by Brian Hodge
“If people know the story, instead of the bullshit you told Ethan and me…don’t they look at you weird, naming your place what you have?”
“Well, ‘tis a very old tradition, and I’ll not be the one to break with it,” Fergus said. “But it’s not a problem. They just think we’re a rude load of buggers. There’s an old saying, see. If you want to stop someone talking about something unpleasant, why, you ‘throw mud in the mouth of Oran.’”
“I know you didn’t tell me that to explain an old proverb I never heard,” she said, “so I’m afraid to ask what it has to do with tonight.”
“Many a thing, but the main one…? Amongst these isles and the people who’ve always called them home, there’s a long, strange history of heads having their say well past the point you’d think they could. We’ll start with that and take it from there as needed.”
“Christ, you don’t mean that we’re on the way to—”
“Hush yourself,” he said, with a hand light upon her shoulder. “Show some reverence, even if you don’t feel it.”
They had gone past the darkened cottage, a whitewashed hulk with a thatched roof, to a lower, flatter building—a stable, perhaps. It looked as though it could have been standing as long as the stones in County Mayo, built from the ground up with wide, flat rocks fitted together with patience and mortared into fortress-like walls. She saw a pair of armed men, silhouetted on the roof like gargoyles, keeping a silent watch.
At Fergus’ knock and a word, they were let inside, then the heavy door was secured after them with an iron bolt and a wooden beam. She wanted to stoop, the roof just inches from her head. Fergus, hand still on her shoulder, led her past a half-dozen others who milled about in the glow of lanterns hung from walls and rafters. Most of the lights were gathered toward one end, around a pair of long worktables pushed close together, with just enough room to walk between.
“Aw, jaysus,” Fergus groaned after he’d taken a moment to stare down at what the tables held.
These are real, she had to force herself to acknowledge. They’re not latex in a movie. These are real.
“Look hard,” he told her. “See what it is you and your fella have done.”
“Fergus,” Kathleen said sharply. “You don’t know that yet, but even if we learn the worst, there’ll be no blaming her. ‘Twas sure to happen in one generation or the next, or the next, and if after centuries of peace it’s happened in ours, then it’s ourselves that bear the blame, because we grew careless enough to let it happen.”
Fergus lowered his head with a disgruntled murmur, but disputed nothing.
“Years ago, we used to guard that yew, same as those before us,” Kathleen went on. “Then we must’ve thought we knew better—silly old tradition, what’s it matter if we’re lax? Well, I never heard you once raise your voice in objection—or any of yez here, or myself for all that—because it saved our arses some cold nights, didn’t it? So. There’ll be no blaming her.”
Easier decreed than lived by, Pandora feared.
Two men, one upon each table: They looked, she thought, as bodies would have looked long ago when brought home on ox carts from battles fought with swords, axes, sledges—things that hacked and things that crushed. From knees to scalps, they were rent with lacerations that laid them open to the bone, even into bone. One man she recognized from the music sessions in the pub, a blond-haired fellow in his early thirties whose fingers, broken now, seemed to never hit a wrong note no matter how fiercely he picked and strummed his cittern. His head hung by scraps of gristle and bone. She didn’t recognize the other…but how could she, with such damage to his skull?
Pandora asked their names and was told; could not force out the words to ask why, with all that the talented Sean Reardon had suffered, they were making it worse. Hadn’t his body been savaged enough already?
Evidently not. Using a knife that she imagined had cut into countless sheep, an older man finished taking off Sean Reardon’s head, then passed it to a woman who wore a cowled cloak against the chill. She dipped a cloth into a bucket to wash his cheeks, his forehead, his sparse, blood-matted beard. Pandora thought that would be the end of it…until this surgeon, butcher, whatever he was, began slicing into the chest and the lower stump of the neck.
“You don’t need to keep looking,” Fergus whispered into her ear. “This is ugly work, I know.”
“If it’s my fault,” she told him, “then I’ll watch.”
