Ireland Read online

  His listeners shivered. They felt the same uncomfortable wonder as he did—because the young man had touched a dim, half-true knowledge. In his passion for stone, he had placed his hand on something inside every one of them—and now he tightened his grip.

  “Sometimes at dawn, sometimes in the dead of night, sometimes when a breeze feathers the waters of the river, we tremble inside, and we wonder: What power that we cannot see, but we can feel, guides us? What great spiritual authority governs our lives? That’s the force of our ancestors. We mustn’t commemorate them with anything that’s less than immortal.”

  In the awed silence that followed, the Chief Elder stepped in and said that he proposed to appoint the wild young man as architect. The young man didn’t react at all.

  One of the Elders, though, sensed the discomfort among the people, and he felt that many might think they had been ridden over roughshod. This man had suave ways and a silky voice, and he knew how to persuade folk to his point of view; we shall call him the Silken Elder. If he spoke to you, his voice never rose. When he stood conversing, he held his hands folded on his stomach. And a little pursed smile always danced on his plump mouth.

  In fairness, he himself had much distinction. This was the Elder who took responsibility for all the rituals practiced on the hillside—the praising of the rain, the warning of coming storms, the songs to the sun. If some unusual act of nature, such as lightning or a whirlwind, drove fear through the people, he was the one who uttered smooth words to fight the danger. He was the man who taught Newgrange how to make offerings to the skies, the trees, the river, and he worked all this so calmly and soothingly that many people liked him. But this Elder was himself a dangerous man; in short, he was a liar, an untrustworthy and shifty man, insincere.

  The Silken Elder decided that it would be to his advantage to speak for the people who disagreed with the decision they had just heard. Smoothly he began to question the young man.

  “What are you going to build?” he said. “How long will it take?”

  “I will create something the world has never seen, something it will always consider extraordinary.”

  This astonishing reply quietened the room somewhat. Even the Silken Elder was taken aback, but, he hurried not to show it, attacked afresh.

  “How do we know you won’t abandon the job before it’s finished?”

  That insult sent a hiss of wonder through the crowd. The young man looked calmly nowhere and never said a word.

  So the Silken Elder tried again.

  “Do you intend to be answerable at all? These folks—this room—these are your people. Will you answer to them? To your Elders? To anyone?”

  Our young man never moved, never spoke. The questions drew none of his blood. He knew enough to wait. Soon the Silken Elder fell silent, appealing to the audience with raised arms, as if to say, “I don’t know what we can do about this fellow.”

  The young Architect of Newgrange turned around and walked across to where the Silken Elder stood. As though it were a lamp, he thrust his big, tawny young head forward. Six inches from the Silken Elder’s face he shone the beam of his eyes straight at the man. Like two boxers they glared at each other for a long moment.

  The Silken Elder broke first. He stepped away.

  “I can understand,” he said, “why you mightn’t wish to disclose your plans in detail. But it isn’t enough to hear your love of stone. You refuse to tell us anything else. Therefore, to protect ourselves in case you fail us on such an important enterprise, we should declare ourselves entitled to Recompense.”

  Recompense! A blood oath! Recompense was the payment for failure to deliver on a vow—and it guaranteed a slow, humiliating death. First the offender was pegged out like a hide to the hillside. There he lay for twenty-four hours. At noon on the next day a warrior came and cut off the offender’s right arm at the shoulder; on the third day at noon, the left arm; slaves staunched the blood with mud, leaves, and skins to prevent the offender bleeding mercifully to death. On the fourth day at noon the warriors cut off the right leg; at the fifth noon, the left.

  On the sixth day at noon they prized out his eyes, sliced off his ears, pulled out his tongue; and on the seventh day they filleted his body like butchers. Some weeks later, when the wind and the rain had washed all the flesh from the skeleton, the whitening bones would be collected by the lowest bondswoman on the hillside and cast out into the countryside for the wild animals to gnaw. That was Recompense, a dreadful matter; the word chilled the spine of every man, woman, and child in Newgrange. All chatter, all murmuring, all noise, in the Long House died. Every eye watched the clashing pair.

