BENDING THE BOYNE: A novel of ancient Ireland (10 page)

She wanted to ask Cian to remain at the Boyne but in the crowded camp kept her distance from him during the sun’s light. Except when Cian brought a girl to Boann to meet her, a young woman of fine features and black billowing waves of hair to her slender waist. An undefined jealousy stung Boann but she spoke well to this Cliodhna, a potter.

“She taught me much when I came to live inside this camp,” Cian told Boann. “You may rely on Cliodhna. Of course I have told her the same about you.”

After sunsets, Boann had no opportunity to leave Elcmar’s side. On the eve of his leaving, he pressed his hand between her legs as they lay together. Her thoughts in turmoil, she failed to respond.

He grew cross. “What’s wrong?”

“The drums, too loud, so much noise. Must this camp have so much noise?”

“Must you answer every question with a question?” He drew away, turning his back to her.

She could only watch Elcmar’s party leaving through the walled bank, unable to speak with Cian among the tumult of men and burdened horses.

The dust and smell of the horses had not cleared before Bresal repeated to her the vile accusations by Maedb against Cian. She eyed Bresal so sternly that he retreated from the great hall. Perhaps Cian’s absence would calm troubled waters here, though now she was entirely on her own among the Invaders.

The shaman left her in peace for a quarter moon, and Boann meant to resume starwatching. She also wanted to learn the intruders’ ways and practice their tongue. A slave girl, Muirgen, worked in the great hall. Boann tried speaking with her and found that Muirgen understood her sufficiently. She did not know whether to leave the great hall open or bar it to the continual visitors and supplicants. Boann helped some persons, and sent others away to find Bresal for his counsel.

Under the ever watchful eyes of Maedb, and Muirgen and other slaves, Boann had little privacy in her quarters. No intruder woman knew how to dress her hair and because she was embarrassed to teach any of them, her hair hung in tangles much of the time. Still she did not ask for help, but Muirgen offered to braid her hair.

“Many thanks, but sure isn’t it enough you’re after doing for others.” Boann refused, using Invader phrases. She ignored Muirgen’s bewildered look, to tussle with her heavy auburn hair unaided by any slave. For Elcmar she had tried the unguents and paints used by intruder women, but disliked their feel on her skin. Freed of pleasing his taste while he was away, she threw the tiny wood pots into the hearth’s embers. Maedb came upon the smoldering remains and threw up her hands, screeching how rare and difficult to obtain these were.

Even before he left the camp, she defied Elcmar and bathed every morning at the stream. Despite cooling temperatures, Maedb and companions took it up but to her dismay, those women insisted on bathing in the Boyne, the Starwatchers’ sacred waterway, where they taunted the warriors with their nakedness.

The intruders neglected the sacred river in other ways. The muck inside the camp walls, mud mixed with refuse and animal wastes, appalled her. She raised their negligence with Bresal, while he sat eating.

“Invaders dispose of animal waste carelessly. It could be set aside to enrich the fields. The trench for human waste, that is located in the wrong area and drains too close to the river. That waste should filter through a reed bed well before it reaches any water.”

“These are your concerns, not mine.” He looked bored and continued eating.

“Can the Invaders not see that bad practices make for sickness? Your camp brought illness to our green plain along the Boyne. We must all avoid more sickness and death.”

Bresal eyed Muirgen, standing back of Boann. “No changes while Elcmar is gone. To be sure, I could have some men dig latrine pits wherever you like. But I don’t care about muck.” He waved his arm, bedecked with a wide bracelet of jet. “A fine armpiece, taken from the Continent. Would you like to wear this?”

Not sure whether Bresal agreed and the waste would be moved, Boann saw Muirgen hungering for the shiny black ornament and she led the slave girl away from him. But she did not let the matter rest and reminded Bresal until he did have the pits re-dug in a suitable place.

Night and day, smoking fires inside the camp walls obstructed any starwatching for her. She missed working with Oghma at the mounds. And Boann yearned for a simple outing by herself to gather herbs before hard frosts would wither them away. Bresal said her outing was not permitted though he didn’t say why. She was followed by the slave Muirgen or by Maedb and intruder women, in the great hall or outside. Accustomed to being out in the open air much of the time, engaging her mind, this new life forced her to remain inside the great hall and be subjected to endless chatter. She lapsed often into thinking of what her Starwatchers would be doing during the sunlight and the starlight, outside in the natural rhythms and stillness. She missed fresh breezes whispering through grass and branches, insects’ humming and bird songs. Her sense of time blurred; she took naps and awoke feeling sluggish and queasy rather than rested.

