Only the Stones Survive: A Novel (20 page)

“The one that lies behind what you believe is the real world. Every drop of water and grain of sand here casts a shadow there. What appears solid here is not solid there. Druids recognize this; we acknowledge no hard edges and permanent boundaries. All things are one, and occasionally we can glimpse the connections.”

Sakkar’s forehead folded into deep ridges. “I don’t understand that at all.”

“If you did, you would be a druid.”

“What about Ír, then? He had no boundaries.”

“My beautiful brother?” Amergin’s smile was nostalgic. “Ír stood up and walked sooner than the rest of us did; he talked sooner too, and he could do anything the first time he tried. If Donn had not been the firstborn, I think the clan would have made Ír chief by acclaim when Mílesios died.

“But about the time his beard started to grow, our mother had noticed that Ír was having trouble. He did not always think clearly and was easily confused. His mind was like a grasshopper; he did not seem able to control the direction it took. Ír was not a druid, all agreed on that, yet he sometimes saw things which were not there and talked to invisible beings. Mílesios shouted at him, but that only made it worse.

“When people outside our family began to comment on Ír’s behavior, Scotta consulted the druid healers. A whole string of them examined my poor brother and employed treatments they swore would cure him. They didn’t. The sacrificers demanded calves to use in exhorting the spirits to correct his infirmity. We gave up some of our best animals, and still Ír did not improve.

“At a loss for any other answer, Scotta finally decided that Ír had an excess of potency which he had inherited from his father. Sexual heat was scrambling the young man’s brains, she declared. Mílesios agreed; the diagnosis flattered him. To ease the problem, he asked a Gaelician clan chief for any woman of marriageable age who would accept his son. For Ír’s sake, the Míl would even settle for a token dowry.

“When the bride was brought to us, we were pleasantly surprised. She had all of her teeth and seemed willing to overlook Ír’s nonsense; I suppose she thought it was a small price to pay for marrying into the dominant clan of the Gael. The children she bore to my brother in swift succession were as handsome as he was. But bedding a woman was not the cure; as time passed, Ír’s thoughts and actions became ever more bizarre. Then, as you saw for yourself, after Scotta was killed he never made sense again.”

“Perhaps he was born mad.”

Amergin considered Sakkar’s suggestion. “Perhaps,” he said thoughtfully, “we are all born mad. Only some of us grow out of it.”

Neither Éremón nor Éber Finn thought himself mad, yet their moods were increasingly unpredictable. They quarreled for the slightest reason or none at all, and their irritability infected their followers. The Mílesian camp split into two distinct communities around separate campfires. Unfounded accusations were made, heartily denied, and passionately defended. Men who had been lifelong friends stopped speaking to one another, and their wives became bitter enemies.

More than once, Amergin was summoned to separate two women who were rolling on the ground, pulling hair, and trying to claw out each other’s eyes.

Frequently, Clarsah’s music sounded discordant, as if her strings were tarnished.

Amergin tried talking to his brothers separately in an attempt to root out the poison. It was about land, of course; quarrels were always about land or cattle or women, but this was more vehement than most.

Of the surviving Mílesians, the bard was the only one who had enough authority to resolve it.

When Amergin was a child, he had tried to separate fighting puppies and been bitten not only by the puppies but by their mother. Her fangs had inflicted a much more painful wound than the youngsters’ milk teeth.

It was one of the many lessons from which a druid could learn.

Scotta, who would have had strong opinions and perhaps been willing to fight for one son over the other, was gone now. It remained for Amergin to do all he could to restore amity to the clan.

He waited with druidic patience until a balmy evening when the air smelled like leaf-spring. He had spent the day on the hill, which he now thought of as Taya’s, although to him it seemed that Shinann was everywhere there. He never saw the Danann girl and was unable to find out anything about her, but there were places where he felt her presence strongly. On the Hill of Tara it was the most intense—which did not surprise him.

Silent except for the omnipresent voice of the wind, invisible except for whatever occupied the standing stone, Tara was occupied by an elemental force. Amergin could feel it. Time, which had little importance on Ierne anyway, was suspended on the hill. An afternoon could pass in the blink of an eye. Or take half a lifetime.

