Princes of Ireland - Edward Rutherfurd [72]
But above all, it was Fergus who took the boy’s education in hand. Once, when Deirdre had started to thank him, he had cut her short. “He’s my only grandson,” he had growled. “What else would I do?” Indeed, the boy had seemed to give his grandfather a new lease on life. Fergus had seldom been depressed once he had Morna to look after. He drank sparingly. He had seemed to find a new vigour. But she knew there was more to it than that. For he had sensed a special quality in the boy. Everybody did. His quickness at learning delighted Fergus. By the time he was six, Morna knew all the tales of Cuchulainn, and the island’s legendary kings, and the ancient gods. He could relate the stories of his mother’s family, too, of the slaying of Erc the Warrior. It delighted Fergus to let Morna hold the old drinking skull in his hands while he told it. He taught the boy to use a sword and throw a spear. And, of course, Morna had demanded to know if his own father had been a great warrior, too.
Deirdre had been uncertain what to say, but Fergus had satisfied him without any difficulty. “He fought all kinds of battles,” he would say airily. “But the greatest was against Finbarr. A terrible man. Your father killed him near here, on the shores by the Plain of Bird Flocks.” Morna never tired of hearing details of the battle, which in due course included the additional slaying of a sea monster. It was hardly surprising, then, that Morna should dream of becoming a warrior and a hero himself. But Fergus had handled this quite well. “I wanted the same thing when I was a boy,” he told his grandson. “But warriors mostly go across the sea to plunder other men’s goods; whereas look at all the cattle we have here. You will have to defend this place, though.” If, as he grew to be a man, Morna sometimes dreamed of being a warrior, he did not speak of it.
It was not, in any case, his potential as a warrior that had so impressed his grandfather. It was his quality of mind. It showed in all he did. By the time he was ten, Fergus made him sit at his side whenever people came to him for justice. After some years, the boy knew almost as much as he did of the island’s ancient brehon laws. He delighted in the knottier kinds of problem. If a man sold a single cow and then a month later she produced a calf, to whom did the calf belong: the new or the former owner? If a man built a water mill powered by a stream that came down from another man’s land, did the latter have a right to use the water mill free of charge? And subtlest of all, which of two twins was the elder, the firstborn or the second? Elsewhere in Europe, it was the firstborn, but not always on the western island. “For if he comes out behind the other,” Morna reasoned, “then he must have been in there first. So the second-born is the elder.”
His sons would never have worked that out, Fergus thought. Unless the case concerned themselves, such abstract problems did not interest them.
There was something else about Morna, something hard to define. It showed in his love of music, for he played beautifully on the harp. It showed in his bearing—and it went beyond his dark good looks. Even as a youth, he had the dignity of old Fergus; but there was something more, a magical quality which drew people to him. He was royal.
It had not been easy, deciding what to tell Morna about his royal ancestry. Deirdre had wanted to tell him nothing. “He’ll get no good from that quarter,” she had argued, “anymore than his father did.” Royal blood was a curse, rather than a blessing.