Book of Kells

by R. A. MacAvoy

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  The Book of Kells

  R. A. MacAvoy

  This book is more Sharon’s than mine.

  I would like to give recognition and thanks to the following people without whom this work would have been impossible:

  To Dr. James Duran of Oakland, California, for Gaelic and Gaelic usage and the loan of many good books; to Dr. Dan Melia of the University of California at Berkeley for help on Medieval Gaelic and medieval sources of all kinds; to Dr. Donal McGivillry of the University of Sydney on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, for all Newfieisms and maritime history; to the gentlemen of Salamander Armory in California for tutoring in the handling of a medieval long-handled ax; to Ms. Anne McCaffrey for the geography of Wicklow; and to Miss Pat Lyne of Herefordshire for her history of the Connemara pony.

  To Sharon Devlin, who was the inspiration for this book, and who worked with me and guided me every step of the way. All that is worthwhile in the book I owe to her; the errors are my own.

  (All poems in the story itself are by Sharon, or were edited by her.)

  Prologue

  It was an hour for bog colors: the close of the workday in the Bog of Allen. The boy-os working the Bord na Mona mechanized turf cutters were just beginning to put their shirts back on in the sea wind of early evening. That wind was cool and saline and it drove forty miles in from the shore.

  They had gotten low in this particular deposit, cut deeply today, and even the men on the machines thought that a pity.

  Some parts of this bog, the greatest in the world, were now stripped to the rock. The demands of industry, the world market, and the new power plants had done more damage in a decade than the frugal spades of the Irish had done in thousands of years. With no chance for the sphagnum beds to regenerate, biologists warned, it would be gone in a generation.

  Fine traditions would go with it. The seasonal work of “winning the turf” in great teams of family and neighbors. Heavy men’s work with the long peat slans. And then women’s and children’s work: the stacking and drying. The ceilis afterward.

  Missed above all would be that scent which is enjoyed even in the cities, in hearths or modern stoves. The scent of the peat as it made its slow, even, nearly smokeless flame: it was the age-old smell of comfort and crachon—conviviality. The smell of home.

  Surely something beautiful would be gone out of the world. Besides the value they serve as producers of fuel, bogs are wonderful, mysterious places. Sometimes dangerous, they always hold secrets. Wild, eerie, with their outcroppings of rocks, their coffee-colored dim pools, their heather, gorse, and bog willow, thick with birds of all kinds, a bog is a fit place of concealment for a fugitive, a treasure, or a whisky still.

  But the bogs shift. Old people can tell you about that, for their changes can occur within one lifetime. Sometimes things hidden in them will disappear. And reappear, far removed in time and place.

  The chemistry of the turf does strange things. It colors and preserves. Occasionally a farmer, lifting his winter fuel in summer, will come upon a sealed bucket of long-forgotten workmanship, filled with what once had been butter, stored in the cool moss long ago. This dark grease is found to be wonderful for skin complaints, lubricating axles, and for healing the roughened udders of cows.

  Roots of the red bog oak and sally will come up too. If set aside and slowly dried out, the dark wood is good for any construction that requires great strength and resiliency. It can be made into a “creepy” stool, or a flour cist, or even (in the old days) the belly of a harp.

  But every so often something appears in a bog that makes people cross themselves and go for the priest or policeman. Bodies appear occasionally. Generally, the corpse is found to be some poor fellow who twenty or even two hundred years ago got lost and was drowned for his trouble. But these finds are uncanny as well as disturbing; however old they are, the lost child of fifty years ago or the ancient sacrifice to Crom Duv of twenty-five centuries ago, they are recognizable—as intact as if they had died yesterday.

  The National Museum has gained greatly from these finds. And since the Bog of Allen was first exploited technologically, it has yielded hundreds of artifacts to enrich the collective memory of the Irish people. Wooden things, vessels of all kinds, carvings, votive objects, jewelry. Ancient livestock and wild creatures. Textiles, dresses, cloaks, shoes, belts, often left deliberately in the peat by their original owners to get a fine, brown color from the chemistry of the bog, and then lost in the deep, slow currents.

