by John James
‘And who else would there to be doing it? Why, do we not live here rent free for that very purpose, to be finding the horses for the High King, and to be making the Feast of Tara for him, and to be forging his sword, and to be making his coffin if indeed there is enough of him left to need a coffin. Mind you, whenever there is a battle, there are usually one or two of us that do get killed, but it is by accident only and not through malice, and it is worth a little risk, you will agree, thinking of all the other advantages of living here.’
‘Oh, yes, there must be great advantages in living here,’ I agreed. These were quite a familiar people, slaves of the God, living around the Temple, and serving the Priest King, whoever happened to be Priest King for the time being. I asked:
‘And where is it that the High King is living?’
‘Why, ’tis in his own kingdom that he lives, and it is to Tara that he only comes on the Feast of Tara, and to the Hall of Tara that he and his warriors will go after the battle for the feast. And sure, it is there you will be wanting to go now, is it not?’
‘And if it was wanting to go there we were, then which way is it we would be needing to go, now?’ The rhythm of their language, even of their way of – no, not thought, a Barbarian cannot think, let us say of their pondering and puzzling – it was infectious. Besides, obviously nothing of any value was to be gained by staying here.
‘Why, it is past the mound that the hall is. And if after the feast tonight there is nowhere to sleep that you are finding, then it is in my house that you are welcome to sleep the night.
‘Oh, good!’ Aristarchos and I both exclaimed together, and then we glared at each other because there is something about the air of the island that is very relaxing to both physique and morals, though it is a fine and keen edge it puts on wit and logic and understanding. But she went on:
‘And it is my husband that will be very glad to meet you. That is Cullain over there at the smithy. The one bending horseshoes out of billets of cold iron.’
‘It must be very strong teeth he is having,’ I was moved to remark.
‘Indeed, and it was a strong man he was in his prime,’ was her answer. We bade her good day and walked on towards the mound, and round it to the hall. We both spoke together. I said:
‘There ought to be some pickings of Gold and silver here, if no one has been here before.’
Simultaneously, Aristarchos remarked:
‘I wonder if there will be anything to eat.’
We both laughed. Aristarchos said:
‘There is the difference between the soldier and the merchant; you want something to sell, and I want food. But there is nothing to buy, and no one to sell to, and we neither of us had any breakfast.’
We soon caught up with our little band who had gone on in front while we had been talking to the woman. They were straggling forward in an irresolute way, looking about them like worshippers at Delphi, impressed by everything they see, from statues to horse droppings. We two took care only to speak Greek when they could not hear us. We led them round the mound and came to the Hall of Tara.
This hall was the biggest of its kind I had ever seen. It was of the usual British type, round but very big. The roof was held on circles of posts. There were seventeen posts in each circle, and there were nine circles one outside the other. We went in. The hall was empty. No Gold, no silver. Not even good wool cloth hung on the walls. Only the bare oak pillars and the mud-and-wattle walls and the rough thatch. Later we heard talk of pulling it down and rebuilding it in the new Roman style some of the Irish had seen overseas, with straight walls, but there was no thought of making the hall as it stood at all good to look at or comfortable.
Inside, there was a big fire in the centre, venting its smoke through a hole in the ceiling, and bales of hay and baulks of wood strewn around haphazard for people to sit on, around the fire and in the alcoves. Otherwise there was nothing. It was bare as a barn. There is something in the Irish character which forbids them to make their places of worship at all ornate or richly decorated.
Outside the hall, though, were big open fires, and men were roasting huge bloody carcases whole on spits. Others were baking bread of a kind, flat barley cakes on flat stones. Aristarchos went over and picked up a loaf and tore it in half. We stood and wolfed it, hot and fresh. Someone handed us a pot of barley beer, and we shared that too, swig and swig about. One of the cooks looked up and asked:
‘And is it waiting for the feast you are, then?’
‘And for what else would we be waiting?’ Aristarchos answered. ‘Would you not be wanting to know who it is that won, and who it is that will be feasting here?’
