Book of Kells

by R. A. MacAvoy

  Within was more bloodshed, around the sad small remains of a hearth. There was a woman who had been stripped of all clothing before being decapitated. There was a single bench the fire had missed, and on it lay a gray-haired and heavy-bearded man, also naked, transfixed to the wood by an oaken spear.

  MacCullen wasted only a moment on this scene before sinking down on hands and knees among the ashes on the floor. “Stop him, Johnnie,” came Derval’s voice from the doorway. John Thornburn followed, cursing as he set his hand on a living ember.

  Fallen beams made the floor an obstacle course. And it was still being formed, for even as John crawled a section of wall sagged in and collapsed a few yards from his head. Smoke filled his lungs and confused him. He coughed and retched.

  When he caught up with MacCullen the man was crouched by the wall, beside a figure with scorched skin and hair burned away. It seemed no more than a boy. The wounded man moved the body aside and uncovered a thing of wood and wire.

  “He’s found his harper,” John called out. He took the instrument from MacCullen and helped him drag the body across the breadth of the house and into the sunlight.

  The air outside the building tasted impossibly sweet. John’s eyes wept away the ashes and charred wool. After a moment he heard the noise.

  “Is he keening now?” he asked Derval resentfully, for MacCullen stood over the shockingly burned body of the harper, holding the clàirseach in both hands. The instrument seemed more or less intact. His fair head was raised to the blue and white heavens and his resonant voice must have carried for miles.

  Derval listened astonished, as the man who had a moment before been semiconscious orated with a self-possession united with great feeling.

  “Sharp my grief!

  The pain pierces me

  Child of my kin

  The strings of your heart are broken!

  The song of your life ended!

  Fitting for you all to lie here together

  Under the sun three things are most pitiful,

  The burial of youth,

  The cutting of ancient trees,

  The—”

  Derval at last put an imploring hand over his mouth.

  John turned to Ailesh, who was still as a statue, her hand white-knuckled on the handle of the hammer. Her eyes were fixed on the seared young face on the earth by the ceili wall. “Explain to him,” John asked her. “Tell him we’re not being unfeeling, but that we have to go.”

  She did speak, though not from John’s prompting. The poet stared from Ailesh to John. Then his knees gave out and the tall Irishman sank over the body of his harper. John hoisted him again.

  Once over the palisade the going was easier. Ailesh led and Derval pressed against the now fouled and filthy wound on MacCullen’s side. Out of the corner of his eye John saw the white shape of the cross bobbing nearer. Assuming Derval’s tin-whistle trick worked, he’d be back home in minutes.

  Had anyone remembered to bring the codeine?

  Ailesh clapped her hands and darted back into the ruins of the village. “Eh?” said John, and Derval made a noise of frustration. But the girl returned very soon, flourishing a little silver tube on a chain. She opened it under Derval’s gaze. “My sewing needle,” she announced. “It is the only thing of value left to me, except the hammer.”

  Derval nodded in understanding. John merely sighed. He tramped on.

  If the placing of Greystones Hill meant anything, this abbey had been built where his house would be someday. Or almost. His house was (or would be) along this path a ways. Perhaps by the stone. And perhaps, just perhaps, that rosy glow in his bathroom doorway was actually produced here—in the same place, but a thousand years earlier. The coincidence was—

  Suddenly John felt himself shoved violently sideways. His feet left the path and floundered in deep grass. In brush. Ailesh hissed into his ear.

  Derval grabbed his shoulder and yanked him into the trees. After hopping a frantic fifteen yards he fell among briars under the shade of the black oaks. Derval and Ailesh belly flopped beside him. The weight of MacCullen lay half over him. He raised his head to see, along the bright ribbon of the path, some twenty or more figures striding.

  Men. Not wearing horned helmets. Not all blond. Not especially large, by modern standards. But they wore heavy swords and assuredly they were Vikings. They stopped by the cross of Bridget. Five of them leaned against it and the white gleaming stone went down with a crash and fell in pieces.

  “Jesus and Joseph,” whispered Derval to John. “Now we are stuck.” He did not reply.

