Book of Kells

by R. A. MacAvoy

  Trees took them under again, robbing them of the feeling they had reached their goal. The speckles that were Dublin vanished, along with the dark Liffey and sparkling sea. John let out a grunt that was half a groan. Ailesh leaned on the pony’s fat rump as they descended.

  By nightfall, thought MacCullen, pulling his legs under the mare’s sides to avoid the close-growing gorse, I will be dressed properly again in a clean, bleached leinne and a brat with a cotton lining. I will have my hair cut, I think. And a close shave with water almost blistering hot. Tonight my bed will be indoors and my tale will be Olaf Cuarán’s worry.

  He felt Ailesh’s head against his side as the mare turned to the left along the descending path. My tale, but her tragedy, MacCullen corrected himself. I have lost a servitor, partner, and kinsman. The daughter of MacDuilta has lost all. The first pang of pity he felt for the girl echoed in his system long enough to spark from the poet the phrases “orphan child, crimsoned in her own bright blood” and “this daughter of art and beauty, naked upon the road.” The poet had not seen Ailesh crimsoned in her own bright blood, nor naked upon the road, but he felt these images true to her condition and his mind hung over them, testing their effect, until by the great uprush of compassion for Ailesh that welled through him, he decided the lines were good.

  He looked over his shoulder at Ailesh’s frizzy head quite coolly, for the sight of his traveling companion could not move MacCullen half as much as the crafted words describing her. Her success with Cuarán would depend entirely upon his ability to move the king. Abbeys were torched every year, along this coast. Girls were raped and orphaned daily.

  But they didn’t usually have a Munster Academy poet to compose their stories.

  MacCullen shifted forward on the mare’s back and she paced the slightest bit faster. His challenge to the Dane king’s justice had to be a great work. If it went well, it would increase his name a hundredfold. They would no more call him a speaker of learning and wit (mild praise), but instead a poet of divine passion. What else, when he stood there in his heavy wounds (and here MacCullen quailed within himself, because he felt very unsettled in this matter of his wounds. Oddly enough, he felt guilty about them). In his wounds, bereft of kindred, new come from slaughter, with a poem on his lip—and for Cuarán it would have to be in the Norse language and form, striking its five beats like blows of Thor’s hammer—a poem that would set Dublin in a month’s amazement at least.

  But how could a poet work under the leaves of trees in dappled sunlight, while swaying to the motion of a pacing horse and listening to birdsong? Impossible. He would have to find a room with a mattress for a few hours and pull the shutters on himself. Whose? Dublin was full of his patrons and associates, but the number of people before whom Labres MacCullen wanted to present himself in his present ragged condition, bearing with him two people whom Dublin would only see as a sort of rabble—that was small.

  There was Alf Bjoergolfsson, Clorfíonn, the old brehan who had been his foster mother, and possibly Frodi the shipbuilder, who would not think the less of him for his condition. But the shipwright would hardly be home at the broad end of June, and Bjoergolfsson, if his memory worked correctly and the bride price had finally been settled, must have been remarried this last fortnight. That left Clorfíonn Iníon Thuathal. She was not rich, but she had enough, and the saints knew she was discreet. And she knew everything that blew in the wind around Dublin, especially concerning the court.

  But as MacCullen decided his course, a high cloud obscured the sun and the dappled wood went chilly. It occurred to him that perhaps Iníon Thuathal would be away. Or would not welcome his plans. And he could not be sure a few hours would be long enough to compose. Perhaps he was not ready to create a poem to amaze Dublin. Perhaps Dublin itself (smart and cynical town that it was) had not the heart to be amazed.

  And King Olafr, MacCullen remembered the last poem he had made for him, in which, by great wit and language, he had managed to describe the history of the king’s line—the sons of Ivar losing and rewinning Dublin and York to the surrounding tribes, and intriguing, fighting for, and occasionally buying their way back with peace bribes—and conveying it all in a light that made them appear heroes. What a work that had been, and how much sweat it had cost him. (And all for Domnall’s poor sake.)

  Yet what had the Dane said? He had called MacCullen to him, and his great wide face had smiled as he had said he had understood every word of MacCullen’s Norse this time and complimented him on his more moderate use of skald’s kennings.

