NaGeira (2 page)

“And lose precious skin and blood?” I say, laying the clump of coarse sandy hair close by the now raging hearth. The wood the boy brought me is good and dry and will do for days. It hisses and smokes but little, sending odd sparks rising into the room. They waver in mid-air for a moment, then wink out in the darkness. The nights are still cold, and I am getting too old now to gather wood for myself.

“What do you have of hers?” he says hugging himself morosely, sitting far off by the joint-stool.

I reach into the folds of my dress and pull out the tooth—dried blood still on the root and a crack down the middle. “When you are physician to everyone, a piece of everyone remains with you.”

His look of disgust does not affect the odd sense of pride I feel. No one in this place can do without me, I know. It doesn’t matter how I am shunned. Sudden elation gets the better of me for a
moment and I am like a child again, striking out for the first time to discover the possibilities and limitations of my powers. I defy the crone that has become my outward shell. It is just a disguise; I can feel the withering years peeling away from me. “You should be careful what you wish for, my boy,” I say. “A girl who loses a first tooth at thirteen will likely lose her last at twenty. You will feel you are sucking on the mouth of a codfish!” I laugh with abandon. Although it feels like the mirth of youth flowing in a torrent, I’m sure the boy, who now purses his lips and turns to the door, would call it a cackle.

He knows he cannot leave now. His desire is too great and is held fast in my darkened room as sure as the black and gold shadows that leap and duck over the four walls.

“Now come, boy, kneel beside me by the fire.”

I turn to the flames with the boy’s hair in one hand, the tooth of his beloved in the other. He leaves the joint-stool and shuffles towards me, kneeling.

“What now?” he says.

“Put out your hand as though to receive.”

Obediently he does so. I put the clump of his hair in the middle of his palm. His hand is sweating and the hair sticks as it should. I place the tooth in the centre of this little nest.

“Now close your fist.”

Again he does as he’s told.

“Now,” I say grabbing hold of his wrist and turning it so that the knuckles face upward. I can feel his alarm in the stiffness of his hand. “Don’t be afraid. Hold on as long as you can. Only when you cannot bear it any longer, only then can you open your fist and let the hair and the tooth drop on the fire.”

Feeling his wrist tug away, I look at him hard. His eyes glisten with fear and he is breathing quickly, yet I know he is bracing himself. He nods. I put both my hands behind his elbow. David grits his teeth and mumbles to himself. I squeeze his elbow tight as a sign to get ready, then push his elbow forward. He does not resist.

David gives a muffled cry and jolts his arm back for a moment. Stiffening, he plunges it forward again, gives a small, rising moan but keeps his fist steady above the flame. Then, shaking with pain, he opens his fist and pulls his hand away, cradling it to his belly like a chick he has lost and found again.

The hair and tooth land on a glowing log. The hair sizzles and curls around Sara’s tooth. A single small flame dances around, licking the now black and withering strands.
Perfect!

The boy shivers and breathes heavily, his head bowed.

“Up!” I say, using my knuckles against his shoulders to climb into a standing position. He is slow to react. “Salt water!” I say to rouse him. “And quickly, or your hand will be useless for a week.”

I lift the bucket onto the table while he gradually rises, stumbles towards the table, and plunges his hand into the water. He cries out, turning his head to the ceiling, eyes tight shut.

“Quiet!” I hiss at him. “Do you want them to hear you down in the cove?”

I know no one will hear us—my home is far from the rest of the settlement. But this boy is beginning to worry me. So timid, yet sullen; so backward with his girl, yet so determined to win her, no matter how singed his skin must become in the attempt.

“If your uncle, or anyone else, asks about your burn, tell them you were helping me with the fire.”

The boy doesn’t reply but looks down, drawing his hand out of
the bucket. Tears of pain run down his face and he breathes hard, gritting his teeth.

“What now?” David asks, gazing down at his pink and trembling hand.

“Now?”

“What must I do to win her?”

“You have done it already. Go home. Rest. Let the medicine work.”

He stands rigid, still staring into his quivering palm as though expecting to see some kind of answer there.

