Nothing here was about me. In the shadows beyond the torchlight lurked the unguessable.
Of my own volition I restricted my meals to only half of what I had eaten in the beginning. I was aware that our food stores were running out.
The stones began to press in on us. The walls around us drew closer, with all the weight of the earth behind them. The dome above us sank lower. “It drops down in the night when we’re asleep,” fearful little Piriome confided to me.
The air became chokingly thick with torch smoke. The stench from the passageway where we relieved ourselves was dreadful. When the Dagda went to try to clean it up, I followed him. “What do you think you’re doing, Joss?”
“I want to help you.”
“This is no task for a child.”
“I’m not a child,” I insisted. Without waiting for him to offer, I took some of the bundled sticks and dead leaves he carried. We crouched side by side, scrubbing away the filth and parceling out a little of our water for rinsing. It was an unpleasant task. To distract myself, I said, “Can you tell me any more about the people who built this?”
For once the Dagda gave me a straight answer, but it was not enlightening. “Only the stones survive,” he said. He dropped his few remaining sticks and straightened up to massage the small of his back. “Now—shall we see if my wife has any fruit bread left?”
As I followed him up the passageway, my attention was caught by a sound from outside. A distant roar, like the voice of an angry sea. I caught hold of the Dagda’s elbow. “Do you hear that?”
He turned to face me. Cocked his head for a moment. “The question is, Do you hear something, Joss?”
“Of course I do. It’s…” I struggled for words. “It’s coming from far away and it’s terrible, like hundreds of voices all screaming at once. What is it?”
He did not answer. But his shoulders slumped as if receiving a blow.
When we entered the chamber, I could still hear the roaring, even through the embrace of the earth. No one else appeared to hear anything unusual. Neither the Dagda nor I mentioned it again. Gradually the sound faded away.
That night everyone was restless. To lull the little ones to sleep, Melitt sang the songs of a gentler time. Listening to them, I tried to hear my mother’s voice.
The Dagda made several trips down the passageway and returned without saying anything. At last, he lay down and took his wife in his arms. I presume they slept.
A cry of alarm roused me from a troubled sleep. I pulled my blanket around me and ran into the passage. In the dark I collided with one of the standing stones and bumped my forehead very hard but felt no pain until days later.
The entrance to the passageway was shielded by the boulder the Dagda had referred to as the Guardian Stone. For all its size and bulk, it was not sufficient to protect my bare legs from a chill wind blowing up from the river.
I stepped outside with no idea what to expect.
The stars were dimming with the promise of dawn. The Dagda was holding a torch aloft. By its light I saw my father coming up the slope toward us, carrying a large bundle in his arms. Mongan staggered as he walked; his unsteady feet slipped on the grass. The old man hurried to help him, but Mongan warned him away. “Mine,” said my father in a shredded voice. At first I thought he was carrying a bundle of robes with the sleeves hanging down. Then I saw her white hands. And a familiar bracelet on one slim wrist. The middle of the bundle was soaked with blood.
Mongan stopped in front of me, breathing like an ox that had been ploughing stony ground. His reddened eyes burned into mine. With a trembling hand, he uncovered her face long enough for me to see it. “Remember,” he commanded.
The word sank into my flesh and crystallized in my bones like an early frost.
ELEVEN
“ONLY THE STONES SURVIVE” was one of the many sayings the Túatha Dé Danann passed on to their children. The words hid a deeper truth. Staring down at my mother’s dead face that morning, I learned the world was not what I had thought it was. And survival was conditional.
“Remember,” Mongan reiterated.
And I did.
At his command, my spirit opened like the petals of a flower. Half-naked and trembling with emotion, I began to absorb. No effort was required; I could not have stopped myself. Every detail of my surroundings burned itself irrevocably into my mind.
The lake of the sky was fading from bottomless blue to icy rose, the herald of approaching winter. From where I stood, the breast of the hill hid the river from me, but I could hear the song of dark water. I could smell the mud in which the reeds grew. Brittle reeds chattered in a rising wind.
My skin reported the advance spears of icy rain striking my cheek.
We would have an early frost.
Behind me—the back of my neck was aware of its size and weight—rose another hill, smaller and steeper: the mound built by those who were here Before the Before. I turned around to look at it. And caught my breath.
The front of the mound was covered with white quartz pebbles that reflected points of fire from the Dagda’s torch. Seen from below by travelers in boats on the river, the structure would have glimmered like the moon.
Temple.
Carrying my mother in his arms, Mongan edged around the Guardian Stone and entered the passageway. I followed at his heels. The Dagda and his torch were close behind me. By its wavering light I saw my father gather his dead wife closer, trying to keep her dangling feet from being bruised by the stones lining the passage.
To this day my legs recall the slight angle of the slope. My nose can recapture the scent of sweet earth and stone dust. My ears still hear the hiss and crackle of the torch and the first gurgle of rainwater in the drainage channels buried in the walls.
I remember.
Where the passageway took a slight bend, Mongan paused. I almost bumped into him; I do not think he was aware of me. He carefully adjusted the weight he was carrying before we entered the main chamber.
