by C. E. Murphy
And neither, more was the pity, did anyone dissuade her of the taking of a bad wager: that she herself alone could navigate a small little currach from miles beyond Clew Bay back to the safety of shore on a morning when a red sun rose warning of storms.
It had seemed a fine idea at the time. Saint Brendan had done it, after all. Had taken himself and nine monks all the bloody way to the Americas, if legend could be trusted. In the small hours of a morning, having taken deeply of the drink, Grace, trusting both legend and her own navigational skills, had been fool enough to let someone drop her off in the hide-hulled boat in the middle of the ocean. The night had been clear, though, with no hint of the upcoming storm. Now, at dawn and still half-stupid with drink, Grace scowled at the scarlet sky as if the weight of her impotent gaze might cow it into fair blue. The sky cared not at all, and the storm would care even less when it drowned her. Grace swore, once at those who had laid the bet, and thrice at herself for taking it.
The currach was a wee little thing hardly long enough to lie down in, with no mast and a single bloody oar. A child could paddle it around the bay for a week without tiring, but the bay would bring a child back to shore with its tides. The ocean would offer Grace no such help, and besides that, if she didn't come to a casual docking at her own castle on Clare Island she would be laughed out of being the O'Malley; making landfall in north Mayo, or down the country at Galway, would nearly be worse than never making landfall again at all. She took the oar in her hands, feeling it settle familiarly against old callouses, and set off with one eye on the sky and the other on the horizon, where a shadow marked Ireland's placement in the cold northerly sea.
A pleasant ache settled into her shoulders and arms as she worked her way east, and the thought struck her that, so long as she beat the storm getting home, rowing across the ocean wasn't a bad way to spend a morning. There were no children wanting attention and no men seeking advice, no ships to collect taxes on and no squabbles with the other clan lords to tend to. Just herself and her sweat and the cool sea air, with the sound of gulls complaining and water slapping the boat to keep her company.
That and the wind coming up. More than was safe: enough that she was only holding her own against the sea rather than being driven back to the west, and then in a little time, she was no longer managing even that. Waves swelled, tossing the currach as they wished; it became Grace's duty to lash the oar down, that she might not lose it, and do what she could to keep the boat from filling as rainwater pissed down from the sky. Her fingers went numb with the cold, and in due time, so did her mind. Dry was a thing of the past, a distant memory not to be dreamed of in the moment; indeed, drawing another breath above the water was all that could be dreamed of, in the moment.
She was too wet and too cold and too tired to even realized it when the currach capsized.
#
A Serpent slept beneath the ocean's surface. Far beneath: it wound around the ocean floor, squeezing and flexing, stretching and sighing. Earthquakes rumbled when it did, and mountains rose, or great belches of gas erupted in bubbles that reached the sky. A bubble had caught her, and drifted downward again, as if her weight was enough to anchor it but too little to send her falling through its curve into the cold water beyond. It sank until it bounced against the bottom, and with each bounce, brought her closer to the serpent.
It was the devil himself, she decided: if there'd been a serpent in the garden, it had to be this one, large enough to end the world. Though it didn't look interested in ending the world, or anything else. It might even have been said to save her. "Sure and of course it did," Grace said beneath her breath. "I'm the O'Malley, after all," and laughed at her own audacity.
The Serpent opened its eye at the sound of her laughter, an eye three times her height and full of its own glittering light. There shouldn't be any light this deep at all: she shouldn't have been able to see the Serpent, or anything else. But then if she was applying good sense, she ought to have drowned an hour or more ago.
Maybe she had.
The thought made her shudder from her bones out. She was cold, as the dead were meant to be, but so was the fathomless water, so that was no signifier. She breathed still, but perhaps the dead breathed, on the other side of the night. "What do you want of me?"
