couple can be found and if his blood be mixed
with the soll of Tara the blight and ruin will depart from Ireland,"
said the magicians.

"If there is such a boy I will find him," cried the Hundred Fighter.

At the end of a year Art returned to Tara. His father delivered to him
the sceptre of Ireland, and he set out on a journey to find the son of a
sinless couple such as he had been told of.

CHAPTER V

The High King did not know where exactly he should look for such a
saviour, but he was well educated and knew how to look for whatever was
lacking. This knowledge will be useful to those upon whom a similar duty
should ever devolve.

He went to Ben Edair. He stepped into a coracle and pushed out to the
deep, and he permitted the coracle to go as the winds and the waves
directed it.

In such a way he voyaged among the small islands of the sea until he
lost all knowledge of his course and was adrift far out in ocean. He was
under the guidance of the stars and the great luminaries.

He saw black seals that stared and barked and dived dancingly, with the
round turn of a bow and the forward onset of an arrow. Great whales came
heaving from the green-hued void, blowing a wave of the sea high
into the air from their noses and smacking their wide flat tails
thunder-ously on the water. Porpoises went snorting past in bands and
clans. Small fish came sliding and flickering, and all the outlandish
creatures of the deep rose by his bobbing craft and swirled and sped
away.

Wild storms howled by him so that the boat climbed painfully to the sky
on a mile-high wave, balanced for a tense moment on its level top, and
sped down the glassy side as a stone goes furiously from a sling.

Or, again, caught in the chop of a broken sea, it stayed shuddering and
backing, while above his head there was only a low sad sky, and around
him the lap and wash of grey waves that were never the same and were
never different.

After long staring on the hungry nothingness of air and water he would
stare on the skin-stretched fabric of his boat as on a strangeness, or
he would examine his hands and the texture of his skin and the stiff
black hairs that grew behind his knuckles and sprouted around his ring,
and he found in these things newness and wonder.

Then, when days of storm had passed, the low grey clouds shivered and
cracked in a thousand places, each grim islet went scudding to the
horizon as though terrified by some great breadth,