The Celtic Riddle Page 20

  Fortunately, I was not the one to find the body. That sad task fell to Paddy Gilhooly, who was out in his boat early that morning, and saw something suspicious nearer to shore.

  “Can’t blame Conail O’Connor for this one,” Rob sighed, “seeing as how we have him under lock and key. I suppose we’ll have to let him go. We can’t hold him forever for having battered a garda’s nose. Not that we wouldn’t like to, but it can’t be done.”

  “And the rest of the family?”

  “Eithne, Sean, and Margaret have, as usual, provided each other with an alibi. All at home all night together. Way too cozy, if you ask me. Fionuala is being coy, but I think we’ll find she was with some guy, married, no doubt, who will eventually come in here looking furtive and asking us to promise we won’t tell his wife. Now, Gilhooly, I haven’t yet talked to. He may have found the body, but that doesn’t automatically mean he’s innocent, although I understand he’s pretty upset by what happened. He’s still hugging the porcelain bowl after the shock of finding her, I gather, according to Garda Minogue. We’ll have to see what he has to say for himself a little later.

  “I’m supposed to check on Alex, by the way, since he’s on the list of people who got something out of the Will. I doubt he’ll have anyone to confirm his whereabouts, seeing he’s staying up there all alone. And no,” he said looking at my startled face, “I do not think Alex did it. I’m taking this note of Deirdre’s, you understand. Any idea what she might have wanted to tell you?”

  I shook my head.

  “When did she die?” I asked.

  “Sometime in the night, or very early morning. Several people saw her at dinnertime, including one of those lawyer types. Those two drove back together to Dublin—I’ve talked to them.” I was tempted to tell him that Charles had called me at midnight from Dublin, to confirm his whereabouts, but I decided that was unnecessary, and I was just being uncharitable.

  “The family said she went to bed at the usual time,” Rob went on, “but sometime in the night she must have crept out, to what? See someone, I guess. Who, I have no idea.

  “God, she had a rough life,” he said, riffling papers in the file. “Looks to me like years of really poor working conditions. Second Chance, for all its faults, must have seemed like paradise. No wonder she came back. She worked for several years in a dry cleaners before she went there,” he said, pulling out a piece of paper. “In the back, too, with all those chemicals. Perhaps that’s why she looked so morose. Well, if you think of anything I should know, call me.”

  I walked back to the Inn from the garda station, thinking about Deirdre. Despite the morbid events of the last few hours, the town looked rather gay, with posters and banners strung everywhere proclaiming the music festival, set to begin in less than a week. Everyone in town was talking about it and obviously looking forward to it. I found it impossible to get into the spirit, however. I could not shake an overwhelming feeling of helplessness in the face of terrible events. I just couldn’t make any sense of what had happened: another staff person killed, another individual, who hadn’t even been given one of the clues, had met a horrible death.

  I kept thinking about my conversation with Moira, when she’d said that it would be either money or passion that had led to it all. If that were the case, there seemed to be only two possibilities for me to explore: the treasure or Eamon Byrne’s past. I hadn’t found the treasure nor knew yet what it was. There was also a lot about Eamon Byrne I didn’t know. But I did know he was always looking for the four great gifts of the gods. I headed down to the pier. Denny sat there talking away to a post.

  “Denny,” I said softly, then more loudly. “Denny!”

  He looked slightly baffled for a moment. “Lara,” he said finally. “It’s you.”

  “I brought you a bottle of whiskey, Denny,” I said. “And I need to hear some of your stories.”

  “Which one would you like?” he asked, looking pleased.

  “All of them, Denny,” I said. “I want to hear all Eamon Byrne’s favorite stories, the ones about the gods and the great battles, the arrival of Amairgen on Ireland’s shores. And I want to hear about the lost child again, the story of the Kerryman and the child stolen by the fairies,” I added on impulse. “The one that was Eamon Byrne’s favorite. Start anywhere you like.”

