Winter Serpent

by Davis, Maggie;

  “It has no name,” Barra lied. As he gazed out at the island he had an almost overwhelming sense of foreboding. He alone was responsible for the decision which brought them here.

  In the twilight the village looked as though it stood upon a natural island, which was deceptive. Each foot of the island had been transported to the lake’s center by men’s hands. There had been a warlike tribe of Scots here once, and to defend themselves they had taken the ancient pattern of the lake village from those the Celts had once built in the lakes of Europe. It had taken months of labor to float the oak piles and brush mats to be sunk in the lake’s center, much labor to work the beams down among the fogs which would hold them in place. Many days and many tons of earth until the foundations were covered and ready for the final turfing. A palisade of stakes around the water’s edge made attack most difficult.

  The crannog was not large. There was room for less than twenty huts, but it was solidly constructed and offered safety and shelter to those who stood on the shore.

  Barra inspected the coracle in the weeds. It was old and leaky, but it would not be required to go far.

  “Wait here,” he told Ildri. “I will cross to the crannog and see what is to be seen.”

  He was worried. He put the wicker craft across the gray waters with anxious thoughts that while he was gone Ildri would remember the tales of this village. He hoped the other man would not flee and leave him to take the girl to Inverness as best he could. Ildri must stay with him, if only because his own heart beat wildly at the sight of the silent huts before him, and only his desperation bent his arms to the paddle.

  The gate to the village swung brokenly on its hinges. He tied the coracle to one of the mooring posts set in the bank, and entered the place warily. It was as Ildri had said; an air of enchantment hung in the unlighted dwellings and deserted streetways.

  Barra chose the hut nearest the gate and crept under its low lintel. It was almost too dark to see much of the interior except that it was empty. Barra felt as though the black air choked him, and knew that it was also his fear and the knowledge of the evil which had been there. He could not bring himself to breath deeply in this place.

  He left the hut hastily and was not satisfied until he had brought a threshing rake to clean out the rushes and debris. With these precautions, and a feeling of having cast their fate in the making of them, he put the coracle back toward shore.

  Ildri sat quietly enough in a corner of the hut while Barra struck his flints on the stone hearth and kindled a fire. By its light Barra was able to see the young Pict’s face and the fear on it. He knew that Ildri had at last divined the secret of the crannog. Fearful of an outburst that would wake the girl and her child, he jumped up, taking the younger man’s arm and hauling him outside.

  “I know this crannog!” Ildri cried. “It came to me as I sat and listened to the quiet of death which is all about us. This is the village of Glen Laghan, and all men know the curse which hangs on this place!” He struggled in Barra’s grip. “Let me go! You have brought death upon us here!”

  “Lower your voice,” Barra urged him.

  “It is the place of the smallpox,” Ildri shouted. “And as for me, I will soon shake the dust of it from my feet!”

  Barra jerked his nephew to him.

  “Listen to me! For what we have done the Red Fox would impale you on a stake in Cumhainn and cut out your tongue and leave you to die slowly. Here men will not come to seek us, being afraid of the curse. It was a bold move to come here, for if you have eyes in your head you will see that the woman cannot survive the journey in the snow. If we stay here, perhaps the One God will keep the winter sickness from us. After all, it has been five years since the curse fell on this crannog.”

  “You will see! We will swell up and die like the rest and no one will find our rotted bones to bury them! I am leaving!”

  Barra threw his nephew from him.

  “Leave, then. You who have braved the snows of Crioch will surely survive to make your way back to Cumhainn where the Red Fox waits, or northward to the Old Cruithne, the King of the Picts, who will demand the full story of why you have abandoned us. If you will leave, why then, leave!”

  He bent and re-entered the hut. The girl was nursing the child in her arms, absorbed in him, and did not look up. It occurred to him that she had not seemed much aware of her surroundings for some hours.

  “Princess,” he said softly. “I will prepare you something to eat. There is not much for us this night, but tomorrow Ildri and I will hunt and then we shall have a good feast. When the snow has thawed we will take you to your uncle. But until then this is a safe, dry place, and you need have no fears.”

