things, and took last reluctant look at Ota the queen to whom he
should deal death. Grief was on him that it must not be done by his
hand if he would save the scornful holy thing in the tower.
So secure were all the guards of the outer walls, and the far points
of vantage, that those of palace and cloister slept heavily and
without care after the wine feast. It was not as an armed camp they
rested, but a safe household.
He kept to the shadow of the walls from point to point and reached
the tower safely. No guard was there, and he unbolted the door below
it in silence, and bolted it back of him in the darkness.
The queen’s key served at top of the ladder and he felt that the girl
was again crouched against the far wall.
“Haste,” he whispered, “here are shoes and cloak. Take a leathern bag
in which the spoils were carried and thrust the garments in that. We
have muck and mire to wade through ere a boat is ours.”
“Give me a knife that I may die here,” she made answer. “You are a
greater thing of fear than the northmen.”
“Geroid is waiting a call of safety; I am his voice,” he whispered.
“Geroid!” and her voice was a flutter of hope. “I will trust his
trust of you, if ... you give me a knife!”
“It is here to your hand.”
The dagger of the queen was passed to her in the darkness, ere she
would take cloak, or shoes, or move a step toward the door.
“Haste!” he whispered as he heard her empty the bag with a little
click of metal on stone, “haste, for the night is brief.”
She crept to the ladder but halted as his hand touched hers.
“Put no touch on me,” she muttered. “If die I do, it will not be in
handclasp with the queen’s lover.”
At foot of the ladder he knelt and felt over the flagstone paving in
the dark, and she heard heavy breathing as he worked fiercely among
the rubbish and tossed aside sacks of grain stored there for siege.
Then he found the stone for which he was searching and threw all his
strength into his task.
Doirenn felt a rush of damp air where she stood. It had the smell of
the river in it.
“The way is hard and narrow,” he whispered. “Also it is wet under
foot. Give me the bag.”
“No,” she said, “sacred things are in it: the holy book and jeweled
chalice, not to be touched by God’s outlaw. I am strong, I can
follow.”
At first it was dry, then the dampness came, then the water, and she
was wading near to the knees but wading toward the open. A tangle of
vines and brush was to push through and she saw the glimmer of the
Great Star on the still river.
“Steady,” he said, and moved up a space where the small boats were
moored. A guard slept in one and Ruadan stood, girdle deep, beside it.
There was enough light to see the bare throat of the man, and strike
true that no slightest cry go out on the night. He twitched once or
twice and lay still forever.
Ruadan unfastened the boat and guided it back to where Doirenn stood,
fearful and alert.
“Get in,” he whispered, and she did so, not noting the Dane until she
stumbled and felt warm blood on her hand.
“What is it?” she asked, but Ruadan climbed dripping into the boat
and took up the oars, but did not answer.
He dared not row, lest the dip of the oars be heard. They drifted
in the darkness, making no more sound than an otter swimming in the
night.
Doirenn stared at the still thing by her feet, and thence to the
still man of horror, who was perhaps her safety, and wrapping herself
in the cloak, she drew close the sacred helps in which all her trust
was.
A late and fading moon came up over the forest as Ruadan used the
oars for speed—they had passed the last fire of a river guard in
safety.
The weird light showed the staring open eyes of the dead man at her
feet.
“Dead and unshriven!” she gasped in horror, “and you with the soul
stain of blood on you!”
“It is the first of the men for whom Bronach was washing grave
clothes in the dream I rode to tell you of a year ago,” said Ruadan.
“I saw his face yesterday, and knew he was the man. When we come to
the high reeds of a meadow brook we will hide him there until the
crows find him. There will be others.”
Until the edge of the day they bore the weight of the body ere a
rushy place was reached where a boat could enter leaving no broken
reeds near the sweep of the river. Far in, where a bog would hold the
body, Ruadan stripped him of cloak and ax, and left him to the black
earth.
“You make not a prayer,” said Doirenn in horror, “though well you
were taught the ways of prayer.”
“It is yours to pray,” said Ruadan. “My knife did murder for you on
him because you would not heed the warning I brought you from the
mountains of the south a summer gone.”
“It was enchantments you spoke, and not warning. The enchantments of
men of evil are things to fear.”
“Truth is truth—whether holy or unhallowed,” he said darkly.
