BENDING THE BOYNE: A novel of ancient Ireland (22 page)

Muirgen blurted as they hurried through the dusk, “I come from the south. Invaders raided our coast and took me at nine suns of age from my people.” Muirgen’s villagers were excellent mariners, she told Boann, living along the northwest corner of the Continent. They sited their mounds beside the ocean’s horizon and observed the stars relied on to navigate.

Over her shoulder, Boann saw the slave girl clutching the robe of softest swan feathers, that Boann cast off to move faster. Muirgen kept talking softly, “My people assembled at our mound built on a small rise, looking out at the rolling waters. I remember sighting on stars with my mother, and hearing stories of the Swan, the Hunter, and the Seven Stars.”

Boann winced. The ceremony at the mound had given the girl a taste of dignity, if not actual belonging. Perhaps it occurred to Muirgen that the Starwatchers are more like her own people than they are different. It was the traders, the Invaders, who took slaves. They took even children.

But she could not stop to hear Muirgen’s tale. Boann offered a few words of comfort, seeing that little remained to the young slave of her mother’s ways, scraps from the past that Invaders had ripped away. Stolen while but a child, Muirgen learned the baser appetites of her captors at a precocious age. Almost a woman now, she had large grey eyes and comely hair and figure. Boann knew: Muirgen used her body to gain advantages, little gifts and rewards, food and a warm sleeping place, and thus she survived her captivity.

Boann did not know that the girl had met several times with Elcmar and Ith, who knew from her that a starwatch would transpire at lambing time.

Muirgen kept the pace as Boann scurried over frozen tussocks and around thickets, to reach the camp and join the Invader feast. Darkness stretched fingers from the east behind their backs until it blotted out the last light in the west. The slave hastened at her heels, hands wound tight around the cloak of swan feathers, as Boann rushed toward certain disaster.

With sunrise, Elcmar took Muirgen aside and into Ith’s chamber. She reached expectantly for him and he pushed her away. Elcmar had no appetite for this girl whatsoever; her fawning at him while they gained her confidence merely annoyed him. He spoke with Muirgen only when others were present. Ith stepped out from shadow.

She began trembling before these powerful men, the
ard ri
and the austere Ith. Her moment of belonging with Boann’s people faded; these two had her back inside walls.

“Your opportunity to gain favor with either Elcmar or Boann has evaporated. You can be killed, or worse, if you do not cooperate.” Glowering, Ith questioned her in detail about accompanying Boann to the mound ceremony. Elcmar made her describe the final moments of the starwatch, then repeat to him when and where the Starwatchers lit signal fires.

“Surrounding the Boyne, it was.” She stood shaking before them.

Disgusted, Ith saw that she gave them the barest bits and pieces of information, she played the fool. “You are not to talk to other slaves, d’you hear me?”

Before that very sun set, Ith married Muirgen to a disabled warrior who had been a source of discontent. They could start a new camp close by, at the place called Teamair. There they would have to be productive, he told them, and gave the couple charge of a cumal of cattle that Maedb had neglected. Muirgen reached without hesitation for her scarred new husband and a chance to forge an existence apart from the camp. Ith allowed the couple no wedding feast and no time to lie together before he sent them away with only a poor herd onto the cold plain.

Their union solved a problem as to each, he declared to Elcmar. After they disposed of Muirgen, Elcmar left Ith’s side. He evaded the throng who sought him inside the great hall and rode alone out of the camp and hiked up Red Mountain. From there he stared at the Boyne valley and the mountains ringing the surrounding plains. Elcmar spent some time evaluating all the information he had gathered thus far about starwatching.

He gleaned several bits from what Muirgen told them. First, that the Starwatchers lit signal fires only after their extended observations of the skies. Next, Elcmar reasoned that for greatest effect, these fires were lit on the highest places. Finally, that this all happened in some sort of order. Ith told him that the first signal came from close by to the south, a place these quiet ones thought to be the navel, the physical center, of this island. Only torches had been lit at the Boyne mounds on the previous night, but Ith had seen the signal fires progress outward at high places in all directions.

