Tim Severin - Odinn's Child

'Then perhaps you were imagining your friend in the form of this man Ardal. It seems an appropriate name for the king's champion. It means someone who has the courage of a bear.'

A berserker, I thought or was it because of the bear-claw necklace? And this thought distracted me from asking what the steward meant by a fuidir cinad o muir.

I never solved the mystery of Ardal because on the next celebration of Samhain I fell sick during the six-day walk to Cairpre. I developed a shivering fever, probably caught from too many damp days spent in Eochaid's forest retreat during what was a very wet summer, even by Irish standards. Eochaid left me in the care of a roadside hospitaller, whose wife fed me — as he had instructed — on a monotonous diet of celery, raw and in watery broth. The cure worked, but it gave me a lasting dislike for the taste of that stringy vegetable.

TWENTY-ONE

I WAS NOW in my nineteenth year, and my situation in the company of a forest-dwelling brithem, offered little opportunity for contact with the opposite sex. My heartbreak over Orlaith had left its mark, and I often wondered what had become of her. A sense of guilt for what had happened made me question whether I would ever achieve a satisfactory relationship with a woman, and Eochaid's attitude towards women only served to increase my confusion.

Eochaid regarded women as subject to their own particular standards. There was the day when two women appeared before him for judgement after one had stabbed the other with a kitchen knife, causing a deep gash. They were both wives of a minor ri, who had exercised his right to have more than one wife. When the two women were brought before Eochaid, he was told that the wounded woman was the first wife and that she had initiated the affray. She had attacked the new wife a few days after her husband had married for the second time.

'How many days afterwards?' Eochaid asked gently.

'Two days later, when the new and younger wife first came into the home,' came the reply.

'Then culpability is shared equally,' the brithem stated. 'Custom wife provided it is non-fatal and it is done in the first three days. Equally, the second wife has the right to retaliate, but she must limit herself to scratching with her nails, pulling the hair, or abusive language.'

An assault with words was, in brithem law, as serious as an attack with a weapon of metal or wood. 'Language,' Eochaid once said to me, 'can be lethal. A tongue can have a sharper edge than the best-honed dagger. You can do more damage by inventing a clever and hurtful nickname for your enemy than by burning his house or destroying his crops.' He then cited a whole catalogue of verbal offences, ranging from the spoken spells of witchcraft uttered in secret, through hurtful satire, to the jibes and insults which flew in a quarrel. Each and every one had its own value when it came to arbitration. 'If the monks ever told you that the drui used spells and curses,' he said to me on another occasion, 'they were confusing it with the power of language. A drui who aspired to be a fili ollam, a master of words, was striving for the highest and most difficult discipline, to deploy words for praise or poetry, irony or ridicule.'

That was the day he told me about his own time as a monk. We were seated on a log outside his forest hut after returning from an expedition to net small fish in the stream, when a blackbird burst into full-throated song from somewhere in the bushes. Eochaid leaned back, closed his eyes for a moment to listen to the birdsong and then began to quote poetry,

'I have a hut in the wood, none knows it but my Lord;

an ash tree this side, a hazel on the other,

a great tree on a mound encloses it.

The size of my hut, small yet not small,

a place of familiar paths; the she-bird

in its dress of blackbird colour sings

a melodious strain from its gable.'

He stopped, opened his eyes, and looked at me. 'Do you know who composed those lines?' he asked.

'No,' I answered. 'Are they yours?'

'I wish they were,' he said. 'They were spoken to me by a Christian hermit in his desert. He was living here, on this very same spot, when I first came across these woods. It is his hut which we now occupy. He was already an old man when I found him, old, but at peace with himself and the world. He had lived here for as long as he could remember, and he knew that his time would soon be over. I met him twice, for I came back a couple of years later to see how he was getting on and to bring him some store of food. He thanked me and rewarded me with the poem. The next time I came back he was dead. I found his corpse and buried him as he would have wished. But the poetry stayed echoing in my head, and I decided that I should go to the monastery where he had been trained, to visit the place where the power of such words is nurtured.'

Eochaid had enrolled at the monastery as a novice and within months was its star pupil. No one knew his brithem background. He had shaved his head completely to remove his distinctive tonsure, telling the monks he had suffered from a case of ringworm. With his phenomenal trained memory, book learning came easily to him and he quickly absorbed the writings of the early Christian authors. 'Jerome, Cyprian, Origen and Gregory the Great . . . they were men of acute perception,' he said. 'Their scholarship and conviction impressed me profoundly. Yet, I came to the conclusion that much of what they wrote was a retelling of the far earlier truths, the ones in which I had already been schooled. So in the end I decided that I would prefer to stay with the Old Ways and left the monastery. But at least I had learned why the Christianity has taken hold so easily among our people.'

'Why is that?' I asked.

'The priests and monks build cleverly on well-laid foundations,' he answered, 'Samhain, our Festival of the Dead, becomes the eve of their All Saints' Day; Beltane, which for us is the reawakening of life and celebrated with new fire, is turned into Easter even with the lighting of their Paschal Fire; our Brigid the exalted one, of whom I am a particular adherent, for she brings healing, poetry and learning, has been transmuted into a Christian saint. The list goes on and on. Sometimes I wonder if this means that the Old Ways are really still flourishing beneath the surface, and I could have stayed a monk and still worshipped the Gods in a different guise.'

'Didn't anyone at the monastery ask after the hermit who lived here? After all, he had been one of them.'

'As I warned you, the monks can be harsh towards people who abandon their way of life. They had a nickname for him. They called him Suibhne Geilt, after the "Mad Sweeney" who was driven insane by a curse from a Christian priest. He spent the rest of his life living among the trees and composing poetry until he was killed by a swineherd. Yet, such is the power of words that I have a suspicion that Mad Sweeney's verses will be remembered longer than the men who mocked him.'On the eve of my third Samhain in Eochaid's company he announced that, instead of going to Cairpre that year, he would travel east to the burial place of Tlachtga, daughter of the famed drui Mog Ruth. A distinguished drui in her own right, Tlachtga had been renowned for the subtlety of her judgements, and it was custom that those brithemain who were adepts in arbitration should assemble at her tomb every fifth year to discuss the more intricate cases they had heard since their last conclave and agree on common judgements for the future. The hill of Tlachtga lies only a half- day's travel from the seat of the High King at Tara, so it is here that the High King of Ireland also comes to celebrate the Samhain feast. 'It is one of the great gatherings in the land,' Eochaid told me, 'so perhaps Adamnan the Timid might be better advised to stay away. Equally, it might be a chance for you to learn whether you should begin using Diarmid as your alias.' It was an old joke of his. With his usual keen observation he had noted how I kept glancing at the younger women whenever we went to the settlements. In legend Diarmid carried on his forehead a 'love spot', a mark placed there by a mysterious maiden which caused women to fall madly and instantly in love with the handsome young man.