BOOK II
CHAPTER I
Time flies, scattering on all that had seemed important the ash of forgetfulness, and so crowding memory into memory that the thing we recollect has no longer the shape or colour that strode against us once upon a time.
For all men but the dreamer time flies. But it may be stationary for him who can recreate in the night all that he forces to oblivion in the morning. His woeful yesterdays can be timely at any time, for nothing that touches him will rust or fade, and he may be seen to wince at a word which his contemporaries have lost the significance of.
The seven years that passed had not touched Conachúr. He was still the masterful king, the unremitting lawgiver. He was still the idol of his people. What would abanquet in the Red Branch be if the king were away? But he was never absent, and wherever there was music or frolic or laughter the Son of Ness was urging it on, and would be eager for more when the youngest companion was wearied to stupidity. Not time nor thought could blunt the edge of his bodily or mental energy, so vast was it, and misfortune beat as unavailingly against him as the wind did against oaken Emania.
To be energetic and self-sufficing is to be happy; but while one desire remains in the heart happiness may not come there. For to desire is to be incomplete: it is the badge of dependence, the signal of unhappiness, and to be freed from that is to be freed from every fetter that can possibly be forged. Man becomes god when he finds his satisfactions within himself, but his dreams then are other than those that harried Conachúr as a pack of hounds harry a fox.
For Ulster might forget, and those who had not been outraged might forgive, but he would not forget or forgive until he was as dead as those should be against whom hismind was directed like the point of a secret spear.
Deirdre and the sons of Uisneac had fled to Scotland, where they had kinsmen and acquaintances who had grown up with them in Emain Macha as fosterages from the Scottish courts, or as lords and captains in Conachúr’s mercenary armies. They may have met Cúchulinn there, for it would be about that time that he was under the tuition of the female warrior and witch, Scatach; and, if so, they should have met his comrade Ferdiad also, he who was to assail the ford afterwards with what a hand! and it may have been during their exile that Cúchulinn fell in love with Scatach’s daughter, and that the child was born who would receive such a woeful stroke on Báile’s Strand.
It is one of the wise arrangements of providence that no person can either eat of the same thing or talk of the same thing for more than a week; and so, when gossip’s time had passed, Ulster, unless it might be to some travelling historian, spoke no more of the king’s misfortune. Such an historian would have learned that Deirdre was tall and short, and that she was dark and fair andsallow: for every woman he interviewed would lend her own contours and complexion to such an heroine, and would, as they reprobated or forgave, endow her with the moral qualities which they best appreciated—their own. Lavarcham could tell the truth and so could Conachúr, but they would not be questioned for some years to come.
The king had downfaced the whole matter from the start. He went to the chase that day. He sat at the banquet that night. He visited his foreign troops the next day, and the day after he inspected the fortifications at the Pass of the Fews and a length of the Black Pig’s Dyke on either side. There was the Boy Troop to be reviewed and their competitions to be scrutinized. There were the unending ceremonies of the court, the Judgement Seat, and of the embassies from all parts of his realm and from overseas: there were gifts to be received and returned: counsels to be given and listened to. There was an eternal variety of occupations for the king, who, although he might employ a day of eighteen hours’ work, could have something yet to think of ere he slept.
Cúchulinn and Conall Cearnach had been equal kings with him, but they had (Lavarcham had assisted in that) surrendered their powers to Conachúr, who was now known and described as Emperor of Ulster.
What allegiance he gave to the High King of Ireland we do not know, and it may have been part of his plan to arrive at that dignity himself. A Connacht prince was then, and for a thousand years afterwards, High King of Ireland, and although the effort of Connacht and Ulster to achieve supreme rule may now be forgotten, the effects of those bitter wars lasted longer than an historian would dare to count.
So far as Ulster was concerned the king might have been at ease. His honour was as safe as his kingdom, and as for the other actors in his drama their condition was so manifestly gentle and their youth so extreme that no taint of ugliness or treachery could remain in the tale, or in the mind of the person who heard it. It could, in a while, have been told of as a regrettable childish misadventure, and one which not even the king need further remember.
But the king remembered.
It was to escape such a memory that he plunged into affairs and banquets and a whole roystering self-expenditure which would have devitalized any other man. He prolonged his day until it could not for very weariness be further extended, and then he went to bed.
No: he went to Deirdre’s bed where Naoise slept, and over which he hovered sleepless, though in sleep, and in a torment that poisoned the very sunlight when he awakened.