Disruption of the next Starwatcher ceremony would be so simple a task that Elcmar chuckled. He allowed his horse to trot back to the camp, his rib having almost healed. After a few nights spent in solitary thought beside the hearth’s flames, he sent for Ith.

Ith had never seen Elcmar so full of himself.

“I may well have divined the enigma of the fires.” Those amber eyes glowed like sun metal as he told Ith his plan. It would be easy enough to carry out.

The better the question the harder the answer. There is no answer at all to a very good question.

At Swim-Two-Birds
, Flann O’Brien

Seafarers

D
URING THEIR TRAVELS
west from where they landed on the Seafarer peninsula, Gebann halted abruptly. Cian had no choice and climbed with him all that morning on a rough path up through sun-dappled beech and oak forest. They reached a striking monument, totally hidden from below. When they arrived at the tall outcropping, the height they had ascended startled Cian. The ocean stretched north and east and west, far into its distant meeting with the paler blue sky. From this new perspective, the water’s endless expanse dwarfed him, it dwarfed even the mountains where they stood.

Subdued, he said, “Here one can see a ship coming in any direction from where it’s half the sky out from shore.”

Gebann caught his breath then answered, “Yes, that’s part of my bringing you to see this high place. Now let us look at the message of my ancestors.”

The massive grey rock had a rough cylinder shape. Its eastern and southern aspect held the most stonecarving that Cian had seen so far on the Seafarer peninsula. He stood facing the carvings on the towering rock, the ocean glistening on the horizon beyond. He saw chiseled into the stone, above his height, a rounded solar symbol topping a tall rectangle etched with horizontal lines. This arch-topped rectangle was bordered entirely by two bands filled with lozenges, the sacred shape used also in passage tomb carvings. He had in the past carved such a lozenge pattern. The carvings here were dusted with ceremonial red ochre to highlight them, or he would have touched them.

More amazing to him, to the left of the arched plaque was carved a large upright dagger, almost the height of the arched plaque. Below the dagger, a deep horizontal line began at the left edge of the monument and ran straight to the border of the rectangle, ending in a slight cupmark. Someone had colored the dagger and the line with deep yellow ochre. He looked at Gebann, who stood watching him.

Solemnly, Gebann explained each symbol. “We stand at a holy place of those who lived before us on this coast—those who fished the waters long before my people thought to call themselves Seafarers. At this high place I affirm our traditions. Here I search myself for good and bad, and I ask for wisdom from the ancestors. Take your time here, so.” He moved away a few paces.

Cian shut his eyes and conjured those who had ventured for centuries from this littoral onto the treacherous ocean. Countless generations who explored strange coasts yet whose spirits rested at this place. Those people protected their beliefs, they took care to record them on this mighty rock and carried them to far shores. His eyes stung to recall the triple spiral carved at the Boyne. In this land so foreign, but familiar with its mounds and carved symbols, he at last understood Oghma and his singleminded devotion to carving stone. He could choose a different future for himself without discarding his ancestors. Their weighty past could anchor him in shifting seas, rather than pull him under. How he wanted to talk with Oghma and his elders now!

He looked again. The entire figure made sense to him, except the dagger. The oversized dagger had been added later, that was clear. Its outline under the midday sun was grotesque, hastily incised, a warning perhaps? An Invader long knife, good only for attacking another human. He checked the deep blue horizon for trader ships, as if Invaders might appear while he stood before the menacing knife.

A cold fear gripped him under the hot sun of this peninsula.
I must return, I will return to Eire
.

Gebann sat close by on the edge of the rock plateau, staring at the ocean.

“Are you all right?” he inquired, not sure whether the older man had taken ill.

Gebann took his time answering. “I am thinking of Cliodhna and how to find her on the ocean.”

