BENDING THE BOYNE: A novel of ancient Ireland (18 page)

With Gebann, he visited several old copper mines, the rude huts in bad repair and the rock barely producing enough metal to justify the labor. The miners dug inside lateral tunnels, going after ore that was readily available, just like they dug for it at The Lake Of Many Hammers. Mixed forest of black poplar, ash, and conifers had disappeared around the mines, cut down for making charcoal. Cian saw the telltale sediment of erosion filling in nearby streams, the land dead, birds and animals gone. The air stank of smelting.

“The ore always runs out. Remember that, lad. The ore supply does not, cannot, last. We journey on now and you shall meet one of the big traders,” Gebann said and the two rode on.

They arrived at a much larger mining area. A few words from Gebann caught the attention of its overseer. He brought them up a hill where one larger dwelling stood among a cluster of eight or so inside fortified walls, removed from both the ore smelting and the mining. A man named Bolg stepped from the larger dwelling, and waved away the overseer. Gebann and Bolg cautiously exchanged touch, then Bolg showed the two men around at a smart pace. The fort’s stone walls enclosed a cistern, a grain storage place, and huts where the final smelting and any smithing occurred. Guards stood watch over all of it. After their rapid tour of his fort, Bolg bade them rest and then return to dine with him at sunset. All had been spoken in Invader, not the Seafarer tongue.

The two walked back down the hill. Stout horses bred by the trader Bolg crowded a pen. Sheep grazed close by, but those sheep were for the fort’s table, Gebann told him.

“How did one man, Bolg, gain control over this area?” Cian asked.

“The same as all traders. Traders arrived with exotic wares, new textiles and necklaces made from strange stones, which they would exchange for metal from our land. Within one generation, Seafarer tribes became indebted through trading with the Invaders. Bolg merely takes advantage.”

Cian stopped him. “I do not understand this word debt.”

“Just as we did not understand their ways of trading. Over time our own greed outstripped what my people could exchange: our raw ores never equaled their goods. Ore must be mined and smelted as you’ve seen yourself. Like your people, we had never traded in copper, bronze, or gold, or amber or jet, or foreign fabrics. Soon trading affected our farming and herding and our very landscape. Even what we drank! The traders introduced new grains for making beer, supplanting the mead we brewed. They had us fermenting beverages from all sorts of fruits—the Invaders crave a better wine, one that does not sour on long voyages.

“Our fields expanded for all this, until we actually produced a surplus of grain—only to see that food stored and guarded by Invaders to dole out to us. Invaders staked out territory as theirs for trade and now they live among us.” Gebann looked up at the stone fort and rubbed a hand through his black hair shot with silver, his face showing fatigue. “Many traders come from our own people, those who learned new ways. Like Bolg.”

At the setting sun, after they rested below the fortified walls, they washed and redressed. Cian rued his salt-stained and frayed tunic but it was all he had. A grateful man took a scrap of copper from Gebann for minding their mules and packs. They ascended to the stone fortress.

Inside its gate, a slave boy took them to Bolg. Every surface in the trader’s dwelling held sumptuous items of stone and wood, along with patterned textiles. When he saw Cian looking at a curving tusk of white, the trader let him hold it.

“From shores far to the south,” Gebann said. “Traded for a great many copper axes.”

Bolg smiled serenely, then indicated they would have the meal outside to enjoy the cool air. There stood a large open pavilion, a ceiling of painted skins supported at its corners by polished wood poles. They took seats with the other diners, all men, on leather and wood tripod stools around a hearth pit wafting fragrances from burning rosemary and apple branches. Their host took up a translucent marble cup. The burnished black cups passed to his guests with a flourish were of thin-walled ceramic.

All these things were new to Cian and his senses whirled.

Their host and the other men seemed to ignore the serving girl.

She wore a thin linen top that ended above her navel, and a short skirt made of twine cords looped through woven binding at its hem and waist. Every time she moved her thighs showed, or her bottom, through her string skirt. This display made Cian nervous. She had flaxen hair dressed in braids pulled tight around her head, dull blue-grey eyes, and a square look to her body. Overall, she looked not unlike Maedb and he guessed she came from the same land as did that rough lady. She filled their cups without care for the rare objects he understood them to be.

The serving girl brought steaming food courses of partridge, wild boar, and rabbit. The men ate with their fingers from polished wooden bowls. They used bread made of pounded acorns to clean the bowl between courses and Cian imitated this while enjoying the new bread. He was relieved that his host did not adopt sitting at a table to dine, although he could have done without having the serving girl’s breasts served up under her flimsy top—and her privates served up, close—while he was trying to follow the conversation. All these men skillfully used the Invader language.

Bolg had moderate height, with curly black hair, high cheekbones, and smooth skin of even color like bronze. He dressed for the dinner in a tunic that Cian guessed came from far away and cost a pile of copper. Bolg’s tunic was made of white fabric like mist, finely woven, and pleated all over, even its joined sleeves. A patterned woven belt in many colors circled his waist, cinched by a bone hook carved into an animal head. He wore a gleaming dagger.

The decoration of Bolg’s pavilion dazzled the eye. The diners were seated over colorful rugs made of joined cords and with tasseled ends. How comfortable their host seemed in his expensive tunic and lavish tent—while dirty, hungry miners worked the ore tunnels a stone’s throw down the hill. Cian sobered and poked at the food in his polished bowl.

Bolg saw his discomfort when the swaying skirt neared Cian, and laughed. “Starwatcher—never seen that? I guess we men of the bags can show you men of the bogs a thing or two!”

