Macha nodded. “That is why I ask. For that one moment, I will not be lonely.”
“And for this you will kill none of them?”
“None until they come for us in battle.”
“And if they do not?”
“They will, Eriu. They are human. Generation after generation, they make war on each other. Morrigu has depended upon it for thousands of yearss.”
Eriu held her hand forward. She leaned back hard against the rocks. “Take it,” she whispered.
“I will remember this,” said Macha. “For you and for yours I will remember.”
And she closed her hand around Eriu’s own small hand.
25
“What did they do to her?”
“I know not. Her eyes are bruised and swollen and she cries out as though she is asleep.”
“All our time in Lia Fail did not weaken her like this. Only Airmid looks closer to death!”
“Banba! Hold your tongue!”
“I am afraid, Fodla. What should we do without her?”
“I fear to wake her with the sorrowful news.”
“We must.”
Eriu opened her eyes to find her two sisters bent above her bed and whispering. She smiled softly. “I do love you both.”
“We know that,” said Fodla.
“It was awful, wasn’t it?” asked Banba. “You should have let us go with you.”
“She asked to hold my hand. For that she promised not to kill the Invaders unless they come against us in battle.”
“For holding your hand?”
“That cannot be all; you look like a ship that has washed against the rocks.”
“I tell you now that was all. But it was enough. What she contains is terrible beyond belief. All of the darkness, all of the evil of all of the worlds.”
“You pity her?”
“No. And yes. She chooses for darkness. But I pity anyone who dwells in those choices. At the same time that they fill me with loathing.”
“Are you well enough to rise, Sister? We bring news.”
“Airmid has passed? Her work in the dolmen took too much of a toll upon her?”
“No, she is at the shore,” said Banba.
“At the shore? When the Invaders are nearly upon us!” Eriu sat up. “Is she maintained in Metaphor?”
“Something has washed up on the beach,” said Banba.
“Someone,” said Fodla. “A woman and a little boy.”
Eriu leaped to her feet.
“The Banbh said that there would be dead in the water.”
“The Banbh?” asked Banba, her tone cross.
Eriu waved her hand. “They tried to join us. The Macha sent them away. Now come, we must go to the sea.”
For a moment they stood silent at the headland. Below them Airmid worked feverishly, waving her arms at the Light Spear warriors who ran for the portal.
“At first the people thought a porpoise had beached,” Fodla whispered softly. “Or perhaps one of the seal folk. When they realized what they were seeing, they posted a guard.”
“Against the Banbh?”
Fodla nodded; she pointed skyward. Ravens and gulls swooped and circled.
Eriu moved to the shore with a heavy heart. She stepped to the first figure on the sand.
It was a woman, pale and heavy with child, her long hair matted against her head like seaweed. Airmid had lifted her gown to expose her pale skin. Over her swollen belly she had placed a long transparent strip. Near the woman on the beach was a small boy, now pale as the moon, his sightless eyes wide.
Eriu knelt beside Airmid. “Is there any hope for them, Ancient?”
“Not for the woman or the boy,” she said, shaking her head sadly. “They were too long without breathsong.” Suddenly she pointed, trembling, to the long clear strip, which had begun to pulse with faint red rhythms. “But look you now! The womb-child lives. It lives! Hurry, daughters. Send for bier bearers. We have much work to do.”
“Surely the Danu watches over both of us with this blessing.”
Airmid nodded. “Then pray that she continues to watch. She is not out of danger, this little one; look how tiny she is, nearly as small as a Danu babe. Too early; we have been forced to bring her into the world too early.”
The baby was suspended in fluid in a tube which hung from the ceiling in Airmid’s Healing Chambers. Lights of various warmth and colors shifted position on the infant.
“What is this chamber?” asked Eriu softly.
