The woman was making progress, or rather, had ceased to be dangerous; she had stopped muttering to herself and her eyes no longer slid about in the way that had made him uneasy, they had just become dull.
She was more presentable now and he was less ashamed to introduce her as his distant kinswoman. He didn’t want anybody to think he was married to her.
While they were on the more deserted part of the Shannon bank, he grubbed about for leaves of mugwort, remembering vaguely that his mother had used it on her hair to repel what she’d called ‘visitors’. He boiled them and then took the woman behind a wall and washed her hair in the decoction. ‘And if you ever tell a soul I’ve done this I’ll kill you,’ he said to the interested Art. He made her put on a new dress he found in her baggage and complimented her on the result: ‘Less ratlike.’
He slapped her when she slouched, making her put her shoulders back. He slapped her when she didn’t eat but, as she still didn’t eat, he was forced to spend time spooning food into her. ‘One for Sir John, there’s a good girl. One for Art. I said one for Art, you little devil. That’s right. Art will be pleased. Now then, one for St Martin. How the hell did I get into this? One for St Patrick.’
Starvation, he decided, was her problem; lack of food had made her brain thin. ‘And it’s not going to get fat on your food,’ he told Art, ‘which would make a dog retch. We’ll eat at monasteries along the way.’ If she died he’d lose his passport. Posing as a pilgrim might get him to the various holy places in western Ireland, but if he was to gather the sort of information Fitzempress wanted he needed to infiltrate the wider community, assessing ways of life, battle strength, strongholds and the like.
That evening they arrived at Lorrha where the great monastery of St Ruadan overlooked the flat, brown swampland of the Shannon. The place was packed with pilgrims and the students who flocked from all over Ireland to its schools. Sir John was told by a harrassed porter that women were not allowed in the guest house. He had to take the winding Road to the Holy Women, to the nunnery where, though reluctant to interrupt the regime he had worked out for her, he left the madwoman for the night.
‘She’ll need feeding by hand,’ he said, handing her over to the porteress, ‘Chopped red meat and red wine for strength.’ He watched the limp figure being led away. ‘And stand up straight,’ he shouted after it.
That night before dinner, he joined the other pilgrims and went down to the lakeside to wash in its holy waters, repeating prayers during the ablutions. It was never wise to ignore a saint as considerable as St Patrick and, besides, Sir John approved of him; a good, military saint, he thought him, like his own St Martin. There was a quiet intensity about the shadows around him, some richly-dressed, others very poor, old, young, many crippled. But Sir John found difficulty in concentrating on his own prayers. He was worried about the loony being out of his sight; if she collapsed while at the nunnery, she would be kept in its infirmary and his passport would be gone. Anyway, like every owner of a dog, Sir John distrusted other people to know its ways. Perhaps, after all, he should make a sprint to Lough Mask, stopping as little as possible – but that meant riding.
Until now he had covered the ground on foot, more in keeping with his disguise than on horseback. He hadn’t enjoyed it; no knight was truly comfortable off his horse, but as a pedestrian he had been able to talk to more people and gather more information along the way. It had also enabled him to save the money Fitzempress had given him for expenses – and Sir John had all the care for money of a man who had begun life poor. Sighing, he decided that the situation demanded the outlay of some of it. He told Art to buy two ‘inexpensive’ ponies and a pack mule. He’d be able to sell them later.
It was with relief that he retrieved his charge, still limp, from the porteress at the nunnery next morning.
There were boats in plenty taking pilgrims to St Patrick’s Purgatory, but the ferry between the east and west banks of the Shannon had been abandoned and Sir John had trouble finding a waterman with a barge large enough to take them and their horses over. When he did he had to pay what he considered an inordinate price. ‘Is this how you treat poor pilgrims?’ he grumbled in his halting Irish.
‘Poor pilgrims aren’t going into Connaught at this time of year and in the middle of a war,’ he was told.
He would have liked to go on the trip to the Lough island where nothing female could exist. The monks had told him that even hen birds alighting on it had been seen to drop dead; he had no difficulty in believing it. He promised himself a visit on his way back.
