Book of Kells

by R. A. MacAvoy

  “Ui Garrchon,” Derval echoed without inflection.

  “You will find them to the south along this very road,” the taoiseach added helpfully. “And they are a band that might have been created especially for this heavenly endeavor of yours, for they have many sins to account for.”

  “Ui Garrchon,” repeated Derval once more. “Now, I wonder if that could have been the empty clanstead I passed in the early hour of night, where the spiders had made their webs in the firepit and all the manure was dusty dry? Nay, it could not be Ui Garrchon.”

  “What is that?” The gray man spoke. “Cobwebs in the firepit?” He turned his suspicious glance to his taiseach. “Wouldn’t it be like them? To raid before we could discover the move, and send us pelting over the night road to an abandoned dun?”

  The chieftain looked undecided. The gray man bit his nails (like Johnny, thought Derval). The foot soldiers, one and all, stared white-eyed along the road Derval had come.

  “Come,” she urged. “I will show you the abandoned house and you yourselves may judge. But I must in truth warn you that we are like to meet the Gaill before we come there, for they cannot be now far behind.”

  “You are pursued?” The redhead started so that his horse shied.

  Derval brushed her black hair from her face with both hands. “Noble sir, I do not stumble along the north road behind an ass’s child in fulfillment of a penance!”

  The taoiseach made an ursine noise in his throat and once more called upon physiognomy of Mary. “We have homes,” he said. “And families left undefended against the scourge.” He swung his pony around on its hind feet. Then, remembering Derval’s condition, he added, “Stranger, you are welcome to take your shelter with us, but pray God you do not bring the berserkers after you!”

  The entire troop returned then the way it had come, the ponies pacing and the foot soldiers trotting with a will. Derval was left alone under moonlight.

  MacCullen pressed his head against his mare’s neck and allowed her to bull a path through the brush along which Ailesh and John followed, hopping and floundering. In the next whitewashed meadow the pony stopped, and feeling no hand upon the rein, put down her head to graze.

  MacCullen rose and pulled twigs out of his hair. “Good old… Hah! I never asked your name. Well done, whoever you are, my pearl of price.” He looked around him, saying, “Iníon Chadhain, you have good ears.”

  Ailesh was leaning against a tree, puffing hot, ragged breaths. John was pulling something out of the laces of his shoe. Balancing on one foot, he said, “She was ahead of you, eh, Olive? I never saw her anywhere else.”

  MacCullen shook his head blankly. “I turned first into the trees, because I had the only animal to force a path.”

  John looked back at the black hole they had ripped through the forest. “Oh shit!” he said in English, and he threw himself back along it. His arms up and out, warding off the branches, he looked like a running baboon. But in another second he was bowled over by the white mare, who was kicked whinnying into the forest, and MacCullen shouted, “God forgive me for an unfaithful fool!”

  “He does very well for a fellow so sick,” John said.

  Ailesh peered into the gloom as the white rump bobbed and faded, while a cry of “MacCullen to Chadhain” echoed in the heavy air. “True,” she said. “And although I do not belive the Bean Uasal Iníon Cuhain has come this cold distance to be bested by the small taraigeacht of Ui DunLainge, I am heartened to see Labres MacCullen for once acting the part of a poet.”

  John took the girl’s hand as he picked his way by feeling into the brush of the woods. “He doesn’t always?”

  Ailesh made a noncommittal sound. “He is a learned man. His history is faultless and he is friends with all the people of importance, both among the Gaels and the Dublin Danes.”

  “But his poeting isn’t very good, eh?”

  She stepped up beside him. “MacCullen is a…considered man. His poems have never driven men mad.”

  John spit out a guffaw. “Thank God!” he said in English, and then added, to Ailesh, “I don’t know what art is, but I know what I like.”

  “That is the beginning of all knowledge,” Ailesh replied, and to the young woman’s immense surprise, John doubled up laughing, and charged full tilt toward the road still doubled up, dragging her behind him. At last she broke free, bending his wrist around the trunk of a sapling. Their bodies continued in the arc imposed by the tree and met, chest to chest, with some force.

