An Unjust Judge

by Cora Harrison

  ‘We’ve got him! Keep firing, Niall!’ Cael’s voice sounded thin and high above the roar of the sea and the shouts of the birds. The enormous jet spurted up again, but now the twins and their burden were safe from its reach. Mara threw her last stone and moved to their side.

  ‘Weighs a ton. Must have a rock at the bottom of it.’ Cian was breathless with the exertion and Cael had slumped onto the grass. She sat up quickly, though and then, with one glance upwards at the hovering birds, she turned her head towards the body in the lobster pot.

  ‘He’s dead alright, Brehon. Look at his throat.’

  Under the white face and the empty eye sockets there was a gaping hole, a long slit that stretched almost from ear to ear. Cael was right. The man’s throat had been cut. No one could have lived for hours with a wound like that. As Mara came nearer she could see that a piece of white linen had been used as a gag, had been tied around the mouth that had been so eloquent and fluent on judgement day. The hands that held the law scrolls were tied behind his back, attached to the ankles and the whole bundle inserted into the lobster pot.

  And then as she concentrated on the dead body, to her relief, the birds hovering above all rose high in the sky and then flew noisily out to sea. There was a shout from the hillside and Mara turned back. A man with a stick in his hand had appeared at the top of the hill and was making his way down towards them. It was Setanta, Art’s father.

  ‘I met Art on his way to the physician, Brehon,’ he explained. ‘I told him that I would come across to see if you needed any help.’ Once again he raised the short straight stick and pretended to aim at the birds and once again the whole flock went noisily off to descend on Crab Island.

  ‘Learned that trick on board ship when you have a big catch,’ he explained. ‘The birds will keep away if they think you have an arrow trained on them.’ And then he looked down on the dead man and his eyes widened.

  ‘That’s the new Brehon of Corcomroe; Art didn’t tell me that, just that there might have been an accident.’ Without waiting for her comment, he said urgently, ‘Better get him out of that quickly, Brehon. There’s a chance that he might not be too stiff if he has been under that cold water all night.’

  Mara forced herself to reach over and to touch the dead man’s fingers. They were pockmarked with pecks, she noticed but no blood appeared. Her mind registered this while she tested the flaccidity of the body. They felt quite loose, but the sun, despite the October date, was quite warm and the man would probably start to stiffen now that the body had been moved out of the icy temperature of the water.

  ‘You’re right; we’d better get him out,’ she said and watched while Setanta cut with his knife the rope that bound the man and then with the help of Cian and Cael, plucked the body from the wicker pot. He had been trussed like a chicken for the boiling pot, legs and arms closely bound to the trunk. Niall turned aside and Mara heard him gulp heavily, but she had a feeling that he was now only pretending. At any rate, he did not vomit so she ignored him and turned her attention to the pot which had imprisoned the body.

  The pot was more of a creel, a large basket woven from willow and bleached a pale tan colour by the sun and the sea. The top half of it had been broken off at some stage and the container itself had probably been discarded as past repair. It had still been solid enough to contain a man.

  And then she turned her attention to the body. Setanta was on his knees, knife in hand, cutting the remaining pieces of rope.

  ‘Take his shoulders, Cian,’ he said and together they stretched the corpse out on the grass. Mara winced at the noise of two sharp clicks. The body had begun to stiffen at the joints. Setanta, however, did not hesitate, but continued straightening out the limbs, the legs stretched out very straight, the sodden lawyer’s cloak pulled straight under the body and the arms placed one on either side of the trunk. Mara forced herself to gaze steadily at the man, trying to ignore the horror of the missing eyes.

  ‘Yes, it’s Brehon Gaibrial O’Doran,’ she said aloud. She would say no more about the matter for the moment. It was important to observe the law and to take all the steps in due order. Now the corpse had been identified, Nuala would perform the autopsy and then the legal work to ascertain the cause of death would begin. Speculation at this stage could be misleading.

  ‘Cael and Cian, you are both soaking wet,’ she said. ‘Take your ponies and ride as fast as you can to Fergus’s house. See if you can borrow some dry clothing and wait by the fire there. I’ll come and collect you when we are ready to go back to the law school.’

