Magdalen Rising (5 page)

“The mothers have arrived,” announced the Cailleach, unperturbed.

I looked around and saw the swiftly bobbing lights of their torches. Soon they had surrounded us: the Cailleach, the skull and me. And their shrieks gave way to a silence even more unsettling. My mothers were not quiet types. Usually they all talked at once. I would have expected loud, competitive upbraiding from them. Instead they just stared, but when I tried to catch anyone's eye, each one looked away from me—all except Grainne, who looked so stricken that I felt my first thoroughgoing pang of remorse. The Cailleach did not speak at once, but her eyes glowed, and her mouth twitched.

“So,” the Old One spoke at last, “shall we begin by stating the obvious? She is here.”

“Yes,” said Fand. “And what do you intend to do about her? She's broken the one geis we laid upon her!”

“Now, Fand,” Boann objected. “It wasn't exactly a full-fledged geis. We didn't say anything about danger and destruction coming upon her and all that. It was more like a rule—”

“Whatever it was,” put in Emer, “she broke it.”

“And had us all in a tizzy,” chimed in Dahut.

“Well, but we knew where she'd gone,” Etaine pointed out.

“No we didn't!” Deirdru was heated. “With that one, you never know. That's why we went to the cliffs first!”

“I always said that was stupid,” grumbled Boann.

“You know we had to,” Grainne spoke up. “We knew she'd at least be safe here—”

Did they? I pricked up my ears. Then why the so-called rule?

“But she has run off to the cliffs before, and you know how dangerous they are—”

“And with that storm coming,” broke in Liban, frowning at Boann. “We had quite a time heading off that storm, once we realized—”

“And it was going to be a doozy,” Boann sighed wistfully. “I sort of hated sending it out to sea. What a waste of a good head wind.”

“Well, what else could we do?” Liban was getting huffy. “With Little Bright One off on her own somewhere, exposed to the elements.”

“I keep saying,” Etaine was exasperated, “we
knew
where once we thought about it.”

“It doesn't matter now.” Fand cut in. “The point is whether you call it a
geis
or not, she broke it willfully. Knowingly. Damn it all, on
purpose
!”

“Well, of course she did!” Boann threw up her hands.

The sound of my mothers arguing was as soothing as the lullaby it had often been. And the outcome would be the same as ever: whatever I'd done, I'd get away with it. My mothers could never reach consensus about punishing me. Never.

“You will see if you look: the maiden was not mistaken in her timing.” The Cailleach spoke quietly, but all dispute instantly ceased. She gestured towards my bloody thighs.

Then another cry rose from my mothers, a soft one, full of tenderness and reproach. As one being, they planted their torches and swarmed around me.

“Little Bright One!”

“Why didn't you tell us?”

“We would have taken you here!”

“In solemn procession.”

“With drums and singing.”

“And a bright red tunic!”

“And wreaths of flowers on your head.”

“And mead to drink.”

“Ah, Little Bright One. Our baby. A woman.”

Then I understood. Of course. That was the “right time” they kept referring to: my first blood. They'd been saving the Valley between Bride's Breasts for my initiation. It was to be a surprise, a present, a revelation of mystery. And I'd jumped the starting line and raced here on my own. In effect, I'd eloped with myself, cheating them of the ceremony.

“I didn't know.” I spoke for the first time, and two tears—one from each eye—overflowed and started down my cheeks. “When I ran away this morning, I didn't know that the blood would come today. I just wanted to do something that you wouldn't let me do. By myself. I'm sorry.” I wasn't used to saying those two words. My tongue felt stiff and strange with speaking them. “I'm sorry I caused you grief.” I borrowed the Cailleach's phrase.

“Grief!” There was a collective snort from my mothers. “Do you suppose she even knows the meaning of the word?”

“She'll learn,” the Cailleach stated flatly. “Oh, yes, she'll learn.” Her eyes swept the circle of Mothers. “It's time she came to me, you know.”

“Oh, surely not yet!” gasped Grainne.

“She's only twelve and a half,” added Liban.

“She has her blood,” countered the Cailleach.

“Wait a minute,” I interrupted. “Do you mean—”

“Hush!” said the Cailleach and all the Mothers together.

“Haven't you taught her all you can?” The Cailleach put it to them.

“Not really,” said Boann. “Her aim with the
laigen
needs work. We haven't even started her on chariot driving. And she's only now developing the upper body strength she needs for serious work in the forge.”

“You are assuming that she is going to become one of you.”

There was a shocked silence that I shared. My craving for adventure notwithstanding, I had never imagined being anything other than a warrior-witch like my mothers. What else was there?