“Who is Bronach?” she asked after a long silence, while he sought
other channel where the reeds would leave no trace as he swept again
into the Sionan.
“She is the washer of the ford. She washes in the land of souls the
garments of men doomed to die. For my house to see her means death by
us or for us. In a dream you stood beside her in my land.”
“The priests forbid,” she began, but he stopped her with a gesture.
“Talk me no priestcraft! Bronach is older than foreign priesthood in
Erinn.”
“If I held not a holy book close in my hands for soul help, I am
thinking the sky would fall on us with all its stars for that saying,
or the water of the Sionan run backward from the sea!”
“It will do that in spite of your book,” he made answer, but she gave
him no belief. She did not think the truth was with Ruadan at all.
She watched him in dread and in disdain while he bent to the oars in
the dawn. The boat skimmed the air like a bird under his tremendous
strokes.
“This is the time of the sun they will be searching,” he said. “One
night is all we have in the lead of them, but many oarsmen has Ota
the queen. Their course will be swift after they start the search.”
No guards of the river or lake were stationed in the middle land
between Cluain-mac-noise and Killaloe, for forest and meadow and
island were stripped of Irish herdsmen and Irish homes along the
Sionan. He toiled lustily, with the current in his favor, while the
day was young and the way clear, knowing that cover must be found ere
midday, and all other water journeys must be in the night.
When a fair place of shelter came in their path he turned the boat to
the mouth of a meadow brook and crept carefully over the black waters
drained from bogs beyond.
It was none too soon, for his breath was scarce even again from the
labor until a man was seen by them leaning on a spear, moving swiftly
west above the meadow reeds; his head was turned ever from side to
side, searching.
The boat and the oarsmen could not be seen because of the height of
the swamp growths and the distance. But their swiftness was a wonder
to view: it would be a good horse to be beating it.
But they swept out of sight, and Ruadan knew the lough toward the sea
was now a place of danger.
“They have no trail, and that is a good help,” he said. “Now while
the sun shines there is only the woods for us, and it may be berries
or roots for food.”
Far he went inland where the boat was lifted over shallows into a
little still lough under shadow of the wood.
“’Twill serve,” he said. “Nothing but the wild cattle may be coming,
and it is a hiding place.”
He left her to get out as she might and wade with wet feet in the
sedgy marge. Her looks at him were ill and fearful, and she clutched
to her the bag in which the sacred helps were borne.
“I have no liking for this place,” she said, “and it will not be
resting under birchtrees we will find Geroid.”
Ruadan made no answer. The labor had been to the limit of strength.
He drank of the cool water and cast himself on the turf. She frowned
at the discourtesy.
“Where is Geroid, O Queen’s Lover?” she asked. “It is to him I am
going.”
He looked long at her, darkly frowning. He had killed a man for her,
and was risking life for her, yet she had no thought for a creature
of earth, but thought only of that anchorite who had turned to prayer
and a bed of stone, and would not look in her deep, seeking eyes.
“By the Elements! It is to your Geroid you shall go,” he swore
roughly. “My thought is that he is in his glory without you, but that
is nothing. Though we circle Erinn to find the way to him, it is to
Geroid you will go! Sorrow on the night you called for help and I was
the fool to answer.”
She let fall the leathern bag and sank down beside it—her eyes wide
in wonder.
“How are you knowing that—and you an evil man in an evil world? I
did send the call. On my knees I made the prayer that holy Saint
Kieran might help the call go out to some soul beyond the walls—and
you—_you_—”
“I heard it in my sleep and knew your voice though I had only heard
it when weighted heavy with hate. Also I followed it.”
She brooded over that long, and drew the book to her.
“You followed Ota the queen,” she said at last, “and you fled in the
night with her jewels on you lest her kinsmen return and spear you to
the ground.”
“You shall go to your Geroid,” he muttered, and got up and walked
away.
So wearied was she that she fell into sleep there in that warm hour
when the wind and the bees and birds all swept drowsily through the
low green branches. So thick were they that a dusk was on the turf,
though beyond their shadow the yellow light of sun was a glory.
It was beyond he had gone, and in her sleep she thought he had gone
over some edge of the world where she could not find him. She woke
with a moan of fear.
