The Greener Shore (33 page)

Stop, head! I forbid you to proceed any farther along this road. It will lead to the destruction of the pillars upon which my life is built.

Searching for something else to think about, one morning I ambled over to the forge to watch Teyrnon and the Goban Saor making a new sword. A chieftain’s sword had been ordered by Fíachu, who was still willing to do business with my people. It appeared that only I was in bad odor with the leader of the Slea Leathan.

The forge was a scene of strenuous but highly organized activity. Each man had his particular work to do. Each in his own way was an artist.

In a time before the before, some distant ancestor had been attracted to a bright glitter in a lump of rock. Perhaps it was gold, perhaps it was copper. Moved by curiosity, the man had chipped the shiny substance free with a flint axe so he could examine it more closely. Eventually he—or one of his descendants—discovered that the ore would melt if held too close to a fire.

Metalworking was born.

At first its use was limited to the creation of ornaments to designate status. In time someone else used his imagination to combine several melted ores into a material strong enough to make tools. And weapons. First of bronze, then of iron.

Imagination is yet another manifestation of the Two-Faced One. Used creatively, it produces great benefit. Used destructively, it can destroy worlds.

The Goban Saor already had carved the sword’s grip from oak to resemble the upper body of a Celtic warrior, inset with a face of polished bone. As I watched, the great craftsman began shaping the torso to fit Fíachu’s hand exactly. He had taken an impression of the hand in beeswax to use as a model. When the fit was perfect he would cover the grip with beaten silver. The weight of the entire piece must be carefully calculated to balance the blade.

Teyrnon was forging the blade to his own design, an improved version of Labraid’s weapon. Experience with the Romans had shown us the advantages of the gladus. The longer Gaulish sword, while terrifying when wielded by a man on horseback, was cumbersome in close quarters. When two men were fighting eye to eye and knee to knee, a leaf-shaped shortsword, with two cutting edges and a sharp point, could drive in under the breastbone or skewer a man through the throat. Either way was fatal.

Glas operated the leather bellows to keep the fire at the specific heat required for each step of the forging. By now Lakutu’s son knew just when the fire must be cherry red, when it must be angry orange, when it must be as white as ice. A mistake on his part could have destroyed days of labor.

As they worked the men spoke to one another from time to time, but not about what they were doing. Their hands were so perfectly attuned to the task that their heads were free to think of other things.

Back in Gaul, I remembered, swords had been forged in what was called “pattern welding.” The blades were so malleable they could be twisted into a spiral of three or four turns without breaking. This very malleability proved their downfall. They were quickly deformed in battle and had to be beaten back into shape with the nearest handy rock, which ultimately made them too brittle for further use.

Teyrnon was forging Fíachu’s new sword out of successive layers of iron, each beaten very thin, then hammered into the next to build up a blade whose total was stronger than its individual parts. After every additional layer he pounded out the shape he wanted, then plunged the blade into cold water until it hissed like an angry snake. Then it was thrust back into the fire and hammered again, and quenched again. And on, and on…

So is man burned and chilled by the events of his life, my head observed. If he survives them he is stronger than ever before.

What if he does not survive?

I watched the making of the sword for a while longer, then wandered away, captured again by thoughts I did not want to have.

Without the Otherworld, where could our spirits go between lives? They had to await rebirth somewhere. Rebirth allowed the immortal part of us to learn and grow. Rebirth enabled us to resume interrupted friendships and rediscover lost loves. I could not make sense of rebirth without the existence of an Otherworld.

And I had lost faith in the Otherworld.

I was drowning in murky depths of disbelief. How could I save myself? Who could throw me a lifeline?

No one.

Those who might have helped me regain my faith were gone. The great Menua had been dead for over two generations. Gone into the dark from which there is no returning, as were the other druids who had studied the lessons of nature for countless lifetimes. So much wisdom.

Lost forever, I thought bitterly.

My head, my cruel head; always tormenting me. Perhaps when my ancestors relieved their enemies of their heads they did them a greater favor than they knew.

A man with no meaningful work to do is less than a man. As I wandered around our clanhold I thought I saw pity in the eyes of my family, and I turned my head away. The old Ainvar would have known what to do; would have performed some spectacular magic that would have restored him to his rightful place.

The new Ainvar was bereft of magic.

Yet magic was real; at least I was certain of that much. My own eyes had witnessed great magic being done. I had even done it myself. Through some failing of my own, great magic was now denied to me. Even the small magic of teaching was lost.

The greatest of all teachers still existed. Nature, once again making a point, was heralding the approach of another winter. The meadows flowered no longer. The swans deserted our rivers and lakes and flew off to their secret shelterings in the west. The days grew short and dull, while at night the stars blazed from the sky with a crystalline malevolence.

The dark side of the Two-Faced One was coming to the fore.

Throughout the Plain of Broad Spears people were preoccupied by the preparations for winter. In my own clanhold Briga was overwhelmed with requests for her help, while Lakutu was smoking meat and making warmer clothes and stacking up firewood on the north side of the lodges and grinding more flour and…There was no end to the busyness of women.

When I put my arms around one of my wives in her bed, I usually found her already asleep.

The cold of the approaching death of the sun seeped into the very marrow of my bones.

And all the while my head tormented me. The next question it asked came like a knife through my heart.

If there was no Otherworld, was rebirth just another comforting myth?

