BENDING THE BOYNE: A novel of ancient Ireland (32 page)

“Those at Lough Gur could make war on us as easily as the Invaders. They could act against us to side with Elcmar and Connor.” The elders at the Boyne kept an eye on Lough Gur to see where its loyalties would lie. Boann relayed any information that could be of use though on occasion it meant conversing with Ith to see what he might disclose.

The Invader levy on crops and animals resulted in more clearing of land, the cutting and burning of stumps to make new fields. The weather continued its shift, cooler than in previous cycles of the sun, and areas of bog increased. The bog’s encroachment made land unsuitable for growing and grazing, and the bog crept onto sites where surface flint had been easily available to Starwatchers.

Slainge told the Dagda, “We have to look for more supplies of flint, maybe dig for it. Just as we feared, our young Starwatchers want to trade with Invaders for metal tools.” A flint tool had fine sharp edges when newly made, but it dulled quickly or worse, it broke. The best stone axe could shatter without warning. “The young covet the new copper tools.”

The Dagda cracked open hazelnuts and chewed the rich meats thoughtfully. “We must avoid being drawn into trading and reliance on the Invader goods, against which Cian cautioned us. Cian spoke of other metals and other traders. We must wait for alternatives, for traders sent by him or Cian himself to return. For now, we can work under and around this taxing scheme.”

The Boyne elders traded cautiously for a few copper axes from the Starwatchers at Lough Gur. These they buried, for when weapons might be needed against Invaders—or the tribe at Lough Gur.

Subtle changes in attitudes and values pained the Starwatcher elders. No formal council had ever been held with the intruders and reluctantly, they discarded that idea. Across the island, their astronomers met in such groups as and when they could travel and still evade the Invader sentries at the mounds.

In truth, it was not always possible to ignore either the sentries or the nighttime curfew. The elders had a limited supply of the yellow safe-passage stones and inevitably stones went missing. The notion that Elcmar could detain any Starwatcher who didn’t carry the stone pass did not sit well with them. In reprisal, Ardal, Tadhg, and the Boyne scouts engaged in skirmishes with Invaders, those who ventured out after dark. These encounters usually resulted in a rout of the intruders by the quiet ones, who escaped swiftly into dark mists and forests and bogs.

Elcmar’s warriors claimed that the natives disappeared before their eyes.

Then Airmid was intercepted after dark, by Invader sentries freshly bruised from doing battle with Starwatcher scouts. Mindful of repercussion from harming her, the warriors brought Airmid straightaway into their camp. Elcmar did not wait for Ith’s arrival before he began to interrogate her in the great hall.

Airmid remained calm before Elcmar. “I know nothing of this. You say the Starwatchers attack the Invaders at night. But I have been collecting herbs, as you can see.” She held out fresh shoots to show him.

Elcmar called Boann from the sleeping chamber.

She rushed to Airmid’s side. “Elcmar! For Airmid to be out gathering medicines at night is routine for our herbalists. You well know this.”

At the public rebuke from Boann, his jaw tightened. “Pull off this woman’s cloak!”

The warriors smiled to do as he said, and stripped off Airmid’s cloak so that it flew to her feet. All the herbs inside her cloak fell out in confusion: dandelion, meadowsweet, yarrow, water mint, plantain, wort, and chamomile. Shocked, she did not stoop to pick up the scattered herbs, nor did anyone present.

Elcmar sheltered Airmid briefly in the slaves’ quarters. Ith made sure that her fate was similar to that of Muirgen; he quickly married her to an Invader warrior. They changed her name to Brighid, and compelled her to live within the camp walls with her new husband.

Boann and Airmid, now called Brighid, from that night ceased supplying medicines to the Invaders. Of this misfortune the intruders said, Brighid’s cloak scattered the island’s herbs so completely that since then no one knew their healing properties.

Great was the distress of Boann at her friend’s plight, but greater still would be Ardal’s sorrow.

Outside the camp boundaries, he patrolled the forest and waited for her. Of necessity, Ardal’s duties as a scout kept him away from their village and from Airmid more often than not. I cannot rest easy on another man’s wound, he told her. The lovers waited to marry with formalities until the time their island would know peace.

