Brigid and the Snakes
(A Tale of Ireland that Might Have Been)
A plague on them that said the chores of an alewife were beneath the dignity of a goddess and the first Reverend Mother Abbess of Kildare! A fine thing it would have been if Brigid hadn’t checked the barley crop that bright summer afternoon, thirty years after Bishop Patrick’s return to Ireland.
She would have never heard the leaves in the oak grove behind the convent fretting like old men at their gruel. She would have never seen the smoke from the Shrine of the Eternal Flame wring its fingers in supplication to the northwest. Yet there was no wind to rustle the leaves or stop the smoke from rising heavenward. The day was so still, you’d swear the air itself held its breath.
Beneath her sandaled feet, currents of energy that normally ran east and south along the island’s underground streams snaked in the opposite direction, drawn by the same force calling the smoke. She sent her magic to follow. When she found the source, she shivered, chilled to her bones in the heat of Lammastide. Cruach Aigle—Aigle’s Stack—wasn’t the tallest peak in Ireland, but water from its spring found its way into every river, stream and well. A spell worked there would ride the flow from Malin to Mizen, catching the whole of the island in its watery net.
She couldn’t let that happen. Like her friend Patrick, she had a calling. His mission was saving the souls of the Irish. Hers was saving the Irish from themselves. She hiked her skirts and ran.
Brigid was young and strong. Each of her strides carried her as far as a Roman mile. The island’s central plain and western forests blurred past. She quickly reached the foothills of the holy mountains guarding Clew Bay, but she feared she hadn’t been quick enough. An unnatural cyclone spun widdershins around the Stack, turning sod and scree into a cruel sideways hail. A dark haze spread outward from the storm. But instead of smoke or honest dirt, it filled her nose with the lightning-scorched scent of magic.
To her shame, she hesitated. Her divinity was not yet complete. Her flesh was not yet stone. She could still suffer, still bleed.
The baleful clang of an iron bell ended her dithering. Bells were powerful magic tools, as potent as a wizard’s staff. Three peals of a bell equaled three strikes of a staff. They could dispel demons or seal a devilish spell. All signs pointed to the latter. Shielding her eyes, she charged into the wind. Clothes could be mended. Flesh would heal. She had to save the land.
The bell tolled again as she burst onto the heights, flesh scored and battered, lungs heaving for breath. The air inside the sacred precinct was cold, sour, and thick with power. But the enchanter who called the storm was no evil-minded sorcerer. Bishop Patrick stood on the capstone of a vanished dolmen. The wild hair fringing his tonsure crackled with static. His eyes were magic mad. His left hand hoisted his bishop’s crozier. Its gilded crook glittered a pestilent green. His right hand lifted an iron bell.
She snatched the bell from his grasp, muffling the clapper with bloody fingers. Patrick staggered but quickly recovered. He struck the stone with his crozier. The crash was lost in the storm. His voice was not.
“Give me back my bell!” he roared, throwing all his magic behind the command.
Brigid’s temper, never the mildest, snapped. She dug in her heels. Carried by the blood from her wounds, her magic poured into the earth, slithering toward the cords of energy that bound the mountain to the land and the divine inferno at the world’s core. The power leapt to her command. She wrapped her will around it. The link threaded her veins with fire, burning away her hurts. She reared to her full height, a goddess’s height, dwarfing the man before her.
“Not for all the saints in Heaven or the Sidhe beneath the earth. You shall not curse this land!”
The ground trembled. A nearby cairn collapsed in a cloud of dust. Patrick steadied himself by jabbing his crozier into the cracked stone. He shook his head like a beast harried by flies. The madness leached from his eyes. The storm dissipated. Its flotsam crashed into the mountainside, clearing the sky—if not the smell. The man reeked as if he hadn’t bathed in weeks.
“Curse?” His sunburned cheeks paled. “I’m not cursing Ireland. I’m saving it. I’m casting the serpents from the land.”
Her stomach and her anger dropped faster than the scree. Her worst fear had come to pass. The weight of Patrick’s magic had finally broken his mind.
“Oh, Paddy, what’s to become of you? There are no snakes in Ireland. Were you thinking of your home in Britain? Is it homesick you are?”
“Not snakes,” he huffed. “Serpents. Serpents, woman! I’m talking about the druids.”
Druids. Of course. She sighed. “What have the heathen tree huggers done now?”
“What haven’t they done?” he said bitterly. “You remember Coroticus’s raid on Duno?”
She nodded. Who could forget? Some years prior, the town of Duno held a mass Baptism. Since they’d be entering the water in nothing but their shifts, the converts and their families left all their weapons home. The pirate Coroticus and his war band seized the opportunity, falling upon the ceremony like the wolves Patrick compared them to. Scores of townspeople were killed. Far more were taken captive.
