Authors: Heather Terrell
Brigid glances in her father’s direction. She hopes he has observed her stoicism, if not her victory. But he is gone, leaving her to wonder just what he witnessed.
She curses to herself as the crowd dissipates. Her overeagerness had caused her fatal misstep, one only a rank beginner would commit. She is furious with herself.
“Ach, don’t beat yourself up about it, Brigid. Everyone knows you’ve got better sword skills than me.”
She turns toward the voice. It is her opponent, her foster brother, Oengus, who has been sheltered by her family since the age of seven, according to Gaelic custom. He will return to his own family at seventeen, taking the newly made bond with him as a tie to his own family. “Easy for you to say. You just won to a warrior’s crowd of a hundred, with my father at the center.”
Oengus does not respond. Wisely, Brigid thinks. For she knows—and he knows—that she is right, that her father expects her to dominate in every respect. Even on the battlefield against a man. For her father is Dubtach, king of the Fothairt people of southern Gael, and he demands nothing less of his only natural child.
The long walk across the crop fields to the stone
cashel
ringing the royal homestead lessens her inner anger. As they pass the cattle and sheep fields, she forgets her troubles for a moment and unconsciously counts the animals’ heads: they are the measure of her father’s power, along with the slaves captured by raiding parties. By the time they cross the rampart over the ditch encircling the inner wall of the
cashel
,
Brigid has even mustered a laugh at Oengus’s imitation of their instructor, an aging warrior of her father’s. Oengus alone can make her laugh. At their approach to the two vast earthen mounds used by Dubtach for his ceremonies, she is able to pretend that she has forgotten about her humiliation. But she never really forgets.
Brigid and Oengus near the large heather-thatched building used for their studies. Though they are well ahead of their appointed time, they notice a number of unfamiliar people entering the structure. Brigid picks up her pace, pushes open the heavy oak door, and enters with Oengus hard at her heels.
“Fresh from the battlefield, I see?”
Brigid’s eyes adjust slowly from the bright spring light to the dim interior. She does not need to see the face to recognize the speaker. It is her mother, Broicsech, queen of the Fothairt people, and from her tone, Brigid understands that she is fuming.
Brigid falls to her knees out of deference and custom, and Oengus quickly follows. Broicsech is every bit as formidable as Dubtach, and Brigid does not want to be the subject of her wrath. Her father is fond of saying that Broicsech wields a blade as well as any man, but her most fearsome weapon is her sharp tongue.
“You see that my daughter and foster son like their feats of martial skill and courage. They enjoy those skirmishes so much, they cannot bear to wash away the bloody badges, can they?”
Brigid wonders to whom her mother speaks, but she dares not raise her head until given permission. She chastises herself for not changing her dirty garb before entering the library, the place where her mother is most often found. She stays frozen in her position.
“Our Lord Jesus Christ implores us to turn the other cheek to our enemies, not brandish our swords before them,” an accented voice says in response.
“He does indeed, and we try to heed His Words. But He did not know the Gaelic people, did He?”
Brigid is surprised to hear a deep laugh come from the serious-sounding stranger. “He might not have met the Gaels while still here on earth, but I feel certain He knows them well from his vantage point in heaven.”
Broicsech chuckles at the retort, the kind she might have made herself. “Well spoken.”
Brigid’s knees begin to ache from kneeling and from her battlefield fall. She alters her stance the tiniest bit, and Broicsech says, “So impatient to meet our guest, Brigid? I suppose you and Oengus may rise.”
With little of the grace her mother insists upon, Brigid struggles to her feet. Behind her lovely mother, immaculately dressed as always in a pristine robe and with a golden crown encircling her black hair, stands the stranger. A very strange stranger indeed, Brigid thinks to herself.
The man wears the dark robes of a monk or a Druid, though Brigid supposes that the reference to Jesus Christ marks him as a monk. He has dark hair tonsured in the Roman style and light eyes and seems of her mother’s age, though much worse for the wear. Yet it is not these features that distinguish him as strange. His oddity comes from his eyes, so intense they seem as if fire lights them from within.
