Deirdre of the Sorrows Read online

  And she saw it in springtime already,

  awakened with blues and golds. It was a place

  for a child to run in and discover.

  Let’s be here, she said. We’ve come far enough for safety.

  How many days that cold?

  Even the sun dull and dead,

  a snowball muffled by the wintering sky.

  The last clutches of rowanberries

  like drops of blood on branches,

  whorled ice on the pool when she broke it for water.

  So still she heard the soughing of swan wings

  and saw the four of them swim far above.

  They held together in the night like wild beasts

  in the rough den he’d made from brush and branch.

  When the big winds came, it wouldn’t stand a chance.

  So there was one whole night he worked,

  the moon full: not gold but silver now –

  no, not silver even, purest white –

  close and clear she saw its every crag.

  He built with turf and wood, walls

  to last the wind, to keep the winter out.

  She watched him where she lay and wanted

  to touch his hands. The knowledge came from nowhere.

  She drifted through a land

  somewhere between waking and sleeping,

  was swept away in the end

  and woke knowing only that he held her.

  Always the fire: the fire was the centre of their world –

  they fed it like some hungry god, knelt to tend it

  day after famished day. He found whole armfuls of heather,

  came back triumphant to make a better bed.

  They slept that night –

  the hurt out of their hands at last.

  Let this be Christmas, she said.

  He brought her a strong trout

  silver-veined, still slippery from the stream,

  the last wild apples from a gnarled tree

  right out at the end of the creek.

  There was someone here before us, he said;

  someone who planted that tree.

  They never came to find us, she said,

  and he saw the blue of her eyes,

  knew why he loved her, for he saw

  all of her soul in those eyes.

  He wanted to tell her they’d come one day

  but it was Christmas, and he could not.

  Instead he showed her the single star that burned

  above them in the bluest skies,

  and held around her, burying his face

  in the red-gold field of her hair.

  He remembered a prayer his grandfather taught him

  the first time they went out to fish.

  He breathed it now, too shy to say it aloud.

  She said: I come from a place of waterfalls and flowers

  under a high cliff. I lived beside the sea

  and was never in a boat my whole life.

  I had three sisters and we ran wild every day –

  there was a river with an island;

  we made a house of turf to hide in.

  My father was a fisherman; he was a kind man,

  gentle and dark and strong.

  When he took me on his knee he called me Dorrie.

  One day he went out and never came back;

  they found his boat upturned on the beach

  three weeks later. My mother went half mad:

  she never laughed again,

  didn’t come with us to pick flowers,

  stopped telling stories.

  There was too much for her to do:

  everything was just too much.

  I was the eldest and learned to do all I could,

  but when I grew, when I became a woman,

  she saw what could be done with me.

  She let them take me away. For twelve silver coins.

  He said: I never knew my father.

  Only a man who beat me. I wanted him to die.

  I lay awake at night and prayed that he would die.

  There was an anger in him like a coiled snake.

  My mother loved him all the same:

  she fluttered round him like a butterfly

  and all he ever did was hurt her.

  But there was something. When I grew older

  I could see it in him, a wound that wouldn’t heal.

  I remember once when I was ten or twelve,

  he took me to a field a mile or so away

  where clans had fought their worst: some feud

  for ownership of land or gold. We stood above the place,

  looked down and saw however many men

  like broken insects on the ground.

  And when they tried to move you saw the blood,

  the blackness of it coming from their mouths.

  But what I can’t forget, still see in dreams,

  is the darkness in their eyes and how they looked;

  they watched us and I felt the pleading of those eyes.

  I wanted then to run, and yet it felt as if my feet

  were sunk in mire. I looked up at him, wounded,

  to ask why he had ever brought me there.

  To learn, he said, and turned to go back home.

  They sat a time, said nothing –

  saw it was growing dark.

  And they lay in the house he’d made

  and faced one another. Then they took their fingers

  to stroke the soft skin

  of forehead and temple and cheek.

  Their eyes met and held,

  tender and generous, good –

  as though they touched the sorrow

  deep inside the other.

  And not a word was spoken

  as night fell gently down.

  One day the sun woke her –

  she slipped outside a time, marvelling at the light.

  Where the stream chattered into the sea

  an otter was busying itself with a fish.

  There was a thatch of birdsong; she held her breath

  for the moss voice of a cuckoo.

  She thought of her sisters and for a moment

  saw them laughing as they ran to find her;

  at their back her drowned father,

  the soft shyness of his smile.

  But there was no one. She sat

  and the sun came in butter yellow;

  she felt her face warm

  for the first time she could remember –

  a hundred tributaries shone from melting snow;

  and there, the first bowed heads of snowdrops.

  And suddenly she realised that she missed him –

  she picked one for Naoise, then ran and ran to find him.

  He wanted to make a ring for her

  swirled of the flickers of gold he found

  from the very river floor. All day he laboured

  under the falls where the pools were black,

  deeper than he was tall. He scooped them

  to swivel a bowl of silt; merlin-eyed

  his eyes shone for every glimmer.

  But by the time the sun had turned to molten gold,

  and lay like a warrior’s sword along the west,

  he had no more than might have made a mouse’s wedding band.

  Bowed and bedraggled, he came back,

  eyes dark and empty.

  She met him; her soft hands raised his face.

  Her eyes were dancing and he melted in them;

  gave her the smile he feared was lost for good.

  Do not despair, she said –

  the sun will be our wedding ring.

  They ran until they were out of themselves,

  and beside the silver jewellery of a stream

  she brought him down, gentle, and laid him soft

  in a field that was the beginning of summer.

