Sacrifice (11 page)

When we had finished, we walked to the water to wash, then the three of us went in front of the hut to talk. Kevin looked so shaken that I was afraid he was going to fall down, so I suggested we sit on the grass.

“Deirdre,” Dari said at last, “please don't tell me this is some kind of sacrifice performed in the old days.”

I couldn't even look her in the eyes as I spoke.

“I can tell you this much. In ancient times, on rare occasions, there was a sacrifice of human flesh to the three mother goddesses of the earth, the givers of life. The victim was always an older woman of the tribe, a volunteer, who gave
her body as an offering for her people. The druids would kill her painlessly, then dismember her flesh to cook in a cauldron. When it was finished, it was placed into the earth as an offering to the goddesses. But such a thing hasn't been done for many centuries.”

“Does that mean the killer is coming back?” Kevin asked. “Maybe we could wait here and catch him.”

“I don't think so. He would see that the fire was out anyway and know that someone had been here. He wouldn't approach the crannog now. He may have wanted us to find her like this anyway, just to make it more horrible for everyone.”

Dari shuddered and looked at me.

“You keep saying ‘he'—but how do you know it isn't a woman doing all this? Do you think women aren't capable of such cruelty?”

“No, it's not because of that. I've known women in my life who could be as vicious as any man, but I don't think that's the case with these murders. There are many female druids, but few are trained sacrificers. It's just not a specialty that attracts many women.”

“But you said every druid receives the training to perform these rituals. Why would it have to be a sacrificer?”

“It wouldn't necessarily, but these murders show a detailed knowledge of anatomy and working with flesh. I could be wrong, but I think whoever is doing them is either a sacrificer or has a lot of experience butchering animals.”

“What about those two fishermen?” Kevin asked. “Could they have done this?”

“I don't see how,” I said. “They're not druids and they probably haven't slaughtered anything bigger than a salmon. Besides, they aren't the type who would commit murder.”

“Are you sure you could recognize the type of person who would?” asked Dari.

I sighed and looked at the remains of Pelagia on the blanket.

“Maybe not.”

We sat quietly for a few minutes, listening to the birds singing in the trees beyond the pond.

“Deirdre,” Dari asked at last, “should we bury her here, or take what's left of her body back to Kildare?”

“Normally I would say we should take her remains back to the cemetery, but I don't think that's practical in this case.”

“Then let's just take her skull,” she said. “There should be something of her to bury beneath a cross in our cemetery.”

We all agreed; so while Kevin dug a hole in back of the house, Dari took the skull from the top of the blanket and wrapped it gently inside her new veil. We then raised the blanket from the corners, tied them together in the center, and carefully lowered the bundle into the hole. Kevin filled it in and we stood together to say a short prayer.

Dari went back inside the hut and brought out both the cross on the wall and the pearls. She placed them along with the skull in her satchel, and then we walked back across the bridge down the road that led to Kildare.

No one spoke a word on the whole journey back.

It was becoming dark when we finally reached the front gate of the monastery. Sister Anna was standing next to it with two of the king's guards. I presumed she was giving them instructions to go and search for Dari and Kevin when she saw us coming. I stopped at the edge of the woods about a hundred feet from the gate. Dari looked back at me, then walked on to Sister Anna. I stood there as I saw her talking with the abbess, who reached out at one point to steady herself on the gatepost.

Dari, Kevin, and the guards went inside the monastery just as the last rays of the sun faded from the western sky. Sister Anna remained there, looking out at me in the distance as I waited. Then she went back inside the monastery grounds and closed the gate behind her.

Chapter Twelve

I
spent most of that night thinking about the three murdered sisters. Two of them were from the eastern clans of my own tribe and of course all three were nuns; but aside from that, they had had very little in common. The only other similarity between the three was that Brigid had changed their lives—though this could be said for many of the nuns.

Grainne was an old woman from a peasant family who had become a Christian when she met Brigid fifty years earlier after losing her husband and young daughter to a fever. She had told me once that she had been on the verge of killing herself when Brigid came to her small farm and helped her find her way back to life. Saoirse, on the other hand, was from a wealthy family of the local warrior nobility who had been raised as
a Christian from childhood. She often said that her earliest memory was sitting in Brigid's lap when she was no more than three years old, listening to our founder as she laughed and told her stories. Pelagia stood apart from the other two as a foreigner and a woman with an almost mystical reputation, among Christians and druids alike. One of the few things I knew about her was a story I had heard from Brigid herself. She said she had met Pelagia even before she founded the monastery, in the early days when she had come to Kildare to try to persuade King Dúnlaing to lease her the land for the monastery. She had seen Pelagia on the road one rainy night and invited her back to her hut. Even though they couldn't speak the same language, Pelagia had somehow communicated that she had been wandering for a long time and wanted to find a place where she could live alone and pray. Brigid had led her to the small crannog and helped her settle there as a solitary.

That was the magic of Brigid. She had the gift of seeing inside everyone she met and giving each what they needed. Sometimes it was nothing more than a kind word or a jar of honey, sometimes it was healing and a new beginning. But if the murderer was targeting victims whose lives Brigid had changed, he would have to kill most of the people in Kildare.

