Twice Upon A Time (The Celtic Legends Series) Page 16

  It was a single cygnet, lifeless in her arms.

  He felt a wrenching weakness in the back of his throat. It shivered through his body and left his knees unstable, his throat parched, his eyes smarting. Something swelled in his chest, a wordless cry, a song of lamentation. He opened his mouth but a sudden gust of wind blew up from below, stealing the noise from his throat. He’d seen a thousand men wounded in warfare, their faces twisted from the wounds that drained the life from them, of deep sword thrusts to the belly that left a man gagging on his own blood.

  Until today, he had thought he had known the face of pain.

  Ten

  Winters flowed into summers, with little change between the two. But no one came to threaten their sanctuary, and Brigid began to settle upon the island.

  Their days took on a rhythm. They rose when the sun peeked over the bay. Their senses grew keen to the wind, the tumult of the currents, the strange, silver-white light of the sky, and the mercurial shifts in weather. Brigid tended the fire and gathered food while Conor fished and snared ducks and made infrequent journeys to the mainland for peat and fruits of the land. Their sweat watered the stubborn earth and the burn of their muscles kept them warm.

  For many seasons, Brigid welcomed the labor. While her back was bent as she cleared a stretch of barren land, while her hands were busy piling rocks upon one another in a makeshift fence, while steam ruddied her face as she bent over the cooking fire—then she was too busy to think of the hollow ache of her womb that she still wished beyond all hope would someday be filled.

  Only when the surviving swan returned, once, in the spring, searching for his mate while he keened, did the ache surge, pushing out a new flood of tears. She had hidden these tears from Conor, though he must have seen the trails upon her face when she returned later in the day. She knew he thought she cried for the lost babe, and in part she did—but that was not the whole of it.

  She cried for Conor.

  There were times when she raised her gaze and found her husband as brooding and quiet as herself. How he’d changed. Gone was the laughing, loose-limbed, arrogant warrior she’d come to know in Morna. In his place stood a silent, contemplative man, his body pared down to solid muscle by work and lean rations, his eyes filled with shadows. It was during these times that a niggling doubt worked its way into her mind.

  Much good it would do to brood about and mourn for a lifetime, when all the keening and wailing would not bring back what they had lost, nor move Fate a hair’s width from its path.

  “It’s time we got ourselves a cow,” she said one day, as they hauled baskets of sand to the height for making land. “You promised me one not so long ago.”

  “You want a cow now?” Conor let his basket of sand thump to the ground. “We’re barely keeping body and soul together—”

  “We’ll have an easier time of it,” she argued, “if we had milk and a calf once a year.”

  “Then it’s a bull you’ll be wanting too?”

  “What good is one without the other?”

  She got her cow, and sometime later, a bull, both bought from the priests who inhabited the next island, in exchange for several boatloads of peat Conor promised to send them from the mainland. The cow’s lowing filled the mornings as in the old days. How much else were she and Conor missing by wasting time in silence and painful memory?

  “Here,” she’d said another day, thrusting a cup of frothy milk in his hand as he returned from delivering another load of peat. “Go and tell me that isn’t worth the price of a few boatloads of peat.”

  He drank the full cup. Brigid watched the working of his throat and a familiar yearning arced through her.

  “I’ve boiled you water,” she’d said, turning away. “Strip yourself down. I won’t have you eating at my table with all that grime upon you.”

  While she bathed him within the smoky warmth of the clochán, his gaze rested upon her. She’d washed her hair that afternoon in a pail of rainwater she’d collected overnight, and then let it dry with the wind and the sun. It lay loose about her shoulders, the way he’d once liked it. Sunlight streamed through the smoke-hole and fell warm upon her head.

  It was not long before she was as soaked and sudsy as he.

  Another day, she said, “I think we need some sheep, Conor.”

  “Sheep?” He clawed another scoop of clay out of the rocks and shook it off his fingers into a basket by his feet. “What will be next? A loom?”

