Legend of the Celtic Stone

by Michael Phillips

  She would have to find out later. Right now, this place gave her the shivers. She had no intention of getting involved with druids!

  She backed up to a wider spot, turned around, and then drove back down the entryway. It was time to return to Dublin and see what Larne Reardon was up to.

  Twenty

  It had been a long and awkward day for Harland Trentham.

  His wife was not accustomed to words of reproof from him. She could take any amount of criticism from her political adversaries, and fling it back in kind. But her husband was a different matter. He did not usually speak his mind quite so bluntly. As a result, she had been silent and grumpy most of the day and had kept to herself.

  Andrew’s father had thought it best to be away at dinnertime. He had gone out about eleven and had not returned until a little after two. By teatime that evening, however, he thought the chill had gone on long enough. When Franny began to set out the tea things, he went upstairs to his wife’s sitting room. She sat motionless, staring out the window toward the lawn behind the house.

  “Coming down for tea?” he said, giving his voice as cheery a sound as he could.

  She turned, then rose, exhaling a little sigh intended to convey that she was still hurt, invitation to tea notwithstanding, and that they both knew who was responsible.

  Mr. Trentham stepped aside. She passed him and led the way downstairs to the dining room. They entered. Franny was just pouring boiling water into the pot on the table. Andrew’s father turned toward his chair.

  The next instant he heard the sound of a crash behind him.

  He spun around. His wife had collapsed over a corner of the table.

  Franny gave out a scream. The boiling water spilled onto the middle of the table even as Lady Trentham’s body pulled cloth and dishes from one edge of it tumbling down upon her as she collapsed to the floor.

  Andrew’s father was on his knees at her side in a second. She was unconscious, her face ashen, her eyes closed.

  “Franny, call an ambulance!” he cried, still on the floor. He leapt up, sought a napkin and glass of water, and attempted to revive his wife. He spoke tenderly and frantically as he dabbed at her face and forehead with the damp cloth. It was obviously more serious than a mere fall.

  He now jumped up and rushed to the phone himself, which he took from Franny’s hysterically shaking hand.

  Twenty-One

  As Andrew continued his stroll about the legendary island of the Hebrides, a great sense of reverent history stole over him at the mere sound of the water lapping against the jagged stones of tiny Iona’s coast.

  The evening was warm and calm—unusual, he had been told, for this far north. Evocative smells from the sea water and rocks and coastline lifted gently into his nostrils, mingling with scents from the close-cropped flowering turf just inland and filling his head with haunting pleasure. The deep blues and greens of the ocean, arrayed with the varied and multihued colors of shoreline, rock, sea grasses, and sand, combined to remind his senses more of the Mediterranean than the North Atlantic.

  Ahead, a fisherman was lugging in his nets and tying up his small boat for the night. Andrew approached.

  “A good day’s catch?” he asked.

  “Ay, middlin,’” the man replied.

  “Do you fish here all year ’round?”

  “Canna git oot much in the winter.”

  Andrew nodded.

  “Seas be too fierce,” added the man, more to himself than to Andrew, for rarely would a Highlander give out excess information to a lowlander. “’Tisna a friendly place when the water’s angry. I ten’ my beasts an’ hire mysel’ oot on Mull an’ wait fer the weather t’ turn again.”

  “Why do you stay if the living’s so hard?”

  The man paused and stared, as if wondering whether to continue the conversation with a stranger. Then he answered, “The sea’s my life, laddie. I love the sea. Couldna be happy wi’oot its waves in my ears an’ its salt spray in my nostrils. If I canna be upon it wi’ my wee bit boatie, I still must be near it.”

  Andrew nodded. “I can see that a place as beautiful and peaceful as this would get into your blood,” he said.

  “Iona’s like no place on earth, lad,” said the fisherman, waxing strangely philosophic. “’Tis my home, an’ my parents’ before me, an’ theirs before them. ’Tis why I stay.”

  Andrew continued on. It would be easy to find oneself beguiled on a day like this, he thought, into believing this a more temperate climate than it actually was. But as the man had said, the Atlantic was no tame sea. It took a singular breed to make a life here—like the fisherman he had just left. The lives of those who braved crossing it for their faith so long ago were far from easy ones.

  Encountering a few sheep and an occasional cow, Andrew worked his way gradually up the small mountain called Dun-I. When he reached the top, he had arrived at the high point of the island, from which most of it was visible. Slowly he turned his gaze all about him.

  Behind him stood the sacred abbey on the site first established by the venerable saint called Columba. Andrew had not expected to be so moved at first sight of it a few hours earlier. But a silence had swept through him as he gazed on St. Martin’s cross and the edifice rising out of the stones of the isle—a silence that had deepened into awe when he had some moments later gone inside.

  Until recently, he had not been a man much given to praying. But now, as he stood on the mountain overlooking the place where Columba was conjectured to have landed, Andrew Trentham found no other response that seemed appropriate except to pray.

  As Andrew gazed contemplatively out upon the calm waters, he wondered what must have been in Columba’s thoughts when he set sail from his native Ireland.

