Sweeney Astray (2 page)
Authors: Seamus Heaney
  7   After that, Ronan came to Moira to make peace between Donal, son of Aodh, and Congal Claon, son of Scannlan, but he did not succeed. Nevertheless, the cleric's presence was taken as a seal and guarantee of the rules of the battle; they made agreements that no killing would be allowed except between those hours they had set for beginning and ending the fight each day. Sweeney, however, would continually violate every peace and truce which the cleric had ratified, slaying a man each day before the sides were engaged and slaying another each evening when the combat was finished. Then, on the day fixed for the great battle, Sweeney was in the field before everyone else.
  8 |               | He was dressed like this: next his white skin, the shimmer of silk; and his satin girdle around him; and his tunic, that reward of service and gift of fealty from Congal, was like thisâ crimson, close-woven, bordered in gemstones and gold, a rustle of sashes and loops, the studded silver gleaming, the slashed hem embroidered in points. He had an iron-shod spear in each hand, a shield of mottled horn on his back, a gold-hilted sword at his side.  |
  9   He marched out like that until he encountered Ronan with eight psalmists from his community. They were blessing the armies, sprinkling them with holy water, and they sprinkled Sweeney with the rest. Sweeney thought they had done it just to mock him, so he lifted one of his spears, hurled it, and killed one of Ronan's psalmists in a single cast. He made another throw with the second spear at the cleric himself, so that it pierced the bell that hung from his neck, and the shaft sprang off into the air. Ronan burst out:
10 | Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â | My curse fall on Sweeney for his great offence. His smooth spear profaned my bell's holiness, Â |
 |  | cracked bell hoarding grace since the first saint rang itâ it will curse you to the trees, bird-brain among branches.  |
 |  | Just as the spear-shaft broke and sprang into the air may the mad spasms strike you, Sweeney, forever.  |
 |  | My fosterling lies slain, your spear-point has been reddened: to finish off this bargain you shall die at spear-point.  |
 |  | Should the steadfast tribe of Owen try to oppose me, Uradhran and Telle will visit them with decay.  |
 |  | Uradhran and Telle have visited them with decay. Until time dies away my curse attend you.  |
 |  | My blessing on Eorann, that she flourish and grow lovely. Through everlasting pain my curse fall on Sweeney.  |
11Â Â Â There were three great shouts as the herded armies clashed and roared out their war cries like stags. When Sweeney heard these howls and echoes assumed into the travelling clouds and amplified through the vaults of space, he looked up and he was possessed by a dark rending energy.
 |                  | His brain convulsed, his mind split open. Vertigo, hysteria, lurchings and launchings came over him, he staggered and flapped desperately, he was revolted by the thought of known places and dreamed strange migrations. His fingers stiffened, his feet scuffled and flurried, his heart was startled, his senses were mesmerized, his sight was bent, the weapons fell from his hands and he levitated in a frantic cumbersome motion like a bird of the air. And Ronan's curse was fulfilled.  |
12Â Â Â His feet skimmed over the grasses so lightly he never unsettled a dewdrop and all that day he was a hurtling visitant of plain and field, bare mountain and bog, thicket and marshland, and there was no hill or hollow, no plantation or forest in Ireland that he did not appear in that day; until he reached Ros Bearaigh in Glen Arkin, where he hid in a yew tree in the glen.
13Â Â Â Donal, son of Aodh, won the battle that day. A kinsman of Sweeney's called Aongus the Stout survived and came fleeing with a band of his people into Glen Arkin. They were wondering about Sweeney because they had not seen him alive after the fight and he had not been counted among the casualties. They were discussing this and deciding that Ronan's curse had something to do with it when Sweeney spoke out of the yew:
14 | Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â | Soldiers, come here. You are from Dal-Arie, and the man you are looking for roosts in his tree. Â |
 |  | The life God grants me now is bare and strait; I am haggard, womanless, and cut off from music.  |
 |  | So I am here at Ros Bearaigh. Ronan has brought me low, God has exiled me from myselfâ soldiers, forget the man you knew.  |
15Â Â Â When the men heard Sweeney's recitation they knew him at once and tried to persuade him to trust them. He said he never would, and as they closed round the tree, he launched himself nimbly and lightly and flew to Kilreagan in Tyrconnell, where he perched on the old tree by the church.
