Print_ireland

CHAPTER ONE

Wonderfully, it was the boy who saw him first. He glanced out of his bedroom window, then looked again and harder–and dared to hope. No, it was not a trick of the light; a tall figure in a ragged black coat and a ruined old hat was walking down the darkening hillside; and he was heading toward the house.

The stranger's face was chalk-white with exhaustion, and he stumbled on the rough ground, his hands held out before him like a sleepwalker's. He looked like a scarecrow deserting his post. High grasses soaked his cracked boots and drenched his coat hems. A mist like a silver veil floated above the ground, broke at his knees, and reassembled itself in his wake. In this twilight fog, mysterious shapes appeared and dematerialized, so that the pale walker was never sure he had seen merely the branches of trees or the arms of mythic dancers come to greet him. Closer in, the dark shadows of the tree trunks twisted into harsh and threatening faces.

Across the fields he saw the yellow glow of lamplight in the window of a house, and he raised his eyes to the sky in some kind of thanks. With no fog on high, the early stars glinted like grains of salt. He became aware of cattle nearby, not yet taken indoors in this mild winter. Many lay curled on the grass where they chewed the cud. As he passed, one or two lurched to their feet in alarm and lumbered off.

And in the house ahead, the boy, nine years old and blond as hay, raced downstairs, calling wildly to his father.

The stranger's bones hurt, and his lungs ached almost beyond endurance. Hunger intensified his troubles; he'd eaten one meal in three days. The calm light in the window ahead pulled him forward in hope. If he held their attention, he might get bed and board for a week–and maybe more. In the days of the High King at Tara, a storyteller stayed seven days and seven nights. Did they know that? Nobody knew anything anymore.

With luck, though, the child in this house would help. Children want stories, and the parents might stretch their hospitality, fired by the delight in the boy's eyes. Unlike last night's billet; high up on a hill farm, he had slept in a loft above the cows, where the east wind got at his bones. The ignorant people there, who had no use for stories, gave him no food and closed their fireside to him. It happened more and more.

But this house would surely prove better; and it was, after all, Halloween, the great time of the year for telling stories, the time of All Souls', when the dead had permission to rise from their graves and prowl the land.

Over the last few hundred yards the fog dispersed into flitters and wisps. At the house, a small white gate opened from the lane into a country garden, which in summer would shine with bunched roses and morning glories and tresses of sweet pea. The tall man in the black coat rapped twice on a brass knocker. Immediately, the husband of the house opened the door.

"Aha!"

The stranger and the householder exchanged a solid handshake, eye to eye. Behind his father, the boy waited in the hallway, jigging from foot to foot.

"God save all here," said the stranger; he hunched his shoulders nervously.

Over the years, his voice had grown deep and rotund. His manner and speech had an unusual formality, with trace elements of stately English from an earlier century and a hint of classical learning. Consequently, his language rang generally more colorful than the speech of the people he met every day.

The man of the house smiled and stood aside.

"Come in. You brought clear skies to us."

"With your permission, I'll bring clear thoughts too."

"Your coat is wet–let me take it."

The man extended a cold, bony hand to the boy peeking around his father's waist.

"A fine boy. God save you too, ma'am!" called the Storyteller to the woman of the house.

She looked irked, and he guessed that he, this stringy, unwashed man, with skin like canvas, would disrupt her rigorous household; nonetheless she set a place for him while her husband, pleased and comfortable, poured the visitor a drink.

The boy watched the stranger attacking the food like a tired hound. He sensed that the man's hunger fought with the man's decorum. Nobody spoke because the newcomer seemed too famished to be interrupted. The boy examined the man's face, saw the long, thin scar, wondered if he had been in a knife fight, perhaps with a sailor on some foreign quayside.

And the sodden boots–in his mind he saw the stranger fording streams, climbing out of gullies, traversing slopes of limestone shale on his endless travels across the country. Did he have a dog? Seemingly not, which was a pity, since a dog could have sat guard by the fire at night. Did the man ever sleep in caves? They said that bears and wolves had long been extinct in Ireland–but had they?

That evening, in that white house among the fields, a boy's most passionate dream came true. His father had long talked of the traveling storytellers. He said they possessed brilliant powers; they brought the long-gone past to life vividly, without what he called "the interference of scholars. Those professors," he said. "They dry out history in order to put it down on paper." In his father's view, a tale with the feeling taken out of it had "no blood and was worth very little."

