“And we have seen that Bres was a true friend and companion in arms,” said Banba. “The histories have painted him as traitor.”
“Well, whatever he later became, he saved the life of Nuada on that day. But I wonder at the arm,” said Eriu.
“Wonder what? It looked to me as though the weapon operated on the same principal as Metaphor and Transport do, rearrangement of the molecules of matter, water, air.” Fodla waved her hand in the air at her obvious and simple conclusion.
“That, yes, but what of history?” asked Eriu.
“Ah … I see what you mean.” Banba closed her eyes. “The histories say that the physician Dian Cecht created the arm for Nuada after his had been lost in war. They say nothing of the arm being already created and ready.”
“Precisely.”
“And yet we have seen him using it on the Plain of Many Towers on that very day.” Fodla shook her head. “How was it done?”
The Sisters fell into a long silence, curled into their chairs, deep in contemplation. Long moments passed. Then Eriu gasped.
“Sisters, hear me now. For our ancestors have given us the answer. They did not shift the molecules of matter, water, air. Not on that day. They shifted time!”
“By the Danu!” said Banba. “I see it too. They slowed it down.”
“But how was it done?” Fodla shook her head.
“I know not, but I know that we must know. Somehow, in that timeshift is the answer to our problem.”
“Then let us return to them,” said Banba. “I welcome the task.”
“You would,” said Fodla.
“I think we must ask the Ancient. Airmid the Physician,” said Eriu. “Perhaps she will know or remember.”
Suddenly there was a soft, hissing sound in the wall and a door slid open. Illyn moved through, her slippered feet quiet on the stone floor. In her hand she held a tray filled with fruits and small crystal candies. Steam rose from three clay goblets bearing warm honeymead.
She set the tray on the surface of the rock.
“How did you know we were here?” Banba snapped the question at her. Illyn’s eyes went wide.
“Have I done wrong? The Ancient wished for you to have libation. She said that it is time for you to rest from your labors.”
“Banba.” Eriu wheeled toward her sister. “You frighten our Daughter of the Braid.”
Banba stood and threw her arms around the child. “I am sorry, truly. I am so sorry. I fear that the Morrigu will find us here. We try to prevent a war of the Silver Arm. Of course the Ancient knows that we are here. It was she who warned us. O Danu, I am babbling.” She released the little girl, who stepped back immediately and hid her hand behind her back.
Eriu knew that she made her own people’s ancient sign against the evil. Eriu sighed.
The child heard the sigh, pulled the hand forward from behind her back, guilt washing across her face. She twisted her hands together.
“No, child,” said Eriu softly. “You need not hide it. These are troubled times; we are all filled with fear.”
Illyn’s huge dark eyes filled with tears. “They will not hurt my mother, will they?”
“The Morrigu or the Invaders?”
“I know that you will keep the Morrigu from her. But the Invaders. I think that they grow closer.”
“Have you seen them?” Banba asked, her voice imperative. Tears sprung into the little girl’s eyes.
“Sister!” said Fodla. “Surely the Chamber of Memory makes you more irritable than usual.”
Banba hung her head.
Eriu sat and opened her arms. Illyn launched herself into the huge chair, snuggling up beside Eriu. She leaned her head on the little woman’s shoulder. For a time, Eriu stroked Illyn’s long, dark hair. She loved the silky feel of it between her fingers, remembered the days eight years ago when Illyn had first came among them, when Eriu had calmed her by washing and braiding and flowering the rich tresses. This child of the Fir Bolg was the closest thing that Eriu had to a daughter, and she loved her as she would her own child.
“You have been on the surface, haven’t you, sweeting?”
Guilt flashed across Illyn’s face, but she nodded. “I was afraid for my mother. I thought that I would go to her, but when I got to the surface I thought that I heard music. It was sad and angry all at once and I grew afraid.”
“Would you like to see your mother?” Eriu asked softly.
