‘I’ll need to work at nothing else.’
‘And that won’t be difficult for him,’ grumbled Blat.
‘And it can’t be done on ale. I’ll be needing the very best wine.’
‘Wine,’ nodded the king.
‘And a new mantle. Swans’ feathers with drakes’ crests. I could be going to my death, after all.’
‘Yes, yes, but can you do it?’
‘I can,’ said Niall and sat up, flicking the branch to make it ring.
The cheering and stamping that broke out couldn’t have been louder, nor the feasting that followed more jolly, than if a messenger had knocked on the door with the news that the King of Leinster had just dropped dead.
‘That’ll fix the bastard,’ said Blat, popping a piece of pork into Finn’s mouth from force of habit. ‘I never did like the Leinstermen.’
Finn swallowed. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘Niall is going to compose a satire on Dermot,’ explained Blat patiently, passing a chipped but still-beautiful glass cup to Finn, ‘Put a drop of this at the back of your soul. And when he’s composed it, he will go round the courts of the kings on the annual cuairt of poets and he’ll sing it.’
‘And?’
‘Well, but Niall’s satires are strong. Didn’t he bring out boils on the king of the Hy Fiachrach after their cattle raid with just a little gentle one? It’s almost a pity to be divorcing the bugger, so it is.’
Tenderly, helplessly, Finn looked at her family who were going to avenge her rape with a rhyme. ‘Thank you, Niall.’
‘I have eaten of the five salmon and the nine hazels,’ sang Niall, drunk, ‘My satires are deadly spears, my word is a blister, my quatrain certain death.’
‘Then that is settled,’ said Iogenán. ‘We have received back the Lady Finola, but is she healed yet? Lady Blat?’
All eyes in the glorious, decaying hall turned on Blat, who shook her head. ‘She is not healed,’ she said.
Finola wondered tiredly how she knew. How did Blat understand that she had not always been the way she was now, compliant, quiet, uncombatative, depressed, with the good days only good because they passed without hurting too much?
Iogenán nodded. ‘Well, then, we must send her to Scathagh.’
There was a deep intake of breath, and reluctant nods around the hall. Blat put her arm around Finn’s shoulders. ‘Must she go?’
‘If she consents.’ He stepped down from the dais and crossed to Finn, stooping down to stare into her face. ‘There is no light in your eyes,’ he said, ‘and God knows, good reason for the lack. We want you returned to us as a whole woman and it may be that Scathagh can make you whole, though I do not always like her methods. Will you go?’
She looked back at the old man, not wanting any further disruption, not knowing whether Scathagh was a person or a place and not curious to know; but they loved her, they wanted her to go, it would please them and she wanted to please them. Above all, she didn’t have the energy to refuse. ‘Yes, if you like,’ she said.
After they’d all eaten and drunk that night, Iogenán escorted Finn to the doors. ‘In case you were wondering,’ he said, ‘we’ve had a message from the O’Conor. He and your man, the Pilgrim, will be returning here in a day or two. Do you hear that, Cuimne?’ A very pretty girl fluttered her eyelashes to show that she did. Iogenán told Finn: ‘Cuimne has attracted the love of the King of Connaught, just as your sweet mother attracted the love of his cousin, and may more good come of it than came to her, poor soul.’
‘The Pilgrim’s no man of mine,’ said Finn, ‘I don’t know who he is.’
‘Isn’t that the coincidence,’ said Iogenán, ‘for neither do I. No pilgrim, that’s for sure; here we are a spit from the Croagh of the blessed St Patrick and he has not been to pray. Ah well, the man is my guest.’ It meant that Iogenán could not question him. He kissed his granddaughter. ‘You will have company when you go to Scathagh, for the Hy Fiachrach were raided by Ulstermen only a little while ago and have asked permission for their damaged women to come here. This is the place for the damaged women.’
‘Yes,’ said Finn, ‘it is.’
And even if she still was not sure who this patched-up woman was, or whether she could survive, she took away from the king of Partraige’s hall that night the certain knowledge of where she belonged.
