Thomas Boyd.

n the days when Murtough Mac Erca was in
the High Kingship of Ireland, the country was
divided between the old beliefs of paganism
and the new doctrines of the Christian teaching.
Part held with the old creed and part with the
new, and the thought of the people was troubled
between them, for they knew not which way to follow and which
to forsake. The faith of their forefathers clung close around them,
holding them by many fine and tender threads of memory and
custom and tradition; yet still the new faith was making its way,
and every day it spread wider and wider through the land.
The family of Murtough had joined itself to the Christian faith, and
his three brothers were bishops and abbots of the Church, but
Murtough himself remained a pagan, for he was a wild and lawless
prince, and the peaceful teachings of the Christian doctrine, with its
forgiveness of enemies, pleased him not at all. Fierce and cruel was
his life, filled with dark deeds and bloody wars, and savage and
tragic was his death, as we shall hear.

ow Murtough was in the sunny summer palace of Cletty, which Cormac, son of Art, had built for a pleasure house on the brink of the slow-flowing Boyne, near the Fairy Brugh of Angus the Ever Young, the God of Youth and Beauty. A day of summer was that day, and the King came forth to hunt on the borders of the Brugh, with all his boon companions around him. But when the high-noon came the sun grew hot, and the King sat down to rest upon the fairy mound, and the hunt passed on beyond him, and he was left alone.

There was a witch woman in that country whose name was “Sigh, Sough, Storm, Rough Wind, Winter Night, Cry, Wail, and Groan.” Star-bright and beautiful was she in face and form, but inwardly she was cruel as her names. And she hated Murtough because he had scattered and destroyed the Ancient Peoples of the Fairy Tribes of Erin, her country and her fatherland, and because in the battle which he fought at Cerb on the Boyne her father and her mother and her sister had been slain. For in those days women went to battle side by side with men.

She knew, too, that with the coming of the new faith trouble would come upon the fairy folk, and their power and their great majesty would depart from them, and men would call them demons, and would drive them out with psalm-singing and with the saying of prayers, and with the sound of little tinkling bells. So trouble and anger wrought in the witch woman, and she waited the day to be revenged on Murtough, for he being yet a pagan, was still within her power to harm.