On the last night of his life, Clonycavan man watched the evening star hanging like a lantern in the southern sky. At dawn, he knew, he would be punished for his failure to cause the crops to grow and the kine to calve, writes Kevin Myers.
He had been born into royalty, and with that privilege came the burdens of responsibility. Failure in that could only mean the ultimate sacrifice.
And he had failed, as he had always known he would. He was an unlucky man, a comical little antic whom no one respected. He should have been born a simple herdsman, destined to spend his days minding the long-horned cattle in peace on the bogs, away from the stern warrior caste who now held him in such contempt. For he was certainly no natural leader. His councils were usually bedlam, his pronouncements often interrupted by jeering, ruffianly young upstarts.
They laughed at his hair too, though it had cost him many gold coins to buy the resin from the wily Phoenician trader who berthed in the shallows beside the river estuary, three days' walk away. He thought the hair-ointment would give him height and status, but it had achieved the opposite effect: as he strode through his royal entourage he could hear giggles behind him, erupting sometimes into mutinous guffaws.
Nor had his reign had been accompanied by luck. Winters had been cold, summers wet, the autumn yields parsimonious. The wheat rotted in the fields, the cattle had the murrain. Famine came, and the young and old died in their peat-walled dwellings. Women cursed him. Children spat. He put more resin in his hair, as the Phoenician had advised him to, promising that it would make him taller, more kingly, more manly when he coupled with his harem.
But it did no such thing. Even his women mocked him, and found succour in one another's arms. Finally, he had led the cattle-raid on the kingdom on the far side of the Red Lough, but fatally he had hesitated as he led his men towards the cattle-brattice, so allowing the defenders to close the furze-shutters. From the safety of that enclosure they were able to fire arrows at the now defenceless attackers.
His slua had retreated from the hail of missiles, losing many dead. Even more had died of their injuries on the long haul back home. Back in his royal enclosure, he found plague had taken half of his harem.
The night after his return, he had woken to the tickle of a broadsword on his throat. He was then bound with hazel branches and led to the stone altar of the high priest, certain of his fate.
"I am innocent," he said. "I did my best to bring sun in the summer and soft, southern breezes in the winter. I made due sacrifices to the gods. I read the runes of the night-sky, and studied the entrails of slain oxen. All told me that my kingship was good, and if my people were patient, my rule would prosper."
The priest was derisive and impatient. No traders came their way any more, he said, because it was known this was an impoverished kingdom led by a weak and powerless king. They must placate the gods by slaughtering him, and burying his body in the bog-which-preserves, so that though he had been killed, he would never know death, and would forever be denied the glories of paradise. By that sacrifice might his people win the favour of the god of wheat and the god of kine and the sun-god in the skies.
He knew the fate that awaited him. He had witnessed his uncle being put to death in his neighbouring kingdom for a comparable failure. Unlike him, his uncle had been a giant of a man, and his agonising end had lasted days.
They had made holes in his arms and pulled branches through them. They had gouged out his eyes. They had cut off his nipples. When he pleaded for death, they kept him alive, until finally there was hardly any life left in that whimpering, wheezing body. Ritual demanded that he not die, but be killed; and so he was, before being despatched to the shameful limbo of a bog-grave.
Clonycavan man wept in terror as he contemplated the last ordeal of his life, to be followed by an eternity of his tortured soul being marooned in his incorruptible body.
Briefly, he slept, and his dead uncle came to him in a dream, whispering, "May no good come to this island which murders and buries the innocent. May its curse be that those who torture their victims over days and bury the corpses in bogs are duly rewarded beyond all measure, and thus war, murder and secret burial become a regular season here, just as in other, happier lands, golden harvests regularly ripen in the fields, and trees grow heavy with luscious fruit." So Clonycavan man woke from his dream, and before going to his terrible end, he laid the curse on the island, just as his uncle had instructed.
In 2003 - 2,300 years later - the ground yielded up the dead. His body, and his uncle's, were separately uncovered in their midland bogs, while the remains of Jean McConville were also finally found in the limbo-grave made for her by the IRA. Meanwhile the barbarian responsible for her abduction, torture, murder and secret burial had, like all such heathens on this accursed island, been rewarded with mighty honour and high renown, in strict accordance with Clonycavan's ancient curse.