‘And why should I worry my head about that? There’s little difference to us, one king wins or the other king wins. And indeed, it is always the new king that it is that is winning.’
It was now a little after noon. Aristarchos and I took our bread and bear, and we lay on our backs on the side of the Mound of Tara, a great grave mound of the men of old that is the centre and the heart of Tara. We lay and we looked up into the dark blue clear sky, all flecked with the burning white clouds of May, with never a fleck of grey on them. The air was so clear, with never a trace of mist, it might have been at home.
And so I and Aristarchos were like two small boys again, let out from lessons, and with nothing to do but to lie and watch the clouds. We teased each other as boys do, in our childhood dialects, though we had never known each other as boys; he in clumsy Thracian, I in the purer Greek of the Old City, the best form of the Koine that every civilised man speaks. We pelted each other with the heads of the grasses, and we blew the first seeds of the dandelions in each other’s faces, and we played guessing games with the petals of the daisies. And after a while even this intellectual exercise was too exhausting. We lay still and listened to the birds singing, and watched the sparrows come for the crumbs of the barley loaf. I remembered all the birds I had ever seen, and these birds that swarmed about on the Mound of Tara, they were bolder and they were more numerous than any other flock, and they were of all kinds, and it was as if Rhiannon again stood with us. But for no reason, there were two things I was certain of. First, that Rhiannon would not come to me now, however many birds came winging to me from the countries of the dead, each singing, singing, to try to send some message of love and sorrow to those the soul had left behind, and frantic that no man could understand. And yet, a second thing came into my thought, and I was as certain too of this: that it was Rhiannon indeed who had sent these flocks about me in Tara, as a sign that neither in life nor in death would I ever be free of her to whom I was given, of her who was given to me.
And drowsier we grew, and even those thoughts melted in sleep. The afternoon lasted a thousand years, a thousand happy, happy years. This was the high peak of all our lives, for Aristarchos and myself. It was the high peak of all our time in Ireland, and never again would such achievements crown our dreams. This day we had fought a great battle and seen it won. We had taken the enemy’s capital. The whole Island of the Blessed was at our feet. Blessed indeed were we in that day.
Chapter Five
Suddenly I was awake. The birds rose in a cloud above us, their singing that had charmed us to sleep, that singing sweeter than the song of women, changed to a frantic scolding of terrified creatures, souls that now remembered that it was true, that all was finished, that never again would they talk as humans, that henceforward they had no words to speak, only the twitter twitter of ghosts. The sun was westering and lower. I nudged Aristarchos awake. He followed me to kneel before the Druid who stood over us on the summit of the mound. He was old, an old, old man. His scanty hair was white and thin on his scalp. His skin was soft with the tenderness of age. The mistletoe on his breast was berryless. I thought back to things Taliesin had said, and I knew from that who it was who wore the leaf without the berry, and I trembled before him. I knew who this must be. I knew the name.
‘Cathbad,’ I said. ‘You must be Cathbad.’
/> ‘Mannanan, who are not Mannanan’ – the Awen was on him, on the greatest Druid of the Island of the Blessed. I could tell it from the light in his eyes, from the rhythmic chant in which he declaimed, not poetry, but prose—’ Son of Lear who are not Son of Lear, Dark Son of the Bright Sun, Bright Star that light the stars below, I know who you have been, I know who you will be, and that you do not. Sorrow and trouble you will bring on the Island of the Blessed, but the whole blame is not at your door.
‘Listen to me, then, Mannanan. Stay within the plain of Tara! Do not cross the river in the south, or the river in the north, or the great bog that lies to the west. Here in the plain of Tara I can keep your head for you by day, and by night it is the Gods Below who will see you safe in the dark, because it is the darkness that you serve now, who once served the Sun. But once you leave this place, then neither man nor gods can save you, and your doom, and the blame for it, will lie on your own head.’
