Book of Kells

by R. A. MacAvoy

  The doorbell rang. By pure reflex, John pulled the tracing from the board, folded it and stuffed it in his pocket, as though it were evidence of criminal action. Then he turned and stepped toward the front room, still holding pill bottle and water. He was in the dining ell when he realized he did not want visitors at this moment. Through the little glass panel in the top of the door he could see Mrs. Hanlon’s permed ginger hair. He paused, uncertain.

  The air was bright on his sore eyes. It was bright and rosy, and the brilliance was emanating from the hallway, from whence darted Ailesh, babbling ancient Irish. She plucked him by the sleeve and he found he was standing on the cap.

  “No,” said John plaintively. “The door is knocking. I mean—” He was being dragged toward the bathroom. “Ailesh, no!” John cried in alarm. “If you pull me in with you, then we’ll all be…

  “…stuck.” The little Irish girl was remarkably strong for her size. John finished his sentence standing on green turf under the black leaves of the oak. Water sloshed in the tumbler in his hand.

  Chapter Four

  “A sword’s across your throat,” said Laghaid.

  “Eating a mouse includes its tail.”

  —Tenth-century Irish story

  “Ailesh! Now look what you’ve done.” John swiveled from the girl’s stubborn face to the pink glow again.

  But it was neither the shining haze nor the doorjamb of his bathroom he saw behind him, but a tall and massive cross carved in sharp relief out of white limestone. In the center of it was the figure of the saint or female deity, knees drawn up as though to give birth: the Shiela na Gig. Around her wove twisted animals holding their own tails in their mouths, and about the whole, a border of exquisite, clean-edged interlocking spirals—hundreds of them. They extended the full length of the cross and out the arms as if the Shiela literally floated on the waves of the sea.

  “Ye Gods and little fishes,” whispered John. He went down on his knees before the work. Ailesh tugged at his shirt.

  John’s knees grated over stone shards. His left leg touched something soft. Peering over the water glass in his left hand, he saw a heap of canary-colored cloth. It was heavy against his foot. There was a hammer lying in the middle of it. The hammer was held by a hand. It was stained, covered with dark clots. John’s eyes refocused and perceived the dead man.

  He wore a smock much like Derval’s. Round face, stubby nose, balding. No—not balding. The man had shaved his scalp back to his ears; it was the old tonsure for monks and all the lower orders of clergy. Behind the ears…

  John sloshed water over his left arm. Behind the ears the man’s skull was staved in. John Thornburn had twice in his life gone netting for men the sea had taken, once in Newfoundland on the Grand Banks and another time in the Bay of Fundy. That was an ugly death, but not like this. He made a noise in his throat. His right hand involuntarily slapped the freshly cut limestone.

  “Goban!” Ailesh sank down beside the body. She picked up the square, stubby-fingered hand of the dead man in her own small, stubby-fingered hand.

  John had eyes. He looked from the gray face to Ailesh’s.

  “Your…father?”

  She made no reply, of course, but sat with her small mouth open, her whole body frozen with loss.

  Derval appeared from somewhere. John shared a glance with her, unspeaking.

  With her eyes closed, her head thrown back, Ailesh began to chant. She spoke slowly at first and then with growing conviction. A song rose from her grief. Dropping the hand of her father, she raised both arms over him. Derval stood beside her, helpless to comfort. Helpless even to touch, for in the midst of their danger, Ailesh had begun keening like a heroine of the Táin Bó Cúalnge.

  “Without the blemish of envy

  Clean of the blemish of hatred

  Such were your eyes, Goban my father

  Sharp and insightful was your glance

  Quick to see the need of the pitiful

  And quick were your hands to feed the hungry

  Swift to give comfort

  Swift in gift-giving

  Swift to see beauty your eye

  Eager to give it birth your hand

  Ochon o! Crows of the hill of Ard na Bhfuinseoge

  Sweet will your feast be at noon and sunset!

  Noble your meat! Bitter my grief

  Ochon o! Goban, father, my heart’s pulse is spilled out!”

