55. Tombs of Promises
55
TOMBS OF PROMISES
…and these images were made by means of spells and magic lore.
— ANONYMOUS FIFTEENTH-CENTURY AUTHOR, THE DINDSHENCHAS
“ C assandra! Wait!”
We were just about to pile back into the little Fiat Jonathan had hired from Galway when Rachel’s voice called across the lawn. She had promised to send us whatever translation she could come up with later that day, much to Jonathan and Robbie’s frustration. Without anything else in hand, we had left her with the parchment, locked in its box that both men assured me she would keep safer at an Order safe house than we could at the Brigantian.
She jogged over, her auburn curls bouncing on her shoulders. “Before you go, I’d like to show you something. I—” She stopped and glanced at Jonathan almost apologetically. “I think it might have something to do with your mystery. Please.”
We followed her across the lawn to an excavation site on the far side of a large mound covered in grass. A swimming-pool-sized ditch had been dug in front of what looked like an entrance only just uncovered from layers of mud. Now that the rain had stopped, several people who looked like grad students were on their knees with chisels and brushes designed to remove layers of sedimentation without damaging the treasures they might find below.
“Is this the mound Gifford found last year?” Jonathan asked.
I glanced at him curiously. The man really was informed about everything.
Rachel nodded. “The family who owns the land called Trinity. It’s been overlooked for years since it’s a bit farther from the other valley sites.” She beckoned. “Follow me. This is what they’ve asked me to consult on. Er, if you gentlemen would be so kind with your lights.”
Through the dark, I heard a few distinct murmurings by both men, and seconds later, a long passage was lit by pleasant starlight.
“Fancy,” I said.
Jonathan rolled his eyes, which glimmered from the effort of sustaining the light. “I do try to impress you. Rachel, can we make this quick?”
“Always so impatient,” she told me before heading down the passage to the end, where a flat boulder had been half-excavated from the rocky base. To its right was another blocked passage that hadn’t yet been dug out.
“Is it safe in here?” I wondered. “It won’t collapse on us?” The walls looked tenuous at best.
“It is with those two here to talk to the earth for us,” Rachel said. “But look. Just there.”
A limestone surface at least a foot taller than me formed the basis of what appeared to be some kind of altar, although the table in front of it looked more like a bowl than a sacrificial surface. All of the surfaces, ragged and dirty with age, were covered with the swirling carvings characteristic of neolithic sites, many symbols that would become the basis for Celtic cultural identity millennia later. Triple spirals covered almost everything, split here and there with jagged bolts or tooth-shaped inscriptions.
Rachel, however, was pointing to something just under a large triple spiral in the far corner—something I would have missed if I hadn’t come within six inches.
My mouth dropped. It couldn’t be. “Is that…is that Greek ?”
It didn’t look strictly like Greek. And yet, it did. In fact, it oddly resembled a few of the symbols on the parchment currently in the box under Rachel’s arm.
“Almost,” she agreed. “Linear B, as it happens.”
I stared, like the nearly illegible carving, less than the width of my fingers, might jump out at me. “No.”
“Can’t be.” Jonathan elbowed his way in front of us to look at it more carefully. “Rob, take care of the lights will you?” His eyes blazed a slightly different shade of bright green as he muttered a different spell.
“None of that, please.” Rachel grabbed his shoulder and pulled him away. “This is an active site, darling. I can’t have your spells interfering with even one speck of dust in here.”
“I only wanted to ask the age?—”
“Which is exactly what the university lab did this morning,” she replied. “And they confirmed that the other artifacts we’ve uncovered keep this tomb well within the range of the other passage tombs in the valley—most were constructed between 2900 and 3100 BC.”
“Could it…could it have been written later?” Robbie asked. “By someone who knew it, maybe?”
There were myths about the connection between ancient Greece and Ireland. Mythological histories said the Fir Bolg, one of the ancestral groups of the Irish, left Ireland and were held captive in Greece for two hundred years before they were able to return.
It was just mythology. But if the last six months had taught me anything, it was to look beneath the stories of plain folk to find the truth of our people.
“We’ve recovered tools from the Bronze and early Iron Ages, and the tomb was sealed after that,” Rachel said. “And we know there was some trade with the Etruscans beginning around the fifth century BC, well before the Romans ever visited. But nothing before that. And that would have been several hundred years after Linear B fell out of use, as we discussed.”
