Part 10

“You mean he comes to wake Cethair, spirit king of the forest, out of his winter’s sleep,” said Ardan. “Cethair but breathes over the fields, and all the snows melt, and all of leaf and bloom comes out for his carpet of green fragrance.”

“There is no king but King of Heaven and Turlough, Ard-Ri of Erinn—our own kings of Leinster and Orielle, and such,” said Cormac, but Ardan was deep in his new play and had no words of argument. Once Cormac looked and saw he had set upright a slender straight sapling of yew in the packed snow of the slab, and once he noted that the hands of Ardan stripped from the sapling all but two branches reaching out east and west as the arms of a cross, and after that Cormac carved at stone traceries, well satisfied that the fosterling of King Donough was, after all, but making a holy thing.

That was a comforting thought to the good Cormac, who had love for the lad who was known only as Ardan of Ardbreccan, and whose stay near them had not been so long. He had been the ward of the holy and learned O’Cahsahde of Ardbreccan, where his childhood had been lived between gray walls, and under the great oaks’ shade. At death of that holy man, who was called “Dall Clairineach” and known of all scholars, his ward Ardan, with wealth and comfort, was left to King Donough with instruction that he was the son of a mother whose dying hope had been that sheltered holiness be his share in life; and no more was known of him than that.

But his breeding spoke of gentle blood, and Maureen the queen made choice of him for comradeship with her own children, and her own maidens in the garden games, and the gracious sweetness of him won its own way in king’s palace or monastery walls.

In the shadow of the wall he made his snow form—that the rays of gold of the sun not melt the white of it; and Donough O’Carroll of Orielle, and Diarmod of Leinster, his overlord, passed that way and spoke of the handsome boy and his destiny, for the work he did made him look like a monk, and his father had been known only to the holy Dall Clairineach of Ardbreccan, where many sons of princes wore the robe of scholarship and holy sanctity.

The two kings went their way, and Cormac was called by Duighal the prior to another place, and the boy was forgot by all, and the snow image was not seen by any until the morning after, golden lances of the sun touching it when coming first over the edge of the green sea.

And then, at sight of it, Cormac the monk cried out in awe, and his cry called others from the chapel.

Duighal the prior was there, and the two kings were there and Ardan stood in the shadow of the wall in a queer trembling of joy—and mayhaps some hunger, for he had worked till the setting of the moon, as in a trance, fasting.

“Is it a miracle of Brighde, the Foster Mother of God, as the blessed mantle was given her?” muttered the prior, and others thought it Mary, Queen of the Elements. But Diarmod the king stood beside Donough and stroked his dark beard, and his eyes shot green fire.

“A miracle it may be, holy father,” he said, “but the miracle is in the gift given the mortal hand placing it there. Where is the Ardbreccan fosterling who heaped up the snow on this slab but yesterday?”

Cormac the carver of stone pushed forward Ardan, whose teeth chattered as he knelt under the eyes of all the brethren and the two kings.

“This is the lad, your royalty; always he is making the coaxing word for my edged tools that are not for a child. It is true I tossed him a trowel yesterday, but this thing of whiteness with jeweled robe of dewdrops could not have been formed by mortal hand and mason’s blade.”

“Speak, if you did it,” said Diarmod of Leinster.

“Of snow I did it with a tool cut from wood. In the light of the moon I worked on the mantle with clear water from the well. The freezing water there made the jeweled fringes to the robe—it was no miracle, O King, and I will do penance that I made the thing on consecrated ground. The fever took me to work, and I asked no permit.”

“You need ask none forever in Leinster,” said Diarmod. “Rise up to walk where you will in our domain, and work when you will.”

There was a buzzing as of bees among the monks who looked at the lad and at the white limbs of the snow creature, tip-toe with wide-spread arms like a bird lifting for flight. The mantle of it spread from wrist to wrist across head and shoulders and hung truly like jeweled wings in the early risen sun, but the white breasts and limbs and body were bare against the mantle save for the girdle of maidenhood.

The prior Duighal was the one with a frowning face at the words of Diarmod, and he looked from the king to the white wonder, and then to the faces of the monks, bent and shifty-eyed as they glanced sideways at each other, and then at the white snow of the round breasts.