There was an armed sentry at the landing place on the opposite bank and they were taken to a watchtower and questioned by a captain of the Hy Many. They kept the story simple – a pilgrim escorting an unhappy lady back to her own people.
The captain’s heart was touched by the sight of the madwoman and her blank stare. ‘Undoubtedly, she is of the Partraige,’ he said. ‘They breed beautiful women – strange, but beautiful.’
Sir John looked at his loony, amazed that anyone should think her beautiful. ‘She’s strange, all right. And very sick.’
The captain nodded. That much was obvious. ‘But she’ll get well among her own,’ he said. ‘There is healing for women at Lough Mask, so they say. God bless the track of your ways, then. I shall send word of you to the O’Conor.’ He looked carefully at Sir John. ‘And he’d be glad of your courtesy to pay him the visit when you can.’
Sir John promised to report to the O’Conor as soon as possible, and took the road to Lough Mask, with the loony and Art on the ponies and himself on the Arab, since it was more befitting to his status.
Up into Galway it was a good road, classified by the Irish as a ramat, which meant those whose land ran alongside it had the duty to keep it clear, and they reached Athenry in one day, though the ride took its toll of the unprotesting loony, who was beginning to breathe badly.
But after that both road and weather deteriorated and each day Art protested at setting out at all. He said his mistress was too ill, but Sir John loaded her onto her pony, wrapped every rug he could find about her and rode alongside, pulling on its bridle to keep its pace up to his own. They passed more and more stretches of water, some large, some small and each time they did so, Sir John expected to hear Art say they’d arrived at Lough Mask, but he didn’t.
The road got worse, more hilly, dirtier, the horses became unwilling and the weather turned colder. The woman started to cough. It was evening when they trotted down a slope and saw water dotted with islands.
‘Lough Mask?’
Art nodded.
‘Thanks be to Jesus.’ The place seemed deserted except for birds, but there was a smell of peatsmoke coming from somewhere. They followed it along a path that threaded through bumpy land which was otherwise almost impassable from the trees and rocks that bestrew it.
‘God forgive me,’ said Art, ‘but the Lough’s been beside us for miles and I didn’t see it. It’s a hidden place, Mask.’
Sir John grunted. There was no doubt this was strange territory, with a stranger atmosphere, but he didn’t care if it was the moon as long as they found shelter for the woman. She would die, and soon, if they had to spend the night in the open.
Then he saw a glow on a hillock and made for it. There were large walls in front of him, and dogs barking behind a gate. He hammered on a high, solid door and spoke the words which opened all doors in Ireland. ‘In the name of God, we need shelter.’
Minutes later he was in a courtyard and a house was in front of him. He lifted the shivering bundle down and carried her into it. The inhabitants were in the middle of a quarrel in which dishpans, baskets, vessels and hens flew about the main room like enormous, angry bees. Sir John ignored it, strode to the nearest decent bed, put the woman on it and began the fight for her life.
* * *
Despite the expansion of clans like the O’Flaherties and the O’Malleys, the remnants of what had once been a great people, the Partraige, still clung
to the upper shores of Lough Mask. And though they were great no longer, they comported themselves as if they were.
In his huge and crumbling rath at the head of the lake, Iogenán, their king, maintained a travesty of the state his ancestors had once kept, appearing on public occasions with his nine required and hereditary attendants, leading his tiny army to war when his over-king, the O’Conor, commanded him to, and doing no apparent manual work. (Sometimes it was necessary for him to help get in the hay, or round up the horses, but his people would politely ignore his company until the job was over and he could resume his royal persona.)
Once their summer lands had extended over most of Connemara, but now the encroachments of more modern, vigorous clans had confined the Partraige to thin stretches of fields on the east of the Lough and the mountains in the west which bore their name, and where they ran their herds of horses. Mainly they were lake dwellers, the people of upper Lough Mask, using its water as a thoroughfare and an inexhaustible larder, and its many islands as pasture and refuge.