He meets her stare. “So this is your Brigid?”
“It is indeed.” She gestures toward Oengus. “And this is my foster son, Oengus, of whom you have heard me speak. Brigid and Oengus, pay your respects to Bishop Patrick.”
They lower themselves to the floor once again. Brigid is astonished that Bishop Patrick stands in their midst. That a senior Christian official visits their
cashel
does not startle her; her family is ostensibly Christian and certainly royal, and thus the visit is unusual but not unfathomable. That a stranger stops in their kingdom does not surprise her. No, her incredulity arises from the fact that Bishop Patrick pays
his
respects to the family of Dubtach, best known for the ferocity and frequency of his raiding parties for slaves in Britannia. For Patrick was born a wealthy Roman Briton, the son of a Christian deacon and the grandson of a Christian priest, but he was taken prisoner at sixteen by Gaelic raiders and served as a slave for six years, until he escaped. Astonishingly, Patrick then eschewed his own people to minister the Christian faith to the Gaelic people, who once enslaved him, and to preach against slavery.
“Shall we pray?”
Her mother nods her acquiescence, and the assemblage kneels. Bishop Patrick leads them in Jesus Christ’s own prayer, then stands and addresses them while they continue to kneel before him.
“Broicsech, I know your family to be strong leaders of your
tuath
and ardent Christians. You serve as sublime examples to your people in the saving ways of our Jesus Christ.”
As Broicsech gives her thanks, Brigid thinks on the cleverness of this Patrick. Patrick, though foreign, understands the Gaelic people well—from his years in Gaelic captivity, she supposes. By referencing the
tuath
, or kingdom, over which her father rules in all matters material and moral, he subtly reminds her mother that Dubtach is the sacred protector of the people’s lives and their souls. Brigid wonders what Patrick wants that he raises the stakes so high.
“My monks and I will pass through your lands again in six months’ time. I know your family to be good Christians, but as yet unbaptized. I ask in the name of our Lord that you will consider allowing me to baptize you and your family in a ceremony before your people. Where your family leads, your people will follow.”
Broicsech is quiet for a time, then answers in an uncharacteristically muted voice: “Bishop Patrick, I vow to you that I will consider your request for myself, my daughter, and my foster son, but I cannot speak to my husband’s willingness for a baptism or his appetite for a public ceremony of the rite.”
Patrick is silent, but Brigid sees the fury simmering in his eyes. His voice rises in anger to match.
“Broicsech, I do not ask much of you as a Christian. Nor does God. Consider my ministry to convert the people of Gael. I am bound by the Holy Spirit to work here in Gael and never again see my own kin. I must extend God’s mercy and kindness to the very people who once took me captive, and who made such havoc of my father’s estate. God asks comparatively little of you.”
Watching her mother offer apologies and promises, Brigid considers Patrick’s statements. She finds him not only clever but convincing. For how could he bear his ministerial burden but for the grace of God? It is compelling evidence that his God must exist. She wonders how Patrick’s words will resound with the Gaelic people, who would rather draw pools of blood from their enslavers than bestow mercy as did Patrick. And she wonders what this God would ask of her.
The moment Alex feared before every flight finally happened.
The Transportation Security Administration agent grabbed her bag off the conveyor belt as soon as it passed through the X-ray machine. Inwardly, she flinched as he pawed through it, but outwardly, she smiled at the portly, overworked agent—as if the contents were perfectly normal to carry on board a transatlantic flight.
The agent signaled for her to walk through the metal detector and join him in the screening station on the other side. “Is there a problem, Officer?” she asked, careful to keep an innocent smile pasted on her lips and her voice even. A well-placed grin or a friendly remark had always warded off this dreaded level of scrutiny before.
“You realize that sharp objects and knives are prohibited in carry-on luggage, don’t you?” He said it with a patronizing tone as he pointed to the sign making the logical prohibition abundantly clear.
“Of course, Officer—” She searched for his name tag, but had no luck.
“Then”—he reached into her black student’s bag, a vestige from her Columbia University days, and pulled out the container of her instruments—“what exactly are these?”
