Confessions of a Pagan Nun

by Kate Horsley

  When we passed a dark pool, she could tell me which spirit lived there, perhaps the spirit of an ancient one who regretted the loss of its human form and sought to grab a child to inhabit. There were also spirits who listened to wishes and tried to fulfill them by saying certain words in their dark waters. The words came up as bubbles to the surface. As I followed my mother to these places, I kept my eye on her black hair draping her shoulders and back like a fine cloak hiding a tattered robe. I was afraid of losing her in the deep woods, for, as I said, I was small and frail; but she treated me as though I were strong, striding forward with no concern that I would fall behind or be snatched by a more sturdy entity than myself. It was my mother’s assumption that I was not weak that made my bones solid and encased my spirit. Once she told me, “You are very clever, Gwynn.” She told me this as though it were a wonderful and dangerous secret. She warned me to use my cleverness to be free from the obligations of a woman married to a man who raises pigs, or at least to keep secrets from him. For she had a life apart from her husband, my father, though he knew little of it except for the praise of those whom she made well with her herbs. Sadness gathered in her face when she looked at me long, as though she could see events that she could not prevent from wounding me.

  In those days no one else looked into my eyes or endowed me with strength. The other members of my household believed in terror as a method of binding us together, telling stories of horrible deaths, of the loneliness of corpses, of the pain of disease and of the cruelty of the elements: winds that ripped a man’s arm from him, famines that caused a woman to eat her own child. To point to the world’s punishing suffering was to give a necessary lesson. To point to a person’s weakness was to inspire him to be strong. So my father and my sister told me that I lived too much in dreams and that my breasts would never be large enough to please a man or nourish a child. My father accused my mother of starving me by filling me up with stories instead of food. Everyone in my túath was hungry, especially during the months of thick frost. But I did not want food as much as I craved her stories, which soothed me. I listened to my mother weave words together and create worlds, as though she were a goddess. Words came from her mouth and dispelled my loneliness, even when she was not with me. She began every story with the phrase, “It was given to me that . . .” When I asked her who had given her these stories, she rattled her cíorbolg,5 in which she kept small oiled stones that she claimed entertained her with tales. I began then to know words as immortal things one could see and touch, each having a color and shape like a pebble that never suffers disease or death. I dreamed of bags of polished pebbles; each bag a story; each bag holding one precious jewel among the many pebbles or a dark, black stone that was death’s eye.

  My father and sister and others in the túath tried to teach me that I loved words too much, but what I loved was the freedom of words. Even the man who stole a brooch from the chieftain’s daughter and was put in a cage made of pine branches had words, the curses that he flung at children who squatted in front of him to learn about the appearance of thieves. Even a man in a cage can speak words, or if his tongue be cut out, hear them, or if his ears be filled with dirt, have them in his mind. In words he is free at least until he dies, and I do not know, nor did my mother, if a man has words after he is dead, other than what he has left behind in his writing, if he were literate.

  I see no reason to live other than to be free. A person does not have to do anything in this life but die. He may defy everything but death. If death proves that I am not free, then I praise Our Lord Jesus Christ for overcoming it, though I still do not know where my grandfather might be and with what difficulty he eats his eternal feast. I still wonder where the dead who drew my love to them like a golden thread from my belly have gone, why they are so silent. I still feel them pull my organs. I look for them beneath the surface of pools in the deep woods and would happily give them my body to inhabit, for sometimes I would rather be bound by death than by loneliness, and sometimes I wonder if death itself is not the greatest freedom.

  In the last years of my mother’s life, she was on our region’s council of women and therefore traveled once a year to the Fair of Tailltenn. In those days there were a women’s council and a men’s council at which their túaths’ concerns and secrets were discussed. I went with her only twice before worms diseased her. In those years I was too young to attend the council and waited for her beneath the tree of the druids. The first year my mother began to train me to be a member of the council. When we walked the road home and stayed the night in the public hostel situated on the crossroads where the eastern road crosses the northern road, she made me look into her eyes. She reminded me that our eyes were poured from the same pool, colored deep like green holly. She told me of the words that the women say at the start of their meetings and the order in which the women may speak. There were long portions of our walk home on the northern road when she said nothing, not even giving up a story. Her eyes and nose and mouth seemed to drift closer together in a solemn concentration. A laugh would leap from her like a bird flying suddenly from a branch. The branch moved but was empty, and I felt then that I would starve if my mother did not feed me with her words.

