Twice Upon A Time (The Celtic Legends Series) (18 page)

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 f
rom 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 s
he 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.”

“W
ould 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 room. 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.

His arms tightened around her. The words
rumbled, ripped from his heart. “Don’t go, Brigid.”

Tears surged in her eyes
. She would not shed them. She would not leave as her final memory a moment full of sorrow.

The days past began to unfurl in her mind, tumbling one upon the other, like pebbles rolling
down a hill. She turned her face towards the sea. “Do you remember,” she asked, softly, “the day you brought back that great length of blue linen for me from the mainland? You worked so hard bringing it up to the fort with it draped over your shoulder. . . and when you reached the top, the wind tugged it off you and unfurled it like a great sail, and sent it fluttering over the cliff.”

He did not smile. His gray gaze probed her face, as palpable as if he traced her brows, her eyes, her nose, her lips, with his fingertips, willing her to stay with him, as once he had done with the fury of his kiss.

She clutched the large metal clasp on her cloak, then traced the amber jewels, the swirling goldsmith’s work she had always worn near her heart—Conor’s first gift to her.

“No
woman has ever been so well loved as I.”

Fear
flashed in his eyes. Fear, in a warrior’s eyes.

He said, “There will be no other
.”

She tried to shake her head, but languor stole over her. I
n any case, it was useless to argue when he had such a voice upon him. He’d learned patience in the unrolling of time, but in this angry rumble was a shadow of the warrior-king, of the man who’d taken what he wanted and never known what it was to be thwarted.

Then, all of a sudden, something else stole over
her. She did not know if it were the last gasp of the Sight, or some quivering sprig of hope born of her dying senses, but for a swift, lingering moment, it seemed as if she were young again, as if the wind blew back her long mane of thick hair, as if her heart beat hard and fast in her chest as she filled her lungs with fresh sea air, and she felt Conor near to her, and happy.

She opened her eyes and the feeling stayed with her, like
an updraft under a swan’s wings. In the midst of the glory, a voice came to her, and she knew not whether it was memory, or some music from beyond the thinning veils of the worlds. It was her mother’s voice—och, that sweet long-forgotten lilt—and the words wafted to her, murmurings of the ways of this world and the other, lessons on the wanderings of souls, how dying was but a transition to another body, another life . . . for though our bodies were mortal, our souls were immortal.

Even the priests believed that.

Her heart beat faster. Blood rushed to her face. How she’d forgotten the ways of the Druids with the passing of the years. The words rose to her throat—she’d tell Conor, surely they’d be together again, surely he’d find her again—but then she hesitated, unwilling to burden him with hope.

Then it was too late
. Her strength drained to the dregs. The salt-sea smell of Conor’s cloak filled her head. She heard the sharp cry of a raven.

She spoke, once,
Conor’s name.

A
nd she saw above, against the blinding sky, a cormorant soaring, its black wings spread. Wheeling, rising . . . wheeling, rising . . ..

Her passing would be honored like that of a king.

Conor
threw upon the pyre everything within Dún Conor: Spindles, baskets, the bolt of fine blue linen, the bed they’d shared and all its coverings, pails and baskets, and even the loom he’d carved from wood boated over from the mainland. When that was done, he yanked the thatching off the roof with his bare hands until blood stained the hay. That, too, joined the pyre.

He carried up the cliff
the curragh he’d built for her and settled it upon the mound. He climbed up the pyre with her cradled in his arms, and placed her form within it. He covered her with a woolen cloak and tucked it around the edges.

Gazing upon her face, he thought: May the Christians be right. Let there be peace in death, which we have not in this life.

When the sun set, he touched his lips to hers. Then he climbed down the wreckage of his life, and set the pyre afire.

The flames hesitated, then caught, then caught some more, and then blazed with a violent leap to the sky, shooting sparks at the stars. His throat tightened, for the keening came next, the lamentation, the singing of great deeds, but his ears rang with an inner screeching that could not penetrate the dry walls of his throat. Her greatest deed was staying with the man whose folly h
ad caused her so much anguish. Her bravest deed was in surviving so long pretending a joy which could never have touched her broken heart. He watched the flames devour the pyre, basking in the last heat he’d ever feel from his wife.

