Chapter 23

Féichín’s Bones

The day was fading as we came through the last pass between wooded slopes and saw the churches rising from the plain which opened up before us. The children were past cheering, and we pushed on into heavy weather, bloodied feet and aching legs, chattering mouths, the women in rent and billowing garments. Ness walked at the front, leaning on her spear, a little girl on her back, burying her face against the wind into the exposed skin of Ness’ shoulder. A boy of five or six rode on my shoulders, his weight adding to the wearing heaviness of my mail shirt.

I progressed with mixed feeling, unsure of my welcome to Milesius’ house, though thoughts of his stern face moved me in a way I had not expected. A yearning awakened in me, or rather, finally made itself known, emerging from the crowding feelings that had beset me over the weeks and months of confusion and violence, of trickery and betrayal. I yearned to sit with him in the scriptorium as we once had, surrounded by the intoxicating musk of vellum and inks and the power of the written word, carrying voices from ages past and prophesies of the future. I yearned to speak to him of Duiblinn. Its streets and its market, its immense cathedral and the varied tongues of its quayside. I wanted to speak to him of the great Lorcán Ua Tuathail and of what was befalling the Gael in those lands. I wanted to hear him expound on these matters, bringing his insight to play where mine had long ago exhausted its potential. Bringing light to the darkness. To take my face between his two palms and kiss my forehead and tell me that God has foreseen what is happening and that it is the right thing, that slavery is lifted and the kings will need to take notice. I yearned to tell him of what I had done for Conn, of the risks I took and the stratagems I employed, though my blood ran cold at the thought of speaking Hamund’s name. Of bringing the news that Conn was likely dead, swallowed by the grey-brown waters beneath the Ben of Étair.

I yearned to ask him of my father. Of my parentage. Was the Tiarna my sire? And what of Johan of Frodsham? Would I find him there too? Would I question him now that I had the strength to stave off his blows? Would I question him with a sword tip to his throat? Or would I embrace him, and let him keep his secrets, his hurts? Accept his penance?

Crossing the fields of broken winter barley, we knew that something was not right, stumbling on the trampled and pocked muck. A quiet and empty feeling from the place. Sodden and wind whipped. A ragged length of fabric, tethered to something beyond sight, gusted and cracked, shooting up over the rampart and disappearing to the caprice of the gale. And then we saw the gate reduced to charred and broken timbers, and a sickness rose from the pit of my stomach, touching the back of my throat. Naked, burned roof poles rose, ghoulish, over the bank.

We passed through, palming the sanctuary cross carved into the gate passage, and, touching our lips, we entered the civitas. None challenged us. No gatekeeper stood out in front of us. And none were seen within the outer space, except a small parcel of cattle stoned into a makeshift paddock against the shelter of a ruined building. The forges quiet and not a waft of smoke rising. The bolt of fabric seen now as the weft of a loom, broken and trailing its last workings of half-woven stuff. The only other movement came from a pack of wet and blackened children climbing over each other in the mud before the high cross. Hunger was scored deep on their faces as they played a violent game with broken scraps of once sacred things. The children in our arms shied away from them, burrowing their heads further into our backs. I called out to them.

‘Ho—where is the coarb? Where are the brothers?’

They scattered upon hearing my voice, one scrawny boy spinning in his flight to cast a warning sign—the evil eye—towards us before following his fellows, scrambling and clawing over the inner rampart. Something within me recoiled to see such unwashed and irreverent bodies crossing into that sanctum—that place of the saint’s relic, of the brothers’ graves and holy scripts. Their passage left us alone in the devastated expanse, rain dropping from the ruined shelters and buildings. Engleis arrows embedded in door-jambs. Ness called to me, setting the girl to the ground and sending her running back to the others. She stood by the doorless opening into a low stone house. Her face blank. Stone hard. Looking within, I saw bodies, twenty or more heaped and the intestinal smell of death rank from them. We turned quickly from the scene and hurried the others along towards the next enclosure. Rivulets ran down the paths against us as we pushed ourselves onwards. At the gate through the next rampart, we saw some life. A circle of women sat beneath a lean-to roof sorting bushels of barley along with sorrel and nettle. They sat silently, picking the nibs and preparing them for the pot.

‘Ho’, I called out, though the dirty children had alerted them to our coming.

Some of the women stood looking and some recognised in our companions sisters or cousins, coming forward and bringing them close in commiserating, warming embraces.

