by Mervyn Wall
But as the traveller by daylight winds his way further, he will come nearer and nearer to the great mountain wall that bounds the Tipperary plain on the south. When he has passed through a brief stretch of woodland and stream, he will find to his astonishment that the road, instead of going around the mountains in a civilised manner, is intent on running straight at them and trying to jump. More amazing still is the road’s success. It is true that its progress up the precipitous hillside is drunken in the extreme, but a thousand feet up it finds a great cleft which local people call “The Gap”; and in there, a little out of breath, the road knowingly worms its way.
At this point, twenty miles south of Cashel and a thousand feet above the Tipperary plain, on a grassy bank by the roadside sat Fursey thinking of his sins. Below him lay the rich plain, an astonishing checkerboard of green and golden fields in neat squares, the opulent domain of the men of affairs and of the priests. Above him arose the cliffs and shoulders of the Knockmealdown Mountains, windswept and torn by storms. Over on his left he could see among the bogs and the rocks the shimmer of a small mountain lake, and near it a white dot which was a cottage.
“I seem to be a desperate character,” was Fursey’s sad summing-up of the situation. “To begin with, I’m a genuine sorcerer. It would be useless to deny that I’ve meddled with very dark powers and practised the blacker forms of magic. Then, in one afternoon I told Cuthbert more lies than most men tell in a lifetime. I’m a notorious hobnobber with demons, and I encouraged King Cormac to lechery, at least I did not repel his advances as a decent girl should. I have probably been an occasion of sin to the innocent in that for a day and a half I roamed about the countryside undraped (someone is sure to have seen me), and lastly I’m a thief. I had no moral right to rob that scarecrow of his rags—he was possibly the property of a poor man, and now the birds will eat all the seed so laboriously sown. There’s no doubt about it but that I’m a most abandoned ruffian,” he concluded gloomily. “Probably my like for villainy has never been seen in the world before.”
Fursey sighed and grew tired of thinking of his iniquities. Instead he began to remember that he was very hungry. If only he had a rope——! Even the tiniest bit of cord would do. If he had a little bit of cord, he would throw it over a thorn bush, and by pulling hard enough he could probably produce at least a couple of hard-boiled eggs. He sighed a second time and told himself that the practice of sorcery was a sin; still he wished he had a small piece of cord. His soul was by now so deformed and hideous that one extra little sin wouldn’t make much difference.
However, sitting still wasn’t going to produce food, so he got wearily to his feet and continued his way along the rocky road. From time to time he glanced across at the distant white-washed cottage beside the mountain tarn. There would be food there, but would they give him any? Would they even lend him a rope for a few minutes if he promised to bring it back? They’d probably conclude, he reflected gloomily, that he wanted to hang himself, and indignantly refuse.
He came to a point where a pathway joined his road. He paused and looked down the crooked track. That would be the path that led to the cottage. He felt that if he went down the track and approached the dwelling, the owner would probably set the dogs on him. Hospitality would scarcely be extended to a man of the tramp class so inadequately clad in a scarecrow’s cloak and kilt, as to be almost an offence against decency. Yet he hated to continue further on his way: the mountain road looked as if it led only to menacing and barren lands, and he was sick and tired of nature anyway. He longed to hear human voices and feel the warmth of a peat fire against his knees. Then he remembered again how hungry he was, and he sat down on a stone. He sat there for a long time with his head between his hands thinking of nothing, and then he began to think of Albert. He hesitated for a while, but at last he raised his head.
“Albert!” he called softly. “Albert!”
There was a movement in the dust of the road, and Albert’s bear’s paws slowly took shape, and soon the whole of Albert was there, but an Albert jaded and sulky-looking and very much emaciated. His red, foggy eyes observed Fursey steadily.
“Nice mess you got yourself into with the clergy,” he said. “I thought they’d burn you to a cinder.”
“Well, they didn’t,” replied Fursey.
“I suppose you’ll tell me that it was your superior intelligence that got you out of it,” remarked Albert sarcastically.
