Chapter V: Part 5

“It will be in time,” he said. “No human thing can part us now, for our coming together on the sea had no mortal touch to it, yet we were as one soul. Since she lives nothing can change that. She is the soul of me.”

“She lives,” said Flann.

More than that he had no heart to say, but while food, and horse, and servant were made ready for the journey through the wilderness, Flann spoke apart to Ronan, his cleric and confessor, who had been with the men through the battles, and shrived them as they went the last Way.

“Is it madness of the mind is on him, or is it some spell of magic that makes for him a vision far out at sea of that which is true on land?” asked Flann. “Is it evil, or is it good?”

“It has been both. The words of druids and the words of saints are witness. It comes between a man and a maid. It comes not of earthly marriage but rather of separation of the mortal body. It comes of great strength and of much weakness. Saints have known it to the glory of God’s mysteries, but it is not for the telling to every asker of curious things. You have a kinsman in sanctuary who has the right to tell you more than I have right to know. The craft of idolatry, and the spells of druids, and power of saints, have one likeness to the eyes of the unlearned. Yet is there a difference, and a great differing, too! The mother of Liadan was of the race of Dana, and she went the Way at the birthing. Her child came into life with the sign on her of secret knowings. It is a thing of grief that she was bred in the rath of that dark woman of Slieve Mis who could use arts of her own on a child of secret vision.”

“You mean dark Moria, the nurse?”

“I mean Moria, the concubine of Donal, who went into death beside him. It is an old story and strange. The Dun of Donal is far enough in the wilderness to hide many secret things.”

“You know that I have taken his daughter Aevil to wife,” said Flann darkly.

“I do. You were swift about it, else I might have spoke caution. But the two are dead and God send that her evil died with her, and that your children live by God’s grace. Judge you not Kurithir with harshness because of his own words. The darkness is on his mind concerning this matter. Few of us see as God means us all to see in His own good time.”

“God be with us till the Day,” said Flann.

“By the Elements, and the Father and Son,” said Ronan.

The raiders were gone from Connaught and the work of the chiefs was done there, and Flann rode south and told Kurithir he rode to fetch back his new wife Aevil, from Dun Conchinn, where death had been, and many shadows. And Kurithir scarce noted that Flann rode neither in state nor in joy. He rode silent and with dark thoughts, and with few servants or comfort.

But he saw to it that none but himself held converse with his friend on the long south journey. And Kurithir went through the rivers and wilderness as he had sailed north over the sea, thrilled by the nearness of the sweet warm spirit of her.

It was at rising of sun they reached the Dun of Conchinn, and saw marks of the siege on it, and it was Aevil who met them in the hall, vested in royal weaves and with a golden circlet of richness above the black braids where pearls were woven. Already she was wearing all gauds and trappings of queenship, and waiting jealously the day of the succession of Flann.

She stared in dislike at his company.

“Have you fallen to meaner estate that you ride home with none of the chiefs you led away?” she asked. “A servant and a horseman is small retinue for Flann.”

“Greet my friend and send for your cleric,” said Flann. “I have questions to ask of this household.”

“I give greeting to any friend of yours, O Flann,” she said, “but your words and your looks coming back with him are not those of Flann, the prince, who went away with his many men of the shields.”

“If it is your will I will walk apart until granted welcome,” said Kurithir to Flann. “It is you who know best the desire of my heart and the way to it.”

“We will find that way,” said Flann, “but the first thing must come first! Send your maids to their duties. I want only your cleric, and his tablets for writing. It is your own desires I make plans for. You will not be wanting the enviers of a princess around you this day of your days.”

Kurithir was no less amazed than Aevil at the curious speech of Flann, or at his long curious stare at the cleric with his tablets and his scrivener.

“Send your assistant out of the hall,” said Flann, and went on staring, first at the comfortable, round old man, and then at the queenly woman he had called a star of beauty.

“Nealis of Desmond,” he said, “it is a long time you have been in the Dun of Donal, and it is much you have seen of the woman who died with Donal, and it may be much you had to know of her.”