Tara.

Before he climbed the hill, Amergin had removed his soft leather boots. Gazing out from the crown of the ridge, he had tried to envision the whole island. None of his people had explored its limits yet or even knew its shape. Ierne was a mystery shrouded in mist. Yet as he stood on Tara, Amergin
knew.

He returned to the Mílesian encampment—now split into two parts—and waited until the day’s principle meal was over. When men’s bellies were too full for fighting and their eyelids began to droop, he summoned his brothers to a quiet meeting between the three of them.

“This island will be shared,” Amergin declared with a traditional authority that even his brothers could not question. The official pronouncements of bards were sacrosanct. Their capacious memories contained the complete genealogies of the tribes; without them, there could be no inheritance.

“Ierne will be occupied in equal portions,” Amergin continued, “by the followers of Éremón and those of Éber Finn. Éremón will take the north and east, since he has already claimed the Danann hill as a gift for his wife. Éber Finn will have the south and west, with a gentler climate for his wives.”

The two brothers exchanged glances. At first, each thought he had received the better deal and felt triumphant.

But Éremón was thinking faster. “I claim the bard to come with me as ranking druid,” he said before his brother could have the same idea. Amergin was not Éremón’s favorite person at the moment, but it was a way of adding more prestige to his holdings.

Although Amergin would have preferred to go with Éber Finn, he agreed. Éremón was the more difficult of the two, and it was necessary to pacify him if possible.

Besides, Tara was the last place where Amergin had seen Shinann.

On the following day, the Mílesians began to make permanent plans. There was great excitement throughout the entire tribe of the Gael at the prospect of having land allotted and acquiring individual clan holdings.

Éber Finn’s followers would have the most distance to travel, so they asked for a larger share of the communal food supply to take with them. They also wanted the few cattle and sheep who had survived the Green Wave. “In my territory, we’ll have better grazing for livestock,” Éber Finn stressed.

Éremón refused outright. “My people need those animals more than yours do. It may be colder in the north; we will need adequate hides and plenty of warm wool and…”

For once, Sakkar could not help himself. “This is only an island,” he interrupted. “Surely you can trade with each other for whatever you need.”

The two brothers responded with a single voice. “I won’t do any trade with him!”

Under his breath, Amergin said, “I warned you, Sakkar.”

The negotiations took an unconscionable time. From the beginning, every single detail, no matter how trivial, was dragged out and argued over. When Amergin could bear it no longer, he took Clarsah and went off by himself for a while.

Sakkar soon followed him. He found the bard sitting under a tree, frowning down at the strings of the harp. “Will Éremón and Éber Finn be able to work things out between them?” Sakkar asked.

Amergin sighed and put Clarsah back into her case. “You said it yourself, Sakkar; this is an island. My brothers know they both have to live on it. I only hope they are intelligent enough to realize they must cooperate sooner or later.”

Sakkar sat down beside the bard, stood up to remove a troublesome pebble from the ground, and sat down again. Stretched out his legs. Scratched his itchy jaw. He had decided to let his beard grow out again—or shave it off. He was not certain which.

“Your brothers may be intelligent,” he said, “but there is no doubt about their being obstinate. In the land I come from, obstinate men hold onto their views until war breaks out or their children’s grandchildren die of old age. This island may not be big enough for Éremón and Éber Finn, but at least there is plenty of timber here. We could build more boats, Amergin.”

“And sail where? We were exceedingly fortunate to arrive here alive and make landfall. Besides, who would build the boats? I don’t like to say this, but you are not a young man, and time is not on your side.”

Sakkar shrugged both of his shoulders. “Time is different here.”

Amergin raised an eyebrow. “You’ve noticed that too? Sometimes you surprise me, Sakkar. You may be right about time being different here, but I don’t know how we can use it to our advantage. The best thing for you and me, my friend, is to shape the lives we have left so they are worth the effort we made to come here.”