Perhaps it was easier to take because of the tenderness they showed the body, in spite of what they were doing to it. This was not mutilation for the sake of spite, not even when they used shears to snap through the upper rib cage and expose the top half of Sean Reardon’s lungs. Pandora wondered if the woman half-hidden in the cloak was his wife, or lover, summoned to perform the last kindness she could, softening the barbarity of the ritual. If so, her composure and grace were remarkable.
A few minutes more and the cutter had freed what he wanted: the ringed length of Sean Reardon’s severed windpipe, removed just above the point at which it branched into the bronchials. This too they washed, and trimmed its tattered upper end. By the time they rejoined it with the head, tightly stitching the trachea back to where it had been parted from the upper neck, Pandora was past the worst of her revulsion.
He was a stranger to me. It’s not like Ethan. A stranger, she thought. So isn’t there beauty in this…?
There had to be. It lay in the care, the devotion…
She turned a questioning glance to Fergus, then mouthed, But why?
“If they’re to speak, they need to breathe,” he told her. “But the dead can’t breathe on their own.”
The woman who had washed the head now held it as carefully as she might a newborn, supporting its weight while the windpipe dangled loose…then Kathleen knelt and grasped it and put its free end to her mouth.
“Few can do this,” Fergus told her, “but some have been able in Kathleen’s line, as far back as we know it to go.”
Spellbound by the soft glowing lights, the dance of shadows across expectant faces, she watched as Kathleen exhaled breath after slow, gentle breath through the remnants of Sean Reardon’s airway. She could hear it leaking from the head…sighing through the nostrils, where popped a bubble of watery blood; puffing free at the slack corners of the mouth. She’d heard Ethan’s breath escape like that sometimes, when they would talk late into the night and fall asleep together on the sofa. The tongue peeked out next, forced by air pressure…or so she thought until it dragged itself on a slow path from one dry corner of the mouth to the other. The eyelids eased open, no more than halfway, but good god, they’d moved, the eyes staring even though they seemed not to focus, and now the lips began to quiver and the chin to twitch.
And while the breath may have been borrowed, Sean Reardon rasped out a groan that was very plainly his own.
Pandora couldn’t help herself: “No…fucking…way.”
She’d heard of heads lifted from baskets beneath the blades of guillotines—how they stared in shock with eyes still bright, how their mouths struggled silently to convey some final message that was lost forever, because they had no breath to carry it. Poised for moments between life and death, what secrets might they have had to tell, if only, if only? She wondered if what she was witnessing was less an act of magic than a titanic act of will from a fading ember of spirit that hung on as long as it could in hopes that it might be permitted one last declaration.
Words were exchanged—Gaelic again, forever keeping her on the outside—but Sean Reardon’s were few, brief, and ragged, and soon extinguished as the eyelids drifted shut and the breath Kathleen gave was spent, sputtering through flesh that was now truly dead.
Judging by the somber faces all around, the news they had gotten was as bad as they’d evidently feared. Together, Kathleen and the other woman returned the head to the table, to reunite it with its body.
The skinny old man who’d done the carving cursed. “So much for hopes
‘twas some escaped nutter, who we’d find dead of his own wound soon enough.”
“And that,” Pandora said, “would be the good word and aim of Gerry Fallon?”
Fergus nodded. “The same.”
“So, even though from the way it sounded earlier, that it was just a temporary solution, who’s he supposed to have shot?”
“Have you not suspected already? If you were to go back to the yew, it’s a dreadful surprise you’d be getting from who you wouldn’t find there.”
She must have shaken her head, something. It’s what you did when you reached your threshold of the impossible. Ethan…? Okay, work with it. The second point, maybe, from the tale of Oran and from Columba’s dismissal, accurate or not, of the message his friend had relayed: It’s not Oran anymore, but something that’s usurped the rightful place of maggots so it might take up its own residence inside.
“In Ethan…there’s a demon?”
“That depends on your perspective.”
