BENDING THE BOYNE: A novel of ancient Ireland (4 page)

“Don’t you see it? She takes after you, she escapes in the stars and her work,” the Dagda said. “She’s had the same losses, after all. Give her time to recover, let her spirit heal.”

He heard the Dagda’s kind and good advice like a thunderclap. So that was it, Boann still grieved for her mother, as did he. As to Cian’s absence, Oghma saw little reason for Boann to feel any loss. He had but faint hope for his apprentice, an indifferent pupil of stone carving, a dreamer. But surely Cian would respect the equinox, rejoin his people at their starwatch.

The young people would dance in the firelight and pair off in the ritual of spring. Perhaps a young fellow from another village would catch her eye. But not Cian, that one would never do for Boann. Oghma tutted disapproval.

Cian once asked him, why did the ancestors build their great mounds? Not “how,” he recalled the question, but “why.” Oghma did not answer. It was better for young Cian to find his own answer to that question.

The ancestors’ history told Oghma precisely why they built their mounds. To ready himself for the equinox, he recited their tradition now on his way through oak woods to the passage mounds. He recited verses of their deeds and lineage as they would have been told to Cian, and all Starwatchers. Back to Griane, our first astronomer, he thought. Griane, who set the first upright marker stone to show us the seasons of the sun and freed us from hunger. Oghma offered a short invocation for the spring sunset that all Starwatchers would observe that evening. “May the coming season bring us bounty, thanks be to Griane.”

He waved away a cloud of midges under the oaks’ emerging yellow-green canopy. From the corner of his eye, he saw a red fox flash through the undergrowth. “It is an honor to carve the stones!” he called after it.
Could Cian change his shape into a fox?
Oghma snorted.
What nonsense these intruders do believe: shapeshifting.
He swiped at the midges.
Fox or not, Cian could have warned us that more foreigners would arrive.

There stood the warrior camp, visible when he approached the central mound’s clearing, and he frowned at this affront on their landscape. He liked to rest beside the Boyne at twilight and gaze at the central starchamber, at its shimmering white quartz around the dark granite entrance. These days his view was partially obstructed by the intruders’ camp: a banked, circular earthwork topped with a crude palisade of unpeeled logs. The camp’s size and fortification spoke a threat from a hostile presence, a threat that his Starwatchers had yet to assess.

The Starwatchers’ pikes would be useless against those high walls. Oghma knew it, sure as the sun made little green apples. He implored the ancestors for wisdom to guide the elders.

At the standing stone to the southeast of the central mound, he spotted the elders talking and laying out sightlines for that sunset using cord stretched between wood posts.

“Once in every generation was often enough to receive visitors from far across the waves. These haven’t brought any women or polished axes to exchange. Just what have these latest blow-ins brought to us?” Oghma heard the question as he joined them.

“We’ll find out soon enough,” came the Dagda’s reply, calm and deliberate.

“We made the right decision to go forward with the equinox feast,” Oghma added. He saw the children playing in the clearing, laughing and running in the misty morning. With a premonition, he saw it all as if held inside a chunk of clear quartz: his villagers bent to their tasks, their precious children beside the flowing river, their carefully constructed mounds.

Oghma would make sure that the children assembled enough reed torches before dusk. After watching the stars in utter dark, the people took up torches so that no one need stumble on their way back to the village. He would supervise stacking the wood for the great bonfire to be lit after their vigil, the signal to Starwatchers at distant sites. If the adolescents collected wet or green wood, their beacon fire would be smoky and its effect diminished.

He would see to it that the Boyne fire blazed when it should with the other fires, lit first at the island’s center, its navel, and then to the four sacred directions. He would see Boann enter into the ranks of their astronomers. He raised his head in pride.

“Let these intruders see our fires, and hear our pipes and dancing.”

“And if their warriors venture forth?” the Dagda asked.

No one had an answer.

Legs stinging, Boann found long-eared leaves coming up along the path and rubbed them on the red welts from her flight through nettles. Relieved, she let her thoughts meander in the heavens.

She learned to track the moon, like the sun, as it moved in its phases through to full moon. Her people needed to know when nights would be bright under the full moon and their methods of observing the moon were old, “old beyond our time on this island,” the Dagda told her at the rich carvings outside the great mound called Knowth.

