Book of Kells

by R. A. MacAvoy

  Derval put her arms behind her head and yawned.

  “Are we not blessed to have come to this place, when we expected another night in the cold?” Ailesh sat down at John’s other side. Their sides touched and John felt his penis slap his belly. He curled up, hot as he was, and rested his chin on his knees.

  “In this dun lives my own foster mother,” said Ailesh. “It was the Christ Himself who arranged it so their drive would run so late, that they find us on the road when we most needed it. And what better welcome could there be than the shelter, ale, and food they have shared with us?”

  “Do they always eat so many onions?” John asked, but he spoke quietly, or perhaps his idiom was off, for no one answered.

  “And this blessing came no more than a minute after the miracle when we met the saint at the spring.”

  Both Derval and John came to attention at Ailesh’s words. Derval spoke first, haltingly. “What…what exactly did you see, my sister, my treasure. In the old nun? Eoin here speaks of sunlight and moonlight and the faces of beasts. I saw a great power of mercy. You…?”

  Ailesh smiled humbly. “I saw siun Bride, who seemed to me a woman filled with love and age, worthy of reverence. I was not granted any greater vision.”

  “But when she turned on the side of the bank,” John had to break in, “she lit the sky!”

  Ailesh lowered her head. “I knew that the Bhean Uasal O’Cuhain was frightened, and you, Eoin, had a swoon on you. That concerned me so that I didn’t look up the hill at all.”

  Derval gave a sigh of sympathy. She reached out and took Ailesh’s hand and kissed the back of it. John wished he had thought to do that.

  “And yet you call it a miracle, just because Eoin and I…”

  Across Ailesh’s broad face spread a grin: the first John had seen on it. She stood before them and spread out her arms. “How can I deny it? Look at me, my brother, my sister. Is there not a change in this body before you?”

  “John wrinkled his brow. He leaned forward until his face was no more than inches from Ailesh’s navel. There was a faint odor of onions on her skin.

  Her belly look ordinary: child-round and smooth of skin. Her little breasts bobbed with her giggles.

  “Migod! Her wounds are gone!” Derval whispered. “All gone. She’s a clean sheet of paper.”

  “Very fine. Very pretty,” said John, as though he had been asked to judge a work of art. He sat back on his haunches and tried to trap his penis between his legs.

  “The saint has healed me without scar.”

  “The saint…” Another voice echoed Ailesh. At the same moment a disagreeable chill air slid around them. Both John and Derval twisted around to discover Labres MacCullen in the open doorway behind them, supported by two villagers.

  “To the very young every bird is a great singer,” he said. “And every madman or woman is a saint of God.” The poet saw young Iníon Duilta turn her head from him and there was such anger in that movement that he wished he hadn’t spoken.

  “MacCullen, you should not be up,” Ailesh said, still turned away, stepping closer to the fire.

  “I can manage,” he replied shortly, her words killing his momentary regret. He stood staring at the orange glow in the center of the room. Then the poet lifted his impressive head and spoke with difficulty.

  “I seem to remember… I do remember that I have been surly to you all. I am conscious that I owe my life to the three of you, and especially”—he leaned toward Derval—“to you, lady, who nursed me through both danger and my own insults.”

  Derval’s black hair clung wetly to her forehead. She faced MacCullen directly, for they were of equal height. He, in the starlit doorway, made a black shadow, while her naked body glimmered faintly in the dark. She opened her mouth and then closed it again. At last she said, “What did you see, Ollave? In Bride?”

  He shifted from foot to foot, as the rough-skinned, broken-toothed visage came before him once more. Could a man recognize divinity in that? MacCullen glanced at Derval and felt angry—angry like a man who suspects he’s the victim of a joke. He showed nothing of this feeling as he replied: “In my time I have seen many old nuns.” His breath steamed in the conflux of hot and cold. “It is not that I wish to deny that divinity comes down among us. If I did, I could not remain a poet. But why suspect that there was a blessed saint among us tonight, eating our chicken and casting shame over the…over Eoin na Leim bó.” (Owen Cattle Leaper.)

