Princes of Ireland - Edward Rutherfurd [53]
It was a grim time. The failure of the harvest the year before was a serious matter. It had not brought starvation to the land, so far. The chiefs of each territory usually saw to that. There was still milk and meat, vegetables and berries. As they led their people out onto the communal grazing lands, they knew that despite the failure of the crops at the farmsteads, they could still live in the manner of their distant ancestors before the raising of crops had come to supplement the tribe’s resources. But hardship there was. Oatmeal, bread, and ale, too, with the destruction of the barley, were all in short supply. In most cases on the farmsteads, Finbarr noticed, the chiefs had been ruthless in keeping back grain for sowing. It was as well, he thought, that the land of the island was rich, and that the chiefs had good authority. But if the people looked to their chiefs, and the chiefs to their kings, then the focal point of all their hopes was, more than ever, on the High King and his favour with the gods.
Just after Lughnasa, the rain began to fall. Not the usual rain that might be expected in the warm, wet coastal regions of ocean-bordered Munster, but driving storms and howling winds, day after day without ceasing. This year, too, it was clear the harvest would be ruined. And seeing this terrible evidence of the gods’ displeasure, though Finbarr loved his friend, he could not help wondering if Conall’s humiliation of the High King might not be the cause.
Fair weather or foul, they searched the coasts and hills of Munster; they scoured Leinster; they went up into Ulster. Sometimes they found shelter at a farmstead; sometimes they slept in the open and heard the howling of wolves. They crossed the rich pasturelands where great earthwork walls and ditches marked the divisions between the lands of one tribe and another; they ventured into the dark bogs where people lived in brannog settlements built on wooden platforms in the water. Everywhere they asked, and everywhere the answer was the same: “We have not seen them here.”
Once, just once, Finbarr had a feeling that they might be close. It was on the eastern coast, just above the Liffey’s bay. There, by a deserted strand of beach, he had met an old woman and asked if she had seen any strangers.
“Only the druid,” she had said, “who lives on the island.”
“Has he companions?” Finbarr had asked.
“He has not. None at all. He lives alone.”
Yet an instinct might have made him go out to the place, but for his two companions, who called to him: “Finbarr, come on. He is not here.” And so they departed.
At last they had come to Connacht, with its mountains and lakes and wild coastline. They do well, he thought, to call it the land of the druids. And thinking of his friend’s lonely spirit, it seemed to him that this was where he might be. So for months they searched, but there was not a whisper of him. Until one day as they were standing on the great, sheer cliffs of Moher, staring out at the wild ocean in which somewhere, it was said, lay the Isles of the Blessed where the spirits of the great warriors went to their eternal rest—and Finbarr was just wondering whether perhaps his friend might have died and his spirit gone out there—one of his two companions spoke.
“It is time to return, Finbarr.”
“I cannot,” he replied. “I have not found him.”
“Come with us,” said the other. “You can do no more.”
And he realised that it was a year since they had set out.
Sometimes it seemed to Conall that he had never been happy before. His life with Deirdre had been a revelation to them both. It had not taken her long to become, in their lovemaking, even more adventurous