On that bitter night, he traveled through low marshy areas on a hidden trackway. He and the other scouts had built this trackway, extending older tracks since soon after Sheela’s murder, when the elders instructed their scouts, “More trees shall be coppiced. Allow these rods to grow tall, half again as tall as a man, and thick as a strong thumb. We need thousands of straight hazel rods.”

To coppice a tree, they manipulated its growth by cutting it down to a stump. The stump yielded young shoots springing up around it that were not allowed to branch, so that these shoots became long straight rods of ash or hazel. To grow and harvest the rods for making hurdles required four to six full cycles of the sun.

During the long sunlight of summers, scouts cut down the mature rods and lashed them together into hurdle panels to support and underlay tracks through the worst boggy areas. Over the hurdles they laid a top layer of hardwood planks, usually oak, cut from thick trees growing for generations and selected carefully through the forest. Workers felled the giants with their polished stone axes and split each tree into planks using a stone wedge. They laid the stout planks over the hurdles. It was hard, sweaty work done in stealth while battling swarms of midges. Occasionally the workers silenced their axes while intruders passed by, unaware of them working in the forests. The Starwatchers made a solid track at hidden places through what had been marshy bog.

With dawn, Tadhg found Ardal at work in a coppice and told him what had happened to Airmid. Three scouts had to restrain Ardal else he would have tried to demolish the Invader walls with his bare hands.

It was Boann who assembled the Starwatcher women and brought them before the elders’ council. Their women protested Airmid’s kidnapping and forced marriage; this was yet another outrage. They had lost another woman of childbearing age to the Invaders, and Airmid was their best teacher of herbs and medicines, their most adept healer.

“What do you intend to do?” they demanded of the elders.

Oghma mumbled into Daire’s ear, who sat next to him. Since his stroke, the young man helped him dress and eat, walk through the village and visit the mounds, and meet with the elders. Daire steadfastly nursed Oghma, while studying the stars. Oghma grew more weak with each season of the sun, still he hung onto life for his people. He had yet to complete the mounds’ kerbstones.

Daire announced what Oghma said. “We shall put out the intruders’ eyes.”

Ardal and Tadhg led many stinging attacks on Invader warriors who were feckless enough to be caught outside their walled camp in the dark, spying.

The intruders’ fear of the Starwatchers came to the fore. Their assailants seemingly disappeared into the night. The Invaders deemed it magic. They gave up trying to track the Starwatchers and remained inside their high walls at night. They feasted and told stories of the big fellow who eluded them by changing his shape, and the little people who danced under the moon.

The sun sped through its seasons, solstice to solstice. Their Boyne camp, the intruders called “
Bru na Elcmar
.” Boann continued to live within the camp with Elcmar. To her surprise, Elcmar did not take other wives, and he remained coldly courteous to her. She circumvented him to visit the Starwatchers and young Aengus. She continued to serve as an emissary from her people and interceded whenever possible, often without his realizing it.

Boann waged her ongoing struggle with Elcmar and Ith. Their ban on the mounds did not prohibit Starwatchers from watching the skies. The mounds showed neglect, sadly, but the astronomers kept to their practices and taught their children. She worked with the Dagda to save her people from cultural annihilation. Their delicate equinox observations carried on in secrecy to pinpoint the Northshift. None of the Invaders, who would be hard-pressed just to locate north in light or darkness, had any idea that the great mounds had been laid out across the landscape from shore to shore according to a plan with the skies. Any notion she might have of sharing information that Ith wanted so badly had been overcome by his ongoing disrespect of her people.

Constant pressures distracted Elcmar; his levy on Eire’s wheat, milk, and cattle had not met his needs. His men had not located the mountain stream of gold nuggets but the Starwatchers there always found his warriors. After the loss of Creidhne, Lein grew powerful in his role as master smith in the southwest. Elcmar allowed it, giving him free rein at the Lake mine so that Lein would stay on Eire. He tempted Lein, sending him to scour the mountains where Elcmar picked up gold in the stream long ago. Taranis now firmly controlled that area, so Lein’s messenger told him. That ended that. Lein returned to the southwest to concentrate on keeping the copper mines operating, and seek gold there, while Elcmar fortified his base at the Boyne.

