AN SEANCHAS MóR
(THE GREAT ANCIENT TRADITION)
The king is bound by law to do justice to his meanest subject.
A king carrying building material to his castle has only the same claim for right of way as the miller carrying material to build his mill.
The poorest man in the land can compel payment of a debt from the king himself.
The man who steals the needle of a poor embroidery
woman must pay a far higher fine than the man
who
steals the queen’s needle
.
W
HEN THEY GOT DOWNSTAIRS, the whole house was filled with savoury scents, the table was spread with snowy linen, glittering goblets and shining silver.
Seated by the fire was an elegant young man, freshly bathed and combed and richly dressed. The manservant had obviously found clothes for him, also. The snowy white
léine
and rich crimson gown, tailored to suit an emaciated old man, fitted the slim young figure perfectly and the rich colour enhanced a pair of beautiful brown eyes.
Toin led him up to present him and visibly enjoyed the start of surprise from Turlough when he said, ‘My lord, this is Cuan, the son of Sorley the silversmith.’
Toin had already told Nuala all about Cuan, Mara guessed from the gentle way that Nuala greeted him and from her rapturous pleasure at the little song, which with childlike obedience he had sung for her at Toin’s request. Nuala was fourteen and Cuan was seventeen, but she seemed the elder of the two. She had always been very grown-up. The long illness and the tragic death of her mother over a year ago had forced her into an early maturity. She sat and chatted with the boy when he had finished the song, and although he did not say much, what little he did say was sensible and, in his new clothes and with the wine bringing colour to his cheeks, he almost looked like the son of the household. Nuala was good with him. She treated him just as if he were one of the boys at the law school and he was soon at ease with her, and also with Toin whom he had obviously known for a long time, though he stammered over his words when Turlough or Malachy addressed a kindly remark to him. He was certainly not to be classified as a
druth,
thought Mara listening carefully. She was inclined to think that Toin’s account of the boy, in his childhood, was probably correct. He was a pleasant boy, not overburdened with brains, but friendly by nature and certainly not suffering
from any mental handicap. His murmured replies to Nuala’s questions were all quite rational.
Rory came in a few minutes later and then there seemed to be a change in the atmosphere. Rory gave Cuan a long, thoughtful look and Cuan blushed like a child. Had Rory already accused him of being close at hand when Sorley met his death, wondered Mara. There was certainly an unease between them, though perhaps that could have been the fruit of past resentments.
‘What glorious weather we’ve been having,’said Malachy and Mara, usually bored by discussions of the weather, seized on the subject with relief. While Turlough, Toin, Malachy and she shared memories of past autumns the silence between the two young men passed unnoticed. In any case, the door was open to the banqueting hall and that was full of bustle as servants came and went carrying in, first of all, long cloths of linen, followed by trays of costly silver and precious Venetian glasses, flagons of wine and of ale, then platters and baskets heaped high with food. When all was ready, Tomas approached Toin with a low bow.
‘Will it please you to be seated, my lord,’ he said. The words were formal, but the care with which he stretched out an arm to escort Toin through into the hall and gently helped him to his seat at the head of the table showed the depth of feeling that existed between servant and master. Though wifeless and childless, Toin, because of the essential sweetness of his nature, was being carefully cared for by his servants in these last months of his life.
The banqueting hall was a magnificent room, a long high room with a ceiling of great arched beams of oak wood, a floor of gleaming green and white Connemara
marble, the walls, in the Italian fashion, boarded in chestnut wood, with candle sconces carefully placed so that each illuminated the beautifully carved panels. The table was a long one, left over from the days when Toin held his great banquets. Places had been laid for each guest at a rather unfriendly distance of a couple of yards from each other. Mara cast a quick glance around when the servants retired to fetch the hot dishes of food.
‘Shall I sit here, Toin?’ Mara quickly moved a place setting and inserted it into a gap, ‘Cuan can sit next to me, and then Nuala on his other side. Is that all right, Toin? My lord, you sit here, next to Toin and opposite me. And Rory down there on Malachy’s other side.’
