Author’s Note: The practice of ‘setting adrift’ was a legal form of execution in Early Medieval Ireland, thought to have been introduced with Christianity, and often used as a penalty for convicted women. The mythological elements of the story are drawn from the medieval texts Togail Bruidne Dá Derga and Tochmarc Étaíne. The language is designed to mimic the pattern and style of Old Irish prose.
On the day they put my mother out to sea, I was at the hiding of my head and the shielding of my face, unable to look, unable to weep. My father stood by me, and into his face was etched a fury which would never again wear away from it.
Although I did not look, I see the scene of it in my mind now, as clear as if it unfolds still in front of me. The priest, at the intoning of some pitiless scripture. The crowd of men and women of our túath, come to see the sinner off. The brightness of the day, and the way little frothing tongues of white licked in playful leaps at the sand on which stood the bare feet of my mother. A windless day it was. Having tied her down in the hide boat, with my baby brother screaming at her dry breast, four men it was then at the pushing of the coracle out into the sea. The law lays down that a convict must be set adrift beyond the ninth wave, there to await the judgement of the Lord. From that distance, the coracle might be washed away out, and so the Lord has declared the guilt of them; or it might drift back in, and so their life He has seen fit to spare.
He did not see fit to spare my mother.
•••
The cause of her crime happened less than a year before, that is at the time of the getting upon her of my baby brother. Nine long months he lay in her womb, with my father all of that time gone from home, on an errand which should have taken him only a day.
Our home was down in the black belly of the mountain. A place of swamps it was, of sudden shiftings in the ground, lochans that opened overnight out of the earth, and untold disappearances. In winter the mountain was at starving us perpetually of daylight and at the funnelling of the icy rain in showers down upon us; in springtime it was at the flooding of us with meltwaters. As children, we used climb up its mean, uneven haunches, at following the trails of black-orange peat grass across the mountain’s broad back, and the crows they used flap past on a level with us, awck awck awck they used say.
The love between my father and mother grew from the time they were children. When they married, my mother was thin and rope-muscled on her upbringing of bog food, while my father, already tall despite his deformity, was yet strung between his own bones like a drying pelt. No other woman would have had him, on account of his blemish. For it was known that any man upon whom God has seen fit to lay a blemish, it is not he that shall rule, for he has been marked by God that he shall not hold power over other men. But the thickness of my father’s black, wiry hair, and the mouth of him that was quirked always to one side of his face, as though upraised in an eternal smile, held some power over my mother.
Always he was large but deformed. To see him is a beholding indeed. Black hair sprouts from his neck, his wrists. An unkempt growth of beard forests his chin, and it would be a while that you were at the wielding of an axe in that forest before you’d carve yourself a clearing. My mother used shrink and squeeze around him in the tiny house, laughing, her head the level of his chest.
So it was that Conall mac Brandubh, the swift-hound son of the black-haired raven, took her for his wife and lived with her in the home at the foot of the mountain. Wood the walls of the house, the floor of packed earth, and a thatch of reeds over the rafters.
My father’s father, Brandubh of the raven-dark hair, had gone down into the bog years before, and death was upon him there. Some would have called my father and Brandubh alike in looks but for the blemish. Some there were even who swore it was Brandubh himself they’d see walking down of a nightfall from the sheep-grounds on the mountain, a ghost out of the bog, though there are always those who say such things, and in fairness there are always ghosts out of the bog.
The night the crow-god came for my mother, my father was gone on his errand. To the túath beyond the mountain he’d been sent, to exchange a man’s prized pig for a highly valued hunting dog. My father would not say who it was that sent him, only that a man of great authority it was, likely a lord, who had promised him mighty rewards upon his return. He mentioned also that the hair of the man was of an exceptional colour: as silvery-pale as the frost on a winter cobweb, though he appeared young in age. My father packed provisions for a day’s journey, kissed my mother on the mouth and me on the top of my head, and left us before the sun was at rising.
All of that day, my mother fretted. She told me that an unnerving dream was upon her in the night: a premonition of the ill to come, as clear to her mind as flat stones laid out upon a path. She bolted the door long before night came on. She shuttered all the windows, but for the one high in the centre of the roof that let the smoke out from the fire. A bed she made for me in the corner at the back of the house, concealed behind the animal pens. “Not a word, my Eithne,” she said. “Not a sound, not a move, no matter what you may hear.”
