Book of Kells

by R. A. MacAvoy

  They were at the top of a hill. He looked down a long slope and there was grass, and a broad river, and a few yellow sparks in the shadows beside the water. He stared at these wearily, wondering, until he recognized them as fires.

  Dublin. Ye Gods and little fishes, could it be? From Ard na Bhfuinseoge to Dublin in maybe an hour and a half? It had taken at least two miserable days before. John petted Tinker with awed respect. No wonder Derval had picked him above everything else…

  Tinker took the soft slaps as a signal to move forward again. He picked his way down the long hill carefully, his rider rigid with nerves and leaning on the horn. In the wet grass west of the palisade of Dublin City Tinker threw up his head and whinnied. From behind the wooden walls came the answers of the Irish ponies, weak and treble next to the power of Tinker’s lungs. He was now where the Slieg Dala, the Road of Assembly, met the Lands of Dublinn. He crossed a small bridge and rode quickly on past.

  John looked at the black pool and the black wall of the city and felt a species of fear, remembering Olaf Cuarán and the assassin’s ax in Clorfíonn Ui Neal’s door. He ignored his body’s pain (he was sure he’d pulled a muscle in his groin) and turned the horse’s head north.

  The low ground was slushy and the road soft, even in June. Starlight beat down into the cleared valley, illuminating the bare tree stumps ahead and east, where one day the row houses of Glasnevin would be.

  He approached a tiny wooden shed, lit from within. He stopped the horse once more, fearing the unknown presence. But before the door of the building rose a stone cross, larger than Bridget’s cross but very like it, and that symbol encouraged him. Still mounted, he looked into the open doorway.

  It was empty, except for a low table with a cowbell of brass and an oil lamp upon it. The walls were intricately painted and the floor covered with heather. Garlands of wilted flowers lay all around.

  It was obviously a shrine. St. Molua’s, he remembered, stood by the Ford of the Hurdles. John’s glance returned to that heavy bell. It was very yellow: perhaps not brass at all. Surely not gold? But it was very yellow. He was more curious every moment. He lifted one leg from the saddle.

  Or he tried to. The leg didn’t seem to get the message. He considered pushing himself sideways off the horse, but he was quite certain that once he was on the ground, there would be no way on earth he could climb up again. So unwillingly he left the shrine behind him.

  In front was the Liffey, breaking starlight into swirls which bespoke shallowness. Two posts stood by the road, showing the place to enter the water. But would Tinker cross water? John had sat futilely on horses that wouldn’t. He placed the gelding at the edge of the river and gave a good nudge, thinking strong thoughts all the while.

  Tinker would have been outraged had he known of his rider’s doubts, for he had never refused a water obstacle in his competitive life. He entered the Liffey with a grand leap and splashed over and among the wicker baskets full of stones which had been set to provide footing. John clung to the horn, his eyes shut against the splashing. Three hundred yards later the horse rose out on the north bank.

  To John’s relief, he found Sliege Mid Luchra right where he remembered it, northwest of Dublin and going up into the hills. Tinker, no longer fresh but still strong, climbed up and out of the Liffey Valley.

  John fought off sleep, not so much because he feared he might fall, but because he did not want to miss the unmarked turnoff west over the mountains. He came to it within the hour and then did not have to worry about sleep again, for the trail Ailesh had called “no cow path but a deer path” slapped him in the face mercilessly. John was forced to lean forward in the saddle, bent over the high ropers horn, while Tinker flailed over stone and bulled his way between the trees.

  He passed the place where he had kept watch—when? Only last night? Ye Gods. He erupted onto the flat and treeless table of the low hills, where both he and Tinker felt themselves abashed by the stars. After a mild canter over this tableland he rode down to the wide plain of Brega, and to St. Sechnail’s monastery. Tinker drank from the pool among the willows where John had seen the wild hermit. No one was praying in the cold water tonight.

  John heard chanting. He was glad there was someone still up. Wouldn’t Derval be surprised to see Tinker? A smile stretched itself across his weary, dust-caked, and branch-switched face.

