Saint Brigid's Bones (13 page)

The pagan philosopher and mathematician Hypatia, a woman of extraordinary intelligence who attracted many Christian students to her school in Alexandria, had been murdered some years before Father Ailbe was born. The local bishop Cyril, later declared a saint, was jealous of her success
and had ordered the Parabolans to hunt her down as a witch. Few pagans dared to raise their heads in Alexandria after her death, but one disciple of Hypatia named Sophia quietly continued her work in mathematics and philosophy. She was a teacher and dear friend of Father Ailbe and lived near his family.

It was many years before Father Ailbe would tell me the whole story, but one night the Parabolans found Sophia and dragged her into the street. By the light of the full moon, they tore her apart like wolves. Father Ailbe had been away tending to a patient, but he found her remains when he returned home that morning. He gathered up the tattered pieces of her body and buried them himself in his family's tomb. Unable to understand how men who claimed to follow Christ could do such a thing, he decided to devote his life to the true service of God. Although raised a Christian, he had never cared much for religion before that terrible night. Now, over the fierce protests of his family, he turned his back on the world, left the chest with the precious scrolls to a trusted friend, and became a monk of holy Anthony at a desert monastery east of the Nile.

He would never tell me exactly why, but a few years later he left the monastery, retrieved the chest, and sailed away from Alexandria on a grain ship bound for Rome where he stayed with family friends. While there, he became acquainted with Pope Leo and treated his malaria. Leo had several Irish slaves in his household and so Father Ailbe, curious about this distant land, spent time with them tending to their illnesses and learning their language. A few months later he received the Pope's blessing to go to Ireland as a missionary. He travelled north to Milan, then across the Alps and Gaul to the channel where he took the only boat he could find to Britain, even though it was a broken down wreck with a drunken captain. At last he made his way to the western coast of Britain and
sailed from there with some wine merchants to Munster. He so impressed the king at Cashel with his medical skills that he was allowed to start a church at nearby Emly, where he worked among the local tribes for many years. When Bishop Conláed died, Brigid asked Father Ailbe to come to Kildare to take his place. He had always admired our founder, so he left one of the priests he had trained in charge in Emly and came to our monastery as our new bishop.

“So, what are you going to do about the bones?” pondered Father Ailbe as we walked along. “Why don't you tell me first how things went with Dúnlaing.”

I told him.

“Yes, that's what I would expect the king to do. He always held Brigid in high regard and would never suffer one of his people to touch her remains. But you were right to begin your search with him. If nothing else, you've caused a stir among the nobility of his court. Word will spread across Leinster about the bones and someone who knows something might tell Dúnlaing, then he can tell you.”

“Abba, do you think the king would really kill one of his own sons if he turned out to be the thief?”

“Oh yes. No king could allow a challenge to his authority like that. I don't think he's ever liked Illann anyway. The boy doesn't have the qualities to make a good ruler. Too devious, too much living in the shadows. And his brother Ailill is nothing but a bully.”

We came to the hut of his first patient, an old man whose leg had been injured weeks earlier when a tree he was chopping down fell on top of him. He had begged the man to let him amputate it, but he wouldn't listen. Now it was swollen and oozing a greenish pus that smelled so foul I almost fainted. Father Ailbe gave him something for the pain, but he shook his head as we left and said the man wouldn't last another week.

People always said Kildare was the best place in Ireland to be sick. Father Ailbe had received his medical education in Alexandria under the leading physicians of the day. In the years since, he had moved far beyond the theories of Hippocrates and Galen into practical medicine based on observation and an open mind. He was a master of herb lore as well as surgery. I had seen him cut into a young woman after a long and fruitless labor to remove twin girls from her womb. With any other physician, this would have been a death sentence for the mother, but with his skillful technique and strict attention to cleanliness, the woman returned to good health to raise her daughters.

“What about the abbot of Armagh?” I asked as we left the farm. “That man is as slippery as an eel. Sister Anna agrees that he might have stolen the bones or is at least taking advantage of the theft.”

Father Ailbe nodded.

“I wouldn't put anything past the abbot. I met him when he was a boy at Armagh. Even then he was plotting and scheming. I can tell you Patrick never liked him. My old friend would be appalled that such a man is now in charge of the church there.”

“But I hate to believe that any Christian, even the abbot, would steal the bones of Brigid.”

“Deirdre, my child, I'm afraid that churchmen can be as deceitful and avaricious as anyone else in this world. I'm sorry to say that such thefts are not unknown among Christians in the Mediterranean world. Once, when I was in Jerusalem, I saw monks from different factions at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher come to blows over a missing baby tooth supposedly belonging to our Lord. It turns out a visiting bishop from Antioch had snuck into the church one night and taken the tooth back to Syria. They were still fighting over possession of the tiny relic last I heard.”

“What about Cormac? Do you think he could have taken the bones?”

I pulled Cormac's letter out of my satchel and handed it to him. He read it quickly as we walked.

“I think our young prince paid too much for the Alexander coin, but the letter is intriguing. It could be he has some evidence that implicates someone or he may be trying to lead you astray. With Cormac you never really know. He was my best student—aside from you of course—but after all those years I never felt as if I understood him.”

“I'm going to his inauguration in Glendalough soon,” I said. “I'll question him then.”

“Really? It will be interesting to hear what he has to tell you.”

He looked at me in a knowing way.

“Are you sure you're ready to see him again, my dear?”

