The servants and guards were listening with their eyes staring, their mouths open, and their breathing forgotten.
A whisper, a thrill, a terrible constriction of the heart fled through the vast palace, and went zigzagging like wildfire about Ulster. And in the centre of that Conachúr stood, alone; with his fists closed and his eyes closed; listening to the whispers that were an inch away and an hundred miles away; that were over him and under him and in him: listening to the blanching of his face and to the liquifying of his bones: listening in a rage of curiosity and woe for the more that might be said and all the more that might be thought: trying, as with one gripping of the mind, to sense all the bitterness that might be; to exhaust it in one gulp, and re-awaken as at a million removes from all that had ever been or could be till Doom.
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 a banquet 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 his mind 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.