“Penance for all whose eyes are smitten by the sight!” he thundered. “This is no holy thing—no white picture of saint: it is the work of the Evil Father forming temptation! What wench has bared herself for you that you know the way of that?”

His staff was lifted as in threat above Ardan, who gazed, round-eyed, at the faces of the monks, and the holy fury of their shepherd. Donough O’Carroll stepped between the lifted crook and the builder of the mystery.

“Look again, holy father,” he said. “The boy has not been tempted; that understanding is elsewhere.”

“My word with Donough,” said Diarmod. “The lad says he worked in a fever a day and a night—”

“And fasting, too, your royalty,” said Cormac.

“And fasting, too,” said Diarmod. “Look at him: it might be words of foreign tribes we speak for all he understands. Look at him! It was only a game of chance that he formed a virgin maid instead of a white bull—or a white fawn of the forest.”

“But the bulls roam the hills uncloaked,” said Donough O’Carroll with a laugh; “so also does the fawn and its dam. Speak, lad—we know it was no wench came to you here in the cold of the night—and to a wench no girdle would be given. How got you that mystery as you got it? This is sanctuary—you can speak.”

Ardan stared at the listeners like a trapped thing, and then knelt before Donough.

“I am under bonds as a son to you—and I meant no evil. I have the mind dark on your meanings. I crave your pardon, and the pardon of your queen for her fosterling. It was at the bathing pool in the summer time. Her maidens were in the water, and like that she stood tip-toe on the high stone at the pool’s margin. Like a bird with wide wings she stood ere the mantle slid from her shoulder. Proud she stood, and I from the thick green of the other shore saw her thus—more of beauty in her than snow and ice can tell! I went deep into the forest that day—lest they see me and deem me a spy on their pleasure-place. That is all, O Donough! If I have done a wrong deed, I ask to atone to the priests and to the maid.”

“Her name has not yet been spoke,” said Donough, and Diarmod made a quick step forward and laid his hand on the head of Ardan.

“To your feet,” he said. “Is there name to a living maid for the double of that? Is there a name?”

Ardan turned his gaze from the eager king to Donough, and then to the frowning prior.

“If it might be spoke in another place?” he plead, but the prior lifted the staff.

“Here in this place where the evil thing was wrought,” he thundered, “here begins your penance with open confession before all!”

Ardan turned to Donough O’Carroll.

“If first I could speak of the word to you alone?” he said.

But Donough laughed at the pleading, and lived to know sorrow of the heart for that laughing.

“As you have shown her breasts and her body to us, give us the name.”

“But—let me entreat—”

“The name, lad, the name! What is she called?”

“She is called—Dervail.”

The voice of him went low as the breath-whisper. Yet it was too loud for Donough, whose face was thunder-black and threatening.

The prior heard and turned on the monks, with words of censure for hearkening, and his orders brought them to heel like a pack of hunting hounds on the wrong trail.

Diarmod heard, and his eyes, with the strange green fire, narrowed as he looked at King Donough.

“What sweet hidden thing have you put away for holidays, good friend?” he asked. “The lad only spoke in whisper, yet the sound of it echoes among you like a thunder-clap in the hills.”

“It is not hidden by choice of mine, Diarmod,” and the voice of Donough had the gloom on it. “We will to break fast and then—”

“The lad at our table for the food!” decided Diarmod. “Look not so down, lad, because you held beauty in your mind more close than most of us. The monks today dare not bury you alive as they once did to sinners. Their forbears would have left you pinned to the earth for a smaller thing than a naked virgin in their cloister—even the prior will have dreams tonight!”

Then he walked around the white figure to see the solid backing of the cloak to the slender body, and smiled at the craft of it. The mystery of it was going, yet he glanced from under his brows at the lad, and had wonder.

“Lucky for me that I abode the night with you, Donough O’Carroll, else would I have missed this in life,” he said, “and no man can hope to see it twice. This will be a melting day, and the wind has turned: it comes the sea-way since the dawn.”

