R. A. MacAvoy - The Book of Kells

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R. A. MacAvoy
The Book of Kells
(V2.0 - 20020527)
I would like to give recognition and thanks to the following people without whom this work would
have been impossible:
To Dr. James Duran of Oakland, California, for Gaelic and Gaelic usage and the loan of many good
books; to Dr. Dan Melia of the University of California at Berkeley for help on Medieval Gaelic and
medieval sources of all kinds; to Dr. Donal McGivillry of the University of Sydney on Cape Breton
Island, Nova Scotia, for all Newfieisms and maritime history; to the gentlemen of Salamander Armory in
California for tutoring in the handling of a medieval long-handled ax; to Ms. Anne McCaffrey for the
geography of Wicklow; and to Miss Pat Lyne of Herefordshire for her history of the Connemara pony.
To Sharon Devlin, who was the inspiration for this book, and who worked with me and guided me
every step of the way. All that is worthwhile in the book I owe to her; the errors are my own.
(All poems in the story itself are by Sharon, or were edited by her.)
Prologue
It was an hour for bog colors: the close of the workday in the Bog of Allen. The boy-os working the
Bord na Mona mechanized turf cutters were just beginning to put their shirts back on in the sea wind of
early evening. That wind was cool and saline and it drove forty miles in from the shore.
They had gotten low in this particular deposit, cut deeply “today, and even the men on the machines
thought that a pity.
Some parts of this bog, the greatest in the world, were now stripped to the rock. The demands of
industry, the world market, and the new power plants had done more damage in a decade than the frugal
spades of the Irish had done in thousands of years. With no chance for the sphagnum beds to regenerate,
biologists warned, it would be gone in a generation.
Fine traditions would go with it. The seasonal work of “winning the turf” in great teams of family and
neighbors. Heavy men's work with the long peat slans. And then women's and children's work: the
stacking and drying. The ceilis afterward.
Missed above all would be that scent which is enjoyed even in the cities, in hearths or modern stoves.
The scent of the peat as it made its slow, even, nearly smokeless flame: it was the age-old smell of
comfort and crachon—conviviality. The smell of home.
Surely something beautiful would be gone out of the world. Besides the value they serve as producers
of fuel, bogs are wonderful, mysterious places. Sometimes dangerous, they always hold secrets. Wild,
eerie, with their outcroppings of rocks, their coffee-colored dim pools, their heather, gorse, and bog
willow, thick with birds of all kinds, a bog is a fit place of concealment for a fugitive, a treasure, or a
whisky still.
But the bogs shift. Old people can tell you about that, for their changes can occur within one lifetime.
Sometimes things hidden in them will disappear. And reappear, far removed in time and place.
The chemistry of the turf does strange things. It colors and preserves. Occasionally a farmer, lifting his
winter fuel in i summer, will come upon a sealed bucket of long-forgotten workmanship, filled with what
once had been butter, stored in the cool moss long ago. This dark grease is found to be wonderful for
skin complaints, lubricating axles, and for healing the roughened udders of cows.
Roots of the red bog oak and sally will come up too. If set aside and slowly dried out, the dark wood
is good for any construction that requires great strength and resiliency. It can be made into a “creepy”
stool, or a flour cist, or even (in the old days) the belly of a harp.
But every so often something appears in a bog that makes people cross themselves and go for the
priest or policeman. Bodies appear occasionally. Generally, the corpse is found to be some poor fellow
who twenty or even two hundred years ago got lost and was drowned for his trouble. But these finds are
uncanny as well as disturbing; however old they are, the lost child of fifty years ago or the ancient
sacrifice to Crom Duv of twenty-five centuries ago, they are recognizable—as intact as if they had died
yesterday.
The National Museum has gained greatly from these finds. And since the Bog of Allen was first
exploited technologically, it has yielded hundreds of artifacts to enrich the collective memory of the Irish
people. Wooden things, vessels of all kinds, carvings, votive objects, jewelry. Ancient livestock and wild
creatures. Textiles, dresses, cloaks, shoes, belts, often left deliberately in the peat by their original owners
to get a fine, brown color from the chemistry of the bog, and then lost in the deep, slow currents.
Now and then things turn up which have clearly been “killed” there: objects thrown in to hide them
forever. Sacred things of the old church and of paganism hated by Protestant iconoclasts or the Catholic
Jansenist priesthood, these were often broken and drowned, to kill them doubly.
