Book of Kells

by R. A. MacAvoy

  John cut her off. “Say a thousand years ago. Nice, round number. One year for every spiral on the cross, and if it’s not accurate, who’s to care?”

  Derval’s mouth tightened at this cavalier treatment of history, but she said nothing.

  “Poor thing,” he said, sighing. “I begin to feel she’s my responsibility, Derval.” His eyes, both the blue one and the brown one, rested on the mouselike figure of Ailesh, who was peering out at the street from a corner of the window blind. She had found John’s cap (he wondered where) and was wearing it helmet-style, the brim low above her nose. John thought she looked charming in it.

  “Just begin? From the moment she landed in your bathroom…”

  “Maybe. But I didn’t feel it.” John bit down especially hard on his ragged thumb end. His face expressed some sort of resolution. “I don’t claim to know politics, Derval. You do.”

  “Claim to, you mean,” growled Derval, who could be as hard on herself as she could be on anyone.

  “Probably do. Ailesh isn’t going to get swallowed by the military maw. Not if I can help it.” He cleared his throat and continued. “But she can’t stay here. Not with Mrs. Hanlon only a hundred feet from the front door.”

  Derval giggled. “All right, Miss Prim.”

  “I don’t mean that. I mean she’d never pass. Can you see her walking into Bewly’s and ordering a cuppa?” He laughed at his own joke. “So what we have to do…”

  John paused and folded his hands on his lean thighs.

  “…is send her back through the dimensional warp.” Derval finished for him. “Of course, love. That’s the only way.”

  “But safely,” he added, his lower lip protruding thoughtfully. “Not into the Vikings’ lap.”

  “Certainly not the Vikings’ lap.” John did not see Derval’s sly, superior smile.

  Ailesh was now leafing through John’s portfolio with exaggerated care. Now she pulled out two line drawings and extended them. One was a complex, circular zoomorph and the other, which interested her more, was a design in traditional Eskimo style for a kayak paddle. She spoke to John in tones of great approval. John Thornburn sat beside her on the sofa, smiling and nodding at her incomprehensible noise, like a father watching over the infant of his old age.

  Ailesh ran the length of the tin whistle through her fingers. Its smoothness pleased her and she couldn’t find the seam: good metalwork. She held it up to the light of the window of clear glass. That was also good work, better even than the Frankish glass bottle that the Welsh traders had sold to her father.

  What was this place to which Saint Bridget and Goban had brought her? Not heaven, surely. One doesn’t enter heaven bloody and shrieking. (But perhaps that wasn’t the truth. After all, how did martyrs enter the kingdom of God?) Nor was one reincarnated in the same body, complete with scars.

  Ailesh lifted the teacup that sat beside her in both hands and drank a little of the hot brew. It burned her tongue; obviously she wasn’t in heaven. The drink was clearly an herbal medicine, though tempered with milk and honey.

  Ailesh blushed to think how she had shamed herself with that display of panic in front of the fair man.

  The fair man. She gave a peek at John Thornburn from under her eyelashes. So odd he looked, pinch-faced and slouching, with his long trousers like the bark of a tree over his skinny legs. He looked like a man who’d never run a mile nor sat a horse.

  Despite this, Ailesh knew he was no ordinary fellow. Even had she not been sent by miraculous means to this great house with walls of crystal, the skill of the man’s hand would have revealed the divine spark in him. Well, the Goban was no ordinary fellow, either, and she was his daughter. And there was a comfortable feeling about this one, perhaps because he was no larger than her father. Looking at the pull of the fair man’s thin shirt over his shoulders, Ailesh laid wager with herself that like the Goban, he had a strength of arm and hand. And he was the gentle one, too, though tight-strung. Ailesh made him nervous. She knew that, and she smiled.

  Should she be smiling over a man with her father in danger and her home in ashes? Ailesh thought of Goban, with his round face like hers and his massive torso, and in her mind she asked the question of him. He came to her eyes, laughing the way he did when at work with the stone, red-faced, his lips pulled back from his teeth. He asked her if a young man was any less fine because an old man might be dead. Hadn’t it been Goban himself who had lifted her off the ground and dashed her against—no, through—the great cross?