‘Come, come’, they said, ‘sit by our fire’. A torrent of news was given and received. ‘The foreigners came’. Tears and bitterness. The resolve of women. They pushed the children forward and made them stand before the fire. They rubbed their blue-tinged arms and legs between the rough palms of their hands and pushed quids of sorrel into their reluctant mouths.

‘Where is the coarb?’ I asked once the initial clamour had subsided.

One of the women, hugging the boy who had rode on my shoulders, pointed significantly with her chin towards the inner sanctum and the rising gable of the church.

‘Within’, she said. Signalling discreetly for Ness to stay, I moved towards the centre of the civitas, following ground I knew. I passed through the inner vallum and into the sacred space it encircled. Through the gateway I could see a meagre group of men working to rebuild the roof of Féichín’s oratory. Others prepared a meal of mashed grain over smoking pots. Shouts of alarm rose as I approached in my gambeson, the sword hanging at my belt. Some screamed, running away into the church, believing another attack. I held my hands high.

‘Síocháin’, I shouted—peace. And I recognised one of them. Cearbhaill. One who had scorned me in a different life, who had decried my visits to the sanctum. He stood at the head of the workers, a taut rope in his hands as his gang raised a salvaged beam into place over the building. He flinched backwards at my approach, knowing me instantly, and the beam sagged, men crying out ‘hold, hold’, and he pulled taut, unable to flee.

‘Síocháin, Cearbhaill’, I said. ‘I come under the law of Adomnán. We have brought Mánus’ people, away from rapine and away from murder’.

The cleric stood his ground, eying me with suspicion. He ceded the rope to a companion. And we walked a short distance from them to talk.

‘Alberagh’, he said, rubbing his reddened hands on his robe, ‘you bring them to not much better’.

‘What has happened here?’ I said, ignoring his unease. Ignoring the rancour that lay between us.

‘The foreigners came, three days since’.

I shook my head. ‘No, not possible. What colour were their standards?’ He paused, his face clouding, recalling a painful memory.

‘Some yellow, some red’.

‘Angulo’, I said.

‘And Ua Ragallaig also. I went to the gate to speak with them. Some parlayed and pledged respect for the church. They said they were seeking Mánus and any taoisig or tiarna who might be claiming sanctuary within our foundation. Any Ua Ruairc or Máel Sechanill. Any who would style themselves king. I assured their chief man that we were few, that the daoine uasail had all passed on westwards away from their coming. Yet as we spoke at the gate, others grew impatient—archers and rude men of savage intent. They came over the ramparts by the mill and began to plunder. Ua Ragallaig and his men joined them, leading them through the gates to our reliquaries’. Tears fell from Cearbhaill’s eyes, and he did nothing to hide them or brush them away. ‘Féichín’s crozier broken, the house for his relics ripped and plundered. The demons had eyes only for the gilding, trampling the saint’s bones underfoot’.

‘They disobey their lord’, I said to reassure him. ‘This was not mandated. The lord de Lacy will return, and justice will come with him’.

‘They killed many’, he said, ‘brothers and sisters in Christ. They drove off most of our herds and trampled our fields’.

‘Brothers and sisters you have yet to bury’, I said harshly as I remembered the corpses we had seen in the ruined house by the gate.

‘We have been working day and night since, to protect our manuscripts and to keep body and soul together’, he said, his face flinching, studying me and watching for a blow. ‘We have not the strength to dig graves also. These will follow’.

‘And what of the desecration of crows and foxes?’ I said. ‘Where is the coarb? I cannot believe he would leave the dead unburied’.

‘I am coarb’, he said, confused, and I shook my head in denial.

‘Milesius. Where is Milesius?’ I said, trying to mask the urgency in my voice.

‘He is gone’, Cearbhaill replied, and the earth pitched beneath me. I grabbed at his vestment to steady myself, and he recoiled with fright.

‘Do not say so, Cearbhaill, do not tell me he is slain’.

‘You misunderstand me’, he said hurriedly. ‘Milesius is gone west to find Ua Conor’s host. To seek aid against the foreigner. He is coarb no longer but Abbot and heir to St Féichín. The old Abbot died in the early winter’.

