- In pre-Christian Ireland, a young, recently bereaved woman with no one left in the world, travels the land in search of a remedy that can bring her child back to life, only to find a cure not for the child's mortality, but for the grief she can no longer bear.
- When the only child of a recently widowed young woman living in pre-Christian Ireland falls ill, she desperately sets out to find a remedy to cure him. At first, she looks for treatments available in her own village. When they fail, she sets out on a journey alone with her child to find a means of healing him.
The journey is arduous. She travels throughout the land without protection. She encounters the dangers of the natural world, as well as ill-intentioned individuals who would wish the worst for her and her son.
After many days, the young woman still has not found a cure for her child. An older woman, however, tells her of a wise woman who lives high up on a mountain. Only she, it is said, can help the young woman in her strife. The young woman is wary of this recommendation; the wise woman lives many days away. Her child will surely die within that time. But the young woman acknowledges that she has no other choice and so she sets out to find her.
The young woman's worries are tragically proved right when her child's body falls cold as she climbs the mountain atop which the wise woman lives. She sees the wise woman's hut in the distance and runs towards it. Inside, she finds the strange woman waiting for her. The young woman is distraught. The wise woman reassures her: she has a remedy that is sure to help.
The wise woman tells the young woman that she must find a handful of mustard seeds. She gives her special instructions: she must boil the seeds into a tea and feed the liquid to the child. Before the young woman leaves, however, the wise woman indicates that there is a condition to this treatment. The mustard seeds cannot be borrowed from any house; they must only be sourced from a house untouched by the black sun of suffering, the suffering that has scorched her life.
Renewed and hopeful, the young woman returns to the communities at the foot of the mountain. She visits fishermen and families, travellers, huts and villages. She finds many who possess the seeds, but no single family that remains untouched by suffering, death and loss.
At first desperate and distressed, the young woman gradually finds that her despair begins to dissipate. As she hears stories of others who have suffered, and as she is able to share her own, the young woman is gradually able to come to terms with the loss of her child. She beds down for the night and in a dream becomes conscious of the intentions of the wise woman and her remedy: to realise that the universal nature of the human condition is that of loss, to understand that only death can give life power and meaning.
As the young woman wakes the next day, she prepares her child's body for burial. And, as a community, the villagers join together in a ceremony to burn the dead child.
The young woman walks out into the ocean and casts her baby's ashes into the sea.
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