BENDING THE BOYNE: A novel of ancient Ireland (3 page)

“You will see that the night stars behave differently from the sun,” he told her.

The Dagda and other engineers made field trips with Boann to the older mounds, high on adjacent mountains. She stood out in harsh winds up at the old carvings to study the sun’s range along the horizon and its arc overhead. She began to fathom how the astronomers oriented the mounds’ dark stone passages to capture sunlight as the great sun moved through the four seasons.

Boann studied with the other apprentices, watching the skies and checking each other’s observations. She discovered the poetry in what had seemed to be chaos in the skies. Passion for their astronomy consumed her. It compared only with how she felt about Cian, since they were children. Of late, she could not be sure of his feelings.

Seduced by the astral bodies, she spent increasing time at starwatching and that annoyed her friend Sheela. She tried to placate Sheela, with little tricks used to spot individual stars among the multitude in the night sky. For example, the Bright One could be found at four lengths of her thumb from the far left star in the belt of the Hunter, whose outline was always easy to find. This rule of the thumb delighted Sheela, who asked to learn more. They spent much time out in the dark and cold, then soothed each other’s chapped faces with meal paste.

With a start, Boann saw the sun’s angle across the flagstones. “The time! No need to find my shawl pin this instant.” She had almost forgotten their meeting to groom each other’s waist-length hair for the equinox. She quickly applied a salve to the angry scratches on her legs. She’d have to find more water to wash her face, maybe at Sheela’s.

She hoped that her good friend would not ask again about Oghma’s slow progress at the kerbstones, nor ask what happened to scratch her legs so.

On this equinox Boann looked forward to having few duties, a rarity. She helped with harvesting medicine plants with those of the women who specialized in healing, particularly young Airmid. Their herbalist lore they absorbed easily, since they had been children following their mothers through billowing grasses taller than their heads and deep into the green shades of the forest. Boann recalled her own mother from the faintest smell of a leaf, or in giving cool comfort to the suffering. Neat stocks of perfectly prepared medicines graced her mother’s shelves. Airmid’s medicines looked like that, perfect and all in good order.

If Airmid could take over the healing, then she would have more time for astronomy. Boann eyed the heaps spilling from her baskets and the mess she had made on the shelves, and sighed. She had let the house get into a muddle but she held her own at starwatching; her mother would be proud of her. She would tidy the living area later, and look for her shawl pin.

The loss earlier of her good shawl brought another shiver, and not from cool air. Steady, she told herself, but the intruder’s assault would not let her go. If only she had her mother to ask for advice. She might yet tell the elders about it. Then again, that might jeopardize Cian, living among those warriors as he was. Perhaps she would tell the Dagda, before the ceremony.

The Dagda would present her as an apprentice astronomer on this equinox. She should make an effort with her appearance and she wished her mother were there to help her, there to see the ceremony. Oghma would be judging any young man who came within arm’s length of her at their bonfire; she gave that a wry smile.

She made her way to Sheela’s, skirting the bustle of their village but keeping watch for movement in the budding foliage. The woods no longer seemed a friendly place.

Nothing should mar this important dawning. As one of the elders, Oghma meant to sort out any confusion. He turned decisively onto the central path through their cluster of stone dwellings.

Children shouted and ran to his side. “Oghma, Oghma! When may we go to the river?” They looked up at him, faces open and excited. The elders gave prizes and treats on the equinox for things the children did: gather reeds for torches, find eggs in the woods and meadows for the evening’s feast, run footraces, and the like. Oghma put the eldest two in charge, a lyrical boy and a brown-eyed girl. The two would keep the other little ones busy, and with merely a ripple of concern he watched the children scamper off.

The village hummed with talk of more intruders arriving. A community of herders, basketmakers, netmakers, toolmakers, scrapers and tanners, and not one among them who’d fought in battle. He saw his people working with a new urgency. He nodded at the bowmaker who was steaming pliant yew for bows, and again at the young man close by hewing hard ash for tool handles. The latter put down his flint adz and caught up with Oghma.

They had gone but a few steps together when the toolmaker asked, “Is there any word from Cian?”

Oghma shook his head.

“I don’t mean to trouble you.”

“It’s no bother, Tadhg.”

They stopped and faced one another, the toolmaker visibly tense. Oghma placed his hand on the younger man’s shoulder. “Some wood has flexibility and some has strength. Let us hope that Cian has both qualities.”

The two men regarded each other. “If he lives,” Tadhg said. He clasped Oghma’s arm briefly, then Oghma moved on.

His people had little use for making weapons. Stacks of hides, rushes, willow stems, wool and bast, sinew and bone, awaited their artful hands. All, even scraps, would be made into useful items. He saw a woman, hair greying at her temples, bundling rushes to make a broom. It would have a sleek wooden handle, welcoming to the touch. He blinked hard, flooded with a vivid memory of his wife sweeping the flags around their hearth, and turned away.

He looked to see that livestock had been secured inside holding pens. He checked stores of cereals and roots, and hid his dismay at their depleted food supply in this young season of the sun. That meager amount would have to suffice in the event—

Villagers interrupted him with whispered queries about the boat sighted at dawn.

“The scouts will tell us where they landed, and how many of them.” Oghma reassured each person, making his voice sound confident, and not mentioning Cian.

He ordered a few young fellows to break from what they were doing and help Tadhg make pikes, wood poles sharpened into a spear point. “We may need those, and soon.”

