by Tim Severin
I never lit a fire. Even if I had carried a flint and steel to make a spark, I would not have risked the telltale smell of wood smoke. The autumn weather was mild so I did not need a fire for warmth, and I had no food which required cooking. I lived off wild fruit. This was the season for all manner of nuts and berries to ripen — hazelnuts, cranberries, blackberries, whortleberries, rowan berries, plums, sloes, wild apples. Of course, I still went hungry and sometimes my gut ached from eating only acid fruit. But I made no attempt to catch the occasional deer or hare that crossed my path. I was as shy as the animals themselves. I crouched back into the undergrowth when I observed them, fearful that the alarmed flight of game would attract hunters who might then find me by accident.
I was never far from human settlement, at least during the first part of my journey. The countryside was a mixture of woodland, cleared fields, pasture and bogland. There were frequent villages and hamlets, and twice I came across crannogs, places where a ri tuath had built himself a well-protected home on an artificial island in the middle of a lake. The village guard dogs were my chief worry. From time to time they detected my presence and raised a furious barking of alarm, forcing me to retreat hurriedly and then make a wider circuit round them. Once or twice gangs of children playing at the edge of the forest nearly discovered me, but in general their presence was useful. Their shouts and cries during their games often alerted me to the existence of a village before I blundered into it.
I had no idea how far to the west I was progressing. I noted, however, that the landscape was slowly changing. The forest was not nearly so dense and there were many stretches of open, scrubby ground. Increasingly the hills showed bald caps of rock, and there were broad expanses of barren moorland. It was a more harsh and unforgiving land so there were fewer settlements, yet the lack of forest cover made me more vulnerable to detection. After five days I had become so accustomed to slinking across the countryside that I began to think of myself as almost invisible. Perhaps made lightheaded by lack of food, I found myself again recalling the fantasies of my Greenlandic childhood and how I had fancied myself in the role of Odinn the Invisible, travelling the world without being seen.
So my discovery on the sixth day of my flight was all the more shocking. I had spent the previous night in a little shelter that I made by laying branches to form a roof over a cleft between two large rocks on a stretch of open moorland. Soon after daybreak I emerged from my lair and began to descend the valley that sloped down from the edge of the moor. Ahead I could see a grove of trees on the bank of the little stream which ran through the dale. The trees would give me some cover, I thought, and if I was lucky I might also find some which were fruiting. I entered the wood and penetrated far enough to come to the bank of the stream itself. The water was clear and shallow, rippling prettily over brown and black pebbles, and overhung with vegetation. Shafts of sunlight speckled the greenery of the undergrowth, and I could hear birdsong from several directions. The place seemed as innocent as if no human had ever stepped there. I pushed aside the bushes, placed my satchel on the ground beside me on the bank and lay down flat on the earth so that I could submerge my face in the water and feel it run cool against my skin. Then I drank, sucking in the water. Finally I got back on my knees, reached down to scoop up a palmful of water and splashed it on the back of my neck. As I wiped away the drops, I looked up. On the far side of the stream, no more than ten feet away from me, stood a man. He was absolutely motionless. With a shock I realised that he must have been standing there even when I first arrived and that I had failed utterly to notice him. He had made no attempt to conceal himself. It was only his stillness which had deceived me, and the fact that the wood was full of the natural sounds of birds singing, insects chirping and rustling, the ripple of the stream. As I looked directly into the man's face, his expression did not change. He stood there, considering me calmly. I felt no alarm because he seemed so relaxed and self-contained.
The stranger was wearing a long cloak rather like my own, of grey wool, and he carried no weapon that I could see, though he did have a plain wooden staff. I guessed his age at about fifty, and his face was clean-shaven with weatherbeaten skin and regular features that included a pair of grey eyes now regarding me steadily. What made me gaze at him in complete astonishment was his hair. From ear to ear the man had shaved his head. From the back of his head the hair hung right down to his shoulders, but the front half of his scalp was bald except for some stubble. It was a hairstyle that I had read about while browsing in the monastery library, but had never expected to see in real life. The monks at St Ciaran's — those who still had any hair — used the Roman tonsure, shaving the central patch. The man in front of me still wore his hair as a monk would have done if the style had not been outmoded and forbidden by the Church for nearly two hundred years past.
TWENTY
'IF YOU ARE hungry as well as thirsty, I can offer you some food,' said this apparition.
Feeling foolish, I got to my feet. The stranger barely glanced back at me as he walked away through the undergrowth. There was no path that I could see, but I meekly splashed across the stream and followed him. Before long we came to a clearing in the wood which was obviously where he had set up his home. A small hut, neatly made of wattle and thatched with heather, had been built between the trunks of two large oak trees. Firewood was stacked beside the hut, and streaks of soot up the face of a large boulder and a nearby blackened pot showed where he did his cooking. A water bladder hung from the branch of a thorn tree. The stranger ducked into his hut and reappeared with a small sack in one hand and a shallow wooden bowl containing a large knob of something soft and yellow in the other. He tipped some of the contents of the sack into the bowl, stirred it with a wooden spoon, and handed the bowl and spoon to me. I took a mouthful. It proved to be a mix of butter, dried fruit and grains of toasted barley. The butter was rancid. I was not aware until then just how hungry I was. I ate everything.
