The Celtic Riddle (26 page)

"Got them!" she exclaimed. "Both circled. The mountains in the
Dingle too."

"Right. Next?"

"I'll skip the ones I don't know and just give you the ones I do,"
Alex said. "I mean, frankly, I have no idea where the Umbilicus
Hiberniae might be. Hibernia is an old name for Ireland, and umbilicus,
well, I have this thought that it might be like the Greek concept of
omphalmos, the navel of Greek civilization at Delphi. I don't know what
the Irish equivalent could be. However, Aine's Mount to Macha's
Stronghold I can locate: both ancient goddesses. The old word for Mount
is cnoc, now spelled Knock. There's a place called Knockainy in
Munster, which was a sacred center in that province a long time ago,
sacred to the goddess Aine, so Knockainy, or Cnoc Aine, Aine's Mount.
Ma-cha was also a goddess, a horse goddess, apparently. Macha's
Stronghold would surely be Emain Macha, now called Navan Fort, in
Ulster. Close to Armagh, Jennifer."

"Got them both," she said after a few minutes.

"Grianan Ailech to Granard, down the line of the noonday sun.
Grianan Ailech is the supposed home of the Dagda, one of the gods of
the Tuatha de Danaan. I think it's way to the north, Jennifer."

She checked the map index. "Grianan Ailech, yes, right at the top.
Granard," she paused, "almost directly south, 'round about the middle
of Ireland. Okay, marked them both."

"Almu's white to Maeve's Red. You were right about Maeve, Lara.
Queen and goddess of Connacht. Very powerful woman. Her capital was at
Rathcroghan. Almu was another goddess, referred to as 'the White.' Her
home was on Knockaulin, that word knock or cnoc again, now the Hill of
Allen, then the seat of the Kings of Leinster."

We waited until Jennifer had found them and marked their place.

"Due east, Partholan turned to die," I said. "I remember Partholan
from Denny's story of the Battle of Mag Tuired. He was one of the early
invaders of Ireland, wasn't he? He and his people perished
mysteriously, if I recall. Plague or something."

"That's right. The Book of Invasions of Ireland tells of several
different peoples who came to Ireland in the dim past. Partholan was
one of the first and is said to come from the west, from out in the
Atlantic somewhere, by some accounts. He and his followers did battle
with the Fomorians, those primitive creatures who were later defeated
by the Tuatha de Danaan. Partholan is supposed to have driven these
Fomorians north into the sea. But then they were afflicted by a plague
of some kind. The place Partholan and his people are supposed to have
gone to die is the Plain of Elta Edar, supposedly the first area to be
settled in Ireland. It is just about due east of the Seat of the High
Kings at Tara, north of where Dublin is today."

"I've got Tara," Jennifer said. "I'll mark the area east of that and
north of Dublin."

"That's it," Alex said. "The others, I either can't figure out, or
they refer to the object itself rather than the location, or something.
One's like 'all seen and seeing fire eye,' for example. I could find no
reference to such a thing in the books I've read. The same for the
cursed stones and the cup lifted to the stone."

The three of us looked at the map. We had Jennifer's little circles
all over the place, north, south, east and west.

"Do you think we have to go to all these places?" Jennifer wailed.
"It would take us months. They're all over the country. Northern
Ireland, even!"

"There must be something else here," I said at last. "First we are
given clues that are lines from a poem. Then, we find these clues lead
to other clues, all in ogham. At least some of these clues lead to
other locations, but they're all over the map, literally. The object
can't be in all these places, surely. We've circled ten spots, for
heaven's sake. We can't be doing this right. I mean, is Jennifer right?
Does this mean we have to travel all over the country looking for yet
another set of clues? I don't believe it can be this complicated.
Surely, Eamon wanted his family to find the treasure, not spend their
lives in idle search."

"Maybe it's join the dots," Jennifer said. "But how?" She took a
pencil and joined them. All we got was a somewhat smaller area of
Ireland. "We could crisscross the dots in some way, but I don't see any
pattern, do you?"

"No," Alex and I agreed. I had a feeling we could look at this map
for a long time before a pattern would emerge. I studied the list of
clues one more time. If I'd learned anything while I was here, it was
that the Irish possessed a particularly rich mythology, with more
stories, almost, than anyone could imagine. Eamon Byrne had picked only
a few of them, but the ones he'd chosen were supposed to lead to a
treasure.

"You know," I said, after a minute. "A lot of these are something to
something else, from one ancient sacred site to another, if you get
what I mean. What if we joined up these from-to's and see what we get.
For example, the Grianan Ailech to Granard clue also says down the line
of the noonday sun. Wouldn't that give us a north/south axis?"

"I believe it would," Alex said. "And the clue about Tailte's Hill
talks about a May sunrise. When I think about it, in May, the sun would
rise right about here," he said pointing slightly north-east.

"However would you know that, Uncle Alex?" Jennifer interrupted.

"Years at sea, my dear. Now, we could join the Hill of Tailte and
the sun line."

"Not just join them, draw a line right through and across the map.
And do the same with Partholan's plain. The clue says due east,
Partholan turned to die. You said the plain where he died is east of
Tara. Draw a line right through those two and then on across the map.
That should give us an east/west axis," I said.

"Some of the others link the ancient political or sacred centers of
the four provinces of Ireland. If we join these circles, like Hill of
Allen in Leinster to the capital of Connacht at Rathcroghan, and
Knockainy in Mun-ster to Emain Macha, Navan Fort, that is, we would get
a big 'X' across the country," Alex said.

"And across the north/south and east/west axes," I said.

"Maybe they all intersect," Jennifer said, as she grabbed a piece of
paper to give herself a straight edge to trace along.

They didn't intersect, not exactly anyway, but the lines did cross
the north/south axis at approximately the same area, more less in the
center of the country. We all peered at the map.

