Cobbles, large gravel, and water worn pebbles rose from the beach and began to fly at the pirates with the force of sling stones. Within moments half the remaining men were down and the others were fleeing in all directions. The rest was just revenge. I cannot think any of them escaped. They were hated everywhere along the coast. As to the women aboard the vessel, they had seen their fathers, brothers, husbands, and sons killed by the slavers. Many had been raped, some repeatedly, and those pregnant or with babies at the breast had seen their newborns killed, because a woman with a child at the breast was worth less than one without. They showed no mercy.
The fishermen hauled the ship ashore and beached her above the tide line while the erstwhile captive women drowned the few remaining wounded pirates in the surf after they deprived them of their eyes, ears, noses, and other offending body parts. For when women take revenge, it is with all their hearts and souls, not to mention considerable inventiveness and ingenuity.
The sun was low, casting a lurid light over the beach, the surf foaming like stained lace against the violet water. The killing was finished. We went to the chief’s hall to undertake a division of the spoils. It was then
Gray gave me the head, the head of the leader of the pirates. He placed it before me in a bag as I sat between Dugald and the Gray Watcher in the chief’s hall. I opened the bag and looked at the face. The pirate chief looked annoyed at being a trophy, as though he were about to protest his slaying at the hands of rank amateurs, boys only. He had not expected to die today.
Odd how I remember his face. I cannot now call to mind the faces of those I have loved all my life, those for whom more than one time I would have sacrificed everything.
Dugald, shivering next to me, drained with the effort of his magic, said, “That’s no gift for a child.”
Maeniel studied the head. “We will place it in cedar oil and dry it in the smoke from our hearth fire.”
Gray nodded. “She was the one who first saw the sail and warned us. Without her, we would have been taken by surprise.”
The one eyed woman was spooning soup into Dugald’s mouth. She spat in the chief’s face. “He died too easy. I wish I’d gotten my hands on him. He gouged my eye out because I fought him when he tried to have me. He said one eye was all a weaving woman needed. He promised me worse this night.” And she laughed. “Seems he won’t get to keep that promise.”
“The ones who did live long enough to meet you regretted it,” the Gray Watcher said.
It was a good feast, and we all drank our fill, even the captive women. They remained because none of us knew how to send them home. None of us had any idea where they might be from. The boys from the war band all got good offers from the people in the village, though Bain strutted and preened as though he’d won the battle single handed.
When we left to go home, the one eyed woman went with us. She told Dugald, “Look at the three of you, dirty, dressed in rags.” She twisted my head toward her. “Gray called you she. Are you girl or boy?”
“Girl, and I regret it. I would like to join the war band like Gray and Bain,” I said.
“Yes, well, you need a woman to look after you at present.”
“To be sure,” Dugald said. “That’s why you won’t do. I would rather share house room with a wolf pack.” Then he remembered. “Oh, good God, I do.”
Mother and Black Leg were striding along at my side.
When the one eyed woman came to our hut, she exclaimed at the disorder and filth. Mother and Black Leg gnawed bones on the hearth and none of us were particular about table manners. But first Dugald and Maeniel put her on a bed. She looked ready to fight when they did that, but Dugald, still shivering, said, “My God, woman. I am burnt to the socket, and—” he gestured at Maeniel “—he is not human.”
Maeniel put off his weapons, went wolf, and settled down at the fire. She laughed when she saw him do it.
“That’s a trick I’ve never seen,” she said.
Dugald poulticed her eye so that it took away the pain, then gave her something to drink that he said quiets the soul. She told us her name was Kyra.
Our house was built after the old manner and it was part of the currents of the world. It was round with wooden uprights and three courses of dry stone walling between them. Flexible canes were lashed to the uprights and formed a skeleton for the dome. This was covered with boiled cowhide and then a layer of green turf. More turf was piled against the walls to keep out the storm winds. So it seemed to rise, a green mound near the sea. It was warmed and lighted by a hearth in the center. The chimney—we knew of no such things then—was a smoke hole in the roof. A lattice that could be moved aside covered the hole.