Illyn looked up, hope spreading across her features. “Will she know me?”
Eriu closed her eyes. They had let her return once, when she was eight years old. She had accompanied Illyn then, cloaked carefully in Metaphor. The child’s mother would not come near her daughter, repeatedly making the sign against the evil in the air. At last Eriu led a weeping Illyn away. Only when they reached the edge of the village did the woman come dashing after them, slipping from tree to tree. Though she would not approach them, she called from hiding. “Woman of the Danu!”
“Eriu,” she called back, thinking that a real name might calm the Fir Bolg woman. But the woman made no connection between Eriu and her name.
“Woman of the Danu! Do you keep my child safe inside her?”
“Inside Illyn?”
“Inside the girl that you call Illyn?”
Eriu understood then. The girl that the woman had left to die in the forest was not the girl that she saw now. That child of four years had had a clubfoot and a harelip. She had been mentally deficient and had possessed no speech. How could the woman recognize the fleet and beautiful Illyn with her quick speech and bright mind? So Eriu replied, “I do. I keep your child safe inside her. Illyn keeps her safe.”
From behind the tree, she could hear the caught breath, the muffled sob.
“Then I thank you and I am in your debt.”
Now Eriu stroked Illyn’s hair. “I think,” she said softly, “that she will see you as the bearer for Illyn, that she will believe that inside your beauty is the wounded child of the forest. She may not know you as Illyn, but she will revere you as keeper of Illyn.”
Illyn sat up straight. “I do not wish to frighten her. That is how I will introduce myself. ‘Keeper of Illyn,’ so she will not be afraid.”
Eriu felt the tears well up in her eyes. Not for the first time, she wondered if they had done the right thing in rescuing the abandoned children of the Fir Bolg, in using all of the skills of healing and ReBraiding to right them physically and mentally. Now they were children of no tribe, neither Fir Bolg nor Danu.
She felt Illyn’s soft hands against her cheeks.
“We are the Children of the Braid, Eriu. Do not fear for us; we know that we belong among you and are loved.”
“You are wiser than we are,” said Banba. “I am sorry, little Braid sister, for my quick tongue today.”
“How lucky we are that you are among us,” said Fodla.
Eriu said nothing, used the sleeve of her gown to wipe away the copious tears that flowed from such large eyes.
“I will send three Danu with you, two warriors and one woman. All of them will go in Metaphor. You may take with you any other children who wish to see their tribe.”
“You will not go with us?”
“No, we will watch by the sea while you are gone.”
“You will look for the Invaders?”
Eriu nodded quietly.
“And may we warn the Fir Bolg of them?”
“I thought perhaps that was why you wished to go. Warn them, Illyn, but do not frighten them. The Invaders look for land or cattle or riches. Your people’s country is stone and bog and far to the west and north. I do not think the newcomers will wish the harsh lands of the Fir Bolg. Only say that some are coming from the sea. And specify the south.”
Illyn leaped to her feet, her twelve-year-old frame bursting with energy. “Lest they think the Fomorians have returned.”
“Precisely,” said Eriu.
It crossed her mind that the newcomers could prove to be as bad as the Fomo
r. Or worse.
16
“How long did it take to make the Silver Arm?”
Airmid, daughter of Dian Cecht, the most ancient physician of their created race, was one of the original children of the Braided Ancients.
Although she had lived now for almost three millennia and looked every day of her years, even at this great age she was busy in her lab, her eye glued to some instrument, searching out the patterns below the lens.
She leaned back and regarded the threesome for a long moment and then smiled, a toothless upfolding of the lips that seemed so reminiscent of an infant smile that Eriu turned her head to hide the answering laughter.
“Why don’t you ask what you really want to know, Sisters? And did you rest as I asked you to do?” No trace of the infant in the acerbic directness of the question.
“We rested and partook of—” Eriu began, but Banba cut her off.