  Now and then things turn up which have clearly been “killed” there: objects thrown in to hide them forever. Sacred things of the old church and of paganism hated by Protestant iconoclasts or the Catholic Jansenist priesthood, these were often broken and drowned, to kill them doubly.

  It had been an overcast, heavy day: warm and humid. But with the wind from the sea, the gray clouds were lifted along the horizon like a blanket, and the westering sun streamed under it, turning earth and cloud golden, deepest brown and rose.

  Smasher Burke loved it like this. The changing mood of the place was one of the things that made this an interesting job. Riding like a king in a machine that took him three minutes to climb on or off, he saw everything.

  The only disadvantage was the noise. The racket from the rows of blades that neatly cut the peat into briquettes was deafening, as was that of the belts that carried them to the receiver.

  He lit up a fag and stuffed the packet of Silk Cut into his pocket. And then he heard it. A subtle change in the sound of the machine, followed by a grinding.

  He instantly switched off the blades and brought her to a halt. As he climbed down from the cab, McWilliams, his partner, was already at the blades, trying to free them with a crowbar.

  “Ya fucking bastard, ya!

  “It’s no good! Smasher, it’s jammed. No good at all.”

  Burke’s Wellies slowly squashed across the peat and around the cutter beams.

  “It’s a great fucking stone, Smasher.” McWilliams squinted, the golden light picking out his yellow broken front teeth. “You’ll have to back her up a bit.”

  “Right,” Burke answered him, and clambered back on. “Stand away, will you,” he shouted, impersonally as a bus conductor. Then he kicked her in, lifting the blades and rolling her five feet to the rear.

  “Good enough, man,” McWilliams bellowed. “Fucking great.”

  Within five minutes it had spread all through the crew that the Smasher had turned up a carving. An archaeologist from the museum had been called, but before he could get there it was fully dug out and examined by the men.

  “When I heard the crunch I knew it was no ordinary lump of rubbish,” McWilliams said proudly. “Look at her, will you? Look at that! It must be thousands of years old.”

  “It’s a cross, man,” Burke countered quietly. “It’s not thousands. Couldn’t be thousands.”

  It was old, though. Anyone could see that. Spirals. Spirals all over.

  “Look there. Yer woman in the middle, with her little cunt stuck up, just as shameless!” McWilliams laughed nervously.

  Burke had bent down to examine it more closely. Following it with his finger, he had discovered that the spirals—hundreds of them—seemed to be made from a single line.

  “It doesn’t look Christian,” McWilliams stated.

  The Smasher didn’t answer.

  Chapter One

  Bound to Render the King of Laighin

  Horses and Drinking Horns to Caiseal

  Gold and riches brought across the Sea

  Are what is due from the Leinstermen.

  The Leinstermen are co
mrades to Munster

  Against the Foreigners in any battle.

  Should the Gaill come to them truly

  The King of Caiseal must repulse them.

  Leabher n-gCeart,

  The Book of Rights

  Perhaps the sound of the Uillean pipes was knocking plaster from the ceiling, or perhaps John Thornburn had neglected his household duties, for the ramps of sunlight braced against the floor were sparkling with white motes. Each oblong of light was broken by the shadow of window mintons, like a Cartesian grid, and each contained a single floating shadow-circle, thrown by the tatted pulls on the window blinds.

  John let his gaze slide abstractedly from his work to the sun splashes and then back again. Circles on a grid. How appropriate. All over his house. He flattened the huge, blue-checked tracing tissue over the heavy paper and crayon rubbing below it and lifted limp flaxen hair out of his eye. His free hand (free except for the pencil between thumb and index finger) groped around blindly, seeking his blue fisherman’s cap, which he usually used to keep his hair off his face. Not finding that, it crawled to the head of the drafting table and snatched up a paperclip. This he thrust into his forelock, bobby-pin style.

