Book of Kells

by R. A. MacAvoy

  Then Holvar was surrounded by his men like a warm cloud of love and approval. Respectful hands clapped him on both shoulders. He said little, but rubbed Thorir’s bruise in comradely fashion. Thorir was still laughing about his own slowness.

  “They will follow their godi anywhere,” whispered Ospack to Holvar, a hint of slyness in his voice. Hovar’s own glance was dry. “Odin has been very good to me this morning,” he replied.

  In another quarter of an hour the path was empty. In the bushes on one side lay the severed heads and the cooling bodies of men, while hidden in a declivity on the other lay three ponies, tangle-legged, their pretty white heads encircled by rings of red. The flies came.

  They passed unchallenged through the stockade wall down where the river Pottle emptied into the pool that formed the harbor beside the Liffey. MacCullen was waved through. At the gate, the dirt road ended abruptly. John stumbled against the wooden sill and fell face flat onto the paving with a cry, almost breaking his nose on the rough surface of the logs. “Oh! Oh Jeezus,” he moaned.

  “Honest to Christ, John,” Derval snapped angrily. “Watch your bloody feet!”

  John struggled right up again. Ailesh looked hard at Derval. “He’s your husband. You should not speak to him like that.”

  “He’s not my husband,” said Derval nervously. “We’re…pals.”

  “But he has the friendship of your thighs, my sister?”

  “Well, yes.”

  “It’s not my place to tell you,” Ailesh apologized, “but even if no cattle have been given, there should be honor between a man and woman who sleep together.”

  Derval opened and shut her mouth several times but couldn’t say anything. For a moment she struggled with embarrassment, then forgot all about it, as Dublin drew her attention and held it.

  They were below Christ Church Hill now, approaching a stretch of water that would be gone in later times, and all the busy activity of commerce was going on around them. They passed through a sort of open area. Derval guessed it to be the lower part of High Street. Then they descended to the harbor.

  The houses and ships were all of wood. Wood greased and pitched sometimes, but mostly the natural color of wearing, silver-gray to brown. Here and there a brilliantly painted gable ornament displayed the townhouse of a rich person. But those were few: paint was costly. Walking carefully over the bumpy pavement of close-set logs, they had to maneuver around a work line of stevedores who were unloading a great longship. No, Derval realized, it wasn’t a longship. It was a knorr—a cargo vessel—the real work vessel of the Norseman. Broad and deep-bellied, with a bow that suggested the bosom of a well-endowed matron, it could carry the contents of a good-sized farm: food, household goods, and people, and even some livestock. There were far more of these resting against the Dublin mud than the elegant, slender dragon ships, with their gilded wind fans, suitable only for travel and war.

  The men in the cargo line passed the bundles to each other, the last man ordering it on top of a wagon and a sleigh that stood next to it. As he did so he called out a phrase to a well-dressed fellow with a waxed tablet and a stylus who was keeping account. He stood between the two vehicles, and Derval noticed with some surprise that his hair style and clothing looked Byzantine. Of course, how stupid of me, she thought quickly, he had been in the service of the emperor in Constantinople. He was probably part of the Varangian guard: they were all Norse by the time of Harald Hardraade. “But that’s a long time to come. This is nine eighty-five,” she whispered to herself. “Ethelred the Uncounseled is king of England. Maelsechnaill is Ard-Ri. Domnall Cloen is king of Leinster.” Her head swam, as they passed the clerk with the tablet and stylus. Probably a king’s man, she thought. Olaf Cuarán, I understand, is/was a man of business before anything else.

  “A shrewd man of commerce,” MacCullen said in her ear. “That’s what Olafr Sigtryggsson is. And the way we deal with him must take that into account.”

  Derval grinned and shook her head to hear him echo her own thought.

  Looking down the street in the direction of the sea, Derval was struck by the way Dublin—or Dyflinn, as she knew the Gaill called it—resembled a traditional village in White Russia or the Ukraine. The houses were squarish or rectangular, all with peaked roofs: some flat, others bowed. Bands of fancy carving decorated the edges of the roofs. Carvings of animals and birds adorned the peaks. The dacha—the Russian farmhouse—she understood now, was descended from these. And hadn’t some of the fathers of the Vikings called themselves the Russ? Didn’t “Russia” originally mean the “land of the Swedes”?