“This stone shows us that the moon completes its entire cycle in the sky once for every nineteen cycles of the sun. That’s time enough for you to have married.” She felt her cheeks reddening. He ignored her blush and went on, “The arcing paths of the moon and sun intersect from time to time. We know when, from certain stars.” She memorized those star patterns. They compared the carved symbols at Dowth and Knowth, the Dagda coaxing understanding of the moon’s phases from Boann with a speed that surprised each of them.

Next came the stars. In visits to the old stone markers at Loughcrew, and Fourknocks, he demonstrated that certain stars’ positions had changed compared with their notch on the standing stone. How could this be? It was a crawling, infinitesimal shift, not visible to them in only one solar cycle. The Starwatchers called it Northshift, because the bright stars had moved which showed them true north. Even greater prestige would accrue to the Boyne if they deciphered the Northshift and predicted the next equinox constellation. The Dagda said they would be the first people to do so.

In all their lessons, he made no comment about the intruders. She checked the woods and hurried along.

The Dagda decided when she had learned enough of the movements and cycles in the sky, to accompany Oghma to the kerbstones. Her father wouldn’t allow her to carve with him, saying he did not want her to ruin her hands working stone, but she knew he admired her progress with astronomy. Boann stayed at his side, helping Oghma position the symbols on each boulder’s unique surface. They planned how and when the sun’s light would strike the varied carvings: star shapes, waveforms, lozenges, arcs, and spirals.

“Our great stones cannot be rushed to completion,” he told her and she saw that it was so.

Her friend lived alone since the fever took both of Sheela’s parents. The dwelling was simple but solid, like the others. As Boann arrived, she smoothed her tunic and retied her old shawl at her waist so that it swung down covering her legs. The sun’s radiance warmed the entrance, where Sheela gave her a welcoming hug, then seated herself on a rush stool.

Boann began plaiting in the way her friend preferred, to make braided swags over a central bun. Their conversation flowed easily, but Boann tugged at the heavy strands.

“Your hands are tense, what are you thinking about?” Sheela tilted her head back, concerned. Boann concealed the thoughts clouding her face.

“Nothing, it is nothing. You look wonderful from this angle. Truly lovely.”

“Then tonight it’s upside down I’ll stand!” Mischievous lavender eyes looked up at hers. They began to giggle. She’d only half arranged Sheela’s black hair and it swung freely with her own auburn hair as they laughed together. She scooped up the bone pins that escaped, and started braiding again.

“When I finish pinning this, you can stand however you like,” Boann said, then cringed with regret. Sheela only flushed and reached back and patted her hand. She leaned forward and their eyes met again.

“You’ll have an offer, I know it,” she told Sheela. “Such gorgeous hair, enough for three women gracing your head.”

Boann wished she had more words of encouragement. Like her, Sheela was old enough to marry. But Sheela had one leg slightly longer, one ankle badly formed. It impaired her gait, and gave her suitors pause: would the children of Sheela have that ankle? It was a hard truth of their ways though there were plenty of men. Yet Sheela does have her admirers, Boann thought, she defies adversity living on her own, and has boundless humor. If not for Sheela, and the stars, she might have lost her wits in the past dark winter. Boann knew that one man who had good sense might step forward to marry Sheela, and she hoped that would happen on this equinox.

“Do you remember when we pulled burrs out of my hair?” Sheela asked.

“That I do,” and Boann smiled. On a warm night in early autumn, a night Sheela spent pleasantly in the fields with that young man, her friend’s hair had been strewn with thistle heads. She sought out Boann, looking much amused, and together they removed thistle after thistle caught up in the dark tresses. Sheela exclaimed how the tiny needles had hooked and enmeshed her hair.

“When I’m older, with my vision failing and stiff fingers, it will be difficult to tie patterns fine as a spider’s web. So I’m trying to knot my fibers using a slender bone shaped into a little hook at one end.”

Clever Sheela perfected the knotting of fibers, an art learned from an uncle who made nets for fishing in the river. Others copied her delicate knots all over the island, for everything from fringes to webbing that made an entire garment.

“And where are you getting these bone hooks? From anyone I know?” Boann asked though she well knew.

