Chapter 10

Saoirse

Killing the file was like crushing the wasp after it had stung. Though Ua Ruairc had boasted and swaggered for the remaining days of the óenach and held feasts each more lavish than the next, his legitimacy had been damaged. And all who rode home in the deepening winter felt the cold more keenly, and several days after the last warming draft and enlivening meat had been consumed, the only thing that anyone could remember of the great assembly was the file and his words. The file and his death. The file’s tongue burning and spilling its tallow onto the logs.

Faith in Ua Ruairc was shaken to its foundation, particularly in the fringes of land he laid claim to. The Tiarna’s clients came from all around to seek his counsel. Smoke lifted from their fires deep into the night, creeping through the thatch and rising slowly like a sleeping breath. Father was called again and again to the Tiarna’s house to answer their questions, never returning until the blue morning. Entering the mill in silence, he would eat, wash his face and apply himself directly to his work.

Fearful of what was coming, of the eroding of the edges of my world, I tended flocks of sheep on desolate hillsides, waiting for the voice of God to speak to me. For a bush to burn without being consumed. For a star to shake loose its mooring in the sky and lead me to somewhere of significance.

We heard more of foreigners upon the slíghe. Of a hostel sacked in Luigne. A mill burned in Fore and violence against the people there. As the days grew short, we received the first exiles coming across meadow and through wood following no known path, tearing themselves on the scéach and bramble as they approached. I helped Lochru bring them skins of water and buttermilk as they congregated at the bottom of the hill below our farmstead.

‘See a deer in open country, running wild, the wolf is sure to follow’, Lochru muttered from the side of his mouth as we came close to them. Wretches all, their eyes shifting, their faces haunted, waiting for a blow.

The Tiarna bade us take them in. A sod house was thrown up outside the palisade, and he fed them oats and put them to work on his borders, clearing out the ditches and rebuilding the banks. In the woodland he set them to plashing—that ingenious weaving of live saplings and bramble, turning the green things in towards themselves so that they coiled together, growing in tightening knots into a kind of living, choking basketry that none could breach. The Tiarna prepared. And through his preparation, the danger became real to us all.

One day while tending the flock, I saw four riders on a distant hillock, surveying and pointing and talking with their hands. In strange raiment, they made broad arcing gestures over the land, sitting high and proud on leather seats clasped to their horses’ backs. Before, I would have run to the Tiarna with this, tripping over myself to fall at his feet, offering the news for a moment of conspiracy, a moment within the circle of light thrown out by his hearth. Now it was different. It fell to me to decipher the signs.

Conn was gone, the Máel Sechlainn claim to Míde gone with him. One of Ua Ruairc’s sons killed at Ceannas, murdered by an Ua Ragallaig. Weak claimants attacking forts and killing hostages all across the kingdom. It was not difficult to see the hand of the foreigner behind all of this, bolstering some, weakening all.

The great feast of nollaig came and went—Christmastide, a muted celebration. The winter bit hard and food was not plentiful. One bitter morning, to shake free the gloom that hung over the baile, the Tiarna took the household to the hill of the hunt, to watch his hounds chase the hare. I went ahead with Lochru and Fiacra with the timber and cloth to make up a tent. We pitched it three sided with a sloping awning and set a fire at its mouth. We walked the course then, looking over the boundaries and making sure that the scéach and gorse were sown tight and in good order. When we came back to the hill, the Tiarna was there with several of his clients speaking earnestly into his ear. The household guards loitered around the bottom of the hill, long spears in hand—Erc and Donchad amongst them. Gormflaith stood to the Tiarna’s side, and behind her, holding the lady’s mantle in the place of Mór, stood Ness. The sight of her, as ever, like a hand pressing on my chest. Lochru cuffed me gently.

‘Stop staring, you mooncalf’, he said. Fiacra followed my gaze but said nothing.

