The Greener Shore (32 page)

Against her will, Briga’s eyes grew misty. She wanted to go on arguing but the rose between her thighs had begun to bloom. The language of the body is older than the spoken word.

I took my wife in my arms. While waiting for the worst to happen, I made the most of Here and Now.

On the day following the full moon Fíachu’s clan challenged another clan to a hurling match. Caman was serious business; war in miniature. The match would be played on Fíachu’s racecourse. The pillar stones inscribed with Onuava’s name would serve as goalposts.

A rousing game was just the distraction I craved. Although many summers had passed since I took an active part in sport, I still enjoyed watching. In my head I would again run with the young men; in my head I would strike the winning goal.

The lives we live in our heads can be the most vivid of all.

If Fíachu was going to banish me I felt confident he would not do it publicly; he was stern but not cruel. To be safe, however, I embedded myself deep among the spectators on the far side of the field.

It was an exceptionally hard-fought match. The action swept up and down the field without the slightest pause. Most of the players were young men who had survived no more than twenty winters. A few were older: the cunning ones, the heads who plotted every move in advance. Caman had few rules but strategy was all-important.

As I watched, my legs remembered how good it felt to run with an excited team. My feet remembered the sensation of skimming over the earth with wings on my heels.

Before I fully realized what I was doing, I had seized a stick from the spare hurleys stacked at the end of the field. Heedless of the fact that my presence would make the sides uneven, I ran out onto the field of play.

Another spectator quickly redressed the balance. Duach Dalta came running toward me from the opposite side. For a fleeting instant I thought he intended to beat me to death with his hurley, but that was only my imagination. He threw himself into the game as I had done, revealing an exceptional speed and agility for a man of his years.

Every sport has its rhythm. This is doubly true of caman. At its best, the members of a team appear to be following one drumbeat. If one side can disrupt the rhythm of the other it gives them a great advantage. The unexpected arrival of Duach Dalta and myself on the scene threw both sides off their timing. The game sputtered to a near halt.

We did not notice. In the center of the playing field, surrounded by other men, we saw only each other.

Duach Dalta got possession of the sliotar. On his face was an expression compounded of hatred and jealousy and grim determination. As he ran toward me with the sliotar perfectly balanced on his hurley, I realized he was better at the game than I was. At exactly the right moment he checked his forward rush and hurled the sliotar upward with his stick. Step, bend knees, twist, and a mighty swing sent the ball flying. Straight at me.

Men sometimes lost their front teeth during a match. I did not think Duach Dalta would be satisfied with knocking out my teeth. He wanted to break my head.

My sporting reflexes might not be as quick as his, but my head was quicker. By the time the missile reached me I was already throwing myself to the ground. I felt the wind of the sliotar’s passing.

Duach Dalta hid his disappointment well. “Ainvar the useless!” he crowed. Some of the other men laughed.

I lay on the ground while I regained my composure, then stood up, wearing a good-humored smile. “I never was good at games,” I lied. “It doesn’t take much effort to best me at any of them.”

The chief druid, his triumph diluted, glared at me.

I carried my hurley back to the end of the field and returned it to the stack. “Try to get along without me, lads!” I shouted. Some of the men who had just been laughing at me, laughed with me. One of them called, “Anytime you want a little practice I’ll help you, Ainvar. I need some, too.”

I replied with a cheerful nod and headed off toward my lodge.

To a tree, simply being alive constitutes success. I must remember that.

Although I expected Fíachu every day, he did not come. If Duach Dalta was buzzing in his ear it was having little effect—so far. The wheel of the seasons turned and we were still part of the Slea Leathan.

I threw myself totally into teaching. Those of my students who had found no druidic talent in themselves drifted away. Others took their place. Almost a score of young people were studying the disciplines I thought we had left behind us in Gaul.

The most gifted of my students was the chieftain’s daughter. Aislinn needed little instruction. Her mind was as nimble as a young deer. While I was formulating one thought she leaped ahead to the next with perfect comprehension. As I told Keryth, “Sometimes the Pattern is as clear to her as if it had been drawn on a stone with a burnt stick.”

“I was like that at her age,” Keryth said. “Everything was wonderfully clear to me. Old people—or what I thought of as old people, meaning my parents’ age—were slow and stupid and I lost patience with them.”

“It was the same with me. Was our vision flawed, Keryth?”

She shook her head. “Our vision was fine, we just couldn’t see the dust.”

“What dust?”

“The motes in the air. The obstacles. They were there all the time, but our young eyes were so clear we couldn’t see them.”

“Now the clarity’s gone and the obstacles are still there, Keryth.”

“I’m not even sure I can see the obstacles anymore. I’m losing my vision.”

“If you’re going blind, remember that one of Briga’s springs has great curative powers for the eyes. I’m sure she could—”

“It isn’t my eyes, Ainvar; it’s much worse than that. My druid gift is fading. I can rarely
see
anymore, and even when I do I’m mistaken. My prognostications are no longer genuine.”

“Oh, Keryth.” I, above all people, could appreciate what she was feeling. I wondered if I should tell her of my own loss. But the habit of secrecy had become too ingrained. When we might have comforted each other, I could not bring myself to share.

Within a single cycle of the moon Keryth aged five years. The rapid change shocked me. Was it the result of losing her gift? Had a similar fate befallen me?

Surely not. Briga would have told me if I became an old man overnight. Or would she?

If the same thing happened to her would I tell her? Would I even notice? Probably not. To my eyes, Briga would always be the same.

