Book of Kells

by R. A. MacAvoy

  “Under arrest? What the hell for?” Derval rose up, regardless of nakedness. The round blue eyes of the man at the door widened, looking at her.

  “What would you be under arrest for, you mucking sap? Where have you been, and by the by what did you do to that boy-o’s little brother?”

  But John was asleep: solidly, unshakably asleep.

  Derval sighed again and stood up. She considered kicking the limp shape beside her, but remembered Ailesh’s words and the presence of the brehan before her. It was a dirty shame—neither of them had ever had to baby-sit John Thornburn, that they should criticize her handling of the brute.

  Her irritation woke her fully, and she looked up to find herself the object of the ruddy Norseman’s great attention. “What are you staring at, I ask?” She spoke to the man in Irish.

  The brehan stepped between them. “It is only, my treasure, that the strangers are not accustomed to the sight of the unclothed body. It is a sort of…gaès with them.”

  “Oh.” Derval blinked down at herself. “I…uh…forgot.” She grabbed her borrowed shift and threw it over her head, amazed at herself.

  MacCullen was now awake, and from his pillow he stared at the intruder without welcome.

  “This good man,” continued Clorfíonn calmly, “has sworn himself the friend and protector of your John.” She said the foreign name clearly and with a good French j.

  Derval fastened her belt and gave Snorri back a stare as good as he’d given. He returned a grin and a wink.

  “And why, Bhean Uasail Clorfíonn,” asked Derval frigidly, “has he done that for a perfect stranger?” The brehan spoke to Snorri again, and her tact so far placated him and reassured him as to John’s present safety that the man’s knife was once more hidden under the folds of his tunic, and his face split in expansive jollity. He began a long explanation which was half charade. Derval watched with interest as he chopped, swung his arms, and jumped up and down in the doorway.

  At last the brehan translated for Derval. “It seems that your John, whom this gentleman calls Jan Thorboern, saved his life from an attack by two Saracens.”

  “Saved…” Derval’s voice failed her for the body of the sentence, returning only in time to squeak “two Saracens?” at the end.

  Snorri nodded his large head forcefully in agreement and pointed at the limp, childlike figure sleeping on the corner of the mattress. John had shoved his thumb-knuckle into his mouth. “With nothing but a bowl of curds,” he added in Norse.

  “Our Eoin is a man of unexpected talent. I have said so before.” The drawling, amused voice was that of MacCullen, who was by now sitting upright by the wall, clothed in his long-sleeved linnia.

  With an appraising glance at the stranger, he stood, and spoke in Norse as excellent as that of the brehan. “I am Labres MacCullen, Chief Poet of Leinster, trained at the Munster Academy, and we share this most valuable ally, Eoin Cattle Leaper.” He pointed at John’s recumbent figure.

  There was something in MacCullen’s ironic courtesy that took Snorri aback. He stepped again into the doorway, conscious that he had not been invited into the house. “I am Snorri Finnbogison, shipwright. I name myself Snorri the Unfortunate, also, for only this year I was on my way to Greenland with all I owned when worms ate through the hull of my ship and she began to take more water than we could bale. She broke up and sank in heavy seas. My life itself and what I get through the skill of my hands is all I possess to me now, and but for this man Jan Thorboern I would have lost all that today.”

  MacCullen listened to Snorri in the blank-faced way he had when putting things into memory. He narrowed his eyes as he replied. “Finnbogison? That name is familiar to me. Would it be the Finnbogi who was son of Grim that is your father? And would that be Grim Geitskor who walked the breadth of Iceland and brought the All-Thing into being?” Snorri shrugged and nodded. “Then yours is a high lineage, my friend.” And MacCullen smiled genially at Snorri’s puffy face.

  The Icelander shrugged as though embarrassed. “I had a pretty good grandfather. We got on.”

