Ireland Page 5
The girl looked terrified. She was now in her twenties and very beautiful; the Architect had known her long enough to trust her completely.
She ran off on a deceptive path, across the hill in the opposite direction, giving the impression as she went that she pursued some errand on which he had sent her.
Strolling to the doorway of the tomb, he commanded the younger guard to fetch four men, whom he named. He waited at the door until they arrived. Then he gave them their orders—guard the entrance with their lives, let no one in—then stood down the junior guard and beckoned to the senior one.
In single file they walked quickly up the steepest part of the hill, past the Long House. At the top, he veered right, hearing the guard breathing heavily behind him.
Up on the high slope, men and women worked on the skins, scraping and cleaning. The stench, which everybody else found appalling, pleased the Architect in some way he never quite understood. All the skinners rose and stood respectfully, their backs turned, as he passed by. Ahead, he could see the gap in the trees.
The senior guard lurched awkwardly and dropped his stone axe. That was a serious offense for a guard—a slovenly matter, like a soldier dropping his gun. The man scrambled for the axe and began to yammer to himself. Fear had struck him. He and the Architect cleared the far side of the bank and walked into the shade of the trees.
Then the guard moaned, a low moan; he was growing hysterical. Suddenly, in a little open space ahead, the messenger appeared—and the guard screamed.
The blow that struck the man in the knob of his throat drove his head back so far that it seemed to hang down his spine. For the rest of her long life the messenger remembered the sound of that blow—a kind of dull crack, like a stone hammering down on a smooth log. The Architect had delivered the blow with the edge of his hand.
He went forward, to hear what she had to say.
“The Elder,” she said, trembling. “You know which one. He’s been talking to that guard. They have people waiting up here.”
“People?”
Other than lone travelers, such as the little bald man in the coracle, few people visited Newgrange. Those who did come by never surprised the residents; the view from the hill revealed the river east and west for long stretches; and the hillside’s peak offered a view for miles.
“Beyond the river bend. I’ll show you. Where the black rocks are,” she said.
That was the one place whence someone could approach Newgrange unseen. As they trotted forward, she said, “They’re to come in early tomorrow. Before dawn. They have many, many weapons.”
“How do you know?”
“I followed the Elder. That’s how I saw them. And I heard him telling them. The guard saw me.”
“Why didn’t you tell me earlier?”
“I’ve only known since noon. And I’m so afraid of you, sir, I can’t speak easily to you.”
He reached out and patted her hair. They stopped whispering and trotted on through the wood.
As they climbed out of a gully, the girl dropped to her haunches and pointed. Ahead, two men stood under a tree, guarding the path.
The Architect signaled her to hide. From a small canyon she watched him slink like an animal into the bracken. In a moment or two she saw him again—on the top branches of the largest tree. She had known that men were required to endure severe trials before warriorhood; one of these required them to move through the woods without disturbing a leaf or breaking a twig. Many of the boys and girls discussed these tests endlessly and tried to imitate them, hoping they too would join the warrior elite. Few of them made it. Now, she was watching this power at work.
The Architect flattened himself along the thickest branch of his tree and looked down. Below him, the two sentries stood close together, blocking the narrow path. The Architect edged along his branch and eased himself onto a much thicker bough, directly above the two guards. Nothing in their behavior suggested that the guards heard anything more than the breeze through the leaves.
Many times in her life the girl told the story of what happened next.
In each hand the Architect held a stone larger than his own fist. Then, as lazily as a man waking from a warm sleep, he rolled his body around and dropped from the branch. Against the sky the girl saw his body fall, his hair like a lion’s mane—and she saw his hands connect with the guards’ heads. They were dead before she heard their skulls crack.
The Architect picked up each body and pitched it into the undergrowth as though tossing a log on a fire. That a man capable of such delicate calculation, sensitive enough to judge the force of the wind and the brightness of the sun, should also possess such massive strength made her marvel evermore at the mention of his name.
The girl didn’t move forward to join him until he beckoned. Now they ran on, and she led. Presently, she darted to the left and led him up rocky and dark ways where there was no path.
High on a hill, where brambles and briars clustered in the deep furze, she dropped to her hands and knees, as did he. She pointed, then watched him lean forward and look down.
Below them, on the flat stones by the river, a wide camp of armed men made preparations to destroy the Architect and his work and his people and his life. In their midst stood his old enemy, the fat and sleek Silken Elder, talking to a bigeared stranger.
The Architect and his messenger eased back from their hiding place and ran home without stopping. He warned her to speak nothing of what she knew. His hands on her quaking shoulders, he said, “You’ve done better than any man.”
In Newgrange, all warriors lived and worked in the House of the Axes. They spent many of their days making new weapons and sharpening old ones. The Architect went there now. For the next three hours he explained the enterprise and supervised the preparations for an attack.
“Swiftness and silence—that’s what I want, above all. Be vicious. Be silent. Be swift. I will lead you.”
