Still, they were young, and with young people impressions that come quickly go as fast. They have so much in common; their interest in the present is so quick; their faith in the future so fearless; their memory of tenderness is so recent, and their experience of treachery so small, that friendship comes easier to them than enmity does, and trust grows where suspicion withers; so in a little time they were again at ease, and when the food they had been preparing was eaten they knew one another and were friends.
Naoise was then almost nineteen years of age, his brother Ainnle, seventeen, and Ardan more than fourteen, while Deirdre herself was almost a full sixteen years.
If she had listened before as it were to the chattering of a brook or the outburst of a flight of birds, she now listened to a talk that was like a mill-race for exuberance, and the cawing of a colony of rooks for abundance; and yet, when she remembered it afterwards, she could not remember much, or she recollected that they laughed more than they spoke. For the talk consisted more of questions than anything else, and the answer to each query was in nearly all cases an outbreak of laughter and another question.
Do you remember the day Cúchulinn came playing hurley into Emain?
And the way he took the troop under his protection?
And the night he went out a boy and came back a hound?
Jokes, hinted at, that had been played on foster-fathers; grisly jokes of the first combat of a comrade who had left his head where his feet should be; questions that hinted at outrageous parties in the night, when the boys chased a wild boar and their fathers and foster-fathers hunted them; of punishments that had been evaded as a fox dodges a dog, and behold, when safety had been found, there was the punishment awaiting them.
They were young, but they had killed; and they rocked with glee as they told by what marvellous strategy they had got in the lucky blow, and how the champion had gone down never to rise again, and they had trotted home squealing and squawking with joy, with a head surveying the world from the top of a spear, and it grinning down on them as joyously as they chattered up at it.
Names that Deirdre was unfamiliar with, and some that she knew from the servants’ talk, flew from mouth to mouth. Conall the Victorious, Bricriu the Prank-player, Laerí called the Triumphant, Fergus mac Roy, these youngsters spoke of as familiarly as she might have told of the birds in her garden, and criticized them with all the unsparing freedom of youth.
They did not consider that these great men were in any way superior to themselves: the contrary was certainly in their minds. It was evident that Ardan and Ainnle thought their brother Naoise could whip any other champion rather easily: but Naoise was modest and would say nothing for or against this theory.