  John was lost in the sound of the words, even though he didn’t understand them. He stood listening to the song, so sorrowful and yet still filled with a kind of proud joy, and found himself wishing he could speak Gaelic like that.

  Derval, on the other hand, who did understand it, could only think of the fact they were surrounded by dead people. The smell of death—of blood in the sun—was already heavy. The air was dancing with jewellike green flies, and the crows, so poetically invoked in the keen of Ailesh, were already picking out the eyes of the unburied.

  This is real, she thought to herself. We could die here. And fear sent adrenaline rushing through her veins. Suddenly she knew that Ailesh must not finish the keen. The verse would be followed by the cry, and that might carry a long way. The Danes could still be with in earshot. Perhaps the jealous squawking of the birds had shielded them so far.

  She clapped her hand over Ailesh’s mouth. “Quiet, my treasure, my sister. Or we will join him.”

  Ailesh at once saw the sense in that and nodded in agreement. “We will bury them later,” Derval soothed. “We’ll come back and raise a stone over them.”

  “At least we will live to do that.” Ailesh wiped her tears away. “He will have a stone. I myself will carve it.”

  Derval had spoken phrases pulled from the old stories she had taught so often. They seemed to her hackneyed, stereotyped, but they had been what was needed.

  Ailesh pried the heavy mason’s hammer out of the clenched, stiffened fingers. She held it up to the light for a moment. “A good blow, my friend, but not timely,” she whispered to the weapon. “Still, the blood of my father’s enemy has cleansed you from shame.”

  It appeared that Goban and the ax-wielding Dane had slain one another almost simultaneously, for the dead Viking lay half-hidden in the long summer grass behind the cross. His temple had been smashed in by what seemed to be a single hammer blow. His eyeball lay (so far unnoticed by the birds) along his cheek.

  Ailesh cleaned the hammer off on her fathers clothes and then, for a moment, her hard-won control crumbled as she bent to touch him one last time. Her face went into a distorted grimace of pain, and then she turned away from the corpse she had no time to bury, slipping the hammer into the belt of her trousers.

  “Dean deifir, Eoin Ban,” she whispered.

  “She’s telling us to hurry. We’ve got to get to the clanstead,” Derval hissed to John. She led him by the arm down the length of the grassy path and up an embankment on which stood the village of Ard na Bhfuinseoge.

  It was a huge round house of wood, conical-roofed, and like some great sow it had farrowed little copies of itself all about it. To make the porcine image even more realistic, the great house and all the outbuildings were surrounded by a penlike palisade of wattle. It looked to John Thornburn disturbingly African, but he hadn’t time to waste on the architecture before him. The great house was smoldering; its roof had collapsed. All the smaller houses were reduced to charcoal.

  Bodies lay everywhere.

  John turned on his heel, but along the path that blind-ended at the cross of Bridget no help was forthcoming. The black oaks rustled in a summer breeze, shadowing the late-morning earth. The air was full of woodsmoke. It smelled close: a bit foul. A red hen wandered over the packed earth, busily aimless.

  Something crackled in John’s hand. He looked down to see he was holding the tube of codeine—holding it too tightly. Sweat broke out on his bare arms, chilling him. John became aware of Ailesh’s insistent tug on his hand.

  She led him through a gap in the palisade into th
e devastated cattle enclosure. John stumbled over the body of a spotted dog and into the branches of a freshly felled ash tree. Around the fence more trees were down. His confused mind paused to wonder why anyone ravaging a village would stop to hack down trees.

  The cows, the people, and their dogs lay together, butchered with equal savagery. John was led past a man with blond hair very like his own, staring sightlessly at the sky. Beside him lay in an ungainly heap a woman whose mantle of coarse wool lay bunched under her legs. She had been strangled. Her body was covered with bites. The entrails of a black bull lay spilt around her head.

  John raised his eyes to Ailesh, as his mind filled with memory of her wounds, and how Derval had bandaged them, squatting by the toilet in his bathroom. He grabbed at the girl’s forearm, in a strange fear that she might lie down now with all these horrifying others and be dead. He dropped the codeine.

  Ailesh picked it up. She turned her face from him and led him across the cattle enclosure to the one building the fire had not consumed: a rectangular shed made of saplings and daub.

