When he sighed and sat back on his heels, I dared a question. “What could you possibly do? I have been cursed.”
“Cursed?” The snort that escaped him would have been a laugh, if it had not been so full of anger and derision. “If those two knew anything about real curses, they would not bandy them about so freely. Put curses out of your mind.” He rose to his feet and began to pace about the little room, suddenly agitated. “You have been poisoned. No ordinary wound could go septic and spread so quickly. If I knew what Abhartach used...”
I heard a hiss of indrawn breath, and Roisin stepped forward, fumbling in her pouch. She pulled out a wrapped piece of linen and thrust it at Geanann. “I pulled that from her cheek. Could there be poison still on it?”
Geanann unwrapped it gingerly, eyed the little shard of crockery under the lamplight, sniffed at it. He scratched at it with his blade. Then he wiped it on the linen, dripped a bit of water on it and examined the result closely. To my alarm, he once licked it—a quick touch of the tongue that I thought I must have imagined until I heard Roisin’s involuntary gasp.
He stood then as if lost in thought, and as the minutes dragged on, the pain roared back into my face in a fierce wave and licked against the inside of my skull, and I fought to hold back that mewing groan that spoke to me of death.
The choice he finally put to me was clear enough. He could, just possibly, save my life, but the pain of it would be greater than anything I would experience in the course of merely dying.
Or, if I chose not to endure such an ordeal, his draughts could ease my passing to the next world, which would take place in a matter of days.
“How much greater?” I asked, dreading his reply, but he shook his head.
“It is not given us to measure the degrees of pain as we can measure the shadow’s length,” he said. “I will have to cut away the dead flesh and then cauterize the edges. After that, you will have a long slow battle as the poison drains and the wound heals. And at the end, a wide scar that will disfigure the left side of your face.”
The revulsion and fear I felt as I tried to picture the surgery was paralyzing. The skin of my cheek was now so stretched with swelling it felt near to splitting open, and so exquisitely tender that even the accidental brush of cloth against it made me cry out. Marshaling any other thought was almost more than I could manage—yet deep in my fevered brain an uneasy question was fighting its way to the surface.
I raised my hot eyes to his and saw that he was waiting.
“Why do you offer me a choice?” I demanded. “If life is indeed within my grasp, however difficult the pathway, why should I choose death?”
There was a silence while he studied me and seemed to search for words.
“My father said you would need the whole truth, ill though you be. He says you have a mind that seeks understanding.”
Suddenly the real question was plain to me.
“Geanann, why has Conchobor not come? If he knows I kept faith with him, why does he not come to me?”
He told it as gently as he could, but there are some truths that cannot really be softened.
“When the king married you, Luaine, it was not your welfare he was thinking of, nor even your beauty, whatever he may have said.”
I lay in my bed and closed my eyes against his kind face as he laid out what Cathbad had discovered. I understood now how it was possible to die of shame.
The king did not want me.
He had never wanted me, only my lands and the strength of my father’s men and our herds and riches. And there was none of Cuchulainn’s family left but myself to stand in the king’s way. He had hired Abhartach and his brother to get rid of me, and was even now riding in a supposed rage to their house to kill them, thus ensuring they would never be tempted to let slip his secret.
“So you see,” Geanann concluded, “if it is life that you choose, it is not clear what life awaits you. The king expects that you will succumb to the ‘curse,’ and there is no telling how it will be if, instead, you recover and return to Emain Macha.”
“I will never return to him,” I gritted. Tears welled up under my lids and scalded their way down to my pillow. I hadn’t the strength left to feel anger at Conchobor’s betrayal, but despair feeds on weakness and it washed over me now like the surf breaking over a rock. All I had to do was to let go, and let it take me...
“Luaine.” Geanann’s hand rested on mine, long fingers wrapping about my wrist, the pressure of them calling me back to him. Reluctantly, I opened my eyes and was grateful to see in his neither pity nor contempt, but only compassion.
“I cannot choose for you. But I will say that if it is life you decide to follow, Cathbad and I will help you to find a new path.”