  It was busy here next to the black pool. It was a market, of course: the margad, as the Irish called it. Who would want to haul merchandise a long way from the ships, to sell it? Cloth, animals, food, craft items, were offered everywhere, right from the vessels that had brought them, from wagons, from the backs of animals, and from baskets on heads.

  Dahomey by the Liffey, thought Derval.

  It was slow going through the press of people. A woman in Norse dress—in pleated shift, embroidered double apron, fastened with heavy round buckles that made her look like she had an extra pair of breasts—walked by with a basket full of smoked salmon dipped in honey and salt. Derval could see the pink flesh, brown on the edge from the fire. Her mouth began to water; the smell was luscious. She didn’t think she’d ever been so hungry. The woman, noticing her interest, walked up and began haggling, offering different-sized pieces and stating what she wanted for them. But before Derval could say anything, MacCullen told the woman that they weren’t really interested, and she turned away quickly, giving Derval an angry look because she had wasted her time. Derval almost burst into tears. She was going to scream at MacCullen, but was stopped in midutterance by the sight of a beggar, right arm and left leg missing. The other, remaining limbs were powerfully built, and he had clearly been a man of the sword and the oar. The cripple called out to the crowd in guttural Norse.

  So this was the end of unsuccessful Vikings—to drag out one’s days near the ships one would never sail again. Was he a drunkard, cadging jars in the local alestalls? So it seemed to Derval.

  But a small group of people gathered around him as the four travelers moved off. He collected coins and then began chanting a long poem. A town skald: a public storyteller, he was no beggar after all. Yet how different, Derval thought, this man’s fate, from the famous heroes of the saga literature. No vellum book would carry the deeds of this poor fellow. His “victory luck” had failed him. He would never enjoy the dignity of a big farmer chieftain back home in the North.

  She had another insight. In the year nine eighty-five, the indomitable, almost satanic Egil Skallagrimsson was growing old in Iceland. In a few more years his sight would fail him and he would be bullied and tormented by his own servants and relatives. No. Perhaps their fates were not so dissimilar after all.

  In the Norse world, it was a bad thing to grow old and helpless. Among the Gaels Derval had seen in the dun of Ailesh’s foster kin, it was somewhat different. The old were treasures, adorning with their years the bright energy of the young people whom they counseled, supported, and restrained. But then, the Gaels never seemed to be alone in the same way the Norse were. A Norseman was a man apart, putting his personal loyalty where conscience or profit told him. When he was ruined, he could easily find himself without support. The kinbond of the Gael was stronger. The dirbfine would never let him sink to a gutter seat like that one. They would have come for him long ago, brought him back to the hearth, still a man among brothers, whatever fortune had done to him.

  John scanned the boats. He hardly noticed the people or houses. His eyes widened at the perfection of a magnificent merchant vessel, the planks sweeping in rhythmic curves to form the hull, the line rushing, it seemed, upward to join at the omega points of the keel ends with their carved beasts. Above it a huge brightly painted sail was unfurled across the deck. A pair of riggers, one on each side of the sail, with their needles
and leather palms (tools changed almost not at all in a thousand years), searched for flaws against the morning sun and mended them.

  John turned and saw the cripple too. It made him remember a popular song from Nova Scotia about pirates. “God damn them all, I was to sail/ The seas for American gold./ Fire no guns and shed no tears,/ Now I’m a broken man on a Halifax pier,/ The last of Barett’s privateers.” John was not shocked. This was the way of the world; he knew that well enough.

  His eyes went back to the ships again. They followed the line of a mast upward. He had seen a man break his back upon a deck—a man who’d been trying to free up the seine lines from the net struts and who fell. That man still sat near the boats in his battery-driven wheelchair every day. On the dole forever. “Dead from the waist down,” John’s father had said.

  “I’m on easy street,” the injured man told his old friends in the local bar. “I live like a fucking king. I pity you poor bastards.” He laughed, smoked his cigarettes, and rolled down to the wharf to watch the ships come in, looking out to sea, always.

