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could go down there, all of us, if you’re too busy,’ offered Cormac. ‘I could borrow a few of the King’s new guns. We know how to fire them.’
    ‘It’s too far,’ said Mara. She had been thinking hard while replying mechanically to the questions. ‘If Nuala thinks that the man died of exposure, of thirst, or of any cause of death that would result from spending days or even weeks on the face of the ocean, then we will just have to bury him in the churchyard here.’
    ‘There’s no mark on him,’ said Cormac.
    ‘His tongue is sticking out; he was probably trying to catch raindrops,’ said Cian.
    ‘His eyes look like he died in agonies of thirst,’ said Cael and that was an unusually imaginative thought from a girl who was usually very keen on facts and logic. Obviously this death had impressed the young people.
    ‘The first duty of a lawyer is to gather evidence,’ said Mara, rising to her feet. ‘Let’s go across to Slevin and see whether there are any particulars that we can observe from the body before Nuala arrives and can tell us how he died.’ As she went along she could see how the discovery of the body would not have been made except for the accident of the child climbing over the rocks looking for shells. If this had been on land, by now the birds would have discovered it, but here on the beach today fish were being gutted at great speed and buckets of innards thrown into the sea, giving enough tasty morsels for the grey and white kittiwakes and larger fulmars which were continuously swooping down and picking them up. The dead body had not been spotted by any of them.
    Slevin was glad to see them – he had amassed a small pile of smooth black limestone pebbles just in case he was visited by some large seabird, but now he was just sitting on a rock and staring out to sea. He jumped to his feet when they arrived and greeted them warmly.
    ‘I was wondering about his clothes, Brehon,’ he said speaking in a discreetly lowered tone of voice when they were near enough to hear him. ‘Have a look at him.’
    Mara bent over the body and nodded slowly. ‘I see what you mean. What do you think, the rest of you?’ And then, when they made no answer but just looked blankly at the body, she said slightly impatiently, ‘Come on, think, all of you, look at him; what’s he wearing? No cloak, you’ll observe …’
    And then when they still did not answer she said in exasperated tones: ‘Tell them, Slevin.’
    ‘It’s linen, but it’s not a
léine
,’ said Slevin triumphantly and she nodded to him approvingly. ‘I must say, Slevin, that I didn’t notice that when I looked at him first. I suppose it was all that dried seaweed heaped on top of him.’
    Slevin had not disturbed the dark brown strands of crinkled seaweed, but with the sun shining down on the body Mara could now see quite clearly that the front of the garment was fastened together with small knotted woollen buttons inserted into slits of buttonholes.
    ‘He’s dressed in a linen shirt, not a Gaelic
léine
,’ said Slevin eventually to the younger scholars. ‘Can’t you see the buttons? We don’t have buttons – we just pull it over our heads. And the linen seems different, doesn’t it? May I touch, Brehon?’
    He had already done so, she guessed, but she nodded permission. It was part of her method of teaching that the older should instruct the younger. Slevin, she thought, had not wasted his time. While he had been gathering stones he must have been thinking hard. She listened to him telling the others how superfine the linen was, and pointing out that most men in the Burren and other Gaelic kingdoms, unlike this corpse, did not usually wear hose during the summer months.
    ‘They must have taken his sandals off?’ said Cian eventually.
    ‘Perhaps he wore boots,’ said Slevin and this fitted so well that she half-wondered whether Domhnall had said anything to him. She didn’t think so, however. Domhnall was a boy of the