Those descendants of the bantuathaid are stripped bare of robes and flesh, their blood spilt across their own altars. The sacred groves burn whilst oaks weep tears of boiling sap. Cautioned by the crucifixion of a young man thirty years before, the mighty fist of Rome refuses to stand religious dissidence. A centre for philosophy and free thought, Mona must bend or be made to bend.
Unlike the blood of the druids, carried away on the tide, the blood of that young man refuses to wash clean. Saint Peter, the Bishop of Rome, appointed by Christ, sits a chair that will crown kings for thousands of lifetimes to come.
Jerusalem is taken by force to the bosom of its conquerors. Daub and dung give way to bricks, from which half the wonders of the world are built. The most formidable empire on earth raises three-hundred thousand soldiers. Yet it is man’s accomplishment with pen and ink, rather than the sword, which will change the course of worlds.
One hundred years after Christ’s death, Cai Lun fells trees to make paper, and ink finds its true purpose. As the Kama Sutra teaches people to pleasure one another in the Far East, the West adopts doctrines of morality, handed down to the followers of the Son of God. No longer are words passed from mouth to mouth, mother to daughter, stranger to captivated listener, to be interpreted within the context of a single life. Now words become absolute, immutable, law.
Far away in Campania, a dragon named Vesuvius stirs beneath the earth, devouring eleven-thousand people in a single sitting, whilst the dead druids of Mona smile in their watery graves. Their lands are divided by a wall which spans the breadth of the border between civilized Rome and the Savages. Hadrian stands abreast the limits of his creation, raising a toast to those free-born in the North.
Ptolemy sets the world to paper, with brushstrokes of indigo and gold. He paints the hills and the rivers and the forests, then the invisible walls which separate kings from warlords, emperors from chiefs. Whilst Atlas strained to hold the heavens on his shoulders, Ptolemy holds the entire earth in his hands.
The Antonine Plague and the Plague of Cyprian lay low the Roman forces. People die pox-ridden and rasping, arms outstretched, bellies empty. In their eyes the goddess moon is reflected, even as Cleomedes asserts her heavenly glow comes not from within, but from her lover, the sun. A goddess felled as the children of science open their minds to see the truth behind the fables.
Five good emperors give way to Commodus. Egypt, that ancient seat of art and power, where once people rose in rebellion, where once a daughter of Greece held an asp to her breast, is brought to her knees, impoverished through inflation and starvation. The Father of All Monks sets forth from her dusty ruins to penance himself in the wilderness. Brahmanism gives birth to Hinduism, Zenobia stands proud in Palmyrene, and the shaman queen Himiko casts her spell over the orient. Yet all is not well for Rome. Alemanni, Franks, Goths, Vandals, Quadi, Sassanids and Sarmatians revolt. Clodius Albinus, general in Britain, declares himself Emperor and stands against corruption. The Caledonian Picts unite to overrun the North. Caracalla, son of Septimius Severus, unsheaths his sword on the Scots, massacring them into submission.
In Ireland, the Goidelic High Kings depose the Milesians and the conflicts continue much as before. Conn of the Hundred Battles divides the land whilst Cormac mac Airt is declared the greatest, most just king that ever lived.
A great winter falls across Britain turning all to snow and ice. In the Far East the Chinese invent a black powder which causes flowers of brilliant colour to bloom in the sky. Children clap their hands with delight, and even adults proclaim it the prettiest thing they have ever seen. Who is to know that man will turn beauty and light into untold destruction? Such is their gift for death.
Gnomons cast their shadows across the sundial, hours drip through the clepsydra, and on and on the years roll.
Part III
Aodh
Leaving Sruth na Maoile was not like leaving Loch Dairbhreach, for we had loved on the shores of that place, whereas our time at sea had been full of misery and discomfort.
We did not know what awaited us at Irrus Domnann, yet we reasoned that it could not be as dreadful as what we had already endured. The thought of leaving brought us hope, and three hundred years closer to the end of our curse.
