title: Smoke in the Wind: A Mystery of Ancient Ireland
author:  Peter Tremayne 
description: Sister Fidelma, seventh-century <i>religieuse</i> and advocate of the Brehon courts of medieval Ireland, returns in the latest chapter of one of the most suspenseful and intelligent series of historical mysteries. Traveling with Brother Eadulf, her faithful companion and ever-hopeful love interest (the concept of celibacy was alien to the ancient Celtic Church), Fidelma sets out to visit the new archbishop of Canterbury. Blown off course by a raging storm, their ship sails into the Breton kingdom of Dyfed and straight into a particularly puzzling dual mystery. Charged by the local king to investigate the perplexing disappearance of an entire monastic community, Fidelma and Eadulf are also intrigued by the brutal rape and murder of a young local girl. As they begin to unravel two separate crimes, it becomes increasingly clear that the strands of each need to be interwoven to expose a diabolically clever scheme. Tremayne continues to challenge readers with a compelling combination of church, cultural, and legal history, buttressed by intriguingly complex plots and a superlative cast of sympathetic characters. <i>Margaret Flanagan</i><br /><i>Copyright  American Library Association. All rights reserved</i>
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  # **26**
  
  The ilkan's hoofs raised puffs of dust as it trotted down the riverfront
  street. On the wharves, smoking engines chuffed, powering cargo booms that
  loaded or unloaded nets of cargo from holds or decks. Voices called directions
  and warnings. And over and around it all, the morning's sea breeze brought the
  odor of kelp beds, adulterated here by a smell of sooty smoke from dock
  engines and deck engines and ships' funnels.
  
  "That is the passenger boat," Ban-Shum said, pointing. "The one with the tall
  slender smokestack and the long deckhouse aft."
  
  Smokestack? Varlik didn't realize for a moment what was meant, then following
  Ban-Shum's gesture saw a riverboat, with a thin plume of smoke rising lazily
  from an erect cylinder amidships. The vessel was some hundred or more feet
  long with a beam of perhaps twenty-five feet, built to carry both deck cargo
  and humans. The ilkan trotted even with it