Ireland Page 4

  For the next twelve years the people of Newgrange made hundreds of these journeys for stone. No idle day passed; every morning, hail, rain, or snow, parties of workers left the hillside, traveled to some distant rock marked by the Architect and his child helpers, and hauled it back to the hill.

  In the process they developed the first roads in county Meath. A team hauling a stone through the countryside would come across a great brown scar in the earth, and they’d know it was the mark left by a previous team hauling a rock. If they followed this trail, it would lead—often, but not always—to the water. By the end of the first year, three hundred people were employed hauling stones from distances of up to thirty miles away.

  Most of these workers came from the ranks of the least skilled. The Architect thought of them the way a queen bee thinks of her drones. He gave them miserable lives, using them as he wanted, with no consideration; indeed, he scarcely seemed to regard them as human. In his eyes they all had only one purpose—his purpose. No allowances were made for age or sex; a girl of fourteen worked as rough and raw as an old man of forty-four—and forty-four was old in those days.

  They suffered frightful injuries. In the cold weather their hands froze to the surface of the stone. They slipped on the rocks, and the bindings made of thin branches ripped their flesh. Flash floods on the water left them gasping and terrified—or dead on the riverbed. Hauling stones across the steep landscape, their bones snapped, their backs broke. Many of them, men, women and children, became cripples for life.

  The hazards increased. As the Architect developed the site, he chose larger and larger stones. Some rocks fell on the laborers, pinning or shattering an arm or a leg. Or a boulder keeled over, bringing instant death through a crushed skull or rib cage. When that happened, he ordered the corpse hauled to one side and left there for the family to collect. Nothing, he said, must interfere with the work. A hard man when young, he grew harder with age.

  He reserved his tenderness for his materials. When a new rock arrived, he paid it as much attention as a cat to her kitten, stroking, measuring, examining each side, each surface, each little ripple. When he supervised the final placing of a stone, people nearby observed that he spoke more quietly than his normal, high-pitched rasp.

  And while he hardened at work, he seemed, in himself, to have become a somewhat happy man. Certainly a fulfilled one—he’d embarked upon a great enterprise and felt himself succeeding at it. Away from the site, he seemed more approachable, and some people surmised that he might have softened, perhaps changed; he looked easier, less tense and hostile.

  The Angry Woman’s admiration for him grew and grew. She thought him wonderful. He possessed qualities she wanted in a man; he was strong, he was decisive, he was inspired. So she stayed near him, and without ever asking him, she appointed herself his closest helper.

  When he forgot to eat, she brought him food. When he looked exhausted, she suggested rest. If some good news reached the hillside, she brought it to him first. And she tried not to allow herself to feel slighted when he retired to his house at the end of every day without inviting her, sometimes without seeming to see that she existed.

  She told herself, “I shall ignore the hurt. I shall be patient. I shall content myself to wait. Then one day, when all this has been completed, he’ll take me into his life.”

  He made one gesture that encouraged her to bide her time. Six years into the enterprise, her daughter reached the age of fourteen, old enough to work as a messenger. The Architect appointed her into his service. The girl was delighted—but not nearly as pleased as her mother. After all, no one knew him as well or saw more of him. She knew his moods, his tempests.

  What she didn’t know was the fear under which he worked. Everywhere he went, he could see the sleek face of the Silken Elder, watching him, eyeing him, always calculating. The fat man had taken great care to assess constantly what the hillside thought of the Architect. Every adverse or envious word added grist to his mill, and he repeated them willingly to all who’d listen. The Architect never heard these scraps of calumny or gossip because he kept himself so aloof, but he never doubted what the Silken Elder was doing—he was plotting.

  And all the while, those magnificent rocks continued to arrive on the green slopes of Newgrange like some breed of strange animal. Some gleamed like flowers in the sun. Others seemed darker—but if you looked closely, you could see they had souls.

  The most beautiful specimens went straight to the carvers. In the beginning the Architect declared that certain stones would bear messages to their ancestors—words of gratitude, symbols of praise. This work would take as long, he said, as the building itself. He chose the most skilled men and women to make these designs—and remember, their only tools were stone.

  They tapped and leveled and etched and caressed; each day brought a small advance or a giant leap—a tendril materializing, a whorl beginning to uncoil; the Architect drew the design in the mud, they copied it. They alone never feared the Architect, and in return, he made them into an elite group of Newgrange society.

  By the end of the twelfth year most of the construction work was done, as the Architect had promised. But now he came to a standstill, facing a sharp and important challenge. He wanted different stones, beautiful stones, for the front of the building, the facade, but he didn’t know where to find them—and already he had gathered every significant rock within a radius of forty miles.

  Fortune rode in, as fortune will for those she favors. One day a little round boat, like a bowl made of cowhide, bounced up the river Boyne. Inside it sat a small man with no hair, who looked up and admired the great work-in-progress, all those huge stones forming a wonderful giant ring embedded in the earth of the hill.

  To him, a stranger, the edifice seemed astounding. Indeed, it seemed no less amazing to the people of Newgrange, who had watched it rise stone by stone. Whether shown naked in the light after rain or shrouded in the mists of the dawn or casting long shadows down the hillside’s evening, the building had a power to make you stop and look at it many, many times every day.