Knowing how bad they looked, Alex tried to stay as calm as possible. “Appraiser’s tools.”
The agent fanned the items out on the inspection table. “They look like weapons to me.”
Alex remained silent, realizing that any defense or explanation she might offer would only ignite the situation. The wrenches, the brushes, the magnification equipment, and the pliers were tiny—indeed, she’d made certain that they fell within the allotted seven-inch limit—but they did look unusual and ominous.
“You can check these items, but you cannot carry them on board.”
“No—” Too late, she realized that her protest was too vehement.
“No?” He arched an eyebrow. Sweeping the tools into his meaty palms, he began walking toward the collection bin for banned items. “Okay, you’ve made your choice. I’ll just confiscate them instead.”
Alex knew that confiscation meant destruction. “Please don’t take them. I need this equipment for a project appraising medieval relics for a church in Ireland, and I can’t risk their getting lost in the baggage check. I swear they’re just tools.”
He looked her up and down, trying to squeeze her into some profile and realizing that a tall, blond, Caucasian woman in her early thirties simply did not fit the bill. “Do you have any proof?”
“Yes,” Alex said. She dug out a business card identifying her as an appraiser of medieval religious artifacts, the letter of commission for her current project, and a completed appraisal for a related project that she thought might prove useful. The latter contained her full academic résumé as well as her photograph.
The agent stared at the papers, unsure of what to make of her credentials or the detailed description of a ninth-century Germanic chalice. He lumbered off to consult his boss. She watched as they studied her tools and measured each instrument against the seven-inch standard.
Please God, please God, please God, don’t let them take my instruments, Alex chanted to herself. She knew it was risky—not to say foolhardy—to insist on bringing equipment on her trips. But she’d used these tools for all her appraisals since finishing her doctorate, and
she’d experienced an unusual amount of success with them. She was too self-confident to attribute her success wholly to her instruments, but she was just superstitious enough to refuse to leave them behind.
The agent returned. Although he had broad authority to seize any object he deemed suspicious—and her instruments were certainly more suspect than the average nail scissors—he slapped a fluorescent pink label on her bag instead. “You can keep the tools in your possession until you get on board. Then you have to turn them over to the staff to keep in a locked closet until you land,” he said, as he typed her particulars into a computer.
Alex didn’t really exhale until she reached the gate for her Aer Lingus flight. She settled into an isolated seat near the windows, and, still clutching her worn bag like a life preserver, she closed her eyes and breathed deeply.
She opened them to a jam-packed tarmac. A veritable United Nations of airplanes—emblazoned with the white-on-red cross of Swiss-air, El Al’s Star of David, and the bright green shamrock of Aer Lingus, among them—jockeyed for positions. By now, Alex had seen similar sights hundreds of times as she jetted off for her work, but it never failed to infuse her with anticipation over the possibility of fresh discoveries.
After a moment of indulging in the view, Alex reimmersed herself in her work. Always work. She unzipped her bag and slid out photographs from a hand-labeled manila envelope. She’d reviewed them in the office, of course, but she wanted one last look in the natural light.
The amateur pictures, with grainy color and poor lighting, showed three liturgical vessels of obvious antiquity: a chalice; a paten, or communion plate; and a rectangular reliquary box. Even the amateur photography couldn’t mask the beauty and rare craftsmanship, not to mention the intrinsic value of the gold, silver, and inlaid gems. The owner of the items—a small convent in the countryside near Dublin—believed the relics to be very old, from the sixth century perhaps, but solving the riddle of the pieces’ exact age and value was her task. Her privilege, she always told her clients.
The boarding announcement sounded, and Alex gathered up her
things. As she shuffled the photos back into a pile, a close-up of the reliquary box caught her attention. She brought it near the window to better capture the dimming daylight and drew her magnifying glass close. The reliquary box, designed to hold the physical relics of a saint, had a sumptuous gold overlay of a cross bearing the symbols of the authors of the Gospels—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—in the corners and the Virgin Mary at the center. Alex sensed some discordant element in its design, though she couldn’t quite place a finger on it.