Turlough was surveying her with an amused look, but she didn’t care; it wouldn’t matter to Toin who sat where, but Cuan might as well have a good dinner, cocooned between herself and Nuala. The boy was nervous and ill at ease with Rory; that was obvious. He took up a knife, then looked at his deformed right hand, flushed, transferred the knife and tucked the other hand under the table.
‘Could you always sing, Cuan?’ asked Nuala. He turned to her with surprise, dropping the knife onto the table. He was poor with his left hand, thought Mara, watching him carefully from the corner of her eye. Obviously he had tried to use it in preference to the right hand, but it didn’t work for him. She herself was the same. Once when she had injured her right wrist, she had tried very hard to write with her left hand, but she just could not do it.
‘I mean,’ continued Nuala, ‘Fachtnan says he could sing like an angel before his voice broke, but now he makes a noise like a bull calf.’
‘Whereas,’ said Rory, helping himself to some more wine, ‘Cuan has always sung like a nanny goat.’
It wasn’t so much the words – the law scholars bandied much worse insults between them in a carefree way every day of the week – it was more the concentrated malevolence in Rory’s voice, thought Mara, eyeing him across the table with a steady, cold look as she noticed Cuan flush and clench his hands, his eyes full of misery.
‘I wouldn’t drink too much wine, Rory,’ she said evenly. ‘I notice that it can often lead young men into saying silly things.’ And then she filled her glass and sipped it appreciatively. ‘Wasted on young people, Toin,’ she added lightly. ‘Just give them ale.’
Turlough roared appreciatively at that and Malachy’s dark face lit up with a smile.
‘I’m drinking ale, but then I have the patient to look after since my father has already had two glasses of wine,’ said Nuala primly.
Malachy protested, though with an indulgent smile. Turlough teased Malachy and in the ensuing merriment, the angry flush died down from Cuan’s face.
‘I was talking to Cuan about a bard school,’ said Mara to Nuala. ‘And now I find you want to go to a medical school. I suppose a day will come when there is a school for everything.’
‘Well, I went to the monks at Emly,’ said Turlough ‘and I just can’t imagine what Nuala wants to go to school for. Hell has no terrors for me now.’
‘You were probably not concentrating on your studies, my lord,’ said Nuala severely.
She was looking very well this evening, thought Mara,
wishing that Fachtnan were present. A confident girl, one who could speak sociably to a king and yet was gentle and deferential to poor Cuan. Toin’s admiration for her skills had brought a flush to Nuala’s cheek and a gleam to her eye. She was a pretty child, with her dark eyes and hair and her brown skin, still bronzed by the summer sun. Her whole face and bearing shone with intelligence and sensitivity, also. Cuan was trying desperately to separate the pink succulent flesh of the salmon from its bone, swapping his knife from his deformed right hand to his unhelpful left and, quietly, with no fuss, she took the plate from him.
‘Let me do it,’ she said. ‘Boys are no good at this sort of thing. I’m always having to open shellfish for Fachtnan.’
Cuan was best left to Nuala, thought Mara. She sat back and relaxed and devoted herself to the dinner and to the wine. The rich taste of the pinot noir grape filled her palate. Perfect with the slightly gamey taste of the woodcock, she thought, making a note to tell Brigid about the sauce. Malachy, from his pleased face, was still enjoying the salmon and the flinty coldness of the bottle of Montrachet which accompanied it. She leaned against the cushioned comfort of her chair and looked around her, holding her glass to the light of the beeswax candle in its candlestick of silver. Not as beautiful a candlestick as those she had seen in Sorley’s house, she thought, and at that moment Turlough, following the direction of her eyes, and forgetting Cuan’s presence for a moment, said to Toin: ‘Did you buy your silver from Sorley?’
‘No,’ said Toin, shortly. ‘No, I didn’t.’
