On such days if his father had reached home before he did, the sun shone again.
“Well, Champion, how’s the whole wide world today?”—and from his pocket his father would pull a treat; a wooden gewgaw or a chocolate bar or newspaper cutting he knew Ronan would enjoy—a man has died of senility in France, aged only seventeen, or a calf was born in Wales with two heads, or how a lightning bolt in Arizona had split a tractor in two.
Sometimes, and these were the best days, his father brought Ronan a package with English postage stamps. John had an addiction to mail order, and he sent away for what he called “things.” One contained a “Seebackroscope,” which John explained to Ronan: “Put it to your eye, and it’s like a backward telescope—you can see what’s happening behind you as well as in front.” Either the thing didn’t work, or Ronan couldn’t master it. And there was the Ventrilo, a small, metal half-moon that, if placed in the roof of the mouth, helped you, said the catalog, to “throw your voice and become a great ventriloquist.” That didn’t work either—but Ronan never complained. As for the book that said “Become an Immediate Juggler,” which came with three red-and-green rubber balls, not even Kate could master the instructions.
Kate taught in a school some miles away, and Ronan listened each afternoon for the swish of her bicycle tires on the gravel. She always greeted him first, John second, and Alison last. For Ronan she had a special backward handshake. He had to twist his arm to get it right, and Kate followed it with a slow ruffling of his hair and then a grabbed hug to her bosom. The game didn’t end until he squealed a muffled, “I can’t breathe!”
All his teachers remarked upon Ronan O’Mara’s high intelligence, but found he had difficulty separating fantasy from fact. He proved best on subjects that made pictures in his mind—history, geography, literature. The morning after the Storyteller’s arrival, he went to school with a radiant brain. “Newgrange!” He rolled the word in his mouth. Like a spotlight on a stage, that miraculous shaft of light shone down into his mind, and he asked himself over and over, “Where will he take us tonight?” Perhaps to Ulster, he hoped—powerful, magical Ulster, with its knights and courts and intrigues? Or the wild coast of the west, where men launched boats into Atlantic gales?
Throughout the day, he carried the Storyteller inside him, like a startling, marvelous secret. And after school Ronan raced home and lingered near the barn, hoping for a glimpse—but the stranger stayed in bed, still resting.
The house, however, held the man’s traces. A smell of tobacco hung somewhere in the air. Josie Hogan, the O’Maras’ housekeeper, had stuffed newspaper into the Storyteller’s great battered boots to finish drying them. Then she polished them to a shine, and they stood inside the back door, ransomed, healed, restored, forgiven. Across the yard, his ancient shirt flapped on the clothesline, wan as a ghost in the late afternoon light.
Just as the sun was going down, Aunt Kate arrived like a lovely, happy bird. She had missed the first night—staying with friends—and Ronan’s words cascaded over her. He told her about the Architect and the bear and the Angry Woman and the dish of sunlight and the Silken Elder. Kate whooped.
“We’ll go to Newgrange!”
She whirled him round and round.
That evening, the Storyteller looked almost glossy—no more an ashen-faced scarecrow. He now wore a faded shirt of soft blue wool; Ronan recognized it as one of his father’s. From his shining boots peeped some gray socks that Kate had knitted too big for anyone they knew. Under the long black coat he wore the same black trousers with legs like drainpipes. And under his black jacket he had a black waistcoat like a gambler’s vest, across which looped a tarnished silver watch chain. He had shaved the gray stubble from his chin.
No longer did he seem famished or desperate. Until he was served, his hands lay folded in his lap; no elbows on the table. He listened for opportunities to contribute to the conversation. Kate and John asked about his travels; each of his replies added value to the question. Alison spoke little, and never directly to the old man. With Ronan, though, the Storyteller engaged as an equal; he asked Ronan’s opinion, looked him in the eye, included him in all that was said.
At the meal’s end the two women rose, and the Storyteller stood respectfully.