But the old stories, told by traveling storytellers round the fireside on winter evenings–they came hurtling straight down the long, shiny pipeline of the centuries, and the characters, all love and hate and fire, "tumbled out on our own stone floor." So said his father. "They're still among us. I wouldn't be surprised if one of them came here one day. He'll probably be tall and old, with boots and a hat, and he'll enchant us all." And now such a storyteller had finally arrived.

He was the last of his breed. Figures like him had trudged the countryside for twenty-five centuries, telling the story of Ireland in one form or another. In the old days, they were beloved; a visit from one often gave a village its brightest moment of the year.

They had counterparts all over the globe–India, South America, China. Such travelers wandered into a village, spread a rug under a shady tree, and began a daylong tale of the country's old times. They called up dragons and fire and mountains and maidens and gods. Wary villagers who drifted forward to hear what was being said always stayed to the end. Whatever the topic, the audience knew they could be assured of vitality and drama–great events told in bright colors with huge spirit. Thus the traveling storyteller and his oral tradition shaped much of the world's culture and character.

The Storyteller tongued the last crumbs from behind his teeth. He moved to a chair by the fire, where he prepared to smoke a pipe. From a yellow oilcloth pouch he offered a fill of tarry, black tobacco to the husband, who thanked him and said he didn't smoke. The stranger filled his pipe, picked up the iron tongs, plucked a tiny ember from the fire, and planked it on top of the pipe. After much sucking and tapping, the tobacco glowed, and blue smoke drifted forward in search of the chimney.

He leaned back in his chair. The boy had settled directly opposite him, on the cushions of a long wooden bench beside the hearth. With teeth tall and yellow like a horse's, the Storyteller smiled at the boy, who still gazed huge-eyed at this sorcerous creature.

"D'you know what an architect is?"

The boy looked at his father for approval before he answered.

"A man who causes buildings?"

"And d'you know where Newgrange is?"

"Up in county Meath?"

"Sure enough. May we ask on the banks of what river?"

The boy glanced again at his adored father.

"Isn't it the Boyne?"

At a noise from outside, the Storyteller swung his head hopefully. The door heaved open; a man and woman ambled in with two daughters, aged about twelve and eight. One was blond and one red-haired, and they wore flowered pinafores. The younger girl was directed to join the boy on the high bench by the fire, where she sat watching the Storyteller with wonderland eyes.

A coal fell forward on the hearth. The Storyteller sucked vigorously on his pipe, and it made a little dottle of noise. Next moment, the audience increased again–another couple strolled in from across the lane with their young daughter.

Word had obviously spread. Perhaps someone among the farms had earlier seen the tall stranger's descent through the misty fields and guessed who or what he was. So he would have an audience tonight. Whether he would have one tomorrow night–or a venue–would depend on him.

"What would you like in your whiskey?" asked the host.

One neighbor said, "More," and they all laughed.

After some minutes of talk and smiles, everyone settled down. No electricity in the houses in those days; an oil lamp in the window and another with a glass sconce on the wall laid gilded shadows into the room. The firelight played on the Storyteller's long face. He jiggled his pipe, eased back in his chair, spread his shoulders, and began.

CHAPTER TWO

Every worthwhile story begins with the immortal words, "Once upon a time." Never did a phrase ring so true as it will this evening. I have come to this hospitable and decent house to continue my life's work, to do what I do every night of the year. And that is, to tell the story of Ireland.

The tale I shall render you this evening concerns the most brilliant Irishman of all time. He was the architect of Newgrange–but, as all stories should, this one begins before its own beginning. And that was a long, long time ago, before there was ever a place called Newgrange, before there was ever an architect to build its famous work, even before there was a country called Ireland.

So: once upon a time, the ground upon which we walk was no more than a lump of stone down at the center of the earth. It was part of the thick shell containing that furnace that rages down there night and day. And that thick shell was always kept cool by the oceans that covered it. But in the early days of our planet, the shell was weak in places. The flames burst through again and again, and vast layers of rock were flung up into the seas.

This boiling volcanic surface spread over the prehistoric oceans. It split and re-formed into wide lands of nothing but black rock. And these split and re-formed and cooled and split again until, two thousand, five hundred million years ago, there were five continents. These continents became all the countries of the world.

And so, every land on this planet is the child of ocean and rock, water and stone. Every day and every age since then, some rock or island somewhere crumbles and breaks off at the edge of some landmass.

