Brigid of Kildare

by Heather Terrell

  “Ah, you’re not going to make an old nun like myself wait, are you? Who knows how long the good Lord might grant me?”

  Alex almost guffawed. For a daunting figure like Sister Mary to play the part of an ailing woman of God was laughable. The smile disappeared from Alex’s face, however, when she remembered that she was about to tell a lie of omission. “If you insist, Sister Mary. I have come to believe that your chalice, paten, and reliquary box may come from the sixth century. This would make them the very oldest Irish communion vessels.”

  Sister Mary looked confused. “But I already told you that they were made in the sixth century.”

  “You did indeed, Sister Mary, and I wish I could take all my clients’ representations at face value. But my job as an appraiser is to reach my own conclusions. My assessments would be meritless if I didn’t approach my work with some modicum of objectivity.”

  “I understand,” the nun said, though her face revealed her disagreement.

  “I tend to agree with your order’s history that the pieces were made in the sixth century. If my final bits of research pan out as I hope, my appraisal will describe your relics as literally priceless.”

  “Priceless, you say?”

  “Priceless. Not to worry, though. I’m sure we’ll be able to put a price tag on their pricelessness, and I’m certain we’ll find a very willing—but respectful—buyer.”

  The nun paused and then gifted Alex with that saintly grin. “Well, then, let’s get you on that train to Dublin. And may God be with you.”

  xiv

  GAEL

  A.D. 470

  Brother,

  My bag grows heavy with the weight of my unsent letters to you, letters that might ease your undoubted concern over your long-missing brother. I have accepted that my words cannot reach you, that no Roman messenger will ever appear on these hills, but I keep writing. The words save me. On my sea voyage, our imagined conversations were my only authentic exchanges during long days of playing the fellow outcast, and since I took my leave of that kindly band on the Gaelic shores, our invented talks are my only companion.

  Other than God, of course. Strangely, our Lord has begun to seem more visible to me here in this simple country than He did on the long trek through the marginally more civilized Italian and Gaulish countryside or in the chop of the seas of Britannia. I marvel that Lucius felt tempted in this land where He feels so near.

  Perhaps His presence can be explained by the natural lushness of this island so untouched by the hand of man. As soon as I left the crashing surf of the rocky beaches and stepped onto firm soil, landing alone on a rare sunny morn, I experienced the most curious sensation. I entered a landscape so awash in shimmering green that I felt as though I were diving deep into God’s emerald waters rather than emerging from them.

  This peculiar impression did not leave me, even though nature and man conspired to shake it free. I found that the stormy days of stinging rain and ever-blackening skies only enhanced the feel of deep waters. Even when I passed a rare long-abandoned gray stone ring fort or an enigmatic circle of boulders scrolled with concentric circles, my sense of submersion only increased. I swam through a landscape of green grass, moss, and leaves.

  I suspected that the reputedly rough Gaelic people might release me from this strange sensation, but of them I saw little on my way to Kildare. I had only Lucius’s account of them as a warrior people with quick wits and quicker tempers, deep stores of pride, and a love of tales and music; as a folk whose women were allowed to be queens, warriors, judges, even priests. I stopped my guessing at them, as I knew I must make my own assessment soon enough.

  After weeks of this unsettling travel, I stood at the gateway to the plains of Kildare. I surveyed the open expanse at dawn, taking measure of the final steps I must make toward my destination. Yet the terrain looked so different from Lucius’s description and so unlike the rough map I had drawn from his and the other monks’ accounts, I despaired of having lost my way.

  As I stared into the plains, I spotted a patch of heather at the base of a small hill. I crept toward the nook quietly, thinking it might conceal a hare or pheasant suitable for my meal. I’d crouched down slowly and readied my bow when the heather moved. It shifted not with the gentle rustle of a bird’s wings or the leap of a rabbit but with the bold movement of a human being standing upright.

  I froze. After so many days without human contact, I could not conceive it so. I reasoned it to be a trick of this land’s changeable light, so unfixed at dawn particularly. Yet the being walked toward me.

