The Lost Prophecies

PROLOGUE

The coast of Kerry, Ireland, October 574

In the early-morning light, the fisherman Guleesh ventured nervously from his hut above Banna Strand in the Bay of Ballyheigue. His wife watched him from the door-hole, one arm around her little daughter, the other holding a hand to her mouth in breathless anxiety.

All Souls’ Night had been full of omens, starting with a huge ring around a ruddy moon. When the orb had set, flickering curtains of green light weaved eerily in the sky to the north, rarely seen except as portents of some great disaster. As if this was not enough, silent lightning flashed for the rest of the night, unsettling the dogs and making them howl in company with a vixen that barked in the woods above the beach.

Now, thankfully, the dawn seemed quiet, with not a breath of wind. The sea lapped innocently along the miles of sand that faced the great western ocean that stretched out to the edge of the world. But this virgin strand was broken by a black dot at the water’s edge, directly below their mean dwelling.

It was this that had eventually enticed the reluctant Guleesh out of his house. With the tide only just turned from the ebb, he walked cautiously down across the wide expanse of sand, his bare feet marking the pristine surface as he went. His thin, careworn woman watched him as he reached what they both had thought was a coracle. All kinds of flotsam ended up on their beach and, if it were not for the eerie signs in the heavens the previous night, it would have caused none of these premonitions of unearthly happenings.

She saw Guleesh reach the object as it rocked gently on every new wavelet that hissed up the beach. He bent to peer inside, then straightened up and began waving to her like a man possessed, his arm beckoning her to come.

Commanding her daughter to stay by the cradle with her brother, a lusty boy of two months, the wife Deirdre ran down the line of her husband’s footprints, looking ahead uneasily at the strange lines of grey cloud that hung over the sea, where the Seven Hogs of the Magharee Islands broke the horizon. A dozen large jet-black ravens suddenly dropped from high in the sky and wheeled in a circle close over her head, cawing at her to hasten. As she came to the surf, which barely washed above her ankles, she saw that it was indeed a common coracle, a round tub of greased hides stretched over a wicker frame.

‘Look, wife, look inside!’ keened Guleesh, his voice taut with awe, as he lifted aside a rough-spun blanket. Deirdre steadied the rocking craft with one hand and looked down, her eyes round with wonder, as the guardian ravens strutted behind them.

Nestled on the blanket was a naked boy-baby, still with a few inches of birth-cord attached to his navel. Motherly compassion banished all fear, and she lifted the infant in his shawl and put him to her full breast. As she crooned into his ear while he sucked greedily, there was a long, low rumble of approving thunder from over the horizon and a single large wave came to speed the coracle up the beach.

Clonmacnois Abbey, Ireland, May 608

‘What is to become of him, Father Conan?’ The abbot’s voice was weary with despair as he contemplated the problem that had beset them now for the past eight months.

The aged bishop shook his head sadly. ‘The High Council feels that there is only one solution, Brother Alither. He has been chained now for a dozen weeks. It would be kinder to return him whence he came, rather than to leave him like this until he is claimed by God – or the devil!’

Alither, the abbot of Clonmacnois, shuddered at the prospect and tears appeared in his eyes, running down the grooves in his lined face. ‘But the man is but thirty-three years old, the same as Christ at his Passion!’ he groaned. ‘He has lived here almost all his life, since he was brought here as a mere babe.’

Conan shrugged, not without compassion but bowing to the inevitability of God’s will. ‘The High Council considers that he is possessed, and I cannot say that I disagree with them, though I have never actually set my eyes upon him.’

Alither shook his head in bewilderment. ‘You must see him for yourself; he is most comely. Apart from his affliction, he is perfectly sound in wind and limb.’

‘But it is not his earthly body that concerns us, brother. It is his mind and his soul, if he has one!’

The bishop picked up a thin book from the rough table at which he sat and brandished it at the abbot. ‘Is this the product of a Christian brother – or the ravings of the devil that lives within him?’

Conan opened the covers of wood covered with black leather that were bound over a thin sheaf of yellow parchment. He held it out towards the abbot and riffled the pages under Alither’s nose.

‘What demonical evil is this? Who in Ireland has ever seen the like of this before? Can you doubt that Satan had a hand in this?’

