Book of Kells

by R. A. MacAvoy

  “You’re not short,” he replied. “Besides, you gave up after thirty paces.”

  Derval was quiet for a few seconds. “I’ve no experience in that line of work. Now, if it had been a sword you wanted me to carry…”

  John smiled, but Ailesh appeared quite impressed.

  They grew less careful as the day progressed. After another hour’s rough progress they reached what Ailesh called Sliege Dala, which was a forest trail twelve feet wide, studded with tree roots.

  “North is Dublin,” Ailesh informed them, pointing. “South are the fields where our horses graze. It is perhaps twice as far to the city.” She looked to her companions for advice. Derval, in turn, looked to John.

  “What say, Johnnie? You’re totin’.”

  John pointed north with his chin. “I’d rather walk twenty miles than walk ten and ride thirty.”

  Much to John’s amazement, his words decided the issue. They headed north.

  The hinny picked up her pace on the smoother ground. John also trotted. He had tied the shafts to his wrists with strips from the tail of his shirt.

  Now the injured man rode quietly—so quietly that John wondered whether he was alive—but the harp sang with the hinny’s jouncing trot. After a few minutes he voiced his worry. “Is he alive—the olive, I mean? Hell! Is anyone alive in this dreary place? We haven’t seen a soul.”

  Derval let the animal’s steps patter to a stop. “Don’t complain, John. A little while ago we were thanking God we’d seen no one. And as for dreary…” She raised her head and peered above her, where the oak and elm had given way to a net of pale birch leaves which shuddered in a wind from the west. The rain had given up, except under the trees. “You just wait till the sun comes out. This wood will look like fairyland!”

  “Tra la, tra la,” muttered John Thornburn, sniffing wetly. He gripped the litter shafts afresh and pushed the hinny forward.

  “It is time to rest,” stated Ailesh in a voice of great authority. Both her companions gaped at her, but her small mouth was set firmly and she pointed to the right. “There is good water in a hollow to the east of the road—that is, it will be good if no cattle have wallowed here today—and we can make a fire.”

  John looked at the sky. How far had they come? Five miles? Ten? Not ten, surely. His shoulders ached as though they had been beaten with sticks, and his stomach gave a loud and disheartening growl. “Because she mentioned fire,” he said to Derval, explaining the noise. “Now it thinks it’ll get something to eat.”

  Derval stared anxiously along the road and bit her lip. “I… I’d hoped to make better mileage today.”

  John hung his head resentfully. “Oh, I don’t mean to fault your hauling, Johnnie,” and she slapped his withers affectionately. “But while there’s still daylight…” At last Derval shrugged and let Ailesh undo the hinny’s trappings. Suddenly John’s earlier complaint filtered through her brain.

  “Your stomach, John? Well, tell your expectant stomach to fix itself for roast chicken, okay?”

  John winced. “Don’t do that, Derval. Makes it worse.”

  But Derval had waltzed to the small pile of wraps and baggage which had been lowered from the hinny to the road. She pulled out the harp and removed the back from the soundbox. It came off easily, and Derval pulled from beneath it a naked thing which looked much like a rubber chicken, complete with beak and scaly feet. “Da da!” she bugled. “The paradox is resolved.”

  John’s eyes refocused. “It’s…real? It’s Mrs. Hanlon’s chicken?”

  “Hardest part of my work last night, wringing its neck without making noise. And cleaning it in the dark, with only the harp key as a tool.”

  “Mrs. Hanlon’s chicken!” John almost wailed. “You killed her! She was a pet! I won’t touch the thing!” His stomach made a noise of contradiction.

  They built their camp next to the spring Ailesh had recognized, and the chatter of the water both quieted the company and made them realize their weariness. Derval laid the fire but then fell unexpectedly asleep. John felt it incumbent upon him, as part Indian, to start the fire, but upon opening the pack, he discovered that Derval had neglected to pack matches. He managed anyway, using a willow sally and a strip of cloth for a fire bow. But the earth beneath the bed of twigs and branches was rock-hard and his efforts to build a rotisserie were frustrating. At last he got one forked stick propped securely and another, pointed stick resting on it, with the pale and gory bird hanging over the fire. The other end he held between his knees.

