Her County: Finale

PART 1

PART 2

PART 3

PART 4

The mouth of the wooden cathedral gaped as the thick, dark oak doors parted, pulled aside of their own accord as I stood upon the threshold. I looked from the hollow, dark depths of the entrance hall, swallowing what little moonlight was cast upon my back, to the heights of the edifice, bulging and buckling under its own mighty weight, with three large and open circular shutters. Unsure, I turned around to Meabh and the others, still by the fire, watching me. Their unblinking eyes stirred a twinge of unease in my chest, but they didn't appear apprehensive, nor glowering. It was more out of fascination, as though I was about to do something extraordinary. I returned to the opening, reminding myself what was at stake, and stepped into the shallow, dim island of light.

Slowly, just as they had opened, the heavy, thick doors pivoted with gargantuan heft, once again unmanned, thinning the shaft of light, with a final slit slicing the darkness, vanishing in a single stroke.

I stood there, embalmed in the dark, preserved as wholly as a bog burial, suspended. Just as I considered wandering further into the dark, the entrance hall erupted into life as countless candles popped alight, inhaling the cool night's air in one balmy breath, winding me in surprise. The prevailing aura of amber fought back the dark so much the shadows only had the grooves in the wood to retreat into.

The light revealed a long, stretching cathedral sized hall with rafters so high they were barely visible, just on the outer limits of the candlelight's reach, drifting, as I walked on, like the murky currents of deep, decrepit waters, hiding all manner of flickering, predatory eyes. Perhaps it was the glimmer of nail heads, I unconvincingly lied to myself.

The hall stretched with wide open doorways, leading off into connecting corridors and rooms. The ground, instead of being laid with stone slabs and straw, was peculiarly dotted with tree rings, small enough to have been from mature saplings. The different shades of ash, oak, spruce, and hawthorn were arranged in such a way as to take the shape of Celtic markings; spirals, figures, sun-crosses. As I stepped onto these discs, they felt surprisingly smooth and softened, worn by time.

I walked on, looking into each of the open doorways that led off from this hall. One led into another dark chamber, just barely illuminated by the candlelight outside, with a long table and stretching benches; a dining hall. Another led into a much larger room, with rows upon rows of surprisingly plump beds, the kind you'd only hear a king or noblemen having in their chambers.

It was only then that it struck me how odd it was that, despite its size and the time of night, there was no one inside. Yes, there was Meabh and the others outside, but that wasn't nearly enough to warrant a commune this size. Though the beds were made and neat, there were still folded gowns at the foot of each bed, filled jugs of water and empty basins to their sides, charms hanging overhead, and even reed dolls, much like Lugair's daughters had back at his crannog, tucked under the quilts. I continued down the hall, passing more and more deserted rooms; a washroom, a pantry, a kitchen, even an owlery. My suspicions about those glinting dots up in the rafters were eased a little, until I remembered how violent hungry owls, with their sharp, flesh-shredding talons and gut-tearing beaks, can be.

The hall stretched ahead for yards, but, when I caught the sound of gentle shuffling and a familiar humming from behind the only door left slightly ajar, curiosity forced my hand.

I pushed the door open, which brushed aside a gathered heap of scrolls and sheaves. The floor was littered with loose pages, written in strange languages and with even stranger depictions of animals, buildings, and people; that's if they were people. As I entered, tall wooden shelves loomed over me, packed to bursting with more and more scrolls and sheaves. The few shelves that were empty seemed to have vomited their contents out onto the floor beneath, spewing the knowledge they held. Though this library was as dark as the other deserted rooms, the candlelight from outside bounced softly from surface to surface, enough to highlight corners and turns, of which there were many as I descended deeper into this labyrinth library, spurred on by the growing sounds of scratching, shuffling, crinkling flutters, and the ever-persistent hum. I strained, when faced with multiple aisles and turns, to hear the direction the noise was coming from. More than once, I doubled back as I came to a dead-end or else when I realised I was heading away from the sound.

Finally, turning into a junction between the end of an aisle and a wall, I froze, finding someone unceremoniously perched on a stool, hunched over a desk buried beneath sheaves of parchment. Their hand twitched rapidly before them as they wrote, pausing only to dip their quill into an ink pot, briefly looking to their side, away from me, to consult one of the scrolls they had on hand. She was thin, almost skeletal, and her blonde hair slithered in long, clumped strands down the folds of her dark green cloak. She was humming to herself. Humming the tune I had heard so many times before.

I stood there and watched her for a moment. She was the first woman I ever met who was literate, working away feverishly, writing and sternly analysing symbols I could never hope to decipher, all by her own candlelight. I went to speak, clearing my throat, but her other hand shot up, holding up a single finger as she continued to write.

