“A bad time is coming,” she said in Irish.
Her eyes remained fixed on the low orange flame spurting liquidly in and around the burning logs.
“There’ll be starving and wailing and killing,” she said. “You’ll hear the banshee cry in the night.”
She poked the fire with a blackened oak stick. The flame stirred. Sparks danced into the air but had no way to reach the stars through the roof of the cave.
“You’d best get ready,” she said. “It’s coming.”
Later, her words made him toss and shift beneath the thin muslin blanket in his place in the darker recesses of the cave. He kept thinking of Joseph and his brothers, the warning to the Pharaoh, the horrors of the bad time: the tale coming to him in his mother’s voice. The cave felt damper, colder. He knew Mary Morrigan’s prophecy was true; she didn’t lie. And that meant he must warn his father. Mary Morrigan would speak her truth to the tribe, but Cormac must tell his father. He was coming in the morning, to bring his son back to his life as Robert Carson, son of John. He knew his father would come for him, because whenever he said he would do something, he did it. He wondered whether Mary Morrigan would tell the tribe the tale of Joseph and his brothers. There were no Christians in this holy grove, and no Jews other than Cormac, and he was only half Jewish. These were the Irish. And Cormac was Irish, and a Jew, and he knew the tale. He thought: Shall I tell the tale of Joseph to Mary Morrigan? Shall I tell the Irish tribe? And what, after all, did she mean by her prophecy? Will plagues come first, arriving tonight as I fight against sleep? Will they start in the city of Belfast and follow John Carson into the forest? And will plagues be followed by locusts and boils and hunger?
All those calamities from the Christian Bible, spoken softly and carefully by his mother or bellowed by the Rev. Robinson: They were coming. They must have been what Mary Morrigan called the bad time. They must. But although Cormac knew the words of calamity, they didn’t put pictures in his head. What, after all, was a boil? What did a locust look like? His mother had tried to explain them to him. A boil, Rebecca Carson said, was a great shiny swelling on the body, pale yellow, bursting with disease. And a locust was an insect like a grasshopper that came in great clouds of its fellow creatures to eat the green off the face of the earth. Turning now in the damp, peat-smelling darkness of the cave, trying to convert words into vivid pictures, he wished his mother were there to describe them better to him. He wished she could rise from the place where she was buried, only a few hundred feet from this cave, emerge from the emerald light of the Otherworld, and explain to him what she knew and the truth of what she’d seen and whether it was like the truth of Mary Morrigan. And if the plagues and the boils and the locusts were real, if they were part of that bad time coming, he wanted his father to be safe from all the badness. And, yes, he thought: I want to be safe myself. I want to live a long time, to see what happens to everyone, to discover what happens to people I don’t yet know. Thinking, as he remembered the rules set by Mary Morrigan: I need to earn my way to the Otherworld. I need to build my courage. I need to forge my passion. I need to avenge all unjust acts committed against family and tribe. I must learn to live with the pain of the world until my time comes. Then I will see my mother. Then I will see my lost brothers. He fell asleep trying to imagine the sound of the banshee.
Then he was awake. An hour later, or three hours, he could not tell. The fire dozed, and in its light he saw the leathery face of Mary Morrigan very close to his own. Her grainy fingertips touched his cheek. She was kneeling beside him.
“You’re a good lad,” she whispered.
And then leaned down and kissed him.
She shuddered. So did he.
Then, with a wind rising beyond the cave mouth, rustling the trees before it, her hard, granular skin fell away, vanishing into the dark orangey air, and Cormac O’Connor was afraid. Looking down at him was a woman with an oval face framed by thick ringlets of black hair, eyes lustrous and hungry. He smelled pale roses. Her full lips widened into a serene smile. He touched her face. To see if it was real. And to still his trembling hand. Her skin remained the color of leather but was now smooth and pliant. Dark-skinned woman. Dark Rosaleen of the old, sad Celtic song. She moved his blanket aside and played with the bone buttons of his coarse blue shirt.
No words were spoken. She eased out of the ragged clothes of Mary Morrigan, naked now in the firelight, shifted above him and his tense, sweating body, and held in her dark smooth-skinned hand her smooth full dark-nippled breast, and offered it to his mouth. He took it. Hard-nippled brown-nippled dark-skinned woman. Suckling him. Dark-skinned woman with hair falling like a black flower from her head, as he tried to suck all she knew, all she was offering, all she could give him. Her soft smooth kneading hand, damp and cool as the dark air, found his bursting cock and slowly smoothly moistly firmly she began then to move him out of himself, out of that place, out of time, into the future.
19.
He told his father none of this, of course, when he came for Cormac in the morning. Nothing about the wetness and the tightness and the milky taste of Mary Morrigan, nothing about the scent of pale roses seeping from her flesh, nothing about the rising midnight wind and the whipping sound of trees and the long, deep stranger’s roar that had come from within him and the caress of hands and the taste of tongue and lips and hair: and nothing either about the dark, emptied sleep that followed.
From his place in the morning trees, he saw Fergus O’Connor, his fierce-limbed father, drive the cart into the grove, and the men of his Irish tribe rushing to greet him while Bran leaped from the seat and bounded forward to greet Cormac. The dog was jumping and leaping and licking his hands, his tail whipping the air, then gestured with his head for Cormac to follow him to Thunder. His father waved, signaling with his hands for Cormac to stay back for now, follow the dog, his face saying, Wait, son, I must do something first. Cormac understood. Following Bran to the horse, he looked around, but Mary Morrigan was nowhere in sight. He wondered if she’d told the men what had happened in the night (for in the time of feasts they spoke of all things) and then thought that she had not. And then wondered if it had happened at all, if it had only been a dream. Then, thinking: No, it was not a dream. I can smell her on me. The scent of pale roses.
Bran and Thunder broke his thoughts. The great horse was slick from the journey, his black coat streaked with white foam. Cormac loosened the harness, hugged Thunder’s massive head, and led him to the hidden stream, where all three drank together from the silky current. The water was the color of the sky.
Through the trees he could see the men now unloading crates from beneath a false bottom Fergus O’Connor had added to the cart, using one of his father’s tools to open each in an almost reverential way. Suddenly they were all holding new muskets. Then Fergus was showing them how the guns were used. This was what he needed to do first, Cormac thought, and he didn’t want me to be part of it. Men use muskets. And I’m not yet a man. Da must know that a bad time is coming.
The men moved into the forest with the guns, and Fergus came to fetch his son, to hug him, to drink sky-colored water with the boy and the horse and the dog. Then they all gathered with the others for a small feast of eggs and bread, bacon and vegetables, washed down with icy water from earthenware mugs. The other women brought the food, young women, golden-haired, long-gowned, their bodies hidden. In his mind, Cormac could see their breasts and bellies and hidden hair. But none were made of the stained dark skin of Mary Morrigan, who was still nowhere in sight. The men grew flushed and excited, skin reddening, nostrils flaring, but not because of the women. “Let them come now,” one said. “Let them come, and we’ll be ready for them.” Another said, “Aye, let them come, and we’ll fight them with their own weapons.” All talking abruptly, breathily in Irish, while Fergus said nothing. He had done his work, kept a promise to deliver the weapons; what was to happen with the guns was in the future. Cormac asked him where he’d gotten the guns. He answered that it didn’t matter. He said he hoped they’d never be used, that they would rust in their hiding places, because he hated the guns, which were mere machines.