  Above them, the swallows flitted and swept

  in the open acres of blue-white light.

/>   She brought away his belt and opened him

  until he lay strong and shy before her;

  their eyes met and she looked at him a long time,

  not blinking. With the tip of one finger she touched him –

  here and here and here. She ran the finger up and round,

  fast and slow, watching his face. He searched her,

  wanting to touch her, but she would not let him move.

  She closed the lids of his eyes and lay close to him,

  and the warm flickering of her tongue set him alight,

  so he breathed her name and tried to find her.

  Then she was above him and he felt her softness,

  the flow of the full curve of her and he gasped.

  They held together in the meadow, melded and flowing,

  hands wild and everywhere, giving and generous –

  closer and closer until the night broke under them

  and fell and fell.

  Then there was nothing but their own breathing,

  the red-gold of her head on his breast and the blue night

  filled with the rising of the moon.

  One day he came back with news

  of a white strand that ran for miles.

  They sped there and broke out into the sea:

  the delicious cool of it, the blue-green deep.

  When evening came they trailed back tired,

  talking and not talking.

  That night there was no night;

  the sky held its blue, so light

  they could have walked

  for miles and miles unguided.

  They did not sleep; there was no need –

  instead they sat and watched

  like children at a window

  with all the summer left to play.

  The woods rusted;

  great gusts of gold and red,

  shuddered to sudden dark.

  One night he saw the sky flicker –

  a single tail of light. Another and then another.

  He rocked her awake and slowly

  she came back from another land.

  He took her hand and without a word they got up,

  went down from the red core of the fire

  to the place where they first stood –

  the hazel wood above the creek.

  The land etched still and silver,

  a brilliance to the night’s edge;

  and now they came in hundreds –

  flashes of falling stars, some of them so bright

  they gasped as their faces shone.

  What do they mean? Deirdre asked him.

  Is this some kind of warning?

  She held in close to him, searching his face for an answer,

  but he knew he could not look at her,

  and did not dare say no.

  Even the trees have ears.

  He woke with the words;

  sat up and listened, not breathing,

  hearing only silence.

  He wrapped a cloak about his shoulders,

  went out and stood. His breath smoked the air;

  the trees white with rime.

  Two deer carved from flint,

  saw him and scattered.

  Show yourselves! he shouted,

  and there was nothing but the echo

  from the high rock beyond the creek.

  Deirdre lay still,

  eyes searching.

  If you are here to find us – show yourselves!

  The air sore with so much sound

  till the silence swam back in waves.

  And when he had almost turned away,

  believing he’d been wrong after all;

  the softness of grass stems

  and a boy in white who looked at him,

  eyes wide, his voice high:

  Everything has been forgiven;

  you can come home safe.

  Only then half a dozen others

  rose from their caves of hiding

  and stood – watching, waiting.

  Everything she did

  was a slow saying farewell:

  the fire they had kept alive

  through the long torment of winter,

  hissed now into a pillar of steam,

  a black circlet of sticks.

  The house he had made with his hands

  that now would fall forgotten;

  the place where they first made love,

  their imprint left in the stems.

  I am ready, she said in the end,

  her face bewildered with grief.

  They slid into the mirrored water;

  a moon of cobwebs above.

  She found a hiding place in the boat’s bow

  to hold her soreness alone.

  The hills rose high, rusted with late autumn

  and behind them, beyond and beyond

  they lay curled in the first snow.

  Once upon a time

  she had sorrowed for her childhood landscape,

  when she was sold to the highest bidder

  and carried away in a cart.

  She did not cry now, only somewhere

  in the secret chambers of her heart

  as the men laughed stories around her.

  Then his hands holding her; his face deep in her hair;

  his murmured words at her cheek. She closed her eyes,

  for all this land, this Alba, she loved through him –

  without him it would not be.

  When they landed she was not there –

  so lost in sleep he carried her like a child

  curled in his arms.

  It was nightfall and they came with torches,

  with ropes and chains to take them away:

  what more had Naoise expected?

  A huge man with foul breath

  tried to hide his delight and failed –

  She would have married the high king;

  we will give her a gentle death –

  yours will take a long time.

  And still she slept and still he cradled her

  as they were taken along some dark road

  in a cage kept for wild beasts.

  Only when she was torn from his arms

  did she awaken, frightened, crying his name,

  as they were thrown out into blackness

  and a key turned in a lock.

  I’m here, he whispered

  and found her in the darkness.

  They touched and held, as once they did

  that first time; the tenderness no less.

  It’s no different now to when I used to hide,

  hoping to glimpse you in the tower. He smiled.

  He held her. All of it was worth our journey.

  There is nothing to regret. They cannot take from us

  all we have been given, all we have found.

  I want to remember your scent, she said,

  so when we waken in the next world

  I will know you. Softly, they kissed.

  She sat up and looked at him:

  And there we will have our child,

  the one that should have been.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Kenneth Steven spent his first years in Helensburgh, but the bulk of his childhood and adolescence was spent in Highland Perthshire. He was born to writing parents, his father was a journalist and his mother a social historian. Kenneth has always been first and foremost a poet; fourteen of his collections have been published over the years, and he has made many poetry-related programmes for BBC Radio. Birlinn published his novel, Glen Lyon, in 2013.

  A NOTE ON THE TYPE

  Deirdre of the Sorrows is set in Dante, a mid-twentieth-century book typeface designed by Giovanni Mardersteig, originally for use by the Officina Bodoni. The original type was cut by Charles Malin. The type is a serif face influenced by the types cut by Francesco Griffo between 1449 and 1516.

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