Book of Kells

by R. A. MacAvoy

  Delbeth frowned and blushed horribly, thinking the poet was making fun of him. But the force of the big man’s grip on his legs and the hot tears against his legs made this impossible to believe. He sank down, losing his balance, and squatted before MacCullen. “Ollave. Ollave! It is not worth this! Believe me; my anger is over. I was not very angry at all, for I knew you must have had your reasons. And the taiseach never liked me a great deal, I think. I’m the son of one of his father’s other wives, anyway.”

  MacCullen took Delbeth’s knobbed, unfinished hand in his own. Delbeth winced at the strength of that grip. “Still you are my brother, Delbeth MacCullen.”

  “The honor is too great,” replied Delbeth, wonderingly.

  MacCullen snorted and sat back then. Suddenly he felt how tired he was, and how cold. “It may be a short-lived honor for both of us, Delbeth. Tomorrow the sun is like to shine on a lake of our bright blood.”

  The gawky boy cast his eyes left and right, but the dark was thick and he could think of nothing to say. At last he propped up his knees and rested his elbows on them. “The harp is undamaged,” he said encouragingly.

  Wearily MacCullen returned to the meeting. Blathmac was talking, as he had been when the poet was called out. Derval Iníon Chadhain was no longer at the table. MacCullen narrowed his eyes in sheer disappointment, for no other face besides hers could bring him comfort at that moment.

  “Does no man here long to stand among Christ’s martyrs, should it come to that?” the priest was saying.

  “Whether I long for that blessing or no, Blathmac,” replied a burly monk, “I don’t want it visited upon my daughter, who is but three years old!” There was a growl of support for this. Blathmac tightened his lips and muttered.

  “I didn’t ask you to bring a woman and children here.”

  “Your mind is not very open and charitable to the rest of your brothers. Did not Saint Brendan carry the sword?” asked a brawny, dark-haired monk. He stood up to look about him at the frightened eyes of his companions. “My ancestors were among the first to embrace the snow-white Hero, but we didn’t shrink from a fight either. This is the day I will give myself bravely to Mary’s son, but it will be because I stand before his house steadfastly, defending the sacred things here. Will the words spoken by our Lord, written in scarlet in the Gospel books, be used to line the shoes of these Danish dogs? Not while I can lift a hoe or a reaping hook.” He sat down, folded his arms, and waited for an answer.

  For a long time there was silence. Then a monk MacCullen had not noticed before, one with the old tonsure, began speaking. “No one knows of these Danes better than I do myself. Isn’t it myself who swam from Dalkey Island to escape from slavery not two years ago? It is true that the sacred things must not be defiled, especially the blessed sacrament.” MacCullen caught the glistening of the man’s eyes. “The body of Christ must be totally consumed before morning. All the books should be hidden. Inside the graves of some of our holy dead would be a good place, where the marks of digging would be covered by the stones. Then maybe, if we live, we can retrieve them. Or others who come after us here will find them. But as for my choice, I’m willing to offer myself up to our enemies with a word of forgiveness and blessing. I’m willing moreover to go out to them with all the gold and silver vessels that they covet and offer my life to them in exchange for those of the women and children here. I invite all true heirs of Christ to do the same with me. Perhaps our example—”

  He was cut off in midword by Father Blathmac. “You would just give them the sacred treasure? This is sinful beyond belief! Just what I would expect from someone with the apostate’s mark on his forehead!”

  The man who had offered to give his life looked at Blathmac with an air of patient sadness. “My dear brother, our treasure here cannot be taken from us by anyone. He has promised us that. No glory of this world is worth a human life. Better that we should give them everything here than that they should sin by stealing it. Better that we should offer up our bodies to martyrdom than that we should do murder. You may not kill; His law is clear. I, too, come from a lineage of fighting men, but when I left Corkaduibne to be married to the Word of God, I knew I must put aside violence for all time.”