  And he did. Eamon Byrne’s favorite stories, as I suspected, were the legends about the four great gifts of the gods. So he told me about the Dagda’s cauldron, how it was never empty, no matter how much you ate, or how many came to dinner. He told me about Lia Fail, the Stone of Destiny, the one that roared when the true king of Ireland touched it, and which was now either lost or in Edinburgh; he told me about Lugh Lamfada, Lugh Long Arm, holder of the magic spear no battle was ever won against, and how he killed his grandfather, the Fomorian, Balor of the Evil Eye, after entering the royal court and persuading the king to throw off the yoke of oppression of the Fomorians. And lastly he told me about his own favorite hero, and Eamon’s too, Nuada Silver Hand, Nuada Argat-lam, holder of the fourth gift of the gods, a magic sword, and king of the Tuatha dé Danaan, those godlike people who, after the arrival of the Celts, were banished to the sidhe, the fairy mounds. And for good measure, he told me the story of the arrival of Amairgen and the Sons of Mil, the coming of the Celts to Ireland.

  And then he told me about the lost child, the child stolen by the fairies, the child whose father had made a pact with the devil to get, only to lose him. It had a happy ending, what with the man finding the son just before his death and their being reconciled, which for some reason didn’t ring true. It sounded like one of those stories that started out true, but over time got all mixed up as time went by and it got repeated. But it was Eamon Byrne’s favorite. It had brought a tear to his eye, and he was not a man to cry lightly—I could only assume—and as such it bore some looking in to. It confirmed for me that Eamon Byrne had a past that was not an open book. He’d moved here from Galway with Margaret, after spending a miserable time at sea, if Alex’s story was anything to go by. Whatever had happened to make him up and run away like that, from the woman who later became his wife? I decided I needed to know much more about Eamon Byrne’s past. But who would tell me? Certainly not Breeta. She was still assiduously avoiding me. And maybe she didn’t know. Maybe none of them did. Perhaps it was the kind of thing you never told your family.

  I took out the list of the clues and looked at it again.

  AMAIRGEN’S SONG

  I am the sea-swell (Alex)

  A furious wave (Michael)

  The roar of the sea

  A stag of seven slaughters (Eithne/Sean)

  A hawk above the cliff

  A ray of the sun (Conail/ Fionula)

  Beauty of a plant (Breeta?)

  A boar enraged

  Salmon in a pool (Paddy)

  Lake in a plain

  A flame of valor

  Piercing spear (Margaret?)

  God who fashions heroes

  OGHAM CLUES

  May’s sunrise by Tailte’s Hill is seen

  A curse be on these stones

  Leinster’s Hag to Eriu’s Seat

  Clue still missing

  Aine’s Mount to Macha’s Stronghold

  Grianan Ailech to Granard down the line to the Celtic Sea

  Raise a cup to the stone

  Almu’s white to Maeve’s rath

  Axis Mundi

  Due east, Partholan turned to die

  All seen and seeing eye of fire

  Umbilicus Hiberniae, the sacred center

  Clue still missing

  Did it matter, I wondered, who had had which clue? I’d thought so, at first. Whoever owned the clue found in dead Michael’s hand would be the number one suspect in his death. It was probably either Margaret’s or Breeta’s, although I was beginning to wonder whether, despite their general unpleasantness, I’d put either down for it.

  Money and passion, I thought. I was willing to bet it was more often money t
han love at the root of these kinds of situations. That brought me right back to the treasure, and so I would start with the where and what of that. Maybe the who would follow.

  “I’ve looked up all the references,” Alex said. “I’ve checked the names and wherever I could, I associated them with a place. Actually, it was relatively easy to do.”

  “Okay, well, here’s the map of Ireland,” I said, unfolding it and spreading it out on the floor of Rose Cottage. “I say we ignore ‘Song of Amairgen’ from now on and forget who had which clue. Let’s concentrate on the second column of clues, which if my guess is right, should lead us to the treasure. Let’s go! Take them one at a time, from the top. May’s sunrise by Tailtiu’s Hill is seen.”

  “Tailtiu was an ancient goddess, sometimes referred to as goddess of the corn. Her hill is said to have been a royal residence in the dim past, and it’s here,” Alex said pointing to a spot on the map on the east side of Ireland, near Drogheda. “I don’t understand the sunrise reference, however, although May could refer to the ancient feast of Beltaine on May 1. There were three other festivals: Imbolc on February 1; Lughnasa, August 1; and Samhain on November 1, although there are no other references to them that I can see.”