  The Architect had seen the Recompense more than once; he had even been called upon to participate in it. At last he nodded slowly, like a man thinking aloud, and turned to face the people.

  “I understand,” he said. “But—if you, all of you, eventually agree that I have accomplished a satisfactory and eternal commemoration, then”—and he spun around to face the older man—“I will take your Elder’s robe. And you’ll pay the Recompense.”

  A soft roar came up from the people. This young man knew the laws of Newgrange. A person threatened with the Recompense had the right to turn it on his challenger, even an Elder. In the shocked hush, the Silken Elder had no choice.

  “I agree,” he said, soft-spoken but very angry.

  He tried to recover his position a little, using all the powers of his silken voice.

  “What can you tell us about how long—”

  “I will tell you nothing,” interrupted the Architect, and he left the Long House abruptly. The meeting broke up, and there wasn’t a man or a woman there who didn’t feel astounded.

  From that moment, one September day fifty centuries ago, the Architect began to plan the great white circular building on the hillside at Newgrange above the river Boyne. And from that moment he knew that the Silken Elder would plot every day to cause his downfall and wreck his project, because any time a great man tries to do a wonderful thing, lesser men will try to stop him. That is one of the laws of life.

  Now—there lived on that hillside a certain lady. She was tall, she had thin brown hair, and she was known as the Angry Woman. Her husband was dead, killed by a mad elk—spiked on its horns one morning when he was blinded by the sun and unable to measure how close the animal had come. Some said that the goring of her man had made this woman angry. Others claimed she had always been angry, except with her own child, a red-haired girl, eight years old, whom she loved as a tigress loves her cub.

  Since the end of her mourning this Angry Woman had desired a new husband, and the mate she wanted was our young man. If, wild or not, he seemed eligible before, now he became a prize. She had watched him for some time, studied his mixture of tenderness and anger, saw the efficient way he dealt with things round and about the hillside, and observed above all his impatience with fools. Shrewd women (and she was shrewd) always value intelligence in a man, and here was a fellow who had the brains and the handsome looks. And now he had power. She didn’t care that he was moody—she was moody herself.

  Once or twice she had approached him, knowing she risked his snub. At a feast she filled his plate; he never even looked at her. And one day she rushed to help him when he was building a hut. The rooftree fell, she grabbed the pole, and for a moment they stood side by side, arms touching, until they could haul the beam upright. Again, no acknowledgment came from him.

  When he left the meeting that day, the Architect went alone down the hill; he had a walk like the lope of a wolf. Behind him, the crowd lingered, chattering like sparrows on a roof. At the doorway of the Long House the Angry Woman stood for a moment, looked down, and saw the man of her desires striding toward the river. Her heart still raced at the excitement she had just witnessed. She wanted to talk to him in his moment of triumph—but she didn’t wish him to know how she felt.

  Once again she faced the difficulty of this man; when she met him or spoke to him, he improved
the way she felt, he enlarged her life, he made the day bright and bearable. But he gave her no direct or tangible evidence that she had any effect, of any kind, on him.

  After a moment’s thought, she followed him. To disguise her intention, she took a different route. Where he had gone to the south, she headed west, to the reed beds, and began plucking rushes to cover the earthen floor of her home.

  She hoped that he would see her, and soon he did. When she lifted a sheaf of the green, wide blades from the water’s edge, the swing of her white arms caught his eye.

  The Architect gestured to the Angry Woman and began to walk toward her. She stopped building her rush pile and waited for him; anxious, she ran her tongue along the back of her upper teeth. Our young man held out his hand, and she took it. She could see he was agitated, she could see that he had difficulty controlling his mood. So she stroked his bare forearm and led him into the grove along the riverbank. Inside the trees, where nobody on the hill could now see them, they lay down on the grass.