Many of those fragments still retain the shapes of the countries and continents to which they were once joined. On the maps of my schooldays, some of them look like couples who have gone to sleep close to each other and then floated gently apart in the night. Tomorrow, take out your atlas and look at Ireland and Britain. Together, they look like a child curled up asleep near a larger child, who is then curled up in the lee of the parent continent, Europe. That's how our own country and our most important neighbor began life–as stone born of fire and cooled by sea.

Some of that ancient rock is with us still. I can take you to a place far down on the east coast where you can see and touch it. Near Wexford there's a stone, which, the locals will tell you, dates to two million years B.C. Two hundred miles higher up the coastline, as the crow flies, there's another such rock, in Antrim. I've looked closely at these two items, and I could see the specks of quartz sparkling inside them. They looked like the eyes of little creatures who saw the mighty flames that imprisoned them in the rock long, long ago.

So the fact is, when the volcanic earth had mostly stopped heaving, Ireland amounted to nothing more than a cold field of stone. Much, much later, sediment from the universe floated over and settled on this stone acreage and spread and thickened there like a primal silt.

Gradually, gradually, across those hard plains, there rose an island of rich loam and gentle hills, where today quiet rivers flow through green woods down to seas full of glimmering fish, where shiny horses and their foals gallop across the meadows in a bountiful and misty land flowing with milk and honey. That's how the world thinks of us today, and we're glad of the compliment, which is accurate enough–but it isn't the whole story. Before the land finally settled, before the final phase of seeds blew in on the wind and fertilized it, and before the birds and the insects again made their homes here, we were also born of another great earthly power–the direct opposite of fire. We were born of ice.

Four ice ages attacked Ireland, one after another, and the ice took possession of everything. It destroyed any fertility that had been established, ruined any progress that nature had made. Wherever it met rock, the ice's freezing edges gleamed like the starched frills of folded cloth. It found hidden flaws in the mountains, ripped them open, and filled them–they're what we call glaciers, and in time they became today's rivers. In the largest rock faults, the ice cut channels wide enough to turn into eventual seas, and that's how Ireland was cut away from Britain.

All the hills and highlands and all the ravines and hollows and gullies and gulches and every wrinkle and creek and punchbowl of the Ireland we know today was carved by the cruel hand of ice. They say that great ice takes hold slowly. It begins when the sun grows colder and the land bends under an endless chilling gale. The temperature sinks without mercy, and over the bald clay of the plains and valleys a deep rime forms, squeezing out all plant and animal life.

Across Ireland, one such pulverization followed another until the countryside became a carpet of impenetrable cold. That all happened in the accumulations of the first three ice ages. And then, just as things were thawing out once more, a last northern marauder settled Ireland's final shape–the savage Fourth Ice Age.

Twelve thousand years ago, a vast sheet of compacted and frozen snow broke away from the Arctic Circle, which surrounds the North Pole. It was thousands of feet thick and hundreds of miles broad, and when it finally rode down the curve of the planet, it looked like a floating country.

They say that ice on the move sounds like the beginning of the world. With shouts louder than the voice of God, its shelves heave and crack. The intensity of its light alters every color it meets. Ice, they tell me, is never pure white, never a fixed or lone shade. It is ivory, it is silver, it is chalk, it is salt.

Except that–according to the polar explorers, and I've met more than one of them in my own travels–ice isn't white. Close up, it handles as white. At certain distances, it stands as white. But those who know it well, who have stood on it, lain on it, even fallen through it–they say that ice in bulk glows blue.

Does it take its cue from the sky, as the sea does? Or is it a trick of the light? Maybe it has struck a pose to show how chilly it is, how menacing? Perhaps the blue is clothing, cladding, a gift of nature–as we know, she has all the best tricks. Whatever the cause, the ice that broke away and sailed down those high Atlantic latitudes twelve thousand years ago was as blue as a lady's gown.

But it had other colors too. Do you know the names of the noble Metals? Gold, silver, and platinum. All ice shines like those noble metals, and all color, as we know, is determined by where the light falls. As this island of ice moved south, I wonder how many shades of gold the sun sparked from it. Yellow and bronze and copper. Amber and brass and saffron. And then, at night, under the wind-whipped moon, thousands of new shades glinted, mostly silver, soft or piercing or ominous or benign.