Nealis, the cleric, went the color of old wax, and looked at Aevil, and Aevil flamed red while her brows were a straight black line of rage.

“What should he know?” she asked. “What should he know of my nurse and my friend? Why ask a man of the household and pass me by?”

“I asked for an answer—and I am answered,” said Flann. “Fear not that you will be the one passed by! I will ask another question. Nealis, it is not the husband of Aevil who asks you this, it is the man who is Ri Domna of Erinn. Donal talked with you here when I offered marriage to his child, Liadan?”

“That is true,” said the cleric, but his small eyes looked right and left like a trapped rat, fearing what the question might lead to.

“And it was that time the word went out that Liadan was dying of a secret ailment?”

Kurithir sprang to his feet, but Flann put out his hand in kindness.

“She did not die,” he said. “It was a crooked plan but of her death there was no need, and the plan was changed.”

He looked at Aevil, and the flame was gone from her face; she was gulping as if to strangle back some fury of protest.

“You were her confessor—also the confessor of Moria. You surely heard things curious between the two.”

“What should he hear more curious than other priests hear?” demanded Aevil after one look at his pallid face.

“It is not your confession, Aevil, for which I ask,” said Flann, “so rest you easy. But it may be easier for Nealis to tell the thing here where there are few ears than in open shame before the king and before his spiritual superiors. Nealis, was it drug of herbs Moria of the hills gave to Liadan, or was it the deeper craft of a mind chained until life and death was all one to her?”

“You are asking that which is not asked even by princes, and I would it were not asked,” said Nealis. But his voice shook and Aevil glared at him frowning, striving to make him meet her eye, which he would not.

“The witch is dead,” continued Flann. “I ask nothing concerning sins of the living, but this thing I mean to know. It is not best to depend on the grace of a Ri Domna’s wife. There will be no queen of mine but by my will—and justice may come before my will, and before I come to a king’s seat.”

“Is that gray rat to come between you and me even with your marriage gifts on me?” shrilled Aevil. “The High King may say something if you take two sisters to wife at the same time.”

“The sisterhood will come later,” said Flann in great quietness, and at that Aevil choked, and the cleric looked at Flann.

“It is little use to speak, since knowledge has somehow come your way,” he said. “I know of no drugs, but the Lady Liadan lived as in a trance when I was let see her. I was told it was a love sickness and that life was hateful. To me she said nothing but that she was a shamed maid, and that the man had sailed on the seas, and away from her.”

“She sees no man but you. Is she growing more weak as the days go?”

“No,” said the cleric with the first straight look, “she has slept well, and smiles now—and her maids no longer fear for her.”

“When did this begin?”

“It is strange to tell it, but the day of the battle with the Northmen was the day she changed. A swoon came on her, when the woman Moria died, but when she waked from it the trance look was gone. No fear of the battle touched her, so the women say. She is pale as a primrose, but she smiles again, and the maids now gossip that she sings in her sleep.”

“You tell more than you know, and you tell it straight,” said Flann. “She had lived under the black shadow of Moria of Slieve Mis until the life was smothered by that curse. When Moria died the shadow passed. Do you see, Kurithir?”

“I see and I know,” said Kurithir. “She was seeking me that first day of freedom, and found me at the nightfall.”

Aevil looked her scorn for the words she did not understand, and her look was black at Nealis of Desmond.

“There is one other thing,” said Flann. “The mother of Liadan was known, and her race was known since Erinn had a name to it. But who was the first wife of Donal of Dun Conchinn?”

Aevil arose, trembling with rage, and her eyes glaring down at him.

“Keep to your seat,” he said in the voice of a master. “I am to know these things and the reasons for them. A lady out of Spain was brought to these shores a bride in his youth, all are knowing that. But where is there some man or some woman to tell me when she died, and what of her children?”

There was silence and the breathing of Aevil could be heard as she leaned forward, her eyes on the cleric, and her hand slipping into the folds of her robe.

“I—I was not here at that time,” he said, stammering.

“But you have seen records, you know?”

“It—is true. I—”

No more than that was said when Aevil leaped forward with a slender Spanish dagger crashing for his throat, but Flann was quick, and caught her arm. She struggled and fought, but he shook her as he would a rat and flung her to the floor, where she lay senseless.

