Faery Tale (32 page)

“I have a curse, I think, involving mountains that are supposed to have spectacular views,” I grumbled, thinking of my windy, cold, wet trip up Snaefell on the Isle of Man. “Sure would be nice to have a view . . .” I hinted to the rocks and pools around me.

“Well,” KP said, “maybe the faeries are trying to tell you something.”

“What? Like I should have kept my day job?”

“No, maybe they're saying that you should stop looking outside, and try . . . looking within.”

“Could it be,” I gasped, in mock awe, “that the faery within is the faery that I've been looking for?!”

“I'm serious,” she said. “You've been getting so frustrated with things not ‘happening.' Maybe things
are
happening.You just don't know it yet.”

“Okay. So you think I just need to chillax?”

“Yes.”

Maybe Kirsten had a point. Maybe, like the tall stranger in the field on Man had said, I just needed to enjoy it.

At the top of the mountain, which we reached at long last, the wind whipped, and we tossed our packs down to zip into some more layers. We'd been planning lunch on the summit but it was too damn cold, so we just walked around. I picked up a few red rocks. “These are cool,” I mumbled, stuffing them in my pocket. Then I caught myself, and thought, a conciliatory gesture,
I hope it's okay if I take these?
There was a strange stone structure dug into the top of the summit—definitely a ruin of sorts, but it almost reminded me of some of the burial tombs I'd seen photos of in Devon. A portal tomb, was that what it was called? It looked like it led down into the ground, but it was now covered in earth. Could it have been a monastic cell? Even the pagans probably weren't crazy enough to live up here.

It was then that I realized the entire time I'd been hiking, I'd been seeing them in my mind. Lines and lines of people, trekking up the hill, their feet coming before mine on the ancient stones. I could see their faces. They looked like Celts. Up and up, but only in certain times of the year. Something whispered,
This was a special place, a place of pilgrimage, just as it is now, in Christian times.
But was it really? Or had I let my imagination get carried away?

We stopped to eat on the leeward side of the mountain, then climbed back down the slippery wet rock in the mist. At the bottom awaited dinner and a pint, and another night of sleeping underneath the stars.

Months later, in South Carolina, I wrote a letter to my new friend and partner in historical mystery, Peter Guy.

What I stumbled upon was my own etymology-based theory. In antiquity, it became custom for those who didn't know any better to refer to any pre-Christian Celts simply as Druids. As more people converted to Christianity, the term
Druid
was demoted further, to the title of “bard.” (From that point on in Christian texts, we find examples of bards who are in actuality Druids, making this a proven fact.)

Of course in Celtic society, the word
Druid
actually denoted a particular and specific high-level position (that of teacher, judge, peacekeeper, etc.), yet in Christian records, monks refused to give any credence to the societal distinction.
Druid
came to represent the entire pagan Celtic population and their beliefs. A thread of this Christian propaganda still lives today: there is still a common misunderstanding that Druids were a cultural people.

A harp player was called a Cruitier. A bard was a traveling poet or musician. In many cases, these “bards” were actually Druids, on the run to avoid further persecution. Fighting to keep their sacred culture alive, they traveled among pagan communities recounting oral history, in many cases posing as simple poets or musicians to avoid death. It was during this time, perhaps, that the terms became somewhat interchangeable. If we can accept that, Harp Lake was likely to have been, in essence, a pagan holy lake that was strongly connected to the “Druids.” Lake of the Bards, or Lake of the Druids. After all, what did you look for when looking for an ancient pagan site? You looked for its strongest established Christian church. Or in this case, an entire mountain named after a Christian saint. History would tell us that if this was the case, the mountain must have held a very real cultural or religious significance to the ancient Celts.

We need look no further than written history to find evidence of this blurring of the lines between bards, pagan Celts, and Druids. In 1283, Edward I ordered the massacre of hundreds of “bards and harpists in Wales, Scotland, and Ireland.” Edward was a Christian crusader and was also responsible for expelling the Jews from England seven years later. So, as late as the thirteenth century, a high king of England was ordering the massacre of a group of musicians? It seems certain that in these areas, the Druids still held the loyalty of the local populace—a power that a king found threatening enough to want to exterminate. A contemporary historian, Adam Ardrey, contests that the countryside functioned as strongholds for the pagan religion, and the carriers of its oral history, the Druids, for several hundred years after AD 500. Essentially, Edward I was rooting out the pagans.

This was a topic that Peter and I would debate. But in my opinion, KP and I were sleeping at the foot of a 300-million-year-old mountain that had most likely been worshipped by the ancient Celts. I wish I'd known that at the time. It would have made being there so much more poignant, and so much less . . . frustrating. And perhaps I would've further explored my vision of the lines of ancient people. It was just one more part of my experience that was validated when someone or
something
deemed the time was right.

Even though we were physically and metaphorically in the dark, it
was
magical. Outside the tent the stars were bright, and I was aware of how amazing it felt to have all that beauty hovering up there, directly over our heads. I let out a soft sigh and tried to adjust my bumpy “pillow.”

“Signe?” Kirsten whispered.

“Yes?” I whispered back.

“Do you think we appreciate Dad more now, now that he's dead?”

I thought for a moment. “Yes. I think it's a very hard thing, sometimes, to appreciate people while they're here. Especially, for some reason, family.”

We were quiet for several breaths, both locked in memory.

“Kirsten?”

“Yes?”

“Do you ever . . . sense him?”

