Book of Kells

by R. A. MacAvoy

  “I’m on watch.” Again the hazel wind, the oak wind, and the bird like a buzz saw.

  John gazed down at the trail. “I thought,” he said much more quietly. Hesitant. “I can’t sleep. I thought we could take a little…walk.”

  “A walk. Why would…oh. No, Johnnie. I’m on watch.” Still he sat beside her. The wind lifted his flaxen hair and it shone like limestone under the stars. His oversized arm lay over his thighs, with his relatively small hands dangling.

  Derval sighed. “What are we going to do, Johnnie? Not these people, I mean—they’ve got their business—but you and I? How are we going to get back to the cross?”

  “I haven’t thought about it,” he answered.

  Just like you, Derval thought, but aloud she asked, “Don’t you want to go home?”

  He smiled. His teeth glimmered in the darkness. “Sure. All these onions…I’m farting myself to death.”

  “By now they must think we’re dead,” whispered Derval, looking up at the stars.

  John gave a sad little laugh. “No. They’ll think I killed you and ran away.”

  “Johnnie, you are so fucking paranoid. They can’t convict you of murder without a body, and I don’t think—”

  “I think I heard something,” John interrupted very quietly.

  Derval’s sentence ended in a tight exhalation. The blackness she had almost forgotten closed in heavily. In an instant she had gooseflesh on her arms and a pit of black terror within her. “Don’t scare me like that, Johnnie. It’s bad enough sitting here—”

  He put his finger to her lips, or near her lips. “I heard something.”

  “Oh, dear God!” Derval sat and listened. The saw bird, the hazel wind, John’s breathing and her own.

  A crackle of leaves.

  She could hear his muscles tighten. He could hear her rise from her seat. “A deer, maybe,” he whispered. “Or a raccoon.”

  “No raccoons,” she said weakly. “Fox.”

  “Hush.”

  She heard it again, and also a rustle from a different quarter. Her breath caught.

  Derval felt the pressure of invisible eyes all around the hill. She slid back toward the fire. Her bladder threatened to fail her for the first time in twenty-six years.

  There was no dealing with this terror. She had not felt anything like it in the Vikings’ camp. Surely the noise of her breath whistling through her lungs would draw them—whoever they were—to the camp. Surely the tiny warmth of the dying fire would call.

  She looked at the faint outline of blankets. Only eight bodies. Only four men. Only two swords. Perhaps it would be better not to wake them at all. Better to die asleep than screaming and pissing oneself in terror. But as Derval thought this, her hand was shaking MacCullen by the shoulder, and her other palm was over his mouth.

  “I see a man, I think,” said John at the watch stone. He sounded calm as stone himself.

  MacCullen, in turn, crept over to Snorri, who lay on his stomach with his fingers locked on his sword hilt. He called his name, and when Snorri’s hand tightened on the sword, MacCullen put his own hand over it. “Peace, Icelander. The enemy would not bother to wake you up.”

  The poet sought out Derval, to thank her for her warning, only to see what might have been the woman’s shadow huddled over at the edge of the camp. And his eyes hadn’t played him false; she was relieving herself on the ground.

  By Mary’s face, what a cool woman. But perhaps she had information. Perhaps some saint or spirit had told her she would not die tonight. MacCullen sighed, well aware no one had said as much to him.

  Around the fire they stood, in a circle with shoulders touching. Clorfíonn had Snorri at one side of her and Holdfried at the other. John stood between Derval and Ailesh, holding in his hand a carving knife of the brehan’s that felt very awkward to him. MacCullen, he noticed, held nothing: not even leather to shield him. He stood tall—taller even than Snorri or bulky Holdfried, with one hand on the shoulder of each of the women. Looking at him John’s eyes stung. He could forgive the man any arrogance. Any crime—even that of cutting him out with Derval O’Keane. That weaponless confidence of MacCullen’s made it possible for John himself to face death without horror. Starlight circled the hill like the ring of flame around a candle.

  A voice on the hillside. John’s stomach tightened. His hand was slippery on the knife’s wooden handle, but what he felt was more anger than fear. I don’t want to die like a rabbit, he thought. I don’t want to be made to look like a fool and then die.

