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 and sallow: 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.
CHAPTER II
Conachúr mac Nessa was preparing a feast.