“The druids of Ard Mhacha brokered a deal to sell the captives to the Picts,” Patrick continued. “When I tried to ransom the Christians, they arrested me for spying. Then they confiscated the ransom money. They said it was to pay for my keep. My keep! I was their prisoner!”
Aiding Coroticus was a crime, but charging Patrick for being jailed … She bit her lip to keep from grinning. She was Irish, after all.
“But they weren’t done with me yet,” he spat. “As soon as I returned to Duno, they hauled me into court. They said I took money from married women under false pretenses and lured their daughters from their homes for immoral purposes.” His outrage reverberated in the chill of the heights like silver chimes, reminding her there was nothing funny about his magic.
“Ah, the ladies,” she said carefully. “I warned you about them. No family takes kindly to their women donating their property or marrying off their daughters to the Church.”
“They don’t have any problem with their daughters going to Kildare!”
Because the goddess offered them blessings in this life as well as the next. Patrick promised the faithful a crown in heaven, but humans needed a little more in the here and now.
“Still and all,” she said, “it’s hardly Christian to punish all druids for the sins of a few. What about the ones who helped you? The Redeemer said those who aren’t against us are for us.”
“Mark, Chapter Nine, Verse Forty,” Patrick cited automatically. ‘Yet in Matthew, He says: ‘He who is not with Me is against Me, and he who does not gather with Me scatters.'”
She crossed her arms and tucked the bell in her elbow. “That’s a poor excuse for stripping the Irish of their lawgivers and tearing their families apart. Did you never think those Gospels might be saying the same thing?”
“I did. That question haunted me for months. I prayed for guidance. Then, on Pentecost, an angel came to me in a dream.” His resonant voice lifted in wonder. “The angel told me all would be revealed if I prayed and fasted for forty days on Aigle’s Stack. So, I came and consecrated the old roundhouse as a chapel. Last night I found my answer. It was in the Gospels all along. As Our Lord said to His disciples, those who believe in Him will cast out devils in His name. They will pick up snakes and be unharmed if they drink deadly poison.”
Some answer. Patrick might see his foes as devils and serpents. But the druids weren’t evil spirits preying on an unwilling host. They played a vital role in every aspect of Irish life. Losing them would be a catastrophe. Surely, he could see that—or she could make him see.
She rubbed her chin. “I can’t argue with Holy Writ. So how does this casting work? Where will the druids go? Will your prayers drive them into the sea, or will they die where they stand?”
“Die? No! They …”
He couldn’t finish. He plainly hadn’t thought that far. His shoulders sagged. “I don’t know. But the Gospel is the word of God. I was so sure.…”
“Sure enough to send all those souls to perdition without a chance of redemption? That’s not like you, Paddy.
“It’s not like you,” she repeated with an air of abstraction, as if in the grip of her own epiphany. “Tell me, Paddy, you didn’t happen to experience any visitations while you were here?”
The lines on his forehead deepened. “What do you mean by ‘visitations’? Some local Christians brought me food, and we prayed together.”
“No. Not people. Them—the Deceiver’s minions. Huge, dark, winged things.”
“Lots of them,” he drawled. “It’s a mountain, Brigid. There are birds everywhere.”
“Birds big as a cow and black as a sinner’s heart?” she elaborated. “They say the Devil’s Mother haunts these hills with a murder of fiends nearly as large and foul as herself. Did you see nothing of them or their sendings?”
He wouldn’t be the first. All it took to distort a human’s sense of scale was altitude, a wisp of fog and a pinch of privation. And nothing appeared so black as an object viewed against the sun.
She held the worried look on her face as he searched it for signs of deception. But she wasn’t lying, not really, merely asking questions and repeating local lore. Inevitably his certitude crumbled. She saw it in the lowering of his brow, the uneasy flicker of his eyes.
“There was nothing like that, only a few eagles. Big, black-winged beasts,” he muttered to himself. “Their screams distracted me from my devotions. I tried to drive them off, but nothing worked until I lost my temper and threw my bell at them. I haven’t seen them since.”
“When was this?” she asked.
“The day before yesterday.”
“And when did you find the passage about the devils?”
“Yesterday.”
“And what day was that?”
“The thirty-ninth.”
“The thirty-ninth!” she exclaimed. “Saints be praised I got here when I did. This is only your fortieth day. You haven’t finished your prayers. Who knows what would have happened if you’d gone through with your plan?”
His eyes widened in horror. “It would have been a curse, just like you said.”
“But you didn’t, and all is well. Now finish your prayers and gather your things. Then we’ll find you something to break your fast.”
