Wise Child Read online

  Wise Child

  By Monic Furlong

  Juniper and Euny dipped their hands into the foul mess in the bowl and advanced toward me. They started smearing the ointment on my body.

  "No!" I yelled as I realized what they intended to do, and caught the disgusting whiff of the ointment all over again. By now they were covering my legs, my thighs, my heels, even the soles of my feet. It felt disgustingly greasy. Suddenly I thought I saw something out of the corner of my eye, and turned my head quickly. It was as if a piece of the roof had come right off, and I could see the sky and the stars through it. The roof had now rolled all the way back—and shining there in the heavens was the huge orange hunter's moon. I realized suddenly that I was weightless, that I was beginning to move upward.

  "Wait a moment. Wise Child!" Juniper shouted to me, grabbing me by the hand. She walked across the room holding on to me—I half flew across the floor—and she bent and handed me the hazel broom. I jumped astride it. The cat leaped onto the handle of the broom, Juniper let go, and I flew up, up, up into the luminous, moon-filled sky.

  To my grandmother, Neni,

  and to Nina Coltart,

  with gratitude and love

  Contents

  I. JUNIPER

  2. THE WHITE HOUSE

  3. THE HERB GARDEN

  4. FAIRY FOOD

  5. CORMAC

  6. FLYING

  7. THE ATTIC

  8. TEMPTATION

  9. THE CELLAR

  1O. RESCUE

  11. SECRETS

  12. I RUN AWAY

  13. MAEVE'S DAUGHTER

  14. THE LANGUAGE

  15. THE FEAST OF BELTANE

  16. SUMMERTIME

  17. THE SUMMONING STONE

  18. JUNIPER'S RETURN

  19. THE ARREST

  20. THE TRIAL

  21. THE SHIP

  1. JUNIPER

  Juniper was different from us. In the first place she came from another country—Cornwall—and although she spoke our language perfectly, apart from the p’s, which no one but us could pronounce properly, she looked different. She was taller, darker skinned, and although she had black hair as Finbar and I did, she did not have our bright-blue eyes. Her eyes were a soft, dark color, brooding and quiet.

  Then again, she did not live as our women lived. She was what in our language was called a Cailleach—it meant a single woman, but more than a single woman, one who had something uncanny about her. In our village the women were the wives of farm workers, of sailors, of fishermen, with swarms of children tumbling over their doorsteps. The few who were unmarried lived at home and looked after their parents. No woman lived alone, as Juniper did.

  Juniper lived away from the village, high up in a white stone house set on a sort of inland cliff that looked as if, a few yards from the front of her garden, the ground had suddenly split open. Behind her house was a great meadow covered in spring and summer with flowers. Beyond that, as I was one day to learn, was a moor, fragrant with mint and asphodel and bog myrtle, and beyond that again blue mountains. At night up there the stars seemed very close, and by day you felt as if you were on the roof of the world.

  At the front of her house was a winding path that led down to the village; there were sheep tracks and caves in the red wall of the cliff. The front of her house looked toward the village and the back of it onto her herb garden and the moor.

  The most important thing that separated Juniper from the rest of us was that she did magic. When we called her a cailleach, what we really meant was that she was a witch, a sorceress, probably in the pay of the Devil. Proof was that she did not come to Mass on Sundays, when the priest held aloft the bread and the wine. She came to the village when people were desperate and did not care anymore if Fillan Priest disapproved of them. When a man whose wife had labored for hours in vain could not stand it any longer, when someone was near to death after an accident, when a child was delirious with fever, when a woman had an evil spirit, they sent for Juniper; and whatever she did (and no two people ever agreed about what she did), as often as not the patient recovered. It did not seem to make us grateful; on the contrary, it only increased our feeling that she was a witch.

  I was really frightened of her as a tiny child. Mothers in our village used to threaten their children, "I'll give you to Juniper if you are naughty." I wonder if Maeve so threatened me. Of course, Juniper wasn't the witch's real name. Like so many in our village she was called by a nickname—in this case because the plant juniper was a favorite remedy of hers. It was easy enough for people like us to get hold of—we could go and get it up on the mountain, and in a village where many were very poor, it was cheap medicine for many ailments.

  My earliest memory of Juniper was when I was a little child of three or four standing in the village street while my grandmother chatted with a group of neighbors. Suddenly a silence came upon us as Juniper passed, with a friendly word to the women and a smile for me that I did not return. I buried my face in my grandmother's skirt—I can smell the fusty, old-woman smell now—and did not breathe again until the tall figure had passed on her way. My grandmother had put her hand on my head to reassure me, but with childish logic I reasoned that she would not do that if Juniper were not dangerous.

  The first time that Juniper and I had anything you could really call a conversation was when I was about five. I spent a lot of time with my cousins because my mother, a woman so beautiful that she was known as Maeve the Fair, had left by then, and my grandmother was getting too old to care for me all the time. (My father, Finbar, was usually away at sea, sailing that angry triangle between Wales and Dalriada and Ireland. Sometimes too he sailed to Cornwall or to Brittany, and brought back tin or silver ore or copper or finely wrought armor or salt.)

