Sacrifice

by Philip Freeman

  When we had finished, we walked to the water to wash, then the three of us went in front of the hut to talk. Kevin looked so shaken that I was afraid he was going to fall down, so I suggested we sit on the grass.

  “Deirdre,” Dari said at last, “please don’t tell me this is some kind of sacrifice performed in the old days.”

  I couldn’t even look her in the eyes as I spoke.

  “I can tell you this much. In ancient times, on rare occasions, there was a sacrifice of human flesh to the three mother goddesses of the earth, the givers of life. The victim was always an older woman of the tribe, a volunteer, who gave her body as an offering for her people. The druids would kill her painlessly, then dismember her flesh to cook in a cauldron. When it was finished, it was placed into the earth as an offering to the goddesses. But such a thing hasn’t been done for many centuries.”

  “Does that mean the killer is coming back?” Kevin asked. “Maybe we could wait here and catch him.”

  “I don’t think so. He would see that the fire was out anyway and know that someone had been here. He wouldn’t approach the crannog now. He may have wanted us to find her like this anyway, just to make it more horrible for everyone.”

  Dari shuddered and looked at me.

  “You keep saying ‘he’—but how do you know it isn’t a woman doing all this? Do you think women aren’t capable of such cruelty?”

  “No, it’s not because of that. I’ve known women in my life who could be as vicious as any man, but I don’t think that’s the case with these murders. There are many female druids, but few are trained sacrificers. It’s just not a specialty that attracts many women.”

  “But you said every druid receives the training to perform these rituals. Why would it have to be a sacrificer?”

  “It wouldn’t necessarily, but these murders show a detailed knowledge of anatomy and working with flesh. I could be wrong, but I think whoever is doing them is either a sacrificer or has a lot of experience butchering animals.”

  “What about those two fishermen?” Kevin asked. “Could they have done this?”

  “I don’t see how,” I said. “They’re not druids and they probably haven’t slaughtered anything bigger than a salmon. Besides, they aren’t the type who would commit murder.”

  “Are you sure you could recognize the type of person who would?” asked Dari.

  I sighed and looked at the remains of Pelagia on the blanket.

  “Maybe not.”

  We sat quietly for a few minutes, listening to the birds singing in the trees beyond the pond.

  “Deirdre,” Dari asked at last, “should we bury her here, or take what’s left of her body back to Kildare?”

  “Normally I would say we should take her remains back to the cemetery, but I don’t think that’s practical in this case.”

  “Then let’s just take her skull,” she said. “There should be something of her to bury beneath a cross in our cemetery.”

  We all agreed; so while Kevin dug a hole in back of the house, Dari took the skull from the top of the blanket and wrapped it gently inside her new veil. We then raised the blanket from the corners, tied them together in the center, and carefully lowered the bundle into the hole. Kevin filled it in and we stood together to say a short prayer.

  Dari went back inside the hut and brought out both the cross on the wall and the pearls. She placed them along with the skull in her satchel, and then we walked back across the bridge down the road that led to Kildare.

  No one spoke a word on the whole journey back.

  It was becoming dark when we finally reached the front gate of the monastery. Sister Anna was standing next to it with two of the king’s guards. I presumed she was giving them instructions to go and search for Dari and Kevin when she saw us coming. I stopped at the edge of the woods about a hundred feet from the gate. Dari looked back at me, then walked on to Sister Anna. I stood there as I saw her talking with the abbess, who reached out at one point to steady herself on the gatepost.

  Dari, Kevin, and the guards went inside the monastery just as the last rays of the sun faded from the western sky. Sister Anna remained there, looking out at me in the distance as I waited. Then she went back inside the monastery grounds and closed the gate behind her.

  Chapter Twelve

  I spent most of that night thinking about the three murdered sisters. Two of them were from the eastern clans of my own tribe and of course all three were nuns; but aside from that, they had had very little in common. The only other similarity between the three was that Brigid had changed their lives—though this could be said for many of the nuns.

  Grainne was an old woman from a peasant family who had become a Christian when she met Brigid fifty years earlier after losing her husband and young daughter to a fever. She had told me once that she had been on the verge of killing herself when Brigid came to her small farm and helped her find her way back to life. Saoirse, on the other hand, was from a wealthy family of the local warrior nobility who had been raised as a Christian from childhood. She often said that her earliest memory was sitting in Brigid’s lap when she was no more than three years old, listening to our founder as she laughed and told her stories. Pelagia stood apart from the other two as a foreigner and a woman with an almost mystical reputation, among Christians and druids alike. One of the few things I knew about her was a story I had heard from Brigid herself. She said she had met Pelagia even before she founded the monastery, in the early days when she had come to Kildare to try to persuade King Dúnlaing to lease her the land for the monastery. She had seen Pelagia on the road one rainy night and invited her back to her hut. Even though they couldn’t speak the same language, Pelagia had somehow communicated that she had been wandering for a long time and wanted to find a place where she could live alone and pray. Brigid had led her to the small crannog and helped her settle there as a solitary.

