Princes of Ireland - Edward Rutherfurd [52]
“While they go looking into every hill and valley in the south-west, we could be on our way up there,” she pointed out. It was a clever bluff—to return to the coastal edge of the very regions from which they had fled—and it was unlikely anyone would think of it. She also made another suggestion which surprised him: “We should leave the horses and go on foot.” But he soon saw the wisdom of this, too. No one would be looking out for Conall the prince on foot. And then she made two further suggestions which surprised him even more.
So it was the middle of June when a single druid, walking slowly with a staff and accompanied, a few steps behind, by a servant boy, made his way at dusk down from the Wicklow Mountains and took the track towards the crossing of Ath Cliath at Dubh Linn. Fergus and his sons, as Deirdre had told him they would be, were out on the grasslands far away, with their cattle. But it was deep night in any case when, skirting some way from the rath, in case there should be any dogs about, they made their way across the wooden causeway over the shallows of the Liffey. As they did so, Deirdre noticed that the rotted planks had still not been replaced. Then they passed onto the broad Plain of Bird Flocks.
Up to now, her plan had worked. When, at her suggestion, Conall had shaved his head in the druid tonsure, she had smiled to herself because he looked, it seemed to her, even more himself than he had before. When she in turn shaved her head like a slave, he burst out laughing. She had wondered whether the loss of her splendid hair would make her less attractive to him and interfere with their lovemaking which, since the afternoon at the pool, had been frequent. She discovered within moments of completing the operation that it would not.
But why had she suggested they should seek their hiding place so near to her home? Was it, at this time of crisis, that she was craving the security of her childhood and family? Perhaps. As they passed by her father’s rath in the dark, she felt a sudden stab of emotion; she longed to creep in, sniff the familiar scent of the hearth, see the pale shape of her father’s drinking skull on its shelf. If only the proud, talkative old man were there, so that they could take each other in their arms. But he was not there and she could not enter; and so she could only peer towards the rath’s faint outline as she went by in the dark. Yet her choice of hiding place was also clever. For nobody ever went there.
The first day Conall left her in the dolmen shelter up on the promontory. He went along the shore but had no luck. The second day he came back smiling. He had found an old widow woman living alone in a hut by the shoreline. Telling her he was a single druid seeking greater solitude, he had explained his needs and she was glad to provide them: a bit of food when he came for it, and the use of the small curragh that had belonged to her husband, who had been a fisherman.
Late that night, and quite unseen, Conall and Deirdre came down to the shore and set out in the curragh, upon a still and starlit sea, for the little island with the cleft rock that lay below the headland Deirdre loved. No one, she hoped, would find them there.
II
For a year the search continued. Spies from the High King watched the harbours; on several occasions they also secretly watched Fergus and his rath in case he was concealing his daughter; but each time they returned to report: “No sign.”
And for a year Finbarr travelled.
Day by day the pattern was unchanging—Finbarr, with Cuchulainn bounding along beside, rode first. The two chiefs followed behind. Sometimes they took winding tracks; sometimes they would journey along one of the island’s great slige highways. It might be a broad cattle drove across the upland pastures, a pathway cut through the forest, or a stout wooden track through a bog, but