She is in the garden beneath the moonlight. She knows where she is going. She picks the red berries off the yew tree. They appear at the start of winter, and now, in the spring, they are always more concentrated and vicious, devastating. She crushes them and produces a small quantity of powder which fits in the hollow of her palm. Day is about to break. She goes back indoors, her fist clenched over the sombrous powder. The serving women have already brought the princesses’ milk. Brigid opens her hand and the powder mixes with the milk.
They take communion in their white robes. Leary is there, wavering. He has combed his beard and donned his fur-lined cloak. They kneel, Patrick stands very tall above them, they receive the body of the Bridegroom from his hand. They are now in His presence, although He remains hidden. They have closed their eyes. Opening them, Brigid sees only the impassive face of the king. It is over. They step out into the May sunlight, and in the sunshine, one after the other, they fall to the ground: one on the steps, one on the path, and Brigid beside the rosebush. One has her head in her arm, one in the dust of the track, Brigid is turned toward the sky, her eyes wide open. They are impeccably dead. They are contemplating the face of God.
COLUMBKILL’S SADNESS
Adamnan recounts that Saint Columba of Iona, who is still called Columbkill, Columbkill the Wolf — a member of the tribe of the northern O’Neills through his ancestor Niall of the Nine Hostages — is a brutal man in his youth. He loves God violently, and war, and small precious objects. He was reared in a bronze cradle; he is a man of the sword. He serves under Diarmait, and under God. Diarmait the king of Tara can count on his sword for raids in the Irish Sea, marauding cattle, crapulous feasts which turn into massacres. And God, King of this world and the next, can count on his sword to persuade the disciples of the monk Pelagius, who deny Grace, that Grace is devastating and can be weighed in iron. The small objects are also allies of God and the sword: they are won at sword point, and all of them — chalices, rings, or croziers — belong to God. The most beautiful, the rarest, the most precious — those that later, when they exist in plenty, the West will call books — speak of God, and God speaks in them. Columbkill prefers books to ciboria: for this military captain, whom Adamnan calls the Soldier of the Isles and of God, Insulanus Dei miles, this wolf is also a monk in the manner of monks at that time, a manner that is inconceivable to our way of understanding. When he lays down his sword, he rides from monastery to monastery, where he reads: he reads standing up, tensed, moving his lips and frowning, in the violent manner of those times, which we cannot conceive of either. Columbkill the Wolf is a brutal reader.
It is winter in the year 559, and he is reading.
He has just arrived at the monastery of Moville, built in dry stone on the bald heath facing the Irish Sea. It is raining the way it rains in Ireland; you can hear the sea below, but it is not visible. Finian the abbot has left him alone in the hut that serves as the library. There are four books: Columbkill leafs through the large altar copy of the Gospels, a copy of the Georgics, and Priscian’s Grammar. The Gospels are a run-of-the-mill piece of work; he read the Georgics when he was in Cork. He also knows Priscian. He bends over the fourth volume: it is smaller and fits inside a little pouch with a strap that needs unfastening. He opens it at random, and reads, I hate double-minded men, but I love Thy law. He does not know this text. It is a great rhyming paean divided into a hundred and fifty smaller paeans. In the pictures on the facing pages you can see King David variously occupied with slaughter and music. The colors are very beautifuclass="underline" an orpiment yellow and a vertiginous lapis lazuli. The blue and the paean are the book of Psalms. It is the first psalter he has ever held in his hand, perhaps the only one that exists in Ireland. He can hear the sea below dropping with all its weight. He sinks into the text.
