The Druid Path

Back beyond the sweet-smelling reaches of the heather he could hear the bay of the hounds of his uncle Kieran, Tiern over North Tormond. He could no longer hear the clink of their silver bridles, nor the laughter of their ladies, nor the scream of hawk on dove.

But the hill of the ancient god was a sweet place in the silence, and he rested there, and made him a pillow of fern—and listened to the soft breath of the wind in the rowan tree. Its sigh of love for the green earth was a sweet song, and he slept there to that music, while the sun rushed beyond the wide seas of the west, and soft-footed dusk crept after, filling all the hollows with the gray web in which the night is held.

A curious dream of white birds came to him there; the dream had come to him before, yet not with clearness—and in the dream was a dusk path in an ancient wood, and a well there—a well rising and sinking with the tide, and a vision of a maid moving before him into the shadows—a vision swathed in a white cloud, with hidden face but a voice in which was held all the music of beauty of life in all the world. His soul was as a harp on which that music played, and his body was but as a shell left behind while the wings of harmony lifted him—lifted until he was borne as a cloud far from the touch of the earth—and he heard a word over and over in his ear, until he strove with might to echo it, and then, in the striving, the smell of the heather was again in his nostrils, and the forefeet of the white hound were on his breast, and above him a star shone in the soft rose of the sky.

He lay entranced, thrilled by the ecstasy of the perfect dream, and somewhere from the very earth came a song to his ear and an earth echo of the word he had striven for and missed. And this was the song he heard—

Make strong your charms against Danaan,

Danaan of the snowy breast,

Who lured the souls of the Gods of Old

To the land of the mystic west.

The voices were those of two boys, and with them was an old shepherd who bore fire in a strange bowl of thin carven stone, and in the arms of the boys were dry heather and branches of yew. And in fear they let fall the yew at sight of Phadraig, and at sight of his white hound beside him.

“Peace to you,” spake Phadraig. “And who be you to sing here a song of charms? And who is Danaan?”

“A blessing of all saints on you from Jerusalem to Innis Gluair,” spake the ancient who bore the fire. “We bear here boughs for the puring fires of Beltain, and the mothers of these boys bade them make a prayer and sing the song ere they crossed the three magic circles of the Tor of Cromm Cru.”

“And is this that hill?” asked Phadraig. “As a childling they tell me I was nursed in sight of it, but never before have I stood on it, and who made the song of the charm?”

“One of the anointed of the saints who loved every plain and black crag and forest dell between us and the sea. It was no other than Nihil of the Deep Wood.”

“Strange, that is,” said Phadraig, the son of Nihil, “other songs of that singer I have been taught, but never this one until I hear it as in a dream in this strange place; and look, there are white sea birds against the stars—and they also were of the dream.”

“On the night of Beltain strange power is abroad—and strange dreams! And what is the name of you who venture to sleep on the hill of the ancient gods in the dusk of this day?”

And when Phadraig told him, the old herdsman would have knelt, but Phadraig took his hand and spoke to him in kindness, yet could get from him no other word as to the song of Danaan.

“Go to Roiseen of the Glen, the wise woman down by the sea,” he said. “She was nurse to you and knows all your father Nihil would have had you know of the names of the ancient gods of the land.”

“But Danaan was the name of a people—the old, old people, soul brothers to the fairies!”

“Ay—it may be. And may not a people have a spirit, as has a person? Have we not our own this day in Erinn, our Mother of the Land? Ask me no more, O Lord of the Ua Dinan, but go you down to Roiseen of the Glen, and peace go with you.”

And with his white hound at his heels and one of the shepherd boys as guide, Phadraig took trail to the sea glen and would have gone through a deep wood in the valley, but the boy drew back.

“Not there, my lord,” said he.

“Yet it is the shorter way.”

“No way is shorter if you never come out alive, O Lord of the Ua Dinan.”

“What abides within the wood?”

“No living thing, my lord, but the water in the Druid’s well, and it pulses there as if it might be the heartbeat of the ocean beyond, yet the water is not salt.”

“This is a land of strange riddles I am coming back to this day,” said Phadraig, “but do you not hear music in the wood—or is it the wind through the new buds?”

