Odinn's Child

After the fourth or fifth of these self-important little cavalcades had splashed past us, the hooves of their horses sprinkling us with muddy water from the puddles, I ventured to ask Donnachad why the ri tuathre travelled with such large escorts when the land seemed so peaceful.

'It would be very wrong for a ri tuathre to travel alone. It would diminish the price of his face,' Donnachad answered.

'The price of his face?' I enquired. Donnachad had said 'log n-enech', and I knew no other way to translate it.

'The price of his honour, his worth. Every man has a value whenever he is judged, either in front of the arbitrators or by his own people, and a ri' - and here he sucked in his breath and tried to look a little more regal, though that was difficult in his shabby and mud-spattered clothes - 'should always act in measure with the price of his face. Otherwise there would be anarchy and ruin in his tuath.'

'So what would be the price of Cormac's face?' I meant this as a joke. I had noted that the Irish have a quick sense of humour and Cormac, one of Donnachad's cliathaires, was particularly ugly. He had bulging eyes, broad flat nostrils, and an unfortunate birthmark running down the left side of his face from his ear to disappear under his shirt collar. But Donnachad took my question entirely seriously. 'Cormac is a cow-freeman of good standing — he has a half-share in a plough team — so his face price is two and a half milch cows, rather less than one cumal. He renders me the value of one milch cow in rent every year.'

I decided to take my luck a little further. A cumal is a female slave, and Donnachad's reply would have some bearing on my own future as his property. 'Forgive me if I am being impolite,' I said, 'but do you also have a face price? And how would other people know what it was?'

'Everyone knows the face price of every man, his wife and his family,' he answered without even a moment's pause for thought, 'from the ri tuathre whom we saw just now, whose honour is eight cumals, to a lad still living on his parent's land whose face would be valued at a yearling heifer.'

'Do I have a face price too?'

'No. You are doer, unfree, and therefore you have neither price nor honour. Unless, that is, you manage to obtain your freedom and then by hard work and thrift you accumulate enough wealth. But it is easier to lose face price than to gain it. A ri endangers his honour if he even lays his hand to any implement that has a handle, be it hammer, axe or spade.'

'Does that include using a sword hilt as a mallet?' I could not refrain from answering, and Donnachad gave me a cuff around the head.

It was on the fourth day of our walk that I had my most notable encounter with this strange Irish notion of face price. We came to a small village where normally we might have stopped and bought some food. Instead we marched straight forward even though, as I knew, our supplies were running low. The brisk pace made my

back hurt. It was still sore from the blow received in the battle, but my companions merely told me to hurry up and not delay them and that I would soon have medicine to reduce the pain. They quickened their pace and looked distinctly cheerful as if anticipating some happy event. Shortly afterwards we came in sight of a building, larger than the usual farmhouse and set much closer to the road. I saw that it had a few small outhouses, but there were no cattle stalls nor any sign of farming activity around it. Nor did it have a defensive palisade. On the contrary, the building looked open to all and very welcoming. Without a moment's hesitation my companions veered from the track, approached the big main door and, barely pausing to knock, pushed their way inside. We were in a large, comfortable room arrayed with benches and seats. In the centre of the room a steaming cauldron hung over a fire pit. A man who was evidently the owner of this establishment came forward to greet Donnachad most warmly. Using several phrases of formal welcome, he invited him to sit down and take his ease after the weariness of the highway. He then turned to each of the cliathaires — ignoring me and Donnachad's servant, of course — and invited them likewise. Scarcely had our group found their seats than our host was providing them with flagons of mead and beer. These drinks were soon followed by loaves of bread, a small churn of butter and some dried meat. There was even some food for myself and Donnachad's elderly servant.

I ate quickly, expecting that we would soon be on our way. But to my puzzlement Donnachad and his cliathaires appeared to be settling in to enjoy themselves. Their host promised them a hot meal as soon as his cook had fired the oven. Then he served more drinks, followed by the meal itself, and afterwards made another liberal distribution of mead and beer. By then the cliathaires had settled down to story-telling, a favourite pastime among the Irish, where — as at Earl Sigurd's Jol feast in Orkney — each person at a gathering is expected to tell a tale to keep the others entertained. All this time more travellers had been entering the room, and they too were seated and fed. By nightfall the room was full to capacity, and it was obvious to me that our little party would be spending the night at this strange house.

'Who is the owner of the house? Is he a member of Donnachad's tuath?' I asked Donnachad's servant.

He was already drowsy with tiredness and strong drink. 'Doesn't even come from these parts originally. Set up here maybe four years ago, and is doing very well,' the old man replied with a gentle hiccup.

'You mean he sells food and drink to travellers, and is making his fortune?'

'No, not making his fortune, spending his fortune,' the old-timer answered. 'He's made his fortune already, cattle farming somewhere to the north, I think. Now he's earning a much higher face price and he well deserves it.' I thought the old fellow's wits were fuddled and gave up the questions. There would be a better time to solve the mystery in the morning.

In fact next morning was not the right time to ask questions either. Everyone had fierce headaches, and the sun was already high before we were ready to set out on the road again. I loitered, waiting for Donnachad to pay our host for all the food and drink we had consumed, but he made no move to do so, and our host seemed just as good-natured as when we first arrived. Donnachad muttered only a few gracious phrases of thanks and then we rejoined his men, who were trudging blearily forward. I sidled across to the elderly servant and asked him why we had left without paying. 'You never pay a briugu for hospitality,' he answered, mildly shocked. 'That would be an insult. Might even take you to court for looking to pay him.'

'In Iceland, where I come from,' I said, 'a farmer is expected to be hospitable and give shelter and food to travellers who come to his door, particularly if he is wealthy and can afford it. But I didn't see any farming near the house. I'm surprised that he doesn't move away to somewhere a bit more remote.'

'That's precisely why he's built his house beside the road,' explained the old man, 'so that as many people as possible can visit him. And the more hospitality he dispenses, the higher will rise his face price. That's how he can increase his honour, which is much more important to him than the amount of wealth he has accumulated.'

What the briugu would do when all his hoarded savings ran out, he did not explain. 'A briugu should possess only three things,' concluded the old man with one of those pithy sayings of which the Irish are fond, 'a never-dry cauldron, a dwelling on a public road and a welcome for every face.'

We arrived at Donnachad's tuath in the second week of Beltane, the month which in Iceland I had known as Lambfold-time. After trudging halfway across Ireland in the mud with Donnachad and his slightly shabby band, I was not expecting Donnachad's home to be very grand. Even so, its air of threadbare poverty was flagrant. His dwelling was merely a small circular building with walls of wattle and daub and a conical thatch roof, and the interior was more sparsely furnished than the briugu's roadside hostel. There were a few stools and benches, and the sleeping arrangements were thin mattresses stuffed with dried bracken, while the beaten-earth floor was covered with rushes. Outside were some cattle byres, a granary and a small smithy. There was also a short line of stables of which Donnachad was proud, though there were no horses in them at the present moment.

From the conversation of his cliathaires I gathered that Donnachad and his warriors had gone to fight alongside the Irish High King not from loyalty, but in the hope of bringing back enough booty to improve the hardship of their daily lives. The land on which their clan or fine lived was unproductive at the best of times, being waterlogged and boggy, and there had been so much rain during the last three summers that their ploughings had been flooded and the crops ruined. At the same time a recurring murrain had afflicted their cattle herds, and because petty kings like Donnachad and his chief farmers counted their wealth in cattle, this loss had brought them very low. The victory at the weir of Clontarf, as the battle was now being called, had been the only cheerful event in the past five years.

Donnachad put me to work as a field labourer, and he treated me fairly, even though I was a slave. He allowed me rest time at noon and in the evening, and the food he provided - coarse bread, butter and cheese, and an occasional dish of meat - was not much different from his own diet. He had a wife and five children, and the homespun clothes they wore were a sign of their very reduced means. Yet I never saw Donnachad turn away any stranger who came to the farm — the Irish expectation of hospitality extended farther than the briugus - and twice during that summer I was called in as a house servant when Donnachad entertained his clansmen at the banquets which they expected from a man with his log n-enech. The food and mead, I knew, were almost everything that Donnachad held in his storerooms.

That summer in the open air, herding cattle, minding sheep and pigs, making and mending fences, changed me physically and mentally. I filled out and grew in strength, my back healed, and my command of the Irish improved rapidly. I found I had a gift for learning a language quickly. The only disappointment was that my injured hand still troubled me. Though I flexed and massaged it, the fingers remained stiff and awkward, and it was a particular handicap when I had to grip a spade handle to cut and stack turf for Donnachad's winter fire or grapple with boulders that we pulled from the rough fields and heaped into boundary walls.

The harvest was poor but not disastrous, and soon afterwards I began to notice that Donnachad was showing signs of gathering anxiety. His normally cheerful conversation dried up, and he would sit for an hour at a time, looking worried and distracted. In the night I woke occasionally to hear the low murmur of voices as he talked with his wife, Sinead, in the curtained-off section of the house they called their bed chamber. In the scraps of their conversation I often heard a word I did not know — manchuine — and when I asked its meaning from Marcan, the elderly servant, he grimaced. 'It's the tax Donnachad must pay to the monastery in the autumn. It's levied every year, and for the past five years Donnachad has not been able to pay. The monastery allowed him more time, but now the debt has grown so large that it will take years to clear, if ever.'

'Why does Donnachad owe money to a monastery?' I asked.

'A small tuath like ours must have an over-ruler,' Marcan replied. 'We are too small to survive on our own, and so we pledge allegiance to a king who can give us protection when we need it, in a local war or a dispute over boundary lands or something of the sort. We give the over-king our support, and he gains in honour if he is acknowledged as over-king to several tuaths. Also he supplies us with cattle which we look after for him. At the end of the farming year we give back an agreed amount of interest, in goods such as milk and cheese or calves, and we do some service for him.'

'But how does a monastery get involved in all this?'

'The arrangement seemed sensible when Donnachad's grandfather made it. He thought the abb would be a more considerate overlord than our previous ri tuathre, who was always asking us to provide him with soldiers for his endless squabbles with other ri tuathre, or he would suddenly show up with a band of his retainers and stay for two or three weeks, treating our houses as his own and generally reducing us to beggary. Donnachad's grandfather came up with the notion of transferring our loyalty to a monastery. The monks weren't going to ask for soldiers to join in their wars, and they wouldn't come visiting so often either.'

'So what went wrong?'

'The new arrangement worked well for nearly twenty years,' Marcan replied. 'But then the new abb got grand ideas. He and his advisers began claiming a special sanctity for their own saint. He must have precedence over other monasteries with their patron saints. The abb started bringing in stonemasons and labourers to build new chapels and erect imposing monuments, and he began to purchase expensive altar cloths and employ the best jewellers to design and make fancy church fittings. It all cost a great deal.' More log n-enech, I thought.

'That was when the monastery treasurer began asking for increased returns on the cattle that had been loaned to us and, as you know, our cattle herding has not been lucky. Next, his successor came up with a new way of raising revenue. The monks now go on a circuit of their tuaths every autumn, bringing with them their holy relics to show the people. They expect the faithful to provide them with the manchuine, the monastery tax, so that the abb can continue the building programme. If you ask me, it will take another couple of generations for the job to be done. They're even asking for money to pay for missionaries whom the monks will send abroad to foreign countries.'

Marcan's remark about the missionaries reminded me of Thang-brand, King Olaf s belligerent missionary to Iceland, who had made such a nuisance of himself. But I wasn't sure of the old man's religious views so I kept silent.

'When are the priests due to make their next visit?'

'Ciaran is their special saint and the ninth day of September is his feast. So we'll probably see them in the next couple of weeks. But one thing's sure: Donnachad won't be able to settle the debt that the tuath owes.'

For some reason I expected St Ciaran's relics to be part of the saint — a thigh bone and a skull, perhaps. I had heard rumours that White Christ people revered these macabre remnants. But it turned out that the relics which the monks brought with them ten days later were much less personal. They were the crooked head of a bishop's staff and a leather satchel, which, they claimed, still held the Bible that their saint had studied. Certainly the crozier was proof of Marcan's assertion that the monastery had spent huge sums on glorifying their saint. The bent scrap of ancient wood was enshrined in a magnificent filigreed case of silver gilt, studded with precious stones and cleverly fashioned into the shape of a horse's head. This, the monks claimed, was the staff that Ciaran himself had used, and they held up the glittering ornament for all of us who gathered outside Donnachad's house to see and revere.

Strangely, they were even more reverential of the book. They affirmed that it was the very same miraculous volume that Ciaran had always carried with him, studying it at every available moment, rising at first light to begin reading, and poring over its pages far into the night, rarely setting it aside. And, unwittingly, they reminded me of the day my mother's hay had failed to dry after the downpour of rain at Frodriver, as they recounted the tale of how Ciaran had been sitting outside his cell one day when he was unexpectedly called away. Thoughtlessly he placed the book on the ground, lying open with its pages exposed to the sky. In his absence, a heavy shower had fallen; when he came back to collect the book all the ground was sodden wet, but the fragile pages were bone dry and not a line of the ink had run.

To prove it to us, the monks unfastened the satchel's leather thongs, solemnly withdrew the book and reverentially showed us the pristine pages.

Such tales made a great impression on Donnachad's people, even if they were not capable of reading and had no idea how to judge the age of the book. It made for an awkward interview as the little party of monks in their drab gowns stood in the centre the earth floor of Donnachad's home and asked for payment of their dues. The abb, or abbot, was represented by the treasurer, a tall, lugubrious man who exuded a sense of sad finality as he made his request. From where I was standing against the side wall with Marcan, I saw that Donnachad looked embarrassed and ashamed. I guessed that his log n-enech was at stake. Humbly Donnachad asked the monks to allow him and his people to pay off their obligation in small stages. He explained how the harvest had been a disappointment once again, but he would gather together as much produce as could be spared and deliver the food to the monastery throughout the coming winter. Then he delivered his pledge: as an earnest of his intention he would loan to the monastery his only slave, so the value of my work would be a surety to set against the annual debt.

The sad-looking treasurer looked at me where I stood against the far wall. I no longer wore a chain or manacles, but the scars on my wrists made my status obvious. 'Very well,' he said, 'we will accept the young man to come to work for us on loan, though it is not our custom to employ slaves in a monastery. However, the blessed Patrick himself was a slave once, so there is a precedent.' And with that I passed from the ownership of Donnachad, ri tuathe of the Ua Dalaigh, into the possession of the monks of St Ciaran's foundation.

SEVENTEEN

To THIS DAY I look back on my time at St Ciaran's monastery with immense gratitude as well as heartfelt dislike. I do not know whether to thank or curse those who were my teachers there. I spent more than two years among them and had no inkling that the knowledge made available to me was such a privilege. My existence seemed pointless and confined and there were many days when, in my misery, I feared that Odinn had abandoned me. With hindsight I am now aware that my suffering was only a shadow of what the All-Father endured in his constant search for wisdom. Where he sacrificed an eye to drink at Mimir's well of wisdom, or hung in agony upon the world tree to learn the secret of the runes, I had only to bear loneliness, frustration, bouts of cold and hunger, and the repetition of dogma. And I was to emerge from St Ciaran's monastery equipped with knowledge that was to serve me well every day of my life.