"Just a moment, Pól, thank you."

After everything I had witnessed, it still amazes me that this took me by surprise. I had heard stories about this woman that had reshaped my belief, my trust in what I've been taught, in my self-assurance that the world is safe and full of good people, and it was her knowing my name that shocked me the most.

Nonetheless, I waited.

…

Brigid spent another minute finishing up whatever it was she was writing. Once done, she potted her quill and studied her work, mouthing soundlessly as she read, before finally putting down the sheaf, turning to face me fully, smiling.

"Thank you, Pól. I was hoping to have finished that before you arrived. I expected Meabh to have kept you busy a little longer."

"You know who I am?"

"It would be terribly rude of me if I didn't. After all, you've come a long way, and learned a lot, just to meet me. I'm awfully flattered."

"You're… you're Saint Brigid?"

"Saint? Is that what they're calling me now? That's somehow more of an insult than anything else I've been called. Tell me, Pól; after hearing the stories about me, do you think I'm a saint? A witch? A monster?"

"… I think… you're just a woman."

"HA! An excellent answer!"

"No! I didn't mean it like that! I just meant you're not what I expected."

"What woman is? I think that's been everyone's problem all these decades. They all had expectations of what I was. A dutiful daughter. A doleful sister. A hapless maiden. And every time, I shattered their preconceptions, savouring the sweet, anguished confusion on their faces like a tongue swishing mead. Speaking of which, would you care for a cup? You must be thirsty travelling from Meath. Ha! You left Meath for mead! That's funny!"

Brigid turned to her side and pulled out a clay jug and cup, pouring out a generous measure of shimmering golden mead. I was a little confused by what she had said.

"I don't understand."

"It's a pun. Mead is a drink, but it sounds like Meath, which is the name of - -"

"No, I mean, you said decades. But… you don't look…"

"Old? Oh, you are a charmer! How old do you think I am?"

"… Um… Twenty?"

"Now you're just being polite. Go on, I won't be upset."

"… Forties?"

"And how old did you expect me to be, reading all those tomes with your… uncle… in the monastery?"

"I… don't know."

"Pól, I know you're not stupid. I won't be offended. How old did you expect me to be?"

"… Well… We were told you would have been in your seventies by now."

"Do I look it?"

"No."

"Drink up, Pól."

Brigid held out the cup. I took it and sipped, trying not to give myself away. I was familiar with the sweetness, having snuck some from the monastery cellars. It was premature and watery then, but this tasted aged with an ensnaring sting. Though I wanted to swallow it whole, I was careful to pace myself with slow gulps as Brigid leaned closer, watching me. Likely she knew of my youthful act of rebellion already.

"I am not in my seventies. Nor my forties. In fact… I'm not even alive."

I coughed, choking in surprise, dropping the cup of mead, spilling and shattering it. As I spluttered, thumping my chest, I looked up to Brigid, only to find her pouring more mead into the cup again.

"Please be careful, this is my favourite cup."

Her words briefly hung in my head, as though I were inspecting them carefully to make sure I had heard her right. Something, perhaps realisation, snapped my head to the floor, clear of any cup, broken or otherwise, with no puddle of spilled mead. When I looked up to Brigid again, she took a savouring sup herself from the cup before flashing a smug smile.

"Go on. Ask."

"… H-how… how did you do that?"

"Who was the first person you met when you entered my county? The king, correct?"

"Fincath, yes."

"A man you had heard had died some years before. Then you met my younger brother, Dubhtach, yet he should have been in his sixties by now. And then you met Lugair and his many daughters. More daughters than one man could ever sire in a single lifetime. What do they all have in common?"

"… You?"

"Lucky them, eh? No. Have you not wondered, if I am the monster they've imagined me as, why have none of them left? Wouldn't they want to be as far away from me as possible? It is because we are all trapped here. Trapped… outside time… unburdened by age and death. It was the only way to escape."

"… Escape what?"

Brigid picked up the lone candle on her desk, the only shimmering source of light defining her strong face, holding it before her thin, pale lips. Her blue eyes, unlike the radiant flame, never wavered.

"The inevitable."

Brigid blew out the candle, yet instead of plunging us into darkness, the scriptorium flared with searing light and swelled with a gorging heat as the huge, dark mahogany structure sheltering us became an inferno of hellish magnitude. The stinging, hissing embers swirled around us like a devilish blizzard of reckless consumption. And the screams. The once empty halls and chambers rattled and rang with the screeches and cries of hundreds abandoned by God, like some merciless strike from a bell of utter damnation and torture.

And just as quickly, Brigid blew again, snuffing out the fiery vision, leaving only a single flame to ripple, perched upon the candle once again. It took a moment, as she returned the candle to her side, for me to find my voice, lost in my traumatised bewilderment.