  “You were not healed?” asked Ailesh in a small, stubborn voice.

  Equally stubborn, MacCullen confronted her, his shoulders squared by some emotion. After an awkward silence he answered her. “I was not healed. But then my wounds are not of the sort that heal in a few days.”

  John growled a protest at this dismissal of Ailesh’s injuries, remembering her blood dripping on the dirty oak floorboards of his bungalow. But Ailesh herself said nothing, and supposedly MacCullen had come to the sweathouse to make peace with them all, so John said nothing. Besides, John Thornburn was never sure, with Irish, that he had heard correctly.

  “We have come…my voyaging friends…to tell you that the taoiseach has called his brehan and a few others now to the house of assemblies, to hear our story from our own lips.”

  There was a general stir, as Derval and Ailesh went to rinse themselves with water. Only after both had dressed did they notice that John was still squatting on the plank, huddled and naked. He had lit a second oil lamp from the small one that belonged in the sweatlodge.

  “You don’t need me,” he said in explanation.

  MacCullen showed teeth in a smile. “But yet I think the rumor of our cattle dancer has spread, and many will want to meet the man who rides the stampede.” John only put his head between his knees.

  “John Thornburn: bull dancer. Or almost bull. A regular Cretan,” murmured Derval, stepping out through the door.

  At last he was alone. For the first time in days. Four walls between him and the world: it was a different world, to be sure, but for John the relief was the same as it had always been, after too long in company. He felt inchoate bits of himself drift out to fill the quiet space. He gazed mindlessly at the fire.

  Like all shy people, John had occasionally imagined that in another place or time he might turn around and take hold of things. Well, Ireland was another place, and ancient Ireland was certainly another time, and nothing had changed at all. This understanding did not really surprise John, for he had had little faith in his imaginings. Nor was he dissatisfied with his shyness. Not enough to stand up on his hind feet and do something about it, anyway. Let Derval handle this; she was the sort who actually enjoyed talking.

  This place of heat and wood smelled just like a sauna. John had never been in a sauna until he had taken classes at Cooper Union in New York. But he had become addicted very quickly, and now he let the heat of this Irish sweathouse, oddly moist and dry at the same time, soak into his body.

  It wasn’t now as hot as it had been, since no stones had been hauled from the fire outside the wall for the last half hour, but it was easily warm enough to go naked, and with the two small oil lamps, he could see the pale limed walls. Only a little while ago—two hours, perhaps—he had fainted. Fainted from sheer revulsion. At what? Sex? John’s bouncing penis rejected that idea. Ugliness, then? He thought of old Bride’s beautiful feet. He thought (disciplining himself to the necessity) of her shrunken dugs. He made himself visualize her grizzled vulva, which was, now that he stopped to consider, very little different from that of a younger woman: arches, ovals, spirals, all intricate and richly colored.

  John didn’t know why he had fainted, but he did know he should not have. He’d failed someone, somehow, and now he felt very bad about it.

  None of which interfered with the single-minded drive of his penis, which jerked up and down all by itself and tickled against his thighs. He let it distract him.

  Well, good. He could sit here by himself and jack off. Why not? It was a thing J
ohn liked to do, sometimes looking at dirty pictures and sometimes at Byzantine art. Tonight he would look at the walls.

  He took his penis in a practiced left hand (always the left, for the right had to turn pages) and let his eyes unfocus until the shadows of the wall became shapes in black and cream. Became legs and arms. Breasts and buttocks. Fat bodies and withered. One gray stone was a perfect head with face.

  Lamplight trembled on the pale wall. John found his right hand at his breast, seeking a nonexistent pencil in the pocket he wasn’t wearing.

  A need more intense and consummatory than his solitary desire took him. He bounded to his feet and ran out naked, to where the fire of wood and turf burned to heat the sweatlodge. There he scrabbled among the dead coals. Besmirched and chilly he popped back into the hot room, over to the blank white wall. His eyes measured and his mouth moved. With great sweeping gestures he began to draw.