  That was the magic of Brigid. She had the gift of seeing inside everyone she met and giving each what they needed. Sometimes it was nothing more than a kind word or a jar of honey, sometimes it was healing and a new beginning. But if the murderer was targeting victims whose lives Brigid had changed, he would have to kill most of the people in Kildare.

  I left my grandmother’s house before sunrise and set off down the path back to Finian’s farm. About two hours later, I was passing by the short trail that branched off to Cill Fine, the oldest church in Ireland. It had been founded almost a century earlier by Palladius, the first bishop in Ireland. Palladius was a member of the Gaulish nobility who had served Pope Celestine as a deacon and church diplomat on missions to his homeland and Britain. Celestine ordained him and sent him to the south of Ireland when he received word that there were Christian slaves captured from Britain on our island. Palladius had limited success in persuading Irish slave-owners to let him minister to their property, but he did found several churches over the years he worked in Leinster. Cell Fine was the only one still standing. Inside the church was the tomb of Palladius and an altar with relics of Peter and Paul brought from Rome. The churchmen at Armagh were always embarrassed by the fact that Palladius had arrived in Ireland long before their patron Patrick. They tried to minimize his contribution and claimed he had left in disgrace after only a year or two, but everyone in our province knew better. My grandmother remembered meeting him when she was a little girl and said he was a kindly old man dedicated to good works.

  The old church was no longer used for services, but one of our solitaries, Sister Fedelm, had moved there years ago as a caretaker and lived in it as her hermitage. She was another of the nuns from the eastern clans of our tribe, but I wasn’t worried about her safety since she had returned to the monastery immediately after Sister Anna’s order. I liked Fedelm, but she was one of the most nervous people I had ever met. One Sunday when she was back at the monastery for services, a small mouse ran across the floor in front of us on the sisters’ side of the church as we knelt in prayer. She ran screaming from the room just as Fath
er Ailbe was blessing the wine for the Eucharist, almost making him drop the chalice.

  As I passed the Cill Fine trail, a man came stumbling toward me from the direction of the church. He was bleeding from a wound behind his ear. I recognized him at once as Brother Michael, our new monk from Gaul. I ran to him just as he collapsed onto the ground.

  “Michael, what happened? What are you doing here?”

  He was moaning and incoherent, so I gave him some water and held him up against myself to drink it.

  “Please, try to tell me.”

  He recognized me at last and grabbed my robe with his hand as he began shouting something incomprehensible at me in his native language. He was still trying to learn Irish.

  “Michael, I don’t speak Gaulish! Tell me in Latin.”

  He nodded.

  “Deirdre,” he said slowly. “We came back for the relics. Fedelm forgot to take them when she left. She was worried about them. I was her guard . . . her guard.”

  “Where is Fedelm?” I demanded.

  “In the church,” he said. “I didn’t see him. He hit me from behind. I blacked out. I couldn’t help her. Holy God, Deirdre. I swear, I couldn’t help her.”

  I left him lying in the grass and started to run down the trail to the church.

  When I got there, the door was open. I drew my sword and rushed inside—but I knew I would be too late. The fourth sacrifice was to Crom Crúach, the darkest of Irish gods. Some Christians called him Lucifer, the devil, but he was nothing like the biblical angel of light who fell from heaven. Crom Crúach was primordial chaos, the embodiment of the madness that always threatens to tear our world apart. Few Irish actually worshiped him, but the druids taught that neither could we ignore him. Even darkness has its place in the balance of the universe.

  Fedelm was stretched out on her back on top of the altar in the front of the small church. Her tunic had been torn from her. Her arms and legs were tied firmly to the bottom of the altar. She was cut open in a single deep incision from the base of her throat to her lower belly. Fedelm’s heart rested on the altar next to her. Her face was frozen in horror. Victims dedicated to Crom Crúach were not given mistletoe to drink, and they were never volunteers. It was an essential part of this darkest of sacrificial rituals that they be innocents, usually slaves, taken unaware and tied to an altar against their will. They would be forced to watch, still alive, as they were slit open and their beating heart pulled from their body.

  I closed her eyes. Her skin was still warm to the touch. The murder couldn’t have happened more than a half hour earlier. I rushed out the door and ran around the church, looking for the tracks of the killer, but there was nothing.

  “Why are you doing this?” I shouted as loudly as I could, shaking with rage, hoping the man could still hear me.

  There was only silence.

  I went back to the road and found Brother Michael sitting against a tree, weeping with his face in his hands. I quickly examined his head and could see that the place where he had been struck was swelling, but that he was in no danger. I forced him to his feet and marched him back down the trail to the church. I brought an old cart out of the barn and rolled it next to the front door of the church. Michael refused to go back inside, so I went in, untied Fedelm’s body, and wrapped it in a blanket from her bed by myself, first placing her heart back inside her chest. I then carried her in my arms out the door to the cart and laid her gently inside. There were no animals to draw the small wagon, so I put on the yoke and began pulling it down the path to Kildare, Michael trailing behind me.

