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The Disappearance of Walter Map:
Our breath stood white in the black air, as stubborn as blood in water. I took him from his world too quickly for misgivings. He was sleeping under a tree, poor fool. He opened his eyes and saw me but showed no alarm. It was easy. Terrifying. Once our breath had mingled, I simply took him in the crook of my arm, as I would a child. His head fell forward across my chest, the little shaven place on his pate ringed with greasy strands of brown hair. I held him to me, light as a bird, wrapped in his dark woolen cloak. The smells of woad and lanolin were almost buried under the reek of wine and old sweat....
In the Knot:
Forget what you have heard. Dervorgil’s hair was not red.
It was black. When she combed it out, it hung in two dark curtains on either side of her head. In her youth, it had been like the wings of a bird. Her eyes had flashed green like its neck-feathers. She had worn her hair, then, in two long twists down her back. She used to run among the sheep-women in the hills of Meath till the sun turned twists of her hair red gold, in the right light.
In her forty-fifth year, she stood on a cold afternoon with a mirror in her hand, and looked at her hair hanging dully, darkly. It was still fifteen years before the dark foreigners would come and change Ireland. It was still fifteen years before the invasion for which she would be blamed. They would say: She left her husband. They would say: She made her husband fight for her. She made Diarmait fight for her. And Diarmait was the one who brought the foreigners. What a selfish bitch was Ireland’s Helen. The cause of war....
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