BENDING THE BOYNE: A novel of ancient Ireland (30 page)

Several miners trudged to the coast from the Lake of Many Hammers to see what the trader vessel, arriving late in that season of high sun, had brought from Taranis’ famed port.

Creidhne noticed the man Sreng giving a mariner a polished red jasper bead for a foreign pot, and interrupted them. “A Starwatcher trading for food? Why should I let you have this meat when I could eat it myself?”

“Have it then, but your man says the meat’s gone off and shouldn’t be eaten, so,” said Sreng, glib with the Invader tongue, and turned as if to walk away. “I want only the food vessel.”

The husky mariner snatched up the red bead, swore an oath at Creidhne, and thrust the pot at Sreng.

“Keep it, will you!” Creidhne moved on to inspect other goods from this shipment. He would not cross any man who dared to ride the high seas.

When this boat left, Creidhne would be sending Elcmar’s spy with it, but he kept that fact to himself.

Sreng emptied the big pot that came from a far shore, its markings curious to him. Under the meat, somewhat spoiled, he found the plaque etched with signs, and Sreng rejoiced.

He mobilized select men among the miners, showing them the plaque, and his small group quickly left the Lake Of Many Hammers. As they made their way at night to Eire’s eastern mountains, Sreng circulated the safe passage stones smuggled in from Cian so that those tokens would reach the Boyne. His group arrived in the valleys around Lugnaquilla well before cold weather.

Cian’s plaque brought them to the steep cliffs streaked with quartz. Sreng and his men began pulling gold from the rushing stream. The gold lay accessible and in good quantity, they found. Sreng shattered the plaque and threw the pieces into the stream. He kept the strange pot.

They built a more permanent camp in a narrow ravine at a distance from the sun metal. The local Starwatchers, who had lost men to Elcmar’s warriors, aided them with scouts who showed them routes to carry sun metal to the coast. The sun sped south along the horizon toward equinox. Starwatcher scouts brought Lir from the coast up to the mountain stream. He arrived just before the autumn sun, laden with goods for the miners.

Sreng tried to convince Lir of the quantity of gold around them. “You simply pick it up. With gold there’s little smelting, so we’ll do little felling of trees. We can leave scarcely a footprint and live out of sight. Unless Elcmar challenges us. Then we must fight him.”

Lir gloated with him over their find, but cautioned Sreng. “Cian cannot send metal weapons to you, not yet. The trader chief Taranis does not permit it.

“You must hold back your share of gold until the right time comes. Do not trade with anyone using sun metal! I bring you a few copper axes, ropes, furs and warm cloaks, and hides worked for clothing and shoes. With each boat, Cian will send items you need.”

“No more spoiled meat, tell him.” Sreng made a face, then laughed and told Lir about the mariner who delivered the foreign pot. “Still full of meat, it was.” They savored the ruse.

“How was your man to know that he carried a pot of gold!”

Lir gave precise instructions to Sreng. “Here is how you must divide the gold according to Cian’s arrangement with mighty Taranis. Use these symbols on each plaque sent back with gold.”

No Starwatcher in Eire would reveal the gold source nor its paths to the ships, and only Sreng knew it was bound for Cian.

To Streng’s dismay, he had no news of Cliodhna to send with Lir.

Cian and the Basques used dugout log boats from locals to follow the river east, hiking when they encountered shallows. His companions enjoyed the trip and camping. They had Cian try eating frog legs seared with wild garlic, a dish he only tolerated. The tribes they encountered proved friendly and helpful, grateful to receive metal scraps and beads since his party carried no pots or stone axes for exchange.

Their expedition could have been deemed a failure in that Cian returned sooner than expected, suffering from an onslaught of allergies the farther they went inland. However, he brought back insights having immediate benefit to Taranis’ trade. He had the pleasure of placing a dark lump of alluvial tin on Taranis’ tabletop.

“Tin, to make bronze.” Cian tried to sound offhand. The two stared at it.

Taranis lifted his eyes from the tin. “If there’s more tin where you found that, your efforts have been a huge success. Rest now, have a sweat bath to clear that head. I’ll send my own slave to give you a massage.” The trader chief looked down his nose, resting his immaculate chin on soft fingertips, at the Starwatcher seated across from him. “One more thing. I have met with your man Lir, inspected his vessel and sent him off. Impressive mariner. Nothing escapes my notice in this port, you know.”

Upset though he was to have missed briefing Lir, Cian thanked Taranis. He could only hope that Sreng received his message and had gone east to take gold. Also he had wanted to send seed grain with Lir’s vessel that would have gone on to the Boyne to help feed his people. Now he must simply wait.

Cian’s favor with Taranis annoyed the chief’s sons. They plotted and came to the hall for a formal audience. Taranis kept them waiting in line with all the others wanting his ear, then his guard ushered them into his presence, seated at his long table. He displayed a gold nugget on its smooth expanse, along with quartz crystals, blue-green copper ore, and the newly found tin; all from Cian.

“We hear of troubles at the Morbihan. Traders attempt to set up camps there to send their goods inland and bypass our harbor here. What are you going to do about this?”

Taranis snorted. “What is it that you are going to do about this, my sons?”

They regarded each other furtively. “Why not send the Starwatcher and his
Euskaldunak
men there?”

Taranis nodded. “Very well. When all of you return to me from the Morbihan, I want a full report. Does this pose any problem for you?”

They left him quickly.

One of the brothers informed the Starwatcher that he must leave on sea travel.