They stared north at the vast undulating blue. Then Cian left the smith to ponder, and below in the musty forest he snared a rabbit and found mushrooms and laid the food on a flat stone. He climbed the cliff again and led Gebann down the steep path from the monument. They went further down the mountain to prepare their meal in the shade of beech and oak, after leaving one mushroom behind in thanksgiving.

They traveled for several more days, moving west. Steep emerald mountains enfolded them as they passed through lovely valleys. Rushing streams were bordered here by thickets of apple trees and berry vines in varieties Cian had never seen. Despite the strange yellow soil, there were good fruits to eat and unspoiled by frost. The big dust cloud hadn’t come this far south along the Continent, he told the smith, who nodded in tacit agreement.

Among still sharper mountains packed close together, they hiked to several copper mining sites on the slopes. Gebann pointed out how the long lateral tunnels had been dug and reinforced, unlike the shallower Lake mine on Eire. Inside, the miners used a swinging hammer contrivance: large rocks on ropes tied to wood uprights, bashing them against heated rock faces to loosen ore; he admired their ingenuity. At the smelting pits, Gebann showed him how leather bellows clamped to the pit walls forced air in and raised the pit’s temperature. The miners were polite but guarded with them. Gebann indicated he did not wish to burden these struggling men to shelter and eat with them as guests, and the two travelers left to find the coast again.

There Gebann exchanged the mules with a man who ferried in a dugout canoe to continue west, for this stretch of mountainous coast was too rough to traverse even with mules. Cian noted how the smith traded bits of metal and colored stone beads for things they needed, including food and two fresh horses when they landed; and they rode forth again.

They spoke infrequently and that pleased both, and they settled into easy companionship as they traveled. Mines and Seafarer settlements dotted this scenic coast. Always the smoky mining areas were denuded of trees and eroded soil was filling in adjacent streambeds. Where the streams ran clear, Gebann looked for gold and often picked up a good-sized piece or two under the sparkling surface. “We’re too late for good fishing here, Cian. Might as well catch something.”

They progressed in humid, salty air toward the place of the setting sun. We’re headed for land’s end, the smith teased. Along the shoreline, Gebann showed him how to catch seafood, periwinkles and squid, among the rocks. Cian’s fair skin darkened in the warm midday sun as he waded for seafood and bathed.

As the two men rode or walked the horses, Cian saw the familiar shape of passage mounds along the way. Gebann affirmed that these small mounds enclosed stone chambers with burials. They stopped at stelae having strange markings. Some of the carvings resembled a human outline or a face; others were in the form of the familiar sheepherder’s crook. Still other stelae had geometric hatch lines. Horizontal granite slabs had cupmarks. Cian recognized the symbolism of many of these carvings and he learned new Seafarer symbols quickly.

“It is a good system here, to show boundaries and grazing lands,” he said.

“Else the traders come along and build camps wherever they like,” Gebann added.

Dagger shapes threatened on some stelae that they passed. Cian felt they were being watched, shadows moving in high places along their way, but he could discern no one following. Gebann glanced over his shoulder from time to time as well, and left Cian’s wrists unbound.

Traders invariably built their enclosures on elevated places where mining took place below. None of these traders lived in caves. Cian saw that the native Seafarers who lived back from the coast often used caves as handy dwellings, dry and warm enough if facing sunlight. The inland Seafarers embellished their cave interiors with reed dividers and colorful hangings, and added drystacked stone walls and flagged entrance courts.

Their travels brought them to one such dwelling cave. When no one greeted them outside it, Gebann and Cian dismounted and ventured inside. They found this cave filled with bodies, dead for some time and almost bare of flesh, all of them young people and children, some infants. None had a burial tunic or ocher tribute. The bodies had been tossed into piles, some carelessly dismembered. Cian recognized the clean slice of metal through the tangled bones. The fetid air choked him and he struggled to keep his morning meal down. This scene was the work of madness, depravity. As Gebann and Cian exited the cave, several old women and one old man whom they half-carried along emerged from the woods to speak with them.

“What happened here?” Gebann asked with a stern face.

