Now Ruari had sent back most of the large retinue with which they’d been travelling – ‘I have an agreement with Iogenán not to cess too many of my household on him,’ – and had come, with only twelve men, the minimum with which an Irish king could travel with honour, for what Sir John thought of as ‘a couple of days of rumpty-tumpty’ with his Partraige girl, Cuimne.
‘Will you take her back to court with you?’
‘And lose the romance of swimming out to her island? And me with too many wives already, not to mention a queen riddled with jealousy?’ Ruairi O’Conor shouted orders to the men coming up behind them. ‘Tell Iogenán with my compliments that I’ll attend on him later and will he forgive a young man’s ardour.’
‘I’ve got a call of my own to make first.’
‘Ah, your loony.’ The O’Conor rolled his eyes and made upward thrusts with his clenched fist.
‘Nothing like that,’ said Sir John, stiffly, ‘I have a proprietary interest in the woman. You Irish pagans don’t recognise Norman chivalry when you see it.’
‘Forgive us. Where did you acquire her did you say?’
‘Kildare.’
‘And she speaks Norman French?’ The king was reflective: ‘Interesting.’
‘As much as she speaks anything, poor soul. Why?’
‘Nothing.’ Ruairi O’Conor applied his spurs and turned to wave. ‘Give her a bit of chivalry from me.’
As if glued together horse and rider galloped down the hill track, across the flat and into the lake. Sir John watched the young king lie along the horse’s neck, urging him through the grey water towards one of the islands. ‘Fat lot of use he’ll be when he gets there,’ he said to himself, ‘with his balls frozen off. Buggered if I’d do that for a woman.’ Sedately, he trotted down towards the house of Niall of the Poems.
Blat was standing outside her gate, spinning.
‘God save the work,’ said Sir John, who knew the form now.
Blat looked up. ‘Is it yourself, Pilgrim? Come in and have a warm.’ There was some element of respect absent from the way she treated him, Sir John felt. However, she was a good woman and hospitable. He lowered his head when he got to the door of the house and entered, encountering the remembered smell of hens, turf smoke, humans and herbs. He greeted Niall’s mother and looked around. ‘How’s my loo… my Lady Finola?’
‘Gone.’
‘Gone?’
‘Gone.’
‘Where? Did she leave word for me?’ Had the woman left no broken sentence of thanks? No tearful expression of gratitude for his kindness? All he wanted was recognition of what he had done for her; that he hadn’t had it left him peculiarly unfulfilled.
‘She’s gone to Scathagh to be healed.’
‘Where’s Scathagh?’
Sir John spent the next days sulking. He went hunting, played chess with Iogenán and diced with the young men of Iogenán’s household, refusing their suggestions that he join them in a game of hurling, considering it an over-energetic form of suicide. But mostly he watched the lake. In this he was not alone. Lough Mask was a mirror to which the hills and all those who lived on them were the Narcissus. Blat did her spinning facing towards it, children played on its edge, households looked out on it first in the mornings, the herdsmen of the flocks piped to it and the peat-cutters in the bogs leaned on their turf-spades in the direction of the beautiful time-waster. There were cold nights when wolves were outlined against the moon on the hilltops staring towards the water as if it were the floor of some great amphitheatre and they were waiting for a play to begin.
Sir John was impatient of mystery unless it was in church and he resented the lake for an enigma which was feminine and therefore pagan, for whatever rites women were performing on those scattered islands to which men swam out and did not return – the O’Conor hadn’t been seen for two days. He especially resented his role as spectator; in the world he knew it was men who acted and women who watched and that was how he liked it. He wanted women on the sidelines, admiring men’s prowess in tournament and war, binding up men’s wounds, listening to male talk, laughing at male jokes, with no other return than having a roof kept over their heads, on occasional baby and a brief acknowledgement of their damned needlework. That’s what women were – an audience.
But still he watched the lake.
