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The Disappearance of Walter Map:
Stealing a man wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be. Once I had his breath, I had everything. I exhaled, he exhaled, and our combined breath stood waiting, white in the black air, as stubborn as blood in water. That’s all there was to it, really.
After that I moved quickly, to ward off misgivings. The idiot had been sleeping under a tree. He might as well have been waiting for me. Although he opened his eyes and saw me, he didn’t seem to understand the danger he was in. He let me do whatever I wanted. It was terrifyingly easy. I took him in the bend of my arm, the same way I would hold a child. (If I had one.) His head fell forward across my chest. His head was shaved in the centre and ringed with greasy strands of brown hair. I held him to me, light as a bird, wrapped in his dark wool cloak that reeked of wine, of old sweat, of woad and lanolin.
I guess it’s possible that he wanted to come.
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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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