So little had happened upon the ocean that it felt like a living death. Winters froze our feathers together, waves hit the rocks, drowning us in icy water, and the wind had beaten us bloody in its iron fist. We had not even the comfort of days passing, for they bled into one another until it felt as though we were living one long day and one endless night both at the same time. When we looked at our reflections on the surface of the sea, all that stared back was our slender white faces and bottomless black eyes. Our hair did not grey, our brows never wrinkled – there was no sign at all that we might belong to the realms of men.
As our final days came upon us, my sister refused to sleep, for she fretted how our kin would fare without us.
“We have become a part of their lives,” she told me one night. “All this time they have cared for us, and fed us, and washed our wounds on the full moon. Yet never have I seen another in that house beneath the sea. I fear that if we leave, they may only have each other.”
Although I did not raise my voice to say as much, I could not share in the pity she felt for Manannán and Fand. I had loved Bé Chuille, with a fondness greater than the love one feels for the first person their eyes rest upon when they think themselves dead. True, she scraped me from the beach of Reachlainn, and reunited me with my kin, yet she did more than that. She opened the gates of Tír fo Thuinn to us when I suspect Manannán might not have. She did so at risk to herself, confronting her own shame that we might find some comfort by his hearth.
I understood that we could not live down there in the depths, that our suffering was part of our story. Yet sometimes I did question whether Manannán and his wife had truly done all that they could for us. What harm would a little conversation have done? A little company there upon those barren rocks of an evening? A larger fire, a little laughter and music? Certainly, it would have made the days pass faster. Still, I understood my sister’s grief, to lose one family and then another. Our lives would have been harder without them, even if they had not done all that they might.
Since the burning of Mona, our brother and his wife had seemed to age. It was not noticeable for many a decade, yet now, as we prepared to take our leave, I compared Manannán’s image with the first I recalled, and began to wonder. His hair, still long and dark, was shot with silver, exactly as our father’s had once been. His cheeks drew in a little further, and that beard of his was as salted as the sea. His brow did not unfold after frowning, and his teeth drew longer and yellow. That bright blue glow in his eyes never fully returned, and with each passing moon he almost began to seem human, as though his thoughts and feelings might one day be read by mortals.
Fand fared no better. Her white hair, with its robin feathers like drops of blood, had become brittle. The red faded to brown, the snow-white to ivory. Her hands were no longer soft but callused from stroking her husband’s face each night. Her shoulders hunched a little, and when she transformed into a gull, she flew lower and returned breathless.
I had watched Caílte grow up. We had watched our father grow old. Yet, deep down, I suppose I had always questioned whether our father’s blood flowed fay or not. I had always expected our father to age, as I had once expected myself to come of age. Yet here, in the watery wilderness of the ocean, it seemed strange to me that such brazen gods as these were lessening.
On the morning we took leave of Carraig na Ron, the sun broke like a golden yolk across the rocks. It truly felt as though a new dawn had come, and I for one was ready to embrace it. We collected the trinkets that the selkies and the merrows had brought over the years, the jewelled torcs and silver chains. Placing them carefully within our nests, we pushed them out upon the waves where they sank beneath their own weight.
“If only we could string ourselves in jew
els and take them with us,” Fiachra said, mourning the loss of our wealth. “We could have bought a kingdom with all that.”
“Aye, yet still it would not make us kings,” I replied.
Manannán came to our shore aboard Wave Sweeper. He told us that Fand had not wished to dull the morning’s splendour with her cloak of mist, though secretly I suspected she’d had her fill of goodbyes. Her son, her sister, and now us. Perhaps she preferred to keep her peace below.
“Will you come with us?” Fionnuala asked. “We only move from East to West. Irrus Domnann is but an outlet to the sea, you could follow.”
“You may see us there,” he said. “Look to the sea birds in the sky, and the fish that haunt the depths. You will hear our voices on the tide, and see our faces cast upon the sea spray.”