  The shape drew closer, and I realized that the swath of heather was actually a hooded tartan cloak, a sort of camouflage for its wearer. I quickly stood, dropped my bow, and reached for my blade; then I realized that the shape was not man but woman.

  The woman pulled back her hood and revealed a striking face. Long tresses of a color unlike any I had seen before spilled out. Despite the meager sunlight, her hair shone neither red nor gold, but both. The style was distinct, designed in three sections, two wound upward and a third hanging down her back in waves nearly to her knees. It served to enhance the unusual hue. I found her age difficult to discern; her face bore the color and freshness of its first bloom, yet I noticed fine lines around the outer corners of her eyes.

  Having been long estranged from any company, I struggled to speak. Cobbling together nearly forgotten words from Lucius’s instructions, I offered greetings. I then asked, “Do you know the way to the Abbey of Kildare?”

  She stepped back, placed her hands on her hips in a most impertinent manner, and took the measure of me. This forthrightness, from a woman no less, startled the words right out of me. I collected myself and repeated in my stammering Gaelic, “Do—do you know the way to the Abbey of Kildare?”

  She smiled and answered in speech much more melodious than the rough intonation of Lucius: “Cill Dara?”

  My pronunciation, borrowed from Lucius, must have been the source of confusion; thus I corrected myself. “Yes, Cill Dara.”

  “I do know the route to Cill Dara.” Her eyes squinted in deeper discernment of me.

  “Will you show me the way?”

  “We are always hospitable to strangers traveling in our land,” she answered with a nod. Pulling her hood back over her startling hair, she headed back up the slope from which she had emerged.

  I scrambled after her, for she was lithe and quick on her feet, affecting no delicacy of movement as Roman women are wont to do. Once at her side, I calmed my breath and asked a few innocuous questions about the plain and its topography. She answered me cordially enough, but with brevity rarely displayed in polite Roman conversation. During one of the many silences, it occurred to me that, with effort, I might learn something of the leader of the Kildare abbey and monastery from this woman—who might be a peasant or novice, for all I could detect.

  “Know you the abbess of Cill Dara?”

  “Indeed.”

  “Is she your mistress?” Though her cloak and manner seemed ill-suited to a nun, I thought anything possible in this strange land.

  She slowed her pace and turned toward me. One corner of her mouth turned up, and if she had been other than a Gaelic woman, I would have taken it for a coy smile. “She is, and she isn’t,” she said.

  Her mildly mocking tone confused me. I had not intended to amuse or insult by my question, and yet somehow I had. I determined quietude to be the safest course, and we passed the following hour in an increasingly comfortable silence.

  We reached the pinnacle of a steep hill and looked down upon a most agreeable plain, through which a sleepy river meandered. At the plain’s center stood a giant oak tree around which a vast settlement grew.

  The woman pointed and said, “Cill Dara.”

  I understood her words for the first time: “Cill Dara” means “Church of the Oak.” I will be certain to call it Cill Dara now. I stared down in amazement at the sizable community and the massive oak tree that held court in th
e center. An enormous wall, twelve feet high, penetrated by various gated openings, encircled the development. At the wall’s inner perimeter stood dozens of stone structures in beehive shapes, with dozens more just outside the wall. Closer to the center, where the oak dominated, three immense wooden buildings prevailed. One of these edifices connected to a round stone tower rising to nearly one hundred feet, topped off with a roof like a conical cap; another displayed a sculptured high cross of curious design.

  “It looks near to a Roman village,” I said to myself. In Latin.

  “So they say,” she answered in Latin. Latin, brother.

  If my face had borne amazement before, at spying a considerable town in this barren land, it now revealed shock. Lucius had given me to understand that very few Gaels had exposure to Roman citizens, let alone a Roman education, so I’d expected the language from abbey inhabitants only. And even then, only the religious men. I asked the obvious, if only to hear our mother tongue again: “You speak Latin?”

  “I do,” she continued in Latin with a wry smile. “Some of us Gaels are not as ignorant as rumored.”

