Page:The Yellow Book - 07.djvu/99

 no word of resistance when we lay here that night, and looked down, and saw the thatches flame up like torches, and the fire roll through the fields of corn. It was not in your mind to fight then. We saw the black forms of these English against the furnace they made of our corn and our roofs, and we were glad to be at this distance. And why should we be talking otherwise now?"

If his companion had some answer ready, Turlogh did not wait for it. A lifting breath of air had filled the sails of the strange vessel, and brought it along up the bay until now it hung in view close to the opposite shore of Muinteravoira. The sight raised new thoughts in the chief's mind.

"Will that be English, too?" he wondered, aloud.

Goron had forgotten this part of his tidings.

"It is a ship from some unknown land," he explained. "I hailed it from the rocks beyond Dunlogher at daybreak. It is a sort of holy miracle, O'Mahony. Our Lord Bishop is in that ship, coming all the way from his pilgrimage to the True Cross. Two years gone he is, and we not knowing if he was alive, and be returning to us with grand relics and a train of priests. 'Twas with one of them I spoke—a young man walking the deck and reading his prayers. I cried to the blackamoor at the helm to beware the sunken rocks at the headland, and waved my arms to force my meaning on him; but the priest had the Irish, and called out to me that it was God's ship, with a Bishop in it, and holy relics beside, and no harm could come to it or them. But he told the helmsman, none the less, and the ship's course was laid off."

Turlogh stared at him.

"Is it your meaning that our Bishop, Laurence Malmoon (Luirint Maol-Mughain), son of Ivar, will be in that ship?" he demanded.

"No