  She began to talk to him; she said that he had been given a great honor, that nobody would carry it off better than he could, that should he need any help, he had but to ask her. Slowly but surely she calmed him down—and through it all, he never said a word.

  In a clear western sky, the sun shone. Some time passed. And the breeze ruffled the water. The couple lay on the ground, hugging each other tighter and tighter. Eventually the Architect stood up and walked silently away. From the edge of the grove he turned to look at the Angry Woman, who sat up. He walked back to her, bent down, and stroked her hair kindly. Then he helped her to her feet, and they went their separate ways.

  Along the riverbank little areas of mud rested, where the water sometimes flooded in and ebbed away. Over one of these the Architect crouched and began to think. Behind him, on the water, two men worked on a raft, repairing it. One fixed a loose log while the other held the raft steady.

  From the folds of his deerskin tunic the Architect took a small pointed stone. With this, he began to etch patterns in the soft black mud. Nothing he drew satisfied him, and he leaned back on his haunches.

  But when he looked up, his eye caught the cross-sectioned face of the log on the raft, and he saw the rings that tell the tree’s age, a circle for every year—a tree grows a new ring in twelve months. He looked at this pattern for several moments and then etched again in the ground. This time, he drew a series of whirling circles not unlike the face of the log.

  Getting restless, he rose, walked further along the riverbank, and began to sketch on a different patch of mud. This time, he drew a picture of the hill of Newgrange. Like any painter, he looked up now and then to check the proportions. Even though it was composed of very few lines, this picture took him several minutes. When he had finished it, he stood to his full height in order to look down on the drawing at his feet. Then, his mind’s eye filled with this new perspective, he stared up at the hill again, assessing the shape and depth.

  At that moment the Angry Woman came back to the edge of the wood and, her arms full of rushes, stood where he could see her. She smiled cautiously at him and walked forward to where he could see her better. In doing so, she stepped into a pool of sunlight, and her smile turned to gold.

  There’s an old saying, “Man’s love is of Man’s life a thing apart—’tis Woman’s whole existence.” The way the Angry Woman smiled at the Architect was important to her, but not to him. He saw her all right, he even gazed at her—but he didn’t smile back.

  Instead, he turned away, crouched again, and in the mud drew a beautiful sketch; he drew a wide circle, then a thick, single line entering this circle, and at the end of the line, inside the circle, he drew a rough cross. By now, his entire body quaked with excitement, especially when, in four last strokes, he made a clear drawing of a small rectangular box.

  The Architect stood up, exhausted. He knew he had just had a wonderful inspiration; he knew he had decided what this great monument of Newgrange would be and what it would look like. The thrill of it, the brilliance it contained! And it was such a simple idea! But he also recognized that it would be very difficult to achieve. Quite simply, the Architect of Newgrange had decided to make the sun in the sky do his bidding.

  Genius, you know, works in many ways. In some people it comes at the end of years spent thinking deep and endless thoughts. With others, the brilliant idea flashes into the mind from nowhere, the way a hawk attacks with the sun behind it. That afternoon, the Architect felt his mind climbing higher and higher. He was brave to the utmost, brave as brave can be, thinking thoughts of great daring and then swooping to draw exactly what he wanted to express: “Can I,” he had asked himself as he drew his pictures in the mud, “can I capture the sun to keep our dead warm?”

  Seeking an answer to the question, he had looked back over his shoulder at the flowing waters of the river Boyne, had seen the sunlight on the Angry Woman’s smiling face, and his imagination announced to his brain, “Light also flows.”

  If there was any true justice in the world, that shining moment, the arrival of that idea, would have inspired the Architect to go over to where the Angry Woman stood, take her in his arms, and thank her profoundly for what was arguably the most brilliant idea that he or any Irishman, before or since, would ever have. But he didn’t do that—he turned away.