  I am certain my face grew red; she spoke aloud what I had thought. It seemed that I had done nothing but entertain or offend the first Gael I had met. This did not bode well for my reception and integration into the abbey.

  She hastened down the hill. I ran after her, uncertain as to the introductions she would make on my behalf to the abbey’s gatekeepers, but reliant on her presentation. I caught up to her just as we approached the largest aperture in the wall.

  The guards rushed out to greet her. I stayed a few steps behind, listening as they conversed in quick, unintelligible Gaelic and observing broad gestures in my direction. I waited until they gave me leave to enter.

  Once we were inside, one of the guards barked out orders, and a rotund monk emerged from one of the large wooden structures, hurrying to my side. I turned to give my thanks to the woman for her guidance, but a swarm of nuns had flocked around her. I watched as they slid off the heathery cloak to reveal an ankle-length white robe fastened at the shoulder with a gold pin, a circle pierced by a lance. The nuns’ fussing motions hid her face, so I could see only the hint of an ornate golden necklace around her neck and a matching armlet around her upper arm.

  The monk ushered me off toward the building from whence he’d come, preventing me from staring further at the stately woman who’d appeared from beneath the mantle of a common girl. Before I entered the interior, I looked back one more time to call out my gratitude. But she was gone.

  And I realized that I did not know her name.

  I wait here in the abbey’s refectory for an offered repast and for my fate. I know not our Savior’s plans for me, brother. Whatever they may be and however strange this land, I feel His purpose beginning to unfold. The wily Gallienus may have set me on the Lord’s path, though for his own ends.

  Brother,

  Only hours have passed since I last wrote you, but how much has transpired. I wonder how you would view the conclusion of my first day in Cill Dara. I have been chastising myself, but your nature is more agreeable and optimistic than my own, so perhaps the events would provide you a good dose of laughter. I know naught for certain, other than my own discomfiture, which I will relay in due course.

  I write to you in dim candlelight from the hut assigned to me by Ciaran, the monk who welcomed and fed me on my arrival, after a thorough questioning. My hut is one of the many beehives I spied from the hill. These unusual round structures, outwardly cramped, with some made of stone and others of wood, wicker, and thatch, provide a warm, surprisingly spacious living space within. Each religious person—monk, priest, or nun—has their own hut, in which they may sleep, meditate, and pray.

  Dining and working takes place elsewhere. The religious folk—men and women alike, mind you—dine communally in the refectory building. Work occurs in a myriad of locations, depending on the task, a function of “our God-given gifts,” as Ciaran explained to me. But forgive me; I skip ahead.

  Over a simple meal of cured fish and dense bread, Ciaran quizzed me in his paltry Latin, and I responded in my sad Gaelic. We conducted this halting exchange for some time, during which I divulged my “identity” as a Christian monk and scrivener seeking refuge from a former Roman region beset by warring pagans. He seemed less interested in my status as a religious exile—for these Gael has aplenty—than in my skills as a scribe. Ciaran asked me question after question about my trade—what materials I used, whether I could read and write languages other than Latin, how I fared in my image making—but nothing intrigued him quite so much as my mention that I’d brought with me some manuscripts the barbarians otherwise would have burned. He requested that I turn over these minor texts, in accordance with Cill Dara’s policies. I had procured them for this exact purpose from Gallienus’s own library, and, as I handed them to him, I mistakenly passed him a small Gospel book I had created for myself, for my own worship. From his look, I knew I could not reclaim this item.

  Brother, you would have been proud at my ability to don another identity, a talent you would deem necessary for any man calling himself Roman in these mercurial times. For somehow, this stumbling conversation satisfied, and Ciaran assigned me to the scriptorium, a place I will visit tomorrow when the light permits. When the monk made this decision, after plodding consideration, I could almost hear Gallienus applaud; this assignment was his particular goal. For he believes that in the Gaels’ texts we will uncover the firmest evidence of their heresy.