She lay there thrilled by a sort of terror that she had wanted him—it
was a thing she could not understand, and puzzling things angered
her. That thought of evil enchantments of his would not go away.
Then, while she framed a prayer against magic and druid spells, a
sweet smell came to her, so close she thought it was part of a dream.
But it was a better thing, for fresh sweet blackberries were heaped
beside her, and a little apart Ruadan sat with his back to her,
eating.
She had not known how hungry she was until she tasted the melting
sweetness of them, and then she determined that, on the rest of the
way, she would pick her own berries—there was anger on her that she
had not done it.
As she moved away to look for more, he spoke.
“You are not to go from this shadow,” he said. “Cattle are beyond,
and a hut of a herder; we have far to go, and meat will be good to
have. I am going in a circle till I come to them, that no track will
seem to come from here, for this must be the hiding place of you.”
“And if foreign men are there? If they take you—if I am lost alone in
this place where you bring me?”
“It is not in this place you will be lost. In the dream I saw you to
the west, and that place is yet to find.”
No more than that he said, and no look did he give to see if it was
well or ill she liked it.
She crept back to the birchtree shadow, and watched him go, and she
held the book with its precious work and precious words close to her
bosom, and was making prayers on it—the prayers of Phadraig the Saint
against enchantments.
With the eyes of her closed she went over the prayers and over them
again, and the sun was in the very center of the sky. Two wood doves
came close and spoke their loves sweetly in a rowan bush near, and
listening to them was like listening to the silver string of the
magic harp of the god of music, for the silver string has the wood
music of sleep in it.
The sun was low to the edge of the forest trees and was red as a
signal fire of danger when she woke. The doves were flown away, and
the world was very still about her.
He had not come back, and she felt fear at the wide aloneness of the
deep forest and the reedy marge of the wide lough; alone she could
not make her way even to the flowing Sionan or Dearg below.
She looked the way he had gone, and listened for faintest sound of
his step until every droning bee set her heart to thump. When she
could bear it no longer, she looked at her knife’s edge, tied the
leathern bag of the sacred things to her girdle, and looking with
care to all things by which the return way might be found, she ran
with swift feet to the last point from which he had vanished in the
green.
No living thing was in sight, and she went on more slowly. There was
a hill to climb, and from that height she had hope to see the cattle
toward which he had gone. On the high point of the hill there was a
circle of stones, and two with strange spiral carvings. These magic
places of the old gods had curious legends in Meath, and she drew
close to her the holy things of the altar as she stood in the shadow
of the great stone to look westward over the plain.
The herds were there, but they were only far moving specks, no more
size to them than birds. But among them, or near them, she could see
no man.
But the hut of stone and timber at the edge of a wood she did see,
and sat long in the shadow of the huge stone watching for a sign of
any living thing—and no sign was there.
Then she crept through fern and gorse at the edge of the land where
the cattle fed, and dragged herself along the brink of a dark wooded
glen, and the hut was at the wall of that glen, and the look from
there was a wide look for the herding.
A sound came to her, and her thought was that her heartbeat was
loud in her ears from the fear of the still, strange place. And she
crept more close and knew it was not her own heart, for it was a man
breathing, and the breath was a rattle in the throat.
Through a chink in the hut she could see the man, and him a stranger
and a great dog dead near him. The man was stained with blood and
was looking with no good looks at something her eyes could not see.
He was reaching for a long knife with blood on it—far from him it had
fallen—and there was a stagger to every movement he made, for great
weakness was on him.
Yet he watched one way whilst he crept to the knife and fell as if
dying, yet roused himself to creep again a little ways.
The blood of Doirenn went cold from that look of hate on him, and
then blazed keen and hot to learn why the knife was coveted even in
the face of death.
With the dagger of Ota the queen unsheathed in her hand, she crept to
the low door, and the low sun of the west pierced to the dark corner
where Ruadan lay. She could see no movement of him, yet she knew he
was not dead, for if it had been so, the foreign man would not reach
thus for the knife, or creep, dying himself, on a wounded foe.
She had no plan of attack, yet as he grasped the knife and lifted it
over the body of Ruadan, she leaped through the door, and her dagger
struck deep and true in the neck of the stranger.
He gurgled, choked, and lay still.
She crept back to the wall and sat there, wild-eyed and fearful. She
had not meant to do the thing before her: to strike the knife from
him had been her thought. But the right hand of her had done its own
task despite any thought of hers.