  I was younger than all but the youngest of my cousins, and an only child who had tantrums when she did not get her own way. Looking back, I am amazed at how patient they were with me, especially as, at least at the beginning, I had more to eat and nicer clothes than they had. Like Juniper and many others, I was not called by my proper name, but by a teasing word that you would translate into English as "Wise Child." This was not a compliment—it was a word for children who used long words, as I often did, or who had big eyes, or who seemed somehow old beyond their years. I did not mind it, since I admired my cousins so much and felt loved by them and it was such fun to be among them and petted by them.

  It was an autumn day, golden and still. We had gone to the shore and played there, Conor and Domnall, Seumas and Fingal, Bride, Morag, Mairi, Colman, and me. Then, with big baskets, we had wandered until we found the fields where the blackberries grew thickly, huge walls of bramble encrusted with luscious hulls like red and black thimbles. I did not pick very quickly, because I stopped so often to eat the fruit, but in the end I filled a small basket.

  On the way home I got tired. It was getting toward dark, it was cold and misty, and the scratches on my arms and legs, which had not bothered me before, began to hurt. The basket felt heavy, and I wanted to be carried. Conor carried me for a long way on his back, and Colman, always a friend to me, though not much bigger than I was myself, carried my basket, but in the end they too were tired, and Conor set me down on the track and Colman returned my basket.

  "Walk!" said Conor.

  I had loved riding on Conor's broad back, and I did not want to walk. I sulked, I dragged behind while the others waited for me, and finally I sat down on the ground, thinking this would force Conor to carry me again.

  "Very well," said Conor. "We will go on without you."

  "The tarans may get you," said Mairi, who had always had a spiteful streak. "Or the people of the Sidh." The tarans were the ghosts of unbaptized babies who were said to snatch children away, and the people of
the Sidh were the fairies, the Shining Ones.

  To my amazement they all walked off and left me sitting there—they were sick to death of my temperamental out-bursts—only Colman looking uncertainly back over his shoulder. I could see their white and brown smocks growing fainter as they crossed one field and passed into another, and finally they were gone. The darkness was edging the bushes and gently nudging its way into the corners of the fields, and the sky was a dim blue like the eye of an angry old man. I was shocked at their desertion.

  It did not occur to me to get up and follow them. I went on sitting on the track where they had left me, and a great loneliness crept over me. Undoubtedly the tarans or the Shining Ones would get me and I would never see anyone I loved again. Tears poured out of my eyes and down my cheeks, and I leaned my head on my knees and sobbed out loud with tiredness and hopelessness. Then it happened.

  "Wise Child!" said a voice. There was sympathy in it. I looked up, and there was Juniper, sitting on her donkey, looking down at me. She climbed down with a lithe, youthful movement and, before I knew what was happening, had bent down and wiped the tears from my cheeks with a handkerchief. I stopped crying, mainly out of surprise, I think, and she picked me up in her arms and swung me onto the saddle.

  "Poor baby!" she said. My legs did not reach the stirrups, but she held me firmly onto the saddle and spoke gently to the donkey, which began to walk. It was all very surprising. It was surprising too to notice that the donkey's panniers were filled with blackberries, with a few large mushrooms lying on top of them—it had never occurred to me before that Juniper ate, as other people did.

  Quite soon we came upon my cousins, waiting a couple of fields away to teach me a lesson. They were startled by the sight of the donkey and Juniper in the gathering darkness, and perhaps even more by the sight of me in the saddle. I did not know whether I felt smug or shy.

  "She wouldn't walk," said Conor defensively, by way of explanation.

  "Her legs are short," Juniper replied, without judgment.

  The troop of children followed us, always the same distance behind, and I could hear them whispering and giggling. One of them—it was surely Seumas—called out, rudely and daringly, "Teach us a spell." I looked sideways at Juniper, but she just smiled to herself and said nothing. She was silent in a particular way of her own that made me feel as close to her as if we were having a conversation. She spoke only once again, which was as we approached the village and began to see the comforting rushlights peep out from people's homes.

  "You may be too tired to walk today, but you'll be a great traveler one day," she said. "You're not Finbar's daughter for nothing." Then she lifted me off the donkey and set me down, and I stood rather foolishly in the road waiting for the others to catch up with me.

  "What did the witch talk about?" Bride wanted to know.

  "Nothing really," I said, keeping my secret.

  "Just think!" Colman said admiringly. "You rode on Juniper’s donkey."

  "She's called Tillie," I said.

  "It was only 'cause she's such a baby," said Mairi.

  "Still, it was an adventure," said Morag.