Of course, it was not meant to be like that. I came to St Ciaran's monastery as a slave, a non-person, a nothing, a doer. My prospects were as bleak as the grey autumn day on which I arrived, with the air already holding the chill promise of winter. I was a down payment against a debt, and my only value was the manual work I was able to perform to reduce the arrears. So I was assigned to the stonemasons as a common labourer and I would have

remained with them, hauling and cutting stone, sharpening chisels and heaving on pulley and tackle until I was too old and feeble to perform these simple manual tasks, if the Norns had not woven a different fate for me.

The monastery stands on the upper slope of a ridge facing west and overlooks a broad, slow-flowing river which is the chief river of Ireland. Just as Donnachad's royal home was not a palace in the accepted sense, so too St Ciaran's monastery is not the imposing edifice which might be imagined from its name. It is a cluster of small stone-built chapels on the hillside, interspersed with the humble buildings which house the monks and contain their books and workshops, and surrounded by an earth bank which the monks call their vallum. In physical size everything is on a modest scale, small rooms, low doors, simple dwellings. But in ambition and outlook the place is immense. At St Ciaran's I met monks who had travelled to the great courts of Europe and preached before kings and princes. Others were deeply familiar with the wisdom of the ancients; several were artists and craft workers and poets of real excellence, and many were genuine Ceili De, servants of God, as they called themselves. But inevitably there were also dullards in community, as well as hypocrites and sadists who wore the same habits and sported the same tonsures.

The abb in my time was Aidan. A tall, balding and colourless man with pale blue eyes and a fringe of curly blond hair, he looked as though all the blood had drained out of him. He had spent his entire adult life in the monastery, entering when little more than a child. In fact, it was rumoured that he was the son of an earlier abb, though it was more than a century since monks were allowed to have wives. Strict celibacy was now the outward show, but there were still monks who maintained regular liaisons with women in the extensive settlement which had grown up around the holy site. Here lived the lay people who provided casual labour for the monks - as their carters, ploughmen, thatchers and so forth. Whatever his origins, Abb Aidan was a cold fish, conservative yet ambitious. He ran the monastery along the same unwavering guidelines that he had inherited from his predecessors and he shunned innovation. His great strength, as he would have seen it, was his devotion to the long-term interests and continuity of the brotherhood. He intended to leave the monastery stronger and more secure than when he was first made abb, and if such a stiff figure recognised the frailty and impermanence of human existence, it was in order to concentrate his energy on longer-lasting material foundations. So Abb Aidan strove to increase the reputation of the monastery by adding to its material marvels rather than its sanctity.

He was fixated on finances. Brother Mariannus, the treasurer, saw the abb more than any other member of the community, and he was expected to render an almost daily account of the money that was owed, the taxes due, the current value of the possessions, the costs of administration. Abb Aidan was not avaricious for himself. He was interested only in enhancing the prestige of St Ciaran's, and he knew that this required a constant flow of income. Anyone who threatened that revenue was dealt with harshly. Most of the monastery's income came from renting out livestock, and in the year before I arrived a thief was caught stealing the monastery's sheep. He was hanged publicly on a gibbet just outside the holy ground. An even greater stir came in the second year of the abb's rule. A young novitiate absconded, taking with him a few articles of minor value — a pair of metal altar cups and some pages from an unfinished manuscript in the scriptorium. The young man disappeared in the night and managed to travel as far as the lands of his tuath. Abb Aidan guessed his destination and sent a search party after him, with orders that the stolen items be recovered and the miscreant brought back under guard. When I arrived at St Ciaran's, one of the first stories I was told in scandalised whispers was how the young monk had arrived on the end of a leading rope, his wrists bound, his back bloody from a beating. The other monks had expected that he would suffer a strict regime of mortification to atone for his sins, and they were puzzled when the young man was only held overnight at the monastery, then led away to an unknown destination across the river. A month later news filtered through that the young man had been placed in a deep pit and left to starve to death. Apparently it would have been profane to shed the blood of someone who had been about to promise himself to the Church, so the abb had revived a method of execution rarely used.

The yield from Abb Aidan's meticulous husbandry of the monastic finances was spectacular. The monastery had long been known for its scriptorium - the exquisite illumination of its manuscripts was famed throughout the land - but there was now a whole range of other skills devoted to the glorification of the monastery and the service of its God. Abb Aidan encouraged work in precious metals as well as in enamel and glass. Many of the craftsmen were the monks themselves. They created objects of extraordinary beauty, using techniques they sifted from the ancient texts or had learnt in foreign lands during their travels. And often they exchanged ideas with the craftsmen who came to the monastery, attracted by its reputation as a generous patron of the arts. I was put to work for one of these craftsmen, Saer Credine the master stonemason, because our abb believed that nothing could express immutable devotion better than monuments of massive stone.

Saer Credine was surprisingly frail-looking for someone whose life was spent carving huge blocks of stone with mallet and chisel. He came from a distant region to the south-west where the rocks break naturally into cubes and plates, and his tuath was a place where stoneworkers have been reared and respected for time out of mind. Any fool, he would say, could attack a lump of stone with brutish strength, but it took skill and imagination to see the finished shape and form within the rock and know how to coax that shape from the stone. That was the God-given gift. When he first made this remark, I thought he meant that the White Christ had endowed him with his skills.

Abb Aidan had commissioned him to produce an imposing new stone cross for the monastery, a cross to be the equal of any of the splendid crosses which already stood in the monastic grounds. The base was to show scenes from the New Testament and the shaft would be incised with the most renowned of St Ciaran's many miracles. The senior monks had provided the stonemason with rough sketches of the scenes - the resurrection of the White Christ from his tomb, of course, and the wild boar bringing branches in its jaws to make St Ciaran's first hut - and they checked that the tableaux had transferred correctly to the face of the stone before Saer Credine gouged the first groove. But from that moment onward there was little that the monks could do, and everything depended on Saer Credine's competence. Only the master stonemason knew how the stone would work, and by subtle distinction how to lead and instruct the eye of the beholder. And, of course, once the carver's blow had been struck there was no going back, no rubbing out, starting again and altering the moment.

By the time I joined his labour force, Saer Credine had the massive rectangular base nearly complete. It had taken him five months of work. On the front panel a shrouded Christ was emerging from his coffin watched by two helmeted soldiers; on the rear panel Peter and Christ shared a net while fishing for the souls of men. The two smaller end panels were simple interlace carved by Saer Credine's senior assistant because the master craftsman was already working on the great vertical shaft. It was of a hard granite, brought by raft down the great river and laboriously hauled up the hill to the shed where we worked. When I arrived, the stone lay on its side, sheltered by a roof. It was supported on huge blocks of wood so as to be at a convenient height for Saer Credine to strike the surface. My first task was no more than to pick up the stone chips that dropped into the muddy ground, and at dusk my duty was to cover the half-completed work with a layer of straw against the frost. I was also, by default, the nightwatchman because no one had assigned me a sleeping place and I slept curled up on the straw bales. At breakfast time I went to stand in line with the other servants and indigents who came to the monastery kitchens to seek charity of milk and porridge, then I carried the food back to eat as I squatted beside the great block of stone that rapidly became the fixed point of my slave's existence. After a few days of gathering stone chips it was a short step to being given the task of brushing clean the worked face of the stone whenever the master craftsman stepped back to view his work or take a break from his labour. Saer Credine never made any comment on how he thought his work was progressing, and his face was expressionless.

Within a month I had graduated to the task of sharpening Saer Credine's chisels as well as wielding the sweeper's brush, and he even let me strike a few blows on the really rough work, where there was not the slightest chance that I could do any harm. Despite my stiffened left hand, I found that I was fairly deft and could cut a true facet. I also discovered that Saer Credine, like many craftsmen, was a kindly man beneath his taciturn exterior, and extremely observant. He noted that I took a more than usual interest in my surroundings, wandering round the monastery enclosure whenever possible to see what was going on, examining the other stone crosses that already stood with their instructional scenes. But, typically, he said nothing. After all, he was a master craftsman, and I was a doer, nothing.

Late one evening, when the butt of the shaft was finished, neatly flattened across the base and precisely squared on each of its corners ready to be dropped into its socket on the base, Saer Credine cut some marks which puzzled me — they looked like scratches, twenty or thirty of them. He made them after the other workmen had left, and he must have thought himself unobserved when he took his chisel and lightly chipped the lines across one of the corners. He made the marks so delicately that they could hardly be seen. Indeed, once the shaft was set into its socket hole the lines would be buried. Had I not observed him doing the work, I would not have known where to look, but I glimpsed him stooping over the stone, fine chisel in hand. When he had gone home I went to where he had been working and tried to puzzle out what he had been doing. The lines were certainly nothing that the abb and his monks had ordered. At first I thought they might be rune writing, but they were not. The lines were much simpler than the runes with which I was familiar. They were straight scratches, some long, some short, some in small clusters and several at a slant. They had been cut so that some were on one face of the squared-off stone, others on the adjacent face, and a few actually straddled both faces. I was completely baffled. After gazing at them for some time, I wondered if I was missing any hidden details. I tried running my fingertips over the scratches and could feel the marks, but they still made no sense. From the ashes of the midday cooking fire, I took a lump of charcoal and, laying a strip of cloth over the corner of the shaft, I rubbed the charcoal on the cloth to reproduce the pattern on the material. I had peeled the cloth away from the stone and laid it out flat on the ground so that I could kneel down and study it, when I became aware of someone watching me. Standing in the shelter of one of the monks' huts was Saer Credine. He had not gone back to his house, which was his usual custom, but must have returned to check on the final details for the stone shaft which was to be erected next day.

'What are you doing?' he demanded as he walked towards me. I had never heard him so gruff before. It was too late to hide the marked strip of cloth as I scrambled to my feet.

'I was trying to understand the marks on the cross shaft,' I stammered. I could feel my face going bright red.

'What do you mean "understand"?' the stonemason growled.

'I thought it was some sort of rune writing,' I confessed.

Saer Credine seemed surprised as well as doubtful. 'You know rune writing?' he asked. I nodded. 'Come with me,' he stated bluntly and set off at a brisk walk, crossing the slope of the hill to the site where many of the monks had been buried, as well as visitors who had died on pilgrimage to the holy place. The hillside was dotted with their memorial stones. But it was not a monk's last resting place that interested Saer Credine. He stopped in front of a low, flat, marker stone, set deep in the ground. Its upper surface had been carved with symbols.

'What does that say?' he demanded. I did not hesitate with my reply. The inscription was uncomplicated and whoever had cut it used a simple, plain form of the futhark. 'In the memory of Ingjald,' I replied and then ventured an opinion, 'he was probably a Norseman or a Gael who died while he was visiting the monastery.'

'Most of the Norse who came to visit this place didn't get a memorial stone,' the stonemason grunted. 'They came upriver in their longships to plunder the place and usually burned it to the ground, except for the stone buildings, that is.'

I said nothing, but stood waiting to see what my master would do next. It was in Saer Credine's power to have me severely punished for touching the cross shaft. A mere slave, and a heathen at that, who touched the abb's precious monument could merit a whipping.

'So where did you learn the runes?' Saer Credine asked.

'In Iceland and before that in Greenland and in a place called Vinland,' I replied. 'I had good teachers, so I learned several forms, old and new, and some of the variant letters.'

'So I have an assistant who can read and write, at least in his own way,' said the stonemason wonderingly. He seemed satisfied with my explanation, and walked back with me to where his great cross shaft lay on its trestles. Picking up the nub of charcoal I had left behind, he searched for a flat piece of wood, then shaved a straight edge with his chisel.

'I know a few of the rune signs, and I've often wondered whether the runes and my own writing are related. But I've never had a chance to compare them.' He made a series of charcoal marks along its edge. 'Now you,' he said, handing me the wooden stick and the charcoal. 'Those are the letters I and my forebears have used through the generations. You write your letters, your futhark or whatever you call it.'

Directly above my master's marks I scratched out the futhark that Tyrkir had taught me so long ago. As the letters formed I could see that they bore no resemblance to the stonemason's writing. The shapes of my runes were much more complicated, cut at angles and sometimes turning back on themselves. Also there were several more of them than the number of Saer Credine's letters. When I had finished copying, I handed the stick back to Saer Credine and he shook his head.

'Ogmius himself could not read that,' he said.

'Ogmius?' It was a name I had not heard before.

'He's also called Honey Mouth or Sun Face. Depends who you are talking to. He's got several names, but he's always the God of writing,' he said, 'He taught mankind how to write. Which is why we call our script the ogham.'

'It was Odinn who acquired the secret of writing, according to my instructors, so perhaps that is why the two systems are different,' I ventured. 'Two different Gods, two different scripts.' Our conversation made me feel bolder. 'What is it that you wrote on the cross shaft?' I asked.

'My name and the name of my father and my grandfather,' he replied. 'It has always been the custom of my family. We carve the scenes that men like Abb Aidan decide for us, and we take pride in such work and we do it as well as our gifts allow. But in the end our loyalty goes back much farther, to those who gave the skill to our hands and who would take away that skill if we did not pay proper respect. So that is why we leave our mark as Ogmius taught. The day that this cross is set in the foundation stone I will leave him a small offering beneath the shaft in thanks.'

Saer Credine gave me no hint of what he must have decided that evening when he learned that I could read and write the runes.

Three days later I received word that Brother Senesach wanted to speak with me. I knew Brother Senesach by sight and reputation. He was a genial and vigorous man, perhaps in his fifties. I had seen him frequently, striding around the monastery grounds, ruddy-faced and always with an air of unhurried purpose. I knew that he was in charge of the education of the younger monks, and that he was popular with them on account of his good nature and his obvious concern for their well-being.

'Come in,' Senesach called out as I paused nervously at the doorway of his little cell. He lived in a small hut made of wattle and daub and furnished with a desk, a writing stool and a palliasse.

'Our master stonemason tells me that you can read and write, and that you take an interest in your surroundings.' He looked at me keenly, noting my ragged shift and the marks left on my wrists by the manacles from Clontarf. 'He also says that you are hardworking and good with your hands, and suggested that you might one day become a valuable member of our community. What do you think?'

I was so surprised that I could scarcely think what to reply.

'It's not only the sons of the well-to-do who join us,' Senesach went on. 'In fact we have a tradition of encouraging young men of talent. With their skills they often contribute more to our community than the material gifts which the richer recruits bring.'

'I'm very grateful for your thoughtfulness and to Saer Credine for his kind words,' I replied, seeking to gain a moment's thinking space. 'I have never even imagined such a life. I suppose my first worry is that I am not worthy to devote my life to the service of Christ.'

'Few newcomers to our community are completely certain of their calling when they first arrive, and if they are, that is something of which I personally would be rather wary,' he answered gently. 'Anyhow, humility is a good place to start from. Besides, no one would expect you to become a fully observant monk for years. You would begin as a trainee and under my instruction learn the ways of our brotherhood, as scores have done before you.'

It was a suggestion which no slave could possibly have turned down. I had no one to pay a ransom for me, I was far from the places where I had grown up, and until a moment ago I had no prospects. Suddenly I was being offered an identity, a home and a defined future.

'I've already talked to the abb about your case,' Senesach continued, 'and although he was not very enthusiastic to begin with, he agreed that you should have a chance to prove your worth. He did say, however, that you might find that being a servant of God was more demanding than being slave to a stonecutter.'

