Trian, meanwhile, is a mere youth, “ungainly and odd” by his own rueful admission. Cormac is well past his prime, a grizzled brawler who found Christ only after a plague claimed his family and a rival clan his patch of land. In fulfilment of his vision, Artt settles upon an unlikely pair of missionaries. Taking two monks as companions, he is to journey to this storm-lashed rock – a place not “tainted by the breath of the world” – and found upon it a bastion of prayer.
Artt’s dream, being divinely inspired, is also highly specific. God has visited him with a dream, he explains, of a solitary island “far away, in the western ocean”. It is to general relief, then, that Artt announces his departure. Donoghue does some deft scene-setting in these early pages, giving us a strong sense of a society still stitching together its disparate fabrics, a people not so much embracing the light of Christ as putting it where it wouldn’t be in the way.
Bringing with him new and uncompromising notions, he finds himself an honoured if not entirely welcome guest, refusing the abbot’s wine and disparaging his lax observance of fast days. Artt, a learned priest recently returned from afar, arrives at the monastery of Cluain Mhic Nóise. From the outset, it grounds itself in an early medieval Ireland that was much more plural and fluid than is often supposed.
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