Book of Kells

by R. A. MacAvoy

  “Turning your cloak is mere superstition,” she replied, dropping into her usual brusqueness.

  But MacCullen refused the side issue. “Where are these burials, Scholar? Show them to me and then I will believe.”

  Then Ailesh, standing beside them, shivered and crossed herself. “Do not ask that, Ollave! Derval is a woman of unusual knowledge. I beg you to give in to her.”

  “Give in? It is ridiculous!” MacCullen shook with frustration. “Graves unknown to learning and barren women… The truth is that women who have no children sleep here. They come up here with their husbands to get babies! That’s how dangerous this place is to fertility.”

  Derval perked up. She stared at the poet for a few seconds while her brain made connections from her own childhood. Could a folk legend remain recognizable for a thousand years? She believed it could. “You’re wrong!” Derval cried triumphantly, pointing due west. “I know of that place myself! Half a Roman mile is it from here, I’ll place a bet, and it is a dulmen under the moon with no tunnel at all!” She saw doubt creep over his features and pressed her point. “I think your wound has changed your memory, Poet, for the spot you’re mistaking this for is all the way on the far side of Kilmasnogue.”

  MacCullen sank back in the saddle as though he were a ball being ventilated with a pin. “The woman is right! By the naked saints, she speaks the truth and it is I who have misremembered!” he said at last. He slapped the pony’s croup with his hand and it began to move slowly on again. They all walked on in silence for a while, then MacCullen looked down at Derval, who was holding onto the saddle blanket. “How many are buried there?” he asked quietly.

  Derval opened her mouth to say there were a good score of people buried there, for Celtic oral history ran to round numbers—but instead she searched her memory for the right answer. After some work, she could visualize the page of the book which contained it. She answered, “There are seventeen men and women buried there. I don’t remember how many of which.”

  “Christians?”

  “No. From the ancient times.” She considered how best to translate for him the idea of radiocarbon dates, and gave it up. “When Moses was in his cradle in Egypt. Before the Milesians came, these dead were old in their graves.”

  “I will remember that,” MacCullen said with renewed satisfaction in himself. “What else do you know about them, there?”

  “Nothing more. Wait—I forgot. Some are buried with their weapons, and these are made of stone.”

  He brightened further. “That is something. Stone. Indeed, I believe they must be old, for lore has it that the first people on the isle met the Milesians with nothing but stones for weapons. My ears hear truth, and I thank you for that. Who taught you these things?”

  Derval hesitated only a moment. Her dedication to the idea of preventing time paradox had been all but extinguished by now, by all the needs of the moment. Let time take care of itself.

  “A man named O’Roirdan taught me: a great scholar. And I heard it also from a Welshman named Eston Evans.”

  “O’Roirdan. Eston Evans. Where do these teach? In what sacred place?” Derval struggled for a response. Where were they, indeed, she wondered. Where are any of us before birth? “Neither of them are now living men.”

  MacCullen seemed unsurprised. “God to them.” He nodded his head, murmuring softly. Derval watched his work of a practiced memory and knew that if ever he had occasion to recite what she had told him, he would finish with something like “And I heard this from Derval, the learned Iníon Cuhain, who heard it from the scholar O’Roirdan, and from Eston Evans, the Welshman.”

  She got goosebumps on her arms and her throat tightened. The mercurial flashes of this man’s arrogance and humility caught her off guard. She did not yet feel she understood him, but more and more she wanted to.

  She realized another thing about both MacCullen and herself. As she began to accept that he would not, under any circumstance of peril or personal gain, tell a falsehood, it was becoming difficult—no, impossible—for her to lie to him.

  In the slowly growing light they walked on. The pony’s head was drooped with effort. They were climbing again. This time no one sang. MacCullen was quiet, too, but Derval was not happy that she had silenced him. He had spoken for nearly two hours, reciting the memory of the countryside by heart. Did he really know the Dinn Seanachus—the old histories of the whole province?