  Despite a weariness that covered him like a deep bed of briars, MacCullen stirred with remembered anger. And his confidence failed him as he remembered the blemish-raising satire he had promised to deliver—promised only bare hours before and in public—should Olafr fail his promises.

  Yet why should he be expected to fail? A king need not be a scholar or a man of art in order to keep his promises. It was the job of the Ollave to show him his duty. Perhaps his greatest job. MacCullen pulled his brat tighter over his shoulders and rode down through the morning chill.

  Derval looked down at Dublin at the foot of the hill with a predatory exaltation. There, she told herself, in what looks (if I squint my eyes) like that town in Sweden, when I was eighteen and that bollox threw me out of his car when I wouldn’t…and there was the village, only fifty little square houses and a petrol pump around a puddle-bay.

  And there it is: Dublin. The crib sheet. The teacher’s answer book. The smug refutation/confirmation of a hundred academic wrangles. There it is, and it might as well be Welsh, or Danish, or even Canadian, like the swamp hole where I found Johnnie and where Johnnie’s father used to steam out in the evening smelling of engine oil and dead fish.

  And there is the old, fat slatternly Liffey, brown even before she became man’s char and his sewer, bulging out over her banks and making a dirty mess at the sea’s edge. And that hill’s the Tailors’ Hall hill, the long Market Street visible as an open space even from where they stood.

  And there was where the first bridge would be, in about forty years. Sitric, whose testicles haven’t descended yet, will build it. And behind it—far behind it—the river wasn’t peaty but light hazel, like Johnnie’s right eye, and that round hill must be the Thingmount where the Norse have their assemblies.

  She lifted her eyes to the north, across the river, and saw the slash and bare earth that would be Glasnevin, where she had been born, or would someday be born, or which was at least twin to the place of her birth. Ugly even then. All the stumps of cleared land alike, like row houses, and among them wandered cows dressed in dull, uniform black. In the middle of the waste was what appeared to be a monastery.

  Derval swayed against the hinny. Dear God! What a fate for an historian. That she should see, hear, and touch all this, and none of it any use to her. Like receiving the answer to a math problem she hadn’t the method to work out. It would do her no good with her peers to say she had seen tenth-century Dublin in a dream, visitation, or out-of-body experience. In fact, it wasn’t fair to show her this, for it was Derval’s job to dig for truth, either in old books or old mud, and the knowledge given freely ruined the work.

  But when the hinny brayed and she pinched it on, her exhaustion made her feet stumble and the shade of trees brought miserable gooseflesh over her body. Free? Shit, she was buying this experience with her life, and it was only worthless because she could not get home, and would never be able to use what she was learning.

  When the cloud covered the sun, Derval bowed her head, her eyes watering hopelessly.

  Ailesh had been to Dublin before, on expeditions to buy iron tools or Italian alabaster, but it was no ordinary thing to visit the strangers’ town. And she had never been there without her father. She watched the sun play on the bay water until her eyes smarted. Goban spoke the speech of the Danes, and it was always he who shepherded his daughter through the town, making jokes about how Dublin was a collection of outhouses.

  Ev
en when she’d been four years old she’d known that Goban’s Norse was awful. She could see the way the Gaill—no, give them their name: the Dublin-men—smiled when he asked directions, and usually he would have to repeat his questions in a half-dozen ways before getting a response. But the smiles had been tolerant, for Goban MacDuilta dressed well, when not covered with stone dust, and the important people knew him and honored him as a carver of genius. And besides, Father’s arms had been as thick as some men’s thighs. No one ever made fun of him to his face.

  During that first four-year-old’s trip, young Ailesh had been presented to Awley and to Awley’s queen, a pretty woman with yellow hair, who had smiled and called her (as Ailesh learned later) “the poor motherless chick with a little hammer in her belt.”

  Ailesh had never mourned the loss of the mother who had died in her birth, but now her heart quickened, and in her own mind she told the story of her father’s death to the yellow-haired woman, and imagined her small eyes fill with tears. And Ailesh would tell the queen she still carried a hammer, and what use she planned for it. The girl’s own sight swam, thinking of this. King Awley himself she did not include in her vision, although she knew it was to Olaf she must present her case. Little Ailesh had not remembered the king of Dublin at all.

