What are these dreams to foolish babbling men —
Who cry with little noises ’neath the thunder
Of ages ground to sand,
To a little sand.
Ebric moved homeward through the moonlight wondering much at that song of Fionula. But because he was a poet, he understood.
From him the people of the hills, and the valleys round about Irros Domnann, heard the story of the speaking swans; and soon the wonder of it, and the whole sorrowful tale of the Children of Lir became as well known in that region as, long, long ago, to the Dedannans and Milesians on the shores of Lough Darvra, when they encamped by its shores because of the slow, sweet, fairy music of the four swans.
Then once again it chanced that the four children of Lir unwittingly transgressed their doom, and so had to leave the shores where they could converse with the people who loved them. But Ebric, to whom they had told everything, was a poet, and wrought of their story a tale so sweet and marvellous that it has lasted all these ages, and is heard to this day on the lips of peasants in the west of Erin.
From that time onward the sufferings of Fionula and her brothers were no less than they had been on the sea of the Moyle. Yet even the worst they had there known was surpassed midway in the heart of a terrible winter, a winter when cattle died in covered sheds, and men and women in their houses, and the wild creatures of the forest under their branches, and the storm-inured seabirds in the hollows of their ocean-fronting cliffs.
On that day the whole surface of the sea from Irros Domnann to Achill was frozen into one solid mass of ice. Across this a polar wind drove sheets of hail and sleet. By nightfall, Aed and Fiachra and Conn were so far spent that they despaired of any morrow; and at the last Fionula herself, who had striven to comfort them, was herself in so pitiful a misery that she could only lament with them that death was so long in coming.
But in the full horror of midnight, while they clung nigh-frozen to the rock of Glora, Fionula had a vision. It was of that God, that new faith, that great wonder and beauty which was even then coming towards Erin, though St. Patrick had not yet set foot upon its shores.