BENDING THE BOYNE: A novel of ancient Ireland (15 page)

“The season of storms has arrived. Elcmar sends no boat here for you. He would keep you hostage at the Boyne.”

The village faced a hard winter and would be competing for food with the warrior camp. The elders confided to Boann that the disastrous weather affected all of Eire’s crops and no doubt ravaged crops on far shores. There was little chance that any Starwatcher tribe could help oust the Invaders from the Boyne.

Boann thought, this new weaving loom arrives even as the Starwatchers’ lives unravel beside our great mounds. She crossed her arms, defending the life in her swelling body.

It was then they made the sun stand still
to the end of nine months—strange the tale—
warming the noble ether
in the roof of the perfect firmament.

From:
Metrical Dindshenchas

Month of Two Moons

D
UST CONTINUED TO
smudge and distort the skies. Two of the nocturnal orbs shot past on irregular paths, ignoring the stars and moon. Then on a rare clear dawn the astronomers observed the glowing, reddish planet rising up before the sun, an event that they understood.

The Invaders saw the eerie dawn also and it caused panic in that camp. Bresal and his helpers set to work sacrificing swans, rather than watching the skies or asking the Starwatchers about the angry red planet. “It’s angry because you’ve let the
ard ri’s
wife and the woman Cliodhna escape,” Maedb scolded Bresal.

The Starwatchers prepared for their solstice ceremony that would occur in less than one lunate. Boann used this solstice event, in which the moon’s arc would play a special part, to record with Daire the lunar rising on the horizon each night. He knew that the moon rose on the horizon where the sun would rise in six months. Daire followed the moon’s path overhead and found the nodes, where the moon crosses the sun’s daylight path twice as the moon waxes and wanes during one lunation.

Daire tracked the moon and the Dagda confirmed with him that the moon reliably spends half its time above the sun’s path and half below. “You are closer to understanding the mysteries,” and he smiled approval at Daire. As the moon phased into the quarter preceding the solstice, Tethra and more astronomers from other villages joined them. The air in the village vibrated with purpose and anticipation.

Falling stars streaked silver through the dark above. Boann mentioned it at a meal, that this star shower occurred every winter while the sun approached its standstill.

Cliodhna shook her head, amazed. “How can you keep track of it all?” she asked. “I would enjoy attending a solstice watch with you. My father will be most interested to hear about the great Boyne solstice.”

When the two arrived, the Dagda showed Cliodhna what the astronomers were doing. “For generations, Starwatchers observed the moving light. Our ancestors were building small passage mounds long before we attempted to direct sunlight into a narrow passage. After many generations we engineered the great mounds by this river.

“That central mound, that one admits sunlight only at winter solstice. Our builders calculated the angles and where to place the passage to the inner chamber,” and swept his arm along the clearing to show Cliodhna. “During the solstice the directed sunlight enters the passage for a brief period each dawning, on around ten sunrises. Perhaps future generations can build a monument that captures only the exact solstice sunrise. And our weather does not always cooperate! But you see that our astronomers relish their tasks.

“The small change in the sun’s rising position when it slows at the solstices is hard to observe reliably with just the unaided eye,” and the Dagda energetically lifted her hand to show her. “The variation from one sunrise to the next around the solstices is a sliver, it is no more than the tip of your fingernail.”

“How do your astronomers keep from looking into the sun?” Cliodhna asked. “My Seafarers have this difficulty as well, in tracking the sun above the great waters.”

The Dagda nodded. “To find the point of sunrise, without staring into the sun, we made ever more precise refinements in how we track it on the horizon. Watch that man, he is going to take a careful stance at that standing stone, to sight beyond it to a distinct point in the landscape.”

Cliodhna watched. Round balls in different stones’ colors, made of worked granite and chalk, were used to position the engineer at the stele and the other astronomers so that they were standing exactly at the proper place. “So slight is the change at solstice that as we near the actual event, only one astronomer takes all the sightings. Using different observers could affect reliability of the measurement.”

An apprentice lay on the ground holding the engineer’s heels firmly in place during the delicate observation. When the sun’s first rays appeared and created shadows, a chant started: the astronomers were counting in a steady rhythm. Some held stones tied to cords and they let the stones fall to the ground, and others pounded pegs along the cord’s shadow line. When the counting ended, apprentices cut notches on lengths of bone. The Starwatchers conferred with the engineer at the standing stone. It was Daire who showed her, on a strip of bone, a tiny space for how far the sun had moved south from the prior sunrise, and a large space for how far it had moved since equinox.

“My father would understand these things far better than I, Dagda,” Cliodhna said.

“You may tell him what you saw here but in these dangerous times, tell no one else,” the Dagda said.

She repeated solemnly, “No one.”

He stood still as a standing stone himself, or like a gnarled tree tipped with white in the winter morning, thinking. The Dagda asked her, “In this season on your peninsula, the Seafarers’ home, have you more daylight than we have here?”

“We have, yes. But our light shortens in winter as it does here in northern waters.”

“I thought so,” he said. Cliodhna’s gaze turned to where his blue eyes like infinite sky looked south. “Starwatching links our people. I would have liked to meet your father and your Seafarers and study your skies. But I am too old for that journey.—Mind yourself on these new boats, for the ocean remains unchanged.”

“What do you mean, Dagda?”