So there it was, sinister in its bright lights and content in its own power. Its noble metals flashed. The sound of its great creakings and crackings echoed across the waters. And the whole glimmering mass headed relentlessly down the northern seas like some great, glowing ocean liner built for a nation of giants.

It was the biggest iceberg ever seen, a thousand times bigger than the one that sank the "Titanic." It was its own landscape and its own geography. The fierce weather of the north had polished it like glass. And the harsh winds of the east had ruffled it and etched little furrows on the plated surfaces. These shales looked like ruched fabric or ebbing sands, and the whole mass had hogbacks and crests and headlands and forelands, all sharp-edged, jagged, and crystal.

The bow of this great vessel formed itself into a fierce and concentrated spearhead. It slammed forward in slabs and reefs so wide that the very horizon seemed made of ice. And it attacked Ireland with spikes half a mile high and half a mile wide.

The first white prow crashed into the cliffs of our northermost counties, Antrim, Derry, and Donegal. Huge chunks of foreland fell away into the ocean and formed today's bays and harbors. Higher wedges of ice scythed out deeper inlets–you can gaze up at those cliffs today and some of them look as if a great hand descended with a sharp knife and cut a sheer slice from the rock.

After it came ashore, this great iceberg plunged south across the country. It kicked rocks and even hills out of its path, and it scooped out valleys and glens that had never existed before. A few peaks and ridges were higher than the ice-cliff, and they continued to raise their spears above the ice. You know them; mountains like Errigal in Donegal, Galtymore in Tipperary, Croagh Patrick in Mayo, where pilgrims after the Ice Age climbed to be nearer their gods, and do so to this very day. But along the lower slopes and in the deep valleys and ravines, the ice fought every fold and won every groove. A new cold gripped the mountains so tightly that its chill penetrated to the stone's deepest core.

The wisest men tell us that everything, sooner or later, changes. And all change commences with a specific moment. We say to ourselves, "I won't do this again, I must become different." And we succeed–eventually.

One day, even the mighty ice changed–it started to shrink and retreat. One single day, ten and a half thousand years ago, Ireland's climate began to alter. The chilling gale that came with the ice blew itself out. Softer breezes floated in from the west. Gentle and warm sea currents came from the southwest. A hot African wind rode up past the coast of Spain and caressed our southern shores.

Gradually these warm forces loosened the ice's awful grip. Its edges frayed by an inch at a time–and then by a yard–and then by a mile. Soon, like the pink-brown skin in the healing of a wound, the native earth of Ireland began to appear again.

I've described to you how the ice had ripped into the terrain on its advance. Well, it did so too on its retreat. Large melting slabs of ice gouged out caves and fjords and chasms. The ancient stone foundations of our land shook, undermined by the desperate, slipping ice. Rocky glens opened again as their walls crumbled. The clay began to breathe. Hills and mountains shone in the new sun, and down their slopes poured ribbons of new, silver waters. When you gaze at a mountain from a distance, and you see a shining river that looks like the spoor of a snail, you can be sure that was an Ice Age stream.

That final loosening sent boulders sliding down mountainsides and hurled stones down into valleys, as the ice ripped them away from their rock bodies. These "glacial erratics," as they're called, loiter to this day across the Irish landscape, some of them big as houses. I myself have been glad of their shelter many times. And they lie at the core of the story of Newgrange.

CHAPTER THREE

As though to collect breath, the Storyteller halted. Puffs of steam rose from his wet boots as they dried in the heat of the fire.

In the pause, people stirred. The boy looked anxiously at his mother to check her mood–and she seemed calm. His father took off his spectacles and polished them with a little amber cloth. Without his glasses, his sky-blue eyes sparkled.

The boy pushed down his stockings and rubbed his shins, now hot and mottled from the fire. Nobody moved from where they sat; one or two of the men had taken off their jackets and sat shirtsleeved. Their faces glowed, with pride as much as heat; this epic account gave them the story of their own ancestry, the origins and magnificence of their own country. The women seemed more placid, less intense in their enjoyment–but nonetheless enthralled. Nobody reflected the magic of the hour as much as the children, whose faces glowed like lamps.

As the Storyteller gathered strength for the next installment, he curled one hand around the bowl of his pipe and raised the forefinger of the other hand commandingly. He drew three, four, five, silent puffs on the pipe and took it from his mouth.

