CHAPTER 24
THE HILL OF TLACHTA

Tara is the sacred jewel in the territory of the high king, a territory that borders each of the four provinces and thus gathers all of Ireland to itself. It is, in fact, a good deal closer to Muirthemne than to the Isle of Women. And so I found myself, sooner than I could have foreseen, journeying north toward my homeland.

We traveled in comfort this time, by main roads and well protected. Chieftains were honored to lodge us, and the weather held crisp and clear. Orlagh was frisky as we set out, dancing through the drifts of leaves, and my heart was as glad as hers. But I awoke on the second morning of our travels with my high spirits of the previous day vanished. At first it was just a vague uneasiness that I put down to restless sleep, but hour by hour, mile by mile, a foreboding grew that I could not shake. Though I told myself it was only my own nervousness at this first venturing out of the protection of the island, by nightfall I knew it was something more. I ate my supper in near silence, unable to enjoy the lively banter of our host’s table, wondering what, if anything, I should do about the shadow that had settled over my mind.

It was a relief when Tlachta asked to speak with me. I was hovering at the edge of asking her counsel, held back by my reluctance to burden her when she had already so much to see to.

There was no privacy to be had—not unless we braved the night chill—but we found a low space under the eaves, far from the fire and the conversation, and settled ourselves on the cold flagstone floor. Tlachta was direct, as always.

“How are you feeling, Finscoth?” The name was so new I hardly recognized it as my own.

Once, perhaps, I would have felt foolish confessing such vague fears. I had learned better. If Tlachta thought my feelings worth discussing, then they were worth discussing.

“It is uneasy I am, Mistress, without knowing why. The feeling has grown on me all this day. In truth, I can think of little else.”

Tlachta nodded. “I, too, sense some darkness ahead. I thought it concerned you in some way. Now I am sure of it.”

A flicker of panic licked at me. I was remembering the other times, the times the black hand had squeezed at my innards and the message its dark fingers had delivered. Someone is dead, I thought. Roisin. Berach. Maybe the high king himself. Lugh save me, what has happened?

I must have spoken that last part aloud, for Tlachta raised an eyebrow at my appeal to my father’s patron, Lugh of the Long Hand. He is a sun god too, of course, and with a greater name than Mug Ruith. To this day he is closer to my heart than the god of our island, for he is the god who shone on my childhood.

That single eyebrow was enough to check my runaway fears, and Tlachta’s next words brought them under rein.

“Stop now. It is not a time to let wild imaginings take hold. Let us see what can be learned from this message.”

She questioned me for some time: What, exactly, did the foreboding feel like? It was the first time I had ever described the black fingers to another person, and though my words were halting and unsure I could see she understood me.

“And is it the same this time as it was before, when your brother was killed or when you foresaw Deirdriu’s death?”

This brought me up short. It was not the same, was it? Or only in general type (the scrabbly feeling in my guts, the uneasiness, the sense of shadow) but not at all in its particulars. My vision of Deirdriu had made me cry out in fear and sorrow; my certainty that the youth of Ulster would be killed had squeezed my heart with grief. And in the sacred grove, when I saw Conlaoch killed, the horror had been a black vise that all but crushed me.

“No, Mistress,” I told Tlachta. “This is not the same. It is milder. And it does not fill me with grief.”

She was nodding. “Now you are learning to look at these things head on. And what you describe matches my own foreboding, though it comes to me in a different manner. Now, let these feelings take hold of you, and answer me this: Do you still think something has happened?”

I took a deep breath, closed my eyes and surrendered to the shadow that had been tugging at my mind all day. I let it take me, unpleasant as it was, but I tried to keep one part of myself apart, to listen and watch. I felt it all, yet I could observe it too.

I opened my eyes. Tlachta waited patiently.

“No.” I was sure of it.

“Then what do you think the feeling means?”

“It is a warning. I think it is a warning. And...” I hesitated, took a deep breath, plunged on. I was so new at this, so likely to be wrong. But Tlachta knew this. She asked only for my best try. “I do not think it is an omen of death. I think...I think there is danger for me at Tara.”

Tlachta was silent, considering. Then she found one last question for me.

“Finscoth, may I borrow your Messenger?”

If Cathbad had been at Tara, I could have sent Fintan with a more useful question. As it was, we had to send him to one of Lugaid’s druids, who would have no knowledge of me or my history. It was Tlachta’s message Fin carried, as she at least was known to the druids there, and knew where to direct him.

The question, though. We could come up with nothing more specific than, “Is all well at Tara?” If Tara was under attack, or in the grip of a plague, we would find out. But I doubted very much there was anything so dramatic amiss.