  In the next several years I lost my baby plumpness and became thin and wiry. I was never an especially pretty child, and when I got the lice my grandmother, who could not see too well, hacked off my hair unevenly all over my head so that it stuck up here and there in spikes. The children laughed at me, but I did not mind very much—I was not interested in my appearance just then. When Colman wasn’t in school, the two of us ran wild together like a pair of rabbits, both of us barefoot in summer. In winter, how-ever, I wore neat leather shoes, while Colman wore an old patched pair of boots with flapping soles. His clothes were very worn and much too small for him. It did not occur to me to pity him, however. My main feeling toward him was one of envy because he went to school. I had gone for a little while to a school for girls run by an old woman in the village, but once she had taught us to read and write, something only a few of us mastered, there was nothing else to learn but spinning and sewing, both of which I loathed. This meant, in the winter days at least, that I was obliged to spend a good deal of time at home, which I was sorry to do. Finbar, of course, had long since sailed away on his great voyage, which left only my grandmother as a companion. She, I seemed to remember, had once been quick on her feet, busy about the house, cleaning and cooking. Now she sat before the fire all day, dozing in her chair most of the time, too weary to spin or even to talk. Once she had been such a grand storyteller, such a singer—I had laughed, and wept, and been terrified by her stories, sometimes actually putting my hands over my ears because I could not bear any more.

  "No. I don't want to know!" Then: "Tell me. Go on, tell me." There were no stories anymore, just that clouded, puzzled look in her eyes.

  "Finbar?" she had said to me once, and I had said in a frightened voice, "You remember, Finbar went away. He’ll be back soon."

  Our eating got more and more haphazard. My grandmother never prepared anything now, and it never occurred to me to try to cook, any more than I tried to clean up the house. My aunt did her best to sort us out from time to time.

  One summer day I went to see my cousins and said, “Granny’s too tired to get up today." My aunt's tired, pretty face looked up from the washtub and she started drying her hands at once.

  "I'll just go around to see," she said, and put on her shawl. Later on that day she told me.

  "What will I do, then." I said in a very loud, angry voice that hid how scared I was. Then I answered myself: "I know. I'll come and live with you and Colman."

  My aunt slowly shook her head and lifted me onto her lap, something she did not often have time to do.

  "Wise Child, you know we love you," she said, "but there's no room. And there's not enough food for the children I've got already. And in any case, Uncle Gregor ..."Aunt Morag was mortally afraid of Uncle Gregor.

  I knew that what she said was true. I had often seen the children in bed, five of them crammed together, which I would have hated, and in the same room as my uncle and aunt. I suddenly remembered how when my grandmother, in her good days, had baked a cake or made a stew, they had devoured it desperately, and how once when I had taken the last oatcake in my thoughtless way, Bride's eyes had filled with tears. I was a proud child who loved my own bed, my clean smock, my good leather shoes that Finbar had bought me. And I liked to eat.

  "So what will happen to me." I began to wail. But I knew the answer before she began to tell me.

  In our village, which prided itself on taking care of those who needed it, we had an institution called "the auction.” When a child's parents died, or sometimes if a woman was left alone in the world, the village would gather together after Mass, standing in a circle on the piece of grass in front of the small stone church; the priest would preside, and together they would all work out who needed the service of the homeless one, or, more often, who could be persuaded to put up with her or him.

  "But what about Finbar." I said desperately, trying to think of a way out.

  "It's like him to be away when he's needed," my aunt said. "The Lord knows when he'll be back. Where could you live, chick, in the meantime? Who will look after you?” I longed to say, "I will look after myself," but I knew that

  I could not do it. When my hair was still long I could not wash it or plait it myself. I could not make a soup or a stew, nor bake a cake or a loaf, though hunger had taught me how to make porridge. I wept again, for my helplessness, for the public humiliation of the auction.

  "It's not so bad," my aunt comforted me. "There are good women in this village, and if they are not good to you, they will have me to reckon with."

  It was not that that I minded so much, though. It was more that I had thought myself special, a child to be prized, and now all of a sudden I was a thing like a pot or pan, to be bargained over.

  So I sat and wept throughout Mass, and afterward the priest led me out to the waiting ring of villagers outside. He w
as an Irishman, with the crinkly red hair and the flushing skin that was different from the blond hair, the blue eyes, and the clear pallor of most of our people. His hand rested heavily on my shoulder. I wriggled to get out from under-neath it, but he tightened his hold.

  "In the name of Our Lord Jesus Christ, who bade us to care for the homeless and the fatherless, I am asking you this morning to find a home for this little sister of ours, reminding you that charity is the essence of our faith, and that you will be piling up a reward for yourselves in heaven."

  Despite this incentive there was a long silence. I hung my head. Nobody wanted me, it seemed. Then Brigid from the Beyond spoke.

  "We could do with a girl's pair of hands about the place, especially just now with the harvest coming on, but she’s really too small, and she's never worked. We always said she was a spoiled one."

  Greta the Scarred spoke next.