Mary Morrigan taught him the Irish language, with its eighteen letters, starting with the words for man, fear, and woman, bean, and bread, aran, and water, uisce. She taught him how to say “I want.” And then she began talking in Irish to him, even though Cormac didn’t yet understand. Cormac was angered by this new stage. He thought: Why does she insist on speaking this language? It’s gone, destroyed. He thought: Why not just use English? But she calmed and fed him, and named the food in Irish, and the pots and the fire, and told him to sleep and then, in the morning, started over again. As he moved around the forest that surrounded the grove he understood that it was actually a village with trees separating and hiding the houses. About six hundred people were hiding there from the world. Beside one house there was a huge well, and all drew from it, using hand-carved wooden buckets. In another house were supplies of oats, available to all. Cormac didn’t see anyone using money. About a dozen horses, small and lean, were tied to trees with straw ropes (he never once hear them whinny). Pigs and chickens roamed freely. At a tanner’s, animals were skinned, their pelts hung on ropes to dry, while sweet, sickening odors rose from boiling pots. A metalsmith gave shape and beauty to shields and jewelry, and Cormac chatted in his broken Irish with a blacksmith who knew Fergus. Mary Morrigan introduced Cormac to the men and the women and the young people, and all of them spoke to him in Irish. He listened and nodded shyly and remained mute.
Then one morning Mary Morrigan asked him in Irish whether he had slept well and he answered her in Irish, “Yes, I’ve slept well.” The key had turned in the lock, the way he had climbed a magic ladder into arithmetic. By the end of summer, he was not simply speaking Irish, he was thinking in Irish. And, yes: dreaming.
“Good,” Mary Morrigan said that first morning after the key turned. “There’s much for you to know.”
She instructed him about the seasons, and the great feasts. Imbalc, with its sacred flame, and the white stones that were marked with your own sign and thrown in the fire, and how if your stone wasn’t there when the fire cooled then it had been consumed like food by the flames and you’d been blessed by the gods of fire. Beltane, on the first of May, when Cormac saw cattle driven between walls of flame, and a maypole dance, and then men and women falling down together in the woods. And though this had not happened to him, although he had lain down on the earth with no girl, he wanted to dance around the maypole with all of them, red-haired women and golden-haired girls, dark-haired and black (while rough-skinned Mary Morrigan whispered to him in Irish: “No, not you, not here, not yet”). Lughnasa in August: a great gathering of horses and cattle, to be traded and sold, with beef roasted for the tribe, and fires lighting up the night sky, mad dancing and much music and Mary Morrigan telling him that Ireland is a woman, is called by some the Dark Rosaleen, is always deep in the dark heart of the dance. Samhain in November: the harvest gathered, fruits and grains and great soups simmering in immense kettles while the music drifted through hills and over mountains and into caves and down into the Otherworld. They used that word a lot, as if it named a specific place. Cormac would hear more from Mary Morrigan about the Otherworld.
Across those years, he attended all of the feasts except Imbalc, because if he disappeared from St. Edmund’s in February, he might attract hard attention. In summer, many people scattered around Ireland, including the English and the Protestants; none went off in winter. Across those years, a new calendar was being added to his sense of time. The calendar of Ireland. Before Samhain, he and his father cleaned every speck of dust from the house, as was the custom, and followed another custom by leaving food for Cormac’s mother. When they returned to the house from their journeys to the forests or the town, the food was always gone.
All those great feasts revolved about the land and the sun and the marvelous gifts they granted to mortals. If the sun was not a god, what was? Who was? In the old days, Mary Morrigan said (and his father confirmed), the feasts were held under sun and moon on free, unfenced land, drawing men and women from all over Ireland. They were held now in the last unconquered forests of Ireland (the timber along the edges departing each month to build mansions in London or to be turned into ships for pirates and buccaneers who stole and looted for the English crown). The boy, becoming a man, becoming a Celt, saw that guile was essential to all his summer Irishmen. They needed the gift of deception as they traveled to the feasts on roads patrolled by British redcoats. Guile and deception, along with the ability to see and to hear and to connect their facts, because informers could be among them. The feasts were now held behind hidden pickets of men armed with swords and pikes, disguised as trees, allies of birds and deer and wolves, watching always for the English with their guns.
Cormac was never clear about his exact location, because none of the Irish made maps that could be found by their enemies (later he was certain that the grove was on the inland side of the Mountains of Mourne). What he did know was simple: He was in pure, untouched Ireland. They all spoke Irish. The jokes were Irish and the laughter was Irish and the gods were Irish, and so was the story, the legend, the binding tale. Along with one other immense thing. Beside the fire in the cave, on rainy summer nights, Mary Morrigan explained to him about the Otherworld.
“The Otherworld is beneath us,” she said, gesturing with a leathery hand, her palms flat with the ground beneath them.
The Otherworld was a place, as she described it, not a mere story or an abstract idea, and it was reachable through raised mounds called shees. Down there lived people called the Tuatha de Danaan, who had been in Ireland before the Celts, a race of poets and warriors who fought to maintain their place and then, after one final defeat, had retreated beneath the surface of the earth. Ever since, the Irish, when they died, had been following them into the earth. Hearing her descriptions, Cormac understood that the Otherworld was not like the ferocious Hell described by the Rev. Robinson, filled with flames, torture, screams, and horror. There was enchanted music down there, she said, and endless games, and eternal feasting. Nobody ever got ill in the Otherworld, and nobody fought, except for fun. There was no such thing as old age or even time. The future was the same as the past, and the present contained both. Or so said Mary Morrigan, as Cormac struggled to understand, and to imagine.
“Who gets in and who’s kept out?” he asked.
“The just are admitted, the unjust barred,” she said. “The Christians borrowed all that from us.”
“So my mother is there?”
“Aye.” She paused. “If you live a just life, you’ll see her there. Of that, there is no doubt. Sure, didn’t we help her into the Otherworld from this very spot?”
“Who else is barred?”
“Those who fail to avenge injustice,” she said. “For want of courage. For want of passion. If an unjust act is done in the family of a man or woman, it must be avenged. That is the rule.”
Another pause.
“And suicides,” she said. “Those who cannot live with the pain of the world and kill themselves are barred forever.”
On many smoky evenings, she told him tales of the Other-world. There was a very special, beautiful light down there too, she said, invented by the Tuatha de Danaan. A light never seen in this world. A light created by millions of emeralds embedded in the walls, a green, watery light that was both alluring and welcoming. The just people who came to the Otherworld were cared for by the Other People, which was what some called the Tuatha de Danaan. Sometimes the Other People emerged into our world from the emerald caves, disguised as fawns or birds or beautiful women, and lured our heroes back down into their secret world. Wasn’t the great Finn MacCool himself tempted? And the great Celtic warrior Cuchulain?