We joined them on the hill as the harpist began playing and the hounds were brought forward, their gilded chains making a delicate music of their own as the kennel master led them amongst the Tiarna and his guests. The Tiarna named each one proudly, his hands rubbing their jaws with playful roughness. The kennel master led the dogs down to the flat, and Lochru followed, carrying a wicker cage. The kennel master held the chains tight as Lochru reached in and brought out a hare, one hand gripping its ears, the other curled beneath its rump. He introduced the stricken animal to the dogs, walking up and down before them as they quivered, mouths open, eyes straining. Then he paced out into the course, setting the hare on the ground, and looked back over his shoulder at the hill, waiting for the signal. The Tiarna raised his arm and then let it fall. Lochru released the hare and stood still as it sprinted away down the narrow course and the hounds, released, sped past him on each side. Shouts rose from the hill, and all eyes followed the chase. The hare tried her turn before the end of the course, and the lead dog barrelled into her flank, bringing her down as the pack descended it in a frenzy of rending and tearing. Cheers went up from the hill as wagers were tallied.

Fiacra served them wine, and the rest of us stood on the slope, the cold slowly invading our bodies, watching the hounds streaking down the long, narrow course again and again as Lochru’s baskets emptied.

When the wine had done its work and the party on the hill had fallen to laughing discussions, Gormflaith put her mantle on against the cold, and Ness stepped back from the tent to the edge of the hill, kneeling in the grass to rest her legs. I saw Erc sidestep slowly towards her, stopping at her shoulder, his mouth forming words I could not hear, his body leaning into her. Ness edged backwards from the brow of the hill until she was out of sight of the Tiarna. Erc, in full view, could not follow. I came up behind her, hooking my finger around hers, and drew her down the hill. She threw a glance back at Gormflaith, who sat deep in conversation with one of the visiting men and his wife, and followed. We slipped in through a breach in the hawthorn at the bottom of the hill, pushing onwards to a small stream grown over with willow. We hid beneath the falling branches, and she kissed me, excited by our transgression.

‘Come away with me’, I spoke breathlessly, holding her hands in mine.

Her eyes narrowed.

‘Where would we go?’

‘To the camp of the foreigners. My father is a man of some standing among them. We will present ourselves as husband and wife. I could translate for them and guide them through the land. Share in their takings’.

She looked away for a time, climbing lightly over the tree trunks that grew at all angles across the stream. After a long pause, she said, ‘Mór will help us’, and my heart bucked in my chest. ‘It is clear what is coming’, she said finally. ‘Neither Brega nor Laigin could stand against them, nor Osraige nor Airgialla. The Tiarna could barely stand against a northerly breeze and must trust Ua Ruairc, who will hold him out as a shield against the army of the foreigners’. I laughed at her astuteness.

‘You perceive much’, I said.

‘I will not become one of those wandering wretches clawing the land for roots and grubs’.

A strange lightness came upon me, settling in my limbs as a quickness, an energy I had not known.

‘Husband and wife?’ I asked, not blinking from her dark regard.

‘Wife and husband’, she said, a half-smile lighting her face.

We emerged from the trees, and though the wan sun had not changed, I felt warm against the wind. Until Erc stepped out from where he had been waiting, Fiacra behind him, and a chill descended.

‘Look at his stained face’, Erc said. ‘It must be her time of the month’. The stupid, ulcerous churl laughed then at his own coarseness, looking back to Fiacra. The younger man did not smile, his face indignant. He pointed and spoke in a voice quivering with anger.

‘An síofra ocus an cailleach’—the changeling and the witch. Erc came at us without warning, knocking me to the ground, and ploughing onwards, he enfolded Ness with his arm, forcing her backwards into the bushes. Fiacra, standing over me, stamped down on my back, and I stifled a cry. Rolling, I kicked his legs from under him. I moved to follow Erc, casting around for a stick or stone, his broad back disappearing into the undergrowth, and Ness swallowed by his frame. I ran after him, clawing at his shoulders. His elbow jerked back powerfully and sent me sprawling. I lay still a moment in the damp grass, willing my mind calm until I came to wits. Jumping up, I darted past Fiacra’s lunge and ran to the bottom of the hill, shouting.