Patrick nodded and turned toward the peak’s ruined roundhouse. For a blessed moment, the strands of energy connecting her to the heart of the world relaxed. Then he paused, close to tears. Her augmented magic, like the short hairs at her nape, stiffened with alarm.
“I can’t leave,” he said. “The angel said I would receive an answer to my problem after forty days of prayer. But I’m no closer to an answer than I was when I started.”
“Faith, what more do you want, trumpets from on high? The Lord brought me here on your fortieth day. Isn’t that enough?”
She expected Patrick to argue, as he always did, that God would never send a woman as His messenger. She hoped he’d argue, as it would mean he’d returned to his normal crusading, curmudgeonly self, and she could get on with the business of extracting him and his dangerous magic from the Stack.
But he didn’t. In a soft, awestruck voice she scarcely recognized, he said, “Yes. I do believe He did. What’s the answer, Brigid?”
She stared. Never once in all the years she’d known him had Patrick asked an Irishman’s opinion on a matter of faith—much less an Irishwoman‘s. And wouldn’t you know, the one time he did, the words clotted in her throat. The only true answer was the one he couldn’t bear: time. Time for the Redeemer’s teachings to take root in people’s hearts. Time for the druids to understand the path of Christ need not conflict with nature. Time for the kings and the warlords and all the wicked people who would never seek salvation on their own to be worn down by the will of better folk. But Patrick was mortal. His life was nearing its end. He had no time.
Maybe those eagles were devils. In the distance, she thought she heard one laugh. Not that she blamed them. She landed herself in this pickle with her false portents and knowing words. More importantly, Patrick deserved an answer, one that wouldn’t crush the spirit which had uplifted so many.
She could do that. Not for nothing had she drunk from the Well of Wisdom nine days running. She only wished she’d eaten the Salmon of Knowledge while she was there.
She said, “I believe the druids are like serpents, in their way. They were put here for a purpose, even if it’s hard to see. It’s like that story you’re always telling about the shamrock, where one thing means another. Sometimes the Lord sets a little evil in the world to lead to a greater good.
“Consider Ireland. We have a grand climate for growing crops, yet we’re a land of hunters and husbandmen. Farming isn’t worth the effort. Mice devour our grain. Rats eat our stores and feast on our Good Books. All our ferrets and cats and dogs and falcons make no headway against them, because the vermin breed too fast. The island of Britain, on the other hand, grows as much grain as Pharaoh’s Egypt. The difference is Britain has snakes. To be sure, the vipers carry poison in their fangs. But those who understand their nature and tread carefully in their company are the better for them.”
“Snakes,” he whispered. His gaze turned inward. She barely had time to congratulate herself on her cleverness before his features suffused with a glory so intense he seemed cast in gold. The air around him shimmered in a nimbus shot through with sparks. “Snakes!” he cried.
Faster than she could react, he turned to the east and thrust his crozier into the earth. Brigid felt the blow like a knife in the ribs. The third stroke! It froze her dumb, her voice and her magic pinned to the earth by his sanctified wizard staff.
Why didn’t she grab his crozier when she had the chance? Why didn’t she think to count its blows? Too late, too late, her mind keened. She fought against her magically induced paralysis with everything she was. But Patrick was the greatest miracle worker of his age. as powerful as the strongest sorcerer of ages past, and she was bound to him by faith and friendship as surely as her own magic was bound to the land.
“Druids of Ireland,” he thundered. The mist that normally shrouded the mountain fled at the sound. The air above them cleared until Brigid could see stars in the daylight. They winked at her helplessness, devoid of mercy or any gentle feeling. “Serpents I named you, and serpents you shall be. Let your form reflect your unbelieving souls. Poison in this life, I give you a purpose for your venom. You shall be the destroyers of vermin and the defenders of the land. This I command in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit!”
Patrick’s eyes rolled back in his head, but he didn’t fall. Blindly he raised his right hand in benediction. A new gale arose from nothing. It snatched an unwary eagle in its claws and rent the bird to pieces. Hot blood scalded Brigid’s face, mingling with the tears she couldn’t remember weeping, much less control.
The bell slipped from her grasp and bounced down the slope. It rang and rang and rang, shrill as a wounded pig, louder than the booming wind. The eagle’s blood sank into the earth. When it touched the currents of energy caught in Brigid’s grasp, the shock burned through her like lightning, searing flesh, blood and bone.
Later she would wake to find herself flat on her back, bleeding from her nose and the ruin of her right eye. But in the moment all she comprehended was magic. A torrent of blazing energy fanned from the mountain, snaking along the veins of power that underlay the land, spreading across the island, searching for its prey.