  His penis—stiff-standing, ignored—made a series of tiny smudges in the charcoal. Eventually these blended into a stripe like a chair rail around the room.

  The alcove bed of the taoiseach and his family was at the second row in the dun, which meant that Derval, sitting against the wattlework lattice which separated it from the two on either side, could stare down ten feet to the middle of the hall, with its benches by the hearth and the great turf fire. Like from boxes in an opera hall, families looked out of their two storys of bedrooms, draperies and screens drawn back, to see the event of the council. Some of them were still eating as they reclined, with wooden bowls and spoons of horn, sopping the gruel with hunks of oat bread. Others were grooming themselves before sleep. Just across the empty space from them, in a room with scarlet wool curtains, a woman combed her long black hair before a polished metal mirror illuminated by a small lamp in a bowl. She was naked except for a shawl. Most of the people looking out from their rooms were nearly or totally naked, clean from the bath.

  The black-haired woman noticed Derval watching her, and she nodded and smiled. With perfect friendliness Derval nodded back in reply. She felt slightly drunk with the warmth of the place. Her eyes wandered.

  Derval was startled to discover an elderly couple making love in an alcove with open curtains. No one else was paying the slightest attention to them, except for a baby (grandchild, perhaps) who was playing delightedly with the ribbons in the woman’s elaborately braided hair. This infant squealed with joy as the man removed his face from his wife’s neck long enough to tickle its stomach with the end of a braid. He kissed the baby on the top of the head and called out. A young woman came, speaking in soft teasing fashion, and took the infant away. The couple resumed their pleasure.

  “Shameless,” Cambrensis had called these, the Gaels. Derval’s face tightened in glad vindication of her own native stock, even as she blushed like a rose to see it. She remembered a phrase from The Wooing of Etain: “Come with me where there is no sin between man and woman.” There was no sin here; Derval knew that.

  And Johnnie was holed up in the sweathouse, alone. He could have used a little of this training. Hell, he could have used a crash course. What a man to have beside one in the freedom of the tenth century. Derval’s lip curled.

  But then her brain delivered to her the image of John that evening in the trees, just before Bride had… Johnnie crying out in great misery his shame and his need. And she had offered him nothing, not even a word of friendship. She had an excuse, certainly, for a miracle had been impending, or perhaps a string of miracles. And she was not a therapist, after all, Derval told herself. All in all she had been quite patient with Johnnie’s sexual problems, which hurt no one as much as himself. She had nothing with which to reproach herself, Derval decided, but still her gloating over her Gaelic heritage seemed suddenly silly and her proud mouth softened. She looked downward, toward the hearth.

  Children and dogs ran across the floor like mice in a granary while adults of both sexes chased them. Evidently it was bedtime.

  The private quarters of the taiseach were dim, and consisted of a line of heather mattresses laid against the outside wall of the dun, each mattress covered with a feather bed, a double woolen cloak, and cowskins or sheepskins. There was a highly ornate ax and a shield on the taiseach’s wall, and below it a carved stand displaying a prayer on parchment. Three tallow lamps hung from chains of bronze. There were no facilities for cooking in the alcove: only the huge caldron and the iron spit on the hall fire in the very center of the round wooden building.

  Why did the taoiseach—the battle chieftain—live on the second story of the dun, where he (not to mention his wife, his old mother, and crippled father) had to go up and down stairs every day? Perhaps the second story was warmer, or perhaps the family had lived there before he was elected taiseach and didn’t want to move. Derval cast a glance at the burly man, clad only in a blue-green cloak which was deeply embroidered about the hem and seams and closed at the top by a handsome enamel brooch, and decided that he was in no mood to be bothered with questions of that sort. A silver-bound horn of ale was passed round, and she sipped of it before passing it on. It was warm, that ale, and sweetened with honey.

  The fire heated her back and the incense smell of turf filled her nose. The sweathouse had drained her nerves away. Derval gave herself another five minutes before she’d close her eyes and start snoring.

  She sneaked a glance at Ailesh, to her right. The little redhead sat on her heels with her palms cupping her opposite elbows: a rather formal balance. She appeared neither weary nor intimidated as she waited for the taiseach’s mother to be helped onto pillows and wrapped in a cloak with a heavy woven pile, like that of a rug.

