Summer's End (2 page)

October 21, 2012

Evening

Wilson
Armitage turned out to be one of those college professors who you knew had
girls fighting to sign up for his classes—he was maybe 35, with a charmingly
ragged haircut, a quick smile, and clothes straight from Urban Outfitters. His
office was more old-fashioned than he was, full of language reference books and
stacks of papers and jars of pencils; only one small laptop on the desk
offering evidence of the 21
^st
century.

If
I liked Wilson immediately, I was less sure about the man with him: Thin,
fifty-something, with narrow features and a perpetual scowl. Wilson introduced
him as Dr. Conor
ó
Cuinn,
the archaeologist who had overseen the
excavation at which the manuscript had been found. He’d flown over from Ireland
with the actual artifact, which UCLA was still in the process of scanning.
Wilson did most of the talking, but Conor never stopped staring at me. It
occurred to me to wonder if he simply mistrusted women. Or perhaps American
women?

Wilson
started by offering me a chair, then turned his laptop around to let me look at
pages of the manuscript while he talked. The photos on the screen showed a
continuous scroll, broken into frames for scanning, with edges chewed and
uneven; the parchment or vellum was covered in neat handwriting that I just
barely recognized as Latin.
The scroll had been wrapped in oiled
cloth and laid within a metal box with sealed edges—a box still clutched by the
bony fingers of a long-dead female corpse. A poor farmer in Northern Ireland
had discovered the remains while digging peat blocks out of a bog. Fortunately he’d
had enough sense to call the authorities, who’d brought in ó Cuinn. The
excavation had been brief—there’d been nothing else at all in the bog—but the
scroll was remarkable. The author had been named Mongfind
^[6]
, and
claimed to have been the last of the Irish Druids.

“Well, right off the bat,
something’s odd,” I said, “that’s a female name, and most of the Druids were
men, although there are isolated historical recordings of female Druids.”

The two professors exchanged a
quick glance, and then Wilson smiled. “You’re going to be in for a few
surprises, I think. According to this…exactly half the Druid caste were women,
and they were essential to the Druid rituals.”

I couldn’t even answer, not
right away. Half the Druids were women
?
“How do you know this isn’t a
fraud?”

Wilson shot a glance at his
Irish companion, who nodded back to him. “We’ve got everything from carbon
dating to Mongfind’s body to confirm this.”

“So you think the body you
found this with was Mongfind herself?”

“We believe so—Mongfind
mentions several…uh, peculiarities of her body that matched up to the corpse
found in the bog. We’ve even got autopsy results on the body confirming how she
died, how old she was, and what she ate for her last meal. And of course, Dr. ó
Cuinn is a highly regarded specialist in his field. No, the evidence is
incontrovertible.”

ó Cuinn spoke up, and his
brogue was thick and obvious, even with only two words spoken. “The tongue…”

Armitage made a quick grimace,
then added, “Of course. One of those ‘peculiarities’ mentioned in the
manuscript is that Mongfind’s tongue was cut out. The body we found had been
mutilated in that manner.”

“Why was her tongue cut out?”

Armitage took a deep breath and
then said, “What do you know about the conversion of the Celts to
Christianity?”

I shrugged. “As much as anyone,
I guess. Gregory the Great taught his missionaries the doctrine of syncretism
^[7]
, of
incorporating existing pagan practices rather than stamping them out. All
Saints’ Day was probably moved from May 13
^th
to November 1
^st
to help Catholic missionaries in Ireland convert the Celts
^[8]
.”

ó Cuinn asked, “Have you not
wondered why the Celts would have so easily converted?”

In fact, I had. I figured that
more often than not, conversion had been along the lines of the conquest of the
Aztecs, when Cortez had ridden into their lands with a banner that read “We
shall conquer under the sign of the cross” and a large force of men with
superior armor, weapons, and diseases that the Aztecs couldn’t fight. “Sure, I’ve
wondered that, but I figured they probably kind of bought them off with a
combination of gifts and threats.”

“According to this…” Armitage
gestured at the laptop screen, “…the Catholic missionaries had studied the
tactics employed by Roman troops against the British Celts, and they learned.
When they were ready, they moved into Ireland with a hired army and started by
slaughtering all of the Celt warriors, then moved onto the Druids. Only a few
escaped; the remaining Celts converted easily.”

“So you’re telling me this
document reveals that early Catholic missionaries were basically mass
murderers?”