“We want to know if they somehow shifted time to create the arm,” Banba said, ever blunt. Eriu realized with a start that a thousand years hence, Banba would be this very woman, looking infantile and cherubic, with speech as caustic and direct as a spear.
The old woman set down her instruments. “Not precisely. Why do you ask this question?”
“In the Chamber of Memory, we saw Nuada lose the arm, saw him return on the same day in the same battle with the Silver Arm upon his own.” Eriu shrugged. “Biology alone would tell us that such a thing could not be possible.”
“It was not; he was badly maimed. Even with all of our skills, the arm would have required some time to heal. So Dagda moved him to an alternate leaf, and Bres with him.”
“Dagda himself?”
“An alternate leaf?”
The old woman sighed. “It is strange how the story of my life has become the history of your generation.”
“Well it was more than three thousand years ago,” said Banba.
Eriu glared at her for letting her acerbic tongue run away.
“Not to me,” said Airmid. “To me, it all seems as present as you three. They were a threesome, you know. The first Council Triad. That is how they were created by the Makers, as a Thtitle.”
“It was large work. It was Dagda who organized the people in the camps, who created the three-pronged attack. My father, Dian Cecht, coordinated the medical care so that we could be renewed and healed. Dagda was the provider, the great engineer. He created the Silver Arms. A dozen of them. Nuada, my uncle, was the chief warrior and negotiator. How he wrangled from the Creators ships and Penitents and provisions I do not know to this day. I do know that the Creators wanted to destroy the arms. As weapons they had been too effective in the BraidRising. But Dagda negotiated for those that remained. He argued that we would need them to protect ourselves in the new world and that the ancient world would be safer with them gone.” She smiled again. “You have heard the Teller say that Gorias provisioned us with Invincible Spear Arms?” The Sisters nodded. “Well they did not provision. They relinquished. They gave up the arms. They did it to get rid of us.”
“You were born on the ancient world?” asked Banba, hearing the tone of deep bitterness in Airmid’s voice.
“I was. I was a child, I and my brother Miach, two of the Firstborn of Joining, natural births resulting from mating between two Braideds. That alone terrified the Makers, that we could reproduce all on our own apart from science. They feared that we would multiply and take over the world, long-lived, self-healing, intelligent. They feared that they had created a master race who would enslave them. They were right, of course, to fear the arms.” She shook her head.
“And how many of the arms still exist?”
“Three. We never used any of them until Nuada, but we lost almost all of them. Only three remain.”
“We lost them to the humans?” asked Eriu, a note of alarm in her voice.
“No, thank the Danu. When the great volcano destroyed our island in the Internal Sea, the entire armory was lost. We can only hope that it tumbled to the bottom of the sea and will never be found by humans. One can imagine what they would do with such a weapon.”
“And those that remained?”
“Three arms. My father had been keeping them in his BraidRoom, had been working to alter them so that they would slip on like a glove, so that each finger would articulate a different purpose. Only those three remained, and it was one of those that Nuada used.”
“But as to the alternate leaf?” said Banba, direct and hurried.
Airmid grinned. “I like you, girl. You remind me of me.”
Eriu laughed aloud. “She reminds me of you as well.”
“Never mind,” said Airmid. She patted Eriu’s hand. “You are triad leader. You are supposed to be the diplomatic one. As Nuada was. They can’t all be like us.” She winked at Banba, who made a face at Eriu.
“Now. The alternate leaf. Fetch me that silver spear,” she said. She pointed at a thin silver needle stuck upright in a base of gold. Near the base, a series of small, bright leaves of silver and gold fluttered in the constant breeze of the recycled air.
“It was supposed to be a replica of the spear used in the Fir Bolg war. I thought it a particularly stupid thing to commemorate, so I use it to incise reminder notes to myself,” said Airmid.
At this all three sisters laughed aloud.
Airmid pulled all of the bright leaves with their hieroglyphic markings up and over the top of the spear, their little rips increasing in size as she did so.