Maedb invited her to practice their sport with those few women who were not slaves, in the clearing outside their banked walls, but after watching them Boann chose not to participate. These Invaders’ war games shocked her; the fervor, their love of combat. They seemed to mock her: why don’t your Starwatchers fight us? More and more, she shied away from the camp’s inhabitants.

She did take in a stray puppy found in the camp, underfed and wobbly, and her sole comfort was her little dog Dabilla. Each rising of the sun found her more restive. The camp boundaries squeezed her even when she could not see them. She detained Muirgen for taking walks with Dabilla around the palisade, then after a brief interval inside the hall she called upon the girl to take yet another walk. The slave at last gave her a quizzical look.

“I prefer your company to being followed by a guard, you see.”

“Would you like to watch at the cooking pits?” Muirgen asked.

Boann wondered if she could bear the smells, but the girl looked fidgety herself. Muirgen pushed on a loose section in the high wall and it opened, a door of sorts. Surprised, Boann followed her out to the cooking site where slaves prepared feasts for the great hall. She stepped gingerly around the
fualachta fiadh
, long pits lined with wood. Meat cooked there in greasy steaming water heated by red-hot stones. The cooking pits and all the surrounding area reeked of spoiled fat from repeated use for their big feasts. The cooks simply heaped the cracked stones to one side of the rancid pit. Boann’s nausea returned on the spot.

Dabilla nosed at a bone; she threw it and the puppy chased it. No one followed her going after him. Tossing the bone here and there, she scouted with the puppy. Anyone could come and go in the area of the cooking pits, set into a sheltered dip outside the gap in the high log walls. She ambled back to the pits, unnoticed. She told a slave, a cook, “Be sure that my food is prepared at its own covered fire,” and pointed to the rise behind the sunken troughs.

The older slave woman nodded, expressionless, busy grinding grain at a quern stone.

The camp bustled with producing supplies and feeding everyone at frequent banquets—usually with food stolen from Starwatchers, Boann saw it. She hadn’t cared so much about food until she lived inside these walls. Invaders ate huge joints of sheep or cattle and rarely ate salmon or any fish from the river, saying fish suited the slaves. The camp let extra milk go to waste, seldom producing yogurt or cheese. She craved fruits and greens, largely absent from the intruders’ diet. Scurrying about at the whims of many, Muirgen had no time to search for late produce and greens for her and she doubted the slave knew what to select.

Food was a regular topic inside the walls, with Maedb whining that no supplies would reach the Boyne in winter, and the slaves saying that crops hadn’t ripened, the heads on cereal stalks empty and only small hips and fruits on flowering plants. Boann needed to see the crops for herself, but sentries barred her way out of the camp’s gateway.

Airmid brought Boann the mixed grains for stirabout, but despite the warriors admiring Airmid’s red curls and her face and form, they did not allow her inside the camp to visit. Boann heard of it sadly, from Muirgen, and felt the more isolated.

Baffled, suffocating inside walls, Boann sent a brief message to Oghma that she hoped to see her people soon. She scratched the message on a rock beyond the cooking pits. No one but a Starwatcher would understand the symbols she used.

Will the sea ever waken

Relief from despair?

My Grief on the Sea
, Douglas Hyde, from the Irish

Transportation

C
onnor purloined the scarce Invader boats for his trip to the north. While Elcmar readied to voyage south to the mining camp, he discovered Bresal’s failure to guard their seagoing boats.

“Bresal! We won’t be taking you with us on this trip, sure. No trader goods for you either. Not until Connor returns those ships safe and sound.” His look bored into Bresal. “I’m leaving you at the Boyne, in charge. Do not disappoint me again.”

Elcmar rejected the skin and wicker-framed Boyne boats as too small and not seaworthy. He conscripted the largest hide-covered vessel that he could find. It came from the coastal Starwatchers living at the river’s mouth east of
Bru na Elcmar
. That community monitored the sun’s range between the solstices using two offshore islets as fixed horizon points. Elcmar took the Starwatchers’ only oceangoing boat without offering so much as a stone axehead for it. One man tried to stop him, asking, “Why do you take from us?”

“Why? Because I can!” Elcmar drew his knife and the man backed away.

This ovoid boat, framed of steamed oak ribs with yew bindings, was covered by tanned cattle hides joined by stitched seams and smeared with pitch. For this trip the boat must carry eight men. When the intruders packed all their gear, weapons, ropes, and food stores into it, to Cian’s eyes it looked overloaded. He told himself, my ancestors traveled using a hide boat, and he made himself climb aboard with the warriors.

The
currach
set forth headed south along the coast. Elcmar’s band rolled and pitched through that rough strait bounded by the larger island to the east. From comments by the men, about a place visited by some that had a great stone circle, that other coast lay closer to Eire than Cian had realized. Elcmar saw him looking east.