“Please don’t nag,” answered Fursey. “I’m hungry. I want something to eat.”
“You want something to eat!” replied Albert shrilly. “What about me? Look at the state I’m in, with the skin of my belly clinging to my spine. For once and for all, are you, or are you not, going to part with some of your blood? Answer yes or no.”
Fursey looked at his familiar with heavy eyes. Right enough, the creature had shrunk away to mere skin and bone. Fursey felt sorry for him, but he did not see that he could do anything about it. He sighed again.
“I want you to scout around, Albert,” he said, “and see if you can find me a bit of rope.”
Albert faced him determinedly. “Once,” he said with a tremor of indignation in his voice, “I was as frisky a familiar as you’d meet in a day’s walk, but your confounded meanness—”
“Don’t argue,” commanded Fursey. “Do as you’re told. Scout around and find me a rope.”
Albert threw a venomous look at his master and began a half-hearted sniffing and snuffling up and down the ditch. It was just then that an old man of the farmer class came around the bend of the track. He was carrying a long stick of ash-wood to which was tied a piece of cord and a worm. He stopped opposite Fursey.
“That’s a queer class of a dog you have, mister,” he said, blinking short-sightedly at Albert. “What breed would he be, now?”
“Vanish,” commanded Fursey.
“What’s that?” asked the old man.
“Nothing,” answered Fursey. “I haven’t got a dog. You’re making a mistake.”
The old man peered where Albert had been.
“Dear me,” he said, “the old eyes are going on me. I would have sworn I saw a dog.”
“Not a dog for miles around,” responded Fursey blithely. “Are you going fishing, sir?”
“Yes,” replied the old man. “I’m going down to the lake.”
“Then you’re going in the wrong direction,” said Fursey. “The lake is behind you.”
The old farmer looked bewildered.
“So it is,” he replied at last, and turned back the way he had come. Fursey arose from the stone and fell into step beside him.
“May I ask if you live in the cottage beyond?” he queried.
“Yes,” responded the ancient. “That’s my house.”
“Very convenient having the fishing right at your front door.”
The old man looked surprised.
“The lake is at the back of the house,” he said.
For a few minutes they walked side by side in silence. Then the old man stopped and peered sharply at Fursey.
“What are you accompanying me for?” he asked.
“So that you won’t lose your way to the lake.”
“How could I lose my way to the lake?” retorted the old man. “Don’t I live beside it, and haven’t I fished it these forty years.”
He continued on his way, and Fursey fell into step with him once more. When they were within a few hundred yards of the cottage, the old man stopped again and turned to Fursey.
“You’re still following me,” he asserted. “You’re up to something. If you don’t go away, I’ll call my daughter.”
Fursey’s voice broke. “It’s some days since I’ve had anything to eat,” he said. “Maybe you have a slice of bread in the house that’s not wanted, and a cup of milk?”
“What are you?” asked the old man, looking down suspiciously at the scarecrow rags that covered Fursey. “A travelling man?”
“Yes,” lied Fursey.
The ancient regarded him closely for a few moments, then he answered gruffly.
“All right. I’ll see what the daughter can do for you.”
Fursey stepped out joyfully beside him.
“Do you do much fishing, sir?” he asked politely.
“Forty years,” responded his companion, “and I haven’t caught one of the little devils yet. I’m beginning to suspect that there aren’t any fish in the lake.”
Fursey, who had fished once or twice with a bent nail and the cord of his habit in the Shannon at Clonmacnoise, plunged into a discussion on the relative merits of the lugworm and the lobworm as bait. The old man listened with interest until they came to the fence of the cottage.
“We’ll have to find the daughter first,” he said. “She’s probably feeding the hens at the back of the house.”
As they made their way into the yard, the old man sighed and turned to Fursey.
“I’m in a bad way here,” he confided, “what with the advancing years and the fishing, I don’t be able to do much work about the farm. I had a good farmboy, but off he went yesterday to fight in the war.”
