Song of Ireland

by Juilene Osborne-McKnight

  “Come, Amergin,” she called over her shoulder. “We have three days to prepare your brother for the rigors of travel.”

  CEOLAS SINGS OF JEALOUSY AND DESIRE

  Even in her anger I desire her,

  the sweet whiteness of her skin,

  the lightning of her eye,

  her spirit like great water.

  Rigid am I; quivering with desire,

  my own anger turned against my brother,

  against his ways with women,

  his winning ways, his courtly ways,

  his ways that I despise.

  I suppose that they thought we three the most disposable of the tribe, but no matter. We were given our own wagon and no duties but to see to Bile. By day, we sang silly songs and took turns propping him against us by the rear opening so that he could see the countryside unfold behind him. When we stopped to set up camp, we got him walking around the circle on a little wooden crutch that our mother’s craftsmen had made; by a few weeks into the journey, he needed only a cane.

  He did not speak of the arm, or speak at all. Each time he tried, the sounds came out as a series of animal utterances, unintelligible as human speech. Skena and I took to interpreting his vocal clues and learned that “Ah” meant yes. For no, he simply shook his head; for all other wants he took to gesturing, eventually creating a language with his hand and face that only Skena and I could read. We two knew instantly when he was hungry or ready to walk. Sometimes when we were camped, I brought him his papers and his chalk. Bile would mime to me the things he would wish to draw; I would steady his left hand in my own right hand and let him guide our sketching. The sketches became more complex as our journey progressed, and eventually he was capturing the mountains and rivers, the trees and campfires of our journey.

  At night the three of us slept together in the wagon, Skena and I on sleeping platforms attached to the walls of the wagon, Bile between us on his little silken bed. I took to watching Skena as she slept, waiting for the moonlight to slip across her cheeks and illuminate the pale skin. I loved the way she shifted in her sleep and the soft noises that she made in her dreams.

  One night as I was watching her I looked down to see Bile, eyes wide open, watching me from his little bed.

  “I love her,” I whispered.

  “Ah.” He nodded simply, as if he had known all along, and I wondered if she knew as well, if she was aware of my longing stares, if she suspected that the poems I wrote and sang on Ceolas were all for her. I felt a great fool, until Bile patted my hand gently with his own little hand. From the moment that he returned to us, I had felt that he was, after all, the older brother, an ancient spirit made wise by its journeys, and I took comfort in his approval.

  But the next evening I returned to our wagon to the sound of my brother Airioch, making wry and pungent observations about our journey to gales of laughter from Skena. I had taken Bile to visit with Uncle Ith; the two of them were happily absorbed in Bile’s drawings when I returned to the wagon. I will admit it honestly, I hoped to spend the evening there with Skena, helping her with the simple domesticities of the wagon, engaging in conversation as we worked. But instead, there was Airioch, propped on one arm.

  I stopped outside the wagon and listened.

  “So the horse reared up and caught my brother in the chin. You should have seen him then; his eyes wept like a girl!”

  I could hear Skena’s laugh in response and then a murmured comment I could not understand. For a moment I felt a flash of jealousy that my older brothers were riding to horse on the journey, while I rode the wagon like a child. Airioch spoke again.

  “In truth I am not much better, Healer. All this jostling by horse and wagon makes the bones ache. That is why I have come.”

  I heard her murmur again, concern in the tone.

  “It is this shoulder, and my rein arm; they ache. Do you have a poultice you could rub in for me?”

  A pause.

  “Here, allow me to remove my tunic.”

  I came around the corner of the wagon and launched up the steps like a cat. Airioch was stretched out on my sleeping platform, his boots grinding dust into the linens of my bed. He was shirtless and propped on one elbow, his long, muscled body gleaming in the lamplight of the wagon. Skena was busy rubbing one of her salves into the exposed shoulder and down his arm.

  Rage pulsed through me as hot as coals. Jealousy. I wanted to stab his heart, to strike her down for her hands upon his skin.