  “A spindle first.” She caught his outraged glare as she scraped some clay off her own fingers. “Do you want me prancing about for the rest of my life wearing nothing but a bit of rag?”

  His gaze burned over her. “And what would be wrong with that?”

  Finally, on a summer’s evening, they feasted on fish soup she’d made fresh that day. When they were finished, they lolled, warm-bellied, with their backs against the rock-pile wall, watching the shimmer of sun sink into the sea.

  She dipped a finger into a hole at the knee of her tunic. “I’ve been thinking a mite, Conor.”

  A ghost of a laugh rippled in his voice. “I’ve noticed you’ve been doing a lot of that lately.”

  She tugged upon the linen, twisting it around her fingertip. “We can do better than this bowl of smoke we’ve been sleeping in.”

  “Now you don’t like the clochán?”

  “It’s fine enough for sheep or a cow. But you can’t even stand up in the thing, and I’m sick of waking with a night’s worth of smoke in my lungs.”

  He shifted his legs. “My bones are already feeling the wear of a good year’s work.”

  She stood up and faced the highest point of the island, a bare sheaf of rock which sloped away on all sides to scrub grass and stone. “That would be a fine place to build a home.”

  She sensed his warmth behind her.

  “It would take a mighty fort to keep a house atop that drumlin,” he warned. “It would have to be a fort made of stone, and with a strong rocky fence about it to break the battering of wind.”

  “We could wall off the ground on the lee side of the house,” she continued, watching in her mind’s eye the rise of the home upon the rosy height, “and fill it with sand and clay and seaweed to make land. Then I’d have a garden.”

  His hands fell upon her shoulders. “A task like that could take a lifetime.”

  She thought of the cool silence of the Morna woods, of the way the leaves turned from the translucent green of spring to the thickness of summer to the crackling dry brown of fall; she thought of honeysuckle and foxglove, of a ring of oaks amid the mists . . . she thought of the past. Then she opened her eyes and stared out over the sea, with the sun bleeding pink and orange and red into the waves, and then to the bare, smooth hillock of Inishmaan. She felt the heat of her husband, solid and strong behind her—the future.

  “It’ll be our new kingdom,” she said. “We’ll call it Dún Conor.”

  He breathed her name into her ear as his arms banded around her. She twisted in his embrace and faced him, pressing close to his warmth. The sap of life rose in her, hot and eager, filling up the hollowness still lurking in her heart. His lips found her temple, her cheek, her neck. This was the magic, the wonder, of life, and she had been a fool to deny it to herself and to him for so long.

  All they had left in this world was this one life.

  “We’ll start tomorrow,” she whispered, as his lips finally met hers again, and yet again. “We’ve so little time . . ..”

  Winters flowed into summers, and their dream took root in the bare rock. Stone by stone their fort rose in defiance of the wind and weather. First came a solid house, thatched-roofed, with a floor paved with smooth stones. A rocky, tumbled-down fence wandered around a burgeoning garden. This done, another wall rose, higher, in a great, sweeping ring around the house and garden.

  Their days took on a rhythm again—of work and work and still more work, but this time, when the sun began to set, the greatest joy came. For Brigid would see
Conor walking toward her, his hair lit red by the sun. He’d smile beyond his weariness and he’d clutch her. She’d feel the solid strength of his arms, his body—lean and muscular from hewing and heaving stone over long distances, from wielding a skillful oar on the angry swell of the sea. She would feel the heat of his breath. She would see the light of hungry desire in his eyes. She’d feel the yawning need inside him for something more than their body’s joining. And like a reed bending to the force of a gale, she opened herself to him in the dim blue light of dusk, and they became one again—the joyous joining that never lost its glory between them.

  The years slipped by unnoticed, for ever there was work to do, grain to sow or harvest, cows to milk, calves to slaughter for winter’s meat, snares to lay, periwinkles to collect as she danced carefully among the rocks in the surf ... But there came a time when the fort was finished, the field rich and fertile, the cows for which they had bartered with the monks healthy and full of milk, and the struggle to survive grew kinder.

