"R. A. MacAvoy - The Book of Kells" - читать интересную книгу автора (MacAvoy R A)

R. A. MacAvoy


The Book of Kells

(V2.0 - 20020527)


I would like to give recognition and thanks to the following people without whom this work would
have been impossible:
To Dr. James Duran of Oakland, California, for Gaelic and Gaelic usage and the loan of many good
books; to Dr. Dan Melia of the University of California at Berkeley for help on Medieval Gaelic and
medieval sources of all kinds; to Dr. Donal McGivillry of the University of Sydney on Cape Breton
Island, Nova Scotia, for all Newfieisms and maritime history; to the gentlemen of Salamander Armory in
California for tutoring in the handling of a medieval long-handled ax; to Ms. Anne McCaffrey for the
geography of Wicklow; and to Miss Pat Lyne of Herefordshire for her history of the Connemara pony.
To Sharon Devlin, who was the inspiration for this book, and who worked with me and guided me
every step of the way. All that is worthwhile in the book I owe to her; the errors are my own.
(All poems in the story itself are by Sharon, or were edited by her.)




Prologue
It was an hour for bog colors: the close of the workday in the Bog of Allen. The boy-os working the
Bord na Mona mechanized turf cutters were just beginning to put their shirts back on in the sea wind of
early evening. That wind was cool and saline and it drove forty miles in from the shore.
They had gotten low in this particular deposit, cut deeply тАЬtoday, and even the men on the machines
thought that a pity.
Some parts of this bog, the greatest in the world, were now stripped to the rock. The demands of
industry, the world market, and the new power plants had done more damage in a decade than the frugal
spades of the Irish had done in thousands of years. With no chance for the sphagnum beds to regenerate,
biologists warned, it would be gone in a generation.
Fine traditions would go with it. The seasonal work of тАЬwinning the turfтАЭ in great teams of family and
neighbors. Heavy men's work with the long peat slans. And then women's and children's work: the
stacking and drying. The ceilis afterward.
Missed above all would be that scent which is enjoyed even in the cities, in hearths or modern stoves.
The scent of the peat as it made its slow, even, nearly smokeless flame: it was the age-old smell of
comfort and crachonтАФconviviality. The smell of home.
Surely something beautiful would be gone out of the world. Besides the value they serve as producers
of fuel, bogs are wonderful, mysterious places. Sometimes dangerous, they always hold secrets. Wild,
eerie, with their outcroppings of rocks, their coffee-colored dim pools, their heather, gorse, and bog
willow, thick with birds of all kinds, a bog is a fit place of concealment for a fugitive, a treasure, or a
whisky still.
But the bogs shift. Old people can tell you about that, for their changes can occur within one lifetime.
Sometimes things hidden in them will disappear. And reappear, far removed in time and place.
The chemistry of the turf does strange things. It colors and preserves. Occasionally a farmer, lifting his
winter fuel in i summer, will come upon a sealed bucket of long-forgotten workmanship, filled with what
once had been butter, stored in the cool moss long ago. This dark grease is found to be wonderful for
skin complaints, lubricating axles, and for healing the roughened udders of cows.