It had been an overcast, heavy day: warm and humid. But with the wind from the sea, the gray clouds
were lifted along the horizon like a blanket, and the westering sun streamed under it, turning earth and
cloud golden, deepest brown and rose.
Smasher Burke loved it like this. The changing mood of the place was one of the things that made this
an interesting job. Riding like a king in a machine that took him three minutes to climb on or off, he saw
everything.
The only disadvantage was the noise. The racket from the rows of blades that neatly cut the peat into
briquettes was deafening, as was that of the belts that carried them to the receiver.
He lit up a fag and stuffed the packet of Silk Cut into his pocket. And then he heard it. A subtle
change in the sound of the machine, followed by a grinding.
He instantly switched off the blades and brought her to a halt. As he climbed down from the cab,
McWilliams, his partner, was already at the blades, trying to free them with a crowbar.
“Ya fucking bastard, ya!
“It's no good! Smasher, it's jammed. No good at all.”
Burke's Wellies slowly squashed across the peat and around the cutter beams.
“It's a great fucking stone, Smasher.” McWilliams squinted, the golden light picking out his yellow
broken front teeth. “You'll have to back her up a bit.”
“Right,” Burke answered him, and clambered back on. “Stand away, will you,” he shouted,
impersonally as a bus conductor. Then he kicked her in, lifting the blades and rolling her five feet to the
rear.
“Good enough, man,” McWilliams bellowed. “Fucking great.”
Within five minutes it had spread all through the crew that the Smasher had turned up a carving. An
archaeologist from the museum had been called, but before he could get there it was fully dug out and
examined by the men.
“When I heard the crunch I knew it was no ordinary lump of rubbish,” McWilliams said proudly.
“Look at her, will you? Look at that! It must be thousands of years old.”
“It's a cross, man,” Burke countered quietly. “It's not thousands. Couldn't be thousands.”
It was old, though. Anyone could see that. Spirals. Spirals all over.
“Look there. Yer woman in the middle, with her little cunt stuck up, just as shameless!” McWilliams
laughed nervously.
Burke had bent down to examine it more closely. Following it with his finger, he had discovered that
the spirals—hundreds of them—seemed to be made from a single line.
“It doesn't look Christian,” McWilliams stated.
The Smasher didn't answer.
Chapter One
Bound to Render the King of Laighin Horses and Drinking Horns to Caiseal Gold and riches brought
across the Sea Are what is due from the Leinstermen.
The Leinstermen are comrades to Munster Against the Foreigners in any battle. Should the Gaill
come to them truly The King of Caiseal must repulse them.
Leabher n-gCeart, The Book of Rights
Perhaps the sound of the Uillean pipes was knocking plaster from the ceiling, or perhaps John
Thornburn had neglected his household duties, for the ramps of sunlight braced against the floor were
sparkling with white motes. Each oblong of light was broken by the shadow of window mintons, like a
Cartesian grid, and each contained a single floating shadow-circle, thrown by the tatted pulls on the
window blinds.
John let his gaze slide abstractedly from his work to the sun splashes and then back again. Circles on
a grid. How appropriate. All over his house. He flattened the huge, blue-checked tracing tissue over the
heavy paper and crayon rubbing below it and lifted limp flaxen hair out of his eye. His free hand (free
except for the pencil between thumb and index finger) groped around blindly, seeking his blue fisherman's
cap, which he usually used to keep his hair off his face. Not finding that, it crawled to the head of the
drafting table and snatched up a paperclip. This he thrust into his forelock, bobby-pin style.
John Thornburn had a rather vague face and eyes of two different colors, which he had inherited from
his grandfather. Grandpa had been a large, crusty old man who had prided himself on being one of the
last of the purebred Micmac Indians in Newfoundland. On Cape Breton there were plenty of these, but
in Newfoundland they were getting scarce. Grandpa even claimed that an ancestor of his had been a
Beothuck taken in a raid, though as far as anyone knew there had been no Beothucks left by smallpox
and English bullets even as long ago as two hundred years. (Because he was Grandfather, he had gotten
away with it, despite the telltale blue eye.) John was immensely proud of his status as a Newfoundland
Jack-a-tar, or half-breed, though he had noth ing of his grandfather in him except the eyes. (Unless he
could count his inability to grow a noticeable beard.) He stood five feet five and a half inches tall.
