"Mongan," he said, "had been Fin MacCool two hundred years before. When
he was Fin he had been present at the death of a certain king. The bard
was singing before Mongan, and mis-stated the place of the king's death.
Mongan corrected him, and the Bard was so incensed at the correction
that he threatened to satirise the kingdom so that it should become
barren. And he would only agree to withhold his terrible satire if
Mongan would give him his wife.
"Mrs. Mongan?"
"Yes, just so," Ulick replied, laughing. "Mongan asked for three days'
delay to consider the dreadful dilemma in which the Bard's threat had
placed him. And during that time Mongan sat with his wife consoling her,
saying, "A man will come to us, his feet are already upon the western
sea." And at the time when the Bard stood up to claim the wife, a
strange warrior came into the encampment, holding a barbless spear. He
said that he was Caolte, one of Fin's famous warriors, that the king
whose place of death was in dispute was killed where Mongan had said,
that if they dug down into the earth they would find the spear-head,
that it would fit the shaft he held in his hand, that it was the
spear-head that had killed the king."
"Go on, and tell me some more stories. I love to listen to you--you are
better than any play."
And she wondered if he were indeed an ancient Druid come to life again,
and that the instinct of the ancient rites lingered in him. However this
might be, he could answer all her questions, and she was much interested
when at the end of another tale he told her of Blake's visions and
prophetic books. She knew little about Blake, and listened to Ulick's
account of his visions and prophecies. Evelyn thought of Owen, and to
escape from the thought she spoke of a legend which Ulick had once
mentioned to her.
"You did not tell it to me, only the end; the very last phrase is all I
know of it, 'and the further adventures of Bran are unknown.'"
"Bran, the son of Feval, is the story of a man who went to the great
plain, the land over the sea, the land of the children of Dana. He was
sitting in his court when a beautiful woman appeared, and she told him
to man his ship and sail to the land of the Gods, the land where no one
dies, where blossoms fall for ever.... I have forgotten the song, what a
wonderful song it is. Ah, I remember, 'Where music is not born, but
continually is there, where' ... no, I can't remember it. Bran sails
away, and after sailing for some days he meets a man driving a chariot
over the waves. This man says, 'To my eyes you are sailing over the tops
of a forest,' and in many other ways makes clear to him that all things
are but appearances, and change with the eye that sees them."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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