They were strange because the Lough was strange – nobody unless they had been born and brought up on it ever got over how beautiful it was, how difficult of approach and how varied. It was over six miles long and four miles across at its widest point, but to walk its shoreline meant a scramble of hundreds of miles and probably a broken leg, because it went in and out in fertile fjords stacked with slabs of rock, especially on the eastern side. Every bay and inlet was different from the next and hidden from it so that the dwellers in each secretive fjord, usually one family, were a separate community unseen by all the others, only meeting up with the rest of the tuatha on the water, or at riotous feast days or assemblies in Iogenán’s rath.
The word, measg, which had become Mask, meant ‘a mingling’ and outsiders thought the name derived from the mingling of the rivers which flowed into Lough Mask and thence into its lower neighbour, Lough Corrib. Perhaps it did. Or perhaps it had to do with the supreme tolerance of the Partraige, where Christian culture mixed indolently with a culture that had worshipped goddesses and had been old before St Patrick climbed to the top of the great conical mountain in the distance and, fasting, had sent all snakes packing from Ireland.
They were a gentle, tolerant people, the Partraige, and a dying people.
It had been the driest summer anyone could remember and an extraordinarily sharp winter had come early, but not by the flicker of an eyelid did Niall of the Poems and his chief wife, Blat, indicate to the gentleman who came bursting in through their gateway – and that in the middle of one of their more interesting quarrels – the inconvenience, not to say hardship, the presence of him, his patient and the man Art would cost them. Indeed, they gave the impression that he was just what they had been waiting for to fill their cup. They asked no questions, and beyond the fact that the sick woman was called Finola, Sir John gave them no information.
Blat and her servants rearranged the house, fetched and boiled water, saw to the poor lady’s more intimate needs, got rid of the waste products, did the extra washing, cooked the extra food, first slaughtering or picking it, while Niall took the credit and composed one of the best poems he’d done for ages on the romance of the wasted stranger who took his bed.
Sir John barely noticed them. Crossly he watched over his charge, taking turns with Art to sit by her. It seemed impossible to him that she should die after all he’d done for her. He pointed this out to her unceasingly, bullying her to stay alive. ‘Fight, you ungrateful little bitch,’ he repeated until his voice was hoarse. ‘Concentrate. You can do it. Fight, damn you.’
If she heard him there was no indication. She became increasingly feverish, coughed and muttered without intelligence. On the fifth day the local priest, Baccaugh, limped in and put beneath her pillow a knucklebone of St Adamnan, well known for his care for women. But he gave her extreme unction as well, and the holy oil slid down over eyes that intended to stay shut forever.
When he’d gone, Sir John knelt by the bed and prayed. ‘Jesu in your mercy, I don’t know why this stupid woman is important to me, but I would very much like her not to die. If there are sins I have not yet accounted for, forgive them. Jesu in your mercy, as we live in your mercy, hear my prayer.’
He looked across the bed to Art. ‘How the hell did this happen to her?’
Art sobbed. ‘One of the great ones tried to destroy her.’
‘Fight, blast you,’ said Sir John hopelessly. For the hundredth time he wiped the small face that was setting into the lineaments of death, then gave up. He’d done what he could. ‘Well, he’s bloody well succeeded.’
Straight fight eat one for St Patrick fight ungrateful blast you fight, the new one’s voice floated down on dustbeams of incoherence which mattered less and less as the void became softer and darker. Then a string of sibilants that made sense reached some portion that responded. Irritated, because it was so tiring and most of her pieces didn’t see the point of it, she reassembled enough to grasp the ladder the syllables made. Painfully and grudging every effort she began to climb up it.
The two men watching the body on the bed saw its lips move. Sir John bent over her face to hear and saw that sweat was breaking out on her skin. He looked up at Art.
‘What did she say?’
‘I think she said: “I’ll give him bloody succeed”.’
