Little Bile accompanied us to the stone-and-cedar circle, my mother being occupied with Ir and with the suckling of her newest babe. To distract Bile and his seven years while we worked on our lessons, Uncle Ith had given him Egyptian parchment, with a little collection of paints and pots. He had become an artist of some little skill, capturing ships and sails, birds, and even the faces of our clan.
Now my uncle Ith looked up at the approaching form of Airioch and then down at the drawing by my little brother. Though Bile had well captured Airioch’s tall, rangy form, the golden hair that fell constantly forward over his eyes, Airioch’s form was surrounded by a smudgy nimbus of gray.
“This is what he does,” I whispered to Ith. “His humans … billow, in various colors. Their edges are never sharp.”
“Hmm.” Ith looked down the hill at the approaching form of Airioch. “Bile,” he said, sharply.
My little brother looked up at him.
“What mean you with the shadow of Airioch? I see his shadow before him on the ground, long and thin, the morning sun behind him.”
Bile smiled happily. “Not his sun-shadow, Wise One. His other shadow. The one that comes from his body. It grows larger than once it was.”
Ith regarded Bile seriously. “Can you describe it to me?”
“It is not the same as yours.”
“As mine?”
“Yours is gold, like firelight.” Bile smiled in delight.
“So. So. And gold is a color that you favor?”
“I favor you because of it. You are always warm.”
“That we all know well enough,” I interjected.
“Hush!” Ith held his hand up toward me. He was entirely focused on Bile. “And your brother Amergin here?”
“Oh, his is blue and green and sometimes silver. Like the sea or the bending trees in wind or rain.” He smiled up at me. “Your shadow is most beautiful, Brother. When I see it, I feel …” He tapered off, looking off into the distance. “Forever.”
“What does this mean?”
Bile shrugged. He returned to his drawings, Ith and me forgotten.
I looked toward my uncle; Ith was staring down the hill at Airioch, who would be upon us momentarily. I regarded his face, felt surprise course through me.
“You like him not! He is my brother, your nephew. He is clan!”
“Clan is all of creation!” Ith snapped. “Have you not been listening to my teachings?”
“Do not avoid me, Uncle. You are my teacher. You have taught me to question all of creation, all of life.”
Ith looked at me directly. “What do you know of this brother of Scythia?”
“But little. He is the son of my father’s first wife. She died in his birthing. He is more than twenty years older than I.” I shrugged. “I know little else; like my father he is a soldier. He pays me no mind. What do you know?”
Ith looked at Bile, at his little drawings. “This little one sees well; we will begin to train him in his drawings.”
“That is no answer.”
“Men choose their destinies, Amergin; remember this. A man’s character is his destiny. We are not born to our character; we choose it with each small action of each day, accruing light or darkness to us, putting light or darkness into the world. That is my answer. Now Airioch is upon us.” I watched as my uncle composed his face, smoothing out his features, dropping into a practiced smile. It was the first time that I had ever seen anything duplicitous in my uncle. Surely my own astonishment must have made me slack-jawed.
“Welcome, Airioch, son of Mil. What news do you bring us?”
Airioch made a formal inclination of his head and shoulders. The golden brown hair dropped across his eyes, as always. He regarded all three of us.
“Well, brother Amergin. You seem surprised to see me.”
I felt a flush begin to rise in my cheeks.
“I am indeed surprised, Brother. Though not by you. For Uncle has just told me that the star maps change their faces in the southern part of the world. So he has learned from the Phoenicians and the Greeks.”
Why had I lied?
“Is that so?” Airioch asked, his voice utterly uninterested. “Well, our uncle has much knowledge. But I bring news. Your mother is well and walking, her newest spawn fit now to travel. Our father says to set aside your studies and prepare. We will journey within the week.”
He turned, his cloak swirling around him. He began to lope down the hill, his stride tipping left and right for the angle of descent. We three were silent. When he had gone far enough away, Bile drew a deep breath and exhaled.
I turned to my uncle.
“I would know,” I said.
He pointed at the top of Bile’s head and pressed his finger to his lips. Later.
“We have much to do,” said Ith.
Bile looked up and smiled at us both. He held up his little drawing. He had begun to sketch a ship in full sail.
3
Most of the stories of my life I have learned from my uncle Ith, who had learned the great tradition of the seanchaie of the Keltoi and knew how to keep even a great crowd rapt with his telling.
Once, though, when I was young, my mother told me a story.
We had gone to Rhatokis on the great Internal Sea. I loved the sea, the wash of the waves against the rocks, the smell of far traveling places, and I told my mother that we should move our household here beside the sea.
“Oh no, my dreaming boy,” Scota replied. “You do not wish to live by the sea. She can rise and overwhelm the land with no warning at all.”
“Not so, for see the gentleness of these waves upon the shore.”
My mother smiled.
“When I was much upon the age that you are now, my father, your grandfather, told me a tale.” Here she turned to look at me. “I wish that you had known your grandfather. He was an emperor in Persia, where we come from in the long ago.”
“I remember well,” I said, more anxious to hear the tale than to speak of him. In truth, he had been dead before my birth and I thought of him not at all.