Sheela grinned. “It seems Tadhg can make anything. We’ve already tried bones from birds and even a big salmon bone, but those were too thin or too weak. Now I’m trying a young sheep’s bone that Tadhg worked. We’ll see how long it lasts.”

Smiling, Boann finished pinning the looped braids. She avoided talking about the progress on the stones until Sheela’s cautious question, “How is he?—Oghma, that is?”

She kept her voice casual. “The carving is sure to be going better. We’re over the frosts, and have the longer light ahead.”

Sheela nodded as she touched her hair. “Perfect.”

The friends changed positions and moved the rush seat to follow the sunlight. Boann tucked her scratched ankles underneath it, out of sight. They chattered while Sheela pulled up and dressed her hair, complimenting its reddish-brown gloss like hazelnut shells. In high spirits, Sheela weaved the village gossip into the plaits.

Under caring hands, Boann relaxed. A chance encounter, and she wouldn’t worry her friend over the stranger who surprised her at the stream. Neither spoke of more intruders arriving or what dangers their scouts faced at the coast.

They washed their faces and smoothed each other’s brow with hazel tonic.

When she made ready to leave, Sheela hugged her again and tried to give Boann one of the best of her knotted overtunics. “You can’t wear that old shawl for this equinox!”

“No, I mustn’t take this. I’ll snag it on a branch or trip over a log in the dark.”

“Go on, now. You should wear fine feathers on this evening.” She hesitated until Sheela said, “It’s all right, I understand. Who knows if Cian will show himself? But I’ll be there with our people and proud of you. Take this, and off you go.” Sheela forced the supple netting into her arms. “The starwatching shall be your rock and your refuge.”

“You are a true friend.” Boann relented and went on her way.

“Good luck to you,” Sheela called.

Her steps quickened as she turned to wave at Sheela, whose smile in reply shone to rival the sun. Boann’s thoughts returned to how she might detect the tiny but crucial shift of the equinox constellation above them. Perhaps Cian would return for this evening’s ceremony.
With or without you.

The river wound past in its banks, reflecting the uncertain sky over the mounds.

Let grief be a fallen leaf

At the dawning of the day

Raglan Road,
Patrick Kavanagh

The Crime

T
HE SUN’S RAYS
sloped from the west when Sheela inspected her water pots, numerous but all of them empty. She wanted to set out a little brimming jug of water, an old custom to reflect the spring moon inside her door. She stepped into the early evening where the air was fresh again after becoming close under sunshine. Tadhg smiled as she passed him with her pot and her gear. Tender plants sprouted in the rich soil of the meadow along her way to the stream. She wished for children in her season, like the fecund earth.

When she reached the watering stream, the young grass and ferns along its shore showed no trampling or disturbance. A pair of swans drifted along the banks for her to admire. Sheela strolled there, looking for the bluegreen plants she used to make an excellent fiber. She would return in summer to harvest their tough stems with her sharpest flint blade. Purple evening shadows were gathering under hazelnut and willow trees beyond the grassy banks. Out in the open, nothing moved or shimmered except the first small white flowers at her feet. Birds called softly as they would before the hush of darkness that follows sunset.

Sheela had no warning of the assault.

She tried to slip from his clutches but she was not fast enough. She had only a sideways glimpse as her assailant came crashing onto her, taking advantage of her slowness. He was one of the intruders. Her water pot dropped from her hand and smashed into shards. Heavy hands caught at her waist, grabbed her arms and raised her tunic to pin them behind her. He flipped her over onto the sweet riverbank grasses.

His right hand ruined her looped braids to pull her head sideways facing away from him. He did not speak. She caught a sickening smell from him as he lowered himself onto her. He breathed fury, this was no caress. Her fear rose exponentially and she could only voice a strangled scream under his weight. Her muscles spasmed as his knees, clad in rough leather leggings that had been too hastily cured, scraped her inner thighs and knocked her legs apart. His bulk shifted and she felt him pushing to enter her. Bewildered, struggling for air, she convulsed, her insides clamping on him like the intruders’ cruel metal.

Taunts she didn’t understand sounded from his companions in the shadows, watching his clumsy and interrupted attack upon this woman they surprised by the stream. “Look lads, will you look? He can’t!”

She sensed his rage at being observed. The bronze dagger rang out of its sheath and Sheela felt his left forearm sliding up to her neck. With a keen instinct she bit deep into his hand as he, half propped on one elbow and wielding his knife, was closing on her neck.