“The timelines don’t match.” I hovered a hand over the stone, wondering what it might tell me. Was it my imagination, or did the carvings glow as my fingers came closer? It was almost magnetic, the way they drew me.
“Cassandra, please don’t touch.” Rachel pulled me back, albeit more gently than she had with Jonathan. “It’s stone, yes, but everything in here is incredibly fragile.” Then she pointed out one particular section of the inscription. “It’s Linear B, but it’s not. Some have suggested Linear A, but it wasn’t until I saw your parchment that I realized what it was. That line there. And that little squiggle. Together, they look like the Linear B word for ‘water’— u-do . But there are things after it that look something more like Ogham, which of course developed several hundred years after anything in this tomb was left behind.”
All four of us stared at the tiny inscription with a new sense of gravity. There was a connection here—but what, we couldn’t hope to learn without understanding the language itself.
We followed Rachel out of the tomb, and the moment the weak sunlight found our faces, Jonathan swung toward her.
“Please tell me you’ll work on deciphering that message,” he said. “It’s of the utmost importance.”
Instead of answering, Rachel turned directly to me. “How many ancient groups invaded Ireland, Cassandra, according to the Lebor Gabála érenn ?”
The Book of Invasions. One of the most seminal Irish texts.
“Six,” I replied and proceeded to count them on my fingers like I was teaching my own class on early Irish literature.“The people of Cessair after the flood, followed by the people of Partholón, then the people of Nemed, the Fir Bolg, the Tuatha Dé Danann, and finally, the Milesians. It’s been suggested that at least some of these ‘invasions’ may correspond with the different waves of settlers who reached prehistoric Ireland. Waves of Celts and pre-Celtic groups that came. In the story, the first three groups fail and die. It’s not until the Tuatha Dé Danann arrive and expel the Fir Bolg that long-term settlement really begins.”
Rachel nodded. “Good. But do you remember who else they had to fight in order to take over Ireland?”
“The Fomorians.”
“Rachel, not this again?—”
“Yes, this, Jon,” she said, that dulcimer tone sharpening. “If I’m to help with her quest, she must know mine. We can’t be at odds.”
Both Jonathan and Robbie remained quiet, though Robbie looked uneasy.
She turned back to me. “The Fomóiri were a terrible race, so say the legends. ‘The undersea ones’ according to some linguists. ‘Underworld demons’ according to others. Monsters, all of them. ”
“Rachel…” Robbie tried again.
“She must know!” The siren’s explosion seemed to darken the sky itself for a split second before she turned to me. “Who do you think wrote these tales and told these stories, Cassandra? It was your people—the bards, the so-called ‘keepers of knowledge.’ But my people—your grandfather’s people—were here first. And then we were forgotten when the ‘histories’ were written.”
“Rachel, that’s a matter for debate, and you know it,” Robbie put in.
“Only because you sorcerers won’t admit the truth,” she snapped. “That it’s easier to keep sirens and shifters as minstrels and dogs rather than to acknowledge our very real contributions to fae history. The fact that there would be no magic if it weren’t for us. That we. Started. Everything .
I blinked, unsure if I was understanding her correctly. “What? How?” This wasn’t a myth I was aware of.
That penetrating gaze turned to me and suddenly seemed to contain galaxies. “ Think .” She gestured around us. “Imagine arriving in this world at the end of an ice age. Living—no, thriving—at a time in which your very survival depends on congregating with the elements around you.”
She waved a hand behind her as if to set the scene with the ancient woods that once covered Ireland and Britain instead of endless moors and peat bogs. And to her credit, I could almost see it—our paleolithic and mesolithic ancestors, hunting and gathering, living in skin-covered tents or thatched huts that could be easily taken down as they moved from site to site with the seasons. Living with nature instead of trying to fight it.
“It would require intimate knowledge of the environment,” she continued. “And what came after that? Knowledge of the constellations, the seasons, other flora and fauna.” She cocked her head. “What are the first markers of human civilization?”
I swallowed, my Sight prickling with answers it wanted to find in the tomb we’d just left. “Art.”
“And what, pray tell, did our ancestors think was so important to illustrate?”
I closed my eyes. I wasn’t touching the paintings that still decorated caves in France, Spain, and England, but I could imagine them just the same. “People. Animals. Nature.” I tried and failed not to look at Jonathan when I said the last word. “Sex.”
