Spirit of the Mist

by Janeen O'Kerry

  Now the rest of the men and women of Dun Bochna, those who had followed Brendan and Muriel, began to file past the end of the grave. Each handed down whatever he had brought for his king.

  The warrior men and the druids offered beautiful objects and ornaments of lustrous gold—plates and cups, wristbands and finger rings. Then the women filed past and handed down their own offerings: leather skins filled with blackberry wine, small golden cups of honey, a basket of bread topped with butter, a gold plate with a heavy thigh of beef resting up on it.

  The men in the grave took down the objects as they were offered and placed them all around the edge of the rectangle, leaning the weapons against the stone-covered sides and arranging the food and plates and gold jewelry all at one end of the pit. When at last all was ready, they caught the hands of the men at the surface and climbed out, then stood back as the seven warriors slowly and carefully lowered the body of the king into its final place of rest.

  The druids unrolled two long sheets of leather and allowed them to drop into the grave, so that the king and all his possessions were now hidden from sight. The seven warriors then used wooden spades to throw the heavy, damp earth back into the grave from whence it had been taken. They worked in silence, unashamed of performing the menial task because it was in service to their king.

  With the grave filled in, Colum stepped forward to stand beside it, facing the gathering and holding out the king’s torque. “People of Dun Bochna,” he called, “this day you have laid the body of your king to rest in the forest. You have given him the things he will need and the things he will desire in his next life, and he will reside in the Otherworld until such time as he is reborn in this one.

  “He served us well in life. And you have served him well in his death. Now do this last service for him, and we will return home behind Brendan, his son, the chosen tanist of Dun Bochna.”

  One by one the men and women walked to the great pile of stones nearby, took one in each hand, then walked to toss them atop the newly turned earth of Galvin’s grave as they passed. Finally, all of the stones had been moved to the grave and formed a cairn above it.

  “King Galvin lies safe and protected,” said Colum. “Now it is for us to return to his hall and celebrate his life.” He looked to Brendan, who started on his way with Muriel beside him; but just as they started down the path Muriel heard a little gasp from behind them.

  She turned around to see Colum stagger, half leaning on the arm of one of Dun Bochna’s warriors as though he had just stumbled. Apparently he had, for Muriel saw the heavy gold torque of kingship clatter across the rocks of the cairn and settle halfway down.

  It was the final addition to the grave of the old king. Colum reached down to pick it up, turning pale as it caught on the heavy rocks. It seemed he would not be able to free it, but at last he lifted up the golden torque and carried it away, and the procession continued down the path which led back to the fortress.

  That evening Muriel sat beside her husband at the feast, listening to the merry music, smiling and laughing with the others at the tales of King Galvin’s heroics. She found herself enjoying, as everyone was, the happy memories of a strong king and a life well lived.

  Everyone, it seemed, but Brendan. He was far more subdued than Muriel had ever seen him. She rested her fingers on his arm and leaned down to catch his eye, smiling gently when at last he turned to look at her. His strange eyes were somber now, almost unreadable in the shadows of the lamps.

  “So many fine tributes to your father,” she said. “And to see the best one of all, you have only to look at the faces of the people gathered here tonight. Each one shows peace and gratitude at having lived under the rule of Galvin.”

  “Most have never lived under any other king,” Brendan answered, then took a long drink from his gold cup. “He was king for many more years than I have been alive. It will not be the same without him.”

  “It will not,” Muriel agreed. “But this place will be as safe, and as happy, and as just, under the rule of King Brendan.” She held his arm a little tighter, and he set down his goblet and turned to her to take her hand. Still, his face was somber and serious.

  “King Brendan,” he murmured, then shook his head. “Now it is my turn to tell you, my lady, that I am not a king yet. I saw the king’s torque fall from Colum’s hand and come to rest on Galvin’s cairn…and I am not ashamed to tell you that the sight of it left me cold.”

  He laughed a little. “Before I tried to calm your fears. Now I am the one telling you that I saw a sign that has unnerved me. This time I am the one who is taking it to heart.” He tried to smile. “I am surprised that you have not.”

  She placed her other hand atop his. “I saw what happened. And I never fail to take such things to heart, as you well know. And yet…”

  Muriel paused, gazing out over the lamps where the people laughed and applauded the bards’ stories. “And yet I can also see what is plain and true and undisputed. The old king is gone. The tanist has been named, and you are that tanist, as loved and respected as your father was, and the people look to you with nothing but trust.”

  She smiled and smoothed the warm skin of his fingers. “Even I, always the first to worry, can find little cause to worry now.”

  He looked at her, and she could see the doubt that remained in his eyes; and then he shrugged and looked away. “Well… Colum never was known for his agility.”

  Muriel tried to suppress her amusement. She put a hand to her mouth, but it was too late.

  The two of them put their heads together and laughed out loud. “There, you see?” Muriel asked, sitting back. “Some signs are not really signs at all. Sometimes they are just a bit of clumsiness.”

  Brendan laughed again and leaned forward to kiss her cheek. “I hope you are right,” he said. “I hope you are right.” But his face soon became serious again. He lifted his cup and went on staring at nothing, paying no heed to the music and the storytelling just across the room.

