Princes of Ireland - Edward Rutherfurd [16]
She awoke suddenly. She must have slept awhile, she realised, as the sun had shifted its position. She was still in that hazy condition of having been jolted through the veils of sleep into a too bright consciousness. As she glanced at the sun hanging over the great plain, she experienced a curious vision. It was as if the sun were a spoked wheel, like that of a war chariot, strange and menacing. She shook her head to dispel the last mists of sleep and told herself not be foolish.
But for the rest of that day, and while she lay trying to sleep that night, she was unable to rid herself of a vague sense of disquiet.
It had been late morning when Goibniu arrived. His single, all-seeing eye surveyed the scene.
Lughnasa: a month after the summer solstice, the celebration of the coming harvest, a festival where marriages were arranged. He liked its patron god—Lugh the Shining One, Lugh of the Long Arm, the magician master of every craft, the brave warrior, the healer.
People were arriving at Carmun from every direction: chiefs, warriors, athletes from tribes all over the island. How many tribes were there, he wondered. Perhaps a hundred and fifty. Some were large, ruled by powerful clans; some were lesser, ruled by affiliated septs; some hardly more than a group of families, probably sharing a common ancestor, but who proudly called themselves a tribe and had a chief. It was easy, on an island which nature had divided by mountain and bog into huge numbers of small territories, for each tribe to have lands of its own in the centre of which there was usually a sacred ancestral site, often as not marked by an ash tree.
And who exactly were these tribes? Where had they come from, these Sons of Mil who had sent the legendary Tuatha De Danaan under the hills? Goibniu knew that the conquering tribes had come to the western island centuries ago from neighbouring Britain and from across the sea to the south. The people of the western island were part of a great patchwork of tribes, whose culture and language, called Celtic, stretched across much of north-western Europe. With their swords of iron, splendid war chariots, and magnificent metalwork, their druid priests and poets, the Celtic tribes had long been feared and admired. As the Roman Empire had spread northwards and across to Britain, the main centres of each tribal territory had usually become a Roman military centre or market town and the Celtic gods of the local tribe likewise put on Roman clothes. Thus in Gaul, for instance, the Celtic god Lugh, whose festival this was, had given his name to the city of Lugdunum, which would one day become transmuted to Lyon. And the tribes in turn had gradually become Roman, even losing their old language and speaking Latin instead.
Except on the outer fringes. In the northern and western parts of Britain, which the Romans largely left alone, the former tongues and tribal customs had continued. Above all, in the western neighbour island across the sea, where the Romans came to trade but not to conquer, the old Celtic culture, in all its richness, remained intact. The Romans were not always certain what to call these various people. In northern Britain, which the Romans called Alba, lived the ancient tribes of Picts. When colonisers from the Celtic western island sailed over and established settlements in Alba, gradually pushing the Picts back towards the