He had come to Ireland because Derval O'Keane asked him to, and because the Book of Kells was
here. He worshiped that scripture in a way that had nothing much to do with its religious content. It
grieved him that after coming so far, he was only permitted to see a single page at a time, and that
through glass.
Circles on a grid—spirals, really. Winding and unwinding to wind again. John overlay the nubbly soft
suggestions of form with spirals exact and mathematical. He knew he had exactly one thousand spirals to
copy, for he had counted them. The tissue crackled beneath his hand.
This was a high day for John: a day of fulfillment. The cross whose bog-brown fragments he had
traced was in a peculiar sense his cross, for it had lain in the basement of the Museum at Trinity College,
untouched, for five years. No one before him had cared to trace its designs, perhaps because the subject
matter of its central panel was not considered fit for display. But for the influence of Dr. Derval O'Keane,
John would not have been given his chance.
Not that this work would make any professional or financial difference for John. No school or
museum was waiting eagerly to see how the rubbing turned out; no one had suggested paying John
Thornburn for the work. Nor had he academic credentials to advance, not even the bachelor's degree he
had pursued for three dazed years in New York. He hadn't even an opinion on the provenance or
meaning of the stone he had traced. He merely liked the looks of it.
John got by from day to day by teaching a few courses in the basics of Celtic design (also a product
of Derval's influence). Though he was an excellent draftsman, he was, unfortunately, a lackluster teacher.
He found life in Ireland expensive and he was not particularly happy. Except, like now, when drawing.
Outside the bright windows in the bright June morning Greystones sat placidly, waiting for evening
and the commuter train from Dublin. A woman hailed and another replied, banging a mop against her iron
balustrade. A bicycle flew by, casting shadow and cheeping its tinny bell. If there was other activity, John
couldn't hear it over the stereo.
The blasting music, also, was a product of Dr. O'Keane's influence. It was in fact Derval's
record—Finbar Furey on pipes—and therefore very authentic. John had been lent it as a learning
exercise, since Derval O'Keane believed that certain elements of Irish design could best be appreciated
by a study of the old pipe airs. He had been listening to this same disc all morning, while he pulled
together the various rubbings he had made that week. The different surges and quavers of Furey's artistry
did little for John, tone-confused as he was, so in an effort to force comprehension he had increased the
volume.
He was not deaf to rhythm. His right hand (deft as the rest of him was awkward) spun the inner and
outer arcs of his freehand circles to the great swagging whine of the bagpipe. So many, all alike: twinned,
tripleted, touching in rank. It was easy. Not like the blush-producing, upside-down Bridget in the center
of the cross. That reconstruction required thought. This required not-thinking, which John did very well.
His eyes clouded and his lower lip drooped. There was only a short piece of the last upright to
complete: say twenty spirals. John counted silently as he drew, betting himself (strictly a gentleman's bet)
that he had estimated correctly and there were twenty left.
Nineteen... eighteen... fifteen... eight... He began to feel the surge of elation of a man who is winning a
bet with himself. The pipes skirled in sympathy. Three... two... He'd won, of course. Here was the last
spiral.
One. Furey produced a last, aggressive blast of his regulators and went silent as John flourished his
pencil in the air.
There was the tiny metallic busyness of the automatic tone
arm lifting and drawing away from the record. John's overused ears rang.
In the next moment they were nearly shattered by the unmistakable shriek of a woman, full-throated,
heart-rending, and uttered at close range. John levitated helplessly off his stool to witness the emergence
from his bathroom of a very young and rosy woman clad only in a cloud of auburn hair and howling like a
catamount. She flung herself down the short hall and vanished glimmering into John's bedroom.
John Thornburn made no immediate movement, but stood behind his drafting table with hands folded.
The paperclip winked silver on his head and his pale, lashless eyes were perfect circles. “So. . . so very
pink,” he whispered reverently.
Slowly, as though breasting a strong current, John moved across the front room toward the source of
the disturbance. He felt sweat prickling his scalp. He stood before the brown-paneled door. “Miss,” he
called, or rather attempted to call, for as he opened his mouth his shocked brain slipped into gear again.
The girl was naked, it told him. (She must have gotten in through the bathroom window.) She was
naked and screaming and probably a madwoman with (why not?) a madwoman's lies. And he—John
Thornburn—was an alien in Ireland.