Fursey muttered sympathetically. He did not enquire which war, as he knew that among the one hundred and eighty kingdoms of Ireland there were always several wars in progress, and they were usually very confusing. Moreover, he had never understood geography. But he quickly saw his opportunity.
“What about taking on a new boy?” he asked eagerly. “I’m a willing and hardy worker.”
The old man turned his head and inspected Fursey closely.
“You’re a queer-looking boy,” he replied at last, “with your hair snow-white. How old are you?”
“I’m forty.”
“You look about a hundred.”
“You’d do well to take me,” rejoined Fursey. “I understand everything about a farm, from paring edible roots to milking a goat. I’m a great hand at feeding hens. To say nothing of my knowledge of fishing.”
The old man seemed impressed.
“I’ll have to talk to the daughter,” he replied.
They found her at the back of the house spreading out clothes on the hedge to dry, a fine, wide-eyed girl of about thirty-two, with a large, full-lipped mouth and two sets of the whitest teeth Fursey had ever seen. She watched Fursey curiously while the old man explained the immediate need for a slice of bread and a cup of milk. Under her friendly gaze Fursey stood grinning bashfully, his cheeks and his ears pink with his blushes. When the old man had finished, she immediately led the way into the kitchen and put Fursey on a stool by the fire. She loaded the table with bread, butter, cheese and cold vegetables, and drew a beaker of ale from a cask in the corner. Fursey ate with difficulty, partly because he was embarrassed by such hospitality, and partly because the old man had emptied three canisters of lugworms on to a corner of the table and was earnestly soliciting Fursey’s opinion as to their quality and striking power. He was too shortsighted to observe Fursey’s efforts to be polite and at the same time to prevent the bait from crawling into his food and up his sleeves. The girl stood leaning against the wall by the hearth smiling at them both.
When the meal was finished and the lugworms had been returned with difficulty into the three canisters, the old man and the girl went into the far corner of the room and conducted a long conversation in whispers, while Fursey sat with his knees to the fire anxiously awaiting the outcome. At length the girl came forward and seated herself at the table.
“My father tells me,” she said, “that you’d like to be taken on here as farmboy.”
“Yes,” replied Fursey eagerly.
“There’s not a great deal of work to be done,” she explained. “Just to keep the yard and outhouses clean and dry, bring water from the well and milk the cow. We’ll give you your food and your bed here by the fire, and an old suit of my father’s as well. He thinks it’s hardly decent to have you going around the way you are, with a young woman in the house.”
Fursey could find no words to express his thanks, but the tears welled up into his eyes and crept down his face. When the old man observed Fursey’s emotion he was powerfully affected himself, and it was with difficulty that his daughter succeeded in shepherding the two of them through the door out into the yard, where she put the ash rod and line into her father’s hand. She instructed Fursey that his first duty was to see the old man down to the shore of the lake and into his coracle. Then Fursey was to return and sweep the yard.
Day after day crept by, days of scudding cloud, of rustling showers and defiant sunshine. Never had Fursey been so happy. In the mornings he accompanied Old Declan to the lake and saw him safely into the coracle. The old man browsed around the little tarn all day, and it was one of Fursey’s duties to summon him to his meals, otherwise he would have forgotten to come home at all. Fursey swept the house and the yard, milked the cow and carried water from the well. He flapped around in a suit of the old man’s clothes, which were far too big for him, chatting amiably to the cow and the hens, amusing Declan and his daughter with his antics, and all the time he felt an elevation of heart that he had never known before. He could scarcely credit his happiness and good fortune. Sometimes in the cool of the day he sat on a rock at the edge of the lake, and as he watched the water come wrinkling in towards his feet, he brooded on his happiness and wondered uneasily how long it would last. He would close his eyes and tell himself that there was no reason why his present blissful state should not continue always. Then he would hug his knees and lose himself listening to the hollow slapping of the water among the stones and the metallic notes of the birds, the long drawn-out twitter of some individual songster that seemed to have an impediment in its speech, mingling with the curling chirps and the tuneful tootings of the others.
