Even the sceptical Alan couldn’t deny his curiosity. ‘What the blazes is that, Grandad?’
‘Well now!’ Padraig’s lips crinkled into a wry smile. ‘Will you take a look at the weapon that killed Prince Feimhin!’
‘I don’t understand!’
‘I was impetuous, foolishly arrogant. Not a lot older than you and young Mark here. My father brought me to the grave and explained it, much as I explained it to you. But there was a single difference. This battle-axe adorned the lintel, just inside the entrance, as if to ward it. Though hoary, with three thousand years of patina, yet it had resisted decay – much as you saw with Feimhin’s blade.’
Alan stared at the weapon, which was about three-quarters the length of a long bow, with a central hilt between two heavy blades, curved like opposing scimitars.
‘What are you saying – this is what killed Prince Feimhin?’
‘Cleaved right the way through helm and head! Sure didn’t I hold it square against that terrible wound to confirm my suspicions, soon after I had first cleaned and oiled it? Everything fitted exactly, like the pieces of a jigsaw. This is certainly the weapon.’
Padraig took a firm grip of the central stock of the battle-axe with his right hand, allowing it to twist and turn with a balanced flexion of his wrist. The bright-cut patterns decorating the cutting edges glittered. Alan realised that the patterns were not mere embroidery. They appeared to be invocations, but drawn in a very different script from the Ogham they had seen in the burial chamber.
‘It doesn’t look like any battle-axe I’ve ever seen.’
‘Of course you’ve seen many ancient battle-axes!’ The old man laughed at his expense. ‘But you’re right – there’s none to my own mind that is remotely like it. From the shape of it, I believe it’s intended both for close quarter hand-to-hand combat and most particularly for casting.’
‘You mean, like throwing?’
‘Indeed!’
‘Can I hold it?’
‘You may – but be prepared! It’s quite a weight.’
Padraig laid the axe across the palms of his outstretched hands so Alan could take it in both hands by the central stock.
‘Careful now!’
‘Oh, baby!’ Heavy was an understatement. Alan found that he was pressed just to hold it steady in his hands.
‘Study its geometry carefully, its curves and patterns. As you’ll discover, it’s not flat, but subtly curved in three dimensions. The work of a master craftsman – truly a fearsome weapon!’
Alan felt a curious thrill just to hold it. ‘You’re saying that this belonged to a Fir Bolg warrior?’
‘I would assume that you’re holding the weapon of a warrior prince – a leader of that race in his own right!’
‘Man! This is really what killed Prince Feimhin?’
‘I’m certain of it. Haven’t I studied that axe for most of my life? But even in all that time I’ve glimpsed no more than a hint of its potential. I’m going to attempt a demonstration. See – I’ve set up the target yonder.’
Padraig nodded to the stump of a tree about forty yards away, close to where the track took off into the woods. It was perhaps a foot in diameter and stood about six feet out of the earth.
‘I’ll attempt a single throw. No more! I’ve learnt from experience that use of the weapon draws deeply on the thrower, in body and spirit. It’s my guess that the inscriptions you see on the cutting edges of the blades were meant to be invoked in the act of throwing. I cannot read a single character of these but I’ll make do with a mantra of my own. In the meantime you should all stand well clear.’
They drew back and watched.
Padraig closed his eyes, rocking slightly on his feet as he searched for balance in his grip about the stock. Opening his eyes again, his gaze focused on the distant tree trunk. His right arm sprang back in a curve, muscles standing out like hawsers. In that same movement, his head inclined so that his line of sight was one with the target, and then, as a low-pitched growl of song burst from his lips, the weapon leapt from the twisting curl of his wrist.
The battle-axe whirled, making a low humming noise, as if in reply to the invocation of Padraig’s chant, while the four friends watched in astonishment. When the axe struck the tree trunk, the dense wood shattered, as if struck by an explosive missile. But still the humming and whirling continued. Only the pitch changed, signalling what appeared to be an impossible change of direction, as the spinning blade wheeled around in an arc, heading back to be grasped, as if in a consummation of purpose, by Padraig’s upraised hand.
With gasps of awe, the four friends gathered around Padraig, witnessing the discharge of spiritual tension that exhausted him as he slowly fell to his knees and, with a reverential right hand, laid the battle-axe on the ground.
