In the west of Ireland you can never tell what the weather will be from one hour to the next. Sometimes the elements will shift even more quickly, so you will walk through curtains of rain and in between you will stand in the finest new-washed sunlight. You look around and the mountains behind are suddenly smothered in slow buffering mists. The teeth of the crags in front of you are sawing cleanly against a forget-me-not sky. To the sides of the road there are glens where the shale is as dark as dragon armour, and the water slinks like a sump of quicksilver. However, pass through another veil of rain and all is re-conjured. What was grey is now blue. The slopes that were glad in the breath of the morning are now bled and dour.
In the seventeenth century Oliver Cromwell, with his hatred and implacable convictions, tramped through the land with a Bible in one hand and a sword in the other. He told the Irish to get ‘to Hell or Connacht’. They were driven into this land of tricksy storms, of scoured mountains and scrubby pastures. When at last they came to the cliffs that rise above the western ocean they knew they could run no further, so they turned to eke their lives in places where even goats had trouble finding sustenance.
*******
A man with ragged hair is walking a road of sharp stones. The wind limmers the icy waters of a loch into chipped slate peaks. His brogues are torn and his raw heels rise from the sodden leather. He has wrapped a ragged cloak of saffron wool around his shoulders, but it is heavy from the rain and he trembles. He seems to be grinning, but his lips are drawn back from his gums with fever and the chill. It is as if he has taken his pallor from the dull light on the surface of the puddles. He looks for some place to rest but everything is broken and bare here. Not one tree to sit under. This place is like a foundry of rock. He is dying and he knows it.
We will not give him a name, since he is lost to history. He will lie in this deserted pass and no one will find his body. It is the year 1660 and there are perhaps a hundred of his type wandering the roads of Ireland. He is a bitter and mournful man. You look into his eyes and the death pangs of a whole way of life, the ruin of a whole culture, stab back at you. The world has turned on him. His certainties have all been torn and scattered. He has seen the dispensations of an ancient profession forfeited by conquest.
For this man is a bard: a court poet of the Gaelic aristocracy, keeper of the genealogies, satirist and craftsman of words. His time has only just passed. He remembers, as if it were yesterday, the firelight in castle halls; nights when they listened as he told the glories of his chieftain – verses embroidered with assonance, half rhyme and slanting rhyme, allusion; metres as strict as advanced trigonometry. These were the tools of his art. He was schooled as a boy in poetic forms reaching back, in unbroken succession, all the way to the verses of the druids. He can summon hundreds of poems to his tongue. They are all stored like golden vestments in the chest of his skull. He can speak Latin, French, a little Spanish and about a dozen words of English.
But now all is all cast down. The castle, where he was an honoured retainer, was smashed by Puritan canons. His chieftain is in exile. Now his poems are as useless as silk shoes on a sow. He knows of no other life, save that of his calling, and the calling of a Gaelic bard is one that the world no longer needs.
He stands on his stilty legs and wheels about in the desolation of the wild valley. He takes himself off the road and starts to climb up the slope among the boulders and bracken. In an hour he has scrabbled high up on the mountainside. He is muttering and shivering like an old crow. When he coughs it is as though some mechanism has broken in his lungs. He speaks some words to the stones, then sinks slowly to his knees. The sun is fading and the shadows are coming like dark spears along his narrow path. He lies down, still murmuring, all alone.
But he is not alone.
From the ridge above him steps a woman. She comes always at the very moment he drifts into sleep. This evening it is a sleep that even his terrible coughing will not hinder. Everything about this girl is absolute, so please forgive my recourse to old, time-worn expressions. She is barefoot. Her toes are tiny. Her skin is keenly white, like a jug of new milk left out in the rain. Her hair is dark, darker than a starless sky. Her cheek bones are sharp. Her eyes are sapphires where swims a shoal of minnow-flecks. She bends over the bard, crooning a low whispering song. Her voice is like laurel leaves hushing. Her breath is like rubbed laurel leaves. Her dress is the gleam of laurel leaves. It is the twilight – the coineascar – but her black hair makes a sudden night over his face.
It has been this way for three years or more. In ditches, in the rubble of wrecked churches, in the huts of peasants, wherever he lies down, she is there. The first night of his wandering found him on a hillside in Mayo. He had nowhere to go. In haughty dudgeon he bought oatcakes from a woman and ate them in the growing cold. He had no wood for a fire. A bard forced to tramp the roads! Such was his fury at having to sleep in the open, if his words had been sparks that evening the heather around him would have kindled and he would have flared like a beacon, whelmed by the sulphur of his own curses. He hunkered in his fringed mantle and, after hours of tossing, fretted into chilled doze.