It occurred to me that perhaps Odinn had at last observed my plight and arranged this sudden opportunity. 'Of course I shall be happy to join the monastery in whatever capacity you think fit,' I said.

'Excellent. According to Saer Credine your name was Thorgils or Thorgeis, something like that. Much too heathen sounding. You had better have a new name, a Christian one. Any suggestions?'

I thought for a moment before replying, and then — silently acknowledging Odinn the Deceiver — I said, 'I would like to be called Thangbrand, if that is possible. It is the name of the first missionary to bring the White Christ's teachings to Iceland, which is where my people came from.'

'Well, no one else here has got a name like that. So Thangbrand it will be from now on, and we'll try to make it appropriate. Maybe you will be able to go back one day to Iceland to preach there.'

'Yes, sir,' I mumbled.

'Yes, Brother. Not sir. And we don't talk of the White Christ here, it is simply Christ or Jesus Christ, or Our Lord and Saviour,' he answered, with such sincerity that I felt a little ashamed. I hoped he would never discover that Thangbrand had failed completely in his battle against the Old Ways.

As the abb had warned, the physical life of a young novitiate at St Ciaran's monastery was little different from my days working for Saer Credine. I found that my previous chores as a slave were mirrored in my duties as a trainee monk. Instead of sweeping up the stonemason's chippings, I swept out the senior monks' cells and emptied their slops. In place of hammer and chisel, I grasped a hoe and spent hours stooped and hacking away at the rocky soil in the fields which my brethren and I prepared for planting. Even my clothing was much the same: previously I had worn a loose tunic of poor stuff held in at the waist with a bit of string. Now I had a slightly better tunic of unbleached linen with a waist cord, and a grey woollen cloak with a hood to go over it. Only my feet felt different. Previously barefoot, now I wore sandals. The major change was in discipline and for the worse. As a slave I was expected to rise at dawn and work all day, with a break for a midday meal if I was lucky, then curl up for a good night's rest so that I would be fit and strong for the next day's labour. A monk, I found, got far less rest. He had to rise before dawn to say his prayers, work in the fields or at his desk, repeat his prayers at regular intervals, and often went to bed far more exhausted than a slave. Even his diet was little consolation. A slave might be inadequately fed, but the monk ate coarse food that was little better. Worse than that, he often had to fast and go hungry. Wednesdays and Fridays were both fast days at St Ciaran's, and the younger ones among us ate double portions of food on Thursday, if we could.

But none of this mattered. Senesach's benevolence threw open the door of learning, and I walked in and revelled in the experience. As a slave I had been credited with the mind of a slave and offered only the knowledge that was relevant to my work - how best to scour a cooking pot with sand, stack a pile of turf, straighten a warped plough handle by soaking it in hot water. Now as a monk in preparation I was offered schooling in an extraordinary range of skills. It began, of course, with the requirement to learn to read and write the Roman script. Senesach produced a practice book, two wax tablets held in a small wooden folder, and he drew for me the letters, scratching them with a metal stylus. I think that even Senesach was astonished that it took me less than three days to learn the entire alphabet, and that I was writing coherent and reasonably well-spelt sentences within the same week. Perhaps my mind was like a muscle already exercised and well developed when I learned the rune writing and the rune lore — of which I said nothing — and had gone slack from disuse. Now all it needed was sharp stimulus and practice. My fellow students, as well as my teachers, soon came to consider me something of a prodigy when it came to the written or the spoken word. Maybe my combination of Norse and Irish ancestry, both peoples who relish the rhythms of language, also accounted for my fluency. In less than six months I was reading and writing Church Latin and was halfway to a working knowledge of French, which I was learning from a brother who had lived in Gaul for several years. Both the German tongue and the language of the English posed little difficulty, for they were close enough in pronunciation and vocabulary to my own donsk tong for me to understand what was said. By my second year I was also reading Greek.

My talent with words kept me on the right side of Abb Aidan. I had the feeling that he was waiting for me to falter and disgrace myself, but he could only acknowledge that I was among the star pupils of the community when it came to that prime requirement of memory - the learning of the psalter. There were some one hundred and fifty psalms and they were our chief form of prayer, chanted at holy service. Normally it took years for a monk to have the entire psalter word-perfect, and most of my contemporaries knew only the most popular psalms, those that we repeated again and again. But for some reason I found that I could remember almost every word and line more or less at the first hearing, so I found myself singing out the verses, line by line, while most of my colleagues were mumbling or merely joining in the refrain. My memory for the psalms was uncanny, though, as someone remarked, it was closer to the devil's work because, although I could remember the words, my singing of them was discordant and grating and offended the ears.

My new-found mastery of the Roman script meant that I was able to soak up all manner of information from the written page, though at first it was difficult to gain access to the monastic library because Brother Ailbe, the librarian, believed that books were more valuable than the people who read them, and he discouraged readers. In a way he was justified, as I came to appreciate when I was assigned to labour in the scriptorium. The manuscripts in his care were the glory of St Ciaran's and exceedingly valuable, even in the physical sense. The skins of more than a hundred calves were required to make sufficient vellum for a single large volume, and in a land where wealth is counted in cattle this is a prodigious investment. Eventually Brother Ailbe did come to trust me enough to let me browse the shelves where the books were stored and I found most of the volumes were Holy Scripture, mainly copies of the Gospels with their canon tables, breves causae and arguments and paschal texts. But there were also writings from classical authors such as Virgil, Horace and Ovid, and works of Christian poetry by writers such as Prudentius and Ausonius. My favourite was a book of geography written by a Spanish monk named Isidore, and I spent hours dreaming of the exotic lands he described, little knowing that one day I would have the chance to see many of them for myself. I had a magpie's facility to select and carry away bright scraps of unrelated information in my head, and my erratic robbery from these solemn texts quickly irritated my teachers, the older and more learned monks who were assigned to give the novices their classes in such subjects as history, law and mathematics.

As novices, we were expected not just to acquire knowledge, but also to preserve and transmit its most precious elements, namely the Holy Scripture. That meant copying. We were issued once again with the wax tablets from which we had learned the alphabet, and shown how to form our letter with the help of a metal stylus and ruler. Over and over again, we practised, until we were deemed fit to mark the surface of reused vellum, over-writing the faint and faded lines left by earlier scribes until we had the gist of it. At that stage we were mixing our own ink from lamp black or chimney soot. Only when we could write a perfect diminuendo, starting with a large initial letter and then progressively writing smaller and smaller along the line, until the eye could scarcely distinguish the individual letters, were the most deft of us permitted to work on fresh vellum. It was then I appreciated why the monastery needed a never-ending supply of younger monks for the famed scriptorium just as much as it needed flocks of calves and lambs to produce the vellum skins. Young animals provided unblemished skin, and young monks provided sharper eyes. Our finest copyists were men of early to middle age, deft, clear-eyed and with remarkable artistic imaginations.

Strangely, the materials designed to please the eye remain in my memory according to their smells. The raw calfskins had been steeped in a fetid concoction of animal dung and water to loosen the hairs so they could be scraped off easily, and they gave off a pulpy, fleshy odour while stabilising in a wash of lime. Oak galls had a bitter stink when crushed to provide our best red ink, and as for greens and blues I still smell the sea whenever I see those colours. They were made by squeezing out the juice from certain shellfish found on the rocks. We then left the liquid to fester in the sun, which made the extract alter from green, to blue, to purple, all the while giving off the pungent smell of rotting bladderwrack. It complemented the fishy odour of the fish oil we employed to bind the ink.

The transformation of these reeking originals to such beauty on the page was a miracle in itself. I was never an outstanding copyist or illustrator, but I acquired enough of the techniques to appreciate the skill involved. Observing one of our finest illuminators decorate the initial letter of a Gospel would make me hold my breath in sympathy in case he made a slip. He required a steady hand as well as the finest brush - the hair from the inside of a squirrel's ear was favoured for the most delicate work — and a rare combination of imagination and geometric skill to interweave the lacing patterns that twined and curved like tendrils of some unearthly plant. Curiously, I was reminded of the patterns that I had seen — it seemed so long ago — carved on the curling stem post of King Sigtryggr's royal ship when he sailed from Orkney. How or why the patterns, Christian initial and Viking prow, were so similar I did not know. What was even stranger was that so many of the bookish trellis patterns ended in a snarling figurehead. That I could understand on the high bow of a ship of war, designed to frighten the enemy, but how the motif was found in a book of Holy Scripture was beyond my understanding. Still, it was not a topic on which I dwelt. The extent of my contribution in penmanship was to write the occasional line in black, using the tiny script which Abb Aidan favoured because it meant more words could be squeezed on each expensive square inch of vellum, and I was delegated to fill in the red dots and lozenges which were liberally scattered across the page as decoration. This kept me occupied for hours as they could number in the hundreds on a single page.

It would be wrong if I gave the impression that my life as a novice monk was spent in the fields, the schoolroom or the scriptorium. Religious instruction was severe and unfortunately was the responsibility of Brother Eoghan, who was at the opposite remove from the kindly Brother Senesach. Brother Eoghan's appearance was deceptive. He looked benign. Rotund and jovial-seeming, he had dark hair and very dark eyes that seemed to gleam with a humorous twinkle. He even had a booming, cheerful-sounding voice. But any of his pupils who presumed upon his good nature were quickly disillusioned. Brother Eoghan had a vicious temper and a grinding sense of self-righteousness. He taught not through reason, but strictly by rote. We were required to memorise page after page of the Gospels and the writings of the Church Fathers, and he tested us on our acquisition of the texts. His favoured technique was to pick out an individual in his class, demand a recitation, and when the victim stammered or erred, to suddenly rum to another student and shout at him to continue. Terrified, the second performer was sure to make a mistake, and then Brother Eoghan would swoop. Seizing the two novices, each by his hair, our tutor would complete the quotation himself, grinding out the words through gritted teeth, his face set grimly, and punctuating each phrase by banging together the two heads with a steady thump.

Every novice, and there were about thirty of us, reacted in his own way to the unyielding world in which we found ourselves. Most were meekly acquiescent and followed the rules and routines laid down. Only a handful were genuinely enthusiastic for the monkish life. One young man — his name was Enda and he was a little simple - sought to model himself on the Desert Fathers. Without informing anyone, he climbed to the top of the round tower. This was St Ciaran's most spectacular edifice, a slim spike of stone which had been a lookout in the days of the Viking raids, but now mostly used as a bell tower. Enda clambered to the very top, where, naturally, he was out of sight from the ground, and sat there for four days and four nights while the rest of us searched for him uselessly. It was only when we heard his weak calls for a supply of bread and water and saw the end of a rope he had lowered down - he had misjudged the height and his rope was dangling far too short - that we knew where he was. Brother Senesach organised a rescue party, and we clambered up and retrieved Enda, who by then was too feeble to move. He was taken to the infirmary and left there to recover, but the experience seemed to have left him even weaker in the head. I never knew what finally became of him, but in all likelihood he became a monk.

EIGHTEEN

I MADE ONLY one real friend among my fellow novices in the two years I spent at St Ciaran's. Colman had been sent there by his father, a prosperous farmer. Apparently the farmer had prayed to St Ciaran for relief when a severe cattle murrain had affected his herd. As a remedy he had smeared his sick animals with a paste made from earth scraped from the floor of the saint's oratory. When the cattle all recovered, the farmer was so grateful that he enrolled the lad — the least promising of his six sons — with the monks as a thank offering for the saint's beneficial intervention. Solid and reliable, Colman stood by me when the other novices, jealous that I outshone them in the classroom, ganged up to bully me about my own alien origins. I repaid Coleman's loyalty by helping him with his studies — he was something of a plodder when it came to book learning — and the two of us made an effective team when it came to breaking the bounds of monastic discipline.

Our dormitory huts were situated on the northern side of the monastery grounds, and at night the bolder ones among us would sometimes scramble over the monastery bank to see what the outside world was like. Slinking among the houses that had grown up around St Ciaran's, we watched from the shadows how ordinary people lived, eavesdropped on quarrels and conversations heard through the thin walls of their dwellings, listened to the cries of babies, the drinking songs and the snores. We were discreet because there were townsfolk who would report our presence to the abb if they saw us. When that happened the punishment was harsh. Spending three or four hours flat on your face on the earth floor reciting penances was the least of it. Worse was to be made to stand with your arms outstretched as a living cross until the joints creaked with pain, supervised by one of the more callous senior brothers, while reciting, over and over again, 'I beseech pardon of God,' 'I believe in the Trinity,' 'May I receive mercy.' Little mercy was available. One of the novices, reported for the second time for a nocturnal excursion, received two hundred lashes with a scourge.

A short walk from the monastery was a small stone-built chapel, sheltering in a wood. No one knew who had built it there or why. The monks at St Ciaran's denied any knowledge of its origins. The place was nothing to do with them, and they never went there. The little chapel was abandoned and falling into disrepair and housed, as we discovered, a hidden attraction. Which novice first found the lewd sculpture, I do not know. It must have been someone with remarkably sharp eyesight, for the carved stone was tucked away among the stones forming the entry to the chapel, and under normal circumstances it would have been invisible. Whoever found the carving mentioned it to his friends and they in turn passed on the knowledge to other students, so that it became a sort of talisman. We called the stone the Sex Hag, and most of us, at some stage, crept down to the chapel to gaze at it. The carving was as grotesque as any of the strange and leering beasts which appeared in our illuminations. It showed a older and naked woman, with three pendulous breasts sagging from a rugged rib-cage. She was seated with her legs apart and knees open, facing the observer. With her hands she was pulling apart the lips of her private entry and on her face was a seraphic smile. The effect was both erotic and demonic.

Of course, there was a good deal of salacious talk inspired by the Sex Hag's revelations, but for the most part it was ignorant speculation as we had few occasions to meet any women. Indeed the frightening posture of the Sex Hag acted as a deterrent. Several of the novices were so disturbed and repelled by the graphic quality of the carving that I doubt they ever touched a woman thereafter.

The same cannot be said for me. I was intensely curious about the opposite sex and spent a good deal of time trying to devise a way of striking up an acquaintance with a female of my own age. This was well-nigh impossible. Our community was all male, and our only regular women visitors were those who came from the nearby settlement to visit the infirmary or to offer prayers at the various oratories. Unfortunately they seldom included anyone who was youthful and nubile. Sometimes a young and unmarried woman was glimpsed among the pilgrims who came to St Ciaran's shrine, and we younger monks would gaze in fascination, telling ourselves there was nothing wrong in our curiosity because the temptation was only momentary as the pilgrims would linger just a few hours, then vanish out of our lives for ever.

It was Brother Ailbe the librarian who, unwittingly, provided me with the long-desired chance to meet a female of my own age. Our keeper of books was so solicitous about the well-being of the precious volumes that he wrapped all the important books in lengths of linen, then stored them in individual leather satchels to protect them from harm. One day he decided that the satchel which contained St Ciaran's own copy of the Bible — the same book which had been paraded before Donnachad on the day I was handed over to the monastery as a slave — needed attention. For any other book in his library Brother Ailbe would have ordered a replacement satchel from the best leather-worker in the town, sending a note with the necessary dimensions of the volume and waiting for the finished satchel to be delivered. But in this case the existing satchel was something very special. It was claimed that St Ciaran himself had sewn the satchel. So there was no question of throwing it away and ordering a new one. Yet the existing satchel was so shabby that it did no honour to the saint's memory, and there was an ugly rip in the leather that cut right across the faint marks which, it was said, were the fingerprints of the saint himself.