  Airioch did not stir when I entered. He looked up, lazy and satisfied, a big cat before the kill. “Little brother,” he said. “Your good healer ministers to my aches. Already I feel better.”

  He took his large hand and closed it over hers where it worked on his shoulder.

  “I thank you, Healer,” he said. He brought the hand to his lips and kissed it, his eyes locked with hers. Something seemed to be working around her mouth, but she said nothing. Airioch stood, long and lean and shirtless.

  “I shall return,” he said, his voice fraught with significance.

  Skena nodded, saying nothing; she caught her bottom lip between her teeth.

  Airioch disappeared into the darkness. Skena dropped to her knees on the wagon floor, holding her stomach, absolutely silent.

  My anger was replaced by fear and I dropped beside her and lifted her face in my hand. Tears were streaming down her face.

  “Did he hurt you?”

  She placed her finger on her lips, then drew my head down until my ear tickled against her lips.

  “The salve,” she whispered. “It was fire salve. To warm the muscles. He kissed my hand. His lips will burn for days.”

  Then she dropped to the floor and, stuffing her face into Bile’s pillow, laughed until she had no wind left to her.

  All my anger left me, but I did not tell her that the place where her lips had touched my ears burned too. And yes, for days.

  All the way, in fact, to Galicia.

  7

  There! I had heard it again.

  From my perch in the top of the tower I heard soft laughter.

  For a fortnight now, when Bile had drifted off to sleep, I had climbed Breogam’s Tower to look out over the moonlit sea, longing for the north, for Inisfail.

  I did not know how soon my father would choose to depart, but for me it could not be soon enough.

  Here in Galicia, I was a stranger.

  I do not know what I had expected from my father’s country. I had lived in Egypt, traveled in Greece and Rome. Perhaps I had expected the alabaster palaces of Greece with their white colonnades, or the billowing silks of the Nile River palaces with their white light.

  Perhaps I had expected the worldliness of all those places, where all the citizens of the world contended together.

  Galicia was none of those.

  The countryside was rainy and green, swards of green hills down to the roiling sea. My kinsmen dressed in braichs, a kind of baggy belted trouser, and plaid cloaks, and dwelled in conical huts that reminded me of the slave huts of Egypt. They scattered brochs—huge stone towers with many levels—around the countryside and used them for both meeting places and storage holds for grain and supplies. Though their villages were well fortified, surrounded with circles of stone walls and laid out on a well-defined street system, they were not the great cities of Egypt and Greece. And though my kinsmen were prosperous, mining, herding cattie, farming the sea and the land and trading beautiful artwork to the Greeks, I missed the scrolls and libraries, the rich learning of Greece and Egypt—and was ashamed of myself for missing it. Here, the Galaeci spoke my father’s tongue, but in a rapid and inflected way that he had evidently forgotten, so that all his teaching of us was for naught. We sounded like foreign fools, stumbling over the language of our ancestors.

  Here in Galicia I was a stranger, but I wondered often if this was why my father had departed Galicia, the search for Inisfail an excuse merely, a ruse for venturing into the wider world. For surely my father’s restless sp
irit was too large for this place, for the repetitive days and nights, for the clans who had all known each other for generations and who now excluded us from the small borders of their world.

  Oh, they welcomed us well enough, my father’s cousins exclaiming over the return of Mile Easpain, the great warrior of Scythia and Egypt, but we were strangers among them. In truth, I could understand their suspicion of us. We traveled with Egyptian servants and Roman plate-ware, Persian cousins and fine silk garments. Never mind that we traveled in the same curved wagons as our kinsmen; our horses were fine Greek warrior beasts; our wagons were swathed in silks. Our women and our physician wore kohl around their eyes. We brothers were not all of the same mother, the same clan, or even the same country. And then, of course, there was Bile.

  They took great pains to avoid Bile, making small signs with their hands when they encountered him, but in truth, even my own father and my brothers avoided him as well. Only my mother visited him; Skena and I were his constant companions. Because of this, I too was exiled in their midst, and my heart grew hard at the treatment of my brother.