My friend. Sakkar felt a quiet glow inside. The bard calls me his friend. Whatever happens, my life will have been worth the effort.

The two men continued to sit beneath the tree with Clarsah in her case propped between them. There was no more conversation, only a companionable silence, until the petulant tug of necessity dragged them to their feet and back to the Gaelic encampment.

The shape that future lives would take was very much in question. The division of the island would prove to be less troublesome than dealing with divided loyalties. Hard choices had to be made not only by the Mílesians but also by the Gaelician clan chiefs, because neither Éremón nor Éber Finn possessed their total loyalty. Every chieftain had to weigh the potential advantages—or disadvantages—of going with one brother or the other. A man must peer into the murky future and try to guess what it held for him and his clan.

In the privacy of their blankets on the damp ground, intense discussions took place between husbands and wives. The women of the Gael did not always agree with their menfolk. Under brehon law, they had rights of their own. More than one chieftain set out in the morning to assure Éremón that he stood with him, only to return later to report a change of mind. Éber Finn had the women’s vote.

Within the family of Mílesios it was agreed—after a lot of arguing—that the widow and children of Ír would go with Éremón. The remainder of Donn’s family would accompany Éber Finn. But that was only the beginning.

Over a period of several days, the entire tribe of the Gael—including children, grandchildren, cousins, adherents of nominal kinship and freemen—had to be similarly apportioned. Amergin’s presence was required again and again to persuade someone of the necessity of agreement.

Sometimes he succeeded. Sometimes not.

Inevitably, the perceived self interest of every individual was involved. Those who accepted Éremón as leader of the tribe were determined to stay with him because they believed he would be more prosperous and his wealth would benefit them.

Those who doubted Éremón’s self-proclaimed right to rule wanted to follow Éber Finn not only because they preferred him personally but also because they wanted to protest his brother’s usurpation of power.

In some families, there were quarrels that would not be forgiven for generations. If ever. The Gael knew how to carry a grudge.

Éremón and Éber Finn also had to agree on the distribution of communal property and of the livestock, except for their own horses. The brothers quarreled over each individual cow and sheep. Every cracked water jar and sickly hound puppy became an item of inestimable value whose acquisition was imperative for both sides. Insults were hurled and fists were shaken, but there was no actual fighting between them.

The most important question already had been decided.

While irrevocable choices were being made, Sakkar considered his own fate.
My friend.
That relationship must be weighed against all the others.

At the end of a long, fraught day, when the livestock finally had been separated, Sakkar sought out the bard. He found him sitting on the wrong side of a cooking fire, oblivious to the smoke blowing into his eyes. Sakkar startled Amergin out of his reverie by saying, “You’re downwind here, why don’t we go around to the other side?”

“A friend who looks after me,” the bard said. “I’m a lucky man.”

As they waited for the deer roasting on the spit, Sakkar remarked, “Everything seems different now, doesn’t it? Even the people. I miss the way Éremón used to laugh at himself; he doesn’t do that anymore.”

“He doesn’t laugh at much of anything now,” Amergin agreed. “Éber Finn has become the sunnier man. It happens that way sometimes; the gentlest calf in a herd can develop into a nasty-tempered bull.”

Sakkar said, “I’ve been giving a lot of thought to what you said about shaping our lives. If I only had myself to consider, I think I would rather follow Éber Finn. But you and Soorgeh will be with Éremón, and Soorgeh has a red-haired daughter called Sive…”

Amergin smiled. “You have come a long way, little shipwright.”

“I have; a very long way. From Tyre on the Middle Sea to Ierne on the edge of the world. Now I want to build a family. My own family!” Sakkar abruptly flung his two arms wide.

Amergin had never liked Sakkar as much as he did in that moment, when the essence of the Celtic spirit shone from a swarthy little man born on a very different shore.

“You have my blessing,” the bard told him. “Build yourself a stronghold and sire a lot of children on that handsome big daughter of Soorgeh’s.”

“I intend to,” Sakkar replied, deciding in that moment to let his beard grow. “We will need many children if we want to people this island with Gaels.”