* * *
Cuimne disappeared. ‘Frolicking with her royal lover,’ spat Dagda. The preparation of the food, of which there was now abundance, improved because it was taken over by Blat, who moved into the tower in preparation for her divorce. ‘Is it yourself?’ she asked in amazement when she saw the thin, weatherbeaten, athletic Finn. Finn picked her up and swung her round. ‘I don’t think it is.’
At dinner Scathagh said: ‘We’re being watched. Who is it?’
The group shrugged. Unusually, after the meal was over, Scathagh summoned Finn up to her gallery while Dagda was left, jealous, down in the hall. ‘Who is the watcher?’ she asked.
‘How should I know, Scathagh?’
‘You know. Who is it?’
Finn gave in; the woman was all-knowing. ‘It’s the one who brought me here to the lake. He watches when I go over to my island to see to my horses.’
‘Are you afraid of him?’
‘Yes.’ It was a different fear from any other, but fear was what it was. Somewhere, long ago, she had seen him before.
‘Then he’s your challenge.’ Each of the group was being set the task of facing something they dreaded. Scathagh said it was time for them to act as individuals. Tailltin and Muirna, who were scared of heights, were set a rock face to climb; Bevo had to leap through fire, Aragon to unleash the smith’s dog, which was renowned for its ferocity; Niav, easily intimidated by the male establishment, was made to walk up to the house of Baccaugh and tweak the priest’s nose. ‘That child worries me,’ said Scathagh. ‘Keep an eye on her.’
* * *
Sir John gained some information, though not much, in Iogenán’s hall from men who guarded the Scathagh mystery at second-hand. ‘It’s nothing at all, nothing at all,’ they told him, easily, ‘just an old custom that’s nearly died out. From the old days.’ And when they said old days, he discovered, they really meant old, long before history had begun in Europe. ‘A sort of last resort for women who’ve been, well now, damaged in some way. No use to anyone, a healing place. Scathagh heals them. Just a custom. A thing for women.’
And as for Scathagh… ‘Ah well, she’s just a lady.’ But when Aengus, Iogenán’s hereditary storyteller, was recounting the legend of Cuchulainn, Sir John’s ears pricked up at the name of Scathagh Buanand as the head of some Pictish military academy. Sir John leaned over to Iogenán: ‘Is that the Scathagh down on the lake?’
The king’s face wrinkled even more and he wheezed. ‘She’d be older than God if it were. But an ancestress, I dare say. There’s always been a Scathagh.’
About his loony he learned no more than Blat had told him. She had gone to Scathagh to be healed, though she now also had an island of her own on which she kept the two horses she’d brought with her. He knew they knew more than that; some knowledge about her had seeped through and been absorbed by those of her blood like a staining fluid to which he, an alien, was resistant.
The next day he asked the porter at Iogenán’s gate: ‘Which is Scathagh’s island?’
‘Are you meaning Inis Cailleach? That one,’ and the man pointed to the island with the stone tower.
Sir John was puzzled by the word ‘Cailleach’ which had two meanings as far as he knew: ‘a nun’ and ‘a hag’. The porter had used it as if it were some combination between the two.
‘And Swan Island?’
‘That one.’
Boats sailed or paddled by women left the one with the tower each morning and made their way to the opposite side of the lake which, being less hospitable than the east side, was virtually deserted, though what they did there was unknown. Every now and then, before it got dark, a single boa
t would leave Inis Cailleach for Swan Island, but he couldn’t make out who was in it, except that she was alone.
On the third evening a horse with John of Sawbridge on its back galloped into Lough Mask and swam towards Swan Island.
It was as freezing as he’d thought it would be and getting the horse up the frosted steps from its tiny holm wasn’t easy either.
The island was small and through some trees he could see a turf fire burning near a couple of huts. A thin figure stood between him and the light and a voice as cold as his feet said: ‘What do you want?’
Sir John led his horse round the ungrateful bitch and towards the fire so that she had to turn to the light and he could see her face which, now that the eyes were more sensible and alive, was better than he remembered it. A familiar mare whinnied at him from a stable door. ‘Can I put my horse in there?’
