Chapter 2

Milesius

We took the hard road, and I clung to Milesius with bloodied arms as he steered the horse with his thighs and a fistful of mane, mumbling incessant prayer. I fought the urge to look behind for fear of what I might see following through the night. We gathered speed on the lower slopes, cantering over the soft turf, and in the cushioned drum of hooves on earth, I heard the voices from before, intoning into my ear.

‘Dead, are you dead? Not of this land. No blood in this soil’.

I burrowed my face into Milesius’ back, squeezing my eyes shut, and, in this way, we came to the great monastery on the plain, its walls of earth and timber hulking in the darkness, ringing the spaces within, and we passed through the stone gatehouse into the outer precinct. I slipped from the horse and touched the sanctuary cross with great relief. Milesius left the lathered beast with the gatekeeper, leading me onwards. The massed houses and workshops silent. And along the paved way, I followed, through the next gate into the middle precinct where the cells of the monks flanked the scriptorium, the schoolhouse, the food hall. Milesius cried out with some urgency, calling names into the sleeping space, his voice deep and carrying over the muffled night. I followed his labouring back across the open platea, pausing fearfully at the next gate, guarded by a looming cross of painted stone. The dark opening, a pool I shuddered from, leading into the saint’s sanctum. I hesitated at that threshold, the sacred space within housing Féichín’s bones, the great church and the chapels. The relics and gold-bound books. A space I had only ever been to on the saint’s day, when the Abbot walked in procession through bunched throngs who battled to catch sight of the golden reliquary, reaching out forlorn hands, at once supplicatory and violent.

Milesius turned impatiently, yet when he saw me, a boy fearful of his next step, the chiding faded from lips that tightened into a smile.

‘Simple Sasanach’, he said, his voice warm with fondness. ‘You throw yourself headlong into the underworld and contend bodily with the sídhe yet falter at the threshold of sanctuary and sainthood. You baulk at the Godhead’. I shook my head, desperate to defend myself, yet I could form no words. He laughed then, saying, ‘Come, you soft fool, there is work yet to do’, as two clerics came up beside us, their heavy tread speaking of broken sleep. ‘Coltsfoot, and hawksbeard’, he said, and they passed on ahead, moving confidently as those used to waking in darkness to trudge to prayer. I followed Milesius through the gate, the great churches, tombs and shrines, indistinct shadows passing on each hand.

He led me into a stone chapel, its walls dimly lit by crackling rushlights, the smell of tallow rising, masked by the heavy odour of gorse flower. At the altar, he bent his head and kissed the stone slab, his voice low and incanting still.

He approached me then, putting his hands on my shoulders and pushing down with sudden strength. I folded to my knees on the cold flags of the floor. Standing over me, he produced a short sickle from within his robe. He pressed it into my hand, saying, ‘Hold this tightly’, and I perceived in some cleft of my memory that the sídhe cannot bear the touch of iron. I clenched the sickle to my chest. Then he drew forth the silvered vial I had seen earlier. He shook the thing once, and I felt a misting vapour settle over me. The two clerics entered, bowing towards the altar and coming on with herbs and a cask of water. As they prepared the draught, Milesius approached them with a small book of psalms and dipped its edge into the cask. He then passed a candle in a circle around my head, reciting prayers. I waited patiently throughout the rite, the cold stone warming beneath me, drawing my heat down into its hungry lifelessness. My muscles began to tremble once again—deep, uncontrollable shudders born of cold and fear and exhaustion. My head fell back, and I became lost in the dimness above, the vaulted arch of the roof swimming with painted shapes, knots and spirals with faces—both animal and human—emerging from the tangle as if peering from the chaos of a forest in storm. I stared upwards until it felt like I was falling, falling towards the faces that waited with placid eyes and bared teeth.

‘Drink’, Milesius said, standing over me with a wooden cup, and I did as I was told, the cold, acrid draught curling like a serpent, stabbing down into my body and filling the empty bag of my stomach. The sweat gone cold on my back and a sudden violent hunger coming over me.

‘Might I have a crust of bread?’ I asked, ashamed suddenly at these profane words emptying out into that sacred space.

‘In the morning, lad’, he said. ‘It is best that we cleanse the spirit before feeding the body. Tomorrow you will break your fast with us. But now we will pray’, he said. ‘Pray through the night, and I will pray with you’.

‘What is it’, I asked, ‘the kelt?’

‘It is an object of the otherworld’, he said, watching me, considering what my wrung mind could handle. ‘Some say they are thunder­bolts, thrown down when lightning meets the earth. Others that they are fashioned by the artificers of the sídhe. A weapon perhaps, a repository of their power’. He saw the fear on my face, and he spoke again. ‘Peace, Alberic, they will not come for you in this place. And with the first touch of the sun, you will be safe’.

I nodded and spoke. ‘Let us gird ourselves with the power of God’. He smiled faintly and began to pray. I followed his Latin words as best I could, adding my meek voice to his, and the sound resonated around the sacred space, bringing me strength.

‘Sancti Patricii Hymnus ad Temoriam’.

‘I am a refugee, a sinner, a simple country person, near sixteen when I was taken prisoner from Britannia. At that time, I did not know the true God. It was among foreigners that it was seen how little I was. I tended sheep on the mountainside every day, and it was there that I turned with all of my heart to God. Faith grew, and my spirit was moved. I was like a stone lying deep in the mud. Then he who is powerful came and, in his mercy, pulled me out and lifted me up and placed me on the very top of his wall. My name is Patricius’.

