Book of Kells

by R. A. MacAvoy

  Gormflaith’s breath caught. “United under what lineage?”

  Derval laughed and flung herself to her feet. “Pity to you, who will see the bloody mail shirts stacked up in this place.”

  “What lineage?” Gormflaith insisted. “What lineage, shadow woman, my double? What lineage?”

  “What lineage do you think, woman of Erin?” and then it seemed as though the dim, swimmy world went out for her. She fainted in a heap at the queen’s feet.

  Gormflaith’s red robes were almost black against the keel wall of the fortress. She shuddered convulsively twice, and it seemed as though she might join the prophet in unconsciousness on the carpet of reeds. But she remained upright, and asked, “MacCullen. Iníon Goban. Who is this woman?”

  The poet swallowed. He made a clumsy gesture to lift Derval in his arms. “Lady, at…at this moment, I cannot say I know who it is that she is.”

  “Unless,” said Ailesh, “she is your twin walker, come from the sidhe world, Noble Lady. You and she are very like.”

  Gormflaith shuddered a third time.

  Ailesh added, “The Bhean Uasal Derval is the friend and protector Holy Bridget sent to save me in the hour of ruin. She is a terrible warrior, and went into the camp of the reavers and came out unseen, with knowledge and treasures. She saved the Ollave and rescued young Caeilte’s harp. I did not know she was a seer, though.”

  Gormflaith made the sign of the cross. “Christ grant that she be a false seer and her words empty!”

  The blare of a horn rang through the doorway. “I must go back,” the queen whispered, and clapped for her attendants, who had stood waiting on the slick wooden street, their hands—those not holding torches—stuck in swordbelts for warmth.

  The sputtering torches illuminated Derval’s worn features, as she lay stretched out along a bench under the awning. MacCullen raised his head from her long enough to call for the last servant through the door to take the filled plates back with him.

  Derval woke from her swoon to find herself lying on wood, with her head supported by something warm and firm. It was the poet’s hands beneath her neck and head, and his face was close.

  “Who are you, woman?” he whispered.

  “Derval Mora Caitlin Daughter of Cuhain,” she answered, and then sighed heavily. “Doctor of History at Trinity. Thirty years old. Spinster. Now resident in Dublin.”

  His long fingers massaged her neck. “And have you lied or told the truth here, Doctor of History Cuhain?”

  She worked her brow in headachey fashion. “The truth?” A chuckle escaped up her nose. “I don’t claim your ancient virtues, MacCullen. I lie when it suits my purpose.” Then her pale, dark-smudged eyes focused. “But I didn’t lie to Gormflaith, if that’s your question. Whether I ought to have told what I know—that’s another question, but I felt so odd…”

  “And how do you know these things—about Olaf’s son and the king of Munster?”

  Derval closed her eyes against the red light, reflected off the linen awning. His hands were warm against her ears. “I am from the far future, poet,” she said, with a feeling of having leaped off a bridge. “John Thornburn and I have come a thousand years into the past with Ailesh. You people are my history.”

  She felt the hard bench against her head as his hands were withdrawn. MacCullen stared at the featureless, rain-soaked wall.

  Chapter Twelve

  Bloody decks to ya!

  —Newfie blessing to sealers and fishermen

  “That is very well done,” stated Snorri Finnbogison. “Very well done.” He took the flat shard of limestone and lay it upon his knees under lamplight, regarding his own exophthalmic visage in miniature.

  “It’s a…a cartoon, you understand.” John spoke in Irish, for the brehan to translate, throwing in the English word “cartoon” in desperation. “I don’t mean to say you really look like that.”

  Clorfíonn gave him a startled glance. “But he does look like that, John Thor’s Bear. Exactly like that.” Then she translated for Snorri.

  “Indeed,” agreed the Icelander. “It is my very image.” Snorri leaned forward over the low table. His very heavy and intricately ornamented sword banged against the bench.

