‘Scathagh’s second rule is this,’ she said, ‘that all candidates be proficient at handling a curragh.’ When Finn had translated this information, Aragon grunted: ‘At least we sail off this damn place.’
But it wasn’t as easy as that. First the curraghs, one larger than the other, had to be hauled into the centre of the courtyard and greased. When Dagda lifted the lid off the vat containing the grease, lanolin squeezed from sheep’s wool, a new element entered their lives – its smell. It was appalling and it was to live with them in varying degrees of intensity for the next few weeks as if they had been joined by a loud, pestering, aggressive personality which accompanied them to bed, slept with them and got up with them in the mornings. They were made to scoop it out with cloths and slap it on to the oxhides which covered the frame of the boats and work it into every inch of the leather. When they’d done the outside they had to prop the curraghs upside down on blocks so that they could crawl underneath and do the same to the bone-white ash cagework of spars that were the boats’ frail-looking skeletons, rubbing it into the wood and making sure that every leather tie which lashed the frame together was supple with it.
The lanolin permeated their skin, their hair, their clothes and, it seemed, their nostrils while Dagda’s voice dominated their ears, urging them to work harder and faster, pointing out sections which remained ungreased. The five Irishwomen obeyed her because they were too spiritless not to; when she didn’t order them they stopped moving and stared into space. Aragon obeyed her out of solidarity with the others and because even she was intimidated, not by Dagda, whom she loathed, but by the unseen presence that lived in the upper gallery. Each one of them had the unnerving feeling of being watched by some body or thing overhead.
None of them had worked so hard for a long time; even so, Niav screamed in her sleep again that night. It did no good to comfort her, yet to leave her uncomforted was against humanity. It was also against sleep, which they all needed. The next morning, fetching buckets of water from the lake, they found that some Good Samaritan had left bread and a pot of honey outside on the tower steps. As they breakfasted on it Finn said: ‘Perhaps we should take it in turns. Each night we’ll delegate one of us to sit with the one who’s having bad dreams. Let’s face it, it isn’t just you, Niav – we all have them.’
It was the beginning of what became known as nightmare patrol, a simple holding of hands in the darkness. It was also the beginning, though they didn’t realise it at the time, of a group identity.
The next day they hoisted the curraghs up to the tower entrance, manoeuvred them through it and down on to the lake, which was achieved without damage to the precious leather skins, despite the tendency of the boats to swing round in the wind as if intent on their own destruction.
‘This,’ said Dagda, ‘is where you landlubbers become sailors.’ They looked at her with what, if they’d had more mental energy, would have been dislike. There was something artificial about Dagda; her lofty way of treating them, her delight in her superiority, were like a child showing off. She swaggered her energy in contrast to their lethargy, over-acted her sighs at their obtuseness, shouted her orders unnecessarily loudly, all as if she were trying to gain the approval of that the unseen presence the gallery towards which her every move was directed.
For the next two weeks they were either cold and wet or, while they were rowing, hot and wet. Dagda drove them like a galley slavemaster up and down the lake as they tried to get the strange, bladeless oars of the curraghs in and out of the water in some form of unison. They caught endless crabs, falling backwards to hit their aching backs on the thwart behind them. If it hadn’t been for the lanolin which permeated them and the oars themselves their hands would have been skinned. When they had achieved something like proficiency at rowing, they were taught to sail, raising and lowering the single leather sail of the bigger curragh at the mooring by the holm until they felt they could do it in their sleep, and then finding out that it was a very different matter to do it out on the lake with the wind bucketing them through the water at speed, the steering oar refusing to respond to their inexperience and the lakeside coming up fast. The boat would have been torn into scraps by the limestone rocks which surrounded the margins of the lake had Dagda not chosen a section of Lough Mask edged thickly with reeds which acted as a buffer, though it was back-breaking work to get the boat out of them once it had lodged itself in.
All this time the lake itself stayed aloof as if disassociating itself from these blunderers, remaining grey, blustery and without personality. Swans stretched their necks and paddled frantically to take off out of the curraghs’ erratic progress, while ducks and geese lifted out of the reeds in their hundreds, squawking at the disturbance.
