The Monk Who Vanished Read Free

careful way from the battlements, his back bent, leaning on a thick blackthorn staff for his support. Fidelma stood staring after him with her sudden feeling of unease not dispelled. She had known old Brother Conchobar since her birth thirty years ago. In fact, he had assisted at her birth. He appeared to have dwelt at the ancient palace of Cashel for ever. He had served her father, King Failbe Fland mac Aedo, whom Fidelma could not really remember for he had died in the very year of her birth. He had also served her three cousins who had succeeded to the kingship in their turn. Now he served her own brother, Colgú, who had been proclaimed as King of Muman hardly a year previously. Brother Conchobar was considered one of the most learned of those who studied the heavens and made maps of the stars and their courses.
    Fidelma knew enough of Conchobar to realise that one didn’t take the old man’s prognostications lightly.
    She gazed up at the melancholy sky and shivered before turning down from the battlements into one of the many courtyards of the large palace complex which rose on the rock of limestone peak. Interspersed here and there were tiny courtyards and even smaller gardens. The entire network of buildings was surrounded by the high defensive walls.
    Fidelma began to walk across the paved courtyard towards the large entrance of the royal chapel. The sound of children’s playing caused her to glance up as she walked. She smiled as she saw some young boys using the chapel wall to play a game called roth-chless, the ‘wheel-feat’. It had been a favourite game of her brother’s when they were young because it was the one game that Colgú knew he could beat her at. It was a game that relied on the strength of the arm because it consisted of throwing a heavy, circular disc up a tall wall. Whoever managed to cast the disc up farthest was the winner. According to ancient legend, the great warrior Cúchullain hurled a disc up so high that it went up beyond the wall and roof of the building.
    There was a scream of delight from the children as one of their number made a particularly good cast with the disc. A grizzled hostler passing near the children stopped to reprimand them.
    ‘A silent mouth sounds sweetly,’ he admonished, wagging his finger and using almost the same proverb that Brother Conchobar had just quoted to her. The servant turned and, observing Fidelma, saluted. Behind him, Fidelma saw a couple of the young boys
pulling faces at his back but pretended that she had not observed them.
    ‘Ah, my lady Fidelma, these young ones,’ sighed the elderly servant, deferring to her royal status, as did everyone in Cashel. ‘Truly, my lady, their noise pierces the tranquillity of the hour.’
    ‘Yet they are merely children at play, Oslóir,’ she returned gravely. Fidelma liked to know the names of all the servants at her brother’s palace. ‘A great Greek philosopher once said, “Play so that you may become serious”. So let them play while they are young. There are plenty of years ahead of them in which to be serious.’
    ‘Surely silence is the ideal state?’ protested the hostler.
    ‘That depends. Too much silence can be painful. There can be a surfeit in all things, even honey.’
    Smiling at the children, she turned towards the doors of the royal chapel and was about to ascend the steps when one of the doors swung open and a young religieux in a brown woollen homespun habit emerged. He was a thickset young man whose abundance of curly brown hair was cut into the corona spina, the circular tonsure of St Peter of Rome. His dark brown eyes carried a humorous twinkle and were set in pleasant and almost handsome features.
    ‘Eadulf!’ Fidelma greeted him, ‘I was just coming to find you.’ Brother Eadulf of Seaxmund’s Ham, in the kingdom of the South Folk, had been sent as an emissary to the King of Cashel by no less a dignitary than Theodore, Archbishop of Canterbury. He grimaced pleasantly in