Adder fast it struck, sinking its fangs into doddering elders, reed-voiced children at their lessons, judges in court, doctors attending sickbeds, a youth chanting prayers over a farmer’s field, an oracle rocking her infant child. No druid or apprentice was spared. They spasmed and convulsed, muscles jerking, bones snapping. Hands and arms shriveled to nothing. Legs fused. Spines lengthened into the whip of a tail. Skin contracted and hardened into scales. Hair peeled from skulls that shrank and flattened. Their agony stole Brigid’s breath. Their tragedy crushed her soul. But like them, she had no voice to scream.
The shrieks of their companions more than made up the lack. Still webbed within Patrick’s spell, she watched the newborn serpents flee. They were heartbreakingly beautiful—gleaming lengths of yellow gold studded with diamond-shaped patches greener than a meadow in spring. Brigid couldn’t decide if it was a sign of God’s mercy, or His idea of a joke.
Patrick was canonized for his Lammastide miracle. The great enchantment snuffed his magic and left him near dead. But without druids to tell them, the kings of the Irish didn’t know. They were terrified he would do to them what he had done to their advisors. They stampeded to convert. They even changed the name of Cruach Aigle to Cruach Phádraig in his honor.
Brigid found no comfort in their salvation. She had destroyed thousands and betrayed her life’s purpose, all because she dealt with Patrick—her teacher, her brother!—as a friend instead of a threat. She couldn’t even seek absolution. Her confessor refused to consider the druids’ metamorphosis a sin.
But she could do penance—real penance, none of that nonsense about mortifying the flesh. She mended what she could. Not with laws—she left those to the kings and their new counselors. It kept them too busy to harass the druids’ kin or confiscate their remaining property. Instead, she offered her protection to the bereaved families of Leinster and convinced her allies in the other kingdoms to do the same. She founded schools to ensure the histories of the Irish were remembered and transcribed. She learned to read and write Patrick’s Latin, and pretended she found the druid’s knowledge of healing and husbandry in Christian texts. She spent her essence and her magic comforting the afflicted, healing the sick and nurturing the land.
All the atoning played hob with her godhood. Her tribe was the source of the great standing stones spread across the island. The human form she wore was only the first stage of her life. Ultimately, she would plant herself in the land and transform into a menhir. It was supposed to be a conscious act, but Brigid had lost control of her change. Her body had begun to petrify from the inside out. Her every act of magic made it worse.
Meanwhile, the snakes utterly failed their charge. To be sure, they were murder on rats and mice—as well as unwary squirrels, abandoned kittens and the occasional small dog. But the rodents bred faster than the serpents ate. As for protecting the land—she didn’t know whether to laugh or weep. Slavers like Coroticus continued their evil work unimpeded. Kings and nobles fought and raided. The only difference was the people egging them on were greedy clerics and self-serving bards instead of their druid counterparts.
Some might argue the snakes were never meant to defend Ireland from the Irish. But they should have done something about the Vikings who landed three centuries after Patrick’s death. The heathen Northmen pillaged, slaved and killed more than Coroticus and all of Ireland’s Christian kings combined. But aside from killing a few fools who mistook them for harmless water snakes, Patrick’s serpents ignored the Northmen entirely. It took the women of Ireland to stop the attacks—by marrying the Northmen into submission. Within a generation the Viking Gaels were raiding cattle and assassinating their relatives like natives. The only difference between them was their names.
When the Kildare oaks began muttering to themselves in the Year of Our Lord 1169, Brigid thought it was a warning of yet another local raid. Not on Kildare. No war band—Viking or Irish—would be daft enough to attack the abbey, which had grown into a town-sized community of lay workers, scholars and clergy. It boasted stout walls in concentric rings and a tall, stone bell tower with clear views of the countryside for miles around. More to the point, both the Irish and the Irish Vikings sent their children to the abbey for schooling and fostering. Attacking Kildare would mean harming their own.
The glass-winged sprites and small furred creatures who aided Brigid in her work disagreed. They twittered darkly about the Pope’s campaign to change the Irish Church, and how his monks conspired with the ousted Leinster king, Diarmait Mac Murchada, and the Norman lords of Britain to restore Diarmait to his throne … under their control. But the Wee Folk were addicted to gossip and scared themselves for sport. According to the envoy of the king of Dublin who visited the abbey the Thursday after Easter, the Norman king Henry had sent Diarmait packing. The old king and his followers had retired to a monastery near Wexford. The envoy and the current Reverend Mother Abbess might disapprove of such goings-on, but Brigid saw no cause for alarm.
The Eternal Flame of Kildare was not given to gossip or panic. Protected by the stone walls of its sanctuary and a dense withy hedge, it had burned for nearly fifteen hundred years. Its smoke had been swayed by Patrick’s magic, but the fire itself never wavered, not on that dire Lammastide, nor in all the years that followed. But on May Eve, the night before Beltane—May Day, as the Irish called it now—when the elderly Brigid wrestled her crutches past the hedge and the sanctuary doors to take her turn as the as the Keeper of the Flame, the fire sputtered and collapsed into a single red cinder.