‘Gone to seek the famed host’, I said. ‘The unity of the Gael. Then he is fooled by hope’. Cearbhaill’s mouth set in defiance, though he did not speak. ‘I return to Troim tomorrow’, I said. ‘Whatever is in my power to do I will do it to lessen the suffering of your flock. But I suggest that you let it be known that the foreigner is now king here and that all who take up their hoe and harrow in his service will see the chance for a better life’.

‘And those who do not?’ he said.

‘They should take their chances in the west’, I replied bluntly.

‘And we are left thus. The wage of a blemished king’, he said.

‘Perhaps. And perhaps it is as Milesius says, that this is the Lord’s plague sent against the Gael for their sin of slavery’. I turned and walked from him, and his dying words came braver and louder with each step I took.

‘We will rebuild as we always do, Alberagh. It is not the first time we have been burned, nor the last. We will persevere with Christ’s protection. He is judge of the living and the dead; he rewards every person according to his deeds . . .’

I went unchallenged to the scriptorium and found it rummaged but not destroyed. All the surviving manuscripts salvaged and heaped by the stone door. The gilded casings of books ripped away. The jewelled reliquary gone. The wooden stairs and decking above burned out, with fat staves of charcoal jutting from the wall. I climbed up on these to the partially collapsed vault, doves scattering, and I sat in front of the window where I had spent such rich hours with Milesius. I looked out at the red sun burning low as it settled into the navy vastness of the western sky. A light mist rising from the river engulfing the valley floor. No sign of a kingly host.

I went looking for Ness before the light failed entirely and found her at the fording place in the gloom of dusk, kneeling at the verge washing something in the placid water. The sight of her chimed bells in me. Small, delicate bells deep in my chest, along my spine, the cardinal points of the groin. This is what I had yearned for since I first saw her riding with Meyler into the stockade. A moment with her and her alone. To ask her. To understand. As I approached, a crow wheeling above on its broad-fingered wings landed to dart its beak towards a pile of bloodied clothes heaped by the riverbank before it lost its nerve and leapt awkwardly back into flight. I, too, hesitated before coming on. Fear stalled me. Fear of her body, her mind, her magic. I watched her a moment and mastered myself, moving forward, approaching unsteadily.

She affected not to notice. The closer I drew, the weaker my knees, the more constricted my heart. Words would not come, nor was I sure if any would serve. Beside her, small knots of white flowers on the hawthorn overhung the waters and dunnógs hopped lightly through the thin branches. I treaded on wetly, my feet sucking in the mud. The rude sound of my approach relieving me of dignity. Still, she did not look up from her work. I stopped, stood, my mouth opening, and the only sound from it was the hammering of my heart, flooding my brain with blood.

‘You live’, I said finally, feeling the weakness of the words. ‘What I wanted to say earlier. I am happy that you live’. She did not respond but kept at her work. ‘I looked for you in the forest. I waited through the winter’.

‘And you wait still?’ she said, looking up from the side of her eye, her mouth curling slyly. ‘Do you still wait for me, Alberic?’ She spoke my name in jest, copying the accent of the Engleis. I knelt down in the mud close to her.

‘I have seen many things since then. I have been to Duiblinn in Leith Moga and many things happened to me there’. She listened quietly, her strong hands kneading beneath the surface, a wad in the rushes. Her thumbs working in the clear, running water, dislodging muck and gore. ‘I have thought of you every day since that night on the hill’, I continued. ‘I have dreamed of speaking to you every night in Troim’. She nodded slowly as she worked. And a coldness opened inside me. A cold emptiness. A hard realisation that her heart did not lie the same as mine, even before her words emerged.

‘I left you on the hill, as that is where you wanted to imprison me. You offered me nothing but a lower form of bondage. A bondage without security. Without comfort’.

‘I offered freedom. And love’, I said too quickly. She laughed a high, ringing laugh, her head falling back to expose the white workings of her throat. Small birds fled from the sound.

‘You promised me a life among the foreigners. A life of security and plenty. You told me of the harrowing that was to come. I listened to your words. You spoke truly’, she said, her hand gesturing around her, ‘even if they were words spoken only to control me. You are not Diarmuid, nor I Gráinne. And even if we were—that story does not end happily for either’.

Her gaiety in the face of slaughter, her free-falling hair, her laugher were all goads that struck hard, scoring me deeply.

‘What will you do now?’ I asked.

She was silent a moment before speaking. ‘I will return to Troim. Away from this slaughter’.

