BENDING THE BOYNE: A novel of ancient Ireland (36 page)

“Only during full moon,” Aengus answered at once.

“Correct,” said the Dagda. “For this event the Seven Sisters align during the waxing crescent moon, then after seven risings of the sun the lunar eclipse occurs. Now, look again. Who can tell me how many more sunsets until we have this particular eclipse?”

Daire checked his bone marker strip and figured out when full moon would arrive. The Dagda congratulated him. “The rest of you, show me the answer using your markers.”

While the others reached the same answer, Aengus groaned inwardly. The eclipse would overlap the Invader feast. He could not explain that to Elcmar, nor renege on their agreement. Elcmar would hold him to that date. He would have to rush from the eclipse to the Invader camp.

Aengus asked Midhir for the swiftest horse kept at the warrior camp, and he gave Midhir a lump of sun metal sent to him by his mother. The island had gold coming slowly into circulation and Midhir looked happy enough to exchange a nugget for his horse. Aengus made it a point to ride and train this horse during the time remaining before the eclipse.

The appointed sunrise came for his return to the Boyne. He took leave of the other young warriors with his horse standing ready, when Midhir took him aside.

“Aengus, I bring you hard news. Oghma has passed from us to the Otherworld.”

His breath caught and he hung his head to hide tears. When he looked up again at Midhir, his eyes saw with a man’s wisdom. Aengus said, “I shall remain at
Bru na Elcmar
.”

Midhir nodded assent, hands on his shoulders. The time had arrived to confront Elcmar, who had yet to acknowledge Aengus as son and heir. Midhir embraced his foster son, then Aengus rode away, strong and true, from Bri Leith straight to the Boyne.

He arrived at the mounds in advance of the eclipse, just as the children of his mother’s village finished bundling reed torches for after the starwatch.

The Dagda had decided to observe this eclipse at Knowth, in celebration of the skywatching disk. In the western passage of Knowth lay the body of Oghma, and the Starwatchers intended to honor Oghma as well. They gathered discreetly, without firewood.

The astronomers and apprentices including Aengus waited in darkness outside the mound on its eastern side. Soon enough, the rising moon developed a curved shadow on its lower edge.

The moon turned dark red where the rounded shadow slowly covered it, an intense hue the elders had never seen in an eclipse. Then on the clear still air, the observers heard telltale hooves, many horses coming at them from the Invader camp. Elders, with the women and children, left the mound immediately, fleeing into the forest.

At the feast Elcmar announced his offer to Aengus and he took umbrage when Aengus did not arrive promptly at nightfall. A breathless sentry ran in to announce that Aengus had ridden to Knowth, and Elcmar rose and ran with Ith and warriors to the horses’ pen. Elcmar followed his darkest suspicions in a gallop to the mounds. He saw Aengus’ own bridle on a horse tethered close to the western mound, just before the full moon’s light faded. It turned fully to a deep copper color above them. His blood hot, Elcmar swung his legs over his horse’s neck and ignored the pain as he leaped off. He ran with his warriors toward the small knot of Starwatchers who remained defiantly watching the eclipse. Bright rage followed Elcmar like a comet’s tail.

Aengus left the Starwatchers and tried to stop the onrushing warriors. Elcmar pushed him aside as warriors chased the quiet ones, some of whom escaped into Knowth’s dark passages.

“Why are you here? Go see to your mother and our guests!” Elcmar shouted as he ran to join the fray.

“I am a Starwatcher!” Aengus shouted back.

Elcmar turned on him. “By Lugh, I don’t know who you are.”

Aengus wavered, then rode off under the ruddy moon to the great hall. He would advise his mother of the troubles here. Then he would win
Bru na Boinne
from Elcmar. He would take it without violence.

Bresal remained inside the camp and worked up hysteria over the reddening face of the moon. Boann presided at the feast, though wishing that she might watch this eclipse and honor Oghma at Knowth, and hoping that Aengus could observe it all. She listened to the growing clamor of the crowd outside the great hall. Shouts derided her, as always. She no longer feared the noisy warriors, no more than being wary of a wolf that howls from a safe distance.

Her guests diverted themselves with tall tales over the laden table, and she waited. At last Ith might see for himself that an eclipse is a natural occurrence of the moon, she told the foreigner who stayed on after Enya left. He nodded. He had toured the mounds and spent much time with her elders, sharing secrets of metals and smithing as they shared starwatching with him. Shall we, he said to her, and they stepped out to see the eclipse.

