Soothing the Dead
at the base of the mountain.
Dia dhaoibh a chairde/ Hallo everyone
Yes, yes. I know, I said there’d be no newsletter this month due to my return home to Ireland. That said, I wanted to send another piece of Beara: Cry of the Banshee to the ‘paid’ followers group in preparation for step-up events in the following chapter, so consider this a short postcard from where I’m standing at the moment. Normal service will resume at the end of September.
Soothing the dead at the base of the mountain
Last night, I sat in the graveyard that’s been holding our family’s bones the length of several generations. Accompanying my uncle (and my brother) I was attending an annual mass to commemorate the dead, something I once heard a neigbour refer to as ‘soothing the dead’.
Sitting there, I was surprised by an unexpected sense of nervousness –probably stemming from the fact that I hadn’t attended a religious ritual (of any denomination) in over thirty years. All the same, this was a place I was intimately familiar, where everyone could work back up the family chain to work out who I was and where I came from. This was, essentially, part of home.
The mass was held outside among the graves. People sat on a line of wooden chairs that ran along the side of the church. These filled up pretty fast, so most people sat on the graves of their families, spread erratically throughout the graveyard.
Mass was held by a priest who must have been in his eighties. Old and tired, he was sitting at a table between the graves, reading from a book while speaking into a microphone for the surrounding sound system. Despite his age, he was in good humour and charming and you could sense his genuine fondness for the church and the graveyard and the bulk of Cnoc Daod looming over us in the background. Beside him, a soft-spoke young African priest turned the pages with gentle motions and helped in other ways.
Surprisingly, I remembered all the liturgical responses embedded into me as a child and they came rolling off the tongue without obstruction. Nothing, it seemed, in all that time, had changed except me.
The evening sky grew very dark and a soft breeze started blowing across the graveyard, but no-one really took any notice. At communion, my brother and I got trapped and ended up taking the Eucharist as we didn’t; want to be rude. I, fortunately, bluffed my way through the process. My brother, who’s just as much a heathen as me, couldn’t remember the response and said ‘Thanks’ when he received the Eucharist instead of ‘Amen’, which was quite a funny variation on the norm. The priest certainly looked a bit surprised.
Once the main part of the mass was done, the African priest got the job of blessing the graves and started out across the graveyard casting holy water on the graves. Just at that moment, the skies opened up and a deluge fell over the graveyard, making a bit of a mockery of the blessing. Everyone scattered, making a rush for the shelter of their cars or the inside of the church. Stumbling into the overhang of the church door, I met three cousins I hadn’t seen for over twenty-five years, but who turned out to be just as lovely as I remembered.
Hurrying back to my own car, I stopped to look back at the graveyard for one surreal moment as an African man in white robes flitted in and out of the darkness, still sprinkling water of purification over the bones of my ancestors.
Liath Luachra: The Great Wild
This is just a quick note to let you know that Liath Luachra: The Great Wild is now available in the Irish Imbas Shop. The book was exclusive to Amazon (until last week) but you can now find it on Kobo and the Irish Imbas shop (as well as well as Amazon of course) It’s not available anywhere else in digital form at the moment.
As you probably know, I’m no great admirer of Amazon or Apple so I decided to pull this book from their exclusive grip. A key driver for that is the fact that I’m starting another series (to replace the Fionn mac Cumhaill Series - once that’s completed) and ‘The Great Wild’ will be the first offering in that sequences of stories.
To celebrate its release, I’ll be knocking the price down to $2.99 (only in the Irish Imbas Shop HERE) for the next two days. Apologies if you get this message late. I can’t really extend the offer beyond that.
The book is kind of an experimental ancient-Irish Robinson Crusoe adventure that leads into the main series.
Here’s a taster from a chapter called ‘Na Samhlaca’.
Na Samhlacha [The Spectres]
The howling started on the first night at her new refuge: a haunting dirge that rolled in on a breeze from the deep eastern forest. Inside the cave where the girl was sleeping, that sound rang alarmingly loud and she leapt to her feet, all sense of safety smashing on the ground about her.
Scurrying towards the narrow entrance, she crouched with the knife in one hand, resharpened spear in the other, and peered fearfully through the cavemouth. She listened carefully as the mournful baying repeated, slowly distinguishing patterns within the sequence of desolate sounds. Each howl was initiated by a single wolf. Deep and sonorous, it lasted the length of several heartbeats, its pitch remaining constant or varying smoothly as other pack members joined in.