  Frowning, he repeated his words in Gaelic, but she did not raise her head or give any sign that she understood.

  He was comforted and relieved by the sudden appearance of Ildri, who crept inside to escape the empty darkness of the deserted street. The young Pict went to a corner and drew his sheepskin over his head, like a child, to sleep.

  The three bright days that followed gave no promise of a break in the cold. The winter sun was pale and glittering upon the fragile snowfall, and it was easy to follow the tracks of game, but these were few. The best that the two men could manage in this time were two lean and stringy hares. Food was Barra’s first worry, and the listlessness of Doireann nighean Muireach the second. Perhaps it was best, he reasoned, that she had withdrawn to this place of calm and could not know the fears which beset them. She had endured much, and the mind was balanced on a fine point of suffering. Yet, he worried, she should be walking about to restore her strength for the journey.

  Ildri was not much comfort. Barra missed his good-natured rattling. The morose young man at his side was now alien and apart from him. When they were in the crannog Ildri hung at the door, staring at the empty streets and rows of dwellings which they dared not approach.

  Barra admitted to himself that the vast quiet which cloaked the place was a thing which gnawed at a man’s courage. He, too, had fallen into the habit of glancing over his shoulder at the empty huts behind him as though haunted by the stares of the dead. Ildri’s depression worried him, for he feared the young man was not far from breaking. In the suffocating black of the night he could feel Ildri lying tense, petrified, as though the evil of the place lurked ready to attack him if he but let down his guard to sleep. He was as haggard as Barra, and their worrying had worn their tempers thin.

  Barra could not escape the fact that it was his decision which had brought them to the edge of destruction. When he went to lay traps for game he searched the snow for signs of searchers come into the valley, but only his own tracks showed on the white expanse. At least until a thaw he had determined that they should stay in the crannog, but with every rising and setting of the sun he felt a drawing tighter of the ominous quiet which lay upon the glen.

  Barra was asleep. Constant vigilance and his worries had exhausted him, and for the past two nights he had slept deeply. It was useless to send Ildri to stand guard for him, for Ildri was terrified of the night and the lurking unknown.

  It was the girl who dragged him awake with her screaming. From the corner Ildri added his howls and woke the child. With every nerve in his body crying alarm, Barra scrambled to his feet and threw a handful of sticks on the fire. It blazed up.

  Doireann was pointing to the doorway. Barra went to her at once. “Now, now,” he said soothingly.

  She could not hear him for Ildri’s demoralized howls and the child’s squalling. “In the name of God!” Barra shouted.

  There was a sudden silence.

  “I saw it!” the girl cried. “It was a man, I think, but a man with a terrible face!” Ildri fell on his knees and sawed the air with clasped hands.

  “It has come upon us!” he wailed.

  “What was it you saw?” Barra asked, and his hands were shaking. “Look,” she whispered.

  The fire cast a faint light upon a figure in the doorway, its face a black s
hadow under a hood. Ildri gave a moan and fell upon his face in the dirt.

  “I did not come to frighten you,” the figure said in a rusty voice. “I am accustomed only to emptiness within these huts.”

  “Who are you?” Barra croaked.

  “I am Kevin, and I ask what brings you to this place?”

  Barra rubbed his head in an expression of despair.

  “It is the end of us if you come bearing the curse of Glen Laghan.” Kevin the monk shook his head.

  “It has been five winters since death was in this place. I am free of it now, with only the mark left on my face.”

  Doireann put the complaining child to her breast. “What is this place he speaks of?” she asked.

  It was the monk who answered her.

  “You are now in a dead village. Death has been here but has passed on, leaving only silence behind him. The fear, the disease, is gone. There is only peace. And God.”

  Barra shuddered.

  “But why are you here?” the girl asked wonderingly.

