Saint Brigid's Bones

by Philip Freeman

  I walked to the door flap of the tent and looked around. I wanted to make sure no one was nearby.

  “So, what did you think of the king’s sons?” I asked her.

  Dari yawned and stretched her arms.

  “I think they’re guilty. Of what, I’m not sure.”

  “But it has to be the bones.”

  “Maybe. Illann and Ailill were plainly terrified of you, as was Roech. But did you look at the women in that room?”

  “Not really. I mean, I saw some of their jewelry.”

  “I was looking at more than what they were wearing, Deirdre, and I was listening too. I have good ears. They spent the feast talking about how horrible you looked in your ugly robes and wondering why you would invite some trashy peasant into the king’s royal hall.”

  “Oh Dari, they were just talking. I’m sure they didn’t mean it.”

  “Of course they meant it, but that’s not the point. What matters is that whatever plot is going on doesn’t involve many people.”

  “How can you tell that?”

  “Because wives know everything their husbands are involved in even if the men think they don’t. The only women in that hall who were worried were the two wives of the king’s sons and that poor woman married to your sleazy cousin Roech. They looked like they were going to faint from the moment we showed up. They were afraid of what you were going to say to Dúnlaing.”

  I thought about this for a moment.

  “If that’s true, maybe we could get one of the wives to talk to us.”

  Dari shook her head.

  “They won’t, Deirdre. They may not agree with their husbands and they may even hate them, but they know that if their husbands fall, so do they and their families. No mother is going to sacrifice her children’s future to help you.”

  Dari collapsed on the bed and closed her eyes.

  “Deirdre, I’m so tired tonight I can’t even pray. Can we go to sleep now?”

  “Of course. Let’s leave early tomorrow. I want to get back to Kildare as soon as we can.”

  Dari was asleep before I finished speaking. I pulled the blanket over her and tucked it around her shoulders. I placed my harp in its case and walked out of the tent to the top of the ancient earthen walls of Dún Ailinne. The moon was rising and gave the night an eerie glow.

  “Powers of the Otherworld,” I whispered to the darkness, “if you will hear the prayer of a Christian on this Samain night, please help me find the bones of Brigid.”

  A cold wind blew against my face and an owl hooted in the distance. For a moment, I thought I saw someone moving in the shadows at the edge of the woods, but I looked again and there was no one there.

  Chapter Twelve

  When we returned to the monastery the next afternoon, I was thrilled to see smoke rising from the roof of Father Ailbe’s hut. He was sitting outside his door even though the weather had turned cold. I had a feeling he was waiting for me.

  “Abba, you’re back!”

  Father Ailbe’s real name was Albeus, but no one had used that name since he left his home in Egypt almost sixty years ago to make his way to our distant island. The Irish shortened his name to Ailbe, a common name among us. When I was a little girl still learning to talk, I couldn’t say Ailbe, so I called him Abba. He thought this was wonderful and so I had called him that ever since.

  I rushed to him as he struggled to his feet and gave him a big hug. I could feel the bones of his back through his cloak and knew he had lost more weight. He hadn’t been eating properly lately. I led him back into his hut to sit by the warmth and sweet smell of the peat fire.

  His hut was small but comfortable, with a bench by the fireplace and a bed in back. An old chest stood at the foot of his bed and a writing table with a lamp sat beneath the window. A simple cross of twisted reeds hung on the wall, a gift from Brigid herself. Next to the cross was a single shelf holding a few mementos from his travels and a small wooden doll. The doll was unlike any other I had ever seen and I remember being fascinated by it when I was a little girl. The wood was hard like oak, but with a strange reddish color. For a long time I thought it was made from alder, which turns from white to blood-red when cut, but when he finally let me hold it I could tell the weight was wrong. The mouth, eyes, and nose were carefully but not skillfully carved, as if a father unused to working wood had made it for his child. The tunic was sewn with great skill, but the material was woven from coarse flax rather than the soft wool normally used for a doll’s clothing. The wood also had bite marks on the limbs and head as if from a teething child, as was common enough, but the oddest thing about the doll was its obvious age. The cloth was frail and yellowed and smelled as if it had been made many years ago. Whenever I had asked Father Ailbe about it, he would only say that it had belonged to a patient of his long ago.