“Do you wish to remain here, or go on? I’m sure our host will make you welcome, and we can pick you up on our return journey, if that seems best to you.”

Fintan had left at first light and returned by midmorning. As expected, he had no alarming events to report. Now Tlachta, to my surprise, was leaving this decision to me. I had spent half the night mulling over the same question.

“If it is permitted, Mistress, I will go on. It might be wiser to stay, but I would discover what awaits me. And if my foreboding is indeed a message, then I am thinking the message is not to turn back, but rather to be cautious in my going forward.”

I don’t know where I got the nerve for such a speech. As if I had any business even interpreting such vaporous inklings. It was like trying to assign a shape to smoke. But I had my own reasons, and not only my eagerness to see Roisin, that propelled me. In the darkest hours of night, a kind of pugnacious determination had come over me. I had already lost my old life. But I had begun again and I would not now be turned back from my new path. I would go forward and meet my fate.

We did not go into Tara, but straight to the Hill of Tlachta, arriving mid-afternoon. Preparations for the Samhain were already underway, and I was put to work, as the previous year, hauling and greasing the wood. It felt odd at first to work side by side with the male apprentices from Tara, but in a strange way my scar made it easier. Because they were not interested in me as a woman, we were more quickly comfortable as colleagues.

The fire here would be huge, half again as tall as a man, and constructing it was a job that would take much of the next day. And there were other preparations—the torches to bind and soak, the altar to clean, the sacrificial tools to sharpen. The site was open and smooth from long years of use, but patches of gorse and thistle still sprang up each summer and had to be cleared.

After inspecting the site and assigning us our duties, Tlachta and Rathnait rode on to Tara in the late afternoon. Evidently the apprentices were to stay overnight, sleeping in the circle of small tents that had been erected by the foot of the hill. I hoped that one was set aside for Tlachta’s women.

By the time we stopped to eat—long after the sun had gone down—I was sweaty and redolent of pork grease and had worked my jumpy feelings down to a quiet murmur. I wondered how long it would take for us all to wash, sharing pots of hot water heated over our campfire.

Ah, but there was no need. This was sacred ground and a sacred ceremony, and all who assisted at the rites, however humbly, were to come to Samhain thoroughly clean. They had built a sweating house, a structure very like the little hot-air hut we had on the Isle of Women for drying clothing and herbs, but big enough for five or six people to go in at one time. I had heard of them, of course. Healers use them with fragrant herbs to ease labored breathing or old ones’ joint pains, but I had never been inside one.

Myself and the two older female apprentices, being guests, went first. We scrubbed our greasy hands up to the shoulders with brushes and warm water, shucked off our clothes and entered the tiny building. The pit in the center was piled with hot stones, dragged from the core of the fire that burned beside the house. New stones had already been added to that fire, ready for the next group.

It was the hottest place I had ever been. So strange, it felt, to leave behind the chill nip of a late autumn night, stoop into a dark doorway, and have a wall of heat hit my face, solid and thick and almost suffocating. As soon as we found our places around the fire, the door was closed, and now the heat was black: an invisible all-surrounding presence. It seared my nose when I breathed, penetrated my lungs, heated my eyeballs. It was frightening at first, but as the heat seeped into my limbs, it became comfortable and finally, comforting. Sweat began to prick out on my skin—in my armpits and the crease of my neck, on my forehead and scalp. It was stinging and acrid at first—I could smell the other women too—but as the perspiration increased it ran clear as water. I was slick with it, even my hair, and I felt cleaner than ever in my life.

Damnhait, on my left, began chanting softly—a simple prayer that I had memorized mechanically as part of my training. Now, in that dark place, it became luminous in my mind as we sang it over and over.

Sky to the earth
Earth to the water
Water to the deep
Wings in the air
Legs on the earth
Fins under the waves
Night to day
The seasons turn
The firmament over all

The words, strung from one person to the next into a web of meaning, released their power into the waiting darkness. We recreated the wheel of the sun, the wheel of the seasons, the wheel of life, and we turned as one with the wheel. For the first time, I understood what prayer could do.

Afterward, we threw blankets over our shoulders and ran, shrieking and giggling and splashing, into the little stream that chattered behind the tents. Our hides were tingling pink and cold when we clambered out, but our hosts had seen to our needs. We found our clothes in a basket, waiting for us on the stream bank.

My mother came to me in the night. She danced into my dream on silent feet, so that it seemed to me I simply turned and there she was. Emer was as beautiful as I remembered: hair a thick stream of dark gold, a form both straight and shapely, eyes as green as the silk of her dress.

It was the silk that kept me from rushing into her arms. Green as the barley fields in spring, it was. The same green that had wrapped my father’s head. And as I gazed on it, my love for her turned sour in my breast. It was not hate I felt—hate would have been welcome, with its clean hot flame—but rather a bloated angry pain. You abandoned me. You left me to face everything alone.