Brother Ailbe decided to entrust the repair to a craftsman living in the town, a man by the name of Bladnach, who was a master of the long blind stitch. In this technique the needle, instead of passing straight through the leather, is turned and runs along within the thickness of the skin to emerge some distance away from where it entered so that the thread itself is invisible. But using a long blind stitch on old and brittle leather is a risk. There is only one opportunity to run the needle in. There can be no second chance, no withdrawing the point and trying again, as this destroys the original substance. Yet this is how Brother Ailbe wanted St Ciaran's satchel to be mended so that it would appear to the uneducated eye that the satchel had never been damaged. Bladnach was the only craftsman capable of the work.

Bladnach was a cripple. Born without the full use of his legs, he moved about his workroom on his knuckles, though with remarkable agility. This way of motion had, of course, developed the strength and thickness of his arms and shoulders to an extraordinary degree, and this- was no disadvantage for a man who needs all his power to drive a needle through heavy, stiff leather. But Bladnach's disability also meant that it was more logical for Brother Ailbe to bring the damaged book satchel to Bladnach's workshop than for Bladnach to be carried to the monastery each day to make the repairs. Yet St Ciaran's bible satchel was so precious that Ailbe could not possibly leave it unguarded. The librarian's solution was to ask Abb Aidan for permission for someone from the monastery to accompany the satchel to Bladnach's workshop and stay with it until the repair was done. By that time I was a familiar figure in the library, reading my texts, and Brother Ailbe suggested that I would make a suitable envoy. Abb Aidan agreed and stipulated that I was not to live in the leather-worker's house but to live, eat and sleep within the workshop itself, not allowing the satchel out of my sight.

Neither our abb nor our librarian were aware that when it comes to the sewing of the very finest leather, the most elegant stitching of delicate lambskin or the threading of a single twist of flax so fine that you cannot use a needle to insert it but make the merest pinprick of a hole, the work is almost invariably done by a woman. In the case of Bladnach the work was done by his daughter, Orlaith.

How can I describe Orlaith? Even after all these years I feel a slight tightening sensation in my throat as I remember her. She was sixteen and as fine-boned and delicately formed as any woman I have ever seen. Her face was of the most exquisite shape, where delicate cheekbones emphasised the slight hollows of the cheeks themselves and the gentle sweep of her jaw led to a small and perfect chin. She had a short, straight nose, a flawless mouth and the most enormous dark brown eyes. Her hair was chestnut, yet you could mistake it for being black, and it made an almost unreal contrast with her pale skin. By any standards she was a truly beautiful woman, and she took meticulous care with her appearance. I never saw her with a hair out of place or wearing a garment that was not perfectly cleaned and pressed and selected for its colours. But the strangest thing of all is that, when I first laid eyes on her, I did not think her beautiful. I was shown into her father's workshop, where she sat at her bench stitching a woman's belt, and I barely gave her a second glance. I utterly failed to appreciate her stunning beauty. She seemed almost ordinary. Yet within a day I was captivated by her. There was something about the fragile grace in the curve of her forearm as she leaned forward to take up a thread of flax, or the flowing subtlety of her body as she rose to her feet and walked across the room, which had me in thrall. She stepped as delicately as a fawn.

She was in the early bloom of her womanhood and responsive to my admiration. She was also, as I later understood, in despair for a private reason and that made her all the more alert to the chance of happiness. There was little that either of us could do during those first few days to progress our feelings. It took her father a week to mend the precious satchel, most of the time being spent applying coat after coat of warmed wool grease to soften and restore the desiccated leather. There was nothing for me to do but sit in the workroom, watching father and daughter at their work, trying to make myself useful in small ways. When Orlaith left the room for any reason, the room seemed to lose its colour and turn lifeless, and I would ache for her return just to be close to her, sensing her presence so powerfully that it was almost as if we were in physical contact. Two or three times we managed to speak to one another, awkward, shy words, each of us stumbling and mumbling, sentences fading away and left unfinished, both of us fearful of making a mistake. But these stilted conversations were only possible when Bladnach was out of the room, which happened rarely as it was a great effort for him to swing on his knuckles, hauling his useless lower limbs as he left the workshop to go to relieve himself. All three of us took our meals together, Orlaith fetching the food from her mother's cooking fire. We would sit in the workroom, eating in quiet, shared company, and I am sure that Bladnach was alert to what was happening between his daughter and myself, but he chose to ignore it. I suspect that he too wanted his daughter to have some happiness in her life. With his own disability he knew how to value any small chance that occurred.

When the satchel was repaired, Bladnach sent word to the monastery, and our librarian came down to collect the precious relic. As Brother Ailbe and I walked back to the monastery, my heart was close to bursting. On that last morning Orlaith had whispered a suggestion that we try to meet a week later. She had grown up around St Ciaran's, where all the sharp-eyed children knew about the novice monks and how they came out at nights to spy on the community. So she proposed that we meet at a certain spot outside the monastery vallum a week later, soon after nightfall. She thought that she could slip quietly out of the house and she would be free for an hour or two, if I could meet her there. This first tryst was to become a defining moment in my lifetime's memories. It was a night in early spring and there were a few stars and enough light from a sliver of new moon for me to see her standing in the darker pool of shadow cast by an ash tree. I approached, trembling slightly, aware even of the scent given off by her clothing. She reached out and touched my hand in the darkness and gently drew me towards her. It was the most natural, most marvellous and most tender moment that I could ever have imagined. To hold her, to feel her warmth, the yielding softness of her flesh and the wondrous life and structure of her fine bones within my arms was a sensation that made me dizzy with elation.

For the next weeks I felt as if I was sleep-walking through my daily routines of prayer and lessons, the sessions in the scriptorium and the hours spent labouring in the fields. My thoughts dwelt constantly on Orlaith. She was everywhere. I placed her in a thousand imaginary situations, speculating on her gestures, her words, her presence. And when I came back to reality, it was only to calculate where she was at that particular moment, what she was doing, and how long it might be before I held her in my arms again. My trust in Odinn, which had begun to falter among so much Christian fervour, came surging back. I asked myself who else but Odinn could have arranged such a wondrous development in my life. Odinn, among all the Gods, understood the yearnings of the human heart. He it was who rewarded those who fell in battle with the company of beautiful women in Valholl.

I should have been more wary. Odinn's gifts, as I knew full well, often conceal a bitter core.

Our love affair lasted nearly four months before catastrophe arrived. Every one of our clandestine meetings produced intoxicating happiness. They were preceded by a giddy sense of anticipation, then followed by a numbing glow of fulfilment. Our meetings became all we lived for. Nothing else mattered. Sometimes, returning through the darkness from the tryst, I found it difficult to keep walking in a straight line. It was not the darkness which confused me, but the physical sense of being so happy. Of course, the three companion novices who shared our sleeping hut noticed my nighttime excursions. At first they said nothing, but after a couple of weeks there were some approving and slightly wistful comments, and I knew there was little risk of betrayal from that direction. My friend Colman stood by me one night, when an older monk noticed

I was missing. It was Colman who made some plausible excuse for my absence. As spring passed into summer - it was now the second year of my rime as a novice - I grew bolder. My nocturnal meetings with Orlaith were not enough. I thirsted to see her by day, and I managed to persuade Brother Ailbe that two more satchels might need the leather-worker's attention. They were humdrum items of little value, and I offered to take them to Bladnach's workshop for his inspection, to which the librarian agreed.

My reception when I arrived at Bladnach's workshop was deeply unsettling. There was an awkward atmosphere in the workshop, a sense of strain. It showed on the face of Orlaith's mother as she greeted me at the door, and it was repeated in Orlaith's response to my arrival. She turned away when I entered the workshop and I saw that she had been crying. Her father, normally so quiet, treated me with unaccustomed coldness. I handed over the two satchels, explained what needed to be done and left the house, puzzled and distressed.

At the next meeting by the ash tree I asked Orlaith about the reason for the strange atmosphere in the house. For several harrowing moments she would not tell me why she had been crying, nor why her parents had been in such evident discomfort, and I came close to despair, faced with some unimaginable dread. I continued to press her for an answer, and eventually she blurted out the truth. It seemed that for many years both her parents had needed regular medical treatment. Her father's deformity racked his joints, and her mother's hands had been damaged by years of helping her husband at the leather-worker's bench. The smallest finger on each of her hands was permanently curved inward from the strain of tugging on thread to pull it tight, and her hands had become little more than painful claws. Initially they had used home-made remedies, gathering herbs and preparing simples. But as they aged these medicines had less and less effect. Eventually they had presented themselves at the monastery's infirmary, where Domnall, the elderly brother who worked as a physician, had been very helpful. He had made up draughts and ointments which had worked what seemed a genuine miracle, and the leather-worker and his wife were deeply grateful. In the years that followed, they began to made regular visits, every two or three months in summer and more frequently in winter when the pains were worse. Blad-nach would be carried to the monastery on a plank, and it was on one of his early visits that he first came to Brother Ailbe's attention and received his initial commission to work on the library satchels.

But Brother Domnall had paid for his selfless work at the infirmary with his life. A yellow plague had swept through the district, and the physician had been infected by the invalids who came to him for help. Willingly he made the final sacrifice, and the running of the infirmary had passed to his assistant, Brother Cainnech.

When Orlaith mentioned the yellow plague and Cainnech's name, my heart plummeted. I knew all about the yellow plague. It had struck in the late winter, and to my sorrow it had carried off the stoneworker Saer Credine. His commission from the abb, the grand cross, still stood half finished as there was no one skilled enough to complete the carving. The yellow plague had left Brother Cainnech as our new physician in its wake, and there were many in the monastery who considered that he was a reminder of the pestilence. Brother Cainnech was a clumsy, coarse boor who seemed to enjoy hurting people under the pretext of helping them. Among the novices it was generally considered preferable to endure a minor broken bone or a deep gash than let Cainnech near it. He seemed to enjoy causing pain as he reset the bone or cleaned out the wound. Often we thought that he was under the influence of alcohol, for he had the blotched skin and stinking breath of a man who drank heavily. Yet no one doubted his medical knowledge. He had read the medical texts in Brother Ailbe's library, spent his apprenticeship as Domnall's assistant, and stepped naturally into the chief physician's role. After the outbreak of the yellow fever it was Cainnech who insisted that every scrap of our bedding, blankets and clothes were thrown on a bonfire, leading me to wonder if this is what my mother had intended at Frodriver when she had insisted that her bedding be burned.

One day, Orlaith told me, she had accompanied her father and mother on their regular visit to the infirmary for their treatment and she had come to Cainnech's attention. The following month Cain-nech informed her parents that it was no longer necessary for them to come to the infirmary. Instead he would call at their house, to bring a fresh supply of medicines and administer any treatment. It would save Bladnach the difficult trip to the monastery. Cainnech's decision seemed a selfless act, worthy of his predecessor. But the motive for it soon became clear. On the very first visit to Bladnach's home, Cainnech began to make approaches to Orlaith. He was shamelessly confident. He presumed on the complicity of her parents, making it clear to them that if they thwarted his visits or hindered his behaviour while in their home, they would not be welcome back at the infirmary for treatment. He also emphasised to Bladnach that if he complained to the abb, there would be no further work from the library. Cainnech's visits quickly became a frightening combination of good and harm. He always remained the conscientious physician. He would arrive at the house punctually, examine his two patients, provide their medicaments, make careful notes of their condition, give them sound medical advice. Under his care both Bladnach and his wife found their health improving. But as soon as the medical consultation was over, Cainnech would dismiss the parents from the workshop and insist that he be left alone with their daughter. It was hardly surprising that Orlaith felt she could not divulge to me what went on during the sessions when she was shut up with the monk; she had never told her parents. What made the nightmare even worse, for both Orlaith and her parents, was Cainnech's absolute certainty that he could repeat his predatory behaviour for as long as he liked. As he left the house, leaving an abused Orlaith weeping in the workshop, he would pause solicitously beside Bladnach and assure him that he would return within the month to see how his patient was progressing.

Orlaith's wretched story made me all the more passionate about her. For the rest of that dreadful rendezvous, I held her close to me, feeling both protective and helpless. On the one hand I was outraged, on the other I was numbed by an acute sense of shared hurt.

Worse followed. Even more anxious to see Orlaith, I risked visiting the leather-worker's house in broad daylight, pretending that I was on an errand for the library. No one stopped me. The following week I repeated my foolhardy mission and found Orlaith by herself at her workbench. For an hour we sat side by side, mutely holding hands, until I knew I had to leave and get back to the monastery before my absence was noticed. I was aware that my luck would eventually run out, but I felt powerless to do anything else. I was so desperate to find a solution, I even suggested to Orlaith that we should run away together, but she dismissed the idea out of hand. She would not leave her parents, particularly her invalid father, who depended on her skill with the fine needle now that her mother was unable to work.

So it was an irony that her mother, unintentionally, caused the calamity. She came with a group of her friends to the monastery to pray at the oratory of St Ciaran. As she was leaving the oratory, she chanced to meet Brother Ailbe and mentioned to him how much she appreciated his continuing to send me to her house to assist her husband. Of course, Brother Ailbe was puzzled by this remark, and that evening sent for me to come to the library. He was standing beside his reading desk as I entered, and I thought he was looking slightly pompous and full of his own authority.

'Were you at the house of Bladnach the leather-worker last week?' he asked in a flat tone.

'Yes, Brother Ailbe,' I answered. I knew that I had been seen by the townsfolk on my way there and that the librarian could easily check.

'What were you doing? Did you have permission from anyone to go there, away from the monastery?'

'No, Brother Ailbe,' I replied. 'I went on my own initiative. I wanted to ask the leather-worker if he could teach me some of his craft. In that way I thought I could learn how to repair our leather Bible satchels here in the monastery, and then there would be no need to pay someone for outside skills.' My answer was a good one. I saw from Ailbe's expression that he anticipated a favourable response if he put the same proposal to the abb. Anything which saved the monastery money was a welcome suggestion to our abb.

'Very well,' he said, 'The idea has merit. But you broke our rule by leaving the monastery without authorisation. In future you are not to visit the town without first asking permission from me or from one of the other senior monks. You are to make amends by going to the chapel and reciting psalm one hundred and nineteen in its entirety, kneeling and cross figel.'

He made a gesture dismissing me. But I stood my ground. It was not because the punishment was severe, though the hundred and nineteenth psalm is notoriously long and would make the cross figel - kneeling with arms outstretched — very painful. I faced down the librarian because a strange and wild spirit of rebellion and superiority was welling up within me. I was overcome with scorn for Brother Ailbe for being so gullible. It had been so easy to dupe him. 'I just told you a lie,' I said and I did not bother to hide the contempt in my voice. 'I did not go to the leather-worker's house to ask to be his apprentice. I went there to be with his daughter.' Brother Ailbe, who had been looking rather smug, gaped with surprise, his mouth open and closed without making a sound, and I turned on my heel and left the room. As I did so, I knew that I had irreversibly destroyed my own life. There was no going back on what I had said.