  Now the little bald man in his bowl of a boat saw it and couldn’t take his eyes off it. Then he told the people of Newgrange that, where he came from, he had seen stones that looked as white as the moon.

  The Angry Woman rushed to tell this news to the Architect, and the next day he and she set out from Newgrange. In the boat with them sat the little bald man, and they towed his coracle behind them. When they reached the moment where the river Boyne joins the sea, they sailed five days south. Then they entered the mouth of another river and followed it inland. That journey came to more than seventy miles.

  Out of the boat they climbed, and the little bald man led them over two hills down into a large hollow. There was grass overgrowing everything, but when they scrabbled at it they found underneath precisely what the Architect wanted—loose rocks of all sizes, stones so beautiful that he believed they had been hidden there for him to find. They did indeed look like the moon—they looked like silver dipped in cream, pearls that the gods had hidden in the grass to be stumbled upon like treasure. The Architect knelt to look at them, stroked them, examined them; it was the only time the Angry Woman ever saw him close to tears. Now he believed that his great task was slowly coming to a wonderful end.

  So for the next three years, when the leaves came back on the trees in the spring, a hundred boats took to the waters of the Boyne and disappeared round the bend in the river to fetch those wonderful stones from Wicklow. After the first few trips, the Architect rarely went again—because he had yet to face the biggest challenge of all.

  One sunlit morning, the people of Newgrange looked across at the distant ridge and saw a man behaving strangely. Sometimes he stood and made a frame of his arms against the sun, or he turned to face the four corners of the world. Soon they realized that the distant figure was the Architect. But what was he doing, they asked themselves—inspecting the world?

  As they watched, he desc
ended the ridge and returned to the hillside, where he also stood and framed his arms to the sun. With an array of sticks, long and short, with stones placed at intervals along the ground, he took measurements, paced out distances, eyed levels. He directed some of the children to gather a collection of small but long stones. Each stood perhaps no more than a foot high, and he built a little corridor of these, covered it with a tunic, and knelt before it, holding a rush light, then a torch under the tunic.

  They thought he was trying to measure the length of the sun’s rays on the grass. That is indeed what he was doing, and more than that: he was measuring the effect of light upon everything—on his fingers; against stones of various heights; amongst the shadows of the trees, upon the ridge of the hill. Sometimes he came down to the workplaces or the dwellings, took hold of the first person he saw, and made them stand still while he measured their shadow on the grass. To their intense curiosity, he would walk in a circle around them, or crawl on the ground by their feet, grunting and thinking.

  Naturally, nobody asked him what he was doing; by now they’d learned not to. But in front of their eyes, a great idea was being born. Every morning, afternoon, or evening, on every slope of the ridge or every level of the hillside, where he held his hands to shade against the sun or measured the different lengths of a woman’s shadow and that of her child’s, he advanced the cause of science and therefore Man’s understanding of the universe.

  At last, at long last, came the day when everything seemed ready. All his measurements were taken, all his calculations were sealed. Now the building was finished. Now the carvings had been completed. And now the last stones were set in place. What a long trial it had been, the mornings of extracting one more effort from the builders, the afternoons of preventing one more whorl from cracking in the last throes of its carving, the evenings of despair that not enough stones had yet been found and ferried, and the nights of fear that nothing would come of it all.

  In recent months the Architect had allowed himself to stand halfway up the hillside and look at his work, and he even began to permit himself to admire it. As he did so, others often drifted by, notably some of the Elders, who finally—but cautiously—asked if he could set a day for the opening ceremony. He replied, with a blitheness that surprised them, “Of course.”

  But he had known since the beginning of the project what day he would choose. It had always been his intention to have the monument unveiled only on the December solstice, the shortest day of the year. No other day would do.

  He had never told anyone this, lest his experiments fail him. Had anyone known his intention, they would have called him foolish beyond belief—because the risk he had taken, the idea into which he had plunged all his efforts and fifteen years of his people’s hardest labor, was something that had, at best, a very difficult chance of succeeding. He and he alone knew that, for the success of his project, he required this midwinter day deep in December to dawn with bright sunshine.

  Was he mad? Would the sun shine at dawn, without fail, in the middle of winter on a foggy island in the northwest of Europe? If anyone had guessed his plans, they’d have dismissed him as even crazier than he so often seemed.

  Of course he was the only one who knew the magnitude of this gamble. The Elders merely professed their pleasure at his choice of date—a great feast day, the moment of the year when their forefathers slept deepest. But the Architect—he felt nothing beyond a dull numbness. Men had died, babies had been born, new people had come to Newgrange, others had left to venture into the interior of Ireland, and still he went on building his monument. Now the end had almost arrived; tomorrow his great inspiration would be put to the test in front of everyone.

  He wasn’t yet excited at the thought of all his planning and experimentation bearing fruit. Nor did he dwell on what the Silken Elder would do to his body in the Recompense if everything failed. Instead, memories came pouring back, especially when he thought of the most delicate and sensitive part of the building—a box of four flat stones placed above the door.