  To the house of the fair man.

  Out of the corner of her eye she saw Derval watching her watch John. Ailesh lowered her eyes to the whistle once more. There was something between these two, and there would be no honor in going between them. Probably she would make a fool of herself, if she tried.

  The whistle had six holes, three more than a cuislean. It was tuned similarly to the strange box that had the Buíon pipes in it. She put the whistle to her lips. When the dark woman started the box going, Ailesh tried to play along.

  “I’m getting tired of that record.”

  Derval put down the dust cover of the turntable and looked over her shoulder. “I’d think you’d be tired of making circles sooner,” she remarked.

  John shook his head, then winced at the effect this had on his vision. Sick headaches left all sorts of reminders. “I hardly notice I’m doing that. But I’m going to wear the paper through if we have to go through this one more time.”

  Derval stretched her arms above her head and cracked her fingers together. She yawned. “That we will do, Johnnie,” she said, filling the silence between the bands on the Furey album. “Or do you want to shove the girl through willy-nilly and trust to fate?”

  Ailesh, the person in question, was leaning over John’s shoulder all this while, watching him work. She lifted her frizzed russet head and spoke to Derval.

  “She says you have a gift,” translated the taller woman. There was no time for John to answer, for the pipe hummed and tweeted and his hand began to trace. In two minutes the pink cross glowed in the bathroom doorway, and Derval, swallowing her heart, reached her long arm in and snatched back the broomstick (with ancient, useless bristles) she had thrust through the time before. On impulse she pulled it halfway through the shining haze and let it lie there on the floorboards. The pink glow faded and Derval O’Keane knew an instant of horror. What would happen when the past pulled away from the present? Would the wooden stick divide with it, down to the veriest submolecular particle?

  What happened was the broomstick scooted across the floor as though kicked, hitting the woodwork of the hallway and scraping paint as it clattered. “Jesus H. Christ,” She said. “What got into me to try that?”

  “Eh? What was wrong in it?” asked John, who still sat slouched over his draftsman’s stool. “What harm could the broom come to?”

  “Ripped electrons,” stated Derval. “Pulverized atoms. Ireland a thermonuclear accident and the world a smoking cinder twenty minutes later. That’s what.”

  John shifted in his Valium-induced torpor. “You are pleasant company, Miss O’Keane, aren’t you? Well, even I could have told you that wouldn’t happen.”

  Derval raised her eyebrows very high. “And how would you be knowing that?”

  “Air’s made of atoms as well as wood,” John told her. “And the mirage…”

  “Stop calling it—”

  “…has been full of air every time it’s happened.”

  Derval, who couldn’t deny his logic, stared sullenly at the floor. “Still did a bit of damage to your hallway. I wouldn’t want to be halfway through when the gate closed.”

  John rose slowly from his chair and paced toward the hall with the steps of a much heavier man. On the way he stopped to rumple Ailesh’s hair. “I wonder what she thinks of all this.”

  Derval spared a glance at the girl, who squatted huddled Indian-chief fashion against the wall, her eyes half-closed and reddened and her mouth drooping. “She thinks
it’s a blessed miracle, of course,” said the tall woman. “Why wouldn’t she? Pulled away from some squarehead’s vicious attentions. God, I wonder how her village is doing.”

  “Maybe she’s right and it was a miracle.” John slid down the wall beside Ailesh. His ankles were not nearly as flexible as hers, but his narcotized relaxation made up for much.

  Derval looked down at the two. She had given away her own peace of mind, she thought dispiritedly. In pills of ten milligrams. “We’re not allowed miracles,” she told John. “We traded them in for technology some years ago and now we’re stuck with finding out how things work. Get up, Johnnie.” She sighed. “We’ve got to do it again.”

  The hen had been found on the front porch. It was a plump copper-red. Once Derval pinned its wings to its back it stopped struggling, but by the dilation of its reptilian eyes and the silently gaping beak it showed small appreciation for the music of Finbar Furey. “Mrs. Hanlon has missed her, you know,” John remarked, as at Derval’s command he tried a loop of twine around the bird’s foot. He then took his position. “She has no business letting the creatures roam,” replied Derval.

