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By Root 2295 0

his mind. The former Viking families had almost all been pushed out of Fingal. In their place were Norman and English names—Plunkett and Field, Bisset and Cruise, Barnewall, and the Talbot lords of Malahide. They were all stout Englishmen; they married among themselves or other English families. But elsewhere, the situation was less clear-cut. If the Norsemen were no longer in Fingal, what about the old suburb on the north bank of the Liffey? Oxmantown, people often called it nowadays, but the origin of the name—Ostmanby, the town of the Ostmen—was not forgotten. There were plenty of people of Norse descent around there. And making the great curve round to the west and south of the city, one encountered local lords with names that were anything but English. There were the Harolds, descendants of Ailred the Palmer’s son. They were Norse. So were the powerful Archbolds. As for the Thorkyll family, they descended from a former Norse king of the city—loyal to the English Justiciar, no doubt, but hardly Englishmen. And finally, there were the families like his own. There was a cluster of them in the territory south of the city, living on rich, fortified farms. Howell, Lawless, and the several branches of the Walsh family: their names might or might not make it obvious, but they all had come over from Wales. Were they, too, loyal to England? Of course they were. They had to be.

All the same, life down in the southern farmlands was rather different from that above Dublin. Because of the wild Wicklow Mountains which rose close by, and where the old Irish clans still held sway, the area was more of a frontier. John’s mother had come from the settled conditions of Fingal, and it had worried her that he was allowed to run wild with the local Irish children, but his father had taken a different view. “If he is going to live beside these people,” he would say cheerfully, “then he’d better know them.” And know them he did. Even at the Walsh farmstead, a harpist or an Irish bard would sometimes arrive and offer to entertain his father in his hall—an offer his father never refused, and for which he always paid generously. And as for young John, there was hardly a month when he didn’t go out with the fishermen at the nearby coastal village of Dalkey, or go up into the Wicklow Mountains and run with the O’Tooles and the O’Byrnes. They all knew who he was, of course: he was a Walsh, one of the colonists who had taken their best land from them. But children have a passport into places where their parents may not go, and for a number of years the boy was only dimly conscious of the barrier that lay between himself and his companions. He spoke their language, he usually dressed and rode bareback as they did. Once he discovered an even closer link.

A party of boys had gone up into the hills and ridden their ponies over to the lakes at Glendalough. The old monastery there was a shadow of its former self: the bishopric had long since been taken over by Dublin and only a small group of monks lived there now; but John had still been impressed by the quiet beauty of the place. They had stopped by the little settlement nearby when he had noticed the dark-haired girl watching him. She was about his own age, slim; he thought her rather beautiful. She was sitting on a grassy bank, eating an apple, and silently staring at him with a pair of bright green eyes. Feeling a little uncomfortable under her steady gaze, he had gone over to her.

“So what are you staring at?” he had demanded to know; though he had said it in a perfectly friendly way.

“You.” She took another bite out of her apple.

“Do I know you?”

She munched for a moment or two before replying, “I know who you are.”

“And who is that?”

“My cousin.” She watched his look of astonishment with interest. “You’re the Walsh boy, aren’t you?” He agreed that he was. “I could be a Walsh, too, if I wanted,” she declared. “But I don’t,” she added fiercely, taking another bite out of her apple. Then she had suddenly sprung up and run away.

Could this girl really be related? he had asked his father that