This place, Newgrange–how much do you know about it? You might have read in the newspapers of this great and mysterious edifice under the ground in county Meath. It's not far in from the coast, and it's northwest of Dublin by about thirty miles or so. I've been there myself, and it's a mighty place, in rich land on a hill above the river Boyne. The local people know all about it because over the centuries many gentlemen and scholars have examined it, guessing at its history and building a good body of lore. A kind woman who lives on the hillside took me into what she called "our cave." She lit a stub of a candle, and the flame was enough to display great wonders to me.

This marvelous, immortal structure was built five thousand years ago, before Stonehenge in England, before the pyramids of Egypt. Every person in the world should visit it, because it tells us how amazing were the ancestors of man. It's a very inspiring place, and while I was there, I came to consider a great deal about it and the person who built it–and this story entered my mind.

The Architect of Newgrange was a young man, possessed of a tall and thin physique, above which his wild head of tawny hair looked like a tree on fire. His deep-set eyes frightened the children, and his manner took no account of courtesy–which is to say that he treated people abruptly. Until the events occurred that I am about to relate to you, he had spent much of his life in silence, speaking only when spoken to, never offering friendship, and generally avoiding the burden of conviviality. His was the life of the aloof. If we wish to excuse someone for being like that, we say, "Ah, they're shy," and I do believe he was a shy child and grew up a shy young man.

At one stage of his life, this remote and strange individual began to invest a deep interest in the observation of stone–and by stone, I mean those rocks I've just described to you that were cast down the mountains when the ice melted.

To most people, a stone is a stone–nothing more and nothing less than a rock. But this young man grew to love stone the way farmers love cattle, the way women love children, the way boys love pretty girls, the way the waves love the shore. To him, stone seemed to speak; he didn't hear a voice, but he understood it just the same, because deep in his mind a picture formed–of the world as it must have been long, long ago, before there were trees with leaves or animals with fur. Stone brought the past to him and brought him to the past.

Now, this man's people, who commanded the hill of Newgrange–they lived handsomely. Their land of rich, brown clay was left behind ten thousand years ago, a great, wide silt after the ice melted. Like all such terrain in Europe, it was discovered by travelers coming over from the east in search of a fertile living.

In Ireland they found a good and pleasant home. Hazel and rowan trees already covered the plains and grew down the mountainsides and into the valleys. Wide, slow rivers took the voyagers in from the coast on the logs of their simple rafts. And they discovered that if they cleared the trees, they could settle almost anywhere, because the earth was so easy to cultivate.

Hillsides proved the best places. They could live off the fine land and cast an eye over the surrounding countryside for approaching dangers. Newgrange proved ideal–a high hill with good soil overlooking a placid river. People settled there very early, six thousand years before the birth of Christ, and they began to work the earth of the Boyne Valley.

In those far-off days, everyone on such a hillside labored hard. From the age a child could lift or scrabble to the oldest man or woman able to drag or push, they hauled and parted and combed the clay. The soil they tilled was warm and deep and full of different colors–honey or red-gold or mahogany. Scatter seeds there, and something always grew.

And every year they turned the soil, they sowed their seeds, they welcomed the rain, they hailed the sun, and they were happy.

Yet for all their prosperity and for all their good fortune, they made slow progress in life–because they hadn't yet discovered anything better to work with than stone. They depended upon it for their weapons and tools, and they handled it well. In their hands, stone made stone; using stone tools, they hammered out new stone implements–knives and chisels, copied from shards of stone that they found among the occasional little beaches of shale on the banks of the river.

They also established what you might call local factories. These were places to which they hauled the rocks that they found strewn in the countryside. Hacking into such boulders with stone axes and sledgehammers, they cut javelins, arrows, more hammers, and better stone axes.

Every stone in the world has a cutting point, a place on the stone where the cleanest break may be achieved. The men who made those weapons knew how to find that fault line, how to split a stone as neatly as a slice. As every stonemason has understood since the gods were born, when you add edge to weight, your cutting power doubles. And once they had mastered how to use it, nothing resisted their stone; the skull of a foe, the neck of a beast, the crest of a slope–everything yielded to it.

And that is how our young man with the wild tawny hair and the deep-set eyes first came to such a closeness with stone; he found that he had a gift for using it expertly. He understood economy–how to get strong results from controlled circumstances. His weapons and tools seemed neater, more efficient, more powerful than anyone else's because he realized that no dagger need be too long, no axe too heavy–a weapon's power only springs to life in the hands of its user, and those he made for himself always had perfect balance.