  It came to her with force that he, probably, didn’t remember her either. And she did not speak the tongue of the Gai…the tongue of the Dublin-men. Did Derval Iníon Cuhain? Did Eoin Ban? She must not make the mistake of thinking that because they were foreigners, they would be able to understand all other foreigners. Though they were sent to her by heaven. Ailesh lifted her eyes toward heaven and found instead MacCullen, who rode before her.

  The Ollave had been her father’s friend. He spoke Norse like a native, it was said.

  She wished she had not spoken so sharply to Labres MacCullen in these last days, for she felt entirely within his power. And she would have much rather been in Eoin’s power, if she had to be in the power of a man. Eoin was her size. Like Goban.

  A cloud covered the sun.

  John looked at the little fishing village below them with the loose rafts of logs floating, and wondered what it was, and what that big, ballooning estuary that floated the logs was doing on the east coast of Ireland. Could such a bay have silted in entirely by modern times?

  Could have, but probably didn’t. With the distance they had come, it must be the realm of King Olaf Cuarán—king not of a country, but of a single city. Dublin. John stared at the river below, as at the face of a stranger who suddenly took on a familiar look. Was that—could it be—the same Liffey he had spat in for luck on the first day he arrived in Ireland? (Goddamn waste of spit it had been.) Was that cluster of wood huts the biggest town on the island? The Micmac settlement where Grampa had retired seemed bigger than that.

  Oddly enough, the realization of Dublin’s insignificance put a broad smile on John’s face. He let his gaze slide east, from the buildings to the harbor, where his vague eyes suddenly went sharp.

  Those needle shapes weren’t logs at all, but longboats. Dragon ships. Fifteen feet wide, he estimated, with no draft to them at all. Even from this distance he could see the bright splashes of color on them, the brilliant sails furled in lumps on the decks. There must have been twenty ships bobbing at the wooden docks, and half again that many pulled up on slick mud beside the water.

  And the longboats weren’t all. Here and there among the bigger craft were other vessels, some round as water bugs, that huddled together as though from fear of being pierced by the fierce needles of the Norse. Big coracles, he saw with blooming interest. The coracles were rolling and bouncy and so flat-bottomed they could navigate a bathtub, if they didn’t spin one or throw one or turn belly up, as they would at a moment’s notice.

  These… Ye Gods—so many wild horses! John Thornburn felt a moment’s hot desire to own one of the small round water bugs himself. He quickened his pace and went among the trees. When the sun went behind a cloud he didn’t notice at all.

  Holvar marched through the woods with an unusual grace, considering his short legs and wide frame. He felt his men at his back: a complex presence that tickled his neck. For a moment he was certain that the man behind him was Skully Crow and that he was getting closer. Too close. But he dared not look around lest he show weakness. He was uncomfortably aware how near he had been to losing his command that morning, when he told the men they must leave the ships behind. Perhaps it was only the bright weather that had saved him from insurrection. That and the support of five or six of the most respected fighters: Thorir and Ospack the Old particularly. These men were hounds of Odin, and the god must feel his own glory in them.

  The man behind him was certainly drawing closer, and Holvar put his hand in the most casual manner on his belt beside the hilt of his sword. But in another moment he let the fingers slide free, for in the footsteps he noticed a slight hitch, a fault in rhythm, and he knew it to be Ospack.

  Holvar turned to catch his eye, and between them they shared their knowledge of how near a thing it had been. But Ospack smiled through his faded chestnut beard, and wrinkled the scar that ran along his scalp like an exaggerated part in the hair. “Cheer, Godi! Maybe these dark woods will open to a sweet and succulent city, filled with things to eat and drink.”

  Holvar snorted. “The Irish do not have such cities. They live wholly like beasts in the wood, in houses like that big corncrib we just burned.”