  Muriel touched his arm. “If you have no ear for the poetry tonight…would you play a game of fidchell with me?”

  His face brightened a little. “You can play fidchell?”

  “Of course. And it is more than a game. It can also be a divination.”

  “So it is.” Brendan set down his cup and got to his feet, reaching down to help Muriel up. “A game of fidchell it will be, then.”

  They sat down together on a bench, a little space apart, and a servant brought them the fidchell board. Brendan placed it between himself and Muriel and began to set it up.

  The board itself was a flat oaken square with seven rows of seven holes. An immense wooden box held the two sets of playing pieces, which were large, heavy oak pegs capped with either gold or bronze. Muriel took out the first set, unwrapping the heavy pieces from their protective linen squares, and set them before Brendan.

  “You take the king and his defenders. Somehow it doesn’t seem quite right for anyone else to play the king.”

  He grinned. “I’ll take the king, and tremble in fear at the thought of you being the attacker.” Taking the king peg, which was capped with a gold sea-dragon’s head much like those on his own torque, Brendan placed it on the center square and surrounded it with defenders.

  These other pegs were just a little smaller and capped with the gold heads of dolphins.

  Muriel took the attackers, which were all capped with bronze hawks with outstretched wings, and arranged them along the sides. “I believe the attacker goes first. Is that how you have played?”

  “It is. Go ahead.”

  The game began with Muriel moving her pieces along the rows in an attempt to surround the king, and Brendan trying to get the king safely moved to one of the corner holes. They battled back and forth, arguing, laughing, playing their best, until at last Brendan seemed to have the win right in front of him.

  “Well, my lady wife,” he said with a laugh, “you said that fidchell was a divination as well as a game. What do
you make of my great victory?”

  She laughed as well. “I should say that this game has given you a very good sign. Perhaps we should play it often.”

  “We should. And we will. But first…” He lifted up the king by its gold sea-dragon head to make the winning play.

  The peg dropped off of the head and clattered to the board below. Brendan was left holding the heavy head in his fingers. In shock, he let go of it, and it too fell to the board.

  Muriel caught her breath. Quickly she reached out to grab the broken pieces. Lifting them up, she saw that the heavy gold sea-dragon head had left a deep gouge in the polished wooden board.

  “That board has been in my father’s family for longer than anyone can remember,” Brendan whispered. He touched a finger to the damaged spot. “Look what I have done to it.”

  “You have done nothing to it,” Muriel said. “Here—look here. The cap will fit back onto the peg. It simply needs a craftsman’s attentions. It is loose, do you see? No doubt it has been so for a very long time.”

  She began wrapping up the pieces in the linen squares and replacing them in the boxes. “It was a great victory. And I do not often lose at this game! Come, Brendan, help me put it away, and then we will return home. I can only imagine how tired you must be after all that has happened in the last few days.”

  “I will look for no more signs,” he said. “No more signs.” Muriel glanced up at him, but he made no move to touch the pieces or the board. “And I may never play this game again.”

  He stood up. “Please. Leave that for the servants to put away. I want only to go with you to our home, and tomorrow I want to think of nothing but preparing for the kingmaking at Lughnasa—not signs, not messages, not magic, and certainly not games of fidchell.”

  He glanced down at the game and its scattered pieces. “And since I am not a king yet, as I am constantly reminded, I will think only of what I can do to be a prince until I am made a king. That should be enough to keep my mind occupied until that day.”

  Muriel tried to smile. “I will do anything I can to help you.”

  “Just come home with me and love me, and always stay by my side,” he whispered.

  “Done,” she whispered in return, and together they left the hall.

  Beginning the very next day, and for many days thereafter, Brendan threw himself into the role of king. Each morning he would say the same thing to Muriel: “I cannot wait for a ritual to make me king. I cannot wait until Lughnasa. I must begin now, so that there will be no doubt in anyone’s mind what I am. Not mine—not yours—not anyone’s.”

  Muriel could only nod and reach up to kiss him. “Everyone knows that you are a king,” she would say, then smile. “Even I am convinced. No one doubts you, Brendan.”

  “Don’t they?” he would ask, and she would see the unsure glint that lingered in his eyes. But then he would kiss her in return and go off to do all the things that a king might be expected to do, making every effort to do them twice as well.

  Brendan started his tour of his lands close to home. He began by walking through the dun and inspecting the great hall and the armory and the horse pens and the cattle sheds and every one of the houses, directing the craftsmen to repair the thatching on one house or add to the smooth white clay on another, or set to work making more wooden and iron buckets since some of the old ones were beginning to wear out.

  But he quickly moved on to matters outside the everyday concerns of daily life in the dun. Muriel could see that he was anxious to range farther out in larger and larger circles, determined to see every man and woman and child and tree and rock and flower and blade of grass with his own eyes—now the eyes of a king.

  He wanted to speak to all of the farmers and herders and their families living in the raths, those small isolated ring-forts just large enough for a family and their livestock. They must all be told of the death of Galvin and that Brendan’s kingmaking would be done at Lughnasa. They should all see for themselves that now they had a new king.