Chapter Five
Blat was worried about sending Finn to Scathagh and felt it necessary to warn her kinswoman: ‘Women who go to Scathagh either come back better or they die.’ Finn nodded. She would opt for that. In the torpor of depression that had once again enveloped her life wasn’t worth living anyway.
She listened without much interest to what Blat could tell her of Scathagh. The woman was eternal. As far back as Partraige race memory went Scathagh had existed. Where she came from was uncertain – Scotland, some people said. She arrived and returned to nothingness, like migrating birds though without their regularity; sometimes years would go by without Scathagh being in residence in one of her stone keeps on the islands of Lough Mask, but eventually she would turn up again, usually in winter, bringing with her women from all over the world who had been mentally or physically wounded, accepting any women among the Partraige who needed her peculiar form of treatment, usually women who’d been raped and who had reacted so badly to the rape that they were useless to the clan.
‘When Ulster invaded us,’ said Blat, speaking of two hundred years ago as if it were last month, ‘nearly every female in the tuatha was raped, and most of them were rejected by their men afterwards. But Scathagh took them and made them different.’ How different Blat was unable to say, but so changed that their husbands and fathers had been forced to take them back – though some of the women had refused to go back and from then on had led independent lives on the islands.
‘They weren’t the same women,’ said Blat. ‘The men said they had become people of the sidhe.’
There had been an occasion when Scathagh died. Men had been called to her island and found a dead old woman in the keep and, despite opposition by the then priest, had buried her in the churchyard. But two years later another Scathagh, or maybe the same one, had turned up again.
For men she was a forbidden mystery, and they kept out of her way. But it was tradition that while she was in residence on Lough Mask the Partraige supply her with whatever she wanted. Horses were kept for her use on either side of the lake, curraghs were put at her disposal and she was entitled to take what she liked from flocks and herds, while women rowed across to her island every week with gifts of bread, beer and mead, laying them on the steps of her keep as on an ancient altar.
The Church loathed her, and the bells in the monasteries that had sprung up around the southern end of Lough Mask had rung Scathagh out of her island strongholds down there, forcing her back into the pagan tolerance of Partraige territory.
* * *
On a blustery cold day Blat rowed Finn out into Lough Mask and headed north towards a stone tower apparently rising sheer out of the water. Its squat walls curved outwards at the base so that from a distance it looked like an abandoned boot. Closer, it could be seen that it rested on a foundation of limestone slabs lying at all angles, as if it had been built on some giant, petrified swans’ nest. Its ninety-foot diameter occupied nearly all the island, except for a small area around which roamed some goats and two sheep. Its only entrance – apart from its top, which was cambered and open to the sky – was a door ten feet up in its massive side.
As the curragh approached a voice from one of the tower’s narrow lights shouted: ‘Who are you and what do you want?’
Blat’s reply came pat, like a formula: ‘The woman Finola begs admittance as a candidate to the school of Scathagh.’
‘Does she swear to abide by the rules of this Academy and to complete its training?’
Blat, feathering the curragh to keep its steady, turned to Finn. ‘Do you? You don’t have to go. You have a place by my hearth forever.’ She
had already arranged the matter with Scathagh but the sternness of the tower was giving her second thoughts.
Finn looked at the grey bulk in front of her with disinterest; it was so silly to give her choices, as if they mattered. As if this ridiculous place mattered, as if anything mattered. The impulse for her to enter it came from other people; they were propelling her towards it and her own intertia kept her on the course they’d chosen. ‘I might as well,’ she said dully.
‘What?’ came from the tower.
It was an effort to raise her voice. ‘I swear.’
‘Let her enter.’
A rope ladder came tumbling out of the tower’s door.
Blat patted her shoulder and said good luck as if she were saying goodbye and held the curragh against the island’s tiny holm while Finn clambered up the steps to the tower wall, took hold of the ladder and began to climb. It wasn’t easy, but the real difficulty was the memory of the last time she had been on a ladder leading to a tower. Halfway up it overwhelmed her and she clung, shaking and retching, unable to move up or down.