  Then, they took their well-earned ease. Laughter echoed among the stones of the island, swirling through the mists. They made a crude fidchell board from seashells and driftwood, and played in the evenings. They found another cavern in the rocks where they could make love under the great, blue white arch of the sky, protected from the wind.

  Much time had passed since that fateful Samhain Day. Conor grew bold and took to intercepting the trading vessels that sailed into the bay. For the price of fresh fish and water he would bring back all sorts of exotics. On those days, he would drape her naked form in fine cloth, share some foreign wine, and then dance with her to the music of the wind whistling through the stones.

  They were not always alone. During one of Brigid’s wanderings on the west side of the island, she saw fairy-foot marks on the cliffs, and she knew then that the Sídh had not abandoned them. Occasionally, a certain priest rowed over from the north island, and he would stay a day or two to barter and play fidchell. On those days, Brigid would serve the men and keep her eyes lowered. The priest would compliment Conor on her modesty. Later, she and Conor would laugh about it, for the priest was old and wise to the ways of men, and he had seen the Beltane fires lit upon the height of the island each year, yet he continued to come to the island nonetheless. He and Conor would argue gently in the quiet of their home about Christianity and the old ways. Though at first the priest had made Brigid uneasy, she could see the humor and honesty in the man’s face. He had made it his task to convert them, though he tried it with a gentle hand. It was a lonely existence on these isles and company of any sort was a pleasant diversion. For Conor’s sake, she welcomed this man whose inland brothers had caused her so much pain.

  The years grew shorter and sped by. The endless battering of the elements smoothed and rounded the stones of their house. Inside, the turf smoke of innumerable fires darkened the walls to a gentle brown. A sprig of ivy which had nestled at the base of the garden wall sprouted, wound its way over edge and branched out, until the tiny root blossomed into a great netting of waxy leaves, softening the rock-pile wall like a coating of deep green moss.

  The years did not touch Conor. His body was as unchanged as the great cliffs of Moher Brigid could see on a clear day from the open doorway of the house. He blinded her sometimes, when he appeared in the doorway. His eyes, silver-bright, his hair thick and luxurious and long; his skin as fresh and unlined as when she had first laid eyes upon him in the sacred circle of oaks in Morna. Vitality sparked from his very fingertips, as he picked her up by the waist and whirled her breathless. He was sea and river, earth and sun—ever steady, ever ageless, ever eternal.

  But she knew she was fading, growing brittle and dry, like all things of this world. There were days while she stirred porridge or cut the barley, or when Conor reached out to help her over some rocks, when she would see her own hands with new eyes. The skin had shriveled and dried upon the bones, so the blue trails of her veins stood out against the spotted skin. It was always a shock to see them, fragile and old, in Conor’s broad palm. For though she felt the passing of time in her bones, in her heart and mind and spirit, she, like Conor, was as young as if she were still dancing among the trees.

  There came a time when her feet could no longer dance. The familiar path down the side of the cliff became an enemy—a labor which stole her breath and left her joints aching. More and more Conor took to gathering food and seaweed along the shore until Brigid’s circle of work spread no farther than the grazing grounds of the cattle, and then, no farther than the crumbling rock fence of their ring-fort.

  Then, one year like any other, when the spring gales had washed the world clean, she took to her bed. The sickness had been eating away at her all winter, and no paste or potion eased her fatigue or stopped the flesh from melting off her bones. Old age only had one cure.

  Oh, but she wanted to live forever on this island, with Conor by her side, with his smile, his touch, his lovemaking which had grown so tender and so gentle these past years. There were times when she wished she could trade the rest of her days to be, for one single moment, fair-haired and strong-limbed in his arms.

  So it was one summer morning when the glimmer of dawn shone through the cracks around the door, when she lay awake among the wolf pelts in their woven-wattle bed, knowing she’d never find the strength to rise from the softness and the warmth again. She heard a song outside the walls. It was Conor’s light, lilting whistle, as he gathered logs of peat to stoke the morning fire.

