BENDING THE BOYNE: A novel of ancient Ireland (6 page)

And then whom might I marry? How can I pledge myself to a fox, a shadow… a rebel.
She kept those thoughts to herself.

To their left in the distance, the main starchamber glimmered, an emerald hill ringed in white and set in a smooth lawn. Sparkling, fist-sized quartzes girdled the mound in a thick layer of white that rose higher than a tall man’s head, above dark grey kerbstones circling its base. Throughout this white quartz bank, the builders scattered smooth grey cobbles gathered from a bay to the north. Grey stone slabs defined the entrance set deep into the white quartz revetment.

“We hold the greatest treasure of astronomy lore of any people known to us,” Tadhg said, his eyes on their great starchamber. “Invaders—Cian can learn nothing from these Invaders.”

“You cannot judge that!” Boann softened her tone. “Perhaps Cian will learn what we do not know that we don’t know. Why the great cloud of dust blackened our skies.”

He made a derisive sound but stayed at her side.

Each footstep took her closer to seeing Cian. She said nothing of it; Tadhg would not understand her feelings. Again she mourned the loss of her confidantes, her mother, then Sheela.

They had almost reached the camp. Tadhg spoke hurriedly.

“Mind yourself. No telling what they have in store for us.”

An Invader sentry met them as they neared its high walls. A crude earthen bank higher than a tall man surrounded the camp. They crossed a bridge of wooden planks leading through the bank. Inside the camp’s wooden palisade, more sentries stopped the two Starwatchers and checked them for weapons. Their eyes met. Neither Tadhg nor Boann carried any weapon such as these warriors carried, and given the nature of their mission in the camp they found this precaution amusing.

The smell of sweaty warriors blended with that emanating from the intruders’ horses, animals unfamiliar to the two Starwatchers. Smells of cooking, and retting fibers, and a choking smoke from charcoal pits, assailed the two. Tadhg and Boann silently followed the sentry into the camp.

Boann was surprised to see that the camp consisted of small wooden buildings, made of vertical oak planks rammed into the ground and topped up by wattle and daub walls. Their roofs were roughly thatched without much ornament in tying down the thatch such as a Starwatcher might have added. Not all of them had a hearth, she judged, from the lack of smoke. Or maybe the occupants neglected their fires, or were still sleeping. She saw that the intruders hadn’t bothered with flagstone paving or grass, and muck suctioned each step inside their camp walls.

Here and there, curious pairs of eyes followed the two; she could feel them staring at her back. She wore a simple tunic of soft leather whitened by the sun and realized with misgiving it was similar to the tunic in which Sheela lay buried. Her knotted shawl was draped loosely over her head, crossed over under her chin, and its ends hung down her back. Small carved bone weights, slipped over the shawl’s ends, ensured that it would stay in place behind her shoulders. She still had not found the grooved antler pin carved by her father. It didn’t matter, this visit merited no special costume. They came here under duress.

Couldn’t even let me bathe for the stampede to get us here at first light. Why do these people travel and camp where they can’t take care of their own?

Her chin rose in defiance. Tadhg matched her steps, close by her side.

The sentry and the two Starwatchers progressed through knots of people; men with tattoos at their joints and ankles and down their backs, and women with tattoos on their arms and legs. She saw that both men and women had a fondness for their hair to be bleached to an unnatural color and then stiffened or spiked up from their heads. These men and women appeared equally fond of wearing jewelry, and it was hard to see how they could move for all their bracelets and necklaces and ear and hair ornaments.

The sentry brought them before the largest wooden structure. Center posts supported its wide roofspan, where smoke curled from an interior hearth. Carved doors were barely visible under the uneven thatched overhang from its roof.

The intruder sentry spoke. “We have a tradition of hospitality. We would serve you food before you see the ill man. Do you understand me, or should there be an interpreter?”

The two looked at each other. Neither spoke the Invader language.

Cian stepped forward from a tangle of observers. “I would like to interpret.”