“So, who do you think determined first that the natural world could be communicated with? Your lot? Theirs maybe? Or perhaps it was the fae who observe nature at its core. Its auras and its forms. And it was us who eventually learned to absorb that nature and tap into the magic.”
Jonathan and I glanced at each other. Whether or not what she was saying was true, it was more than interesting.
“We were here first,” she said, more sharply than I would have imagined possible from her. Her bell-tinged voice was tinged with a glass edge. “We were everywhere first. Sirens and shifters. Like the Formoiri in that book, which isn’t about the taking of Ireland, but the taking of the entire world. Our intuition, our instincts started the basis for entire species of fae to evolve. But are we thanked for it? No, we are the villains of this story. A people to be vanquished.”
Jonathan swallowed. “Please, Rachel. We need your help. My father. You know what he’s after. He thinks he’s looking for the cure for his mortality, but clearly, it’s tied up with this. Our origins. He killed Penny for it, and he will kill Cassandra and many others if he thinks it will help him get it. If he has the Council rallied with him, there’s no telling what they will do. We need to know what the parchment says. We need your intuition, Rachel. More than ever.”
Dr. Cardy looked between us for a long time. Under that intensity, Jonathan’s hand reached out for mine.
Wait , he bid me before closing his mind completely.
Her gaze settled on our linked hands as if she could See the connection flowing between us.
And maybe she could. Her Sight identified auras. She Saw the truth in people beyond just what their rational minds were thinking.
“Our magic is dying,” she said finally. “We all know it. What was possible even a hundred years ago is no longer. Seers are losing range. Sirens are going mad. Shifters can’t come back to human form. It took both of you to maintain light in a cave that a wizard should be able to manage with the snap of his fingers. Don’t think I didn’t see how hard you had to work.”
Robbie looked mildly ashamed but didn’t argue with her. Jonathan’s mouth settled into a thin line of admission.
She turned to me. “But you, darling, are a wonder. An oracle, after so long without. And with your mate…” Her glance moved back to Jonathan. “You manifested us all, Jon. And she will be able to channel that. Together, you can right the imbalance. Our world needs it. You know it does.”
Fear and obligation flickered through Jonathan’s grip on my fingers. But woven through that bicolored cord, I saw his mother—someone who was also born with multiple gifts, as was the man who had sired him. The siren who had stolen his father’s heart, back when he had one.
All four? I asked. Do you really have all four gifts?
He pondered the question for a long time before he answered. Yes .
“Faedom needs it,” Rachel said again, though the intensity of her gaze seemed to be pulling me into her without a single touch. I thought I had understood before how the appeal of sirens inspired great art, but now I was starting to see how their intensity could border on insanity. “Our very essence—magic plus humanity, which is exactly what you’re chasing, isn’t it? Hope for us all. The beginning and the end of it.”
She looked around, like she thought someone might be watching, then grabbed my wrist.
Jonathan lunged forward with a snarl, pulling me out of reach and tucking me behind his back. For a moment, the world seemed to stop. In fact, everyone froze, except me and him.
It was only for a second or two.
But enough to feel the power emanating from him and into me.
Just as quickly, the world returned to normal.
Rachel smiled, and the sun peeked out from behind a cloud. “I was wondering when you’d start protecting your mate.” Then she turned back to me. “If I translate this for you, you must promise me something else.”
Careful , Jonathan said. She’s sweet, but she doesn’t take promises lightly .
In spite of Jonathan’s grip, I leaned closer. “Of course.”
“You will remember us all ,” she said. “You will set the balance right.”
I gulped and stood up straight. Around us, the wind had picked up, whistling around the tomb’s front, like the dead themselves had gathered to hear my answer.
“I’ll try my best,” I said. “I’ll do what I can.”
“I suppose that’s all any of us can say.” Rachel stepped back and crossed her arms, and when she opened her mouth again, it was with poetry I’d never heard but knew in my soul just the same.
Nuair a thig an gaoithchear abhaile,
A draíocht iomlán arís,
Uisce rachaidh saor,
Gach ainmhí feicfidh,
Agus dóchas filleann an beatha ó bhás.
When the priestess returns home
Her magic whole again
Water will run free
All creatures will see
And hope will return life from death.
The Secret, translated. What it meant was a different questions altogether.