The Celtic Riddle

Even before the Boar's Head clue, we were still missing the stag of seven slaughters and the ray of the sun. It was difficult to know whether to keep looking for them, or to assume someone else had found them first. Other than the mess in the garden shed and our little set-to with Conail O'Connor, there had been no signs of anyone else looking for clues. Maybe Margaret Byrne had been quite sincere in saying the family wouldn't be participating, and Conail was the only renegade. Somehow, I doubted it, though. They'd shown themselves to be quite ruthless, certainly where Alex's inheritance of Rose Cottage was concerned, something else I still had to deal with. We should keep searching, I thought, looking about the bar. My eyes alighted on the painting over the fire, the scene which I found quite repulsive despite its quality, of a stag, its snout full of arrows, being set upon by a pack of hounds. Stag of seven slaughters, I breathed, counting the dogs. Seven, of course. Right under my nose.

Picking up my drink, I ambled over to the hearth in what I hoped was a nonchalant way, then stood for a minute or two with my back to the fire, drink in hand, that most Irish of poses. As Aidan entertained the lads at the bar with one of his stories, and all eyes seemed fixed on him, I pulled up the lower corner of the painting and took a quick peek behind. The clue was there, or at least it had been. All that was left of it was a comer of the paper still secured by the tape which had held it to the back of the painting. I quickly pulled it away. I would check it against the paper on which the clues we'd already found had been written, but there was little doubt my question had been answered and that at least one other person was, despite all protestations to the contrary, looking for the treasure just as we were. The question was who, and just how dangerous were they?

I went to the front desk to retrieve, from safekeeping, what we were calling the Master List, and added the Boar's Head clue to it, then studied it for a while. I took a fresh piece of paper, drew a line down the middle, and marked one column Amairgen 's Song and the other Ogham clues, and looked at what we had.

AMAIRGEN'S SONG

I am the sea swell
The furious wave
The roar of the sea
A stag of seven slaughters
A hawk above the cliff
A ray of the sun
The beauty of a plant
A boar enraged

OGHAM CLUES

May's sunrise by Tailte's Hill is seen
A curse be on these stones
Leinster's Hag to Eriu's Seat
---------
Aine's Mount to Macha's Stronghold
----------
Raise a cup to the stone
Almu's white to Maeve's red

It was all rather baffling. The ogham clues didn't seem to have anything in common with the lines of the poem, other than that the clues in the poem had led to their discovery. Was there supposed to be a direct relationship? I didn't know. It seemed to me that it was possible that the first ogham clue referred to a real place. What of the rest? Almu's white to Maeve's red sounded like a board game to me, White Queen or something to Red whatever. I assumed that Maeve wasn't Garda Maeve Minogue, although I had absolutely no basis for thinking that. Maeve, I knew, had been an ancient Celtic queen.

Three of the ogham clues had a something-to-something-else pattern, again perhaps directions, but the trouble was I didn't know what, or where, any of these things were. Stones were big, that was certain. The clues irritated me: they were either coy or the product of someone who thought he knew a whole lot more than the rest of us. I felt I was being toyed with and by a dead man at that. But I did acknowledge, reluctantly, that had the circumstances been different, that is, had the family and the rest of us been working together amicably, this might have been fun. But whose fault was it they didn't?

A curse be on Eamon Byrne, I thought, rather uncharitably, which led me right back to what Deirdre had said and to the other hints about something bad in the past that no one would tell me. I understood their reticence. Really, why should they tell a total stranger, and one from far away, their worst secrets? This was the Dingle, after all, a wild and relatively remote place with its own ways. Even in Ireland, I suspected, it would be regarded as someplace different: the Gael-tacht, the Gaelic-speaking part of Ireland, a throwback in an ail-too modern world. But it was frustrating nonetheless.