  She had no doubt of it. Yes, she too was a scholar, but her knowledge was in books. She knew where all the books were, and remembered little snatches like reference tags about each of them. MacCullen had the library in his head. Whole volumes leaped to his tongue when needed. This last incident, in which an accident of recall had saved her and put him to shame, had made her understand that difference, as she searched her mind in befuddled agony for the things she thought she had mastered. The way he had thanked her for what she knew—for her, till now, such things had just been data. To him, receiving the tradition from her was much more. To him, the transmission of fact and skill was a sacred thing. No wonder his person was sacrosanct, not for his own sake but for the treasure of human knowledge he carried. Killing him would be like burning the Alexandrian library. She shook her head at her own thoughts. How fragile. How fragile. How important that the knowledge not die with the man.

  At true dawn, when the sun was touching the northern mountains, they came to the ridge overlooking the long valley of the river Liffey. The northern face of the Wicklow Mountains, grazed and logged bare of timber, looked over a sea of green oak forest, and wide, flat marshes with cleared farms here and there on either side of the river. Mist rose in transparent blankets from these lowlands, and the unbanked stream reached out in wide silver fingers for the sea. The low plains were still in blue shadow as the golden yellow light caught the smoke rising from the breakfast fires of little Dublin, a half-moon of what appeared to be hundreds of small brown and yellow-thatched boxes. A semicircular fortification encircled it all; the congested houses and streets packed tight around the black pool, the dubh-linn that gave the town its name; a natural tidal harbor, where the river Pottle joined the Liffey. From up there on the hill, the town looked like a big bitch on her side, with ships suckling her like pups.

  Over to the left Derval saw smoke from other fires, from the houses of a separate village. It stood farther up the river. The great road running through it before it crossed the river. The tide being out, she could just see a shadow like a road bed on the surface of the flood plain. It was not a bridge but a wattle-bottomed causeway. Baile Átha Cliath: Town of the Hurdle Ford, the Gaelic town immeasurably older than Dun Dublin of the Strangers. Built at the meeting of the great roads there, it seemed to stretch toward but not to touch her newer sister. There must, Derval reasoned, be a church there (probably St. Mo Lua’s), because the sweet, very faint ring of a bell reached her where she stood. The two communities, Gaelic and Gaill, seemed very separate, with the round houses and huts contrasting sharply with the rectangular roofs.

  Around Baile Átha Cliath stood no wall, because she needed none.

  Just outside the fortification, on the height of Dublin, on what Derval knew to be Christ Church Hill, where St. Auod’s and the Tailors’ Hall would be, was a complex of large buildings that looked as if ships had been turned keel up and used for the roofs. Barely discernible wisps of smoke rose from the louvers. “The hearth in the law hall of Awley Cuarán is never allowed to go out,” Ailesh told them, proud of her own small learning.

  Chapter Nine

  Rise now in your force

  With warlike, cruel wounding shield

  And strong-shafted, curved spear

  And straight sword dyed red

  In dark gatherings of blood.

  Táin Bó Cúalinge,

  Thomas Kinsella, trans.

  It’s a grand life, if you don’t tire.

  —Gaelic proverb

  It was too bad about the women. Holvar splashed hot water over his face, then
dipped his hands into the soft soap, first sparingly, then, thinking better of it, taking a generous handful for himself. Why not be luxurious, he thought. It had come cheaply enough. He soaped his face, arms, and neck and rinsed himself again. By Frigga, it was good to be clean again.

  Yes, it was too bad they had killed the women, he decided. They would have brought a good price almost anywhere on the continent. In the Levant, or in Sicily or Gibraltar. They would have been worth a fortune. Had he known it wasn’t the usual celibate monastery, he wouldn’t have dedicated every living thing in it to Odin before the attack. Then that way…

  He rubbed his arms and face dry on an odd, nubbly but soft cotton square that had been found in one of the two canvas boxes framed in metal, which had been otherwise full of cylindrical tin weights, like the anchors of small boats. Holvar wondered idly about the construction of both the boxes and the weights as he let the air finish drying him. This raid had been profitable, but he had to admit the killing of the women and children disgusted him. You are getting old, Holvar, he told himself. Still, he’d really wanted a fair fight; it was more satisfying that way. The frenzy that he worked himself into—the most sacred experience of his life—was not sustained without real risk to himself. Real danger. Unless he ended up bleeding a little himself, it wasn’t worth it. “Blood bathed the bright-steel biter,” he murmured inaudibly. “Hell has her horde increased.”