  “You, on the other hand,” she said, panting, “are a madman already.” And Ailesh gave John a sweet, blundering kiss which caught only the corner of his mouth.

  “Eh?” He stood absolutely still, with one hand around her waist, where the violence of their contact had carried it. “Eh?” His face was cut into scowling lines by shadow.

  Ailesh turned away and floundered along the horse’s trail, her short legs stepping very high. John, slightly dazed, had to follow.

  Derval rubbed her eyes with three fingers of each hand. She seemed to have lost the hinny while talking to those silly Ui DunLainge men. What if it had followed the riders and was now a half-mile away? Shit.

  But she heard a rustle and rummage in the trees to the left of the road. She pulled Muiregan out of a clump of briars and was only grateful she couldn’t see her hands bleeding under the moonlight.

  Now she had to stop and think about her companions. It wasn’t pleasant thinking, for all evidence pointed to her being abandoned on the road. She imagined the lot of them, Johnny, MacCullen, and little Ailesh, tiptoeing away into the woods as she marched on, attached to the hinny’s tail. But she couldn’t believe that, and strange in her own mind, it was prickly MacCullen whom she could least see committing such a treason to friendship. Her mind instead filled with an image of giant black spiders depending from slimy cords in the trees to lift each of her compatriots to a terrible, shriveled death. It was The Hobbit she was thinking of, she told herself. Such giant spiders would not yet be invented for another thousand years. She dared to look up and saw the moon high, broken like china by the twigs of a dead oak.

  She heard labored hooves again and leaned on the hinny’s flank wearily, awaiting the night’s next entertainment.

  MacCullen burst out of the bushes eighty feet behind her. His pony came to an awkward, star-gazing stop. With his brat and long hair flying, the poet looked awfully large on that pony. Spotting her on the road, he swiveled the beast and it lunged toward Derval.

  Another yawn came out of nowhere, but she smothered it. With a touch of surprise (strange—that anything still had the power to surprise her) she saw MacCullen fling himself upon the dirt beside her feet. “Woman, forgive me! It was not ingratitude but only confusion that caused me to fail you here, and I swear by the blood of Christ crucified and by his voice upon the storm of the water—I swear further by the bright edge of the sword of light—that never shall such shame fall upon me again!”

  “Bright edge of wha…?” began Derval, stifling a series of yawns as endless as waves of the sea. But she looked cannily at the white pony and amended her sentence. “You don’t have stirrups.”

  Perhaps he hadn’t heard her, for he still lay flat out upon the ground, with his face tilted upward, ever so oddly. Derval lowered herself down next to him. The ground was cold on her bottom. She heard her knees crackle.

  “Don’t…uh…fesh yourself about it,” she said, shaking him by the shoulder. “Just explain to me where everybody went. And why you don’t wear stirrups.”

  MacCullen crawled up on his elbows. He sat back, dusted the leaf mulch from his brat. “Why should I wear stirrups, woman? Am I feeble, fat, or aged, to need such a crutch? Or am I carrying weapons that require such support?”

  “Only those feeble, fat, aged, or carrying weapons wear stirrups?” she asked keenly.

  MacCullen blinked at her confusedly. “I simply tell you I do not.”

  She sighed. “Then it becomes hard to say who’s the fool
, me or Sully,” she muttered, not caring particularly whether the man heard or not. “Well, at least you can tell me where you all went.” She glanced around. “And where Eoin and Ailesh are.”

  “They will come,” answered MacCullen. By his beetled brow and thrusting lower lip, Derval judged the poet to be working up a case of the sullens. But hands rubbed his face into composure. “How did you escape the anger of the taraigeacht, Scholar? Or did you merely slay the lot of them?”

  “Me?” Derval stood, noticing the hinny had begun to eat MacCullen’s pony’s tail. She separated the beasts. “I killed no one, Ollave. I merely sent them home. They had no bottom.”

  “No…bottom?”

  Derval shrugged and tapped herself over the gut. “Nothing here to push with. Gave out before the race was half run.” She stood by the pony’s head and met its round, dark eye. She giggled. “I wish I had my horse, Ollave. I’d like to see your face when you see him! Now, he has bottom.”