  For a moment she thought of sending Niall with them, but then changed her mind. She wanted, she decided, to keep him under her eye.

  Four

  Bretha Crólige

  (Judgements of Blood-letting)

  In the event of an illegal injury, the victim is brought to his home or to the physician’s hospital and nursed for nine days. If he dies during this period, the culprit must pay the full penalties for the killing.

  It took quite some time before Nuala, accompanied by Art, arrived. They had kept pace with the cart driven by Nuala’s apprentice, Ulan, and had come around by the road, rather than cutting across the fields as Mara and her scholars had done. Setanta had rigged up a shelter against the birds for them and for the corpse by cutting some branches of a spindly ash tree, inserting them in the ground and tying their tops together. After he had made sure that the birds were not approaching again, he had departed for a day’s fishing. He reluctantly confirmed that Peadar had not spent the night with him, but had gone off when his friend, Donal the bard, had called to the house just after the evening meal.

  It was just as well that Setanta had gone because Nuala was not at all pleased with his efforts to lay the corpse out for her. As Art was listening in an embarrassed fashion, Mara tried to save his feelings by claiming that it was she, not his father, who had taken the decision, but Nuala was scathing about the bull-strength that Setanta had used in order to straighten the bent limbs of the dead man. She reluctantly admitted that it was probably useful to have taken the lobster pot from under the spray of the blowhole, but declared that she would have removed the body, still encased in the wicker pot, right back to her hospital in Rathcorney, if it had not been interfered with.

  ‘You see, Mara,’ she said severely, ‘those cuts on the hands. I suspect they are not caused by birds, but by the wicker.’ She surveyed the pot and then went back to studying the long scratches on the man’s hands.

  ‘You won’t find any blood marks on that,’ said Niall scornfully. ‘The sea would have washed them off.’

  Nuala gave him a long cool look.

  ‘Get into the basket,’ she commanded.

  ‘What!’

  ‘Go on,’ said Nuala impatiently. ‘Ulan is too big. Your master was a small man, no bigger than you. If he could fit in, then so can you.’

  ‘What about Art?’

  ‘I’ll do it, if you like,’ said Art heroically.

  Nuala gave him a glance. ‘No, you’re too long-legged. Niall is a better match. Go on, get in. Stop making a fuss.’

  ‘But he was trussed up, bound with ropes!’

  ‘We can do that, if you’d prefer,’ said Nuala glancing at the pieces of rope lying on the grass.

  ‘No, no,’ said Niall hastily. He climbed into the basket and crouched down awkwardly, managing to kneel on its base.

  ‘And hands behind your back,’ commanded Nuala. ‘Tie his wrists, Ulan.’

  ‘I don’t think that is necessary,’ said Mara firmly. ‘Just pretend to struggle, Niall. The physician wants to see whether the hands would have moved against the broken pieces of cane.’

  ‘That’s freshly done,’ said Ulan, bending down and examining the side of the basket. ‘You can see that the inside of the canes are still white, look just there.’

  ‘That’s what I was thinking,’ agreed Nuala. She went back to the cart and examined the hands, now neatly tucked against the man’s sides. ‘Yes, I�
�d say these marks look more like scratches than pecks from birds. They would be smaller and deeper. Look at the marks on the cheeks. They are bird damage, now, but the marks on the hands are something else.’

  Mara grimaced. ‘You think that the man was alive when he was tied up and put in there. Deliberately tortured and then his throat cut.’

  Nuala ignored that. Mara did not repeat her question. It was never any use to rush Nuala. She wouldn’t give an opinion until her work was done and the body had given up its secrets. She turned her attention to Niall. The boy looked sick again and she took pity on him.

  ‘Well done, Niall,’ she said cordially and stretched out a hand to him. ‘I think that the physician has a good idea now of how the corpse was packed into the basket.’

  Calling Brehon O’Doran a corpse perhaps took away some of the horror that a living man might have been bound, trussed and then his throat cut.

  But why stick the basket under the drenching spray of the Atlantic waves? There didn’t seem to be any reason for that.