  John wiggled in an ecstasy of embarrassment, but when Hulda, in a small voice that contrasted with her strapping physique, requested her own likeness drawn, he added another sketch to the white stone. He had never learned how to flatter a model, but he did his best with an outline of waving hair (not filled in with pencil, to show it was blond) and larger-than-life eyes. Hulda was very happy. Holdfried, her twin brother, appeared on the stone beside her, their fraternal resemblance exaggerated as much as was in John’s power. Soon the stone was covered with cartoons.

  The four of them, John, Snorri, Holdfried, and Hulda, sat bunched around the slight figure of Clorfíonn Iníon Thuathal very closely. At her left was Hulda, in her canary-yellow dress, and at her right was John Thornburn. Clorfíonn leaned toward the left to avoid snagging her silk on the rough stone. John also leaned left to avoid bumping his drawing arm against Holdfried’s sword, which was flat, dull, and hammered out of a single length of iron. The brehan’s servant had no such nicety as a sheath; the weapon ran through a ring of brass attached to his belt. Two oil lamps burned quietly before John’s work. No draft disturbed the flames, for all the doors and windows of the brehan’s house were shuttered and bolted. It was a very late hour of the night, yet no one had suggested going to bed.

  Clorfíonn stood, saying she would find something else for John to draw on.

  “Let me,” said the maidservant. Hulda pressed the brehan down into her seat again. Smiling ruefully, the old woman whispered in her ear and Hulda scuttled off into the shadows of the house.

  These shadows loomed uneasily as the others waited for her. Silence in the room brought the silence of the street outside into focus. John heard the grunt of a pig outside the garden gate, perhaps trying to find a way in to eat the onions. MacCullen’s blue-eyed mare, or else the hinny, dropped a hoof behind the house. It was very close also. John felt himself sweating beneath his woolen brat.

  Hulda came back with a leather bag, painted all over in a key pattern of crimson and gold. Opening this, the brehan took out a book which she handed to John.

  “There are many blank pages scattered through it,” she said to him. “I will provide a pen and some good imported ink.”

  He took the book on his lap. It was small, almost paperback-sized, and its leather cover was dark and soft with cows-foot oil and the oil of hands. He opened it to a page of painted vellum and gasped.

  “This is a missal.”

  The brehan’s face rounded into a Buddha-smile. “And so you must draw nothing irreverent in it. But you are certainly as good as the others who have decorated it, and pages were meant to be filled.”

  It had been put together with a minimum of gold ink. The pictures in the margins—birds, the eggs of birds, cats leaping after birds—were casual and unrelated to the text. Yet the script was beautiful and the illuminations fine. The doodles completely enchanted John. He handed the book back to Clorfíonn and his hand shook.

  “I’m sorry, Your Honor, but I don’t dare.”

  Her smile widened at his peculiar form of address. “One picture, perhaps? Of me? I would be grateful.”

  And John lowered his head and played with the ink stick and quill until they were to his liking. He drew Clorfíonn Iníon Thuathal’s face, and then, under it, a small sketch of a bird in the style of the man who had done the marginal drawings, making the bird also look very much like the brehan. When he gave it back to her he felt all eyes in the room staring at his little work, and he himself wondered if there were something ominous or at least portentous about the sketch. The shadows loomed more heavily.

  John stood himself up, clumsily, slapping the circulation back into his legs. “I think I know how to get more drawing surface.” Stepping over the bench with the limestone in his hand (he carried it mor
e easily than one would think, looking at him), he sought out Ailesh’s hammer. This she had left behind on her trip to the law hall, as a forbidden weapon. It had been cleaned of its rusty stains. John picked it up and weighed it in his hand.

  “Time you returned to your legitimate functions,” he whispered to the hammer. He glanced from Snorri’s side to Holdfried’s, and then gestured to the brehan’s servant to come to him.

  The stone was placed endwise on the floor. Reluctantly, Holdfried rested the blade of his sword along the top of the stone. John placed his brat-tail over the sword, raised the hammer and brought it down. A deep, almost warlike grunt escaped him as he did so, and the limestone broke with a sharp crack. It fell into two flat pieces—each with a virginal white side exposed.