An answer came, but not in words. Hardly even in images: it was as though the sense of what the mighty beast wanted overwhelmed her, took her thoughts and mind and self away to be replaced by a knowledge as endless as the sea. Mortals skimmed the surface of the sea, fighting battles with each other and the weather, all almost too small to notice. All just large enough, together, to sometimes disturb the Serpent's sleep. To make it aware, as a creature so vast could hardly be, of the lesser beings in the world it encircled. Very few other living things came to its notice: sea serpents, perhaps, for they dove so deep as to find the Serpent himself, and brought with them whispers of the world above. Perhaps it was those smaller serpents who had made him aware of humans at all. Other sea monsters, squids and great whales, brushed by him from time to time, carrying stories of the small things that hunted on the surface. And sometimes a ship sent its crew into the deep as well, but very few, very few indeed, of those drowned sailors brought with them enough of a spark to draw the Serpent's attention. More of those luckless seafarers were taken by the siryns, whose songs had once soothed the Serpent's slumber, but who never swam into the deeps where he coiled around the heart of the world. For all that they lived in the ocean, they were closer to belonging to the other, his counterpart, the green thing that grew through all the land and nurtured the life that had crawled from his domain into hers. The serpents were his, and perhaps even their winged brethren who flew the skies above, but the dragons never came into the sea, and the Serpent was—
"Lonely," Grace breathed, "and curious, I'd say. What has that to do with me?"
The world as she knew it, blue and green and grey, came to life as if the Serpent woke every memory she had at once. The sun raced through the sky and hid behind clouds, a thousand days of living, of dying, of birthing and fighting. Clear moments she remembered without prompting: her red braid bleeding on the ground, her childrens' first squalls. Moments she had forgotten and many of them better left so: unwarranted cruelty and unbearable shame awakened to haunt her, for she wouldn't easily forget them again. Moments that lay in between, forgotten in the daily business of life but recalled with a certain scent or taste. Memory even seemed to cast forward, as if the Serpent couldn't quite understand imagination or anticipation, and saw a dream of what might be as something no less real than the recollections of what had been. The one constant was Grace herself, a fixed and always-changing point, weighted, going forward, with a sense of observation: the Serpent, seeing her world through her eyes.
"Hah! And what do I get out of this?"
Water pressed in, sudden and cold and unforgiving. Salt filled Grace's lungs, and a sensation of fish nibbling at her fingers, at her flesh, at her very bones, gave a seafarer's answer to the question. She flung her hands up as if she could protect herself from the surging ocean and found no water clawing at her face, but still felt the weight of it in her chest and throat. As quickly as it had come, it vanished, leaving her coughing and doubled as she gasped for air. Wiping her eyes, she wheezed, "You'll throw me back to land, then, like a fish too small to keep? It's a devil's bargain, beastie, but it's better than drowning. I'll take it, and sing a song for my supper, too."
The Serpent's eye glittered again and its whole head settled a little, like a cat expecting a bit of meat thrown to it if it lay quietly enough. Grace ran her hand over her eyes again and frowned at its glimmering gaze. "You wouldn't really want me to sing, beastie. My brother Donal has the voice for it, but mine is only passing fair." The Serpent waited, and she sighed. "Though who else would sing for you here in the depths, I suppose. Those mermaids you put me in mind of haven't sung in a long time, have they? All right, but the decision is yours to regret." Her voice, she knew, wasn
't as bad as all that, but even when they were no taller than her knee, her children went to their father or uncle for lullabies when they could. Grace found one of those tunes and brought it to life for the Serpent, and then another, for she knew the words and melodies as well as anyone might, even if her song wasn't as sweet as another's might be. And then for the sake of singing, she sang a third, making bold enough to sit by the Serpent's jaw and close her eyes while she drew jigs and poems and laments from memory, until her voice was gone. She had been hours under the sea, she thought, though the cold no longer seemed to touch her. It was magic at work, and she who had never done more than blow a kiss to the fairy forts to help pass safely by, was content with that: superstition could be winked at, but magic could not be denied. She stood, not surprised to find her muscles stiff, and looked up at the Serpent again. Its eye was lidded, barely a glimmer of light curving at the bottom, but something shone at the inner corner. Grace reached for it, then snorted at herself: the beast's eye was thrice her height; she could hardly hope to reach the distance up to its eye without climbing its face. Bold she might be, but not that bold.