In the orange glow, he worked his way down the side of the cliff to where his curragh waited in the lee of a boulder. The bla
ze of the fire filled the night and the crackling drowned out the sound of the sea and wind. Let the priests on the north island think it a pagan rite. It would make Brigid laugh to think she’d confounded them to the end.

Conor
stood with one foot in the curragh, and the other on the sands of Inishmaan, his head tilted to the pyre, with the heat of tears running down his throat.

Forgive me, my heart.

There would never be another who would know who he was and understand. There would never be another heart so open, so brave, and so full.

Within him, something cracked.

Good night, my love.

Good night.

France, 1249 A.D.

It was time for the Fair of St. Jean.

Dust billowed up from the roads that
threaded through the rolling domain of the Count of Champagne. Merchant caravans from all over Europe—and even from the distant East—plodded through the forests with archers and pikes men guarding their flanks. Couriers on swift horses beat tracks into the earth, galloping past castles and monasteries and tilled fields, past carts mired in muddy pools, stopping only to pay tolls on privately held roads and river crossings before racing to one common destination.

Every morning the enormous gates of the city of Troyes yawned open, welcoming all the riches of the world within the safety of the limestone walls.

Conor plodded silently amid the lumbering caravans. A haze of dust salted his hair and settled deep into the creases of his face. The merchants welcomed him among the donkeys and the carts and the well-mounted men of their guard. It was rumored that this skilled doctor had followed the caravans from as far as the Holy Land, healing broken bones and foot sores, making a living of a sort as he followed the annual summer migration toward Troyes. Though he spoke little, ate even less, and asked for no more than safe passage among them, behind their silk-covered carts, the merchants wondered what a man of medicine with the bearing of a king and the silence of a monk was doing walking the roads of France, when the weight of his pouch and the fine cloth of his surcoat marked him a man of means.

Their curiosity went unanswered, for whenever they edged a conversation toward his past, he would gaze at them with eyes as flat as worn silver coins.

He was a mystery to them, a mystery to men who had voyaged from the sheep-dotted shores of Britain to the glittering Eastern palaces of infidels. Nothing seemed to affect him, not the frigid cold of the Alpine passes, not the sharp pebbles that penetrated the soles of his boots and left him, at one time, smearing bloody footprints along the dusty earth. He refused all offers of donkeys or horses, accepting only coin in payment for his services, continuing to walk like a pilgrim or a beggar. As the merchants neared Troyes, they celebrated and sang and danced, relieved that brigands had not stolen their shimmering silks, their precious pepper and spices, their wagonloads of rich wool cloth; had not struck them through with crude knives and left them bleeding on a road so far from their homes and families—yet their mysterious companion continued to plod along, straight-backed and mute; his feet in this world, his mind lost in another.

Conor
knew what they were thinking. He felt their sharp, curious gazes, but they affected him no more than the buzzing of flies in the hot July sun. Seven hundred years of wandering had a way of dulling a man’s senses.

Yet one singular impression had broken through his thoughtless trudging in the past hours of the journey: The sticky sweet fragrance of ripening grapes had ceded to the gritty stench of smoke, the pungent aroma of tanne
ries, and the acrid odor of human sweat and urine—the signposts of a large city: Troyes in the height of summer after a rain. Like a lazy summer bee who’d wandered too far afield, Conor set his sights upon his next resting place.

He jostled his way through the throng
funneling through the double-leafed iron gate. For the first time in a dozen leagues, he lifted his head from his dirty boots to glance at the city he’d not seen in several centuries. Timber post-and-beam houses still stood cheek by jowl, sagging against each other like tired old dogs. Stalls bowed in front of each house, laden with boots, belts, spoons, pots, and paternosters, surrounded by snapping burghers and garrulous housewives in white wimples. Stray dogs rasped against the pulled wool of his hose as they snarled and chased each other through the swarm.

Aye, this place will do.