  John laughed. Holdfried laughed. And then time froze, as all within the room turned to follow the horrendous blow against the door, and saw the blade of an ax blooming among the slivers of oak.

  All the people in the house sat without stirring, almost seeming without interest in the event, and the only movement was Hulda’s, as she tugged at her belt of rope.

  The first assassin stepped forward, and it still seemed no man in the brehan’s party had the power to act. But as the flaring ax blade rose above her head, Snorri’s hand twisted at his side, and the ax fell, chipping the floor. John found himself staring at the gold-plated hilt of Snorri’s sword, which protruded from the assassin’s crotch like a jewel-encrusted cock. The blade had vanished upward through the man’s body.

  The second assassin was only a moment behind the first, however, and as he struck sideways at Clorfíonn, a third ax-wielder threw himself into the room. The brehan ducked quite limberly, and then Hulda was on the man’s back, and her belt of hard hemp was around his throat.

  Snorri could not free his blade from the body of the man he had impaled, for his victim was kicking as his life ran out. As he pulled, bent over, and braced against the assassin’s thigh, the third man swung down at him.

  Holdfried’s black sword intersected the ax and broke. The ax was deflected so that it bit deeply into the fallen man’s breast. That one cried out and died, while Holdfried slashed his broken sword across the attacker’s face and throat, which opened red in the lamplight. Three times the Saxon smashed the snapped end of the sword into the juncture of the attacker’s neck and shoulder before he was ready to believe the man dead.

  He held up his shortened sword and laughed. “It has never been so sharp before!”

  The remaining assassin stood flailing his ax around him, while his other hand clawed wildly at his throat. Hulda, big as she was, hung behind him, tossed like a dog at the neck of a bull. John sprang over the bench, but could find no way through the rain of blows to help.

  The man bellowed, sounding also like a bull, and tossed the Saxon woman above his head. The ax struck backward and hit Hulda flat on the forehead. She fell.

  But in that moment John leaped up and forward and Ailesh’s hammer smacked the black head. There was a sound like a wooden bowl breaking.

  John stood for a moment, balanced wide on his legs. When he saw there were no more enemies standing, he put his head down and ran until he hit the wall of the house. There he threw up. When he saw what horror he still held in his hand, he dropped it.

  Hulda sat on the floor, her legs tangled with those of the dead. She held her head in both hands. Her eyes were crossed. Holdfried came to her and pulled her to her feet. Snorri at last freed his sword from the body of his enemy.

  The brehan sat quietly weeping on her bench, in the wavering light of the oil lamps, and the neighbors, full of sleep and carrying rude weapons, started to arrive.

  “How could they be Gaels? How could they be Gaels and do this?” asked Hulda once more, as bitterly as though her own people had betrayed her.

  “They were dressed as Gaels,” said Holdfried, stating the obvious, in Norse.

  “I could wear the skin of an ass,” replied Snorri, fingering the edge of his sword gingerly. “Would that make me one? Or any more of one?” he added, with a faint smile. “They didn’t say anything, that I recall.”

  “There is no difference between the Gael and the Gaill,” said Clorfíonn, who had been wrapped in blankets, “when they lie still in death.”

  “Oh, I don’t know.” The Icelander’s face reflected a flicker of interest. “I think I can usually tell an Irishman.” He took a lamp in his hand and stepped out into the garden, where the bodies of the assassins had been dragged. His light floated in the dark like a will-o’-the-wisp.

  “I think,” he announced on return, “that the one with the split face might be Irish. Hard to tell, now. The others…I’d say no.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Clorfíonn. “I don’t even want to know.” She looked about her, at her house filled with bustling nocturnal activity, as the woman who lived next door mopped the vomit out of the corner, while three others worked at the congealing blood in the middle of the room.

  Hulda sat beside her mistress, a wet poultice on her forehead. The tall blonde was developing two black eyes. She smiled triumphantly at Clorfíonn.