“Good,” said my mother, smiling. “I should not wish him to be forgotten.” She wrapped an arm around my shoulders—even then, I remember, my head was nearly level with her own—and pointed out across the water. “My father said that long, long ago, the gods grew tired of the ways of men, so tired that they created a great flood. The seas rose up and overwhelmed the world.” She pointed at the vast body of water before us. “This sea itself stretched across all the lands around us, they say. My father swore that there are ancient cities drowned beneath the sea. The rage of the gods was so great that all of humanity was destroyed.”
Though I had not yet begun my training with Uncle Ith, I fancied myself a budding philosopher, so I applied my child’s logic to the tale.
“This cannot be,” I said. “For surely if the gods destroyed all humans, you and I would not be here.”
“Ah, my little Greek,” said my mother, ruffling my hair. “But the story goes that one of the gods had grown fond of these human creations. That god chose a man named Atra-hasis, who was wise and soft of speech. To him, the god gave the warning of the waters. He told him to build a great ship and to put in it his own family and two of every creature on the earth. Thus did they ride out the flood of the world, and thus, slowly, was mankind restored. For his work in saving all the creatures of the world, Atra-hasis was rewarded with immortality.”
“What god would destroy its own creation?” I demanded.
“I am not a philosopher like you, Amergin,” she answered, smiling, “but it seems to me that if the gods indeed created humans, they created also trees and earth, river and sea, and even the great crocodiles of the Nile. Surely mankind is the most difficult of the creations of the gods, for do not the Egyptians call us the tears of Ra? Why should the gods protect mankind above all their other creations, for surely they must be proud of all that they created?”
I remembered thinking about her answer for days
afterward, turning it over in my head, seeking out the idea of what the gods themselves might hold sacred. Or disposable.
And I thought of that story again as we fought to load our wagons and our wretched, balking horses onto our Greek cargo ship for the final leg of our journey to Spain. Immortality did not seem gift enough for Atra-hasis, if this was what he had to endure with all of the creatures of the world. The horses kicked and snorted, their eyes wild, their ears drawn back. They stamped their hooves among the wagons and pulled on their leads as we tried to drag them to the cargo holds.
Oh, you gods! Why did I not see then what would befall? Where were my powers of observation when the horses shifted their weight in fear? Had I known what was to come, I would have stayed on the island of Gotia forever, never again to think of Inisfail.
We made landfall well enough, our ships coming into a quiet harbor on the far eastern coast of Spain. Our mother disembarked with the two babies and her waiting women. We brothers and our retainers stayed on board to move the horses and the wagons.
We managed to get the kicking, snorting beasts onto the deck, but from that point chaos reined.
I saw my brother Airioch sidling among the horses, looking busy enough, but doing nothing to hold them. My uncle Ith called out to him, “You know they like you not, Nephew. Go ashore and there await the wagons!”
I saw the look that Airioch returned, full of disdain. Who was he to take direction from our uncle, never mind a druid? He moved among the horses swiftly and they snorted back from him. I saw my brothers Eber Donn and Eremon try to calm the beasts, blowing into their nostrils and talking softly. But just when the horses began to calm, the boat shifted on the incoming tide. One of the wagons was standing at the head of the gangway, awaiting the horses to draw it to shore. With a creak, it began to plunge down the gangway, then to tilt toward the water. This spooked the horses further. Three who were not tethered reared up in fear, then plunged toward the selfsame gangway, manes tossing and eyes wild. They divided around the wildly tilting wagon the way the crowds parted for the pharaoh of Egypt. Two careened to its port side, thundered down the gangway beside the wagon. One veered stupidly to the side nearest the edge. He slipped and dropped over the side, rear legs landing in the water, forelegs hammering a terrified staccato rhythm on the boards as he tried to drag himself back up to safety. Other horses witnessing the scene began to buck and scream, to tear their harnesses loose from the hands who held them. A wild parade of hooves and manes pushed against the shifting wagon as all cascaded toward the docks.
And standing just below the onrush, his mouth agape, his eyes wide, was Bile.
I knew then what would come.
“Bile,” I screamed. “Bile!” But by then it was too late.
The stampede roared over him like a tide. I watched in horror as he was trapped beneath them, hooves and wagon wheels, flopping like a whitened fish out of its element against the shore. Finally his cloak caught in the rear wheel spoke of the wagon. The wagon thumped over him, then rolled him up in his cloak like a shroud, like a mummy of the Egyptians, tipped to its side, and fell.
Strangely, because the cloak had caught the outside edge of the wheel, the wagon did not fall on Bile. Rather, it pulled him up into the air, onto the surface of the wheel, and, still spinning, wound in his cloak like a shroud, he circled endlessly as the assembled company grew still.
I heard my mother’s wail split the silence at the same time that some fool began to scream. I saw my uncle Ith approach me and say something, but I could not hear his words for the caterwauling of the fool. His hands came up suddenly beside my face and he clapped me on both sides of the head. The screaming stopped.
I launched myself toward Bile in the selfsame moment that I realized the screaming had been my own.
I halted the wheel and examined him.