  ‘So we’ll take him away now, and the basket, Ulan, store that carefully. I’ll need that beside me when I am examining the body. Come and see me before supper this evening, Mara, and then I might be able to give you some information, despite the interference with the body. We’ll be off then, if that is your instruction,’ she added.

  ‘Yes,’ said Mara trying to make her voice sound humble and apologetic.

  And then she thought of what she should have remembered before.

  ‘Oh, my God,’ she said aloud. ‘My instructions! You’ll have to wait, Nuala. I’m very sorry. I must get Turlough. I have no right to be here, in reality. I have no jurisdiction over this kingdom. I’m Brehon of the Burren, but not of Corcomroe. In law, I have no standing in this kingdom, no authority to give orders. What was I thinking of? Art, get on your pony and ride up to Ballinalacken Castle. The king is still there. I can see his flag fluttering from the turret. Tell him what has happened and ask him to come here as quickly as possible as I need him. If he can’t come himself, then perhaps he could send some sort of written authority.’ She watched him go flying up the hill towards the castle perched high above them and to the north. Turlough, she guessed, would laugh and would consider it all a lot of nonsense, but Mara knew that it was important always to keep to the letter of the law as well as the spirit of the law. The people of the Burren accepted everything she did. She had been Brehon there since the year 1494, almost thirty years, she thought ruefully. Her authority was absolute, but she really had no right to question the people of another kingdom without the king’s authority. And yet there were five young men somewhere in this small kingdom, all of whom received an excessively severe sentence by an unjust judge. And that judge now lay there with his throat cut. These five needed to be found and questioned without any further delay.

  She had been rather outside the law in sending for Nuala, she thought. True, there was now no Brehon in the kingdom so her arrival might be excused, but there was a physician, a man who lived by the sea and who was reputedly good at sawing off mangled legs from injured stone workers. Apart from his skill with a saw, she had never heard anything good about that physician, in fact, most of his amputees seem to have died in the weeks following their operation, from what she had heard, and he probably would have done little other than confirm that the man was dead and that his throat was slit. Her instinct had undoubtedly been correct to send for Nuala. In any case, there was nothing that she could do now, except pray that Turlough had not yet returned to Bunratty. She watched Art ride rapidly up the hill and then turned her gaze back to the flag. It still fluttered in the wind from the sea. If Turlough was on the move, that flag would have been taken down and given to the bearer before the main party assembled in the courtyard. There was, she comforted herself, always a lot of fuss before Turlough managed to get underway. His favourite dogs had to be assembled, the servants at Ballinalacken had to be thanked and rewarded and various items from the state rooms suddenly recollected as necessary for his journey. Mara hoped for the best and went to join Nuala who was standing at the cliff edge, smiling at the antics of the small comic puffins that inhabited it.

  ‘Strange how the birds of prey just took themselves off once Setanta put up that bit of roof over the man.’ Mara scanned the skies, but there was no hovering menace. Eagles, buzzards and falcons had all removed themselves to attack their normal prey.

  ‘He’d have been better doing that in the first place and leaving the cadaver as he found it,’ said Nuala testily. ‘I’ve been trying to think how I will be able to work out whether the man was dead or alive when he was put into the lobster pot. I was thinking that it’s not positive that those scratches happened before death. The seawater has washed away all evidence of bleeding. He might have been dead and they occurred while the body was being stuffed into the basket.’

  ‘Alive, almost certainly,’ suggested Mara and Nuala turned surprised eyes towards her.

  ‘Really! How do you make that out?’

  ‘The rope tying wrists and ankle.’

  ‘Perhaps done just after death to make a neat bundle.’

  ‘But not the gag, surely. That would be pointless unless the man was alive and could shout for help.’

  ‘You may be right,’ said Nuala grudgingly. She turned back to the cliffs while Mara gazed out to sea and tried to imagine the last minutes or even hours in the life of the young man who had just been appointed as Brehon of a small kingdom. Somehow the crime did not make sense. What was the point of the lobster basket? What was the point of putting the man under the drenching spray? Why not cut his throat, throw the body over the cliffs and into the sea and hope that the turbulent waters would wash it far away and that Brehon O’Doran would just disappear.

  Unless … she began to think and then Nuala interrupted her thoughts.