Airmid sighed. “It is my father’s womb cradle; this is the way the Homeworld made him; remember that the Braided Ancients were not born of women, but of science.” She shook her head. “You see now why such practices were banned, and yet, with this tiny child, my father’s womb cradle will sustain her and allow her to grow. She dwells in her mother’s own fluids. How sometimes we receive gifts from sorrows.” She smiled. “The Mother never wearies of finding ways to care for us.”
“Why did the child live?”
“Because her mother was so cold; because inside her mother she was so cold. Because she did not need breathsong to live. The boy and his mother were too long without breathsong under the cold sea. Had they been there less time they too might have survived. The cold slows all of the processes of the body, it … suspends. It holds functions in a kind of stasis.”
“Imagine the joy of a man of the Invaders who finds that his child lives, that something of his love for his woman has survived,” said Fodla.
“You cannot tell him!” Airmid shook her head. “No. You must not!”
“But, Ancient,” said Eriu. “We must. She is not our child.”
“Her survival is not yet guaranteed, Sisters. You look into the womb cradle and you see a little child. I see a child that has been too cold for too long. Will all of her functions return? And what of her mind? I see a child who cannot yet draw breathsong. She cannot be removed from this cradle.”
“For how long?” asked Eriu.
“These humans carry their infants for nine full turnings of the moon. This wee one I judge to be at six turnings.”
“We must keep her a secret for three months?” asked Fodla.
“Well, what else would you do? Would you bring him here to see her, this Invader father?”
“If we do, he will return to his people a withered Ancient,” said Banba. “He is not one of us.”
“No, nor Hybrid,” said Eriu softly. She looked at the tiny child. “Nor is she.”
“No,” said Airmid. “We have brought her here among us and we can raise her here among us, but she is neither Danu nor Hybrid.”
“So she cannot return to them. By Danu, what have we done?”
“Now you see our dilemma,” said Airmid softly. “And why our ancestors so struggled with this knowledge. And why they outlawed Braid Creation. And why my father chose for Miach as he did. And why it took so long to change our laws even to allow ReBraiding. It slips away from us like water, the answer to this question; soon it becomes a raging cascade.” Airmid sighed. “Should we have let her die, Eriu, her little heart beating away inside the womb cradle of her drowned mother?”
“No!” said Eriu in horror. “To abandon a child of the Mother that way! Never.”
“And yet,” said Airmid, “we must now answer a great question. If she were a child who could not breathe, or a child with a missing limb, or a child whose mind was trapped inside itself, I could alter her braiding, rebind the sequence with our own braid, correct the problem. The laws that we have revised permit us to do that; to return a child to normalcy. Then, like Illyn and like we of the Danu, this little girl would be so long-lived that she could come and go in both worlds as she pleased; the added age for moving in their world would not even show upon her, as it does not show on Illyn.
“But she is a perfect human child. They age much more rapidly than ours. Their leaf of time progresses much more swiftly than ours. She will have to remain in the womb cradle for three more turnings of the moon. And t
hen what do we do? Do we take her back among them, she appearing suddenly as a woman of bearing years, but with no speech and no experience of one that age? Would they believe she was one of them, or would they think her bewitched, a creature of their superstitions fit only for burning or drowning or exile? Or do we wait until she is of bearing years and then take her among them, a woman in her late years, past her bearing, a woman raised by Danu, speaking Danaan, possessed of Danaan knowledge, thrown suddenly among humans?”
“So we must raise her here,” said Fodla quietly. “The only one of all of us who can never leave the confines of Tara.”
“Or braid her,” said Banba quietly. “This you could do, Ancient. A healthy human braids well with Danu. This we know from those who have been born of both. Lugh. Bres.”
“But those were births of mating between a Danu and a human. The law does not permit me to alter that which the Braid has made whole. The law provides that I can repair and mend and heal. I cannot wholly alter that which is already whole.”
“What should we do, Ancient?” asked Eriu softly.