“The dagger is a dainty toy and useful,” he said. “It was perhaps for me she carried it.” Then he turned to the wounded and trembling man, “Go on, tell it as you meant to.”

“She knows,” he said, looking down on Aevil in her rich robes and braided pearls. “The Spanish wife died, and died soon, without children. Moria was then what she always has been, full of one thought only, and that for her daughter here. Donal himself had fear of her, and made promises to her and kept them.

“But when men looked on Liadan they did not forget her. She came before Aevil, despite the beauty of Aevil, and of that the troubles began, and many of them. It was jealousy first, and after that there is no knowing what it was, but it has brought terror, and it has brought grief to this roof.”

“Write this as you have told it,” said Flann, “and call the maids to look after the daughter of Moria. See that a guard is at her chamber door, and no more toys like this to play with.”

Then he turned to his friend.

“There will be no shadow between you ever again,” he said. “You have been shown all the reasons.”

“There can be no more shadows,” said Kurithir, and thought he spoke truly. He followed Flann through the hall, and to the grianan on the south wall; from there a troop of horsemen were seen lounging in the shadow, and four more with furnishings for women riders.

“It looks a holiday for gay gallants,” said Kurithir, but Flann had no smile; he strode to the door and threw it open.

The grianan was no longer the lightsome ladies’ chamber for broideries or games or music. An altar was there, and candles lit, and four nuns knelt where a priest recited a prayer, and their voices responded.

One voice out of the others pierced the heart of Kurithir, and he broke from his friend and called out in love, but the priest stepped between, and the eldest nun threw a gray veil over the primrose face he knew.

“Liadan!” he cried.

“Kurithir!”

She drew the veil aside, and the two lovers looked long at each other. But even with love in her eyes she put out her hand.

“It is for life, Kurithir,” she said.

“I have come for you!”

“Flann, my brother, tell him!” she said.

“I knew of this,” said Flann, “but had hope to outride the ending of it. This is why Aevil met us in queenly circlet and royal robes at sunrise to flaunt before Liadan a final magnificence.”

“We are here to guard a new sister on the way to sanctuary of Clonfert,” said the priest. “From this day she has no life in the world. Men are her brothers, women her sisters. There are no other human bonds for her.”

“But there are bonds not human, yet between two mortals,” said Kurithir. “I have gone through hell to learn that truly, and have sailed far over deep seas to bring the word to her.”

“It cannot be said here,” said the priest. “You are doing sacrilege in your speech. You disturb the spirit of her on her path to Paradise. You to your confessor for penance, and abide by his ruling!”

“Penance will I welcome for her sake,” said Kurithir, “and some brotherhood will I find to give right of converse with this, my friend. For that I will wear the robe and go into silence forever after.”

Her eyes were on his as she passed out the portal between the two nuns, and the look in her eyes was the look of the nights on the sea. Yet there was question in that look, and a wistful question.

Flann bade them farewell in the stead of Aevil, and watched them cross the plain into the forest.

“The evil magic of Moria lives on, even though her body is dead,” he said. “It was she put into the head of Donal this business of sanctuary—and Aevil helped as she might, until this is the end.”

Kurithir was silent, thrilled by that look, and dazed with the temptings to follow after, to take her and reach the sea and some land of foreign men, even though all the bells of Erinn rang their curses on him.

“Did you mean that as to wearing the robe of a brotherhood?” asked Flann.

“I would do more for one day of converse out of life with her,” said Kurithir.

That night he abode with Flann, and when the late stars were going into the west, she came as on the sea and crept between his arms, and lay silent there.

No songs were between them that night and no words. She rested like a tired bird after long wanderings, and in the morning he told Flann of how it was between them.

“She will walk free in a walled garden,” he said. “Peace she has and no fear, and in the Dun of Conchinn she had many and strange fears, and of them she would speak to me, and not in dreams.”

“I am believing your word,” said Flann. “No other man could, but I saw _the look_. In all of life I will see nothing again like that. My feet are on the earth, and my cares are of earthly things.”