Melitt gave a little moan when she saw him with his burden. The old woman’s body folded in upon itself, assuming the shape of grief.
Mongan carried Lerys to the recess at the back of the central chamber and laid her down, oh so gently, in the stone basin. Then he briefly fumbled amid her bloody clothing.
He lifted up a tiny pink creature.
Before coming to us my father had delivered his daughter himself, cutting her free from the dying womb of his wife. I can only imagine the pain it had cost him to rescue their child.
My first glimpse of my sister was as baffling as anything else that happened that night. Mistaking her for a small animal that had gnawed my mother’s breast, I darted forward to punish her with my fists.
With the next heartbeat I saw her clearly. As clearly as I shall always see her in my mind. A wizened, bowlegged scrap of a thing with blood drying on her skin; the long head and large eyes and a wisp of pale hair atop her skull; the miniature fingers opening and closing on the air. The unformed features already resembling my mother’s.
“Remember,” my father said a third time.
From that moment and forever, I could not forget. My dead mother’s face and my living sister’s tiny fists and the capstone above us and the mass of earth and stone containing us. One of my cousins beginning to sob. A tiny spider weaving its web to bridge the space between two rocks. The blood ringing in my ears and my mother’s blood drying on her daughter. I shall carry those memories to my grave.
Yet time passes, and passes. And still I live.
Before you ask, I do not know how old I am. My people had such long lives they did not bother to measure them. They lived as long as they wanted and then moved on.
Except for me.
My cousins and I were herded into a different recess, and Melitt tried to arrange a blanket across the opening. “The youngsters do not need to see this,” she said over her shoulder.
“No,” the Dagda agreed.
I protested. “But she’s my mot
her!”
In a voice I hardly recognized, Mongan said, “Come to me then, Joss.”
Melitt raised the edge of the blanket, and I went out.
My father stood beside my mother’s body, gazing down at her. His back was rigid with the effort to control himself. When I joined him, he turned to me and rested his hand on my shoulder. Only a few days before, he would have put his hand atop my head.
My eyes were now on a level with his chin.
For the first time I saw Mongan of the Túatha Dé Danann, really saw him rather than just recognizing him as my father. I had never seen any of them in that way before; they were simply the furniture of my life.
When I was a child.
Mongan had silver-gilt hair and large gray eyes that sloped downward at the outer edge. The planes of his face were finely modeled, with a noble brow and tapering chin. His ears were only slightly pointed and fitted close against his skull.
Until I saw the invaders up close, I would not appreciate how slender my father was. We all were. By comparison with the sturdily built foreigners, the Children of Light looked as ephemeral as frost and fire. A puff of wind might blow any of us away.
Looks can be deceiving.
I watched my new sister being cleaned and wrapped in a blanket and saw the beginning of the process by which Melitt and Mongan tended my mother. The Dagda stood off to one side, his lips moving silently. I was reminded of the distant roaring I heard the evening before. The roaring that was over now.
Sound without words; words without sound.
Mongan and Melitt gently removed my mother’s bloody clothing and bathed her ruined body with our drinking water. The final steps of preparing her were too intimate to see. Melitt asked her husband to take the rest of us outside.
The thin cry of the baby followed us as far as the Guardian Stone.
The fresh, cold air was welcome after the noisome atmosphere in the chamber. I drew a deep breath and filled my chest all the way to the bottom. The rain had passed; the rising sun was celebrated by myriads of songbirds. Placid sheep were grazing on the hillside.
Children with little experience of life are unprepared for the event of a death. My cousin Demirci suddenly burst into tears. His younger brother Trialet gave a nervous giggle, and little Piriome caught my hand and pressed anxiously against my side. As for me, I just stood there. Letting the day fill me up.
I had once asked the Dagda, “What was I before I was born?”
“You were you. A rather different version, but you.”
“What will I be after I die?”
“You can still be you,” the old man replied reassuringly. “A different version, but you. Minds forget, but spirit remembers.”
Without Lerys, there was no milk to feed Drithla. Fortunately, Melitt could do more than bake bread. She carefully selected various items of food and chewed them to a soft paste that she blended with water, then fed to the baby on the tip of her finger. Drithla tasted it, suckled at the proffered finger as if it were a nipple, then refused the remainder by spluttering and crying. Melitt altered the mixture slightly and tried again. And again. A drop of honey; the squeezing from a berry. Try again.
The baby consumed enough to stay alive. Then all at once she began eating with enthusiasm. Soon she was thriving on her diet; the spark of life in my little sister was very strong. Life has a way of enduring.
So does death. The opposite ends of the same experience, the Dagda said.
My mother’s death introduced me to the uncertain borderland that lies between the dead and the living. Mongan insisted that Lerys was always near him, close enough to summon if he chose. She might be singing songs beside the lake, he said, or dancing in a beam of sunlight in the meadow.
I wanted to believe him; I did believe him. The expression on his face assured me she was visible to him. He cocked his head as if listening to her voice. My eyes could not see her and my ears could not hear her, but that was my fault and not hers. Lerys was there; a permanent yet intangible presence.
Faith was my father’s greatest gift to me.