For the first time, the woman who’d washed and cradled Sean Reardon’s head spoke. She stepped closer, away from the tables and the pair of slaughtered men, and now, no longer distracted by the carnage, Pandora noticed the face inside the hooded cloak.
“The way it sees things, I’m the demon,” she said. “Even though we’re both creations of the same god.”
I’ve never seen you, not even in my most hopeful dream, Pandora thought, but now that I have, I would know you anywhere…
“We’ll leave her to you,” said Fergus, and Pandora almost answered him, until she realized the obvious: He wasn’t talking to me.
VII
Her name was Maia, and she should have been dust. Before the first blocks were laid for the Acropolis and the Tower of Babylon, she should have been dust.
Online, Pandora had encountered much rumor, much speculation about her—much bullshit, as she understood now. Know-nothings had credited Maia and her two Sisters with everything from plagues and miracles to the rise and fall of empires.
What Pandora thought most likely to be true were the relatively few details contained in the brief autohagiography of Saint Patrick the Fallen: that Maia and her Sisters had been born ordinary women in Assyria, where they had become concubines of King Sennacherib; that they had been betrayed and abandoned to the Hebrew king Hezekiah after the Assyrian army’s failed siege of Jerusalem; that the god of Israel had ravaged them with a triune fate, beyond death but with an eternal hunger for the bodies and essences of mortal men…
Lilah, their flesh.
Maia, their blood.
Salíce, their seed.
Pandora sought her face for some sign of origins in the Middle East, and in her dark hair and eyes it was there to be found…but over more than two and a half millennia her countenance had assumed a translucent luster that seemed to transcend race. She could live anywhere, belong anywhere, and be revered.
Yet her splendor had been shaped by sorrows above all. She was as beautiful now as she must’ve been during the siege of Jerusalem, when her babies had been fed to appease a demon unleashed by her king’s sorcerers, after it had turned on them. She was as beautiful tonight as she would’ve been the day in Belfast when, after seven-year-old Patrick Kieran Malone had nearly been killed by an I.R.A. bomb, she kissed the blood from his knee and tasted his destiny. She was as beautiful now as she had been during the years she’d watched Patrick grow; as the day she took him as her lover; as the evening she’d drunk his tainted stigmatic’s blood to steal secrets from Heaven; as the night she and her Sisters consumed him.
And Maia would be beautiful, Pandora knew, long after she herself had turned to dust.
The surprise, after encountering Maia in the first place, was that the cottage and the stable where the dead man had spoken were hers. For one who’d slept in palaces, it seemed so…prosaic. After Fergus and Kathleen and the others had left, she had taken Pandora in, away from the sight of butchery, and made a pot of herbal tea for her. Tea, for gods’ sakes.
“The stone, the carving,” Pandora said, and thought of it sitting on the dresser in her room. She wished she’d thought to bring it, a talisman to touch in the night. “You left it for me, didn’t you?”
“You seemed to need it,” Maia said.
“You watched me…? The way you watched Patrick?”
“Does it matter?”
Did it matter? Pandora almost laughed. Did this woman not know there were people out there who longed for such a thing to happen, who prayed for it…present company included? Did it matter? It was only the most flattering thing she’d ever heard.
Only moments later did she look at it from the other side, sensing what an awful life it would be to spend it forever out of reach of the maternity that Maia had briefly known, then had ripped away. Lifetimes of letting herself be drawn to surrogates, who often never knew she existed, and watching them grow, flourish, mature, wither, die.
Because of the sustenance Maia was forced to rely on, she was a monster—or so said traditions all over the world—yet Pandora could not see it. The only monstrosity she could recognize was whatever had turned its wrath upon the people of Glenmullen. Why—because Maia lived as one of them?
“You didn’t stay in Dublin,” Pandora said, thinking of the estate Patrick had told of, where the Sisters of the Trinity had lived in privilege and privacy it would’ve taken an army to breach.