The stranger still said nothing. Looking at him over the edge of the wooden bowl, I guessed he must be a hermit of some kind.
The monks at St Ciaran's had occasionally spoken of these deeply devout individuals who set themselves up in some isolated spot, far away from other humans. They wanted to live alone and commune in solitude with their God. St Anthony was the inspiration for many of them, and they tried to follow the customs of the Desert Fathers, even to the point of calling their refuges 'diserts'. They were not far removed in their behaviour from the pillar dwellers whom poor Enda had tried to emulate at St Ciaran's. What was odd was that this half-shaven hermit was so hospitable. True hermits did not welcome intruders. I could see no sign of an altar or a cross, nor had he blessed the food before passing it to me.
'Thank you for the meal,' I said, handing back the bowl. 'Please accept my apologies if I am trespassing on your disert. I am a stranger to these regions.'
'I can see that,' he said calmly. 'This is not a hermitage, though I have been a monk in my time as, I suspect, you have been.' He must have recognised my stolen travelling cloak, and maybe I had a monkish way about me, perhaps in my speech or in the way I had held the bowl of food.
'My name is—'. I paused for a moment, not knowing whether to give him my real name or my monastery name, for fear that he had heard about the fugitive novice called Thangbrand. Yet there was something in the man's shrewd gaze which prompted me to test him. 'My name is Adamnan.'
The corners of his eyes crinkled as he took in the implication of my reply. Adamnan means 'the timid one'.
'I would have thought that Cu Glas might be more appropriate,' he replied. It was if we were speaking in code. In the Irish tongue cu glas means literally a 'grey hound' but it also signifies someone fleeing from the law or an exile from overseas, possibly both. Whoever he was, this quiet stranger was extremely observant and very erudite.
I decided to tell him the truth. Beginning with my capture at Clontarf, I sketched in the story of my slavery, how I had come to be a novice m
onk at St Ciaran's and the events that had culminated in my flight from the monastery. 1 did not mention my theft of the stones from the Gospel. 'I may be a fugitive from the monks and a stranger in this land,' I concluded, 'but I originally came to Ireland hoping to track down my mother's people.' He listened quietly and when I had finished said, 'You would be wise to give up any hope of tracing your mother's family. It would mean travelling from tuath to tuath all across the country, asking questions. People don't like being cross-examined, particularly by strangers. Also, if you do manage to trace your mother's people, you may be disappointed in what you hear, and your curiosity will certainly have aroused suspicion. Sooner or later you would come to the attention of the abb of St Ciaran's, and he will not have forgotten the unfinished business between you and the monastery. You will be brought back to the monastery to stand punishment. Frankly, I don't think you would find much pity from him. The Christian idea of justice is not so charitable.'
I must have looked doubtful. 'Believe me,' he added. 'I know something about the way the law works.' This was, as I learned later, an extreme understatement.
The man I had mistaken for a hermit was, in fact, was one of the most respected brithemain in the land. His given name was Eochaid, but the country people who encountered him in the course of his work often referred to him as Morand, and this was a great compliment. The original Morand, being legendary as one of their earliest brithemain, was renowned as a man who never gave a flawed verdict.
My teachers at St Ciaran's had warned us about the brithemain, and with good reason. The brithemain are learned men — judges is not quite the right word — who trace their authority to a time long before any of the Irish had even heard of the White Christ. Many Irish — perhaps the majority — in the remoter parts still retain a profound respect for a brithem, and their deference galls the monks because the brithem lineage goes back to those early physicians, lawgivers and sages commonly known among the Irish as drui, a name the monkish scholars have been at pains to blacken. Yet the nearest word in their clerkly Latin that the monks could find to describe the drui was to call them magi.
I can write about these matters with some familiarity because, as it turned out, I was to spend almost as long in the company of Eochaid as I did with the brothers of St Ciaran's and, truth be told, I learned as much from him as I did from all the more erudite brothers put together. The difference was that in the monastery I had access to books, and the books provided me with most of my monastic education. Eochaid, by contrast, looked on book learning almost as a weakness. The brithemain did not write down the laws and customs — they remembered them. This required prodigious feats of memory, and I recall Eochaid saying to me one day that it needed at least twenty years of study to learn brithem law, and that was just the basics.
I would be proud to claim that Eochaid took me on as his apprentice, but that would not be true. I stayed with Eochaid because he invited me to remain for as long as I wished, and I found sanctuary in his company. For the next two years I served him in the capacity of an assistant or orderly, and at times as a companion. He had no ambitions for me as his student. He probably thought my memory was already too weak for that. The brithemain begin their studies when they are very, very young. Formerly there were official schools for the brithemain but they are nearly all gone and now the knowledge passes from father to son, and to daughters as well, for there are female brithemain of distinction.