  MacCullen looked at the face of this man, getting comfort thereby. His features were beautiful: large, heavy-lashed eyes, a straight and perfect nose, and the shape of his head was oval as pieces of ancient stonework that he had seen. What was the cause of this Kerryman being so far from his home? MacCullen decided it must be to escape from the violence of his own tribe’s quarrels.

  MacCullen walked to the side of Abbot Conoran and cleared his throat. In the presence of the whole company he made his request. He described in detail what he wanted and why he wanted it. There was a moment’s silence.

  “By Benedict!” said Blathmac. “A bloody bull’s hide! That completes it.”

  “It is an old and sanctified ritual: the wattles of knowledge,” replied MacCullen, “and I—”

  “Old I will grant you, poet. As old as the standing stones in the cowfields. But no more sanctified than any work of ignorant, pagan hand. Next you will ask for dog’s flesh to eat, so that a spirit may speak through you. It is all of a piece with this place,” stated the small priest, bringing his hand down on the tabletop. “There is no monastery in Ireland, I think, where so much ritual of heretical or simply pagan inception has been permitted to grow and flourish—”

  Conoran was stung into reply. “What was pure Christianity in my grandfather’s time cannot be heretical in mine, Father Blathmac. My grandfather was abbot here and so am I, may I remind you, though not by my choice. Mine is the authority to say whether we fi—”

  “Yours is the authority?” Fury drove Father Blathmac to his feet. “Then tell me, Prior Conoran, who is your bishop, who granted you this authority? Or does the Holy Father speak to you directly in your drug-induced dreams?”

  Father Conoran, whose white, sweaty face and red-rimmed eyes marked how harshly either the drug or the discussion was treating him, opened his mouth in protest, but could not break in.

  “Or do you here set yourself up as an Irish Papacy? I would believe that, as easily as anything else. A fine Church you would make of it, with ax-wielding monks indistinguishable from barbarians.”

  “The question is not, Blathmac, what I or any of us in the old tradition are doing here. The question is, out of all the monasteries of Ireland, why did you choose to come plague us?” Now Conoran stood as well as Blathmac, on opposite sides of the table.

  “Peace!” called Brother Eochaid, who sat in a badly lit corner. All turned to him and there was silence.

  Conoran sobbed. “Eochaid! Let me go. I never wanted to be abbot either.”

  Eochaid bent his half-shaved head. “Forgive me, Conoran. I have been selfish, I know.” He rose from the bench and walked slowly to the head of the table, where Conoran had already risen from the tall-backed armchair. He sat down, slump-shouldered. Conoran took Eochaid’s position at the bench, and on his round pale face settled a look of sweet relief.

  MacCullen took the opportunity to speak. “You may call the wattles of knowledge heretical or pagan, Fathers, but I had it from my teacher Erard Mac Coyssie, of Munster, and I know it to be neither of these. Whether to use physical weapons or not is not a choice I have to make. My gaesa forbid it. And tomorrow, at dawn…very soon, now…I will face a test beyond anything I have known. Perhaps it will be the last for me, as perhaps tomorrow will be the last morning for us all. I have”—and here MacCullen stumbled on his words—“I have in the past been found unworthy. I—” Here he paused and gathered breath.

  “Indeed I would be very happy to be the vessel through which a spirit spoke—a spirit of God—for I know I myself have not the power to create a poem to save us from the madness of the Gaill. If there is any way to be tried—” And here he broke off, not knowing quite what he wanted to say.

  “I will pray for you, Labres MacCullen,” said Brother Eoch
aid, looking closely and compassionately at the poet. “My prayers may not have the power of the wattles of knowledge, but that is for Iosha MacMarie to decide. And, we have no time to kill and skin the bull and bury you in the hide before dawn.”

  MacCullen bowed. He felt oddly relieved at the brother’s words and left the room without any feeling he had been denied a thing.

  Now Eochaid turned back to the gathering at the table. “Captain MacImidel,” he said, gesturing to the fair man who slouched at his left. “What chances have your men against this assault if none within the monastery rise and help you?”

  MacImidel stretched and smothered a yawn. “Most of my men,” he said, “have never seen battle before.”