Months later I realised that the spirit of defiance which had overwhelmed me had came from Odinn. It was his odr, the frenzy which throws aside caution and pays no heed to sense or prudence.

As I walked away from the library, I knew that I would be severely punished for breaking monastery discipline, above all for consorting with a female. That was the worst offence of all as far as the senior monks were concerned. But I found some consolation in the thought that at least I had brought Bladnach and his family to the attention of Abb Aidan, and it would be unlikely that Cainnech would risk continuing his abuse of their daughter until the scandal of my behaviour had died down. Maybe he would be warned off for ever.

I underestimated Cainnech's viciousness. He must have realised that, through Orlaith, I knew about his degenerate behaviour, and he decided that I should be put out of the way for good. That evening Abb Aidan called a conclave of the senior monks to discuss my fate. The meeting was held in the abb's cell and lasted for several hours. Rather to my surprise, there was no immediate decision on my punishment, nor was I called to give an explanation for my actions. Very late in the evening my friend Colman whispered to me that Senesach wanted to see me, and I was to go, not to his cell, but to the small, newly built oratory on the south side of the monastery. When I arrived, Senesach was waiting for me. He looked so despondent that I felt wretched. I owed so much to him. Yet I had failed to live up to his hopes for me. It was Senesach — it seemed so long ago — who had persuaded the abb that I should be released from slavery as the stonemason's assistant and given a chance to train as a monk, and Senesach had always been a fair and reasonable teacher. I was sure that if anyone had argued my case for me during the discussion of my transgressions, it would have been Senesach.

'Thangbrand,' he began, 'I don't have time to discuss with you why you chose to do what you did. But it is evident that you are not suited for life within the community of St Ciaran's. For that I am heartily sorry. I hope one day you will regain your original humility enough to pray for forgiveness for what you have done. I have asked you here for another reason. During the discussion of your misbehaviour, Brother Ailbe spoke up to say that he believed you may be a thief as well as a fornicator. He claimed that several pages are missing from the library copy of Galen's De Usum Partium, which you were studying as an exercise to improve your Greek. Did you steal those pages?'

'No, I did not,' I replied. 'I looked at the manuscript, but the pages were already missing when I consulted the text.' I had a shrewd suspicion who would have stolen them: Galen's writings were the standard authority for our medical work, and I wondered if Cainnech had taken the missing pages - as monastery physician he had regular and unquestioned access to the volume - and then drawn the librarian's attention to their absence.

Senesach went on, 'There was another complaint, a more serious one. Brother Cainnech' - and here my heart sank as usual — 'has raised the possibility that you have a Satanic possession. He pointed out that your association with the leather-worker's daughter has a precedent. When you first came to us you said your name was Thorgils, and we have learned that you were captured at the great battle at Clontarf against the Norsemen. Another Thorgils defiled this monastery in the time of our forefathers. He too came from the north lands. He arrived with his great fleet of warships and terrorised our people. He was an outright heathen and he brought with him his woman, a harlot by the name of Ota. After Thorgils's troops captured the monastery, this Ota seated herself on the altar and before an audience she uttered prophesies and disported herself lewdly.'

Despite the seriousness of my situation, an image of the Sex Hag sprang into my mind and I could not help smiling,

'Why do you have that stupid grin on your face?' Senesach said angrily. His disappointment in me came boiling to the surface. 'Don't you understand the gravity of your situation? If either of these accusations is found to be true, you will suffer the same fate as that stupid fool who ran off with the relics a couple of years ago. You can be sure of that. I've never told anyone this before, but when our abb condemned that youngster to death, I broke my vow of unquestioning obedience to my abb's wishes, and asked him to reduce the penalty. You know what he replied? He said that St Colm Cille himself was banished from this country by his abb because he was found guilty of copying a book without the owner's permission. Stealing the pages themselves, our abb told me, was a far worse crime because the misdeed permanently deprived the owner. So he insisted that the culprit had to suffer the greater penalty.'

'I am truly sorry that I have distressed you,' I answered. 'Neither accusation has any truth in it, and I will await the judgement of Abb Aidan. You have always been kind to me and, whatever happens, I will always remember that fact.'

The finality in my tone must have caught Senesach's attention, for he looked at me closely and said nothing for several seconds. 'I will pray for you,' he said and, after genuflecting to the altar, he turned and strode out of the chapel. I heard the brisk footfalls of his sandals as he marched away, the last memory of the man who had given me the chance of bettering myself. That chance I had taken, but it had led me onto a different path.

NINETEEN

I WAS CERTAIN that the conclave would find me guilty. And, as I had no wish to be left to starve in a pit like my predecessor, that night I gathered together my few belongings - my monk's travelling cloak, a workmanlike knife that Saer Credine had given me, and a sturdy leather travelling pouch that I had made for myself while sitting in Bladnach's workshop. I clasped Colman's hand in farewell, then crept out of our dormitory hut and found my way to the library. I forced the door, and took down the largest of the bible satchels from where it hung on its peg. I knew that it contained a ponderous copy of the Gospel of St Matthew. Sliding the great book out of the case, I took out my knife and with the point I prised out several of the stones which had been inset as decoration into the heavy cover. They were four large rock crystals as large as walnuts, and a red-coloured stone about the size of a pigeon's egg. The stones were of little value in themselves. I just wanted to hurt the monastery in the only way I knew, by stealing something which would cause Abb Aidan a moment of financial pain. I wrapped my booty in a strip of linen rag torn from the Gospel's slip cover, and dropped it into my satchel. Then I made my way to the earth vallum that marked the monastery boundary, and clambered over it, as I had so many times before on my way to meet Orlaith.

In my flight I had one single advantage over the wretched runaway novice who had been starved to death in a pit. He had been caught because he had fled back to his tuath, and Abb Aidan had easily guessed his destination. This was the natural course for any fugitive. Among the native Irish the only place that an ordinary man or woman has any security is on the territory of their own tuath, among their own kinsfolk, or on the land of an allied tuath which has agreed mutual recognition of rights. But such rights are worthless when confronted with the power of an important abb capable of making his own laws and regulations. So the fugitive had been handed over meekly by his own people and led away to his death. But I had no tuath. I was a foreigner. I had neither clan nor family nor home. So while everyone's hand was against me, my lack of roots also meant that the abb and his council would have no idea where to send their people to look for me.

For one stupid moment, as I dropped down on the ground on the outer side of the vallum, I thought that I might make a brief visit to Bladnach's house to say goodbye to Orlaith. But I quickly put the idea out of my mind. It would only make matters worse for her. The monks would surely interrogate her and her family about where I might have gone. It was better that they remained ignorant of any details of my departure, even the hour when I had disappeared. Besides, any time spent visiting Orlaith reduced my chances of getting away cleanly. I had already decided that my best route lay to the west and that meant I had to get across the great river before dawn.

St Ciaran's stands on the east bank, on the flank of the hill where the great road follows the line of the ridge then dips down to the river crossing. Here the monks had built a bridge, famous for its length and design. It stood on massive tree trunks driven deep into the soft mud as pilings, and approached by a long causeway laid across the marshy ground. Stout cross-pieces of timber held the main structure together, and the surface was made of layers of planks interleaved with brushwood and laid with rammed earth. Everyone used the bridge. The river was so broad, its banks so soft and treacherous and the currents so unpredictable, especially in the winter and spring floods, that the bridge was the natural choice for any traveller. For this reason the monks maintained a toll keeper on the bridge to collect money for the upkeep of the structure, which needed constant maintenance. Few people travelled at night, but the monastery profited from any surplus income, so Abb Aidan insisted that the toll keeper stayed on duty during the hours of darkness. He lived in a small hut on the eastern side of the bridge.

The events on the beach after the battle at Clontarf had taught me that very few of the Irish know how to swim. Those of our men who had escaped the defeat that day did so by swimming out to the longships, and I had seen how few of the Irish fighters had been able to follow them. Even Brian Boruma's grandson had drowned in the shallows because he was a poor swimmer. By contrast there is hardly a single Norseman who is not taught to swim when he is a boy. It is not just as a matter of survival for a seafaring people. At home in Iceland we considered swimming a sport. Besides the usual swimming races, a favourite game was water wrestling, when the two contestants struggled to hold one another underwater until a victory was declared. Though I was a rather indifferent swimmer by Norse standards, I was positively a human otter when compared to the Irish. Yet my ability to swim was something the monks could not possibly have known. So the bridge, which ought to have proved an obstacle, in fact served me as a friend.

I crept cautiously down to the river bank. A half moon gave enough light for me to select a path. Unfortunately the moonlight was also strong enough for the nightwatchman on the bridge to see me if I attracted his attention. With each step the ground grew softer until I was ankle-deep in the boggy ground. The stagnant water gave off a rich, peaty smell as I gently pulled my feet from the ooze. There was insufficient wind to cover any noise if I blundered so I moved very, very gently, dreading that I would startle a night-nesting bird in the reeds. Very soon I was half walking, half wading. The water was quite warm, and when I was almost out of my depth, I rolled up my travelling cloak and tied it in a bundle with my leather satchel and strapped them both on my back. Then I launched out into the river. I was too cautious to risk swimming the entire width of the river in a single attempt. I knew that my cloak and satchel would soon become a soggy burden, and hamper me. So I swam from piling to piling of the bridge, keeping in the shadow. Each time I reached a piling I hung on quietly, listening for any sounds, feeling the pluck of the current sucking at my body. When I had almost reached the far bank, where the causeway began again, I paused.

This was the riskiest part of the crossing. The west bank of the river was open ground and there was no question of leaving the river here. In the moonlight I would have been in full view. I took a deep breath, submerged, then released my grip. Immediately the current swept me downstream. I lost all sense of direction as I was spun in the eddies. A dozen times I came to the surface for a gulp of air, then let myself sink again. I did not even try to swim. I only surfaced, sucked in air, then used my arms to push myself back underwater. Gradually my strength faded. I knew that I would have to begin to swim again if I was not to drown. The next time I came back to the surface, I glanced up at the moon to find my direction and struck out for the shore. The diving had tired me more than I had anticipated. My arms began to ache, and I wondered if I had left it too late. Cloak and satchel were weighing me down badly. I kept lowering my feet to try to find the ground, only to be disappointed and I was so tired that each time I took a swallow of muddy water. Finally my feet did touch bottom, though it was so soft that I could not support myself, but floundered, lurching and flailing with my arms, for I was too tired to care any longer about keeping silent. I only wanted to reach safety. With a final effort I staggered through the shallows until I could grasp at a clump of sedge grass. I lay there for at least five minutes until I felt strong enough to slither forward on my stomach and pull myself onto firmer ground.

Next morning I must have looked like some ghoul of the marsh. My clothing was slimed with mud, my face and hands scratched and bloody where I had hauled myself face down through the swamp. Occasionally I gave a retching cough to try to dislodge the foul residues in my throat from all the muddy water I had swallowed. Yet I was confident that my crossing of the river had gone undetected. When the abb of St Ciaran's sent out word that I was to be stopped and brought back to the monastery, his messengers would first go to check with the keeper of the bridge if I had been seen, and then alert the people living on the east side of the river. By the time the news spread to the west bank, I should have put some distance between myself and any pursuit. Equally, I had to admit that my long-term chances of evasion were slim. A single, desperate-looking youth, wandering through the countryside, skulking past villages and hamlets, would be the object of immediate suspicion. If caught, I would be treated as a fugitive thief or an escaped slave and I still had the faint scars of the manacles that had been hammered on my wrists by Donnachad after Clontarf.

An image came to my mind from my childhood in Greenland. It was the memory of my father's two runners, the Scots slaves Haki and Hekja, and how the two of them would set off each spring and travel up into the moors, barefoot and with no more than a satchel of food between them, and live off the land all summer. And there was the tale, too, of how Karlsefhi had set them ashore when he first arrived in Vinland with instructions to scout out the land. They had gone loping off into the wilderness, as if nothing could have been more normal, and returned safely. If Haki and Hekja could survive in unknown Vinland, then I could do the same in Ireland. I had no idea what lay beyond the great river, but I was determined to do as well as my father's own slaves. I got up and, bending double, began picking my way through the tussocks of grass towards a line of willow bushes that would provide cover for the first few steps of my flight to the west.

The next five days blur together so I have no way of knowing the order of the events, or what took place on which day. There was the morning when I tripped over a tree root and twisted my ankle so painfully that I thought I was crippled. There was the lake that I came across unexpectedly, forcing a wide detour. I remember standing for at least an hour on the edge of the woods, gazing at the water and wondering whether I should circle around to my left or my right and, having made my decision and started walking, how I spent the next few hours wondering whether I was going in the right direction or doubling back on my path. Then there was the night when I was asleep on the ground as usual, wrapped in my cloak and with my back to a tree trunk, and I was startled awake by what I thought was the howling of wolves. I sat up for the rest of the night, ready to climb the tree, but nothing came closer. At dawn I was so drowsy that I set out carelessly. I had walked for an hour before I noticed that my knife was not in its sheath. Alarmed by the howling, I had pulled the knife out and laid it on the ground beside me. I turned back and retraced my steps. Luckily I found the knife within moments, lying where I had left it.

I never lit a fire. Even if I had carried a flint and steel to make a spark, I would not have risked the telltale smell of wood smoke. The autumn weather was mild so I did not need a fire for warmth, and I had no food which required cooking. I lived off wild fruit. This was the season for all manner of nuts and berries to ripen — hazelnuts, cranberries, blackberries, whortleberries, rowan berries, plums, sloes, wild apples. Of course, I still went hungry and sometimes my gut ached from eating only acid fruit. But I made no attempt to catch the occasional deer or hare that crossed my path. I was as shy as the animals themselves. I crouched back into the undergrowth when I observed them, fearful that the alarmed flight of game would attract hunters who might then find me by accident.

I was never far from human settlement, at least during the first part of my journey. The countryside was a mixture of woodland, cleared fields, pasture and bogland. There were frequent villages and hamlets, and twice I came across crannogs, places where a ri tuath had built himself a well-protected home on an artificial island in the middle of a lake. The village guard dogs were my chief worry. From time to time they detected my presence and raised a furious barking of alarm, forcing me to retreat hurriedly and then make a wider circuit round them. Once or twice gangs of children playing at the edge of the forest nearly discovered me, but in general their presence was useful. Their shouts and cries during their games often alerted me to the existence of a village before I blundered into it.

I had no idea how far to the west I was progressing. I noted, however, that the landscape was slowly changing. The forest was not nearly so dense and there were many stretches of open, scrubby ground. Increasingly the hills showed bald caps of rock, and there were broad expanses of barren moorland. It was a more harsh and unforgiving land so there were fewer settlements, yet the lack of forest cover made me more vulnerable to detection. After five days I had become so accustomed to slinking across the countryside that I began to think of myself as almost invisible. Perhaps made lightheaded by lack of food, I found myself again recalling the fantasies of my Greenlandic childhood and how I had fancied myself in the role of Odinn the Invisible, travelling the world without being seen.