  It had been an expedition that had sent the spiritual roots of a new religion down into the rocky soil of this region of the world. What the Romans had failed to do in three hundred years, Columba accomplished in a lifetime.

  Andrew sat down on a stone and breathed deeply of the fragrant evening air. He opened the book he was carrying and began to read the ancient account of the first landing here . . . a landing that changed Scotland forever.

  11

  Coming of the Dove

  AD 563

  One

  Tears of impending dread filled the eyes of the twelve-year-old girl.

  She was marching in a solemn procession of Celtic ritual up a gentle slope. On its crest ahead grew a towering oak. A moment of high and sacred import had come for the people of her village. But her heart did not rejoice to be part of it . . . for she herself was to be the sacrifice.

  The girl was terrified for her life. But in her youthful and ignorant way, she also possessed some vague sense that this rite was horribly and shamefully wrong.

  She had always been an unusual child for the culture into which she entered the world. These remnants of a now-vanished Celtic empire were what might have been called an innately spiritual people, but theirs was a crude spirituality and its forms of expression were base and pagan. She felt, on the other hand, the higher callings of that spirituality. She was seen as strange—possessed, some said, by devils of the dark powers.

  The girl’s odd behavior as she grew confirmed the suspicion in which she was held. She did not fear the power of the world, as did most, but relished in it. From an early age she was more at peace away from the village under the open blue sky, beneath the stars that sprinkled the vast blackness of night, even amid the fiercest of black clouds when they roared and unleashed bolts of fire and sent icy pellets of hail or rain whipping across the land. She might be found in the midst of such fury, face gazing up into the tumult, laughing with pleasure.

  Nature delighted her. The world made her happy. Yet she did not worship it, as did so many of her kind. Though but a child, she sensed that the earth and sky and sea—all its creatures and growing things—had been created by something above them all. The wonders of the earth had been given and she had been placed in their
midst . . . to enjoy not deify.

  Though she would not have been capable of forming the rational conclusion that she could think in more significant and abstract ways than the eagle or the bear or the mighty stag of the forest, somehow she knew herself to be greater than all these manifestations of that Higher she sensed but knew not of.

  The girl’s name was Diorbhall-ita.1 She was the daughter of the king.

  As this day approached, she was told that to be offered to the Great Oak at the High Place was the highest honor that could come to one such as she. The druidic priestesses said she should rejoice to have been chosen from among all the young virgins of the village. The great god Bilé, who dwelt in the oak, and Danu, the mother goddess who watered the oak from heaven, would be greatly pleased. They would drink her blood and bestow the blessing and prosperity of harvest to her people.

  In her heart, however, Diorbhall-ita knew that her father, King Brudei of the northern Picts, had selected her because he hated the sight of her. She reminded him of her dead mother.

  He had done away with that one when he was through with her. Now he would be rid of the daughter too.

  “You will be highly exalted by the gods,” High Druid Broichan told the king, “for offering your own seed.”

  Thus had it been arranged.

  Diorbhall-ita already suffered a girl’s worst agony, that of knowing she was despised by the man who had given her life. She hated him, and she hated the evil man Broichan. She would kill them both if she could. She would kill them with her own hand!

  But she was just a child. Her father was the king, and Broichan was the High Druid. What could she do against them?

  As the procession now approached the sacred High Place above Inbhir-Nis, twelve-year-old Diorbhall-ita, already extremely tall for her age, trembled in terror. Behind her the column of druids and druidesses chanted in solemn cadence.

  In front of the bloodstained altar ahead stood the horrid towering form of Broichan. She could not prevent her wide, petrified eyes from seeing the great knife beside him. That sharp blade was meant for her neck!

  The procession stopped. Hands forced her to her knees and now bent her head toward the stones of the altar. A cry escaped her lips. Above her the evil shadow of Broichan rose into the air. His deep voice began to chant in dark tones.

  She did not want to die!

  Out of the corner of her eye she saw his hand move toward the huge knife. He clutched it, then drew it toward her. Now rose the chants of the druidess procession to a loud frenzy of—

  Suddenly Diorbhall-ita squirmed loose.

  A gasp of astonishment went up from the druidic assembly. A few hands grabbed at her.

  “No!” she screamed. “I won’t let you kill me!”

  She darted away across the top of the hill.

  An angry curse exploded behind her. It was the voice of her father. Another shout followed from Broichan. Running footsteps came after her.

  But she was young and swift of foot. And she was running for her life. None of those present could catch her now.

  She ran and ran, knowing not where, heedless of direction. She sprinted over the hill, into a wood, down into a ravine, up the other side, then followed a stream bed until she came out onto open heathland.

  Still she ran . . . on and on and on.

  Several hours later, she found herself at the edge of the River Nis some two or three miles upriver.

  She lay for some time exhausted and tearful. She could not move another step.

  In the agony of terrified desolation, as her weary lungs at last slowed, young Diorbhall-ita began to whimper, then broke into sobs of loneliness. For many long minutes she wept uncontrollably, until at last the storm began to pass.

  “Help me,” came a murmured cry from her lips, “please . . . help me!”

  Within moments she was sound asleep.

