Chapter 6 #6
Their dogs, all of whom come from Brith’s father’s hunting hounds, drink deeply of the spring waters and will never enter the hut, for some reason, but choose to sleep further off, near the edge of the wood, their heads resting watchfully on their paws.
Season follows season; year follows year.
The descendants of the man with the ash stick abandon the flat ground at the base of the mountain—why live so far from the shore, so distant from the monastery and from others?
—and settle where the widow’s house will eventually be built.
The giants in their boat come again, and again, and then they are never more seen on the shores.
The holy men increase in number, more arriving over land and by sea, and the monastery gets bigger, sprawling now all along the marshy shore, with huts clustered around it.
The monks exchange honey and candles and healing herbs; they employ a number of men to tend their goats; some of the women from the huts will spin their fleeces into yarn.
One of the monks, a thickset man with an iron cross around his neck, gets into an altercation with one of the people’s high druids: a fight ensues, and the thickset monk kills the druid with a single blow of his meaty fist. The people from the huts disappear into the hills, then, like in the bad times, leaving the goats and the spinning wheels to themselves.
The thickset monk is seen to ascend the slope, to the very copse of trees where that druid would invoke the spirit of the water; other monks come behind him, hands hidden up their sleeves.
The murderous monk goes into the trees and the people hear him saying his prayerful words, crying out, his fellow monks responding in a murmur.
I bless this holy well, he calls out in words they understand.
It is now a place of God. The people murmur to each other; some of them laugh.
How can the murderous monk make their sacred spring his own?
How could it ever belong to his invisible God?
What a preposterous notion. They ruffle the fur on their dogs’ backs and settle further into the concealing vegetation, content to wait out this strange visit, waiting to see what the holy men might do next.
A king whom none of the peninsula people has ever seen sends out armies and these soldiers knock down the walls of the monastery with battering rams made of oak trunks.
They sever the heads of all the monks from their shoulders, they steal the honey from the hives, they roast the goats, and the scent of charred flesh quivers in the mist. When the soldiers march off, the women pick over the remains, collecting the goat bones to make soup, saving any pots or beakers or tools they can salvage.
They leave the iron crosses, out of respect or perhaps fear: they don’t wish to invoke the wrath of the holy men’s invisible God.
They make visits, on their own or sometimes in groups, to the sacred spring, to make offerings and imprecations, always careful with what they say and how they conduct themselves, for the spring is said to bestow what is needed, not necessarily what is wanted, which is not always the same thing.
What they want now, more than anything, is for this peninsula and for the whole country to be left in peace, that they be allowed to live as they please and how they please, without the incursion of others.
History, however, has other plans. The country is encircled by sea: its western coast is abraded into inlets and loughs, the land giving way slowly to water, and faces a vast ocean.
The sea is ice-cold, threaded with great shoals of herring that flitter by on huge currents.
Seaweed accumulates on the jagged rocks and on the white-coral sands of the bays, and seabirds stalk the estuaries, their slender legs dipping into grasses.
The opposite eastern coast lies close to another country; on clear days, across the narrow sleeve of sea between them, the neighbouring land may be seen from higher ground, a bluish shape on the horizon, like something glimpsed in a dream.
The other country, however, is very much real.
Larger and more populous, with organised and extensive armies, it crouches on the far side of the cold grey channel of water, and it eyes the smaller country speculatively.
Its rulers take advice about the dog-shaped land’s strategic significance, its discomforting proximity, its fertile plains, its tribes, its chieftains, that long and complex westernmost shore lying open to all comers from afar.
This coastline is of great interest and concern to the larger country: might it not at any moment be invaded by anyone?
Could it not be used as a stepping-stone or a back door for an invasion of their own shores?
It is decided that the larger country should claim its dog-shaped neighbour, just in case, to tame it, to subjugate it, before anyone else does.
The patch of flat land around which the streams flow, where the ancient elders had their altar and invoked their gods, not far from Brith and her dog’s place of burial, is indifferent to the bloody and fearsome shifts going on around it: all land is.
One tribe gives way to another; high kings attack chieftains; chieftains invoke the aid of a foreign army; another tribe slaughters and drives out a third; the people from one side of a river snatch the territory of those from the far side.
And while battles still rage throughout, the monarch from the larger country across the water arrives, ostensibly to implement the orders of the Church and restore order, but instead he has his own agenda.
He smiles at the high kings with his mouth while his hands take the citadel from them.
He promises the tribes and the chieftains that he will help them but banishes the indigenous people, driving them back into woodlands and wild places.
Then he leaves, satisfied, sailing back across the narrow sleeve of water to his country, leaving behind a garrison filled with his soldiers.
The monarch is pleased, all in all, with the outcome.
His country now possesses a colony: the first of many.
The old altar at the foot of the mountain experiences these shifts and brutalities in ways that are imperceptible to the humans who walk upon it.
All the land knows is that its trees are felled and cut—for houses, for fire, for weapons, for the walls of fortresses—and this leads, first, to an increase in water in the soil, and then a mysterious dryness as some of the streams vanish, their beds hardening in the summer sun.
There are fewer birds, of course, because if trees vanish so do their inhabitants, and so after a while fewer meadow flowers grow, as no seeds are dropped.
Insect life increases, which means that more crops are devoured by their swarms. Some winters, therefore, are long and the people grow lean.
The wild irises spread, gathering in the still-wet places, the fissures in the earth where the surviving streamlets run, their blade-like leaves a sign to anyone passing that water can be had.
Lichen blooms on the sides of the remaining trees; the branches rattle back and forth in the wind, unprotected by the once-dense forest.
What lies between the mountain and the shore now looks very different.
The country has been conquered, ruthlessly and systematically, by an army commander from the colonising country.
He has confiscated the lands and given them to his most loyal officers; they have established their plantations and estates, and the peninsula people—whom the landlords call “wild ones”—are forced back to live in the scant and rocky places, to work in the landlords’ fields, and pay heavy tithes.
Hard times, then, here on the peninsula, and many are compelled to climb up the hillside, to visit the ancient wellspring, to ask for relief or assistance, or merely seek a chance to speak their woes, to tell them to the water.
And a woman carrying a baby on her back, in much the same way as Brith’s mother did more than a thousand or so years ago—they might even be mistaken for each other, at a distance—notices the flat piece of ground, and points it out to her mother, who walks alongside her, who in turn points it out to her man.
He glances at it, grunts, doesn’t make a reply.
They enter the copse, they make their devotions at the well, and return to the plantation below.
Later the next day, however, the man returns with two of his sons.
They walk one way across the raised piece of ground; they walk the other.
One son notes, as others have before him, the way this piece of land is sheltered, by the two hills and the mountain behind; the other gestures to the streams, the upright rock.
The father stands upon the earth there, looking down on the field boundaries of the foreign landlord, and sees how distant they would be, how hidden, how nobody could find them, unless they knew exactly how to get here.
The sons face the father, awaiting his verdict.
The father turns, looks up the mountain and the copse, whistles for his dogs, which have disappeared into the trees.
Then he nods, and the son shrugs the pick from his shoulder and strikes it into the ground, in celebration, in defiance, breaking into the sod.
(Below, far below and off to the side, in the marshy bog, Brith’s body feels this strike, the slender jigsaw of her finger bones clicking together, the leather noose loosening around her neck, the delicate beaded spine of her dog shunted minutely towards her, their entwined forms nestling ever closer.)