Hearing steps rushing behind them, Tadhg turned to face their pursuers. His reed torch dimly lit the east passage. He gave the torch to the Dagda, urging him, “Go into the chamber!” while he grabbed the Dagda’s macehead and stuffed it under his belt. He crouched and pried up a paving stone.

Ith and two warriors slammed into Tadhg as he leaped up in the darkness. One Invader swiftly pressed a long copper knife at his throat.

“The Dagda! Take us to him—I know that he is here—I see light within!” Ith’s eyes bulged and his thin lips pulled back from weasellike teeth. The warrior pulled Tadhg’s free arm behind him to the point of breaking. His captor dragged him down the passageway toward the torchlight but stumbled on a stone sill. Tadhg knocked the warrior in the groin, hard, with the paver and the man’s knife clattered to the floor. He grabbed the knife and now it was Tadhg who dragged the moaning warrior down the passage, knife at his throat, as Ith pushed them all toward the inner chamber.

They arrived at the inner recess, where the Dagda stood firm. Lifting the torch, he showed Ith the lunar map on a great stone, and carved waveforms on another. “All these carvings relate to the moon and its cycles,” he told Ith. “Here we keep track of the moon. This carving on the interior backstone replicates the carving on the entrance stone but poorly.” As it happened, Cian’s work at Knowth had been hasty despite Oghma’s patience and encouragement.

The Dagda showed Ith the symbols, “Over many generations, the Starwatchers learned the moon and sun and star cycles and when there would be an eclipse. There is no magic to the moon’s eclipse and nothing to fear.”

Too impatient to puzzle out the Dagda’s words about motions of moon and sun, Ith grabbed the torch for himself and briefly looked around in the passage. He could see a serpentine form on one of the tall slabs, and many concentric circles. He found a carving of a dagger on another passage slab and frowned at the dagger. Something about those wily Seafarers on the Continent suggested itself, and inflamed Ith. He had no way to verify the intent of these carved symbols; more deception, probably. This might be the mound that concealed stores of gold. He could not tell if that large stone mapped the shadows on the moon’s face, and if it did, so what?

He didn’t trust what the Dagda was telling him. The quiet ones might have caused this eclipse, how else could they know it in advance? In all his seasons among the Starwatchers, Ith had not learned the secrets of these mounds. He sought in vain the Starwatchers’ calendar. Rumors from the Continent reached him, rumors that the heavens were shifting, and he suspected these quiet ones understood this cosmic change. He craved the new object that a trader from the Loire spoke of, the sky disk. No doubt his rival the Dagda possessed such a bronze disk right here under his nose at the Boyne. He understood Elcmar’s fury that a Starwatcher had Taranis’ favor. His own desires eluded him for too long here.

Ith returned to the inner chamber. All the men smelled of the sweat of fear, except the Dagda and himself.

“Master of great knowledge! Show me the disk that tells the stars,” he snarled. The Dagda stood silent. “Show me the sky disk,” Ith demanded. Still the Dagda said nothing. Ith stepped forward and plunged deep his cold bronze knife.

With a growl, Tadhg thrust the knife he carried into the shaman Ith, who collapsed. The warriors leaped at Tadhg and he knocked them senseless with the paving stone. He ran out from the passage. Elcmar and his other warriors were not to be seen out in the open. Tadhg gathered those Starwatchers who could run and sent them to the village for aid. He ripped thick moss from under a tree and ran back inside Knowth.

Ith’s warriors had fled and left their shaman behind.

The Dagda lay on the stone floor and Tadhg knelt there holding moss on the wound until help arrived. The Starwatchers did not move the frail Dagda, but lit a fire of strong herbs in a bullaun stone. They gave him a stimulant brew, but it did not revive him. He lay in the dimly lit inner chamber, his life bleeding steadily from him.

“All things change, making way for each other.” The Dagda’s eyes faded. “You may look back, but you must not stare, at the past.”

As the full moon recovered its brightness outside Knowth, the spirit of the Dagda rose from the Boyne, above the central plain and surrounding mountains, and up to the stars where he hid his face among them.

Tadhg and Slainge crossed the Dagda’s arms over his chest and placed pebbles on his eyelids. No one knew how old was their Dagda, but with him an age expired. What was the way forward without him, their Lord of the Light? Who would take his place? No one could speak for grief at this loss.

