Bretha Crólige(Judgements of Bloodlettings)

Fingal (kin-slaying) is the most serious crime that can be committed under Brehon or Gaelic law. No fine can be paid, nor no recompense made by someone who has killed a member of his immediate family. The murderer is banished from the kingdom by being placed in a boat with no oars and sent to drift out to sea.

The body of the man in the boat with no oars had been washed up onto the orange sands of the beach of Fanore. Mara, Brehon of the Burren, with her seven law scholars flanking her, stood very still for a moment, looking down into the sightless eyes. The sands and the dunes behind them were crowded with fishermen and their families; with boats; with small canvas-covered shelters; with fires smoking beneath the long lines of herring and mackerel suspended from straight twigs resting on v-shaped upright ones; but everyone, including the small children, was very silent. Death by drowning was well known to this fishing community, but there was something strange about this death and it chilled even the experienced Mara to the bone.

Mara had been Brehon – judge and investigating magistrate – of the one-hundred-square-mile Kingdom of the Burren for over twenty-five years. She had imposed penalties for many crimes, including that of murder, but she had never had to impose a penalty for the ultimate sin in Gaelic Ireland – that of the murder of a close family relation. Brehon law refused to shed blood and ordinary deeds of murder were punished by a heavy fine and full declaration of guilt and repentance in front of the people of the kingdom. And since blood cannot be shed by the judicial process, then the punishment for fingal (kin-slaying) was left to God. The murderer was put in a boat with no oars, the boat was pushed out to sea and the man was abandoned to the ocean and the winds. It was one of the first laws that any young legal scholar learned at the commencement of their schooling.

The dead man was unknown to her, unknown to all, it appeared. Not a young man, a man in his fifties, she judged; though the hair was plentiful, the face was lined. Clothed in white linen, he lay there, judged by God and condemned to death. What had he done to merit this death and where had he come from to end up on this remote shore – these were the questions in Mara's mind, but as she gazed down at him, doubt crept in.

Was all as it seemed?

Mara turned and looked around. The body in the boat had landed in a small inlet on the southern extremity of Fanore Bay, right into a little sandy cove, well away from the main beach. The storm winds had died down, but there was still a strong breeze from the south-west and it was easy to see how the boat had been washed in by the tide. The position was right; it was the boat itself that puzzled her. Where had it come from? And what was the history of the man who lay there, quietly dead, half covered with seaweed, dressed only in linen, the skin of his face whitened by the salt spray, the tongue protruding, looking for water, the bleak sentence of death to be read in the position of the body lying within a boat with neither oars nor sail; a boat set adrift to be at the mercy of wind and waves. Mara looked out at the Atlantic Ocean, and then back at the grey stone of the mountains that towered above the beach. She could not have foreseen that this would occur within the few short days since she had last visited Fanore.

It was three days ago that Mara came to the seashore on the north-west side of the Kingdom of the Burren. She went there on midsummer's eve with her seven scholars, who were going to take part in a great fishing expedition. They set off early that morning, riding the eight miles from Cahermacnaghten on a path that wound between the mountains and then descended from Ballyiny to sea level. It had been a long time since Mara had travelled this steep narrow roadway and oblivious of the excited chatter around her she was absorbed in the beauty of the flowers. The hills rose high on either side of them, not gentle mounds covered with grass or heather, but vast chunks of exposed rock where the rain had carved the limestone boulders into thick bare slabs and terraces of stone and where each crevice and crack was filled with tiny plants. As Mara rode along behind her noisy scholars, her eyes were on the dark green ferns and on the flowers, noting where the intense pale sky-blue of the harebells contrasted so beautifully with the bright pinkish-purple of the daisy-shaped cranesbill blooms. The tiny rock gardens of wall rue and starry blossoms in white and purple absorbed her so much, even when they emerged from the mountains, that it took a startled exclamation from one of her scholars to make her turn her towards the sea.

It had been raining heavily during the Sunday night and there had been claps of thunder from time to time, so they had all been relieved when the morning showed fine and sunny. But the sea that stretched between them and the Aran Islands was tumultuous, boiling over with white-capped waves, and the sky was full of seabirds, squawking with noisy elation. For a moment Mara enjoyed the sight, the contrast between the deep blue of the sea, the foam on the immense breakers that rolled, one by one, into the shore, the long level shining black slabs that stretched out to meet the water, the scarlet legs of a large flock of oystercatchers overhead, their call like the drumming of the waves themselves, and the plumes of water smoke rising high above the coastal fields, but then the dismayed words of sixteen-year-old Domhnall, her eldest scholar, penetrated her brain.

'The boats will never put out in a sea like that,' was what he said.

'Of course they will,' contradicted Cormac, Mara's eleven-year-old son.

'Of course they will,' loudly asserted the MacMahon twins, Cael and Cian, but no one else said anything, just looked out to sea. Art, Cormac's foster-brother, almost his twin as they had been babies together, usually agreed with him, but Art was the son of a fisherman and knew more about the sea than any of the others. Fifteen-year-old Slevin took his opinions from his great friend, Domhnall, and fourteen-year-old Finbar was so depressed about his examination results that he had not opened his mouth for the whole morning.

'We'll see,' said Mara as they turned their horses off the road and went down the sandy path towards the beach, Mara carefully picking her way in and out of the clumps of wiry-stemmed...