find this out early enough to make the change to a less demanding way of life.

  Finbar, Mara decided, would be all right once he began work in Galway – that’s if his father gave permission – and in the meantime he was better with the exuberant company of the younger scholars, not to mention the lunatic dog, Dullahán, who, no doubt, would soon rouse the sleeping camp. She decided to give Finbar his privacy and she turned her attention towards the mountain that rose up behind Fernandez’s castle. The River Caher wound its way around this mountain, flowing through a small valley, rich in flowers and sweet grass. The climb was not a difficult one. The slopes of the mountain were terraced, by the hand of God, people around said reverently, and, indeed, it would take a God-like power to move those heavy boulders, to chip and sculpt the limestone slabs. Here and there, though, man had added to the work of the deity, placing stones to help to make a stair-like progression up the hill. The neat, small cattle of the locality used these as well as men, and the goats, with their kids, wandered at will, relentlessly devouring any embryonic hazel sapling or holly bush that dared to spring up in the earth that collected in the grykes.

  Still we must have been a giant race in the past, though, thought Mara as she clambered up the steep slope and looked at some of the man-placed steps. How could mortal men have managed to shift those stones, many of them the size of a small house? And then there were the walls. Running the length and breadth of the mountain there were miles and miles of stone walls, most of them formed by leaning slab against slab, though some, she noted, were more elaborately built with a double row of the stones, filled in the centre with smaller stones. Every one of them had their own crossing place. A stranger would have found it difficult but Cumhal had taught Mara how to look for the built-in stile, sometimes a gap filled with a rounded stone of granite, not limestone, arrived from where, only God knew, and which could be rolled out of the way and then replaced and sometimes a slab jutting out horizontally to form a step, decorated by a grayling butterfly; some just a gap in stacked uprights, cleverly made part of the wall; others a v-shaped notch, too high for a cow. Mara recognized all of the crossing places and she progressed, hand resting lightly from time to time on the sun-warmed stone, until she had attained enough height to look down into the Caher Valley and to see the river as the birds saw it – just a twisting line that snaked in and out. From here, she thought, she could make a better map and regretted that she had not thought to bring with her the satchel that contained her pens and her securely stoppered inkhorn. The scholars, of course, also had their satchels with them and she wished now that she had asked Domhnall and Slevin to come with her. Still, they may have been awake late the night before – she had seen the embers glowing and heads close together in the firelight from the dunes when she herself had gone up to bed.

  Mara seated herself on the ledge of an enormous boulder, carefully avoiding the wiry black stems and tender green leaves of the maidenhair fern, and looked down. This twist in the river that was directly beneath her was higher up the valley than any of them had searched before. Her mind, and the minds of her scholars, had been fixed on the idea of the sea and the sand, and the fact that the boat had been lodged between two sand dunes close to the beach had misled them all. And then, of course, there was the find of the dead man’s clothing, once again near the beach. If Fernandez’s castle had not been so near to the side of the mountain she would not have thought of coming up here and would not have looked at that part of the river.

  But a boat, she reminded herself, could be almost as easily dragged upstream as downstream. The difficult thing was the body, but if the boat were taken to the place where the body lay, then loaded, the water would bear the weight of the dead man. The clothes could have been dealt with afterwards, once the boat was safely floated down on the river water and launched upon the outgoing tide. She stood for a moment staring down to where the river wound around the base of the mountain. The sun was getting stronger every minute and its light shone down and suddenly she saw below her, on the bank of the river, a glint, a gleam of silver.

  After a moment she realized what it was. There was a seam of calcite in the limestone rocks down there and the light had picked out the mineral – an odd seam, a strange streak, shaped like an arrow, or a lance head, which she felt she would recognize when she saw it again. An idea suddenly came to her. This treasure of gold would have been hidden in a time of unrest, a time of clan warfare, but it would have had to be hidden in a place where it could easily be found again – after months, or even longer. If that was the hiding place, the person who had buried the treasure could have memorized that odd streak of calcite; it would have formed the marker for the place where the treasure lay, a place to which, perhaps, he never returned. It could be that he was killed in a battle, died before he could reveal the secret. The treasure could have stayed hidden there for centuries upon centuries.