  He’d given his sword a good drink the day before yesterday, but he’d come out of the trance not at the end of the battle but just at the gate, before he could strike a single enemy. There was no barricade of armed warriors to hack through, just an old man raising his hand up as if to get the right to speak once more before being slain. The man’s face had shown neither fear, nor anger, nor expectation of mercy, unlike the terrified eyes of the little boy, not more than four, that clung to his skirts. Then he had stopped, his sword frozen in the air, till another came beside him and the two Irish no longer existed. “Odin, this blood to you.” He screamed the dedication. But for the first time, the ecstasy of destructive joy failed to cover the reality of what was done. Indeed, he still recalled the face of the tall Irishman upon whom he first wet his spear. Before he’d fallen the fellow had stared at Holvar as though he were so much dung.

  For the next thirty minutes Holvar had murdered in utter sobriety. Even the woman he’d taken in the midst of the slaughter failed to move him. He killed and killed, more in fear of what his men would do if he failed, than because he wanted to. Fear of his men, and fear of his god.

  I am being tested, he told himself, as he began to sweat, remembering the sun and the blood and the flies. Oh, the shit flies wallowing in the blood! His whole body trembled a little. He suddenly felt cold—cold in the morning sun. He thrust his hands into the heated wash water. That was better.

  He is testing my faithfulness to him, the father of poetry. I’ve never before felt fear or revulsion like this. I must face it boldly. This is a part of a second initiation. A new stage has been reached in my priesthood.

  He rubbed his chin. His tongue felt around his front teeth. I might be—once I overcome this—a greater man in his sight than before…a greater skald perhaps.

  For a moment he felt better, bathing in the hope his rationalization had given him. And then the terror was back: that somehow, the next time he put the wolf belt around his waist and chanted the seor verses, nothing would happen. Maybe he would never find the frenzy again.

  “Godi? What do you think Einar is telling his old comrades now?” Holvar looked up to see Skully Crow squatting on his heels on the other side of the basin. “He must be talking fast and hard to explain how he got killed by a woman.” The boy said it loudly enough to be a public joke. It occasioned lewd laughter and whistles.

  Holvar smiled quickly. “He’ll be asked if it was worth it, that’s all.” The godi must be first in wit, as well.

  Every man of them was laughing now, even the dead Einar’s closest friends. Part of Holvar’s difficult task as leader was to keep internal strife to a manageable level. Sometimes he had to fight someone or just cuff them up a little, but if he could do it by turning aside an insult into comradely repartee, so much the better.

  “I would bet she was worth it,” Ospack the Old agreed. “She was a wild little mare.”

  “Was? She’s alive, I’d guess,” Skully chuckled softly. “I saw the whole of it, and I don’t remember burning her! But a girl like that deserves life,” he said with an air of genuine admiration. “If I had a woman, I would want her to be as good with a knife as Einar’s Irish bitch.”

  Holvar stopped picking his teeth and looked over into Skully’s face. The boy was grinning with pleasure at his reminiscence, totally unconscious of the underlying meaning of what he had just said. “No one was to escape!” Holvar shouted out, and leaped to his feet before the fire. “Why was she permitted to escape?”

  Skully fell backward in his attempt to get out of the chieftain’s way. “It was not my fault! It was the will of the gods! She must have been intended to survive.”

  “They were dedicated!” Holvar cried out. “Ulf! You were supposed to search for survivors afterward. You have failed me.”

  “Holvar!” Ulf spoke hurriedly. “I did search. There was nothing! What does it matter if she is gone? It’s the same as if she were dead, and she would have only made a difficult slave. Their women are nothing but trouble.”

