Legend of the Celtic Stone

by Michael Phillips

He struggled to continue.

  “But . . . but you must . . . you must beware of—”

  He could not go on.

  “I understand, Father,” said Fidach, speaking at last. “If they choose that I succeed you, I will be faithful to your wishes. I will serve our people as you have done.”

  Taran nodded, then motioned toward the door with his free hand.

  “Cru—” he began.

  “I will bring him to you,” said Fidach, beginning to rise.

  He hesitated, then glanced back toward his father and chief. Suddenly a paroxysm gripped the old man. Fidach felt his own hand squeezed as if pressed between two stones. Quickly he knelt back down and placed his ear close to his father’s lips.

  The old man was clearly struggling to speak, but only indistinguishable sounds came from deep in his throat.

  Fidach felt the grip of Taran’s hand go limp.

  The next instant he pulled back and sought his father’s eyes. The pupils had retreated inside his head. All that met Fidach’s gaze was white.

  He knew his father was dead.

  A moment more he knelt, pressed his lips against the wrinkled forehead, then rose.

  Fidach hastened outside. With his eyes and a quick nod of his head toward his brother he made the truth known. Cruithne ran inside to stoop down beside the body of his father and chief.

  Fidach embraced his mother, weeping silently.

  Seventeen

  The sun rose high in a clear sky.

  Two days of driving rain had impeded the brothers’ progress. Today, however, promised not only brightness again but also warmth. In the smell of the warming earth could be detected hints of the coming summer, whose promise already flowed throughout the land, through roots and stems, stalks and trunks, branches and buds of the shrubs, trees, flowers, and grasses.

  It was a fine day to resume work on the stone monument planned first as a symbol of brotherhood—now also to be dedicated as a memorial to the dead chief.

  Long had ancient legends surrounded an enormous flat slab near the summit of Beinn Donuill. The hazy stories had been passed down to them when their people settled the area by a few scattered relations now too distant to recognize who still populated the nearby forests. The huge stone, it was even said, overspread the remains of some long forgotten settler to the region. Hints of fragmentary shapes upon it might faintly be detected, mostly worn away by centuries of harsh wind and rain. Fidach had noticed them in his youth and had done his best to find meaning in them. It was obviously the largest stone for miles. But as it could not be moved, and was considered too sacred to mar with inscriptions, the brothers would find smaller stones to commemorate their own father’s life.

  The day after their return, therefore, Fidach and Cruithne, driven by their common vision but also as a balm for the grief they now shared, had set out to locate stones large enough for their purpose but small enough to be managed with enough men. They had found them high on the far rocky sides of Beinn Donuill. Foundation holes near the summit had been dug to receive them. One of the stones had even been dragged around the crest of the hill to within thirty feet of the site.

  Then the rains had come.

  But today, with the sun shining down once more, and with every man and boy and half the women of the community ready to help, the two youths—now joint heads of their shared home and the acknowledged leaders of Laoigh, though the final decision of the elders had yet to be made—hoped to have the first stone in place by nightfall.

  It would not be an easy task to erect the two upright pillars or to hoist the flat slab atop them. The completion of ann an aonachd tha bràithreachas would require every muscle as well as all the technological insight to be found in Laoigh, for the brothers had indeed selected gigantic stones that no ten men could budge. It had taken twenty men, pulling with ropes and with slender logs underneath, to roll, push, pull, haul, and drag the first stone around the uneven mountainside, then up the remaining portion of slope.

  The death of the chief, along with the suggestion that ann an aonachd tha bràithreachas would be erected partially to memorialize the site of his tomb, had energized the settlement. Fidach and Cruithne knew they would have all the help they needed to complete their task.

  Even as the rain had poured down, Fidach had ventured across the plain to Beinn Donuill with his metal chisel, his pounding stone, and other tools, to begin the process of inscribing upon the stones the message of the monument. There were many carvings to make—figures that told not only the story of the stag and the brothers who walked in unity, but also of their father’s reign as chief—and they could be more easily begun while the stone lay flat on the ground.