  Among the bigger vessels were many smaller, more archaic boats and skiffs. One reminded him of a sampan; it was low, shallow, and flat-bottomed, built of moss-caulked planks, with a tongue of wood at the bow that went straight up onto the mud. There were skin boats of all kinds, besides the small, round coracles. There were larger, bull-hide curraghs: one he saw was thirty five feet long, with a cross at one end and a cow’s skull on the other. Several cattle lay bound up in it, feet together, ready to be sold for meat and hides.

  It was leather, tanned and untanned, that had given the king his Gaelic nickname: Olaf Cuarán—Olaf “Sandal.” He had a state monopoly in shoes over the whole area, and though the ones in the king’s cobbler shops were for export, and of good enough quality, intricately colored, stamped, and slashed, as often as not, the cuarán was the footwear of slaves and ditchdiggers. It was the uncured hide knotted or bunched with hairy thongs. This was the thing they called him, because they hated him.

  John saw a vessel that made him stop in his tracks in awe. It was not docked, but out in midstream. The craft was only twelve feet long or so, and a young man and his companion pulled it against the current with long paddles. The sun was behind them and the transparent skin of the little boat shone as if it were filled with light. The dark ribs of the supporting structure made blue shadows. A strange, Y-shaped projection was the only decoration of the bow.

  “It’s like an Inuit boat—a ummiac from Greenland,” said John aloud. “I don’t believe it.” He watched in fascination as the young men paddled strongly past and disappeared. When he turned around to share his excitement with the others, he found he was alone.

  In dismay he looked down at the line of medieval garbage, lapping against the bank. Scraps of fish guts, a bread crust, a rag, a drowned kitten… Sea gulls were eating of this noisily. A floating turd bobbed past. Reality smelled bad.

  It was the smell that verified to John he was in Dublin. A thousand years had produced no change in the silty, dead-minnow smell of Dublin harbor. He stood with his hands in his jeans pockets, his brat hiked up to his hips. The glitter of the water held him, with no thought in his head.

  It was so easy for John not to think, when thought might be unpleasant. He’d been practicing all his life: doing boat chores, cleaning fish, reading schoolbooks with unfocused eyes. Sometimes he got by in that manner; John (said his father) was the only boatman who could pilot reliably in and out of the Grand Banks while staring straight at the sky. (Looking like a stunned ox, the elder Thornburn usually added.) Sometimes, as in the tests at school that followed the blind study, he did not get by. But this misty trance state was the flip side of his ability to draw—or at least he liked to believe it was—and he usually let it have its way with him.

  Therefore it was nothing unusual for John to turn around and discover that he’d lost all three of his companions on the way down to the town. Nor was he upset to discover this. John’s usual vagueness, abetted by trauma, overwork, and undersleep, led him to proceed quite casually down to the waterfront in the Viking town, leaving to his friends the job of finding him.

  And there was nothing about this little wooden town to break the trance. Here there were no riven bodies, no men in helmets of flowers, no herds of archaic great-horned cattle. Here was a straight though rutted single-lane street. Here was a blond boy with a stick, hitting the corner of a building with great concentration, making the usual private vocal accompaniment that boys make when engaged in such activity. There was another man, half-bald and half-dressed rolling a barrel that John’s nose told him contained beer.

  John Thornburn stood in the street and whimpered to himself. Had he been suddenly possessed of the sea-going coracle he had lusted after so recently, he would have traded it for a single tall glass of that beer. Joyfully traded it, along with his pants and jumper.

  He followed the man with the barrel, not so much in an effort to find where it was going, but because his thirst gave him no choice. The great heavy thing rumbled down the dirty road until it became lodged in one of the ruts. John found himself helping the bald man work it free. This was not a trivial task, and the effort cost John dearly; he could feel his heart pounding and his lungs laboring as he docilely applied himself to rolling the barrel down to the docks. Neither he nor the bald man spoke a word.

  This barrel had become the center of John’s existence, and when it rolled away into a house of bare wood, he simply had to go with it.