The Druid passed on. What he said had meaning and truth enough, but I laughed at his warning as I led Aristarchos into the hall. Once the legions came, how could the gods of the Irish harm me? If in this island I once burned incense before the bust of His Sacred Majesty, what could the spirits of the bogs and the rivers do?
I forgot it all as we entered the Hall of Tara. A horde of men sat about on the bales of straw and the tree trunks. Cuchullain the Setanta sat in the place of honour, looking south across the fire out of the door of the hall. The warriors from the chariots sat on his left hand and on his right in a circle around the fire facing it, and their drivers sat next to the fire, singeing themselves and keeping the heat off their masters. It is a thankless task to drive a chariot, and no work for a gentleman. But there was no place in the circle for Aristarchos or me, or for the hairy Callum or the other men who came ashore from the ship.
The villagers of Tara had stacked piles of wooden platters near the door, and we took one each and squeezed as near to Cuchullain as we could, and that was not very near. We only got into an alcove behind him. Nobody took very much notice of us or of the others of the Fianna, which annoyed me, and I began to think as little of Cuchullain as I had of the Legate of the Second Legion. And then I remembered what had happened to him, and I was happier.
The food was, let us say … different. The Britons eat what they grow, mutton almost entirely, with oat bread and beer brewed from wheat. They don’t let principle interfere with their appetites except where goose is concerned. But the Irish have a fine idea of what is fitting for a noble to eat. The peasant may eat beef if he likes (while the Briton may drink milk, but when he kills a bull it is for the tallow, not the meat) and he may eat barley bread, and so does the noble most of the time, when he is at home and only being a herder himself with his clansmen. But when he is, so to speak, being an active noble, and going to war, or celebrating it, then he wants to eat in a manner fitting for a gentleman, as he thinks his father ate before they began to be bothered with all this business of the tiresome care of cattle and crops. Then he eats, not what he has killed himself, since this would take up too much energy and time that would otherwise be better expended on eating, but on what he thinks would not be beneath his dignity to chase and kill himself.
The carcases they had been roasting outside on the spits, so big they were that they were not fully cooked yet, were deer. Not red deer, or fallow, but the great elks of the deep forests, almost all gone now in Britain but still roaming in plenty in the dark woods of Ireland, as they do in Germany. This is the beast that the great dogs, which are the only export of Ireland, are trained to bring down. So, at the feast, we ate venison, because tradition said that it was a dish that a noble might eat. Great lumps of the half-raw meat were dumped on our platters, and we sank our teeth into it and stuffed our mouths, and cut it off close to our lips, and chewed for dear life till we could breathe again. We washed it down with beer and all kinds of unnameable native drinks.
Somebody dropped on my platter what looked a bit like a boiled baby. Aristarchos tore off a leg and tried it.
‘Badger,’ he pronounced. He knew the taste all right, he said; a man who had seen active service like he had knew the taste of many strange dishes. This was the only special treatment I had that day: only I had a boiled badger given me, and Callum, and no one else. I did not know then why.
I stripped the badger carcase; not bad, but not good – two at a meal would be too much, you may like to know, if you are planning a party. And we finished a hare apiece, and I had a hedgehog baked in clay, so that his prickles came off, and a spit of roasted larks, hoping that Rhiannon would not hear about it, down there wherever she was in the South-East. And we had a bowl of stewed mushrooms between us, Aristarchos and I, and he looked a bit doubtful, but, I assured him, I knew my fungi, and besides, how could there be any harm in mushrooms in the Island of the Blessed, where there is neither harmful serpent nor any other dangerous thing, except wolves and bears, and they are so near to man that they do not count. How else do you think that the land got its name?