  As though the chief hadn’t spoken, Ospack continued. “And maybe when we find this city, the godi will not feel it necessary to dedicate every good thing in it to the god, but will allow his poor ship-brothers some share—”

  Holvar winced. “Ospack, Ospack! Is this necessary? Do you think me a fanatic of some kind? Remember the loot of Northumbria!”

  Ospack’s smile grew gentler. “Indeed. The harvesting of Northumbria. I wonder how it slipped through my fingers?”

  “You traded it for the greatest paunch worn by any—” Holvar stopped in midsentence. He came to a dead halt and his eighty men pulled up in confusion behind him. “Horses,” he whispered.

  In another moment all heard the drumming on the earth. “Little horses,” added Holvar pleasantly. His smile drew as wide as Ospack’s. He waved his men back.

  Three gray ponies appeared on the road before them, shining white in the light of midday. One of them wore a rug of blue and crimson, and on it sat an Irishman in a yellow linnia, his yellow hair tightly curled. This one called out, and the words no one could understand were filled with alarm. Holvar’s smile was beatific as he strolled forward. “Pretty bird,” he whispered to the rider, “I killed my fear and buried it at the roots of a tree when I was thirteen years old. It is unfortunate that it is too late for you to do the same.”

  From a loop on his saddle rug the Irishman pulled a dull iron ax. One of his companions did the same, while the other hefted a slim, pale spear, bright-headed. Ospack moved behind Holvar, but only to keep the rest of the Vikings back. For a moment the three riders loomed above Holvar Hjor, while the leader of them stared in horror at the mass of armed Norsemen blocking the Sliege Dala. Then he spoke a word and all three ponies spun in place.

  Holvar drew his sword and made two strikes. The leader’s white pony crumpled, both hocks cut cleanly. In an instant the rider with a spear had reacted. Holvar saw the delicate dart, shining like a ray of light, and he stepped to the right just as much as was necessary. For good measure he cut the shaft in two pieces as it went by. He heard his men cheering.

  The remaining rider was having trouble controlling his mount, which reared in terror at the cries of the downed pony beside it. Holvar slipped in under its feet and stabbed it in the belly. He cut off the loot of the rider as he darted out.

  By now the first man had slipped off his disabled horse. He raised his long-handled ax against Ospack, but the old warrior merely blocked and led him back toward his godi.

  Holvar was overjoyed to come to grips this way, on foot
and weapon to weapon. With the gladness filling his face he thanked the Irishman and feinted with his sword. The axman took the blow on his weapon’s oak handle and let the force of it carry the iron head in a circle, aimed at Holvar’s head.

  A helmet of boiled leather and iron strips might turn a sword stroke, but never that of an ax. Holvar was careful to step out from under the ax as it fell. Almost without conscious thought, he struck his blade across the Irishman’s unprotected stomach as he did so. Then, out of consideration for his foe, he took off the man’s head before he could see his own guts spilling out in front of him.

  Perhaps the spearman had no other weapon and didn’t know Holvar would have been happy to lend him one, for he turned his back on the carnage, kicking his pony into a gallop. Holvar looked over his shoulder with a face set with disgust and boredom and at least ten spears, propelled by leather throwers, leaped after the fleeing Irishman. Three of them found their mark, and another two entered the broad back and croup of the pony, which screamed.

  Holvar glanced around him to see the second of the riders, the man who had already lost a loot, dragging himself upright by the trunk of a sapling. Bled white already, he was, and soon to die, Holvar noted, but still gripping his horse-soldier’s long-handled ax. Holvar stepped toward him, to cut his sufferings short, when the man raised the ax against him. “Do you plan to throw that at me?” Holvar murmured softly. “Well, good luck to you.”

  The man aimed, and Holvar stood rock-square before him, giving him his chance. It wasn’t much of a chance, because the weapon was not at all designed to be thrown, but Holvar approved of the fellow’s spirit. But the throw that came was not what he had expected, for at the last minute the Irishman shifted and sent the clumsy missile not at Holvar but into the middle of the crowd of watching Norsemen. The Vikings scattered, their yelps of dismay turning into rowdy laughter. The ax hit flat against Thorir’s shoulder point, and Thorir swore good-naturedly. The dying man bared his teeth at Holvar, who took careful aim and stabbed him in the heart.