At the far edge of the clearing around their dwellings, he came upon the open pit fire where their potter fired her vessels. Her ritual acts with fire transformed raw clay into ceramic. Pots held water and food essential for life, and pots enfolded their death-ashes. The wet smell of the clay and the coals’ peaty aroma mingled and reminded him of women, of good things cooking, of the hearth. Transfixed, Oghma watched the potter’s agile hands.

From the pliant brownish-red clay, she shaped a bowl with wide shoulders and squat body, then smoothed this pot with a curved bone and set it aside to cure. She was young and pretty but focused on her work, like his Boann.

“A pot created on this dawning holds good luck,” he said.

She looked up and smiled. “May this equinox favor us all, Oghma. Your visit honors me.”

He smiled in return, putting on a glad face for her. “Fair lass! Have you decided yet on a marriage?”

“Has Boann chosen, and is there any man left for me?”

“You’ll both be spoiled for choice this evening,” he teased her back.

She picked up a cured pot to decorate its leathery surface, and he caught his breath. If the vessel were less than perfect, the potter must discard it and begin again. Using a bone comb, she made intricate grooves meet flawlessly around its girth. The master potter showed her well—before taken by the fever, and now who could she take on as her own apprentice? He helped to stoke the kiln then wished her luck again, secretly humbled. Unlike her firing of clay, he didn’t have to risk putting his handiwork into hot coals.

He hurried on toward the river, to their sacred landscape of mounds that proclaimed the Starwatchers’ beliefs. These huge mounds stood taller than a tall tree and spanned many trees across. His carving with stone chisel and mallet gave meaning to the slabs lining the passages and to the boulders forming the high kerb around the outside. His painstaking labor suited Oghma, it contented him.

But on this equinox, the impending boat loaded with men and deadly weapons from afar irritated him like a thorn. The foreigners’ small camp on the southwest coast of Eire, far from the Boyne, had not seemed a threat. For a time, Starwatchers accepted the intruders’ seasonal presence and their odd probing in the earth. Upon seeing copper, the Starwatchers hoped to learn how these strangers turned red-hot stones into a material that shone like the sun and cooled to the color of a shadow moon. They allowed the miners to come and go in peace at that far coast. Then with the past summer, armed intruders appeared in their bloated ships at the Boyne’s mouth and traveled inland.

Starwatcher scouts followed the strangers who searched along the Boyne, poking at outcroppings and leaving behind piles of shattered and scorched rocks. Scouts monitored the dirty smoke rising from inside the intruders’ new camp. The intruders wandered ever farther from their camp and began to take cattle and game as they pleased, despite the coming winter.

Starwatchers avoided contact, fearing the metal knives—and fever. His people suffered. The strangers brought the death of his wife and others, too many others. Then Cian quit his own people to live among the warriors, a thing almost unthinkable. What should be done to protect their children? Should the Starwatchers confront these intruders? The elders deliberated and watched the intruders’ comings and goings.

Will we tolerate another boatload of armed strangers, Oghma asked himself.

His green eyes were clouding, his stone chisel slipping in his hand. Over his seasons, he buried two wives, and of his children only Boann survived. Twice as many Starwatcher men survived beyond the age of twenty-five suns than did women; his people cherished their scarce women, and all children. He had lived a long time and only the Dagda counted more suns among those at the Boyne. While a young man, Oghma measured in the night skies and tracked daylight with the astronomers. Led by his mentor who was descended from the revered ancestor Coll, he learned to style the stones at the great starchambers with crisp precision, completing work on each stone at fairly regular intervals. But that was decades ago.

Through that dark winter, he grieved but continued carving at the mounds, as resolute as the raindrops wearing down the island’s granite slopes. Pain shot through his joints in the damp chill, his shins stuck to the freezing soil as he knelt. His lean shoulders became stooped, and his thick dark hair whitened. Oghma toiled on in order to finish carving the massive kerbstones, with a quip to the Dagda that the stones might finish him first.

All his hopes rested on Boann. In time, he might see his grandchild. He was glad enough to see newborn lambs and the promise of flowers on this bright morning of the spring equinox.

When he learned from the Dagda’s lips of the untimely boat, he told the Dagda, “We people of Eire want for nothing. We have mastered the rhythms of the soil, of the salmon from the ocean, and especially those of the sky. Even the least clever among us know how to prosper here. From sun to sun, we produce enough to sustain us while we study the heavens. We should celebrate spring equinox, our time of planting signaled by the Seven Stars.”

The Dagda agreed. “Despite our trials, we can show gratitude for spring’s arrival. Never mind what the ocean brings to our shores. On land these intruders cannot travel any faster than Starwatchers.”

How many warriors arrived this time? They trusted in their scouts and the Starwatchers who lived at the coast, to alert the Boyne. Oghma hastened along the path to the mounds, his brow furrowed.

The Dagda told him that it was Boann who sighted the new boat bristling with more intruders and weapons. She’d rushed from Red Mountain to tell the Dagda, then she rushed to bring water from the stream, Oghma told himself. That would explain why Boann looked so rattled, something amiss. He did not want to pry. She returned with little water, but he brushed that aside, a trifling thing. At least she’d had a fine sunrise to watch. It did trouble him that she watched many a sunrise and sunset, more than her share. She displayed little interest in any of their young men.

“She secludes herself more and more with the astronomy. That’s not a healthy state of affairs for a young woman,” he told the Dagda. “Often when I speak to her she doesn’t hear me.”