“Do you know something you're not telling us?” demanded Fand.

“I do not,” said the Cailleach, “but it may be that the young one does, though she may not know what she knows.”

What? What did I know? Even as I asked myself I knew what: my vision in the pool. And if I hadn't run away—upsetting everyone and losing out on a new red party tunic—I never would have seen the vision. I did not know how I was going to do it or what it would mean, but someday, somehow, somewhere I was going to find the Appended One. I had a destination now. A destiny.

“But we're not ready to let her go!” cried Grainne.

“Look here. It's just too sudden.” Boann was blunt.

“Very well,” said the Cailleach after a moment. “We will wait till
Samhain
when she has lived thirteen years. That gives you the bright half of the year to teach her all you may. Consider well what she may need to know, and give her your manifold gifts. Meanwhile, it may come
to me what lessons I must prepare for her. Is it agreed among us, then? Among the Nine Witches of Tir na mBan?”

You might need to be a Celt to know the jolt I felt to hear the Cailleach call herself and my Mothers the Nine Witches. Nine is the number of numbers, the sacred three times three. I did not simply learn to count like any child with fingers and attentive parents; I learned the meanings of numbers, the stories connected with them. I had always considered myself all the more special, because I brought—so I thought—the human population of the island to nine. I brought my mothers' number to mystical completion. Now it struck me with the force of a blow: There were already nine, had always been nine. I made ten, a dangerous, dubious number: an overflowing, a new beginning, a change, change of pattern, change of fortune.

“We are agreed. We are agreed.” My mothers' voices circled around me, and I felt dazed and dizzy.

“Now,” resumed the Cailleach. “We are all here. And the maiden bleeds for the first time in the dark moon of Shoots-Show. Little Bright One, Bride's Flame. Do homage to your mothers as you have done to me.”

Can you see us? We stand beside the Well of Wisdom between Bride's Breasts, their massive blackness edged with stars. My mothers surround me, their faces lit by torchlight. They are so well known to me. These are the faces that crowded over my cradle, vying for a turn to rock me and nurse me. Yet tonight they are also unknown, new, strange. For the first time I am separate, not just their child. I am a woman bleeding as they are bleeding. One of them, but no longer theirs. The Cailleach has retreated into the circle. I am left alone in the center with the painted skull. I am standing naked in the midst of the women who made me.

And I am beautiful.

I begin with Fand, anointing her forehead and cheeks, and make my way slowly from mother to mother. Their tears mix with my blood, and we are all wordless. The last one, standing next to the Cailleach, is my womb mother, Grainne. As I touch her face it blurs, and I can't see anymore. Then in one dark rush, the mothers wash over me, and I am fully enclosed in a warm, dark woman place that tastes of tears and smells of blood, as one more time I am cradled and rocked.

I
N MANY TIMES AND places, there's been no such thing as adolescence. The change from child to adult is as sudden as the turning of day to night at the equator. Blaze then blackness. The transition is sudden, dramatic, maybe even violent. I thought it would be that way for me when my blood came. And hadn't I looked a skull straight in the eye? Hadn't I traced the map of time in the Cailleach's face?

In the far North, where I lived, twilight lingers during the bright half of the year. There are hours and hours when it is neither day nor night. Those last months with my mothers, I lived in a kind of twilight, suspended between my child self and whatever was to come, enduring the awkwardness and indignity of metamorphosis in process. No wonder caterpillars spin a cocoon. You need a little privacy. You certainly don't want the running commentary of eight mothers.

In fact, they were as confused as I was. One day they would schedule activities to the minute, even going so far as to announce change of classes with a blast on the bagpipes. Another day they'd turn me loose with my pockets full of oatcakes and send me off to wander. I suspected them of wanting to get rid of me, the better to kibitz about my fate. Or maybe they just wanted a break. I certainly did. I got tired of their teaching, especially since they couldn‘t—or wouldn't—tell me anything I really wanted to know.

“The people with the appendages, you know, like the stallions and the stags, where are they?” I asked not long after my excursion to the Well.

“People with
appendages
!” My mothers looked at each other and tittered. Really! Who were the adolescents? “They're all over the place. Why, most of the world is theirs!”

“But why don't they come here?”

“We have been wondering that ourselves,” my mothers sighed and looked broody.

“But why don't you know?”

“We don't know everything, Little Bright One. Not quite everything.”

“You don't even know my name,” I informed them. “I am not Little Bright One anymore!”