“The sea-way,” said Ardan, “the eastern sea-way—the path of sorrows.”

“Why do you give that word?” asked Donough O’Carroll, staring at him.

“I have no knowing why I spoke it,” said Ardan. “I thought I heard it somewhere. And look you! It is true: I fasted and half froze to build that while the joy of building was with me—and like a white jewel it was when the sun touched it this morn. But the sun ray is gone, and the wind of the east brings the melting with it, and the jewels of the mantle are dripping tears already—tears! I should have wrought with metal tools in stronger stuff.”

Cormac had come back with a stout, long stave under orders of the prior, and stood waiting in courtesy the going of the two kings.

“Go you to your food, lad,” he said kindly; “the tools you shall have at need. But go you, for your fasting gives you the sight of things you know nought of at all! The Hidden People of the Ancient Days are putting speech on you; go to food, and drink, and human thoughts.”

“I would rather do that,” said Ardan. “I had the Dream of things with me when I built this, and my heart would sorrow to watch the white of it melt gray in its own tears. She is still the white bird tip-toe for flight!”

Donough O’Carroll looked at Ardan as if he was seeing him for the first time in life, and Diarmod the king tore himself from the gazing, and strode beside Donough with the swing of the man who had found things easy in life.

“Diarmod MacMurrough, have you given heed to the words you have heard beside that white wonder image?” asked Donough.

“I have that. Some of the words are as full of wonder as the image itself,” said Diarmod.

“Take them to your remembrance then, for no idle words were said there. That boy had the right knowing, and was right in his silence, but I made him speak. It is my grief.”

“It is no grief of mine,” said Diarmod, and laughed as one who holds his own thoughts.

At the angle where the path narrowed to the portal, Donough, in courtesy to his overlord, stepped a pace aside and behind. A sound came to him of wood striking on wood, and he looked back, and he was glad the lad was making reply to some asking of the king, and did not see the thing he saw.

Cormac was doing well his task: the white wings were shattered, and the slender white body broken. There was nothing left of the Dream but the dark cross of the young yew tree dripping drearily against the gray stone of the wall. The wind from the east carried the melting mist with it, and there was no longer any sight of the sun anywhere.

Donough O’Carroll went into his house that day with a heavy gloom on his face—a strange gloom for one shown honor by his overlord.

The woman who loved him looked her amaze that he put aside the bread she offered, and called first for the wine at morningtide.

“Let be, Maureen,” he said, and spoke to her lowly. “Take your heed of our friends if I limp lacking in courtesy this day. I feel ‘fey’ with some happenings of the morn, and would that you send best messenger and swiftest horse for Kieran Dall of the caves. The king must be told some truths and some sayings. And it must be a holy man, and a wise one for the telling.”

The coming of Kieran Dall was at the nightfall, and the O’Carroll had a day of fever and fuming with his overlord who had moods of haste for the thing he wanted.

“Why should the name of a strange maid so witch your thoughts from Mor na Tuathal and the daughters of princes?” asked Donough, and Diarmod laughed his happy laugh by which hearts had been won.

“Why should the lad who knows not love have made her his Dream? Answer me that, and you will have your own answer! What put silence on the monks when her name was spoke? There are mysteries in it, and riddles are sometimes witchery.”

“Mine is not the telling of the riddle, but it will be told for you,” said Donough.

When the supper was over, and only the two kings and the blind monk called Kieran Dall were in the great room which was for private and secret things, their talk began.

“It is for a curious thing I have sent for you, O Kieran,” said Donough of Orielle. “With me is my friend, a hunter from the south. He is a MacMurrough, and I want him by my side when I hear the story of the maid called Dervail nan Ciar.”

“That maid is of your fostering, since the death of Ethnea your sister, to God her soul! She is called the ward, or the daughter, of Murtagh of Meath—is Dervail of the Shadow. Beauty was hers by birth, and wealth is hers by a dower of fear. Of that you should know somewhat, O’Donough, as you should know why the wife of Murtagh has fear of her and would give all wealth of the valley of the Boyne rather than have her under the roof of Meath. What new thing can a hermit of the caves have for your worldly knowing, O Donough, prince of Orielle?” said Kieran Dall.