Boann turned to him, and hid her emotion to thank Cian and ask what had been said. Once she understood the sentry’s offer of food, she refused it. Her words tumbled out, “No Starwatcher would leave their hearth without the morning meal, tell him it is simply our custom to eat before leaving our dwelling.”

Cian cautioned her, “Refusing the Invaders’ custom of hospitality might be seen as an insult.”

Tadhg offered conciliatory phrases to tell the Invaders, but his manner toward Cian was curt, cold.

“Tadhg of both sides?” Cian turned back to the Invader sentry. “The Starwatchers wish to see to the ill man immediately despite your good and generous offer.”

The sentry stiffened and scowled. Boann and Tadhg were more or less ordered to take a beverage before they could see the ill champion. “They won’t be disturbed for the rest of the day, so,” he told Cian, “and that filly with her glorious little nose in the air, wait till the champion sees her—and his wife sees her!”

This interval of serving broth to the visitors provided an opportunity to impress them with the interior of the large building, its sleeping dogs, exotic textiles, and carved wooden beams and posts. It was a long hall. They had an uncomfortable cup of scalding brew while seated on oak stumps at the entrance.

Then the two Starwatchers with Cian stepped after the sentry through a trail of drinking cups and bones still lying about on the floor from prior feasting. Sizable polished bronze daggers hung along the walls in the only orderly display to be seen. Rush mats under the banquet debris emitted a dank odor over the packed earth floor. More than a few men were sleeping noisily along the walls and in the far corners, some openly lying with women of varying descriptions. Scruffy workers minded the flat bread baking on stones at the hearth fire, one of them a maturing girl with a hungry expression when she looked up at Tadhg.

Boann focused on the sentry’s back rather than exhibit her curiosity about the dimly lit structure, the shining weapons, or its disheveled occupants. By the time they reached the rear of the hall, she knew that Tadhg had memorized its height and dimensions, the position of every human and dog in it, how many weapons hung on the walls and how many steps to reach the weapons, their distance from the entrance, and every possible route of escape.

At last they reached the sleeping chamber of the would-be
ard ri
. Its door was flung open by a woman somewhat taller than Boann. She had hair almost the color of the bronze daggers and it hung in untended clumps over her large shoulders. She was straight through the waist like a man and the belt cinched tight over her bright drapery did not help to dispel that impression. Her breasts drooped oddly to each side, under a necklace of thick lumps of amber. Her square arms and square hands hung at her sides after flinging open the door. She looked them up and down with cold blue-grey eyes, then stood aside, going to seat herself upon a stool of wide leather slung between wood supports joined by an X frame. She sat down on this stool with her tunic raised, her knees falling open, and gave a daring look at Tadhg.

Tadhg turned to look at Cian and not at this woman. The woman spoke sharply to Cian.

Cian stated in their language, “This is Maedb, wife of Connor, the champion of the intruders. She greets you and asks that you please attend to her husband straightaway.”

The sentry motioned and Boann approached the bed, a wooden structure lined with furs and soft fabrics that she did not recognize. An unforgettable smell overwhelmed her from the man who lay in this bed. Boann froze. This was her attacker, from the morning that became Sheela’s final sunrise; Boann was sure of it. Tadhg at her side urged her to step forward.

Can he not smell it as well?

She had no opportunity to ask Tadhg for she was at the bedside and now she could see the Invader and his discolored hand and arm.

His infection has been cooking for some time. Whatever shall I do with that hand!

Without flinching, she lifted his grossly distended hand to examine it. The broad sweaty face of Connor swiveled toward Boann and he stifled a groan and gnashed his teeth while she turned up his forearm. On the outer flesh of his left hand below the wrist, she saw the wound: a dark crescent impression, the size exactly of a human bite. She planted her feet and tried not to retch, her mind whirling with revulsion.
Sheela!

Tadhg kept his back to the wife of the
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. Whatever distraction Maedb wanted to provide, Boann saw that he would have none of it. He watched Boann’s face and movements. She disguised her deep apprehension, for clearly this champion of the Invaders lay dying.