A Weslyan-born too.
He saw himself unjustly accused. He saw himself convicted. He saw himself in an Irish prison, carving
Celtic knotwork and Eskimo figures onto the stone walls of his cell with a sharpened spoon. And so
John's voice failed him halfway through his single syllable and the word “miss” came out as no more than
the mewl of a kitten.
But now there was silence from behind the bedroom door. Heartened, John put his hand to the knob.
The racket of breaking glass bounced him back.
He could wrap his sheepskin jacket over his arm and, using it to guard his face, throw open the door
and. . . And what? Rush in and grab the girl: the pink, naked, and screaming girl? Let her break
windows. Let her crawl out of a window, the way she came. Let the bored housewives on their porches
see a naked girl crawl screaming out of his bedroom and then only a short hop to the Irish prison and the
sharpened spoon.
The tinkle of glass recurred on a smaller scale, followed by an oddly plaintive whimper. John's terror
veered toward irritation. “You've cut yourself on the glass, eh, my maid?” he called, in a voice much like
that of his father. Immediately the whimper was cut short, to be replaced by the sound of wallboard
tearing. John saw in his mind's eye his heavy brass candlestick reading lamp ripped from above his
pillow. He grabbed a kitchen chair (the only kind of chair he had) and wedged it firmly up against the
door.
John backed down the hall and into his empty front room. The sun lapped his feet, beckoning him. He
let it carry him out the doorway and into the handkerchief-sized front yard.
Bright June air touched John's shoulders and told him they were knotted. It felt the line of his jaw and
caused his teeth to unclench. It communicated to him the fact that his house had been stuffy and the
garbage might have better been emptied a few days ago. It riffled the tiny leaves of the neglected box
hedge and made John want to go away.
He could take a bus somewhere—out to McCaffrey's stable perhaps, where Derval worked her
horse. He remembered the thud of hooves, felt through the earth, as she cantered her enormous beast
along the fence. He remembered, with much more fondness, the thud of the waves against the wooden
side of his dory, at home. The coast was only a few miles from Greystones—it was not his coast, but no
matter. Anyplace would be better than sharing his empty house with a naked crazy woman. John strode
over the lawn to the street.
Here, standing between his house and the next, he could see his bedroom window, new-punched
with a jagged patch of black. Within there was a flash of pale skin.
John's spirits sank in a manner even the airs of June could not buoy, and at this moment he heard the
small creak of a door opening across the street, and a woman's voice hailed him. “Good morning, Mrs.
Hanlon,” John replied, not looking up, and then all courage deserted him and he had to run. Since he was
twenty-nine, rather than nineteen, he ran not away but back into his afflicted house.
Hands stuffed into the pockets of his jeans and shoulders at his ears, he approached the blockaded
bedroom door. “I'd like to know what you think you're doing in there,” he said to the door, tacking a
shamefaced “miss” onto the end of his sentence.
The moment's silence which followed allowed John to hope that the creature had actually found her
way out the window.
Mrs. Hanlori or no, that would be a blessing. But then he was answered by a rant of verbiage
incomprehensible to him.
Incomprehensible, but familiar sounding.
“I'm sorry,” he replied. “I don't speak Irish at all well, eh?”
Nothing. John knew he would have to call the gardai. He wandered into the kitchen, where the phone
was. He nibbled his fingernail, staring down at the square black box. Finding this comfort insufficient, he
bit down on the cuticle as well. It hurt.
What was the number? Where was the phone book? He found it, and his torn cuticle left bloody
smears on the paper. Derval was always making fun of him for his bitten-down nails. Calling him “frog
fingers.” Also for his indecisiveness, which he felt was really too bad, since ambidextrous people more or
less had to be indecisive.
Derval would not be paralyzed by the arrival of a crazy woman (or man) in her bathroom. She'd take
such an invader firmly in hand. John found he was dialing Derval's number instead of the garda.
“Irish Department,” answered the secretary in impeccable British English.
“Doctor O'Keane, please.”
There was a long silence, during which John had nothing to do but lean against the kitchen sink and
stare out the window of the back door, which was too warped to open easily. His nose told him he
definitely should have emptied the garbage. About the time he had decided he should hang up and call
again, the secretary came back on the line. John listened.
