He pulled me back under the trees and, faster than was comfortable, up a precipitous grassy hillside to a vantage point crowned with a little cairn of stones. We had already travelled a long way up from the coast; the track had been hard for the horses, and at times folk had climbed down and walked alongside the carts. Peg had told me to stay where I was, and I had not argued with her. Perhaps they thought I would not keep up, because of my foot. Darragh was making no such concessions.
‘Now,’ he said. ‘Look out that way. That’s your last sight of the Kerry coast. You’ll want to remember it. There’s no sea at Sevenwaters, just lots and lots of trees.’
It was far away; already so far. There was no crash of waves, no roar of power, no sound of sea birds squabbling on the shore as the fisherfolk gutted the catch. Only the gleam of sunlight on distant water; only the pearly sky, and the land stretched out in folds of green and grey and brown, dotted here and there with great stones and clumps of wind-battered trees.
‘Look further out. Out beyond that promontory there. Tell me what you see.’ Darragh put one hand on my shoulder, turning me slightly, and with the other he pointed to what seemed to be a stretch of empty ocean. ‘Look carefully.’
There was an island: a tiny, steep triangle of rock, far out in the inhospitable waters. If I squinted, I could detect plumes of spray as waves dashed its base. Another small isle lay close by. Even by my standards, it was a desolate spot.
‘You can’t see them from our cove,’ Darragh said. ‘Skellig rocks, they call that place. There’s folk live there.’
‘Live there? How could they?’
‘Christian hermits. Holy men. It’s supposed to be good for the soul, so they say. The Norsemen put in there once, killed most of the brothers, smashed what little they had. But the hermits went back. Strange sort of life, that’d be. Think of all you’d be missing.’
‘It would be quiet, at least,’ I said somewhat testily, still staring out at the specks in the ocean, and wondering at such a choice.
‘Finding it a bit much, are you?’
I said nothing.
‘You’re not used to folk, that’s all it is. It’ll get easier as we go. You’ve no need to be scared of us.’
‘Scared?’ I bristled. ‘Why would I be scared?’
Darragh thought for a moment. ‘Because it’s all new?’ he ventured. ‘Because you’re used to the quiet, just you and your father shut up alone doing what you do? Because you don’t like being looked at?’
Misery settled on me like a small, personal grey cloud. I stared out towards the sea in silence.
‘True, isn’t it?’ said Darragh.
‘Maybe.’
‘Perhaps you’d rather be a hermit living on a rock in the sea, feeding yourself on seaweed and cockles? You’d not have to think about a soul besides yourself then.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ I snapped.
‘No more nor less than it says.’
‘There’s nothing wrong with a life like that,’ I said. ‘At least it’s – safe.’
‘Funny way of looking at it. What about the cliffs? What about the Norsemen? What about starving to death in winter? Or might you point your little finger and turn one of the brothers into a nice fat codfish maybe?’
I froze, unable to look at him. There was a difficult silence.
‘Fainne?’ he asked eventually. ‘What’s wrong?’
And I knew that his words had been innocent, a joke, and that it was my own mind that had put the fear into me.
‘Nothing.’
‘I worry about you. There was someone else there this summer, wasn’t there?’
‘My grandmother. On a visit.’
‘Uh-huh. And that was why you wouldn’t come out?’
‘Part of the reason.’
‘And what was the other part?’ He was frowning, his dark brows drawn together.
‘I – I can’t do ordinary things any more. I can’t have – friends. I can’t let that get in the way. It’s hard to explain. This is bad enough, going on the cart, mixing with folk, having to talk and listen and – I just can’t do those things any more. I – I can’t let anyone close.’
Darragh did not reply. I stared at the ground, knowing he was looking at me, but unwilling to meet the expression in those too-honest brown eyes.
‘I’m sorry,’ I whispered.
‘So am I,’ he said slowly. ‘Sounds pretty odd to me. You might think yourself too fine for the likes of us. But there’s folk of your own kind, where you’re going. Family. It’ll be good for you, Fainne. They’ll welcome you. Folk are not so bad once you get to know them. And – it’s only right, to have family and friends around you. I don’t understand how you could do without them.’
I drew my shawl closer around my shoulders. ‘No, I suppose you wouldn’t,’ I said. ‘But our kind don’t have friends.’
Then we turned and made our way back down the hill, and he took my hand on the steepest bits, and neither of us said a word until we were nearly under the elms and could hear Molly laughing at some joke of Peg’s.
‘You have, you know,’ Darragh said softly. ‘Sometimes you get friends without asking for them. And once you’ve got them, they’re not so easy to lose.’
‘I’m going a long way away,’ I said.
‘I’m a travelling man, remember?’ said Darragh. ‘Always on the move, that’s me.’
The journey was long. I learned to shut out some of the noise by repeating in my head, over and over, the recitation of question and answer that Father and I had perfected during the long years of my childhood.
Who were the first folk in the land of Erin?
The Old Ones. The Fomhóire.
And who came next?
So it went, as the carts trundled along under gentle autumn rain and crisp westerly breeze, and sometimes, when we were running late, under a great arch of stars.
Whence did you come?
From the Cauldron of Unknowing.
For what do you strive?
For knowledge. For wisdom. For an understanding of all things.
The lore was all that I had to keep me going. The lore was control and direction, amidst the noisy children and the chattering women and the constant company, more company than I was likely to want in a lifetime.
Peg was kind enough in her rough way. She never asked me to help with skinning rabbits, or fetching water, or washing the children’s clothes. She tried to find me a quiet corner to roll out my bedding, once she saw how I edged away from the other girls and pulled the blanket over my ears. When we stopped for a single night, we’d sleep in the carts, with a sort of awning over that gave half-shelter. The boys slept out under the trees, next to the horses. There was a smell, with so many folk close together, and it was never really quiet. Often I lay awake looking up at the sky, thinking of Father back home, and listening to the small cracklings and rustlings around me, the horses shuffling, the sigh of children rolling over in their sleep, the snores of older folk worn out by a long day on the road. At dawn they’d be up again and soon ready to be off, the packing a well-practised, speedy process. It seemed to me we were covering a great distance, despite many stops to sell baskets, or collect a pony, or simply to visit old friends. I lost count of the days after a while. There was a time when we came down