  Once my belly was full and my work determined, Ciaran led me on a tour of the abbey. We began at the impressive elliptical stone wall, or cashel, as he called it, and moved inward to more substantial buildings. From the desolation of the countryside, the plainness of the refectory, and Roman rumor, I expected little. I was wrong to so judge.

  True enough, the design of the wall, the huts, the outer structures, and the refectory were basic, nothing to the grandeur of our Roman buildings. And the materials were rudimentary, only the rough stone, wood, and minerals that the land yielded. Yet as we moved toward the interior, inching ever closer to the seemingly sacrosanct oak, I saw evidence of craftsmanship and inspired creation. Every available surface, whether a building exterior or a freestanding sculpture, sprang alive with curvilinear shapes, swirls, and figures. On first glance, I took the decorations to be primitive, yet on closer examination they revealed a delicacy and subtlety, different from our Roman sensibilities but still beautiful.

  Nowhere was this artistry more impressive than in the church, to which Ciaran and I retired for evening Mass. As daylight faded, we made our way toward this large rectangular structure, through a crowd of other religious men and women offering greetings to me. The people amazed me with their warm salutations, so unlike the guarded warriors’ reception I had anticipated.

  We entered through the main doors, flung open wide like an embrace, to a soaring oak church of spare beauty. The benches were nearly full, and from their dress, I could see that regular folk occupied many of them. I was shocked to notice the departure from the strict delineation and hierarchy of seating of our Roman services, where every man knows his place and where woman has none. Scattered among the male and female commoners were the monks, nuns, and priests; the religious held no special accommodations.

  Ciaran took my elbow and led me toward one of the few open benches in the back. I struggled to see the altar over others’ heads. I noted that the worshippers included monks bearing the curious style of shaving the front of the head from ear to ear so reviled by my superiors as a sign of disobedience. Rome had long mandated the shaved crown alone for its followers; the Gaelic tonsure resembled the old Druid style.

  A sudden shift by an unusually tall woman in front of me revealed an altar splendid in its simplicity. A single enormous stone, polished until it glistened, sat atop a pedestal. Along its edge, I saw a chorus of intricately wrought sculptures in the shape of men. Ciaran witnessed my staring, nodded with p
ride, and said, “The apostles.”

  The carvings indeed depicted Jesus Christ’s twelve apostles. On their sturdy backs stood a silver and gold chalice and paten, the sacrosanct articles of the Mass. Though I found the details hard to discern from a distance, the items seemed of excellent workmanship, equal to what I’d witnessed during my walk with Ciaran.

  Bells pealed. Knowing well this signal of the service’s commencement, I rose along with the others. The procession started down the center aisle, and the incense drifted toward the high arched ceiling as the celebrants passed. I breathed deeply of its heady scent, and it drew me into the pleasing ritual of the Mass, with its attendant proximity to God.

  A white-robed priest stood before the altar and uttered a few words. They were strange in their pronunciation but familiar in their cadence. I closed my eyes and folded my hands in prayer, feeling closer to our Lord than I had for some time. Then a woman began speaking from the altar.

  A woman, brother.

  My eyes opened. I strained to see the altar over the sea of tonsured heads and hoods. Try as I might, I could not discern the source of the forceful voice. Yet I could not help but notice that it did not alarm the other worshippers.

  Knowing the importance of securing the trust of my new peers, I maintained my composure. This will not surprise you, brother, who knows my reserve so well. I confess, though, I writhed within at the thought of a woman performing the Mass, in clear violation of all Roman precepts and all church tenets. In the apostle Paul’s letters to the Corinthians, does he not instruct, “Women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the Law says”?

  Without warning, the worshippers knelt in prayer, affording me a fleeting view of the altar. I lifted my eyes while keeping my head locked in a respectful nod. The woman stood, arms outstretched, each one bearing a sacred vessel, uttering the secret words of transubstantiation. Garbed in white, her brow encircled by a gold headdress, she was undoubtedly Brigid, the abbess of Cill Dara I had come to learn about. But to my surprise, I recognized her face.