  “Are you so drunk you don’t realize the truth? We’ve made an error that may cost us much. We must get out of here and keep moving now. I had hoped to rest in this place, isolated as it is. For weeks we might have sat here unknown, if we were sure no monkish visitor survived his visit. Instead, she or any others that made it out alive will raise the countryside against us.” He threw his hands up in the air.

  “How often do I have to explain that this is not just another raid. With Haakon’s jealousy we can’t go back to Norway!”

  Holvar looked down around the fire again. Skully had recovered himself and was smiling, squatting on his heels like before. “Only a stupid man is happy to be rebuked!” Holvar muttered. Nothing was going well, he thought, as he sank back down in his place. He was beginning to be dissatisfied with the quality of men he was leading. This would never have happened—mistakes like this—among the others he had fought with. Maybe because it was too easy the other day, Holvar thought. It put us all off guard, and my discipline is falling apart.

  Across the washbasin Skully Crow, known as Tooth Skully because of his broken front teeth, stared sullenly at the godi. Now the boy was angry. He was young and easily set off. At the same time pitifully eager to impress the older men. He hadn’t liked being called stupid just now.

  Of course, Skully hadn’t liked it. He was an extra son—one too many for the size of the homestead. His plight was shared by many of the men there. Grudgingly given a place at his brothers’ table, after his father’s death, he stayed on until his idleness and drunkenness caused his mother and sisters-in-law to nag him and finally to beat him to do his share. One day the whole family turned on him and he threatened to go off reaving, never to return, only to find general agreement with this idea. “Now I can see what you are fit for, worthless, stupid thrall of a son,” Mother had said. (There. That word “stupid,” again.) “Good for nothing else!” his mother had shouted, as their slaves had grinned in mockery. “Be a thief! You are more afraid of work, even, than dying!”

  Skully looked into Holvar Hjoer’s eyes as if he would see out the back of the man’s head. Then he pulled his sword out of its sheath slowly and shoved it back with a snap. Before anyone near them could see what had happened, Holvar moved in a blur and was back in his place. Skully was holding the very tip of his nose, which had just fallen into his hand. His mouth opened in amazement as the blood ran in streams down his face. Ospack the Old was bent over, head to knees, laughing. “Today, boy, you get a new nickname.” He slapped the calves of his legs. “Our godi is named Holvar Sword. Don’t forg
et that.”

  Not daring to show weakness, Skully managed somehow to smile, as he turned around and, taking a brand from the fire, seared the little wound closed. He only flinched a little as the fire touched him, looking at Holvar the whole time.

  I’ll have to kill him eventually, the older man reflected. This is what I get for taking an itinerant market duelist into my company.

  Holvar stood up and turned his back on them as he walked into the woods. For a while—nearly an hour—he searched the land all around the monastery. By midafternoon he had found the creel, the bloodstains, and a bandage that had come loose and been overlooked in the escape, and the tracks of a small donkey or mule.

  Holvar sat down in the booth of wattlework and watched the sun stream in broken patterns across his knees. Then, as he got up to go, he noticed a long strand of woman’s hair, frizzy from braiding, caught on a snag on the bark. It was a rich, dark red-gold. “The girl in the sauna,” he said aloud.

  She and at least two others had escaped together. Somehow a part of him was glad, and then the other part of him, the part that was unbelievably tired, knew it would have to track them down.

  Holvar grunted and ran his fingers through his limp, fine, nearly white blond hair. He had squarish hands, strangely delicate for all their strength.

  We will bury the dragon beams in the woods, he thought. Hide the ships and go inland. What a shame, when he had been planning on a good month of rest.

  Holvar had decided everything by the time he got back to the fire.

  The sight rolling out before them, mixed with the warmth of the first sun on their hands and faces, kept the company rooted for a while. The only noise was made by Muiregan, who broke her long silence with a very asinine welcome of the day. The blue-eyed pony shook her head, as though she found the sound no more pleasing than did the human audience. Then, as the hinny prepared to continue her performance, Derval yanked the lead on her headstall and led the beast forward and down the hill.