Oh, death of Fergus, that is lying in the boat here,
Betwixt the man of the red hair and him of the black beard,
Rise now, and out of thy cold white eyes take out the fear,
And let Fergus mac Art mhic Fheargus see his weird!
Sure, now, it’s a blind man I am, but I’m thinking I see
The shadow of you crawling across the dead.
Soon you will twine your arm around his shaking knee,
And be whispering your silence into his listless head.
And that is why, O Fergus—
But here the man hurled his sword into the sea, and with a choking cry fell forward; and upon the white sands he was, beneath the trampling feet of the Washer of the Ford.
II
It was a fair wind that blew beneath the stars that night. At dawn the mountains of Skye were like turrets of a great Dûn against the east.
But Torcall the Blind Harper did not see that thing. Sleep, too, was upon him. He smiled in that sleep, for in his mind he saw the dead men, that were of the alien people, his foes, draw near the stream that was in a far place. The shaking of them, poor, tremulous frostbit leaves they were, thin and sere, made the only breath there was in that desert.
At the ford—this is what he saw in his vision—they fell down like stricken deer with the hounds upon them.
“What is this stream?” they cried in the thin voice of rain across the moors.
“The River of Blood,” said a voice.