The High King did not know where exactly he should look for such a
saviour, but he was well educated and knew how to look for whatever was
lacking. This knowledge will be useful to those upon whom a similar duty
should ever devolve.
He went to Ben Edair. He stepped into a coracle and pushed out to the
deep, and he permitted the coracle to go as the winds and the waves
directed it.
In such a way he voyaged among the small islands of the sea until he lost
all knowledge of his course and was adrift far out in ocean. He was under
the guidance of the stars and the great luminaries.
He saw black seals that stared and barked and dived dancingly, with the
round turn of a bow and the forward onset of an arrow. Great whales came
heaving from the green-hued void, blowing a wave of the sea high into the
air from their noses and smacking their wide flat tails thunder-ously on
the water. Porpoises went snorting past in bands and clans. Small fish
came sliding and flickering, and all the outlandish creatures of the deep
rose by his bobbing craft and swirled and sped away.
Wild storms howled by him so that the boat climbed painfully to the sky on
a mile-high wave, balanced for a tense moment on its level top, and sped
down the glassy side as a stone goes furiously from a sling.
Or, again, caught in the chop of a broken sea, it stayed shuddering and
backing, while above his head there was only a low sad sky, and around him
the lap and wash of grey waves that were never the same and were never
different.
After long staring on the hungry nothingness of air and water he would
stare on the skin-stretched fabric of his boat as on a strangeness, or he
would examine his hands and the texture of his skin and the stiff black
hairs that grew behind his knuckles and sprouted around his ring, and he
found in these things newness and wonder.
Then, when days of storm had passed, the low grey clouds shivered and
cracked in a thousand places, each grim islet went scudding to the horizon
as though terrified by some great breadth, and when they had passed he
stared into vast after vast of blue infinity, in the depths of which his
eyes stayed and could not pierce, and wherefrom they could scarcely be
withdrawn. A sun beamed thence that filled the air with sparkle and the
sea with a thousand lights, and looking on these he was reminded of his
home at Tara: of the columns of white and yellow bronze that blazed out
sunnily on the sun, and the red and white and yellow painted roofs that
beamed at and astonished the eye.
Sailing thus, lost in a succession of days and nights, of winds and calms,
he came at last to an island.
His back was turned to it, and long before he saw it he smelled it and
wondered; for he had been sitting as in a daze, musing on a change that
had seemed to come in his changeless world; and for a long time he could
not tell what that was which made a difference on the salt-whipped wind or
why he should be excited. For suddenly he had become excited and his heart
leaped in violent expectation.
“It is an October smell,” he said.
“It is apples that I smell.”
He turned then and saw the island, fragrant with apple trees, sweet with
wells of wine; and, hearkening towards the shore, his ears, dulled yet
with the unending rhythms of the sea, distinguished and were filled with
song; for the isle was, as it were, a nest of birds, and they sang
joyously, sweetly, triumphantly.
He landed on that lovely island, and went forward under the darting birds,
under the apple boughs, skirting fragrant lakes about which were woods of
the sacred hazel and into which the nuts of knowledge fell and swam; and
he blessed the gods of his people because of the ground that did not
shiver and because of the deeply rooted trees that could not gad or budge.