Slaves loaded much equipment and brimming food baskets onto boats, and Taranis’ sons embarked with their armed guards, and Cian with his Basques, for the brief voyage west to the Morbihan. Their boats turned in at the curved bay where a jagged arm of land stretched out like a crab’s pincer into the water from a marshy area backed by low rolling hills. Though the sun stood high, the entire bay was eerily still. A haze made sky and water a matching pale blue. They saw no sign of Invaders or trading vessels. They decided to pull in and go onto shore. Leather soles crunched on the wet shingles, the sound muffled in the heavy air.

As the group made their way inland, the scene unfolded. The haze thickened into dirty smoke. Fires flickered in the wind on the tops of sacred mounds, their entrances smashed and blocked. Giant menhirs lay crashed on the ground, columns of granite that had stood tall as two oaks. The tallest column lay in four pieces, another in three pieces. All around the fallen menhirs lay bodies, the coastal inhabitants, the males slain as they protected their mounds and their homes. Seafarer women and children, killed at dwellings that had been put to the torch.

As the men surveyed around the bay Cian found the area thick with stone monuments and alignments. The Morbihan venerated the sky for centuries. Now the land reeked of destruction and death. The wide scene could not have been ghastlier. Why Invaders or anyone would kill these Seafarers and destroy this place, he did not apprehend.

Their expedition turned into a burial detail. They all worked over several sunrises. A few survivors appeared from the woods and helped to cremate and bury their dead. There was no glory to be had and the sons of Taranis had little to report to him in his great hall, except that all of their men and Cian with his Basques had indeed returned.

Cian looked as if he had visited the spirit world. The slaughter at the Morbihan reminded him of the cave far away to the south filled with murdered young people. The senseless murder of Sheela at the Boyne. Worst of all, one of the dead children at the Morbihan had been the tender age of Aengus, and his image of that slain infant stayed with Cian. So close he was to snatching the gold safely away from Elcmar, but all that he held dear for himself he had left vulnerable at the Boyne. He fasted, and mourned the dead, and he spent many chill nights watching the stars of his ancestors and following the white river in the sky.

The Basques fretted and brought him special foods, dishes they concocted with their own hands, to have him eating again. Slowly Cian returned to his surroundings at the Loire and to his senses. But he could not stop his inner reality from revisiting the slaughter at the Morbihan. A large carved axe that menaced him overhead in a stone passage near to the wrecked menhirs, recurred in his fitful dreams. He woke shaking and sweating.

He recalled the long alignments, hundreds of standing stones over large areas. The Morbihan’s profuse, swirling carvings inside passage mounds; he knew that style, like carvings at the Boyne and Fourknocks. A sillstone inside a passage almost tripped him, and his touch found that it was carved like sillstones in mounds on Eire. He recognized a tradition as rich as the Starwatchers’ and deeply connected with theirs. Did those Morbihan astronomers know of the Northshift, he wondered. Did those bayside dwellers honor the eight year cycle of the sunset star, and the moon’s long cycle? Why topple their menhirs and desecrate their mounds and standing stones? Why would anyone kill those people?

He tried to make sense of what he had seen, desolate for Boann and Aengus and his Starwatchers. He considered leaving the Loire forever and returning to the Boyne. There he could share the Starwatchers’ fate, die among his own people. Traders and trading were a curse, a plague; Cian wanted no part of this life. His quest for the gold trade seemed pointless.

Cian sought Taranis and found him tallying goods in his inner storeroom: ingots, piles of fabrics, rare pots, stacks of scented wood, bright feathers, animal hides, stone beads and pierced seashells, oils, dyes, and exotic herbs. Metals, every known metal; except the gold was kept elsewhere, hidden. The glut of goods repulsed Cian but he needed an answer, now, or he would leave immediately for Eire.

Taranis dropped another pebble into a clay jar then looked up from counting. “Yes?”

“Those people were killed for their beliefs,” he confronted Taranis.

The great trader did not inquire which people he meant. Taranis pouted his lower lip, threw up his hands, and shrugged.

That was not the answer he expected. Whether Taranis had himself ordered or permitted the slaughter, Cian never wanted to know. He did not ask.

He returned to the shoreline, to the sun and stars and incoming ships, and he waited. The reaping time, and he could only hope this harvest replenished Eire’s supplies. He could not yet return to Boann and little Aengus. He understood now: no one could be safe. Invader violence infected every coast he had seen. The truce at the Boyne would not hold, the Starwatchers could have no peace.

He felt sullied. He stacked flat stones to form a small arched cell and installed himself in it alone at the coast, and he waited.

Before winter seas set in, he saw the first gold shipment from Sreng arrive at the port of Taranis. Cian’s gold trade had begun. He greeted it with mixed emotions: what good would come of this and for whom?

Taranis had to see all the gold before it went into storage—but this time I’ll not have it banged on my rare tabletop, he cried—and revelled in the sight. With Taranis’ consent, Cian rewarded Lir handsomely. They feasted with Lir and his crew on a venison stew redolent of roots, herbs, and juniper berries cooked by the Basques, and they heard the tale of Lir’s stormy autumn passage.

At sunrise, Lir departed to winter among his own Seafarers, but first he took Cian aside.

“Elcmar has sent an agent looking for you along these coasts.”

Cian put his guardian, the port official, on watch to warn him of any stranger seeking the Starwatcher named Cian. If Taranis heard any of it, the great trader said nothing about it. Taranis had already given Cian a new name and that name was how he was known to all at the Loire.

While he had Taranis’ attention over that first winter, Cian consulted his mentor on whether to hire boats rather than build his own. “When a vessel lies idle in harbor, or if it sinks, either would be a senseless loss. Let others own the boats. Even a small amount of gold will yield enormous trades for us on the Continent.”