For me, when I did not watch for Ith’s return, I studied with An Scail. I wrote songs for Ceolas and played my gaita at the window while I kept the watch for Ith. The songs became beloved of the Galaeci. In the evenings, Bile and I would sing them by the fire, and in his humming accompaniment, the people ceased to fear Bile. By firelight they would call for us by name and Skena would push us forward, whispering, “Sing well, my boys.”
I had loved my Skena so often, by day and by night, by the fire in the lightkeeper’s room, on the end of the rocky shore, that when she told me that her courses no longer came, it seemed to me inevitable perfection. So much great love could only serve to produce another being, to call back a spirit from the Country of the Young. I began to sing to the womb-child on my harp, and when the moon was full, I sang my praises to Creation with a heart more full than all its whiteness.
CEOLAS SINGS A LULLABY
Come to us, returning child.
Here is the hand of your mother,
she who rocks the womb-cradle,
softly, softly, little one, beloved one,
here is your beautiful mother.
Here is the song of your father
that you might know his voice,
the love he will bear you always.
Come, little journeyer,
swiftly among us.
Grateful our hearts
that we are chosen.
Great the love between us
who will keep you safe from harm.
And at last the morning came when I was standing at one of the windows of the tower looking down at the village spread below us and it came to me that I no longer wanted to leave Galicia, that somehow this place and its people had become home. And soon I would have to leave them.
Too soon, for our idyll lasted for only two full turnings of the moon.
We began the month that bore my brother Airioch’s name with a wild storm at sea. Not for the first time, my father fretted that Ith had chosen to return on winter seas. On the sixth morning of that month, when Bile and I were keeping watch at the window, we saw Ith’s ship undulating toward the harbor.
I sounded the alarm on the long curved war horn that hung by the tower window for just this purpose and raced for the shore, hand in hand with Skena, Bile and Ir behind us.
By the time I reached the curved bay, the ship was coming into harbor and my father and mother and half of the clan of the Galaeci were assembling.
My father grinned when he saw me and slapped me on the shoulder. “Inisfail, lad. At last, I see our destiny!”
So it was to my father’s face that I first looked when they carried my uncle Ith down the gangplank on a litter, Eber Donn and Airioch beside him.
My father ran toward them. The bearers lowered the litter to the ground and we pushed in toward my uncle.
The Ith who returned to us was not the uncle who had left us. Drool coursed from one side of his mouth, and like our brother Bile, Ith had to him no speech. His arm on that same side was useless and flopped about like a fish. Only his one eye seemed to hold any awareness of his surroundings, and it swung wildly from side to side as if it searched for someone or something.
Our father dropped to his knees beside him and gave out such a heartrending cry that I thought my own heart would break. Scota knelt behind him and put her hands against his shoulders. When she looked up to meet my eyes, her face bore a look of piteous supplication, as if she thought that someone, I or Skena, could somehow nurse Ith back to health as we had done with Bile.
I turned to Eber Donn. “He was injured on the sea journey?”
Eber Donn’s face twisted with rage. “No. It is they who did this to him, the treacherous Danu, the Children of the Braid.”
“The Danu? But they sent us greetings, said that they returned him to us with honor. They indicated that perhaps they would welcome us if we were people of peace.”
“We will not give them peace. We will go among them and slaughter them for the treacherous, dangerous creatures that they are.”
This Eber Donn shouted, raising his arm in the air and screaming it to the assembled Galaeci as if he bore aloft an imaginary sword.
“Hush!” I commanded. “You frighten our uncle Ith.” And indeed, Uncle Ith was twisting on his pallet, mewling and wagging his head from side to side.
Eber Donn heeded my wisdom, pulled me aside. “Hear me, Brother. They are dangerous, duplicitous folk, these Danu. Their women are beautiful but strange … . Their eyes, I do not know. They possess magical powers beyond anything even our druii have seen. They seem to disappear and reappear in all hours and in all places with no signs of journey upon them. They are keepers of dark secrets. There are places on the island from which they warn us away, even taking to charging some of their most sacred doorways with lightning bolts. Can you imagine?”
Airioch had sidled over to us and now nodded his head vigorously. “It is true, Brother. I tried to penetrate one of their secret spaces!” He whispered it and then turned his back on the assembled company gathered around Ith.
“Why did you try to do so?”
“They keep treasure,” he said. “Vast treasure. They wear ancient jewels and diadems.”
I waved my hand at this. “I care not for treasure. Return to Ith. How was he injured?”
“I know not,” said Eber Donn. “I was preparing our ships for departure. Ith had decided, he said, that we would not return to Inisfail.”
“Why did he decide this?”
“I know not. He said that he would speak to our father of what he had learned. I will tell you that it suited me well enough, for I like them not; they keep impenetrable secrets. On the morning of departure, I went to his hut to fetch him and I found him thus.”
Airioch broke in. “They were with him before departure. All of the evening before. The Sisters!” He spat the word. “Banba, Fodla, and Eriu. They did this; they cast some spell upon him.”
I returned and leaned over my uncle Ith. Skena was bending to him, wiping the spittle from his cheeks.