  In the second year that my mother took me to the Fair of Tailltenn, she had become wild with weariness and a resolution to live at least some of her life without any fetters. When she was away from my father, who tethered her with his fears, she went feral, like a wolf who has been domesticated only in its fur but not in its flesh. She even howled once, tossing her hair back and lifting her face to a moonless sky as I stared at her and shivered. At the public hostel she met with men in ribald activities such as drinking mead provided by the tánaise.6 She laughed well at the satires told by the druids, old satires about dead men with no heirs, which were not dangerous to hear. She held me close when we went to a corner to sleep and whispered in my ear that people needed herbs and stories and sometimes ale to overcome their pain. I could see the pain beginning to take the place of her stories and desire for knowledge.

  I learned soon that no one, not even the most beloved of a chieftain, is free from worms, treacherous falls, vicious animals, or sorrow.

  The freest humans I observed were the aes dána,7 who attended the Fair of Tailltenn and could travel from túath to túath without fear of being attacked or turned away. They were not caged by any loyalty. They transcended political and marital affiliations and saw the severing of a warrior’s head at the jaw not as tribal glory but as part of an eternal mystery much larger than one túath’s reputation. Druids were able, it was said, to stop warfare with a black fog and transform a man from king to fool with their satires, words so powerful that they cut more deeply than swords.

  The poems and stories of the druids went far back to before the time of anyone’s grandfather. They knew histories and geographies, rituals and prophecies so great as to make one man’s mortal life seem like a small feather dropped by a bird who is sleeping with its head tucked inside its wing. The druid’s power was knowledge, and the druid’s knowledge came in words. I began then to lust for the druids’ power. For if one does not have knowledge of what to do or think, he will be told by another what to do or think. It is my greatest challenge to obey what another tells me, may God forgive me. My mother’s fingers holding herbs, stained by the black earth she dug them from, and her merry mouth, one side curling up, are pictures of pagan freedom that I cannot purge or unlove.

  FIRST INTERRUPTION

  I HAVE SAT HERE LONG with the pen poised over parchment and now interrupt my own history to describe events taking place in the present. One of the elder nuns, Terrech, who is blood sister to the remaining elder, Luirrenn, died in the afternoon when rain was pelting my back as I worked in the garden. I was called upon to sit with her as she took her last breath but was too late to do so. Still there was peace in her face and her eyes were closed by her own effort before death. And so we were eighteen, and a new nun, a strange woman who had been waitin
g in the settlement adjoining the convent, has joined Saint Brigit’s order to make us nineteen again. She is very young, perhaps half my own age, and has a silken complexion and large eyes that have the color of a blue cloth left in the sun for many days. When she came to the doors, she shed her own clothing as though it were made of thorns and thistle. Naked, she knelt and kissed the hand of each sister, lingering long with her lips on our skin, so much rougher than hers for our work in the gardens and around the fires. Her hair is well combed, falling straight in oiled bands that are the color of oak bark. She keeps her eyes always wide as though in fear or in shock, even when her trembling lips are smiling. The other nuns touch her skin as though feeling linen at a fair. We are all of us compelled to act as mother to her, fondling her as one would a child. We implore her to speak, but she says little and only in whispers. She drops her head as though ashamed of words she will not let pass over her tongue or ashamed of the defect or spell that has taken the fullness of her speech away. She is like a pet come to us from another world. There are even contests between nuns as to who will sit next to her and put bread between her lips.