With a glance at the boy sitting silently beside her, Mara
intervened hastily, ‘I don’t think I have ever eaten a meal quite like this before. What is that wonderful sweet, but slightly sour, taste in the sauce, Toin?’
‘That’s probably the oranges,’ said Toin. ‘Cathal the sea captain brought me some from Spain the last time he came. I sent a messenger to him this morning to bring me some more back from his next voyage. I’ll ask him to bring some for you, too, Brehon, if you would like some. What about you, Malachy?’
‘Why yes,’ said Malachy with a start. He and Turlough had been deep in a discussion about coinage and its advantages and disadvantages over barter. ‘Yes, I’m sure that Nuala would love to taste an orange. I don’t think I’ve ever seen one myself.’
He turned back to his conversation with Turlough, saying, ‘The thing is, my lord, if I have bred a fine saddle horse and you have a prize bull then we can get together and if the value seems equal then it’s a straight exchange that benefits both. If you use coinage, someone else is making money out of both of you.’
‘We dry the oranges and store them for the winter,’ said Toin turning to Mara. ‘But Cathal tells me that they never taste the same as they do when they are picked straight from the trees in Spain.’ He was speaking with an effort now. Mara eyed him with concern and noticed that Malachy was doing the same thing. The wine and the company drove Toin’s pain and weakness into the background for a short time, but his twin enemies had obviously reasserted themselves.
‘I wish I could eat some more,’ said Nuala sadly, putting
down her silver fork reverentially. ‘This is gorgeous food, your cook is almost as good as Mara’s Brigid,’ she added with the tactlessness of youth.
‘I went on a voyage once with Cathal,’ said Turlough. ‘It was in the carefree days before I became king. We were both young men then; we went to France. I don’t remember anything about oranges.’
Sheedy, thought Mara. I must go up there tomorrow afternoon. If Sheedy were guilty it was important to find out as soon as possible, or, if he wasn’t then he needed to be eliminated. She took another sip of the burgundy and rolled it carefully around in her mouth and then took a bite of the woodcock. That sauce was just perfect. She would put off thinking about the murder and just concentrate on enjoying every mouthful of the wine.
‘Let’s have some music,’ said Toin when they were all sitting around the fire. The long linen cloths had been cleared from the table and the servants had all retired to the kitchen house to have their own supper. ‘Rory, play your zither, Cuan, you’ll sing for us.’
The song would not be a success; Mara knew that before Cuan stumbled to his feet. She was not very musical, but even she could hear that Rory was playing the zither very fast and very loudly – too fast and too loud for Cuan’s high sweet voice – the words and the tune did not blend together but seemed at odds with each other and there were times when the notes of the zither seemed to drown out Cuan’s voice. He faltered and then turned red and suddenly
stopped. He sat down, shaking his head, as Rory cocked a quizzical eyebrow at him.
And then Rory, himself, started to sing. Unlike Cuan he had a powerful voice and was well used to singing at open-air festivals and assemblies. Now the zither took its rightful place as a backing to the song. For a few minutes, Mara did not realize what was happening. It was a clever mimicry of a typical rural song – but this was about Nanny the goat that went courting. The continual use of the word
ciotógach
was neatly slipped in. The word, of course, just meant ‘left-handed’ but in the rural idiom it had all sorts of other meanings attached to it:
clumsy, awkward, stupid
, even
deformed
.
With a howl of rage, Cuan was upon him, Rory holding the precious zither well out of reach, but otherwise taking little notice of the blows that were rained ineffectually upon him, while keeping an infuriating smile on his face.
‘All right, all right, it was just a joke, calm down,’ he was saying. There was a note of triumph in his voice.
‘Malachy,’ said Mara quietly, as Turlough got to his feet and Malachy obediently came across and took Cuan by the arm in his powerful grip.
‘Take it easy, boy, take it easy,’ he was saying, but Cuan was now sobbing hysterically, tears of rage and of humiliation pouring down his cheeks.