The sight of his own hand bloodied from her bite enraged him further. He almost took off her head when he applied the dagger.

They decided not to take her head as a trophy. The murderers fled. They left Sheela sprawled on the grass, red streams flowing out from her body over the tiny white daisies low in the grass. Horror, pain, and fear were frozen on her face. Her lavender eyes, it was later said, resembled infinite pools of the sky upon which they were fixed.

A lone bird called as darkness and mist shrouded the still figure.

When the body was found at the next dawning by Starwatchers searching for Sheela, the hideous scene wrote itself indelibly upon their memory. No one had ever done such a deed on their island. They had no word to describe the crime against Sheela. Scouts gathered up her remains tenderly after the elders had seen that place of death.

At Sheela’s dwelling, Boann waited. She looked up to see Airmid bringing a basket of herbs and soft skins for preparing a body. Airmid shook her head. Her red curls looked out of place in the still and grim space. Gentle Airmid told her, “You shouldn’t do this alone. Let me help.” The body arrived and the two women looked at each other, aghast. The scouts left them reluctantly, one man staying outside the door.

The women silently set to work. Hands trembling, Boann redressed Sheela’s hair to its state before the murderous attack, after washing it with aromatic water to rid it of the choking smell, the smell of the intruders. Airmid, white-faced, repaired wounds as best she could.

They chose to dress Sheela in a soft skin tunic bleached in the sun. They added the most delicate overtunic made by Sheela, the knots too fine to be seen at arm’s length. Then the two women wept to see beautiful Sheela lying dead in her garments meant for her wedding.

The Starwatchers kept the body in the coolness of a small cairn with an honor guard of women and men until the ceremony. After lying in the great eastern mound of Dowth, Sheela’s cremated bones would be interred in one of the smaller mounds to the southeast. The elders delayed the first interment while runners brought the news to other villages, so that as many Starwatchers as possible could attend.

Hundreds of Starwatchers gathered to mourn. They walked to the Boyne mounds, some traveling for the better part of one sun, and in lowered voices made arrangements to share food and set up shelters. The crowd converged at Dowth mound.

The horrific deed overshadowed the death itself and skewed the focus of the burial ceremony. The Dagda spoke first in benign phrases about the fragility, the gift, of life.

“He said nothing of the intruders,” one elder whispered angrily to another.

Boann spoke briefly. “Remember our friend Sheela. Remember Sheela for her life, her joy, her contributions to our community, and not for her death.”

Family members were too stricken to speak, and the singers’ chorus was muffled. A cold wind arose and bowed the grass, it shook the young barley, as the people stood together in the wordless shock of what had happened.

Tadhg hung his head and when he looked up at last, Boann hardly recognized him for the new emotion showing in his eyes: hatred for the intruders.

Late sunlight glittered on the white quartz around the entrance to the north passage in Dowth. The wrapped, slender form lay upon the grass. The mourners filed past, bereft of flowers to cast down in this early season. Then four young men stepped forward. They locked arms under the body and carried Sheela across the entrance stones and along the narrow passage to the innermost chamber. They tripped on three low stone sills in the dark passage but none cursed or drew a breath. Inside the chamber, the men carefully lowered the body to the flagstone floor. Behind it in an oval stone basin, dried sweet herbs were burning, Boann’s last gift to her friend.

After the others withdrew, Boann stayed inside the mound, seated, with Sheela’s body. She looked vacantly around this inner chamber. Its ceiling was lintelled and flat rather than corbelled; that was a mark of its earlier construction. Sparse carvings of rayed sun circles, spirals, and chevrons would guide Sheela in the spirit world. Starwatchers treated the body with respect. The sealed mound kept out animals while natural processes cleaned away flesh. The bones would be burned and later arranged in a small cairn nearby. The bones of Sheela’s family who preceded her in death lay in smaller cairns around Dowth, and now Boann served their memory by thinking of each name and reciting their lineage. Other than cousins, the death of Sheela ended her mother’s line.

Boann remained motionless in the silence of the old starchamber. Sheela must lie here alone and in darkness. This north passage inside Dowth, and its second passage to her left, both faced west where the sun would soon set. She spoke to the spirit of Sheela.