I woke deep in the night to hear Kyra weeping. She lay beside me. There were only two beds in the room. Dugald had the other. The wolves slept near the hearth in the center. Dugald slept as one drugged. The wolves were also quiet, curled tails covering their noses. The Gray Watcher had slung the head above the hearth and slightly to one side, so it could begin to cure in the smoke. It hung by its long, dark hair, and as I watched, half asleep, the face seemed to take on the lineaments of life. The eyes opened and stared at me malevolently. The skin was no longer sallow and the cheeks sunken. It seemed as though blood flowed in the veins and the heart still beat.
“Doesn’t weeping hurt your eye?” I asked Kyra.
“Yes,” she said, “but the pain in my heart is so much worse than any pain my body could endure that it doesn’t seem to matter.”
I was a child and my imagination couldn’t bridge the gap between my state and hers, but I wanted to give her something that would allow her some peace. “It’s cold,” I said. “The fire is low.”
“Is it? I thought it was only my grief that chilled me. In a moment I will rise and build it up. I can’t expect to live among you, whatever you and your people may be, without making proper recompense.”
I was yet young, but I didn’t want one who had suffered so much to feel she must be my servant. “No,” I answered. “That will be my task. Tell me, the one whose head hangs over the hearth—what was his name?”
She answered me after the old fashion. “Once I had a man and a son and a child at the breast.”
I glanced at her and saw the front of the rags she was wearing were wet and stiff with milk from her nipples. It was leaking out with no child to take it.
“Now I have no man, no son, and no baby. Its name was Cymry.”
“Cymry,” I said, trying the name on my tongue. The eyes blinked. On the head, the mouth moved. “Cymry,” I said. “Cymry, build up the fire.”
The flames leaped high, filling the room with light and warmth.
Kyra laughed. “So there is truth in the old tales.”
“So it would seem,” I answered.
The fire was dying down again, but there was plenty of fuel on the hearth. It made a pleasant blaze. The head was quiet and death took it.
“He is paid out for the things he did,” I said. “You may rest easy.”
But she was already sleeping.
Things went well after that. This surprised a lot of people, because we were all farmers, and farmers never think they will prosper. Or possibly they don’t care to attract the anger of the gods by too much complacency. Kyra quietly improved the house, finding hides for the floor and strewing rushes. As soon as she could begin to weave, she set up the sort of warp weighed loom under the trees that our women have used since… since… who knows how long—before they sailed south and traded with the people who became the Greeks at a place called Troy. She washed and cooked better than the two men. Much better. I liked her food. But we quarreled when she tried to make me dress as a girl.
“You are one, you know,” she told me, “and will have to act like one. The priests say it is an abomination not to.”
I spat like an angry cat. “And what did being a woman get you?” I asked. When she stood silent, then turned and walked away, I knew I had hurt her, and that was the first time I’d hurt the feelings of any human being. I was unhappy and it made me sad, so I ran after her, trying to say I was sorry. At first she wouldn’t listen to me or talk, then I saw she was crying and I felt worse. But at last she stopped, sat, and buried her face in the old dress she wore, in terrible sorrow. She was silent, and we both sat in a little patch of cedar trees high on a cliff and watched the play of light and shadow on the sea. Black Leg, Mother, and I sat beside her, and a time or two, Mother thrust her nose into Kyra’s hand as though offering her comfort.
The morning fog had lifted, and the clouds were rushing by, white and glowing at the tops, dark at the bottom, the color of the Gray Watcher’s coat in winter. Far out to sea, it was raining. I saw the long, trailing veils of the storm darkening the horizon like misty smudges in the distance, and sometimes when the sun shone into the storm shadow, I saw the double arch of a rainbow leaping from the sea to the clouds.
She sat quiet, arms around her knees, looking out into the distance. “You are right. Being a woman didn’t get me much of anything. When they had killed all I ever loved, I fought them because I hoped they would kill me also. That was when he gouged out my eye, saying it would make me more compliant, and he was right. The pain was dreadful. Rather than let them blind me, I behaved the way the other women did, doing what I was told, even seeming to welcome their embraces. He was so sure I was tamed, he left me untied. It was I who freed the others.