Alither had no need to look at it; he was only too familiar with the weird volume that, along with its author, had been the bane of his life for the past few months. Though the script was neat and regular, the content of the text was beyond comprehension.

‘Perfect Latin, beautifully penned!’ continued an exasperated Conan. ‘And what does it mean? Gibberish, blasphemous gibberish! Apparently claiming to foretell the future, blasphemously encroaching on God’s Holy Will, which has preordained every action until the end of time!’

The abbot nodded reluctantly. ‘It seems that way, bishop,’ he agreed sadly. ‘Compared with this, the Revelation of St John is crystal clear!’

Wearily, Conan dropped the book back on to the table. ‘Tell me again, before I cast my eyes upon him, how came this Brân to be here?’

Alither refilled the bishop’s mead cup from a small jug before replying.

They were seated in the bare room where the abbot slept, worked and prayed, one of a dozen wooden buildings clustered inside the palisade on a low gravel ridge on the banks of the great river.

‘He was named Brân, as the simple fisherfolk who found him were besieged by his namesake ravens as they rescued him from the beach – and Brân is well known as the son of a sea-god!’

With little effort he mixed pagan beliefs with his Christianity as he continued. ‘They took him straight to the abbey of Ard Fert, not two miles from where the babe was washed ashore. The women there cared for him for seven years, until he was brought up the Shannon to us here at Clonmacnois.’

Conan knew, as did every religious in Ireland, of the magical origins of this Brân. But as the years passed and the child grew first into a scholar, then a novice and finally a monk without any further manifestations of the Other World, it was forgotten for almost three decades.

‘He was talented with a quill and was put to work in our scriptorium, copying the Psalms and the Gospels,’ said the abbot. ‘Then one night last autumn, when the moon was full, he suddenly fell to the ground and had great spasms of his limbs. When he eventually fell quiet, he slept for a whole night and a day, then woke as if normal.’

‘Not quite normal, brother,’ said Conan dryly. He knew all this from the deliberations of the High Council in Tara five days previously.

Alither nodded slowly. ‘No, you are right, Conan. As soon as he awoke, he went like a man in a trance to the scriptorium and began writing these verses, with such obscure meaning.’

‘He had never written anything like this before?’ growled Conan.

The abbot shook his head. ‘Never. His copying was perfection itself. Over the years he prepared a large section of the Vulgate of St Jerome which was a joy to behold. Others did the coloured illumination, but his penmanship was exquisite.’

‘But the fits worsened, I understand? What did he have to say about all this?’

‘He told us that he always knew when a seizure was coming, as he was transported to some ethereal place where a voice spoke to him, filling him with prophecy and commanding that he record it as a warning to posterity. Then he knows nothing more until, when he recovers from the spasms, he has an irresistible urge to seize his pen and write.’

The bishop frowned. ‘Whose was this voice? Does he claim it was the Lord God Almighty – or maybe the Horned One?’

The abbot shrugged under the coarse brown habit that hung on his weedy frame. ‘He does not know, he says. It is just a voice that must be obeyed. He has no power to resist.’

‘And his chaining? That cannot control his convulsions, surely?’

Alither raised his hands in despair. ‘The fits come more frequently with every week. Now he suffers one almost every day. Lately, he has taken to wandering off like a sleepwalker, when he is in the trance that precedes each seizure. We cannot watch him all the time, so he has been shackled to prevent him walking into a fire – or into the river, which is so near.’

Conan grunted. ‘Maybe it would have been better to let him plunge into the Shannon – it would have saved us a painful task.’

He hauled himself to his feet with a groan. His journey here from Tara had been undertaken with reluctance, both from the distasteful nature of his mission and the effort at his age of riding a pony across the bogs of the Midlands.

‘Let us see this man, if indeed he is a man?’ He sighed, picking up the book again as they left the room.

Outside, in the circular compound that encompassed the wooden buildings and three tiny churches of the abbey, a group of monks and their women stood uneasily, watching the abbot lead this emissary of bad tidings across to a thatched hut on the extreme edge of the enclosure. Just beyond this, the low knoll on which the abbey stood sloped down to the oily waters of the Shannon, gliding silently through its many lakes down to the distant sea.