That first time she came up from the far side of the hill. In his dream he knew this. He saw her rise from the bushes and step lightly to his side. Behind his eyelids it was a fine spring morning. She knew his name. She spoke it back to him as she told her sorrows. There was no one to care for her, she said. She was lost in shadows. She grieved in echoing glens. ‘Ochone,’ she sighed, ‘ochone.’
He reached to brush her cheek. What age was she, eighteen, twenty? Deserted in bitter country. His finger touched one of her tears and suddenly it was a cold winter’s day behind his eyelids. Rooks in the bare trees. She knew his misery. She spoke it back to him. ‘The English have come,’ she said. ‘I know they are felling the forests. The Sasanaigh have scattered the Princes. The soldiers of the Gael are in their graves or lost from the land. Ochone.’
At her right shoulder was a silver pennular etched with twisting spirals. She stood up and unclasped the pin. Her gown fell at her feet. He opened his cloak and she sidled along the length of him. Their flesh made a hot seam between them. ‘Give me poems, Bard,’ she whispered. ‘Make me live in this world.’
He shuddered awake to an autumn morning that promised nothing. All night he had known the secrets of the woman; the cleft behind her ear, the bow strung nape of her neck. But now he coughed among thistles. Dry mouthed and queasy, as if he had been drunk, he stumbled down the road. She was gone as if she had never been there at all, and there was not so much as a spailpin’s hut in sight.
He walked that day as if he had not slept. His feet dragging, his arms like stiff lumber. But his eyes blazed, for he had a new flaring stanza on his tongue. It had come to him fully formed with the dawn. I will render them in English as closely as I can.
The red moon hid below the hill
In the land of clan O’Malley.
They who are gone now on the waves to Spain.
It is comfort they gave me often.
I met a girl, in the wild land, straight, tall and blue-eyed,
Her forehead pale as a white banner.
Pearl shouldered – She lay skin to skin with me.
So it was, every evening after that, as soon as he lay down she was there, whispering, softly cajoling, giving him her love and moaning as he whispered back to her his verses. He could not deny her, her fingers flickering down his back. He had no power to forbid her.
Her kisses as sharp as melt water
From the highest stream.
Kisses like a new ring of silver.
Kisses like a swan breaking the morning water
Of the loch …
He set himself up as a teacher. For, under the Cromwell laws, no children were to be permitted an education. With immense chagrin he took little coins, bread and buttermilk in payment from half-starved families. He attempted to teach rhetoric, Euclid and the high Gaelic poems to boys who smirked and cheeked him. He schooled them in the open air in the lee of a rock but the rain ran down his face and into his mouth. He built a hovel of sods and wattles and rocked in front of a tiny fire shedding furious, desperate tears.
Yet as soon as he curled on the earth floor she entered. He had grown as thin as a bundle of loose reeds. His hair was lank. His lips were cracked. But she called him her prince and she was beautiful. She knew he had eaten at the chieftain’s table, knew he had tasted the strong wines of France, knew he had once worn brocades of silk and slept before a well-lit hearth.
She let her black hair free
Into a wind of cold echoes.
Secrets, secrets she told me.
Oh, mouth of honey and thyme.
Promises rare as apples on a spring tree,
Rare as a song on the lip
Of a salmon …
At first he did not notice. In the face of all his miseries he trembled with expectancy each time he settled for sleep. True, he rose each morning with a glowering despair and a hollow weakness in his limbs. But he craved her coming, hungered for the glide of her breasts against him. Those nights her words came to him distantly as though she was speaking through a woven tunnel of rowans. She was a queen. She cried in wild lands. She could only taste and touch the world through his verses. She begged him for more.
He quit his hovel and left the sullen boys to their games. He wandered further into the west, into the land of wet pewter and silver light. He shook inwardly with anger when he was forced to beg scraps of food. He offered to pay with old poems and courtly songs but the people had no use for his words. Some scorned him; others took pity and gave the soaking man a place to sleep. But when they awoke to find him thrashing and groaning and caressing the empty air they threw him into the night.
Soon he began to shun even the cabins of the poor. He rested wherever he could find enough dry branches and a nook between the stones. Still she came, crooning in her far-off words of opals and moonstones as she twined her body with his. By now he knew he was sick. His days were spent shuffling along rough tracks.