  “I came to this place seeking that which had left me. It is an old story. I was a monk who had failed in his faith. I had turned my back on my vows and my life, sick unto death of it. Yet I did not so much seek proof of God as the knowledge that He had compassion for us, His children. Even in my blackest hours I could not deny that it was His earth I trod. But when I saw the dying and the suffering my soul was destroyed and I was broken by His unheeding cruelty. I was like the psalmist who cried, My God, why hast Thou forsaken me? In the midst of my suffering I, too, was taken ill and when I recovered all were dead or had fled from this place. Save God. He was still with me. I knew then that He grieves, that He suffers also and His love is over us. It was a great truth, and one I had nearly died in seeking.”

  The hooded face turned from one to the other as if searching for something. “I say to you now, why are you afraid? Know that God dwells in the midst

  of desolation, and you are not alone.” Barra groaned.

  “Is God here, now?” the girl cried. The face seemed to smile.

  “In all places. But it is here that He dwells with me.” “Princess,” Barra whispered, “this monk is mad.”

  She made an impatient movement.

  “Can you prophesy for us? Can you tell us whether God will help us?” The monk stepped back, and seemed almost to melt into the darkness. “We will all have God’s help, in His due Time,” he said sadly. “Why do you

  despair? This is not an empty world. Christ lived in it, and He found it good.” He left them.

  It was Ildri who spoke, his face still pressed to the dirt floor.

  “That was no monk,” he said with conviction. “That was no man, it was death who spoke to us.”

  “It was a man,” Barra said flatly. He studied the girl. “Princess, do you know where you are?”

  She smiled at him.

  “I have been with you all this time, Barra.”

  “Nevertheless, it is good to see you smile once more. I have in my mind that as soon as the first light comes upon us we will leave this place and go on. Mountains, madmen, and snow… nothing shall now stand in our way if you feel that you are ready to journey with us.”

  She turned back to the insistent child, but Barra took it from her.

  “Let Ildri take care of this one for a while. It will do them both much good.”

  10

  The monk of Glen Laghan had said, “In His due Time,” and these were the words of their travail in the winter journey to Inverness. From Dalriada to the land of the eastern Picts it seemed that God drew out the cruel winter with implacable purpose, and their bodies bent to

  His will. The cold was bitter; it was a winter harder than in many years, and the mountains seemed deserted of life, each valley a twin to the crannog’s desolation. The mood of wild loneliness begun at the lake village was not changed. Game for food, even the sight of any other living thing, seemed to have vanished from the earth. Doireann nighean Muireach and her child, with the two Picts, moved slowly through the deep snow of the hillsides, avoiding the deeper drifts in the valleys, and only the forest skill of the Picts kept them from perishing. At the last, in desperation, Barra slew the skeleton-like pony for its meat, submitting to the fact that he must carry the girl on his back, the Northman’s child wailing feebly in Ildri’s arms.

  In this manner, blackened with dirt and exhaustion, like beasts in their snow-crusted clothes, they crept over the last ridge of hills and looked down on the fortress of the King of the Picts. Barra stumbled and fell, Doireann nighean Muireach on top of him, and Ildri sank to his knees in the snow. In the glare of the winter sunshine it was not long before hunters from the fort found them and carried them bodily to the gates.

  Doireann remembered nothing until she fell, and then she saw the gray crumbling ruins of the Roman towers of Inverness far away. And then, as she was carried, a glimpse of the walls of the fort coiling over the hillside, coming nearer with each step, and the leaden sheen of water in the loch beyond. On the back of a Pictish hunter she remembered being carried through bronze gates set in the earthen walls of the castle, many faces, and then the blurred onset of collapse, the giving over to the end of the thing. It did not matter whether they died now, she thought. They had won their battle against the winter and there was no strength left to acknowledge anything else.

  Then the fever came to Doireann and the days were muddled and confused. The child was brought to her at her insistence. She sat somewhere in a dim room and nursed him in the bed and his mouth was cool against her hot skin. She clung to the child with more strength than she clung to life; her blind stubbornness fixed itself on the child in the midst of the illusion, and knew nothing more. From somewhere outside came the sound of rain which wove itself through the dimness, and at night she lay drifting, waking to find faces bending over her, speaking the tongue of the Cruithne. The old language stirred the memory of her childhood, of her mother’s voice, and the dream thickened, carrying her through it unresisting.