"What… happened?

"The same thing that always happens. Those misunderstood are punished by those who misunderstand. Word of my commune reached a bishop. You know him. Conleth was his name."

"Conleth? Bishop Conleth? But he - -"

"He found your monastic order, yes, I know. Well, Conleth came to see for himself the stories he's heard about this abbess of the woods. He was impressed by my legend but cared little about my actual beliefs. He made me an offer. If I submitted my commune to his diocese, as well as my county, he would allow the women to stay, as brides of Christ, of course, and would absolve our souls of all the terrible sins he's heard of. I refused. There's an odd paradox between the sexes. If a woman surpasses a man, she has earned the right to be seen as his equal. But if a woman doesn't see a man as her equal, she's committed the worst crime any man can imagine; emasculation. I took land from kings, I belittled warriors, I turned rapists into victims, and I refused salvation from the son of God, but, worst of all, I made them feel how they made others feel; powerless. So, what were they to do but burn us all alive? A slight overreaction, in my opinion."

"Are you… a spirit?"

"No… It's… difficult to explain how my… 'miracles' work. Sometimes I don't fully understand myself. But my miracles work a bit like an answered prayer; it doesn't always work but when it does it's because you deserve it. I suppose we deserved to live, for better or worse. You're a scribe; think of how history and gospels are written down. They're preserved forever, ready to be recalled, but never truly alive. That's what I am now; dried ink on a page. Forever remembered but never revived."

"But… I don't understand. Why say you're a saint?"

"My dear, haven't you been listening? I threatened them. The church can never admit I didn't need them. Death wasn't enough for them. They needed to use me. And what's more useful than stories of saintly Brigid Ni Dubhthach of Kildare, an example to keep all the other women in line. The funny part is I'm not even officially a saint. They may never canonise me. That's all they left of me; a story I didn't even get to tell myself. That's why you're here."

"Me?"

"Yes, Pól. I know why you came. Why you really came. Tell me… what is 'Pól' short for?"

"…What?"

"What is 'Pól' short me?"

"Nothing. It's just… just Pól. Pól Óg Utlagh. It means Paul in Britannia."

Her eyes never left me as she tilted her head, goading me to tell the truth for the first time in my life.

"… Pólina. My name is Pólina Ní Utlagh."

"And your uncle isn't your uncle, is he?"

"No. He's my father."

"And you're his daughter."

"I don't want to be though."

"Why? What did he do?"

"Nothing! I love my father. Well, my uncle, as far as the brothers are concerned. My mother was a milk maid for the monastery. It's one of the few ways women are allowed within the grounds. They were both young, and in love. But when she fell pregnant with me, she left, to protect my father's vow of celibacy and his place in the monastery."

"How very noble of your father to accept her sacrifice. Continue."

"One night, months later, my father was summoned by the superiors. A baby had been left in his care; his 'nephew'. He knew what it meant. My mother had died in childbirth. He raised me ever since. When I was old enough, I was told the truth. I was educated to read and write. I apprenticed as his scribe. I was given a life that I never could as a girl. If the brothers ever find out, my father will be punished. They'll flog him within an inch of his life, he'll literally be marked by shame, and they'll banish him from the kingdom, and worse is they'll sell me off, and that's if they don't flog me first as well. We won't be welcomed anywhere, but they'll see make sure we're kept apart. All of this to make an example of us."

"How very Christian of them."

"But, you see… I can't hide the truth from them anymore."

"Why?"

"I'm… I've started bleeding."

"Ah."

"I won't be able to hide the other changes when they happen. This is why I came searching for you. I heard about your miracles. I've met the people you've helped. I need you to turn me into a boy."

The flame fluttered in the silence growing between us. Only now did I fully appreciate the stressed whine of the wooden edifice surrounding us, as though wheezing with anticipating breath. Brigid continued to stare, carefully considering my request. She reached over again, drank her mead, and returned to me.

"I have helped those who's soul did not match their flesh. The difference between you and them is they didn't fear being a woman nor a man. They feared not being themselves. No one should give up who they are just to be accepted. It is better to be seen with disdain than to never be truly seen at all. And even if I was to help, as I said, my miracles don't work like that. You have to deserve them."

"What about Lugair's wife?"

I jumped a little from Brigid's malicious cackle.

"Oh, trust me! They deserved that!"

"So… you can't help me?"

"Oh, I can help you, just not the way you wanted. Help always comes unrecognised, that's why it's so rarely welcomed. But I need something of you."

"Me? What do you need of me?"

As I asked, Brigid hunched forward, looked straight into my wide, apprehensive eyes, and spread her sharp toothed smile, her own eyes alight with sinister delight.

"Your soul."

