Many
called him Cumhal, the son of Cormac, and many called him the Swift,
Wild Horse; and he was a gleeman, and he wore a short parti-coloured
doublet, and had pointed shoes, and a bulging wallet. Also he was of
the blood of the Ernaans, and his birth-place was the Field of Gold;
but his eating and sleeping places where the four provinces of Eri,
and his abiding place was not upon the ridge of the earth. His eyes
strayed from the Abbey tower of the White Friars and the town
battlements to a row of crosses which stood out against the sky upon
a hill a little to the eastward of the town, and he clenched his
fist, and shook it at the crosses. He knew they were not empty, for
the birds were fluttering about them; and he thought how, as like as
not, just such another vagabond as himself was hanged on one of them;
and he muttered: 'If it were hanging or bowstringing, or stoning or
beheading, it would be bad enough. But to have the birds pecking your
eyes and the wolves eating your feet! I would that the red wind of
the Druids had withered in his cradle the soldier of Dathi, who
brought the tree of death out of barbarous lands, or that the
lightning, when it smote Dathi at the foot of the mountain, had
smitten him also, or that his grave had been dug by the green-haired
and green-toothed merrows deep at the roots of the deep sea.
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