‘A boar, a boar in the bush’. The cry was taken up, and I heard the Tiarna’s voice trilling out in excitement, calling for a hound to be brought over. He came skittering down the hill, in his cups, howling like a boy, his guests full of mirth behind him.

Erc, hearing their approach, came slinking back from the hazel, his slow eyes casting around, reading the situation.

‘Yes, a thiarna’, he said, ‘I believe we saw it. I gave chase, a black beast, but it may just have been a wild dog’.

‘The hunt, the hunt’, the Tiarna cried, plunging ahead into the bush, half of his retinue blundering behind him, boys running after with the dogs. In the commotion, none noticed Ness emerge, skirting the small crowd. She smiled when she saw me, her teeth white and etched around with fine threads of blood as if a scribe had traced the gum line with his finest quill. She walked back to the hilltop without letting a tremor show, taking up her place next to Gormflaith, and I stood close to her, seething and plotting escape.

We did not delay, and it was not difficult to go. Knowing Erc’s violence only too well, Mór helped us to gather things discreetly. She found us a shapeless leather bag, cracking in places but fit for our purpose. Over the course of several days, we stole oaten cakes, rushes and tallow, a strike-a-light. I took a fleece of wool from the shed and made a small bag of flour from the leavings in the mill. She took an old linen cloak and folded it into a bundle she stuffed beneath her garment. We left late on a moonless night, through the open palisade and across the meadows to the tóchar. We went slowly, unsure of our way in the dark. I led her past the hazel coppice, skirting the monastery lands to the summer pastures on the high ground to the south. A land of deep heather and mountain bog. We walked well into the following day, until we came to an old buaile hut and crept inside to eat something and sleep beneath the clothes we had stolen.

The next day we walked on, southwards, farther than I had ever been. I knew not the landmarks, nor the placelore, nor the inhabitants of the distant ráths we saw with meek smoke rising. The weather came in from the east quicker than we feared. Before we knew, the darkness had set in, the fields dying and the leaves blown all from the trees. We skulked like the bands of fianna, banished to live in between lands in the company of wolves and foxes. Watched by the spirits living in animals of the woodland, in the birds speaking loudly to each other. A hoard of old gods banished to the underworld. Denizens of heaven cast out at the Fall.

‘Live your life like you are always in company’, Father would say, ‘be it that you are the only soul on a hillside watching sheep. There are eyes and ears all around. Some belonging to God the Almighty. Some to the saints, some to mother Mary and some to the devils and stray spirits that fill the dark’.

Fear and confusion, our steps seeming to turn us backwards, the sucking bog pulling the strength from us, until, without acknowledging it, we knew we were on our way back to the buaile. A second day and night of the same trudging, and we ended up back at our buaile once more, cold, drained, and we sank down, clinging to each other beneath the damp cloak and fleece, too exhausted to build a fire. Our fingers too numb to root in our bag for the last of the food.

We did not try a third day, the weather worsening, the gusts of wind raking the hillside, given body by the drifts of dead leaves raised and flung down like flocks of mad starlings. And it grew colder. We burned more to stay warm. On the mountainside owned by no one. A wattle-built hut, like a basket upturned, and we made what repairs we could, the withies woven into themselves so thoroughly that neither hail fall nor winter wind troubled us. The fibres wound so tight that no spark from the fire, no crackle-shot ember, could find tinder to corrupt. We heaped bushels of heather on the roof, lapped over and over and fed into the coiling lattice, tying them tight with sedge-grass rope. Our hut, low and impervious and invisible from within anything but a few paces. Hidden on the flank of the hill. Just another tuft on the rib of the giant, sleeping beast. Unseen between the peat hags and heather expanses and rilling mountain streams.

And we settled in, without ever speaking of it. We ate the birds that landed in my traps and the beasts, large and small, that could be hunted or dug out from their setts. Snails from the stony places, worms from the streams. Root of the reed and the sap of the birch. Leaves of cress and praiseach and neantóg. Honey from the wood, and the last nuts of the hazel bush. Set in stores for the winter. Pits dug in our floor. Lined with charcoal and packed tight with acorns. Every night we left the fire and the rush bedding and walked to the crest of the hill and looked for lights below. We held each other’s hardening bodies beneath the grand canopy of the night. We closed out the world. Corralled ourselves in and let the shades fall down around us.

