The Greener Shore (8 page)

His lodge consisted of a small round room made of woven branches cemented together with dried mud. The interior was dark and musty. Before my eyes could adjust to the dimness, I stumbled over a rock and stubbed my toe. Pain shot up my spine.

Toes are as tender as noses. My head distracted me by asking: Is there some connection between the two?

“You don’t have a warrior’s moustache,” Cohern was saying to Cormiac. “You’ll have to grow one. Let me feel your arms and legs. Is that your own sword? Can you handle a spear?” If this was a battle lord, he was a battle lord with problems. I had never known anyone to be so excited by a single warrior.

Thus far, the interview was not promising from our point of view. I cleared my throat. “Our party includes an exceptionally gifted healer,” I told Cohern, hoping to distract him from Cormiac. I was gambling that he really was ill and would welcome a healer.

One did not necessarily signify the other, of course.

Ignoring me, Cohern continued his examination of Cormiac Ru. As he bent to feel the muscles in the young man’s legs, Cormiac’s eyes met mine.
Be still,
I mouthed silently.

Labraid would have argued, or refused to obey. Cormiac did as he was told.

When he had satisfied his curiosity, Cohern stood up. “I’ll take this one. He’s as hard as new rope.”

The man thought we were selling slaves. I must disabuse him of the idea at once. “Cormiac’s not for sale. None of my clan is for sale, we are free people.”

“Yes yes, but I need warriors and this one looks promising. I’ll give you…” Cohern gazed around his lodge in a vain search for valuables. There were only some cooking implements, a battered loom, and a stack of fleeces spread with a torn blanket of woven wool. Wind whistled through the gaps in the walls.

Except for his gold torc, Cohern was poor. I could not help feeling sorry for him. If this was what Hibernia was like, we had not improved our situation. “Are you the chief of your tribe?” I asked uncertainly.

“Chief of the tribe. Ha.” He laughed mirthlessly. “I’m only the chief of my clan. This clan: these few old men hiding in their lodges with the women and leaving me to face strangers alone. If you attacked us they would stand behind me, though. Oh yes. As far behind me as they could get.

“Now, Ainvar, tell me what you’ll accept for this fellow with the fiery hair. I have some good wool, raised in the mountains and as thick as curds.”

“We don’t need wool. What we need is a place to build a settlement.”

Cohern’s bloodshot eyes bulged alarmingly. “You expect me to surrender our clanland to you? I’ve killed men for suggesting less!”

“We don’t want all of your land, of course not,” I hastened to say. “Just let us live in peace on any small patch you’re not using.”

His attitude underwent another lightning change. “What can you pay? We don’t rent clanland without payment.”

Mindful of the head on the pole, I decided not to offer him the services of druids. “What payment do you ask, Cohern?”

“Warriors like this one. How many more do you have?”

“I told you, I can’t sell Cormiac, because he owns himself. As we all do.”

Cohern gave a doleful sigh. “You have nothing to offer, then. You might as well leave now.”

I could not go back to my people empty-handed. “Perhaps we can make an arrangement to suit us both, Cohern. I can’t sell Cormiac, but if he agrees I might offer his services to you for a period of time.” My eyes caught Cormiac’s eyes and silently commanded him to cooperate.

Labraid would have argued. Cormiac merely gave a terse nod.

Cohern rubbed his nose, ran his fingers through his hair, scratched himself in the armpit. Winning a little time to think. “All right, Ainvar. Will you exchange a dozen warriors for the holding of a piece of land for six years?”

Praise be to That Which Watches! Bargaining was a skill that required no druid talent. The man did not appear to be physically able for protracted negotiations. If I could wear him down with talk first, this might yet work out. “My people will insist on knowing something about you before we can do business, Cohern. They’ve been badly treated in the past and you are a stranger to us.”

“My clan and I belong to the tribe of the Iverni, in the kingdom of the Deisi.”

So Hibernia was divided into kingdoms! Without giving me time to consider the ramifications, Cohern said, “The Iverni are descended from Éber Finn, who, as everyone knows, was the finest warrior and the most noble of all the sons of Milesios.”

I tried to look impressed, but it was difficult since I had no idea what he was talking about. “Who was Milesios?” I asked.