They prepared to remove his body to their village when Tadhg heard heavy footsteps coming along the passage. He looked around, and tossed the Dagda’s red stone macehead to the right behind a slab in the inner chamber. It went into place with a slight clatter, it must have fallen into a crevice but Tadhg had no time to check on where this treasure lay. The Starwatchers jumped up to face Elcmar and three warriors pushing into the inner chamber.

“We come for Ith.” Elcmar’s voice echoed in the passage and chamber. Tadhg pointed to where Ith lay inert but breathing. Then Elcmar saw that the Dagda lay dead. He lowered his knife and motioned for his warriors to do the same. Elcmar approached the body. Eyes glowing, he abruptly demanded to have the Dagda’s head.

“No!” And Tadhg made for Elcmar, but the other Starwatchers held him.

Slainge spoke. “That is not our way. What this Dagda knew, remains with us. We teach on the mountain, we tell the ages of the moon, we show the place where the sun goes to rest.

“We teach our children, that our knowledge may be saved and not lost with death.” Slainge stepped in front of the body. “You would have to take all our heads. We all hold the Dagda’s power.”

Elcmar halted, but his eyes glowed at the dead shaman of the Starwatchers.
A noble face and head. A worthy life, and by one who was not a warrior
. Suddenly he wondered what, indeed, his Aengus knew from these Starwatchers, and how he should deal with the lad.

He replied in the Starwatchers’ tongue, surprising them, “There are enough of us here to remove the dead and wounded to where they can be tended.”

Tadhg spoke before Slainge. “We accept, but there shall be no mutilation of bodies.”

“It shall be, so.”

Nevertheless, Tadhg and Slainge made sure that the first removal from Knowth was the Dagda to their village, so that his body remained unmolested. Ith went out next, to be slung over an Invader horse that a warrior led back to their camp. The men removed those who lay dying, and next those having lesser wounds, before removing the other dead, Starwatcher and Invader, as the moon steadily lowered.

This night of cooperation following the deaths at Knowth might have produced lasting peace at the Boyne. But it did not.

Full many a war shall be
on Eochaid of Meath because of thee:
there shall be destruction of elfmounds,
and battle against many thousands.

From:
The Yellow Book of Lecan
, 14th Century CE

Teamair (Tara)

E
LCMAR, EXHAUSTED AND
covered in dried blood, returned to the camp far into the night of the lunar eclipse. He found Boann talking with Aengus in the great hall. Aengus sat in the
ard ri’s
chair, so Elcmar stiffly seated himself opposite Boann. The remnants of a fire flickered in the hall’s gloom. Both mother and son gaped at the bloodstains on him but before they could ask, he announced the losses among Starwatchers and Invaders.

“The Dagda, your Lord of the Light, lies dead. Ith is after being mortally wounded.” Then he turned his piercing eyes fully upon Aengus. “What were you doing there at the mounds on this evening?”

Boann buried her face in her hands. Aengus, shocked by the sudden loss of the Dagda and on the heels of Oghma’s death, could not speak. He returned Elcmar’s intense gaze, neither wanting to give way. A black silence settled around them all as dawn glowed in the east.

Through the ensuing day, Aengus busied himself with helping to care for the wounded warriors. He helped the foreign guest depart with others bound for the coast. In passable Invader spoken with his strange accent, that man wished Aengus a long and successful life at the Boyne. Elcmar stood at a distance.

After the sun had set on that day, Aengus sat together with his mother again at table. Elcmar leaned back, watchful, listening. He made no offer to appease Boann for the latest violence at the sacred mounds. At last he said, “Aengus, this night and day that have passed, have hardly put you to the test. I am willing to give you another night and day if you wish.”

“Father—,” Aengus’ young voice cracked.

It startled Elcmar to hear the lad call him father.

“Father, you gave
Bru na Boinne
to me for all eternity, for all of time is made up of night and day.”

Blood pounded at his temples, his jaw clenched. Aengus used the Invader tongue and Elcmar could claim no misunderstanding or trick played on him. The two waited for his response.

“Very well, Aengus. You shall have the Boyne. For all eternity.” He turned to Boann. “And you won’t mind having new quarters at Teamair? Now that we are carving up Eire.” His hand gripped a knife. Her eyes avoided it.