  John Thornburn had a rather vague face and eyes of two different colors, which he had inherited from his grandfather. Grandpa had been a large, crusty old man who had prided himself on being one of the last of the purebred Micmac Indians in Newfoundland. On Cape Breton there were plenty of these, but in Newfoundland they were getting scarce. Grandpa even claimed that an ancestor of his had been a Beothuck taken in a raid, though as far as anyone knew there had been no Beothucks left by smallpox and English bullets even as long ago as two hundred years. (Because he was Grandfather, he had gotten away with it, despite the telltale blue eye.) John was immensely proud of his status as a Newfoundland Jack-a-tar, or half-breed, though he had nothing of his grandfather in him except the eyes. (Unless he could count his inability to grow a noticeable beard.) He stood five feet five and a half inches tall.

  He had come to Ireland because Derval O’Keane asked him to, and because the Book of Kells was here. He worshiped that scripture in a way that had nothing much to do with its religious content. It grieved him that after coming so far, he was only permitted to see a single page at a time, and that through glass.

  Circles on a grid—spirals, really. Winding and unwindin to wind again. John overlay the nubbly soft suggestions of form with spirals exact and mathematical. He knew he had exactly one thousand spirals to copy, for he had counted them. The tissue crackled beneath his hand.

  This was a high day for John: a day of fulfillment. The cross whose bog-brown fragments he had traced was in a peculiar sense his cross, for it had lain in the basement of the Museum at Trinity College, untouched, for five years. No one before him had cared to trace its designs, perhaps because the subject matter of its central panel was not considered fit for display. But for the influence of Dr. Derval O’Keane, John would not have been given his chance.

  Not that this work would make any professional or financial difference for John. No school or museum was waiting eagerly to see how the rubbing turned out; no one had suggested paying John Thornburn for the work. Nor had he academic credentials to advance, not even the bachelor’s degree he had pursued for three dazed years in New York. He hadn’t even an opinion on the provenance or meaning of the stone he had traced. He merely liked the looks of it.

  John got by from day to day by teaching a few courses in the basics of Celtic design (also a product of Derval’s influence). Though he was an excellent draftsman, he was, unfortunately, a lackluster teacher. He found life in Ireland expensive and he was not particularly happy. Except, like now, when drawing.

  Outside the bright windows in the bright June morning Greystones sat placidly, waiting for evening and the commuter train from Dublin. A woman hailed and another replied, banging a mop against her iron balustrade. A bicycle flew by, casting shadow and cheeping its tinny bell. If there was other activity, John couldn’t hear it over the stereo.

  The blasting music, also, was a product of Dr. O’Keane’s influence. It was in fact Derval’s record—Finbar Furey on pipes—and therefore very authentic. John had been lent it as a learning exercise, since Derval O’Keane believed that certain elements of Irish design could best be appreciated by a study of the old pipe airs. He had been listening to this same disc all morning, while he pulled together the various rubbings he had made that week. The different surges and quavers of Furey’s artistry did little for John, tone-confused as he was, so in an effort to force comprehension he had increased the volume.

  He was not deaf to rhythm. His right hand (deft as the rest of him was awkward) spun the inner and outer arcs of his freehand circles to the great swagging whine of the bagpipe. So many, all alike: twinned, tripleted, touching in rank. It was easy. Not like the blush-producing, upside-down Bridget in the center of the cross. That reconstruction required thought. This required not-thinking, which John did very well.

  His eyes clouded and his lower lip drooped. There was only a short piece of the last upright to complete: say twenty spirals. John counted silently as he drew, betting himself (strictly a gentleman’s bet) that he had estimated correctly and there were twenty left.

  Nineteen… eighteen… fifteen… eight… He began to feel the surge of elation of a man who is winning a bet with himself. The pipes skirled in sympathy. Three… two… He’d won, of course. Here was the last spiral.

  One. Furey produced a last, aggressive blast of his regulators and went silent as John flourished his pencil in the air.