For seven days he returns to the library and the rain doesn’t cease. He reads standing up in his cloak, his hands numb with cold and his mouth voracious. On the seventh day he knows the text in detaiclass="underline" he has identified its articulations, he can recite the refrains; he has recognized the author’s mannerisms, and he knows that what he holds in his hand is Saint Jerome’s translation and that it was copied by the monk Faustus, because in the colophon he has read, ora pro Fausto. He prays for Faustus. He prays for Jerome. Despite Faustus and Jerome, a voracious sadness gnaws at his heart: he is going to have to leave the book behind. In the evening he dines with Finian and praises him for owning such a treasure. Finian beams with pride. Over Columbkill’s wolfish face there passes a fox’s smile. “Allow me,” he says, to copy it. “I shall keep the copy for myself; no monastery in Ireland shall be able to boast that it shares Finian’s treasure.” Without replying Finian rises and leaves the table.
During the night, Columbkill slips from his bed. In the darkness of the rain and the loathsome thundering of the Irish Sea he reaches the library. Like a robber he lights a small candle and copies Faustus’s text, which Faustus copied from Jerome. When he reaches Psalm IX, Finian enters and seizes the copy. The psalter falls, King David surrounded by blue plays his lyre. The wolf bares his teeth, but Finian is also a wolf. Both are sure of their right. Very calmly they set a date to meet at Tara in King Diarmait’s palace, and he will decide which of their two rights is that of God. Columbkill is on his horse, which is streaming in the wet, and the rain and the dark carry him off on the way that is dark and slippery, as the psalm says.
At Tara, King Diarmait on his iron chair says, “The book belongs to Finian as the calf belongs to the cow.” Columbkill hurls his ring of allegiance at the king’s feet.
All winter long on horseback he raises his warriors, forty decades of young men in Drumlane, twelve decades in Kells, thirty in Derry. At the feasts of alliance, when he is drunk and weary, he pictures the incalculable blue that seems to rise from David’s harp. He is happy; he sings to himself the refrains from the psalms. In the spring all the O’Neills are under arms. He hurries to Moville with long day-marches and six hundred horse. Diarmait is waiting for him with a thousand horse in the bog of Culdreihmne beneath a clearing sky. Columbkill kneels down: he prays for Faustus, who is in heaven, the blue place which awaits us and favors us. He wants to laugh. He gets to his feet; they draw their swords. On the dark and slippery way they merge and set about each other; many young men are laid in the byre of death. At noon Diarmait lies in the marsh with a thousand horses, you cannot see them because it’s raining much harder now, but you can hear them dying and you can hear the crows cawing with delight. Covered in blood and mire, laughing and drunk, Columbkill takes forty horses and gallops flat-out to Moville. He can be heard laughing beneath the rain at the head of the cavalcade. When Finian opens the door of his monastery, he sees the other man halted there with forty warriors. Their cloaks are gray like the rain. Columbkill has a fox’s smile and the eyes of a wolf; he holds out an open hand. Without a word Finian goes to fetch the little pouch and gives it to him. Forty horses sally forth beneath the dark sky.
In his war tent at Culdreihmne, Columbkill trembles as he unfastens the little pouch and takes out the book. It is plump and docile like a woman. It belongs to him as the calf belongs to the cow, and a woman to her lover: it is his from the incipit to the colophon. He wants to enjoy it slowly: he opens it, caresses it, leafs through it, contemplates it — and suddenly he is no longer trembling, he has stopped laughing, he is sad, he is cold; he searches the text for something he has read and cannot find, and the picture for something he has seen and which has vanished. He searches long and in vain, yet it was there when it wasn’t his. Everything seems to have been spoiled, to have changed, and perhaps only the colophon is like itself — the colophon where the monk Faustus asks that people pray for him. Columbkill lifts his head; he can hear the death throes of the wounded and the crows’ rejoicing. He steps out of his tent; it is no longer raining, and above his head there are even large patches of blue traveling over the byre of death. The book is not in the book. Heaven is just an old blue place beneath which we stand naked, and the things we possess are wanting. He throws down the book, throws off his cloak and his sword. He takes the habit, he takes to the sea, he seeks and he finds a desert in the loathsome Irish Sea: on the bald island of Iona he sits down, free and stripped of everything, beneath a sky which is sometimes blue.