"Maybe I need reading glasses," I said.

"I have bifocals," Alex said, "and there's nothing much there to
speak of. A couple of reasonable-sized towns nearby: Longford, Athlone,
and Mullingar, and a few country roads. Do you see anything, Jennifer?"

"Nope. There are no ancient monument symbols in this area, either,"
Jennifer said dubiously.

"Not much of anything, in fact," Alex agreed. "So I guess maybe it's
back to the library."

"But there must be something there," Jennifer said, pointing to the
small area on the map where the lines crossed. "Maybe we should just go
there and look."

"It's not all that small an area, Jennifer," I said. "We'd have to
narrow it down first."

She shrugged. "I guess you're right. But I hate just sitting around
here while maybe someone else gets the treasure."

Later that night, as I climbed into bed, I took the clues out of my
bag and looked at them again. We had just about all there were, I
decided. I was also reasonably certain the lines of the poem could now
be discarded. They had served their purpose, that is to lead to the
second set of clues, and were no longer necessary. It was this second
set of clues, the ogham clues, that told us where and what. We had a
general idea where the treasure might be hidden, although there was
still a lot of ground to be covered, and we'd have to narrow it down.
The question remained: what was it? What were we looking for?

I stared long and hard at it. I'm a firm believer in the
subconscious, and its ability to analyze information and come to a
conclusion. Whenever I have a problem I cannot seem to solve, or a
decision that seems too difficult to make-open a shop or take a job,
get married or not, leave Clive or stay and tough it out-these choices,
I leave to my subconscious. This involves thinking over the pros and
cons before going to sleep, and telling myself to make a decision.
Sometimes I dream about it, sometimes I don't. I almost always awake
with the decision made. I'm not going to say that the decisions are
always the right ones, only that they are right for me at the time.

So when I awoke the next morning, I was pretty sure I knew what we
were looking for, despite the missing clues, even if I hadn't figured
out exactly where. The clues were in ogham, after all.

Chapter Fourteen

HE WHO CLEARS THE MOUNTAIN PATHS

EITHNE Byrne was born forty-five, forty-five and Irish. I have a
theory, one not supported by so much as a particle of scientific
evidence, that some people come into the world with a particular age
stamped all over them. These are the people who seem so much older than
the rest of us when we're young, but seen again after many years, a
high school reunion for instance, look exactly the way they did in
school. Eithne Byrne was one of these. Not that there's anything wrong
with forty-five-I'm perilously close to it myself-but I realized when I
got a chance to talk to her one on one, she was actually much younger,
almost ten years in fact, than I'd initially thought that first time
I'd seen her at Second Chance, and later when she was playing acolyte
to her mother over tea.

She was also born Irish, with green eyes, slightly reddish hair,
frizzed by the constant moisture, glowing skin, and a certain charming
loquaciousness brought out by a few sips of sherry. She even dressed
Irish, if there is such a thing, in a blouse with a lace collar, a
short boxy wool jacket in dark green, and a long, pleated green skirt
to match.

Her sister Fionuala, on the other hand, was the party girl,
talkative, charming, and a flirt. She wore bright colors, in this case,
a red suit, the jacket done up, but with no blouse under it, revealing
a fair amount of lightly freckled skin and cleavage, the short tight
skirt constantly riding up to show off more than a little leg.

I met both of them over a drink in the bar at the Inn. It was at
their invitation, a fact that took me somewhat by surprise. It was the
first time I'd seen them alone, that is, outside their family home,
without their mother hovering nearby. Despite my inclination to think
ill of them, I had to admit I saw nothing to fault. On this occasion,
they both seemed to me very nice people, intelligent if a little naive,
in Eithne's case, rather more good-hearted than I expected in
Fionuala's. I could see that the two of them and Breeta, in addition to
being closer in age than I'd thought, were more alike in personality as
well.

"We've decided to open a shop," Fionuala said, the bolder of the
two. "And we heard that you own one, an antiques shop, I believe, in
Canada. We thought, we were hoping, you might give us some advice."

"I'd be delighted to. What kind of shop were you thinking of?"

"Antiques, like you," Eithne said. "There are lots of tourists in
the Dingle every summer. And there are all of Da's things, the ones
that didn't go to Trinity College, that is, maps and prints and books.
Is it difficult to open a shop?"

"A little," I said. "Well, no, it's not difficult to open one. It's
staying open that requires some luck, energy, and…" I hesitated,
thinking about the rumors in town about their fiscal state. "Cash,
frankly."

"Does it cost a lot?" Eithne asked.

"A fair amount. You're fortunate to have some items to begin with,
that you don't have to purchase, I mean. But it takes a lot of
merchandise to open a shop, more than you'd think. I expect you'd have
to build up some inventory even with your father's things."

"How much does it cost?" Fionuala said. Talking about money didn't
seem to bother her at all.

"That depends," I said, "on what you've got to start with and what
you want to do."

"Well, there's the furniture in the house," Fionuala said. "It's
quite good, I believe. And we won't need all of it. We're moving."

"We don't need all that room," Eithne added, with more than a touch
of steel in her voice. I wondered just how bad the situation at Second
Chance was.

"And how exactly do you go about setting up shop?" she went on as
the waiter, at a sign from me, set second rounds in front of us.

It was becoming clear to me that working for a living had never been
on either Eithne or Fionuala Byrne's life plan, but I told them what I
had done anyway, about how I'd started out as a wholesaler to other
stores, importing objects I'd picked up in my travels and warehousing
them in the north end of Toronto, and how finally, with some money in
the bank, I'd launched my business. I didn't tell them how I'd married
my first employee and had been forced to sell the store when we
divorced. They might have found that part of the story way too
discouraging, particularly with husbands like Sean and Conail.