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130 lines
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<title>1</title>
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<h1>15</h1>
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<p>There was a click in my head, and I was back in the present again. But when I'd picked up that piece of smooth volcanic glass, it was as if I'd walked through a door into summer, taking the short route, a seven-league step right back to childhood.</p>
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<p>I had flown back to <em>then</em>.</p>
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<p>I was there. Small and skinny, with Colin and Barbara, the original one-and-onlies. The image was so clear I could feel the grass under my feet, and smell the clover and hear the gurgling of that clear stream in the valley.</p>
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<p>Where had Kitty MacBeth found the stone? It was the same one, I was sure.</p>
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<p>Twenty years and more had passed, and there must have been many polished spearheads lying under the dirt for people to dig up or turn up with their ploughs in this place that was steeped in human history since the dawn of time. There must have been others that were like it.</p>
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<p>But this stone from Kitty's box wasn't just like it. Not merely similar, crafted in the same simple fashion.</p>
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<p>Something in me knew that this was the
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<em>same</em> stone. The one that the big man with the wise eyes and the animal skins had come in a dream to give. This was
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<em>our</em> stone. Our magic stone.</p>
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<p>It was the one and only.</p>
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<p>I sat and felt its smoothness, warm and hard where it picked up the heat of my hand and radiated it back to me. More than two decades later, I was getting some sort of pre-cognition, a feeling of foreboding.</p>
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<p>Prescience is a terrific faculty in hindsight. Everybody gets the occasional feeling of déjà -vu: Jimmy Allison had a feeling that a Bad Summer was creeping up on Arden. The monsignor in the seminary, the old soldier turned crusader, had that premonition too.</p>
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<p>Kitty MacBeth had gone much further. She named the beast. The Cu Saeng. The ravener, the dweller under the roots, an old earth power that the people had brought into the world to fight their battle. Cu Saeng, trapped between the earth and what lay underneath it by chants and magic and powerful boundaries.</p>
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<p>Yes, Kitty MacBeth knew a thing or two, and as I held that smooth black stone in my hand the juggernaut, the engine of darkness, was rolling towards Arden, and it hitched up into a higher gear, gaining speed all the way.</p>
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<p>Kitty MacBeth, Catriona O'Connor MacBeatha, the last of the Children of Conchobar and the Sons of Life, whose people had been in this place since forever, died in the cottage hospital. She never regained full consciousness since the time she'd told me to go and find her box.</p>
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<p>Doctor Bell, the resident who ran the two small wards, could do nothing for her at all, except pump in antibiotics and vitamins. Kitty just burned up with a fever that he couldn't identify despite the tests for bacteria and virus. There was no real reason, he told me, why she should have died, but she did, and that was that.</p>
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<p>The nurse on the ward, a round and ruddy-faced smiling girl, told me that she'd been there at her desk, working on her notes under the swan-neck night-light, when the old woman had cried out.</p>
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<p>The girl had got up from her seat and gone to the bedside. Kitty was lying on her bed, heat radiating from her body and her head twisting spasmodically from side to side.</p>
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<p>'She kept asking me who sang,' the nurse said. 'Who sang?' all the time. I told here there was nobody singing and that she must have been dreaming. Then she grabbed at my wrist, really tight. So hard I had a bruise the next day.'</p>
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<p>The nurse unconsciously rubbed her hand over her arm.</p>
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<p>'But she kept on asking me. Then she opened her eyes and looked right at me, but I don't think she saw me at all. 'Who sang is here,' she said. And then her eyes just closed. She seemed to go back to sleep, but about an hour or so later I went back to check on her and she had slipped away. I'm sorry.'</p>
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<p>I thanked the nurse and went out of the hospital into the bright sunlight. From the front steps, I could see past the houses on the other side of the street and across Westbay to the firth. I felt a sense of deep loss that I couldn't explain. I jammed my hands into the pockets of my jeans and went down the steps, blinking hard to hold back the upwelling. Big boys don't cry. The little boy in me, the one who had been evoked when he held Kitty's black stone, did cry.</p>
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<p>The harvest festival came a week later, four days after Kitty MacBeth's quiet funeral in the little cemetery between the north side of the Milligs and the wood at the hill that led to Upper Arden.</p>
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<p>This was where the old parish church had stood until the fire of the reformation. The walls were a jumble of rocks, but the churchyard remained inside the dry-stone walls. Kitty's grave went unmarked as yet, but I ordered a polished granite. It would be another four weeks or so before the stone was cut and put in place, so Kitty went into an unmarked grave for the moment, but it was a grave that she herself had owned, according to the parish clerk.</p>
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<p>I had expected a quiet funeral. After all, Kitty had no family, and what friends did the old woman have here in Arden?</p>
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<p>So I was gratified - and surprised - when I followed the hearse from the little undertaker's parlour and saw a line of cars following on behind. Jimmy Allison stood beside me at the graveyard, still a bit red-eyed and snuffling from the cold or flu that had sat on him for these past days. The major was there too, saying farewell to his fellow nature lover. The monsignor came and, along with the Reverend McCluskie who ran the parish from the opposition, said a few quiet words over the grave.</p>
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<p>But what really surprised me was the number of the townswomen who came to the funeral. Women from Milligs and Westbay and even a few from Upper Arden.</p>
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<p>Wearing black hats and veils, young and old, they must have represented every household in the town. What had Kitty MacBeth been to them? The old witch-woman from the point, with her lotions and her potions, and her reading of the tea-leaves.</p>