“The priest tells us it is the winds, or the waves, or the night birds in their shelter, and that is the thing we must say,” said the boy, and neither of them spoke of the white birds above them against the sky.

To Phadraig it was as if he had walked into a new life from the hour he slept on the western hill of Cromm Cru. And all the path of it held music to make the heart glad of life—yet sad with inarticulate yearnings. The life of the halls of Kieran was left behind, and he trod the heath as an exile returned.

In the cot of Roiseen of the Glen there was a rabbit stewing on the hearth, and Roiseen herself spinning the silver flax at the open door in the starlight.

“Oh, is it yourself come back on your own feet to greet me this day?” she said, and wept with very gladness, and kissed the young hand of him. But he kissed her brown cheek instead, and they talked long after the shepherd boy was asleep in the forest leaves in the byre.

But it was not that night of Beltain that Phadraig asked of the unknown things, for he had noted the salt sprinkled on the threshold to bar out influences of the old gods; so that night they talked of Nihil, dead ere he had seen his son, and Kreda, his wife, dead at the birthing, and all the grandeurs of the house of the Ua Dinan where Phadraig had lived his life of training for the work of a chief. Yet out of it all he had come back with the heart of a boy, and sat on a three-legged stool at the door of Roiseen, and fashioned a flute of alder-wood, and piped on it in the sunshine of the morning.

Then, when the milk was put away, and Roiseen settled with the distaff and the whirling strands, he spoke the name singing in his heart.

“Mother Roiseen, it is to you I am coming with a thing to ask: who is Danaan of the birds of white?”

“That you should ask it, and you with the name of a saint on you! Get you to your hawking or hunting the deer! And see that you pluck primroses to scatter at your door this night that the Ancient People send you no call of Danaan—the men who follow the call wander far.”

“To the land of the mystic west do they wander?”

“Ay, that they do; far over the green meadows of the waters where the horses of Lir have their pastures. From the cliff below you can see them running in races endlessly to the shore.”

“I see the waves run in,” said Phadraig, but she was not to be fooled.

“Ay, and more than the waves to you, as to your father! But you are idling in thought, Phadraig, son of Nihil.”

“What other task when there is peace in Tormond? And the Ua Dinan, as you mayhaps have heard, cannot abide the sight of me near his ailing son, and Kethlen his wife, bitter as gall because she has borne a weakling.”

“True that is. You stand in their eyes as a threat at the crowns they wear.”

“To me a pipe on the hills instead, and the songs of my father to sing! Roiseen, why has the song of Danaan never been given me?”

“That name has been through the ages a hated word to the women of your house and in each generation they try to smother it out.”

“And why is that?”

“It gave a youth the seeking eye and the wandering foot, and it was said to keep young the heart of a man when all his mates went tottering under the sod. No—the women could not abide the thought of that, and they smother it out. Ay, that is the way with the woman-heart.”

“Mother Roiseen, there is a deer for you in the forest. Shall Snard and I bring it in tomorrow’s morn?”

And the white hound, hearing his name spoken, flailed the floor with his tail and rose up and waited.

“To what would you bribe me, Phadraig, my heart?”

“To peace and content while I tell you I heard the song of Danaan on the hill of Cromm Cru in the dusk of Beltain—and I felt the music that all the songs of Nihil, my father, could not give voice to, and in my dream I looked in that Druid well of the wood, and saw the heart of the ocean beat there under the stars! All this came to me by chance in the place of fire to Beltain, so mine is the right to ask what I ask.”

And Roiseen, the wise woman, looked on him and made the sign and plucked primroses for her door.

“Yours is the right,” she said, “come you away from the house and out under the hawthorn tree and what I can say with no hurt to the saints and their faith, that I will. It is said that while many a family trace in pride their fathers to the ancient barbarians, few trace their descent from yon Wise Ones who took themselves into the air with their own enchantment sooner than be conquered. This I heard when I was a girl in the home of the king, your father’s father. But Nihil of the songs learned much from a master of tricks, an aged man who said he had lived on the earth in other days when the sea covered all this valley, and that this w