I thought her foolish; I was at an age when all girls think their mothers foolish. The windows and door were latched sound so, and besides, what would any man want with the blemished man’s wife? They all of them thought us cursed: my father with his own father long dead, and my mother with only one child to show for fifteen years of marriage, and a female child at that. I fell asleep in a poor temper, the slow hot breaths of the animals near me warming my back.
At the darkest time of the night, a sound woke me. My mother was moving about the room. The fire had burned itself almost to nothing, and in its autumn glow the shape of my mother was outlined, at pacing before the doorway. A stout oak branch was in her hand. I kept my eyes upon her.
A sound there was then upon the roof of the house. A scrabbling it was, as though of claws, though huge claws they must have been. Then a shape descended through the hole in the centre of the roof.
It soared down into the room. A crow it was: black and massive, its wings the span of a man’s arms. The breath of its wings brought alive the fire, and in the flare of light I saw that the feathers of the crow’s head were of a fickle, silvery colour.
The crow flapped to the ground at the feet of my mother. She raised the oak branch. In that moment, the air around the crow seemed to draw in and thicken, and a great sense of sickness in my gut convinced me that I was in the presence of the unnatural. A human shape formed where the crow had been. A tall man, of lordly bearing, with silvery-grey hair. He got to his feet. Slow and graceful his movements, as though the limbs of him were yet supported by feathers.
It pains my heart to speak of what came next. I closed my eyes and buried my face in the side of the milch-cow that lay next to me, but the sounds reached me still. As with the coracle on the shoreline, I can see it now, the silver-haired man and my mother, whose oak branch was of no more use to her than might have been a twig.
•••
After they put her to sea, I stopped eating. If God had sentenced her, I thought, let Him sentence me also. I took no food and no water. The thirst and hunger that were soon upon me I accepted with grim patience, because my mother was at the suffering of them also. At night, I sat outside, with no blanket, and the cold ate into my bones. During the day, I scraped my hair back and went about my work bare-armed, letting the blackflies do with me as they would. When it rained, I let it soak through my clothes. I went up to the heights of the mountain and laid my body in the cold of the damp peat, and every shudder of my skin against the water brought me closer to her.
Six days of this and my father was at the fetching of the priest in his desperation.
I was at lying on my mattress when the priest came. I had grown too weak to stay awake, and my father must have carried me in when the consciousness went out of me. My father spoke to the priest just outside the door of the house, and I listened to their words over the sound of my own breathing, which was shallow and sounded unlike to my own.
“Why won’t she eat, Áthair?” said my father’s voice. “Why does she refuse water?”
“Not hard that,” said the priest. “She acts against the will of God. The Devil that was in the mother is in the daughter too.”
“Not so,” said my father harshly.
“Your woman said herself that the Devil came to her in her own house.”
“Not the Devil. A crow, she said. A crow that became a man. The same man who sent me on the errand, who bewitched me that I was gone nine months, though to my mind only a day had passed.”
“And who do you imagine that man might have been?” asked the priest.
“Áthair, you know as well as I know what it was.”
“I’ll stop you there now, Conall,” said the priest, a warning in the voice of him. “I’ll not have a man blaspheme against God in my túath. The Devil himself it was, that you saw. Your woman was at the communing with him so, and has been punished by the Almighty Lord.”
When my father has the heat of anger upon him, rare is the man who’d stand in his way. But the priest had the weight of the Almighty behind him. “You know,” my father said in a whisper. “It was the—”
“No talk of heathen beings from the lips of you, Conall,” ordered the priest. “We’ve spoken of this before. You with your ghosts and superstitions, forever at claiming your old man Brandubh walks down out of the bog and visits you, and him twenty years drowned.”
“I’ve seen him,” said my father, “with these two eyes of mine. He came in through this very door here, dripping with mud, the skin of him all green and white from the rot.”
“His soul is with the Lord.”
“It’s in the bog on the mountain and you know it, Áthair. Up in the boglands on the eastern side, where the lochan forms after rain. Eithne’s seen him too.”
“You always were at the filling of her head with black superstitions.”
“Not so. That which goes down into a bog, it is not that which will come back up out of it again, not even a man’s eternal soul. That’s a truth and we all know it.”
The priest spoke quietly then. “Conall, pay heed to me, man. What is there to gain? Feed your child. Do what you must to keep her in this world. Your woman is gone.”