  MacCullen’s eyebrows rose. “Pretty good? It makes no sense, man, to denigrate the greatness of one’s kin, where that exists. There are people enough to pretend to birth that is not theirs, for—”

  Snorri took in a great lungful of air and blew it out his nose, all the while staring at the brehan’s packed cow-dung floor. “It makes no sense to claim another man’s worth as your own, though that man be your father. I am proud of my kin. But if I am anyone, I am Snorri the shipwright. That is our way, in Iceland.”

  “I am corrected,” said MacCullen, still smiling, but in a condescending manner.

  “You’re nothing of the sort. You spoke well. I’m just explaining… And by the way, that’s a fine-looking woman you’ve got there: the dark one.”

  MacCullen looked startled for a moment. His eyes turned away from Snorri toward Derval. He was fairly sure she understood nothing. He did not reply to the compliment, however, but pursued the first subject. “I should have remembered that the Icelanders are all free men: free from king, from clan, from history—free from all constraint save that of the blood feud.”

  The bulbous blue eyes wrinkled at the corners and Snorri shifted his considerable weight from foot to foot. “I am party to no feuds, poet. Never my life long, and least of all would I feud with the companion or kin of this man who has saved my life.” He rested his hand on John’s sloping shoulder. “Not if I am given the choice.”

  MacCullen’s genial (though superior) smile froze into a smirk. “It would take,” he said slowly, “more than one roaming Icelander to hold a feud with Labres MacCullen, Chief Poet of Leinster.”

  Derval, who had understood hardly one word in three of the preceding, turned away. For lack of anything else to do, she tucked a blanket around John Thornburn. The rather heated conversation died immediately, as both men watched her action. Snorri glanced appraisingly at MacCullen, who did not meet his eyes. To the surprise of everyone awake, the big Icelander giggled and made a bow in John’s direction. He stepped out of the doorway and sat himself, solid as a door pillar, on the limestone stoop, where he seemed to meditate upon the lean, wandering piglets on the street outside.

  MacCullen found the brehan standing close behind him. Her straw hat, with its oddly assorted feathers protruding from the brim, was on her head, and her leather glove was being drawn on. “Another time,” she said languidly and just for his hearing, “you will see the humor in two men squabbling over a woman bound to neither of them. And another time, Labres, you might allow me to be the host in my own house.”

  She went out of the house immediately and engaged in courteous conversation with the man on her doorstep. Grinning broadly, he bowed to the brehan, and followed her into the garden again, holding her basket. She weeded garlic and the medicinal plants until the evening sun set behind the houses across the street and then she came in and brought Snorri Finnbogison with her.

  Chapter Eleven

  Suddenly as Gunnar and Kolskegg rode up to the Rang River, a stream of blood appeared on the halberd. Kolskegg asked what it could mean. Gunnar replied that when that sort of thing happened in other lands it was called the death rain: a sign of imminent battle.

  —Njaal’s Saga

  Translated by Magnus Magnusson

  The heavy smoke from the never-failing fire in Olaf Cuarán’s law hall rolled out the doors and clung to the earth like a nest of snakes, beaten flat by the gray and regular rain. The walls of the hall (or of the halls, as Sigtryggsson’s palace was made up of four long buildings that touched at the corners and created thereby a square central courtyard) rose black and slick as the hull of a ship turned over. Indeed the whole affair looked like a square of knorrs turned keel up on dry land, for the roof was clinker-built of boards and ran smoothly to the ground, windowless save for small shuttered louvers high on the sides and untouched by ornament or color of any kind, except a grimacing animal head at the end of each gable. Thes
e added a nightmare quality to the hogbacks.

  “Jesus!” John whispered to Derval. “This is where a king lives? It looks like a dungeon.” John hadn’t wanted to come.

  “You’re right,” Derval replied. “H-block, but in these days every palace is a fortress.” She raised her voice slightly and glanced at MacCullen as she added, “Even when the king merely bought his kingdom.”

  The poet’s eyes flashed with alarm. “Scholar Iníon Cuhain, we’re not going to be helped by talk like that. Remember that a king is a king—especially in his own hall. If you are unsure what manners are current in this court, I suggest you wait in an outer chamber.”