  Until it was uncovered in times of storm when the river flooded.

  Not completely uncovered, but little by little, a ring perhaps, such as she had found lower down, or perhaps most wonderful of all a torc, that gold necklet so prized by the Celts in the legends and stories. More likely, she thought, some small articles.

  But what if, after that tremendous rainstorm on the Sunday night before midsummer’s eve, when the downpour had been so heavy that, unusually, even the porous limestone of the Burren land had flooded and its fields had turned to temporary lakes. What if, on that night, the little Caher River had thundered down, slicing through the meander around that bend where now it flowed so placidly, scouring out the earth and the stones as it took a left-hand turn to travel on down to the beach, what if then it had uncovered the whole of the treasure, something carefully buried, perhaps a thousand years ago?

  And, her mind went on, busily picturing the scene, trying to picture someone who walked where she walked now, someone who could have seen down into the river valley by the light of the sun, moon, or even by flares; she cast her mind back to the night when Niall Martin had been murdered. There had been a full moon on that night, but there had also been sporadic rumblings of thunder and flashes of lightning. No torrential rain like the night before, a night without rain, a night when one might risk walking under the beam of the moon and surveying the landscape beneath.

  And perhaps, Niall Martin, having sought his treasure up the length and breadth of the Caher River beside the sand dunes, had decided to go a bit further up and into the valley between the mountains and had seen a gleam of gold at that spot, that outcrop of rock which the river encircled?

  But his presence there at Fanore had not gone unnoticed. A watch had been kept on him and he had been followed – was it by a man or by a woman? By the murderer? Whoever it was may have come up here in order to keep an eye on where the man was searching, an unobtrusive, unseen eye, because what man, looking for treasure, raises his eyes to the sky-high mountain? So had the murderer looked down upon Niall Martin’s progress, seen him scrabble amongst the rocks and then suddenly seen the flash of gold? The way down to the river valley would be steep and precipitous but the glow of gold would lend urgency and extra strength to the murderer’s feet. Murder may not have been intended, just a lust for
gold which perhaps led to a fight, and then the fatal blow.

  Or had it, she suddenly thought, been the other way around?

  Mara took careful note of the site and turned to go back down to the castle. It was, she thought, significant that access to the mountain path that she had taken this morning led through Fernandez’s land and that the mountain reared up behind the castle walls.

  Her scholars were all awake by the time she got halfway down. One of them was still down at the water’s edge. Poor Finbar, she thought, with a sigh. Even from a distance he had a lonely, miserable look. Then she heard little Síle’s high, childish scream, half-fear and half-delight, and Cormac’s voice shouting reassuringly: ‘Don’t worry, Síle, he’s a very friendly dog!’ Since Dullahán was the size of a small pony that, thought Cormac’s mother, was hardly reassuring to a nervous eight-year-old, who had probably been roused from her sleep by an inquisitive muzzle inserted under the canvas of the girls’ tent. She raised her own voice in a shout, calling authoritatively, ‘Dullahán, come!’ and remembering with regret her own beautiful and well-trained Irish wolfhound, Bran, the son of her father’s faithful companion and who always did what he was told and was, from puppyhood, a calm and obedient dog.

  Dullahán occasionally did obey her and this time, whether it was because he liked exploring new environments, or whether he was, for once, in a compliant mood, he seemed to be coming to her command. Síle’s screams stopped and she heard the skidding of stones on the mountainside and waited, hoping that there were no sheep nearby. Dullahán’s nature was amiable and he was well used to farm animals, but his exuberance and the suddenness of his movements frightened animals not used to his rambunctious personality.