His gift with stone saved the young man's life once. One day, breaking branches in the trees where the forest had been forced back from the hill of Newgrange, he heard a noise. He looked up and saw a bear glaring at him from the ferns. She probably had cubs nearby because bears, by and large, tend to leave people alone unless they fear for their young.

He had no intention of troubling this creature, but the bear didn't know that. The brown fur stood up at her neck; he could see the red-pink of her gums, the white spikes of her teeth, and the rage and terror in her eyes.

On the ground near his feet, his bare toes felt a heavy rock shard, long as a short sword. He stood very still, watching the bear carefully, his feet teasing the shard of stone into position. With a great roar, she rushed toward him. He bent swiftly, snatched up the shard, and drove the stony spike high into the bear's throat.

The force of his thrust almost broke his hand, but he had enough strength to twist the weapon. He saw blood on the stone, not much, enough to tell him he had wounded the animal. The bear stepped back and collected herself to attack again. But the young man lunged forward, this time roaring wildly. The bear recoiled farther; the young man struck–again and again, until the bear keeled over backward. He jumped on her and hammered the shard into her neck over and over until she was dead.

Now: the people of Newgrange had their own government–Elders and Eldresses who passed the laws and made the decisions that regulated life on the hillside. They addressed all spiritual matters too, such as when, why, and how to make sacrifices to the gods.

One year, as the leaves turned gold, the Elders held a special meeting. The harvest had again been abundant, and as they blessed their fortune they began to discuss, in the warmth of the moment, finding a way to thank their ancestors, honoring their dead. The Chief Elder, his face very serious, said, "We must build something that we will be remembered for. We must build a structure that will not only respect our forefathers but will also preserve the spirit of our people."

A great meeting was called, to which almost everyone on the hillside came. But the arguments grew so heated that they had to convene again, and again, and again. To and fro the discussion raged–what will constitute an eternal honor, and how is it to be done?

I've said that almost everyone on the hillside attended those debates. One voice didn't speak–our wild young man stayed away. Nobody uttered surprise at his absence, and many expressed relief. They'd always found him a little odd; he didn't say much to many, but in the previous few years they'd avoided him even further, because they'd begun to fear him. With good reason–one day, he had suddenly and openly killed two men. His status as a warrior may have placed him above punishment, but his deed caused the hillside fear; folk evaded him, didn't meet his eye, chose not to work alongside him.

What they didn't know–and he never told them–was the reasons he had killed the two men. The day after the bear's death, the young man had grown despondent with remorse; he couldn't endure the fact that when he had killed the bear, he had also orphaned her cubs. So he took off into the forest to bring them back and try to rear them. He never found them. Three, four, five days he searched, checking lairs, taking risks–but no cubs.

When he returned to Newgrange, he came upon a commotion. A bunch of lesser men had found the cubs, had killed one, and were burning the second cub on the spit. The young man raced up the hill and arrived as the squealing cub, two months old, shuddered and died, blood oozing from its eyes, its fur scorched black.

He killed the man who was holding the cub. With an axe lying nearby he split the fellow diagonally from shoulder to hip, and then he pounded a hole in the man's forehead. The first cub was already being skinned by one of the men–a nice fur cap for the winter. He killed him too, this time not bothering with attacking the body–he just split the man's head wide open. The bystanders, who, a minute earlier had been laughing at the sport with the bear cubs, scattered like chaff in a wind. But from that moment, everyone avoided the young man.

He made it easy for them. The incident filled him with dreadful feelings, and he took off into the forest again. Thereafter, his taste for lone roving grew larger. He also knew that his rage had been released, and he knew that when that happened, he had no way of reining it in. So whenever he felt angry, he vanished for days or weeks at a time.

While he roamed, he looked at everything he saw in the world and tried to imagine its origins. That was how he came to love stone. Everywhere he went he scrutinized some new boulder or slab, relishing the sight and bulk and feel of it. And who's to say he didn't now and then run his tongue over a rock and taste one of life's joys–a fresh little pool of rainwater in the hollow of a crag immediately after a shower?