  This time, MacCullen made no retort at all.

  Coming off the boreen from Dun Dergne they heard the whistling, bells, and lowing of a small cattle drive. Ailesh called out in the darkness to the other, unknown group of travelers, and was told to hurry in front so they would not have to walk in the dust kicked up by the animals. She thanked the buchalana—the drivers—that they could not see in the shadow of the trees, and the three walkers and the Ollave on the horse stumbled forward. Once on the main road, MacCullen roused himself from the stupor he had fallen into long enough to call out a blessing to the courteous strangers.

  “Thank you! I need your good words, noble person,” the reply came back. “Today is my wedding, and this is the coibche of my beloved that we are hurrying on, here.” MacCullen brightened up at that. “Then may it aid you to know that it’s the blessing of a chief poet that falls on you today. May no weakness stain your bridebed or its children, strength to your piston.”

  A chorus of hearty cries answered him. “Honor me by eating with us at daybreak,” the bridegroom called out as he rode from under the shadow of the trees into the pale starlight ahead of his company. “You and all your servants are most welcome to take food with us.”

  Derval smiled tightly. Of course the herders would make that mistake. MacCullen was mounted while they were walking. Derval waited to see if he would correct the man or revel in the aura of power and wealth of a man with three servants.

  But MacCullen was not what his vanity made him seem, at times. Or he knew Derval would not let him get away with it. “We would be grateful for your hospitality. But we’re in mortal haste. A lawsuit is taking us to Dublin today. These people are not my servants but companions in trouble. I am wounded and have been given the only horse left to us: my friends walk out of necessity.”

  The rider was so close now that they could see him in profile against the star-speckled sky. John thought his head seemed strangely shaped. Then he realized that the stranger was wearing a headdress. As he dismounted and walked a little way beside them, talking to the poet, John suddenly knew from the scent that he was crowned with a thick wreath of flowers. Light touched them and John saw the baby-pink ruffle of wild roses. The wreath looked incongruous to John over the fellow’s brawny physique, but John shrugged his shoulders. Here was a people who went around all the time armed with mucking great axes, swords, and knives, and life seemed in constant peril. Yet men kissed, nudity was socially acceptable, and sexual intercourse might occur in public without interrupting the conversation.

  The bridegroom got back on his horse. “I’m sorry for your trouble and I wish you were able to join us, for strangers can be good luck at a wedding. Good luck to us all anyway,” he said in parting.

  John, suspicious of his own understanding, turned to Derval and asked, “Nice and polite, but they don’t want to know the name of the great poet who’s blessed them. Maybe they don’t believe a word of it, eh?”

  Derval rubbed sand out of her eyes as she replied, “I think they believe him, Johnnie. It’s hard to fake arrogance like our poet’s. And I’m sure these folks would love to know his name. But they can’t ask outright. Not till after they’d fed us, bathed us, and entertained us all the day would it be polite for them to ask. MacCullen could have told them, though, if he had wanted them to know.”

  John eyed the mounted man narrowly. “Could be he doesn’t want to be known by the company he’s keeping.”

  Derval’s smile went tighter than ever.

  The bridegroom had stopped and turned on his horse to have one last word. “If you expect compensation from Awley Sandal or his queen, you could wait a long time for it.”

  The poet fingered his reins in silence for a moment. “That may be,” he answered the man firmly, “but if that’s the case, I must compose such a black-boil-raising satire that he will be a laughingstock in Eire until the custom of speech dies out among humankind.”

  This speech seemed to daunt the bridegroom, for he backed his pony into the shadows again. “Dia dhuibh,” he said in farewell. “God be with you.”

  “Agus aris oruv,” replied MacCullen. “And with you.”

  Ailesh touched MacCullen’s hand. “If you can stand it, we should quicken our pace. These cows give us an opportunity to cover our tracks.”

  MacCullen laughed smugly. “Your foster kin know quite well where we are headed. They won’t have time to follow us, anyway. They’re scuttling out of the way of the Ui DunLainge.” He glanced down, then, to check whether his words had offended the girl, and added, “You’re right in principle, Iníon Goban; we should not advertise ourselves, helpless as we are. But all roads in this part of the world lead to Dublin.”