“I do not see a spell here,” I said. “We will send for Mehmet.”
Mehmet, surgeon of Egypt, had become much valued among the Galaeci of all the region, traveling from village to village where his medical expertise could right many wrongs. Eber Donn dispatched a rider to find him.
We carried Ith to the village and made him comfortable in one of the conical dwellings. We placed him on soft furs and pillows, built up the fire. My father refused to leave his side. He wept and apologized over and over for sending him to Inisfail, and rubbed constantly at his own left arm, so agitated that I began to fear that he worsened Uncle Ith’s condition.
The druids brought An Scail; her presence seemed to calm Ith greatly as she sat beside him and gently stroked his good hand.
When he was calm, Skena bathed him and fed him sweetened porridge and water.
At last Mehmet arrived and hurried into the dwelling. He examined Ith with care, then spoke directly to Ith himself.
“I have seen this before, old friend. You suffered a great shock, did you not?” Ith slowly closed and opened the one good eye.
“Should I take that to be yes?”
Again the blink.
Mehmet nodded. “Sometimes when the body is old and it suffers a great shock, the mind cannot sustain it. It closes all the pathways that it can. Was it accompanied by a blinding headache?”
Again the blink.
“Pain in the arm.”
Blink.
“I have seen this before,” Mehmet repeated. “But the mind is beyond the practice of medicine, as we have seen with Bile. I have seen the brain that dwells inside the skull. It is carved like a river, with streams and channels that flow in all directions. Sometimes I have seen its pathways reroute themselves. Other times, as with Bile, it is as if the mind has put a dam in its own river. I cannot tell you what your fate will be. Only time will tell that. I am sorry.”
The mention of Bile seemed to awaken some
thing in Ith. He began to gesticulate with his good hand, and at last I realized that he was speaking in Bile’s finger language.
“Do you wish me to fetch him?”
Ith blinked.
I ran for our little brother, who came into the dwelling, his eyes wide with fright.
“Uncle Ith would speak, but his voice will not work. Only his hands work. Only you can speak to him now.”
Bile drew himself up, and I was proud of the way his little body girded itself for the work.
Uncle Ith’s hands began to work, and Bile turned to me. He made the sign for his papers and chalks. I ran all the way to the tower, took the stairs two at a time, clutched everything to me, and returned at a run.
Ith gestured to all of us but An Scail, Mil, and Bile that we should depart. Though I was wounded to be sent from the bedside of my beloved uncle, I complied, waiting outside the hut.
Half of an hour passed.
My father staggered from the hut, his eyes wide. He clutched his own arm and reeled against the wall of the hut in an agony of grief. He cried aloud. Sure that Uncle Ith had crossed, I ducked beneath the lintel. Ith was still alive, his eyes turned toward the door through which my father had departed, his face sorrowful. He gestured to me and I knelt beside him. He placed his hand on my head. He shook his own head gently.
“What has happened?”
“Bile has drawn something,” said An Scail. “It has greatly upset your father.”
I looked down at Bile’s sketch. “But it is nothing. It is simply a sketch of lightning, a storm at sea perhaps. Or perhaps the lightning Airioch has spoken of.”
Again Ith blinked.
“Is that it, Uncle? Airioch has told us that they guard their doorways with bolts of lightning.”
My uncle became agitated again at that, moaning and thrashing from side to side.
“Leave us!” An Scail commanded. “Let me try to calm him.”
From outside the hut I heard a piercing cry. I raced to the door. My mother was kneeling beside my father. He had collapsed in the dust; his skin was the color of the winter ground. He was dead. Ith followed before morning.
The sparks rose skyward from the headland.
We had built their biers side by side, lighted the torches beneath them at precisely the same moment. At their heads, we placed the urns that would contain their ashes.
An Scail had been given the honor of lighting the bier of Ith. As eldest, Eber Donn lighted my father’s bier, and though he was a warrior, he could barely steady his hand for the strength of his weeping.
Eber Finn and Eremon stood side by side in silence, as much a pair as 1th and Mil had been in life. When the grief threatened to shake them, each fastened an arm over the shoulder of the other, and so they stood, a bulwark against sorrow.
Bile clung to Skena on one hand and held hard to Ir on the other. Someone of the tribe had taken Colpa from my mother. I knew not who quieted him.
Only An Scail seemed well, moving back and forth between the biers, chanting to the brothers, the red fire reflected in her lunula and in the sightless silver eyes.
In the darkness of the sacred moon, their spirits rose from their bodies and drifted toward the stars. I could see the path of the twin fires reflected in the sea far below.
My mother clung to me, barely able to stand alone, so shaken by sobs that I thought they would wrench apart her bones. From time to time, she would cry out, “Inisfail my love, Inisfail.” I do not know if she mourned his failure to go to the place of his dreams or blamed the place for his passing. At last, when the fires had burned to nothing, she simply crumpled to the ground like ash. I liftted her up; it was the first time I ever realized how very small she was. I carried her back to her dwelling, and Skena brought a draught that at last allowed Scota to sleep.