“Writing? Can't she be disturbed? Oh, riding? I see. No, I know the number, thank you.” He spun
the heavy dial again.
She must have been at the jumps, it took so long to call her. Derval was going to be very upset, being
called not only from her precious riding hour but from the jumps as well. John swayed back and forth
against the enamelled sink, thinking how unfair it was that he should be trapped between a crazy woman,
the police, and Derval's temper. He reflected and sucked his damaged cuticle. When she was fetched at
last, he tried to cut off all remonstrance.
“Derval, this is John. Please don't talk Irish; I can't follow it right now. I know you don't like to be
disturbed at the stable, but I'm rafted as all hell. I've got this... this crazy woman... in my bedroom, and I
have no idea how to get her out.”
Two seconds of silence was followed by laughter which blew static into the phone. “You should have
thought of that before you bedded her, love.”
“Eh? I've never seen her before. It's a pure mystery to me how she got there. . .
“Here. .. listen.” In sudden inspiration John walked the phone as close to the door as he could and
called out. “Are you still in there?” For emphasis, he leaned out and tapped the door panel with his toe.
The reply from within was quite threatening in tone.
“You hear? That's Irish, isn't it?” Derval sputtered into the speaker again, causing John to smile more
awkwardly than ever. “Derval, what I want to know is, do you think I should call the police—uh—the
gardai? And if I do will you tell them I'm not a monster?”
Her laughter died away into low hoots. “Very, very good, John. I certainly can't ignore such an
appeal, can I? I'll be right over.”
John explained as politely as he knew how that he didn't feel the need for her presence, but only a
word of advice. He found he was talking to a dead line. “Blood of a bitch!” He hung up.
It occurred to John that Derval might have thought the entire story a fabrication designed to entice her
to his house. Since she had turned him down twice this week, she might be thinking he was desperate.
He found himself blushing furiously.
Now here was a damn pretty kettle of fish. Was he expected to stand here waiting for Derval to visit
him out of pity, while a homicidal and quite naked woman planned ways. . .
Quite naked. John's mind settled back on that as one of the few digestible facts of the incident. To the
best of his memory, she had been entirely without clothes and of unusually high coloration. Of course,
memory will play one false when one is in shock.
John remembered the crack that ran between the bedroom drywall and the bathroom, which allowed
him to use the bathroom fixture as a night-light and which let mildew soften the edges of the bedroom
wainscoting. Silently he slipped into the bathroom and put his eye to the crack.
It took five seconds before he could make out her shape, huddled at the foot of his unmade bed in the
froth of covers he had kicked to the floor during the previous night. Her
small, hair-shadowed face was round and her mouth was a rosebud. She stared ahead of her with
glassy eyes and the whole pile of cloth shivered. Seeing that heartbroken countenance with none of the
nubile body exposed, John was convinced that this was no woman but a very young girl. His own thin
face sharpened in sudden compassion, immediately touched by an equal self-concern. If he found her
pitiable, what would the gardai think? Derval had been right to come.
He was dwelling on this particular topic, eye to the blue-tinged crack in the bathroom wall, when
Derval arrived. He heard the sound of hooves on the pavement outside, thought, “She can't have,” and
immediately corrected the statement to “She would have.” He stepped to the front window in time to see
an animal—resembling in both size and color an elephant— sail over the box hedge and plant itself in the
knee-high grass of John's front lawn. Its rider slipped off and snapped a cotton lead line onto the
headstall it wore under the bridle. This she looped over one of the pineapples that topped the porch's
wrought-iron balustrade.
“You're going to leave him there?” John asked incredulously, leaning out the doorway.
“Don't worry, Johnnie. Tinker's never colicked in his life,” Derval said, and swept in. With a last
glance at Mrs. Hanlon on her own porch across the street, John closed the door. Mrs. Hanlon was,
unfortunately, his landlady.
“I like the effect with the paperclip,” John's visitor stated. “The off-center jauntiness of it and all. Just
like your eyes.”
John Thornburn's eyes weren't really off center, and if their being mismatched (one blue and one
brown) made him jaunty, he wasn't aware of it. He put his hand to his head and snatched the clip away.
His limp flaxen hair fell flat into his right (or brown) eye.