Dropping her crutches, she fell to her knees beside the hearth pit. The blow shocked tears from her eyes. She had become as frail as a human of four score and ten. Her bones were rocks, and her joints fast becoming so. Saving the fire could kill her.
Her life didn’t matter. The fire was the Light of Leinster, lit at the kingdom’s foundation and tied to its survival. She had to save it. By herself. She couldn’t seek help. Opening the sanctuary doors to summon aid might snuff the fire. She couldn’t call the Wee Folk. This sacred space was barred to them. She couldn’t even draw on the energy of the earth’s burning core. Her fading powers no longer reached that far.
But there was magic in this hot, smoky, soot-stained cell. For century upon century the Daughters of the Flame had wound their steps in a sunwise path around the hearth, feeding the fire with nine sacred woods and crosses of woven rushes that mimicked the rays of the polar star, heaven’s one undying light. The gods they worshipped had changed, but not their devotion. The magic of their belief was as great a power as any Brigid ever owned. She pressed her hands into the ashes of the day’s fire and let all those prayers, all that faith fill her like air to a bellows. And like a bellows she fanned the tiny spark.
It wasn’t easy. Every time she thought the flame would catch, a hard fist of air burst from the south wall of the chamber, undoing everything she had wrought. In the old days she would have blamed it on an evil sorcerer seeking to destroy the kingdom from within. But no living Irish possessed the power or the skill. Nevertheless, it wasn’t a natural wind. The hedge was a windbreak, and the building’s narrow windows were shuttered tight, as were the chamber’s north-facing doors. Even the vents were arranged to draw away the fire’s smoke while protecting the hearth.
The cause didn’t matter. The fire did. She had to save it. She would not, could not fail Ireland again. She cupped the infant flame in hands of the spirit. She nursed it with the faith of ages and gave it everything she was.
The wind didn’t let up, but neither did she. In the end, she was stubborner. The wind died with the night. The fire caught and burned—and not a moment too soon. At dawn the Reverend Mother would arrive with a torch to carry the fire’s light to the Beltane bonfires waiting in the fields.
May Day, May Day, Brigid chided herself as she crawled to the doors. By the time the Reverend Mother knocked three times three, Brigid could almost stand. Sweating more from the effort than the heat, she unlatched the doors. She slumped against one of the iron-banded oak panels, too weak to open them but determined to keep herself upright. She feared they could never move her if she fell. The weight of her years was no metaphor.
Luckily, the four sisters accompanying the Reverend Mother were Daughters of the Flame, fit to serve in Brigid’s place. One remained behind to finish Brigid’s watch while the rest struggled to help her through the hedge. Their shouts roused the church groundskeepers, but the men couldn’t enter the hedge on pain of death, thanks to a curse Brigid herself had laid centuries before. Had she breath to spare, she would have laughed.
Outside the hedge, the men rushed to shoulder her weight. They staggered under the load. Eventually, someone found a wheelbarrow. They levered her inside and rolled her to the convent like a load of peat. She begged them to drive her to the grove. “One last breath of the oaks,” she pleaded.
She didn’t want them to see her change. They would find it unnatural, perhaps demonic. They didn’t know who or what she had been, and she didn’t want them to think badly of her—or be forced to wrestle with the boulder she’d become. It would murder the convent floors.
But no one paid her any mind. “Old Sister Biddy” had been doddering around the abbey longer than anyone could remember. They thought her wits had failed with her body, and they wouldn’t be satisfied until they tucked her safely in her cot, never mind the groans of the bedframe beneath her bones.
In all her long life, she’d never felt so helpless. Patrick had stolen her magic to work his spell, but it rebounded in a day. She couldn’t reverse the metamorphosis, but she could always see a path ahead, a way to ease her load of sin. Now her mind was as leaden as her limbs.
She knew some great calamity was happening in the south. That much was clear from the assault on the fire. She reasoned Diarmait was involved. But she was paralyzed by the fear of repeating her greatest mistake as much as the weakness of her limbs. Pride and ignorance had been her downfall then. The pride was gone, but she needed more information to act. The winged Folk could supply it … if she could trust them. Word traveled between their clans faster than a horse could race, but they couldn’t always tell slander from fact.
She prayed for guidance. Her sister nuns brought milk and bread, begging her to eat. In their company, she dutifully murmured her Aves and Pater Nosters in Latin. In their absence she switched to Irish, adding prayers to the sun and stars she remembered from her youth.