They stripped down to the minimum of clothing. They greased their bodies with pig fat. They checked their weapons: stubby, pointed hazel sticks, charred for hardness; the short stone axes preferred by some of the younger warriors; and leather slings full of fist-sized rocks that had been shaped into jagged spikes.
Into the night the Architect led a force of eight men and six women. They stole down to the river by a pathway where nobody on the hillside would see them. The six women fell in directly behind him, two by two, each one fearsome in battle. Then came the eight men, and everyone ran light as dancers over the ground and clambered into the boats.
The Architect could see dimly behind him the shape of each boat. His orders to them had been to keep as close to the near bank as possible. Although the leaves had all gone, overhanging branches gave them good shelter.
He checked the skies again. From tomorrow, he would no longer have a crick in his neck from looking upward. Every day recently, and sometimes it seemed to him every minute of every day for the last fifteen years, he had stared at the sky. Tonight all was clear; no moon, with stars sprinkled everywhere.
“Stay bright,” he whispered up to the heavens. “This night of all nights! This coming dawn of all dawns! Stay bright!”
The gentle slap of the oars in the water, the lapping of the river against the nearby bank—the world wished to calm him. Behind, his boats paddled in the lee waters of the riverbank with the gentlest of sounds. The black stones of the promontory began to show. Further along and in from the water, he saw the glow of a dying campfire.
But—no guards on the river! What kind of fighters or wild raiders were these? Were they arrogant? No—they were careless. And had they not yet missed the two western sentries whose skulls he had loved cracking?
He said to himself, “I’m lucky tonight. My messenger brings me good luck. Maybe I’ll be lucky tomorrow, too.”
His boat nudged ashore with a tiny crunch, and he eased himself out. Behind him, all the others disembarked and, as he did, crouched on the flat stones right by the water.
His comrades arrayed themselves in two lines either side of him. Crouching, he went forward again, the others tiptoeing with him. Within a moment or two he came to the first sleeping body. Reaching down, the eyes of the others watching him, he stifled the man’s mouth and nose with a fierce hand and swiftly cut the throat with his sharpest bone knife. It took less than two seconds. The man sagged back with a gurgle. The Architect held the head until it stopped writhing—the man never knew how he died.
Nearby lay two other sleeping bodies; he directed a woman and a man to kill them in the same way. Again, not a sound. He and his warriors slipped like shadows from body to body, cutting and killing and, in some cases, strangling.
Nobody made a noise—until almost the last sleeper. He woke, sat up close to the dying fire, saw them, and shouted. But the man died as he yelled—one of the warrior women rammed a stone into his mouth and down his throat. A last man also started to shout—an axe in the Adam’s apple killed him. Afterward, the raiders darted here and there like cats, checking that each body was truly lifeless. Others tested the camp’s boundaries in case sentries had been posted out there.
The Architect himself went to the fire and threw on a log, made it brighter. Where was the Silken Elder? He wanted to silence that smooth, insulting voice and bring him home to expose his treachery. No sign of the man—not on the ground, not among the many bodies. He picked up one enemy weapon, a knife, then another, a spear. These had been made of something different—not stone, but something just as hard. But these weapons felt lighter, and very much sharper, and they gleamed in the glow of the fire.
The Architect instructed two of his fighters to collect all the raiders’ weapons, which made a clanging noise, the way their own stone knives and wooden spears never did. Soon all the swords and knives and spears lay in a pile by the rekindled fire at the feet of the Newgrange warriors.
Flames from the campfire lit their triumphant faces. Excited eyes and greased bodies glinted in the dark. One laughing woman wiped a splash of blood off her bare shoulder. They began to chatter as all excited people do, but the Architect held a hand up to silence them. He had heard something.
Before anyone else could move, he grabbed a knife from the pile, turned, and ran to the water. Someone had stolen one of the boats. The Architect swam to it and caught the stern. Turning, the escaper tried to lash out with the paddle, but the Architect grabbed it and dragged the fugitive into the water.
His fighters raced to the flat stones to help their leader. All looked shocked when they recognized his captive—the Silken Elder. Smooth as ever, the fat man began to babble. The Architect grabbed the man’s face, forced open his mouth, and rammed in a fold of wet hide. He then tied a strip of the hide around the Elder’s mouth. They trussed the man with skins and dumped him into a boat.
When they got back to Newgrange, it was past midnight. Music and laughter carried on the wind; torches and bonfires blazed. On the riverbank, the Architect praised his warriors. At his direction, four men carried the Silken Elder by a dark route to the Long House and hid him, bound and gagged, under a pile of skins at the rear.
Bowing one by one to their leader, the other fighters scattered. The Architect turned away from them and walked toward the great white shape that dominated the hillside—his creation, his masterpiece.
“Not long now,” he murmured, and looked at the sky; it was clear as a night could be. “Not long.”
Back in his house, his messenger lay asleep, and he trod softly in order not to wake her. She had left some meat and milk on the floor by his bed. He ate and drank. The girl woke, rose, and came forward silently. She had never so deeply resembled her mother—but without the angry face. He reached to her face and put both his hands to her cheeks, the most coveted gesture of approval.