The lowering sun slanted over his dead face, filling her with horror
at the moving shadows of it. Her teeth chattered with chill at the
dead man and dog, and at the other man whose breath she saw lifting
ever so little the lacings of his garment.
It was that piteous little breath, no deeper than of a child in
arms, by which she was urged at the last to draw near. She felt
frozen, and the leathern bag with the sacred helps lay without the
portal, but without that help, and in forgetfulness of prayer, she
crept forward.
He lay in a pool of blood, black and stiff. His shoulder bore a deep
gash, and the red tide yet came faintly at each breath. A long slant
of a blade had creased his brow and his face shone gray white where
the dark smear had not touched it. It all seemed to have chanced a
long time before.
That thought coming to her, she went over where the dog lay and
touched it; stiff it was and cold.... While she had slept in drowsy
rest under the birchtree Ruadan had fought out a battle of fierceness
with the huge foreign man and the dog stretched there as big as a
calf. The two men had all but killed each other. Each had thought his
enemy gone out of life ere he gave way to weakness or swoon, and the
foreign man had wakened first.
Terror went from her suddenly when the mystery of it went. There was
left only a wounded man for her care, and she knelt beside him and
loosened the lacings of his garment as she had seen the white fingers
of the queen unlace it in the tower.
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The sun set, and the other suns rose ere he wakened to knowledge.
Troubled phantoms of blood and death were with him in his weakness,
and a strange presence he did not know.
It was in a rosy dawn he wakened to know the walls, and how he had
first found them, but the strange presence was like mist of the
seafoam—ever about to take form in his mind, and ever fading again.
And out of that fog of dreams and phantoms of carnage a vision of
Paradise came to him.
It was perhaps the slant of the sun through the mists of the morning
by which the magical thing was wrought, but where the sun-kissed
green had been seen through the portal, there was at once a glory of
gold beyond any glory of saint told him in the teachings. He looked
at her and thought of Brighde, the ever young, when bondmaid to her
druid master, bearing cups and bowls of common things made holy by
touch of her hands.
For she stood there with the sun making a halo of her red-gold hair,
and in her two hands was held a golden chalice of richest handicraft,
set with the thirteen flashing stones of beauty.
The chalice was brimming with foam of new milk, and when she saw his
eyes, wide open, she stood silent, waiting, but the look in her eyes
was the look of Brighde, ever the giver, the serving-maid to whom the
angels sang.
“You are a dream, and not truth,” he muttered. “You are Brighde the
goddess; you are the fiery arrow of radiance in hearts of men; you
are Love, and you are Knowledge. When the priests could not stamp you
out, they made a saint of your name to hold the worship of you. You
are the vision always beyond a soul—you are only a dream, and I could
wish you truth.”
“The warm milk is true as if in a wooden bowl instead of a golden
chalice,” she said. “Two days it has been your food, and has served
you fairly.”
He drank it as a gift of God, and stared at her.
“And it is a vision come true,” he said. “Two days? And I not alone
here. There were others—a dog and a man I killed.”
“They were dragged and rolled over the cliff of the glen. There was
no other way,” she said.
“And this?” he asked, pointing to the mass of soothing poultice on
his shoulder.
“It is anemone, a flower of healing. I but gathered it and bruised
the leaves. The work of that was nothing. The only task of fear was
to hold you from wandering. Too restless were you for the boat and
the road of the Sionan.”
“And you did it? I dreamed of your hands touching me; I thought it a
dream of Brighde who was goddess and then saint.”
He went asleep again almost as he spoke, for the weakness was yet on
him.
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When he wakened his thoughts were more steady, and he asked if the
golden chalice had been a thing of dreaming.
“I took it from sacrilege in the tower,” she confessed. “It was the
cup of sacrament, and not to be left to pagans if my life could give
it guard.”
He looked at her long, with thoughts of that day in the tower, and
asked where her dagger was.
“It is no longer with me—I have taken instead the one of the herder.”
“The other had sharp slimness and value of gold and jeweled hilt.”
“This, with the horn of a deer for handle, is a cleaner thing.”
He thought she meant cleaner than a knife touched by the hand of Ota,
and his well hand went up to his neck where the necklet rested—the
gold of it had saved him a death stroke of the herder.