  A hiss of dismay passed down the table. MacImidel thoughtfully cracked each of his knuckles in turn before adding, “But then the question might also be asked, how much of an advantage would it be if you did fight? At least my men have been taught which end of a sword does the cutting.”

  A voice called out, “We’re not infants, Captain.”

  “Nor Romanists,” added another.

  “That is quite obvious,” came a third voice, of a young gingerhead in round tonsure. Blathmac shot his supporter a chiding glance. He stood again, soberly this time.

  “I beg you all to forgive my temper—my besetting sin. I have been thinking since I last spoke, as I ought to have before speaking. As director of the scriptorium, I cherish the relics and art within our keeping as much as any man alive. But there is no book worth murdering for.”

  “How about dying for, Father Blathmac?” Conoran asked. Blathmac shook his head.

  “There is not. And for that reason I suggest giving them up—or rather giving up their jeweled covers to the Gaill.” Having said this, he bowed his head in silence.

  MacImidel smiled. “Paying them off? Hah! There speaks a man with his head in a barrel.”

  Brother Eochaid replied more respectfully. “But they haven’t come to take our books, Father. They have sworn to kill us all. Sworn to their god.”

  Blathmac stared at Eochaid. “Sworn to kill us all? Why on earth—”

  “It seems to be a vow they’ve taken.” He turned to Conoran, met his brother’s eyes, and then smiled. “We will fight, Conoran and I,” he said to the horseman. “And whoever will come with us. God’s love upon all of us within these walls, wherever conscience lead them.”

  He went to his brother’s side and put his arm around him. “Good cheer, Conor. Remember what a great brawler you were as a boy!” Conoran grinned back.

  MacCullen found Derval by the sound of the harp. She sat on a log bench at the west side of the church, and there was no light around her but starlight. She turned as he sat down and rested her head on his shoulder. “I couldn’t bear it any more. Too much like a department meeting.”

  He didn’t bother to ask what a department meeting was. “It’s a sweet music,” he whispered, touching the clàirseach gently.

  Derval was playing one-handed. She touched her free hand to his lips. “Maible Ni Chaillaigh.’ By O’Carolan, they say. It doesn’t sound strange to you?”

  “Only beautiful.”

  “Then maybe it’s older than they say.”

  He was quiet for a few minutes, listening to the slow, many-parted melody. Then he kissed Derval on the lips.

  “Lady and scholar, but for the intercession of the Powers we will die tomorrow. But whether or no, my heart is yours for all my life.”

  “I love you, Labres,” Derval said, and then she put her hands to the strings again.

  MacCullen left her there as he found her. He went to a cell to find even greater darkness and deprivation of sense than night could bring. Within it he lay down and wrapped himself in blankets, to plead with the green woman and to give birth to his poem.

  Tinker shook the dish towel from his face. The big horse looked right and left and then sighed.

  “Well you might say!” said John to him. “Well you might say!”

  Leaning against the leather of the saddle fender, John tried to think. Could he get back to the bathroom? Perhaps. If the Vikings (as they had had reason to suspect) had followed the party north, then he would be free to find the pieces of the cross again. And then what? Drag them back to the base? Ye Gods—it had taken six men to drag them away. And then what—stick them together again with spittle?

  And even if it all worked, what would be the good of finding himself in his hallway in Greystones? He’d be back in the twentieth century with no way into the tenth except the path he’d just now come. John whined in his throat and the horse stared at him. “No good, Tinker. It’s my mistake, but I’m afraid it’s you who will have to do the hauling to make up for it.”

  Cautiously he led Tinker along the sloping path until they came to the Hill of the Ash Trees. It seemed a shame not to look at the place once more. There was no smell of rot in the air, but in the silhouette of the hill against the stars there was nothing to see, neither house nor tree, but only sad lumps of clay and ash, and broken branches pleading between sky and earth.

  One sight of it changed John’s mind. He turned the horse once more to find the path occupied by a doe deer and her spotted fawn. She was very small: much littler than the whitetail John was used to, and she approached the gray horse stiff-legged, and snorted audibly.