“And the baby,” said my father; I could hear tears in the voice of him now. “The newborn boy, who for all I know was mine and no other’s, you put him into the boat with her to die. Where in the laws does it allow that? Where does your Almighty God set down the killing of a newborn?”
“If they were pure of soul, the Lord would have washed them back to shore,” said the priest stiffly. Then his patience broke, and he said to my father, “For the love of Heaven, Conall, there were feathers upon the body of him. Black feathers all upon the infant’s skin. What is that but a sign of the Devil?”
“What is this but a sign of the Devil, Áthair? What is this?” And although I could not see him, I knew my father as he roared gestured then at the twisted shape of his own mouth, and at the coarse black hair of himself, thick and pelt-like, dark as crows’ wings.
•••
Nine months passed from that night of the crow-god’s visit. The stomach of my mother grew. She pined for my father, at the crying of tears of anger each night when she thought me asleep. She whispered his name into the dark, animal-flesh warmth of the house. When the baby was born, I held him close and in wonderment ran my fingers through the soft down of his feathers. His tiny hands curled around mine, perfect skin peeking through the vanes, the crow-god’s son. My mother wept exhausted tears.
In the morning, my father returned, with the famed hunting dog roped at his side. But the silver-haired man was not there to pay the promised reward. Only the priest and the men of the túath, stone-faced in the morning light, stood at the door of our house to receive my father home.
•••
How to kill a god? Impossible that, you might say. What is a god, if not a being of never-ending life, whose birth was many ages ago, before the time of the giants, before Fomorians roamed the land? How could a poor bog-dweller hope to do harm upon such a being?
And yet, my father and I hoped to do it so.
We laid our plans in the safety of the house, while the animals in their pen puffed and blew wetly in their sleep. A raw fury was upon my father. He rained curses upon the crow-god as he spoke, calling him mud-breath, a moulting desert ram, a castrated cockerel, wishing him be wrapped in his shroud and that his anus be knotted. The rage in my heart was of a colder kind. In both his forms I had seen him, the god and the crow. No mistaking him would there be.
We chose the night of the full moon. Deep clouds blackened the sky, the darkness lifted only by the fires of neighbouring homes. Above the mountain, two solitary stars faced each other across a space vast as a battleground.
The torch burned heavy in my father’s hand. We were at heading into the rubble of long grass and heather which lay beyond the cleared field. We leaped over the burn. This was the way I used go as a child, when we used scale the mountain for fun. We used spread our arms on the summit, our feet sunk in sponge-like peat, our mouths open, at the throwing of our voices into the merciless wind. And the bog used settle about the feet of us, always there, always welcoming.
My father and I climbed into the lower haunches of the mountain. We were at the following of old paths trod into the moss, the paths of the shepherds and peat-cutters, the paths of sheep, who although but lowly animals considered the mountain their own.
Clouds assailed us not far from the top. The torch flailed, its flames at dying in the icy vapour that wreathed about them like smoke. We stumbled upwards, at catching each other’s hands when the footing allowed. Short and sharp was the breath in my throat. A frantic beat in my heart, as though it was my own death I climbed to meet.
At the top we found ourselves above the clouds. Vast and glowing was the moon, a silver light about us, and the peat bog stretching on for miles—the crow-god’s domain. The mountain beneath us, the sky unfurling on all sides.
“I’ll hide, Eithne,” my father whispered, squeezing the cold flesh of my arm. “I’ll not let him take you.”
He put the dead torch into my hand and slipped away, the silver dark soon at the swallowing of his outline. I heard his footsteps squishing into moss, and before long heard nothing.
I began to walk towards the eastern flank.
The mountain is a tricky place even in daylight. The soil of it shifts as though alive, deep meres opening up and closing over again, patches of sucking mud which yesterday were solid earth. To walk it by night is madness, and yet with the crow-god’s face in mind, at hardening my resolve, I made good progress. Soon I reached the lochan, which glowed black in the moonlight, a hole in the realm of reality.
I felt afraid. My own cowardice burned a hole in the heart of me. I had lain in the house, silent and unmoving, and let the crow-god take my mother. What was this delusion upon me, that I could cause harm to such as him? I was only a fearful child, filled with ignorance, filled with heathen beliefs that would see me punished like my mother, should the priest come to hear of them.
