The Crow of Connemara (11 page)

“Oh, I'm just grand,” I told her. I lifted my foot to show her the new, thick sole of mud I'd acquired. “I suppose it could be worse. The roads could have been flooded entirely, or I could have been struck down by the lightning I saw.”

“Aye,” she laughed. “It could be worse. Yeh kept yer promise, though, and that pleases me wonderfully.”

“I'm glad to hear it. I'd hate to have traveled all this way for nothing. 'Tis lashing out here.”

“'Tis indeed,” she agreed. “Come with me, then. I've found us a place out of the weather.” With that, she turned and starting walking, leading me southwest away from the mound, and going slowly enough that I caught up to her quickly. She lifted her umbrella in invitation, and we walked that way together, her arm through mine. We walked for perhaps half a kilometer, and I noticed that she walked so lightly that her feet barely made an impression on the muddy ground at all, while I left behind a trail of watery depressions in the soil. Near a gravel road, she turned slightly aside, leading me down a steep hollow to a souterrain—the entrance to an underground structure—so cleverly hidden under a tree that the casual passerby would miss it. The entranceway was made of two lintels, carved with faded ogham letters and holding up a horizontal slab of limestone.

Máire collapsed the umbrella and entered by nearly sliding in. I followed less gracefully, grateful to at least be out of the rain for the time being. Inside, the space was tight and low; we could sit, but little more. I glanced into the darkness farther back, which looked to be a deep cave, and there I saw a glittering like a guttering torch. Máire was already moving back toward the darkness. “What is this place?” I asked Máire as I followed her deeper in.

“It's called the Cave of the Cats: Oweynagat,” she said as she continued deeper in. The cave widened as we descended, the roof now higher overhead so we could stand. I could see the torch, a bundle of sticks lashed together with string, topped with pitch, and jammed into a crevice in the rock; Máire must have placed it there earlier. The cave passage continued on into darkness, and I could not tell how far back it went.

Máire must have noticed my curiosity, for she pointed with her chin to the black night past our torch. “They say these caves connect with another system,” she whispered, though her voice was loud in the bare circle of torchlight around us. “The locals have all sorts of lovely stories about Oweynagat, like how one woman's cow ran into here and came out again near Keshcorran in County Sligo.”

Taking the crude torch from the crevice in the rock, she moved farther back in the cave, and I had no choice but to follow her or be left in the dark. She continued to talk as we walked. She told me how the first priests to enter the region called the cave the “hell-mouth of Ireland,” how in the ancient days the three-headed monster called the Ellén Trechend flew from its mouth and plundered the land until Amergin killed it, how later a flock of tiny red birds flew out from the cave, their breath causing all the plants to wither, and how finally, in the days of Ailill and Medb, the cave vomited forth herds of pigs who could cause everything around them to decay. “And there's yet another legend,” she said. “'Tis said that the Morrígan herself emerges from Oweynagat every Saimhain.”

I laughed at that, but Máire only looked at me strangely. “Do yeh not believe in the Morrígan?” she asked.

“Believe?” I answered. “Do I think the Morrígan's real? Of course not.” I laughed, but her face remained serious.

“That's too bad,” she said. “No one can survive without belief.”

It was a strange statement to make, but Máire didn't give me a chance to ask her to elaborate. We walked on for a time in silence; it was impossible for me to guess for how long it was in that unending darkness, nor to know how many turns we made or how many passages we passed. Eventually we came to a room where the torchlight could no longer touch the walls of the passage and I could feel moving air and hear the sound of running water. There, Máire crouched and thrust the torch into a pile of sticks and peat set in a small ring of stones, rekindling what I realized was a banked fire. The flames stirred and took hold, the light seeming to push back the eternal night here, and I imagined that I half-glimpsed forms moving away with it, rustling and murmuring. Ghosts and shadows. I saw a bed of thick rushes close to the fire, covered with a soft cotton blanket. There was a basket with a loaf of bread sticking out from beneath a lace napkin draped over it, and a kettle hung from an improvised stand over the fire, with a teapot set near it.

I shivered—though maybe that was only my soaked clothes. The heat of the fire felt wonderful, and I moved closer to its warmth. “Yeh might want ta' get out of those wet things,” Máire said, again seeming to know what I was feeling. She sat on the edge of the bed, the blankets rumpling under her, and her eyes were on me. “G'wan,” she said, “an' I'll do the same.” With that, she let her cloak fall from her shoulders, and began to unbutton the dress she wore underneath, her lovely moss-green eyes regarding me all the while.

And the rest I won't relate here as I write this in the Cave of the Cats, but I will always remember it, and I can look at her now in the firelight, sleeping near me . . .

September 10 (?), 1947:

I write this while still in the cavern near Rathcroghan. Here, under the earth, I confess to not being certain what day it is. I can say that late on that first day, Máire led me back to the mouth of the cave. It had stopped raining, and I ran across the fields over the road to where I'd left my bike, with its cardboard suitcase of my clothes and belongings strapped to it under a tarp. I brought the bike back to Oweynagat. With Máire's help, we hid my bicycle in the brush under the tree over the entrance, then carried my suitcase back into the cave, following Máire again through the darkness until we reached her room again.

