Chapter 1
Kelt, 1171
Unlike my father, I was born in Ériu. Hibernia. Yrlande. I grew up far from the sea, in a world contained within the bend of a river and the slope of a wooded hill. We belonged to Mánus, a lord of local importance—a tiarna who ran a herd of ten score cattle and boasted that even his slaves wore shoes. This was an exaggeration. We were occasionally shod with old scraps of leather, and then only on fair days.
Mánus ruled over many farmsteads and had a claim to the province of Míde, a wide kingdom of green, dripping herbage, broad, slow-looping, clear-watered rivers and deep woods alive with grouse, capercaillie, deer and wolf. A land soft underfoot and to everything a name of ancient descent and to everyone a place in the order and a value on his head. Rí, taoiseach, tricha cét, ocaire, boaire, lawman, cleric, freeman, bondsman and slave. Everyone with a strict honour price encoded within ancient laws. A nobleman’s worth measured in heads of cattle. My worth, by contrast, was a portion of a sheep. This meant simply that if a churl, unstable with drink, jostled me in a market crowd, took offence and struck me dead, he would owe the Tiarna a sheep’s hind quarter in restitution. This was something Conn never let me forget, often leaning his tall frame against me, forcing me into the low thatch of the corn kiln or the wattle of the bakehouse. He would tap the side of my skull with the butt of his axe, uttering his warning—‘Don’t test me, Sméar, I’ll carve you up and gladly pay the shank of mutton you’re worth’. And depending on the severity of his mood, I would often counter by asking him, who would he practice ball with then? For I was fast and had a firm shoulder, and I helped give him and the other well-born lads the run-out they needed to keep form. And this would often make him laugh; my temerity in the face of absolute powerlessness. ‘Alberic, you stupid Sasanach’, he would say then—their word for Saxon. A word they flung at Father and I. Not understanding that we were Engleis, that we spoke the tongue of the great King Henri of Anjou. That our fathers had crossed the seas from Normandy and had ground the Saxon under their boots. I pointed this out often, and earned many clouts for it. Despite my station, it is true that at times, I found it hard to say nothing.
Conn was Mánus’ eldest son. Low nobility and a boy of my age. My friend and tormentor. Sméar—he called me that because of the broad purple stroke of a birthmark that swept back from my eye across the side of my forehead and fingered in beneath my hairline. It was a twisted sentiment. Sméar is their name for the blackberry. He did not mean it kindly—not the firm, noble berry of clustered rounds. He meant the pulpy leavings in the basket after all had been eaten. There lay my place, at the bottom. The son of a bondsman owned by a failing lord. A fleck in the eye of a fly. A seed in the storm.
Fitting, then, perhaps, that I was there at the parley on the hill when this old world was shattered. I witnessed the violence of kings, coming face to misshapen face. Both unshakably convinced of the iron-wrought firmness of their destinies; of their favour with God; of the terrible power of their own will. The earth shook. A trembling sod. This the nexus on which the world was to pivot, the two poles of my existence shifting. Engleis and Gaelic. Britannia and Hibernia. De Lacy and Ua Ruairc.
I will not recount the endless days that came before. The fevered dreaming on the hillsides. The long conversations with the night. I will not list the tedious and body-ruining labours. Nor speak of the brotherhood of the oppressed and its snatched, tender moments in shaded places. I will begin rather with the breaking of things. With the beginning of the storm. With the first steps on the path that took me far from Míde and through the turmoil of the wider world.
I was still young when the fulcrum began its pitch. Fortune’s wheel clanking around in its inscrutable way. It was the year that the sky ships were seen in Ard Macha. A silver host, spectral and gold illuminated the heavens, emerging from the cloud with their glistening sails and their ghostly hosts peering down, blazing with light on the men below, who shrank from them in terror. And in that year also, the crozier of the bishop of Cluian Ioraird spoke to its owner, words of radiance and doom setting the kingdom alight.
Though we saw no such miracles to presage coming things, the Tiarna had a dream. He saw a great light rise from the mound on Cnuc Bán. A sídhe mound guarding the high pass over the valley and below—a stag belling, a wild dog of two colours devouring a heron’s nest and, above, a sun rising in the west, spreading brightness over a darkened east. A weapon shining at the heart of the mound. A weapon of immense power.