Airmid walked over to the womb cradle where the infant was sucking on its thumb. “I don’t know,” she said softly. “I did what a healer does; I saved the life of a child of the Mother. Now I do not know what to do. My life seems to have been composed of these choices.” She shook her head. “I will do the only thing I know to do. I will prepare her mother and her brother for burial with all the love and care of the Danu. I will hide the fact that the womb-child is no longer within the mother. I will bring this child healthy into the world. I will love her as if she were my own child, but I will give her no name until I know their tongue. The language of the Invaders. And then I will give her one of their names. That will be her braid. Beyond that, I cannot say. She is here among us; it is done.”
For a long moment the Sisters stood in silence; then Eriu moved to Airmid and put her arm gently around the tiny woman’s shoulders.
“Come,” she said. “We will help you prepare their dead for the journey.”
PART THREE
I SING THE LAND OF ERIU,
MUCH TRAVELED ON THE FERTILE SEA.
FERTILE THE FRUITED MOUNTAIN,
FERTILE THE ABUDANT WOOD,
SHOWERED THE RIVER OF WATERFALLS,
WATERFALLS TO LAKE OF DEEP POOLS,
POOLING DEEP THE HILLTOP WELL.
A WELL OF TRIBES BE GATHERED
A GATHERING OF KINGS AT TARA;
TARA BE THE HILL OF THE CLANS,
THE CLANS BE THE SONS OF MIL;
MIL OF THE SHIPS, OF The GREAT BARKS.
THE HIGHEST BARK TO ERIU,
LOFTY ERIU, WIND-SUNG
A CHANT OF DEEP WISDOM …
I SING THE LAND OF ERIU.
THE INVOCATION OF AMERGIN
26
I came to shore a broken man carrying a broken child on my shoulders.
Skena and Ir were waiting for us.
The were laid out on a bier of some kind of transparent crystal, their heads raised as if they gazed out to the west.
I have seen the drowned before; many have perished in the Internum Mare. Someone had ministered to them with love and care. Skena’s auburn hair had been washed and braided with flowers, and her face looked in repose as it had in life, gentle and full of love. She was dressed in a white gown of some iridescent material. Ir was curled into her arm, his little body seeming to sleep with his head on her shoulder. Someone had positioned their hands so that both the hand of Skena and the hand of Ir rested gently across our unborn child. Between her feet was the cup of Ith, the gift that he had carried with him across the water. It had been filled with iridescent stones of blue and gold.
Somehow the kindness of it, the beauty, opened the wide doors of my sorrow. I dropped to my knees on the sand and wept in great, gulping sobs, much to the embarrassment of my brothers, who made signs against the bier and would come nowhere near me or it. Though I knew that my behavior was unseemly for a warrior, I am not one of them. I could no more have stopped my tears than I could have stopped the wind. I could not even let Ceolas sing our gratitude for this kindness, so shaken with sobs was my body.
Bile, on seeing his two beloved ones so carefully adorned, could not stop vocalizing, circling the bier, throwing his one arm into the air over and over and crying out “Ah, ah, ah” like a wounded, lopsided seabird. Pity for him moved me to further weeping.
At last, my mother came up behind me and rested her hands on my shoulders. “See where they watch us,” she whispered, inclining her chin toward the top of the cliffs. “Consider your duty to the tribe.”
There on the headland were three women, dazzling, beautiful, obviously Greek from their white gowns to their elaborate cascades of curling hair. The wind caught at their gowns and swept them out to the side so that: collectively they looked like a sail. It was that image which brought me from my sorrow; I looked back at our own ships, at our people unloading goods and gear. I sighed and stood.
I gathered Bile into my arms and half carried, half dragged him away from the bier. He leaned into me as he had when he was first injured, but his body, now at twelve years, was much larger and harder to carry.
It struck me that all the work that Skena had done, all the wonders that Ir had wrought, were lost to Bile now; he was as inarticulate and uncoordinated as he had been when he was first injured. In the short three days since Skena and Ir had disappeared into the sea, Bile had retreated into the body of that child who had been broken on the wagon wheel. I did not know if we would ever bring him back.