Fursey thought it was a most beautiful lake. Its threatening cliffs awed and delighted him. When the sun was high overhead he would stand dazzled by the sparkle of its waters, and many an afternoon he sat hour after hour wondering how it was that the water seemed all the time to be moving in towards him, although there was no breeze and the fringes of the water did no more than rustle among the reeds. When he arose and moved back towards the cottage, it often seemed to him that the whole hollow in the hills where lake and cottage lay was filled with a music of which he was aware but which he could not hear. He would look up at the heights where mountain was piled upon mountain, and his heart would be flooded with humility. As he approached the cottage he would, as often as not, hear the sound of Maeve’s singing as she went about her work. “It’s a good thing to hear a woman singing in a house,” Old Declan confided to him. “It means that the house is a happy one.” Fursey would creep noiselessly into the kitchen, returning diffidently her ready smile; and seated on his stool by the hearth, he would watch her surreptitiously as she kneaded the dough or turned the handle of the churn.
Occasionally he accompanied Declan on his fishing excursions, but the old man had to fish from the shore when Fursey was with him, for nothing would persuade Fursey to trust himself to the frail coracle. Declan did not mind very much where he fished from: he never caught anything anyway. Sitting on a boulder he would explain the philosophy of fishing to Fursey.
“It’s not necessary to catch fish,” he would say. “Men fish because it brings them back to their boyhood. They like scrambling over rocks and crossing streams and endangering their lives on lakes, just as they did when they were children. Moreover, it brings them to pleasant, interesting places which they wouldn’t ordinarily have a chance of seeing. All the same,” the old man would add grimly, “I wish I could catch one of the little devils.”
But it was when the door of the cottage was closed against the freshness of the night, and Declan and Maeve had drawn in about the glowing peat fire, that Fursey really came into his own. They quickly discovered that their unusual farmboy, though he could neither read nor write, had a fund of peculiar information. He seemed to have a wide knowledge of demonology and the unprincipled behaviour of
witches, and from his stool beside the fire he gravely gave them advice as to the correct procedure in certain unpleasant sets of circumstances; for instance, if one had the misfortune to encounter a basilisk on the highway. He seemed to them a man with a considerable knowledge of the great world beyond “The Gap.” He had visited Cashel and seen in the flesh the great men of the Kingdom, the Bishop, the King and the great lords and ecclesiastics; he had even visited remote Clonmacnoise and seen the River Shannon. While Fursey told his halting tales, Maeve, from her place on the far side of the fire, kept her big eyes fixed on his face. Declan muttered to himself all during Fursey’s recital, and occasionally gave vent to a mournful groan when some act of human or demoniacal depravity came to be told.
There was one thing that puzzled Fursey greatly. Often, on a warm, golden evening as he sat by the lakeside, he asked himself how it was that in his flight from Cashel he had not been pursued. He had been two days on the road, and in that time he could easily have been overtaken by horsemen or by fleet runners. It was true that he had spent most of the daylight hiding in the hedges and had travelled for the greater part by night; still, there had been no evidence whatever of a desire on the part of the authorities to recapture him. Was it that they were afraid to approach him and that they thought they were well rid of him? He could not bring himself to believe it. Father Furiosus and the Bishop, he felt, were not the kind of men to allow a suspected sorcerer to be at large without making every effort to capture him. And even if they were convinced that he was not a sorcerer, but a demoniac, they would be just as inflamed with zeal to catch him and rid him of his malignant guest. Fursey could not understand it; but as day after day passed and he found himself unmolested, he began to think about the matter less, being only too willing to believe himself secure. He took the precaution, however, of surreptitiously anointing the cottage broom with the ointment which he still carried, lest it should be necessary to make a hurried escape; and one evening when Declan and Maeve were absent, he had a practice flight up and down the yard to the considerable alarm of a large body of hens. He had of course taken the further precaution of not telling his name to the old cottager and his daughter. On his first evening when they had asked him how he was called, he had answered on the spur of the moment, giving his dead father’s name—Flinthead, and as Flinthead he was known to Declan and Maeve.