I could not stay in the lodge. Day by day, while the sun was visibly dying, I paced through the forest like a creature demented. The trees were dying, too; their annual death from which they would be reborn when the sun was reborn. If the sun was reborn.

What guarantee did we have for that? The age-old rituals of our people? Were those not conducted more in hope than in certainty?

My head observed that the wise oaks were the last to surrender to the coming winter. They held their browning leaves with a courage the lesser trees did not possess. Hold on to your courage too, Ainvar, they whispered to me when the wind stirred them.

Courage is a fine thing but one cannot see it with one’s eyes. One cannot see pride, or honor, or hope. Or faith. Perhaps none of them exist. There was a time when I thought I glimpsed Eriu and the Otherworld and they were real to me, but I was wrong.

Do not hide from the truth, Ainvar, I admonished myself. Reject the illusion your imagination created.

We come out of the dark and we return to the dark. There is nothing else. Just the dark.

I wanted to scream. I wanted to cry. I wanted to pound my fists against the sky in raging denial. I did none of those things. They would have made no difference.

When I looked to the west I saw a dull red sun sinking into a pool of its own blood. Who could say if it would ever rise again?

Containing nothing immortal, my body turned and began its slow, sad walk home.

chapter
XXII

F
OLLOWING A WINTER’S STORM, GRANNUS AND THE BOYS OF OUR
clan spent several days collecting windfall from the forest to augment our firewood supply. Since I had nothing better to do, I joined them. It was a pleasant enough task. Mindless.

Late one day I returned to my lodge to find half a dozen men I had never seen before. They were gathered in a circle around my senior wife. While Briga talked, the strangers were chewing frantically.

My second wife still sat by her loom, patiently working the shuttle back and forth. I caught her eye and indicated the strangers with a nod of my head. “They’re from the tribe that lives at the mouth of the Liffey,” Lakutu said. “They’ve come all this way to ask for Briga’s help.”

Of course they had. Unlike mine, Briga’s gift was still valuable.

One by one, the men held out their hands for my senior wife to examine. Fisherman’s hands, red and callused and permanently chapped, with ropy tendons and ridged, broken nails. Hands that plunged into icy water and hauled heavy nets. Hands like feet; indispensable. In the course of their labors they had accrued serious injuries. Broken fingers that knit badly had shapechanged into useless claws; a tendon in the back of a hand was severed; gaping wounds that refused to heal were filled with maggots and pus.

I retired into the shadows and sat nursing my own pain.

Briga cleansed the suppurating wounds with apple vinegar and salt, and rinsed them thoroughly with quantities of pure water. She chewed sorrel leaves until her mouth was filled with a green liquid that she spat into each wound in turn, then applied poultices of ragwort and plantain leaves.

Using a sliver of deer’s shinbone for a needle, she stitched the severed tendon back together with a single strand of badger’s gut, working as deftly as Onuava had once embroidered with silk. The seepage of blood was stanched with cobwebs before the layers of cut skin were sewn closed. The hand was bound in cloth Briga had woven herself, from the wool of a virgin ewe.

She rebroke the misshapen fingers with a stone polished smooth and round by a rushing river. For this operation I thought she might need me to hold the man still, but like his companions, he appeared to be impervious to pain. He just kept chewing. Briga manipulated the bones into the correct configuration, coated them with another of her herbal pastes, wrapped each finger separately in unbleached linen, and strapped them together on a plank of ash wood.

When my senior wife had finished her ministrations, Lakutu fetched a wooden bowl and carried it from man to man. Each in turn spat out the contents of his mouth: sodden wads of herb and fungus and tiny hazel twigs.

Briga urged her visitors to sit around the fire and rest themselves. “You must spend the night with us and have a good meal to fill your bellies for the journey back.” Soon the strangers were laughing and talking with my wives as if they were old friends. I stayed quietly in the shadows and listened. No one paid much attention to me, but that was what I wanted.

To listen is to learn.

I learned that the tribes who lived around the estuary of the Liffey did not rely solely upon fishing. They had a thriving export trade in furs and skins, salted fish, and leather. Albion and Scotia were their principal markets, but they also did business with the Armoricans. They even were visited by traders from the lands surrounding the Mid-Earth Sea. The man with the broken fingers said he could make himself understood in five languages.

How little we know of the way others make a living! A man sees no farther than his own horizon, so his troubles may appear larger than they really are.

What did it matter if I could no longer work magic? What did it matter if Eriu did not exist and our spirits were not immortal? Food still tasted good in my mouth. My women still felt good in my arms—when they had time for me.

My eyes turned toward my senior wife. How serene she was within herself! The light loved Briga. Even in the dim interior of the lodge a tiny ray found and illumined her hair, encircling her head with gold. From what wellspring, I wondered, did she draw her strength?

While Briga and Lakutu were preparing additional beds for our guests, I heard one of the men say something that caught my attention. I stood up. “Did you say ‘Labraid’?”

“Do you know him?” asked the man with the broken hand.

“I know
a
Labraid. It’s not a common name.”

“The Labraid I know is an uncommon sort of fellow,” the fisherman replied. “A very tough man. He calls himself the Speaker Who Sails the Seas.”

Briga straightened up and turned toward me with a quizzical expression.

“When did you meet this Labraid?” I asked.

The fingers of the man’s uninjured hand spidered across his head, scratching. “A few days ago. More or less.”

“Oh, Ainvar!” Briga ran to me. Her eyes were huge.

“Where is Labraid now?” I demanded to know. “Why didn’t he come with you?”