And she laughed deeply when, out of nothing but custom, without thinking on it, I built the bed on the man’s side of the house and gave myself the chief place.

‘Lord of your lios, is it?’ she said, pushing me against the wattle and her eyes watching, searching into me for any sign of a birthing tyranny. Looking for the hubris that a dwelling and a woman can wake in a man.

She found nothing of it. Not that she saw all. I kept guarded my fearfulness tempered with an awe and a hunger. My need for her to yield to me. To share herself somewhat. And always I was enflamed by her closeness. That formative first touch. The memory of her wrist, the shaded eye under fine stranding of hair in the byre never far from my thoughts. The smell from her skin of musk and milk as she pressed me there, making me hard as a whetstone.

She would say she found no pleasure in it when we finally coupled. Comfort, yes, in the warmth and closeness, and she could sometimes even be tender, melting afterwards on the heather, moving me out of her warmth. Though in the end her ferocity spilled over.

A clear night and a sídhe wind blowing. She brought a dangerous forage back, leaves and sprouts I did not recognise. I chewed what she gave me and we lay in the house with the doorway unblocked—the trickle of fire smoke easing out of the low frame.

And after we had, in silence, spun with currents of silent understanding for what seemed like days, watching the stars flicker and form signs and rags of cloud progress across our vision carrying symbols, she rolled on to me, that driving gaze replacing the immense canopy of night. She reached beneath my brat and found me ready and sat back holding me in her fist and forcing down in one long draw, taking all that I had. The explosion of pain and energy. She began moving in sharp arcs of her back, driving down onto me with her eyes smothering mine. Her breath humming outwards with each push. And her hands moved from the earth astride my head, over my shoulders fixing at my neck, her sinew-strong grip clamping onto the blood flow as she thrust herself with more violence and her breath breaking the threshold of voicelessness into sound. My vision faltering and a roaring noise, as of distant surf filling my ears as she pinched off the vessels in my neck, her thumbs coming together over my windpipe, pressing. Her vocal cords resonating and she fought on, squeezing with every muscle, soughing out deep exhalations of sound and rutting, rutting as if rutting away every evil that had ever entered her through that way. As I fell from consciousness into a dense black forgetfulness, I saw her as if from afar as she finished, ferocious, like a woman coming up for air.

In the morning, I looked for her far and wide. In the forest and in the valley. In the bog and over the hillsides until the buds came on the blackthorn, never knowing if she simply moved on to something new, in the way she had given herself up to us on the day of the táin, or if in despair she had thrown herself to her death from a ravine, or whether a wolf or the host of the sídhe had carried her off or a man took her at the river. At first I was frantic and full of fear, stumbling and calling out and creeping to the edges of nearby homesteads to see if she was there. And then I grew despondent and thin, and lightheaded. Looking everywhere to the point where I almost forgot the object of my search. And I began to see the deer. Ever as I searched, a doe strayed near. Or stood watching from a rise behind trees. And finally, I began to believe it was her and that, as in the old tales, one day she might come to me in a clearing and bear a fawn and that fawn would become a son. I waited a long time in the woods, lost in a strange fog of sorrow and loss. I waited until the doe came no more.

I hear the stag’s belling

Over the valley’s steepness

No music on earth

Can move me like its sweetness

In the end I had to accept that she was gone. That by then she could be as far away as Magog at the edge of the world, or in the Asian kingdom of Prester John, or a concubine in the land of the Mongol or on the island of Hy Brasil in the far ocean. I followed my feet back across the wild and dangerous bogs until I came to our túath. I took the punishments, which were swift and savage, though no one had the spirit to bear enmity overlong. It soon became clear to me that the Tiarna was glad I had returned and that my absence had been due to the foolish moonings of a boy in heat and that I had not gone across to Ua Ruairc or the foreigners, selling secrets for freedom. Father said little, though not one single blow did he land on me. I believe he was happy I had come home.