  Cruithne joined his brother an hour later with some of the larger implements. The first stone was reasonably flat on one end. But a protruding jut at the top of the other had to be removed to render it useful for their purposes. It was to this task that Cruithne now bent himself. So as Fidach carved and chiseled the beginning outlines of the figure of a stag on the stone lying near the hole, on the other side of the hill, he could hear the dull clanking sounds of his brother’s blows against the other.

  By midafternoon, wet and cold and with shoulders and arms aching from pounding and hammering against the stubborn granite, Fidach and Cruithne had huddled in their shared home around a fire to which they had just added several large peats. They were shivering, yet their eyes glowed with accomplishment. The beginning outline of a stag had formed under delicate and well-placed blows from Fidach’s skillful hand. And the second large stone, where it lay, now possessed a top flat enough to balance the lintel stone securely, with all former bumps and uneven extrusions heaped on the ground beside it. With these beginnings accomplished, they had settled in to await a change in the weather.

  It had come. And now, by midday, Fidach and his crew of sixteen men and nearly as many boys had lugged the stone upon which he had already expended so much effort the remaining distance to the site and had positioned its heavier end at an angle next to the foundation hole. That completed, Fidach ordered the boys to stand away. With a heavy line of vine-braided rope encircled around the top of the stone and stretching some distance down the hill in front of it, he and ten of the men grasped it firmly to pull, while the other men bent their shoulders under the stone to push.

  At Fidach’s signal, the rope stretched taut, and the top of the great stone slowly rose from the ground. Its heavy base pivoted toward the three-foot-deep hole into which it would be sunk.

  Slowly it rose.

  No sounds could be heard other than the grunts of exertion from the warriors and hunters, now become laborers and builders and movers of stone . . . until at last they began to feel an easing of the load.

  As the stone approached the perpendicular, the shifting weight sank with a quiet, sliding thud into the hole. Gradually the uphill pushers and the downhill pullers relaxed.

  The stone, though sunk three feet into the earth, yet rose some eight or nine feet above the surface and was perhaps three feet in diameter at its base.

  “Easy now!” shouted Fidach. “We mustn’t topple it over the other side!”

  The pushers stood back, then shifted quickly around to the downhill side. As the wielders of the rope pulled the top its final inches, the others now stretched out hands ready to balance it into place lest it come too far.

  At the exact moment that he perceived the stone to be standing at level, Fidach shouted, “Now, boys!”

  All the youngsters who had been poised in readiness immediately began hurling rocks and pebbles into the hole around the stone’s base to secure it into position. Fidach let go his hold on the rope and joined them, while the other men continued to hold the stone firmly. In a few minutes the void was half filled. The men now relaxed their hold and joined in, refilling the remainder of the foundation hole with stones of all sizes and chunks of the peat and earth that had been dug out to make it. In another ten minutes, with the giant rock pointing toward the sky, secure a
nd immovable, and with a figure about halfway up it that hinted of a stag looking downward from the slopes of Beinn Donuill toward the hill-fort, they stood back and gazed upon their work with a weary but elated satisfaction.

  “Well done, men and boys of Laoigh!” said Fidach. “My father would be proud!”

  Meanwhile, some fifty yards away, Cruithne and his crew of men labored steadily, inching up the hill from its opposite side with the second giant stone to stand alongside the recently erected obelisk.

  “Come, let us help our comrades!” shouted Fidach. He ran across the slope toward his brother.

  “You have done well,” said Cruithne, pausing to greet Fidach and admire the stone resting silently in its place. “Perhaps now we will be able to move this beast with greater speed. I fear it is too much for these few of us.”

  “You have already brought it far,” said Fidach.

  “We have moved it,” rejoined Cruithne. “But far . . . I do not think so, my brother!”

  Fidach laughed. “In any case, now that the first stone is in place, we will join our efforts on this brute.”