“May I offer my compliments,” he said. “Many meals satisfy—but few nourish. I have been well nourished this evening, in body and mind.”
By now the word had gone out—a storyteller had “landed” (as though from an alien shore) at the O’Maras’. When eight o’clock chimed in the hallway, twenty-five people had gathered round the hearth.
Some of the men asked where he came from.
To one he said, “It’s a sort of truth that I’m from anywhere.” And to another, “I was born up the country, but now I’m from everywhere.”
Ronan shared the bench with the same girl as the previous night; all other children sat on the floor. The men accepted dark bottles of stout or small glasses of amber whiskey. All the women sat together except for Ronan’s mother; Alison, as ever, stayed at a distance, her eyes roving over every face in the crowded room as she supervised food and drinks.
Kate rubbed her hands with excitement; Ronan wore his Sunday-best clothes. On his forehead the cowlick of hair above the freckles was dark with water where Kate had again tried to paste it down. His father’s cheeks glowed.
The Storyteller looked slowly around the room.
“How many of you heard me last night?”
Numerous hands rose, including Ronan’s. The Storyteller beamed with satisfaction—everyone from the previous night had returned.
“Do any of you offer an observation on my tale?”
A man murmured, “D’you know, we never found out the Architect’s name.”
And the Storyteller replied, “Sadly, we’ll never know it. There are no words carved at Newgrange—only symbols.”
He smiled to soften the disappointment of his answer, arranged himself in his chair, and took a deep breath. Legs curled under listeners. Bodies settled down.
“Tonight”—he cleared his throat—“tonight, we shall thrust forward from Newgrange, forward by many, many centuries. I’m going to tell you a story about the king of Ulster.”
Ronan felt his hair tingle. Ulster?! The Storyteller had read his thoughts.
“As we all know, Ulster is the most northerly of all our provinces. And it’s the one with the most drama in its history. The events in this tale occurred on a night not unlike this one. It all took place in a few hours—in more or less the same time it will take me to tell you the story. Which, like all my tales, is true and tells you how our forefathers lived in Ireland before Jesus Christ was born. So—make way for a foolish and beloved king.”
KING CONOR OF ULSTER SUFFERED FROM toothaches, which occasioned in him a tendency toward the morose. A stocky man, he stood neither short nor tall; he was what the police like to call “of medium height.” He possessed an uneven mind, which swung between flashes of quick thinking and the pace of a snail; either he grasped an idea immediately, or he had to have it explained to him over and over. His heart experienced similar variations, by which I mean that he trusted some people too much and some people too little.
As to his temperament, it was very difficult to measure; he was a man who often had opposite moods in him. His eyes filled with tears at any tender story, especially about a child or a dog. But more than once he had turned a whole family out of their farm—they gave him a gift too small, perhaps, or hadn’t brought enough farm produce to the court.
Conor knew he suffered from these conflicts, and by way of acknowledging them, he always yoked his chariot to two horses. He could have traveled perfectly well drawn by a single horse, but when asked about it, he answered that the horses represented the two sides of his nature: “That’s why one is always black,” he said, “and one white.”
If asked to explain, he’d turn the question back: “What are you like inside? Don’t you have feelings where you lo
ve everyone, and at the same time you hate everyone? Or—don’t you have times when everything goes the way you want, but nothing feels good or right? That’s what I mean,” he’d say, “about my black horse and my white horse.” And he’d add, “And maybe I mean more than that—but I don’t have the words for it yet.”
No matter what he was like, the people of Ulster loved their king. They often discussed him and his little vanities, such as his fineries. He liked bright cloaks, ornamented with embroidered animals—a wolf, his horses, a hound; one cloak had a picture of a great sword with a jeweled hilt. His sandals, they knew, had to be made of calves’ leather, with the softest straps. And around his mouth he often had green stains, from the herbs that he chewed to quell those toothaches.