A runner from the castle of the kings came to Flann at the breaking of fast, and he opened the seals of the tablet, and read, and took Nealis the cleric, and went to the chamber of Aevil.

“Daughter of Moria,” he said, “the dower of a daughter of Donal shall be your portion. It goes with you for gifts to whichever holy home of cloistered women you may choose from out all Erinn.”

She crested her head like a dark serpent, and her eyes were points of jet with jeweled disks on the band above them.

“My Spanish blade is not in my holding else there would be another man than you in line for the crown of Hugh,” she said. “You would wall me from the world that the grayling rhymer come to you at last. Late it is for that—and she under veil! All bells of church in Erinn would ring to damn you.”

“Liadan is not in this, nor can be,” he said. “You go to a cloister for a dagger stroke to a churchman, with thought to silence his speech in death. You could be killed like a wolf for that, and no one to make further question. But Liadan wears the veil to pray for sinners, and she would not have wish that you die in such sin as you have known. You go also into cloister lest you bring to birth a thing of poison such as your mother bred. You are of the women who know lusts, but not love, and such should not be breeding.”

“What then of the love of that grayling?” she asked in mock. “What is the thing it breeds in men?”

“Its breeding will last while speech of Erinn lasts—and after! Liadan’s is the mystical soul. Aengus of the white birds is the priest to hear her confessings. His is the key to unlock gates for Liadan where your feet and my feet may not walk.”

Then while she brooded there Flann turned to Nealis the cleric.

“To you the records of this,” he said, “and let me not hear even the name of cloister she is choosing. It is the daughter of Moria who enters that silence, and is not the wife of Flann. See you to that—and your life and her life to answer if there is mis-writing in this rule of mine!”

Aevil, glooming, took her last throw of the dice of fate.

“To the ears of Hugh the king this may go on a day to be,” she said, “and he may make other ruling against an heir of his.”

“The king of Erinn has no heir,” said Flann, “and when the time comes, it is a clean woman he will be choosing for the mother of heirs. That is a riddle for your reading.”

But she read it quickly and stood up, and cried aloud.

“He is dead then—dead at last! And _you_ are the king!”

“Since the sun of yesterday went down, I am king,” said Flann. “I go now for the seat of the king, and the taking of the white rod.”

Aevil, daughter of the dark woman, took from her hair the gold circlet she was pleased of her pride to wear, and trampled it under foot in her rage at the thing she had coveted and had lost. She knew no record would be writ into the annals of Flann to show that when he was only a prince, and had gay journeys for his pleasure, he had ever taken to wife a daughter of Donal of Slieve Mis.

But of Kurithir there were records, for there was grief on Erinn when he put aside the music of the world and took a monk’s robe for the cover of his youth.

And the day of days came to him when he earned indulgence of his confessor, Cummine, son of Fiancha, to talk apart in the walled garden, and the converse to be of things spiritual with a noble woman, and a youth between them as was custom with mortals in sanctuary.

And there Liadan came to him, and his hands touched hers after the long days.

“O Heart of me,” she said, “twice have I made earthly tryst with Kurithir, and this time he is keeping it!”

“And the May roses in bloom, and the thrush again singing,” he said. “Speak again, speak, Liadan! It is long we have whispered in the nights apart, and now you are in my touch, and I would hear your living voice, Liadan.”

“Kurithir, Kurithir, Kurithir!” she said. “There has been no music like your name written in my heart.”

“Your harp is with me. I mended the strings, and the wind plays on them in the nights in my window, Liadan.”

“I know,” she said, “and I wrote ‘love’ in _ogham_ on the frame of your harp, and you only found it there when you came back from the sea.”

“That is true,” he said, “and you knowing it! You are in the likeness of a flower, Liadan, yet are you strong as mortals are not strong, and you found strong ways to come to me over ocean.”

“I was dying that time, Kurithir, and the death shadow was on me for the shame that you thought my tryst song of evil boldness. The dark woman had sent me in sleeps to vision for her the unseen things, and when her bonds on me were loosed, your bonds drew me, and I found the way to you. You were the stronger then, Kurithir.”

