It might be some sort of weapon.
The little boy spread his feet wide apart and stood his ground. “What are you?” he challenged with as much belligerence as he could muster. “Are you taking me hostage?”
Erc’s lips twitched with amusement. He retraced his steps until the shadow of his crooked shoulder fell across the boy. “I am bishop to the Altraighe, which is your tribe. I have been watching over you since you were born. I know everything about you.”
In a world turned upside down, all the child was sure of was himself. He resented this stranger making claim to his sovereign territory. “You can’t know everything about me,” he stated flatly. “You. Can. Not.”
“Of course I do.”
The little boy narrowed his eyes to slits. This gave him a surprisingly cunning expression. “I can hear the sun singing. You didn’t know that, did you?”
Bishop Erc was disconcerted. “The sun…singing!?”
“The sun. Singing. I’ve heard it lots of times.”
“Ah…that is a pagan…. Sister Íta should have…come along now,” the bishop said brusquely, “there is fish soup waiting for you. You are hungry, surely? Children are always hungry.” He extended a hand. After a moment’s hesitation, the child reached up to take it.
They began to walk together. Tall and small. One leaned on his staff. The other dragged his feet with weariness.
The land was strangely luminous. From somewhere nearby came a constant low roar, like that of a dangerous animal.
The child tugged on the man’s hand. “What’s that sound?”
Erc listened for a moment. “Ah, you hear the belling of the silver-horned stags.” His rapid voice slowed; became a melodic chant. “It is the voice of the sea, little lad. The eternal symbol of God’s power lies beyond the strand.”
The boy stared up at him. “What strand?”
He gestured towards a distant ribbon of sand dunes studded with coarse grasses. “The beach at the edge of the sea. Down there.”
The sea.
Down there.
They came to a high earthen bank, passed through an unguarded gateway, entered a space delineated by roof and walls and peopled with shadows. When they spoke to the child their words bounced off his ears. After a few bites of food he could not taste he was put to bed.
The sun dropped towards the sea. As he fell asleep he heard it singing.
Many years later Brendán wrote: ‘I was taken to Kerry and delivered to Bishop Erc, a lanky man with a great bald dome of forehead. In childhood he had fallen from a tree and shattered his shoulder. The injury healed badly, leaving him misshapen. Erc called his disfigurement a gift from God and claimed it made him a better person.’
The child awoke suddenly and totally. He was in a small chamber partitioned from a larger space by a screen made of rushes. The walls were constructed from hard-packed earth. His bed was a pallet of reeds laid on the floor. The only light came through one miniscule window that framed a dawn sky.
The air smelled of salt. Tangy. Exotic.
He sat up, knuckling his eyes. “Hoigh?” he called tentatively.
Bishop Erc came around the screen, followed by a grey-haired woman carrying a tunic over her arm and a basin of water in her hands. The boy greeted them with a tumble of questions. “What is this place? Why am I here? Who are you again? Why did you say the Altraighe was my tribe? My mother belongs to the Déisi, doesn’t that make me Déisi? Or do I get to choose? Can people choose their tribe?”
Obviously there was confusion that must be corrected. While the woman washed the boy and helped him put on his clothes, Bishop Erc made the effort. “The holy man known as Patrick sent me to this territory years ago,” he explained, “to convert the Altraighe to Christianity. In addition to being their spiritual leader I help with their temporal problems, which are many. Mere survival can be a challenge here. In addition, their small tribe is at risk of being subsumed by the much larger tribe of the Ciarrí Luachra.”
“Subsumed?” queried a muffled voice.
“Absorbed, let us say. If the Altraighe are absorbed into the Ciarrí Luachra they will lose their propria natura, their unique identity. Hoping to avoid this form of extinction, your father…”
The little boy’s head popped out of the neck of the tunic. His thick black curls were tousled, his dark blue eyes enormous. “God Our Father?”
“Your father, who died several weeks ago in a fishing accident. Surely Íta informed you?”