  Ailesh hissed vituperation in John’s ear. But the girl’s anger did no more than match John’s own. For though John Thornburn was no fighter by nature, and though human disaster left him ineffectual, this desecration of art filled him with a glowing, simple rage that overcame both fear and the lingering confusion in his head. John rose to his feet in battle heat and started after the departing ravagers. Derval and Ailesh held him back by the arms. They huddled in the dark woods till the Vikings were out of sight.

  “Yeah, we’re stuck,” muttered John. He squatted on the dead oak leaves with his head between his two hands. Derval, who was standing between two mossy tree boles, a hand on each, gazed down at him with some compassion. “Looks that way, Johnnie. For a while, at least.” She paused, looking closely at him. “Does it depress you that much? This could be a lovely place.”

  John grunted. “Eh? No. It’s just my head. Again. I hit it. Pay no attention to me.”

  This command was easy to follow, for there was much else to attract Derval’s eye. The forest itself, for one thing. Having grown up not too far from Phoenix Park, and having spent most of her childhood holidays at Kilronan, on Inishmore, she found the woods’ shadows a heavy presence. Uncomfortably heavy. Almost awful. The oak trees stopped the wind and blackened the sky. Through them pierced the lighter spears of the ailm and the coll—or at least Derval suspected these were the elm and the hazel. She’d mastered the words, but had never had the chance to become good at identifying trees.

  The high canopy sheltered a brittle undergrowth of hazel, which made too much noise when it was stepped on. And underneath, which in this season should have been grass and meadowflowers, was the acid, rotting carpet of leaves with its faint odor of tannic acid.

  Derval felt the forest crowding her close. She felt judged. She remembered the backpacks, left leaning against the shed door. She reflected on what she had done.

  She thought: all of time is hanging on the edge—here, on this day in these woods outside a smoking village filled with the bodies of the dead. Either I am making the future or destroying it.

  But (she added in her own defense) it was never my idea.

  At a crack of dry wood she started and glanced down at Ailesh, who was using branches to weave a pallet for the sick man. Derval made a shushing noise and pointed significantly toward the Viking-infested village. The girl regarded her patiently. “They won’t be hearing this,” she said. Derval had only to think a moment before replying, “Not at the dun, surely, but they may send”—what was the word for scout?— “riders. They may send riders to look for enemies.”

  Ailesh’s gold-brown eyes flashed with the first touch of sharpness she had yet shown. “Riders on what? Boat riders?”

  Of course. The Vikings had come on longboats, too small to carry horses. They must have marched inland very quickly, to come at the monastery without warning. Only forty men could fit in a longboat, Derval remembered. Could forty Vikings, or eighty, or even a hundred have done all that killing? She shivered.

  Chapter Five

  “McKeogh,” said O’Donnells Kern, “I have worked your cure, but if you come back at me once over with your rudeness and stinginess, that same leg I healed I will break again, and the other to go with it.”

  The Kern of the Narrow Stripes

  Irish Folk Tale: Silva Goedelica

  Labres MacCullen came to himself remembering pain. After some confusion
it localized in his left side. Like the wound in the side of Christ, he thought. A nice image, and he might be able to use it sometime. Not that he dared compare himself to Christ, of course. Not out loud.

  He was used to misery, for he was Ollave of Leinster—the “spouse” of the realm—and the pain of Leinster and of Leinster’s king was his own. But this was not the usual bitterness that ached in his side, nor yet was it a Roman spear that had pierced him, but an iron sword in the hand of a Dane. Even now, in the dark of the forest, that cold-eyed face rose above him—intent, almost seeming afraid. And he saw the stubby hands, and the spiky short hairs on the arms which were red as slabs of meat.

  And him with no protection but a leather-bound book in his hands.

  MacCullen felt it a marvel that he should be alive at all, for he had seen the abbot slain like a heifer of sacrifice on his own table, and the abbot’s wife killed on the dirt below. Then had come the blow in his own vitals and MacCullen had fallen. He had watched the burning thatch cave in over his head. MacCullen’s pain-narrowed eyes went suddenly wide, remembering something else.