  The slow air started. John traced lines. The gate opened and Derval threw the hen through the pink haze.

  The fat bird landed flat on its belly, producing squawks quite audible to John at his worktable. It stood up and shivered its feathers into place. The pink phenomenon gave it a dried-apricot hue.

  Derval was counting. When she got to eight she pulled her end of the twine, hissing, “Now!”

  The chicken fell over, the twine slipped off its foot and piled limply at Derval’s knee. The pink haze glimmered and died.

  Derval stared confusedly at the string in her hand. “You—you made the loop too big. Far too big! It came right off.”

  John yawned and shrugged. “I didn’t want to constrict her circulation.”

  “You didn’t—” Derval took a deep breath. “Well, do you know what that’s led to?”

  “We’ve lost Mrs. Hanlon’s chicken,” answered John, slightly perturbed.

  “We’ve created a paradox,” Derval corrected him. “Rhode Island Reds did not exist in the pre-Cromwellian oak forests of Ireland.”

  John Thornburn shrugged. “Just one. It can’t matter.”

  “Can’t matter?” said Derval in ascending voice. “Such a protein source could change the diet of ancient Ireland.”

  “Hindersome, but after all, what if it did? It’s done and you, at least, still look the sa—” John began equably, only to be interrupted by Ailesh.

  “She wants to know to whom we sacrificed the chicken,” announced Derval, after the necessary laborious translations. “I told her we sent it to prepare the way for her.”

  “How bibical. Saint Cluck the Baptist.” John glanced out of the corner of his eye at the girl. Her evident weariness struck a chord in him. “Poor thing. I worry about her. Can’t we sleep now and shoot her through tomorrow, in daylight?”

  “In daylight, certainly,” agreed Derval. She lowered her tall form onto John’s musty sofa. “And Johnnie, you needn’t worry too much about our Ailesh. I’m going with her.”

  Morning, and once again sunlight threw spears at John Thornburn’s floor. Ailesh wore enormous cuffs at the feet of her trousers—John’s trousers—and his sweatshirt was a baggy tunic over her thighs. When she moved, she rustled with gauze bandages. Before her on the floorboards rested John’s huge khaki frame backpack, stuffed with what supplies Derval could find at the local market: a packet of Green Label tea, a can of Bachelor’s peas, Chef’s salad creme, a bottle of orange barley water.

  She had torn the labels off everything, in attempt to protect history.

  Derval herself stood beside the girl, wearing her knotwork smock and carrying her own blue daypack, with the tin whistle poking out like a standard. “You’ll give us only the length of time it takes to run the record again, Johnnie, so if the Danes are still running about—”

  “It won’t take them but a second to hit you on the head,” he muttered, depressed but hopeless at the thought of turning Derval from her purpose. He straightened the half-completed tracing over the rubbing of the work Ailesh called Bridget’s Cross.

  While Derval had been shopping and preparing Ailesh for her crossing of time’s border, John had been hard at work replicating the pattern which had opened the gate. He feared one more imprint upon the old tracing would pop out the spirals like so many tickets punched. The much-penciled tracing was torn to lie in the dust on the floor, and now the fresh sheet was ready for business. John had his cap on his head and all his front hair tucked into it. Derval thought he looked silly that way.

  It was very quiet on the street. Not even a dog barked. Then from somewhere came a woman’s voice, shrilling, “Here, chicky, chicky, chicky…”

  John’s shoulders rose to his ears.

  Derval heard Mrs. Hanlon also, but she dropped the needle to the record. The driving rhythm of a hornpipe filled the air. “Okay, Johnnie. You know when to begin.”

  John put his pencil to the paper and was struck with a sudden panic. It didn’t seem sharp enough, though it was the same implement he had just finished so carefully rounding off, lest it tear paper. Absurd.

  But this tiny surge of emotion was enough to set off the leftover throb of headache. John felt eggshellish. He was not at all certain he should let Derval do this thing. He had no other ideas. It was time to begin.