On my roaming days, I searched all of Tir na mBan for a new name, and as much of the sea and sky as I could scan from atop one or the other of Bride's breasts. (Would you believe? The open rock faces on the peaks were indeed a brownish pink, especially at sunset.) I was constantly on the alert for a sign or omen. I greeted every animal or bird that crossed my path as a potential messenger. You may wonder why I did not go to the Well of Wisdom again. I can only say that an uncharacteristic restraint, even shyness, inhibited me. Perhaps the Cailleach put a warding spell on the place to keep me at a distance until it was time for me to go to her.

I did not find my name on my ramblings, but I gained an intimate knowledge of Tir na mBan, learning every curve and fold, every cliff and hidden cove. I did not know then how soon I would leave or for how long or how far away I would go from my mother island. But I carried the Shining Isle of Tir na mBan in my body: the blood, sinew, and bone the island had fed and formed. In a sense, I was Tir na mBan. No matter where in the world I went, I could always remember.

Not all changes and exchanges between my mothers and me were frustrating. Some I welcomed. Now that I had my woman's blood, my mothers had spiced their repertoire with tales of Queen Maeve of Connacht. These stories were my mothers' idea of sex education, and I, for one, think every pubescent girl ought to have a chance to hear them.

(I know I haven't helped much with pronunciation. But this name, as you will see, is important. So remember this: Maeve rhymes with brave, as in Maeve the Brave. And Maeve rhymes with a host of other wonderful words like wave and cave. Got that?)

Queen Maeve was always lavish with “the friendship of her upper thighs.” Her requirements in a husband were that he be a generous man, without jealousy or fear. If he were not, she would outshine him in liberality and courage. And jealousy would never do, for, as Maeve declared, “I have never been without one man in the shadow of another.” King Ailill fit the bill, and Maeve had it all—except for the Brown Bull of Cuailnge; we'll get to that part later. Chief among her lovers was the great hero Fergus Mac Roth. According to the lore, it took seven women to satisfy Fergus, unless he was with Maeve. As for Maeve, she would go with thirty men a day or go with Fergus once.

Needless to say these statistics fascinated me.

Excuse me a moment, all of you who just want me to get on with the story, while I speak with the fulminating scholars. You will argue that my mothers can't have known the Tales of the Red Branch, starring Maeve of Connacht, Cuchulain, et al. The stories are assumed to date from the 4th and 5th century CE, recounting events that may—or may not—have taken place in my time. They were not written down until the first millenium when some randy Irish monks decided they really ought to be preserved. For the sake of posterity, you understand. Picture them bending over their manuscripts in their cold, damp scriptoriums, warming themselves with Maeve's exploits. (Thirty men a day! Begorra!)

I suppose you think time runs in a straight line, even though nothing else in the world around you does any such thing. But if you must think in linear terms, think along the lines of a tree. Say the branches are the tales that got written down, and the trunk is some event that you might call the historical basis for the stories. Now don't forget the roots, as vast and intricate a complex as the branches, as essential to the life of the tree as the new light-drinking leaves, though they are hidden from human sight under the ground. The stories of Maeve have such roots, like the stories of Macha, the great mare goddess, and the shape-shifting Mórrígán with her harsh cry and her raven wings.

Note the proliferation of M's—a sure sign of an ancient female force.

Because that's what Maeve is: a female force, and she cannot be pinned down or tidily contained. She is called The Intoxicated One Who Intoxicates. Her name means mead. She is Maeve of Connacht and Maeve of Leinster, kingmaker, whose husbands numbered nine. She is Mab, Queen of Faery. She is old as the hills where she lives still. You can't kill a female force. You can drive her underground, but those roots are alive, and she'll rise again in a new form. Especially if she's one of the M's. Just try to flatten the swells of the sea or to tamp down the Grand Tetons.

My mothers had been telling me these tales, and they'd taken root in my imagination. You will probably say that these stories lodged in my subconscious and caused what happened next. Fine. Interpretation is your job. I'm just the storyteller. All right, listen.

It was the eve of the full moon (the eve of anything being the magic time). Now that I had begun to bleed with my mothers, usually at the dark of the moon, I also experienced the other side of the hormonal rollercoaster ride: ovulation. Note the O for the microscopic moon drifting
down the fallopian rivers, mirroring the full moon in the sky, the river of moonlight on the sea. O for the opening of the vaginal folds. O for orgasm, which I did not yet know a thing about. I only knew that my body was flooded with the strangest mixture of languor and restlessness.

My mothers did not say much to me directly that first cycle. But for the first time in my life, I was not left at the hut with whichever mother had drawn the short straw. They took me with them to the magic orchard, with its impossible heady scent of blossom and fruit, where the flowers opened to moon as well as sunlight, and the bees gathered nectar at midnight. There I entered the ecstatic dance.