They were in a limbo, neither depressed nor happy, and too busy to care either way. They had no wish to win Dagda’s approval by doing well, but they longed to spite her and so did as well as they could anyway, working as a team against her. Eventually they could bring a boat inshore between rocks, as long as the rocks weren’t too close together. The day even came when, after they’d returned from the lake for the night, Dagda reluctantly announced: ‘Scathagh says you can sail by yourselves tomorrow. And I say you can go and fetch the peat from the other side of the lake. Nice little job. Try not to capsize, we need to keep warm this winter.’ She made a ‘so there’ face at them.
‘Non Scathagh est,’ said Aragon as they sat round the table waiting for food, and repeated in the Irish she was acquiring: ‘There is no Scathagh.’ It was a favourite topic of speculation that Scathagh was a myth, a ruse invented by Dagda to gain gifts from the local people and keep themselves as slave labour. They didn’t really believe it – there was a terrifying authority radiating from the gallery – but it enabled them to be scurrilous about whatever-it-was up there that Dagda went to at nights.
‘That bloody Dagda,’ said Muirna suddenly. ‘Personally, I can’t understand what her father saw in her.’
For a second they were appalled, and then a release of guilt gushed out of them like water bursting a dam. Upstairs Dagda heard the screams of laughter and pouted, but she nodded to a huge shape in the corner which nodded back. ‘They’re ready.’
Having spent the next day in cold rain transporting enough turves to last the winter from the drying-stacks on the far side of the lake, the candidates were mutinous by dinner time, despite the sense of achievement brought on by having handled the curragh successfully without Dagda. The food Cuimne gave them at night had not varied since their arrival in either its constituents or its quantity, despite the enlargement of their appetites. Tonight, as ever, beans and fish was their portion, their small portion. ‘Jesus, Cuimne,’ said Bevo, ‘there was a haunch of venison on the steps this morning. What happened to it?’
‘Scathagh’s rule,’ said Cuimne, as she always did. They were kept from lynching her by a departure from the norm; this time, after she’d served them, Cuimne drew up a big, beautifully-carved chair from the shadows to the table, put another, slightly smaller, next to it and in front of both places set a large, covered pot from which steamed nutritious smells. ‘Scathagh is joining you for dinner,’ she said.
Now the moment had come they were reluctant to face it, and none of them turned round to see what caused the tower to reverberate from the footsteps coming down from the gallery. A shadow blocked out the doorway and a figure passed round the table to the carved chair, exuding such a crushing sense of weight that they ducked as it went by in case it should fall on them.
If some blinded, inept Titan had been told what a woman looked like without actually seeing one, he might have carved his block of stone into something like Scathagh; a ball of a head with one side flat for a face balancing directly onto a square body of which the protuberances were immense breasts and belly, all held up on tree-trunk legs. Grey, frizzled hair still striped with red stood up out of the head in a shock that was alarming. Eye holes had been gimleted into the face and out of them shone wicked intel
ligence which, at the moment, was concentrated on the tureen before it.
Dagda helped her into the chair, took her own seat and lifted the lid of the pot to reveal a rich stew of venison with dumplings floating in aromatic gravy. Reverently she helped Scathagh to a huge portion. Besides the giantess Dagda looked inadequate and masculine; for all her hideousness, Scathagh was feminine, or at least a travesty of the feminine. Finn was reminded of the Thing Boniface had once seen on the abbey wall of Kildare.
They forgot to eat in watching Scathagh eat. She speared a hunk of venison onto her knife and shoved it in her mouth. Their eyes followed the gravy as it dribbled down her chin, seeing it as human blood; there was something reminiscent of cannibalismin in the way Scathagh chomped.
When at last she spoke that too was a shock; her voice was a rich contralto and only accentuated the terror of her appearance, as if she’d ripped it out of somebody else’s throat. ‘Good evening,’ said Scathagh, ‘Are you enjoying your training?’