  There was the tiny metallic busyness of the automatic tone arm lifting and drawing away from the record. John’s overused ears rang.

  In the next moment they were nearly shattered by the unmistakable shriek of a woman, full-throated, heart-rending, and uttered at close range. John levitated helplessly off his stool to witness the emergence from his bathroom of a very young and rosy woman clad only in a cloud of auburn hair and howling like a catamount. She flung herself down the short hall and vanished glimmering into John’s bedroom.

  John Thornburn made no immediate movement, but stood behind his drafting table with hands folded. The paperclip winked silver on his head and his pale, lashless eyes were perfect circles. “So… so very pink,” he whispered reverently.

  Slowly, as though breasting a strong current, John moved across the front room toward the source of the disturbance. He felt sweat prickling his scalp. He stood before the brown-paneled door. “Miss,” he called, or rather attempted to call, for as he opened his mouth his shocked brain slipped into gear again.

  The girl was naked, it told him. (She must have gotten in through the bathroom window.) She was naked and screaming and probably a madwoman with (why not?) a madwoman’s lies. And he—John Thornburn—was an alien in Ireland.

  A Weslyan-born too.

  He saw himself unjustly accused. He saw himself convicted. He saw himself in an Irish prison, carving Celtic knotwork and Eskimo figures onto the stone walls of his cell with a sharpened spoon. And so John’s voice failed him halfway through his single syllable and the word “miss” came out as no more than the mewl of a kitten.

  But now there was silence from behind the bedroom door. Heartened, John put his hand to the knob. The racket of breaking glass bounced him back.

  He could wrap his sheepskin jacket over his arm and, using it to guard his face, throw open the door and… And what? Rush in and grab the girl: the pink, naked, and screaming girl? Let her break windows. Let her crawl out of a window, the way she came. Let the bored housewives on their porches see a naked girl crawl screaming out of his bedroom and then only a short hop to the Irish prison and the sharpened spoon.

  The tinkle of glass recurred on a smaller scale, followed by an oddly plaintive whimper. John’s terror veered toward irritation. “You’ve cut yourself on the glass, eh, my maid?” he called, in a voice much like that of his father. Immediately the whimper was cut s
hort, to be replaced by the sound of wallboard tearing. John saw in his mind’s eye his heavy brass candlestick reading lamp ripped from above his pillow. He grabbed a kitchen chair (the only kind of chair he had) and wedged it firmly up against the door.

  John backed down the hall and into his empty front room. The sun lapped his feet, beckoning him. He let it carry him out the doorway and into the handkerchief-sized front yard.

  Bright June air touched John’s shoulders and told him they were knotted. It felt the line of his jaw and caused his teeth to unclench. It communicated to him the fact that his house had been stuffy and the garbage might have better been emptied a few days ago. It riffled the tiny leaves of the neglected box hedge and made John want to go away.

  He could take a bus somewhere—out to McCaffrey’s stable perhaps, where Derval worked her horse. He remembered the thud of hooves, felt through the earth, as she cantered her enormous beast along the fence. He remembered, with much more fondness, the thud of the waves against the wooden side of his dory, at home. The coast was only a few miles from Greystones—it was not his coast, but no matter. Anyplace would be better than sharing his empty house with a naked crazy woman. John strode over the lawn to the street.

  Here, standing between his house and the next, he could see his bedroom window, new-punched with a jagged patch of black. Within there was a flash of pale skin.

  John’s spirits sank in a manner even the airs of June could not buoy, and at this moment he heard the small creak of a door opening across the street, and a woman’s voice hailed him. “Good morning, Mrs. Hanlon,” John replied, not looking up, and then all courage deserted him and he had to run. Since he was twenty-nine, rather than nineteen, he ran not away but back into his afflicted house.

  Hands stuffed into the pockets of his jeans and shoulders at his ears, he approached the blockaded bedroom door. “I’d like to know what you think you’re doing in there,” he said to the door, tacking a shamefaced “miss” onto the end of his sentence.