Skena and I returned to our tower with Bile and Ir. She curled the children into her arms, until at last the three of them slept. I stood late and long at the tower window, watching away to the north, hollow with the loss of Ith and my father, feeling strangely orphaned in the world.
The night had gone well past the turning time when the breeze carried the sound of weeping, muffled, from the shore below.
I took the tower steps by rolling inward, soundless as the air.
He was curled up below the rocks, his head dropped onto his knees. He was wrapped in his cloak like a shroud; already, its neck was wet from the tears he had wept. He lifted his head and stared out to sea. It was Airioch.
For a moment, I considered departing, returning to my tower. But he was my brother. Or so my father had behaved. And so I came up soundlessly beside him and knelt upon the shore.
He must have sensed my presence. His head snapped up, swift and angry, his eyes wide. He regarded me for a moment and his expressions softened.
“Amergin,” he said. “I thought that you were Eber Donn.”
“And that angered you?”
He shrugged. “He is my brother. We are sometimes angry with each other.”
“I am your brother as well.”
Something about the statement brought fresh tears to his eyes; they spilled down his cheeks, silver in the moonlight.
“What have I said to bring you such sorrow?”
He shook his head. “You sounded, then, like Mil.”
“Our father?” A wave of loss swept over me again to think him gone.
“Your father. But he never said so, Amergin. Never once. He must have known that I was not his own. Just look at me. But all my life he called me as his son. He treated me no differently than he did Eber Donn. Than he did any of you.”
“And this has made you weep?”
“I was not grateful enough. I … Why do you think he died, Amergin?”
I sighed. “Sometimes I thought that he and Ith were two halves of the same soul. Mil the warrior and Ith the philosopher, Mil the man of action and Ith the thinker. Perhaps he did not know how to live without Ith.”
“O you gods,” said Airioch. The sound wrenched up from his soul. “Ith knew me for a bastard, Amergin.”
“Ith would not have judged you for your mother’s weakness.”
“Ith watched me for weaknesses of my own.”
It was true enough. I thought for a moment.
“All of us have watched you, Airioch. You keep your feelings close within. Until tonight, I thought you saw our father with disdain. You seem always to have some hidden purpose, some plan that is all your own. And your appetites are large.”
My assessment seemed to agitate him. He shifted his position, punched his fist into his hands.
“O you gods,” he said. “O you gods.”
He turned toward me, his eyes meeting mine. I realized with a start that it was the first time that Airioch had ever looked me directly in the eyes.
“Ith loved you like a son,” he said.
It was not what I had expected. The full loss of Ith hit me in the chest and I flattened back against the rock. A sob shook up from my core and I pressed my hand over my mouth that it might not carry to the tower and wake Skena, Bile, and Ir.
Airioch’s eyes never left my face. I watched as some decision formed on his face. He nodded once.
“I am your brother, Amergin,” he said. “Just as I am Eber Donn’s. Know this. You have nothing to fear from me, ever. I am your brother.”
He stood and looked out to sea, turned, and walked away. We did not see him for two fortnights.
CEOLAS WEEPS
We have lost a brace of fathers.
What cruelty is this O gods?
What whimsy, that you take from us
our wisdom and our strength
not separate, but together?
How shall we live
Without Ith, without Mil?
How shall we journey
In the hollow world
Without them?
On the night that Airioch Feabhruadh returned, my mother called a Council of the clans.
“I say that we shall go
! The sons of Mil shall avenge him in Inisfail!” My mother stood among the assembled company, her dark eyes flashing. She was dressed not in mourning, but as a warrior of the Celts, in leather and war boots, her dagger at her belt, her shortsword at her side.
In the month since my father had died, Scota had mobilized her sorrow to such rage that she had brought my brothers with her, so that Eber Donn, who knew of Uncle Ith’s wishes, shouted also for revenge.
Across the fire, my eyes met those of Skena and Bile. I stood among the company. I raised my hands.
Silence moved across the assembly like a wind; even my mother sat down in the circle. When had such a thing occurred? When had I become poet and bard, wisdom keeper and sage? I felt it not as a joy, but as a weighty burden with Ith and my father both gone.
I cleared my throat.
“People of the Galaeci. Let us reason past our grief. First we must consider history. All our lives we have thought of Inisfail as the place of destiny; our legends speak of it for ten generations past.”
A general nod moved around the circle.
“Yet in any of those legends, did we hear of those who dwelled there?”
“A well-thought point, Amergin,” An Scail called from the fireside.
“And our own brother Eber Donn has told us that Ith did not wish us to return among them. Speak, Eber Donn!”
My brother stood, shamefaced, but determined not to lie.
“It is so. Ith told me that he would recommend to our father that we not go among them.”
“And did you not tell me that you liked his decision well and found them fearsome?”
“Fearsome, no! They are little people and would be no match for the sons of Mil and the clan of the Galaeci!” Again he was screaming and raising his arms as if he wielded an imaginary sword.
“Eber Donn!” I shouted above the noise of the crowd. “Speak without the theatrics of war! What did you say of them?”
Song of Ireland Page 9