Elcmar saw her clearly for the first time since he had seen Boann dreaming under the sun in a meadow. She was wearing her good white linen tunic and an overdress of green, soft wool with a saffron sash: green, white, and gold, the colors of a summer’s day. She wore the gold lunula from Cian at her throat. He could reach over and slit her neck just so above that shining crescent, but he did not move except to cut his joint of beef and eat it.

She bent her head toward him, her voice gentle. “I have never seen you so thoroughly outwitted, Elcmar, yet already you have another scheme to control Eire.”

“Damn you! You have the gold—you have Aengus—you shall not have this island!” His blade flashed at her neck to summon her old fear.

Aengus stood, knocking over his chair. Elcmar jumped up, knife raised.

“No!” Boann threw herself between them.

He sat down, breathing hard, and she pulled Aengus away. They left him in the deep lavender shadows of the empty hall.

Elcmar remained at the table late into that night, thinking. Hidden wounds bothered him now, and he had many. He had a slave bring one of the jars of sour red wine from a far coast, and drank all of its contents without watering it. The gold he had kept back, Cian’s gold, could pay for more wine.

Elcmar never returned to Boann in their sleeping chamber, nor that in the new great hall where she moved with him at Teamair. He turned his ambitions to Tara, lying not far from the Boyne.

The Invaders had long coveted the prominent rise in the landscape to the southwest of
Bru na Boinne
. Tara’s elevated and sizable grassy sweep presented a focal point for building a grand assembly place. That one Eochaid, a Starwatcher, occupied this area and that Starwatchers had an ancestral passage mound there, did not concern the Invaders in the slightest.

The small camp nearby that Muirgen and her husband started many suns earlier, filled with newcomers from the Continent to help build the great new fort. A huge oval enclosure, one hundred strides at its widest point, rose quickly upon the Hill of Tara. This temple-fort consumed three hundred oaks for its stout posts and retaining wall. Stately oaks toppled where they had grown for hundreds of summers before felled by Invaders’ copper axes. The Invaders polished and embellished the new walls, unlike the rough logs surrounding their old Boyne camp. Within the fort, they built a hall of imposing dimensions.

It was to this shining new hall upon Teamair that Elcmar moved with Boann, still his wife in name if not in habit. She kept an eye on Elcmar’s doings while she continued to spend much of her time with Brighid, whom she still called Airmid. Rumblings inside the new camp came to Boann’s attention.

Why be devoting resources to glorify Elcmar when he failed to find gold here, the warriors complained. It was rumored that Connor’s men at last found gold in northern mountains and had no intention of sharing it with Elcmar. Disgruntled warriors returned to the Continent. She passed word along to Tadhg of all that occurred inside the new walls.

Aengus remained in charge of
Bru na Boinne
and the Midh plains. He held the Boyne with young Starwatchers trained by Elcmar’s own men and methods, and he waited.

The shaman Ith died of his wounds from the clash at Knowth but his parting words established his name forever: Ith declared that there was a high tower on the Continent from which a man could see Eire, and from there more Invaders would come to claim these shores.

His prophecy quickly gave rise to jokes among the Starwatchers. These Ith jokes referred to persons who believed the earth to be flat. Starwatchers, who compared astronomy with growing numbers of mariners reaching Eire, agreed the earth must be rounded under the circling sky dome.

The Seafarers said, “The north stars change position before us as we progress north.” If the earth were flat, experience taught them, then the stars would appear fixed. They saw also that the other stars wheeled in motion around the north. And the domed appearance of the sky itself suggested that the shape of the earth was rounded, an orb like sun and moon; like an apple, said the Starwatchers.

With Ith dead, the Starwatchers openly used the bronze sky disk. Their use of the three Boyne mounds resumed though the passages were sealed.

Each side accused the other of interfering with the peace process.

Tensions boiled over in the dispute over the Dagda’s final resting place. The aggression and violence at Knowth sorely reminded Starwatchers of the troubles at Dowth during Sheela’s reburial. For the Dagda’s resting place, the Starwatchers wanted his cremated bones far from
Bru na Boinne
. The elders chose the less conspicuous mound atop Teamair. Meanwhile his bones rested temporarily in a secret place.

This mound at Teamair had received bones over many generations, and Eochaid said that it would be an honor to have the Dagda interred there. Though it had less than a third of the height and width of the Boyne mounds, the sacred landscape included a cursus that would be adequate for their final procession honoring the Dagda. The Starwatchers planned also to erect a stele near that mound to honor the Dagda.