  They were in the middle of the packed field outside the enclosure when John saw the Vikings and the Vikings saw him.

  Derval sat with the sound box of the harp on her lap and rested her chin on the bow. “Damn Johnnie,” she mumbled aloud. She gazed blankly out at the night, listening to the prayers of the assembled people of the abbey, and the occasional shout from the camp of the Gaill. She began thinking how much darkness there was here. It seemed twenty-three hours of every day since she had come—since she had been brought into the past—had been spent in the dark: darkness of night, of woods, of buildings… It needed strong faith for a person to put one foot before the other. An absurd faith it was, too, since one fell more often than not.

  Still, she had seen Bridget. The saint, the goddess. (Being a scholar of old history, Derval felt more comfortable thinking of her as goddess.) Did that seeing mean Derval would escape death in the morning? She wanted very much to believe that it did, for though she was not afraid (how could she be afraid with the memory and smell of the poet’s love surrounding her?) she wanted most passionately now to live.

  Certainly one miracle made another miracle more easily believable. Feeling the force of the old woman by the road was enough to convince her that life was not the collision of blind matter that nightmare often hinted. What more proper than for Bridget to reach out her hand and save the one she had put her mark upon?

  Or perhaps not to save her at all, but to call her to…whatever. It was well-known that people who were about to die saw things. Even in the world of plastic and pavement (and of light. Easy light) from which Derval had come, people who were dying had visions of a certain kind. Psychologists studied them, called them near-death-experiences, and invented dozens of pragmatic explanations involving neural decay.

  Psychologists had never seen Bridget.

  It was as likely that the aisling vision meant Derval’s doom rather than her salvation. Likely she was already close to the edge between life and that cold country. Likely it was by her death that time was to protect itself against interference, leaving of her no trace in a burnt field of battle, where even the stones of the wall would be taken by the crofters of five hundred years from now and put into other walls.

  There was the book. It was known that the book survived. But John had taken the book and disappeared. Derval shuddered at this reminder. They had fallen through time together, but the doom of it was hers alone. Damn him. Damn him. And her shudder grew into a fear that took the ability to move away from her.

  Then Derval was no more the scholar but the daughter of Pat and Mary O’Keane, and the difference between the goddess and the Catholic saint bothered her no more than it did the people at the abbey around her. She folded her hands over her face and implored Saint Bridget to intercede with Christ that she might not die. But her anger at John Thornburn placed itself between her and her prayers and Derval remembered the early teaching of Sister Therisita at school, who had told her that she could not ask good of God while intending evil of her neighbor. It was Johnnie who had done the evil, she thought resentfully. But for him she would be…what? Safe? Perhaps? Not alone? Well, she was not alone. She had Labres MacCullen, and could want no better companion in the world. Derval threw away her resentment of John, not in exchange for divine assistance, but because it seemed suddenly silly.

  She raised her head. The air was getting damp, and there was a dent in her chin from the carved bowpillar of the harp. She heard two monks walk by in front of her. Evidently the mass was over. “God to you,” said one to the other and they smiled as they walked away in different directions.

  Damn religious group
of people, she sighed to herself. Excessively religious. Even for the Irish. Perhaps because there was so much dark to trip in. But it was all a shade ridiculous, on the eve of massacre. Derval herself smiled grimly as she prayed, “Bridget, please don’t make me religious tomorrow.”

  There was a sound of hoofbeats outside the wall. The Vikings didn’t have horses with them. What was this—reinforcements? For the Dublin forces, or for the Gaill? Derval stood up.

  It was one horse. Long-strided. Much different in action from the Celtic ponies, or from the bull-necked horses of the Dublin Danes. Derval knit her brows and put the harp down on the bench behind her.

  There was a pale glimmer far beyond the wall, moving fast. Derval saw light flash from a sword under starlight as the animal charged through the Norse camp. Her eyes strained to focus. She recognized the beast. Then Derval spoke a name: not the name of a horse.