  “And hopefully drag it the rest of the way before every man in Caldohnuill collapses in exhaustion!”

  “The day you collapse in exhaustion, Cruithne, son of Taran,” said Fidach, “will be the day all the water dries from the lochs of Caldohnuill! You have more strength than any four men I have ever seen!”

  “I am too tired to argue the point,” laughed Cruithne. “But I fear we will not be capable of erecting the great slab atop the two pillars, even with every man we have underneath it. Perhaps we will be able to tow it to the site. But to hoist it eight feet in the air will require a hundred men, many stout ropes and timbers, and—”

  “All in good time,” broke in Fidach. “Perhaps we can journey to Kildonanoid for help. Our neighbors are said to possess knowledge of such things.”

  He stopped. Neither spoke for a moment.

  When Cruithne broke the silence, his tone had grown somber. “I do wish our father could be here to see the united efforts of the people on his behalf.”

  Fidach sighed. “We must believe that perhaps he does see, and is pleased, though his spirit is gone from us.”

  As if reminded by the memory of their father of the urgency of the duty at hand, the young men stooped down and stretched their fingers tightly around one of the stout ropes wrapped around the giant stone, and threw it over their shoulders. In silence, each remembering in his own way their dead chief, the men of the settlement all took up their positions, half above the stone, pulling on the dozen ropes wrapped around it, and half below it, shoving with hands and shoulders against the stone itself. With silent consent all renewed their energies, pushing and pulling upward, inch by tedious inch, over the four wooden poles that rolled beneath it on the ground.

  By nightfall the job was done.

  With aching limbs, hands swelled and in many places raw, and legs scarcely able to support their spent frames, the men and boys stumbled back to the hill-fort. Most crawled home to their suppers and beds. But Fidach and Cruithne headed together for the broch and slowly climbed the steps to its top. When they reached its height, they leaned against its parapet wall.

  “This climb has never been such a long one to these legs of mine,” sighed Fidach.

  “Nor to mine,” agreed Cruithne. “I think we will not accomplish more labor for several days.”

  “The lintel slab may have to wait, as you say, perhaps for help from one of the tribes of the Kildonanoid.”

  “We can rejoice, at least, that it is not so far away as the others. Yet even the hauling of it must wait. We must have rest, and there are yet things to do concerning our father.”

  “But look . . . our labors have not been in vain,” sighed Fidach, pointing toward Beinn Donuill.

  There they could see, in the descending dusk, the two giant columns of stone pointing upward into the night sky.

  “I hope our father is pleased,” he added.

  “I am sure of it,” said Cruithne. “Through our efforts, he will be remembered. Whatever the meaning of the great slab nearby, it has already been forgotten. But our monument will stand forever. The people of the future must remember the legacy of Taran, son of Cuthred. And they will remember as well what we, the sons of Taran have learned. Through us, our father’s legacy will be one of brotherhood.”

  “They will remember! We will inscribe the stones to depict the vital message. Your beginning of the stag is well done. We will not allow them to forget.”

  “If the elders do make me chief,” said Fidach, “as Pendalpin says they will, you will rule with me . . . alongside me. It will be my first command.”

  “It will be my joy to serve you, my brother,” said Cruithne.

  As silence again fell between them, the two brothers continued to gaze out into the dusk toward the mountain known as Beinn Donuill. Then their eyes looked out slowly around in all directions over the land, now their domain as sons of Taran, known as Caldohnuill.

  After a few minutes more, Fidach turned and threw his arm about his brother’s shoulder. The two ambled slowly, to the extent that their sore and weary legs would tolerate, back down the circular stairway of the broch toward their mutual home, where they would pass a much-needed night of sound and dreamless sleep.

  Eighteen

  The aches in the arms and legs of the men of Laoigh had not entirely disappeared, though Fidach had used the intervening days to make further progress on his stone etchings, when three men from the north appeared.