We danced and danced for hours and hours, one mother or another drumming. We danced from moonrise—the moon appearing huge and hazy over the mysterious lands to the East—till the moon was high and small in the sky and somehow harder looking, like a smooth white pebble you could grip in the palm of your hand. We danced and danced, and then a silence fell. I could hear the waves on the beach and the drunken buzzing of the lunatic bees in the apple blossoms. I looked around the circle at the mothers who seemed wrapped in the silence. Or should I say rapt? Though I could see their faces, they were somehow obscured, as if they'd taken the moonlight as a veil.

Did you ever sneak out of bed and glimpse your mother in the arms of a lover (never mind if it was only your father)? Or maybe she was just sitting alone and staring at nothing. In either case, her apartness from you, her separate, secret existence was awesome, aweful. It was like that for me in that moment: my mothers were lovely and remote, belonging not to me, but to themselves. By ones and sometimes twos, they slipped into the tangled shadows of the orchard and disappeared. Grainne was the last to go. She looked at me and almost looked like the mother I knew. Then the night wind blew away the tatters of her baffled tenderness, and her face was bright and empty as the moon's. Suddenly, she too was gone.

There I was, left to my own devices. You might imagine that I'd be pleased, but in fact I did not know what to do with myself. I did not even know what I was feeling, though now I'd say it was my first taste of loneliness. I wanted an Other, not a mother but an Other. I wanted the Appended One. All the mystery and beauty surrounding me, the tantalizing secret of my own destiny would remain impenetrable—or unpenetrated—without him. He was the missing piece of the puzzle. I began to walk inland toward the Valley between Bride's Breasts, never
mind it would take me the rest of the night to get there. I didn't have a clue where else to look, although I sensed, even then, that magic seldom repeats itself—which is why there has been no so-called scientific proof of its existence.

Maybe it was the moonlight or the midnight hour—one of the times doorways open between the worlds—but very soon I was lost among hills I did not recognize. For a time, I tried to force the strange landscape to conform to some familiar place, but when I came upon a lake, I had to give it up. There is no lake on Tir na mBan—pools, springs, streams, yes, but no inland body of water this size, with several branches disappearing among the hills. I'd hardly registered this shock when the lake shrank to a puddle.

Straddling it were a pair of muscular legs, swirling with woad up to full thighs and beyond to belly, breasts, and a broad face with a snub nose. The woad couldn't completely hide the freckles. And the lime—twisting the hair into fantastical spikes that would put a punk rocker or the statue of liberty to shame—could not hide the fierce orange of the hair. Whoever she was, she wore nothing but a gold torque and a belt that held her sword. I spied her
laigen
and shield on the ground beside her. She was much too substantial to dismiss as a trick of moonlight, but in case you were inclined to, let me tell you the night was now dissolving into chilly, pre-dawn grey.

“There,” said Herself, giving her bush—as orange as mine!—a shake and stepping aside to survey her puddle with pride. “That's better. Fergus is impatient, but I always say: Never go into full battle with a full bladder. It's so distracting, not to mention you might piss yourself in front of the enemy. And this will be a famous place of a famous battle, because I'm gonna whip that Little Hound Dog son-of-a-bitch Cuchulain's ass once and for all, so I am. And to mark this place, my stream, noble and mighty, will become a great lake with many channels. And from this time forward in all the worlds this place will be called ‘Queen-Maeve-takes-a-leak.' ”

“Queen Maeve of Connacht!” I gasped, recognizing one of Boann's stories come to life.

She turned to regard me, without a trace of the embarrassment most people would feel if taken by surprise while pissing and talking to themselves.

“The same,” she said, obviously pleased with her identity. She picked up her spear and stood at ease, one hip thrust out. “And who might you
be? No!” She held up a hand before I could speak. “Don't tell me you've come with another of those ridiculous, repetitive foretellings of doom.” She rolled up her eyes. ” ‘Red, red, I see very red!' ” Maeve intoned in a high-pitched whine, her imitation, I gathered, of Fedelm the prophetess. “ ‘Honey,' I finally said to her, ‘Go get your eyes checked.' It's all propaganda.” She waved it away. “But you, now! You're a fine, strapping young colleen. You don't want to end up some whey-faced, mealy-mouthed prophetess.”

I shook my head vehemently.

“Then state your name, lineage, and business.”

“I am the only daughter of the warrior witches of Tir na mBan. My father is Manannan Mac Lir. I don't know what I'm doing here, and—er—I'm between names at the moment.” I frowned trying to think if I'd answered all the questions.

“The warrior witches of Tir na mBan!” Her eyes narrowed. “Aren't those the bitches that trained that Little Hound Dog?”