The child stared at the bishop in horror.
Oblivious to the effect his words were having, Erc went on, “As I was saying, your father felt the Altraighe could be strengthened by establishing connections with a tribe equally as powerful as the Ciarrí Luachra. When you were born I helped him to arrange a Déisi foster-mother for you. Fosterage is practiced among most classes but especially by chieftainly families, because it can provide useful alliances in case of war. The ties of affection are often very strong and….” Erc stopped talking. Took a close look at the white face staring up at him. “Do you understand what I am saying?”
“Our Father is dead,” the little boy whispered. He began to shiver uncontrollably. “God is dead.”
Chapter 3
The bishop’s plans for the day unravelled while he and his wife—she of the tunic and basin—struggled to cope with a distraught child who kept insisting, “I want to go home. This isn’t my place. Please, I want to go home. Why can’t I go home?”
Erc’s wife said reassuringly, “You are home, little man—you were born only a brisk walk from here.” Although Eithne had a mouth made for smiling, there were brackets of discontent between her eyes. She had never borne the bishop a son to follow him in the priesthood. Daughters, yes; any number of them, though only two had survived to maturity. But no sons. Privately Eithne suspected the Druids had cursed her.
She never mentioned this to her husband.
“You have a good home among your own people,” the bishop told the child. “Your clanhold is known as Annagh—the Marshy Place—but Finnlugh wisely chose a firm strip of land known as Fenit for….”
“Fenit?”
“The Wild Place.”
“And Finnlugh?”
“Your father. The chief of your clan. The house he built for Cara at Fenit is….”
The boy was shocked. “God is Our Father! His house is at Cill Íde!”
“God is Father to us all, of course,” Erc agreed, “but Finnlugh and Cara were your parents and their house is at Fenit. I shall take you to your mother as soon as….”
“Sister Íta is my mother.” Once again the little boy regarded the bishop through slitted eyes. “Are you saying I have two mothers? And two fathers? Or no fathers? Because didn’t you say God died?” This last accusingly.
“I never said any such thing. I meant your father was dead.”
“God is My Father!” shouted the child, turning crimson. “Sister Íta told me so!”
Eithne had rarely seen her husband at a loss for words. Women, she told herself, are much better at times like this. “I’m sure Sister Íta also explained what it means to be a Christian,” she interjected. “Surely you would you be willing to help a poor woman who needs you very much?”
The boy blinked. “Me? Help?”
“Your mother’s grief at the death of her husband is destroying her. She eats nothing, hardly ever sleeps, keens all day, and walks the seashore by night, clawing her skin and tearing her hair. We hope that restoring you to her will restore poor Cara to herself. Surely no woman could resist her last-born son.”
From this the child gleaned only one fact: “Last-born son? I have brothers?”
“You had three,” said Erc. “The oldest two died in battle. Faitleac, who studied with me, has joined the monastic order at the abbey of Clon Tuaiscirt. Your parents also had a daughter who was born only a year before you. She is young but sensible, so I have given her the task of caring for your mother until such time as the poor woman regains her
senses.”
“Who gave you permission to bring me away from Cill Íde?”
“I did not need permission. I am your bishop, which gives me the authority to….”
“You’re not my father.”
“No, I am acting in his place. I am your father in God, as it were.”
“God is my Father,” asserted the boy. “Even if he’s dead.” He folded his arms across his chest and glared at Erc, daring the man to contradict him.
The bishop tried to be patient with me but I must have tried him sorely. He explained what he knew to be true; I insisted upon what I believed to be true. Each of us was convinced he was right.
It was my first experience of confronting disparate truths.
One of the first souls Erc had claimed for Christ was a clan chieftain called Finnlugh, who was related to the legendary warlord, Niall of the Nine Hostages: Niall the Sea Raider, who once had kidnapped a sixteen-year-old Briton called Patricius and sold him into slavery in Ireland.