  If his eyes closed, he knew, he would fall asleep. Luckily John’s eyes showed no inclination to close, but stared, dry and smarting, into the orange fire.

  He had camped in much colder weather, such as the time his father had taken him out to try his hand at the seal trade, and the boy had thrown up all night. (His father had called it a virus.) But never had he felt so poorly prepared to face the elements. In his mind’s eye he saw the window behind the woodstove at his childhood home, with the six panes of the inner window steaming and the big sheet of the storm window frosted and the outmost sheet of plastic shivering in a winter wind. It was a warm and comforting vision to John Thornburn. He wished fervently he had stayed home and fished like his father. But no—he could not wish not to be an artist, for then he’d be someone else entirely. And that would not take him home.

  And where was home, anyway? With his father dying, John had come back to L’Anse aux Meadows. A short and disappointing homecoming it was, for the old man didn’t know him and was last off calling for the wife who had left him twenty years before, heading for Banff with a dashing young dentist.

  And though eight years in New York had left John feeling completely alien, Newfoundland had then become just as strange. And how was he to make a living in a place like L’Anse aux Meadows? He could not go back to fishing at his age.

  For a while Derval had seemed to offer… John glanced over at the slim ivory face, its power softened by sleep. He could hardly blame Derval for what she had “seemed to offer.”

  MacCullen woke up thirsty. He felt the heat of the little fire stroke his face like a curtain. He saw John at the other side of the fire, his long, rather foolish face slack, his mouth open. The smell of raw meat searing turned the Ollave’s stomach. He clapped his hands at John. “Bring me water,” he said.

  Ailesh had been drawing together the living branches of the hazel bushes that surrounded the stream, making a pavilion to protect the wounded man from night’s damp. She stooped now and rummaged in the pack for the wooden cup Derval had liberated. “He’s busy, MacCullen,” she whispered. “And you mistake Eoin, if you think him a servant.”

  MacCullen smiled with great pain. “This one, too, daughter of Goban? He is without language entirely, and, to look at him, brain. Surely some pigboy of the Dubliners…”

  John caught only the word “language,” and the fact that he had been marked as one of the Danes. He raised his head, worried.

  Then Ailesh’s arm was around his shoulders. The girl was wearing only a brat, and in the corner of his eye he could see her hairy armpit and her swelling breast. “Eoin is a master of the arts,” she said, so slowly and clearly that even he understood. “His work is blessed by Bridget, and he is”—she hesitated—“the foster brother of my father: his equal in skill.”

  John had seen the cross. Indeed, he knew the quality of Goban MacDuilta’s work as few others could know it, and the strength of this praise made his hand on the spit begin shaking. The skin on his arms flushed. “I am only an apprentice,” he said in his best modern Irish.

  “At least this one isn’t full of himself,” said MacCullen. Ailesh brought him a cup of water.

  At Derval’s first scream John dropped the chicken in the fire. He plunged his hand into the flame to rescue it before going to Derval.

  She was screaming in English. “No! No! Oh God, it’s coming! The bombs!” John patted her awkwardly, ineffectually. At last he took her hands in his. She opened her eyes an
d saw him.

  “What was it, Derval my maid? Bad dream?”

  Her blue eyes shone like glass in the firelight. “Bombs! Over Dublin. Wicklow. New York. London. All…white powder. Bright light and white powder.”

  John lifted her head in one hand. His eyes went triangular with concern. She needed him too, he thought. (Or someone like him.) Derval buried her face in John’s sore shoulder.

  “I think, Derval,” he said. “With all the problems we have here, that’s one worry you can put on the shelf. Besides”—he raised her chin—“it’s probably all a symbol for sex, don’t you think?”

  Derval, despite her upset, could not miss what was for John an unusually blue joke. “More likely Vikings.”

  “What is frightening you, my true sister?” asked Ailesh. She crouched beside them: diffident, respectful of their intimacy.

  John rehearsed his Irish answer. “She has bad dreams. She… dreams the end of the world.”