I did not understand his riddle, and had little patience for it. All my life I had preferred those who spoke plainly. Riddles seemed a form of enchantment, and I’d had all I wished of those. Yet Fin seemed to take comfort in his words.
“I have loved you, brother,” she told him.
To this he did not answer, but simply bowed his head.
With that, we spread our wings and took to the beautiful sky. Far below the cliffs and fields, forts and streams, stretched out in an endless display. Our world had been so very small on those rocks, and now it spread as a patchwork of possibilities beneath. I had never felt so glad to leave a place as Sruth na Maoile.
As we made our way inland, the wind grew strong from the north, blowing us further south. It should not have taken so long to fly from one coast to the next. As time passed, so too did the strength in our wings, for we had used them sparingly upon the sea. At first we tried to fly above the current, but it was cold among the clouds, and the air grew thin. Instead, we swooped low, searching for a gentler breeze.
It was then that we saw where we were.
“Look!” cried Conn, drawing alongside. “Do you see?”
I saw as well as Fin and Fiachra. They were ahead of us, sending up a spray of freshwater as they landed on Loch Dairbhreach. We filled our beaks and drank down as much as we could, purging the sea from our throats.
“Brother, do you see it?” Fionnuala asked, coming to my side.
There on the shore, beside my father’s seat, stood a rust-red rock as tall as a man. Weather had worn it down, sanding its ridges smooth, deepening the pockmarks and grooves. As I drew closer, I could make out features beneath the lichen. I half fancied our father had turned to stone, awaiting our return. But it was not our father, it was a face far more familiar.
In seeing Caílte’s statue, I knew that he had left it there because he could not come himself.
“Where is everyone?” Conn asked.
“They must have returned to Sidhe Fionnachaidh,” Fin replied, casting her eyes about the empty shore.
My own eyes fell upon the patch of long grass where I had rested my head those many nights against my lover’s chest. It was no use. The years had worn that place as the weather had the rock. Even the colour of the lake seemed muddied, its woods retreated further from the bank.
“They are long gone,” I said.
“Remember what Fergus told us,” my sister reminded. “They are all together at our father’s fort, enjoying the Feast of Age.”
The thought remained unspoken between us, for our father’s fort lay to the north, as we must fly.
“I’m tired,” Fiachra said. “Let us rest here the night.”
“We can’t,” my sister replied. “Without the Fianna to guard us we might fall prey to foxes.”
“How do we know that wouldn’t be better than what awaits at Irrus Domnann?”
I studied my brother carefully. My memory of him was as a boy, yet he spoke the words of a man. Never before had he sounded so defeated.
“Please, Fiachra,” his twin said, “don’t you want to go home? Why stay here the night in this forgotten place, when a warm hearth and a full belly await?”
“We have been forgotten so long, I doubt another night will matter.”
“Conn is right,” Fin said. “We should fly on. Sidhe Fionnachaidh lies direct in our path between here and Irrus Domnann. Imagine our father’s face to see us!”
My sister took to the sky, allowing no further argument. Conn raced across the water after her, as eager as a hare on the heath, whilst I looked to my remaining brother. His head hung as he stared at his own reflection.
“What is it?” I asked.
“You know as well as me.”
As a boy, I had almost thought of the twins as one person. They had not been old enough to remember our mother, and that had set us apart. I had loved them, and loved to play with them down by the crannóg amidst the mud and the ants. Yet they had always had each other, whilst I had been closer to my sister. I did not know when or how, but over six hundred years of exile, Conn and Fiachra had come to be two separate beings. They thought separately, Conn preferring to stay close to the rocks, whilst Fiachra enjoyed soaring above the sea. Their tastes were different, Conn drinking milk from the cup whilst his brother drank mead. Conn’s laugh was thin and ready, whilst Fiachra’s was deep and slow to coax. All this time I had thought of them as one, and now it surprised me to realise they were not, and that Fiachra thought more like me, whilst Conn thought like Fin.
“You don’t believe they will be there?”
“You know they won’t,” he said, looking me in the eye. “Fergus lied to us. He was going to tell us what really happened, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. You saw it in the way he looked aside. You heard it in his voice.”