So my discovery on the sixth day of my flight was all the more shocking. I had spent the previous night in a little shelter that I made by laying branches to form a roof over a cleft between two large rocks on a stretch of open moorland. Soon after daybreak I emerged from my lair and began to descend the valley that sloped down from the edge of the moor. Ahead I could see a grove of trees on the bank of the little stream which ran through the dale. The trees would give me some cover, I thought, and if I was lucky I might also find some which were fruiting. I entered the wood and penetrated far enough to come to the bank of the stream itself. The water was clear and shallow, rippling prettily over brown and black pebbles, and overhung with vegetation. Shafts of sunlight speckled the greenery of the undergrowth, and I could hear birdsong from several directions. The place seemed as innocent as if no human had ever stepped there. I pushed aside the bushes, placed my satchel on the ground beside me on the bank and lay down flat on the earth so that I could submerge my face in the water and feel it run cool against my skin. Then I drank, sucking in the water. Finally I got back on my knees, reached down to scoop up a palmful of water and splashed it on the back of my neck. As I wiped away the drops, I looked up. On the far side of the stream, no more than ten feet away from me, stood a man. He was absolutely motionless. With a shock I realised that he must have been standing there even when I first arrived and that I had failed utterly to notice him. He had made no attempt to conceal himself. It was only his stillness which had deceived me, and the fact that the wood was full of the natural sounds of birds singing, insects chirping and rustling, the ripple of the stream. As I looked directly into the man's face, his expression did not change. He stood there, considering me calmly. I felt no alarm because he seemed so relaxed and self-contained.

The stranger was wearing a long cloak rather like my own, of grey wool, and he carried no weapon that I could see, though he did have a plain wooden staff. I guessed his age at about fifty, and his face was clean-shaven with weatherbeaten skin and regular features that included a pair of grey eyes now regarding me steadily. What made me gaze at him in complete astonishment was his hair. From ear to ear the man had shaved his head. From the back of his head the hair hung right down to his shoulders, but the front half of his scalp was bald except for some stubble. It was a hairstyle that I had read about while browsing in the monastery library, but had never expected to see in real life. The monks at St Ciaran's — those who still had any hair — used the Roman tonsure, shaving the central patch. The man in front of me still wore his hair as a monk would have done if the style had not been outmoded and forbidden by the Church for nearly two hundred years past.

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.

'The wilderness is where the inspiration for the first brithem laws arose,' he once told me, and 'natural justice' was a phrase he often used. 'It is a heavy responsibility to interpret the Fenechas, the laws of freemen. False judgements ruin men's lives and the evil consequences live on for generations. So I need to return regularly to the ultimate source, to the rhythms and mysteries of Nature.' He smiled his self-deprecating smile and mocked himself. 'How much easier if I could wear one of those heavy iron collars which the first brithemain had around their necks. If they made a poor judgement the collar tightened until they could scarcely breathe. When they amended the judgement to make it fair, the collar loosened.'

'But how could the early brithemain make false judgements?' I asked him. 'The monks at St. Ciaran's told me that the brithemain were really drui in secret, and communed with evil spirits and, besides being able to fly through the air, made profane prophecies. So they must have been able to foresee the future and would have known if they were in error.'

'It is true that in the earlier days some drui were trained as seers and soothsayers,' he answered. 'But those days are gone, and much of what appeared to be their prophesy was really only a prolonged observation. For example, by watching the animals in the forest I can foretell the coming weather. Those who study the movement of the stars learn how they behave. From that knowledge they can predict events like the eclipses of the sun or moon.

Such predictions impress people who fail to notice the signs or who do not understand the value of accumulated wisdom. Six hundred and thirty years is the length of time our star watchers use when measuring a single cycle of star movements in the sky. You can imagine the power of so much stored wisdom.'

Eochaid's journeys were determined by his own celestial calendar. The first occasion he left the forest after my arrival was shortly before the start of the thirteenth month of his year. A thirteenth month, of course, has no equivalent in the White Christ calendar, but for those who measure time by the waxing and waning of the moon it obviously does exist and occurs three or four times every decade. Eochaid called it the elder month, and he invited me to accompany him on his journey. It would be a tiring walk, he warned, but he had a duty to perform for a confederation of four tuaths some distance to the north-west. The people of this region were so respectful of the Old Ways that they had named their territory Cairpre, to commemorate one of the greatest drui, reputedly the son of the God Ogmius.

It was indeed a long walk, six days' striding across an increasingly bleak countryside of moorland and rock to our destination, a substantial crannog. At Eochaid's suggestion I took along my battered leather satchel with a spare change of clothes for myself, a white gown belonging to Eochaid, and a small supply of dried nuts and grain for food. Eochaid himself carried nothing of value, no symbols of his profession. He had only a small cloth bag slung over his shoulder and a sharp sickle, which he used to clear a space in the undergrowth when we slept out in the open or to cut medicinal herbs that he noticed growing by the wayside. Plants which heal, he explained, are available at all times of the year if you know where to look. Some are best gathered in the spring when their sap is full, others when they show their summer flowers, and several when their roots are dormant or they are bearing autumn fruit. On that journey he was collecting the roots of burdock thistles for making an infusion to treat skin diseases and boils, and with the point of his sickle he dug up the roots of something he said was a cure for ringworm. He called it cuckoo plant.

'That broken hand of yours,' he commented to me one day, 'would have healed much quicker if you had known how to treat it.'

'What should I have done?'

'Found the root which people call boneset or knitbone — it's very common - then made a paste and applied it to the wound as a poultice. It would have reduced the swelling and the pain. The same paste, dissolved in water, can be used as a treatment for diseases of the stomach or even given as medicine to children who have whooping cough.'

With his medical skill Eochaid was welcome at every settlement we passed. He seemed to be able to produce a remedy for any malady, even if it was severe. He gave an invalid, who was coughing as if to burst his lungs, an oily drink made from the fruit of water fennel, and an unfortunate who suffered from fits was calmed with an extract of all-heal root. "Valerian is another name for it,' Eochaid said to me as he prepared the fetid-smelling drug, 'which comes from the Latin "to be in health". But you want to be careful with it. Too big a dose and you'll put a person to sleep for good.' I was about to ask Eochaid how he came to know Latin, when we were interrupted. A distraught mother arrived to say her child was suffering from a very sore throat, and Eochaid despatched me to fetch haws from a whitethorn bush we had seen not far back down the road so she could make hawthorn broth for the youngster.

The inhabitants of the hamlets and villages treated Eochaid with a deference bordering on awe. If we needed shelter, we were always given a place of honour in the home of the leader of the community, and no one ever asked where we were going or what our business was. I commented on this to Eochaid, and the fact that he carried no weapon and did not ask permission of any of the tuath people to cross their lands, though this would have been a dangerous act of folly for any stranger. He answered me that the brithemain were privileged. They could walk the trackways and be certain that they would not be impeded or molested, even by brigands. This immunity, he explained, arose from a belief among the country people that to harm a brithem would result in terrible misfortune. 'It's one of the beliefs which date back to the early days of the drui, and which the Christian priests, though they complain that the drui were sent by the devil, have been shrewd enough to turn to their advantage. They now say that harming a priest will also bring a curse on the evildoer, and they sometimes carry and display holy relics to strengthen the aura of their protection. Mind you,' he added, 'if the relic is too valuable, that doesn't always prevent thieves from robbing them.' Thinking of the ornamental stones that I had prised from the big Gospel book and still carried, I said nothing.

The chieftains of the four allied tuaths were waiting for Eochaid to decide their backlog of legal cases. Having seen how the Icelanders dispensed justice at their Althing, I was interested to observe how the Irish applied their laws. The lawsuits were heard in the crannog's council hall, where Eochaid sat on a low stool flanked by the chieftains. They listened to what the plaintiffs had to say, then called on the defendants for their versions of events. Sometimes a chieftain would ask a question or add a piece of corroborating detail, but Eochaid himself said very little. Yet, when the moment for a judgement arrived, the entire assembly would wait for the brithem to pronounce. Invariably Eochaid began his remarks with a reference to earlier custom in a similar case. He would quote 'the natural law', often using archaic words and phrases that few of his listeners could comprehend. Yet, such was their esteem for brithem law that they stood respectfully and they never disputed his decision. Eochaid rarely imposed a sentence of imprisonment or physical punishment. He dealt mainly in compensation. When he found a genuine offence had been committed, he explained its gravity and then suggested the correct compensation that should be paid.

The first cases he heard were fairly trivial. People complained of horses and oxen that had broken into neighbouring pastures, pigs trespassing on a vegetable patch, and even the case of a pack of hounds, not properly restrained, which had entered a yard and defiled it with their droppings. Patiently Eochaid listened to the details, and decided who was at fault - the landowner for not fencing his property more securely, or the animals' owner for allowing the creatures to stray. Then he would deliver his judgement. The pigs' owner was obliged to pay a double fine because his animals had not only eaten the vegetables but had rooted up the earth with their snouts and this would make the garden more difficult to restore. The man complaining about a neighbour's cattle in his field lost his case because he had failed to build his fence to the approved height and strength to stop the oxen pushing through it. In the case of the errant dogs, Eochaid found for the plaintiff. He recommended that the dogs' owner pick up the droppings, and then produce restitution in the form of the same amount of butter and dough as the quantity of dog turds retrieved. This particular arbitration raised broad smiles of approval from his audience.

As the day wore on, the cases before the brithem became more serious. There were two divorce cases. In the first a woman sought a formal separation from her husband on the grounds that he, had become so fat that he was impotent because he was no longer capable of intercourse. One look at the obesity of the husband made that an easy case to settle. Eochaid also awarded the woman most of the joint property on the grounds that the fat man was also lazy and had clearly contributed little to the income of the household. The second case was more finely balanced. The husband claimed that his wife had brought shame on his honour by flirting with a neighbour, and she counter-claimed that he had done likewise by gossiping to his friends about the intimate details of their own sexual relationship. The pair became increasingly strident until Eochaid cut short their quarrelling by announcing that neither side was at fault, but it was obvious that the marriage was over. He recommended that they separate, each taking back whatever property they had originally brought into it. The woman, however, was to retain the family home as she had children to rear.

'How do you know that your judgements will be obeyed?' I asked Eochaid that evening. 'There is no one to enforce your decisions. Once you leave this place, who will oblige the guilty party to carry out the terms you have laid down?'

'Everything depends on the respect that the people have for the brithem law,' he answered. 'I cannot oblige people to do what I say. But you will have noticed that I try to produce a settlement that both parties can accept. My intention is to restore equilibrium within the community. Even in the extreme case of a murder I would not suggest a death sentence. Executing the murderer will not bring the dead victim back to life. It is surely more sensible that the killer and his kinsfolk pay restitution to the family of the deceased. In that way people will think before committing murder, knowing that their own kinsfolk will have to suffer consequences.'

'And what if the compensation is so severe that the kinsfolk cannot find the money to pay?' I asked.

'That is part of the brithem's proper training,' he replied. 'It is our responsibility to know the face price of every person and the value of every misdeed, and how to vary the compensation according to a myriad of circumstances. A ri, for example, has a greater face price than an aithech, a commoner. So if the ri receives an injury, then the compensation awarded to him is higher. But at the same time if it is the ri who is at fault then he must pay a greater amount of compensation than I would award against an aithech.'

While Eochaid was hearing the cases, more and more people kept arriving at the crannog, until the latecomers were so numerous that they were obliged to camp on the surrounding lands. To add to the congestion the cowherds and shepherds brought in their animals from the outlying pastures in preparation for the forthcoming winter season. Surplus animals were slaughtered, and any meat which was not preserved was being cooked over open fires. A holiday atmosphere developed as the people gorged themselves and drank copious amounts of mead and beer. A number of market stalls appeared. Though the gathering was far smaller than the Althing I had witnessed in Iceland when I first met the Burners, I was struck by the similarity. There was a difference, though: among the Irish I became aware of a certain underlying nervousness. It was the eve of their Samhain, the Festival of the Dead.

On the last day of Eochaid's law court a great crowd gathered at the causeway leading to the crannog. Many of the people were carrying bundles of firewood and there was a strange mixture of jubilation and apprehension. Eochaid emerged from the gate of the crannog wearing a plain white surcoat over his normal tunic. He held a long staff in one hand and his small sickle in the other. Behind him came the chieftains of the allied tuafhs. The little group crossed the causeway and headed off across the fields with the crowd following them. In the distance stood a clump of trees. I had noticed the trees earlier because all the surrounding land had been cleared for farming, but this small copse had been left untouched. It was primeval woodland.

I fell into step behind Eochaid as he entered the wood, which was composed almost entirely of hazel trees. In the middle was a small lake, scarcely more than a pond. Behind us the crowd spread out among the trees and laid down their burdens. A dozen of the chieftain's servants began cutting back the undergrowth at the edge of the pond, clearing a space for Eochaid. He stood there calmly, sickle in hand, watching the preparations. Then, as dusk fell, he moved to the edge of the little lake. Soon it was so dark that it was only just possible to make out the dim shapes of the watching crowd amid the darker shadows of the trees. The whole copse was silent except for the occasional crying of a baby. Eochaid turned towards the lake and began to declaim. He spoke sentence after sentence in a language that I did not understand. His voice rose and fell as if reciting poetry, his words producing a flat, dull echo from the surrounding trees. The entire crowd seemed to be holding their breath as they listened. The water in the pond was inky black and an occasional whisper of breeze ruffled the surface, dissolving the reflected circle of the moon. As the clouds slid by, the moon's image appeared and disappeared randomly.

After about half an hour Eochaid stopped speaking and leaned forward. The white overgown he was wearing made it possible to see his movements clearly, and I glimpsed the glint of the sickle in his right hand. He reached forward and cut a wisp of dried reeds from the edge of the pond. A moment later, by a process I could not detect, a flicker of flame danced in his grasp as the wisp began to burn. As the flames grew brighter, they reflected off the white cloth of his gown and illuminated Eochaid's face so that his eyes seemed in deep shadow. He walked over to a pile of hazel twigs and thrust the burning tinder among them. At once the twigs burst into flame. Within moments the fire was burning so vigorously that orange tongues of flame were twisting and wavering to head height. As the fire took increasing hold, the chieftains of the tuaths stepped forward with their bundles of wood and threw them on the fire. I heard the rapid crackle of blazing timber and sparks began to fly upwards in the hot air currents. Soon there was so much heat radiating from the fire that my face was scorching, and I put up an arm to shield my eyes. There was a low appreciative murmuring from the crowd, and looking across the flames I could see that someone had come forward out of each family group. Each face was lit by the blazing fire and had an expression so intent that it seemed as if the person was enraptured by the swirling of the flames. Several stepped so close to the fire that I thought they would be burned. They all cast small items onto the fire - I could make out a tiny rag doll, a child's shoe, a handful of seeds, a ripe apple. They were offerings from those who sought to have children and bountiful crops in the coming year, or making thanks for their past blessings. The fire burned down quickly. One moment it was a high blaze, then next moment it collapsed on itself in a cascade of sparks. That was when the heads of families each thrust a brand into the flames. As soon as the brand had caught alight, they turned and, gathering up their families, began to walk away, heading back to their homes and tents, each carrying a burning flare. They would guard the brand through the night, and use it to relight their hearth fires, which they had extinguished to mark the passing of summer. The flares being carried out across the countryside made a remarkable spectacle, a sprinkle of bobbing light in the darkness. A hand touched my elbow. I looked round and recognised the steward of one of the tuath chieftains. He nodded for me to follow him, and we began to walk back to the crannog. Halfway there I paused and turned to look at the hazel copse. I could see the glow of the embers, and standing beside them the white-clad figure of Eochaid. He had his back towards us and was looking out at the lake. He had both arms outstretched to the sky, and I fancied that I saw the arcing glint of his sickle as he threw it into the pond.