The abbey’s Wee Folk held their own bedside vigil. The glass-winged sprites buzzed the room’s lone window, their spindly forms passing for long-legged flies. Delicate horned mice, leaf-capped shrews with human limbs, and squat, hairy fir darrig huddled around her pillow. They scuttled for cover whenever the nuns approached, but never retreated far. Murmuring small healing spells, they groomed the shorn remnants of her hair, while the convent’s old piebald cat, who had long ago reached an accommodation with them, warmed her feet.
Sleep took her unawares. One moment her eyes were fixed on the cross hung opposite her bed, the next she stood on a dry, featureless waste. She craned her neck to stare at a sky dark with thunderheads and winced at the ache. Even in her dreams she was hunched and sore.
But those weren’t clouds roiling above her. Clouds don’t bleed. They were wings—black, brown and gray, tipped and banded. Squinting at the welter, she glimpsed slashing claws, and beaks pointed and hooked. There were eagles, ospreys, buzzards, kites, and a lone, tattered gyrfalcon surrounded by scores of gray-winged Welsh merlin. But they weren’t fighting each other. They battled a legion of hooded crows and ravens. Brigid had seen crows and ravens drive raptors from their nests. But it was always a family affair, a small tribe of corvids against a solitary raptor. Not a war.
“Don’t just stand there,” a harsh voice cawed. “For Ireland’s sake, do something!”
A blood-spattered, human-headed crow sheared away from the mob to confront her. The Sidhe’s wild, tangled hair was as black as her wings. Her livid skin was freckled with blood. More blood stained her gray-feathered chest, and each beat of her wings slapped Brigid’s face with the stink of rotting meat.
“Morrigan?” Brigid gasped.
A dead, carbonized tree erupted from the ground beneath the Sidhe and sprouted a perch for her dangling claws. “You were expecting an angel?”
“No.” Angels spoke to Patrick and the Apostles, never the likes of me. I expected to die like a lump in my bed. “What is the meaning of this?”
“Meaning!” Morrigan shrieked. A second frenzy of flapping sent more of the crow’s deathly stench Brigid’s way. “The daft woman wants meaning now. You know what it means. It’s war, the likes of which the Irish haven’t seen since the Fomorians.
“An army of a hundred Norman knights and three hundred Welsh archers have landed on the Banne. Diarmat promised their leaders the city of Wexford and two other cantreds as fiefdoms. He promised a Norman earl the hand of his daughter and the kingship of Leinster after his death in exchange for retaking his crown.”
Brigid shook her head. “That’s illegal.”
“Legal be damned. They’re an army of monsters, cased in metal and mail from crown to foot.”
Morrigan cocked her head toward the fighting birds. The raptors transformed into fearsome armored soldiers. The knights wore pointed helmets with long nose guards. Mail shirts hung to their knees, mail trousers to their feet. Metal plates topped their boots and scaled their gauntlets. Weapons bristled from hands and backs, and their horses were covered in mail. Even the Welshmen sported helmets and long mail shirts.
Out of nowhere Brigid recalled an ancient tale about a Greek prince who fought a metal giant. She murmured, “The Bronze Man.”
“And just as hard to kill,” Morrigan cawed. “Compared to them, our warriors are defenseless babes.”
She mantled her wings. The crows and ravens became Irishmen and Viking Gaels. Their swords and axes were as fine as any in Christendom, but their cloth tunics, gaitered trousers, and small wooden shields offered scant protection against Norman steel.
“They can’t win,” the Morrigan’s voice was raw, as if her crow’s throat was rough with tears. “But they must. If the Normans take Wexford, we’ll never see the end of them. They’ll take our land, enslave our people, and ram their foreign ways down our throats.
“You have to stop them.”
“Me?” Brigid yelped. “What can I do? I can barely stand.”
“And whose fault is that? You gave your life to a Hebrew god who called himself almighty and a crucified conjuror who swapped water jugs with wine. You spent the magic of a dozen lifetimes serving your false redeemer, pursuing the sham of Christian peace. You condemned the human guardians of the land to crawl in the dirt with worms and bugs, remembering all the while the humanity they lost. You betrayed your kindred Sidhe. Now they’re dead, dead as the druids and the gods of the Viking north.
“You’re all we’ve got.” Morrigan vanished in a thunderclap.
Brigid jerked upright. The room was dark except for the glow cast by the lamp on the bedside table. From the thickness of the shadows and the snores of the nuns in the adjacent rooms, she’d slept through midnight prayers. The cat stretched and blinked at her with languid curiosity. Startled Wee Folk danced around her head, spinning like her whirling thoughts.
She couldn’t dismiss Morrigan’s warning. The dead who visited in dreams never lied, which meant she couldn’t dismiss Morrigan’s charges, either. But that had to wait. Brigid had too much to do. She’d know soon enough whether the Phantom Queen spoke the literal truth or merely the truth of her perceptions.