  Their path led over the mountains for a while. The lowing, the bells, the whistling: sounds of the laboriously driven cattle continued behind them. Then the bridal party turned off toward the ocean, to the right and down, leaving them alone on the high path. Ailesh sang softly, “making the road short,” as is said in Ireland now as then. Often Derval sang with her. When they were tired and became silent, MacCullen began speaking of the history of the land beyond them and where they were heading. He spoke of Bricru, the poison-tongued, blaspheming poet who demanded, in return for a verse, both thousands of cattle and to have the noblewomen of a whole province grind corn for him: a very insulting task. He told of how Bricru was stopped by the natural world itself at the ford of hurdles at the Liffey. “The waters of the river rose up and confounded him as a false poet. And the men of the South took back the cattle and their wives, leaving him with nothing to sop his pride. He was so ashamed that his face blushed as if it had been burned.

  “And it stayed that way, night and morning, gray skies or blue. Even when he came back empty-handed to the kingdom of Ulster, he was red as a fresh firebrand. ‘What happened to your face in Munster, Bricru? Did you suffer in the sun? Are you fevered?’ Connocabhair the king would ask him, and never get an answer.”

  John listened to the half-understood words that rolled musically from the mouth of MacCullen. A few sentences, a phrase, a name, made sense to him, now and then. But the words, just as sound, were beautiful, soft and thick as the growl of the sea’s wave receding over pebbles.

  For the last quarter-mile or so it was a hard climb straight up. The first lightening of the sky made the mountain on their left visible to them. “This is Kilmasogue,” Derval whispered to John. “We are six miles south of Dublin, as the crow flies.”

  They couldn’t see anything new from the shoulder of the mountain; it was still too dark. The wind hit them, making the travelers wrap their cloaks tightly around their bodies. (Wherever one goes, winter or summer, the wind before dawn is cold.)

  They began to go downhill. After a while MacCullen pointed to their left, to a dim heap of huge stones. “This is one of the beds of Diarmuid and Grainne,” he said with authority. “It has a long passage inside it, and if you would like to get out of the wind, it would be a good stop to shelter ourselves. That pair was being pursued by their enemies and yet
were not taken, so it’s a place of good fortune.”

  Derval didn’t like the look of it at all. She knew, of course, as MacCullen didn’t, that it had been used for burials. She had read that in the archeological survey report. Ordinarily that would have made it more interesting to Derval, but since such strange things had happened to her of late, anything seemed possible. She might wake up among a people of stone axes, where she had neither language nor understanding. And besides that it looked spooky.

  Among the many lessons Bridget had taught her the night before was the meaning of the word ‘awe.’

  “Let’s go on,” she said quickly.

  “There would be no good in approaching Dublin in the middle of the night. And I am fatigued,” MacCullen said with infuriating finality. “A sick man can go only so far.”

  Derval struggled with herself. She didn’t want to cross MacCullen again so soon, and for a moment she couldn’t think of anything to say. Yet moment by moment she grew more obscurely terrified of the cairn. She—who had promoted herself as fearless. Derval sighed deeply, ashamed.

  “Well, if you want to sleep on top of a dead man, that’s up to you. I’ll curl up under the trees.”

  “There are no dead men there,” MacCullen said, gesturing broadly to the stones. “I would know it if there were, for I have by heart the Dinn Seanachus of this whole province!” His black eyebrows lifted under his fringe of light hair. “Can you say as much, Scholar?”

  “No,” Derval replied thoughtfully. “Not by heart. But I know nonetheless that dead men lie here, for it has been told me by teachers whom I trust, and it is gaes to me to sleep on a grave. Besides”—she fluttered her hands in a most uncharacteristic, feminine gesture—“you have women with you, who don’t want to become barren. And you know that sleeping with the dead will do that.”

  MacCullen’s tired face stretched in a grin, appreciating this act of helplessness for what it was. “If you fear spirits, woman, simply turn your cloak,” he said.