  To fit in with the Galaeci, my little mother abandoned her Egyptian ways. She took to braiding her hair with bells, and she wore the tunic and leathers of the women of the Galaeci. She learned to fight with shortsword and dagger from one of their warrior teachers—all women—and began to speak the language of the Keltoi exclusively, to the frustration of my father and older brothers, who had taken pains to learn the tongues of Persia, Egypt, Greece, and, in Airioch’s case, even Rome.

  Our attendant strangeness had made me even more reclusive than I had been in Egypt.

  And so I came to love this tower with its night fire encased in stone and its long views out to the heaving sea. Here Ceolas and I would sing, seated at the stone window, gazing out over the northern sea. Here my loneliness, my sense of belonging nowhere and to no one, grew, mitigated only by my time with Skena and Bile.

  From far below me came the sound again, giggling and then the low murmur of a male voice. A man and woman then, coupling. Well who was I to disturb them at their play? My loins tightened up at the thought. What man of my people and eighteen years of age had never bedded a woman? I felt suddenly ashamed of my own inexperience. Suddenly the woman cried out, as if in pain. Her cry was followed by the sound of a slap.

  I took the tower stairs two at a time. Outside in the darkness I made my way around the tower until I saw them. Airioch and a woman of the Galaeci. He was sitting on a patch of sand, leaning back against one of the great rocks which line the shore, and she was kneeling before him, riding him hard. Periodically he smacked her flank, and his teeth and tongue worked at her dark nipples, which were rigid with desire. Though I had never lain with a woman I felt my own manhood swell to bursting with need. I saw my brother arch against her, then sigh with satisfaction.

  “Go,” he said, smacking her flank again.

  She moaned and leaned into him, evidently not finished with her pleasure, but he set her off from him and pointed up the path.

  “Go! I am finished.”

  She said something unintelligible and angry and strode away, pulling clothing over her head as she went.

  My brother sat back and let the moonlight stream over him. He sighed with satisfaction. “Did you enjoy watching, little brother?”

  The hot shame burned up into my face.

  “Come out here.”

  I stepped into the clearing, my eyes downcast. “I heard her scream and I thought that someone was hurting her,” I mumbled. “I did not mean to intrude.”

  “You did not intrude. I knew that you were in the tower and I knew that you would hear us. Did it give you pleasure?” He stared hard at my braichs. “I see that it did not and I am sorry. I would have called her back to share her with you. It greatly enhanced my pleasure that you were watching.”

  “Enhanced?”

  “Of course. To know that you were watching me perform. I would have liked to watch you take her. You have never had a woman, have you?”

  I said nothing, not sure if I burned with my own lack or at his offer to share.

  “Too much time with our baby brother, I suppose.”

  “I love Bile,” I said defensively.

  “Obvious enough,” he said. “But he is not much draw for women. But for that glorious red woman, the healer. Oh, I do so like women.”

  “You seemed to like this one well enough.”

  He grinned at me. “She was willing. In truth, I like them all.”

  “You have bedded many?” I was ashamed of wanting to know.

  “Hundreds. All shapes and sizes and ages. Boys as well. Does that shock you?”

  “I know it is the Greek and Roman way.”

  “Very good, for that is where I learned my habits. You know little about me, Brother. I spent much time in Greece and Rome. There are many ways to pleasure, and I have tried them all. Galicia offers me new delicacies from the table, and a man should take his pleasures where he will.”

  “What of her pleasure?” I found that I truly wanted to know.

  He opened his eyes and regarded me coolly. “Ah, I hear the makings of a connoisseur. A woman can be pleasured. They are slow creatures, though, and it is only worth the effort if there is something to be gained.”

  “To be gained?”