  Ailesh compressed her lips and took one of Derval’s long hands in her own. “Noble woman, my sister, you must trust in the mercy of Christ and his blessed Mother.” Derval’s eyes slipped from the small Irishwoman to John, to whom she shot a weary, cynical glance. But John was looking intently at Ailesh.

  Across the wavering firelight MacCullen cleared his throat. “Fear not, daughter of Chadhain. The world must have fifteen years more.”

  Derval peered over to the poet confusedly. She sighed and lifted herself from John’s support. “Fifteen…?”

  MacCullen slicked his lime-frizzed hair back from his face. “Indeed, the millenium is not for so many years yet, and although these invasions and slaughters portend the end, still in fifteen years many deeds of high renown may be accomplished.”

  Ailesh snorted. “Indeed, Ollave, you sound like one of the Gentiles yourself, with your inevitable doom and your ‘deeds of high renown.’ Neither Christ nor His saints have made known to us the hour of our deaths nor that of this world of men, and the year one thousand and one will follow the year one thousand!”

  Derval listened to the young woman confusedly, still half in her dream. MacCullen’s answering smile was tolerant but unconvinced. It was John, who couldn’t follow Ailesh’s eloquence, who heard the rustle of cloth and turned around.

  Above, behind them on the bank of the road she stood, with the evening light turning her all to black. She picked her way down amid the gorse and the eglantine, her motions stiff and jerky, and her old hands reaching out for help. It was only the yielding arms of the coll and elder that took her hands, however, and she came into the fireglow sliding awkwardly on mud.

  “Listen to the maiden! By my bees and brews, just listen to her!” The voice was cracked and quavering, but not high as senility will often prove, but deep as a lowing cow. “Such authority! You’d think she’d eaten the head of the salmon. You’d think she spoke for the old dark woman herself.”

  She wore a nun’s habit of dark and dirty crimson which dragged on the mud at her feet, and a hood which sagged over her face like aged skin. Beneath the hood could be seen the tip of her nose, red-nostriled and swollen, and a large mouth with the lips sunken.

  But the cloak which hid her face was not pinned in front, and as she stood near-straddling the fire she pulled it aside to expose two empty and withered breasts, with nipples each as large as a baby’s fist, hanging down to the last of her ribs. Her belly was folded like linen cloth and the grizzled hair of her pudendum, which she arched forward to the warmth of the little fire, hung halfway to her knees in long sausage curls, like the tail of a hills’ pony. Her legs were straight and her knees and feet very large. John stared at her feet, for she was so shameless and horrible he dared look no higher.

  How could anyone walk around so nearly naked, in the wind and the wet of Ireland, even in summer? John knew about ascetics and anchorites, of course, but he felt quite ascetic enough in his woolen right now, and besides, nakedness might be denial of the body for a man, but on a woman he could see it as nothing less than brazenly sexual. Artist though he was, John needed to find sexuality pretty.

  Yet as he stared at the old woman’s feet, he had to admit they were beautiful beyond words.

  The reheaded girl hopped up. “I beg your pardon, a shiun—Reverend Mother. I never meant to say I speak with the voice of Bridget.”

  The hag scratched her pubes casually. “Of course you didn’t mean to speak so, little heifer. You did speak so, and that’s what counts.” She laughed inordinately at her own joke, if it was a joke, while Ailesh’s round face blushed.

  “Yet if I offended, a shiun—”

  MacCullen cut in. “Make you welcome at our fire, a shiun. What we have to eat is God-given, and so given to all with need.” He had raised himself to a sitting position, and his formal invitation was so mellifluous as to take all about him by surprise.

  The old nun gave him a glance out of cataractal white eyes and smiled more broadly yet. “Well said! Well said! You make a fine prancing lad at the courts, don’t you, my sweet? A good mother’s precious son, too, I’ll bet, and a loyal dog to your master! Well, no shame in any of that, though it’s not the way to heaven. And your day will come to curse like a hero, before you make an end.” Then she plumped herself down with force between Derval and John, who just managed to fling himself sideways in time to avoid being sat on. She put one arm companionably over each.

  MacCullen gazed through the fire at her with the weary tolerance of one whom fever has given a rest. “May we know what abbey holds you for its treasure, Old Mother?”