These were mysteries to which I could not be privy, and the steward kept hold of my arm to make sure that I did not double back to rejoin Eochaid. Instead my guide led me to where his own people were waiting. They were from the farthest of the federate tuaths and had set up their camp at a little distance from the crannog. My escort brought me into the circle where the families had gathered to celebrate the successful conclusion of the ceremony. They had lit a central bonfire with their sacred flame and were seated on the ground, eating and drinking and enjoying themselves. I was greeted with nods and smiles. Someone put a wooden cup of mead in my hand, someone else handed me a rib of roasted sheep, and space was made for me in the circle to sit down and join the feast. I started to gnaw at the tendrils of mutton and looked around at the ring of faces. This was the first time that I had been exposed to the society of the true Irish, the ordinary people from the remotest fringes of their island, at a time when they were most relaxed. Now I was a guest, not a war captive, or a slave, or a novice. I savoured the mood of the gathering. Abruptly I felt a shocking lurch of recognition. Seated about a third of the way around the circle was Thorvall the Hunter. I knew it was impossible. The last time I had seen Thorvall had been when he had left our Vinland settlement, angry with Karlsefni and Gudrid, and sailed off in our small boat with five companions to explore farther along the coast. We had never heard anything more of him, and presumed he had been killed by the Skraelings or drowned, though someone did say that Thor would never let someone drown at sea who was so robust in his belief in the Old Ways.

I stared at the wraith. Not since I had seen the fetch of Gardi the overseer in Greenland eleven years before had I seen a dead man come back among the living. Thorvall looked older than when I had last seen him. His beard and hair were shot with grey, his face was deeply lined and his massive shoulders had acquired a slight stoop of age. But the lid of his left eye drooped as it had always done, and I could still see the mark, much fainter now in the creases and folds of his ageing face, where the bear claws had left the hunting scar that had made such an impression on me as a child. A leather skullcap was pulled down on his head and pressed his hair over his ears so I could not see whether, like the Thorvall I knew from Vinland, he had also lost the top of his left ear. He was dressed in the clothing of an Irish cliathaire, laced leggings and a heavy jerkin of sheepskin over a rough linen shirt. Laid on the ground in front of him was an expensive-looking heavy sword. I tried to remain calm. I had taken to heart what Snorri Godi had warned me about: that when you experience second sight it is wiser to pretend that all is entirely normal, even though you are seeing something invisible to others. I continued to chew on my meat, occasionally glancing across at Thorvall and wondering if his ghost would recognise me. Then I noticed the man seated on Thorvall's right turn towards him and say something. My flesh tingled. I was not alone in seeing the wraith. Others were aware of his presence. Then it occurred to me that perhaps I had let my imagination run away with me. The man seated on the other side of the fire was not Thorvall, but someone who looked very like him.

Getting to my feet, I backed away from the circle, then walked round to where I could approach the seated stranger from one side. As I came closer, the more certain I was that it really was Thorvall. He had the same big-knuckled, gnarled hands that I remembered, and I glimpsed around his neck a necklace of bear claws. It had to be him. Yet how did he come to be seated among Irish clansmen, dressed like a veteran Irish warrior?

'Thorvall?' I enquired nervously, standing a little behind his right shoulder.

He did not respond.

'Thorvall?' I repeated more loudly, and this time he did turn round and looked up at me with a questioning expression on his face. He had the same pale blue eyes that I remembered staring at me in the stable all those years ago when I was first interrogated about my second sight. But the eyes looking at me had no sense of recognition.

'Thorvall,' I said for the third time and then, speaking in Norse, 'I am Thorgils, don't you recognise me? It's me, Leif’s son from Brattahlid in Greenland.'

Thorvall continued to stare at me with no reaction except for a slightly puzzled frown. He had not understood a word I said. People were starting to take notice of my behaviour and glancing curiously at me. I began to lose my nerve.

'Thorvall?'

My voice trailed away in confusion. The man gave a grunt and turned back to face the fire, ignoring me.

I crept back to my place by the fire, thoroughly embarrassed. Luckily the tide of mead was rising and my strange actions were forgotten in the general merriment. I kept glancing across at Thorvall, or whoever he was, trying to resolve my confusion.

'Who's that man over there, the one with the big sword on the ground in front of him?' I asked my neighbour.

He looked across to the man with the scar on his face. 'That's Ardal, the ri's champion, though he's had very little to do ever since we allied with the other tuaths,' he replied, 'Just as well. He's getting a bit long in the tooth to do much duelling.'

I remembered Eochaid's warning about not asking too many questions and decided that it would be better to wait till next day to consult the brithem about the mysterious clansman.

'King's champion?' Eochaid replied next morning. 'That's an old title, not used much today. He's usually the best warrior in the tuath, who acts as the ri's chief bodyguard. He also represents the ri if there is a quarrel between two tuaths which is to be decided by single combat between two picked fighters. Why do you want to know?'

'I saw a man yesterday evening who I thought was someone I knew long ago when I was living in the Norse lands. I was told his name was Ardal and that he is, or was, the king's champion. But I was sure he was someone else. Yet that seems impossible.'

'I can't say I know him. Who did you say he was with?' Eochaid asked.

'He was seated among the people who came from the farthest tuath, the one near the coast.'

'That'll be the Ua Cannannain.' Eochaid and I were standing in the mead hall of the crannog, waiting to say a formal farewell to the ri. Eochaid turned to the ri's steward. 'Do you know this man called Ardal?'

'Only by reputation,' he replied. 'A man of very few words. Not surprising. He was half dead when he was washed ashore and it was thought that he would never live. But he was nursed back to health in the ri's own house and became a servant there. Then it turned out that he was so good with weapons that he eventually became the king's champion. Quite an advancement for someone who was fuidir cinad o muir.'

It was a phrase I had never heard before. A fuidir is someone half-free or ransomed, and cinad o muir is 'a crime of the sea'. I was about to ask the steward what he meant, when the man added, 'If you want to meet Ardal, it will have to wait till next year. Early this morning most of the Ua Cannannain set out to return to their own tuath.'

Eochaid looked at me. 'What makes you think that you knew this man Ardal previously?'

'He and his friend, a smith named Tyrkir, were my first tutors in the Old Ways,' I replied, 'but I thought he was dead.'

'He may well be dead,' Eochaid observed. 'We are now in

Samhain, the season when the veil between the living and the dead is at its thinnest, and those who are no longer with us can pass most easily through the veil. What you saw may have been your friend who has returned briefly to this world.'

'But the steward said that he had been in this land for several years, not just at this season.'

'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.

The great gathering at the foot of the hill of Tlachtga was a spectacle that surpassed anything I had anticipated. The bustle and flamboyance of the Irish who came to the High King's festivities made a lively impression. There were several thousand participants, and they arrived in their kin groups, with each chieftain trying to impress his equals. Their retinues swaggered through the crowds, flaunting the expensive finger rings, tores and brooches which their leaders had awarded them. By regulation long-bladed and long- handled weapons had to be set aside during the festivities, but daggers were permitted and were worn to show off their workmanship or decoration. There were displays of horses and hounds, and even a few chariots came bouncing and swaying in behind their teams of shaggy war ponies; the wheels of these old-fashioned contraptions were brightly painted in contrasting colours so as they spun they looked like children's toys. In the presence of the Irish, wherever there are horses and dogs in any number, there will be racing and contests and gaming. By the time Eochaid and I arrived, a wide circle of wooden posts had been driven in the ground to create a race track, where crowds of spectators jostled each morning and afternoon to watch the contests.

Sometimes just two riders settled a personal challenge by racing their mounts. More often it was a general match with an honour prize to the winner, a wild stampede of a score of lathered, sweating horses thundering round the course, urged on by the shouts of the crowd and the flailing whips of their riders, usually skinny young lads. On my second day at Tlachtga I also came across an event which, to an outsider, might have seemed like a mock battle. Two squads of wild-looking men were milling together and striking at one another with flat clubs. Occasionally a man fell to the ground, bleeding from a head blow, and it seemed that the fighters were hitting out with unrestrained viciousness. Yet, the object of their attention was only a small hard ball which each side was trying to propel into the opponents' territory and then through an open mark. The blows to the head were accidental, or allegedly so. The reason for my fascination was that I had seen a similar sport being played - though with less riot and fervour - by my youthful companions in Iceland and I had once played it myself.

I was standing on the sidelines, watching the contest closely and trying to detect the differences from the Icelandic version of the game, when I received a shattering blow on the back of my own head. It must have been a harder stroke than anything being dealt on the games field because everything went dark.

I awoke to the familiar sensation of lying on the ground with my wrists tied together. This time the pain was not as bad as it had been after the battle of Clontarf because my bonds were leather straps, not iron manacles. But the other difference was more serious. When I opened my eyes, I knew my captor: I found myself looking up into the face of the treasurer of St Ciaran's.

Brother Mariannus was gazing down at me with an expression in which distaste matched satisfaction. 'What made you think you would get away with it?' he asked. I shook my head groggily. I had a violent headache and could feel the large bruise swelling up where someone had struck me with a weapon. I wondered if I had been hit with a games stick. A clout on the head with a heavy crozier would have done the job just as well. Then I remembered Eochaid. While I was watching the Irish at their sports, he had gone in search of other brithemain and he probably did not know what had happened to me. He had important business to attend to and when I failed to show up would probably surmise that I had departed in search of strong drink or female diversion. I had left my cloak and travelling satchel in the hut where we were staying, but he might even think that I had taken the chance to part company with him altogether.'You'll discover that it's both a sin and a crime to steal Church property,' the treasurer was saying grimly, 'I doubt you have any respect for the moral consequences of the sin, but the criminal repercussions will have more impact on someone of your base character.'

We were in a tent, and two of the monastery servants were standing over me. I wondered which of them had hit me on the head. The younger man had the stolid gaze of an underling who would do unquestioningly as he was told, but the older servant looked as if he was positively enjoying seeing me in trouble.

'My men will take you back to the monastery, where you will be tried and receive punishment. You'll start out tomorrow,' Brother Mariannus went on. 'I presume that you have disposed of the property you stole, so you can expect the maximum penalty. Would you not agree, Abb?'

I turned my head to see who else was in the tent, and there, standing with his hands clasped behind his back and looking out of the tent flap as if he wished to have nothing to do with this sordid matter of theft and absconding from his rule, was Abb Aidan. The sight of him brought to mind something that Eochaid had once explained to me about the laws of the Christians. The monastery abbs, he said, had created most of their statutes and regulations as ways of raising money locally. Shrewdly they had adopted the brithem principle that whenever a rule was broken, then the transgressors had to pay a fine. So their cana, as they called their laws, were only valid within the territories the abbs controlled. Farther afield, Eochaid had stated, it was not monastery law which applied, but the king's law.

'I claim my right to trial before the king's marshal,' I said. 'Here at Tlachtga I am not subject to the cana of St Ciaran's. I am outside the monastery's jurisdiction. More than that, I have the right to protection from the king's law because I am a foreigner, a fact acknowledged when I was first interviewed for admission into the community at St Ciaran's.'

Brother Mariannus glowered at me. 'Who taught you anything about the law, you impudent puppy . . .' he began. 'No, he's right,' Abb Aidan interrupted. 'Under the law he is entitled to a hearing before the king's marshal, though that will not make any difference to the verdict.' I felt a faint stir of satisfaction. I had judged the abb correctly. He was such a stickler for custom and correctness that I had avoided being transported back to St Ciaran's and within range of Brother Cainnech, whom I knew was my real foe.

'Take him outside and tie him up securely, feet as well as hands, to make sure he doesn't disappear a second time,' Abb Aidan ordered and then, addressing the treasurer, 'Brother Mariannus, I would be obliged if you would contact the officials of the royal household and ask if the case of Thorgils or Thurgeis, known sometimes as Thangbrand, can be heard at the first opportunity, on a charge of theft of Church property.'

So, late the next day, I found myself at a legal hearing once again. But this time I was not an observer. I was the accused. The trial was held in the mead hall of the local ri, a modest building that could scarcely hold more than a hundred spectators, and which that afternoon was far from full. Of course, the High King himself was not there. He was represented by his marshal, a bored-looking man in late middle age, with a sleek, round face, straggling moustache and large brown eyes. He reminded me of a tired seal. He had not expected an extra case to be brought before him so late in the day and wanted it to be dealt with quickly. I was pushed into the centre of the hall and made to stand facing the marshal. He sat at a plain wooden table and on his right was a scribe, a priest, making notes on a wax tablet. Farther around the circle from the penman were about a dozen men, some seated, others standing. They were clearly clerics, though I could not tell whether they were there as advisers, jury, prosecutors, or merely onlookers. Opposite to them, and fewer in number, were a group of brithemain. Among them, to my relief, I could see Eochaid. He was standing in the rear of the group and made no sign that he knew me.

The proceedings went briskly. The treasurer recounted the charges against me, how I had joined the monastery, how I had betrayed their trust and generosity, how I had disappeared one night, and the next day the library was found broken into and several holy and precious ornaments to a Gospel book had been torn from their mountings. Earlier some pages had gone missing from an important manuscript, and I was suspected of being responsible for that theft as well.

'Has any of the stolen material been recovered?' the marshal asked without much interest.

'No, none of it. The culprit disappeared without trace, though we looked for him widely and carefully. It was only yesterday, after an interval of two years, that he was seen here at the festival by one of our people and recognised.'

'What penalty are you seeking?' the marshall enquired.

'The just penalty — the penalty for aggravated theft. A death penalty.'

'Would you consider some sort of arbitration and a payment of compensation if that could be arranged?' The question came from the marshal's left, from one of the brithemain. The question had been addressed to the treasurer and I saw several of the Christians stir and come alert. Their hostility was obvious.

'No,' replied the treasurer crisply. 'How could the wretch possibly pay compensation? He has no family to stand surety for him, he is a foreigner, and he is obviously destitute. In his entire life he could never repay the sum that the loss represents to the monastery.'

'If he is so destitute, would it not be appropriate to forgive a pauper for his crime? Isn't that what you preach — forgiveness of sins?'

The treasurer glared at the brithem. 'Our Holy Bible teaches us that he who absolves a crime is himself a wrongdoer,' he retorted. To the marshal's left I saw the churchmen nod their agreement. They looked thoroughly pleased with the treasurer's response. No one asked me a single question. Indeed they barely glanced at me. I knew why. The word of a runaway novice counted for nothing against the word of a senior monk, particularly someone with the status of the treasurer. Under both Church law and brithem custom, the value of testimony depends on the individual's rank, so whatever I said was of no import. If the treasurer stated I was the culprit, then it was useless for me to deny it. For my defence to be effective, I needed someone of equal or superior status to the treasurer to speak for me, and there was no one there who appeared willing to act on my behalf. As I had known from the beginning, it was not a question of whether I was innocent or guilty, but of what my sentence would be.