All the same, I knelt in the bog by the lochan’s side. I clenched my hands together, to keep the cold from my fingers, and began to pray. In the old tongue I prayed, the words that our grandmothers and great-grandmothers pass down to us along with bedtime songs. I called upon the crow-god in his own speech. I asked him to come to me, to take me as he had taken my mother. For good measure, I threw some insults his way—black cockerel, ugly moulting ram—with a sense that it would be to his amusement. I taunted him, that my mother preferred the touch of a blemished man to his own.
He appeared out of the silver bog. His wings rose first, upraised like a mantle, and as they opened, the man-form stepped forth and came towards me. The feet of him walked the sucking bog without a sound.
He stood before me. His smile was straight and pleasing, his face long, his skin unfeathered. His eyes the colour of the ninth wave, beyond which they set adrift my mother.
Hands took hold of me.
The crow-god’s mouth was warm, sharp-bladed with hair. He licked at my skin as might a cow or a cat. We grappled for balance in the shining dark. When my legs went from under me, we sank into bog grass, into wet peat.
That was when my father ran towards us.
I heard him coming, the slop of bare feet into peat-grass. My body went slack with fear, for I knew that if I could hear him, so could the god.
As my father approached, the god’s arm lashed out. My father was knocked to the ground. The weight of the crow-god crushed me into the bog as he launched himself from me. I breathed in peat water. The crow-god sprang at my father and was at the forcing of his head down into the marsh. White light blazed from his eyes. He let my father surface, my father at gasping and hauling at the air like a landed fish. The crow-god held his hair.
Then he laughed, letting the head of my father tip back. The tangled mane of him drifted in peat water.
I lay where I was. Just as I had lain in the house, when the crow-god took my mother. Water was in my lungs and in my eyes.
The crow-god left my father in the mud. Alive still was my father; I could hear his hampered breath. The crow-god stood, then walked a few paces away. Beyond him, the moonlight was at shining into the lochan, a dark rain-water pool, no telling the depth of it. The crow-god pissed into it and his piss fell with barely a sound.
A movement at the far side of the lochan drew the eye of him then. He peered into the silver. The shape of a man, the height of a man.
Cold fear seeped up me as though out of the bog. My father rose slow from the mud. His hands were at shaking, his eyes burning with frightened tears.
“Áthair,” he whispered. “Brandubh.”
The eyes of my father’s father were white as though filled with milk. Sphagnum moss greened his skin and the raven-dark hair was streaked with cuckoo-spit, bog asphodel his crown. The stench of the bog was strong around him. He gazed at us, quiet in the moonlight.
The crow-god stepped back. Unwilling, he was, to take his eyes from the phantom, but the phantom remained.
At picking our way on hands and knees between clumps of grass-firmed ground and pools of sunken mud, my father and I neared the god. The clothes of us were wet through and stained black from the lying of us in wet earth. We were like creatures of the bog ourselves.
The father of my father, Brandubh, moved towards the crow-god. He walked on the water as though he was made of air. Slowly he glided in, further in, and the eyes and body of the crow-god turned in amazement to watch the ghost glide.
With the crow-god’s back towards us, my father leapt. He barrelled into the god and the surprise of it bore the great body down into the mud. Lying my body flat, with all my strength I grasped the god’s cold ankles and pulled his feet towards me as he fell.
Conall found the head with his hands. He sat himself over the crow-god’s neck, holding the head as it bucked and shuddered, holding the hair of the god down into the mere. The dead father joined him. Ghostly hands gripped the god’s shoulders and held down. Alone one man could not have done it, but together they held the crow-god’s face in the lochan until the arms of him turned to thrashing wings, to tearing feathers, and then sank from sight forever.
On the bank, I breathed and breathed but my lungs were brimming, were filled with marshes. In my belly, a churning, as though of feathers.
There is a bog, it lies high in the mountain, and it is said that anything which is sunk down into that bog, it is not that which will come up out of it again. Into this bog we sank the corp of the crow-god, into that black glimmering pool. The grasses they stretched wetly up over him as he sank and his eyes they were wide opened to the bleak air. See the dead father and the blemished son at shivering and balking in the night? The dead god he went down to his rest below the reeds and perhaps down there he met and mingled with others, perhaps many, perhaps a lifetime’s worth of the lost, the sunken, and the murdered. And that bog it swallowed up this disgrace like others uncounted before, and it is not that which will come up out of it again, not if things happen their way, so prayed the father as he let the body go.