Her hair was the pennant of winter
And I thought I looked back
From a drifting galley
At the harbour lights
Of Galway of the tribes
And we were two ropes coiled in the dark hold.
Yet, in truth we never left
The green slopes near Cruach Phádraig
And the stars were stilled
And her kisses tingled like nettles after the sting
And I awoke deserted.
I was rankled, even more ruined
And left to proceed like a sentence half uttered.
A jacket half buttoned.
Wine half drunk …
He began to feel empty in his head, slack in his legs. A man can get lost in gazing for trout in a stream. Eventually he is not troubled by the prickling of thorns, nor the heat of the day. The man gazes through clear water and the fish rises and bows her beautiful back against invisible currents. The man is beyond pondering. His mind is all glancing light as he sees the trout flexing in her clear tresses, like the smile of a girl who comes freshly laughing from mass with her friends.
For three years the bard has been the wellspring from which she has
quenched her thirst. Three years of tramping in cruel weather have broken him. He would run from her if he could but he knows his legs could no longer carry him far enough. He has grubbed for birds’ eggs and snails. He has eaten them raw, but now he does not eat at all. He does not notice the mould blotting his saffron cloak, or his teeth rocking in his gums.
*******
Now back to the darkness in the steep glen.
The bard’s eyes flutter back into their sockets. His breathing is faint and fast, like that of a stricken hare. His last dream is shuttered by waking moments.
He would run if he could – away from her – to Scotland, the isles, where there are chieftains still who give dues and dignity to poets. Perhaps he could find a place in the tail of a man of standing and generosity: collops of venison and bramble jelly, amber uisge beatha in the glass; and after, time for the harp and the pipes; clarseach and pibroch. Then poems and the crowd listening in silence, hanging on the growing force of his utterance which breaks like surf across the long table. Silence then, as the guests sit and ponder until the fire crackles and they laugh together.
Or perhaps to Spain, where the princes fled – they who walk in sunlight and never want for fine clothes, or comfort, or songs among the fountains. Only poetry they do not have, poems of their lands and the people they have deserted. He could give them a draught of verses.
‘Why stir yourself to these strange thoughts?’ The woman has come. She is lying by his side.
Now follows the pillow talk between them. ‘I have no lodging.’ ‘You are mine, my poet, my love.’ ‘You have bled me like a leech on the thigh of a wader.’ ‘Oh my own! You are handsome and tall, like an oak that was never cut.’ ‘I have no family, no master. I sleep in the crags.’
‘Poet, your tongue is a silver path in the morning.’ ‘Go. You have blighted my flesh. I am a creel of air.’
‘Poet, you have conjured me, so that I will see the noon again and feel the sun.’
‘You have drunk the soul of me.’ ‘Poet, my love, you have given me life.’ ‘You have given me death.’
His eyes close. His mouth sags. All around is dark, save for the glistening slabs and jutting sharps. The woman reaches out her cool arm and cradles his head. ‘Ochone, my love, my poet of gifts and wonders. Wake you again and tell me your verse.’
The bard shudders. His split lips grasp for words. At last he whispers, ‘Go.’
‘No.’ She is shaking him gently, pulling at his shirt like a child waking an old man. ‘Come, my boy, my golden boy, give.’
‘Go.’
‘Tell me again of my hair, my breasts.’ Her slight fingers trace the creases of his cheeks.
‘Your breasts?’ He tries to raise an arm, but it falls. ‘Yes.’ ‘Your breasts are like nubs on the poll of a faun …’ He stutters and gasps.
Your voice was the curlew in search of the flock.
Come, I have kissed your four limbs.
Your skin was as cool as the mist in Ard Raithin Where the white cows wake
And walk to the milking …
We … we will run, you and I,
In May when the tides are calm
In a currach with two oarsmen …
‘Yes.’ Her face is close to his. Her eyes are pricked with fierce joy.
To Scotland, the islands, where they welcome the poets.
Or perhaps to Spain,
Where the sons of the Gael walk
In the summer gardens of Cordoba … Perhaps …
‘Yes?’
If we stay and wait in the glen, we will see the dawn come up over the corpse of a man so drawn and famished it is a wonder that he was able to climb so high among the boulders. We see him lying where no one will ever find his bones and a woman sitting near him. Her dress is the colour of laurel leaves. Her face has the look of a cat that has played too long with a small bird and is watching to see if it will move again. There are no tears in her eyes when at last she rises and disappears over the rim of the rocks.