  In the light of the doorway he caught up once more with Derval, who was leaning forward in a peculiar manner against a wad of torn cloth. John could not understand the purpose of this position. He knelt before her.

  She gazed through him and he saw that her eyes, too, were filled with shock. Finally she focused on the glass in John’s hand, and the plastic vial held by Ailesh. “How’d you know I wanted that?” She took the vial with one stained hand and broke off the top with her teeth.

  John opened his mouth. “You didn’t come back,” he wanted to say. He wanted to say, “We’re stuck.” He wanted to share with her the horror of this place they had come to—to embrace her and support her and simultaneously to hide his head against her neck. He wanted to punch her with both hands for getting him in such terrible trouble.

  “I didn’t know you needed it,” he said at last. “I only knew I did.”

  Silence fell again. Ailesh asked Derval a question and the darker woman answered, but to John it was so much babbling of the birds. He looked around him.

  The shed was dim and floored with packed dirt, like some of the toolsheds at home. It was a toolshed, in fact, for saws and chisels of iron, some of them wooden-handled, hung neatly from the walls. The beams were carved and over the doorway hung a strip of suspiciously Victorian-looking gingerbread. Two backpacks leaned heavily against the door. John heard a hiss coming from the floor beside Derval.

  There was a man lying there and he wasn’t dead, for the square face was taut with pain and the teeth shone in the dark. The sufferer raised one hand as John watched and wiped it over his shaggy forehead. He glanced with effort at Derval and spoke. The voice, though weak, was resonant and modulated: held in complete control. Even in his confusion John noticed that voice.

  He didn’t trust it at all.

  Derval shook pills out of the plastic vial. Two of them went into the injured man’s mouth. This action took a good time because it was accomplished single-handedly. Her right hand remained pressed against the pile of rags which John could now see rested against the man’s body. She took the tumbler from John. Her fingers left dark smudges against the clear glass. “Go see if you can find a harper for this man, will you, Johnnie?”

  John gawked. “A…harper? Is that like a priest?”

  Derval grunted a negation. “He’s just missing one. Won’t rest until he knows. And…” Her shoulders relaxed for a moment. She glanced at the wad of rags, which was black with blood, and peered through the shadows at the black gaping wound she had uncovered. Reapplying the pad, she leaned into it again. “…and if he doesn’t stop moving, he’s going to die.

  “He might anyway.”

  John stood. Ailesh was going out the doorway again. Clear sunlight fell on her ruddy frizzed hair, turning it gold. John began to follow her out, but a thought turned him.

  “Derval, isn’t this the kind of paradox you were talking about? I mean, your coming from the future? If he doesn’t die, and he was supposed to—”

  “Goddamn you to black hell, squarehead,” she said without raising her voice or moving from her task.

  John backed out of the shed. “It was you who was worried about such things,” he muttered. “Not me.”

  Ailesh waited for him. Her fingers stroked the squat hammer in her belt reflexively and her eyes were raised to the hill, where freshly cut stone gave off a white light against the oaks. When she noticed John Thornburn she pointed back into the shed. “Labres MacCullen. Ollave,” she stated. John only sighed.

  He wandered over the packed earth of the enclosure as aimlessly as a cow, gazing vaguely at carnage. His gaze was vague because his eyes had had trouble focusing since the accident with the wall. His head throbbed distantly, like someone else’s complaint.

  So many dead people. Had it been possible to feel any sicker, he was sure he would have. What was the purpose of it, after all? What wealth had these peasant folk that a Viking would want to take away? Nothing but their cattle and their land. Their cattle were uselessly slaughtered and the Norsemen had evidently no use for the place, for they had immediately packed up and left.

  They had, hadn’t they? John shot a glance at Ailesh. “The Danes. Where?”

  Her face registered nothing. Then John remembered the word. “Na Gaill?”

  Ailesh pointed, not east to the nearby ocean, but northeast to the much nearer hills. John’s breath caught in his throat. He peered carefully at the dusty-green rises only a quarter-mile away. He was not sure he saw figures.