Seeing the merchants distracted, Conor slipped down a shadowed street and melted into the crowd. He’d traveled with those burghers for too long. Something in the country air and the closeness of a shared fire bred a poisonous curiosity. They’d begun to ask too many probing questions, wondering too much about a past he could never divulge. There had been too great a stretch between cities.

For in a bold, brash city such as Troyes, glittering with burghers’ wealth, stinking of cheese, and stuffed to the rim with transients from all over the world, fighting and screaming and raging in the twisted alleyways—in such a raucous town, a man could live and die—and live again—and no one would know the better of it.

Moreover, no one would care.

Conor
lurched forward as someone barreled into his legs and nearly knocked his knees out from under him. Swift fingers skidded around his waist and tugged on the sacks slung around his hips. Conor seized a handful of scratchy wool just as the pickpocket wrenched to get away. He heaved the culprit to face him—only to be blasted with breath that stank of rotten fish.

He thrust the creature away. Th
e thief careened into an ass that brayed and narrowly missed kicking him senseless. Conor snorted the stench from his nostrils and stared at the dwarf splayed in the muck. The man’s eyes were small and bright with fury, his cheeks netted with ruddy veins, his beard slick with grease and speckled with a week’s worth of crumbs. He wore an ancient, food-bespattered tunic with a kirtle below, and sleeves cut from a friar’s habit.

Conor
scooped up the man’s abandoned knife. “You’d do better knocking a man out with your stench,” he said as he planted a foot on the thief’s belly, “than knocking him down with your body.”

“
Are ye nothing but a cur,” the pickpocket said as his eyes widened on the knife in Conor’s hand, “to strike at a man in the dirt like a dog.”

Conor
’s gut wrenched like the shock of first food after a five-day fast. The man had a lilt—an
Irish
lilt. He’d abandoned the land six hundred years ago. Yet there was no mistaking the distinctive brogue which garbled this man’s French. The sound vibrated through Conor’s head and echoed down through the centuries, rifling memories as a gale would scour the smooth surface of a lake—and sending ripples through waters best left untouched.

“And what are you
doing, beating on a poor old man like me?” The thief eyed the gathering crowd. “Fie on ye, stranger. Have you no Christian charity? I was walking about, minding my own affairs when you yanked me around.” He surged up against Conor’s boot, playing for the crowd. “I’m innocent, I am, or may the Good Lord drown me where I lay—”

“Innocent as Lucifer.”
Conor kicked at the leather sack lying clutched in the pickpocket’s hand and Conor’s own sandglass tumbled out. “You’re as bad at thieving as you are at lying.”

“God’s Nails!”
The Irishman frowned at the sandglass. “Devil a ha’penny is there in this.”

“
That’s your bad luck.” Conor tucked the knife in his belt and clanked the alms bag hung beside it. “For if you’d stolen this other sack, what a thundering spree you’d have had this night in Troyes.”

The thief squinted up at him, a twinkle of speculation lighting
his eye. “Is that a wee bit of the Irish I’m hearing coming out of your mouth?”

With an angry swipe,
Conor seized his bag. He’d learned French several centuries ago, but he had not been here long enough to pick it up without the hint of his original accent.

“Saints preserve me!
You
are
Irish.” The thief revealed a mouth gated with blackened teeth. “If I’d known that, sirrah, I wouldn’t have marked you. It’s a rare thing to be meeting an Irishman so far from home. Myself, I’m a Galway man.”

“Save your jabbering.”
Conor knotted his bag around his waist. “All the Irish in you won’t save you from an afternoon on the pillory.”

“The pillory?”
The thief planted his dirty fists on his hips. “Begob, we’re brothers, we
are—”

“I have no brother.” 
Or kin, or countrymen, not in this world. He curled his hand into the scruff of the thief’s tunic and hauled him away from the amused spectators. “And I have no liking for thieves.”

“
By the rood, ‘twas naught but a slip of my fingers—aye, aye,” the thief growled, catching the glare of Conor’s eye, “I see I can’t fool you, but you haven’t lost a Provins’ penny. You’ll be moving on, but if you put me on the pillory, I’ll be stinking until All Souls’ Day.”