  I brought him a hot cup of broth from the small pot over the hearth and sat next to him to make sure he drank it.

  “Thank you, my dear. That does taste good.”

  Some of the broth was stuck to his white beard, so I took a cloth and wiped it away. He winced.

  “You don’t need to fuss about me so, Deirdre. I’m not an invalid yet. And in any case, I hear you have a great deal more to worry about than an old man with a messy face. I stopped by your grandmother’s house on the way here. She told me all the latest news, including your trip back to Sleaty and the discovery of the Armagh cross.”

  I had gone to my grandmother’s house the day after my dressing down by Sister Anna. Over a slice of warm bread with lots of butter, she urged me to pay no attention to the disbelief of the abbess, though she said I should have told Sister Anna the truth about where I was going. She believed the cross was an important clue in my search, though I wasn’t so sure.

  “Yes, Sister Anna has put me in charge of finding the bones of Brigid,” I said to Father Ailbe. “But it’s been over two weeks since we discovered they were missing and I’m no closer to solving the mystery. Oh, Abba, what am I going to do?”

  He stood and put his medical bag on his shoulder.

  “Why don’t you come with me on my rounds?” he said. “There are a couple of patients I need to check on. We can talk on the way.”

  Father Ailbe had been born into a wealthy merchant family in the coastal metropolis of Alexandria. His family lived next to the old Jewish Quarter of the city. He grew up speaking Greek, but he was also fluent in Latin, Coptic, Aramaic, and several other languages. He had studied with the greatest scholars of his day, mostly at the fabled Library of Alexandria. The library had once held tens of thousands of papyrus scrolls, but in Father Ailbe’s youth Christian fanatics had burned almost all of them, believing they were tools of the devil. The remaining academics at the library spent their time teaching young people like Father Ailbe and frantically copying texts in hope that some might survive. But every few years the Parabolans, as the Christian brotherhood called themselves, would rouse themselves into a fury and destroy any books they could find. By the time Father Ailbe had reached his late teens, the collection had been sadly depleted.

  One day the Parabolans came to the library with torches in hand to destroy the building and its contents once and for all. The head librarian quickly gathered a few precious scrolls and hid them in a small wooden chest. Father Ailbe was studying there that day and was a favorite student of the head librarian, so he was given the chest. He told the young man to keep them safe for the future, then sent him out the back door while he and the other librarians held off the mob in the front at the cost of their own lives. Father Ailbe took the chest home and protected it, as he had promised, reading the scrolls at night with the curtains drawn. It contained lost treatises of Aristotle, the complete works of Sappho of Lesbos, gospels ascribed to Peter and Judas, and other priceless works unknown elsewhere in the Roman world. When Father Ailbe came to Ireland, he brought the chest with him for fear it would be discovered and destroyed in Egypt. Now it sat at the foot of his bed, holding the last remnants of the g
reat Library of Alexandria. I had spent countless hours over the years in his hut reading these scrolls by candlelight.

  By his own admission, Father Ailbe was an impious youth. Although he was a gifted student and a passionate learner, he and his friends spent much of their free time roaming the back alleys of Alexandria picking fights and seducing girls. Over the objections of his father, he chose medicine over commerce, though he continued to travel frequently on trade missions for his family. He had often told me of his journeys to Constantinople, Jerusalem, and even India. But one night in his early twenties, he witnessed something that changed his life forever.