  Caeilte: young Caeilte, his sister’s son, his harper. Only twenty and full of enthusiasm for the life he had chosen. Not yet among the renowned musicians, Caeilte had been trained since leaving the academy to accompany his uncle’s verse. They were to gain their renown together, the young poet and the younger harper. No more. Caeilte, like the trees of Ard na Bhfuinseoge, was fallen and dead.

  What would he say to the boy’s mother? What a miserable homecoming it would be.

  He had made a poem over his body, MacCullen remembered. A lament. In between grief and his wound’s agony Labres MacCullen wondered whether the poem had been any good.

  He lifted his head. Dizziness made him put it down again, but in that moment he saw he was out of the village and in the wood, lying on a pallet of branches. Captive? The Vikings hadn’t seemed interested in taking captives. They were doubtless the dreaded worshipers of the god of slaughter. Of course if they were seeking ransom, he was the likely choice to be spared, for both his clothes and natural bearing (MacCullen told himself) marked him out as a man of worth.

  Wouldn’t they be surprised when they tried to find some relative of his who could pay their price?

  He heard voices talking. Not Irish, nor yet Norse, both of which MacCullen knew well. They spoke something like the iron tongue of the Saxons, in which he was less fluent. He couldn’t make out their speech at all. Painfully he raised himself up again and looked around for a person of sufficient quality to treat with him.

  The poet recognized the tall gawky woman in the way one would recognize something once seen in a dream. He recalled that she had appeared above him and dragged him from the fallen great house. By his feet. Her nursing, too, had been clumsy and her tongue that of a baby. Or an idiot.

  The blond man was even less familiar, but his outlandish dress and hangdog look marked him as a fellow of no account. With relief MacCullen recognized Ailesh Iníon Goban, gouging the earth with her knife and ramming stripped hazel suckers into the holes. She was weaving a shelter, using the earth itself as her loom.

  “Are we captives, daughter of my friend?” he called to her, his voice whisper-thin and shaky.

  She raised her eyes in surprise from the basketlike crescent. “Indeed we are not captives, Ollave. These heroes have rescued us from the Gentiles.” MacCullen glanced from Derval to John. His mouth opened as though he would laugh, but the effort was too much. “Heroes,” he echoed and then sank flat back on the ground. “All else are dead, then?”

  “They are dead,” said Ailesh shortly.

  “Your father among them?”

  “My father. Your sister’s son, Ollave. The abbot and his wife and the old women and the old men and all the children. The cattle too. It must be that the harbor people ran off at the sight of the reaver’s ships, and not one of them stayed the moment to warn us. Or else they are all dead, as well.”

  MacCullen closed his eyes and swallowed. “Between the treaties of the Gentiles and those of the Ri of Leinster (himself so much worse than the Gaill), we have come to destruction! And where is it we will find our murder price?”

  Ailesh put her eyes back to her work. “It is certain we had no treaties with the king’s brother, Ollave. Our trust was all in Dublin.”

  MacCullen winced as memory drifted back to him. “Goban. I lay in my blood and heard them fall—the compass trees of the abbey. Each screamed with the voice of a man.”

  “By Mary’s face! Perhaps it was men he was hearing,” whispered Ailesh to herself. She crawled over the moist earth to the place where the Ollave lay. In the dim light of evening she put her face close to his bandaged side.

  He was a tall, square-built man, with fine features. His eyes were the same blue was Derval’s, but against his bright complexion they looked darker. The once-careful coif of his yellow hair was plastered to his skull with sweat and mud. “You’re not bleeding any more,” Ailesh said. “For that you have to thank Derval. She nursed you like…like a champion.”

  “A champion I’ll believe her,” MacCullen countered. “At digging onions! She prodded into my side as though she would start a bed there. But what could I expect from a great girl with a shape like a tree? Had it been your hands now, Daughter of the Arts…”

  Ailesh recoiled. “What hard speech is coming out of you? Do you think the woman sitting there has no ears, MacCullen?”

  He puckered his mouth, feeling irritation that his flattery had gone wrong. “In the pain I’m in I’m not likely to care what a serving woman, a foreign slave, thinks of my language.”