“It is not of the new I would hear—it is of the ancient old. It is of the prophecy; it is of the reason why that blood is feared and must not repeat itself in Erinn. It is the year and the time when she was to go from my castle to the walls of holy sanctuary, and the dower of fear to go with her.”

Diarmod, stretched on a pile of wolf skins in the glint of the firelight, looked up and gave Donough a smile at that. But the sightless eyes of Kieran could not see the look, or the mockery of it.

“True, it is the time,” said Kieran, “and the reason of it goes back to the dim old days when men who walked the world took mates ofttimes from the Hidden Tribes. Aye, that was the way of it more oft than in the days in which we live. The dark mist of the earth-mind was not so thick between us in them times, and there were other matings not to be spoken. Women of the sea and wolves from the forest have helped man bring forbidden lives—lives without souls—on the earth. The saints know it, and God knows it, and the tribes of that people have often strange evils in their blood.”

There was silence while the blind eyes stared into the red ash as if seeing visions.

“How far back can you be going into the dim days of that time?” asked Donough.

“The mind can go far back on paths where speech must not follow,” said Kieran. “To give words to things gives power to them as well. To give names calls up the shadow—white or gray—of the soul that answered to it on earth. That is a true saying. And there are them not to be called back—the names going out in shadows! Under a like shade the child Dyveke Og, called Dervail, was born into Erinn. Her birthing belonged in another land, and not here—not here at all.

“Among the druids of the dim days there were sacred things, sacred rules, and names, and priests who were kings. I am not naming the name of one, or the name of his tribe, but there was one who was Highest, who was given ‘the sight,’ yet the rules were broke by him, and broke for a woman who brought temptings. The name of that woman is not to be spoke, but she was a queen in her own tribe—and it was a tribe of the blood of the wolves of Alba. To Erinn she fled as for sanctuary—and brought her temptings. The madness of love she brought on that priest who was king, and he was netted by her as a fish is netted in a deep-sea net—and was borne by her kinsmen across the sea to their land. Her kinsmen were the barbarians of the east, and he was held by them as hostage while Erinn paid eric in skins of the deer and otter, and gold from the rivers of the west. That is how it was until a helot of Alba made way through their traps and their walls and brought the word to Erinn; and a sad word it was, for there was no truth in that people! The priest-king, netted through love, had neither feet, nor hands, nor eyes left to him. Their women tortured him, yet kept him alive as mockery of a king, for a king of Erinn must be without blemish. Speech was left him, and nothing else of a human was left him. He made a rune, and word by word the helot learned the words of it and brought it to Erinn. A long rune it was, too. And first of it was that no further eric was to go out of Erinn for him to the red brutes of the eastern shores. He alone, by his death there, would pay the price of his fall—but it was worth the summer and winter of torturings if he alone could pay for the lesson to Erinn, and to the men of Erinn. He laid on his own clan a heavy rule that by Sun and Moon, Earth and Air, Fire and Water, and the lives of their children, no bond of faith be made with the men of Alba, and no marriage with a woman of Alba, for the blood was not the blood of clean people, and the eyes of that people had no vision of clean faith in bonds of fealty.

“In that rune he had the vision of the greatness of Erinn if tribe by tribe they made bonds only with each other for the glory of Inis Fohdla, which, even in far ancient days, was named that—the Isle of Destiny.”

“Why is Erinn, in the ancient runes, called by that calling?” asked Donough.

Kieran Dall shook his head.

“I do not know. God knows! Men who named the stars called it by that name, and had ‘the sight.’ A land was given to the Hidden People, who were great people; they have not known death, yet have never left the land of Inis Fohdla. In the years ahead they will again have a birthing, and the hidden things of the wise are in their keeping until that day. For three centuries Erinn has been the school for the sons of Brythen and France, and other foreign people. The Dane invaders were driven home by Brian of the Tributes, and Inis Fohdla pays tithing to no viking of the foreign in our day; it may happen that we are near to reading the riddle of Inis Fohdla and that naming; it may be so if the faith is kept in peace, and the rune of that king of the tortures be not lost again as it was lost by Cuan the Dark in the days I hold in memory.”

