We left the shattered remnants of Crom Cruach rotting in the dirt of Leitrim and marched straight toward the wild, windswept western edge of the world. By the time we hit the rugged coast of County Mayo, the year was roughly 441 AD. I was well into my fifties now. The fancy Roman baths of my youth in Britain were a distant memory, and my bones cached a permanent ache from decades of sleeping on damp moss and wading through freezing bogs in my sky-blue robes.
But I didn't come to the west to retire. I came to face the highest, most intimidating peak on the Atlantic coast: Cruach Phádraig (the mountain they call Croagh Patrick today).
If you’ve ever seen people celebrating every March by wearing plastic green hats and plastic reptiles, you’ve heard the famous rumor: they’ll tell you I stood on the edge of these very cliffs, waved my wooden staff, and chased millions of slithering, hissing snakes straight into the freezing Atlantic Ocean.
But if you look at the actual science of this island, the truth is even more fascinating: Ireland has never had snakes.
When the last Great Ice Age ended thousands of years ago, the melting glaciers cut this land off from mainland Europe before a single cold blooded reptile could ever slither across the channel. The dirt was naturally free of them long before my grandfather was even a thought.
So what was I actually hunting when I climbed that mountain?
In our world, "the serpent" wasn't a biological pest it was a heavy, ancient symbol. To the people here, the snake represented the dark, tightly coiled grip of the old druidic magic, the invisible fear of the unknown, and the spiritual venom of endless tribal wars. The mountain itself was an ancient stronghold of those old fears. I didn't hike up there with a broom to chase garden pests; I walked up into the clouds to fight a forty day duel against the deepest psychological shadows of the island.
The climb was absolute misery.
The mountain is a brutal, steep cone of loose, jagged gray shale that slides out from under your boots with every single step. The Atlantic wind howled off the water like a screaming banshee, ripping at my blue cloak and threatening to throw me straight off the ridges. My young disciples begged me to stay at the base, but I knew this was a summit I had to face entirely alone.
I fasted for forty days and forty nights at the peak, surviving on nothing but rainwater and sheer determination. I knew the Almighty was backing my play, but that didn't make the wind any warmer or the hunger any lighter.
As the weeks dragged on, the old landscape seemed to fight back with everything it had. The stories tell of thousands of massive, pitch-black birds swarming the summit a cloud of wings so thick and suffocating that the sky turned completely dark, drowning out my prayers with their deafening screeching.
They thought they could break an old Roman dropout. They thought the cold and the noise would make me pack up my robes and run.
I endured that swarming chaos until day forty, my hands bleeding and my throat raw from shouting prayers into the gale. Finally, I had had entirely enough of the racket. I grabbed my heavy bronze altar bell, held it high into the storm, and rang it with every last ounce of muscle left in my aching body.
CLANG. CLANG. CLANG.
The sound of that bronze bell shattered the spell over the peak.
With a final, desperate shriek, the dark swarm broke. The old storytellers say they plunged headfirst off the sheer cliffs, disappearing forever into the churning waves of Clew Bay below. The sky cleared instantly, revealing a blinding, brilliant wash of golden sunlight that spilled across the green valleys of Ireland.
The "snakes" were officially gone. The toxic fear that had poisoned the minds of the people for centuries had been cast out of the soil.
When I finally stumbled back down that loose stone trail, my feet bleeding and my face weathered by the salt spray, I wasn't just a survivor anymore. I was the man who had cleared the air over the west. The people realized that if a single, frail old man with a bronze bell could clear the highest mountain of its ancient terrors, then the light had truly arrived.
We had broken the warlords at Tara, smashed the golden idol on the plains, and cleared the shadows from the western peaks. The foundations of the new world were firmly set in the emerald soil.
But as I looked back out over the vast, endless Atlantic ocean, I knew my time was growing short. The long roads were taking their toll, and it was finally time to figure out what kind of legacy this old runaway slave was going to leave behind when his boots finally stopped marching.
Chapter 13