Then the Architect placed his hands on her shoulders and embraced her, and from that moment she knew that if all wishes came true, she would spend the rest of her life by his side and bear his children. He lay down on his own bed and closed his eyes, but he didn’t sleep. The girl sat by, watching over him, knowing that this might be the last night of his life.
Exactly one hour later, lit by a single rush light, the Architect stood in the center of the Long House and told the Elders what had happened in the night. He described his messenger’s discovery, the attack on the two sentries, the verification that an enemy party had gathered, the night raid, the trussed betrayer, the remarkable new weapons. The Elders, without saying so, knew what had to happen next: the fat man had to die—but in accordance with custom he would be allowed last words to the people, because he was an Elder.
They decided to untie him, take the leather gag from his mouth, and let him stand before the people; then he would be denounced and killed. Four guards fetched the disheveled man—who hadn’t surrendered any of his suave manner. The Chief Elder addressed him and summarized the man’s offenses. He told him that he’d be granted his right to speak. After that, the Architect would deliver the Recompense—which was also the punishment for treachery.
In his smoothest voice the Silken Elder began to protest. “Don’t believe these lies about me,” he said, but the Chief Elder turned away.
The procession of the Elders formed up and went outside. What a great sight they saw! All along the hillside, the people stood by their bonfires, and they waved and called to the Elders to visit them. Everywhere, the children held out gifts of food and drink. The Elders, including the fat man, walked among them, accepting something from everyone, stroking the children’s heads, praising the gifts—all in flickering, firelit darkness. Skin drums beat rhythms, reed pipes played; boys and girls laughed.
Slowly and joyously, winding by every bonfire on the hill, this procession at last reached the entrance to the circular white building, and the Elders turned to face the chanting, swaying crowds. Behind them, the white high walls of their mysterious and great monument reflected the firelight.
Easily the tallest among them, the Architect stood at the edge of the group. His Elders’ pride in him showed—the Eldresses touched his arms, his hands. Someone tapped his shoulder and he glanced around—the Angry Woman. He looked at her as though expecting reproof; once the building work had been finished, he had seen little of her, and he expected that she grieved. But instead she clasped his hand, looked into his eye, and said, “Thank you for the trust you’ve placed in me and mine.” And she slipped back into the crowd to enjoy the Architect’s triumph.
Tawny and strong, like a lion in his pride, he looked all around Newgrange—at the happy people, the piles of food, their bowls of drink, the lights reflecting on the dark river flowing below. For this moment he had devoted every ounce of spirit he could find within him, day in, day out, every minute, every second, every hour, every breath of the last fifteen years.
The Chief Elder made a grand gesture with his arm, and the Speakers came forward. At large gatherings long before megaphones or public address systems, Speakers, men chosen for their loud voices, relayed the words of the speech throughout the crowd. When the orator spoke, the Speaker nearest to him called it out to the crowd around him, where the next Speaker picked it up and relayed it onwards—and so on, until everyone there had heard every word the orator had to say.
Off to the east, a long stripe of lemon light began to paint the sky, and the Architect knew they must hurry. On a wood pipe the Caller blew what sounded like an everlasting note, and he didn’t stop until silence had fallen across Newgrange. At intervals down the hillside, each waiting speaker looked to the Chief Elder. From his place at the heart of his semicircle of Elders, the old man began to speak. Beside him stood the Silken Elder, who had
the right to speak too, even interrupt.
“My people!”
“My people!” the Speakers echoed.
“In a moment you shall hear the voice of another Elder. You shall know that he is speaking because it’s the last right of anyone who betrays us to tell us his thoughts.”
The Speakers looked so surprised that some of them almost failed to relay these words. A moan of wonder rose from the crowd.
“The Elder was found to have befriended a party of invaders. They intended to capture all we own and make us their slaves.”
The moan from the crowd became a shout—which the Speakers quelled with warning gestures.
“But”—the Chief Elder turned to his right and pointed to the Architect—“this man, who in the coming dawn will honor our dead with this great new monument, discovered the treachery. He and our warriors killed the raiders, and brought back the betrayer to face death.”
Cheers rose, and the warriors who had been on the raid raised their bare arms and shook their fists to the stars.
“Therefore”—now the Chief Elder pointed to the betrayer—“you know what will happen to him. He’ll give Recompense.”
At this the crowd fell silent. Those among them who had seen such a fate talked of little else for months afterward.
Some voices protested, “No!”
The Silken Elder stepped forward two paces, setting himself up in a more prominent position than his Chief, who spoke again.
“But I shall begin with the words chosen for this great day. I shall reveal to you Blessings which shall be ours and our children’s and their children’s.”
The Speakers relayed these words, and the Silken Elder stepped forward another pace. Now he stood near the front edge of the crowd. He looked all around, like a man seeking a way of escape. Yet he made no move; he waited until all the Chief Elder’s words had been passed on, right down to the crowd at the lowest level, down to the bonded, the slaves, and the unsound, whose place was by the water. Then he spoke.