Twice Upon A Time (The Celtic Legends Series) (17 page)

Never once had he seen her cry so openly, not even all those months ago outside of Morna, when the babe was lost. He had admired her strength and thought no more of it, for too many other issues
had flooded his thoughts. Yet here she sat, keening wildly, her spirit as battered as the broken swan.

You’re like the swan,
Conor. You don’t belong here.

The words floated back to him
on memory. Nay, it was Brigid, not him, who didn’t belong on this island. It was Brigid whose neck could more easily be broken. He eased his way along the ledge to join her, and then stopped as he glimpsed something in her arms. Gray feathers peeped out between the edges of her cloak.

It
was a single cygnet, lifeless in her arms.

He felt a wrenching weak
ness 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, h
e had thought he had known the face of pain.

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 quie
t 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.”

“Th
en 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 wa
tched 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 wa
s 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 eveni
ng, 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 no
ticed 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 lik
e that could take a lifetime.”

She thought of the cool silence of the Morna woods, of the way the leaves turned from the tran
slucent 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.