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<p>I don't know why the women came, but as I stood there and watched them crowd into the little cemetery I remembered what the old woman had told me about the time when I was born. '</p>
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<p>'I know you were conceived on the night of the equinox in sixty nine. I know that because I knew your mother,' she had said, cradling her mug of hot tea and smiling mischievously at me. What, I wondered, had she done for my mother, that would give her that knowledge?</p>
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<p>And what had she done, over the years, that these women would leave their jobs and kitchens to come to her funeral?</p>
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<p>Summer stuck with us, promising a typical festival of sunlight and song. All around the area, the farmers were harvesting their corn and barley in the yellow fields. Up at the seminary, the big red combine had been out all week with hardly a break, razing the stalks and leaving a stubbly beard that the field squads burned.</p>
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<p>Now, at this time, unknown to anybody, the priests were reaping something that they had not sown in the wide fields that were bordered by their close-clipped hawthorn and privet hedgerows.</p>
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<p>They had planted in the spring on the red rich earth that they had turned over with their ploughs, and fed with the great heaps of manure that they swept out daily from the milking sheds. All organic and self-sufficient. A lesson in ecology.</p>
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<p>The priests were the masters of husbandry on the land that they had cared for since the time of Kentigern and Columba. Not for them the modern wonders of insecticides and chemical fertilisers. They did it their own way, the old way.</p>
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<p>Good strong corn, they planted, not too tall that it would bend and break in the rains that never came. Thick, heavy ears that threshed easily and made the best wholemeal bread with its light frosting of flour on top. Good corn.</p>
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<p>But not just good corn. Sometime in that summer, on one of the breezes that came and eddied around Arden, something drifted in and settled.</p>
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<p>Tiny almost infinitely microscopic spores came down in an invisible mist when the winds dropped. It landed on the grass and died; on the potato crops and just dissolved.</p>
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<p>But on the corn at the seminary, the spores landed and found somewhere they could live and grow. And when they had grown, they spored, and those spores repeated the process.</p>
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<p>On the other farms, where the crops were sprayed with chemicals that killed the bugs and the threadworm and fungus, the spores were wiped out. But up at the seminary, the old way, the best way, held sway. The light fungus that grew from the spores was a thin dusting of yellow on the ears of corn, and nobody noticed it until the doctor, who had puzzled over Kitty MacBeth's death, finally put some of the fungus under his microscope. He had reasons for doing so, but the fact that there was reason meant it was too late to do very much about it.</p>
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<p>The fungus was ergot, a primitive parasite of wheat and corn, known all over the world for its effects on the human psyche, on the consciousness of man.</p>
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<p>Why it grew in Arden, nobody knows, for certain.</p>
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<p>But I now believe that this was yet another in the string of coincidences that were not real coincidences.</p>
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<p>Kitty MacBeth's last words, the nurse had said, were 'Who sang?' That's what they had sounded like, but that's not what she had said.</p>
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<p>The old woman had warned right to the last: '<em>Cu Saeng</em>. Cu Saeng is here.'</p>
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<p>And if anything had brought the ergot and its madness to Arden, it was that stirring power.</p>
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<p>The first to feel the effects was Father Byrne, a short, swarthy priest, the one who had shown us with pride around his mill where the water from the well had turned the wheel that had made the heavy wooden machinery creak and groan and turn the big millstones rasping on each other to trickle out the stream of flour.</p>
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<p>The Kilmalid Burn, with its extra load of water from the dammed-up runnel at the new road, splashed over the top of the wheel and the flour poured out. The red-faced little priest hefted his sacks and the open cart came and took them away, some for distribution to some of the local bakeries, and some to the bakehouse that was tagged on to the seminary. Father Byrne toiled for two days with breaks only to eat and sleep, say his breviary and kneel for the Angelus.</p>
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<p>The mill ground wheat for most of the local farms on a contract basis, and was in operation almost all the year round, but the seminary's own grain was milled in one operation, almost from the first cut of the combine harvester. In the two days he breathed in flour dust and his face was caked, ghostlike, by the time he swung the doors on the mill at night.</p>
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<p>On the third night Father Byrne was not surprised at all to be speaking to his mother as he ran through his inventory in the little upstairs storeroom that also served as his office. He had buried her thirty years before, his voice cracked with grief as he recited the Latin, despite his knowledge that his dear devout mother was almost certainly in the bosom of the Lord at that instant, and looking down joyously and kindly over her son.</p>
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<p>But there she was, dressed in her long black skirt and cotton blouse, the way she had been when she had bathed him as a little boy. Father Byrne was not surprised at all.</p>
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<p>He had a long conversation with his mother, and then she went away again, her skirt trailing on the dry boards, and Father Byrne went back to his ledger and wrote away for some time.</p>
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<p>In the morning, when he did not appear for early mass, or breakfast, and was not found in his room, there was some minor alarm, and someone was sent to the mill.</p>
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<p>They found him, still writing in his ledger, but none of the writing was legible, or could even be described as handwriting. Father Byrne had studiously covered every single page of the thick lined book with drawings of naked, crucified women.</p>
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<p>They took him away from the book and he cried a little and called for his mummy, and they gave him a sedative and put him to bed in the infirmary.</p>
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<p>Obviously, Father Byrne was overworked. The harvest had taken its toll on him, they said.</p>
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<p>He'd be as right as rain in a day or two.</p>
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