The court of Ulster was like a village. Some people knew some of what was going on. Some people pretended they knew all of what was going on. Most knew very little, and what they didn’t know they made up, as folk do everywhere—that’s part of what we call “gossip.” Some gossip is often accurate—because it’s based on a little information and inspired guessing. Another kind of gossip is no more than a rumor, started by someone who hopes to see it come true. The best gossip of all, though, comes when something new and mysterious happens that nobody had expected and that nobody knows anything about.
Therefore, one day King Conor’s subjects and his courtiers went wild over some new gossip.
What the gossip was saying was this: King Conor was about to announce a decision that might cause, not two horses, but two women to divert his life. And, they said, you could be sure of one thing—these two women mightn’t always be pointed in one direction as easily as his two horses.
Two women? What did he want two for? He already had a wife—his queen, the mother of his little children—so what was this about another woman? Someone said they knew for sure that a high-ranking woman was coming to the palace “by appointment.” It was long known that the king wanted a new chancellor, in place of his old uncle, who had died the previous year. But could it be possible that he’d appoint a woman? Yes—here indeed was food for gossip.
They prattled and they prattled, wagging their tongues up and down and in and out: a juicy question, a plump little theory—they were like birds picking berries off a branch. And they all said the same thing: What a strange decision! And not only a woman but a widow. And not only a widow but a young widow, and into the bargain, very beautiful.
What was wrong with that, you might ask? Conor, being a sensible man, liked beautiful women. However, there was the matter of the queen; she, being sensible too, also liked beautiful women, but she liked them not very much—and only when they kept their distance from her husband the king.
All the people—the courtiers, the tenants, and all the maids and men and servants and slaves of Ulster—puzzled over every aspect of this appointment. How well did the king know her? Dana was her name, or so it was said. Where did he meet this Dana, and why had she impressed him so much?
They had a few details. Dana came from the west; one brother was a druid, priest to a rich chieftain; one was a bard, who did his job well, entertaining the court with good poems (but his satires, they said, never rang bitter enough). Beyond that, they struggled to find illumination.
Someone recalled that the king had been a guest in this woman’s territories the previous year, at a stag hunt. Was that where it all began? This Dana had ridden well, they said, and had ridden closer to the king than any of the men would have dared, risking a breach of protocol.
After the hunt, she’d invited the royal party to her house for a banquet. Conor, never impressed by a woman merely because she could handle a horse, didn’t take up her invitation. He suffered from loneliness in social gatherings, and he longed to return to his own home and table. So it can’t have been her cooking or her hospitality.
No: this is how Dana first came to the king’s attention.
Six years earlier, Conor had paid his annual visit of respect to the High King of Ireland, who lived south from Ulster on the hill of Tara, not far indeed from Newgrange. On the long ride back north, Conor was caught in a thunderstorm. He rode hard ahead and lost four of his six household guards, who couldn’t keep up with him. Conor and the other two champions, as they were called, took shelter in a wood. Not the most sensible place, I’d say, when lightning strikes—another piece of evidence, perhaps, that the beloved king of Ulster mightn’t always be completely wise.
A party of bandits came upon the royal group. It was broad daylight, but teeming with rain so heavy that it leaked through the trees. The king and his two champions, all of them in hunting regalia, looked like wet hens. However, there was one thing you always knew about Conor—even those who had gone swimming naked with him in the river when he was a child said this—no matter where he was, or how he was dressed, he always looked like a king.
The bandits who entered the wood saw that too. But instead of backing off, as they might have been expected to do, they attacked. Nobody could dream of attacking a king and surviving; there was no hiding place on the island of Ireland for such a villain. They must have been desperate men or true ruffians—and they attacked viciously.
First, they fired their spears across the clearing. Three spears went astray, but two struck the horses of the escorts. One animal, hit in the chest, died under his rider, whose leg was crushed when his steed fell. The other horse took a spear deep in his flank, and that poor animal reared in pain. It unhorsed the champion riding it and crashed into the king, who barely managed to steady his own mount. Conor was now the only one fit to fight back; one of his guards lay on the ground, rolling in agony under a dead horse, and the other was staggering around, concussed from a heavy fall.