‘To Meyler?’ I said, the poison in my heart lacing my tongue. She did not respond, and I could not stay silent.

‘So, you are happy to cling to him still?’ I said, anger taking me. Bitterness souring my words. ‘To live as a slattern for that churl? Christ, you have sold your body cheap. You have seen these men up close now. Their thick tongues. Their irreverence. Their ignorance of the natural law’. And I faltered, hearing Milesius’ words repeated from my own mouth. And as I hesitated, she reached up, putting her dripping hand on my chest, and drew me in, savagely pressing her lips on mine. And when, with the unexpected touch, my mind flooded and I flushed full at her closeness, her cold, wet fingers tightened in my hair, heaving my head back.

‘Do you not find my foreigner handsome? Sturdy? Lordly? What care if a Sasanach stag or a Gaelic one ruts me to oblivion? What difference that I am tethered to him? I am sold, yet not sold cheap. And at least in this transaction I have been the merchant—not the chattel’.

I shook my head free of her tightening fingers. I grabbed at my face, covering my eyes, seeking darkness. Seeking to soothe the anger, the desire, the confusion.

‘The transaction was not for a horse’, I said, ‘but for a barn of winter fodder. When it is eaten, it is gone. And you left like a pat in the meadow’. Tears straining from my eyes, the panic clear in my words.

‘Little boy’, she said, ‘gasurn, you were not man enough to take me. Nor to keep me. Nor to protect me. Mooning over me with such piteous intensity. Now you try your hand at cruelty. You live like the rest of them, lying in your cot dreaming of the round, white bellies, the soft thighs waiting for your rape’.

‘No’, I said with a force that gave her pause, ‘I carry the burden of lust. Like all men. It churns inside me, it twists my thoughts. But there is clarity in one thing. If I violate a woman, I break God’s law, I spit upon Cain Adomnán. But more than that, I violate my mother. I do what was done to her’.

She watched me then. Watched my face.

‘Did you not rut me on the mountain?’

It was my turn to laugh, a soft, exhausted sound. ‘You reach’, I said. ‘You reach for a comparison that is not there. You came to me, girl. I burned for it, yes, willed it with every nerve. But did not force it. If memory serves, it was you rutting me. Though in the end it displeased you. In the end you left. And nearly killed me in leaving’.

A flight of seven swans beat voicelessly overhead, the sound of their wings sweeping strongly. We both paused to track their flight. A lone water boatman skimmed a curling back-eddy of the river. She snorted gently, almost a laugh, her eyes softening before falling back to the surface of the waters.

‘Yes’, she said in a low voice, speaking to someone unseen. Speaking to the dark. ‘I will tell him’. She looked up to me once more, and her face had changed. ‘I was not set adrift under Adomnán’s law, as I once told you. I was given up by my father. A failed, weak man. I was given as cumhal to another in exchange for breeding heifers. And he did to me what men do. And I fetched water and bent to his whims and was dealt the rod by his wife until she so scourged him that he gave me up in a secret bargain for a quantity of raw iron. And I was again explored and drooled on roughly until a young man in a stable put seed in me and I visited the morning meadows for the dew fruit, mongach meisce, to make sure it did not take root. And I was captured by a raiding party and thrown down on the dirty straw of a byre, and you came in, a weak, wide-eyed fool. As powerless as my father. As afraid as my stable boy. Desperate as every man to spit seed and shudder and groan with your gléas standing out like a hound straining at the hunt, and I touched you to keep you away. And what you took for feeling was survival. There is nothing more here. Survival. A quick mind. A strong back and a cleft between my legs’.

Her silence when it came was iron bound. I could not break it. I reached out to her and touched her shoulder. In touching, I tried to draw in some of her pain. With an unskilled hand I tried to communicate. Though I lacked the tools. She had returned to her work, the coldness of the river travelling up her arms into her core. My lips finally parted to speak, and she must have heard the small sound of it and moved to silence me.

She drew him from the water then—the object she had been washing, drawn from the rushes. I had not heeded in the gloom, my eyes on her alone, blind to all else. Her strong arms hardened as she pulled him onto the bank. She rose and walked away, leaving me with the dreadful, pale form. Long and white, with large black blossoms staining his body. My father. Kneaded clean, terrible in his nakedness. His face still and faintly pained. His ribs clearly visible through the torn flesh, the scalloped wounds of horse shoes across him. His belly distended with the gases of the dead.