  MacCullen lounged on a mattress on the other side of the girl. He was attended by a young man who arranged his feather bed with exaggerated, awkward care. MacCullen seemed not to notice. His attitude was exaggeratedly calm, but his half-open eyes glittered. He was sizing up his audience, thought Derval, amused. He obviously expects to make an effect of some sort.

  Yet twenty-four hours ago she had expected this man to die. True, she was no hospital nurse, but he’d lost so much blood… Derval shook her head in wonder and almost fell over from the effort.

  “Éistig ré sceál—hear this news!” The taoiseach had spoken. He was a sandy-haired man with a ruddy face and he sat in the middle of the room, disdainful of pillow or prop. His wife, Ailesh’s foster mother, sat beside him and stroked the bereaved girl’s hair.

  There was a murmur of assent. The taoiseach went to the lattice and bellowed.

  The scuff of the children’s play faded. There was silence from below. The slow turf fire and the woven lattice speckled with gold all the faces of the people facing Derval.

  It was the ancient woman who spoke. “Come, Buan. Sit down and let us hear our guests’ story.”

  The poet took this as his cue. He sat up, shifting free of his helper’s arm. He took a measured breath, while his gaze shifted from face to face, commanding attention. “I swear by the Gods my people swear by I am Labres MacCullen, Chief Poet of the kingdom of Leinster,” he said. “I think there is none here whose late fire I have not shared. By the wounds of Christ and by my own wounds, I will speak the truth to you tonight.” He swayed, perhaps involuntarily.

  He’s such a good-looking man, thought Derval. I forgot that, while he was playing the ugly for us. He’s good-looking and knows how to use it.

  “I come this day from the Abbey of Ard na Bhfuinseoge,” MacCullen was saying, “where the compass trees lie broken, their leaves shrouding the bodies of the dead. The abbot’s blood is spilled on the earth, and that of young Caeilte, my sister’s son and cláirsoir. Goban MacDuilta is lost to us as well, let all the island lament!

  “I have seen the great house of Ard na Bhfuinseoge burned; it was set aflame above me, as I lay bleeding, the only one alive after the assault of the Gaill.”

  Ailesh blinked at him. “Remember that I, too, am alive,” she began, seeming reluctant to correct the Ollave in company.

&n
bsp; MacCullen glanced down at the girl and blushed hotly. “Christ forgive me, you are right, Iníon Goban, and I spoke like a fevered man to forget it. There were two who survived.”

  “Ah! Never let truth get in the way of a good line,” murmured Derval in English, quietly.

  He raised his face and voice. “It was the savage pagan Gentiles who came upon us: the servants of the false devil, to whom I will not give strength by naming. Their message was death itself, for they left little even for plunder. Ard na Bhfuinseoge is no more. That is my history.

  “Ailesh, the daughter of Goban the carver, has a story as bitter but yet stranger.” He flung out his arm toward the girl and sagged backward.

  Ailesh lifted her arms out from her sides. “People of proud Ui Garrchon, foster mother, friends of my childhood… Pray for me, for my father is dead, and in my own peril I have not been able to lament him.”

  There was a stir of sympathy, soft as a light wind. Derval saw the sign of the cross being made, as well as other gestures she did not recognize. She was aware of MacCullen’s restlessness. He leaned against his helper once more. Envious, she decided. Envious of Ailesh’s good theater.

  “The Gaill came yesterday at midmorning. The people of Na Clocha Líatha must have fled with no thought of us, and that is little wonder, for it is a matter of dissension that their tribute is to Leinster’s Rí ruirech while ours is sent away to Awley Cuaran in Dublin. The reavers sent their filid before them, to inform us they would attack, but it was an empty service, for he spoke his own tongue to us, and we did not understand. He was a small and dirty man, whom we thought to be a laborer from Dublin. Besides, my kinsmen—what would we have done had we understood his threat of doom: we who had no weapon more deadly than a stone chisel among us?”