CHAPTER THIRTY- AND EPILOGUE
The Champion's Rivalry Ends

The giant emitted a bellow of rage that traversed the dining hall like a whirlwind.

It sent table utensils, flowers, napkins and cutlery crashing to the floor. Table cloths took off like a flight of frightened swans, napkins swirling wildly in their wake and Emer flung herself into the arms of Laoghaire and Conal, sobbing distractedly.

Cú Roí raised the axe above his head with both hands, his red eyes blazing, his white teeth bared in a snarl. Women screamed, men gasped and Emer buried her head in her hands.

As the axe reached the zenith of the deadly upstroke, there was a blinding flash and a deafening thunderclap. The giant disappeared in a cloud of luminous, sulphurous smoke.

All the noble men and women of Ulster froze in the deathly silence that seemed to last for eternity - but it lasted only seconds.

A gentle flap of wings up in the rafters broke the silence. The white dove fluttered out of its hiding place, shedding a single feather, and all eyes fixed on it as it floated down.

Cúchulainn remained motionless. Instead of the deadly axe separating his head from his body, he felt the soft kiss of the feather as it alighted gently on his neck and after a breathless moment, the hall erupted in tumultuous applause.

Cúchulainn looked bemused and Emer ran to him. King Conor rose to his feet clapping his hands vigorously.

Lendabar, smiling tearfully, rushed forward to a bashful Conal.

Men and women crowded noisily around them, shouting the praises of their hero as as Conol and Laoghaire lifted him up on their shoulders.

Back on the performers' platform, Homofeeb struck up a stirring air on the pipes and he dancers took to the floor, whirling and whooping with delight.

The dogs, sensing the end of the crisis, sheepishly returned to their position under the tables.

King Conor, allowing the ragged intermission to continue for several minutes, rose from his throne. A vigilant trumpeter blew a cautionary riff, and silence fell like a blanket.

Conor began to speak in the florid style of the court:

"It seems doubtless that Cúchulainn has the blessing of the gods, or as I suspect, the protection of the one true God, whose emissary I sense is this very day, walking and talking with men in some distant land. I feel it in my wounded head, I feel the joy of those who accept him, and the rage of those who oppose him because he is a threat to their influence over the masses."

This opening mystified all but a few of the King's closest confidants, especially the visionary Cathbhad, whom few took seriously. Cathbhad had, some thirty years before, attached a cosmic significance to the appearance, of a brilliant star or comet in the eastern sky.

According to the druid, it signified a divine intervention by the Supreme God and the dawn of a new era.

"I feel the truth of this mysterious saviour more powerfully now than ever before," Conor went on, his voice beginning to shake with emotion.

"What we have just witnessed is I feel, a confirmation of my premonition that the days of hell's assaults will soon end. We have just witnessed a triumph for the father and mother of all virtues, Love.

By now the King's speech commanded the serious attention of all his audience, and he continued:

"We have witnessed how Cúchulainn's truth uncovered and released the best of what lies in the hearts of men like Laoghaire and Conal. There is a store of blinding virtue in the hearts of the best and the worst of men and women. Cúchulainn has demonstrated tonight how love and reconciliation can smash the power of spirits who seek the division of the human race, the division that begets violence and war."

Conor reached into an inner pocket and drew out a white kerchief to dab his eyes.

"Furthermore, I sense that Cú Roí was the wicked spirit who sought through the agency of Bricriú, to destroy our kingdom and to drive us apart, but he failed. Now, by way of vindicating our fickle ally Maeve, I hereby proclaim that there shall be Champions' Portions, for Cúchulainn, Conal and Laoghaire!"

After a minute of hush, a storm of wild cheering arose. The three champions stood with arms around one another's shoulders as the King added.

Now let us rejoice at the return of peace and harmony to Eamhain Macha."

EPILOGUE

Peace did return to Eamhain Macha after that apocalyptic night, insofar as peace ever reigns over mankind with any degree of consistency.

Peace in the whole island of Ireland, however, was never permanently established, despite earnest solicitations of impartial arbitrators to bring all sides together in peace talks. Their sporadic wars continued, wars between cease-fires, wars with their neighbours, with other races who arrogantly laid claim to the territories of Ireland.

The curse of Macha continued to afflict the Ulstermen. It was the fatal chink in their otherwise invulnerable defences. Indeed it spelled death for Cúchulainn on the banks of the Dee, but that's another story, and part of the great saga of the Red Branch Knights of Ulster.

King Conor was to meet his death at last from the brainball of Cet, that too is another story, a story with a curious parallel in the Transtemporal Dementia wing of Ossageel hospital.

One day Conor Gilchrist, alias Conor Mac Con Íosa, suddenly broke his prayerful silence in the day room and, with a loud cry, rushed out through the French window into the grounds slashing and lunging with his Mallacca cane at trees and shrubs, lopping off small branches, sending showers of leaves all over the grass and flower beds.

"Some wicked men are killing my King," he kept screaming.

Before the attendants could reach him he fell to the grass with a loud cry, and then for ever lay still. Even to these hardened hospital staff the sight that met them caused them to recoil with gasps of horror. The steel plate had become detached from the man's skull revealing, as well as his tortured brain, a tumour the size of a man's fist.

It was about three o'clock on Good Friday afternoon.

This was of immense interest to the Transtemporal Dementia researchers researchers, especially:

Doctor Roderick Brick,

Doctor Mervin Schumacher,

Professor Dave Morgan

and Doctor Emer Farrell, continued to gather evidence.

Was the Conor Mac Con Íosa affair really a startling piece of evidence that their charges really were bi-locating in time and space? Were their charges really bi-locating in time and space, if so which ones, and how many of them? Which were pathological states of delusion? Which were not? Were they all, in some inexplicable way, connected with the kingdom of Eamhain Macha in Ancient Armagh?

Were some or all members of the research team also bi-locating?

During these and other deliberations their eccentric colleague, Professor Timothy Travers simply smiled and nodded knowingly.

Where their questions and investigations were to lead, and what concrete conclusions were eventually to be drawn, is also the stuff of another story.

It is a story yet to be revealed by science in the distant future.

Already the hard filling of quantum mechanics and relativity are forming the bed upon which a concrete foundation will be laid for the conquest of time. Beyond that stage, the advances in knowledge and technology will, as they always have, surpass our wildest imaginings.

The greatest mystery after space, is time. The possibility of moving backwards and forwards on its great ocean is still regarded by most to be ludicrous. As ludicrous as the idea of great ships flying at the speed of sound ten miles above the earth, was to nineteenth century intelligentsia.

But for now it is the mystics, the visionaries, and who knows, the so-called insane, who possess the ineffable, incommunicable secrets of the distant future.

The End