  The pagan philosopher and mathematician Hypatia, a woman of extraordinary intelligence who attracted many Christian students to her school in Alexandria, had been murdered some years before Father Ailbe was born. The local bishop Cyril, later declared a saint, was jealous of her success and had ordered the Parabolans to hunt her down as a witch. Few pagans dared to raise their heads in Alexandria after her death, but one disciple of Hypatia named Sophia quietly continued her work in mathematics and philosophy. She was a teacher and dear friend of Father Ailbe and lived near his family.

  It was many years before Father Ailbe would tell me the whole story, but one night the Parabolans found Sophia and dragged her into the street. By the light of the full moon, they tore her apart like wolves. Father Ailbe had been away tending to a patient, but he found her remains when he returned home that morning. He gathered up the tattered pieces of her body and buried them himself in his family’s tomb. Unable to understand how men who claimed to follow Christ could do such a thing, he decided to devote his life to the true service of God. Although raised a Christian, he had never cared much for religion before that terrible night. Now, over the fierce protests of his family, he turned his back on the world, left the chest with the precious scrolls to a trusted friend, and became a monk of holy Anthony at a desert monastery east of the Nile.

  He would never tell me exactly why, but a few years later he left the monastery, retrieved the chest, and sailed away from Alexandria on a grain ship bound for Rome where he stayed with family friends. While there, he became acquainted with Pope Leo and treated his malaria. Leo had several Irish slaves in his household and so Father Ailbe, curious about this distant land, spent time with them tending to their illnesses and learning their language. A few months later he received the Pope’s blessing to go to Ireland as a missionary. He travelled north to Milan, then across the Alps and Gaul to the channel where he took the only boat he could find to Britain, even though it was a broken down wreck with a drunken captain. At last he made his way to the western coast of Britain and sailed from there with some wine merchants to Munster. He so impressed the king at Cashel with his medical skills that he was allowed to start a church at nearby Emly, where he worked among the local tribes for many years. When Bishop Conláed died, Brigid asked Father Ailbe to come to Kildare to take his place. He had always admired our founder, so he left one of the priests he had trained in charge in Emly and came to our monastery as our new bishop.

  “So, what are you going to do about the bones?” pondered Father Ailbe as we walked along. “Why don’t you tell me first how things went with Dúnlaing.”

  I told him.

  “Yes, that’s what I would expect the king to do. He always held Brigid in high regard and would never suffer one of his people to touch her remains. But you were right to begin your search with him. If nothing else, you’ve caused a stir among the nobility of his court. Word will spread across Leinster about the bones and someone who knows something might tell Dúnlaing, then he can tell you.”

  “Abba, do you think the king would really kill one of his own sons if he turned out to be the thief?”

  “Oh yes. No king could allow a challenge to his authority like that. I don’t think he’s ever liked Illann anyway. The boy doesn’t have the qualities to make a good ruler. Too devious, too much living in the shadows. And his brother Ailill is nothing but a bully.”

  We came to the hut of his first patient, an old man whose leg had been injured weeks earlier when a tree he was chopping down fell on top of him. He had begged the man to let him amputate it, but he wouldn’t listen. Now it was swollen and oozing a greenish pus that smelled so foul I almost fainted. Father Ailbe gave him something for the pain, but he shook his head as we left and said the man wouldn’t last another week.

  People always said Kildare was the best place in Ireland to be sick. Father Ailbe had received his medical education in Alexandria under the leading physicians of the day. In the years since, he had moved far beyond the theories of Hippocrates and Galen into practical medicine based on observation and an open mind. He was a master of herb lore as well as surgery. I had seen him cut into a young woman after a long and fruitless labor to remove twin girls from her womb. With any other physician, this would have been a death sentence for the mother, but with his skillful technique and strict attention to cleanliness, the woman returned to good health to raise her daughters.

  “What about the abbot of Armagh?” I asked as we left the farm. “That man is as slippery as an eel. Sister Anna agrees that he might have stolen the bones or is at least taking advantage of the theft.”

  Father Ailbe nodded.