Derval O'Keane was a tall young woman with black hair streaked in the most ornate manner with
gray. This was pulled back severely from her face and fastened with a rubber band. Her eyebrows and
lashes were thick and black and her eyes, blazing blue. She wore traditional black riding boots and
doeskin breeches which became her well, and instead of the orthodox hacking jacket above, a woolen
smock-shirt stitched with an amazing complexity of zoomorphic knotwork
figures. She saw John's glance at it and held herself out for inspection. “See, Johnnie? I wear it
everywhere I go, and tell the whole world that you made it for me.”
John mumbled politely, though he was not too happy to be introduced to the world as a seamstress,
and the truth was he had neither woven the cloth nor stitched the embroidery, but merely drawn the
figures that Derval had someone else complete. He pointed diffidently toward the bedroom. “She's still
hove up there. You can see her if you peek through the bathroom crack.”
Derval snorted and rejected such voyeurism. “Haven't you got that fixed yet, love? Makes it
impossible to sleep nights with all that light.” She strode toward the bedroom door, but turned halfway
there and added, “Or shouldn't I have mentioned that? Should I be watching my words, Johnnie? For all
I know you're taping this whole exchange—much good you'll get out of it. Everyone knows how
scandalous I am.”
“Taping? For God's sake, Derval, are you going crazy too? Or do you think it's some kind of joke
I'm playing on you? Well, there's the door and she's behind it. Just don't get yourself brained!”
Derval stopped with one hand on the doorknob and the other on the wedged chair. She gave John a
very mistrustful look. Then she put her ear to the door.
She knocked and spoke loudly in Irish. The response was immediate and accompanied by the thump
of a heavy object 0ohn's lamp, he guessed) being hit against the floor.
Derval stepped back. Her eyes were half-closed and her high forehead furrowed with thought. Her
lips moved soundlessly and when she glanced sideways at John there was a sort of challenge in her eyes.
He watched her with the expectancy one gives to a conjurer.
Derval spoke again, this time slowly, with care in every word. John, who knew only a few hundred
words of Irish and who only understood those when overpronounced, made out nothing in the exchange
but the word Gaill, or “stranger.” The effect of Derval's speech was immediate.
“She's dropped the lamp,” he whispered to himself, and he heard scuffing footsteps behind the door.
The girl had grabbed the doorknob and was pushing on it forcefully. Derval pulled the chair away and let
it fall racketing on the floorboards of the hall. She turned the knob and let the door open.
Framed in the darkness, shining and naked, stood a girl of some fifteen years. Her hair was auburn
and hung to her waist, frizzed along half its length as though a bad permanent wave had been allowed to
grow out. Her face was heart-shaped, and this as well as a nubbin of a nose gave her the air of being
much younger than her body declared. Her chest and rounded belly were splashed with rose-red streaks
and patches of rust-red. John, regarding her from over Derval's shoulder, wondered if these marks were
responsible for his original perception of the girl as rosy; now she had not the eerie glow of a neon bar
sign, nor yet the red light of sunset.
She stared at John, who dropped his eyes to the floor. Then the girl spoke to Derval, who listened
with a close frown.
“She doesn't speak Irish at all, Johnnie. It just sounds like it, rather.”
“I thought maybe she had a speech impediment,” offered John. “... with her 'g's sounding so much like
'k's.”
“Truagh, amh! Rom-gabsa na dibergaig, suaill nach dena dim dimbríg!...”
The girl spoke for quite a while, this time seeming more desperate for understanding. Derval's frown
slipped a little, grew puzzled. “The words are almost right, but not the order. Maybe she's a German
speaker, or something like that, and studied Irish dictionaries. That's a good way to come up with
nonsense. She even pronounces a lot of the silent consonants.”
Then, in response to one phrase of the stranger's, Derval's scowl grew particularly fierce. “'Violence
done by foreigners'? She said it perfectly clear. In fact, a lot of what she says has almost-meaning—like
schizophrenic word-salad. Where did you get this card, Johnnie? And what did you expect out of
springing her on me? I don't get the punch-line.”
John Thornburn had no time to reply, for the scorn in Derval's voice sparked panic in that of the
naked girl, who went down on her knees and clasped Derval around the waist, crying out in her (to John)
incomprehensible words.
Derval froze in distaste, but in another moment her set frown went blank from astonishment. “I get it!
I get it! She's re-invented old Irish! What a feat! Of course I can't say how authentic it is, Johnnie; who
could? But still, what a work!
