BENDING THE BOYNE: A novel of ancient Ireland (27 page)

Lir threw out a stone anchor offshore. Two crewmen jumped out to replenish supplies. They refilled skins with fresh water, and stuffed string bags with greens and roots. One man gathered seafood from the tidal pools; Cian steamed it over his fire and they would eat it later. The other fellow climbed and found a clutch of seabird eggs, a delicacy to be pierced and sucked raw from the shell. All made haste; it was best that no one, intruder or native, see them. They had supplies from the opposing coast, they said, and Lir would as usual put in at friendly islands along their way. They told Cian with a poke at his ribs that they carried the acorn-fed ham that kept well on voyages.

He realized then the hunger he had on him, an enormous hunger. All of Eire looked underfed. Their harvest had better be good if the Starwatchers were to survive another winter. The spark flared in his head. He had his own plan to outwit the Invaders.

They returned to the
naomhog
before the sun stood above the treetops. On board, he clasped each crewman and Lir, unable to speak for gratitude and glad to see each face.

“You found us,” Lir teased. “What’s that in your big bags? Elcmar?”

Bundles filled the
naomhog
. On Cymru, they had traded for stacks of skins and furs and for pots having feet, a new style. He helped the crew redistribute the load to take on his heavy bags. They triple-lashed those bags onto a wide plank using stout yew withies, then tied down that plank with hemp ropes leaving just room enough for two rowers seated one on each side.

Lir checked the knots himself. “The ropes should be tight yet these knots would release that plank easily to you,” he said, showing Cian. “We’ll hug the coasts as much as possible. But if we start to sink—then you’ll be swimming for shore with that plank!”

The crew snickered but Cian knew that his friend was not joking.

Lir straightened his back, and stood a head taller than any of them. He blew out a breath long and strong enough to stir the waves. “I congratulate you on the find, lad.

“Let’s be off, your bags have us wallowing as it is. Cut the rope to the anchor stone! Saves us the time hauling it in.” The famed mariner spurned ritual before his voyages, but this time as they sped out from the estuary Lir cast a fragment of copper into the blue depths, and grinned at Cian.

Just like way back in the days of old

And together we will float into the mystic

Into The Mystic
, Van Morrison

A Pot of Gold

O
N
E
IRE, ALL
the people made good use of the lunates of long daylight and smoother seas.

Invaders continued taking copper on the southwest coast. A trader boat came and went from the Lake mine. At the Boyne more warriors and slaves arrived to replace the past winter’s losses. To rub it all in, the intruders built new stone walls at intervals around the large mounds, enclosing plots to graze their purloined cattle and small fields to grow their barley.

The superstitious intruders bypassed the ruined mound of Dowth. Bresal proposed that they rebuild this mound, higher than any other, to reach the heavens. Elcmar and Ith had with difficulty talked Bresal out of this scheme. Ith posted a sentry at the central mound in a wood and wattle hut, and went there often himself, going round and round the great mound, trying to decode its carved kerbstones.

The sun and the moon continued to light the passages and chambers at Carrowkeel, Loughcrew, Fourknocks, and the Boyne. The Starwatchers’ ceremonies occurred in stealth; the
geis
made it dangerous for them to gather at the mounds, especially during darkness. The Invaders regarded starwatching as bad luck with Ith’s encouragement, or so the Starwatchers heard it; but they saw that the shaman skulked around the mounds, examining their carvings. Training of young engineers like Daire had been greatly disrupted. The Starwatchers redoubled efforts to teach astronomy to their little ones. Deciphering the equinox shift became paramount for the astronomers.

Boann occasionally joined them, though occupied with her infant son. Aengus, who grew fat and strong and enchanted all who looked on him. Aengus the fair, the Starwatchers said of him, fair as our sun.

The long days bloomed, one after another. On their whole island, no Starwatcher had heard from Cliodhna. If anyone had had word from Cian, they kept it a secret.

Cian’s return voyage to the Continent with his heavy bags of gold from Eire’s mountains, took him to a landing place further east than where he first landed with Gebann. As the boat neared shore, he strained to see signs of Invaders.