As they walked through the new spring grass, Alither made one last attempt. ‘Is there no other way, bishop? Can he not be hidden away in some hermit’s cell on the Cliffs of Moher or somewhere even more remote, like the Isles of Aran?’

Conan gripped the speaker’s shoulder in a rare moment of compassion. ‘And how would he manage to live, in his condition? Maybe choke in one of his fits, all alone? It is better this way, Alither. Our pagan forefathers would have strangled him or slit his throat and buried him in a bog-pool.’

Outside the hut stood two burly soldiers, part of the High King’s guard who had accompanied the bishop from Tara.

‘These will do the deed, brother,’ said Conan stonily. ‘I appreciate that no one here should be called upon to take part.’

Men and women, monks, servants, mothers and even children were drifting towards them, to stand in a silent ring around the hut as the two senior priests entered through the low doorway, which was covered with a flap of thick leather. Their eyes adjusted to the dim light that came through a narrow slit in the walls of clay and straw plastered over hazel withies between oaken frames. They saw a man in a coarse brown robe squatting in a corner on a pile of dry ferns. A stool, a wooden bucket and a small table with writing materials were the only furnishings, apart from a long iron chain that was looped around the central pole that supported the rafters. The other end was riveted to a wide metal band that encircled Brân’s waist.

The captive looked up as Conan entered and made the sign of the cross in the air.

‘God be with you, brother,’ intoned the bishop. ‘I am Conan, come from Tara to see you.’

The man on the floor looked up, his blue eyes guileless in a face drawn with exhaustion. ‘I know you, bishop. You were sent to kill me.’

There was no fear or loathing in his voice, just a plain statement of fact, lacking any emotion.

‘Why have you written these strange words, Brân?’ asked Conan, holding up the slim wood-covered volume.

‘I had no choice, father. It could not have been otherwise. I was commanded to set down the voice I heard. I am but a device for recording these awful truths. They emerge not from my mind but only from my pen.’

He shifted a little on his heap of bracken. ‘But it is ended now. There is no need for more writing.’

‘Do you understand what is said in the words you wrote, Brân?’ persisted the old bishop.

‘It is no concern of mine. These events will come to pass far in the future. Maybe I will be there to see some of them.’ He said this in an uncaring fashion, as if it was of no consequence.

‘Who gave you these prophecies, brother? Or are they of your own invention?’

Brân, his dirty red hair embedded with bits of fern and straw, turned a face like a tired angel to the old priest. ‘I know that you wish to discover whether it is God or Satan. But I cannot tell you, for I do not know.’

‘Where did you come from, Brân?’ persisted Conan.

‘Again, I know not! My first memories are of the good people who cared for me as a child. My last memories will be of the inside of this mean dwelling!’

Suddenly, his eyes rolled up so that the whites showed, and he fell back against the wall, lolling inertly with his jaw slack.

‘This is the prelude to a seizure,’ said the abbot. ‘He will be like this for a few minutes, then the spasms will begin. Maybe someone is speaking to him now, inside that head.’

Conan made a sudden decision. ‘It would be kinder to get it over with now, when he is unaware.’

Pushing Alither aside, he went out of the hut to speak to the two warriors who waited outside. The abbot hurried after him in time to hear his commands.

‘Release that chain, but leave the band around his belly – it will help to weigh him down! Bind his wrists in case he recovers, then carry him to the river and throw him well out from the bank.’

He turned to Alither, who was standing aghast and trembling. ‘Must this be, bishop? Is there no other way?’

Conan shook his head as the two guards moved towards the doorway. ‘From the waters he came and to the waters he must return!’

As the words left his lips, an ear-splitting clap of thunder crashed overhead though the sky was clear. On the river, a single high wave rolled smoothly up between the banks, splashing up on to the grass and sending birds squawking into the air. It passed as quickly as it had appeared, but now there were shouts from within the hut. Conan and the abbot pushed aside the leather flap and stared as the two soldiers pointed to the corner.

A metal band lay on the bracken, still chained to the post. Inside it was a brown habit, the coarse cloth crumpled into a small heap in the centre. On the table, Brân’s black book lay as it was left.

Alither picked it up and, crossing himself, stared at the bishop, his eyes wide with fear. ‘A miracle, Conan! But is it for good or evil?’