  Much is speculated about this new sister. I say she is mad and would in other circumstances be coddled as a hopeless idiot. Others say she is the daughter of a chieftain, or she is a saint. I have seen pictures of saints in manuscripts and understand only that there is a round light that shines behind their heads, that they have performed acts of transformation, and that they are dead. There is no round light behind this new nun’s head, I have heard of nothing she has transformed, and she is not dead. But I am an ignorant sinner, still tainted by the ways taught to me by a túath of pig raisers.

  I hear her now as I have heard her every night, whispering outside my own clochan so that at first I thought a secret message was being spoken to me by the stones themselves. Then I stepped out into the cold darkness, and though the wind stole the hood from my head and masked my face with my own hair, I saw this new sister running into her clochan, which neighbors my own. She speaks to something I cannot see, and I have just heard a wail come from that place, so strange as to sound like a cry of both ecstasy and horror. I wonder if I should see that she is not harmed or taken by worms. But I dread diverting myself from my work and resent any madness or weakness that compels me from my writing. For do we not all have reason to choose weakness, and is it not our duty to resist it, or the world would be full of mewling and burdensome souls? I have often seen that the rich, though they have more meat than the poor, are yet weaker. For the poor can thresh flax from pink to gray light though their hands bleed with cuts while the rich will wail for a physician.

  Her name is Sister Aillenn. I think she is from a noble family and used to the attention of captives serving platters of meats and cheeses. I think also that she has bad dreams caused by the corpan fedilfas8 we are sworn to endure. Indeed, my mother said that an empty stomach at night is entered by mischievous spirits who take the soul through unpleasant adventures as though pulling a child’s cloak through the wind. I will advise Sister Aillenn to desist from her self-inflicted and arrogant suffering and take some tanag9 from the im noin10 to keep in her clochan for the evening, as many of us do to quiet the stomach and bind the bowels. God forgive us, but we are women who enjoy food more than hunger. Many of us come from túaths where only a fool or a dying man would push cheese away. God help Sister Aillenn, whose wailing comes up again like a mourning wind, calling through the stones of my clochan and making my candle falter.

  We are all wilted because it has rained four days and nights. I have asked Sister Luirrenn, our elder, if I could transcribe the story of Noah in order to learn the lessons of unceasing rain before having to live through them. I told her that I fear drowning in one of the puddles that grows outside my door. Sister Luirrenn glanced at my work, noticing that I did not have any text open from which I copied. She asked if I had finished transcribing the lessons of Saint Augustine. She herself used to confess a dislike of his chastising discourses, but now assumes her role of elder, more so since she now competes without her sister with the abbot, a man who came last season with his monks to occupy our convent. I say that he tries to rule it, but Luirrenn says, “He is a learned brother here to share the blessings of Brigit.” But Sister Luirrenn’s criticism of my work is sharp since his arrival, and I do love her so that I am loathe to anger her. Her eyes dance inside the wrinkles of her aged face, even as she scolds. She said, “It is a blessing that the abbot has too much business to look at the scratchings of an aging and unremarkable nun.” She patted my cheek with playful scolding with her bent and bloated fingers that can no longer do transcriptions, and she said, “You are blasphemous and waste parchment.”

  When Sister Luirrenn speaks I often ignore her words and instead speculate about the adventure that took her front teeth. Many of the women here have had thorned beds to lie in and mysterious sorrows. We soothe ourselves sometimes by clinging one nun to another in the dark nights or taking cheese and bread and blaming Bebo’s folk. Luirrenn is, I confess, sometimes mocked by a sister who blackens her own teeth to imitate the void in our elder’s mouth. Sister Luirrenn hides her mouth with her hand more since the abbot has come with his monks. And the arrival of the dying infant has increased the damage to her smile.