“Who was Cuan the Dark?” asked Donough.

“He was of the blood of that priest-king of the rune; he was also of my blood, but his own name is not spoke. He was of the sacred line into which no blood of the enemy must flow lest it bring the curse of a thousand years’ helotage on Inis Fohdla.”

There was silence as the slow words of the blind hermit sunk to the minds of the two kings.

“A thousand years!” muttered Diarmod. “How could Erinn be held as tribute-payer for a thousand years to a king of the foreign? Thorgils and Ota the queen did hold the Sionan and many harbors, and the tax paid to the Danes was a heavy tax. But years more than one hundred are gone since there was taxing like that. How could it be coming again?”

“I have not the sight for that,” said Kieran. “It was the prophecy, and the penalty spoken in the ancient rune if that line of the kings should take mates from the red-wolf women of Alba.”

“But—it was of one line alone—one family—or one clan,” said Diarmod.

“Aye—it was one alone, but that one was the sacred line of the priest-kings. Their rule was the rule for the men of the crown and the temple, and the people of lower rank would follow. It was before the time of christian men in Erinn. It would take more than the time of one winter night to tell you all the difference in minds and lives between that day and this day. But through all the changes the line of Cuan the Dark kept to the law of that rune—eight times one hundred years was the time it was held to and the line was clean, and the record of that line was proud.

“And then?”

“Then the young had the teaching that no thing could be truth but the truths spoke by the saints of the New God, though truth was in the world before Mary came to the birth.

“Truth is truth for always, and even the pagans had many true things in their hearts. But the young are light of mind, and do not see these things. So it was with Cuan the Dark.

“To Spain he sailed for a matter of import, and I was beside him. To the land of France we went, and I walked the lines of mighty Carnac, and thought of kindred wonders at Knocknarea in our own land. There were women everywhere, and they were the days of his youth, and he gave them love, and good-will, and farewell! So it was with us, and home he sailed, glad and free of heart; and it was here in Erinn he met that trial he was to meet. He broke the geis laid on his line, and on his birth, when he looked on Dyveke the Dove, child of Gorm, son of Knud of the rath of Knud.

“The mother of Dyveke had been a woman out of Alba, blue of eyes and flaming of hair, and in her own land she had been to the front with her kinsmen in battle. But Gorm the Dane had his way with her and stole her to sail the seas with him, as was well-fitting, for each was of a tribe drinking from skulls at their joy-feasts, and fierce alike in their lovings.

“Sons they had, but they never kept life long; that fierce mother held her strength for her own passions. There was a saying for that among the Danes. Then Dyveke came to birth, and the mother went out of life. It may be there were fairer things on earth than Dyveke; but I never saw them.

“Dyveke means ‘dove’ in the wording of her father, Gorm, and no breast of dove was whiter, and no flight of dove had more of grace—and no love-call of a dove had more of music than her voice.

“From her grianan she smiled down with look of longing on Cuan the Dark, who sat on his black racer below, and the madness came on him there for that look and for that woman—and the madness stayed.

“None of his elders was there—I alone who knew the geis was there—the _geis_ every son of our line was bondman to.

“But he was deaf to my words when she spoke!

“A noble of the Danes named Thorold had heard, in the far north, of the beauty of her, and came with gifts and with offers. She took his gifts and gave him love looks as she gave to Cuan the Dark. The boats of Thorold the Dane were anchored in the bay, and the word went out that it would be with Thorold she would sail as wife.

“That was the day Cuan the Dark changed to a wild thing showing his teeth—the girl Dyveke had looked love on him, and he had that madness.

“I made him listen to the record of the ancient horror when a woman of Alban birth had brought death in life to a prince of his line.

“I held him as I reasoned with him, speaking over the names of the men who for the hundreds of years had taken the vow and the bond for his own life, and the lives of his children. He fought me and growled back that the vows were pagan vows—not christian—and not binding on a christened man.

“I spoke the rune of the priest-prince who had warned his clan to make no bond forever with the fierce Albans of the jealous eyes: