Book of Kells

by R. A. MacAvoy

  Ailesh saw Derval duck out of the hive without wondering where the woman was going, but when Eoin went out to talk to Colm’s old white hinny, her eyes followed him through the gaps in the weave.

  Eoin Ban was going to ruin her bothan, playing such games with the animal. She wondered why he didn’t merely send the old beast off. Ailesh heard the crack of the hazel ribs. She moved to crawl out and tell him to be careful (and wouldn’t that be a great battle, with hardly a word shared between them!) when Derval returned.

  This woman who called her “my treasure, my sister” was a great warrior, to have raided the Gaill so neatly. Brats for everyone against the night’s cold and Caeilte’s harp as well. Most cunningly, she had sought out and found the key of the harp, which many wouldn’t think to do, and the heavy, crystal-studded tuner was in her hand now, tuning the bronze strings. Ailesh had every confidence that Derval’s challenge to MacCullen had been true, and she was a master of the clàirseach.

  “It’s scarcely out of tune,” she hissed at John. “Nicely made, well-aged instrument.”

  “Be quiet with it,” John replied. “Between you and the…jinny out there…”

  “I’m making no noise at all.” Plucking two strings together at the middle of the instrument, she nodded sagely. “Good. The sisters. Now we know for sure.”

  John refused to ask what we now knew. He tightened himself into a ball of objection and peered out at the hinny, which was lying flat on its side like a dead horse beside the hutch.

  Rather than making no noise, as she had said to John, Derval was playing the clàirseach.

  He knew she was considered good on the harp. She couldn’t have friends over without being importuned to play. Certainly she moved her fingers fast enough. And he found the sound pleasant, of course, for it was the harp she was playing and that can hardly sound bad.

  But there was a time and place for everything, and John refused to enjoy this music which might lead to their discovery. He leaned his cheek against the rough branches and kept an anxious watch, never knowing when the swirl of bell sounds put him to sleep.

  Ailesh listened, nonplussed. It was a very strange music the dark woman was making: like the clàirseach and yet not like it. It was as though she were trying to play three pieces at once.

  Obviously the woman worked hard at what she was doing, but it seemed to Ailesh that she was like one of those apprentices who learn to plot knots and then so fill a piece with knotwork that it becomes muddy and doesn’t mean anything to the eye. Pity.

  MacCullen stirred next to her. “By the wounds of Christ, is a cat sharpening his claws on the harp?”

  Ailesh immediately buried her own doubts. “Labres adhvine Uasail, keep your tongue in. It must be fever that keeps you from knowing music when you hear it.”

  Derval glanced up, eyes bright as a hawk’s. “Having gone to the trouble to rescue your nephew’s instrument from his murderer, Ollave (of what kingdom you have not deigned to tell me), it may be I deserve better from you. But no matter: I know the streams of harping of more nations than one. If what I play isn’t what your ears are used to hearing, you need only give me a sample of what you do understand. I’m sure I’ll have no difficulty with it.”

  MacCullen narrowed one eye in premeditated scorn. “Give you a sample…? Woman, I’m not about to teach you your trade.”

  Derval’s hands lifted together on the heavy wood of the clàirseach.

  But Ailesh spoke out of her own anger. “To this man the most important thing in life is getting the last blow of every discourse. Even with Goban he was like that, and my father was a man with whom one could not argue. MacCullen would sooner die than be bested.”

  “He is about to, my treasure,” snapped Derval, with the harp still uplifted.

  Ailesh made a placating gesture. “But such a slave’s triumph it would be, and him a sick man! Surely you, who have raided the camp of the steel-armed enemy this night, can give him his small bitter spite?”

  Derval set the instrument down.

  “She’s humoring me,” she growled to John.

  The first light was consumed by rafts of heavy clouds which an east wind had blown in overnight. White limestone went gray and shiny as the day turned to rain: a fine, throat-catching rain that spattered the undersides of the oak leaves and made the grasses go pale.

  The night’s wind had blown fluffy ash through the ruin of Ard na Bhfuinseoge, and in the cracks and crevices of the few buildings which had been allowed to stand: the square buildings. Now the ash crumpled in on itself, its dove-white fuzziness gone quite slick and black. One Norseman camped in what had been Goban MacDuilta’s stoneroom discovered a leak in the roof and cursed the builder, while another wondered if it were raining in Orkney, his birthplace, where he could not return. The Viking chief heard the rain fall glumly. They would not be able to burn the dead today after all. He hoped it would stay cold.

  Water fell unprevented into the great house, sheeting down the walls of charcoal, infiltrating the powdery wood. Loosening it. Like a tent the building sagged inward and slapped to the ground. The earth boomed. Every Norseman grabbed for his sword.

  Derval grabbed John, who had just gone from the doze of a bad night’s morning to painful wakefulness. “Bomb!” she cried.

  “No bombs,” replied John, feeling extraordinarily intelligent. “Not in this Ireland.”

  “By all the powers of the world, what was that?” whispered Ailesh, starting up under her damp brat. (The bothi was good, but not perfect.)

  MacCullen opened dry, cracked lips. “Iníon Goban, that is the sound of a house falling. Nothing else can be so terrible to hear, except the sea in its full anger.”

  Derval scrabbled like a rat at the hole the hinny had made. She peered out one-eyed.

  There was no more to see today than yesterday. The black, rain-gleaming boles of the trees prevented any glimpse, even of the embankment on which the village had been built. But she did see something, and in another moment she had darted under the rim of the hive and was tearing her belt from her garment.

  “Whoa, Hinny-honey. Slow up, girl.” The ancient animal, even more unlikely in appearance under daylight, had heard the noise from the village and taken off toward it at a trot. Now she suffered Derval to loop the cris around her straggle-maned neck and lead her back. Ailesh wiggled out like a mouse from a hole and came to help.

  “Old Muiregan is afraid of nothing!” the redhead chided, hitting the hinny on the nose with one finger. “Because all the children spoil her. And then their children grow up and do the same.”

  The animal tried her parroty brown teeth out on the wool of the cris. Derval stared at Muiregan’s mouth.

  “She is over forty years old,” said Ailesh, understanding that stare. “That’s why her teeth are so bad.” She added, “Her mother came on a ship from Spain. That’s why we call her daughter of the sea.

  “Our horses are somewhere,” Ailesh continued, scratching the beast’s round back. “In the fields to the south. Ronan and Naoise were tending the herd.” Her eyes held an almost childish pride as she said, “We keep thirty mares and a Spanish stallion.

  “Did keep.” Ailesh turned her face away just as John also appeared in the daylight. He wore his brat wrapped unscientifically over his head and his face was screwed up against the misty rain.

  “Why didn’t you let the dumb animal go, Derval? We’d be better off without it.”

  Derval puffed, letting the cowl of her brat fall back ostentatiously from her black hair. “Better off without? A lot you know about it!”

  “I know she shines like a…a diamond in the sun.”

  “How poetic, Johnnie!”

  “And makes noise like a steam engine! How can we lie low with a mule bawling out to heaven—”

  “How can we move the sick man without her help?”

  John blinked.

  “We can’t lie low forever, John. Not if the Vikings have taken up residence next door.”

  Aile
sh had been listening carefully. Now she said, “Does Eoin Ban believe Muiregan a danger to us? She is not a noisy lady, this one. If I tell her our plight, I don’t think she will betray us.”

  Smiling, Derval turned to John. “See there, Johnnie? Ailesh’s going to explain things to the daughter of the ocean, and then she’ll not make noise any more.”

  John scowled briefly at the back of Ailesh’s head. “Eh? That’s very silly.”

  Derval kept her smile. “Oh, I don’t think so. Young Ailesh is a woman with a lot of tact.”

  They sat once more under the woven shelter while rain fell harder without. MacCullen, in the middle, lay in moaning dreams. Ailesh prayed for him.

  “Damn infection,” muttered Derval. “Nothininhell I can do about it.” She held in her hands the square, double-handled wooden cup she had found in her raid on the Vikings, and from it she slipped rainwater between the poet’s parched lips.

