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did not tell him Aisling’s name or the fact that he was sure she was a magical being. For some reason he felt she would like him to keep her a secret, even from Aidan.
    Aidan showed Brendan how to make ink from the berries. The first time he made the ink was quite an experience. Aidan ground down the berries to an evil-smelling paste. Then he boiled them up with other strange potions he took fromhis bag. He spent a long time pouring the mixture from one vial to another, talking and explaining as he worked.
    ‘Now you and Pangur stay under the table for the moment, I’ll tell you why later. Yes, this is going to be a good mix. Those were great berries you and your friend found for me. Now was it two vials of acid and one of mercury or the other way around? The old head is going … that’s for sure. Ah, nearly there …’
    He held up the cup and smiled. ‘Finished!’ he said.
    BANG!
    The liquid exploded, shaking the walls and roof of the Scriptorium. Green smoke filled the room. Coughing, Brendan and Pangur crept cautiously out from under the table.
    Aidan was standing there with the cup in his hand, his face black from the explosion and his eyebrows signed. His hair was singed too, but he was smiling widely. Brendan could only be grateful that his uncle was working on the other side of the monastery wall that day and so would not have heard the explosion.
    ‘Ah, that’s grand,’ said Aidan uncertainly. ‘Lots of smoke. That’s a good sign.’

    Aidan taught Brendan other things too, how to hold the pen steady and straight, how to touch the page as lightly as a bee’s wing. He taught him how to draw the fabulous interlacings that decorated the Book. How every stroke was to be done for the love and glory of God and nature. He made Brendan realise that a line drawn well was as much an act of worship as building an abbey or saying a prayer. Sometimes Brendan made mistakes and felt tempted to give up, but Aidan always encouraged him to keep going.
    While they worked, Aidan told Brendan stories of the saints. He told him about Patrick, the first of the great saints of Ireland, who had turned himself and his monks into deer in order to escape the attack of an angry king. He told him of Brigid, who used a sunbeam as a coathanger and whose symbol was the February snowdrop. He told him of Ailbhe, whose foster mother was a wolf, and who had invited her to dinner every day in his palace when he had become a great and powerfulbishop. Brendan especially liked that one because of the wolf. He also loved Aidan’s story about a French saint, called Austreberthe, who asked a wolf to carry the laundry for her convent, as he had eaten the donkey that used to do it for her. But Brendan’s favourite story was the tale of Colmcille’s horse.
    When the saint was very old, his beautiful white horse, who had grown old with him, came to him one day and laid his head on his chest. And the horse had wept, because he knew that Colmcille was going to die soon. The other monks had wanted to send it away, but Colmcille had not let them, for he loved the animal very much. And also because it comforted him that the horse had realised something that even Colmcille’s best friends in the monastery did not know.
    But Aidan also told Brendan stories that were not about monks or saints. Stories about the magical beings who had lived in Ireland before the coming of Christianity. He told him how many of them had come and spoken to the saints about the glorious days gone by. About Oisín, child of the deer and son of Fionn, and the Swan Children ofLir, and about Lí Ban the mermaid, who had changed shape when the waters of Lough Neagh rose up and covered her kingdom. And because Aidan had studied Greek and Latin, some of the stories he told were wonderful tales about people who lived far away from Ireland.
    Brendan once asked Aidan, ‘But were they real people? Did those things really happen? My uncle says those are only imaginary things.’
    And