Mongan na Manannan Mac Lir was a prince of the highest rank. Nobility confers obligation. Mongan’s share of the fighting was over, but the real struggle had only begun.
As his son and heir, most of it would fall to me.
The New People gave us no time to mourn.
While the blood was still drying on the battlefield where my mother died, they began sending out warriors to locate the remainder of the Túatha Dé Danann. It would be a mistake to leave any members of such a troublesome race alive.
Cynos, son of Greine and the great queen Eriu, summoned an urgent meeting of what remained of the Danann army, to be joined by the surviving elders. Not at the Gathering Place, which now was behind enemy lines, but in a glade hidden deep in the woods. Cynos was the ranking warrior of his generation, the courageous men and women who had borne the brunt of the war so far and been almost destroyed. A brilliant crop full of promise for the future, brutally harvested by blades of cold iron.
Cynos himself had been badly injured. There were not enough of the tribe left to perform the healing ritual, but some of the wounded would survive anyway. Until they died, they would bear, on their beautiful, perfect bodies, the battle scars, like constellations of cruel stars.
Cynos was carried to the glade in the woods on a litter.
My father took me with him. He walked to the meeting on his own feet but kept one hand firmly on my shoulder. Only he and I knew how much he needed my support.
The Dagda was accorded the place of honor as chief elder. Melitt sat next to him with little Drithla in her arms. The sadness in the old woman’s eyes was mirrored in my father’s, and surely in mine too.
Cynos was barely able to talk. He only managed to gasp, “We have to plan our next step,” before doubling up with a violent fit of coughing. A second try was no better. At last he gestured to Mongan, as the next in rank, to conduct the meeting. My father began with a tight-lipped speech of welcome while Cynos lay crumpled beside him like a pile of discarded blankets.
When it was the turn of those in attendance to speak if they wished, Dos, whose throat was swathed in cobwebs held in place with linen, croaked like a frog. But at least we could hear him. “We made a grave error by demonstrating any of our powers,” said the Prince of the Lakes. “The invaders will enslave us in order to gain control of…”
Dos was interrupted by Torrian, the youngest of the surviving princes. There were only five of them, counting my father. One of Torrian’s ears was torn, and a jagged wound on his forehead was seeping fluid. The heat of battle was still in him, though; I sensed it quivering in the air. One of his grandfather’s grandfathers had been Nuada of the Silver Hand. “On the contrary, Dos,” he said. “We should have hit them with everything we had.”
“Everything but the Earthkillers,” amended the daughter of Fodla the Wise.
“Especially the Earthkillers!” cried the younger brother of Samoll the spear carrier. “We should have used them on the foreigners as soon as they set foot on our shores!”
One of the elders was shocked. “Remember what Eriu said? We cannot employ horrors without becoming horrible too.”
Like a river that burst its banks, unvoiced mutterings poured into my defenseless head. The sudden pain left me reeling. When I looked around for help, I saw the Dagda watching me with a quizzical expression.
Can you hear me, Joss? No, do not try to answer yet. Let your gift grow until it is stronger.
“I don’t want it!” I cried.
You have no choice. You must have inherited the gift from your mother; it only comes to a few of us. And never before to a child.
I looked away from him and closed my eyes as tight as I could, willing myself to shut everything out.
The argument continued on two levels, and I was the unwilling recipient of both. If the full complement of the tribe had been alive and present, their silent voices would have destroyed my mind.
Never to a child, the Dagda had said.
“We could survive here for the darkseason,” one of the elders suggested. I could barely hear him through the cacophony in my head, but I struggled to concentrate. “Maybe the invaders won’t come this far. If they do, perhaps we can avoid them for a while as we did before. Then by leaf-spring, we can…”
In voice clotted with pain, a woman grimly predicted, “By leaf-spring we’ll all be in chains.”
“We came here by sea,” said someone else. “We could build boats and…”
“And go where? Back to the last place we came from? By now another race will have been there for generations. It was good land, and they won’t give it up; why should they? They would rightly see us as invaders.”
“Persuade them that we come in peace!” exclaimed Melitt. Warm, soft, old Melitt who never raised her voice.
Torrian scoffed. “Would that make any difference to long-settled people who must consider themselves natives by now? I seriously doubt it. We would have to fight them, and what weapons would we use? Should we dig up the Earthkillers and try to carry them back across the sea? They would probably disintegrate on the voyage. We would arrive with only our battered bronze and have to face iron again, I suspect. I can tell you how that would turn out.”
“More and more war,” rasped Dos. “Killing and more killing. No end to it. No end at all.” With a groan like a death cry, he pulled his cloak over his head.
The Dananns turned toward my father then, seeking answers. Mongan looked old. Older than the Dagda, older than the hills. “As a people, we outgrew our enthusiasm for killing long ago,” he said wearily. “We brought upon ourselves the original catastrophe that left us homeless. Before the Before our ancestors thought they finally had found a new home here. This island fit us like our own skin. If we leave it, we may be homeless forever. If we stay, we will be slaughtered or enslaved; probably both. There are no other choices.”
Only the Stones Survive: A Novel Page 9