“Over on the Big Island, the locals rearranged their great stone circle. To suit newer beliefs, so. Those people don’t be standing in place with stargazing and decorating rocks.”

“Why don’t you set up camp on that eastern island?” he dared ask.

“Metals,” came the gruff reply. “Eire has copper, so. And gold, to be sure.”

If Elcmar wanted to needle him, he paid it no attention. Cian knew of the rugged Channel that divided that larger island from the Continent to the south. His ancestors received visitors from far southern shores who bore tribute in exotic pots, fine axeheads, and yellow flint. Those items in turn made their way from the Boyne to distant passage mounds. That his Starwatchers had long maintained broad contacts, exchanging knowledge from the Continent with tribes east across the strait and north among scattered islands in colder waters, Cian kept to himself. Faraway tribes looked to the Boyne as their center, a center for starwatching. Innate pride, and caution, combined to seal his lips.

When at last they turned west into open water, the broad sea rolled smoother. Cian looked at his hands. The boat’s hemp rope that he hung onto left a ruddy stripe across his palm, a mark of his first travel on the great waters.

His journey introduced him to new beauty from the ocean vantage point. He had no idea until this sea voyage, of Eire’s majestic eastern and southern coasts. Sheer, dark cliffs rose from headlands and along inlets. Small islets rose vertically to assert in stony heights what they lacked in girth. The waters washing the island’s shores showed every imaginable shade of blue, from light aqua in shallow inlets blending to brilliant lapis depths. They passed the place where the three sister rivers flowed together into the sea, all the way from sources at the island’s navel, the midlands not far from his home.

Flocks of crying gulls circled above the boat. Cormorants soared and plummeted for prey. He saw golden-headed gannets plunging from on high, and for the first time the migrating curlews, their trilling cry lingering above the boat. Jets of water lashed up through holes in the rocks and crashed back out into the ocean. Placid crescent-shaped bays with golden sandy shores beckoned. Sloping green meadows rose behind the cliffs and beaches up to deeper green forests on the flanks of grey-green mountains. Cian longed to be showing the island’s beauty to someone he knew would appreciate it with him. But the bobbing
currach
carried him ever farther away from the Boyne.

Despite crowding and rigors on the boat, he enjoyed every overnight camp with the intruders: making shelter, and then cooking what they caught in water or hunted after coaxing wood into flame. All in the same boat, or warmed by the same fire, the warriors acted more equitable toward him. Their taste for adventure, and gifted storytelling and music, were not lost on Cian. He observed their strengths and weaknesses. They constantly took fermented beverages and acquainted him with various brews.

“You do not trust any fresh water,” he commented.

One of the warriors chuckled and held out a cup. “Try this to ward off the evening air, Starwatcher. A concoction made in a warmer climate. We call it Water of Life.”

The Invaders said that drink gave them relief from the northern chill and darkness. Cian took the new beverages in moderation only after he suffered due to overindulging. He ate sparingly of steamed mussels and oysters offered by the intruders; eating seafood in the shell tended to sicken him from the richness of it, he said. The other men snickered, assuring Cian that on this voyage he would get used to strong drink, seafood, and the rolling waves.

He found out how greatly these intruders depended on their possessions. One of the warriors rigged a bone hook on a fiber line and caught a trout. The man stood while it thrashed on his line, flummoxed at having nothing to hold this trout while he fished for more. Cian leaned over into the long soft grasses along the stream and deftly wove an arched basket of grass with one hand, then deposited the trout with his other hand. The warrior looked amazed but still he bemoaned not having a proper basket. By the time they finished fishing, five more trout waggled inside the moist grass cradle. Cian rolled them in a skin and all arrived in the camp in good condition, their silvery gills still reflexing.

At the embers of their camp fires, Cian tried to see the island’s future. He had seen more of the beauty of his homeland and had little desire to see it changed. Patiently he waited for an opportunity to escape, chafing that he traveled against his will. Any misstep, and out came a shining knife against him. Cian neither patronized nor avoided Elcmar. He merged into the men, keeping his eyes open.

After less than a half moon, including stops to look for gold or to wait out rough weather, the men arrived at the island’s southwest coast. There deep fingers of land jutted into the ocean. These men knew a specific landing place, he saw, and marked that place in his mind. After tucking the skin boat beyond reach of tides, they all journeyed inland, up gorgeous red sandstone mountains and through deep valleys thick with animals and fish. Cian stopped to admire the breathtaking scenery of this headland, the distant blue waves below steep cliffs. Elcmar charged past him on the trail, pushing him to the brink: Invaders did not pause to admire the view. So Cian kept up their pace and silently tracked their route using the sun and shadow, and the stars.