  She had no idea to Whom she had prayed. She had always harbored a vague sense that more existed beyond her sight than the oak and Bilé and Danu. But that the whispered, despairing cry of her heart was actually heard by a personal Being greater than Broichan’s inanimate deities—was a truth that lay outside the scope of her imaginings.

  But her prayer had indeed been heard. And even now a savior was being prepared who would be sent to this land to deliver her from this season of her sorrows and afflictions.

  Two

  Diorbhall-ita awoke to rude shakings and angry voices.

  The brusque hands of her father’s men grabbed and yanked her to her feet. Binding her wrists, they shoved her cruelly ahead of them back toward the village.

  A merciless beating at her father’s hand followed her return to her home at the palace. She lay motionless in bed for a week, bruises scarring her face, welts up and down her back, one eye blackened to the top of her cheek. She was kept alive only by the ministrations of a compassionate servant woman.

  Broichan came to the king.

  “I adjure you solemnly, King Brudei,” he said. “As humiliated as you are before the people and the gods, you must not kill the girl. To murder one intended for sacrifice would bring her wickedness down upon you, and with it the curse of the gods.”

  “Let us bind her hands and feet and take her back to the altar,” said the king, still incensed. “She will not escape us a second time!”

  “She can no longer be used,” replied the druid. “She is now defiled. The gods must have a willing sacrifice. They would repudiate such a gift and rain down fire from the heavens. No, she is no longer worthy.”

  “What am I to do with the miserable cur!” shouted the king in a white wrath.

  “There are ways to be rid of such, my lord king,” replied the druid.

  “She has been a curse to me since her birth.”

  “Leave all to me, my lord king. I shall find her a suitable marriage that will ease you of the burden, and bring upon the head of the wicked child a fate such as she deserves.”

  Two months later, Diorbhall-ita was given in marriage to a man from a neighboring village whose reputation was well known to Broichan.

  This Gairbhith had his way with the twelve-year-old daughter of the king of Inbhir-Nis. When he had gained what pleasure it suited him to take from her young body, he rented her to others of his low class. As Broichan had known only too well, such was Gairbhith’s means of having amassed a not insignificant level of wealth. When his youthful brides failed to satisfy his customers, he sold them as slaves to a seafaring people from the north with whom he maintained dealings of commerce.

  And thus did Diorbhall-ita become an outcast and castaway from a society into whose royalty she had been born. Delight died within her. She no longer sought the open spaces. Life became a torment of pain, misery, and abuse at the hands of evil and pleasure-seeking men.

  When her so-called husband died six years later, she was left as an exile and wanderer, without means, with no friend to whom she could turn, and with no home of her childhood to which she might return. Even now, had her father been able without incurring the wrath of the gods, he would have arranged for her murder.

  As the next years passed, she did all she knew to survive and gave herself to the low men who continued to seek her.

  Seven years went by. She sank into mere existence. Her tears dried, for they had been spent. Her soul numbed. No more did she feel its aches, its yearnings, its whispered callings to life’s higher dreams and purposes. The death from which she had once run, should it come to her now, would be a blessing and relief.

  But the cry of her child-heart beside the river long before had risen on the invisible messenger-wings of angels. It had been heard by Him who made little girls and angels, hailstorms and mountains and rivers altogether. And even in this bleakest hour of her misery and destitution, he had not turned away his face of love.

  He only awaited the appointed moment when the answer to her plea would come back down from heaven . . . this time sent to her on the wings of a dove.

  Three

 
; The bird of her deliverance was nineteen when Diorbhall-ita was born, thirty-one when she was marched up the hill as intended sacrifice to the deities of the oak.

  Like her, he was born of royal lineage. He was born not as a dove but as Crimthann, a fox, prince of the Irish O’Neills of Donegal. At his christening his name was changed to Colum O’Neill. Like Diorbhall-ita he would be forced from his home and would never rise to rule his land.

  The destinies of these two would intertwine as they rose into their mutual inheritance in a new Kingdom . . . and as son and daughter of its new royal family they would together help change their world.

  As the Irish lad grew, he was placed into the care of Cruithnechan, the priest who had baptized him Colum, the dove.2 Upon returning from church one day, Cruithnechan witnessed a vision of fire hovering over the face of the sleeping child. Surely, he told the parents, it was a sign that the Spirit of God dwelt within the boy. As a result, they destined him early for the priesthood.

  Among the superstitious peoples of the post-Roman world, spiritual leaders were viewed as more powerful even than kings. In order to further his ecclesiastical training, therefore, in his teen years young O’Neill was given over to the tutelage of an aging Christian bard by the name of Gemnan. His tutor curiously intermingled ancient Celtic craft with the new Catholic faith which had been introduced to Erin in the previous century by Saint Patrick. Columcille learned well from Gemnan’s instruction. He himself would ultimately elevate the bardic priesthood—Christian rather than druidic—to new heights of influence in the Celtic world.

  Of powerful intellect and physique by the time he was twenty, Columba soon made his impact felt in Ireland—in both the political and spiritual spheres. He entered a monastic seminary, was ordained a priest, and within a short time demonstrated that he was at the forefront of a rising new religious generation of Irish leadership.