“You have repose here. The moon visits on its standstill. When the sunset penetrates the darkness of Dowth in winter, then we shall return to honor and remove your bones.”

She sat, numbed with pain, staring at the great grey stones. She thought of all the mounds built by her people. Carved stones from smaller old mounds at the Boyne had been reused to build newer mounds. The one had been destroyed to build the other, reshaped and renewed. She placed more herbs into the small fire in the bullaun stone. What will come of this death, she asked it.

Some events were immutable, final, like a flame extinguished. Death appeared to be one of those. The spirit left the body. Was anything truly permanent? Boann pondered the contradiction of the slow shift in the stars.

If the sky’s dome itself changes, then nothing we Starwatchers know is permanent.

Anxiety seized her in this sanctuary for their dead. “What is happening to us?” Her cry reverberated against stone.

The weight of the surrounding mound seemed to bear down, threatened to crush her like the terrible mistake she had made. How could she have failed to protect others; she should have told Sheela, or her father or the Dagda, about her own attack. What if she hadn’t used water at Sheela’s, or if she had walked with dear Sheela for more water at the stream. If only, but now the result lay before her and could not be undone. Her mistake must be buried in this chamber. Her friend would want it so. Sheela would have forgiven her, and she must find her way forward.

The Starwatchers must find their way forward. Disgust surged in her against intruders; how could Cian bear it living in their camp?

The surrounding stones chilled her. Her flesh needed warmth and she must leave her friend in darkness. She left the cold body and dried her tears, squared her shoulders. Beyond Dowth toward the river, rose the central mound. From the narrow passage where Boann stood, she could see its white quartz glowing in the distance. As she exited the stone portal of Dowth, the setting sun flung deep reddish tints across an unusual lavender sky. A dark bird crossed it above her. She would remember that sky, and her friend Sheela, and unutterable grief.

A select council of elders convened on the next dawn at the central mound, elders from all of the Starwatchers who had learned of the crime. The council rarely unsealed this mound to withdraw inside, preferring to meet openly in fresh air and light under the great oak. Their seclusion signaled the elders’ intent to link with the ancestors for guidance. That brought rampant speculation by the assembled community and visitors, while the elders debated out of sight.

Tethra of Carrowkeel, almost as old and his frame as knotted as the Dagda, spoke first within the council. “The intruders committed this abomination. The nature of Sheela’s wounds, the blatant state of the body, and the smell left on Sheela’s clothing; these all point to the intruders. We have no precedent and indeed we have no name for this mutilation of Sheela.”

Slainge spoke next. The sun had tanned his face while he cleared and plowed his plain, but he looked at the others with clear eyes, in his prime. “The strangers are small in numbers here, but large grow our troubles with them. This boat brought warriors with more weapons. No livestock and but a few food baskets and supplies, the scouts tell us.”

A woman elder added, “We see their invasion of us, of our island and now Sheela’s murder. This terrible deed must be punished! These foreigners cannot be ignored, with their long knives and scavenging ways. Our women will not be taken like beasts.”

“They do call themselves Invaders.” The voice was Cian’s.

The elders exclaimed to see Cian in the chamber. The Dagda held up his hand for quiet, and commanded Cian, “Stand and tell us more.”

Cian rose and told of the intruders’ boasts. The intruders had encountered mounds and carved symbols on stone as they traversed the Continent’s coasts, but the fierce progress they made using their long knives did not lend itself to studying carvings, they said. At their Boyne camp, they dismissed his native skills. They needed Cian, and wooed him, solely for his manpower. He saw that young recruits were a necessity since their rowdy war games routinely injured many of their men. “They have baited me with tall tales of exotic places, at their big feasts with drink and with song. They claim the future lies to the east. They encourage me to travel east with them over the great ocean to see the vast Continent, its wonders and strange animals and snakes. These Invaders have seen it all, they say. They came looking for the sun metal, gold, they call it; like the copper in the southwest.

“These Invaders see and they take. They know little of our ways yet assume that we are ignorant. These are my observations from the winter spent inside their camp.” Cian sat down after this long speech, his hazel eyes serious in a compelling face.

Oghma’s voice arose, angry. “Now you appear before us. How is it that we had no warning from you before one of us suffered violence and death?” Harsh judgments echoed from other elders.