  Yet the winter passed. In God’s due time the sky changed from dull gray to lucent blue and green, the hearth fires were put out, the door to the porch opened to let in the breeze from the sea so that the smoke and the fetid winter smells should be driven out. Doireann nighean Muireach put her bare feet on the floor and stood weakly for the first time, looking through the doors to the real world beyond them, realizing that, without wishing it, she had been restored to life.

  By the coming of Eastertide she was able to go out on the small porch to see the crowds of Pictish tribes arriving at Inverness to pay their taxes and celebrate the Easter Mass. It had been a terrible winter in the highlands, and Wilfrid, the Saxon bishop of Inverness, had proclaimed it a time of special thanksgiving for those who had survived. The pilgrims were asked to do more than the usual penance upon confession of their sins, and to give themselves over to a fervent rejoicing in God’s mercy. But, as in every year past, there were the undercurrents of the old pagan ways, and the crowds of Picts surrounding the fort did not hide the mysterious deaths which showed that the dark people had not yet abandoned their way of acknowledging both the new god and the old.

  On Good Friday Doireann heard in the tower room the chant of the

  Saxon fathers at Mass in the castle chapel, and then, later, the noise of the feasting and dancing from the hillsides below where the tribes were camped. They were the same songs and dances which accompanied the ancient Beltane worship. Remote from it all on the small porch which opened from the tower, she could see the fires on the ramparts down to the edge of the loch, the wailing chants of the pagan rites which could be heard even in the Christian chapel below.

  The bishop of Inverness had gone complaining to Nechtan, the King of the Picts in the east, asking that action be taken against the Picts celebrating the pagan feast, but it was said the king refused to be upset. The bishop, the king said, must not look too closely at the tribes who had come so faithfully to pay their church tithes and ho
nor the Christian Easter. One must learn to be patient and accept their gifts and overlook these other matters. It had been a cruel and desolate winter, and many cattle and children were dead of starvation; those who were left should be given a chance to express their joy in being alive. Of course, it was unfortunate that the Christian Easter and the pagan feast of Beltane came almost at the same time, but perhaps it was a good thing, too, in that it gave the priests the opportunity to work that much harder to stamp out the old ways.

  As evidence of good faith the king declared he would do public penance in the fields among his subjects, and his court would set an example by fasting and regular attendance at Mass. Special dispensation was asked for the king’s niece, Doireann nighean Muireach, who was still weak from her journey from Argyll in the land of the Scots.

  Doireann was glad to be excused from the fasting and the processions. As Easter Sunday dawned fine and warm she took her child in her arms to the porch where they watched the parade of monks and pilgrims traveling from the foot of the hill by Loch Inver to the castle gates, led by the Saxon fathers and Wilfrid the bishop in mitre and gown. There seemed to be thousands of worshipers, with them the King of the Picts and his warriors, the ladies of the court, chieftains of petty tribes, and finally the common people, free and slave, many penitently barefoot on the half-thawed ground.

  The procession wound slowly up the hillside past the monoliths and graves of the old sun-worshipers, past the earthen barriers which surrounded the fort, through the bronze gates into the courtyard where the final Easter Mass was to be sung. As the crowds pressed close in the yard under the porch Doireann could look down and see Flann the Culdee among the Saxon priests, his peculiar Irish tonsure easily distinguishable among the other shaven crowns. Flann had been brought to the fortress in late winter by a band of Picts who had found him wandering in the mountains. His captors had been very proud of themselves, thinking to see him burned, but Wilfrid the Saxon had taken charge of him at once, placing the protection of the Roman Church over the defiant Irish brother. The Picts were bewildered. True, Flann had violated the ban on Culdees within the Pictish kingdom which now belonged to the Saxon communion, but Wilfrid could not lend himself to any persecution of the errant Irish Church. It was not an easy thing to be generous to Flann. Like most of the Culdees, he was headstrong and violent about the differences of the two churches, and this seemed only to convince the Picts that here was indeed a heretic who needed burning. Even though Flann vehemently denied the Saxon Church had any authority over him, Wilfrid graciously offered a teaching position in the court schools, the only alternative being Nechtan’s prisons.