The Tiarna ignored the words of his wife and councillors, he disregarded his ollamh, he closed his house to the monk and chewed his thumb long into the night. Night after night ruminating beside ashen fires, forging his resolve. Until, one darkening day, he sat on his horse commanding the unthinkable. Watching us scrabble and shift moss-thick stones from the ancient cairn.
We worked in silence, frantic in our task, working to quieten the dread that rang out in each of our heads. To stave off the flesh-creep as, hour after hour, we watched the sun pass its peak and begin to drop away westwards over the shoulder of the cairn. The mound’s passive bulk thrumming with threat, and the geis-breaking sound of stones rolling free, rising to swallow everything else. Swallowing the champ of the standing horses, the rare lilts of the wind through the woodland below, the keening of buzzards circling. We cast the stones out beyond the kerbing into the heather, hoping they would land soft. Flinching at each cracking strike as they collided with hidden rock among the furze. Dread and skeletal hands clenching slowly within our skulls as the darkness thickened in the east.
‘Ho’, Lochru cried out—the first human sound in hours—and he came around the curve of the mound, his palsied face white, his hands trembling. He motioned to the Tiarna, who urged his horse onwards. Tuar, his ollamh, and the monk, Milesius, cantering on also. We all followed to where the youth Fiacra stood, unnaturally still, his eyes fixed upon something in the scree. With great reluctance, he raised his hand and pointed at an opening which showed amongst the loose stone. Two rough pillars leaning towards each other, forming a narrow doorway as wide as the span between fist and elbow.
We stood steaming in the cold. Shudders passed among us, and Milesius, hand on the psalter hanging in a satchel at his side, mumbled Latin incantations. The Tiarna gazed coldly. He looked to where his son Conn stood by, leaning on a spear. I saw the subtle question in the Tiarna’s eye. I saw Conn’s face lowering to the ground, refusing the wordless request, and, to disguise Conn’s refusal, the Tiarna’s voice came sudden and barking.
‘Send in the Sasanach’, he said without looking in my direction, and my bowels dropped within me. I stared ahead at the terrible and absolute blackness, a blackness that inhaled the failing light, and did not move. Lochru came towards me, grabbing my arm and pulling me past him with a blow that cupped the back of my skull. I staggered forward, feet twisting among the stones, and fell to my knees before the doorway, backing instantly, as if from a wild beast. I looked to the Tiarna on his horse and Milesius at his side. Their faces as hard as the stone of the hill. I breathed through my nose, a forceful breath. Another. And another. I made the sign of the cross, rose, commending myself to God and the Saints Patricius, Féichín, Lasair, and stepped forward.
I moved towards the dragging blackness. Towards the mouth of the underworld. Towards the realm of the sídhe. I approached as if it were cold water, step by step, clenching something deep within. My hand reached out to touch a pillar, and its frigid surface drew the warmth from me. I turned side-on, a welling panic, though I did not stop. I slid my shoulder into the gap and pushed my chest through, feeling the pillars scrape at once along my spine and breastbone. I dipped my head, without looking back, and entered the dark.
The space within forced me to crawl and I advanced blindly, my bulk blocking the light from the opening. The stones pressed in all around so that I could neither stand nor turn. Pools of water splashed beneath me, a dead air, stale in my lungs. My eyes moved wildly around, though nothing changed in the depthless dark. Hands slipped and scraped, and I struck my head frequently on the uneven roof. Yet I moved, and in moving, there was hope.
After a time, the space around me opened out, and the taste of the air changed slightly. I stood, and the roof of the chamber rose above me. I felt all around with great fear looming over me, though I could stay ahead of it by moving on. Around the chamber, I felt along the walls and found that there were alcoves or passages leading off in four places with low lintels, and in some of these places, objects were placed. I felt around large stone crucibles filled with grit. And among these crucibles, I touched something smooth, hard and cold. My hand closed upon it, and my skin formed around its smoothness. I stood, lifting it from its resting place. Sightless, I felt its shape—almost like an axe-head, though made of stone. A thing they call a kelt. A thing of the otherworld that turns up in ploughed earth or on dried-out riverbeds. A thing of magic.
I tied it up in the fringe of my garment, and the world pitched beneath me. I fell, striking a slab, and blood welled slick on my forearm. Cradling the kelt, I moved towards the passageway, seeking escape, and, stumbling again, I reached and touched solid rock. Fear flared up, breaking over me—a heavy mantle cast over my shoulders. A drowning cat within my chest. I moved around the chamber, feeling into each alcove and following short passages that ended in cold stone. I moved as one pursued, not heeding the knocks and the gouges, feeling hands all around me, feeling mouths opening in hideous forms and shapes, and they greeted me and looked at me and said to me as if in flattery and scorn, ‘The other men in the world who are wise do not come here until they are dead’.