As she spoke, her breath brushed across my face, sending a frigid shiver down my spine, plunging into the bottom of my empty stomach with a sickening drop, rocking my senses as thought the scriptorium itself was shaking from its very foundations. All those hellish screams came racing back to me, only now accompanied by my own anguished, tortured cries.

As suddenly as the thought passed through me, Brigid's girlish laugh summoned me back from my reverie.

"I'm kidding! It was a joke! Relax!"

"Oh… Ha…"

I reached over and swallowed a mouthful of mead. Brigid leaned back in her chair.

"What would I do with a soul anyway? If I wanted something useless, I'd get married. No. What I want is a promise. A promise that when you leave here, when you see what I've done for you, when you start your new life with your father, unafraid and unencumbered by those who don't understand, you'll take the time to write down my story. The real story of St. Brigid."

"I don't understand."

"Look around you. This scriptorium is much like your own, is it not? Filled with records, histories, and guides. They all tell stories. That's all that survives us. Stories. What we choose to remember. What we choose to tell ourselves. Do I not get to decide how I am remembered? Do I not get to decide who hears my story? Don't those who need my story deserve it? I can't leave here, but you can."

"…But …How can I enter and leave, but you can't?"

Brigid pressed her lips together firmly and hummed. It was the same hum I had heard this entire time. The hum I knew could only have come from one source. My mouth gaped as I realised.

"My mother?"

"Where do you think your mother went when she was with child and no where else to turn? The same place all desperate women have turned to. Me. Believe it or not, this isn't the first time we've met. I helped deliver you. You were such an ugly baby."

I was so lost in a whirlwind of vague, blurry early memories, of lost, disjointed recollections, of hazy shapes, sounds, and slender fingers cradling me that I forgot to laugh at that last comment. Brigid looked down at her hands, as though she too was sharing the same distant past as me.

"I never cared much for babies. But then again, I never care much for how they're made in the first place either. People are such messy things in everything they do; conception, birth, life, and death. But I knew you were special. You were of two worlds; here and there. In your world, where you stand now is little more than a clearing, the soil rich in the charcoal from our burnt corpses. The same with the others. Fincath's field is bog land. Dubhtach's cairns have all crumbled and been used for walls. Lugair's crannog was washed away by floodwaters. And Meabh's bonfire is little more than a mossy bed, blanketing the standing stones beneath greenery and bedazzled bug. But you can see us. You can see what no one else can. The truth. You can share stories no one else is able to tell. You are a miracle. I need you to carry my story out into your world. Share it, copy it, preserve it. Centuries from now, when this island has changed beyond recognition, there will be those who will need to hear, those who deserve to hear. You will be godsend for them. You will be their miracle."

"But what if they don't believe it?"

"Those in need will always believe. Will you tell our story?"

"But… what about the monks?"

"I will take care of the monks. Will you share the truth?"

"… Yes."

"Thank you, Pólina. It's time for you to go home now."

Brigid smiled. It was a kind, maternal smile, as though silently reassuring me that everything was as it was meant to be.

"… Wait!"

Brigid cocked her head back in surprise.

"… Does that mean… my mother… is she alive? Is she here?"

The scriptorium around us faded away into a misty haze, the very same I came into as I entered her county. It grew thicker and thicker, until finally it had eclipsed her smile.

I was as lost as I had begun.

 - - - - 

EPILOGUE

…

"…Pól?"

It was as if the world had just stopped, vanishing into a void. It reminded me of a dreamless sleep; comfortingly absent. How long I was gone I did not know. My senses slowly emerged from the abyss. There was the gentle breeze rustling the trees, spraying the cawing crows into the sky, clear and cloudless, bathing my skin in the unseasonably warm February sun, while the frost hardened grass crackled beneath my toes. I stood there, in the courtyard of my monastery, with my eyes closed, soaking up the tranquility.

A distant voice called.

"Pól!"

I opened my eyes and stared ahead. I could not make sense of the sight before me. Where the monastery should have stood, erected in interlocking stone, was a massive burial cairn, dotted with lifeless limbs sprouting from crevices like gnarled and gangly weeds.

"Pól!"

There was no cathedral. No abbey. No sleeping quarters. No dining hall. No legacy for Bishop Conleth to be remembered by. Just a mass of rumble. It made Brigid's wooden sanctuary seem indestructible.

"Pól!"

I was whirled around and held in place by two, strong, dirty hands. My father's reddened, tear streaked face surveyed me, unsure if I was real. Satisfied, he clung onto me, crushing me into a tight hug, crying. It was only us. There was no one to keep secrets from anymore.

"… Father?"

My father fell silent, slowly pulling back, looking at me in anticipating awe.

"… I have a story to tell you."

#HI