Princes of Ireland - Edward Rutherfurd [7]
“So why have you learned to read?” Finbarr had asked.
“I am curious,” Conall had said, as if this were natural. “Besides,” he had smiled, “I am not a druid.”
How often had those words echoed in Finbarr’s mind. Of course his friend was not a druid. He was going to be a warrior. And yet … Sometimes when Conall sang and closed his eyes, or when he returned from one of his solitary wanderings with a faraway, melancholy look, as though he were in a dream, Finbarr couldn’t help wondering if his friend had not entered … He did not know what. A borderland of some kind.
And so he had not really been surprised when, towards the end of spring, Conall had confessed: “I want to take the druid’s tonsure.”
The druids shaved straight up from their ears over the top of the head. The effect of this tonsure was to give a high, rounded forehead; unless of course the druid was already going bald at the front, in which case the tonsure hardly showed. In Conall’s case, since his hair was thick, the tonsure would leave a dark, V-shaped shaved area over his brow.
There had certainly been princely druids before. Indeed, many people on the island considered the druid caste to be higher than even kings. Finbarr had looked at his friend thoughtfully.
“What will the High King say?” he had asked.
“It is hard to say. It is a pity that my mother was his sister.”
Finbarr knew all about Conall’s mother: her devotion to his father’s memory, her determination that her son should follow in his father’s footsteps as a warrior. When she had died two years ago, she had begged the High King—her brother—to make sure that her husband’s line should be continued.
“Druids marry,” Finbarr pointed out. Indeed, the druid’s position was often transferred from father to son. “You could have children who would be warriors.”
“That is true,” said Conall. “But the High King may think otherwise.”
“Could he forbid you, if the druids want you to join them?”
“I think,” Conall replied, “that if the druids know the High King does not wish it, they will not ask.”
“What will you do?”
“Wait. Perhaps I can persuade them.”
It had been a month later that the High King had summoned Finbarr.
“Finbarr,” he had begun, “I know you are my nephew Conall’s closest friend. You know of his wish to become a druid?” Finbarr had nodded. “It would be a good thing if he changed his mind,” the High King said. That was all. But from the High King, it was enough.
She hadn’t wanted to come. There were two reasons. The first, Deirdre knew, was selfish. She didn’t like leaving home.
It was a strange place to live, but she loved it. In the middle of the island’s eastern coast, a river, having descended from the wild Wicklow Mountains just to the south and made a sweeping inland curve, came out through an estuary into a broad bay with two headlands—as if, Deirdre thought, the Earth goddess Eriu, the island’s mother, was stretching her arms to embrace the sea. Inland, the river formed a broad flood basin known as the Liffey Plain. It was a river of changing moods, subject to sudden rages. When it was angry, its swollen waters would hurtle down from the mountains in violent flash floods which carried all before them. But these fits of rage were only occasional. Most of the time, its waters were tranquil and its voice was soft, whispering, and melodic. With its wide tidal waters, wooded marshes, and low mudflats fringed with grasses, the estuary was usually a place of silence, but for the cries of the distant gulls and the piping curlews and the heron gliding over the shell-strewn shoreline strands.
It was almost deserted, except for the few scattered farmsteads under her father’s rule. Two small features there were, however, each of which had already given the place a name. One, just before the river opened out into its mile-wide marshy estuary, was man-made: a wooden trackway across the marshland, which crossed the river