  The brehan squeezed Hulda’s rope-burned hand. “I am surrounded by loving family,” she said into Hulda’s ear.

  The lamps flickered as someone came through the open doorway. It was Labres MacCullen, who stared about the shambles-smelling room and threw himself at Clorfíonn’s feet.

  “Foster mother! Clorfíonn, forgive me. This violence is my fault and my doing! If I had listened to your voice of wisdom…”

  Clorfíonn chuckled. “Instead I listened to your voice of honor, Labres. Well, so be it. If there were not someone to match wisdom with honor occasionally—like you, my dear boy—all our wisdom would become mere cunning.”

  She petted MacCullen on his hair, which was damp with the night mists. She saw Derval O’Keane follow him into the room, her eyes still large from the sight of carnage outside. Ailesh came last of all, and she sat down at Clorfíonn’s feet, wrapping a blanket over her head.

  Derval found John by a wooden bucket, scrubbing at bloodstains on the pages of the missal. His face was pasty and his mouth trembling. “This is the work of months, Derval. I can’t let it be ruined.”

  In Derval’s cold and hunger, John seemed to be standing at the end of a tunnel. “A human being is the work of nine months,” she said, perhaps inconsequentially.

  “I would ask you one favor, Labres my child,” Clorfíonn whispered, half asleep with closeness and the reaction of fear. He raised his fine head. “Anything, Clorfíonn.”

  “Leave Dublin with me.”

  After a moment, he nodded.

  He needed light to cut the runes, so Thorfinn held the lamp close. Snorri grunted softly as the hammer struck the chisel, driving it into the ash stake.

  “You’re very reckless to do this,” his companion whispered.

  “Reckless, hah! He is crazy.” An indignant female voice answered from the bed curtains.

  “Give up, Ermingerd, it’s no use to persuade, let alone shame him into prudence.” A face appeared where the drapes parted in the bed alcove. “Don’t pretend to agree with me. You just want me to be silent. You are bringing unnecessary danger into the house of a family that befriended you!”

  “That’s enough, wife,” Thorfinn scolded.

  A big woman, heavy with child, lowered herself rather painfully onto the bench just outside the bed. Her hair was uncovered, but she was so upset she forgot her kerchief. While she held her belly with both hands, her eyes drilled into Snorri’s back. “There will be killings after you do this! And what house have you lived in? What house?” Her lips trembled and she began to sob aloud. Her husband burst out in rage.

  “No one could possibly take action against us as long as you keep your mouth closed, woman!”

  The hammer fell several more times. Thorfinn said nothing more for a while. He was as terrified as his wife, but he was held under control by the duties of friendship and by a fe
ar of disgrace greater than his fear of the king. “Since she lost the last child she has been distraught. Forgive her.”

  “No pardon is necessary,” Snorri said, sighing. “She is right. I was stupid and ungrateful to come here tonight.” Snorri said it loudly enough for Ermingerd to hear it. She began to sob louder. Snorri continued, “If you are questioned concerning this, I urge you to publicly repudiate me. But I cannot turn back now. I have killed a king’s man and it’s likely Olaf wants me dead anyway. A lawless king is the worst of evils.

  “There. It’s finished.”

  Snorri held up his work, examining it for error. The stake was twelve feet long and sharpened at both ends. Part of it, of course, would go into the ground. On top would rest the horse’s head he’d bought from the butcher. But along six feet of it was written: SHAME TO OLAF, SON OF SIGTRYGG, INSULT TO HIS JUDGMENTS. SNORRI FINNBOGISON CARVED THESE RUNES.

  Ermingerd, overcome with curiosity, rose from her place and waddled around to the hearth to look at it. She was an intelligent woman and a good housekeeper, when not sick. But that was all too often now. Pregnant for the sixth time, she had buried or miscarried four of Thorfinn’s children, but she once had been beautiful, and Thorfinn had not forgotten that. He was very worried about her. For all the bulk of her body, her face was thin and yellow.

  “Where are you going to set it up?” she asked.