“Abba,” I said, embarrassed in spite of myself, “that was over years ago.”

“Deirdre, if there's anything I've learned during my life, it's that love can endure for a very long time.”

We walked to a small farm east of Kildare where a three-year old girl named Caitlin lay dying. I had known her parents for years. They were tenant farmers of the monastery who lived with their five children. The mother and father were poor, but they were hard workers who made sure there was always enough food on the table.

“How is our little one doing today?” asked Father Ailbe when he saw the mother outside the hut. The rest of the family was working in the fields.

“Oh, Father, it's so good to have you back.” She gave us both a hug and led us inside. “My little Caitlin—”

She began to cry.

“I'm sorry,” she said. “It's just so hard to see her this way. She was always the most lively of my children, running all over the farm and getting into everything. Now she can barely walk across the hut. She drinks well enough, but she's not eating as
much as she should. I make special broths for her, rich with fat and honey, but she never finishes a bowl.”

Father Ailbe went to the bed where Caitlin was sleeping. She looked pale and worn. He sat down beside her and took her hand as he felt her pulse, then pulled back the blanket to listen to her heart. She woke up and smiled when she saw him. She had the most beautiful eyes I had ever seen.

“Abba?” She had heard me call him by that name on an earlier visit. He smiled and stroked her cheek

“Yes, my darling, it's me. I couldn't stay away from you long. How do you feel?”

“Sleepy.” She yawned and stretched her arms. They were so thin.

“Rest then, little one. And dream sweet dreams.”

He covered her up and tucked the blanket around her, then kissed her on the forehead. She smiled again and drifted back to sleep. Her mother followed us outside, where she and Father Ailbe sat on the bench by the door.

“Father, is there anything you can do for my little girl?”

Father Ailbe took her hand. I saw that there were tears in his eyes.

“I'm so sorry. I've seen many of these cases over the years and they always have the same ending. The best I can do for Caitlin is keep her comfortable and remember her in my prayers. I'll leave more medicine for her in case the pain returns. I'll check on her again in a few days.”

He held the mother in his arms for a long time as she sobbed. Finally, she wiped her eyes and said she had better go and check on Caitlin. I hugged her and told her I would be back to visit as soon as I could. Father Ailbe and I walked away in silence. The death of children always affected him the most. I put my arm around him and wished there was something more I could do.

We reached the monastery gate and Father Ailbe turned toward his hut while I went to the kitchen to help with the evening meal. But before he left, I had to ask him.

“Abba, do you think I can find the bones in time?”

He smiled at me the same way he did when I was a student and had grown frustrated at some difficult school lesson.

“You know, when I was in India long ago, I came one day to the cave of a holy man I had been seeking because he had a great reputation as a seer, much like your grandmother. He was a Buddhist monk who lived next to a river high in the mountains beneath a crystal blue sky. Before he would even talk to me, he made me take off all my clothes and sit silently with him for three days watching the waters flow past. Then at last I asked him if I would ever find what I was searching for in life, my true path, my calling. He shrugged and said he didn't know because the future hadn't happened yet. Then he went inside his cave and fell asleep.”

“Is that little tale supposed to encourage me?”

He smiled again. “Maybe not, but I think he was trying to tell me that there's always hope.”

O
n a clear day you can see the Wicklow Mountains from Kildare, but on the morning Dari and I started our journey to the high valley of Glendalough it was raining with a cold fog hugging the fields and forests around the monastery. We walked east all morning to the Liffey River, then followed the south bank as it rose into the foothills. We stopped for a late lunch under an ancient dolmen tomb made from a large slab of stone placed like a tabletop on three smaller, vertical slabs. It was a tight squeeze, but I was so tired of being wet I was grateful just to be out of the rain. Some people said such enclosures were lucky places for a woman to take a man if she wanted to become pregnant, but soaked as I was, sex was the last thing on my mind.

I remembered a story people told of Brigid when she was caught out in the rain one day. She had been herding sheep a few miles from the monastery when an afternoon storm came
up quickly and soaked her to the skin. She was near an old stone shed, so she went inside to take off her wet cloak. Just as she approached the door, the sun burst through the clouds and started to shine brightly. She was blinded by the sudden change in light and stumbled into the shed. She saw what she thought was a white rope stretched across the room and hung her cloak on it to dry. But it was in fact a narrow beam of light shining into the dusty room from a small hole in the wall. When some shepherds came by a few minutes later and saw this, they fell on their knees and praised God. I asked Brigid about this story once. She smiled and said people are always looking for miracles. If they wanted to believe she had hung her cloak on a sunbeam, who was she to say they were wrong?

Dari and I spent the night at an abandoned church and arrived at Glendalough late the next afternoon. Cormac's small kingdom was centered on the two lakes that gave the valley its name—
Glen da lough
—“glen of the two lakes.” The lower lake was the smaller of the two, while the upper lake just to the west lay beneath two steep, rounded hills covered with oak and pine. It was one of the prettiest places in Ireland and I regretted that we didn't have more time to enjoy it. Cormac's settlement was on the eastern shore of the lower lake and it was there all the festivities were to take place. There were tents for guests set up near the royal feasting hall and a large field had been prepared by the lake for purposes unknown.

The activities were already underway when Dari and I walked into the crowd. It was a mixed group of nobles and commoners, so I hoped Dari wouldn't feel out of place. At last I saw Cormac in the middle of a crowd of warriors.