Which is where we've stayed since . . . but for how long, I can't tell now. I suppose I won't know until I see a paper somewhere or can ask someone—who will undoubtedly look at me as if I'm daft—what day it might be. Máire doesn't seem to care. We spent much of our time talking, though I still think I know too little about her or about the truth of her past.

I don't know how much to believe of what she said, or whether I've found myself infatuated with a madwoman or am just bewitched entire. I feel like I should be frightened, but I'm not. When I'm with Máire, everything feels
right
, as if I were destined to meet her, that there was a purpose to our finding each other. I've never felt this way about another person before . . .

I don't even know how to write any of this down here, but if I'm to do so, now is the time since I can write privately and not have to worry about Máire reading this over my shoulder. Máire has gone deeper into the caverns—to see after others in her care, she says, though she refuses to let me come with her or help her or even to explain much about who these mysterious others might be—and so I'm alone here with the fire near the bed.
Our
bed.

No one can survive without belief
, she told me, and she says the old gods and the creatures of myth still live, though they diminish with each passing year.
In the old times, those who followed the black-robed priests of the crucified god still also believed in the Old Ones, but now too many of them follow only the newer god. That's why I'm here. If Oweynagat is truly an opening to the Otherworld, then maybe here I can find a way in, a path some of the Old Ones have already taken to another world where they are known and remembered, and where they live again. I'm here to help those who were left behind find that way themselves.
That's what she told me. I thought it a tale like many of those I'd heard in my travels, and I asked her why someone as young as her would help these mythical Old Ones and why they would even follow her, and she gave that laugh again. “I'm older than yeh might believe,” she told me, but I knew that couldn't be true, looking at her face.

Yet . . . What she says is unbelievable, but I can't hear a lie in her voice. I think
she
at least believes it.

And she's told me more, words that I thrill to hear when she whispers them in my ears as we lay together.
I love you.
She says that I'm the one she's waited for, that I was sent by the old gods themselves to help her. In the passion of our nights, I've repeated that same promise to her.
I love you.
But I don't know yet what that means . . .

I can hear her footsteps away in the darkness and see the guttering light of her torch, and so I should stop and write no more for now.

September ?, 1947

Máire tells me that she's forgotten too much of what she once knew, and that's why she can't be certain that the twisting passages of Oweynagat are where she can find this mysterious portal for which she's searching. She tells me that she needs me, that she knows that I was sent to help her, and she now lets me accompany her on her walks into the dark recesses of the caverns. She tells me that she can't open this portal without my help.
How
she knows this or what help it is that I'm to give her, she can't say. “I just
feel
it,” she says. “An' I know yeh feel it as well.”

Maybe I do—and that frightens me most of all. I know that when I'm with her, I don't wish to leave. I don't know that I
could
leave her.

We sleep. We eat. We make love. We're alone down here, but we're also not alone. I sometimes hear other whispering voices or footsteps, or the rustling of someone's clothing in the dark, or even the clanking of arms and armor. I catch a glimpse of a fleeing shadow as we move along or see movement from the corner of my eyes; I smell a peat fire, the pungent fragrance of pipe smoke, or the foul droppings of some creature. Time passes at an uncertain pace in the world outside. I feel as if we left here, I wouldn't be surprised to find it to be the same day that we entered or a hundred years later. Máire and I walk the passages, searching for . . . what? I don't know.

When we did that today—whatever day today might be—everything suddenly changed. Always before, I wandered with Máire, who seems to be able to negotiate these twisting passages without becoming lost, glad to be with her but blind and deaf to whatever force drew her along. We'd already passed several branchings of the passageway—I've become able to sense them: a greater darkness off to one side or another, accompanied by the touch of moving air and a subtle change in the sound of our footsteps on the uneven floor. We were passing one such branch, when a sudden impulse that I still don't understand made me grasp Máire's arm.

“Wait a moment,” I said to her, and she turned, her face puzzled in the warm yellow light of the torch. I pointed to the left. “We need to go that way,” I said.

She didn't ask the question that I might have asked if our positions had been reversed, the same question I was asking myself.
Why?
Máire only nodded, and silently turned in the direction that I'd indicated. We stepped carefully over a jumble of fallen rock and into a narrow archway that appeared to have been carved from the living rock. The room beyond was small, the roof so low that we had to walk stooped over for fear of striking our heads against rock, but after a time, the low passage ended and we stepped out into a larger chamber. We both immediately noticed that the walls here were squared, polished, and carved with ornate swirls, like the stones of the passage graves I'd seen at Newgrange, in County Meath north of Dublin, and that the floor was flagstoned and level. Our torchlight struck fire from quartz-flecked granite, and I noticed that the carved lines in the walls had been painted the blue of a deep sky. Another stone, almost like an altar, stood in the middle of the room, held up by two smaller, low plinths. We approached it, half-expecting to see a body or skeleton laid out there, but the altar stone was vacant.