It was eventually Aragon who had the courage to say ‘No,’ and even she said it apologetically.
‘You amaze me,’ said Scathagh calmly, ‘What’s wrong with it?’
There was silence except for the sound of chewing from Scathagh’s mouth; Aragon’s courage had run out.
‘Perhaps you don’t like the food,’ went on the beautiful voice, ‘or you feel you are slaves?’
They could hear through the open door the whiffling wings of hundreds of white-fronted geese spiralling down to their night retreat on the marshes of the lake, laughing to each other as they descended.
‘You’re right,’ nodded Scathagh, ‘You are slaves, but not mine; you belong to the men who attacked you. For them the night they did what they did to you is over, long forgotten. But you don’t forget. You go on paying them tribute, still serving them, watching the dead die, raping yourselves, mouthing the parts they put in your faces, loyally bleeding from the sword hilts or whatever it was they shoved up your private parts.’
Tailltin’s hands clenched on the table and Finn put hers over them.
‘Diddums,’ said Scathagh, horribly. ‘Have I brought it back to you then? Might it be that in these past weeks you have betrayed your masters and forgotten their crime for a moment? Did you dare laugh last night? How could you? Is that how you repay your attackers?’ She put her head down to her dinner. Dagda, who never took her eyes off her, helped her to another portion.
‘I see,’ said Finn, slowly. ‘Isn’t there an easier way?’
‘Probably,’ said Scathagh with her mouth full, ‘but I don’t know what it is.’
As it got dark Dagda fetched candles and placed them so that Scathagh’s face was lit from below, disembodying it, making pits out of her eyes. The lovely voice which seemed to come from elsewhere spoke in Irish but with an accent, though neither then nor later did any of her candidates try to work out what it was. Analysis stopped at Scathagh. She just was. None of them, not even Finn, ever doubted that she was eternal or a representative of the eternal. Had she dropped dead in front of them they would have waited for an exactly similar replacement to come from some reservoir in the earth that spawned Scathaghs, a place that had existed before God took over the world and would go on existing long after He was dead. She never explained anything about herself or where that place was and they never asked. It was irrelevant. Part of it was deep within themselves.
‘Your real training begins tomorrow,’ she told them. ‘Would you like some nice meat for your supper afterwards?’
‘Yes, Scathagh,’ they said.
Scathagh heaved herself to her feet. ‘Then kill it.’
* * *
‘It’s simple,’ smirked Dagda. ‘See that rock sticking out of the water? I call it Aragon. Watch.’ She fitted a pebble into a leather socket which had been sewn between two thongs, held the ends of the thongs in her hand and whirled the sling faster and faster round her head. The sound was lethal and instinctively the group ducked. One of the thongs was released from Dagda’s fingers and almost simultaneously splinters flew out of the rock thirty yards away. ‘Now you do it.’
Still puffing – they had already run five miles – they were stationed well apart on the lakeside so as not to kill each other. Dagda made them run to retrieve their pebbles from the water and run back with them. At midday they collapsed into despondent heaps for a meal of bread crusts and water before the afternoon session with the javelin which they had to run to retrieve after each throw and run back with. In the evening they ran five miles back to the curragh, leaving the Aragon rock untouched. And there were still beans and fish for dinner. ‘Tut tut,’ said Scathagh, as she carved into a goose pie.
On the third day Aragon lost her temper and rushed at Dagda screaming and punching, and found herself whirling through the air onto her back. ‘When you can do that to me,’ said Dagda, ‘you can have sausage for breakfast.’
The runs to and from the training ground became longer, but on the other hand the Aragon rock was becoming pitted. The lake, too, was relenting to them, becoming a still freezing, but perky blue. Lough Mask now so dominated their lives that it, rather than the weather, seemed to have brightened. However, the nearer they got to the prospect of a good meat meal, the more terrible it became that they didn’t get one.
One night Aragon screamed across the table: ‘You are a wicked old woman to treat us like this.’ She used her own tongue, but it was still a daring thing to do. Finn had pleasure in translating, with her own embellishments. Scathagh didn’t look up from her trough. ‘Dagda, open the door.’