“They wouldn’t even let us bury the dead. I hope… some must have gotten away… I hope they performed the rites. I was told they cannot sleep unless the bones are first burned, then reduced to a powder, and given to the wind. Their spirits are unquiet and will walk. The man and my son were old enough to make the journey, but the baby… he can’t be old enough to find his way alone.”
She was silent for a space and didn’t talk.
“You hear him at night?” I asked. “Don’t you? And then you awaken and wonder if he is lost in darkness.”
She nodded.
“I will ask Cymry,” I told her.
She shivered.
“He is dead and knows where the dead go,” I continued.
“No,” she said. “I wouldn’t want him near my child. Best to let it lie, little one.” And then she kissed me on the top of the head.
“I will dress like a girl if you want me to,” I said.
A strong gust of wind from the sea made the cedars around us rustle, as though the thick limbs had life, and stirred the strong scent of the wood.
“No,” she said, “but you must learn how to prettify yourself and prance and simper and bat your eyelashes as though you want to catch a lover.”
“Like Issa,” I said, speaking of the chief’s daughter.
She had become worse since Bain moved into the chief’s house after the fight. She spent all her time primping, seeking out pools of water in which to admire her reflection. If another girl so much as walked near him, she stopped speaking to her and looked daggers every time they met. When a trade ship stopped at the cove, she threw tantrums until her father bought her a bolt of linen cloth she and her mother could dye for a new dress, and an amber necklace with a silver cross. She wouldn’t do any washing at the stream or scrub pots any longer for fear she would ruin her hands and break her nails.
Kyra began laughing. “Oh, no, not that bad,” she said. “But there are many things women do that you should learn for your own sake: cooking, weaving, knitting, sewing, and how to make the most of your looks. It can be important. You never know where the currents of life will carry you.”
I nodded. “Whatever you have to teach me, I will learn,” I said. “I cannot promise you I will apply the lessons, but I won’t disregard them either.”
She put her arm over my shoulders, and the four of us sat together companionably. I heard Mother sigh as she rested her head in Kyra’s lap, and Black Leg went to sleep at my side.
“I am happy I have come among you,” she said. “I can’t help but miss those I have lost, but you have helped heal my heart. You are deep minded for one so young, and those two guardians of yours should be told it’s time to begin your education.”
And that’s what I did for the next few years: learn from all of them.
Dugald gave up trying to make me into a Roman, but he did make me study Latin and Greek and read such books as he could obtain. We would quarrel, because I wanted to learn magic and he refused to teach me, saying he would rather purge these things from our people, and especially from our leaders. He told me I would marry a king, and I laughed at him. But I was learning about magic without his help.
Gray married Anna and began to help her father at the forge. Every winter we would meet secretly after the turning of the year, take the road, and go up to the mountains. Only the three of us—Kyra, Gray, and me, four if you count Cymry, the head. We would go high, where the rocks were sheathed in ice and a thin skin of snow covered the ground.
Cymry had cured well. We soaked him in cedar oil and the skin didn’t rot but drew tight on the bones. His lips shrunk so his teeth showed, and even his eyes were intact. They were cloudy and sunken, but they peered through half closed lids, and you could tell his soul was still present. The smoke from the fire had darkened his skin, and there was a stubble of beard on his cheeks.
It grows, Gray told me, after death, often for some time.
We killed a deer, dug a pit, lined it with stones, then lit a fire and heated the stones. When they were hot, we placed cedar branches on them, put the deer carcass on top, covered it with more branches and then a green hide weighed down with stones. We hung Cymry from a tree branch where he could watch us and then sat and talked while the meat cooked.
Kyra was one of the old ones. They have a name, but I will not tell it. Like Cymry’s name, it is a thing of power, and one who knows it has some ability to do them harm. They were my friends; my first friends, I think, but for Dugald and the Gray Watcher, and by their learning made me what I am.
Besides, they should always have a place here. They have been part of this land for so long that compared to them the Britons are children and the Romans squalling infants. Kyra taught me their language and their lore. Once, you see, there was no ocean here, and all of this Ireland, Britain, and France was dry land. The world was very cold, and all the water that now covers the land was ice, and all of this belonged to her people. There were no farms, no cattle or sheep. None at least that lived with men. The animals were all wild, and Kyra’s people hunted them in the shadow of the glaciers.