“And now that my mind clicks on that, my dear, let us see whether I'm worthy of the challenge.”
John shifted miserably from foot to foot. “Oh Derval, you're really wrong, you know. I don't know
beans about. . .”
But the girl broke in on him, and, still on her knees, she pointed first at her own breast and then
toward the darkened recess of the bedroom. Derval listened to her intently, much to John's discomfort.
Slowly, with care, she replied, and the girl's small round face lit with hope. “Da ttuchta mo rogha dhamh
ferr lem faesam fort. Na hobait éim.”
“What's she saying, Derval? What's all this talk about foreigners, eh? Don't I have a right to be in my
own house? Ask her how she got in here and where're her clothes?” John Thornburn shifted from foot to
awkward foot, a movement which carried him subtly away from the two women.
Derval snorted. “I imagine you know the answer to that better than I do. I'm more interested to know
what the red paint is supposed to mean. The ancient Britons used blue, if that was your point, but.... Oh
dear God!”
Derval reached out and flicked a finger over the girl's skin, between the pubescent breasts. Then she
stood quite still for five seconds, staring at that finger.
John leaned forward. “It looks like she's soused with blood, Derval. She cut herself on the window,
you know.” But glancing quite shyly again at the girl, John was quite shocked to see how much of the red
stuff that looked like blood she was wearing. The stranger met his eyes and talked to him. She put her
hand to her reddened breast as she spoke, and then to her mottled stomach. After this she put both small
hands over her pudendum and spoke again. Tears started down her face. She took Derval's hand and
twined her fingers through the taller woman's. “Impim orte.”
John, in an agony of embarrassed incomprehension, put his tattered finger in his mouth and bit down
on it until he tasted his own blood.
Derval was now staring at him. John felt his face color. “Do you think I did that to her? Did she say I
did? All—all that? It's ramlatch nonsense if she did. Do you really...you don't really...”
Derval shook her head slowly, as though moving a tremen-dous weight. “She did not. I wouldn't have
believed her if she had. Not you, Johnnie. Not you.”
John felt his shoulders relaxing. He glanced furtively from Derval's blue eyes to the stranger's hazel
ones. “I'll go get the first-aid kit,” he mumbled and darted into the bathroom.
Derval took the kit from John and sent him off again for soap and water. John rummaged around
helplessly, hearing the incomprehensible strings of vowels continue. (His Irish was worse than usual
today, for he couldn't get any sense at all of what they were saying.)
The marks of human teeth around the aureole of Ailesh's breast were the most painful to see, but the
clean shallow slash that went diagonally from her navel to her left hipbone bled most. Derval's
milk-and-roses complexion was ashen as she dabbed the still oozing wounds with peroxide. Derval could
so easily visualize a knife-wielding rapist whose intention had been to slash open the belly of his victim,
but apparently this girl had been fighting hard and had twisted aside, escaping just as the blade
descended.
She turned her head to see John Thornburn standing beside her with a clean bedsheet spread
between his outthrust arms. “I thought she might like to put this... er... on herself.”
“She'd bleed all over it,” answered Derval shortly. “What's the matter, Johnnie? Can't you stand the
sight of a naked woman?”
John bit down on his lip. She was always slagging him about something or other—his modesty most
of all. Just because he buttoned his shirts up to the top and sometimes liked it dark in the bedroom. . . .
Her dig was especially disturbing now, at a time when anything sexual seemed obscene.
“You know better than that. I just thought that maybe she would rather not be looked at.”
The older woman smiled thinly. “She doesn't seem to care.” Derval peered around the girl to discover
matching sets of what seemed to be claw marks on the girl's buttocks. She applied the foaming antiseptic
to these as Ailesh stood stone-still, hands clenched in hard fists at her sides.
She certainly was stoical. John mouthed the word “ouch” on her behalf, and saw brown eyes slide to
him doubtfully. “Of course, she may not have recognized you as a man,” Derval added.
“Ouch for me too,” he mumbled. Cruel as the smile of an excise man. (That was an expression Derval
herself had taught him.)
“What's that, eh? No need for insults.” John remembered to take his finger out of his mouth.
“I only meant she's still in shock.” Derval excused herself, but she was angry at him now, in a totally
unfair, impersonal way. Because he was a man.