When no one was around I visited a deep forest pool to seek my reflection. The visage that stared back from the fern-fringed water was a stranger. How long had it been since I looked upon Ainvar? Yet it was he, beyond a doubt. Same jutting cheekbones and dark eyes. Because I no longer shaved a tonsure, my hair had grown back above my forehead, and was still thick and abundant.

The Ainvar of the pool and I regarded each other with identical grave expressions. “You haven’t aged,” I told him.

Could that be construed to mean that I had not lost my gift after all?

I straightened up. Trying to ignore the sudden flutter in the pit of my stomach, I shaped Eriu’s name with my lips and slowly raised my hands. Never in my life had I poured more effort into an act of magic.

Nothing happened.

Nothing.

Nothing.

I felt totally drained, knowing that I would never try again. There was no point.

Eriu had been more than real to me; she had been the proof of all I believed about the immortality of the spirit. How could she have disappeared so completely? It was almost as if she had never been.

My head took a step backward; surveyed the situation with a wider view.

Was it possible that Eriu had been a product of my own imagination?

The question shuddered through me. Had I been so desperate to believe there was a power greater than Caesar that I had shapechanged this bountiful, hospitable land into a goddess? Had I carved her body from random flickers of light at the corner of my eye? Had I spun her voice from the meaningless wailings of the wind? Was everything concerned with her a dream I had dreamed in the daylight?

Yes, I admitted to myself, it was possible. More than possible.

Druids are trained to deal with things as they are, not as they would wish them to be.

Think, head!

My cowardly head offered an array of distractions. I rejected all of them.

Druids are trained to concentrate.

My head’s reluctance to examine the only topic of any real importance confirmed my worst fears.

I could not summon Eriu because she did not exist.

Somehow I made my way back to the lodge without being aware of a single step I took.

chapter
XXI

T
HE MOON CHANGED AGAIN, AND AGAIN. SINCE I NEITHER PLANTED
nor harvested I was indifferent to the passage of time. I was indifferent to everything; all of the juice had drained out of me. When other members of my clan spoke to me I tried to pay attention but my thoughts wandered. Even when Dian Cet gave me the particulars of a very long and singularly detailed judgment he had made recently, I at first found it hard to concentrate. When I learned that Morand had taken part in the deliberations I forced my ears to listen harder and my head to commit the judgment to memory.

My students were going on to lives of their own. Without me. Which was as it should be, and yet…

The lessons I taught in the glade became mere mouthings because I no longer believed in them myself. It did not take long for the young people to start falling away. Dara was the last to give up on me. Day after day he patiently sat at my feet, listening to me prattle on about matters I now knew to be inconsequential. Then one day I saw pity in his eyes.

The following morning I did not go to the glade. Instead I continued to sit by the hearth, whittling on a bit of stick with one of Briga’s cooking knives. After a while Dara took his cloak and went out by himself.

“Aren’t you going?” asked Briga.

“Not today. It’s raining.”

She laughed, thinking I was making a joke.

I continued whittling.

Briga said, “Rain never stopped you before.”

“Maybe I’ll go tomorrow.”

I did not go to the glade the next morning, either.

Yet I could not continue to sit in the lodge day after day. Without saying a word, both of my wives let me know that a man who spent his day under their feet was as welcome as mud.

If I had felt more comfortable at the fort I would have gone there and spent some time with Fíachu, whose bluff good humor had a way of raising spirits. That good humor was not available to me anymore.

The same interdiction did not extend to my clan, who remained unaware that we had been threatened with dispossession. Indeed, they were becoming more and more interwoven with the tribe.

Dian Cet was frequently approached to make one of his wise judgments. When a man died without repaying the debt he owed another, a debt that would impoverish his widow, Dian Cet considered the matter at length. He then pronounced: “Even a dead body has a right to a cow, a horse, a cloak, and the coverings of its bed. None of these shall be used in payment of the debts of the deceased, because they are the special property of his body.”

This welcome innovation was added to tribal law.

Damona wove wool into original patterns that were quickly adopted by the women of the Slea Leathan. Teyrnon’s ironwork was requested faster than he could turn it out, there now being a great demand for scythes and sickles and plows. Meanwhile the complex designs of the Goban Saor were exerting a powerful influence on tribal jewelry.

Ever since Dara eulogized Onuava in poetry his reputation had grown. He was invited to compose praise poems for other clan chiefs and to entertain at their feasts. How Seanchán felt about this I cannot say, but I suspect he was furious when a new title was bestowed upon my oldest son. Dara was being called an
ollamh,
meaning “master-poet.”

The boys and girls who had been my students in the forest were making positive contributions to the tribe.

The Goban Saor and his wife had just enriched it with lusty twin sons.

Yet I had nothing left to give. When I was ill Briga should have let me die.

But oh, I did not want to go into the dark! Not while the meadows were buttered with every shade of yellow from furze to primrose; not while the thundering wings of a swan could stir up a matching thunder in my heart.

Not while Hibernia still beguiled me with a thousand beauties.

Not while Briga was warm in my bed at night, offering me sanctuary from my thoughts.

However, even my senior wife could not shield me for long. Druids are trained to think; we are not trained to stop thinking. In spite of instructions from me to the contrary, my voluble head babbled on and on, asking questions I did not want to hear; questions for which I had no answer.

If there was no Eriu, was there such a thing as an Otherworld? Or had we created it ourselves because we were afraid of the dark?