I was lucky to stumble on him. Each year he spent only a few months in his forest retreat. The rest of the time he was a wanderer, travelling the country. But retreat to the forest was essential to him, and as a result he could identify the tune of every songbird, recognise the tracks left by deer or wolf or otter or hare or squirrel, name each shrub and herb and flower, and knew the medicinal properties of each of them. He was a herb doctor as well as a brithem, and as well as dispensing justice to the people we visited he also gave out medical advice. In his forest hut he was so calm and peaceable that the wild animals seemed to sense little danger near him. The deer would wander into the clearing by our hut to nose about the cooking fire, looking for grains that had dropped from our plates, and a tame badger lumbered unafraid around our feet and became a pet. But Eochaid was not sentimental about these animals. My second winter with him was bitterly harsh. Snow lay on the ground for a week — a most unusual event — and the ponds turned to ice. It was freezing cold in the hut and we came close to starving. The badger saved us - as a stew.
'The wilderness is where the inspiration for the first brithem laws arose,' he once told me, and 'natural justice' was a phrase he often used. 'It is a heavy responsibility to interpret the Fenechas, the laws of freemen. False judgements ruin men's lives and the evil consequences live on for generations. So I need to return regularly to the ultimate source, to the rhythms and mysteries of Nature.' He smiled his self-deprecating smile and mocked himself. 'How much easier if I could wear one of those heavy iron collars which the first brithemain had around their necks. If they made a poor judgement the collar tightened until they could scarcely breathe. When they amended the judgement to make it fair, the collar loosened.'
'But how could the early brithemain make false judgements?' I asked him. 'The monks at St. Ciaran's told me that the brithemain were really drui in secret, and communed with evil spirits and, besides being able to fly through the air, made profane prophecies. So they must have been able to foresee the future and would have known if they were in error.'
'It is true that in the earlier days some drui were trained as seers and soothsayers,' he answered. 'But those days are gone, and much of what appeared to be their prophesy was really only a prolonged observation. For example, by watching the animals in the forest I can foretell the coming weather. Those who study the movement of the stars learn how they behave. From that knowledge they can predict events like the eclipses of the sun or moon.
Such predictions impress people who fail to notice the signs or who do not understand the value of accumulated wisdom. Six hundred and thirty years is the length of time our star watchers use when measuring a single cycle of star movements in the sky. You can imagine the power of so much stored wisdom.'
Eochaid's journeys were determined by his own celestial calendar. The first occasion he left the forest after my arrival was shortly before the start of the thirteenth month of his year. A thirteenth month, of course, has no equivalent in the White Christ calendar, but for those who measure time by the waxing and waning of the moon it obviously does exist and occurs three or four times every decade. Eochaid called it the elder month, and he invited me to accompany him on his journey. It would be a tiring walk, he warned, but he had a duty to perform for a confederation of four tuaths some distance to the north-west. The people of this region were so respectful of the Old Ways that they had named their territory Cairpre, to commemorate one of the greatest drui, reputedly the son of the God Ogmius.
It was indeed a long walk, six days' striding across an increasingly bleak countryside of moorland and rock to our destination, a substantial crannog. At Eochaid's suggestion I took along my battered leather satchel with a spare change of clothes for myself, a white gown belonging to Eochaid, and a small supply of dried nuts and grain for food. Eochaid himself carried nothing of value, no symbols of his profession. He had only a small cloth bag slung over his shoulder and a sharp sickle, which he used to clear a space in the undergrowth when we slept out in the open or to cut medicinal herbs that he noticed growing by the wayside. Plants which heal, he explained, are available at all times of the year if you know where to look. Some are best gathered in the spring when their sap is full, others when they show their summer flowers, and several when their roots are dormant or they are bearing autumn fruit. On that journey he was collecting the roots of burdock thistles for making an infusion to treat skin diseases and boils, and with the point of his sickle he dug up the roots of something he said was a cure for ringworm. He called it cuckoo plant.
'That broken han
d of yours,' he commented to me one day, 'would have healed much quicker if you had known how to treat it.'
'What should I have done?'
'Found the root which people call boneset or knitbone — it's very common - then made a paste and applied it to the wound as a poultice. It would have reduced the swelling and the pain. The same paste, dissolved in water, can be used as a treatment for diseases of the stomach or even given as medicine to children who have whooping cough.'
With his medical skill Eochaid was welcome at every settlement we passed. He seemed to be able to produce a remedy for any malady, even if it was severe. He gave an invalid, who was coughing as if to burst his lungs, an oily drink made from the fruit of water fennel, and an unfortunate who suffered from fits was calmed with an extract of all-heal root. "Valerian is another name for it,' Eochaid said to me as he prepared the fetid-smelling drug, 'which comes from the Latin "to be in health". But you want to be careful with it. Too big a dose and you'll put a person to sleep for good.' I was about to ask Eochaid how he came to know Latin, when we were interrupted. A distraught mother arrived to say her child was suffering from a very sore throat, and Eochaid despatched me to fetch haws from a whitethorn bush we had seen not far back down the road so she could make hawthorn broth for the youngster.