That night Alan woke from sleep with the memory of Mo’s sweet song to the mountain like a caress in his mind. He sensed what was coming.
He murmured, ‘No!’ But it was a token resistance.
The wave came, more gentle than before, a slow rise over many minutes, washing over his skin like a mist of kisses, as though this time the seduction was meant for him alone. His mind opened out onto the vast panorama that bridged the valley, until the vision of the mountain filled all of his senses. He felt its breath touch the membranes of his eyes. He tasted the exultation of its longing on his tongue. His body unfolded to the ecstasy of the calling, embracing every delicious mote as it flowed, in streams and rivulets of abandonment, through the inner spaces of his being.
Day after day, blue smoke rose from the soot-stained steel chimney over the corrugated iron roof of the old forge. Here, in the summer’s heat, the pulse of the hammer rang out, steel-ringing and clear, disturbing the blackbirds, robins, blue tits and sparrows, and causing them to shriek outrage at the invasion of tranquillity in the broken walls, hedges and hinterland of trees that framed the mill yard. And meanwhile, the days passed by in a blur of enchantment.
Indeed how else could they think of it but as enchantment, days and nights that were woven with spells of seduction, a calling every bit as strange and inexplicable as the caterpillar entombed in its cocoon of magic, from which the magnificent new being, the moth or butterfly, would ultimately appear? An enchantment in which the last vestiges of rational resistance, the last clinging to orderly commonsense, were abandoned to the waves of calling, no matter that, in their more lucid moments, the four friends sensed the anguish of having to say farewell to the world they had been born into, with its comforting bedrock of reason.
It was frightening to accept that there was no logical explanation for what was happening to them. That there was no way of dealing with it other than to embrace it.
And yet it seemed curiously unsurprising to discover that, night after night, all four friends were now sharing common dreams – dreams of Slievenamon, and its ageold history, of the brutal conflicts that ebbed and flowed around its breast of stone. Dreams of battles in which a prince with blazing eyes laid siege and broke through wooden forts atop mounds of earth, to end in slaughter. Dreams about the eternal movement and murmuring of the three rivers, the Suir, the Nore and Barrow, which flowed about the mountain’s skirts. And dreams about the peoples who lived about their shores and adored them before the coming of the Celts. Whispers, sometimes, of the names of people, like the Tuatha De Danaan – and others, the strangest visitors of all, beings that came as lights, or masks of fire, who brushed their minds like Lords of Magic, as though to promise truths and wonders beyond human logic and comprehension.
If, in their waking moments, they knew that such things made no sense, that what was happening to them couldn’t possibly make any sense, it no longer mattered. They had moved beyond caring whether things made sense any more.
One morning Mo followed her brother as he entered the forge at first light. She stood just within the open door, and watched, in fascination, as Padraig kindled a battered cob pipe from a piece of red glowing iron, humming some lines i
n the old language, then dowsed the fierce metal in water, so it hissed and spluttered, with his smoky blue eyes sparkling.
‘Wh-whu-what are yuh-yuh-you doing, Mr O’Brien?’
‘Aha – it’s you, Mo. Come looking for the meaning of dreams?’
Mo’s eyes widened. ‘Do yuh-yuh-you know the uh-answers?’
‘Hasn’t young Mark here been asking me the same questions? My answer to you, as to himself, is that you’re sharing the memories of the mountain.’
‘Buh-buh-buh-buh—’ Mo shook her head in frustration.
‘But mountains don’t have memories? Is that what you wish to say?’
She nodded.
Padraig stopped working and arched his tall body back beyond his centre of gravity, as if to ease a nagging ache in his spine. His chest above the broad belt holding his trousers was only partially covered by a scarred leather waistcoat. He looked over his shoulder to where Mark was stirring a bowl full of engine oil. ‘If your brother is determined to make himself useful, he’d do better to work those bellows.’
Mark’s face was already awash with sweat from the heat. He was stripped to the waist, and covered in streaks and smudges of soot. He winked at Mo as he started to pump the big wooden paddle.
Mo turned back to Padraig. ‘Wuh-wuh-wuh-will you explain … how muh-muh-mountains have memories?’