Cian felt shame for these men. A Starwatcher would not refer to any woman in that way, much less in her presence. He waited to see, would she slam the wood tray she carried down on his host’s head, but the serving girl appeared oblivious to Bolg’s remark.

Gebann intervened. “I admire this Starwatcher’s reserve with women. A bit of reserve is a fine thing in a young man, don’t you think?”

The men stopped talking to listen. A few nudged and winked; her string skirt meant this girl was available, no less and no more. Cian sensed ridicule of him.

Bolg arched an eyebrow and quickly turned their conversation to the safe transport of ingots and the metals trade. And he complained, “Production declines steadily here. I should have set up my camp along the southern coast where copper streams from the earth.”

Gebann eyed their surroundings. “Production might be declining—but that needs more study.”

A trader who came from a great fortress in the south, who wore a bright saffron-dyed tunic and a wide bronze armpiece, bragged, “I have speeded up mining. We burn off the forests to get a ready supply of charcoal for smelting. That means I need fewer laborers in the woods and I put the extra men to work in the tunnels. And fire clears off the land for fields and grazing. In one shake of a lamb’s tail!” He pointed at the serving girl’s bottom and laughed at his own pun.

Cian’s hand stopped midway to his mouth. This trader spoke casually of putting the torch to whole forests. The other diners exclaimed approval, that burning away trees was a grand idea to get things moving at their own mines. Cian put his food bowl down, his appetite gone, envisioning a huge conflagration and then silent, scorched earth. Did even one of these men think about how many suns it took to make a forest? He glanced at Gebann.

“Steady, lad.” Gebann spat it over his shoulder. “Not here. Too many long knives.”

The man wearing loud colors waved his jeweled arm. “At Zambujal we’ll be pouring bronze and not just copper, when we get our hands on enough tin. Mind you, despite our success, this erratic weather and lower grain supplies could tighten all our belts.”

“Keep your friends close, and Taranis closer!” cried another.

All the party toasted to that, their mood buoyed by the serving girl who refilled their cups. She stepped among the men as if pushed at them, hips forward, dangling the jug.

The diners’ exchange of words tantalized Cian. He needed to work out what the word credit meant, and debt. From being immersed in their tongue of trading, Cian did not think the mystery to him of “credit” and “debt” to be merely semantic. He had much more to learn about trading in order to protect his people from enslavement to anyone.

Later, before they retired, Gebann confided, “You handled yourself well at the trader Bolg’s dinner.” The smith pointed up the hill at the stout walls. “This fellow Bolg lives and eats so very well at the expense of other traders far away, those whom he thinks cannot see the ingots disappearing.”

And at the expense of those who labor below his walls, thought Cian.

“When Taranis finds out about missing copper and gold, the sun will set for Bolg!” Gebann’s thick forefinger stabbed up at the fort, and Cian nodded that he understood. Except who was this Taranis?

That night he dreamed of a gold disc earring divided into four equal quadrants, the four cardinal directions given to his people by the sun and taught by the Dagda. North, south. East, west. He dreamed of navigating through dark waters using the star patterns that shone brightest. Cian dreamed of the Swan drifting through the milky stream flowing in the heavens, and of Boann.

It was almost sunrise along the Boyne, and the chorus stood half to either side of the entrance to the central mound. In the approaching dawn, a faint glow emerged from the white quartz revetment with its random dots of smooth grey stones. Starwatchers waited at the speckled gate. The entrance gaped wide and dark, framed by the grey stone forming its portal and the boxlike aperture above. The great stone slab covering the passage entrance had been moved to one side.

The mound’s inner chamber accommodated around twenty persons. On this morning the Dagda chose the group to be allowed inside, with the guests. Bresal and his entourage of five warriors stepped cautiously into the narrow passage. They had never gone inside one of these mounds, here or on the Continent. The rumor among Invaders that this mound concealed a hall of solid gold gave the shaman courage to enter it. Bresal hadn’t taken any drink before they arrived, so that he could later recall this event with clarity for Elcmar, but he was all the worse for being sober.

He groped along the passage as it seemingly closed around him. Someone ahead of him carried the only torch. Above his head, great slabs overlapped to form the long passage ceiling. The long passage transitioned upward with the ramped floor of wide flagstones. The tall passage uprights were thicker than two men around and Bresal wondered how these giants had been set into place. Here and there, carved symbols leaped out at him as he passed and at the first of these, he stifled a cry. The warriors scoffed and pushed him forward.

They continued into the shadowy, tall passage. The construction that Bresal could see was meticulous. Unseen by him, a secondary roof of stone slabs protected the passage. The mound engineers positioned these secondary slabs to be supported independently of the inner ceiling stones, and this hidden upper layer kept the great weight of the mound off the corridor and the inner chamber. The passage uprights stood independently from those of the inner chamber as well, all built to stand for eternity.

Tense in the dim passage, Bresal counted off twenty-two slabs along the west wall and twenty-one along the east. The group filed silently around slabs that angled slightly into the passage.

The shaman panted with nervousness as he followed the rising passage floor. His fingertips brushed a carved triple spiral and he squeaked. Then he stumbled into the great height of the main chamber. In flickering light from the Dagda’s torch, his gaze followed stone layers up and up. Neatly corbeled slabs overlapped inward and rose to a single capstone at the height of three men. His mouth slacked open in surprise. Two smaller ovoid spaces lay east and west from the inner chamber, but in the low light Bresal could not see these recesses clearly. In one, he glimpsed a big stone basin that held cremated bones.