Tim Severin - Odinn's Child

TWENTY

'IF YOU ARE hungry as well as thirsty, I can offer you some food,' said this apparition.

Feeling foolish, I got to my feet. The stranger barely glanced back at me as he walked away through the undergrowth. There was no path that I could see, but I meekly splashed across the stream and followed him. Before long we came to a clearing in the wood which was obviously where he had set up his home. A small hut, neatly made of wattle and thatched with heather, had been built between the trunks of two large oak trees. Firewood was stacked beside the hut, and streaks of soot up the face of a large boulder and a nearby blackened pot showed where he did his cooking. A water bladder hung from the branch of a thorn tree. The stranger ducked into his hut and reappeared with a small sack in one hand and a shallow wooden bowl containing a large knob of something soft and yellow in the other. He tipped some of the contents of the sack into the bowl, stirred it with a wooden spoon, and handed the bowl and spoon to me. I took a mouthful. It proved to be a mix of butter, dried fruit and grains of toasted barley. The butter was rancid. I was not aware until then just how hungry I was. I ate everything.

The stranger still said nothing. Looking at him over the edge of the wooden bowl, I guessed he must be a hermit of some kind.

The monks at St Ciaran's had occasionally spoken of these deeply devout individuals who set themselves up in some isolated spot, far away from other humans. They wanted to live alone and commune in solitude with their God. St Anthony was the inspiration for many of them, and they tried to follow the customs of the Desert Fathers, even to the point of calling their refuges 'diserts'. They were not far removed in their behaviour from the pillar dwellers whom poor Enda had tried to emulate at St Ciaran's. What was odd was that this half-shaven hermit was so hospitable. True hermits did not welcome intruders. I could see no sign of an altar or a cross, nor had he blessed the food before passing it to me.

'Thank you for the meal,' I said, handing back the bowl. 'Please accept my apologies if I am trespassing on your disert. I am a stranger to these regions.'

'I can see that,' he said calmly. 'This is not a hermitage, though I have been a monk in my time as, I suspect, you have been.' He must have recognised my stolen travelling cloak, and maybe I had a monkish way about me, perhaps in my speech or in the way I had held the bowl of food.

'My name is—'. I paused for a moment, not knowing whether to give him my real name or my monastery name, for fear that he had heard about the fugitive novice called Thangbrand. Yet there was something in the man's shrewd gaze which prompted me to test him. 'My name is Adamnan.'

The corners of his eyes crinkled as he took in the implication of my reply. Adamnan means 'the timid one'.

'I would have thought that Cu Glas might be more appropriate,' he replied. It was if we were speaking in code. In the Irish tongue cu glas means literally a 'grey hound' but it also signifies someone fleeing from the law or an exile from overseas, possibly both. Whoever he was, this quiet stranger was extremely observant and very erudite.

I decided to tell him the truth. Beginning with my capture at Clontarf, I sketched in the story of my slavery, how I had come to be a novice monk at St Ciaran's and the events that had culminated in my flight from the monastery. 1 did not mention my theft of the stones from the Gospel. 'I may be a fugitive from the monks and a stranger in this land,' I concluded, 'but I originally came to Ireland hoping to track down my mother's people.' He listened quietly and when I had finished said, 'You would be wise to give up any hope of tracing your mother's family. It would mean travelling from tuath to tuath all across the country, asking questions. People don't like being cross-examined, particularly by strangers. Also, if you do manage to trace your mother's people, you may be disappointed in what you hear, and your curiosity will certainly have aroused suspicion. Sooner or later you would come to the attention of the abb of St Ciaran's, and he will not have forgotten the unfinished business between you and the monastery. You will be brought back to the monastery to stand punishment. Frankly, I don't think you would find much pity from him. The Christian idea of justice is not so charitable.'

I must have looked doubtful. 'Believe me,' he added. 'I know something about the way the law works.' This was, as I learned later, an extreme understatement.

The man I had mistaken for a hermit was, in fact, was one of the most respected brithemain in the land. His given name was Eochaid, but the country people who encountered him in the course of his work often referred to him as Morand, and this was a great compliment. The original Morand, being legendary as one of their earliest brithemain, was renowned as a man who never gave a flawed verdict.

My teachers at St Ciaran's had warned us about the brithemain, and with good reason. The brithemain are learned men — judges is not quite the right word — who trace their authority to a time long before any of the Irish had even heard of the White Christ. Many Irish — perhaps the majority — in the remoter parts still retain a profound respect for a brithem, and their deference galls the monks because the brithem lineage goes back to those early physicians, lawgivers and sages commonly known among the Irish as drui, a name the monkish scholars have been at pains to blacken. Yet the nearest word in their clerkly Latin that the monks could find to describe the drui was to call them magi.

I can write about these matters with some familiarity because, as it turned out, I was to spend almost as long in the company of Eochaid as I did with the brothers of St Ciaran's and, truth be told, I learned as much from him as I did from all the more erudite brothers put together. The difference was that in the monastery I had access to books, and the books provided me with most of my monastic education. Eochaid, by contrast, looked on book learning almost as a weakness. The brithemain did not write down the laws and customs — they remembered them. This required prodigious feats of memory, and I recall Eochaid saying to me one day that it needed at least twenty years of study to learn brithem law, and that was just the basics.

I would be proud to claim that Eochaid took me on as his apprentice, but that would not be true. I stayed with Eochaid because he invited me to remain for as long as I wished, and I found sanctuary in his company. For the next two years I served him in the capacity of an assistant or orderly, and at times as a companion. He had no ambitions for me as his student. He probably thought my memory was already too weak for that. The brithemain begin their studies when they are very, very young. Formerly there were official schools for the brithemain but they are nearly all gone and now the knowledge passes from father to son, and to daughters as well, for there are female brithemain of distinction.

I was lucky to stumble on him. Each year he spent only a few months in his forest retreat. The rest of the time he was a wanderer, travelling the country. But retreat to the forest was essential to him, and as a result he could identify the tune of every songbird, recognise the tracks left by deer or wolf or otter or hare or squirrel, name each shrub and herb and flower, and knew the medicinal properties of each of them. He was a herb doctor as well as a brithem, and as well as dispensing justice to the people we visited he also gave out medical advice. In his forest hut he was so calm and peaceable that the wild animals seemed to sense little danger near him. The deer would wander into the clearing by our hut to nose about the cooking fire, looking for grains that had dropped from our plates, and a tame badger lumbered unafraid around our feet and became a pet. But Eochaid was not sentimental about these animals. My second winter with him was bitterly harsh. Snow lay on the ground for a week — a most unusual event — and the ponds turned to ice. It was freezing cold in the hut and we came close to starving. The badger saved us - as a stew.