  “It’s a fine, fair day, Brigid.” He tumbled an enormous armful of peat against one wall. “The wind’s nary a warm breath and the sea is calm and flat as a silver mirror.”

  He had once given her a silver mirror, a gift from one of the trading vessels that had passed through the bay. She had never seen the like, and for many years she had used it as she plaited and wound her hair. But the mirror was a cruel reminder of the passage of her days. Now it lay, tarnished, amid a trunk full of other gifts better fit for a younger woman.

  Conor tossed a cut of peat under the hanging cauldron, and poked at it until the flames leapt. She loved him with her fading eyes, all of him, the bright flash of his smile, the swell of his muscles beneath his tunic and the leather that covered his calves. It was ever a mystery to her why he stayed upon this mist-shrouded island, tending to an old crone, when the world spread out before him, begging for the tread of his feet.

  How foolish she had been, all those years ago, to try to send Conor away. How little faith she had had in the strength of his love.

  By the gods. She squeezed her eyes shut. She did not want to leave. Not today. Not ever. For the time had come, the time she had dreaded all her life. Not her own death, for that was the way of mortals. There were worse things than dying.

  One of them was being left behind.

  “Is the rain in your bones, mo shearc?”

  Conor brushed her hair out of her face. Concern shadowed his gray eyes. She had often wondered these past months if he knew that she was dying, or if he pretended not to know for her sake.

  “It’s nothing but a faint weakness. It will pass with a little rest.”

  “You’d think you were a woman of twenty summers, the way you tend the fields and climb down the cliffs.”

  “Would you have me tethered to a bed, Conor?”

  “‘Tis a fine thought.”

  It was a gentle teasing, a familiar refrain, for she’d not left the house for a month. But today she could barely muster a smile. He took her wrist in his hand and probed among the bones for her pulse, as she’d taught him. She gently tugged her arm free.

  “Do you remember,” she began, tucking her wrist beneath the pelts, “those herbs I steeped for that kind priest, when he was sick with the ague?”

  “I remember everything you taught me of your witchery.”

  “Then boil me some. Perhaps that brew will restore my strength.”

  The bubbling of water and the scent of boiling herbs soon filled the roo
m. He brought her a wedge of cheese and a cup full of milk. She left the food upon the floor and began to doze. But when she closed her eyes, she felt a different languor stealing over her. A heavier sleep. She struggled against the fog, fighting to open her eyes, to focus on Conor’s concerned face above her. Brigid sensed that they were not alone in the room. The death-crone in her rags hovered in the shadows around the bed.

  “Sleep, lass.” Conor’s voice seemed to come from very far away. “It’s what you need—”

  “Is it still light out?”

  “It’s near midday.”

  “Take me out, then, to the garden. I want to see the light of day on your face.”

  Outside, the sun blinded her. She buried her face in his chest. He carried her past the gardens and out the opening in the rock-pile fence. He sat with the wall at his back, settling her on his lap, her head nestled against his shoulder.

  In the shade, she gazed about the bright summer day. Primroses climbed up the rock fence, waving their delicate blooms with the caress of the breeze. From somewhere beyond her sight, cows lowed as they feasted on stubborn grass. The Connemara Mountains shone purple in the distance. The great bay of Galway spread out before them, calm and slate-grey, and the rhythmic wash of the tide against the lower cliffs filled the air.

  Why would it be summer when her end came? Summer was such a young time, a reminder of all the summers long past. The cawing of seabirds echoed around them as the gulls dove in and out of the breakers in search of food. In all her years upon this island, nothing, really, had changed; she and Conor had eked out a life upon it and made a home, yet it was as wild and untamed and lonely as when they had first stepped foot on the shores.

  Her lids weighed upon her eyes. She glanced up at him and saw that his jaw was tight, the cordons in his throat roped and hard, and that his gaze was fixed on some point far beyond the horizon, to the rim of the world, to a future she could not share.