Came the day of the last big meeting. No matter what the wild young man's reputation, regardless of how rough or dangerous or foolish he was generally thought to be, a number of Elders believed in him and began to raise his name as the man for the job. He might seem unsteady at times, they agreed, perhaps a touch mad, and his rages might cause havoc, but the Eldresses perceived in him the potential of a great doer as well as a dreamer. And the Chief Elder believed him the best weapon maker, the most intelligent of the farmers, and something of a visionary–and so he persuaded him to come to the final meeting. This was to be the day of decision.

From early afternoon the people began to assemble in the Long House, the Elders' parliament building. A great, wide fire lit the darkness of the windowless chamber. Men, women, and children squatted on skins scattered across the mud floor. The Chief Elder spoke first. He announced that, although he wanted to hear further argument, he hoped they would now decide as to how, and with what, and where, they would build this great eternal monument. So far, all they had agreed was that they should use wood.

The wild young man had come in late and stood near the door. He kept his head down, looked at no one. The Chief Elder, who had personally invited him and asked for his views, called him forward; reluctantly he came up to where the Elders stood, coughed to clear his throat, and spoke.

He began by addressing the sacredness of the mighty project. They all claimed, he said, that they wished nothing less than the finest possible memorial. "Our dead," he said, "will always be with us–therefore we must honor them with something that will always be there. And we can't say that of wood. Wood doesn't last."

Yes, he agreed, wood was beautiful, a child knew that. But wood rotted; a child knew that, too–maggots ate into the wood, and the ruin did the rest.

"There's only one thing that lasts," he said, "and that is–stone."

He held out the fingers of one hand and counted. One, stone was magnificent in appearance. Two, it came from the ancient world. Three, it would last to the end of time. Four, it could be shaped. Five, it would accept carved messages of respect and belief.

Then he closed his mouth and sat down on the floor.

People stared at the wild young man, their mouths gaping. They turned to each other, dumb with wonder, their faces reflecting unasked questions. And then, from every corner, in the safety of their numbers, voices began to attack him. What did he know? How could he be so foolish, so impractical? They could easily ferry wood, but how could anyone transport stone? Beneath each complaint and accusation lay an ignoble question: Who was he, a moody killer, to tell them they were wrong? Their words danced like sparks across the shadows of the Long House.

He rose and spoke again. His high-pitched voice sounded something like a girl's, and he looked lean and disturbing. He didn't say, "You fools!" but his tone conveyed it.

"Don't you understand? Stone is unyielding but not unfriendly. The marks we make on it will last forever. What could be more suited to remind us and our children's children of who has gone before?"

But he was speaking to people who had never thought deeply of stone.
To them stone was like air or water–no personality until you do something with it, and it lies out there in the fields, doing nothing and with badges of moss all over it. What more was to be said of it, except that it yielded a good axe now and then?

The young man had little concern for what Newgrange thought. Like many great people, all he cared about was what he felt and what he wanted to do. The force of his passion made everyone peer at him, and the light from the fire made him look more mysterious. His head of tawny hair seemed to flare wilder. The wrinkles on his frown grew darker, his deep-set eyes lost in the shadows of his face.

Slamming one fist repeatedly into the palm of the other hand, he made point after point.

"I sense more things than I can name. I understand more than I can describe. Visions come to me and flashes of light that I can't explain. But all of you–you all have such feelings. Look for them in your heart."

In a voice powerful enough to fight off all comers, he told them that one of life's greatest mysteries lay within stone. No matter how it was approached, whether attacked, caressed, or cut wide open, stone never surrendered the story of its origins.

"As with ourselves," he said, "we don't know where it came from. It must have belonged to the beginning of the world."

His listeners shivered. They felt the same uncomfortable wonder as he did–because the young man had touched a dim, half-true knowledge. In his passion for stone, he had placed his hand on something inside every one of them–and now he tightened his grip.

"Sometimes at dawn, sometimes in the dead of night, sometimes when a breeze feathers the waters of the river, we tremble inside, and we wonder: What power that we cannot see, but we can feel, guides us? What great spiritual authority governs our lives? That's the force of our ancestors. We mustn't commemorate them with anything that's less than immortal."

In the awed silence that followed, the Chief Elder stepped in and said that he proposed to appoint the wild young man as architect. The young man didn't react at all.

One of the Elders, though, sensed the discomfort among the people, and he felt that many might think they had been ridden over roughshod. This man had suave ways and a silky voice, and he knew how to persuade folk to his point of view; we shall call him the Silken Elder. If he spoke to you, his voice never rose. When he stood conversing, he held his hands folded on his stomach. And a little pursed smile always danced on his plump mouth.