  They came from the plains across Aethbran nan Bronait. If further identification than the direction of their march were necessary, the deep-blue tattooed reindeer on the open chest of the one and the wolves on the other two easily marked the visitors as coming from one of the friendly tribes in Kildonanoid. On their shoulders, two of the men carried the ends of a stout pole, from which dangled a dead boar.

  The children playing outside the encampment saw them first. With shrill shouts, they carried the news swiftly up to the hill-fort.

  Cruithne’s mother was first to leave the gate. She descended a third of the way down the hill, stopped as if to peer more closely toward the approaching men, then turned back to shout at several women who had gathered about the entrance to the fort.

  “They are of my old people!” Eormen shouted with apparent joy, then hastened down to meet the strangers.

  When she returned with them several minutes later, a crowd had gathered in welcome, including Cruithne, Pendalpin, and several men of the community.

  “These are cousins of my grandmother’s folk!” said Eormen in high spirits.

  “The news of the loss of your chief traveled quickly to us,” said one of the men with grave countenance. “We have come in peace, bearing a gift in memory of the old warrior, and to pay our respects to his wife and clan.”

  “Wives,” corrected Cruithne.

  His mother shot a glance in his direction, but did not allow her face to lose its composure.

  “You are most welcome in Laoigh,” he added. “We mourn yet for my father. But we do not despair in our grief, but remember him as he was. We mourn by erecting a monument to his memory, with which perhaps you may help.”

  “Gladly,” replied one of the visitors.

  “We will show you the monument tomorrow. Today, however, you must rest from your journey. Come.”

  Cruithne led them inside the encampment. “Surrender your burden to our women,” he said. “They will take it to Uurcell to begin preparations to roast it.”

  “No, please,” replied the man hastily. “We come to honor Taran and his people. We will roast the pig ourselves. If you will simply show us where we might be comfortable, we will rest for a brief while and then begin our work for the feast.”

  “You are most generous.”

  “It is only unfortunate your father could not be among us.”

  “He enjoyed nothing like fresh boar,” replied Eormen kindly. “All of
Caldohnuill feels his loss sorely.”

  “We grieve with you, my cousin.”

  “I must tell my brother of your arrival,” said Cruithne. He turned to go.

  “Your brother?” inquired one of the strangers with raised eyebrow.

  “Yes,” replied Cruithne. “My older brother and Taran’s eldest son, who will soon be chief in Laoigh.”

  “We must meet him.”

  “You will. I shall bring him.”

  “I will see to their comfort, my son,” said Eormen. “The small dun at the foot of the trail should suit them. They can roast the boar in the pit beside the broch.”

  Cruithne nodded, then strode away, in high spirits to see his mother with a smile on her face. Eormen took their guests back outside the wall and partway down the hill on the side opposite of that from which they had come. They carried the heavy boar as they went, the four speaking quietly amongst themselves.

  They were still speaking in hushed tones ten minutes later when Cruithne again approached, this time with Fidach at his side. Eormen saw them coming.

  “Son of my husband,” she said, glancing up at Fidach with a smile such as she had never before bestowed on him. “Come, offer a hand of welcome to our guests, my people from the north!”

  She walked toward him and greeted him with a kiss on the cheek, then turned back to her cousins. “This is he of whom I spoke,” she said with enthusiasm, “the dear friend of my own son.”

  Fidach came forward smiling. He welcomed the three once more and again offered help with the boar, which again they declined.

  Cruithne said nothing. By now he had come to observe the proceedings and his mother’s ebullient spirit with a cautious and unsettled eye.

  The following afternoon Cruithne and Fidach—with the boys and girls of the hill-fort running after them with spirited shouts—took the three Kildonanoid visitors out to ann an aonachd tha bràithreachas on the slopes of Beinn Donuill. With the help of the other men, they had been struggling to haul the great flat slab of stone down from Donuill’s summit to the site of the monument. Only a few hours before, that very morning, they had succeeded in lugging and pulling it the final twenty feet, and now the slab lay at an angle, partially leaning against one of the two upright stones.