  ‘Isn’t that Boetius MacClancy? Coming across the cliff with Domhnall? I heard that he had turned up again. Is it really ten years since that affair?’

  ‘It is,’ said Mara grimly. ‘And now he’s turned up looking for a position and, if I know him, hoping to get not just Fergus’s job but also his lands, his goods and his money. But I won’t have that. Fergus is not fit to make a will, and I remember that he destroyed the previous will where Boetius was named as his heir. Poor Fergus came to see me, while my hands were still bandaged, do you remember how burned they were? He was so upset about it. He came across to Cahermacnaghten and he showed me the will, told me that Boetius would never have a penny of his and then he rolled it up and stuck it into the fire. I remember the smell of it burning.’

  The vellum she remembered had smelled like burning flesh and it had reminded her of that terrible day with Stephen Gardiner and Boetius MacClancy. The thought of it still filled her with horror, nevertheless, she stood very tall and waited for Boetius to approach.

  He didn’t come towards her, though. Suddenly he pulled up his horse. His head swivelled in the direction of Ballinalacken Castle and she guessed that he could see what she was still unable to see: Turlough and his men must be coming down in answer to her summons.

  ‘I must go, Nuala; Niall, you stay here,’ she said. Explanations might take too long. She crossed over to where the horses stood tied to a lone hawthorn bush growing up through the loosely piled stones of the wall. In a moment she was on its back and urging him towards the steeply climbing hill. Domhnall, she saw, altered his course to join her, but she did not look back again. She didn’t care where Boetius went so long as she reached Turlough first. He had already refused, and angrily refused, to give the position of Brehon to Boetius, but anger with Turlough never lasted long and now he might just think that since the man he appointed was dead, then the best solution might, after all, be to appoint a man already on the spot, and the nephew of the former Brehon to boot.

  She met them at Knockfinn Crossroads. Boetius bowed respectfully, almost touching his forehead to the upright of ears of the showy grey horse that he rode. Sh
e gave him a curt nod.

  ‘You’ll have heard of the death of the Brehon of the kingdom, Boetius,’ she said. ‘I am taking over the legal affairs of north-west Corcomroe for the moment and I will need to question you, but first I wish to speak privately with the king. Would you wait here and I will return shortly. Domhnall, perhaps you would bear him company. I’m sure that Boetius can tell you some interesting information about the court of Henry of England, the eighth of that name. And, of course, about Cardinal Wolsey and his secretary, Stephen Gardiner. You can see, Boetius,’ she continued, ‘you can see how well I remember them all and how clearly I remember the events of ten years ago and of the chain of evidence that lead me to discover the truth of what had been plotted.’

  His cheeks turned a darker shade of purple. There was a hint of menace in his eyes.

  ‘Ten years is a long time to hold a memory,’ he said in a low voice.

  ‘It doesn’t seem long to me,’ said Mara emphatically. ‘Now, please excuse me. I will be back soon, Domhnall.’ And with that she rode as fast as she could up the road. Boetius would, hopefully, be taken aback by her decisiveness. In any case, Turlough had already refused his uncle’s position to Boetius, so, even with this sudden and unexpected death, he would have been prepared for a long argument as to whether he was the most fit for the position. Nevertheless, she turned from time to time to make sure that Boetius was not following her or trying to take a shortcut through the fields in order to reach Turlough first.

  ‘Have you heard the news, my lord,’ she called out as they came near and he nodded. He waved to the men surrounding to wait and then moved forward, accompanied only by Art.

  ‘Hold my horse for me, like a good fellow,’ he said to Art and then came forward on foot, taking Mara’s bridle from her.

  ‘God, would you believe it,’ he said explosively. ‘You were right. This fellow was nothing but trouble from start to finish. Not a nice way to kill a man, though. Young Art was telling me all about it as we rode down. Couldn’t believe my ears. You’ll sort it out for me, Mara, won’t you? I have to get back to Thomond today, should have left over an hour ago, but I couldn’t find my favourite dagger. You wouldn’t believe it. I’d put it in that old jerkin that I keep at Ballinalacken and I just couldn’t for the life of me think of where it had gone.’