And a howling began in the crevices of the chamber, rising up from below with a creeping force. I pawed at the walls, clawed at shapes until my fingers were raw. The howling grew louder, circling and circling the chamber and pressing down upon me with such force that I could no longer raise myself from the stones. I do not know how long I lay there beneath the awful force of that deadening sound, diseased with fear. No thought in my mind, the tether of my soul to my body stretched to breaking and all sense of myself lost in that howling weight of terror.
And then came a tremendous cracking, a thunderclap of unknown immensity. Light pouring down upon me, so that I saw myself, my bloodied arms before me on the flagstones, and the howling now reduced to a ragged scream emanating from my own throat.
Above, the capstone of the chamber had been dragged aside, and Lochru’s reluctant face appeared in the opening.
‘He is here’, he cried out over his shoulder, and to me he called out, ‘Up, lad, quick now, up out of that place’.
I stood uncertainly, and Milesius appeared in the breach, his voice raised, intoning powerfully as he cast down drops of water from a metal vial.
‘Credo in Trinitatem sub unitate numinis elementorum’.
I reached out a bloodied hand and he lay on his stomach, reaching down to clasp it, drawing me up, feet scrabbling until I was out, blinking in the weak twilight. I fell to the slab and saw the work that had been done clearing the stone from the top of the chamber. Staves and pry bars and ropes scattered around.
Milesius took my face in both of his hands, staring into me with a careworn intensity as Lochru stood by, dumb as a post.
‘What is your father’s name’, he said sternly.
‘Johan’, I said, and beyond understanding, the words brought tears flooding over my cheeks. Milesius thumbed the red birthmark that enfolded my eye, rubbing forcefully as if to be sure of it. And I perceived what they feared. That I was changed.
‘And where was he born and how did he come here?’
‘He was born over the sea in England and sold as a slave to this land’.
‘Who is Tiarna of this place?’
‘Whose church stands in the valley?’
‘Who is the redeemer and saviour of man?’
Milesius’ regard softened. He leaned in to kiss my forehead.
‘Well done, boy’, he said, and I heard Lochru release a long-held breath. The Tiarna’s booming voice cut through the moment.
‘Well?’ he roared from below.
I undid the garment tied at my chest, allowing the smooth, weighty kelt to roll into my palm. A blue-black stone, ingrained with flecks of white. I marvelled at its surface, lustrous and speckled as the night sky. I fought the urge to hold it to my breast, to curl myself around it, to descend back into black oblivion. With my last reserve of will, I passed the seamless object into Lochru’s waiting hand. Milesius drew me to my feet and impelled me gently towards the edge of the cairn.
‘Away from this place’, he said as he scratched the sign of the cross onto the underside of the slab with the bronze-shod butt of his staff, and to the others standing around the opening, ‘Seal this up quickly’.
At a distance from the cairn, the Tiarna on his horse cupped the kelt in both hands, and Tuar and his other household men gathered close, straining to see. Conn did not approach them, hanging back, his jaw set. He looked up as I appeared over the edge of the mound and held my eye a moment, black shame boiling beneath his brow. He made no other sign before turning and working down the broken trail, alone and unnoticed.
I picked my way down the side of the cairn on uncertain legs. Reaching the bottom, I slumped to my knees in the heather, shaking from all that had gone before. None of the workmen reached out to steady or help me. Uneasy faces. And already, the word passing fearfully between them. The word for one who has been spirited away by the sídhe, taken to the underworld. And the word for the broken thing that has been left in their place.
The Tiarna made no acknowledgement as he turned his horse towards the trail, though as I watched, Milesius cantered his horse alongside, a hand reaching out to rest upon the Tiarna’s wrist, low, urgent words in the Tiarna’s ear, and then they were both looking at me. The Tiarna considering, a reluctance dissolving under the monk’s patient silence. He nodded finally, his hand waving as if warding off a biting fly, and Milesius turned back to me, extending his arm. I jogged forward, climbing up onto his horse and passing my arms around his waist. Without speaking, he spurred the horse down the hillside, separating from the Tiarna’s party and striking out for the monastery in the valley.