Green Fire: A Romance

by William Sharp

"At that a trembling was upon old Padruic, who had the wonder that this stranger should know who and what he was.

"'And who will you be, and forgive the saying?' he asked.

"'Am Faidh—the Prophet,' the man said.

"'And what prophet will you be, and what is your prophecy?' asked Padruic.

"'I am here because I wait for what is to be, and that will be for the birth of a child that is to be a king.'

"And with that the man said no more, and the old shepherd went silently down through the hillside gloaming, and, heavy with the thoughts that troubled him, followed his ewes down into Aonaig. But after that neither he nor any other saw or heard aught of the shadowy stranger; so that all upon Rona felt sure that Padruic had beheld no more than a vision. There were some who thought that he had seen the ghost of the outlaw Donnacha Bàn; and mayhap one or two who wondered if the stranger that had said he was a prophet was not Donnacha Bàn himself, with a madness come upon him; but at last these rumors went out to sea upon the wind, and men forgot. But, and it was months and months afterward, and three days before his own death, old Padruic McVurich was sitting in the sunset on the rocky ledge in front of his brother's croft, where then he was staying, when he heard a strange crying of seals. He thought little of that; only, when he looked closer, he saw, in the hollow of the wave hard by that ledge, a drifting body.

"Am Faidh—Am Faidh!" he cried; "the Prophet, the Prophet!"

At that his brother and his brother's wife ran to see; but it was nothing that they saw. "It would be a seal," said Pol McVurich; but at that Padruic had shook his head, and said no, for sure, he had seen the face of the dead man, and it was of him whom he had met on the hillside, and that had said he was the Prophet who was waiting there for the birth of a king.

"And that is how there came about the echo of the thought, that Donnacha Bàn had at last, after his madness, gone under the green wave and was dead. For all that, in the months which followed, more than one man said he had caught a glimpse of a figure high up on the hill. The old wisdom says that when Christ comes again, or the Prophet who will herald Christ, it will be as a herdsman on a lonely isle. More than one of the old people on Rona and Borosay remembered that sgeul out of the seanachas that the tale-tellers knew. There were some who said that Donnacha Bàn had never been drowned at all, and that he was this Prophet, this Herdsman. Others would not have that saying at all, but believed that the mysterious herdsman was indeed Am Buchaille Bàn, the Fair-haired Shepherd, who had come again to redeem the people out of their sorrow. There were even those who said that the Herdsman who haunted Rona was no other than Kenneth Carmichael himself, who had not died, but had had the mind-dark there in the sea caves where he had been lost, and there had come to the knowledge of secret things, and so was at last Am Faidh Chriosd."