In fairness, he himself had much distinction. This was the Elder who took responsibility for all the rituals practiced on the hillside–the praising of the rain, the warning of coming storms, the songs to the sun. If some unusual act of nature, such as lightning or a whirlwind, drove fear through the people, he was the one who uttered smooth words to fight the danger. He was the man who taught Newgrange how to make offerings to the skies, the trees, the river, and he worked all this so calmly and soothingly that many people liked him. But this Elder was himself a dangerous man; in short, he was a liar, an untrustworthy and shifty man, insincere.

The Silken Elder decided that it would be to his advantage to speak for the people who disagreed with the decision they had just heard. Smoothly he began to question the young man.

"What are you going to build?" he said. "How long will it take?"

"I will create something the world has never seen, something it will always consider extraordinary."

This astonishing reply quietened the room somewhat. Even the Silken Elder was taken aback, but, he hurried not to show it, attacked afresh.

"How do we know you won't abandon the job before it's finished?"

That insult sent a hiss of wonder through the crowd. The young man looked calmly nowhere and never said a word.

So the Silken Elder tried again.

"Do you intend to be answerable at all? These folks–this room–-these are your people. Will you answer to them? To your Elders? To anyone?"

Our young man never moved, never spoke. The questions drew none of his blood. He knew enough to wait. Soon the Silken Elder fell silent, appealing to the audience with raised arms, as if to say, "I don't know what we can do about this fellow."

The young Architect of Newgrange turned around and walked across to where the Silken Elder stood. As though it were a lamp, he thrust his big, tawny young head forward. Six inches from the Silken Elder's face he shone the beam of his eyes straight at the man. Like two boxers they glared at each other for a long moment.

The Silken Elder broke first. He stepped away.

"I can understand," he said, "why you mightn't wish to disclose your plans in detail. But it isn't enough to hear your love of stone. You refuse to tell us anything else. Therefore, to protect ourselves in case you fail us on such an important enterprise, we should declare ourselves entitled to Recompense."

Recompense! A blood oath! Recompense was the payment for failure to deliver on a vow–and it guaranteed a slow, humiliating death. First the offender was pegged out like a hide to the hillside. There he lay for twenty-four hours. At noon on the next day a warrior came and cut off the offender's right arm at the shoulder; on the third day at noon, the left arm; slaves staunched the blood with mud leaves, and skins to prevent the offender bleeding mercifully to death. On the fourth day at noon the warriors cut off the right leg; at the fifth noon, the left.

On the sixth day at noon they prized out his eyes, sliced off his ears, pulled out his tongue; and on the seventh day they filleted his body like butchers. Some weeks later, when the wind and the rain had washed all the flesh from the skeleton, the whitening bones would be collected by the lowest bondswoman on the hillside and cast out into the countryside for the wild animals to gnaw. That was Recompense, a dreadful matter; the word chilled the spine of every man, woman, and child in Newgrange. All chatter, all murmuring, all noise, in the Long Room died. Every eye watched the clashing pair.

The Architect had seen the Recompense more than once; he had even been called upon to participate in it. At last he nodded slowly, like a man thinking aloud, and turned to face the people.

"I understand," he said. "But–if you, all of you, eventually agree that I have accomplished a satisfactory and eternal commemoration, then"–and he spun around to face the older man–"I will take your Elder's robe. And you'll pay the Recompense."

A soft roar came up from the people. This young man knew the laws of Newgrange. A person threatened with the Recompense had the right to turn it on his challenger, even an Elder. In the shocked hush, the Silken Elder had no choice.

"I agree," he said, soft-spoken but very angry.

He tried to recover his position a little, using all the powers of his silken voice.

"What can you tell us about how long–"

"I will tell you nothing," interrupted the Architect, and he left the Long House abruptly. The meeting broke up, and there wasn't a man or a woman there who didn't feel astounded.

From that moment, one September day fifty centuries ago, the Architect began to plan the great white circular building on the hillside at Newgrange above the river Boyne. And from that moment he knew that the Silken Elder would plot every day to cause his downfall and wreck his project, because any time a great man tries to do a wonderful thing, lesser men will try to stop him. That is one of the laws of life.

(This text ends on page 23 of the hardcover book.)

_______________________________________________________________

If you enjoy reading, join one of our free Online Book Clubs at: www.DearReader.com