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would fall into a daydream. I had a wild picture in my head of an Armageddon conflict, with all the Irish aroused and that angry, stirred by the words of O’Connell, all of Dublin, the counties around, the Boyne valley, the people around Dundalk and Malin Head and down in Glendalough and Wexford would rise as one, and the great rebellion would spread along the valleys of Liffey and Shannon, along Erne and Blackwater, across the Bann, the Bandon, and the Lee. The English would flee before this great wildfire.
    The very name, Boyne Valley, rang through my being. Every step I took brought me towards some great name or another: Newgrange, Hill of Slane, Tara, and Mellifont, and then up toDrogheda itself. It was as if I were treading through the great book of Ireland, and not on mere soil and rutted paths between farms and working fields. ’Twas crowded with the history of my race. I knew that O’Connell would give voice to everything that was clamouring in my heart. The mysterious sacred circles on the stones I saw at Newgrange seemed to capture the exultation swirling within my heart. I was sure I would receive one clear sign of the final battle to come.
    •  •  •
    A S I APPROACHED Drogheda, I began to feel in my heart that tragic core which underlay the green; how death was a part of all Irish tales, whether they are about love or any other matter whatsoever. So long as folks trod on this land and worked out their fates, there was a backdrop the colour of blood, and every step a tap on the vast drum of Irish memory.
    What tales had I heard from my childhood about Drogheda and Cromwell! With his head full of stories of Catholic monstrosity culled from Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, this Lord Protector descended on Ireland, planning mayhem and calumny. For full nine months in 1649, Cromwell devastated all he could lay his hands on. He besieged the walls of Drogheda. When it fell, he personally directed four days of slaughter. Women, children, the old, and especially the Catholic clergy were not spared.
    Was this an aberration in the great man of prayer? Nay, indeed.
    When Wexford fell to him, again came his bloody order to put thousands to the sword, children, women, nuns included, even in the sanctuary. “There before God’s altar fell many sacred victims. Others who were seized outside the church were scourged withwhips; and others were put to death by most cruel tortures,” wrote the exiled Bishop of Ferns, in Antwerp.
    Canterbury had had its one Becket, a name remembered. What were the names in Drogheda and Wexford? There were so many that the very numbers became a matter treated like an Irish exaggeration, drivel and hyperbole from bogs and poteen huts. Drogheda and Wexford were iron nails in our Irish memory.
    When first I came to Drogheda, I made straight for the heart of it, up the steep bank of the river, up narrow lanes, from one level of the town to the next terraced stage, flights of steps that took me above the river. I touched what remained of its medieval walls and felt a great organ’s chord ring through my soul as I passed through Butter Gate. In the lowering light, I had the strangest feeling that sounds from the very next lane might not have been made in this century or the last, but further in the past.
    Here, in the heart of our Drogheda, I now felt I was truly standing on a stretched skin, a drum waiting to be thrummed. I was ready to wake to a different sky, a different earth. The great meeting at Clontarf was but a few days away. I felt Destiny was sending me an intimation of death or glory, and I would need to step out, beyond our usual Irish strifes and vacillation, to a Gideon’s trumpet that shrilled my being, and shook me down to my shoes.
    I sharpened my knife on a Drogheda stone that night. Its sheath was snug and I tucked it behind my shirt and gathered my jacket about me. I was headed for Dublin.
    •  •  •
    W HEN I REACHED the harbour where the Boyne met the sea, I found a