An Scail had been standing a little way behind me, silent and still, her white-clad body in an attitude of waiting. I came to stand beside her, deposited Bile on the sand. He curled into himself, shaking and vocalizing.
“Bile is most troubled,” I said softly.
“Skena and Ir are here?” she asked quietly.
“They are, Wise One. I apologize for my grief; when I saw them I could not contain my sorrow.”
“Never apologize for love or sorrow,” she said softly. “Your weeping will help to cleanse your heart and make it ready for what must be done here. Describe to me what you see.”
For a moment I felt startled—it was the first time that An Scail had ever asked me to describe our surroundings. And then the strangeness of all of it washed over me. She needed my descriptions because, for the first time in her life, she had departed from Galicia. No longer did the tower and the oaks, or even the roots of trees, dwell in her memory. I came out of myself then, forced myself up from my own sorrow.
“You would not have come if Ith had not died,” I said to her softly.
“No. But I must now take on the burden that he would have carried. I must be eyes and ears and wise choices for you and for our people. That is what Ith would have wished of me; I give it gladly.”
The greatness of her sacrifice strengthened me for my own; I bent myself to the task of describing for her what I saw. “Three women watch us from the headland.”
“How do they appear?”
“As Greeks in both clothing and mien.”
“Describe Skena and Ir to me.”
“Skena and Ir have been cared for; they are washed and dressed and flowered, laid on a crystal bier.”
“So they do not burn their dead.”
I was startled at the conclusion, saw its correctness immediately. “On such a bier they could not. Their faces are raised as if they face the west.”
“And in their care of our dead, they show themselves to be a civilized people. People who know that the soul continues.”
“Yes, I can see that conclusion.”
She nodded, gestured for me to continue.
“We have anchored in a great, round bay at the mouth of a wide river that winds in toward the land. Here, the hills slope upward toward the headland. The sea is richly blue, the land green and forested.”
An Scail nodded. “That is all well. Describe for me the women on the headland.”
I did so, observing their blowing white gowns, the long, ringleted hair.
“Red hair, black hair, and golden hair, you say?”
“Yes, all long and perfectly coiffed.”
“Hmm. We will speak to these three, I think. Let me walk on your arm.”
Bile, who had been sitting on the ground beside us vocalizing, suddenly stood and raced around to An Scail’s other side, threading her hand through his one good arm.
“Bile,” I said gently, but she raised her hand at me.
“I thank you, young man,” she said in a dignified voice. “In this new country I am blind. You must be my eyes and ears.”
He seemed to draw himself up, ceased vocalizing. Once again the wisdom of An Scail penetrated my grief.
I offered her my other arm, and together we made our way up toward the headland, surely the three most broken members of the Galaeci to make a first impression on those who dwelled here.
When we were halfway up, Airioch dashed up behind us, his heels kicking up sand.
“Wait until you see them,” he said, excitement threading through his voice. “So beautiful. And the gold and jewels.”
“You shall not accompany us,” said An Scail. Her voice brooked no disagreement.
“But I have met them before. They are the Sisters, Banba, Fodla, Eriu.”
“Yes, and you must tell us later of all that you learned of them, but for now we must form a new and first impression of our own. Return to the work of the ships.”
I did not tell her that he had been doing none of that work; in truth I myself had been doing none myself, though not for lingering.
Airioch returned to the beach and began to give orders to Greeks and Galaeci alike.
When we reached the Sisters, I could see that in person they were more beautiful still, tiny women who just crested five feet, perfectly shaped in their billowing white gowns, their exquisite hair. Only their eyes seemed a little off, not quite the size or shape or color that I remembered the dancing eyes of the Greeks. They wore no jewels, no gold or silver, but for odd triangular shapes at their throat, crystalline, each incised with three spiraling and intertwined vines.
Song of Ireland Page 20