  John’s head was on his knees. He was rehearsing a sentence. “Ailesh.”

  The girl lifted her head.

  “Ailesh. How did Goban take stone?”

  Ailesh’s brow lowered in confusion. Derval turned also. “What is it you want to ask, Johnnie?”

  “I’ll ask,” said John Thornburn stubbornly.

  “Stone carved in…house, eh?”

  “‘Eh’ isn’t Irish,” snapped Derval.

  “The cross was carved mostly in my father’s workshed,” Ailesh replied slowly. “But when he saw it in sunlight he took the fine chisel to it again.”

  John nodded. “How…to carry stone from workshed?”

  “Oh?” She understood. “Six men lowered it onto a slidecar, and a horse pulled it down the slope.”

  “You’re thinking of stealing the cross back?” asked Derval. “I couldn’t lift the smallest of the pieces they’d whacked it into.”

  “You tried to lift the cross?” John’s eyes widened. “You were busy last night.”

  Ailesh watched the interchange. “If we can kill the Gaill, then we can take the cross back and set it together again…” She looked hopefully from face to face, before Derval’s expression dampened her.

  “Your abilities are so great, Bhean Uasal, I don’t know when I am asking too much.”

  Then it was Derval’s turn to stare at the ground between them. “I would get your father’s blood price for you, my treasure, if I only knew how.”

  John sighed helplessly. He pressed his knobby knees to his chest. He smelled wet wool in his nose. He heard the crackle of paper.

  Paper. His face lit up like a lantern. “Paper!” he gasped. “I still have the paper in my shirt pocket.”

  Derval gazed at him between hope and alarm. “What paper? The tracing paper?”

  He tried to stand up, hitting his head against the dome of the hive. Old bruises throbbed. John began to tear at his brat, which now seemed unwilling to come off.

  “But, but…” Derval stood beside him, her hands balled before her mouth. “Will it work from this end? Will it perhaps only take us to the spot where the cross used to stand, or to the rubbish heap where they’ve put it?”

  “Don’t care! Got to try.” John stamped himself out of his woolen wrap.

  Ailesh didn’t rise, but turned her face up to the two. “You have found your way?”

  “Yes! No. Maybe,” shouted John, and he reached his hand under his filthy, stained shirt.

  The tracing paper came out in one piece, neatly folded. It was also a uniform color of reddish-brown, and when he unfolded it, it made an unpleasant sticky sound.

  “Blood,” said John tonelessly. “Completely soaked in blood. The marks are gone.”

  “Take it out in the light,” Derval suggested.

  “No. All gone,” John mumbled, as the rain wept over his shoulders. “And how ironic.”

  Derval lifted in interrogative eyebrow.

  “I should have stayed with the old sheet, where the lines were almost worn through. Then I could have at least felt the pattern.”

  Derval stared fixedly ahead, blinking fast as the rain hit her eyelashes. “No matter, Johnnie. It was a thing we hadn’t thought of five minutes ago.” She retreated from him under the wet and glistening creelwork.

  John Thornburn let the paper float to the ground, where raindrops beat on it with a rattling noise. Because it was his own creation, he took pity on it, picked it up once again, and gave it the shelter of his pocket.

  The white hinny, still tied to a tree limb, glared at him with protuberant brown eyes. Its lower jaw jutted out with very human dissatisfaction. Its wet hair smelled. “Don’t blame me,” John muttered to the creature, and his own small, cleft chin mirrored its expression. “I’d love to see the last of you.”

  “So it’s decided then,” Derval was saying as he crept back into the odors of sweat and sickness. “We all head for Dublin.”

  John wheezed from sheer surprise. “Dublin? How decided? By whom?”

  Ailesh glanced from him to Derval. “Eoin must be asked yet, Bhean Uasal,” she said diffidently. Derval did not drop her gaze from John’s face.

  “Well, what else is possible, if you can’t get us home?”

  “If I can’t…” he began weakly.

  “If your paper doesn’t work, and you can’t reach the pieces of the cross. Have you got another idea?”

  “That’s not fair!” he expostulated. Derval shook her head.