  Derval’s chin hardened. “I wouldn’t miss this for the world’s fame, Poet.” Then, seeing real worry in his face, she smiled at him. “I’ll be as silent as the grave.”

  “How auspiciously phrased,” murmured the brehan Clorfíonn, and she led the small company under the black eaves of the law hall, throwing back the hood of her outer brat of boiled wool as she did so. A spatter of drops darkened the wooden doorsill.

  MacCullen and Derval followed, and behind them came Ailesh, shepherded by John.

  Since last night’s supper the girl had said very little, and now her white face shone like the pale, odorous water-repellent cloaks worn by all the company. Her red hair (she had allowed Hulda to henna it this morning upon rising) turned her pallor into something ghostly. Her silk gown was white and unadorned.

  MacCullen’s golden hair had been cut and limed and his eyebrows blackened with walnut-hull juice. Over his leinne he wore a gown belonging to the brehan, which became on him a knee-length tunic with three-quarter sleeves. It was made of white silk and decorated with scarlet bands of embroidery Derval recognized as Chinese work. All the brehan’s personal jewelry had been leant to him for this appearance: a gold neck-ring and bracelets and a silver-gilt kite brooch.

  (Derval had been nonplussed to see the Ollave decked out in the old brehan’s clothes. She had even ventured to ask him if he weren’t dressed rather like a woman, a question he had answered with a steely glare, along with the words “I always dress like a woman in public, Scholar. It is the custom of an Ollave.” This had shut her up completely. John had merely remarked that the olive had a cruel mess of gear on him.)

  Clorfíonn looked like herself, in a leinne of exquisite sky-blue material and a well-woven gray inner brat fastened with a simple penannular brooch with red stones. She was spotlessly neat, but without any bravery or show about her person which might make it seem she was taking notice of Cuarán’s law hall.

  Derval wore Hulda’s best gown, for nothing of the brehan’s would fit her. It was Norse style, and the two saucer-sized brass buttons which attached the straps of the pinafore stood out on her torso. She felt rather foolish in the dress until she came into the torchlight of the hall, where she discovered that this sort of gown was the rule among the females of the court.

  In the general stir of the morning John had been forgotten, and so was dressed and groomed as John: jeans, T-shirt rather large and stretched out in front, all of which was covered by a brat hiked up to allow his hands in his pockets. He had combed his hair but had forgotten to wipe the mud from his tennies.

  There was another person who accompanied them and was of their party and yet not of it. That was Snorri the Icelander. In some respects, he had little idea of the errand, but sure that something important was afoot, he tagged along at the rear, cautiously. He was not certain of the extent of John’s involvement in all this and was determined not to get himself into more difficulties than necessary.

  Snorri’s trust was not in kings.

  The fire ran a third of the length of the hall, dividing it as though the molten earth had riven the place in two. And because it was a fire of oak mixed with pine and aged, damp turf, it produced a great deal of smoke. This gathered at the ceiling in strings, awaiting egress through the cracks of the louvers. The ceiling was the light-consuming color of lampblack, coated by forty years of this hearth’s work. Torches hung from wall stanchions, half surrounded by guards of iron to keep the leaping flame away from the wooden walls. Consequently, as the company, led by MacCullen, proceeded down the hall toward a spot of greater color and light at one end, each concealed flame flashed out of the dark and then was gone. The bottom of the hall was fairly empty, save for a few Norse attendants, dressed in what seemed to be Russian-style frogged jackets.

  “Gustav Doré,” said John to Derval.

  “What?” She scowled privately at him.

  “Doré. His illustrations for Dante,” explained the Canadian. “It all just reminded me.” He hiked his shoulders to his ears and let them fall.

  In a moment all Derval’s anxieties had transferred themselves into irritation at John. This was such a pleasant transformation she was almost grateful to him. But at the same time she felt obliged to remind him once more to keep his mouth shut, lest some inanity of his ruin their cause.

  “Didn’t want to come at all,” he replied, speaking through clenched teeth. At a tremulous sigh from Ailesh, both Derval and John shut up.