  Spitted like a pig. Spitted like a pig, ran the words in Derval’s head. She couldn’t have brought me here to be spitted like a pig. But the saint or goddess sent her no comfort at all. She glanced to the right, at John, to find in his face the emotionless concentration he had always saved for his art. For five seconds she stared at his sharp, severe face. So, she said to herself, this time I have followed him all the way. Now I understand John Thornburn. She could not have said what it was she understood, but it put out her fear like a candle. She gave him a smile meant to say it all, but he did not turn his head to see.

  Now there was no mistaking the men on the hill. One could hear them talking to one another. And as minutes passed and the rustlings became neither louder nor softer, and the voices grew no closer, the circle on the hilltop began to sway with fatigue.

  “Why don’t they come for us?” Holdfried asked, his voice cracking.

  “Because they don’t want to, obviously, though I can’t imagine why,” Snorri replied, laughing. “We can’t make them, you know.” He drew a slow circle in the air with his sword blade.

  MacCullen turned in place, peering into the night. “Perhaps they will not attack until dawn.”

  Derval gave a half-smothered scream. “By dawn I will be dead on my feet!”

  “That is one reason why they would do it,” the poet answered her.

  “I hear something,” said John, tilting his head.

  The circle tightened.

  Soon all their straining ears could make out a rumble on the earth. John stared out at the ribbon path where it broke from the forest growth and came to the crest of the hill. “Maybe this is what they’ve been waiting for,” he said. “The horses.”

  They broke out of the shrubbery at a trot and clambered up the hill: over a dozen horses, most of them white, with riders in mail, bareheaded, their iron helms lashed behind to the saddletree. In front of them rode one wearing a tarred coton and the garb of a Gaelic warrior. The shield at his horse’s flank bore the insignia of Olaf of Dublin: an eagle with a hooked beak and outspread wings.

  Ailesh stepped through the ashes of the fire, kicking them to a glow. She watched the approach of the horse troop and she defied it, hissing like a cat. She swung her hammer in the air. “Swine! Paid dogs of the Gaill! Some of you will never go home to your master again.”

  John put his back against hers, feeling the heat of the fire through his tennies. The riders had not made him forget the men coming through the bushes. At least this girl for whom he had gone to such trouble would not be stabbed from behind. At least that.

  The shod horses scrabbled and slipped on the rock just below. A cry rang up from the captain of the company, and he waved his shield into the air.

  “Thor hulf!” Snorri answered it, and he placed himself in front of his friends, huge, naked, and with his gentleman’s sword raised before him.

  The captain quieted his horse. “Peace to you, stranger. We seek the Ollave MacCullen, of Leinster.”

  Before Derval could restrain him, MacCullen stepped out. “You have found him.”

  With a sigh and a weary rubbing of the eyes, the captain said, “Then know I am Finnchu MacImidel and these are my sworn men. We are sent from the king of Dublin for your aid.”

  Twenty-six people and twenty-one horses made the dimple at the hilltop a very crowded place. It was very lucky that the troop had brought their own beer and jerky, also, for there was nothing in that dry place with which to
make hospitality.

  “Again, please? Forgive the slowness of an old woman, but tell me what exactly Olaf said to you?”

  Finnchu knit his brow and answered as politely as he could, for he was a Dublin Gael and had been raised with a great respect for Clorfíonn the law giver. “The king said that you hunted reavers, and by error had left the city before he could direct us to you.”

  Clorfíonn nodded, and in the light of the rebuilt fire her eyes went the color of mist.

  “Well, I’ll be damned! Why not trust them?” whispered John to Derval. “If they wanted to kill us, it’d be done already, eh?”

  “There’s that.” Derval turned to the nearest of the horsemen, a young man with hair faintly reddish, wearing a leather tunic so worn and old as to resemble linen. “Tell me, honored warrior, why do your foot soldiers not come to refresh themselves in the firelight with us?”

  The young man puzzled visibly over her words. At last he replied, in Norse-Gaelic, “We have no foot soldiers, Bhean Uasail. We are eighteen men and eighteen horses. As you see.”