“Very well. Pay attention, girls; you may ask questions when I’m finished. Most people think of time the way you see this spear, a long straight line with a defined beginning and a defined end. That is a simplistic and inaccurate view of time.”
She took a blank silver leaf from her table. On it, in the stick-letter language of their ancient world, she wrote the words “City of the Danu.” She slid this slip down over the spear. A little tear increased in size as she lowered the leaf onto the spear. Next she took a golden leaf. On it she wrote, “Plain of Mag Tuiread.” She slipped it down over the spear and lined it up so that it was precisely over the first slip.
“This is how it happened, is it not? At precisely the same time that we physicians were below the earth preparing for the wounded, Nuada and Bres were above the ground engaged in battle.”
“Obvious enough,” said Fodla.
“Now I ask you to alter your thinking. Pretend for a moment that the spear is all of the universe, all of life, all of time. On successive leaves she wrote “BraidRising,” “Star Journey,” “Greece.” She slipped these down over the spear and fanned them so that they looked like the petals of an exotic gold and silver flower.
“What if these things are occurring always, at all times?”
“Not possible,” said Banba.
“Not possible if you are standing on a single petal. But what if you could jump from petal to petal?”
Eriu shook her head. “I do not understand.”
Gently Airmid reached down and caught at the bottom petal, the one she had labeled “City of the Danu.” She pulled it so that it was out of alignment with the slip labeled “Plain of Mag Tuiread,” so that they intersected only at the triangle of their base.
“O Danu, the monoliths.” Eriu gasped it out.
Airmid clapped her hands. “My good wise girl; I am most proud of you.”
“Call me stupid,” said Banba
“But we still do not see,” Fodla echoed.
“It works thus,” Eriu began, but Airmid held up her hand.
“They are Danu; let their own good minds work upon it.”
Banba and Fodla circled the spear with its bright petals. At last they looked up.
“Each petal exists in its own time, separate from the others,” Fodla said slowly.
“Yet each intersects at the base in a … O Danu, in a triangle.” Banba sounded excited now.
“And so,” Eriu continued, “the wedge-shaped passage graves, the stone circles, the pyramids, the trian
gles we wear at our necks, all of these are doorways, or reminders of doorways, passages between … between what?”
“The time in which we dwell,” said Airmid, “and the time as it moves here on the Green Orb.”
“Why are we not taught this? Why do we not train in this timeshift?”
Airmid shrugged her shoulders. “Would you train the wind? The stars? This is how the universe is made. We discovered so on our travels across the stars. There are places out there”—she waved her hand skyward—“passages, if you will, where time shrinks and we can jump through space and time. Do you see the little tears in the paper?” The Sisters nodded in unison.
“In those passages are entrances and exits to worlds and times aplenty. Accidental doorways, if you will. We came here through one doorway to the Green Orb. It took us a very long time to harness the secret of those passages and doors. For a time we thought that Metaphor might be sufficient to protect us, but when it became clear that our knowledge and longevity were at least as frightening to the creatures here as our appearance, we knew that we would have to find a way to protect ourselves. You know that some of our brothers and sisters journeyed here to the north and built the monoliths, but they vanished. We suspect that they were destroyed because the locals feared them. And so we built these cities; we ourselves think that they are beneath the ground, but they are not; they simply rest on a different leaf of time.
“So that we might not be so alone here on the Green Orb, we opened doorways—the passage graves, the standing stones. The dwellers on the planet believe that we have armed our entrances with lightning bolts. We ourselves speak of arming the doors, but in truth we do no such thing. Instead we launch ourselves through miniature versions of the passages in space, time corridors, if you will. It is part of the reason we live so long. This petal of time in which we dwell grows slowly. Were you to live constantly among the surface folk, your life would be shortened. Just as it will be shortened by your use of the Chamber of Memory. You do not so much see our history there as reenter it. Through a tear in time. For that you will pay a price.”
Song of Ireland Page 13