John sighed. He turned and paced through his still-sunlit front room. The rectangles of light spattered
his trousers as he moved. He turned off the power to his stereo amplifier.
He felt superfluous, unnecessary. Derval seemed to have taken over. So he said something he thought
might be helpful, but deferred to her for the sake of peace. “Shouldn't I call a hospital to come get her?”
he asked.
Derval didn't stop to wonder that the responsibility for this decision had been laid in her lap. She
answered decisively, “You should not. They would only call the gardai.”
John flung himself onto his couch, which, being on wheels, slid back into the wall, banged against it,
shaking everything. A cobweb and its contents were rudely dumped onto the sofa. A big spider danced
toward a crack between the cushions. Save me, Mammy, save me, save me, he thought
compassionately, watching it run. “And why shouldn't they call the gardai, eh?” he said aloud. “Someone
did this to her—unless she's limber enough to bite her own bosom.” (He almost said “tits,” but caught his
tongue.) “And that someone deserves to find themself between four walls.”
Derval, though tempted, let his grammatical solecism pass. Holding the girl by one wrist, she turned
toward John. “Fine. For him, whoever—husband, father, or worse—he may be. But what about little
Ailesh here? She says that's her name, by the by. She's been raped and nearly killed, John dear.” John
winced. “Didn't your demure little Newfie brain pick up on that?”
John looked fixedly at the dead fireplace. What a bitch she was. And she had the nerve to think he'd
have called her after being turned down twice in a week. Well, perhaps he would have, he thought,
feeling lower than ever. “Yes. It did. I did. Isn't that a matter for the police?”
He saw Derval's rage building and regretted having spoken. Hurriedly he said, “All right, what do I
know about it? It's not my country, after all, and I have no great desire to explain this girl's—”
“Ailesh. She has a name, you know.”
“Ailesh's presence in my house, stark naked and bloody and without a word of English.
“And that reminds me, Derval. I didn't know there was a native left in Ireland that couldn't speak
English.”
“There isn't,” she answered shortly.
“There's her,” stated John, as Ailesh picked up the white sheet John had left lying, wrapped it around
herself, and settled sighing down on the floor. He was impressed to see she could crouch on her pretty
haunches with her feet flat on the boards. It reminded him of his grandfather, and of other native
Americans he had met at the fishing stations: Inuit, Micmacs. They sat crouched on flat feet too. But this
girl's broad, speading feet, while quite handsome in shape, didn't look like they would even fit into shoes.
Derval shook her head and said nothing.
Outside, the iron balustrade rang like a dull bell, and one hoof pawed the concrete walkway
impatiently. Derval had for once forgotten about her horse, and the horse didn't like it. John's mood lifted
a little, for he sometimes felt he was a second-rate competitor with Tinker for Derval's attention.
The dark-haired woman turned her head to the window and stood staring out at her impatient beast.
“It's a really good reconstruction of Old Irish she's. . .” She didn't finish the sentence.
John cast a glance from Derval to the sheet-muffled girl across the room, only to find two round
brown eyes meeting his, incomprehensible as the eyes of a bird. He avoided them with difficulty. “Not
modern Irish, eh? Well, I'm glad to hear it. After six months of lessons I had hoped I could understand
something.”
Derval hadn't moved, nor did she seem to notice that big gray Tinker had pulled two of the rusted
balustrade posts out of their concrete anchors. Her face was averted from John, but repeated in the glass
of the window. “Really good,” she said tonelessly. “And she's told me just now that she's escaped a slua
of Danes.”
“Danes?” John echoed helplessly. “What Danes? She doesn't mean me, does she? I'm not a Dane;
I'm a Jack-a-tar from—”
“No, Johnnie-Joe, not you.” Derval laughed sadly. “Not unless you've just taken up plundering,
burning, and slave-taking.” She turned around and smiled at him, her tongue thrust firmly into her cheek.
“Ramlatch. Pure ramlatch!” John replied.
Chapter Two
摘要：

R.A.MacAvoyTheBookofKells(V2.0-20020527)Iwouldliketogiverecognitionandthankstothefollowingpeoplewithoutwhomthisworkwouldhavebeenimpossible:ToDr.JamesDuranofOakland,California,forGaelicandGaelicusageandtheloanofmanygoodbooks;toDr.DanMeliaoftheUniversityofCaliforniaatBerkeleyforhelponMedievalGaelicand...

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