  Derval sat silent for a moment and then gave a small squeak, staring out into the night.

  At dawn they made an awkward procession over the dry highlands, as riders who had slept little worked to rate irritated horses to the speed of MacCullen’s walking company, who had not slept at all.

  “Agreed that there had been a cold camp down the hill from you,” said Finnchu MacImidel to MacCullen. “There is no way to prove it was last night’s, or that it was inhabited by your enemies. You are a big enough party to perhaps make other travelers wary for their own sakes, and reluctant to show themselves openly.”

  “Why are you so slow to believe, Captain? It was not my ears alone that heard men encircling us. Do you not believe in the very reavers the king sent you to destroy?”

  MacImidel was a fair man, with a nose turned red by the sun. He played thoughtfully with his flowing mustache. “The tale was of raiders to the south, as I remember.” Whether he believed it a true tale, he did not explain. “I find it difficult, Ollave, to believe in rescue coming so aptly. It smacks of the miraculous, and if I were party to the miraculous, I imagine some sense of mine would tell me.”

  MacCullen stumbled over nothing, and stared at the Captain of Horse. His face colored, but he did not open his mouth.

  Ailesh Iníon Goban, however, spoke up boldly. “Yet the miraculous has us in its grasp very often, Honored Captain, as I have reason to know. If you do not see it, you must work to open your eyes.”

  MacImidel glanced grinning at the rosy girl. His young horse, iron gray and restive, swung its head up and down as though to agree with her. “I will remember that fault in my next confession,” the horseman said to her.

  Ailesh stole a glance at MacCullen, uncertain whether to count him a friend or foe in this issue. But the poet now walked at a slower pace and his head was bowed.

  “But whether your neighbors were friend or foe, they did not attack. Nor will any sane body bother us, many and strong and armed as we are, in broad light between here and the Abbey of Domnach Sechnaill, where there will be time to take stock.”

  Derval had at last taken off her riding boots, and her bleeding feet picked a way carefully along the path, avoiding the green nettle and crawling briar. John winced as he looked down. “Ye Gods and little fishes. They’re…suppurating!”

  “I never noticed.”

  John clucked with his tongue and kicked casually at a thistle. “Try Nikes. I wear them for everything and never a blister.”

  Not ten hours ago Derval had felt herself in possession of the mystic truth about John Thornburn. This morning that truth was locked by pain somewhere in a black closet of her mind. The face she turned upon John caused him to shrivel. “Thanks for the advice. And where’s the nearest outlet? I wore boots because I had been riding, remember? And didn’t expect any nature hike. Sweet Jesus, I wish I was riding. What I really wish I had here was Tinker.”

  John danced lightly around a deposit left by MacImidel’s mount. “There’s scads of horses here, Derval. If you want to ride—”

  She sniffed. “Haven’t ridden a pony since I was eight. It’s Tinker I want. He’s big and he’s well taught. These little sausages know nothing more than to stop at a yank and to go at a kick. If you’re lucky.”

  “Myself, I’d like to have my hat,” John announced, to have something to say.

  As always, Derval’s tempers took years of maturity away from John. As he walked beside her now, kicking pebbles and smashing weeds with his toe, he might have been a well-spoken twelve-year-old. “I dunno that I agree with you. About the ponies. I like them. The way they sorta roll along, without the jitter-jitter of a trot. And they have such kind eyes.”

  Her blue eyes, pale with pain, held contempt. “Don’t get ideas. You’re not ready to branch out yet, Johnnie. Not till you’ve really mastered cow riding.”

  He laughed at himself, hoping to put her in a better mood thereby. His laughter failed in the middle. Derval sneaked a glance at his face and the dark closet opened. Her own ill temper disappeared as though it hadn’t been. “They almost got us last night, Johnnie. Didn’t they?”

  He shrugged up his brat and put his hands in his pockets. “Yeah. But who is ‘they’?”

  Ailesh was also barefoot. She bore it much more easily than did Derval. Her embroidered cloth belt tapped her knee with every step. With surprise she noticed that the place where the cloth of the belt had been pulled and twisted by the knot for over a year now lay in a few inches down the slack of it. How much weight she had lost, without noticing! She shook her léinne around her hips. Yes, she was thinner. But she did not feel sick. In fact, it seemed her young system had had all the misery it could take and was determined on recovery. She felt light, and her steps bounced over the grainy earth.