“Well, more in the nature
of…conquerors,” Wilson said, squirming, then riffling through a stack of
printouts on his desk. “Listen to this: ‘Yesterday the Catholics offered a gift
of a great man built of wicker. This figure could hold fifty men, and the
Catholics suggested we should tour it from the inside. When fifty of us were
within, they sealed the entrance and set the wicker man afire. The rest of us tried
to save our fellows, but our enemies had sunk traps in the earth, and many of
our tribe died impaled on great spikes. Those of us who suffered neither stakes
nor flames were forced to listen to the dying screams of our brothers and
sisters.’”

I couldn’t suppress a laugh.
“This is all going to go over well with modern Catholics.”

But bitter jokes aside, my head
was spinning. Hadn’t it been Caesar who had ascribed wicker men to the Celts
^[9]
? Yet now
we had something saying the infamous giant figures were not Celtic, but had
been used as a trick by Catholic missionaries…who were also ruthless invaders.
“So…are you suggesting that all of the other histories…”

ó Cuinn leaned forward, his
pinched features eager. “…are false, re-written by later Christian scribes who
were instructed to hide the truth.”

“Why?” Even as I asked it, I
knew the answer.

Wilson confirmed. “Don’t the
victors in every war write the history they want? The Catholics probably
weren’t comfortable with a society in which women held half the religious
offices and…”

“And what?”

Wilson abruptly dropped his
eyes and fidgeted; he was uneasy talking about whatever came next. I looked to
ó Cuinn, who slid a USB stick across the table to me. “It might be easier if
you just read what Dr. Armitage has translated thus far.”

I picked the stick up. “I can
take this?”

They both nodded, so I put it
in a pocket. “Okay. But…you called me in with questions about Samhain, and you
haven’t even mentioned that.”

Nodding toward the stick,
Wilson said, “Read that and you’ll see. According to our Druid priestess
Mongfind, Samhain was a little more than a new year’s party. It was…” He
trailed off, unsure, or simply unwilling to tell me.

“What?”

ó Cuinn filled in. “According
to this…the Druids could perform real magic, and on Samhain they communed
directly with their gods.”

I’m sure my mouth was open as I
stared at ó Cuinn; I expected him to wink, or laugh.

He didn’t.

October 21

-

October 22

I am Mongfind, daughter of Fidach of
Munster, and a devoted sister of the Morrigan. I was once the Arch-Druid of
Ireland, but now I am simply the last Druid. Last night was Samhain, and I
attempted to speak to the gods. I failed. When I have finished writing this,
the Druids will be no more.

That was how the manuscript
began.

I stayed up all night reading
it. Wilson had translated around 30,000 words so far—he was still working
through the rest—but I understood now why they’d made me sign a nondisclosure
agreement before I’d left the office.

This would change everything.
Not just our knowledge of the Celts, but of the Romans, the Christians, and
much of what came after.

Mongfind began by talking about
her childhood, focusing on how she’d begun training in the Druid priesthood
from the age of six. She memorized thousands of pieces of history, religious
ritual, law, and herbal knowledge. By the age of 16, she could recite thousands
of lengthy chants, or prepare potions that would cure any disease. She
described a world of golden palaces and well-fed, happy citizens, of bards who
performed magnificent poems and noble warriors who fought off enemies with
ease. According to her, the Celts had skilled astronomers who had already
charted the solar system, seamen who regularly visited America, and farmers who
could produce grains and vegetables that remained fresh through the dead of
winter.

She also claimed that the Celts
owed their good fortune to their gods, who were quite real and visited each
Samhain.

The original manuscript had
been a mishmash of Mongfind’s own life, the history of the Irish Celts, and
Druidic rituals. As the manuscript progressed, the sections on her own life had
become less detailed, more rushed, and I soon found out why.

The missionaries had timed
their armies to arrive shortly before Samhain, when they knew the warriors
would be settling into their winter quarters and the rest of the country
preparing for the festivities. The Samhain rituals in essence renewed the
Celts’ contracts with their gods, and the gods’ communion with their mortal
worshippers was at a low point just before. The invaders’ strategies had been
thought out for decades, and were carried out with ruthless efficiency; they
laid waste to the Celts’ nobility and warriors, silenced and imprisoned the
Druids, and enslaved the rest. The Catholics had inadvertently killed many of
the Druids when they’d cut their tongues out to ensure that they would be
unable to call for their gods. Mongfind had been mutilated with all the rest,
but had found one piece of luck the others hadn’t: A sympathetic Catholic
missionary. From her journal:

One day I arrived at the place where I thought I would
spend the remainder of my life: One of our great halls, now a home for our
conquerors.  My cell here was better—I was provided with straw to sleep on, and
there was a high window large enough to permit nearly an hour of sunlight to
penetrate each afternoon.