‘No you can’t. She’s in foal and yours is a stallion and anyway you’re not stopping.’
‘Don’t you remember me? I’m the one who…’
‘I know who you are.’
‘Then you’re an ingrate. The poor beast’s shivering and going back would kill him, not to mention me.’
She walked over to a straw bale and chucked some handfuls towards him. ‘Rub him down with that and put him near the fire and when he’s warm, leave.’
‘That’s the last time I get the nits out of your hair.’
As he rubbed the horse down, he watched her fetch water from the lakeside in a bucket and pour it into a cauldron over the fire. She was younger than he’d thought she was, and too thin for any kind of beauty and her skin had become brown with too much weather and when he’d finished rubbing down the horse he walked round the fire and took her in his arms and kissed her which, he realised, was why he’d come to the damned island in the first place.
She went stiff as a board and hissed at him. He heard her say: ‘It’s all right, Art,’ and realised the gargoyle was with them on the island. He let her go. She stepped back, a look of concentration on her face, brought her hands palm together in front of her as if she were praying, and jabbed them into his sternum, bringing her knee up at the same time.
When he was next able to notice anything but pain she was standing over him, regarding her hands. ‘It works. Wait till I tell them.’ She smiled at him for the first time of their acquaintance. ‘That was Scathagh’s Ploy Number One.’
‘Was it?’
With something like sympathy, Art helped him back on his horse and whacked its rump until it went into the lake. It was even colder on the way back, but his balls hurt too much for him to notice it.
It wasn’t in him to think that he deserved her attack, and if there was one thing in the world he loathed more than any other it was humiliation, but the odd thing was that, when he’d recovered, he found himself thinking of the woman with what he regarded as Christian forbearance. ‘She’s still lunatick, poor cow,’ he said to himself.
* * *
Later that night, in the stone tower on the lake, Finn stood on the table in barbaric triumph. ‘It works. Scathagh’s Ploy Number One got him. Hear me and the kisses I gave him.’
But afterwards, summoned to the gallery again, Scathagh told her privately: ‘It didn’t work. You’re still afraid of him.’
The gallery was always cold because Scathagh, insulated in her layers of fat, refused to have the shutters closed. She liked, she said, to be able to watch the approaches to her island. Finn wrapped herself more closely in the cloak Blat had woven for her and sat in the recess of the outer wall, looking out through the arrow slit at the west side of the lake where the sun was going down.
She was deflated. You never could lie to Scathagh. ‘I know I am. I don’t know why.’
‘Sex,’ said Scathagh. ‘You’re attracted to him.’
Finn looked round sharply. ‘You’re mad. Don’t you know why I’m here?’
Scathagh shrugged. ‘They say that sometimes sex with a man can be beautiful.’
‘Not in my experience.’
‘Nor in mine,’ said Scathagh, amazing Finn, who tried to envisage her in the clutch of a man, and failed. ‘But I think we must both realise that our experience was limited. Niav mourns her husband.’
‘But I could never be dependent on a man for my life. I’m worried about Niav.’
The birds on the lake had settled down now that it was getting dark, just a moorhen called from its nest in the reeds. The silence of Scathagh’s massive shape was magnetic, a one-way pull that attracted words towards her. ‘It isn’t that anyway,’ said Finn, in response to the pull. ‘The Pilgrim’s intrusive.’ Whether he was attractive to her or not, and she didn’t feel he was, there was an extra maleness about him which belonged to the Continent, to Leinster, to all the world she had known, but which didn’t belong here. ‘He’s, I don’t know how to put it, he’s a sort of conqueror, an owner. He wants to possess things. And here, it isn’t like that.’ Here, on the lake, was the epicentre of a female world, ringed about by the Partraige’s regard for women, and outer-ringed by the tolerance of the O’Conors. Connaught, if it assumed a human persona, would be a woman.