    It turned out that Donal, son of Aodh, and his army were there after the battle, and when they saw the madman lighting in the tree, a crowd of them ringed and besieged it. They began shouting out guesses about the creature in the branches; one would say it was a woman, another that it was a man, until Donal himself recognized him and said:
    âIt is Sweeney, the king of Dal-Arie, the man that Ronan cursed on the day of the battle. That is a good man up there, he said, and if he wanted wealth and store he would be welcome to them, if only he would trust us. I am upset that Congal's people are reduced to this, for he and I had strong ties before we faced the battle. But then, Sweeney was warned by Colmcille when he went over with Congal to ask the king of Scotland for an army to field against me. Then Donal uttered the lay:
16 | Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â | Sweeney, what has happened here? Sweeney, who led hosts to war and was the flower among them all at Moira on that day of battle! Â |
 |  | To see you flushed after a feast, poppy in the gold of harvest. Hair like shavings or like down, your natural and perfect crown.  |
 |  | To see your handsome person go was morning after a fall of snow. The blue and crystal of your eyes shone like deepening windswept ice.  |
 |  | Surefooted, elegant, except you stumbled in the path of kingship, you were a blooded swordsman, quick to sense a chance and quick to strike.  |
 |  | Colmcille promised you, good son, kingship and salvation: how eagerly you strutted forth blessed by that voice of heaven and earth.  |
 |  | Truthful seer, Colmcille prophesied in this oracle: All crossed the sea and here you stand who'll never all return from Ireland.  |
 |  | Find the answer to his riddle at Moira on the field of battle, a gout of blood on a shining blade, Congal Claon among the dead.  |
17Â Â Â When Sweeney heard the shouts of the soldiers and the big noise of the army, he rose out of the tree towards the dark clouds and ranged far over mountains and territories.
 |                  | A long time he went faring all through Ireland, poking his way into hard rocky clefts, shouldering through ivy bushes, unsettling falls of pebbles in narrow defiles, wading estuaries, breasting summits, trekking through glens, until he found the pleasures of Glen Bolcain.  |
       That place is a natural asylum where all the madmen of Ireland used to assemble once their year in madness was complete.
 |                  | Glen Bolcain is like this: it has four gaps to the wind, pleasant woods, clean-banked wells, cold springs and clear sandy streams where green-topped watercress and languid brooklime philander over the surface. It is nature's pantry with its sorrels, its wood-sorrels, its berries, its wild garlic, its black sloes and its brown acorns.  |
       The madmen would beat each other for the pick of its water-cresses and for the beds on its banks.
18Â Â Â Sweeney stayed a long time in that glen until one night he was cooped up in the top of a tall ivy-grown hawthorn. He could hardly endure it, for every time he twisted or turned, the thorny twigs would flail him so that he was prickled and cut and bleeding all over. He changed from that station to another one, a clump of thick briars with a single young blackthorn standing up out of the thorny bed, and he settled in the top of the blackthorn. But it was too slender. It wobbled and bent so that Sweeney fell heavily through the thicket and ended up on the ground like a man in a bloodbath. Then he gathered himself up, exhausted and beaten, and came out of the thicket, saying:
    âIt is hard to bear this life after the pleasant times I knew. And it has been like this a year to the night last night!
    Then he spoke this poem:
19 |               | A year until last night I have lived among trees, between flood and ebb-tide, going cold and naked  |
 |  | with no pillow for my head, no human company and, so help me, God, no spear and no sword!  |
 |  | No sweet talk with women. Instead, I pine for cresses, for clean pickings of brooklime.  |
 |  | No surge of royal blood, camped here in solitude; no glory flames the wood, no friends, no music.  |
 |  | Tell the truth: a hard lot. And no shirking this fate; no sleep, no respite, no hope for a long time.  |
 |  | No house humming full, no men, loud with good will, nobody to call me king, no drink or banqueting.  |
 |  | A great gulf yawns now between me and that retinue, between craziness and reason. Scavenging through the glen  |
 |  | on my mad royal visit: no pomp or king's circuit but wild scuttles in the wood. Heavenly saints! O Holy God!  |
 |  | No skilled musicians' cunning, no soft discoursing women, no open-handed giving; my doom to be a long dying.  |
 |  | Far other than to-night, far different my plight the times when with firm hand I ruled over a good land.  |
 |  | Prospering, smiled upon, curbing some great steed, I rode high, on the full tide of good luck and kingship.  |
 |  | That tide has come and gone and spewed me up in Glen Bolcain, disabled now, outcast for the way I sold my Christ,  |
 |  | fallen almost through death's door, drained out, spiked and torn, under a hard-twigged bush, the brown, jaggy hawthorn.  |
 |  | Our sorrows were multiplied that Tuesday when Congal fell. Our dead made a great harvest, our remnant, a last swathe.  |
 |  | This has been my plight. Fallen from noble heights, grieving and astray, a year until last night.  |