I left my grandmother's house before sunrise and set off down the path back to Finian's farm. About two hours later, I was passing by the short trail that branched off to Cill Fine, the oldest church in Ireland. It had been founded almost a century earlier by Palladius, the first bishop in Ireland. Palladius was a member of the Gaulish nobility who had served Pope Celestine as a deacon and church diplomat on missions to his homeland and Britain. Celestine ordained him and sent him to the south of Ireland when he received word that there were Christian slaves captured from Britain on our island. Palladius had limited success in persuading Irish slave-owners to let him
minister to their property, but he did found several churches over the years he worked in Leinster. Cell Fine was the only one still standing. Inside the church was the tomb of Palladius and an altar with relics of Peter and Paul brought from Rome. The churchmen at Armagh were always embarrassed by the fact that Palladius had arrived in Ireland long before their patron Patrick. They tried to minimize his contribution and claimed he had left in disgrace after only a year or two, but everyone in our province knew better. My grandmother remembered meeting him when she was a little girl and said he was a kindly old man dedicated to good works.

The old church was no longer used for services, but one of our solitaries, Sister Fedelm, had moved there years ago as a caretaker and lived in it as her hermitage. She was another of the nuns from the eastern clans of our tribe, but I wasn't worried about her safety since she had returned to the monastery immediately after Sister Anna's order. I liked Fedelm, but she was one of the most nervous people I had ever met. One Sunday when she was back at the monastery for services, a small mouse ran across the floor in front of us on the sisters' side of the church as we knelt in prayer. She ran screaming from the room just as Father Ailbe was blessing the wine for the Eucharist, almost making him drop the chalice.

As I passed the Cill Fine trail, a man came stumbling toward me from the direction of the church. He was bleeding from a wound behind his ear. I recognized him at once as Brother Michael, our new monk from Gaul. I ran to him just as he collapsed onto the ground.

“Michael, what happened? What are you doing here?”

He was moaning and incoherent, so I gave him some water and held him up against myself to drink it.

“Please, try to tell me.”

He recognized me at last and grabbed my robe with his hand as he began shouting something incomprehensible at me in his native language. He was still trying to learn Irish.

“Michael, I don't speak Gaulish! Tell me in Latin.”

He nodded.

“Deirdre,” he said slowly. “We came back for the relics. Fedelm forgot to take them when she left. She was worried about them. I was her guard . . . her guard.”

“Where is Fedelm?” I demanded.

“In the church,” he said. “I didn't see him. He hit me from behind. I blacked out. I couldn't help her. Holy God, Deirdre. I swear, I couldn't help her.”

I left him lying in the grass and started to run down the trail to the church.

When I got there, the door was open. I drew my sword and rushed inside—but I knew I would be too late. The fourth sacrifice was to Crom Crúach, the darkest of Irish gods. Some Christians called him Lucifer, the devil, but he was nothing like the biblical angel of light who fell from heaven. Crom Crúach was primordial chaos, the embodiment of the madness that always threatens to tear our world apart. Few Irish actually worshiped him, but the druids taught that neither could we ignore him. Even darkness has its place in the balance of the universe.

Fedelm was stretched out on her back on top of the altar in the front of the small church. Her tunic had been torn from her. Her arms and legs were tied firmly to the bottom of the altar. She was cut open in a single deep incision from the base of her throat to her lower belly. Fedelm's heart rested on the altar next to her. Her face was frozen in horror. Victims dedicated to Crom Crúach were not given mistletoe to drink, and they were never volunteers. It was an essential part of this darkest of sacrificial rituals that they be innocents, usually slaves, taken
unaware and tied to an altar against their will. They would be forced to watch, still alive, as they were slit open and their beating heart pulled from their body.

I closed her eyes. Her skin was still warm to the touch. The murder couldn't have happened more than a half hour earlier. I rushed out the door and ran around the church, looking for the tracks of the killer, but there was nothing.

“Why are you doing this?” I shouted as loudly as I could, shaking with rage, hoping the man could still hear me.

There was only silence.

I went back to the road and found Brother Michael sitting against a tree, weeping with his face in his hands. I quickly examined his head and could see that the place where he had been struck was swelling, but that he was in no danger. I forced him to his feet and marched him back down the trail to the church. I brought an old cart out of the barn and rolled it next to the front door of the church. Michael refused to go back inside, so I went in, untied Fedelm's body, and wrapped it in a blanket from her bed by myself, first placing her heart back inside her chest. I then carried her in my arms out the door to the cart and laid her gently inside. There were no animals to draw the small wagon, so I put on the yoke and began pulling it down the path to Kildare, Michael trailing behind me.

Chapter Thirteen

T
he horror of what I had seen that day and the days before was beginning to take its toll on me. I couldn't eat and didn't dare sleep, for fear that what I had seen would return in my dreams. So I spent most of that same night sitting with my grandmother in her hut, talking about what had happened and what I should do next. She agreed that Finian was a prime suspect in all four murders, but that we had no proof of his guilt. We talked about asking the king to arrest him immediately, but we knew this would be a gross violation of Irish law. It was a fundamental principle of the legal traditions of our people that no man or woman could be deprived of their freedom without evidence, preferably in the form of sworn testimony from a person of high status.