Princes of Ireland - Edward Rutherfurd [13]
What a curious thing it was. The swirling lines with which it was incised made several patterns, but the most significant was the great trefoil of spirals on the left face. As he had so many times before, he ran his hands over the stone, whose sandlike roughness felt pleasantly cool in the warm sun as his fingers traced the grooves. The biggest spiral was a double one, like a pair of eels coiled tightly together with their heads locking in the middle. Follow one of the coils outwards and it led to the second spiral, another double one below it. The third, smaller spiral, a single one, rested tangentially on the swirling shoulders of the other two. And from their outer edges the grooves gathered in the angles where the spirals met, like tidemarks at an inlet, before flowing on in swirling rivers round the stone.
What did they mean? What was the significance of the trefoil? Three spirals, connected yet independent, always leading inward, yet also flowing out into an endless nothingness. Were they the symbols of the sun and moon and the earth below? Or the three sacred rivers of a half-forgotten world?
He had seen a crazy fellow make a design like that once. It was just at this season of the year, before the harvest, when the last of the old grain goes mouldy, and poor folk who eat it act strangely and dream dreams. He’d come upon him by the seashore, sitting alone, big and bare-boned, his eyes fixed upon nothing, a tattered stick in his hand, tracing spirals just like these in the empty sand. Was he mad, or was he wise? Goibniu shrugged. Who knew? It was all one and the same.
Still tracing the swirling grooves in the morning silence, his hand moved to and fro. One thing was certain. Whoever made those spirals, Tuatha De Danaan or not, Goibniu felt he knew him as only a fellow craftsman can. Other men might find the sid grim and fearsome, but he did not care. He liked the cosmic spirals on the stone-cold earth.
And then it had come to him. It was a strange sensation. Nothing you could put a name to. An echo in the mind.
The season of Lughnasa was approaching. There would be a number of great festivals on the island, and though he had considered the big Leinster games at Carmun, he had been planning this year to go elsewhere. But now, standing by the stone with its spirals, the feeling had come into his mind that he should go to Carmun, though he did not know why.
He listened. Everything was quiet. Yet in the very silence, there seemed to be a significance, a message being carried by a messenger still far away, like a cloud that is hidden over the horizon. Goibniu was a hardheaded man; he was not given to foolish moods or fantasies. But he could not deny that, now and again as he had walked across the island landscape, he had experienced the sensation of knowing things he could not explain. He waited. There it was again, that echo, like a dream half remembered. Something strange, it seemed to him, was going to happen at Carmun.
He shrugged. It might mean nothing, but one shouldn’t ignore these things. His eye travelled along the southern horizon. He’d go down to Carmun then, at Lughnasa. When had he last gone south? The previous year, collecting gold in the mountains below Dubh Linn. He smiled. Goibniu loved gold.
Then he frowned. The memory of that journey reminded him of something else. He’d crossed by the Ford of Hurdles. There had been a big fellow there. Fergus. He nodded thoughtfully. That big fellow owed him a debt—to the value of a score of cattle. A debt that was long overdue. The chief was in danger of annoying him. He wondered if Fergus was going to the festival.
Deirdre had not enjoyed the journey to Carmun. They had set off from Dubh Linn at dawn with a light, misty rain falling. The party wasn’t large: just Deirdre, her father, her brothers, the bard, and the smaller of the British slaves. The men rode horses: she and the slave drove in