Padraig withdrew the red-glowing bar of iron from the furnace and, in a single sure swivel, dropped it on the anvil. He started to hammer it, talking disjointedly in between blows and the crackling showers of sparks. ‘The entire countryside is alive with memories: mountains, woods – if they are old woods – and rivers too. But these are not memories such as you might imagine them, memories seen through human eyes and preserved in the language of human tongues.’
Mark wiped sweat from his brow with his discarded T-shirt. He had stopped pumping while the metal was out of the furnace. Mo knew he was listening, while pretending his concentration was elsewhere.
Padraig brought the metal back into the coals. Mark started pumping again. Mo could see her brother’s sweat dripping onto the flagstones.
‘So whu-whu-what kind of muh-muh-muh-memories are they?’
‘Harder, Mark!’ Padraig shifted the iron in the furnace to find a hotter position before glancing over his shoulder at Mo. ‘You wouldn’t be playing with me, thinking me simple as mutton?’
Mark’s ears followed the conversation, hearing Mo dissolve into a rare fit of giggling. He grinned to himself. They enjoyed bantering with Padraig, now that they were no longer afraid of him.
‘You still huh-huh-huh-haven’t explained.’
‘Do you omadawns imagine you will simply go up there and take a stroll through Feimhin’s gate?’
Mark’s ears bristled to full alertness.
‘Whu-whu-what are you trying tuh-tuh-to tell me?’
‘I’m growing a bit tired of your games. We’re gabbing too much. The furnace is cooling. Mark Grimstone, put your lily-white English back into it!’
Mark worked like a fury until the entire smithy was bathed in a fierce white glow from the furnace. He wanted Padraig to be impressed enough to continue to talk. The metal came out of the coals again for another thunderous racket of spark-haloed hammering on the hard grey steel of the anvil, then back into the water again.
More pumping.
Padraig paused, waiting for the reheating. ‘Isn’t it obvious that such a portal will be fiercely protected – and thus dangerous?’
Mo decided to risk irritating Padraig with another question after a new hissing and spluttering in the steaming pit of water.
‘I duh-duh-don’t understand.’
‘Sure you, who can sense the forces of mountain and river, should know the answers better than anybody. The gate will be warded by some form of guardian – a dangerous one that will already be aware that you are coming.’
*
As Mo ran from the forge, looking for Alan and Kate, Mark stared in her wake, his own heart beating like a drum inside what felt like a hollow rib cage. He wanted to join Mo in talking to Alan and Kate, but he was obliged to stay and keep working the bellows. There were times each day when the old man explained the strange spellings and grammar, or chanted for his education the common invocations that had been found in examples of Ogham, and sometimes Mark imagined Padraig’s throat encircled by a golden torc, like he recalled from Celts he had seen in the history books. He imagined a circle of believers all gathered around a sacrifice, of an animal or maybe even a human, with the druid invoking the old powers.
Right now, as Padraig put the hot metal through another cycle of annealing, Mark expressed his curiosity about the weapon.
‘Why don’t you make an axe, like the Fir Bolg battle-axe?’
‘Such a weapon is beyond my skill. My aim is to construct a spear. Even then it should be cast with a head of bronze. Bronze would carry the Ogham invocations better. But bronze working is a skill largely forgotten. Iron is easier because it is more malleable with the heat. We must have faith that a spear of tempered iron, spell-warded, will be enough to protect you. I take comfort from the knowledge that a blade of warded iron was woven for the great king, Lug, remembered in legend as Lug the Longhand for his fierce strike with the spear.’
It was all Mark could do to stop himself grinning, much as Mo had earlier. It was all so fantastic.
Over lunch in the sunlit grass, Padraig regaled them with the tale of the boy hero, Lug, whose father, Cian, was a prince of the Tuatha De Danaan and whose mother, Ethniu, was the beautiful daughter of the one-eyed monster, Balor.
‘Hopefully,’ Mark whispered to Mo, ‘Ethniu took after her mother.’
Mo pinched Mark’s blackened arm, wanting just to listen to another of Padraig’s wonderful tales. Mark merely grinned, amused to find himself set apart from the others, like a reproach. Surprise, surprise – of the triplets, only Lug survived! And surprise, surprise, and surprise again, it all led to a great battle in which Lug wounded the monster, Balor, with a single cast of his magic-warded spear!