  Tinker gave back a companionable sniff. In his heavy face his eyes blinked as benignly as a whale’s. The deer and fawn brushed by John, touching the back of his hand. The baby stared into his eyes and its ridiculous ears flicked. Then they were gone, up the hill and bouncing over the ruins of the cattle enclosure.

  John found he had been holding his breath. Shoving his cap more solidly on his head, he grabbed a handful of mane and attempted to emulate the deer, bounding onto Tinker’s back. He barely made it, coming down with a thump that stung his bottom. Tinker grunted and John apologized, stroking his neck. He turned the horse down the path away from Ard na Bhfuinseoge.

  This was much better than blundering through the wood, as they had done last week. Feeling confident that this small track would eventually meet Slige Chualann, John decided to chance the perils of the road rather than suffer through the brush once more. And as the passage of wagon traffic had barbered the trees overhanging this little road, there was little chance of being knocked from the horse by branches. He was emboldened to give Tinker’s sides a little kick.

  Suddenly he was hanging on to the horn with one hand and the horse’s mane with the other. The rubber-coated jockey’s reins were tangled through his fingers, but the reins themselves flopped loose against Tinker’s neck. Hooves hit the earth like forge hammers and the horse’s breath made a heavy, bellows accompaniment. How fast the world went by.

  John’s small equestrian background had consisted of riding well-trained and overworked horses, with the nose of his horse against the rump of the one ridden in front of him. Always these trail or trekking horses had worn curb bits, and John had been told not to hurt his mount. Being of rather tender sensibilities, he had followed this warning carefully. He had never ridden a horse “on the bit” in his life.

  Tinker had never worked any other way, and now that he felt his head thrown away completely, he obediently flung himself forward, over mile after mile of lovely, mossy, quiet woodland path. He had been at complete rest for a week, and wanted nothing more than to run all night.

  After the first mile or so, John found himself more exhilarated than frightened, for Tinker was very steady gaited, and never shied or twisted in his stride. Starlight speckled the hoof-pounded path; it unrolled gently before them like a ribbon through the blackness.

  The sides of the blackness opened out for a moment on either side and then closed. John blinked confusedly and recognized that they had just passed the intersection of the path with a wider road. The Slige Chualann the Great, going north into Dublin. “Whoa!” John shouted, and he attempted to gather in the futile, flopping reins. “Whoa!” He leaned back and pulled on the s
ingle side he had found.

  Tinker spun like a cow pony, but John’s shouted command and (more importantly) his exaggerated weight shift had slowed him down enough that John only lurched in the saddle. The horse shook his head in disapproval, and the hardware on the bridle jingled.

  John apologized again and, sitting perfectly still in the saddle, asked Tinker to go back to the intersection and turn right. Tinker was twelve years old and had seen many things in his competitive life. He had no idea what this little rider was saying, but he was aware something was wanted, so he made his own decision, trotted back to the intersection, and turned right.

  John looked at the high-arching dome of branches above Slige Chualann—a road wide enough to run a good cattle drive without injury to man or beast—and wondered if this could be the same road he had thought of last week as a forest trail. He shortened the reins of the snaffle carefully in his left hand, apologized in advance, lest he was doing something wrong, and gave Tinker an experimental squeeze with his legs.

  Tinker tucked to the feel of the reins and set out at a nice trot along the north road. His irritation with his rider turned into an amused tolerance, for John sat quietly and did nothing to interfere with the horse’s enjoyment of this night ride.

  No autos, no paved surfaces on which one might skid onto one’s bleeding knees, no crowds, no loudspeakers, and no fences one must plan in advance. Tinker passed an hour without altering stride.

  John’s back hurt. He found a posting rhythm which helped that, but then his knee hurt. He twisted in the saddle, and immediately heard Derval’s scathing denunciation of people who went off balance and bruised a horse’s back muscles. He cursed Derval aloud, but stopped twisting. Up hill, down hill, and then up a lot more hill. He decided he simply had to stop, and he said as much to Tinker, who was now not sorry for the rest.