She went on, trying desperately to express it properly, ‘It’s as if all of us, Aragon, Muirna, me, have been wounded in the front line of a war that’s being fought everywhere else but here. It’s a war by men on women, as if they hated us. But here Blat can gain a divorce because Niall doesn’t treat her properly, I can be given land and a place in my clan that makes me independent. Sometimes I feel this is the real Ireland, a feminine thing. Perhaps I feel that because it’s vulnerable.’
Scathagh heaved herself to her feet and looked down at Finn, then out through the arrow slit to the lake. ‘It is the last place of the Mother,’ she said, ‘and it is vulnerable. One of these days somebody will come along to try and rape it.’
‘Can’t we protect it?’
‘We must.’
* * *
Finn had another visit from a man during one of her trips to Swan Island. The first she knew of him was when a voice behind her said gently: ‘Comarba?’ For half a second she was back in an assured time when petitioners and God had hung on her every word. ‘Yes?’ she said, and turned round.
A dark and extremely good-looking young man smiled with satisfaction. ‘I thought you were.’
So complete was the wall she had set up between the life of Boniface and this new life that, although she knew she’d seen him before, she had a reluctance to remember where. ‘Who the hell are you? I warn you, I can protect myself.’
‘So I hear. Actually, I was Ruairi O’Conor if you remember, and now I am your Rí Ruirech, your overking, but don’t bother to curtsey.’
‘I won’t.’ Her nerves had been put on edge at being taken back to Kildare; the contrast between that life and this needed almost volcanic adjustment. Besides, in the time since she had first met him outside the walls of Kildare this young man had been fighting his brothers for power, and had won. She was out of sympathy with power.
‘I ask your hospitality,’ he said, and to that ancient command Finn responded. She ushered the king into her hut, seated him on a stool and offered him mead, a gift from the wife of her cousin, Nessa. And, despite everything, she found herself being charmed.
‘I come to you incognito, if it is not against your honour,’ he said, ‘because I gather that you, too, are incognito. But I wished to pay my respects. Little did I think that day at Kildare that I was welcoming my cousin as well as the Comarba. After all, you are my kinswoman as well as the Partraige’s and I look forward to the day when I can receive you into the derbhfine of the O’Conors. Just name the day and may it be soon.’
‘Damn it,’ thought Finn; she wanted to cry again. The Church had cast her out because she had been raped, yet these Irish of the west, also knowing she had been raped, were practically clamouring to claim her and show her honour.
‘Shall I reinstate you as Comarba?’ Either the king was drunk on her mead or his own
youth and power, ‘I can do it, you know. I shall beat Ulster and I shall beat Dermot of Leinster. And when Dermot pays reparation for joining in this war against me, he’ll pay reparation to you, by God.’
‘Would you excuse me a moment?’ asked Finn. She went outside the hut, leaned against its wall and breathed in cold air. Go back? Reincarnate herself? Flaunt a greater power than Dermot’s? Make everything all right again? She looked out on a prospect where she was in the church of Kildare again with Dermot in the congregation, beaten, because the filth he had employed the last time they had been there together had sprayed back on him and left her untouched, inviolable, immaculate.
But it hadn’t left her untouched and the view wasn’t Kildare, it was a provincial lake, a backwater, haunted by birds and a people who were so obsolete that they gave women rights. She slipped her feet out of the calfskin boots Iogenán had ordered his hereditary boot-maker, who was also his cowman and part-time cook, to make for her. She wiggled her toes which had splayed and become calloused underneath with all the running she had been doing. Her feet had grown these past months, along with her understanding of things. They couldn’t again be cramped into the enamelled slippers of St Brigid. They were too big.
Anyway, bless him, the O’Conor couldn’t reinstate her. The Church would never let him; he just liked to think that he could, or wanted her to think that he could. But it had been a very nice offer, a very nice offer indeed.
She went back in the hut and poured the king some more mead. ‘No,’ she said, ‘But thank you.’
‘Moved on?’
She sat down opposite him. ‘How did you learn so much about women?’
He grinned at her. ‘I like them. I thought the first time I saw you that you were too good to be a nun.’
‘Women should be in bed or in the kitchen?’
Daughter of Lir Page 18