  In the second day of rain, a gray woman came with a halfdead infant to the doors of the chapel. She wanted to leave it as a sacrifice to Saint Brigit. There is much confusion among the laypeople about the new rituals and their meaning. When I told her that we did no sacrificing here, she handed the infant to me and said, “I cannot watch another die.” This she repeated three times, so as to be heard in all realms. She then went away, hiding her face with her hair. I have since given the child over to the goatherd to see if it will be suckled by one of the goat mothers. The child, who is a boy, will no doubt be dead by dawn tomorrow, and that is why I did not hold him long against my heart. In the confession of faults tomorrow I will say that I am a coward. But my unwavering love is now given only to Our Lord Jesus Christ, for those whom I loved that were mortal left me in painful grief. I will also say in the confession of faults that I wanted to box the ears of Sister Aillenn, whose dramas of delicate weakness enrage me, for I was never allowed to be weak though I was small. There is no round light behind my head; God forgive me, I sometimes enjoy rage. Neither do I have the character of the martyr, for I love comfortable places where the rain is not cold and the meals are not meager.

  1. Túath: tribe made up of one or more kinship groups or clans.

  2. Finna: royal bodyguard.

  3. Fortúatha: of the alien people.

  4. Fraechoga, crem, and birer: woodberries, wild garlic, and watercress.

  5. Cíorbolg: comb bag for women.

  6. Tánaise: next in line to be chieftain or kin.

  7. Aes dána: druids and their companions.

  8. Corpan fedilfas: denial of food to the body for spiritual discipline.

  9. Tanag: hard cheese.

  10. Im noin: the one meal served at monasteries, in the afternoon.

  [ 2 ]

  CONCERNING THE HISTORY of my family: my mother, Murrynn, married my father, Clebd, because she had finished with another husband, who had trembled when she went wild and who had not given her children. He still lived in the túath and was greatly respected for his ability to tan and cut pigskin. I was fond of him and often wished that he were my father, because he smiled easily with large teeth and worked from pink light to gray light without complaint. My mother spoke of him with respect but did not object when my father ridiculed his lack of wit and scorned her for having lain with him.

  I did not admire my own father, which is a sin I am told. I did all my work to please him because my mother’s eye always turned to his face. I never received praise from Clebd. He was busy with anger concerning many things, which took him to the well where men talked and planned the túath’s cultivation and livestock. My father also had business with the chieftain and his sons concernin
g the use of land and the breeding of fine horses, even though in our túath the chieftain was the only one who owned horses or cattle. But I do not remember my father ever working at a trade beyond conversation. He was a fearful person with thick forearms, yet weaker in character than my mother. The other women in the túath chided my mother for her deference to my father, and she told them to take him to their beds and see if he did not warrant pleasing. My mother had strong legs and many men who would have been her husband.

  Since my father gave me no praise, I tried many methods to obtain the praise of others. And so I began the practice of showing my breasts to the boys who came to use my father’s boat to fish the lake. Everyone in the túath knew that Clebd was not going to use the boat on any day, although failure to return it by dusk caused him to stroll heavily to the well to make promises of punishment. He discussed the matter in dark terms with the other men there, who leaned on the stones and chewed at straws with the sweat of their own work still falling down their cheeks. He was regarded as a fool but respected in part because he was my mother’s husband. I did not fear that my father would strike me, because although I had become a strong young woman, my reputation as a weakling and my small frame exempted me from blows others routinely received both in anger and in games.

  I did not want to anger my father. I wanted to please him in order to elevate myself in my mother’s eyes. I also believed that if my father were pleased, it would be as though a spell had been broken and he would be transformed into someone noble. I did not, however, want to be a wife as my mother was. I began to think with painful concentration about the life that I would lead and the talents I had. I could not be a warrior unless horses were made smaller and weapons lighter. Though they are fine to see, horses frighten me because they are large and weak minded, which is a dangerous combination in horses, men, and gods. As I have said before, I admired the aes dána, especially those who had great knowledge and skill with words. I disliked mundane chores, which I did not imagine the druids had to endure, such as feeding the pigs and gathering and sorting the seeds we ate. A day’s work was often consumed in one meal eaten by people too weary to know what was in their mouths. There was no connection in my mind between the thoughts I enjoyed and the mud constantly caked between my toes or the biting fleas in my clothing. The privileged druid was given food and shelter in exchange for his knowledge of rituals, laws, and magic. An ollam1 was pampered as though he were a king’s son, and he had no need to fight with sword or tame a stallion.