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the ancient mounds.
      It was a fine morning when Goibniu came round the side of the mound. He always went up there if he was passing through the area. Other men might be afraid of the place, but he wasn't. To the west, in the distance, he could see the top of the royal Hill of Tara.
      He had stared down the slope to where the swans were gliding on the waters of the Boyne. A fellow with a sickle was walking along the track by the riverbank.
      He glanced up at Goibniu and gave a grudging nod which Goibniu returned with ironic politeness.
      Not many people liked Goibniu. "Govnyoo" the name sounded. But whatever they felt, the smith didn't care. Though not tall of stature, his restless eye and quick intelligence soon seemed to dominate any group he joined. His face was not pleasing.
      A chin that jutted out like a rock, pendulous lips, a beak of a nose that came down almost to meet them, protruding eyes, and a forehead that receded under thinning hair: these alone would have produced a face not easily forgotten. But in his youth he had lost one of his eyes in a fight, and as a result, one eye was permanently closed while the other seemed to loom out of his face in a fearsome squint. Some said that he had assumed that squinting expression even before he had lost the eye. It might have been so. In any case, people called him Balar behind his back, after the evil, one-eyed king of the Fomorians, a legendary tribe of ugly giants-a fact of which he was well aware.
      It amused him. They might not like him, but they feared him. There were advantages in that.
      They had reason to fear. It was not just that single, all-seeing eye. It was the brain that lay behind it.
      Goibniu was important. As one of the island's greatest master craftsmen, he had the status of a noble in all but name. Though he was known as a smith-and no one on the island could forge better weapons of iron-his calling included working in precious metals. Indeed, it was the high prices that the great men of the island paid for his gold ornaments that had made Goibniu a rich man. The High King himself would invite him to attend his feasts. But his true importance lay in that terrible, devious brain. The greatest chiefs, even the wise and powerful druids, would seek out his advice. "Goibniu is deep," they would acknowledge, before quietly adding: "Don't ever have him for your enemy."
      Just behind him was the largest of the huge, circular mounds that lay along the ridge. A sid, the islanders called such a mound- they pronounced it "shee"-and though mysterious, there were many of them.
      It was clear that the sid had deteriorated since former times. The walls of the cylinder had subsided or vanished under turf banks in numerous places.
      Instead of a cylinder with a curved roof, it now seemed more like a hillock with several entrances. On its southern side, the quartz facing that had once flashed in the sun had now mostly fallen down, so that there was a little landslide of pale metallic stones in front of the former doorway. He turned back to face the sid.
      The Tuatha De Danaan lived in there. The Dagda, the kindly lord of the sun, lived in this sid; but all the mounds that dotted the* islands were the entrances to their otherworld. Everyone knew the stories.
      First one, then another tribe had come to the island. Gods, giants, slaves-their identities lingered in the landscape like clouds of mist. But the most glorious of all had been the divine race of the goddess Anu, or Danu, goddess of wealth and of rivers: the Tuatha De Danaan. Warriors and huntsmen, poets and craftsmen-they had arrived on the island, some said, riding upon the clouds. Theirs had been a golden age. It had been the Tuatha De Danaan whom the present tribes, the Sons of Mil, had found on the island when they had arrived.
      And it had been one of them, the goddess Eriu, who had promised the Sons of Mil that, if they gave the land her name, they should live upon