“You have sent your message to the gods and goddesses who reign over all,” I whisper to comfort him. “They are in all living things, in the earth and the sky. You have joined Sara and yourself in the flames. To the gods, you are one.”

“What if it doesn’t work?” says the boy, his tears mingling with sweat.

“It will work because the spirits move in Sara as they move in us all.”

The boy stares at me for a second.

“I am grateful to you, Sheila,” he says, then turns for the door.

“Treat her well if you want to repay me.”

He nods without turning. His movements are slower, heavier than before. I think of the boy who came to see me earlier, his coltish love and his shyness. That boy was a more delicate creature altogether than the figure whose shoulders now block my narrow doorway.

David opens the door and steps into the night, closing it after him with a clunk. His heavy footfalls crunch on the path as he makes his way down to the cove.

I turn back to the fire which still leaps and ducks around the wood. The spitting violence of the flames seems meant for me, but I am equal to it and stare back in defiance. We are adversaries, the fire and I, and I do not mean to yield to it yet.

I
have lived too long, and I know it. It’s been part of me always, this inclination to survive. All my life I have been skipping rocks over a writhing ocean. People around me gurgle and scream, their anguish like wasps in my ears, but my nimble feet carry me along, barely allowing for pause. As I am predestined to outlast them, I feel a passing sorrow, but little guilt. I have lived beyond events which should wring the very soul from a woman. I have heard the cries of my children as they are taken or slain by pirates, and have felt the fire of grief overcome me. Salt tears have turned my cheeks to rivers. My very life, it seems, oozed in that flow, mingling with the dust at my feet.

But the salt tears dried upon my face, crusted, turned to powder. I was breathing, seeing, feeling. Before too long even hunger began to nibble at my ribs. I would go in search of food to sustain myself. What manner of thing am I to have survived so much?

But I knew from the start. I had been warned.

When I was a child, I met the man of the forest. I recall but little of his appearance now. It was a face that revealed itself one moment, then faded the next into shifting light and shadow. A face whose contours were the knots and dips of tree bark. I remember how his voice hissed gently like the rustling of leaves.
The forest is yours,
he said, through the whispering melodies of the foliage.
While the woods embrace you, no spirit or beast can harm you, no strangers or neighbours smite you, no dank ague infect you. When death lies all around you, the leaves and boughs protect you.

I cannot justify or explain it even to myself—this feeling that the lives are too fleeting to mourn, that only the heart of the forest is constant. I met a playwright once in a London prison. Much of what he said seemed nonsense, but one thing, I thought, was quite good. He talked of life as a flame. “Out brief candle,” he said.

It stuck with me.

———

If only they knew, the people who live in the cove, how easy it is to grow old. I see them studying me sometimes, trying to fathom my secrets. Like cats watching the surface of a stream for movement, they imagine they will catch some word, some action that might explain it to them.
That’s it,
they might say,
she crosses her legs from right to left, this is why she has grown wise enough to overcome the frailty of years.
Or,
I know! She bathes her forehead in brine twice a day. That’s how she keeps time’s scimitar at bay.

It’s the one thing they respect me for, my age. They accept my cures grudgingly. They even listen to my stories with half an ear. But somewhere deep in their hearts, they distrust me. They look to
the ocean and build their homes close to its dim and murmuring shores. I look to the woods where I feel protected by the birds and the fragrance of pine.

My age is the least of me. They can have it.

I used to think I was lucky. I used to think that was what the man of the forest was telling me. But I was a child then and that is how a child hears things. The bough is always heavy with fruit, the meadow always sweet, the cheek always flushed with hope and belief. I was coiled like a young fern, ready for and fully expectant of happiness.

My father was born in Ireland, just outside the Pale, but he had lived in England for three years by the time I was born. Soon after, when I was still very small, we returned to Ireland, to live within the Pale among the other English. “I am the Queen’s subject now,” he told my mother. “As are you and Sheila. It is the way things will be in Ireland from now on. If our monarch can beat back the Spanish, she can surely tame the bogs of this heathen land.”