As if it heard her, the Serpent opened its eye again. Grace swore she saw amusement flicker in its depths, before the monster shook its enormous head once and sent her bouncing across the sea floor and up into the waves.
#
She awakened on a beach, drenched to the bone and cold as a dead man's knuckles. She'd made a pillow of her hands and a stone while she slept, if sleep it could be called, and sat up rubbing at a sore spot where the stone had poked against her cheek. Even under the dull light of a dreary day—rain drizzled down and the sky was so uniformly grey Grace couldn't tell where the sun sat in the sky—even in that light, the stone she'd used as a pillow shone a deep grey opalescence, so liquid in appearance she prodded it to make certain it wasn't a puddle. It wasn't; the ache in her cheek told her that, but she prodded it anyway, then lifted it in her hands. It filled her two palms, its gently rounded bottom fitting against them nicely. The whole of it was roughly oval, but swollen to a nub at the top, like a tear frozen just before it finished settling from its fall. It hadn't the weight of a stone, either, any more than it had the look of the rocks on the rest of the beach: if she looked away from it, she could imagine she held nothing in her hands at all. Grace stood, the stone in one hand, and looked out to the water as if she might see a serpent's coil break the surface and sink again. There was nothing there but the choppy white of small breaking waves, and the arguments of gulls as they dove at the water. At least the storm was over, and if she hadn't come home direct to Clew Bay, then she had still survived, which was more than might be expected, even of the O'Malley.
She wrapped the stone in the extra fabric of her shirt—its saffron yellow was dulled by seawater now, and would need to be re-dyed—tied a knot to keep it from falling out, then struck out for higher land and a sense of where she might be. Far enough away from home that Croagh Padraig, the holy mountain, couldn't be seen once she'd found a hilltop to look from, but then, with the high fog, even the hilltop she stood on was shrouded. The wind, if it blew like it had done through all the summer, would be from the north, but Grace hated to set out only to learn she'd been going the wrong way once the skies cleared. By all rights the sea should at least be to the west, but she'd spent a night nestled with a serpent at the heart of the world, and she didn't like to chance it that all was as it might usually have been.
A cairn stood on a hilltop not so far away, and near the cairn, smoke from a fire made a line against the fog, before mist made the smoke its own. Grace, cursing the shoes she'd lost in the sea, made her way down the hill and through forest to the cairn-hill, where the smoke came from not near, but within, the cairn itself. She stopped short and cast another glance toward the sea, half-suspicious of mockery now. It was one thing to be faced with the Serpent of Eden itself, and another altogether to then march up a hill to a grave with living beings within. "I am the O'Malley," she shouted at the cairn. "If this is earth of the Tuatha dé Danann I mean you no harm and will leave you in peace!"
Silence met her cry: silence, and then the soft scramble of shifting earth before a child's face emerged from the cairn. A filthy child's face, with hair so matted and dirty it had no color of its own, and as human a child's face as ever there was. "My mother is Fúamnach of the Tuath Dé."
Grace crouched, her breath leaving her in a laugh. "And your father?"
The child shrugged. "A man."
"And yourself?"
"My mother's daughter, but nothing more. I have no old magics or godhead. I have run away," the girl declared. "I will not be of use to her in the only way the untalented daughter of a god might be."
"And what way is that?"
"She sups on my flesh and drinks of my blood to bring the power she wasted in making me back into herself." The child extended a hand to show Grace that three fingers were missing, and the dirty scars that said she had not been born without.
"Mother of God." Grim with curiosity, Grace added, "Why not eat you all at once?"
The child's gaze was flat. "Had I been born a son she would have, but a daughter has some power of her own, and not even a witch dares eat it all at once, for fear of losing herself to the rising magic. I cannot work magic, but neither can she eat me all at once."