Then the serious drinking started, after the food was half gone, and the singing. All the songs were melancholy and sad, enough to make a warrior weep, and that is what they did. Then a Bard called Amairgen stood up and sang an interminable song about all the earlier invasions of the Island of the Blessed, and how our invasion was the most glorious of all, and I was very hurt that he made it sound as if Cuchullain had brought over the sea all the men who fought with him, and he named none but the champion, as one would expect in an epic. But I was even more vexed that nobody asked me to sing. At last, it seemed that even if I were to sing, there was no one sober enough to hear me, and so I pulled Aristarchos to his feet, for he was as drunk as anyone, and I was terrified in case he began to talk in Greek, and back we went to the hut where the smith and his wife were, indeed, waiting for us. But it was not as luxurious as you might think because we had the room left in the hut after the smith and his wife, and their nine children and his five apprentices and seven other warriors, and the pigs had all got in before us. Mind you, next day we sent four of the warriors packing, and we killed one of the little pigs: all black the piglets were too, which some people might not like, but which suited me.
Next day, late next day, when at least some of my companions were in a fit state to talk, I tried to have a word with Cuchullain. There was the question of the Gold to discuss, and that would be a question of the conquest of the South-East, and that was where Rhiannon was. There would be no need to hurry yet; no harm would come to her among the Irish, I knew, not to a princess of an ancient house of Britain, not to the Mother of Those Below. But once the legions landed, there was no knowing what the Irish might not do to keep her out of harm’s way – her very presence in the island, they would think, would be a lodestone to draw Roman vengeance on them. They had no real idea what the Empire was about, or what the army was for. They saw it not as a great union of peace and trade, held together by an army of engineers and builders and messengers and administrators: they thought of it as a despotism in other interests than their own, symbolised by the fierce shield wall of the legion. The Irish knew well the rule of their own custom: but the rule of law that we live under in the Empire was beyond their comprehension.
However, there was no talking to Cuchullain, now the battle was over. He was surrounded all the time by his fine friends from the North, who came in to Tara all the day, more and more of them. Clan chiefs and pirates they were who raided the coasts of Britain and Gaul, and each other, but who were too cautious to risk the battle, because that was only for desperate men who had nothing to lose: they were ready enough now to share the pickings and rule all Ireland. The only man of importance who had been in the Fianna was Callum the Hairy, and he was the chief of the poorest and most desperate nation of all the North.
But the chiefs who came down brought their own warbands, and though many of those were only armed with cudgels or with knives tied on to the ends of poles, there were enough swords and spears
dug out of hiding, now it was safe, to have filled our ship twice over. And there were slingers too, and if only they had come earlier, we would not have had those moments of terror when the chariots came at us, because I am sure that a squadron of slingers and another of men with long pikes would break up any charge.
But even the Northerners who came with their cudgels tucked under their arms were enough to frighten me away from Cuchullain. And not only me. The two dozen who had hidden out with him in the hills all winter, even Callum, who came at last in the ship and fought well in the battle, won it for him really, they could not get near to speak to him either. And this went on for day after day, and the longer it went on the worse it got, more and more important princes coming down from the North, and Cuchullain always too busy to talk, and we men from the ship now even shut out of the nightly feasts in the hall, where there was no room for any of us, even for Callum, and getting our food where we could, and not many of the smith’s little black pigs left. And why wait, I asked, like this, why wait?
‘We’re waiting to collect the army for one thing,’ said Aristarchos, who as Heilyn was getting his orders from someone who got them from someone who got them from some northern prince who occasionally saw Cuchullain. ‘He won’t sweep into the West with a little band like we beat their king with. Cuchullain wants to raise an army big enough to pour across the plain and crush all three of the other Kingdoms, and any army they can raise now. The Ulstermen want to do to the South what the South did to them. The Queen of Connaught has a new husband already, they say, and she claims that he is the High King now by right of marriage. But Conchobar says that he is High King because he was married to her first, and because they finished half the enthroning ceremony on him before the Westerners came sweeping into Tara to spoil it and Maeve went off with the King of Connaught. So now, the King of Ulster is on his way here to finish his consecration, and when he has done that, when he is married again to Ireland, then he can go back home safe to the North again, while we do the work.’