Years later Erc had been converted, and then elevated to the bishopric, by that same Patricius—the Christian missionary now revered among the Irish as Patrick. It was Patrick who had sent Erc to the Altraighe.
Lives woven into a Celtic knot.
Erc believed it was his destiny to transform Finnlugh’s kin into Christians. The task had proved more difficult than he anticipated. If any part of Ireland could be described as inherently pagan, that place was Kerry. Men and women in the southwest corner of Ireland were large bodied and long limbed, with handsome features and thick black hair. Both sexes had strong voices from shouting above the prevailing wind. Emotions were slow, deep, often inarticulate, but strongly felt. Passions like primordial ooze heaved beneath the surface.
The Altraighe were stubborn people who had to be won soul by soul and did not always remain converted. A man might be a good Christian until he drank too much ale one night and beat another man to a pulp. A woman in childbed was likely to call upon deities other than Christ.
The human eye could not be trusted in Kerry. Jagged purple peaks brooded on the skyline like mythic kings, flinging forth armies of swirling cloud to seize the folded hillsides and deep valleys, then dissolve into polychrome air bannered with rainbows. Dangerous forces lurked amid the broken terrain, concealed by roseate heather and golden furze. Even more dangerous was the sea. Encroaching on Kerry with clawing fingers, using a bounty of hake and cod and ling to lure men into its wild pagan heart.
In such a setting life was precarious. To placate the ancient gods the natives participated in complex, mysterious rituals. Rituals conducted by Druids.
But change was on the way.
In his journal Brendán wrote: ‘Insular Ireland had avoided the iron fist of Imperial Rome, but would not escape the softer hand of Christianity.
‘Patrick had not been the first missionary to visit these shores. Obeying the adjuration to go forth and spread the Good News, Christian missionaries were among the most widely travelled men of their time. Within three centuries of Christ’s death they had begun visiting Ireland from Britain and Gaul.
‘In 431 Pope Celestine, the bishop of Rome, sent a bishop named Palladius to “care for the Irish.” Although h succeeded in baptising a few of the natives, Bishop Palladius did not gain general acceptance and soon returned to Rome. Celestine had then assigned a recently ordained bishop named Patricius to take his place.
‘Patricius had been born on the northern frontier of Roman Britain, where Roman troops regularly confronted warlike Scottish Picts, Anglo-Saxon smugglers seeking to avoid Roman taxation, and sea raiders from Ireland. Patricius was “freeborn according to the flesh” in his own words. His father, Calpornius, who owned a large country estate west of Luguvalium, was a Christian deacon as well as a decurion. When the armies of Rome pulled out in order to defend their homeland against the barbarians and Britain descended into chaos, Calpornius struggled to maintain Roman order in his territory. This background prepared Patricius for the mission he would one day undertake in Ireland.”
A devout Christian raised with Roman discipline and organization; what a shock Patrick must have been to the wild Gael!
‘Patrick approached the native Irish with a weapon against which they had no defence: understanding. In his youth he had lived among them as a slave, and he understood they were pagan in body and soul. For more than a thousand years their beliefs had shaped every aspect of Gaelic life. A wise man, Patrick realised that a force which has existed for so long cannot easily be killed.
‘Instead of trying to convert the Irish at sword’s point, he grafted Christian images onto aspects of the elder faith. Year by patient year, in ways large and small, Patrick convinced the Irish that accepting Christianity would not eradicate the sacral, but enlarge it. Pagan sacred ground, pagan healing wells, and pagan festivals were gently redesignated as Christian sites and wells and festivals.
‘To help explain the tripartite nature of the Christian deity—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—Patrick used both the three-leafed clover and certain goddesses of the Gael. Badbh the Crow, Nemhain the Frenzy, and the Morrigan, Queen of Battle, were the three faces of War.
‘The choice Patrick offered the Irish was between a god of love and one of destruction. By the time of his death he had won large swathes of Ireland for Christ.
I wish I had known him. At least I knew Erc, who had.
