“Ieuan, how did you know about me and the Winwaed? I arrived only a couple of days before the battle – not long enough to establish my normal reign of terror!” I snorted. “And Penda’s army was utterly destroyed, so there was no-one to carry word anywhere. You weren’t there, were you?” He looked up at me, sharply. My head twinged, momentarily – a reminder of that dreadful time. “No, you can’t have been. I would have heard if you were with Penda’s army, so you definitely weren’t on that side. And you wouldn’t have been with Oswy; he is a Christian and very much against the Old Ways. How did you find out that I was there?” Ieuan looked away, as if trying to remember. He rested his jaw on his right hand and stroked himself a little. I felt my head getting a bit fuzzy again and took another small draft of my medicine against the pain.
“Such an event as you described – two deaths for certain, in battle, along with the shattering of your own psyche – such things trigger a disturbance in the Otherworld,” he said. “I expect everyone with any Gift felt something, even if it was just an ill feeling to wake the simple in the night. I searched for where the ripple started. With a bit of help, I found out where and something of what had happened.”
I was reassured by this. It was perfectly logical. Of course my passing had triggered a reaction in the Otherworld. It may even have looked like death. I had been dead, for all practical purposes, for months, until Padhraig brought me back to my senses. And he hadn’t known who I was. Even as far as I was concerned, Prince Ciaran the Damned was dead. I hadn’t used that old name for nearly a decade and nor had anyone else. I had a new life and new tasks, which didn’t involve the sword or forays into battle in the Otherworld.
It was a perfectly innocent explanation. I was relieved; we moved on, after touching on my murder of Coivin, the reason for my exile.
“I doubt if they care any more. It was thirty years ago, Ciaran.”
“Anselm,” I said. “My name is Anselm.”
“Anselm, then. Are you still carrying the burden?”
“It’s still with me but it doesn’t crush me any more,” I said. “I am different, now. My new name is a sign of the difference in me.”
“Born again and washed clean in the Blood of the Lamb.”
“That’s what they say,” I smiled.
“No-one would recognise you, now. Who would see a prince of Donegal in Anselm, monk of Iona?” This time, I shrugged. I preferred not to find out.
“Is there anything you would kill for now? We know about Ciaran but what does Anselm of Iona believe in strongly enough to kill for?” he asked.
“I can’t think of anything,” I replied, and that set us off down another road of discussion. Self-sacrifice. Standing up for the defenceless, speaking up for the voiceless; at what point would a Christian monk kill another human being? To defend what? I couldn’t think of anything, and I told him so. Through all his hypothetical scenarios, which got ever more ridiculous, to the point of laughter.
“You haven’t been practicing your Craft these last eight years, have you?” he asked. I shook my head.
“Not really, no.”
“Would you be able to withstand another Blood Red Game, do you think?” I thought about it and my head nagged at me a little, just to remind me.
“I know what you mean but I think I would, yes,” I said. “I don’t have the arrogance of Prince Ciaran but I have something more valuable, I think: experience. I have been through it once already. I know what to expect. And, of course – I won. It wouldn’t be trying to do better than I did last time; I would go in knowing that I could do it. It was after I had won the Blood Red Game that I was nearly killed.”
He smiled and went back to his game. More and more outlandish, convoluted and unlikely examples, intended to tempt beyond breaking point a Christian monk’s commitment to peace. I would not be broken.
“There is enough death in this world, without me adding to it,” I said.
7
The Dead Past
The kitchen staff arrived just before dawn and made it clear that they wished to get on with their work. The cook, a woman with a strong red face above an extremely large body, finally shooed us away.
“I fear a hungry king more even than two angry druids, with respects to you both, fathers. The king can cut off my head if he is displeased and I ain’t one of them Christian saints who can put it back on with no harm done. The worst you can do is turn me into a frog. That wouldn’t cause me any great discomfort. I could live on a lily pad.”
“If it didn’t sink,” came the almost inaudible reply from one of the staff. Ieuan and I took our leave of the apoplectic cook, and left her to discipline her troops. We had no doubt she would be firm but we weren’t at all sure she would be fair. The servants and slaves were in for a bad morning.
The sky was beginning to lighten as we stepped out into the courtyard. We stopped to contemplate the dawn but our silent prayers were, doubtless, very different.