  That very night, the Architect chose his first team of workers, five people; four men of Newgrange, and the Angry Woman. No plan did he divulge to them, no schedule of works, no path of progress; instead, he said, “You must tell nobody, ever, anything of what we do. Do you understand?”

  They understood all right; they understood that he might kill anyone who betrayed his confidences.

  To keep the matter entirely secret, he never showed them—or anyone—those final pictures he had drawn in the mud. He memorized them so thoroughly that whenever he wished, he could draw the images again in a few seconds—the circle, the long-legged cross, the simple, rectangular box. Like all great drawings they had no unnecessary lines.

  Next morning, he led his workers westward, out into the deep countryside. Carrying nothing but food wrapped in leaves, the five-strong team walked silently behind him for two hours. At last, he stopped by a grove and pointed down a steep slope to a large flat stone half hidden in the ferns. It measured four times the width of his body and twice his height.

  “Bring this back to the hillside.”

  The four men of the team looked at each other. Impossible. First they must ease it from the earth or, more likely, dig it out; and a stone like that could go down ten yards deep—it might even be a mountaintop. Then they must transport it, over hills and through gullies, up, down, and across mixed terrain, back to the hillside. Did it have to travel whole?

  “No stone you bring back may be broken. So—tell me how you will accomplish it.”

  And the four men looked at each other and thought, No, this isn’t possible.

  All day, these four men had been perpetrating a nasty injustice, because they hadn’t spoken a word to the Angry Woman. It’s true that they feared her a little; but more than that, they didn’t respect her cleverness, and it irked them that she had been included as an equal member of their team. In their disrespect they made their position more foolish—because when the men failed to offer a solution, the Architect raised an eyebrow to the woman.

  “What would you do?” he asked her.

  She looked all around—at the ferns, at the trees, at the steep hill down which they had scrambled to reach this rock. Her hair had been washed in the river that morning and shone like light. A thin red line marked her face where a branch had slapped across her cheek and eyebrow.

  “I know what to do.”

  The four men looked at her suspiciously, but the Architect nodded. One man opened his mouth to say, Explain—but she quelled him with a look that might kill a bull. From that moment the Angry Woman became the team’s leader.

  The Architect left his team prizing loose their sto
ne and went back to Newgrange. He asked the women to assemble the children of the hillside—he said he needed helpers, and he chose teams of boy-and-girl pairs.

  Next day, he led the first pair, a ten-year-old boy and the Angry Woman’s young daughter, out into the countryside. Both children carried small bunches of pointed twigs. When he found a stone he wanted to build with, the Architect directed one of the children to plant a pointed stick beside it.

  Some days later, he went back to find the Angry Woman and her coworkers. They had lifted the stone and left the grove; all he saw was a wide, shallow crater of brown earth. He followed the trail they had gouged in the earth with their big rock, and at last, from a hilltop, he saw them down at the river. The Angry Woman had thought to cut down trees and use the trunks as rollers across the countryside. Now, at the riverbank, she had ordered the men to build a little pier of smaller rocks and tree branches. They’d rolled the stone onto this jetty and then lashed the logs together and made a raft. She’d made them double the structure, building one raft on top of another with some overlaps to guarantee buoyancy.

  “It’ll float better,” she said.

  Her calculation worked. As the Architect watched, they eased the stone onto the raft and no catastrophe occurred. After a slight dip and some shaky moments, the raft with the rock sat afloat the river Boyne. All four men stood in the water, ready to guide it, and the woman climbed onto the stone on the raft.

  They moved as fast as the river’s current. The Architect kept pace with them along a ridge above the riverbank. What a pleasing sight! A great, flat, sand-colored rock sitting like a captured animal astride a raft of tree trunks tied with soft, springy branches—and the Angry Woman lying facedown on the stone, using her hands as oars.

  And so, after many hours, they came safely to Newgrange, where, with much commotion, they rolled the great stone up the hill. The Architect and his workers put it in place, and that stone now stands at the entrance to his mysterious structure.