My brother was right, I had.
“Well,” I said. “We can’t stay here, and even if we could, we’d still have to fly on the morrow. We may as well face our sorrows sooner. Besides, if our father has passed, there will be others.”
“You think Caílte might be waiting?” he asked.
There was no derision in his voice, yet it struck me all the same. Of course I thought he would be waiting. He had promised.
As we raced to catch up with my sister, I began to feel dizzy. I was so used to the sea speeding beneath me, that the green fields and hedges confused my eye, the motion more sickening than the rocking waves. I tried to convince myself that it was just the scent of the earth disturbing me, or how tired I felt from our long flight, yet deep down I knew it was fear. I was drowning again, as I had on the Lake of the Oaks the day Aoife stole our forms.
When we reached the hill of our father’s fort we almost flew straight over it, for there was nothing there we recognised. The palisades had rotted to earth, the huts had been blown away in the wind, the hearths reduced to ash. There was nothing there. Nothing at all.
“We must be in the wrong place. We must be confused?” Conn insisted. His plaintive cries were hard to bear, for we knew that we were not lost. “Where is our father? Where is Bodb Dearg?”
Our sister was silent also. Like Conn, she had hoped, yet like Fiachra and myself, she had suspected.
The great ditches that surrounded the fort had sunk over the years, buried beneath tall grass. From the air, they were hardly visible, yet from the ground I could still see the places I had run in my youth. The view from the top was as beautiful as it had always been. The entire valley swept out below, its rivers shining like seams of silver in the afternoon light, a smattering of even-stars dusting the sky to the east. It felt for a moment as though I were standing at the edge of the world. As though the world I had once known had been torn, allowing me to gaze upon another beyond. One in which life had continued long after my death, and I saw that the druids had been right. Life begets life, and what dies lives again in the trees and the grass and the waters of this world. Like a bulb beneath the earth, we send up a flower for each lifetime. We rise, we bloom, we wither, yet year on year we repeat ourselves, sleeping, never dying. I longed to rest beneath the earth. I longed to close my eyes and rise afresh in a new future.
When I returned to my
sister, her expression was stone. I found her sitting where our father’s great hall once sat. For a moment, I saw her as a girl, dressed in evergreen, sipping from her wine cup and laughing. I sat beside her for a long time, the sound of Conn’s weeping drifting across the hilltop, snatched by the gentle evening breeze. The sky began to darken and the moon shone bright above.
“We should sing,” she said eventually. “Perhaps they can hear us beyond the waves, or beneath the hill, or wherever our people have gone.”
And so we gathered together there, around a small sapling where the central fire had once stood. We opened up our beaks and we sang. Our song was sweet and sad. It told the story of our lives. It told of a beautiful queen who had died on the birthing bed. It told of two moons that rose from her bloodied hands. It told of a sister’s lover, and a brother’s lover, and – yes – even a father’s swollen heart, eaten by grief. It told of solitude and it told of pain. It told of summer, winter, snow and rain. It told of lust, and a woman’s deep, unhealing wound. It told of feasting and of wine, of chieftains and their daughters. It told of the Fianna and their warriors. It told of betrayal, and it told of deceit, of sorcery and wicked witchcraft. It told of longing, and of missing, and of all the things I had never been able to say.
I could sing no more. I hung my head and wept as my brother had before me.
They continued, and as my voice grew weak, theirs grew strong, until I found my strength in them and raised my voice once more.
We sang all through the night. We sang until the horizon grew golden.
When we came to our end, the world around fell perfectly silent, the air tingling against our feathers, as though it held the vibration of our song in its memory.
Fionnuala
Sruth Fada Con, the Stream of the Long Hound, split the coast as though a giant’s axe had rent apart the earth. The sun shining off its tidal waters almost blinded us. The estuary was surrounded by salt marshes, bogs and sinking sand, the earth speckled with dark brown peat and the tiny islands of the machair.
The Children of Lir Page 26