Princes of Ireland - Edward Rutherfurd [127]
Hearing his muttered curse, Morann asked him the reason; and as they walked towards the gateway, Osgar briefly told him.
So it was with delight, after introducing the craftsman to the kindly nun, that he heard Morann remark: “I hear you are both travelling down to Kildare, Sister Martha. I should tell you that the countryside may be a little unsafe at the moment, but if you could wait, I shall be going down that way myself in five days, and we could all travel together.” He smiled at her. “There is safety in numbers.” It was hardly an offer that anyone would reasonably refuse; and after the nun had accepted, and the two men had walked on, the craftsman turned to him. “Will that give you enough time?”
Three clear days in the library. Morann’s company across what might, indeed, be dangerous terrain. “I can’t believe my luck,” Osgar replied with a smile.
Morann’s own plans, he learned, were to settle his family at Kells and then return to Dyflin where he wanted to check on the safety of Harold’s family. “But I have a piece of business I’d been meaning to do in Kildare,” he explained, “and so I may as well go down that way first.” Osgar remembered the big farm in Fingal where he had encountered Harold’s father after being attacked by the robbers years before, and he was impressed by the craftsman’s loyalty to his friend.
“Are you not afraid of the danger at Dyflin?” he asked.
“I’ll be careful,” Morann replied.
“If you get to Dyflin,” Osgar remarked, “you might see my uncle and cousins at the monastery. I hope they are safe. You could give them my greetings.”
“I will, certainly,” Morann answered. “By the way,” he added, “I saw another cousin of yours, I believe. She was coming into Dyflin just before I left, to be safer while her husband was away at the fighting.”
“Indeed? And who was that?”
“She’s married to a rich man out at Rathmines. Wasn’t her name Caoilinn?”
“Ah.” Osgar stopped and looked at the ground. “It was,” he said quietly. “Caoilinn.”
It was the last day before leaving. For the first hour of the day, Osgar liked to practise his illustration. If calligraphy was painstaking, illustration was even more intricate. Of course, there was the design first. That could be simple or complex. Only those skilled in geometry should even attempt the making of a Celtic pattern. But once the design was made in rough, then carefully fair copied and transferred onto the vellum as a drawing, the intricate business of choosing the colours and of slowly painting them in with needle-thin brushes required extraordinary patience and skill.
The pigments themselves were rare and valuable. He dipped his brush in a red, to colour part of the scalloped design of an eagle’s feathers. Some reds were made from lead, but this came from the pregnant body—it had to be pregnant—of a certain Mediterranean insect. He checked a proportion on the design with a pair of dividers. Purple next, from a Mediterranean plant. The greens were mostly from copper. You had to be careful. If the page got wet afterwards, the copper could eat through the vellum. The whites were usually made with chalk. Cleverer were the golds. The pigment for gold was actually a yellow—arsenic sulphide—but when applied it would develop a metallic shine so that it looked like gold leaf. Most precious and rare of all was the blue lapis lazuli. That came from the farthest Orient, from a place, it was said, where the mountains, higher even than the Alps, rose into the blue sky until they touched it. A country without a name. Or so he had heard.
The greatest art of all, in Osgar’s opinion, was the delicate layering of colours one on top of the other so that one achieved not only subtle gradations of tone but even a relief, like a landscape as it would be seen from above, as by the eye of God Himself.
But when he entered the scriptorium that morning, Osgar did not trouble to practise his own poor art. He went straight to the great book on the lectern. It was, after all, his last opportunity to do so.
The wonder of it.