'I find the culprit guilty of theft of Church property,' the marshal announced without any hesitation, 'and order that he should suffer the penalty as sought by the plaintiff.' He began to rise from his chair, clearly eager to close the day's hearings and leave for his supper.

'On a matter of law . . .' a voice interjected quietly. I could recognise Eochaid's voice anywhere. He was addressing the marshal directly and, like everyone else, ignored me completely. The marshal gave an exasperated grimace, and sat back down again, waiting to hear what Eochaid had to say. 'It has been stated by the plaintiff that the accused is a foreigner and that he has no family or kin in this land, and therefore there is no possibility of compensation or restitution for the theft. The same criteria must surely apply to the court's sentence: namely, any individual without family nor kin to guide or instruct him in what is right and what is wrong, must — by those circumstances — be regarded as having committed his or her crime out of a natural deficiency. In that case, the crime is cinad o muir and must be punished accordingly.'

I had no idea what Eochaid was talking about.

But Brother Mariannus clearly did know what the brithem had in mind because the Treasurer was looking wary. 'The young man has been found guilty of a major felony. His offence was against the monastery of St Ciaran, and the monastery has the right to carry out the appropriate sentence,' he said.'If it is the monastery which is the injured party,' Eochaid replied calmly, 'then punishment should be carried out in accordance with monastic custom, should it not? And what could be more appropriate than allowing your own God to decide this young man's fate. Is this not how your own saints were willing to demonstrate their faith?'

The treasurer was clearly irritated. There was a short silence as he searched for a retort, when the marshal intervened. He was getting bored with the continuing discussion. 'The felon is judged to have committed a cinad o muir,' he announced, 'He is to be taken from here to the nearest beach and the sentence to be carried out.'

I thought I was to be drowned like an unwanted cur, with a stone about my neck. However, the following day, when I was brought to the beach, the boat drawn up on the shingle was so small that I could not imagine how I would fit into it as well as the person who was to throw me overboard. The tiny craft was barely more than a large basket. It was made of light withies lashed together with thongs to form an open framework and then covered over with a skin sewn of cowhides. The boat, if such a flimsy vessel could be called that, was in very poor condition. The stitching was broken in several places, there were cracks and splits in the leather cover, and the thongs of the basketwork were so slack that the structure sagged at the edge. It looked as if its owner had abandoned the craft on the beach as being totally unfit for the sea and that, I gathered, was precisely why it had been selected.

'We'll have to wait for the wind,' said the senior of the two monastery servants who had escorted me. 'The locals say that it usually gets up strongly in the afternoon and blows hard for several hours. Enough to see you on your way for a final voyage.' He was relishing his role. On the half-day's walk to the beach he had lost no chance to make my journey unpleasant, tripping me up from time to time, then jerking viciously on the leading halter as I struggled to get back on my feet. Neither Abb Aidan nor the treasurer had thought it worth their while to come to the beach to witness my sentence being carried out. They had sent the servants to do the work, and there was a minor official from the marshal's court to report back when the punishment had been completed. Apart from the three of them, there was just a handful of curious bystanders, mostly children and old men from the local fishing families. One of the old men kept handing a few small coins from one gnarled paw to the other, his lips moving as he counted them again and again. I guessed he was the previous owner of the semi- derelict little boat, which, like me, had been condemned.

'Are you from the settlement outside St Ciaran's?' I asked the older servant.

'What's that to you?' he grunted disagreeably.

'I thought you might know Bladnach the leather-worker.'

'And so what? If you think he'll show up here by some holy miracle and sew up the boat before you set sail in her, you must be even more optimistic than Maelduine sailing for the Blessed Islands. Without his legs, Bladnach would really need a marvel to get here so briskly.' He laughed bitterly. 'You would have thought he had suffered enough without losing his daughter as well.'

'What do you mean, losing his daughter?'

He shot me a glance of pure loathing. 'Don't think your antics with Orlaith didn't get noticed by her neighbours. Orlaith got pregnant, thanks to you, and there were complications. She ended up by having to go to the monastery for treatment, but the hospital couldn't help her. Both she and the baby died. Brother Cainnech said there was nothing he could do.'

His words sickened me. Now I knew why the servant had been so vicious to me. It was no good protesting that I could not have been the father of her child.

'I'm sorry,' I said feebly.

'You'll be more than sorry when the wind changes. I hope you die at sea so slowly that you wish you had drowned; and, if your wreck of a boat does float long enough for you to come ashore, that you fall into the hands of savages who make your life as a fuidir unbearable,' he retorted, and kicked my feet from under me so that I fell heavily on the shingle.

Now I knew what Ardal had been when he was described as fuidir cinad o muir. He had been a castaway, found in a rudderless boat which had drifted onto the coast. The tribesmen of Cairpre had presumed that he was a criminal deliberately set adrift as punishment. If such a person came back to land, then whoever found him could treat him as his personal property, whether to kill or enslave him. That was what it meant to be fuidir cinad o muir — human flotsam washed up by the waves, destined for a life of servitude.

As predicted, the wind changed in the early hours of the afternoon and began to blow strongly from the west, away from the land. The two monastery servants roused themselves and, picking up the battered little boat with ease, carried it down the beach and set it afloat. One man held the boat steady, and the other came back to where I sat, kicked me hard in the ribs and told me to get down to the water's edge and climb into the boat. The tiny coracle tipped and swivelled alarmingly as I got aboard, and water began to seep in through the leather hull. Within moments there were several inches of water in the bilge. The older servant, whose name I gather was Jarlath, leaned forward to cut the leather thong binding my wrists, and handed me a single paddle.

'I hope God does not grant you any more mercy than he gave Orlaith,' he said. 'I'm personally going to give your boat such a shove that I hope it carries you to Hell. Certainly you cannot paddle back to land against this wind, and in a few hours it may even raise waves big enough to swamp your vessel if you have not already capsized. Think about it and suffer!'

He was about to send the boat into deeper water when someone cried, 'Wait!' It was the court official, the man deputed to report on the conduct of my punishment. He waded out to where I sat rocking on the waves.

'The law allows only a single oar, a sail and no rudder, so that you cannot row to shore but are dependent on the weather that God sends. However, you are also permitted one bag of food . . . here . . .'He handed me a well-worn leather satchel filled with a thin gruel of grain and nuts blended with water. I recognised Eochaid's favourite diet, the produce of what he called the briugu caille, the hospitaller trees of the forest. I also identified the leather satchel. It was the same one that I had carried away with me from the monastery when I fled from St Ciaran's. Old and stained and battered, it had been repaired many times because the original leather was thick and stout enough to take the needle. I clutched it to me as Jarlath and his colleague began to push the little cockleshell of a boat out into deeper water, and my fingers slid down the fat seams of the satchel so I could feel the hard lumps. They were the stones I had stolen from St Ciaran's. My time spent sitting in Bladnach's workshop waiting for him to blind stitch the book satchels had not been wasted. I had practised how to slit and close leather so neatly that the stitches could not be seen, and that is where I had hidden my loot. Now, belatedly, I understood that Eochaid must have known all along about my hidden hoard.

Jarlath was so determined that I never come back to land that he kept on wading after his colleague had turned back, until he was chest deep in the sea and the larger waves were threatening to break over his head. He gave the boat a final shove, then I was adrift and the wind was rapidly carrying me clear. Still clasping the satchel, I slid myself down to sit in the bilge of the coracle and make her more stable. There was no point in looking back because the man who had helped me was not there. Without Eochaid's intervention at my trial before the king's marshal, I knew I would have finished up like the unfortunate sheepstealer at St Ciaran's, hanging from a gibbet in front of the monastery gate. I found myself wishing that somehow there had been a moment when I had thanked Eochaid for all he had done for me, ever since that morning on the day we first met when he had stood silently regarding me drink water from the woodland stream. Yet, probably I would not have found the right words. Eochaid remained an enigma. I had never penetrated his inner thoughts, or learned why he had chosen to be a brithem, or what sustained him along that demanding path. He had kept himself to himself. His Gods were different from mine and he had never discussed them with me, though I knew they were complex and ancient. His studies of their mysteries made him wise and practical and gave him a remarkable insight into human nature. Had he been an Old Believer, I would have taken him for another Odinn, but without the darker, cruel side. My silent homage to him as I drifted out to sea was to admit that if there was one man on whom I wished to pattern my life it would be Eochaid.

At first I clung fiercely to the sides of the little coracle as it lurched and swivelled crazily in the waves, then tilted and hung at a steep angle, so that it seemed on the point of capsizing at any moment and throwing me into the sea. With each gyration I braced myself in the bottom of the little vessel, and tried to counterbalance the sudden movement. But soon I discovered it was better to relax, to lie limp and let the coracle flex and float naturally to the waves. My real worry was the constant intake of water. It was seeping through the cracks and splits in the leather and splashing over the rim of the little vessel with each wave crest. Unless I did something, the coracle would swamp and founder. I gulped down the gruel in the satchel and began to use the empty leather bag as a scoop, steadily tipping the bilge water back into the sea. It was this action, repeated again and again and again, which distracted me from my fear of capsize and death. As I bailed, I found myself thinking back to my fellow fuidir cinad o muir — Ardal, the mysterious clansman who had been found adrift on the western coast. The more I thought of Ardal, and how closely he had resembled Thorvall the Hunter, the more I convinced myself that they were one and the same man. If so, I told myself as I carefully poured another satchelful of water back into the sea, then Thorvall had drifted across the ocean from Vinland in an open boat, a voyage of many weeks riding the wind and current. The terrible ordeal must have destroyed his memory so he no longer knew his own identity or recognised who I was, but he had survived. And if Thorvall could live through such a nightmare, then so could I.

It was impossible to tell when the sun went down. The sky was so overcast that the light merely faded until I could no longer make out the distant line of the coast far astern. My horizon was reduced to a close circle of dark, restless sea, out of which appeared the white flashes of wave crests. I kept bailing steadily, my arms aching, my skimpy gown soaked against my skin, and the beginnings of a thirst brought on by licking away the spray which struck my face. It must have been nearly midnight when the cloud cover began to break up and the first stars appeared. By then I was so tired that I scarcely noticed that the waves were diminishing. They broke less frequently into the coracle. I found myself setting aside the satchel and relaxing until the rise of bilge water from the leaks obliged me to go to work again.In these intervals, resting from the labour of bailing, I thought back to the eerie coincidences that had occurred in my life. From the time that my mother had sent me away as an infant, it seemed that there had been a pattern. I had been brought into contact, repeatedly, with people who possessed abnormal qualities — my foster mother Gudrid with her volva's powers could see draugar and fetches; Thrand knew the galdrastafir spells; Brodir had shared with me the vision of Odinn's ravens on the battlefield; Eochaid had spoken of his mystic inheritance from the ancient Irish drui; and there had been the brief encounter with the Skraeling shaman in the Vinland forest. The more I thought upon these coincidences, the more calm I became. My life had been so strange, so disconnected from the humdrum progress of other men, that it must have a deeper purpose. The All-Father, I concluded, had not watched over me through so many vicissitudes only to let me drown in the cold, grey waters of the sea of Ireland. He had other plans for me. Otherwise, why had he shown me so many wonders in such far- flung places, or let me learn so much? I sat in the water swilling in the bottom of the coracle and tried to determine what that design might be. As I brooded on my past, I scarcely noticed the wind was dying away. A stillness settled on the water until even the swell was barely felt. In that tiny coracle, motionless save for a very gentle rocking motion, I was suspended on the surface of black sea, the darkness of the night around me, the inky depths below. I began to feel that I was leaving my own body, that I was spirit flying. From exhaustion, from exposure, or because it was Odinn's will, I went into a trancelike stupor.

A hand grasping my shoulder broke the spell.

'Sea luck!' said a voice. I looked up into a heavily bearded Norse face.

It was broad daylight, my coracle was nuzzling against the side of a small longship, and a sailor was leaning down to grab me out of the coracle.

'Look what we've got here,' said the sailor, 'a gift from Njord himself.'

'Pretty miserable gift, I would say,' commented his companion, helping drag me aboard still clutching my satchel, then sending the coracle on its way with a contemptuous kick so that the little vessel tilted and sank.

'May Odinn Farmatyr, God of Cargoes, reward you,' I managed to blurt out.

'Well, at least he speaks good Norse,' said a third voice.

My rescuers were savages. Or that is what the monks of St Ciaran's would have called them, though my word for them was different — they were vikingr, homeward bound after a season on the coast of what I later knew as Breton land. Their luck had been fair, a couple of small monasteries surprised and looted, some profitable trading for wine and pottery in the small ports farther south and now they were headed north again in their ship. They were proper seamen, so the lookout with the dawn light behind him had spotted the tiny black speck of the coracle appearing and disappearing on the gentle swells. They had rowed across to check what they had found and as they approached they had seen me sitting there, so motionless that they thought I was a corpse.

The Norse consider it propitious to rescue someone from the sea, as much for the rescuer as the rescued. So I received a kindly welcome. I was shivering with cold and they wrapped me in a spare sea cloak and gave me chunks of dried whale blubber to chew, their diet for someone who has been exposed to the cold and wet. After I was recovered, they asked me for my story and discovered that I had abundant tales to tell. This made me popular. My stories helped to pass the long hours of the homeward trip and Norsemen love a good yarn. I found myself telling my tales again and again. With each repetition I became more fluent, more able to pace the run of my narrative, to know which details caught the attention of my hearers. In short, I began to understand how satisfying it is to be a saga teller, particularly when the content of your tales has an appreciative audience. I learned that I was one of only a handful of Norse survivors from the great battle at Clontarf, so I was asked repeatedly to describe the progress of the great battle, where each man fought in the line, how each warrior had dressed for the combat, what weapons had proved best, who had said what and to whom, whether such-and-such had died with honour. And always when I came to describe how Brodir of Man had ambushed the High King and slain him in the open, though he knew it would mean his own certain death, my audience would fall silent and, as often as not, greet the conclusion of my story with a sigh of approval.

As I told the story for perhaps the twentieth time, the thought occurred to me that this might be what Odinn was intending — that I should be an honest chronicler of the Old Ways and the truth about the far-flung world of the Norsemen. Was it really Eochaid who had told me that words hold greater power than weapons? Did Senesach at St Ciaran's encourage me to learn to read the Roman and Greek scripts and write with the pen and stylus? Was it Tyrkir who showed me the cutting of runes in Greenland and taught me so much of the Elder Lore. Or were all of them really Odinn in his many disguises equipping me for my life's path?

If it was Odinn, then I am keeping his faith by writing this account, and I will describe how I travelled even farther afield in the next phase of my life and took part in events that were even more remarkable.

AUTHOR'S NOTE

THORGILS, SON OF Leif the Lucky and Thorgunna, did exist. According to the Saga of Erik the Red, 'The boy . . . arrived in Greenland, and Leif acknowledged him as his son. According to some people this Thorgils came to Iceland the summer before the Frodriver Marvels. Thorgils then went to Greenland, and there seemed to be something uncanny about him all his life.'

The events of Thorgils's life imagined here derive mostly from the Icelandic sagas, one of the great collections of world literature and widely translated, notably in the Penguin Classics. Eochaid's poem of the hermit's hut is taken from Kenneth Hurlston,

A CELTIC MISCELLANY, first published by Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1951; revised edition published by Penguin Books, 1971, reprinted 1973, 1975.