“This necklet has served its task,” he said. “It can take its place
with the other spoils saved by you.”
“It has no place among them,” answered Doirenn coldly. “I saved only
holy things from sacrilege.”
And he saw by that he had said the wrong thing, for she was no longer
the Brighde of tender service—she was a gold-crowned judge who looked
down from a far height.
He held in his memory the wordy condemnation of the priests, and of
Ronan the abbot, but it was easier to endure their revilings than her
frozen look when she remembered the love gift and caressings of Ota
the queen.
“It is to your Geroid you shall go,” he said, and looked at her
darkly, and went out from the hut of the herder, though the blue of
the sky and green of the turf were as one before his eyes because of
the weakness on him.
It was better to be in the woods alone with his tranced vision of
Brighde, than to face the cold scorn of the maid who had seen the
white hands of Ota on his throat.
But despite the look, or the word of scorn for him, Doirenn was not
at ease if he was long out of her sight. Never had she outgrown the
fear of what she had felt at sight of the great dead dog and the
dying foreign man crawling for the knife.
There was trouble on her for the thing she had done, and no holy man
anywhere to take her confession and lighten her mind. Prayer she
could make, and did—but for the sending of an unshriven soul to God
there was no comfort, and her thoughts had no sunshine.
Sometimes there was terror on her because she could no longer judge
Ruadan for the stark body at her feet in that first awesome night.
From the rath of Fethna to the garden of the nuns at Cluain-mac-noise
had been all the world known to her. Even in the raid of the Danes
on her father’s house, when the black smoke of burnings had left her
without roof of her own, or kindred of her own, she had been borne to
safety before the battle.
Of the foreign men who were pagans she thought no more than of
wolves in a pack leaving death on their path, but for Ruadan, called
evil, yet with knowledge of godly things, she could find no gentle
excuse—until her own hand had the secret stain of blood on it!
By that was she made kindred in evil to him, and the shining beauty
of her was under shadow from the thought.
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As strength came back and the wound healed, he had curious looks at
her, ever with the book of amber and pearl of sea on the cover. But
when he spoke of it she frowned her reproof.
“It is holy, and it is a safe charm to lead me out of the wilderness.”
“Yet is it made by the hand of a man,” he said.
“How should you be knowing that?” she asked. “It is knowledge not for
sinful men. My own thought is that Saint Kieran sent an angel to do
the words of this, it may be that a man made the cover.”
“It may be,” he said. “May the charm of it lead you safely, for
another night we leave this place. I am able. Even Dermot and Grania
never hid so long on the way to happiness as we here.”
“There is a difference,” she said, and she blazed a rose red at
thought of Grania’s love.
“There is,” he agreed. “Dermot had to his aid friends and gods.
The pagan gods are driven out by christian bells and there is only
the wilderness for us with that white cat on the trail. I must find
hiding for you and leave you there and gather men of the west to
serve as guard.”
“I will not be left again,” she said. “To be left behind in darkling
wood, or dreary cave, gives me more fear than to be on the way.”
She drove in a young cow and braided a rope of vines to hold her for
the killing that food might be theirs on the way, for their journey
along the shores of Lough Dearg must be in the nights, and all
movement in light of the sun was danger.
With his one well hand and her two they managed the killing, but she
turned away her head because the knife brought her thought of the
dead foreign man under the cliff.
Ruadan went through the russet fern and the berry vines seeking the
silky inner bark of a dead tree for the spark of flint and steel, and
when he found it he wandered on to the circle of stones to sharpen
spear and knife on the ancient altar. When he made his way back he
saw a strange thing, for the glen below the cliff was plain before
him, and he stood very still as if fearing the ancient gods had heard
his speech of their fading away. There was a glitter of gold and
a jewel among the ferns below him, and it was not a place for the
seeking of such wealth.
He crept forward, and saw the dog and the man who lay face downward
as he had been rolled from the cliff. And it was in the neck of the
man the jeweled dagger had been thrust deep. The sun shone on it
through a rift in the boughs above, and set it all aglitter.
It was the knife of Doirenn, and so deep had it struck that it took
a strong hand to draw it out. Away from there he cleansed it in the
earth, and washed it all in a shadowed rill, and brooded over it in a
maze of wonder.