‘Oh, kak,’ swore the tower, ‘All right, hold on and I’ll pull you up.’ Her knees and knuckles were scraped against the wall as somebody hauled in the ladder with her on it. A hand like steel dug into her shoulder and helped her on to the eight-foot-wide sill. She looked down into a big round courtyard. In its centre was a large beehive hut. Lean-to sheds had been built here and there against the circular walls of the keep with lines strung between them on which hung sails and fishing nets and underneath which were different-sized curraghs. Damp streaks of green ran down the walls and there were puddles on the flags of the courtyard from yesterday’s rain around which some miserable hens picked their way. An ungainly wooden crane was there to explain to anybody who wanted to know how goods were got in and out of the high doorway, but Finn was incurious. Apart from the clash of pots and smell of cooking from one of the lean-to’s, the place was not welcoming.
Neither was the woman standing beside her. ‘Can you get down the stairs?’ she asked abruptly, ‘Or shall I lift you down those as well?’
She looked capable of doing it; though stringy she was muscled. A hard, skeletal fortyish face set on a boy’s body dressed in man’s clothes.
Finn went down lethal, open steps to the floor of the courtyard. The woman ran down, showing off, and went to one of the lean-to’s. She flung into its uninviting interior Finn’s rucksack, which Blat had packed for her. ‘You sleep in here.’
She led Finn to the main beehive. ‘And you eat in here.’ Through the gloom and stale rushes, Finn was pushed to a stool at a large circular table around which other figures were sitting. ‘This is Finn,’ she announced, and to Finn she said: ‘Those four over there are Niav, Tailltin, Muirna and Bevo. They’re of the Hy Fiachrach clan. Don’t ask me which is which – none of them has said a bloody word since they came yesterday. The only one who talks is that one I call Aragon…’ a finger was pointed at a shape which, because of its olive complexion and black hair was almost undetailed in the murk, ‘…and I can’t understand a bloody word she says.’ She rapped on the table to get attention, ‘The Academy begins its term tomorrow. Scathagh will make herself known to you later. I leave you now to get acquainted and to eat. I am called Dagda and from the age of seven until I was thirteen my father used me as his wife.’
They assumed she was smiling because they saw her teeth. ‘Scathagh’s first rule is this,’ she went on. ‘Each candidate must know the reason why the others are here. You won’t start healing until you’ve exposed your wound to the Mother’s good clean air. So start talking.’
She left them.
Finn, who was nearest the door, saw her return up the flight of steps to the doorway landing and then up another flight which disappeared into the trapdoor of a gallery running the circuit of the walls, its roof flush with the top of the tower, and which, she assumed, was where Scathagh lurked.
There was silence when she’d gone. Finn stared across at the Hy Fiachrach girls who, because of their fair hair and skin, were easier to distinguish, and they stared back. She recognised herself in their blank faces; de-sensitised bits and pieces of humiliated women.
It was the other one, whom Dagda had called Aragon, who spoke in a burst of indignant, foreign syllables. Finn understood one word in three – there had been a nun at Fontevrault who had come from the Pyrenees, speaking a similar language.
‘What did you say?’ she asked in dog Latin.
‘Ah,’ said Aragon, pleased to have found some communication, however limited. ‘What that man-thing say?’ Though not by any means plump, she was better fleshed than the rest of them and, whatever had happened to her, retained twice as much life.
As best she could, Finn translated Dagda’s little speech. Aragon approved of it. ‘Now I tell,’ she said. ‘But when we eat?’ Finn shrugged. However, Aragon’s need to tell somebody who she was and what had befallen her, overcame hunger and for the next half hour she did so. Finn comprehended enough to translate for the others. Stripped of Aragon’s considerable elaboration, and the comic element introduced by her terrible Latin, the story was stark.
* * *
Soon after her wedding to an Aquitainian sea-trader, she had accompanied her husband on one of his regular voyages to Galway. (The town of Galway was so well known to the people of southern Europe that Aragon was still under the apprehension that Galway was the name of the country and Connaught merely one of its towns.) North of the Bay of Biscay her husband had fallen inconveniently ill and, equally inconveniently, died. Robbed of their master the crew which, according to Aragon, consisted of the sweepings of several nations, had decided to make both his ship and his widow their own. When Aragon wasn’t having to cook and clean for the crew she was being forced to sleep with them. ‘Not nice,’ she said fiercely to Finn.