  He smiled. “Yes. For example, once when I was soldiering in Greece there was a woman—much older than I, but married to a wrinkled ancient Greek near twice her age. I knew that if I could pleasure her, she would give me anything. So I took my time and did it well.” Here, he flicked his tongue at me. “And more than once so that she was besotted. And then I began to ask for things. Fine tunics and gold and a deed of land. All of these she gave. And when I had them and more, I asked for her handmaids to join us, and then her houseboys, and at last I could sate myself with her and with any person or thing of her household. I was sorry to be posted away from that little treasure trove.” He shook his head.

  I thought for a while about what he had said. “Does our father—cavort—as you do?”

  “Our father seems to have eyes only for Scota. And she for him. Even Eber Donn seems to have all that he can do to pleasure his three wives. But perhaps that is all that his paltry tool can do. You see what gifts I have been given.” He stroked himself once or twice and looked with affection at the huge shaft. “My soldier. Always at attention. And I like the games of seduction; I like best to win them.”

  He leaned back against the rock in the moonlight, sighing with satisfaction, content in his naked splendor. As I looked at him there, I realized that he looked like a statue of the Greeks, and then I knew, suddenly and certainly, why my father’s face shuttered each time he saw this brother. I tried to turn toward the sea to hide the knowledge, so that he would not see it in my face, but it was too late.

  “You are thinking,” he said, “that I was sired by a Greek. Do not fear to say it; I believe it to be so. Much better that than the little Gael you call your father.”

  “My father has given you a home, has treated you as his own son.”

  He inclined his head. “Well, he has given me a home, that much is so.”

  “What of Skena?” I blurted out suddenly.

  “Oh, I would love to bed that one. All that auburn hair and those eyes. And I think she is a virgin, although …” He fixed me with a stare. “Have you bedded her, little brother?” His tone was teasing. He met my eyes directly. “No, of course you have not. Well, then, fresh fruit. Though it would be much work to win her.” He sighed again. “All this talk of mating matters. I am ready again. I must go look among the willing. I did enjoy this conversation, little brother. It was, I think, our first as men.”

  He pulled on his braichs and sauntered off into the moonlight.

  I remained on the beach, deeply troubled, rigid with desire and shame, fearful that I would be just like him, not sure if it was a source of fear or of pride.

  CEOLAS SINGS DESIRE

  I b
urn.

  In the dark of the night I burn.

  Rigid with longing, I burn.

  Red woman, cailin rua,

  I am on fire for you.

  I sought out my uncle Ith. Since we had returned to Galicia he had taken to living among his fellow druids in the oak groves and the small stone dwellings that perched like mushrooms on the ground among the great oaks. Of all of us, he was most content among his brother and sister druids.

  I found him seated in a circle of sages, the wind lifting the sleeves of their white robes, all of them conversing on the nature of the soul.

  I stood at the fringe of the grove, waiting in silence, but he called to me, “Come sit among us, Nephew.”

  Again I felt a fool. Twice in the same week to be caught out as I lurked near the activities of my elders. I felt like a gawky, stripling boy of no experience, loud and awkward. I vowed at least to learn to move as the forest cat moves, silent on the ground.

  I came in among them. For two days, since my conversation with Airioch, I had been feeling confused and ashamed, half of me filled with longing; but now, in this oak grove, my curiosity lifted me out of my miasma.

  Here was the brother-sisterhood of the druii, the wisest elders of the Galaeci. All my life my uncle Ith had spoken of them. I studied their faces.

  The oldest of their company was a woman of indeterminate age, older than my uncle. Her hair, though thick with gray, cascaded around her shoulders in long waves of alternating dark and silver. Her eyes were luminous and deep, of some strange color that moved between gray and silver, so that the orbs seemed to catch and hold the light. I found myself staring at her, and she returned my look with such intensity that I could not look away.

  “Brothers and sisters,” she said. Her voice, though soft, was commanding. “Our little brother needs the company of his uncle. Shall we depart?”

  They seemed almost to vanish then, like blowing leaves of snow, their white robes billowing toward the trunks of the huge trees, fading into the forest and gone.