  The crone bellowed jovially. “Abbey? Why, what abbey would take me, nowadays, scholar of Munster? And what abbey could hold me, such as I am?”

  The arm laid under John’s eye jerked him back and forth with her merriment. Its skin was scaly but not withered, and the wrist and forearm were heavy with muscle. He could feel the heat of the old woman’s body. He could certainly smell her too. He tried not to stare at the thatch of hair that ran down the underside of her arm as he wondered how a body composed of parts each interesting in itself could be so unbearably repulsive to have near him.

  She had silver hairs on her face, each the length and thickness of a surgical needle.

  Derval, too, he saw out of the corner of his eye, was staring at this apparition with blank terror. John felt a stab of concern. Could his wild and expansive Derval still be so in the power of a nightmare? Or did the awful old woman affect her as she did him? But it wasn’t terror John felt, only an overwhelming urge to get away from the old creature. He tried to meet eyes with Derval, for question or reassurance, but hers were locked on the old nun like a sparrow on a snake.

  “Yet if I offended…” Ailesh repeated, squatting before the hag, letting her own brat fall back. (Ailesh had the same beautiful feet, John noticed. But her pubic hair was nicer. He no longer minded looking at Ailesh’s pubic hair. He stared riveted at the young girl’s crotch, as a way of avoiding the other so near to him.)

  The nun made a sound like a pig. “What a waste of effort, worrying whether you’ve offended old Bride the Brewer! Why, people offend me every day, and does the sun fail to shine for that?”

  She turned to John to share the joke, and he was transfixed, looking into the catastrophe of her sagging, bleary-eyed face. His head slid down between his shoulders. “Ah! Now, I’ll have you know I’ve bred my share of cattle, too, and I must have a look at this little bull-calf here…” She took his cheek between dirty-nailed fingers and gave it a very painful tweak. “Och! Eyes of sky and earth! How auspicious! I am amazed the flowers don’t bloom as he passes. Now, here’s one who doesn’t worry about offending me. Indeed, he thinks I’m an offense against him, doesn’t he? With my flapping dugs and the holes in my mouth where I once had ivory. It scares the young to see what life has in store for them.”

  John tried very hard to misunderstand the old woman’s words, but they came clear to him as his father’s back-throated Newfie English. “Please,” he said to her. “I do
n’t. I’m not. I didn’t say anything at all. Please…just leave me alone.”

  Instead the old hag put both her arms around John and rocked him to and fro. “Leave you alone? What a sad request, from a fair lad lost in the wood like this! Poor little bull! You’ve a twisted horn, haven’t you, then? Never mind. Old Bride likes you none the less for it.”

  Without releasing the mortified John, she turned her agate eyes on the group around the fire. “Old Bride sees very well, though you might not think so to look at her. She watched you come in, with your grand white horse and your grand wounded poet and the bright woman and the dark woman and my little bull here, hauling away with a frown on his face!”

  When her smile grew sly it was like stretching cobwebs over an old helmet, for her face was all cheekbones and sharp nose bridge. “But I was at work, my darlings, and had to let you wander by yourselves. It was my time to put the old must into the new must so the ale would take.

  “That is how it is done, you know, if you would have an ale with life in it. You seal the old with a bit of the new, and you baptize the new with the old.”

  “So it is, a shiun.” Ailesh nodded politely. “So that the yeast is not lost.” She reached fingers gingerly into the fire and pulled on a charred foot of the chicken. Part of the leg came off in her hand and she extended it to Bride. “Give us a prayer and bless our food by sharing it with us.”

  “I’ll do that for you, my heifer of the sweet thighs.” The old one grinned and stretched out her right hand, palm extended toward the chicken on the spit. “Power of God on this flesh!” she called in a deep and mighty voice. “And power on those who will eat it, to be worthy of the life taken here to nourish them, for the fire of all life is from God. It is finished.”

  Old Bride, who had been embracing the miserable John with both arms, released him long enough to take the chicken leg. Then she wrapped him around once more, so that the greasy and odorous drumstick hung just below his chin. “Eat for strength and courage, my son!” He moaned between hunger and nausea, and she chided, “The weak who shun food don’t deserve to have it.