The man in charge of this place visited me as soon as I
arrived. We were of course unable to communicate—even if we knew each others’
languages, I had no tongue to convey words with—but he gave me to understand
that he intended me no harm. The others treated him with reverence, and I
realized he was in charge of this place. He pointed at himself and said the
word, “Jerome,”
^[10]
which I took to be his name.

He made sure I received generous amounts of food and
blankets, and I soon began to recover some of the health I had lost after my
initial capture. As he visited me each day, he brought long rolls of paper,
ink, and quill, and taught me words from his language, which he called Latin. I
was at first unwilling to use the quill, but reconciled myself soon enough—how
could it be against the gods to learn of his world and language?

I quickly became quite adept at writing in Latin, and
Jerome—whose title was “Abbot”, while his house was called “monastery”—was very
pleased. He began to urge me to write of my people and our history. At first I
refused, and he accepted my explanation that we didn’t believe in committing to
mere paper that which we held sacred.

But one day Jerome arrived at my cell very early in the
morning; it was not yet sunrise, and he woke me. He said he’d just received
word that the Church had issued orders for the remaining Druids to be put to
death.

Then he took me from the cell, led me out of the
monastery, and brought me to where he had a horse waiting. He told me that this
was the only time he’d disobeyed his Church, and that he would spend the rest
of his days begging his God to forgive him. He’d provided my mount with supplies,
including food, clothing, tools…and ink and paper. I thanked him profusely,
communicated to him he would have made a fine Druid, and left him forever.

I knew not this part of Eire, but a day’s ride brought me
to uninhabited woodland, with plentiful game and water. I was well trained in
Celtic survival arts, and knew I could make a home here. Whether I could avoid
the Romans forever…well, only the Dagda and the Morrigan
^[11]
knew that for
certain.

It was a hard life, and lonely, and I did not fare well as
the year grew colder. I was able to call upon the
sidh
for some
assistance, and when I needed to hunt I allowed the Morrigan to fill me…but
without a Druid of the opposite sex, I was unable to call down the Dagda or
even bring the Morrigan’s full powers into play. Samhain came and went, and I
could offer only a small sacrifice—a fox I’d captured and held for that night.
It was not enough.

Within a month I knew I was dying.

Although Jerome’s consideration had led me to believe I
was healed, the mutilation of my mouth by his fellows began to plague me, and
with the onset of winter cold I fell ill. I knew I could hold on for a short
time, but doubted I would live to see Beltane
^[12]
.

Beyond my own death, however, loomed a greater horror: If
I was the last remaining Druid, all of our knowledge would die with me.

Unless I committed the greatest of sins and recorded it
all.

I could, with the language and utensils Jerome had
provided. I knew I wouldn’t have time to write all I knew, but if I began now,
I might have just enough left for the most important things, the rituals and
stories and formulae that every Druid learned in their first year.

And so I begged the gods’ forgiveness and I wrote.

It was more difficult than I’d expected, especially as
winter set in. I built small fires for no other reason than to thaw my ink and
my cramped fingers. I resented time taken away from the task of writing—time to
hunt, to prepare food, to attend to other bodily needs. I realized my thoughts
were not organized, that recollections of my own life (which I selfishly
thought important enough to commit here) were bound with the true knowledge.

Yet it kept me alive. Even as I grew weaker and thinner,
even as the spittle I coughed up began to contain more blood than other fluid,
I kept writing. I burned with the need to record, and my own heat carried me
through to Beltane and beyond.

But as another Samhain approached, my fingers finally
refused to work, and my eyes grew dim. It was enough; I’d written only a
fraction of our learning, but it would do. What was here could provide a new
beginning, should it be found by one of understanding.

As my body failed me, I settled on one last plan:

I would journey to a nearby bog, and on Samhain I would
offer myself as sacrifice there, asking the thick waters to preserve me and
hide me until one would come who was worthy of receiving this, the last of our
real soul. I will wrap these pages carefully in animal hides and a box Jerome
provided, and take them beneath the water with me, trusting in the gods to keep
us both.

Forgive me, holy ones. I know I’ve failed you twice now
and damned the world to a new darkness, but perhaps one day our light will
shine again, if my sacrifice is accepted.