“A king of the Gael, a Celtic tribe that lived in northern Iberia twenty generations ago. Milesios claimed to have Scythian blood in his veins.”

My head was intrigued. It wanted to explore the connection further but Cohern kept on talking. “In search of a new home, several of the sons of Milesios set sail for a richly endowed island that the sea traders told them about. This island. With them the Milesians brought their wives and children, Iberian cattle, and horses from Africa.”

My head was being overwhelmed with questions. What shores had Celts not visited? What lands had not felt their feet?

Listen! my ears commanded.

Cohern said, “When the Milesians arrived here they found the island was controlled by a tribe called the Túatha Dé Danann. They were not many but they were everywhere. They’d even named the place for one of their queens, Eriu.”

Eriu. A rippling, insubstantial sort of name.

Hibernia suited my tongue better.

“The sons of Milesios wanted this land and its resources for themselves,” Cohern went on, “but the Dananns were unwilling to surrender it to them. A great battle was fought; a battle strange and terrible.”

“Obviously your side won.”

“Yes,” he said in an odd voice. “They won.”

“What happened to the Dananns afterward?”

“They disappeared.”

“That’s an odd choice of words,” I said. “I assume you mean the Dananns stepped aside and left the Milesians as the undisputed rulers of Hibernia.”

“Who calls this land Hibernia? I never heard that before.”

“The traders who brought us here use the name. They thought it was Hibernia for the Iverni—or perhaps for Éber Finn?” I added shrewdly.

“Ah.” Cohern was pleased. From that moment he warmed to me. It was easy to keep him talking. He overflowed with partial memories handed down from bygone generations; the sort of tales we had called “grandmother stories” in Gaul. The most interesting of these concerned the Túatha Dé Danann, for whom he made claims that hardly seemed credible. “They could cloud men’s minds and make them see the impossible,” Cohern said. “They could summon great mists to blanket the land, they could whistle up storms to churn the sea into foam. They could vanish while someone was looking at them and reappear moments later in another place entirely.”

If even half of these things were true, the Dananns had possessed magic of a very high degree. In defeating them the Gael had won an extraordinary victory.

“No sooner had the Gael settled here,” said Cohern, “than the sons of Milesios began arguing over the division of territory.”

“Battles between brothers are the most savage,” I commented.

He agreed. “The quarrel fed on itself and grew, until it was passed down from one generation to the next. Eventually the Gael divided into a handful of tribes, each one tracing back to one of the sons of Milesios. And we continue the fight.”

“Do you enjoy fighting?”

“It’s what I do.”

“That’s not what I asked, Cohern.”

He gave yet another sigh. This was an unhappy man. “I used to like to fight, but I’ve been doing it all my life and now I’m tired.”

“Then why continue?”

“My clan’s too weak to swim against the tide.”

“What determines a clan’s status within the tribe?” I wanted to know. My own clan had been foremost among the Carnutes because we had produced a number of druids, but under the circumstances I thought it might be wise not to mention this.

“Status depends on how many warriors the clan can provide to the chief of the tribe,” Cohern told me.

The result, my head observed, was predictable. In Hibernia, battle had become the only means by which men defined themselves; male pride taken to a self-destructive extreme. Cohern’s clan was a perfect example. With its young men lost to war, his family was on the verge of extinction.

By questioning Cohern further, I learned that the Gael had developed a clever stratagem to assure the survival of the tribe as a whole. When tribal numbers were in danger of becoming too depleted, each side in a war nominated a champion. The battle of champions decided the outcome.

If during the battle for Gaul we had challenged the Romans to a battle of champions, Vercingetorix would have defeated the scrawny Caesar without drawing a deep breath. But Caesar—may he be cursed from a height!—would never have agreed to single combat. His concept of warfare was dispatch wave upon wave of warriors to kill his opponents, then pursue their families and slaughter them to the last person.

Now the Romans had Gaul.

We had Hibernia.

I noticed that Cohern’s voice was growing weak. Seizing the moment, I made an offer. “There is a woman with us who is a skilled healer, and we have two outstanding craftsmen. We would be happy to share their skills with you. Furthermore, if you allow us the use of some land, we’ll keep your people supplied with venison.”

“What about warriors?”