The old ones told him in the Seafarer tongue. Gebann’s shoulders slumped. “Dead, all dead, killed!” he repeated.

Cian winced in the sunlight after the darkness and horror of the cave. “Shall I burn the bones?” he asked in a low voice.

“No, lad. Leave the bones as they lie. So that all may see the poor murdered ones!” Gebann bellowed. Later he said as they rode, “That tribe refused to work for Invaders,” and he spat on the ground.

The smith reached up and drew blood from his cheeks in mourning and Cian did the same.

“I must return to help my people, Gebann.”

“I know that.” Gebann sounded weary, and they camped prior to the setting sun.

They rode together through most of another lunate, Cian wondering if they would ever reach this land’s end. At last, past a midsun, Gebann drew back on the braided hemp reins and gazed across a marshy green plain that stretched west from their vantage point, along the great sea’s coast. For Cian, this place reminded of the Boyne and he had a ripple of homesickness at seeing it. Above the plain’s distant edge stood a settlement.

“What is the name of this place?”

“The traders call it
Murias
.” They rode down an incline and across waving grass toward the fortified settlement, located high up on its own plateau and reinforced with stones layered thick around its base.

The height of this trader settlement ensured it had a fine lookout over the ocean. Cian assessed its size and importance as they approached. Gebann confirmed his assumptions.

“Invaders control the water traffic. They keep officials posted day and night. Here, close to the northwest corner of our peninsula, this landing has become a trade node for either offloading cargo or taking on supplies. Vessels continue on the oceans in either direction. A ship continues east along this peninsula’s northern coast. That trade extends up to Taranis and the Continent’s inland rivers. Or, it voyages west and then south. Along the southern coast the route leads east through narrow, rocky straits and into the middle sea, warmer salt waters bounded by exotic lands.” His forefinger traced it all in midair.

“It was here in this port that I first laid eyes on Elcmar.” Gebann’s eyes narrowed against the sun. He briefly described Elcmar’s rise from a scrappy orphan without a tribe to an accepted warrior. “He’s after landing on his feet again—as an Invader champion, in Eire.

“But that’s not why this place is special to me,” Gebann chuckled. “Here you will meet my wife, at my home!” He urged the horses into more speed to cross the plain to his home.

His wife welcomed Gebann with cries of delight, and surprise that he would return after autumn equinox. Her eyes soon brimmed with tears to hear that Cliodhna had been held hostage, and she pressed a hand to her mouth. Small-boned and darting, like a shore bird, she hurried away to fetch bread and hot food from a communal oven.

The exhausted Gebann rested with Cian. His wife flitted around them, ministering to their needs. They shared meals of flat chewy acorn bread, and little olives, and sharp cheeses, field greens laced with chopped wild garlic stems and oil, and roast squid, fish, and game birds; most of it new to Cian. Refreshed and well fed, the two men discussed all they observed on their journey.

They talked late into many of the following nights. After several jars of brew, Gebann spoke freely. “Elcmar thinks you’re my hostage, but to him I say—” and he made a rude gesture. He grabbed Cian’s shoulder. “Their shamans insult us, say that we lack proper gods, your people and mine. Sunworshipers, they call us. Bah!” The smith fell back on his seat. “We have no use for their meddling shamans. Creation happens with every sunrise.”

The two prowled the harbor loading area at odd hours, to evade curious trader officials who might question the young Starwatcher though Cian by now wore his hair tied back like a Seafarer’s. Cian saw foreign goods and people that he could not have imagined to exist. The sight of captives bound with ropes contrasted with the goodness shown to him by Gebann. How would he ever repay it? Gebann led him on narrow lanes and into dark rooms where they met with experienced Seafarers, many of whom knew Lir. Cian heard tall tales of their journeys along these coasts, of crystal islands under the sea where people lived without growing old. He was less fond of their sea monster tales. But there was no word of Cliodhna among any of these ships’ crews. The smith’s steps became halting as their search for news of his daughter proved futile.