The cold night air came in to the hall and they could hear the night sounds of the lake. ‘Go, or bear it,’ said Scathagh.
‘But I have nowhere to go.’
‘Then bear it.’
Two days later two stones, one from Aragon’s sling and one from Bevo’s, brought down a crane, ‘because,’ as Muirna said, enviously, ‘it was too big for them to miss.’ On their run home along the lakeside they carried it strung on a pole between them as if it were a full-grown stag. Scathagh gave them some of her own dinner and made the two slingers stand on the table afterwards to ululate in triumph. ‘Louder,’ she said to them, ‘Gloat louder.’
The next day Finn and Muirna brought down a pelican. They scrambled into the water to spear it as it flapped its one unbroken wing. ‘God I’m sorry,’ Finn told it, ‘but it’s you or beans.’ That night she and Muirna stood on the table and howled like banshees.
As their food improved the training became more intensive. They were running twenty miles a day, practising with the sling and javelin and now, as an evening extra, they learned combat – Dagda taught them wrestling and the rudiments of sword-fighting while Scathagh herself initiated them into a mystery she called her ‘Ploys’, which left them bruised but exhilarated.
Somehow Art was brought in as horse-master, and every second day he and six Connemara ponies were waiting for them at the training ground. In the races and jumping Finn was undoubtedly head of the class, but even she balked at the steed leap. ‘It’s a simple matter,’ Art told them, ‘You can all get up on a horse, so what’s the difference if the little creature’s moving while you do it?’
‘The difference is we kill ourselves,’ said Aragon. ‘What is the use of all this?’ For days the ponies cantered up and down with sad patience while the candidates, running, clutching, slipping, swearing, tried to thump themselves onto their backs until Finn managed a run and jump that swung her body up by her hands only. The ferocious competition which was beginning to prevail among them gave the others desperation and soon they could all do it. They swaggered into hall for supper as if they had personally overcome the Brown Bull of Cooley.
Only Aragon questioned the good of what they were doing, and that doubt emerged from her dislike of Dagda; she was afraid the end result would be that she’d grow to resemble ‘the man-thing’ as she called Scathagh’s lieutenant. ‘She is turning us into men,’ she said. ‘I do not want to be a man.’<
br />
‘Nor do I,’ Bevo told her, ‘but I’m beginning to feel their equal.’
The other doubter was Niav, or rather it was the group that doubted on her behalf. Although she took a willing part in all the exercises and lessons, genuinely doing her best, the depression, which now left the others for days on end, still emanated from her. However hard she tried she never managed to hit anything with her javelin or slingstones and therefore never had a truimph. The others covered up for her as best they could, yet the fact that Scathagh never remarked on Niav’s deficiency in bringing back game, and doled her out as much food as the rest, was vaguely chilling.
* * *
Two riders breasted the hill above the upper end of Lough Mask and paused to look down on it. The taller and darker of the two said something in poetic Irish of which the other only grasped the words: ‘Lake of my heart and my love.’
‘It’s pretty,’ admitted Sir John of Sawbridge.
‘“Pretty”? Have you Normans no soul?’ asked Ruairi, King of Connaught.
‘Not a lot when it comes to swimming bloody freezing lakes just to get at a girl.’
‘Have you seen the Partraige women? The eyes and skin of them? And this one’s borne me a son I haven’t seen yet.’
Sir John shook his head. The way Irish nobles accepted a baby as theirs just because the mother said it was never failed to amaze him, especially as the child then appeared to have equal rights with a legitimate heir. For him it’d be a damn good reason for swimming in the opposite direction. However, he liked the O’Conor. They were both of an age and the difference in their cultures had set up an exotic camaraderie. The days spent hunting and visiting various clans had given him valuable insight into the Irish mind. And the two of them had wenched on a scale which could well provide the young king with several more heirs. The sexual complaisance of Irish girls, even well-born ones, was another source of amazement, not that he was complaining.
Daughter of Lir Page 17