Condemned to Death Read Online Free Page A

and the men running up to the top of the beach, well outside the summer high-tide line, depositing the piles of fish on the tarpaulins which she could see spread out on the marram grass, anchored by heavy stones. There would have been frantic activity, everyone engaged in gutting the fish, hanging them from well-soaked alder rods, stacking dried seaweed and pieces of driftwood onto the fires.
    ‘And then we got the boats tied up or beached just before the high tide,’ he finished. ‘We had everything unloaded by then – all was as you see it.’ He waved an arm, indicating the numerous fires, the drifting smoke, the silver spear-shaped fish, suspended above the fires, and the crowds of men, women and children.
    ‘And the boat with the corpse also came in on the tide?’
    ‘That’s what we think, Brehon. Probably before high tide, because none of us spotted it on the sea. It landed at the spot where you will see it to be, over on the far side of the beach, away to the south of where we were working.’ Was it her imagination, or did his voice become a little cautious, as though he was trying to distance himself from the event? He wouldn’t like this, she thought. The people were superstitious. So far everything to do with Fernandez had borne the sheen of glittering success. This might do him harm.
    ‘Let me see,’ she said and Domhnall, silent at her elbow, moved forward towards the spot that his fellow scholars guarded. The fishermen, their families and the shore-dwellers, together with Fernandez, followed at a respectful distance, straggling across the sands in twos and threes, coming after the two of them as they crossed the rocks and came into a sheltered, hidden tiny bay of sand surrounded by boulders and rock pools.
    The boat had come to rest on the sand and the body of a man lay in it – hands outstretched and dangling over the sides and the face, framed by shoulder-length hair, turned up towards the sky. And the significant thing was that there were neither oars nor sail.
    Mara looked down at him. The sun had risen to its full height; the light sparkled across the blue sea and it cast a warm glow on the face, but there was no doubt the man was dead. The worst thing about the corpse, she thought, was the way the swollen tongue protruded as if seeking moisture and the eyes were fixed and staring – almost betraying the horror of the final moments. She stood there silently for a few minutes, noting everything.
    ‘It’s nothing to do with us, Brehon.’ The slightly belligerent tone came from Brendan O’Connor, the samphire-gatherer, Etain’s brother. His voice was loud and quite hoarse – a man who spent his life on the sea, ferrying the delectable fronds from an inlet on the northern side of Black Head rocks across the bay and into the docks of Galway City. He wouldn’t have taken part in the fishing expedition; his own business was too valuable for him to take a few days away from supplying the cooks and innkeepers of Galway with the fresh samphire.
    ‘Did you find the body, Brendan?’ she asked.
    ‘No, no, it wasn’t Brendan. It was young Síle here.’ Fernandez sounded almost alarmed as he contradicted her. He dragged Brendan and Etain’s young sister forward, Cael’s tent-mate, a child of about eight, thought Mara, noticing with an inward smile that Cael looked disdainfully at the girl and moved a step nearer to the law-school scholars, placing herself firmly between her brother Cian, and Art, the fisherman’s son. The little girl gave her evidence in a frightened whisper. She had gone to collect some pretty shells and then seen something glinting from a rock and so had climbed out from over here … And she pointed back to where a line of rocks, still splashed by the retreating tide, ended in this small oval of sand, surrounded by pool-filled boulders.
    ‘We thought it best to leave it until you came, but we should get it buried before the tide comes in again and sweeps it back out to