Elcmar and his warriors opposed burial of the Dagda so close to their new enclosure. To make their point, the Invaders hastily dispossessed Eochaid’s settlement. This eviction came at a most difficult time, for recent damp and rains on Eire left little food reserves. Other villages could not feed Tara’s displaced inhabitants while they struggled to feed their own. Invader warriors repelled with unrestrained force those homeless Starwatchers who attempted to hunt game in the oak forest between the Boyne and Teamair, what forest remained after Invaders felled hundreds of its trees for their new enclosure.

The evicted Starwatchers turned from grazing herds and tending crops, to waging constant guerilla warfare against Invaders. At Tara’s mound, their scouts dismantled a circle of stones put up by Invaders, a brazen move returned in kind. Bitter resentment divided quiet one from intruder.

The shadow of hunger deepened across the island.

Elcmar issued an edict: no Starwatcher could possess a metal weapon. No Starwatcher could possess any horse other than old mares beyond foaling. No Starwatcher could practice as a shaman, healer, poet, artisan, or lawgiver. The edicts proved difficult to enforce and stimulating to ignore.

Heartened by Cian’s success at securing their gold against the intruders, the Starwatcher elders deliberated. Could they retake Teamair? They counted the number of their young and old men who were fit enough to fight in a pitched battle. They counted the metal weapons at hand to them, now a sizable cache including those that lay well hidden with the bronze sky disk. Still more metal weapons would be needed.

Sreng lit a mighty bonfire on the eastern coast to signal for long knives and halberds from the Continent. The message passed to Cymru, down small islands, across the channel and on to the Loire. The Starwatchers’ share of the gold, held back for so long, left on five swift boats to chance the waves.

Annoyed at gold flooding his market, Taranis balked, but after hard bargaining he gave in to Cian and Enya. They sent the Starwatchers more metal weapons than requested. Cian paced at the Loire waiting for boats returning from the northern isles, desperate for any news.

At the Boyne village a messenger arrived from Lough Gur: those people concurred. The same message arrived from Carrowkeel, from the Wicklow mountains, and from the Lake mine. Men crept through from the north of the island, bypassing Connor’s camp. Ready at last, the Starwatchers would have a rising of all the people. The time had come; they were all of one mind. They felt invincible. Whispers turned into a roar that issued first from Tadhg.

“Stand up! Stand with us! Stand up and fight!”

Thousands of dispossessed, hungry, quiet ones—men, women, and children—marched toward the great hall on the hill of Teamair. Its towering oak timbers, stripped of bark and polished, gleamed in the early morning sunlight.

Invader sentries beat on bronze from inside their new camp. The alarm bounced feebly off the dark mass of people coming to do battle. The inhabitants of the great hall and its camp barely had time to pick up their arms against the flood of quiet ones advancing over the now-treeless plain toward Teamair.

Starwatcher scouts showed lean muscle from seasons of hiding in bogs or on mountains. Led by fighters trained in Invader camps, their fledgling warriors carried smuggled weapons from Taranis: bronze knives and copper daggers. Some had curved yew bows, wristguards, and arrows topped with leaf-shaped flint or copper arrowheads. Fighters from Lough Gur brandished their own copper and bronze weapons. Ordinary Starwatchers armed themselves with stone axes or sharp wood pikes and with their common resolve.

Muirgen and her husband joined in at the front of those marching, and with them their sons and daughters, rousing all for battle with frightful cries.

Airmid watched with Boann from a platform high inside the Invaders’ new walls. They cried out to see her son Ruadan, not yet age twelve, carrying arms with the Starwatchers. Boann put her arm around Airmid’s shoulders. Airmid pointed and she recognized Ardal in the distance.

Boann glimpsed Elcmar striding out with his warriors. Then she saw Aengus, tall and grave among the marching Starwatchers. Her heart sinking, her eyes turned to the sun in a silent entreaty to spare Aengus.

The weapons flashed like lightning from the gathering storm of people. Boann trembled with Airmid at the terrible beauty forming below them on the plain.

The opponents met on the grassland and laid into each other using metal and stone. They hacked without shields, without art or cunning. Caught up in a savage fury, teeth bared, they trampled the injured. They did not regroup or form lines or clever wings, nor would they retreat to fight another day. Only the long bronze knife and the halberd gave an advantage, lengthening the arm’s reach and slashing easily through leather. Those who knew from warrior exercises to duck and bob and weave, lasted only a few breaths longer than the novice on this fighting field.