“Liadan! Liadan! We have only this day.”

“Kurithir, we have all the days forever, Kurithir!”

The sun went behind the world, and the birds called to each their vesper song, and the moon of May grew warm through the dusk, and the youth walked in the shadows while Liadan lay in the arms of Kurithir. Their litanies of love were murmured there, and ever the wonder that their souls had found the way of meeting.

“You were the mystic rose, O Kurithir. The fragrance led me through the deep to you.”

“Oh, sweetest bloom! There was no fragrance on the sea till you were bringing it.”

“You heard the music, too, O Kurithir?”

“With my lips on your rose-leaf body I was hearing it all the nights. You brought it there.”

“It was like this—the clasp thrill of your hand.”

“It was like this—the yearning of my mouth.”

“Sweet dream—O Kurithir!”

“It was like this—O Liadan!”

The moon went down, and the stars of dawn broke on the world, and a veiled woman who had once dreamed of Erinn’s crown stood watching two sleeping lovers in the convent garden. A youth crept from the shadows at sound of her step, and lifted the discarded veil of Liadan.

He spoke, and the lovers wakened and smiled at the waking, and at the dear closeness of the other, but Liadan cowered in the arms of Kurithir at glimpse of the mocking eyes of the watching woman.

“Is it even to a cloistered garden that Aengus, god of Youth Dreams, brings you the key for soul mysteries, O Liadan of Kurithir?” she asked.

“The Liadan of Kurithir is a new name to me and a proud one, sister. Shadow there may be on it, but no shame.”

“By the Elements, you dare it well, grayling, and well your lover! It may be the prior and the abbess can give vouchings for you.”

Cummine came to them there at the bidding of Aevil, and shouted holy wrath at sight of the veil of Liadan.

“It was not told me that a veiled woman was the friend he would converse with in this sanctuary,” he said. “This is a shame beyond words to both our houses—and beyond penance.”

“I could kill you here, Liadan, before their hands touch your sweet body, Liadan,” whispered her lover. But she shook her head and took her veil from the youth.

“In that way we might lose each other in some dread darkness, Kurithir,” she said. “But now we will never lose each other. Give me sweet farewell, O Kurithir.”

“Liadan—O Liadan!”

“Kurithir!”

They bound him there and took him away for slow torturings and penance in a stone cell of the “Solitary Ones” on whom silence is put forever.

They stripped her in shame that she might walk in only her winding-sheet of the grave, and that walk was nightly, and her slender bare feet on the rough stones to the place of tombs. Before all the line of cloistered women she walked thus until the stones of the way were red from her bleeding feet.

After that they took her to a stone cell at the edge of the forest where holy women might not soil their eyes on her. Only her confessor and a poor lay sister came to her window there. She was under penance of silence, and writing-tablets were hers for speech.

She wrote prayers on the tablets, and she wrote confessions. There were times when she wrote poems.

The years left no trace of age on her—she was ever the primrose face of May. Marvels grew up around her because of that—and because of other mysteries.

At a time when the Danish raiders were stealing up the Sionan to the heart of the land, Kurithir wrote the number of their vessels and the number of their shields ere they had fared as far as Killaloe from the sea. When questioned, and told to speak, he asked that Flann, king of Erinn, be sent a warning and gather shields, for Liadan, of the cell in the forest, had seen them coming, and asked him in the night to send word to Flann the king.

When the men of Flann took the battle path and proved the truth of it by a battle with the foreigners, and brought back slaves and many spears, Flann himself rode to Clonfert and talked with the abbot there, and silence was lifted from Liadan and from Kurithir.

The son of a dead prince of Tormond was being disciplined at that time for the reason that he wished to revoke the gift of his life to the cloisters. The gift had been made by his kindred when he was a child, and was not binding on his soul. He had been with the spearmen for the defense against the Danes, and there was a wound in his shoulder, and he talked as prince to prince with King Flann.

“Since my days of a child I have lived this life, and the schools of it delight me,” he said. “I have joy in the work of the annals and their making. I may come back in gladness to cloisters when the snow is on my hair, but they call me ‘God’s Dastard’ for the reason that I would walk free into the world in my youth to win what youth may win.”