* * *
While she just needed sleep and food her bed was put up in the loft where she was kept warm by Blat’s goosefeather mattress and Eleanor of Aquitaine’s swansdown quilt. Now she was on the road to recovery it was demeaning for Sir John to wait on her, so Niall went with him up the lakeside where he took up residence with the king and they all went hunting.
When Blat told her to open her mouth, she opened it, and when Blat told her to chew and swallow the food spooned into it, she chewed and swallowed it, and she went to sleep when Blat said, ‘Sleep now, and grow strong.’ The effort of will which had brought her back to life had exhausted itself in the process, leaving her incurious and dull.
‘She’s a sad thing,’ Blat reported to Niall’s elderly mother, who lived with them.
‘She bears a sad name,’ said Niall’s mother, and Blat sighed. Finola, the name of the Daughter of Lir, carried more personal sadness for the Partraige than just the tragedy of the mythical swan-woman. ‘Tomorrow I’ll bring her downstairs,’ she said, ‘and sit her to look out on the Lough so she can heal.’
The woman’s body was still pitifully light, but as Blat lifted it she saw with satisfaction that the dent it had made in the mattress was deeper than it had been when the woman arrived. She made her up a chair-bed downstairs and propped her up in it in the doorway, covering her with rugs, to look out through the open gate to the portion of Lough Mask which filled the western view.
‘It has the healing property for women,’ Blat said, ‘though there’s a dragon under its waters.’
Nobody ever agreed on how many islands were in the Lough because they altered shape and position in an ever-changing light. Sometimes there were big islands far out in it and at other times they were small; only the islands and crannoghs near the shore remained consistent, but even they varied so much – some being treeless, some covered in trees, a couple bearing buildings on their backs and a couple a stone tower – that it was impossible to count them because many of them hid themselves in the inlets and, anyway, though you might start to do so, you invariably became so interested in some feature that you never finished.
The woman looked out on a path which led down from the gate in the wall over the grass, between the rocks to a landing place where upturned curraghs were kept like beached porpoises when not in use, as now. A white otter emerged from the limestone slabs piling the side of the inlet, contemptuously avoiding the trap Blat had set for it, and fished for trout. From the house came feminine sounds, sweeping, the click of a loom, women’s voices in conversation. The woman sat quietly, smelling the lake water and the warm depth of the thatch above the doorway, and wat
ched, listening to the call of the lake’s diving birds.
The imperative was to live so that Dermot of Leinster didn’t win. She would make sure Dermot of Leinster didn’t live when she’d worked out a few things, like who she was and how she could cope with a world in which all the accustomed planes had shifted. Having no God and no rules to hang on to made her giddy. She had to use left-over bits from the shattered Boniface to make a new woman to stand up in the new world, a patched-up thing with no illusions, no preconceived ideas and no caste. But she was too tired.
In her lethargy, and so stealthily that she didn’t realise it, something was happening to her.
She shrank; the view became bigger and the rocks down at the shore grew to enormous castles of enchantment where fish and crustacea swam in moats of lake water. Without physically moving she was projected unsteadily down the path towards them and clambered up onto the highest, where it hung out over the lake, knowing every handhold and the dip on its landward side in which pinks grew. She got to the top and turned to look back, unsurprised that the house, where she still sat in the doorway, was familiar; the peat stacks and the pigsty, the cow byre and the hayrick; she could have guided a stranger round the back of it, past the labourers’ huts and the smoke house to Blat’s herb garden and the stream that hustled down from behind the house to the Lough where a kingfisher watched the water from an overhanging branch.
‘Look, Blat,’ she called, ‘Look at me.’ Blat’s dog came bounding towards her as she stood on the rock and she watched its advance with pleasure, like a friend. It put its paws on her shoulder to lick her face and its weight knocked her backwards into the water. Unafraid, she looked upwards as she sank down, enjoying the bubbles that streamed out of her mouth, the peculiar effect of reeds the wrong way up. She saw Blat above her, unlined, younger, but anxious, swimming down towards her to gather her up.
Daughter of Lir Page 14