  “I wouldn’t put anything past the abbot. I met him when he was a boy at Armagh. Even then he was plotting and scheming. I can tell you Patrick never liked him. My old friend would be appalled that such a man is now in charge of the church there.”

  “But I hate to believe that any Christian, even the abbot, would steal the bones of Brigid.”

  “Deirdre, my child, I’m afraid that churchmen can be as deceitful and avaricious as anyone else in this world. I’m sorry to say that such thefts are not unknown among Christians in the Mediterranean world. Once, when I was in Jerusalem, I saw monks from different factions at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher come to blows over a missing baby tooth supposedly belonging to our Lord. It turns out a visiting bishop from Antioch had snuck into the church one night and taken the tooth back to Syria. They were still fighting over possession of the tiny relic last I heard.”

  “What about Cormac? Do you think he could have taken the bones?”

  I pulled Cormac’s letter out of my satchel and handed it to him. He read it quickly as we walked.

  “I think our young prince paid too much for the Alexander coin, but the letter is intriguing. It could be he has some evidence that implicates someone or he may be trying to lead you astray. With Cormac you never really know. He was my best student—aside from you of course—but after all those years I never felt as if I understood him.”

  “I’m going to his inauguration in Glendalough soon,” I said. “I’ll question him then.”

  “Really? It will be interesting to hear what he has to tell you.”

  He looked at me in a knowing way.

  “Are you sure you’re ready to see him again, my dear?”

  “Abba,” I said, embarrassed in spite of myself, “that was over years ago.”

  “Deirdre, if there’s anything I’ve learned during my life, it’s that love can endure for a very long time.”

  We walked to a small farm east of Kildare where a three-year old girl named Caitlin lay dying. I had known her parents for years. They were tenant farmers of the monastery who lived with their five children. The mother and father were poor, but they were hard workers who made sure there was always enough food on the table.

  “How is our little one doing today?” asked Father Ailbe when he saw the mother outside the hut. The rest of the family was working in the fields.

  “Oh, Father, it’s so good to have you back.” She gave us both a hug and led us inside. “My little Caitlin—”

  She began to cry.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s just so hard to see her this way. She was always the most lively of my children, running all over the farm and getting into everything. Now she can barely walk across the hut. She drinks well enoug
h, but she’s not eating as much as she should. I make special broths for her, rich with fat and honey, but she never finishes a bowl.”

  Father Ailbe went to the bed where Caitlin was sleeping. She looked pale and worn. He sat down beside her and took her hand as he felt her pulse, then pulled back the blanket to listen to her heart. She woke up and smiled when she saw him. She had the most beautiful eyes I had ever seen.

  “Abba?” She had heard me call him by that name on an earlier visit. He smiled and stroked her cheek

  “Yes, my darling, it’s me. I couldn’t stay away from you long. How do you feel?”

  “Sleepy.” She yawned and stretched her arms. They were so thin.

  “Rest then, little one. And dream sweet dreams.”

  He covered her up and tucked the blanket around her, then kissed her on the forehead. She smiled again and drifted back to sleep. Her mother followed us outside, where she and Father Ailbe sat on the bench by the door.

  “Father, is there anything you can do for my little girl?”

  Father Ailbe took her hand. I saw that there were tears in his eyes.

  “I’m so sorry. I’ve seen many of these cases over the years and they always have the same ending. The best I can do for Caitlin is keep her comfortable and remember her in my prayers. I’ll leave more medicine for her in case the pain returns. I’ll check on her again in a few days.”

  He held the mother in his arms for a long time as she sobbed. Finally, she wiped her eyes and said she had better go and check on Caitlin. I hugged her and told her I would be back to visit as soon as I could. Father Ailbe and I walked away in silence. The death of children always affected him the most. I put my arm around him and wished there was something more I could do.

  We reached the monastery gate and Father Ailbe turned toward his hut while I went to the kitchen to help with the evening meal. But before he left, I had to ask him.

  “Abba, do you think I can find the bones in time?”