by Mervyn Wall
He rose and picked up sword and spear. Fursey clumsily gathered up the shield and corslet. “What are you going to do with them?” he asked dully.
“Put them in the corner beyond the fire where the dust can gather on them.”
They entered the cottage, and Magnus piled his weapons. Maeve was sitting by the fire, but she did not raise her head. Fursey looked about him, but then remembered that he had no possessions to take with him.
“Fursey is going,” said Magnus.
Maeve, brooding smilingly over the fire, did not seem to hear.
“Fursey is leaving us,” repeated Magnus, touching her gently on the shoulder.
“Goodbye, Fursey,” she said, but even then she did not raise her head.
Fursey walked across the kitchen and out of the house. Magnus stood beside him at the door. For one moment the two defeated men looked at one another, then Fursey turned and made his way up the track. It was dusk. He did not pause, but began to plod slowly along the road which led over the hills into the unknown lands in the south. In the dim light, against the mighty backcloth of creation, the tumbled mountains and valleys over which the shadows of approaching night were gathering, he seemed a negligible figure. He was indeed a negligible figure, a small, bowed man holding his torn coat tightly about him, not only for warmth, but as if to keep from the vulgar gaze his terrors and the remnants of his dreams. And so, as he goes down the road, he is lost to view in the gathering shadows, glimpsed only for a moment at the turn of the track or against the vast night sky, just as we have managed to catch a glimpse of him through the twilight of the succeeding centuries.
Last spring I walked the road from Clonmacnoise to Cashel, and from Cashel to The Gap. Fursey and the others are still there, trampled into the earth of road and field these thousand years.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mervyn Wall was born in Dublin in 1908. He attended Belvedere College, a Jesuit school for boys in Dublin, and obtained his B.A. from the National University of Ireland in 1928. He worked in the Irish civil service from 1934-1948 and later for Radio Éireann as Programme Officer. In 1957 he became Secretary of the Arts Council of Ireland, a post he held until his retirement in 1975. Though he published a number of novels, short stories, and plays, Wall is best remembered for his two comic fantasies centering on the medieval monk Fursey, which have been republished several times and praised by critics such as E. F. Bleiler and Darrell Schweitzer. Wall died in 1997.