BENDING THE BOYNE: A novel of ancient Ireland (2 page)

P
ART
O
NE

DAY

I search with my mind into the multitudinous revolving spirals of the stars.

Ptolemy

Starwatchers, circa 2200
BCE

T
HE FLAMING HEAD
of the ancient one tipped above the horizon. The rising sun took Boann into its warm, golden embrace. She stayed until the rays hid the glittering void, ending her vigil of the stars. All in her village would be stirring and she should return to her father’s house. With longing, she glanced back toward dawn over the waves.

She saw it then, a speck out on the vast ocean. With her hand shading her eyes she could see the large boat, crammed black. Sparks of light glinted from metal: the fearsome long knives.

Boann scrambled down the mountain slope to warn the Dagda. She soon found him, a dignified figure herding sheep and lambs on the grassy plain.

“You’re sure that it is an intruder boat?” He cast a wary look to the east.

She nodded. “I am sure that I’m sure.”

“What can this mean? Arriving with equinox, the cursed warriors!” The Dagda raised his staff, its red stone macehead gleaming. “I’ll rouse the elders and send our scouts.”

He sped away on his long legs, leaving the surprised flock milling around her.

Never had she seen the Dagda swear, or run as he did now. His news would cause turmoil in their village. She had better fetch water before returning there. Feet flying, she hurried north to the smaller river.

Mist hung thick over the stream. In the grey stillness, she thought herself alone. She retrieved her clay pot among ferns, lifting their damp scent with it. Auburn hair cascaded over one shoulder as her torso leaned toward the water to fill the jug. Another time she might have glimpsed her face on the stream’s placid surface but now she paid it no heed. A bird twittered and flapped in the copse and her head jerked up, alert.

Behind her a twig snapped under heavy footfall, then another. She felt the noise, she heard it to her core: danger. She spun around, eyes wide, and a pungent odor struck her nostrils. A bulky shadow lurched from a stand of hazelnut and her every muscle leaped into action. His knife sliced at her net shawl but she pulled and ran away from the smell, away from the intruder. She outpaced his shadow, leaving branches whipping behind her in the mist.

She gripped the fragile pot while her legs raced through gorse and bracken and over rocks, this way and that. Only a fox could have pursued her. After a good distance, Boann broke her stride, sank into dense undergrowth, and listened. Other than her ragged breathing, a strange quiet smothered the woods.

Shaking, she rose and stared down at the water jug in her arms.
My mother’s favorite
. Head spinning, she fought an urge to be sick. Her legs stung from nettles. Water blotched her soft skin tunic and thorns had scraped it. Her good shawl lay somewhere behind, ruined. She’d have another, Sheela could make her another shawl but not by this sunset.

Sure that no one followed, Boann turned and found a path that led to the dwelling shared with her father. She slowed to a walk, heart still racing.

Glad she was to reach their home, its old but solid walls of drystacked stone. She left the wood slab door open behind her and slipped inside. Hearth smoke furled up through the roof hole in the thatch, silently reminding her to appear calm before her father Oghma. Ever since her mother had passed to the spirits, his temper could flare. She heard Oghma fussing with his mallets and stone chisels behind a woven willow screen, already up and about.

She swallowed hard; what could she do to distract him before telling him about the boat, much less her attacker? Her quick hands took pieces from braids of drying flowers and potent herbs. She plunged hot stones into a skin water bag to set it boiling and snatched up a clay cup incised with chevrons, the symbol for the Swan stars. As her father appeared, she was admiring the cup.

“Is it herbal water you’re having? Are you taken ill?”

“It is close to my time with the moon. The brew eases me.”

She stepped in front of the emptied water jug. Not even a sharp look came her way. She took a deep breath and told him. “Another big boat arrives. Just so, with spring equinox.” Boann stood still as a deer, deflecting scrutiny.

“Yes, the Dagda stopped here in haste. More of them, it hardly seems possible. Perhaps now Cian will return to inform the elders. He is long overdue.” His mouth set in a hard line.

So the news of another boat shook Oghma as well. He did not speak of Cian to her, had not mentioned him during all the winter. She would not tell her father that she had been on the mountain with Cian through the night. Now that seemed long ago.

“We must go on as we have done. Why would these intruders bother us on the equinox?” She hadn’t meant to sound defiant, the wrong note with him; she exhaled slowly.

“The Dagda and I agree that the people should gather to celebrate. With Cian, or without him.”

With or without you.

Before she could bring herself to tell of her attacker at their stream, her father said he must be going. His expression softened. “We’ll just have to be ready for them. Our scouts left for the coast.” Oghma patted her head as if she were still a child, and set out to join the Dagda and the other elders. At the open door, dust motes swirled in the early light: her bits of hope dashed to the floor only to rise and float again.

Her people must hold their ceremony. Their village at the river Boyne led the starwatching, the center of a network whose strands connected all the tribes on the island, tensile yet strong like a spider’s web.
A tear in the right place could bring down our web
; she shivered and moved closer to the hearth fire. They must hold their spring rites and mark the equinox stars. All the elders would have to agree on it, though. Estranged from the elders as he was, Cian might not return that evening.

The elders including her father supervised at the immense stone-lined passage mounds set in clearings, three emerald mounds spaced in a rough triangle along the wide river plain.

Their Boyne starwatching complex had been active for centuries. The ancestors who dreamed and planned these mounds were long deceased. Their descendants completed the work in stages and returned to older villages in the northwest, or began new villages elsewhere. Final alignment and carving of the stones proceeded bit by bit.