Stones crashed upon me. A dark effulgence of smoke filled me. Roaring fire scorched me. I fell towards him, and the falling lasted an eternity, the world swallowing itself, ejecting me from its count of days. Into Patricius’ purgatory I fell. For long grey hours, draped within mists of confusion, wreathed in howls, I cried into the hard, white flesh at his cheek, his nape, keening like a woman, unhinged.

A man who had claimed me. He had claimed me to right a wrong, to seek deliverance, to find peace with himself, and though he took his payment in the skin of my back, he had claimed me nonetheless, where others would not. I cried for the duty I owed him, the moments we had shared. The searching I had made into his words and his past. Wasted hours. I cried at the blood I had drank. The blood soaked into me. Skin deep. Bone deep. Soul deep. I cried. That is all.

I carried him up the hill in the dark, moonless night. My feet following the flagged path and shades of children and cowled mothers melting away from me. I carried him into the centre of things, into the holiest of spaces, stumbling and falling, my shame fully dissolved, and I lay him close to the shrine of St Féichín. Beneath the cold stars, I dug his grave with my sword. With my hands, scooping. I dug through the sacred bodies of long-dead clerics. I shunted their stones and tossed their ribs aside. Their white robes circled the grave, though none opposed me. She there somewhere also. Her voice low around me. Came and went. With bloody hands, I laid him in the ground and tried to fold his arms across his waist, though they would not bend. A bad smell rising. I touched his white cheek, the stubble hard, his skull more present than his face. And I scooped the black earth onto him with my cupped hands, speaking to him all the time in defiant nighttime prayer.

‘None shall oppose me. None shall bar your way’, my breath a copious and misting fog. Farewell, Father.

Without knowing, I stumbled from the graveyard and past shadowy fences and invisible ramparts to the mill, exhaustion a wet brat upon me, and I lay on the damp, greasy boards, kneeling forward, the crown of my head on the floor, shunting the mail hauberk from me in exhausted heaves, like a dying worm. The tumble of the water below lulled me into the past, drawing me down. I fell. Into sleep. Before the dawn, she came in under my arm, her back warm but hard against me in the blue dark. For a long time she did not speak, and then she rolled towards me, nestling into my shaking body. Like before, on the hill, our bodies close and breathing each other’s breaths. A unity of sorts. A unity of two closed caskets, each containing a void. Yet, the distance which before had been unfathomable in its depth was now discernible to me. Her person somehow more knowable.

Her hand found the kelt at my neck, flinching from it. She touched instead Hamund’s tooth, lifting it on its cord and turning it between her fingers. Asked, ‘Whose token is this?’

‘A friend’, I said.

‘Does he not need it?’ she said, and I felt her face tightening in a smile.

‘She does not’, I replied, ice gripping my heart. Ness fell quiet. ‘I spoke in anger’, I said.

‘As did I’.

‘You pulled my father from the charnel house. You dragged him to the water. You washed him with care. I will honour you forever for that kindness’. She did not respond. ‘What will you do now?’ I asked. She remained silent and for a moment more, until I thought she might have drifted to sleep. At length, she spoke.

‘I will return to Troim. Seeing what sanctuary awaits here, it is clear which side of the rampart I would be on’.

‘And if I asked you to flee with me? To marry?’ I said, warily.

‘To where would we flee? To whom would we go? We have no túath. No protection. The burned ribs of St Féichín’s church should tell you that. Who here will treat us well, will give us land, will protect us from enemies?’ It was my turn to fall silent. ‘We will return’, she said. ‘I will go to Meyler and you will continue to assist the barons. Be close to their plans. Be useful. Be what they need you to be. When de Lacy returns and bestows gifts, you will have land. I can come to you then, and we can be married with the blessing of your lord’.

I smiled in the dark, and her fingers ran along my face, finding my mouth. She kissed me, softly and for a long time, until we strayed close to sleep.

‘Were you the doe?’ I asked as we drifted, ‘on the hillside?’ She laughed lightly at this, her voice soft, sleep rough.

‘Do you not know me?’ she said. ‘I would be the she-wolf. The crow. The eel in the river. Never the doe’.

Sleep took me, a sleep dashed with red and grey images. A hunting horn blowing hollow and distant over the forests and through the vales of the west. Hooves drumming on yielding earth.