“Cathbad serves the king,” I said bitterly.
“Cathbad serves Ulster,” he corrected. “And Conchobor’s king-ship, whatever his personal faults, has been strong. Ulster cannot afford to lose him now, Luaine. Not with your father gone. But neither will Cathbad leave you unaided.”
I could not force my brain to work. The rack and chill of fever, the deep bite of my wound, the debilitating sense of shame—they pushed me toward the easy course. To let go and be at ease. But Geanann had offered me a different road, a harder road, and I owed it to him to at least consider it well.
“I need Fintan and some time alone,” I said. I did not think Fin had anything new to show me, but I thought his white feather might help me find the thread of my thought.
And so it did. The white feather blazed out in the dim room against deepest black. And my thoughts did indeed find something to grip onto there, a focus that gave me some distance from the pain. I fixed my eyes on Fintan’s white feather, and there swelled out of its small bright beacon a wheeling dance of memories.
They were random, at first, fleeting scraps of my childhood. My father’s apple feat. My mother singing. Sunrise over the sea, the Cooley Hills still blue with night’s shadow. The time my father sneezed with a mouthful of ale and it shot out his nose, and I could not finish my meal for laughing. The little white asters that nestle into the grass around our house like fallen stars.
But the memories all ended in death. I saw my brother, the eager young flame of his life stamped out in the service of another’s vengefulness. My mother, throwing herself into the grave without a thought for what was left behind. And then it was Deirdriu swimming out of Fin’s white light. Her sorrowful violet eyes glowed like jewels before me, charging me with some burden or message. And then they vanished in a rising tide of blood, and I remembered how when she lay there, her head shattered and her soul finally free, Conchobor was not grieved but only angered. Cheated of his prize.
And then at last the anger blazed within me, for Deirdriu and for myself too. Was I worth so little, then, that my life should be tossed aside for a man whose greed had swelled beyond bounds? My father had not been king of a great province, but he had shone brighter than Conchobor ever could, nor was he one to betray the memory of a friend.
“Call them in, Fin. Geanann and Roisin both.”
And when they had entered, and Geanann had knelt by my bed to hear me speak, I forced my words to rise above the pain they caused me and sound clear in the little room.
“Cuchulainn’s line will not die out from Conchobor’s treachery. I swear by the gods we honor, I will defy him, king though he be. I will live.”
Two years it has been since Geanann gave me a draught that made me dreamy and limp, carried me out into the bright light of the noonday sun, wound straps across my arms and legs and set Berach to hold my head while two other stout men pinned down the rest of me. Two years and still my mind skitters away from the memory in blind refusal. There are some things that cannot be relived, nor recounted.
Nor can they be forgotten, however we may wish to. Not without Cathbad’s draught of oblivion. Geanann offered it to me, you know—but I turned him down. I didn’t know what other memories might be lost along with the pain, and as you must realize by now, I am not one to turn my back on knowledge.Here is a memory I do not mind sharing: when at last Geanann was done and he laid his fiery blade aside, Berach loosed his hold on me with a groan that was clogged thick with tears. And I hovered on the edge of a blackness that might well have been death and yearned for it to blot out the world, for the agony was a live beast in me still and I shook with a violence that made my teeth clatter. But Geanann poured cool water from a pitcher onto clean linen, and bathed my eyes and spoke in a quiet murmur, and when nausea overcame me his strong arms held me firm as the sickness spattered on the ground, and he washed my mouth afterward as tenderly as a mother. And then he scooped me up and carried me
back to bed. The blackness did close over me then, and I slept the sleep of utter exhaustion.
Sleep was my friend and waking a torment in the measureless time that followed. But never did my eyes open without seeing Roisin or Geanann at my side, ready with the draught that quieted my body and lulled me back to the darkness. Such strange sleep. I swooped and sank in my bed, and behind my eyelids colors and images bloomed and faded like the dancing lights that sometimes paint the northern sky.