“How could we, if we were going to release what Patrick had written? We could’ve been seen for who and what we were then. We would’ve been too easy to find.” She smiled, an enigma. “We had been there long enough.”
Now she lived in the same simplicity as a villager whose family had been bound to the same land for generations, surrounded by roughly plastered walls, unvarnished timbers, heavy crockery. The obvious carryover were two of the mastiffs Patrick had mentioned patrolling the grounds in Dublin, of a lineage that extended back to the war dogs of ancient Rome. Bulky masses of muscle and black and brown fur, they had padded agitatedly about for the first few minutes after Maia had brought her inside, and now watched her from the floor with their great heads settled upon their paws.
“We distributed his bones within the first month,” Maia said, “and within the year had made all the arrangements we needed to disappear. We decided against remaining together, because Patrick had described us well, and we were determined not to change a word of what he wrote…even if it meant the three of us might be easier to recognize for those who knew what to look for.”
Years apart, even decades—what would it matter for those unbound to time? They could reunite a generation later and it would be as a vacation to the rest of the world.
While there was no reason to think that all three Sisters had remained in Ireland, Pandora suspected they had. Even before Maia confirmed it, the pattern implied by the shrines became clear: one shrine in Dublin, near the home they’d abandoned; one Sister and a shrine she kept in the south, another in the west, and Maia with the fourth shrine here in the north. Had no one else discovered this, or even suspected it? Online, would-be acolytes had described so many futile searches in Dublin—or claimed success in what were obvious lies—that she’d thought it pointless to try looking for them.
“You risked everything,” Pandora said, and almost asked why. She didn’t have to ask. She knew why. If she hadn’t already known why, she never would have made this journey in the first place.
Patrick himself had written all the explanation anyone needed: As for me, I’ll not mind leaving bones, and I hope they keep them around, gnawed and clean, true relics for the inspiration of disciples yet to come. In this plaintive statement of faith, he seemed to have foreseen his own future in the quiet but ongoing and perhaps even doomed struggle against their common enemy, described by Maia in sadly lyrical terms:
“Imagine an arrogant and greedy and demented child on a beach, building castles in the sand…only to kick them over out of boredom, leaving what’s left for the waves. Which of course begs
one more question:
“Where did the sand come from?”
Pandora had memorized that years ago, even if she thought it too gentle. Call such a god what it was: a monster that had taken credit for a world it had never created, and grew bloated on the suffering and misplaced faith of the innocents mired in its deserts and mud.
“You’re too generous,” Maia said. “Patrick risked everything. The people of Glenmullen, they risked. You’ve risked, because you believed enough to bring yourself this far.” She looked to one side—at the rough white wall? “My Sisters and I…? We’re better at inspiring risk than assuming it ourselves.”
No, not the wall. At the stable beyond the wall, and the carcasses inside.
“But let’s forget that for now,” said Maia. “You came here for something you’ve left undone. You never visited the northern shrine, you only thought you did.” She stood. “Come. I’ll take you.”
Pandora thought of the wounds she’d seen, of Ethan resurrected, of the violence that she had unwittingly instigated. “It’s not safe out there.”
Softly, Maia uttered some word that brought the mastiffs snapping to their feet.
“Why would you think it’s any safer in here?” she said.
VIII
With the moon ducking in and out from behind low clouds, the path they walked was barely visible, little more than a furrow in tall grasses that led through bowers smelling of autumn and farmland nearing the end of its season. Now and again they would cross a clearing, still close enough to the heart of town that she could see it, a small scattering of dwellings and other shelters huddled together against the dark. Periodically the crack of a gunshot would pierce the gloom, or a shout; less often a scream, lingering like a wound in the chilled air.
“I don’t understand. Ethan would never do this.” Pandora blinked at the tears burning their way through. A wonder they’d waited this long. Until now she wouldn’t have believed it possible for the same long night to be both the best and worst of her life. “Isn’t there anything of Ethan left inside?”