  “Never mind. Let’s just keeping going. Found it, Jennifer? Yes? Okay, circle it. Next?”

  “Next is a curse be on these stones. Haven’t a clue on that one, but the one after that is Leinster’s Hag to Eriu’s Seat. There’s a mountain in Leinster province called Sliab na Caillighe, or Mountain of the Hag. That’s one. Eriu, we all know, is one part of the triple goddess of Ireland. Her seat, if that is what we want to call it, is said to be right here in the Dingle peninsula, in the Slieve Mish Mountains. Jennifer, Sliab or Slieve na Caillighe is not far from Tara and the Hill of Tailte.”

  “Got them!” she exclaimed. “Both circled. The mountains in the Dingle too.”

  “Right. Next?”

  “I’ll skip the ones I don’t know and just give you the ones I do,” Alex said. “I mean, frankly, I have no idea where the Umbilicus Hiberniae might be. Hibernia is an old name for Ireland, and umbilicus, well, I have this thought that it might be like the Greek concept of omphalmos, the navel of Greek civilization at Delphi. I don’t know what the Irish equivalent could be. However, Aine’s Mount to Macha’s Stronghold I can locate: both ancient goddesses. The old word for Mount is cnoc, now spelled Knock. There’s a place called Knockainy in Munster, which was a sacred center in that province a long time ago, sacred to the goddess Aine, so Knockainy, or Cnoc Aine, Aine’s Mount. Macha was also a goddess, a horse goddess, apparently. Macha’s Stronghold would surely be Emain Macha, now called Navan Fort, in Ulster. Close to Armagh, Jennifer.”

  “Got them both,” she said after a few minutes.

  “Grianan Ailech to Granard, down the line to the Celtic Sea. Grianan Ailech is the supposed home of the Dagda, one of the gods of the Tuatha dé Danaan. I think it’s way to the north, Jennifer.”

  She checked the map index. “Grianan Ailech, yes, right at the top. Granard,” she paused, “almost directly south, ’round about the middle of Ireland. Okay, marked them both.”

  “Almu’s white to Maeve’s rath. You were right about Maeve, Lara. Queen and goddess of Connacht. Very powerful woman. Her capital was at Rathcroghan. Almu was another goddess, referred to as ‘the White.’ Her home was on Knockaulin, that word knock or cnoc again, now the Hill of Allen, then the seat of the Kings of Leinster.”

  We waited until Jennifer had found them and marked their place.

  “Due east, Partholan turned to die,” I said. “I remember Partholan from Denny’s story of the Battle of Mag Tuired. He was one of the early invaders of Ireland, wasn’t he? He and his people perished mysteriously, if I recall. Plague or something.”

  “That’s right. The Book of Invasions of Ireland tells of several different peoples who came to Ireland in the dim past. Partholan was one of the first and is said to come from the west, from out in the Atlantic somewhere, by some accounts. He and his followers did battle with the Fomorians, those primitive creatures who were later defeated by the Tuatha dé Danaan. Partholan is supposed to have driven these Fomorians north into the sea. But then they were afflicted by a plague of some kind. The place Partholan and his people are supposed to have gone to die is the Plain of Elta Edar, supposedly the first area to be settled in Ireland. It is just about due east of the Seat of the High Kings at Tara, north of where Dublin is today.”

  “I’ve got Tara,” Jennifer said. “I’ll mark the area east of that and north of Dublin.”

  “That’s it,” Alex said. “The others, I either can’t figure out, or they refer to the object itself rather than the location, or something. One’s like ‘all seen and seeing fire eye,’ for example. I could find no reference to such a thing in the books I’ve read. The same for the cursed stones and the cup lifted to the stone.”

  The three of us looked at the map. We had Jennifer’s little circles all over the place, north, south, east and west.

  “Do you think we have to go to all these places?” Jennifer wailed. “It would take us months. They’re all over the country. Northern Ireland, even!”