  However, all was well. No sheep, not even a goat appeared. Dullahán came at full speed up to her, suddenly remembering that she did not like to be jumped upon, skidded to halt and sat, panting heavily, showing a fine set of gleaming white teeth, which had probably frightened the life out of Síle, roused from her sleep.

  ‘You bad dog,’ said Mara severely. ‘You are, let me inform you, the worst dog in the world.’

  Dullahán wagged at her merrily, but she was conscious of a feeling of slight irritation. It was, she felt, rather a reflection on her dignity as Brehon to own such an unruly dog. When Cormac came up, scaling the mountain with ease, laughing and calling to his pet, she said to him severely: ‘Cormac, you promised to train that dog and he is getting wilder and wilder.’

  ‘I do,’ said Cormac defensively. He scratched the soft hair behind his pet’s floppy ears. ‘Me and Art have been so busy training him to track that we haven’t had time for all this “come” business. I’m going to set him to look for that gold this morning and I bet you anything, Brehon, that he’s going to be the one to find the clue.’

  ‘You’d better keep him away from Etain’s samphire or he’ll dig the lot of it from the rocks while you are calling him to come,’ said Mara, but she could not help a smile at the picture of her son standing outlined against the silver-grey of the limestone, with his gold-red hair and the enormous dog beside him. They looked like a legendary Celtic boy hero with his wolfhound. ‘That smells good,’ she added as they came further down and the unmistakable smell of frying fish rose up in the morning air. And then she thought of the solitary dejected figure at the water’s edge and said impulsively:

  ‘I think I saw Finbar down by the sea, Cormac. You and Dullahán go on down there, bring him back for his breakfast and I’ll make my own slow way down.’

  To give Cormac his due, she thought proudly and tenderly, about her scapegoat son, he was a great friend – the concerns of the other scholars were always important to him. He suddenly looked very worried and left her instantly, sliding rapidly down the slippery stones, followed by his four-footed accomplice in crime barking excitedly at the prospect of a chase.

  Mara followed, seeing thankfully how Finbar, in the distance, turned at the sound of the barks that echoed off the rocks and drowned the noise of the waves. No one, she thought, could be depressed and anxious in the company of Cormac and Dullahán. Together they exuded an air of excitement, pleasure and joy in life.

  Fernandez was swallowing a mug of beer and chewing on an oatcake when she came into the small kitchen beside the hall in the castle. He had the look of one who had taken a little too much to drink the night before, but he immediately exerted himself to provide her with breakfast, offering to go down and get some fresh fish for her as he knew that Setanta had planned to go out soon after midnight, before the tide was too low for the use of the pier. She refused the offer, declaring herself content with an oatcake, and spread it with some butter.

  ‘Have you any milk?’ she asked. Fernandez, she noticed, had no servants. Strange, but, she supposed, indicative of the fact that any silver that he had with him on his return from Spain had been used in the building of his castle. This was, indeed, a man who could use buried treasure to great effect, a man who would know where to sell it and how to do it unobtrusively. He had, after all a fine ship, big enough to sail to Ireland from Spain, so he could easily go off in it, on a feigned fishing trip, and could sell the gold anonymously in Limerick, Cork, Waterford or even in Dublin itself, where he could easily pass for a trading Spaniard. He looked relaxed and happy, she noted; a man at peace with the world and at ease with his legal guest as he readily answered her query about milk.

  ‘Yes, Michelóg filled our barrel this morning – brought some news, too. I hear that you’ve found the dead man’s clothes.’

  ‘Yes, we did. At least I think we might have. It was a black hat with purple silk tassels, tunic of black broadcloth …’ She went on detailing the clothes, and the boots, finishing up by saying carelessly, ‘Would that be what he was wearing?’

  If he saw the small trap, he made no acknowledgement of it, merely remarking that he had never seen the man in his life and then going on to say: ‘Well, he’s buried and will soon be forgotten. We may never know what happened to him.’