It was the poppy did that. Geanann told me later he had got it from a healer he met while studying in Alba, a man who had learned its uses in a faraway land where the sun blazed so hot you could burn the soles of your feet just walking on the earth. His small store was precious, though, and he soon switched me to a weaker brew of local herbs. And so I found myself truly awake and able to really look at the man who had hurt me so terribly. Bright-faced Geanann. That’s what they call him, and one look was enough to show the reason. His mother must have been very fair, for he had little of Cathbad’s darkness about him, but was golden-haired with a boyish high color to his cheeks. Only his eyes spoke of his father, for they were a deep storm-gray where one expected blue.
I made to shift my position—I had lain so long in one place that the straw was packed hard against the bed boards and my back was complaining—and instantly it was my whole body complaining, and loudly. No doubt it showed on my face.
“Sore?” asked Geanann.
“Yes,” I said. Tried to say. It came out a hoarse rasp and felt about the same. I ached everywhere, as if I had been through a battle. I suppose I had.
“For a woman drugged and sick, you fought like a bear,” he said apologetically. Then, perhaps regretting the memories he had sparked, he turned back to the present.
“You are doing marvelously well, despite your aches. The fever is nearly gone, and the swelling on your cheek is improving already.” He hoisted up my shoulders and gave me a spoonful of thick syrup, warm and sweet with honey. “For your throat,” he said.
I took stock of myself and realized what he said was true. My face hurt unrelentingly, but the skin no longer felt stretched tight as a drumskin. My head felt clearer and my limbs lay still, free from the quaking grip of fever. I would live.
Geanann had saved me. I cleared my throat experimentally and looked up at him, meaning to say my thanks. Instead I surprised myself. “You don’t look like a druid.”
That made him laugh, and the merry sound of it lifted my spirits in a way nothing else could have. It was long since there had been any laughter in my life, and I felt my own lips curl into a careful smile.
“Doubtless that’s because I am not yet fully vested, but have attained only the first order,” he replied. “In ten years’ time, I promise you, I shall look as severe and wise as Cathbad himself.”
Three times seven years of study it takes to become a master with the wisdom to guide kings and train apprentices. Geanann had the eyes already: observant, perceptive, quietly commanding. But even with his hairline shaved back in the tonsure of the master druid, I doubted he would ever resemble Cathbad.
A slow tickly motion on my cheek distracted me, and I made—wincing—to lift a hand and brush the stray hair away. Geanann
stopped me, leaning over my face with a thin straw in his hand. “Back to work, you,” I heard him mutter, and there was a momentary twinge as the straw poked at my wound.
“You’d like to know who it is I am addressing,” he stated as he sat back on his heels. “That was one of my helpers.”
“What helpers?” Could he speak with the spirits, I wondered, glancing uneasily into the rafters.
“Maggots,” he said cheerily.
Maggots.
Every flyblown carcass and writhing mass of bad meat I had ever seen appeared in my mind’s eye, and my own face alongside them. My stomach did a slow roll.
“Roisin thought the same as you. I almost had to fight her to get at you with them.”
“You
put
them in me?” My voice was back, loud and clear and full of indignant revulsion. “You put
maggots
in me?!”
“Be glad I did,” he answered calmly, serious now. “They are cleaning out the poison and dead flesh in the deep places I could not reach, and they have very likely saved the sight in your left eye.”
“But—”
“But what? Are they hurting you? Would you prefer the clumsy slicing of my knife?”
No. Not that.
I took a deep breath and put my mind to the facts. My cheek felt better, not worse. I could not even tell the maggots were there. Perhaps most importantly, I had come to trust in Geanann’s skill.
“But what happens when they run out of dead flesh?” I imagined them burrowing into my living tissue. It made me shudder.
“They cannot eat healthy flesh,” he assured me. “When they are done, they will come out.”
Something to look forward to.
For two more days I rested and gained strength, and soon I was well enough to notice that Geanann and Roisin grew more uneasy by the hour. By the time they came to speak to me, I had figured out the reason.
“Conchobor will be sending men here, won’t he?”
Geanann nodded. “And soon. It is coming on ten days since you left Emain Macha. Not to mince words, he will think he has left you ample time to die.”