I have never seen so much green as when our ship landed. The sea was the colour of a meadow after a June rain, and the hills and woods were pulsing with life. I swore I saw them growing before my eyes. My father was to be one of most prosperous landowners of the Pale, that part of Ireland “to which civilization had already come,” as he used to say. The rest, we were told, was a dark place from which we needed protection. The snakes had all gone in St. Patrick’s time, but vagabonds, beggars, and wild men roamed the forests with clubs and knives, ready to pounce. Here in the Pale, though, my father had a hundred and twenty sheep and fields that rolled to the horizon. I would climb the tallest tree and gaze at the ocean of green before me—my father’s kingdom, I thought. The
mingling scents of pine and ash and oak made me dizzy. I breathed in the slippery moss on my hands and felt something swell in my chest. I knew there were murmurings even in the Pale about father being a traitor. Beyond the English territories the wild men would tear him apart. But the militia protected us here, just as in centuries long past the legions of Rome had protected the outposts of the great Empire. This is what my father used to say. England, in time, would be the new Rome. Queen Bess was our Julius.

Sometimes I wasn’t sure where I was living. “Is this place England then, or is it Rome?” I asked my mother as she wove by the hearth. “Neither,” she would say quietly with a smile, touching her bottom lip with her tongue as she concentrated on her sewing. “This is Ireland but we are under the protectorship of England, which is, in some ways, like Rome.”

I still had no idea where Ireland lay. But wherever it was, it was my home and I loved it. I had no notion ever to leave.

———

Then one day everything changed. I was nestled high in my tree watching swallows dart in and out of the ocean of leaves below. The sky was like blue crystal and there was nothing between it and me. The sun pulsed its warmth onto my upturned face, and the breeze scattered its music among the foliage.

Suddenly I was jolted from the top branches by a shriek—it pierced like a sword through the fabric of the afternoon before trailing away into something quieter but no less desperate-sounding. It was then, as it calmed from its animal fury, that I recognized the voice of my mother. I felt the rumble of horses from the earth below.

Like a rock scrambling down a cliff face, I scuffed my way to the forest floor. I ripped through the woods towards my home, snagging my clothes, ducking the boughs, and dodging the tree stumps I had grown to know as friends. Different faces—frowning and serious—now formed in the twisted bark; a wrinkled brow here, an open mouth there.

I came into the clearing in front of our house, surprised somehow to see its red bricks still standing, its roof showing no smoke or fire. Two of my father’s men, Michael and William, were standing outside the front door. Michael caught my eye and looked away. William shuffled his feet and kept his gaze on the ground. Breathless, I scambled between them and into the house.

Inside, my father was laid out on the floor. His eyes were open, staring at the ceiling. Mother paced, wringing her hands, breathing hard. She gasped when she saw me, swooped upon me, squeezed me hard, pressing her fingers into my shoulders. “Little one, little one,” was all she said. Her voice was strange and seemed to come from another world. Then, just as quickly, she left me, clasping her hands once more and circling my father.

———

The man of the forest had betrayed me, I thought. He had promised to take care of things. But my father was dead, pulled from his horse and stabbed by murderers, and all this happened at the very edge of the wood, the place where we should feel most protected. But then I realized the spirit’s promise was narrower than I had hoped. It was a promise for me alone: it did not extend to my family.

My mother became like a ghost, white-faced and twitching. She sat in the shadows, staring into nowhere, doing little in those first few weeks after my father’s death. She hardly spoke to the servants, though they often came before her asking questions in soft voices, bowing when she waved them away. Then one day I saw her through the open door of the study. She was at my father’s writing desk, scratching intently with a quill. She stared so hard at the parchment upon which she worked that I thought she must be coming out of her daze. But as soon as she gave it to the boy, Samuel, to arrange delivery, she fell back into silence.

My uncle James came to the house regularly now with his wife. He stood in the centre of the room with his hands behind his back, tutted at my mother, pointed occasionally at me and shook his head. Gazing at the ceiling, he talked, to no one in particular, of how he must now stay and oversee the farm. He was a big man with shoulders like a bull, and small dark eyes that always seemed to be swimming in liquid. He wiped them often with his handkerchief so that anyone who did not know better would think he was wiping away tears of grief.