  She saw him clinging to the mane with his belly leaning against the gray’s heavy neck. In wonder she made out the blocky shadow of McCaffrey’s western saddle. Surely the high pommel and horn of the thing was poking a hole into the rider’s stomach. Surely he wasn’t going to try to jump the wall like that, with flopping reins and in the darkness. Surely neither horse nor man had so much ridiculous faith as to…

  Derval saw Tinker size up the jump, adjust his stride, gather… He was up and over, and oh Christ he was coming down right on top of one of those stone beehive cells where he was about to be broken and his rider with him.

  But the eyes of the horse and his reflexes were better than she had feared. Tinker snapped up his hind legs and arched his back as though he were a leaping hound. He came down on the dome of rock with all four feet and sprang up and off, touching earth twenty feet away, and he danced his way between the little round buildings, reins dragging.

  His rider touched earth in a different place, flat on his back. His cap covered his face.

  Derval ran to John, holding Tinker’s reins in her hand. The small blond man was already blinking and gasping for breath. She lifted his head.

  With difficulty he made out her features above him. “Idiot gate!” he said. “Didn’t know enough to bring me back here. Took me to Ard na Bhfuinseoge, instead.

  “I brought your horse, like you wanted,” John explained, and then winced as he picked himself up from the dirt. “And my hat.”

  “I know I am judged unworthy,” whispered MacCullen in his private darkness. “Perhaps I was never called to poetry at all. But Lady, I am the only one these people have. I beg your aid.” Then he opened his mind.

  But instead of making poetry, Labres MacCullen fell into a sleep—a sleep which troubled him so he tossed on his mattress of heather until he was wound in his blankets as tightly as any prisoner. And in that sleep he had a dream.

  There was a tree before him, and in its branches a sweet bird singing. And then it turned to ash, both tree and bird. He turned and there was a great house, and in a moment it, too, was gray ash. And a woman stood before him, with the face of Derval, and she, too, was consumed. All this was under a light of horrible brilliance. He struggled away from this, until he knew that he was dreaming, and then—still dreaming—he changed the dream.

  The dirty old woman sat at the end of his bed, bent and splayed as she had sat by the campfire on the road to Dublin. “Tell me why you’re short of the mark, boy. Or why do you think I measure you so?”

  She waited for his answer like one waits for the end of a joke which promises to be a good one. MacCullen grew warm with resentment, but the bedclothes held him still. “I couldn’t see you. You didn’t let me. Though I was dedicated to your service at the age of seven, Lady, still you have never let me see you. Those others—”

  “Those others have their own problems, Labres. Leave them out of this. Some men need dedication—others need visions. And as far as seeing things, well, you can’t see a person standing behind your back, can you? Not even if she’s very close. Close enough to touch.”

  There was a prod against MacCullen’s back: not too gentle. He twisted, but there was nothing beneath him but the fragrant, dusty heather. And she was laughing at him, as he had known she would. Distantly he heard a voice speaking: his own.

  “Are you behind me then, Eire? And have always been? I doubt it, or else I would have far different welcome in the world. They call me clever, you know. Not inspired but clever. How is ‘clever’ going to help these good souls defend themselves against the wickedness of destruction? How can it even help them to die well, if it is a hard, fierce death you demand of us this morning?”

  Old Bride listened to him calmly. “But you are a clever lad, Labres, and have been so from birth. Don’t abuse the gift you’re given, even if it is not what you asked for. So clever you are, that if I showed you the pretty face you have been mooning to see, why, in a moment your mind would be so busy deciding whether my eyes were more like blue sky or seawater that you might as well be staring at a painted picture of me.”

  “Then I am beyond help!”

  Bride grinned, and her smile made her no less plain. “Not so, lad. Yours is a road of stones—no mistake—but then so is mine.”

  MacCullen closed his mouth in wonder to hear this, and forgot entirely that he had been dreaming. His rough swaddling fell away from him, and he was naked at the old woman’s feet.

  “Come, Labres, spouse and son. Share in my work with me once more. Let us make a glorious poem!” The poet wrapped his arms around Bridget’s angular old knees and she put her hand upon his head.