Aragon’s late husband had not only been the master of the ship, he had been its one experienced navigator and without him its course was erratic and managed to miss Galway altogether. When they had found themselves in a storm and drifting nearer to the wicked west of Ireland coastline, the crew had panicked and thrown Aragon overboard, thus ridding themselves of any evidence of their crimes against her and, they hoped, placating the god of the sea who didn’t hold with having women on board a ship and had probably caused their problems in the first place. One of the men, more human that the others, had also chucked a barrel down into the sea and she had managed to spreadeagle herself on it.
As it turned out the crew had done her a favour. Aragon heard later that the ship had turned turtle further up the coast with the loss of all hands, though the ship itself was later salvaged by local seamen. Mary the Mother of God, hearing Aragon’s prayers, had brought her safely ashore where she had been discovered by some fishermen and put into the keeping of the King of Connaught who, somewhat at a loss to know what to do with her – there would be no ships returning to Spain until the spring – but bound by the laws of hospitality to do something helpful for his guest, had sent her to Scathagh.
In Aragon’s recital there was an angry refusal to give way to dreadful circumstances and Finn felt honour bound to respond to her courage by saying in return: ‘As for me, I was a nun until a raiding party came to my convent and I was raped, after which the Church rejected me.’
A frisson of horror ran round the table, not just for the rape but for the sacrilege of the rape. It shook out of Tailltin an account of what had happened to her and her companions when their homes had been overrun by an Ulster war band – the Hy Fiachrach were a Connaught clan. Three of them, Tailltin, Muirna and Bevo, had been badly violated in public while the fourth, Niav, had escaped by hiding under some straw. But Finn saw even then that there was more hope of recovery for the three raped women than there was for Niav, whose in-laws, brother, husband and baby had been burned to death in their house. ‘And all she does now,’ said Tailltin, ‘is to beg God for those minutes back again so that she doesn’t go and hide but stays to bur
n with them.’
There seemed nothing more to say, and the table became silent except for the gurgle of Aragon’s stomach and her complaints of hunger.
It was the pretty girl Cuimne, beloved of the King of Connaught, whom Finn had met at Iogenán’s rath, who brought them their supper. From the look of the food she had other things than cuisine on her mind – she slapped down a piece of bread in front of each of them and ladled onto it a skimpy portion of white beans and fish. ‘Scathagh’s rule,’ she said pertly to Aragon, who growled discontent.
Obviously Scathagh’s rule did not apply to Scathagh herself and Dagda. They watched Cuimne surmount the stairs up to the gallery with covered pots leaving behind an aroma of wine, meat, onions and wild mushrooms that made the pallid mess they had to eat seem even paler. Nobody, except Aragon, had the will to protest.
There were no candles or rushlights in evidence so as it got dusk they retired to the lean-to where six board beds had been laid out with skins for covering. Finn lay on hers in the darkness wondering whether misery shared was misery lessened, decided it wasn’t and eventually fell asleep. In the night Niav woke up screaming, jerking the others out of their own nightmares. Tailltin held her while the other four impotently patted her pillow and made noises of sympathy. The usual phrases of comfort, like ‘Never mind,’ ‘It’ll be better in the morning,’ were inappropriate. Aragon muttered what sounded like a prayer, but prayer had availed them nothing before and it didn’t look like doing so now.
* * *
Dawn seemed reluctant to heave itself over the edge of the tower roof and down into the courtyard but while it was still doing it, Dagda had hauled the Academy’s candidates out of their beds, given them a bucket of ice-cold water to wash in and told them to forage in the kitchen lean-to for their breakfast. Cuimne had gone – she only came over to the island in the evenings – and they found nothing but stale bread, stale ale and the remains of last night’s beans and fish to sustain them. Aragon was still grumbling when Dagda lined them up in the courtyard.
Daughter of Lir Page 16