“
That will be an improvement.”

“I’ll have ye know that I’m worth more than my weight in gold to the man who k
nows how to appreciate me.”

Conor
paused in the street and searched the rooftops for a glimpse of a stony spire. In front of a church he’d find a pillory, and thus be rid of the needling of this creature’s brogue.

The thief followed
his gaze. “You’re new in Troyes?”

“I’ve been here before, I have.”
In the reign of Hugh Capet.

“Then
you’ll know that the pillory’s on yonder side of the city.”

“Do you take me for a fool?”

“I know this city like I know the scars on my own hands. I know which taverns water their wine and which whores are free of the pox. I know how to rid a straw mattress of bedbugs.” He eyed the tattered blue wool of Conor’s surcoat, the pulled embroidery on the neck and hem, then the dusty, beaten leather of his boots. “Is it a doctor you said you are? You’ll need some fixing up. Your boots could do with some mending. Now I know a cobbler who’ll fix them without asking for more than a penny.”

Conor
dropped his gaze to the moldy straw twisted around the thief’s legs. “If this cobbler’s so good, then you’d best be getting some boots of your own.”

“I’ve been
working on it, you know.” The thief toed a pebble out between the cobblestones. “I’d take a bit of honest work, if there was any to be had.”

Conor
felt it then—the slightest of tugs, a thin thread of connection twisting gently around him. He’d long learned to recognize the seemingly harmless little pull, for he knew if he allowed it, even for a moment, the thread would thicken and grow and then shackle him to the creatures of this world with their short, rude, fragile existences and their endless, wracking pain.

He couldn’t
let that happen again.

Conor
let the man go and dug a coin out of his sack. “Take this and be of with you, then.”

The thief gaped at the sight of the
gleaming gold. “You won’t be putting me on the pillory?”

Conor
shook his head in impatience. The thief’s black eyes glittered on the gold in Conor’s palm, but he made no attempt to snatch the coin away. His face grew ruddy, his eyes blacker, and he sucked in his lower lip until it looked as if he had swallowed half his bristled chin.

Finally, he shook his head with a jerk. “Nay,
you can’t rid yourself of me so easily, sirrah. I’m no beggar. Octavius here can earn his own keep.”

Conor shook his head at
a name that no Irish woman had ever called a son. “Be off with you, then and find honest work.”

“Indeed, sirrah, I
already have.” The Irishman snapped his heels together with a muffled thud. “It’s my duty to see you settled right, you being an Irishman. You need someone to walk about the fair and gather your meals for a good price, and not let some blaggard steal your coins from you. You need someone to guide poor, sick souls to your side. Preferably rich ones. Do you know how many travelers arrive with festering foot sores and skin burnt scaly from the sun, how many Crusaders return from the Holy Lands with exotic ailments and—”

“Enough.”  The creature’s wretched accent needled him like long-forgotten fairy music. It was sleep he needed—the long, innocent sleep of the weary, the dreamless sleep of the innocent—wasn’t that a fine dream he’d never know. He’d have to settle for a bed and a moment’s uninterrupted rest, for his lids hung as heavy as lead.

Conor
scoured the Irishman’s face anew. “So you wish to be of service to me?”

“Aye.”

“Then lead me to an inn.”

“You
’ve no place to stay?” His beard crumpled against his chest. “Where did you think you were coming to? Every room in the city’s been reserved since Candlemas. The innkeepers are charging a king’s ransom just to sleep in the shadow of their doors.”

Conor
turned on his heel and clinked the coin back into his bag. It had been his experience that anything could be found anywhere at any time, as long as a man was willing to pay the price.

“Now don’t be walking
off, sirrah, I didn’t say I couldn’t—”

Conor
ignored the sputtering thief. Sooner or later, the Irishman would find other quarry. So Conor thrust himself into the churning mob, scrutinizing the large signs that hung from the storefronts. Just down an alleyway, he found what he wanted: a hostel with a bright red sign, painted with the silhouette of a canopied bed.

Just as he slipped down the narrow street,
Octavius belched out of the crowd and stumbled against Conor’s heels.