  He woke from his dream on the cold stone floor of the cell, feeling he had slept a night through. He threw on his léinne and over it his brat, glad to see by the position of the plow in the sky that there was still some time before daybreak. In his mouth rested the poem Bride had given him. He feared even to whisper it aloud.

  In the church he found all the people he sought: Eochaid, MacImidel, Ailesh, Finnbogison, and of course Derval Iníon Chadhain. Also he met one he had not thought to see again. In the dancing light of yellow oil lamps, John Thornburn was arguing with Father Blathmac. Snorri Finnbogison stood so close to the small foreigner as to hide him from view, and with a broad grin on his face the Icelander punched John regularly on the upper arm. Emotion made John’s Irish almost incomprehensible, and every good-natured blow from Snorri rattled it further, but MacCullen heard the name of Bridget spoken and with his dream fresh in his thought he stepped forward, as one closely involved.

  “It has nothing to do with devils,” John repeated himself, slapping his hand on his knee. “It was Bridget who brought Derval and me here, and Bridget can take us all safely away.”

  “A saint is not God Omnipotent! The only power of the holy dead is to intercede for us with the Father, from whence all power for good originates.”

  Father Conoran, so recently the abbot of the monastery, sat on a little stool and blinked his dilated eyes. “All power originates in the Father? I don’t know, Blathmac. I think perhaps you are saying too much there. Surely the saint who visited Eoin here did not say anything about power originating—”

  “She didn’t say anything at all!” shouted John, with so much venom in his voice that Snorri took a step away from him. “Not a damn, fucking thing! She just opened the damn, fucking gate that we can all just—”

  “Why don’t we try it?” suggested Eochaid. All seemed surprised to hear the new abbot speak. He now stepped over to the bloody paper affixed to the window, which night had colored glossy black. “We can more easily judge the sanctity of this method of escape once we have seen it work.” Father Blathmac opened his mouth to protest, but the abbot continued. “Blathmac can pray for the safety of our souls as we make the venture.” John sighed, puffing out his cheeks with relief. He nodded at Eochaid.

  “Take the lamps out to the other side of the window, so I can see through the paper,” he said. The little lights wafted ghostily out the door.

  John was conscious that someone had stepped close to him. He fel
t a light, dry kiss against his face and heard Ailesh’s voice in his ear. “Please don’t be angry with me, Eoin,” she said. He turned, startled.

  “Don’t be angry with me, but I cannot come back with you into your house. I belong here, where the murder price of my father is to be decided.”

  John hissed between his teeth. “You little idiot. Didn’t you see enough blood? What do you expect to do against those mean mothers out—” He cut off short, realizing he had been speaking English.

  Derval came up on his other side. “Don’t lose your temper, Johnnie. I didn’t think you could convince Ailesh to run away.”

  “Eh? I don’t have to convince her. I’ll just throw her through!”

  “She’ll brain you,” came the woman’s reply. “Or I will.” John felt, rather than saw, MacCullen behind him, standing very close to Derval. He turned to confront the tall poet.

  “Don’t say a word, Labres. I know already. I’m quick that way. Congratulations.” He stalked over to a bench, shoving Conoran aside and barking his own shins in the process. When MacCullen sat beside him he edged away.

  “Eoin, we thought you had left us.”

  John snorted. “Very flattering, I’m sure. And as for Doctor O’Keane, I wish you a great deal of luck. And a thick skin. You’ll need both. I suppose you won’t use the gate either.”

  MacCullen’s reply was thoughtful. “Not…not while anyone remains undefended in the abbey, I will not. I could not, by my vows.”

  “Then help me convince them all.”

  The twin lights wavered outside the window, lending a ruby glow to the assemblage within. John stood, still shaking with anger, weariness, and frustration. “Be quiet,” he said rudely, and walked to the tracing, holding his pencil before him.

  He cleared his throat and tried to clear his mind. He began.

  It wasn’t right, and he knew it wasn’t right, but stubbornly he persisted, until Derval spoke out. “Johnnie. That’s not the right air. You’re humming ‘The Coast of Newfoundland.’“