  Even John had to duck down a little to go through the door. The dim light, which came through the raised roof louvers, showed him a long rectangular room, half-filled with drinking men. Along the center ran an open raised hearth whose smoldering peat fire sent smoke up into the eaves where it hovered among the dark wooden beams for a while before being driven out by the breeze. Sheets of flat bread hung in garlands from the ceiling, with strings of sausages and net bags of onions and garlic. A girl was chopping kale with a big knife. She looked up briefly and grinned at him, tossed her greasy brown braid over her shoulder and went back to work. There was a huge cask, identical to the one John had helped to roll, but this one was settled and open, and the bald man set to filling horns and jugs from it. John could smell it all the way across the room, and knew it had to be something alcoholic. By sympathy with his nose, his eyes watered. The floor around the cask was so impregnated with the barley malt that the white oak had turned ale-brown.

  The publican was taking coins and bits of coins and weighing them on a small scale. John reached into his pocket and took out an Irish shilling piece. He looked at the bullock, and turned it over to show the harp. It looked like silver; he would chance it. Bravely he walked up to the beer drawer, pointed to the barrel and a pint jug, and held up his index finger for “one.” He fixed the bald man with his odd eyes (which held no hint of vagueness in them at all) and said quite clearly, “Eh?”

  The fellow extended his palm. John put the shilling in it. At first he smiled, and then his brow wrinkled. Quizzically he examined the shilling, and bounced it against an iron plate. The sound was not satisfactory. He handed it back to John and shook his head. But with a smile of some apology he scooped curds into a bowl and said, “Take this for the help you gave me.”

  Curds were welcome, but not the desire of John’s heart. He pointed once more to the ale cask. “I’m sorry, my friend,” the publican said in Irish almost as heavily accented as John’s. “You’ve been cheated.”

  John replied, “Ni Tigim.” I don’t understand. In truth he did not understand a word of the man’s base Irish.

  “Your coin is worthless, you poor fellow. Don’t try to pass it in here again. Don’t you have something else?”

  John gesticulated frantically. “Ni Tigim.”

  The publican was not a hard man, nor was he one to be duped, either. Still, he had learned the importance, in an age when most people carried weapons, of not giving direct offense. Gently, with an air of fraternal sadn
ess, he pressed the coin back into John’s hand. John looked at it in shock, realizing his poverty for the first time, and then he dug back into his pocket and took out the rest of his coins. He spread them out on the table and gestured toward them. The barkeep sighed heavily, but when he leaned over he brightened up as if he had suddenly understood something. To John’s amazement, he chose two of the huge, solid copper pennin, and smilingly handed over to John a big mether of ale. John took the ale and the curds with his mouth hanging open. “The buttons are truly lovely,” the man said. “And well worth ale here. Pick yourself a couple of plump sausages to go with the curds.” He split his beard-bottomed face in a grin and punched John in friendly fashion on the chest.

  John hadn’t understood much of what the man had said. The Gaelic was too mixed with Norse slang for him to get the drift of it. Holding the jug and the bowl he picked his way across the room to a corner. There weren’t really any empty areas, and he wasn’t sure about pub etiquette in these parts.

  He took a long drink of the ale. It was not cold, but cool enough for enjoyment. He held it up and let a sunbeam from the louver fall into the vessel. It was clear, deep amber brown. No floaters and a good head too. It was a bit more “green” than he was used to, but Goddamn, eh? At this moment he didn’t care.

  The floor of the outer room was good packed earth, smooth as marble. The walls were raw split oak, devoid of decoration. John stared disapprovingly at them, thinking how they could be improved. Such thoughts led to a reminisence of the time he, a thirteen-year-old Thornburn junior, had added great improvements to the wall of the town bus station: improvements consisting of three nude mermaids and a complete flotilla of PT boats (he had come oversupplied with gray acrylic). But this pleasant memory led to one nearly connected, which involved a police station uglier than the bus station by far, and the rope-hardened hands of Mr. Thornburn senior. It was better to control artistic fervor than talk through loose teeth. John yawned, feeling the ale, and forced his eyes upward.