Opportunities vanished before he had seen them. Strange it is, Elcmar thought, your man Taranis no longer pursues me for payment. Unchecked by anyone, Elcmar freely ordered goods and livestock sent to him from the Continent. He owed for lost cargoes in addition to goods that made it safely to Eire, but he didn’t add up the total. The suns seemed to pass ever faster.

Ith pursued arcane studies of the carved rocks at the mounds. He traveled to Fourknocks, a surprising discovery with rich carvings resembling carved stones on the Continent, at a bay not far from Taranis’ port. Ith perceived similarities at Loughcrew with the three Boyne mounds. He knew by this time that rituals happened at each mound at different seasons. With no extra men to go with him chasing after stone carvings rather than gold, his studies slowed. The symbols’ meanings eluded him like slippery, darting fish.

A full eclipse of the sun, predicted correctly by the Starwatchers, got Ith agitated. There had to be a connection between the sun and sun metal, he told Elcmar. With Bresal, he tried to produce gold by heating smelly concoctions of minerals and blood and bones with quartz pilfered from the central mound, and with stones that resembled sun metal; but without success.

At seeing their initial failures to make gold, Elcmar let his two advisors experiment without him, suspecting that shamans’ usefulness lay in helping control the rowdy warriors but not in making metals. Elcmar and Ith ceased poking into and dismantling the mounds. The Invaders found no gold inside any of the Boyne chambers. For spite, Ith had structures built close to the mounds, flimsy wood and wicker huts at the west mound and the central mound and a circle of wood posts at the west mound. He tried to entice the Starwatchers out in the open for their sun worship. But even Ith avoided Dowth, the eastern mound damaged by warriors with Bresal.

In those years, Elcmar’s luck as a warrior continued in that none of his wounds from various skirmishes disfigured him and he held onto his position as
ard ri
. Connor visited the Boyne occasionally. He had used his severed hand in trickery to claim an area in the north, where he sought gold. His old grudge developed into a wary respect for Elcmar; the
ard ri
had learned to lead the warriors and had fashioned a working settlement on his own terms. Maedb refused to live in the north and Connor left her living at the river Boyne, since for him that made far less trouble.

Food and supplies moved through the bogs with Starwatchers.

Where fair Aengus grew and trained, many Starwatcher youths joined the warrior training. When Elcmar brought his warriors there, the competition took an edge and held danger: the older boys faced off with hardened men using real weapons.

Midhir took good care of Aengus and ensured that the boy incurred no disease. He made Aengus train the hardest so that no wound destroyed his chance to one day become the champion. Fuamnach, wife of Midhir, stood back from the boy. She allowed Midhir to make all decisions regarding Aengus, for fear of Elcmar. The boy’s education consisted of more than the Invaders’ footraces and wrestling and sparring there at Bri Leith.

His mother’s visits occurred while Elcmar traveled elsewhere on the island. Midhir released Aengus for long walks with Boann without the hindrance of an escort, and mother and son talked freely of many things. Boann returned from her walks with Aengus with a lighter step and a trug of medicines gathered for Midhir’s people.

Thus it was no surprise to silver-haired Midhir when Boann arrived bringing with her the Dagda. Midhir chose not to attend them, although invited, as the Dagda indicated that they planned to walk to the hills some distance away. Midhir made sure they had a safe-passage stone and bade them safe journey. Their trip would keep young Aengus away over several sunrises but Midhir did not inquire further.

Boann held Aengus’ hand in hers as they set out. “Our journey with the Dagda takes us to the west.” He grinned in excitement. She went on, smiling back at him, “We’ll be staying on the ancient high place known as The Storied Hills. The mounds built there are much older than our Boyne mounds.”

As Aengus skipped along, he said he hoped that he would find star symbols that no one else understood any longer, or a tool from the ancients that he could keep as a reminder of this trip. “You let me pick up old stone balls around the mounds at Fourknocks, and perhaps I’ll find more of those.”