  Chapter Thirteen

  The horror of what I had seen that day and the days before was beginning to take its toll on me. I couldn’t eat and didn’t dare sleep, for fear that what I had seen would return in my dreams. So I spent most of that same night sitting with my grandmother in her hut, talking about what had happened and what I should do next. She agreed that Finian was a prime suspect in all four murders, but that we had no proof of his guilt. We talked about asking the king to arrest him immediately, but we knew this would be a gross violation of Irish law. It was a fundamental principle of the legal traditions of our people that no man or woman could be deprived of their freedom without evidence, preferably in the form of sworn testimony from a person of high status.

  I heard early the next morning that Sister Anna had sent one of the guards to the king during the night to report on the latest killing. The man was back by dawn with ten more warriors and orders from the king to bring the remaining nuns back to the monastery whether they wanted to come or not. I decided to go to my cousin Riona immediately in hope of avoiding a scene between her and the king’s men. I knew she wouldn’t go with them willingly and I didn’t want to see her dragged from her home by force.

  I strapped my sword to my belt, took a large staff from the corner of the hut, and headed down the path just as it was getting light. A heavy rain was falling, making the track through the woods a muddy mess.

  I knew a farmer not far from the monastery who raised sheep, and I was sure he would take Riona’s small flock until all this was over. With the help of her dogs, we could have them there by noon and Riona safely within the monastery walls by dinner. The problem was what to do with her dogs. Sister Anna would never allow five fierce sheepdogs inside the monastery grounds, but I knew they would be uncontrollable away from Riona.

  I readied my staff as I approached her farm in case the dogs reached me before Riona did. I didn’t think they would attack me if I stood still and didn’t try to come closer to the house, but I wasn’t sure. I stopped at the edge of the meadow, well away from her hermitage, and made certain I was standing next to a tall tree with low branches in case I needed to climb it quickly. Then I called out for her and waited. I could see that the sheep were still in their pen, which was strange for so late in the morning. I called again and prepared to be rushed by a pack of angry hounds, but there was no sound. I moved out of the woods slowly and approached the house, calling out several more times in case she and the dogs were in the back garden or down by the stream.

  Next to a large elm tree midway between the meadow and the yard, I saw a pool of blood on the ground with trails of dark red leading toward the house. Behind the tree, the trails ended with the bodies of five dogs riddled with arrows. I drew my sword and called out for Riona frantically. I heard a crash in the house and ran to the open front door. Riona was lying on the floor inside.

  She had a noose around her neck but was conscious and struggling to sit up. I rushed to her side and held her up as I worked the flax rope off her neck. It had dug deeply into her skin and was tightly fixed from behind, but I managed to get it over her head. She had cuts on her face and hands as if she had been in a fight. There were broken dishes on the floor, and a large jar was smashed against the fireplace. I brought her a cup of water and waited until she was at last able to speak in a rasping voice.

  “Deirdre—he must have heard you coming—he came up from behind—when I was by the fire—my dogs—where are they?”

  “Out by the elm tree. I’m so sorry, Riona, but they’re dead. Someone shot them with arrows.”

  She tried to get up and go to the door but fell back down.

  “Wait. You’re in no shape to move. Just rest here. I’ve got my sword. He won’t be coming back.”

  She sat for a few minutes, trying with great effort to breathe. The rope must have bruised her windpipe. I bound the wounds on her hands and wiped the blood off her face with a rag.

  “Did you see who it was? Did you recognize him?” I asked.

  She nodded and took another sip of water.

  “He had a hood on—black—but I fought him—pulled it off.”

  “Who was it?”

  She grimaced from the pain of speaking, but continued.

  “It was him—the bastard—he killed my dogs.”

  “Who? Who was it?”

  “Finian.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  I tried to ge
t Riona to rest, but she insisted on leaving the house to see her dogs. She knelt beside them and wept. I put my arm around her.

  “We don’t have time to bury them now,” I said. “I’ve got to get word to the king to arrest Finian before he disappears. Are you strong enough to make it to Grandmother’s house?”

  “Yes.”

  I covered the dogs with a tarp to keep the crows away. I would send someone back to take care of the sheep. I led Riona slowly down the path, supporting her as we walked through the pouring rain and keeping both eyes open for Finian in case he tried to ambush us. It took us almost an hour to reach my grandmother’s home. She was in the garden when we arrived. I explained to her quickly what had happened and helped her get Riona settled on a bed inside. Then I ran down the road to the monastery as fast as I could. Kevin was at the gate talking with several of the guards. I told them everything that had happened. The leader sent a rider to the king almost before I had finished speaking. He sent another three of his men on horseback to Riona’s farm to pick up Finian’s trail if they could find it. With all the rain, I had my doubts. Then, leaving a handful of guards at the monastery, he galloped off with four others to Finian’s farm.

  “Do you want to come in and tell Sister Anna?” Kevin asked.

  “No, please, you do it. I’ve got to get back to my grandmother’s house to check on Riona. I know the king will want to see her as soon as possible.”

  I asked one of the remaining guards for a horse, since I knew Riona wasn’t fit to walk. The man hesitated, but I was in no mood for delays. I threw my bardic cloak around me with a flourish and fixed him with my eyes. He was holding his own horse for me a minute later as I mounted it and bolted down the trail to Grandmother’s house. By the time I got there, Riona was sitting up by the fire.