  Why should I be happy when I don’t know where I’m going and my kin are all dead or far away, she asked herself. She looked around her at the high hillside and the wide plain below. The tails of the horses in front swished like the backsides of self-important ladies. The young soldiers in their leather were pictures from a book; Ailesh, abbey-bred, was not used to seeing so many warriors.

  Right behind her was Labres MacCullen, his hair waving fountains in the sun. He might as well be a true brother to her, in his kindness. Surely she took a sister’s liberties with him. After him came Iníon Cuhain and Eoin, his hair dangling in his eyes, his thin legs wrapped, as always, in coarse blue trousers. By his slouch she could tell that Derval had been pecking at him again.

  This morning she could not be bothered by that. There was a bond between them, it was clear, no matter if the bhean uasal chose to appear a shrew. Looking over her shoulder at her friends, Ailesh Iníon Goban sighed with affection.

  Hooves very close to her. Ailesh turned her head the rest of the way round, spinning her body behind it. The young redheaded soldier grinned down at her. He was missing only one tooth. “You must be tired, maiden. Come up on the horse with me for a mile or two.”

  His Norse accent caused a shudder of revulsion in Ailesh, but she berated herself for it. “I doubt your captain would like the sight of that,” she replied, and her nervous hands played with her belt.

  “Hah! Why should he care? Are we in a forest, where enemies might pop out of the trees? Come, maiden. We redheads must stick together, for no one else will do a thing for us!”

  The day would be warm. The wind blew from the west. “Why shouldn’t I?” asked Ailesh of no one in particular, and she hopped up on the pillion behind him. She decided that perhaps she hadn’t lost her looks.

  The small grasses and brush of the hill faded, and the hooves of the horses sparked off white stone. They marched through a very simple landscape, with wind whipping the fringe of their brats against their faces. It was all downhill, from here. Ahead was the great bowl of Ireland, fertile and full of creatures: the wide plain of Brega.

  But after meadow had followed meadow throu
gh the morning, they came to a hollow in the land, and a county so filled with green it might have been piled with grass cuttings. And near the shore of the lake rose a low wall of stone. Within the ring were buildings of stone, ranging from small to smaller. The smallest were domed hives. The least small was a corbeled rectangle of Romanesque architecture which could be nothing but a church.

  “There it is,” MacCullen called ahead. “The Abbey of Domnach Sechnaill. There we can rest and ask ourselves what comes next.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  More, daughter of Donn og McKeally, queen of Ireland, died in this year. Moglekyeran O’Magney was cruelly tortured and martyred to death by the Danes of Dublin. He was a cowarb of St. Coloumbekill.

  Annals of Clonmacnoise (A.D. 980)

  As they came close to the monastery, trees cut off the voice of the wind, leaving a thick silence in the air. John smelled water. Rock turned to gravel and then to black dirt beneath their feet. Ahead was a stand of red sally among lush grass, as inviting to sore travelers’ feet as carpets.

  Clorfíonn, whom chance had put at the head of the line, let out a heartfelt “Thanks to God. The face of disaster from us!” and climbed stiffly off her horse. Holding her shoes in her hand she stepped barefoot over marshy ground. John and Ailesh scampered after her, with Derval limping behind as best she could. The body of the company went slower, engaged in talk.

  At the edge of the willow grove the brehan paused, one foot lifted half off the ground. Then she bowed from the waist, her hands folded in front of her.

  John pelted up in time to send a red fawn bolting for cover. He skidded on the west earth and stood blinking at a small two-point stag with wide eyes and a naked, hairy man standing beside it, his hand on the animal’s antler. His shoulders, his face, his arms, and the root of his penis were deeply tanned. As John met his eyes, the man sank wordlessly down on his knees. In mud.

  John stepped back as quickly as he had approached. He turned to find Ailesh behind him. “A crazy,” he whispered. “I think.” He glanced back to find nothing in trampled grass except the prints of two knees. The brehan had gone on ahead.