Milesius recited these ancient words to me the following morning. He read them from an immense book of cowhide in the empty, sun-warmed scriptorium, where his voice lapped against the walls. I sat, as I often had, among the frames of pinned parchment and the venerated books, watching through the narrow window, the brothers below at their tasks in the herb garden. My belly full of honeyed oatmeal and my head drowsing pleasantly.

Milesius read these words in sympathy, to soothe my young anger, my devouring frustration—to show me that at the dawn of time, the greatest of all saints was once in bondage like me. That through his belief he was elevated in life and became a leader of kings, beloved throughout Yrlande. And though Milesius had his own ends in sight, his words gave me power. A power which settled deep within the bole of my being and allowed me to draw upon a pool of strength when the kicks and lashes became too much, when the burden cracked my young joints and twisted my sinews. Over the previous years, he had furnished me with a spirit that became difficult to dim. A spirit fed by belief. A belief that there would be more for me on this earth and that I would be raised up by the grip of a firm hand. Though ‘he who is powerful’, when he made himself known, proved not to be the Christian God, nor was his beneficence eternal. De Lacy. That morning, I would hear the name spoken for the first time.

‘The world is changed, Alberic’, Milesius said, placing down the book, and I waited to hear more as he bent his face to the studded cover, his lips kissing silently. ‘Mac Murchada is dead and the foreign lords he brought home with him have taken more than was their due. The Engleis King, Henri, has crossed the sea with an army to lay claim to Laighin. Not only that, the King has promised Míde to one of his captains. The Baron de Lacy. An outrage. Unspeakable in its wrongness’.

‘Henri here? In Yrlande?’ I spoke to quieten the tumult of feeling this news had caused within me. And to disguise the hope I felt deep within, I said, ‘Mac Murchada never had true claim over this land’.

‘Indeed’, Milesius said, watching me closely, ‘this is why the Tiarna takes such rash decisions. Looking for answers in ancient mounds and placing his faith in heathen objects. The gaze of one of the most powerful kings of Christendom is upon us’.

‘Will Ua Conor meet his gaze?’ I asked.

‘Surely’, he said, ‘and my cousin Ua Ruairc in the vanguard no doubt. And, as ever, the innocent will be trampled in the clash’.

‘The purpose of all war is peace a mháistir’.

‘Perhaps’, he said, shrewd eyeing me, a thick, ink-stained finger pushing his lower lip into the gentle chew of his teeth. ‘What is certain—your worth has risen, lad. The Tiarna will look to use you and your father to his advantage’.

Milesius—Máel Ísu in the tongue of the Gael—of the family of Ua Ruairc, was a great scholar, and he enjoyed his role, bending me this way and that with the current of his thought. I could not discern at first why I warranted special interest, why I was so often granted access to the workings of the monastery. Many of the clerics presumed sodomy, though, despite long hours in the close dimness of the scriptorium, he never laid a hand on me in that way. The only time his touch lingered was in tilting my head to show the Abbot or some visiting deacon my birthmark, saying, ‘Leag Dia lamh air’—God has laid his hand on him.

This earned me much scorn from the community of monks and lay brothers—one as low as I within their sanctum. Though their scorn was a paltry thing, and I learned to walk tall, uninjured by the bramble of their looks on the back of my neck. In time, they, too, forgot the outrage of it, and I sank into the background, becoming part of the life of the foundation, coming from the Tiarna’s farmstead on my due days to render service—invisible against the high banks of the enclosure, the painted crosses, the stone shrine.

Milesius had been to the realm of the Holy Father in Rome. An unspeakable journey across oceans and burning wastes and forests deeper than the blackest cavern and through heathen lands and mountains so high that snow lay ever on their peaks. Along this route, he passed the vastness of territories controlled by that Imperator of the west—King Henri of Anjou—and read in the stern faces and high-walled fortresses of those Engleis and Normans of what was to come. Forearmed with this knowledge, Milesius fostered me in a way. He saw the value in a half-Engleis lad of reasonable wit. He crafted me, perhaps, as a worker of alder crafts a shield to hold out against future blows.

He knew the law also. A man of great learning, esteemed, it was said, by the bishops at Ceannais and Ard Mhaca. He spoke to me often in the ancient triads that encode the lawman’s wisdom. And I came to know the responses:

Three sons that do not share inheritance?

A son begotten in a thicket, the son of a slave, the son of a girl still wearing tresses.

Like many churchmen, he abhorred slavery and worked to redress it through representations at councils and through his wild-eyed sermons, which he gave at farmyards and market crosses and fording places and anywhere that men congregated within the territory. Whenever he could, he invoked Cain Adomnán—the Law of the Innocents—to protect women, children and bondsmen.

On another level, I believe he enjoyed my company, as I formed a link of sorts to the world beyond the túath, beyond the bounds of Yrlande. For my father had been an Engleis man of rank, before his abduction. He was sold into slavery in Míde before I was born, at some seaport he did not know the name of. That I and Father spoke the tongue of the Normans to each other—a kind of Frankish speech—made me receptive to Latin. I found I could parse its workings quite easily, a fact which Milesius was quick to learn. Each time he read the words of Patricius to me, with every clandestine lesson, he was sending me on another step towards a life in the church, preparing me for the time when he would challenge the Tiarna publicly. When he would draw upon his energies and skills of oratio to shame the master into freeing his slave. Like Patricius lighting the great fire of Sláine in opposition to heathen kings. This was the hope that kept me strong in those early years. I was about fifteen.