Brigid rubbed her chin. How was she supposed to stop an army born in old Vulcan’s forge? She couldn’t do it from a sickbed. What little magic she still possessed reached no further than she could hurl a crutch. The winged Folk could find the invaders easily enough, but to achieve anything, she needed to be present at their camp—and pray she’d know what to do when she got there.
Her days of racing the wind were long past. She needed a mount. She tasked the Wee Folk to find one. The cat departed with them for reasons of his own. By the time she donned a clean habit and hobbled to the convent mounting block, the Folk had acquired a sturdy, bridled pony; an old blanket; and several coils of rope. She wished for a saddle, but they were rare in Ireland, and the Wee Folk could never have lifted one. It took a legion of the abbey sprites to settle the blanket on the pony’s back. But their knots worked better than stirrups for keeping a body astride.
It took all the abbey’s Wee Folk working together, as well as magic she could ill afford to spend, to hoist her onto her mount. She spent more magic coaxing the wind to buoy her weight, only to have her work half undone when the cat jumped up behind her.
Neighing in protest, the pony cantered down the south road. Brigid groped for the reins, but the leather slipped through rock-stiff fingers, as did the pony’s mane. The only sensation she had left was the jarring rhythm of the pony’s gait. She should never have used her magic. It sparked her final change. She tried to stop the pony, to save it from being crushed, but her human voice was lost in her petrifying throat.
A mile from the convent, the cat sprang from its perch. The pony veered right, tearing across a familiar meadow. Moonlight paled the stones of the well where Brigid once watered her cattle. The cat raced alongside. All around her bowed shoulders, faintly glowing Folk wailed and shrieked.
Just before the pony crashed into the well, the cat slashed its foreleg. The pony reared. All the Wee Folks’ elflocks came undone. Her body—half stone, half flesh—slid to the ground.
She felt the impact like an earthquake, without any sense of pain. Cat and pony fled. The Folk gathered on the rim of the well, keening her death song. But she wasn’t dead. Somehow the blessed cat had driven her to the one place where she had a hope of doing good. With the last of her magic, she plunged rock fingers into the sod.
The well drew from an underground stream linked to the river that flowed past Wexford to sea near the Banne. She whispered a plea to the water in a soft grinding of stone. The stream ignored her. Like calls to like, and without flesh she had no liquid in her veins. There was likewise no fire in her belly or air in her lungs. Her divinity was complete, but she was a being of earth, a force in her element but nowhere else.
Her element wasn’t as solid as she imagined. With something like a shrug, she could shift the turf from the Stack to the Banne. But she still didn’t know where the Normans were, and the bawling Folk paid her no heed. She had grown beyond their understanding. They could no more hear her new voice than the stream.
But there were others. Living creatures wove through earth’s mantle, creating their own currents and flow—pink worms, brown grubs and golden serpents flashing in the dark like words written in flame. Low things they were, but perhaps exactly what she needed. Those Greek heroes in the old tales were always being tripped up by their feet—the pin drawn from the Bronze Man’s ankle, the arrow in Achilles’s heel, Eurydice and her snake.…
Earless though they were, Patrick’s serpents heard her call. From Malin to Mizen, green-jeweled heads turned toward Kildare, their gazes flat with loathing. Their inhuman minds remembered, just as Morrigan said. They hissed in amusement at her need. Had it been within their power, they informed her, they would have gladly struck her dead. But they wouldn’t waste their venom on a stone.
Not for me, she told them in subtle shifts of earth. For Ireland.
For the Ireland you and Patrick made? The largest snake hissed scornfully and turned away. The others started to follow.
They were her last hope. God forgive her for the lies she was about to say, but she had to draw them back.
It concerns Bishop Patrick’s other curse.
The large snake paused. The others stilled. The British devil is dead, it said, destroyed by his own foul spell.
But his tribe prospered, she countered, and now they’ve returned with an army from the British west. They seek to master us and conquer our land. They’ve sworn to burn the last of our sacred groves. They will make slaves of the Irish and choose their kings.
The serpents drew closer, or so it seemed. Now that she was part of the earth, she perceived it as she once perceived a large round hall. Its creatures appeared before her as they saw themselves. The large snake was the size of a dragon, its jaws wider than the memory of her head. Though she knew it couldn’t hurt her—she thought it couldn’t—pins of cold jabbed the surface of her stone. The chills wormed their way inside until she feared the ice would break her from within.
Prove it, said the snake.
* * *
“The English and their allies surrounded Wexford,” the tour guide standing in front of Brigid told her group. “They planned to fortify their positions with ramparts of packed earth, but their shovels dug up more than dirt. A chain of gold and emeralds seemed to lie under every rock. The soldiers called their knights. The knights called their lords.