Lir explained, “This eastern stretch of the peninsula where its shoreline curves north, and its mines, are controlled by a most ancient tribe. That tribe keeps aloof; they use their own mariners, have their own sacred symbols, and keep their own customs intact. They speak an old and complicated tongue, and they answer to no one. There’s no Invader official here and so no duty to be levied on what’s in those leather bags.” It greatly relieved Cian to hear that his gold would not be depleted by a greedy Invader the moment Lir’s ship landed.

“Come on, let’s find you a place to stay among them.” Lir helped him find lodging in a village along the coast, shaded by tall oaks and pines. He recommended that Cian remain there through one lunate and learn what he might of their trading and smithing. “You can inquire here about Cliodhna, whisper it like a breeze among the pines. I’ll be searching as well, and I’ll speed a message west to Gebann. You’ll have his reply before the next moon, I swear it.”

Cian held out several chunky nuggets of gold and Lir accepted them. He held out a small bag. “And here is gold to give to Gebann for my success on Eire. Tell Gebann that I now understand the meaning of debt, since I can never repay him.”

“Don’t be so hard on yourself, Cian.” Lir gave him a friendly tap on the arm. “That’s enough sun metal to keep me afloat for a good while. Probably enough for a new boat. Now enjoy the food and drink on offer here, will you? These Basques do be famous cooks—and you’re after getting thin.”

Lir introduced him to a mariner friend on the coast fronting the Pyrenees, and left Cian to live among the renowned metal workers for one lunate. Their smiths could show him all that he needed to know in their art. Lir’s friend, who gave him the use of a hut, warned him,

“Turning stone into metal must be treated with awe by those who do not know its secrets, secrets our smiths have kept for generations.”

Knowing it would take awhile to earn the smiths’ trust, Cian found himself carving with stoneworking tools again so that he might be of use while he lived with these people. Now I don’t mind working in stone, he thought, chastened to compare his awkward time with Oghma. For his labor, after awhile the smiths allowed him to enter privileged spaces where they cast various metals and worked each metal after casting.

Gradually, observing the smiths, he learned the finer details of smelting and casting of bronze, the alloy of copper with tin. He learned to combine the proper proportion of copper with tin, to pour a bronze that would not be brittle. The smiths listed the superior qualities of bronze: easier to cast when hot, required a lower smelting temperature, it was easier to work after casting in a mold, and bronze made harder objects even before it had a final hammering. For Cian it was all strange sounds and smells and irritating smoke but he stayed on.

While at rest, he familiarized himself with plants and animals, many unknown on Eire. A little visitor interrupted his solitude at his sleeping hut, sitting just outside the entrance. Its improbable coloring made Cian laugh in surprise: pointy ears topping a slender body with tawny red fur spotted with black, black feet and a black line down its back, then black rings alternating with tawny around its long tail. The size of a small dog, the genet sat looking baleful until he gave it some stale meal cake. It ate and ran away until the following dusk when it reappeared. For the genet’s company, he gladly shared his food.

Smelting began to have a rhythm and logic for him. From ore to finished item, it took labor involving many different hands to produce an object in copper, or gold, or the other metals. As the smiths showed Cian the finer points of their art, he comprehended why these metal objects had extreme value. Copper, and the much rarer bronze, the smiths poured as tools with obvious utility: axeheads, knives, and awls. Pliable gold or silver was usually hammered, little heat required. In the case of gold and silver, and sometimes copper or bronze, those became items to adorn the body as gleaming jewelry around the neck, or the arm, or as an earring.

Unlike Creidhne and Lein at the Lake Of Many Hammers, here dwelled smiths who wrought only gold and silver, and they worked apart from toolmakers who poured and styled the sturdier metals. Sheet gold’s shiny surface surprised Cian with his reflection so that he almost dropped the first piece he handled. The jewelry smiths showed him that even the smallest scrap of malleable gold could be used, whether rolled into gold wire or hammered into thin sheets. Gold could be used to overlay another substance: gold foil wrappping rare amber around the circumference of an amber earring, or burnishing the wood hilt of a dagger.