  “Go to them, Brendan,” Muriel said. “I can see to the repairs and the work that must be done here. You already know about the thatching and the shortage of buckets; and I have noticed that some of the stones have fallen from the outermost ring and need to be replaced. I will see that it is done.”

  He grinned, looking as happy as she had seen him since the night of his father’s wake. “Together we will make this a kingdom like no other,” he said. “Though…should a queen have to concern herself with buckets and stones?”

  She smiled back at him. “I’m sure that being a queen is not all about gold cups and finely woven gowns. Go, Brendan. See to our farmers, and I will see to things here.”

  He kissed her once more. “Keep my love while I am gone. I will return to you as soon as I can.” She watched as he rode away with four of his men and tried not to wonder when she might see him again.

  As Muriel left her husband at the gates and walked back inside the dun’s stone perimeter, she followed the curving inner wall past the cattle pens. She was in a hurry to get back to the King’s Hall, and her mind whirled with ideas and plans for the many tasks she hoped to complete before Brendan’s return—but when she passed the low wooden shed at one end of the cattle pens, something made her stop.

  A single black cow lay in the shed, chewing her cud; and in the corners, on worn piles of rushes and straw, a group of people—a group of slaves, she realized— shared chunks of old bread and passed a wooden cup of water among themselves.

  Muriel paused, then walked to the wooden fence rails, placing her hands on the top and leaning in to peer beneath the shed’s roof. She looked from face to pale and dirty face, and recognized the fourteen slaves that she and Brendan had found hiding in the woods on their wedding journey to Dun Bochna.

  The seven men, four women, and three children had been here for the past several days, for as long as Muriel had been here; but with all of her time taken up first with preparing for her wedding and then with the death of Galvin, Muriel had not seen them at all. And since their arrival here, she was ashamed to say, she had not thought of them either.

  But now here they were. “’Why are you out here in the cow shed?” she asked. “Were you given no other place?”

  They all looked up at her and froze. Eventually two of the men got to their feet but stayed where they were. The women gathered their children close. “The craftsmen said they would return and give us work for today,” said the tallest man, the one with a hood half covering his face.

  “They told us to wait here and eat first,” added the second.

  “Of course,” Muriel said, folding her hands across the rail. “Do not hurry yourselves. I meant only to ask why you have been forced to stay in such a place. Do the servants here not sleep in the King’s Hall, or in one of the houses?”

  “My lady,” said the hooded man from where he stood in the shadows, “the roughest shed is a finer home than any we have known before. The smallest crust is a better meal than any to be had at Odhran’s fortress. We will stay here. Servants may sleep in the King’s Hall, but not slaves.”

  Muriel could only stare at them, seeing in their gaunt faces and thin and weakened bodies a lifetime of suffering. Her fists tightened. She had told Brendan she would take care of things within the dun, and there would be no better place to start than here.

  “Tell me your name,” she said to the hooded man.

  He hesitated. “Gill,” he said at last. “My name is Gill.” Muriel looked at him again.

  This was the same man who had spoken to her and Brendan on that night when they had discovered these slaves hiding in the forest. As before, he kept a hood up over his head, leaving only a few wisps of white hair showing around his face. He still had the old piece of narrow leather tied over his brow so that it covered his left eye. He was taller than any of the others, and looked strong and broad-shouldered in spite of his age.

  For a moment he seemed to remind her of someone she knew, or had once kn
own, but she could not imagine who that might be. She was not well acquainted with anyone who had ever been a slave.

  “Gill.” She smiled at him, and at all of them. “Starting tonight you will all make your beds in the clean rushes of the King’s Hall where it is dry and there is a fire to keep out the evening chill. In fact…” She glanced at the children finishing the last of their stale bread. “I would like you all to go there now. The rest of the servants have got fresh bread with butter, and dried apples boiled in milk. There is enough for you, too.”

  The men and women all looked at each other, sitting as they were in the cowpens. “My lady—we are slaves. We wear the iron collars and wristbands of slaves. We are not—”

  “Gill,” she broke in. “There is one thing you must learn about Dun Bochna. We may have servants here, but no slaves. Go now; go to the hall and get your share of the food. Find my servant Alvy and tell her I sent you. When you have eaten, go to the armorer’s house. I will tell him to remove your iron bands.”

  After briefly looking at each other, the women took their children and hurried away from the cowshed toward the riches that awaited them in the hall. The men followed, Gill last of all, and he glanced at Muriel with his single brown eye as he walked past.

  “No slaves,” she whispered. “Never slaves.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  For another fortnight, Muriel spent every waking moment making each part of Dun Bochna as new and perfect as she possibly could. The work not only allowed her to show Brendan what she could do for him as his queen, and of how much this place meant to her as her new home, it also kept her from thinking about him, and worrying for him, with every moment that passed without his return.

  “He is a king now, Lady Muriel,” Alvy would say. “From now on he will often be called away to see to the safety of his people. And they do not all live within the confines of these walls.”

  Muriel would smile and try to keep her voice light, saying, “If even you believe he is a king, then it must be so.”