“Their leader, Robert Fitz-Stephen, was the first to die, a great snake five feet long dangling from his eye.…”
Brigid liked this guide. So did the tourists. Even speaking the English, her voice had a grand Irish lilt, and she had a bard’s own way with a tale.
“Then all at once, hundreds of Patrick Snakes reared from the sod. They spat their venom like a volley of arrows. The English who managed to cover their eyes were bitten on the hands they used as shields. The snakes bit through trousers and leather shoes. They sank their fangs into the horses, turning their death throes into a weapon against the English and the traitorous Irish who remained. Finally, the snakes turned on the Great Serpent of Leinster himself, and when they were done, not a man in his whole army remained alive.”
A slaughter to make Morrigan proud. Brigid wished she could have seen it. Still and all, she couldn’t complain. She missed her sisters, but they’d been lost to her long before her translation. Her order stepped into the breach, preserving the well and the clearing, surrounding her with growing things. Now her home was a park with more visitors than any standing stone in the whole of Ireland.
“Of course, the English weren’t done with us, but now the Irish understood the threat. The kings formed an alliance, and thanks to the tireless work of St. Laurence O’Toole, the archbishop of Dublin, it lasted long enough to give the Irish a fighting chance. And as we all know, there’s nothing the Irish like better than fightin’.”
The American tourists laughed, as they always did.
“Now you’re wondering why I’m talking about Dublin and Wexford on a tour of Kildare. Two reasons.”
Two? That was new.
The guide raised her forefinger. “First, it’s important to remember not all priests are pedophiles and abusers—though I wouldn’t mind turning our Patrick Snakes on the ones who are.”
Pedophile priests? How long had that been going on—and why was Brigid hearing the news from a guide instead of a supplicant? She’d heard prayers beyond counting about the Magdalene Laundries. The atrocities they recounted broke her heart and set her petrified blood aboil. But for all her concord with the powers of the earth, in the matter of the laundries, she was as useless as she was when Patrick transformed the druids. The foul hypocrites overseeing the laundries (she refused to call them sisters, much less biddies) immured their charges and themselves behind stone and concrete, fending off the creatures of the sod with great clacking machines and an endless outpouring of bleach. She could have sent earthquakes, but that would have killed the victims with the vile.
Priests, however, must venture forth to attend to their flocks. Carried by one of the tourists’ silent prayers, the image of one of Patrick’s anointed successors defiling a child winged through her mind.… Veins petrified for centuries heated and throbbed.
“Second”—the guide held up another finger—”because Kildare has its own connection to the Miracle of Wexford.
“In Diarmait’s day, it took days to travel from Wexford to Kildare. People here didn’t know about the battle until much later. But they saw the portents. St. Brigid’s holy fire almost died. Milk spoilt. Beer turned to vinegar. And the oldest old nun in the abbey disappeared.
“Between the omens and holy day celebrations—because this all happened around May Day,” the guide explained, “no one missed the old nun until the day after when the convent cat took her place at Mass. It held a snakeskin knotted like a rosary in its mouth. The snakeskin wasn’t the usual slough, either. It gleamed like a saint’s golden crown. When the service ended, the cat rose from the pew and trotted toward the abbey gate. Curious, the Reverend Mother Abbess followed.”
Pondering ways to identify and deal with the miscreants, Brigid absently rubbed a decades-old fissure in her chin, much as she used to when she wore flesh. In the heat of her thinking, it slipped her mind that stone arms aren’t supposed to move, even those belonging to the Sidhe.
“The cat led the abbess to Brigid’s holy well. There she found a granite statue of a kneeling woman with her hands dug into the earth—a statue which hadn’t been there the day before. As the abbess watched, the cat gently laid its golden burden in the statue’s lap.” The guide paused for effect. “The statue looked exactly like the old nun.”
The guide stepped aside for her big reveal. But instead of the usual murmurs of “How lifelike,” and “She could almost be real,” there were shocked faces and gasps. People started yelling and waving their phones.
Maggots, the lot of them! Couldn’t they see she was thinking?
Jean Marie Ward writes fiction, nonfiction and everything in between. Her first novel, With Nine You Get Vanyr (written with the late Teri Smith), finaled in two categories of the 2008 Indie Book Awards. Her short stories appear in numerous anthologies, including the award-winning Hellebore and Rue, The Modern Fae’s Guide to Surviving Humanity, and Tales from the Vatican Vaults. Her short story “Lord Bai’s Discovery,” which appeared in the Eppie-nominated anthology Dragon’s Lure, was shortlisted for the Washington Science Fiction Association’s Small Press Award.