  With the first stroke on the paper his nerves ceased to bother him. John traced the spirals of Bridget’s cross. This was better. This he did well and neatly. Sun glinted off the walls of the room onto the perfect white paper. John Thornburn forgot what it was he hoped to accomplish, tracing the cross. He just did it.

  When the spirals were complete—all one thousand of them, he raised his eyes, irritated by the gleaming pink light.

  From this angle he could barely see through the glow. There were dark shadows, none of them moving. There was a bright horizon. Derval gave a wave both gallant and impudent and plunged into the bathroom, turning rosy pink as she vanished. Ailesh paused and looked over her shoulder at John. She said something in her soft and slushy Irish. She gave him a sober smile.

  Derval’s hand reemerged and dragged the girl through.

  The gate became an afterimage and was gone. John blinked dryly in his lonely living room. He got up and put the needle back to the end of the hornpipe. His hand shook so that he scratched the record.

  Dear God, what if the needle had dropped, broken, or cut a swath across the magical air that followed the hornpipe? His breath was ragged as he returned to his stool.

  Mrs. Hanlon was closer now, calling her red hen on this side of the street. John’s ears turned as red as the hen’s comb, thinking someone might have seen him taking the bird in. His stomach had tied in a knot and his head was aching sadly by the time he began the design that would open the gate for Derval to check in.

  But the slow air had suffered no damage and Mrs. Hanlon was no longer audible. John worked his spirals, feeling for the first time vaguely sorcerous and imbued with power.

  The music ended and so did the drawing. The air in the bathroom glimmered and glowed.

  John waited the ten seconds, but nothing more happened. No one came through the gate.

  He sat very still for some seconds, holding his pencil in his hand. The pencil broke in two pieces.

  Then John tried to speak, to say, “No.” But panic had grabbed him by the throat and no sound came out.

  What had he done wrong? It must have been something he did wrong or else Derval had…no. It must have been something he did wrong. Perhaps the tracing hadn’t been exact, or more importantly, in time with the music. Or was this a punishment for his overconfidence? John deeply believed that overconfidence got punished.

  But the cross of Bridget had glowed in his bathroom doorway. What could have stopped Derval from…no. It must have been something he did wrong.

  John trotted to the ster
eo once again, and then rushed back to his drafting table. Furey worked his art and so did John. The cross filled the hall with light.

  He stood in front of it expectantly, trying to make sense out of the pattern of shadows behind the glow. He came closer and finally stuck his head through.

  Green grass parted as neatly as a head of hair, running along a path between twisted oaks whose leaves looked black. Down the path the land dipped and then rose again to the forested slopes. No stones were visible now, but there were gray roofs protruding from the declivity closeby. And there was smoke.

  John Thornburn was picked up and flung backward as though by hurricane winds. His head hit the drywall of his hallway and left a bowl-shaped impression. He hit the floor hard, and his cap came sliding after.

  He was neither quite conscious, nor was he too numb to feel pain. He suspected his tailbone was broken, but the ache involved in moving his head made the effort of finding out not worth it.

  Concussion. Brain hitting the inside of the skull. The very idea made him dizzy. John felt a deep need for his codeine.

  He rose to his feet, using the cracked wall for support. Gathering his courage together, he entered the now-harmless bathroom. He opened the medicine chest.

  Where was the yellow vial with the impossible-to-open top? Not behind the Feenamint, nor concealed behind the Egyptian key patterns on the Ramses prophylactics foil pack. It hadn’t fallen on its side, nor was it left on the sink beside the toothpaste tube. Gone.

  John was desolate. Tears stung his eyes. Not only was he bound for an Irish prison, but between now and then he would suffer untold agonies. He blundered out of the bathroom.

  But wait. Derval had opened his pills last night. (And how strong the dose she gave him had been. Usually the things didn’t make him quite so mellow.) Where had she left the bottle?

  There. On the sideboard of the sink. John plunged toward it. He pulled futilely at the plastic child-proof top. To gain time for himself, he poured a glass of water.