He was stubborn, I grant him that. “Cormiac Ru is the only warrior we have at present. But there is a lad called Labraid whose father was a mighty warrior and—”

“Done!” Cohern croaked.

It was agreed that Cormiac and Labraid would live with Cohern’s clan and fight in his name whenever required. As recompense for their services, we would be allowed to build a few lodges on Cohern’s clanland. For two milk cows, a young bullock, and six sheep, we would pay Cohern half of our butter and fleeces, plus any leather we subsequently harvested. In effect, we would be tenants occupying land at the mercy of the clan chief. We who had been freeholders in Gaul.

Even so, we were being treated better than invaders had any right to expect.

When the deal was concluded Cohern gave a shrill whistle. Several old men and half-grown boys appeared at the doorway of the lodge. The male members of his clan were as simply dressed as their chieftain, including bare feet. Cohern called their names in turn. Then he identified us to them, beginning with Cormiac Ru. Warriors had more rank in Hibernia than druids.

Once the men had made their appearance the women gradually came out into the open. They had fine eyes and fresh complexions but were not as ample as I like; even Cohern’s wife. He had only the one. The man really was poor.

That night we were given fat mutton, thin oatmeal, and a few gritty chunks from a blackened loaf that resembled no bread I knew. There were none of the seasonings we had enjoyed in Gaul. No kinnamon or black pepper purchased from eastern traders, no olive oil from the south, so silky on the tongue.

These people badly needed the salt we had brought with us. But we had best keep it for ourselves; we had little to barter with otherwise.

The meal was washed down with a reddish ale known as “coirm,” made of malted barley and too sweet for my taste. As an option I was offered an equally unpalatable drink of fermented bilberry juice, so insipid one might as well drink water. Wistfully, I recalled the robust Gaulish wine that made all women look beautiful and all men feel virile.

For the rest of Thislife, my head informed me, Ainvar will eat and drink like this.

For the rest of Thislife.

To distract myself from the unhappiness of my mouth, I listened to the conversations going on around me. I soon learned why Cohern had referred to Dian Cet and myself as “frauds.” Shortly before our arrival a druid belonging to another clan had claimed he could cure Cohern of a persistent fever. The man had failed. His was the head on the pole.

A war between the two clans could be expected at any time.

I also discovered that Cohern’s clan did not take part in the trade Goulvan had mentioned. They were too reduced to have anything of value to offer. The only item any of them possessed that would appeal to a foreign trader was the chieftain’s torc, and Cohern would rather die than relinquish it.

Interestingly, the Order of the Wise was unknown in Hibernia. Separate branches of druidry were not recognized. Cohern flatly stated, “All druids are sorcerers, but even the best aren’t as adept as the Túatha Dé Danann. My fever was a curse put upon me by the Dananns.”

“I assumed they were all gone by now,” I said.

“They are.”

“Then how could they cause your fever, Cohern?”

“Magic,” he replied with a ferocious scowl. “We slaughtered the lot of them, yet they still attack us through magic. Generation after generation. It’s a terrible long time to carry a grudge.”

As the survivor of a slaughtered race myself, I felt sympathy for the Túatha Dé Danann.

Was it they, rather than the Iverni, who frightened Goulvan so badly?

That night I slept on the floor of Cohern’s lodge, wrapped in my cloak and dreaming confused dreams. Once or twice I sat up abruptly and wondered where I was. There is a moment between sleep and wakefulness when one is totally vulnerable. During that moment my spirit trembled within me.

At first light Dian Cet and I set out for the coast. We left Cormiac Ru with Cohern, and promised to deliver Labraid when we returned. I bade Cormiac farewell by saying, “You’re still one of us and always will be.”

The Red Wolf gave a terse nod.

I added, “I’m relying on you to uphold our side of the bargain.”

His face was impassive. Only his colorless eyes flashed fire. “I always keep my promises, Ainvar. Always.”

Cohern walked with us to the gateway. “That woman you mentioned, the healer? Will she be coming with you?”

“She will.”

“If she’s any good, I might be willing to buy her.”

The distance back seemed much longer than the distance coming. Too much food and too little sleep weighed heavily on me, and Dian Cet was in worse shape. Several times he stopped and sat down. I joined him, ostensibly to be polite, but in reality with relief.