The prophecies predicted that Lug would kill his monstrous grandfather and so Balor imprisoned Ethniu in a tower of crystal. But with the help of the druidess, Birog, Cian broke through the seals and seduced Ethniu and she gave birth to triplets that Balor tried to drown in the Atlantic Ocean.
Mark clapped with the others at the end. Padraig was a pretty good spinner of yarns, with princesses as ambitious and lecherous as the worst of the men. ‘No problems,’ Mark intoned seriously, ‘boys and girls. If we encounter Balor, we’ll know what to do.’
‘Your mocking tongue has not abandoned you, Mark Grimstone. But let me warn you not to confuse the romance of storytelling with the real danger you will face soon – or the power of real magic.’
Kate squealed, ‘Real magic?’
‘Perhaps,’ added Padraig, ‘young Mark should reflect on the fact that, if my thinking is correct, his adoptive father has kept him and Mo close so they would lead him, ultimately, to this very situation.’
Mark was silent after that. Had the old man, in a single sentence, explained the puzzle of Grimstone’s behaviour – explained, indeed, why Grimstone and Bethal had kept them alive, while appearing to hate them? Mark was deeply thoughtful all the way back to the forge. Then he called out to Padraig above the hammering, ‘So that’s what we’re forging – the Ogham-warded Spear of Lug?’
Padraig nodded, the wry smile wrinkling his lips. ‘Yes – or as best my ageing memory and arthritic hands can fashion her!’
‘That sounds like quite a challenge!’
‘Sure there’s a devilment in you, Mark Grimstone, that would make a mischief out of virtue!’
Mark had to look away again, to hide his ear-to-ear grin, working the big paddle for all he was worth. ‘I don’t imagine, Mr O’Brien, that you believe in princesses in crystal towers any more than I do.’
‘Take care that sarcasm does not lead you into confusing truth with fact.’
/> ‘Surely they’re the same?’
Padraig lifted the fierce red-glowing blade from the furnace and inserted the point into the jaws of a vice. Then, with enormous grippers, he began to add the spiral twist that would run lengthwise from tip to stock.
‘Sometimes,’ he panted, wiping sweat from his brow with his forearm, ‘a very great truth, yes even a very terrible truth, can become embellished in the telling. When you were very young how did your adoptive parents talk of your biological mother and father? Did they say they had gone away?’
‘Nothing so sweet.’
Padraig loosened the blade from the vice and rammed it back into the furnace, speaking all the while without losing his concentration on the task, or even glancing in Mark’s direction. ‘I have no doubt they were unkind. But even if they had told you your parents were hymning with the angels, do you think that sugar coating would have hidden the painful truth from your heart?’
Mark was silent through some more pumping and reworking of the metal.
‘I’m doing my best to understand, Mr O’Brien. But if there really is something, some important lesson, hidden away in the fairy tales and legends, I just don’t see it.’
Padraig continued to extend the spiral for a while in silence, dousing the metal in the oil-sheened water, then started the cycle of reheating all over again. Only then did he pause to look assessingly at Mark.
‘Take comfort from scepticism, lad, but don’t let it rule you. If it’s real truth you’re after, put aside your gadgets and look into your heart.’
Day after day they worked on the spear. Mark learnt some of the tricks of forging iron, in between studying Ogham and its common inscriptions. To his surprise, he discovered that Irish was a very ancient language, one of the most ancient languages on Earth, and little altered over thousands of years. It had no th diphthong, and no letters v or w or y, so it manufactured the sounds out of pairs of letters, or dots on top of the most unlikely letters, like b and d. An h after a consonant was the same as a dot over it. This was why the Sidhe, of Sidhe ár Feimhin, was pronounced Shee – because the dh was pronounced like a y. The v sound in Slievenamon was really spelled as bh. This was apt to confuse anybody, even when they were skilled at reading Ogham. There was no answer other than to work like hell at it. So it was that the first Ogham words he learnt to spell and inscribe for himself, over the edges of a square tile of blue slate, were the words Sidhe ár Feimhin.
The Snowmelt River Page 10