I turned my back to her, shoulders hunching stiff against the pull of her presence, the poison of memory.

Yet there she stood again, in front of me, and though my face was turned away I saw all the same. The green eyes were sad and pleading. Her face was bright with love. Slowly, she compelled me to look full upon her. She raised her hands, cupped her palms together and breathed into the little bowl they formed. And then she offered it to me, a gift.

I looked into her hands, and I saw a birth. My birth. There was my mother, her hair dark with sweat, features tender and fierce, reaching for the tiny body that slipped out from between her legs, pushing away the midwife’s hands to claim her baby girl. Then came a series of images that changed at a dizzying speed as Emer shuffled through her memories, deciding which to pick. Poignant glimpses of my childhood they were, but she hurried on. There was something more important she was looking for.

At last she opened her hands wide and showed me. There was Emer, speaking earnestly to Eirnin, determined to persuade him to teach me. Next I saw her standing against the fence during my arms lesson, watching Berach wallop me into the mud while she swallowed her worry and showed me only encouragement. Now I was walking out our gate onto the plain, with Fintan on my shoulder, and I saw my mother wave Tullia back and let me go unhindered. I saw her meet with one girl after another, and their families too, until finally choosing Roisin to be my maid. And at the last, I stood with my mother on a hill that looked like a reclining woman, memorizing the location of a treasure, and this time I could read her intent.

I understood. As Emer’s hands closed, and the little worlds winked out, I looked on my mother and found the poison was gone. She had left me alone, but she had not left me unprepared.

I smiled at her. And as she faded back beyond the reach of dreams, her green eyes flashed at me, and her chin lifted in a gesture I suddenly realized was my own as well as hers. Her answering smile was full of pride—not for herself, but for me.

My mother was proud of me.

The blessing of that dream was short-lived, for I woke to a gray day and a mood to match. My jumpy stomach had returned while I slept, blown in, it seemed, on the wind that had risen in the night and the high, scudding clouds it chased across the sky.

Tlachta rode in from Tara around midday, bringing with her the answer to our mysterious fears. I could not believe her news.

“He is here? Now? But why?”

If she minded the way I lost my manners and fired questions at her as if she were a servant, she didn’t show it. Tlachta is like that. She bends her mind to the problem at hand and shuts out all distractions. She was grim now, but focused. It would take much more than this—more than I can imagine, really—to throw her into a tizzy.

“Lugaid has summoned the rulers of the four provinces,” she explained now, “and bid them attend Samhain at Tara. He asserts his rule and tests their allegiance.”

“It is a test of trust, also,” she added. “For they will have to leave their own chief druids behind, and perhaps others of their most trusted men, to conduct the Samhain rites and judgments in their own territories.”

“And Conchobor has obeyed,” I marveled. After years of standing against the rest of Ireland, I could not imagine he was eager to serve another’s will.

A curt nod. “He has come at the high king’s bidding, and left Cathbad and Sencha in charge at Emain Macha. He will be here, on this hill, by nightfall.”

I am not by nature a flighty person, but at the first mention of Conchobor’s arrival my heart had thudded in alarm and my head felt as though no air were reaching it. I was afraid of his very name. And with that thought I became angry and ashamed, enough to pull my thoughts together. Calm. Control. I set myself to be like my mistress, and began to see the thing for what it was.

“There is no reason,” I said slowly, “that he and I should even cross paths, is there?” I was glad, now, for the plain brown cloaks the Samhain helpers wore, cloaks I would not have been caught dead in before my life changed. Saraid had laughed at my distaste when I first saw them. “They are not designed for beauty,” she told me. “It is the rites themselves, and the Wise Ones conducting it, that the crowd should be watching, not us. If the helpers could be invisible, that would be best. As it is, we do our best to fade into the background.” With the thick brown wool pulled over my head and shading my face, I would be nothing in Conchobor’s eyes but an anonymous apprentice. For that matter, I could even stay in my tent for the night, though that would leave Tlachta short a hand.

“Not if we are careful,” she agreed now. “You will keep your face shielded from the light of the flames, and you will do no task that brings you close to the men of Ulster. I will have Rathnait see to it.

“Conchobor will not, in any event, interrupt the Samhain,” she said. “Should he come nose to nose with you, he will still wait until tomorrow. The danger will be during the judgment days. If Conchobor attends, you will have to miss observing them this year.”

She was on the verge of dismissing me, halfway to her next task, when she turned back.

“And Finscoth,” she cautioned, “your old name must not be uttered here. By the gods we honor, make sure the other girls are careful about that.”