The cloak had wrapped itself tight around my little brother, and his face had a grayish cast. I pulled my close dagger from its sheath and began to slice away at the plaid. Immediately, his face regained some color, but it began to swell and distort, like the face of a bloated fish. He coughed and sputtered.
One of his legs was bent and broken in several places. Though his body was tightly wound in the cloak, blood had begun to seep through the fabric. I placed my hand at the side of his neck, where the heartsounds are strong, but could not find the rhythm.
“Physicians!” I cried, looking around wildly.
I saw my weeping mother straighten, hope moving over her face. In the tongue of Egypt she called for the healers who had accompanied us, but Skena, the meiga, a midwife healer of my father’s people, reached us first.
She was young, only some five years my senior, and her knowledge would be for the birthing of babies and of elixirs and tisanes for cough or wounds. I could see the panic in my mother’s eyes.
“Where is Mehmet?” my mother demanded, searching the crowd for the surgeon of Egypt who journeyed with us.
“In the hold,” Skena replied, “caring for those who did not voyage well. Fear not, Scota; I will hold your child’s life as mine until he comes.” She moved toward Bile.
“Send for Mehmet!” my mother cried commandingly, pointing to her household staff. “Tell him Scota, daughter of Pharaoh, commands him. Now!”
They scurried to do her bidding while Skena bent above my brother. She turned to me and spoke softly.
“Cut him away from the wheel, Amergin. We will lift him to the ground.”
I did as she bid me and together we laid him gently behind the tumbled wagon. At Skena’s command, I cut away his cloak and peeled it back from him, thinking all the while of the death bandages of Egypt. My screaming had given way to silence, and I could not speak at all. When we had cut away all of the strips of cloak, I looked upon a sight the likes of which I have never seen in my life.
My baby brother’s body was a pulpy mess, bruised and bloody. His leg was broken in three places and his face was swollen and bruised. One of his eyes had disappeared into the pulpy mass of flesh that was his face. And oh, his arm! His right arm dangled just below the elbow, from a single bloody thread, the forearm and hand hanging loose into the air. Blood gushed everywhere.
To her credit, Skena was efficient and quick. She grabbed strips of the bloody cloak and tied them just above his elbow, stopping only to command me.
“Break me a spoke of the wagon, Amergin. Now twist it tight until all the bleeding stops. Now raise his little legs. Higher. Good. The blood must go to his heart and his brain.”
Mehmet arrived accompanied by my father, who had stayed behind to see to the unloading.
“What has happened?” my father demanded. “Will it hold up the journey long? We have been delayed enough!” He pushed around the cluster of my brothers and their wives. When he saw Bile, he fell silent.
Mehmet knelt beside Skena, his white tunic shrouding my brother. Skena bent her head before him.
“The leg and arm are beyond my skill, Physician. And the rest.” She gestured at her own head.
Gently Mehmet examined my brother with his long, thin hands. Then he turned his full gaze on Skena, his huge dark eyes with their kohl rings taking her in. “You have saved his life, Meiga,” he said. He turned to my mother. “Her speed and skill have let your son live to fight the day. Now we must work to bring him through the night.”
He turned back to Skena. “You will assist me. Who else?”
She pointed at me. “Amergin will do well for his brother.”
Mehmet nodded. He scanned the crowd until he saw my uncle Ith. When their eyes met, Mehmet raised his two bloody hands and held them up at either side of his head. Ith came immediately among us and knelt. He held his own hands at either side of Bile’s head and began to chant. I will remember his words all of my days.
“Eistigi, eistigi,” he began.
“Hear me, hear me.
Here is the soul of Bile
Do not hide it from us
O Maker of the world
R
eturn his spirit to us
Full of song.
Here is the body of Bile
Our brother and our child
Do not return it to earth, O Maker
Give us the skill to heal
Come you now to Bile
O come you now
O come you now.”
Over and over he chanted, and while he sang, Mehmet worked. He instructed our men to build a tent over us. They did so, attaching canvas to the wagons and shoving poles into the ground. At the edge of the tent he requested fire and water and sent his apprentices to find a cold stream with fresh water.
The hours of day passed into night. Ith chanted, his face a mask of worry, while Mehmet and Skena wrapped my brother’s head again and again in cold compresses, set the leg against strips of polished wood, cleaned and washed the wounds. All the while Bile uttered no protest, made no sound.
“Why does he not protest at the pain?” I asked once. “Surely, we wound him with our ministrations.”
Mehmet shook his head, his hands never stopping. “His head was injured, whether by wagon or horses we know not. You see how swollen it is?”
I nodded.
“To protect the spirit encased there, all around it has swollen like a pillow. The mind itself, so fragile in its casing, has retreated, to allow the healing to occur.”
I shook my head, not understanding.
“His spirit travels,” said my uncle Ith. “It departs so that the healing of the body will not affect the spirit.”
Mehmet nodded at this explanation, evidently finding it satisfactory.
I took the nod to bode well. “So he will return to us as he was before.” Mehmet sighed and leaned back on his heels.
“We cannot know that yet. The brain inside its casing of skull is fragile and soft.” He cast around for a comparison. “You have been to the sea and seen the jellyfish that sometimes wash up on the shore.”
Song of Ireland Page 3