  “There must be something else here,” I said at last. “First we are given clues that are lines from a poem. Then, we find these clues lead to other clues, all in ogham. At least some of these clues lead to other locations, but they’re all over the map, literally. The object can’t be in all these places, surely. We’ve circled ten spots, for heaven’s sake. We can’t be doing this right. I mean, is Jennifer right? Does this mean we have to travel all over the country looking for yet another set of clues? I don’t believe it can be this complicated. Surely, Eamon wanted his family to find the treasure, not spend their lives in idle search.”

  “Maybe it’s join the dots,” Jennifer said. “But how?” She took a pencil and joined them. All we got was a somewhat smaller area of Ireland. “We could crisscross the dots in some way, but I don’t see any pattern, do you?”

  “No,” Alex and I agreed. I had a feeling we could look at this map for a long time before a pattern would emerge. I studied the list of clues one more time. If I’d learned anything while I was here, it was that the Irish possessed a particularly rich mythology, with more stories, almost, than anyone could imagine. Eamon Byrne had picked only a few of them, but the ones he’d chosen were supposed to lead to a treasure.

  “You know,” I said, after a minute. “A lot of these are something to something else, from one ancient sacred site to another, if you get what I mean. What if we joined up these from-to’s and see what we get. For example, the Grianan Ailech to Granard clue also says down the line to the Celtic Sea. Wouldn’t that give us a north/south axis?”

  “I believe it would,” Alex said. “And the clue about Tailte’s Hill talks about a May sunrise. When I think about it, in May, the sun would rise right about here,” he said pointing slightly north-east.

  “However would you know that, Uncle Alex?” Jennifer interrupted.

  “Years at sea, my dear. Now, we could join the Hill of Tailte and the sun line.”

  “Not just join them, draw a line right through and across the map. And do the same with Partholan’s plain. The clue says due east, Partholan turned to die. You said the plain where he died is east of Tara. Draw a line right through those two and then on across the map. That should give us an east/west axis,” I said.

  “Some of the others link the ancient political or sacred centers of the four provinces of Ireland. If we join these circles, like Hill of Allen in Leinster to the capital of Connacht at Rathcroghan, and Knockainy in Munster to Emain Macha, Navan Fort, that is, we would get a big ‘X’ across the country,” Alex said.

  “And across the north/south and east/west axes,” I said.

  “Maybe they all intersect,” Jennifer said, as she grabbed a piece of paper to give herself a straight edge to trace along.

  They didn’t intersect, not exactly anyway, but the lines did cr
oss the north/south axis at approximately the same area, more less in the center of the country. We all peered at the map.

  “Maybe I need reading glasses,” I said.

  “I have bifocals,” Alex said, “and there’s nothing much there to speak of. A couple of reasonable-sized towns nearby: Longford, Athlone, and Mullingar, and a few country roads. Do you see anything, Jennifer?”

  “Nope. There are no ancient monument symbols in this area, either,” Jennifer said dubiously.

  “Not much of anything, in fact,” Alex agreed. “So I guess maybe it’s back to the library.”

  “But there must be something there,” Jennifer said, pointing to the small area on the map where the lines crossed. “Maybe we should just go there and look.”

  “It’s not all that small an area, Jennifer,” I said. “We’d have to narrow it down first.”

  She shrugged. “I guess you’re right. But I hate just sitting around here while maybe someone else gets the treasure.”

  Later that night, as I climbed into bed, I took the clues out of my bag and looked at them again. We had just about all there were, I decided. I was also reasonably certain the lines of the poem could now be discarded. They had served their purpose, that is to lead to the second set of clues, and were no longer necessary. It was this second set of clues, the ogham clues, that told us where and what. We had a general idea where the treasure might be hidden, although there was still a lot of ground to be covered, and we’d have to narrow it down. The question remained: what was it? What were we looking for?

  I stared long and hard at it. I’m a firm believer in the subconscious, and its ability to analyze information and come to a conclusion. Whenever I have a problem I cannot seem to solve, or a decision that seems too difficult to make—open a shop or take a job, get married or not, leave Clive or stay and tough it out—these choices, I leave to my subconscious. This involves thinking over the pros and cons before going to sleep, and telling myself to make a decision. Sometimes I dream about it, sometimes I don’t. I almost always awake with the decision made. I’m not going to say that the decisions are always the right ones, only that they are right for me at the time.