‘Almost from the beginning the Church in Ireland was organized along the lines of Roman civil administration. Bishops filled the role of provincial governors. The territory a bishop governed was known as his diocese, and was subdivided into parishes headed by priests.
‘To aid in administration of his diocese Bishop Erc took over a large earthen rampart, or lios, near the Bay of Tra Lí. Once it had been the fortress of chieftains. Within its high walls Erc established an ecclesiastical center which he called Tearmónn Eirc— Erc’s Sanctuary—and organized according to plans laid down by Patrick himself.
‘At its heart Erc erected a rectangular sod-walled church, facing the rising sun. The bishop’s house was built into the rampart beside a small scriptorium. Opposite them were lean-tos for storage and a reed-thatched refectory that doubled as a classroom. The remaining space was given over to tiny beehive-shaped huts, or clocháns, of unmortared stone. Their only furnishings were a reed mat for sleeping, a reed stool for sitting, and a sheepskin for a blanket. The roofs were corbeled; the only doorway was so low a man had to crouch to enter. An adult could not stand erect inside. The clocháns were an exercise in humility.
‘Novices studying with Erc in preparation for the priesthood lived in those cells. During my years at Tearmónn Eirc, so did I.
Every detail is scribed on my soul. The cells smelled of earth and stone dust. The rough stones were tightly fitted together at the top so that no rain entered, but during the day a small amount of illumination filtered through tiny chinks in the walls. In this grainy twilight one relied on touch as well as sight. My nimble fingers soon discovered little niches in which to store my belongings. Over the years those niches would be crammed with oddments I collected: colourful stones and seabirds’ feathers and even a twisted silver buckle dug out of the sand.
When daylight faded the cell became a different place. Black lay on my flesh like fabric, with weight and substance. I thought I could hear it breathing. A great hungry animal in the cell with me. And I with no candle.
The presence of the Dark became analogous in my mind—in all our minds, because we discussed this—with the Devil. Christ within us was the only light.
‘Aside from the stone clocháns, most construction was of hard-packed earth. Trees would not grow around the bay, so the little timber we had timber was obtained through trade with the Ciarrí Luachra. The altar in the church was carved from a single massive oak and plenished with a solid gold chalice and paten. These had been commissioned from a northern goldsmith called Assicus. Erc lavished upon his church the luxuries the Gaelic nobility lavished upon themse
lves.
‘Nestled against the outside wall of the lios were workshops for the artisans who made bells and crosses and every form of adornment for the church. The bishop believed creativity identified a person as being spiritually alive. “What they create is not as important as the fact that they do create,” he said. “With the work of his hands Assicus praised God.”
‘In addition to earning a livelihood for themselves and their families, the men of the parish were kept busy with the ongoing maintenance of the ecclesiastical center. Repairing walls, mending roofs, sluicing out the cesspit that emptied through a drain under the rampart, tanning leather for sandals and book satchels, filling large, shallow pans with seawater to evaporate for salt, smelting ore to make bells and buckets and door hinges—the tasks were endless.
‘Then as now, land ownership was not vested in any one individual but held in common by the tribe, which was composed of clans descended from a common ancestor. The Altraighe consisted of but a few clans. Because their territory contained little arable land they harvested the sea. Cod, haddock, plaice, flounder, sea trout, pollock, wrasse.” No matter how devout the fishermen were, when a big shoal of herring was running only the women attended Mass.
‘Members of the Altraighe sought the bishop’s support, both physical and spiritual, in every aspect of their lives.’ Erc was not a young man but he gave endlessly of himself. Tearmónn Eirc was a hive of activity from dawn to sunset; a splendid education for a boy eager to learn.
I am writing as if I were important but I am no one; an individual of modest abilities who was taught about humility by a fish and about forgiveness by a monster. A number of monks could tell this story in better Latin and with greater clarity. But this is my story; the memories are mine to recapture as I can.
I shall narrate the events of my final voyage in the order in which they emerge from my memory, though not always the order in which they transpired.
Brendan Page 3