  Derval sat motionless not two feet from MacCullen’s knees. As she was not yet perfect in their dialect, MacCullen’s insults struck her slowly but struck hard. As understanding dawned, her face remained set but her blue eyes glittered. She took a breath. “I am,” she began, “Derval Siobhan Iníon Chadhain. My mother is a scholar and a teacher. My father, too, has an academy education.”

  Gaining impetus from her anger, she rose to one knee and rested forward, an arm upon it, as she continued. “I myself have traveled over all Europe and to the West where you have never been, man of Erin. I am lettered in five languages. I am master of the horse and hound. And the clàirseach.

  “I am no man’s servant.”

  MacCullen stared astonished at the woman above his head. By her language he would take her for a foreigner. A Saxon, perhaps. By face and title, though, she was certainly a Gael. Whatever, he had made a mistake. That knowledge made MacCullen feel weaker. His weakness made him angry. “Are you such a prodigy as that, woman? Well, I tell you in turn that my name is Labres, son of Cullen of the Ui Fáeláin and I took my mastery of poetry at Munster, but it is in sad Leinster I hold my rank of Ollave. What else you need to know of me you might ask of any lettered man in Ireland.”

  He stopped to breathe. He had exaggerated a bit. Not any lettered man in Ireland would know his reputation, for he rarely stepped too far from Dublin, and more seldom still out of Leinster, but Ailesh certainly would back him up.

  But would she? She had sounded quite angry. MacCullen decided this war should be carried onto enemy soil.

  “Far from insulting you, Iníon Chadhain, I intend to pay you the high compliment of surviving your nursing. But I beg to know, O great traveler and master of all the arts. Why do we languish in this cold forest if you have horses to carry us off? And if you are a harper, like my poor young Caeilte who is dead, then where is your clàirseach, and the servant to carry and tune it for you?”

  “Where are your servants, then?” Derval countered, but MacCullen’s eyes were firmly closed, and perhaps he slept.

  “Should you yell at your patient that way?” asked John Thornburn of Derval. The dark woman sat with her jaw jutted forward, her cheeks licked with flame. She gave him a glance that pushed his head down between his shoulders.

  “Do you know what he said about me?” she demanded. John shook his head. Derv
al glared at the unresponsive features of the sick man and snorted.

  “Never mind.”

  “But I’d like to know.”

  John flinched back from her clenched hand. “Well, you brought it up,” he reminded her.

  Derval settled slowly, as a bird will settle its angry feathers. “Damn. Damn, damn, damn. When I think that but for that lob we’d be home by now. Warm and at home.”

  At this reminder, John huddled his knees to his chest. “It is rather chilly for early evening. Especially for June.”

  “It’ll get colder,” said Derval, grinding her teeth. She gave a frustrated sigh. “Already I’ve stood up two undergraduate classes.”

  John Thornburn smiled sadly. He edged closer to Derval, for, angry or not, she was warm. “No you haven’t. You won’t miss them for a thousand years yet. Plenty of time.”

  Ailesh called to them. Her little hive was finished. It was only about six feet in diameter and had no door at all. But it needed none, being built like half a basket. She gestured for John to come help her, and together they lifted the construction, shuffled it sideways, and dropped it over the wounded man. Then Ailesh began dragging brush over the entrance. “I’m beginning to understand her,” said John over his shoulder. “I got ‘lift’ and ‘right’ and ‘down.’“

  “You’re a marvel,” Derval said shortly.

  John shrugged away her sarcasm. “I’ve never had a little sister before, you know.”

  Derval smiled crookedly. “Not so very little, Johnnie. And why a sister, anyway?”

  John gave her a look of reproach.

  Ailesh pried the heaped brush aside and crawled in. She crooked her finger to them. John followed her under, giggling nervously. Derval was last in.

  “We ought to keep a lookout,” she murmured. “We’re only an eighth of a mile or so from the bastards.”

  Derval’s whisper was loud in the confined space. The odor of blood and sickness was evident. But Derval snuggled in between John and Ailesh, who gave way with alacrity.