“Patience, fair Cliodhna. You know that the fickle seas hold more peril in winter.”

Cliodhna and Boann passed Daire on their way back to the village after the dawn sighting. He sat on the spiraled entrance boulder at the central mound, working bone using a flint awl and scraper.

Boann indicated the mound entrance to her. “Our engineers placed the opening to the southeast, to align with the winter sun. On this solstice the sun and the full moon shall each enter its long passage. If the weather favors us, that is.”

Daire made a gallant bow to them but hid his work behind his back.

Cliodhna reached out to touch the necklace of varied beads that swung from his neck. He explained to her that from his apprentice time with the Dagda he would have the memento of this marked leather cord. It held small stone beads of different colors, knotted into place. “These can be used to remember the sightings I made at the Boyne starchambers. All the apprentices have beads strung on a leather cord. The older astronomers’ beaded cords are long enough for them to use as belts, from their many observations.”

She admired the beaded necklace, an object showing his personal achievement and study. “May I have this?” Cliodhna said in jest.

“Oh, no! I—well, I couldn’t—” The request and her dimples muddled his young head.

Boann teased him. “What is it you’re holding behind yourself? May we see?” She tried to reach around him but her protruding middle made that impossible and they all laughed.

The two women bribed him, they said, with hazelnuts and smoked salmon for him to eat, so he would show them what he was carving. In his spare time, he told them blushing, he crafted a new set of moon markers in cattle bone for a special friend. Daire carried his own set of observing sticks, marked with one moon width up to seven moon widths. This simple device aided him to measure the visual distance between points of interest in the stars, and to follow the moon through the night skies. When Boann and Cliodhna guessed which young girl was his special friend, he blushed again but remained at his work.

Amused, Boann made her way with Cliodhna back to the stone dwelling they shared with Oghma. The child she carried kicked and rolled low and heavy inside her, ready. She patted the defined mound, sure that this child was a boy and feisty at that.

“How good it is that Daire studies with us, despite the troubles here with the intruders. His spirit is free.”

“He has a hungry mind, like Cian,” said Cliodhna without guile. She had assured Boann that Cian behaved like a friend to her in the camp and she with him; nothing more.

Boann shivered, anticipating when Elcmar and the men he had taken away with him might return, and with them Cian. She didn’t miss Elcmar, nor living in his camp. Here her child could be born in safety away from Maedb and Bresal. She wouldn’t worry beyond the coming birth and Elcmar’s return.

As light faded in the west, a messenger arrived for Cliodhna. A Starwatcher named Sreng, saying he traveled all the way from the southwest, appeared at their door with a Boyne scout who then slipped away. They all sat at the hearth, where Sreng surprised them with items carried under his sheepskin cloak.

Oghma exclaimed as Sreng handed him an axehead, “The shadow moon metal, such a ruddy color it has! And it is heavier than stone.”

Sreng told him, “This axe was made far to the south at the Lake of Many Hammers,” and he described the hole in the earth there being plundered for copper. Cliodhna nodded as he talked. Sreng showed Oghma how to keep the copper axe tucked away in an oiled skin until it might be mounted on a handle and used. Then Sreng gave the women thin copper armlets. Cliodhna saw the bracelets had the distinctive marks of Gebann and put hers on with a smile, her eyes shining.

Their visitor had traveled long and hard, and they made sure that he took food and warmed himself by the hearth. Sreng shared the news that Cian might not return to the Boyne until after the lambing time or even longer. Oghma sounded his displeasure. Boann took that information without comment. She asked politely about the return of Elcmar.

Sreng shook his head. “While I lived among the miners, I worked at felling trees and had little access to information about the
ard ri
, until I left hurriedly for the Boyne.” He turned to Cliodhna. “You and I will talk now, before warmth and good food put me to sleep.”

Sreng and Cliodhna left Oghma’s snug hearth. They walked together on hidden paths along the north stream’s icy banks and Sreng explained all in secret to wide-eyed Cliodhna. When they returned, Cliodhna said she had heard her father’s wishes from Sreng and she agreed. Oghma fretted and he questioned Sreng while Boann and Cliodhna packed foods and herbs for a journey. Then Oghma found him lodging until the next sunrise, when he gave Sreng new hide footcoverings with a padded grass lining.

A scout stood waiting. Cliodhna pressed her hand in goodbye on Boann and then Oghma, all their faces saddened to be parting.

Oghma gave her a stone amulet carved by him and he took her hands in his for a moment. “You’ll find a way home. May you have many children, Cliodhna. Teach them our ways, the old ways. Remember that not all change is for the good.”

She gave him a brave smile. The visitor Sreng left swiftly with Cliodhna, a heavy mist closing around them and Gebann’s daring rescue for his daughter.

The Invader camp fermented with affront at Boann’s prolonged absence, and Cliodhna with her. Maedb took it upon herself to harass Bresal, demanding their return, and Bresal heard whispers growing loud in the camp.

“Your woman Maedb blathers about needing a village to raise a child—maybe she means the slaves’ children who resemble Connor and it’s all of us who must feed and raise those children of his. Maedb won’t, so. And your woman giving out, saying the father of Boann’s child is a Starwatcher.”

“Sure, won’t Elcmar be pleased to hear that. It’s a bad brew our Maedb has started.”