Many Starwatchers declared that their grand mounds at the Boyne would never be duplicated. And, replied some, these mounds would never be finished. Their banter belied an unspoken fear. Fear had arrived with the intruders and their long bronze knives.

She crouched by the hearth in the room’s center, arms hugging her knees and one hand suspending her cup over its warmth. Her mother’s water jug lay by the hearth, safe again. Boann traced its grooved designs. She tried to not think about intruders. Taking this herbal water would erase that stranger’s smell. This was the first time she smelled one of them up close. She might have told Oghma of the assault, yet why upset him further with another armed boatload arriving. He would only worry more when she went out at night. Her mind’s eye saw muscled limbs streaking through the forest, a lone figure quick as a fox, coming to meet her under the stars. Now her tryst with Cian seemed unimportant.

Again she remembered the shadow striking at her, the flashing dagger.

She had avoided her destiny as that stranger would have fashioned it. Slowly the hair on her body lay down and she felt the muscles easing in her neck and back. Best that she not mention her scare to anyone. They all needed a rest from troubles with intruders, they needed to enjoy themselves. But that one’s intent at the stream could not be mistaken. The heavy footfalls resounded:
another moment on the breeze and it would have been far worse for me than that man’s smell
. Her soothing cup had gone cold.

She stood, her legs still shaking and with pink welts rising from unheeded nettles. Boann crossed the room, a flagged living area around the central hearth. Its dim, cool interior was fitted with bed platforms along the sides. At dressed stone shelves against the far wall, she searched for her shawl pin. Her father had carved the pin, a white length of antler with precise chevron grooves and polished smooth. It would calm her to roll its spiraling texture in her palm. She had not worn her pin since the solstice feast, or had she? Disoriented, she felt upset for not remembering, and for her lost shawl. What use was the pin without her good shawl? So many losses since these intruders arrived, and creeping uncertainty spreading like that man’s shadow over all that she held dear.

She fumbled in leather pouches and wood boxes on the stone shelves and threw open the willow baskets on the floor. Her father was slipping at his task as master stonecarver; Boann knew it better than anyone. Oghma wouldn’t be carving another faceted bone pin.

The loss of Oghma’s apprentice had not helped. She quarreled with Cian before he left their village. “You are favored in this. You are the brightest among us. If you hear something once, you have it. But of late you’ve taken to learning all the wrong things, and little or nothing from Oghma.”

“I’ve learned the sky symbols. But I lack the patience to be picking them into stone. I don’t want to be out watching the heavens! For me it’s time wasted, sighting in the cold for a constellation or fixing the sun’s angle at a post.”

She pressed him. “You spend more time among the intruders. What can they offer you?”

“Novelty,” he replied. “Action. New weapons. The intruders play war games all day.”

“Yes, and they feast all night using food they raid from our people. These warriors scorn our starwatching, do they not?”

“They appear to be ignorant of our symbols. They call us ‘quiet ones.’”

“So is it down to Oghma to finish the carving at our mounds, alone and worn away himself and his age written on his face?”

“Boann, I discussed my leaving with the elders. There is nothing more to be said about it.” He rose from their hidden place in the meadow where they had played as children. Within moments, Cian could not be seen in any direction. No sign of him, and no swift fox.

Ohma repeated to her, the elders’ long and serious debates caused by Cian. His reason for leaving that he gave the elders, for him to study the intruders’ ways, offended them. They could see that other young men might take Cian’s path over time, dazzled by the intruders’ metal tools and attracted to bold new ways.

Boann saw the hurt in Oghma’s eyes, but she believed what Cian told the elders. Surely Cian stayed among the intruders for more than making sport with their shining weapons.

As the nights lengthened into winter, father and daughter drew apart across her mother’s empty place at their hearth. Boann overlooked Oghma’s short temper. Say what they will, and some in their village thought him too stern, or overly proud, but her father did not give in to despair. He continued his work, and she could only admire his sense of purpose. She searched the stars for some sign to guide her. The reply, the sign, came clear and simple. She would study the stars in order to replace Cian, the reluctant apprentice.

She petitioned the chief astronomer, the Dagda, for his tutelage of her.

The Dagda heard her out, then he questioned her. “What about your healing skills?”

“Airmid shows great promise. In time she can replace my mother.”

“That may be so.—When our astronomers meet to watch the skies, only those women attend who can be absent from the hearth or have no young children. You must devote many sunrises and sunsets, whole seasons, in order to succeed.”

“I am determined to succeed in starwatching.”

He peered at her as if seeing her for the first time, his eyes blue beyond the telling, a breeze lifting wisps of white hair around his sage face. “You need to know all of our carved notations and much more about the sky’s paths, to truly assist Oghma.”

Recalling the Dagda’s penetrating look, Boann forgot her search for her shawl pin and her shaky, stinging legs. She had not realized the extent of her people’s astronomy.

She had so much to learn at the start that it almost overwhelmed her. The Dagda warned that he would condense her instruction and he had. He skipped explaining the basic movements in the skies, the facts all Starwatchers learned as children. Their carved stones recorded solstices, when the sun slowed and almost halted in its movement along the horizon and then the sun reverted back along its path. They understood equinoxes, when sunlight equaled darkness. He reiterated that the sun’s basic cycle of four seasons, and that of the stars, lasted over 365 light/dark intervals and then the sun’s pattern with the star cycle began again.