  “They’re still here? Ye Gods!” He spun and ran back across the enclosure toward the shed. Flies were everywhere at the scene of slaughter. They buzzed in his ears. Dived at his head. John stepped on the hand of a dead person and apologized.

  “Derval,” he shouted into the gloom. “The Vikings are only in the hills. They might come back any minute!”

  The sick man turned his head at the shouted English. He raised up on one elbow. Derval heard him say, “Who is this stupid Saxon dog who calls them back on us again?” She pressed him down again, hissing in English. “Mind your manners, Johnnie. You’re not helping.”

  “But we’ve got to get out of here,” he said lamely.

  “Not without the Ollave here,” she replied. “He’s the only one left alive. Out of the whole community.”

  “Don’t forget Ailesh. She’s alive. And it was she who told me about the Danes.”

  Derval looked up at him. Her eyes were shadowed. There was blood on her nose. “The Danes. Yes. Well, how do you like the behavior of your sex now, Johnnie?” John stole a glance out the door at the brooding hill. “You’re really the nevers, Derval. What do I have to do with all this? I’m three inches shorter than you and not half as dangerous when provoked. Besides, there’re as many murdered men here as women, and no easier on them. Can’t we drop this guilt business? All I want to do is go home, and that we can’t do, with no one to work the spell on the other side.”

  Derval had a supercilious eyebrow. “Oh no? Then didn’t Ailesh’s penny whistle work like a gem, and without a bit of help from you?”

  John started. “The penny whistle? Is that how—”

  “How did you think?”

  John rubbed his palms against his trouser legs. “I don’t want to think. I want to go home.”

  Derval nodded. “This is no proper place for us. Though”— her face softened—”if it weren’t so damned dangerous. To the future, I mean. I almost feel…”

  Her blue eyes sought out John’s. “This place and time is where my heart lives, Johnnie. With the oaks and the free herds. Before it all…slid into shamrocks, leprechauns, and potato patches. You know.”

  “I don’t know,” he answered. “Given all, I think one place is as good as another—except when covered with dead bodies, with berserker killers not a mile away and probably coming back. To bury their dead, if for no other reason.”

  The injured man gave a breathy sigh. Ev
idently the narcotic was taking effect. John rather envied him. “You decide love,” said Derval. “Should we take him with us? Or should I stay and take care of him?”

  “Stay and—” John snorted furiously. “You’re completely around the bend, Derval.”

  “I won’t abandon him.”

  John sat down hard on the dirt floor. “Who’s asking that you abandon anybody? We’ll take him back with us. And Ailesh. And anyone else you want. But let’s do it now, eh?”

  Derval appeared uncharacteristically undecided. “The paradox is enormous.” She pressed harder against the Irishman’s wonded side. He smothered a groan.

  Ailesh’s treble voice sounded outside. “They’re coming!” cried John.

  “She only said she saw movement on the hill, Johnnie,” Derval retorted, but too late. John squeezed between Derval’s patient and the wall and lifted the man in his arms.

  One who didn’t know John Thornburn would have been surprised at the ease with which he hefted a man much larger and heavier than he was. But John had spent his youth hauling nets and lobster crates, and his adult years working with stone and clay as well as paper. Derval squeaked as the pad started to slip from the Irishman’s wound. “Be careful, love. There may be spinal injuries.”

  John’s great difficulty was not the man’s weight, but the fact that he couldn’t see over him. He felt a panic that he would step on a dead person again. “Derval,” he called. “Guide me to the stone, would you.”

  But instead the woman stood in front of him, and the pressure of her hands seemed like to knock him backward. “He’s bleeding again, Johnnie!”

  It was a miserable, stumbling journey. John slipped twice but it was Derval who fell, flat over the head of a red cow, banging her arm sadly against the mottled horn of the beast. John couldn’t see what was happening. He leaned his left shoulder against the wall of the céilí house.

  Suddenly the man whom Ailesh had called MacCullen strained in John’s grasp. One leg swung free and then he was standing, swaying. John caught him about the waist as the man cried out, and half-restrained, half-supported him as he blundered into the smoking ruins of the house.