"Mother of God," Grace said again. "How do I stop her from eating you?"
"Why would you do that?"
Grace's eyebrows rose. "We don't often eat children, where I come from. Much as we might sometimes like to."
The girl's expression became so suspicious that Grace laughed. "Children try the soul, girl, but we don't eat them. If you've run away I suppose you won't be calling your mother here, so tell me how to find her." She glanced toward the sea, hardly visible now beyond the hills, and muttered, "And tell me if the sea still lies to the west. I don't know this land at all, and I would have said I knew Connacht like the back of my hand."
"Some witches live in houses that walk the earth, that they may not be easily found. Others cast a glamor on the hills they call their own, that the mind slips and cannot see clearly when it encounters the witch's home. My mother lives in Mabh's tomb, but you'll never find her by climbing the hill and calling her name. You must enter my barrow, and go always to your left, even when the path leads only to the right. When you've gone thrice sinister a circle, you will find her by her fire, gnawing on my bones."
Grace glanced at her own fingers, the ones the child was missing. "They're thin bones there. Surely she's eaten them all by now."
The girl, filthy as she was, managed an even filthier look, and dragged both herself and a stick from the cairn. With the stick's help, she stood, letting Grace look her fill at a leg half missing. "She ought to have taken both my legs at the start," the girl snarled, "so I couldn't run away."
Sickness rose in Grace's gullet, though she didn't look away. "How do I kill a witch?"
"With the secret that birthed her," the child said, and to Grace's drawn-down eyebrows, bitterly, said, "You don't. You might bargain with her, but no human has much a witch desires."
"All I have with me is my own life, and that, I already owe to my people and my children. How can I help you?" Wind crawled up Grace's nape, ruffling short hair and lifting bumps on her arms. She would have said that witches and magic were not for the likes of her to truck with, but fate meant to say differently.
"You might steal me away," the child said hopelessly. "I might travel safely over the water, or not, but even if I should die on the salty sea I would die my own creature, and not my mother's meal."
"Now that I can do," Grace said with a smile. "Why would you die on the sea, when you sail with the O'Malley?"
"Because a witch can't cross running water wider than her stride," the girl said in a withering tone, "and I am a witch's daughter."
Grace gently set her teeth together, thinking of her own daughter Margaret, who was thirteen years of age and obnoxious, and did not sl
ap the tone out of the witch's daughter's mouth. "A daughter with no witchery of your own save the life in your veins, so perhaps not a witch yourself. Have you tried to cross water, child, or have you stayed on your hilltop here, like your mother Fúamnach before you?"
A look of guilt and shame skittered across the girl's face before she wiped it into defiance. Grace held up a hand, silencing the excuses that were no doubt about to come, then stood with a sigh. "Down the hill with me, lass, and we'll find a stream to see if you can cross it. At the worst I'll bring you home and wash you, and I'll find the filí to see what tales of witch's secrets he knows. And if I cannot squirrel you away, and I cannot defeat her, then thrice widdershins a circle I'll go and bargain with her, for there must be something a mortal lord can offer a witch."
The girl, leaning on her stick, swayed. "Why?"
Grace sighed again. "Because we don't eat children, girl, and this O'Malley, at least, knows what it is to defy fate and write it the way you wish."
#
The girl could cross a stream, though she stood a long time on the far bank after Grace waded through, staring at the water as if it might leap from its bed and drown her on its own. Grace waited, if not patiently, until the girl lurched forward awkwardly, with the air of one going to her own death. Her foot, then her stick, plunged into the water, and nothing more happened: no shrieking, no wailing, no melting, no—Grace didn't know, truth be told, what might happen to a witch trying to cross running water. Whatever worst it might be, though, it didn't come to pass, and the girl, astonished, came to stand at Grace's side on the near bank.
"There," Grace said. "We've learned a thing about you. What's your name, child?"
"I have none. A witch doesn't name her daughters, for a thing with a name is a thing defined by something other than its mother."