  This was the same rectangular box whose picture he once drew in the mud—more frame than box, four sides with no lid and no base. Two of the stones were about four feet long and three feet wide, and the smaller two were three feet by one and a half. Not until almost every other aspect and detail of the building had been completed would he add this crucial detail, the most important single component.

  Twice he had had to stop the builders filling the space for the box; twice he had had to explain that, yes, he wanted, he needed, a rectangle above the doorway, that he had a personal detail to complete, without which the building wouldn’t be finished. They looked at him as they often did, somewhat vacantly, and they had to accept what he was saying.

  To make the mortar, he chose, nabbed, and killed the calf himself, a russet and lively two-month-old; he slit its velvet throat while its mother lowed in anguish a hundred yards away. Then he pulled back the head and drained the blood, with the Angry Woman holding the stone basin. Next, two of the horses on the hillside yielded much of their tails to his knife, and he then mixed the mortar of blood and horsehair himself. Finally, he erected the box with his own hands, would trust nobody else with it.

  So, late in the afternoon, on the eve of the great day, reviewing all of these memories, the Architect decided he would take one last look. The hillside teemed like an anthill—tables out, pigs roasting, women and children building fires to stay alight all the next day and night. At the entrance to the building, he climbed up to look at the four flat slabs in the mysterious rectangle. The guards at the door, one old, one young, looked away lest he see them staring at him. He climbed down, and stooping his great head and shoulders, he walked into the tomb.

  You remember the momentous day he made his drawings in the mud of the riverbank? You recollect the diagram he etched in the mud—a round structure with a long line ending in a cross? This building of his was what archaeologists and historians call a passage tomb, and now, finished, it completely represented the Architect’s drawings come to life. The line he etched was the passageway, and it led to the cross that he drew—a wide chamber at the very heart of the tomb.

  Along the passageway he went, between the slender rocks, toward the chamber. Before the gloom became too dense, he let himself admire the handiwork. He loved the way his masons had merged the carved stones into the sidewalls. And he acknowledged how faithfully the mud patterns had been carved into the rocks or, in some cases, embossed.

  Here and there he stopped to caress the shapes. He stroked stern triangles and merry whorls, geometric chevrons that looked like worried frowns, smiling triskelia and swirls, a little rippling field of diamond patterns, sweet presences on and in stone. They reflected the world around Newgrange—the triangles made by the hilltops in certain phases of light; the rings on a tree’s trunk; the eddies and whirls of the river Boyne.

  The Architect reached the inner chamber, where the building’s heart opened out into a domed room. Earlier in the afternoon he had placed a small bowl of fire, a rush light, in the chamber entrance. He picked this up and raised it to inspect the highest points of the chamber—more symbols carved into the stones, the juts on the walls, the domed shape deriving from methodical corbeling, which imitates the way a crow’s upper beak protrudes over, and is supported by, its lower beak. And as you know, another word for “crow” is corby in Scotland, or, in France, corbeau.

  Walking round and round, looking at every stone, checking, touching, feeling all the surfaces, all the notchings, all the symbols, the Architect came to a stop at the back of the chamber, directly in line with the passageway. Carefully, with great reverence, he dropped to his knees.

  Inside the chamber lay a huge, round, smooth dish made of sand-colored stone. To achieve its glossy finish took more days than anyone could count. Initially, the Architect selected a flattish stone and told the Carvers to hollow it out. Then he watched over them as they polished and polished with their primitive tools. This was
his massive vessel for the cult of his people’s dead.

  He placed the light bowl on the floor and began to inspect the huge stone dish. Still on his knees, he bent low, almost sniffing its smooth, curved rim. He leaned right in, deep over it, the better to see its heart. Then he lowered himself to the ground until he lay flat prone, his chin almost at the dish’s rim. He squinted across the rim into the passageway and narrowed his eyes for a long time, assessing and thinking. When he rose, he dusted himself down and bowed respectfully to the dish.

  One last time he walked around it, stopping here and there, always looking from the passageway to the dish and back again. He shook his head many times, as if marveling at what he had found in here. What was the dish for? He and he alone knew. Tomorrow, everyone else would know—if the skies stayed clear. A big if. He left the chamber.

  The wind had freshened, and he immediately looked up at the sky, hoping, hoping—so far, so good. His messenger hovered outside the entrance, waiting for him. He found this odd. The girl’s value lay in the fact that she did her work soundlessly and almost invisibly. Yet every place he had gone that afternoon, she seemed to be in front of him. Now he looked closer at her; there must be something wrong. She held up a hand and beckoned him. Suddenly he saw that she seemed very concerned, and he followed her as she led him out of the guards’ earshot.

  “Sir, you must hear what I have to say.”

  Her voice was full of breath, but she spoke the words as directly as her mother would; then she walked past him very quickly.

  “At the top of the hill,” she said. “Where they spread the skins to dry.”

  He nodded—and what she said next astonished him.

  “Go up there, sir. I will meet you. Order the older of those two guards to join you. When you’re among the trees, kill him immediately.”