  ‘That’s not really good enough for me,’ she remarked. ‘I can’t look at it as a piece of inconvenience to be tidied away. A man was killed and someone tried to disguise the facts about his death. As Brehon, representing the King’s justice, I cannot allow this event to go without doing my best to discover the culprit and to impose a penalty.’

  ‘He was an outsider. You owe no duty to him.’ His voice was harsh and abrupt. She had never seen that side of him before.

  And, to a certain extent, he had justice on his side. The original Brehon laws were indeed administered to right a wrong done to a member of the kingdom, to settle disputes between them and to give impartial judgement on matters concerning property and livestock. However, Mara felt firmly, and knew that others of her colleagues felt like this, that, they had to uphold justice for all, not just for those who could pay the lawyers to enforce it, if they were to resist the criticism levelled on them by the English, that their laws were barbarous and fit only for savages. The man had, as far as they knew, done no harm in coming into the kingdom and taking a few shellfish for his supper – the question of the buried treasure was, perhaps, a different matter, but the facts remained that he came to the Burren, spent some nights in the old house, rooted around on the beach, uncovered some sand piles and then was killed.

  ‘I am determined to solve this murder, Fernandez,’ she said aloud and with great firmness. ‘I do not like the thought that a murderer is loose in this kingdom. One death can lead to another and I expect every inhabitant of the Burren to assist me in my task.’ And then she paused, looked at him very directly and said: ‘On the night of the murder, Fernandez, on the night when you were good enough to house my young scholars in the castle, did either you or Etain climb the mountain behind the house – it would perhaps have been some time after midnight or in the early morning.’

  He gave her grin which, somehow, she thought was forced. ‘Etain and I were otherwise engaged at that hour, Brehon.’

  ‘And yet, Et
ain, at least, must have been up at sunrise,’ she said sharply. ‘I understand from the woman in Galway, Joan Blake of Blake’s Pie Shop, that Brendan delivered a load of samphire to her early on Tuesday – that would have been midsummer’s day.’

  ‘No, you’re mistaken, Brehon,’ said Fernandez. ‘It was Brendan himself that picked that load and he was off before we were up, before any of us was up. Etain went with the second load after midday.’

  ‘I see,’ said Mara. ‘So if I were to tell you that a figure had been seen climbing the mountain, who would you guess that it could have been?’

  Fernandez shrugged. He didn’t appear to be alarmed, but there was a slightly wary look on his face. ‘I’d say it could be anyone, Brehon. I put up no barriers; have no savage dogs guarding the place. I say to all of my clan to treat this place as their own, to come and to go as pleases them. All are welcome.’

  Fifteen

  Bretha Comaithchesa

  (Laws of the Neighbourhood)

  An owner is responsible for all damage caused by his dog.

  A fine must be paid if the dog digs under another’s house.

  If a dog defecates on another’s land, then the owner must remove the faeces, and give the landowner the weight of it in curds or butter as recompense.

  When Mara came down onto the beach after her breakfast, Cormac, Art and Cian were running up and down the uncovered half of the strand and over the rocks, shouting, ‘Seek! Seek!’ while Dullahán, barking hysterically, his very deep-throated voice sounding oddly ill-fitted to his puppy-like behaviour, raced from one end of the beach to the other, splashing into the sea and skidding on the dark strip of black limestone which slanted across the orange sand, then turning to follow the others up beside the Caher River. There was no sign of Síle, but Cael was standing beside Domhnall and Slevin listening to the two older boys respectfully and ignoring the three younger ones. From time to time, the dog was encouraged to dig in various places, but all that seemed to be achieved were flying sandstorms and shrieks of laughter. Whenever Dullahán got tired of being directed to do these incomprehensible searches, he turned his attention back towards his primary purpose in life at the moment, which seemed to be to rid the beach of seabirds, even putting to flight a pair of black, hunch-backed and sharp-beaked cormorants, who shrieked rusty, broken sounds of rage over his head for the next few minutes.