I dream of a new world.

There were still pages after
that—apparently Mongfind had remembered a last few items to commit to history.
But her story really ended there. In the bog where she and her pages were
found, more than fifteen hundred years later.

And she’d been right about at
least one thing: The world had descended into “a new darkness.” The Dark Ages
settled over Europe and continued for a thousand years, ten bleak centuries of
ignorance and confusion that climaxed as the Black Death raced across the
continent while the Church burned tens of thousands of so-called witches and
tortured heretics.

Despite the Enlightenment and
the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution and the Digital Age, I couldn’t
help but wonder if the world had ever really recovered. Especially recently, as
I passed each year more convinced that mankind was entering its own final
chapter, that centuries of greed and ecological devastation were finally
leading to a planet that would no longer be able to sustain so many of us.

I was less certain what to make
of Mongfind’s accounts of encounters with
sidh
, of using magic to ward
off foes (before the missionaries had slain the Druids), and especially of
blood sacrifices on Samhain to propitiate the gods. The knowledge Mongfind had
recorded was a mix of what seemed to be practical information—which healing
herbs could be gathered in a forest, when to plant certain crops, how to create
“needfire,” or sparks engendered by friction—but other parts of the recorded lore
read like a fantasy novel. There was an account of a Samhain when the
sidh
had appeared in the king’s throne room, demanding tribute of food and slaves,
but Mongfind and a male arch-Druid name Mog Roith had sacrificed a black sheep
and a young warrior who’d offered himself to invoke a fearsome and powerful
death-spirit named Bal-sab, who had driven the
sidh
back to the barrow
they’d emerged from. Mog Roith and Mongfind had spent the next two weeks not
sleeping or eating, but working first to banish Bal-sab, and then to create a
spell that would seal the barrow forever.

Bal-sab…Charles Vallancey’s
“lord of death.” There was more about Bal-sab and Samhain: Apparently each
Samhain, sacrifices were offered to Bal-sab to ensure his cooperation
throughout the coming year. If they bought him off with a few small deaths at
the end of every summer, he apparently spared the Celts from plagues and wars
and pestilence the rest of the year.

Dear God. Vallancey’s ludicrous
ramblings suddenly didn’t seem so ludicrous anymore. Instead, he’d been right
all along. We were the fools, not Vallancey. The alternate history of Halloween
was the real history.

All of this was presented in
Wilson’s straightforward, matter-of-fact translation, which made it all sound
perfectly plausible. I really didn’t know what to think of it.

I was going over it again when
my phone rang. Checking the caller ID, I saw “Ó CUINN, CONOR.” I’d given Wilson
my number, but somehow I wasn’t entirely comfortable knowing that ó Cuinn had
it.

The conversation that followed
didn’t do much to dissuade me in finding Dr. ó Cuinn unnerving. He wanted to
meet. His Irish accent was anything but lilting; he sounded excited and
anxious. I asked what he wanted to meet about.

“Have you read the journal?”

“Yes. Or at least most it.”

“What do you make of it?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Well, maybe I can help. I’ve
got some ideas on it, but…well, we should discuss it in person.”

I debated for a few seconds. I
could tell him I was busy (which was true; in fact, I had two book signings and
four interviews scheduled over the next week). I could ask that he just e-mail
me whatever he had to say. But then I reminded myself that this man was a
respected archaeologist, an expert in a field I’d once seriously considered
pursuing. He undoubtedly did have some insight into the find, and I was curious
to know why he wanted to share his thoughts with me.

“All right,” I told him. “Did
you have somewhere in mind?”

He had his own temporary office
at the UCLA campus. He wanted to meet tonight.

I almost said no. I’d attended
UCLA as an undergraduate, and the place hadn’t changed much since then. It was
spread out and dark, with parking structures nowhere near any of the buildings.
This was a Monday night in fall, so the campus would be quiet: No sporting
events or film screenings at Melnitz Hall, no crowds of students to feel safe
within. When I’d attended the school, I’d lived in one of the dorms to the west
of the grounds; they’d routinely issued warnings to female students about the
dangers of walking alone after dark. I’d even written a recent short story in
which a male student had been attacked here by a transgendered rapist.
^[13]

But I was intrigued—did he know
something about Samhain? I’d googled Conor ó Cuinn, and his credentials were
solid; not overwhelming, but he’d overseen enough excavations around Ireland
that he was considered something of an expert in Celtic history.