They marched along over two sunrises until reaching a spot overlooking a group of azure lakes surrounded by dense woods of elm, birch, and oak. Lower mountains to the north backed the calm blue lakes. The warriors indicated the northeastern shore of the larger lake as their destination. They rounded this lake and came upon the mine at midsun on the third day.

Cian heard the mining activity from a distance, the sound of many hammers. Heavy smoke filled the air. They halted at a gash made in the earth. In its recesses, fires blazed against rock walls where men struck ringing blows, gouging out the hillside. The mine looked like a red eye in a seared face.

A warrior elbowed him. “Impressed? Invaders found this treasure lode of copper ore. We returned here, bringing masters at smelting and pouring it: smiths, the shamans of the metal,” the warrior boasted.

Elcmar stepped apart to speak with one of the smiths, a powerfully built man, and Cian overheard him order that man to guard the Starwatcher at the camp. Elcmar would then be free to inspect the mines and inventory the camp.

The smith Creidhne scowled, but he took Cian with him over the next suns.

As Cian followed the smith, he learned the copper miners’ routine. The miners accessed the ore by digging horizontal caverns. They lit big fires to fracture the limestone, then hammered the rock loose with stone cobbles, grooved and lashed with leather cords onto wooden handles. After hammers freed chunks of copper-laden stone, other workers smashed the large pieces into usable ore. When a hammer broke, the miners discarded the damaged cobble and their discards littered the caverns and the mining camp.

Everywhere lay pieces of copper-bearing ore, streaked with grey or purple veins when fresh from the mine. This substance mystified Cian: the streaks turned color to a bright blue-green if the rock had lain exposed long enough. From sunrise to sunset, the miners fractured ore and gathered it inside the mines by light from burning resinous switches, then hauled the ore out of the horizontal tunnels in split-wood baskets or leather bags. They hauled the ore-laden rock some distance to the smelting area, where workers used shovels made from cattle shoulder bones to shovel it into piles at the smelting pits.

More workers sorted the copper-bearing rocks by hand, and used stone hammers and anvils to separate the richer bits. At charcoal fire pits, the pulverized ore transformed into copper droplets. Cian counted more than a dozen smelting pits where workers crushed the ore and melted it into irregular drops of shadow moon metal. The workers consolidated the copper droplets using heat again, then took the lumps to Creidhne and the other smiths at a different charcoal pit. The next time Cian saw it, the copper had been smelted into irregular, flat ingot cakes or into finished axeheads.

The smith was a big, bear-like man who disclosed next to nothing about how it was that stone changed into shining, malleable copper. Creidhne gave him small tasks at a distance while the smith produced shining tools, mostly axeheads. When Cian tried to work close to the smelting pits, the smith sent him away.

Cian felt no embarrassment to be working near the women and the sleeping huts. Huts dotted the work area. Tens of workers, including but a few women, toiled at the copper mine and cut trees. The women ground grains and cooked joints of meat to feed workers hungry from smashing and hauling copper ore. The miners had a mix of languages; few dialects were native to Eire. The most common dialect was that of Seafarers, a people familiar to the Starwatchers. Despite the workers being of childrearing age, no children lived at this mining camp, he noted. A woman explained that many workers stayed only during the warm seasons, then traveled the great waters to spend the cold moons with their families.

“You mean to say they have been here more than once from your shores?”

The woman chuckled at seeing his surprise.

From the litter of cobbles and depth of the caverns, it appeared to Cian that miners had been extracting copper from this place for many cycles of the sun; that also surprised him. Intruders didn’t freely exchange those copper axeheads or Starwatchers would have them at the Boyne by now.

Rather than any smith’s magic, what most impressed him was the repetitive nature of the mining and smelting—and the debris. No smith’s magic could repair the shattered rock faces, the volume of spent ore and litter of broken cobbles that mining left behind, defacing the area by the lake. For all that, he found only one drop of shining hard copper overlooked on the soil.

The smelting of raw copper ore produced a choking smoke, by now familiar to him but even stronger here than the intruders’ smoke at the Boyne, and these pits burned nonstop. Everyone at this Lake Of Many Hammers picked up the distinctive smell. He suspected the smelting fumes to be toxic. He scrubbed, but could not get the smell out of his hair and skin. It clung to his leather tunic and leggings. Out of aversion to that smell, Cian traded his making of stone tools to have a new set of clothing made for him by the women, who did fine work with needles made of the shining metal. Making stone tools and scrapers kept him occupied away from the charcoal pits and seemed to please Creidhne.

Cian observed the camp activity until his mind boiled. Over a shared evening meal with Creidhne, he tried some questions.