  It seemed the hall was divided by more than just the long hearth. This end of the upturned “keel,” was lit by lamps of oil and a single tall wax candle, however around the dais was a three-sided screen of heavy tapestrylike rugs to reduce drafts. Up in the curtain space two high seats had been set. The one on the left was built upon four oars of ivory, richly carved and pierced through. The bench and the chairback, too, were ivory—narwhal ivory—and the cushions were gold and red brocade from the Levant. In the blackness of the hall it glowed like a moon. On this chair sat a man whose colors mirrored his surroundings perfectly, for his round face, heavy-set and heaviest through the cheeks, was carved with ivory-white wrinkles, and his hair and beard, despite his obvious age, were golden. But there was that about the set of his head and his eyes, as they stared and shifted here and there among the people assembled below him, that was more like the empty dark hall with the hidden light of torches, than like candles, ivory or gold.

  At the other side of the long hearth the high seat was not so high, and it was of black wood which faded so into the darkness that its carvings or lack of same were impossible to make out. And the hair of the woman who sat upon the seat was as black as the soot on the ceiling. But her face had a glow beyond that of ivory and her eyes were sky blue. Her dress, woven of fine wool the color of flame, fell down the sides of the chair and lay in a gorgeous puddle at her feet.

  Around Gormflaith gathered a retinue mostly of women, and some of these in Gaelic dress. Around Olaf Sigtryggsson the audience was much larger and almost exclusively Norse. As chance or MacCullen had planned it, the party had walked along the fire on the queen’s side and now found itself before Gormflaith.

  But the queen was not looking at them, nor was any of her retainers. She sat propped against the right arm of her chair, looking at a fair watchful young boy who sat on the stairs of the dais playing with a small dagger. This boy, in turn, had his attention fixed by something that was happening at the feet of his father, the king.

  MacCullen did likewise, and though the hearth was raised with flat stones he could see a flash of white, as though someone were dancing about in his shift, and he heard a raised voice pleading in such bad Norse it could scarcely be understood. And he heard the king laugh.

  “We are not the first here today to implore the king’s justice,” he whispered—he thought—into Derval’s ear. But it was not the tall woman but John who stood beside him, craning his neck to see over both stone hearth and the ring of courtiers opposite.

  “What is that? What is that?” cried John Thornburn. “I hear something, I—”

  MacCullen had to resist an urge to pick the small man up as one would a boy and set him on his shoulders. “It is another case, Eoin, brought by the wharf merchants. And it will go heavy for the defendants, if carried. They are accused of dueling within the confines of the margad, and as the brehan can tell yo
u, both will lose all their goods to the king.

  “The most interesting part is that these travelers came very far, indeed, to come to such scrapes in Dublin, for by their dress and face, these are Saracens.”

  “I thought so,” cried John. “My Saracens!”

  And then MacCullen did pick John up and set him on his shoulders.

  “He cheated me!” The Turk spat. “Of the price of five healthy slaves. I did not contract for seven-year indentures, but that’s what he gave me. This coal-faced Moor is a disgrace to the merchants of all the earth.”

  “I do not doubt it,” answered the king, grinning down in great amusement. He shared his mirth with the three gray men in black who sat on the bench to his left. Then he shifted in his seat and flicked his hand at a daunted ship’s captain, who had been brought under guard to translate for the Moor. “What does the black say in his turn?”

  The captain’s colloquy with the Moor was short. “He says he did nothing: neither cheated the man nor drew sword on him. The captives were fairly described and priced, and if the Turk did not know the Irish laws of indenture—”

  “Indenture is not at issue here,” said the whitest of the three gray men.

  “I beg leave to doubt any merchant’s word, when he claims to be free of the taint of cheating,” the king interjected, “but as old Ovaegen says, it’s not at issue.” And here Olafr Konig paused to allow the titter of laughter to spread itself and die in the hall. “What is at issue is dueling, which is forbidden in the marketplace.”