booksnew/source/Bane/Bane15.txt

CHAPTER F IFTEEN
There was a click in my head, and I was back again. But when I’d
picked up that piece of smooth volcanic glass, it was as if I’d walked
through that door into summer, taking the short route, a seven-
league step right back to childhood.
I had iiown back to then. 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. Where had
Kitty MacBeth found the stone? It was the same one, I was sure.
Twenty years had passed, and there must have been many polished
spearhead, 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.
But this stone from Kitty’s box wasn’t like it. Not merely similar,
crafted in the same simple fashion.
Something in me knew that this was the same stone. The one
that the huge man with the wise eyes and the raggedy skins had
come in a dream to give. This was our stone. Our magic stone.
It was the one and only.
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 twenty
years later, I was getting some sort of pre-cognition, a feeling of
foreboding. Prescience is a terrific facility in hindsight. Everybody
gets the occasional feeling of deja 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 the feeling too.
Kitty MacBeth went much further. She named the beast. The Cu
Saeng. The ravener, the dweller under the roots, an old earth god
that the people had brought into the world to iight their tights. Cu
Saeng, trapped between the earth and what lay underneath it by
chants and magics and powerful boundaries.
Yes, Kitty MacBeth knew a thing or two, and as I held that
smooth black stone in my hand the juggernaut, the engine of
death, was rolling towards Arden, and it hitched up into a higher
gear, gaining speed all the way.
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Kitty MacBeth, Catriona O’Mac Connor MacBeatha, the last of
the Sons 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. 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.
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 in her delirium.
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.
‘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.’
The nurse unconsciously rubbed her hand over her arm.
‘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.’
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 grievous 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, felt he
must.
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.
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
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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.
I had expected a quiet funeral. After all, Kitty had no family,
and what friends did the old woman have here in Arden?
So I was gratiiied — 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 snufiling 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. 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.
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.
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. ‘
‘I know you were conceived on the night of the equinox in forty
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?
And what had she done, over the years, that these women would
leave their kitchens and their washing and their shopping to come
to her funeral?
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 helds. 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 iield squads burned.
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.
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, truly self-sufficient. A lesson in ecology. The priests were
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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.
Good strong corn, they planted, not too tall that it would bend
and break in the rains that never came. Thick, heavy ears of corn
that threshed easily and made the best wholemeal bread with its
light frosting of flour on top. Good corn.
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. 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.
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. On the other
farms, where the crops were sprayed with the polyglot protection
from ICI, that killed the bugs and the threadworm and mildew 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.
The fungus was ergot, a strange, primitive parasite of wheat and
corn, known all over the world for its effects on the human psyche,
on the consciousness of man.
Why it grew in Arden, nobody knows, for certain.
But I now believe that this was yet another in the string of
coincidences that were not coincidences.
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.
The old woman had warned right to the last: ‘Cu Saeng. Cu
Saeng is here.’
And if anything had brought the ergot and its madness to Arden,
it was that stirring power.
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.
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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, and say his breviary
and kneel for the Angelus. 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.
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, and 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. 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. 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. 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. 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 doodles and
drawings and squiggly lines. 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.
Obviously, Father Byrne was overworked. The harvest had
taken its toll on him, they said. He’d be as right as rain in a day or
two.
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