Eventually, the girl allowed herself to relax. Her refuge was safe. There were no wolves on the island. If anything, they were probably a great distance away. On clear nights, a wolf howl could travel across huge stretches of land. Here, on her refuge, surrounded by water, any noise that ran down the valley would be amplified by the terrain and sound far louder than it actually was.
Returning to her bed, the girl put her weapons aside and lay down, wriggling into a more comfortable position as the distant wolf song continued. As sleep began to reclaim her, the mournful tone took on an unexpectedly soothing resonance. Closing her eyes, the girl imagined the animals gathered in a circle, snouts pointed at the night sky, projecting their call upward to allow their message to carry.
Out into the surrounding dark.
***
That night the nightmares returned.
With another deserted valley.
This valley was far narrower than the valley with the lake and the smattering of islands, sandwiched by a long range of steep hills to either side. The central plain was coated in forest, bar a slow running river and the occasional clearing where trees had been felled.
In one of those clearings, the girl encountered a farmlet, a rude habitation with a single building, two lean-tos and an empty pen for cattle and goats. A small plume of smoke seeped from a gap in the roof of the larger structure, but, as she watched from the trees, the wind quickly snatched it away. The bright, orange-yellow glow from a fire flickered through the doorway in the western wall, a sharp contrast to the brooding mass of clouds pressing down from overhead.
The building was a wide wattle and mud structure with a high, thatched roof. Even at that distance, it looked worn and poorly maintained. The wall was peppered with ill-made repairs, the roof visibly sagged at either side of the central ridge and discoloured patches of thatch showed clear need of renovation. A pile of poorly stacked firewood sat to the right of the doorway. The rusty blade of an axe was embedded in a tree stump alongside it.
Staring from the treeline, the girl was struck by unexpected recognition, a sense that this might have been a place once familiar to her before she’d woken in the clearing. Curious, and confused, she stepped out of the trees and walked warily across the cattle-flattened pasture.
Approaching the building from the west, she drew to a halt twenty paces from the doorway which now sat like a threat in the flat of the mud-wattle wall. Cautiously stepping a little closer, she attempted to peer inside, but the interior remained a dark enigma, thick with shadows and a fiery orange glow at its fringes.
Swallowing down her fear, the girl pushed herself those last few paces forward, sliding up alongside the wall with mounting trepidation. Placing one foot on the doorway’s stone threshold, she poked her head inside.
The interior of the building was a black void, with no discernible sense of size or structure. Even squinting, it was impossible to make out any detail beyond the flickering flames in the fire pit. In fact, the fire was the sole object she could make out with any clarity, a high-stacked blaze of crackling wood, the fierce heat of it warming her skin even at the doorway.
She was still staring into that mass of shadow when it shuddered and shifted, and two dozen stars flickered into life. Ten, twenty, maybe thirty pairs of glinting yellow eyes.
All turned to stare in her direction.
Alarmed, the girl took a frightened step backward. Turning, she fled from the doorway, rushing desperately towards the safety of the trees. The scramble of frantically shifting bodies rumbled in her wake, followed by the frenzied jostling as they fought to get through the crowded doorway.
Wheezing in panic, she pounded across the grass, the sanctuary of the trees wildly beckoning her closer. Thirty paces. Twenty paces. Ten paces ...
In a snarling mass of fur and teeth, they swarmed and took her down.
Five paces from the treeline.
***
The presence of wolves became a matter of more practical consequence in the cold grey light of dawn. Shaken from the bloody nightmare, the girl had never returned to sleep. Standing by the inlet in that bleak dusk glow, she tossed pebbles at the murky water, her thoughts riding out on the ripples they created.
Ideal though her new island refuge was, its limited food resources meant she couldn’t remain there for any kind of extended period. The previous night’s chorus however, had highlighted the real implications of returning to the mainland. The broad river valley that she now inhabited formed part of the wolf pack’s extended territory and, by default, part of their habitual hunting grounds as well. That posed a problem in that it meant she was now not only potential prey for the wolves but, given her own need to hunt, a potential competitor as well.
The End
That’s me done for …er .. August. I have about a hundred cousins to visit, some additional research to carry out and limited time to do so, so I’ll leave you here.
Apologies for the somewhat curt tone of this newsletter, by the way. It’s hard yacker writing and organising this while constantly on the move.
Anyway, the usual newsletter will be back next week and the ‘paid’ followers group will get a chance to learn about the practicalities of cursing stones and what happens when they … backfire.
Until then …
Slán go fóill!
Brian