She asked for hot water in three bowls, and Cian told her request to the sentry. The sentry then relayed an order to a woman slave. Boann filled the ensuing delay and took out a small, sharp porphyry knife from her herbalist bag. Her hand hesitated in the bag, then took out several medicines: fresh green needles and leaves, shavings of a dried root, and a black powder.

When the bowls of hot water arrived, she mixed the medicines into one, and had the intruder drink some of its contents. He drank with difficulty and Boann forced herself to help him drink the medicines. Into the second bowl, she began to deposit fluids from a deep cut she made in Connor’s hand. The sentry muttered and stepped toward the bed. Tadhg moved not a muscle. Cian stood firm between the sentry’s knife arm, and Tadhg and Boann.

Maedb complained from her slouched position on the leather stool, “Why isn’t she chanting? Our healer would be chanting while the blood drained.”

Without turning her head, Boann told Cian to explain. “I am not merely drawing blood, but removing the bad fluids from the hand. The liquid medicine will also be applied to the open wounds for quick intake, in addition to that which the champion has drunk hot from the bowl. And tell her that by after mid-sun, if this hand is not better it must be cut off if this man is to live.”

Maedb began to wail in a contrived fashion. Connor shouted for the sentry to remove Maedb from the sleeping chamber. That done, with extreme effort Connor turned his head fully toward Boann, whom he had been watching sideways through slits of eyes rheumy with fever. She never returned his look. His breathing changed, and the intruders’ champion appeared to sleep at last.

Boann’s eyes adjusted to the gloom in the sleeping chamber. Earlier when she quickly looked for a stone shelf on which to mix the medicines with hot water, she found none. She was not accustomed to the wattle and daub walls, nor the lack of stone niches and shelves. Now she took in the features of this chamber while the wounded champion slept. The tamped-earth floor had scattered skins on it from darkhaired sheep, comfortable beneath her feet. Although, it appeared the sheepskins could all use a shaking. A mouse scurried from one.

She saw small tables and coffers made of wood placed around the sleeping chamber. She had never seen wood so thinly cut and joined and polished. It had a reflective surface like water. Perhaps the intruders’ metal tools did that to wood. Wood, taken from living trees, filled the space of the room. Boann wasn’t sure if she liked the effect, and how many trees had been felled to make these strange furnishings? These intruders had already cut down a large area of trees around their camp, not replacing any of them. A huge boar’s tusk, and horns from an ibex, hung from great colored cords fixed to the walls by the bed. Oddities carried from far shores, she surmised.

Someone entered the room during her ministrations, a man better groomed than any she had seen among the intruders, straight and tall and handsome from his feet to the top of his head. He stood to one side watching her. The construction and stitching of his leather shoes, leggings, and tunic looked meticulous and she would have liked to closely examine his clothing.

Boann’s gaze settled on his face. He had the most amazing eyes, slanted and honey brown yet cold and predatory like those of a forest animal, and fringed with thick lashes. She nearly shuddered from the shock of his cruel eyes, but he smiled with those eyes flashing sparks at her. A heat rose from deep within her and she flushed all over. He saw her color rise, but his eyes went hard and cold once more, and abruptly he turned away. This tall man was the only person who frightened her in the intruder camp and she did not understand why. She washed her hands in the third bowl, in clean water, and set it aside.

When the sun reached an oblique angle in the west, Boann met Cian’s look. “The intruders’ champion must lose his hand.”

He translated it, and the sentry stepped out to tell those in the long hall. A great cry arose outside in the camp while warriors left the hall and brought back the intruders’ own healer Bresal and his helpers.

Bresal the shaman barged into the sleeping chamber. He bent his large girth and balding head to look at her work on Connor’s swollen limb and at the contents of the wooden bowls. The medicine that Connor had drunk from Boann rendered the champion unconscious, too drugged to move or snore and still in the grip of a high fever.