“No. Well, I mean, just in the same way I did when he was alive. When I was doing something outdoorsy and cool, I would always think, ‘Dad would totally love this.' It's just that
now
I can't tell him about it. But I guess I take a lot of comfort in one thing.”

“What's that?”

“Well, there's half of Dad in you, and there's half of Dad in me. So when we're together, we make one whole Dad.”

Tears sprang to my eyes, and for a moment the lump in my throat kept me from saying anything at all.Taking my silence as non-agreement, she whispered it out for me, in typical KP logic. “You know . . . Dad is fifty percent of the genetic material that created me. So technically, he is half of me, therefore, if I am hiking, then he is there, enjoying the hike.”

I bit the edge of my lip to keep from laughing. She had actually just used an “if/then” statement. Leave it to my sister to describe her philosophy of our father's presence using conditional predicate logic.

“You know, in a literal sense,” she continued in a low voice, “because your children technically
are
you. So . . . maybe I feel him. But maybe it's just me, so . . .”

“No, I get it, I get it!” I laughed.

“Kirsten,” I said after a long moment.

“Yes?”

“Can I ask you another question?”

“Mmm?”

“Why are we whispering?”

She paused a moment, then whispered, “Uh . . . I don't know.”

It was one of those moments, like you have in sleepovers when you're little, where one person starts laughing and soon no one can stop. The tent exploded with our laughter, which grew into irrepressible cackling. We laughed until we cried, until our stomachs cramped, futilely trying to muffle ourselves in our slightly damp, irregular pillows.

 

More than a hundred years ago Yeats wrote, “In Ireland there is something of timid affection between men and spirits. They only ill-treat each other in reason. Each admits the other side to have feelings. There are points beyond which neither will go . . .” As I traveled Ireland it seemed this mode of thinking, this close relationship between man and spirit, was a thing long forgotten in the collective consciousness. I was following such a cold trail in trying to find people who still viewed the world in this way—as sentient, and reached out to it with a spirit of collaboration, a spirit of respect.

One hundred years' time and a girl comes to pick the threads. If only I could have plucked one thread that could take me back to the source. I guess that was the saddest thing about Ireland. It was such a beautiful, paradoxical country where faith in God coexisted with a belief in faeries. Each was a part of the other. And there was suffering then, terrible suffering. Poverty that would rip your guts out it was so pervasive, so unjust. But they had something then. They had their beliefs, and they had their stories. They could have one loaf of bread to their whole family, and they would still leave a few crumbs for the Sidhe; they would still leave a few crumbs for the good people. An old peasant woman in Yeats's time said, “The faeries are always looking out for the poor.” And who's to say they weren't, in whatever way they could?

Perhaps there was an exchange there, a kindness, in thanks for being recognized and remembered. Perhaps then, if they had a chicken, it would give a few more eggs every once in a while, but it was those extra eggs that gave enough to keep the family fed. Perhaps if they had a cow, it gave sweeter milk. We don't yet know, and may never yet know, the ways in which their world reaches out to us. But I had begun to see it. I had begun to understand that when the worlds intertwined, the faeries' touch was subtle. And in that subtlety we always have the right to choose. We can choose to believe or not to believe. I only knew that the stories of fear and dread and violence that made up our folklore hadn't shown themselves to me. Instead, I found that the more I was willing to walk toward belief, the stronger my own intuition got, and the more gifts and kindnesses I received, even if it was only because I was now more aware, faeries or no.

But thinking back over my path, thinking back to where it had led me in that very moment, sitting in Shannon Airport, waiting to board a plane, I knew that my journey since undertaking this book had been nothing short of miraculous. In carefully picking up my own thread in the faery story, I saw that there had been signs all along.

They were silly little things. The ease with which I met my book agent, how quickly the project sold, Eric and I finding the one little house in our suburban neighborhood with a wild, almost mystical backyard—at a price we could afford! All of the incredible people I'd met who had accompanied me on a piece of my journey so far, each one contributing something to my search for the meaning under everything, each one of them magical in their own way. This was the enchantment I'd found in following my own faery path, whatever that meant. And I couldn't help but wonder what the people of Ireland were losing in leaving theirs behind. I'd quizzed shopkeepers, bartenders, patrons. Children, mothers, bus drivers. I'd spoken to more than a hundred people in passing through Ireland asking them all the same thing:
Do you believe in faeries?
The answer had been no.

In Ireland, the storytellers cling to the dusty fabric of the old days even as the new generations absentmindedly sweep everything under a new three-thousand-euro rug. They don't wonder what will happen to their culture when there is no one left to tell its stories. They don't wonder what will happen to Eddie's treasure—his trove of tapes—when he is no longer alive to protect them. Would they forget altogether? There were struggles in the newspapers between believers and local government, when they wanted to chop down sacred faery trees to build the new highway to Shannon Airport. But the new generation beats back the magical mist from their shores with every “I don't believe” that's uttered from their lips.

I envied them their enchantment even as I watched them ignore it. I had heard it stirring in the untamed echoes of a night's entertainment, in the haunting whistle and frenzied bowing of an evening's music session. In hearing and in dancing, it was enough to make me wild with it. To be Irish, with that ancient Celtic drumbeat thrumming through your veins, thousands of years of connection within you, between you and the land, the land and its spirits. I felt a pulse buried beneath it all, and it gave me hope. The Shining Ones have slumbered for hundreds of years, relegated to a forgotten corner in the country's collective nursery, but perhaps there was still a chance that once again people would stir them, reigniting the mysticism of ages past.