  “I’m not interested in fair. Just in getting home. The Gaill aren’t leaving, and this neighborhood is going to get more and more dangerous. Can you think of a safer place to be than Dublin?” Her raptorial eyes softened. “I’d love to see the place.”

  “I’ll bet you would!” replied John, stung into playing personalities. “I bet you’d glory in it, every rotting middenheap in the city and every croak of incomprehensible, dead Gaelic! I, on the other hand, would rather be back in L’Anse aux Meadows with a glass of Labatt’s, watching my history on the telly. Or even better, a good game of football!

  “And,” he continued, stopping only momentarily for breath, “I think there’s something very indicative about our…about you and me, that we’re where you want to be, and not where I want to be.”

  Derval did not rise to the bait, but remained peering thoughtfully through the dim damp at him. “But you don’t follow football, John.”

  He hissed at her.

  Derval shrugged. “Well, really. It was your bath… Never mind. Just tell me what we’re to do, then.”

  John glared sullenly and said nothing. He pointed at the huddled poet on the branches, shivering. “What will we do with him, if we set off for Dublin? Leave him here?”

  Derval tightened her lips, and John pressed his point. “You don’t care about his life or death so much maybe, since he doesn’t appreciate you?”

  Derval put one long arm out to either side, along the struts of the weaving. There was something vaguely crucified in her attitude and her face was expressionless as she said, “Of course not, John. We’ll have to take him with us.”

  John snorted and flexed his arms, remembering MacCullen’s weight. “I’m not a horse.”

  “No. Muiregan is. Or close enough. Ailesh will rig up a litter. We’ll take turns with the other end of it. That’s what we’ve been talking about in here.”

  John looked at the girl with a reproach she did not in the least understand. She spoke to him.

  “I’m what?” he replied uncertainly. Ready to take offense.

  “She suggests you’re not feeling well,” Derval said. “Good, sisterly concern, she shows.”

  John turned away from both of them.

  It was all well and good to say that they would share the hauling of the sick man, but the plain truth was that John was far better fitted for the work than Derval. And none but he had been able to rip from the wet earth the straight saplings necessary for the litter. The roots of these saplings stood out in matched aureoles behind his hands as the little band marched through the trees. Derval led the
hinny, which carried the heavy clàirseach as well as the front shafts of the litter, while John used the back shafts to force the sad beast’s hindquarters into greater effort. When the hinny hurried, John stumbled. When she balked, which was far more frequently, his arms were wrenched. With every jolt MacCullen groaned in his fever.

  Ailesh walked next to the sick man, but her head was over her shoulder, looking at John.

  “It will be easier when we reach the Slige Chualann,” she promised.

  “Easier on him or me?” John was not sure of his grammar, but Ailesh smiled.

  “Both.”

  Perhaps they had come a mile. A mile farther from Ard na Bhfuinseoge and the Viking camp. Derval’s shoulders settled down from her ears. She looked behind at John’s flushed face. “Not cold any more, are you, Johnnie?”

  He opened his mouth to snarl at her, but then decided he hadn’t the energy.

  The tall woman led the hinny to the black moss-streaked bole of a fallen oak. “Here, let the shafts rest on this for a while.”

  John did so, and he sank back wearily on the tree trunk with his hands in his lap. Ailesh turned them over.

  “Your hands are none the better for this work, Eoin,” she noted. John, not understanding, merely stared as Ailesh lifted her brat and stepped over the near shaft of the litter. She lifted the saplings, and the hinny, by reflex, moved forward.

  John found the litter moving on without him. Clearing his throat he bounded after.

  “That’s too heavy for you,” he said. But Ailesh denied it, and in fact the girl was moving on with a good stride. John skittered beside her.

  Her sleeves were rolled up and her forearms angled with muscle. John noticed the heaviness of the tendons at Ailesh’s wrist. “You are too short,” he told her. “The… things you hold go down and the weight of the man is on you instead of the hinny.”

  She turned an amused hazel eye on him. “It is not bad, Eoin.”

  Derval kicked leaves at her feet. “You weren’t so damned worried about me when I was trying to carry it.”