“It was not always so with him,” said his confessor darkly. “There was a time indeed when he was quite content.”

“Yes, when I was a child,” said the soldier-monk, but his face went white and he looked elsewhere.

“Come, tell me of it,” said Flann, and walked away with him.

“You are a man and not a monk, Flann, and I can speak. I was a child here—it is not so long ago. I saw the love-night of Liadan and Kurithir.”

Flann looked at him and the tears were thick in his eyes for the penance done for that one night of a May moon.

“Then you saw that which was holy, for there was no evil ever in the soul of Liadan,” he said. “You will come to my castle and make books as you will, or range free where you will. I heard of the hard penance given to that lad to force his speech of that night.”

“The scourgings were given, and were heavy,” said the youth, “but the speech they did not get.”

Flann took the youth away with him and later placed him back at the head of the province where his jealous kindred were dividing his goods and his lands.

So, by this and by that, Flann left trace of the heart-faith he gave to Liadan, and to his friend who had the love of her.

He lived as a king lives, and took to wife Maelmara, the queen of Hugh Finnlaith, who had no knowings of druid power or of jealous loves, and children grew around them to strengthen their bond.

But when the Night of nights was come to Liadan and Kurithir, and their souls met at last tryst, and did not come again to either body, it was Flann the king who did them honor. It was by his will that the building of their tomb was at the cell of Liadan in the edge of the forest where the thrushes sang.

It was also Flann the king who had their poems of love writ on fine vellum, and set in a golden, gem-crested casket, that the memory of Liadan might live.

But in the wreckage made by wars and plunderings of the men of Lochland the treasure books and annals of beauty were wrested from many a castle and monastery, and stripped of their cases of silver, and pale gold, and copper into which jewels were craftily set. Among such plunder of priceless worth fell the royal gifts of Flann the king, whose memorial slab at Cluain-mac-noise is a wonder of beauty after the passing of a thousand years.

And of the veiled poet-maid whose soul he saw rightly, there has come down through the centuries only fragments of her love lines, and among them her wistful unashamed confession:

“_I am Liadan
Who loved Kurithir,
It is true as they say._”

[Music: _Eleventh Century._]

DERVAIL NAN CIAR

(Dervail of the Shadow)

Ardan, the fosterling of Donough O’Carroll, King of Orielle, watched with longing the carving of the stone as leaf, and bud, and traceries grew under the precious tools of Brother Cormac for the new temple to God and Mary.

“To me the doing of that work would be dearer than to wear robe and circlet of the king,” he said.

“The cowl of a monk to you if cold stone contents your youth,” said Cormac. “Hard and cold it is. The crown of a king means warm robes, and warm cherishing on snowy nights, and—and all the other comforts a king can command. Go you to your verse-making and folly. Your head is o’er soft if you would trade a king’s crown for a mason’s tool—and neither crown nor trowel yours for the trading!”

“But to dream beauty and then form it out of the stone—that is to be as one of the _Daoine sidhe_” (Gods of the earth).

“You will burn in hell if you believe in the pagan ancient gods; not even must their names be said. To make speech of them calls them near.”

Then Cormac crossed himself, and muttered a bit of the lorica of Phadraig the Saint, and looked at the lad whose face had a pale dark beauty, and whose gray eyes looked black under heavy lashes.

“Take clay and make your dreams,” said Cormac at last. “If well mixed the mud will take all shapes. What are we all but the dust of the earth?”

“It is not in mud I see dreams,” said Ardan, “but you give me a thought, O Cormac!”

The white snow of the past night lay, rose-tinted, under the path of the early sun, and, singing low to himself, Ardan began to gather the whiteness on a great slab of gray stone near the south wall.

“It will not be mud of which I build my dreams, good Cormac.”

The monk watched him idly for a while, and then tossed to him a trowel from among the tools of the builders.

“It will take no harm from the snow,” he said, “and will save your hands. But make your play quick, for the sun travels north to bring the end of the cold moons.”

“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.