The five bandits came in close, drawing their long swords. The king and his men had only worn short swords, which became a serious disadvantage; it meant that the attackers had a longer reach.
Conor unhooked his beautiful round shield from his saddle. This had a jeweled boss—that’s the round knob at the center. He wore it mainly for decoration, an ornament, to show respect to his High King. For fighting, he would have preferred his long, oblong shield, which protected his body from chin to knee. Nevertheless, he went forward on his horse, his shield on his left arm, the sword in his right hand cutting circles of light in the forest clearing.
The outlaw leader, a scarred man with one eye, tried to duck under Conor’s swinging sword but had to pull back. One of the champions half recovered and came to help, but two of the outlaws seized the man. One clawed his head back by the hair, and the other cut his throat. And that same two bandits now attacked the other guard, the one whose horse had fallen on top of him. They dragged him clear and with one swipe of a sword almost severed his head from his neck.
All five villains could now turn their undivided attention to the king. Two of them got under his shield, grabbed his left leg, and managed to drag him off his horse. Conor, though, had always been a remarkable fighter, and even though they manhandled him to the ground, he wounded one grievously in the throat, caught another in the eye with the boss of the shield, and got to his feet again.
In his exertions, the king’s mouth began to froth with saliva. He’d been suffering from a bad toothache that morning, and he’d been chewing herbs, so that it began to look as though his mouth foamed green.
Very disconcerting, you might think—but not for the ruffians, who were gaining the best of things. While one fought Conor from the front, two tried to get behind him. Conor stayed as close to his horse’s flank as possible, but they began to stab the horse in the rear. The poor creature bucked and reared, and Conor tried to decide whether to cling to the horse or fight his way out of the circle of his attackers. There was little he could do—the horse screamed in pain, kicked out, and broke away, leaving Conor utterly exposed.
At that moment, two horsemen, strangers, galloped into the forest. They too had come there by accident, also sheltering from the storm, and they recognized that this
man fighting for his life was a king—and that the odds were unfair. They stopped, took stock of the situation, and decided to act.
With great force and style, the newcomers routed the bandits, killing one immediately. The pair whom Conor had injured ran off—and now there were two. The strangers jumped from their horses and with their swords slashed the chest and stomach of one more, leaving Conor to face the bandit chief alone.
Both strangers stood back a little to allow a king to recover his honor. The bandit chief, even though he wielded a long and mighty sword, proved no match for Conor’s skill. With the delicacy of a dancing master, the king ran rings around the ruffian, piercing him here and here and here, the face, the stomach, the chest—swift, thrusting blows that drew spurts of blood. He then disarmed the bandit chief with a dreadful blow on the villain’s sword arm. Finally, in the great gesture of all fighting kings, Conor killed him with the man’s own sword.
Then and only then did he turn and thank his rescuers. One of the king’s two saviors on that rainy day was a landowner out on a hunt—and the husband of Dana.
“I’m a lucky man,” said Conor to him. “Thank you very much.”
The gentleman shrugged it off.
“We all deserve a bit of luck. I’m a lucky man too,” he told the king. “I was lucky enough to marry a wonderful wife, and you must come and meet her.”
And it was true—no man knew more love from a spouse. Dana thought her husband the core of the world, a man from whose eyes the sun shone in the morning and the moon at night. The servant women in that house could scarcely keep up to the standards of attention Dana wanted for her husband. When the king met her—she was part of her husband’s party that day—he agreed; this was a grand young wife.
But some years after the king’s rescue, that fine man died in a fall from a horse during a helter-skelter hunt. Such a tragedy! People thought Dana might die too, of grief. At the graveside, nobody could get through to her on account of her wailing and weeping. Young though she was, nothing girlish marked her mourning—hers was a powerful, adult grieving.