Very few persons could possess these objects, one smith told him, but their craft flourished as smiths worked more gold into finery. “The big traders lust after gold,” another added. “It carries great power.”

It dawned on Cian: sun metal conveys abundance. His hidden bags of sun metal gave him enormous means to barter, even among these
Euskaldunak
, the Basque people. He could have anything he desired.

Cian met with the elders. Their master smith Basajuan needed much gold for making a ceremonial object, the elders told him. For a weight of gold from his cache, he could gain access to Basajuan, said to be a goodhumored giant of a man. Cian bargained as he had seen Gebann do on many occasions. The Basque elders were to exchange the gold he would turn over toward many things Cian indicated that he would need including the use of a strong ship, a crew, and supplies for it, heavy rope and provisions and food; all that would be needed to take him far north along the curving bay. That raised some eyebrows, they saw he was no mariner, but they agreed.

After he took a ritual sweatbath, the elders introduced him to Basajuan. The man stood like a bull with an incongruous broad smile.

Cian turned over the agreed weight of gold. Basajuan labored at hammering the gold into a wide flat sheet, Cian working nearby to make a new curved anvil. The great smith wanted the anvil for just this project. Cian chipped and polished small stones into rectangles which Basajuan used to smooth the sheet gold into final shape. At the anvil, the smith fashioned a cape of gold. It spanned the chest and over each shoulder and upper arm, with its opening at the back of the neck. Basajuan bent over the anvil to finish the exceptional cape, embossing tightly spaced curving ribs alternating with curving rows of tiny raised bosses, until the gold appeared to be a flow of luminous textile and beads folding around the lucky wearer. Its underside, he would finish with reinforcing leather held with bronze strips.

This flowing gold cape astounded all who saw it; it was an unprecedented object.

“Who shall receive this cape?” Cian inquired as the smith tapped the final rows of dazzling embossed beading into the gold’s arcing surface.

“This? This cape of mine is going to Taranis, the chief trader at a great estuary north of here.” The master ran his hands over his delicate work. “I shall never see it again.” He stared with Cian at the gold treasure that would travel far away from his talented hands.

“Will this chief know where it is that you Basques obtained the gold for it?”

Basajaun considered this, wiping his brow. “What do you suggest?”

“Let Taranis hear that this gold came from the Starwatchers. Nothing more.”

Basajuan agreed with a wink.

Cian felt very comfortable among the
Euskaldunak
. They held their important councils under a great oak, much like his people. He tried to master their language, but found it took a long time to learn if one had not heard it while a child. The Euskara phrasing and complicated grammar made it similar to the Starwatchers’. In comparison with the less precise Invaders, the Starwatchers and these
Euskaldunak
expressed themselves very well using few words.

“So, both our people are quiet ones,” he teased the placid Basajuan.

Glad for his safe journey and good fortune, Cian asked to visit a starwatching place as the elders might permit him and they chose a fellow his age to take him. They traveled inland on sturdy horses, then climbed steep footpaths. His guide brought him to small mounds with ancestor burials, where they stopped but Cian grew restless.

“I wish to connect with the sky,” he repeated and pointed above. His guide’s look changed.

“Our practices are hidden from outsiders.”

“What face do I wear?” Cian replied. “I look more the
Euskaldunak
than you!”

They traveled to higher peaks in the coastal mountains and on the third day reached the sanctuary, Oianleku.

Cian thought he stood at the top of the world; then he saw that, no, to the east rose another ridged profile of equally high mountaintops. He turned slowly. From the grassy plateau of Oianleku, he looked toward the great waters to the north, barely seen across the intervening peaks and lush valleys. The smudge of dark blue led to Eire, his home, and he felt the pull as he gazed north. He turned to the west and then south, where rugged mountains filed into a hazy infinity.

Cian turned again to the east. Now he saw that the mountains directly across from him had five distinct peaks, like fingers folded over into a mighty fist. Deep notches lay to either side and divided this raised fist from the mountaintops on the left, north, and to the south.