The Mermaid Saint

This first story is an Irish legend, derived from medieval sources. It takes place in both golden ages of Irish mythology: the pre-Christian era of heros and giants and the early Christian age of saints and miracles. The story is retold in the same mixed-culture as the medieval sources.

This is my first experiment in the minimalist writing style I explain in the About page. It was written slowly and is meant to be read slowly.

And then a good king took the throne over Mumha, and he had two sons named Eochaid and Ribh. Eochaid was unruly and abandoned his father the king, and Ribh departed with him. Each took in train their households, druids, servants, and their champions, and set their faces to the North. When they reached the Pass of the two Pillar Stones, they took leave of one another, Ribh to the west, and Eochaid still north.

Ribh settled in the Plain of Arbthenn, and a spring burst forth and drowned his entire clan.

Eochaid came to the Brugh of the Boyne, whose king, the wicked MacIndoc, slew his horses at night while he slept. When Eochaid and company woke the next morning and saw that their horses had been killed, the king shouted from his palace walls, “Be gone, lest tonight I slay your people!”

Eochaid rebuked, “Ho, you have worked great mischief! How are we to leave without horses?”

MacIndoc, the wicked, gave him an enormous horse, forty hands high, on which he was to pile all of his belongings and depart. “Lo,” said that devious king, “you may never stop to rest, for the place this horse tarries is the place you shall die.”

With that, the megalithic horse slowly creaked and groaned and clomped one foot in front of the other, and trod north. Eochaid and his people followed.

In the month of August, the people of Eochaid entered a great grey plain: the ground was covered with smooth white rocks, the horizon was flat and featureless, and the sky was red and humming with a drone like a sick bagpipe. Every day they marched without stopping, and every night, they took turns walking the Horse in slow circles around the camp. One morning, Maol mac Morna grew tired of walking around and around with the Horse, and schemed to sleep an hour before the rising sun. He spied young Curnan, a simpleton, and pressed him into walking the Horse instead. Curnan led the Horse admirably at first, but in time his mind wandered, and he stopped to gaze at the sun as its first rays spider-stepped upon the plain. The Horse, meanwhile, wandered off its track and discovered a clover— the only plant in the white, stony desert— and stooped to eat its petals. As soon as the clover was out of the ground a gush of water sprung up, mounting into a geyser.

The roar of water woke the entire camp, and all were distressed, for they knew that they would soon drown. Even the Horse staggered back, and dropped its load in fright. All the wealth of Eochaid washed away in the roaring waters. Only one among them had the presence of mind to calm the water, and that was Eochaid’s youngest daughter Ariu. She removed her shoes and waded, in small circles around the geyser, holding her right hand to its up-flowing column, praying. This quelled the torrent, reducing it to a gurgling spring. The people rejoiced, and Eochaid himself praised and blessed his daughter in their hearing. He then asked whose turn it had been to walk the Horse, and Maol the slothful servant, now awake, was accused. Eochaid sliced him with his sword, and the parts fell two ways.

As they could travel no further, the House of Eochaid was established on that spot. The waters of the spring nourished the land and made it fertile, and Eochaid raised a mighty castle from the smooth stones that they cleared away. He then ordered a house to be built around the spring, and set his daughter Airu as its keeper. Whenever the people wanted water, they approached her and she entered the gate, locking it behind her. She paced three times clockwise around the spring, and filled the buckets with water. Then she exited the gate, locking it again. Meanwhile, Curnan the Simpleton watched with adoration. Every day he would be first in line to request three buckets of water, just to be near her. As he took them away, he poured them out on the ground, having no need of it.

The lonesome camp grew into a village, and the village into a bustling town. Ariu became a young woman and Curnan a young man. One day, Curnan gathered the courage to express his love to Ariu, and she accepted it. Being in the habit of giving his daughter whatever she wanted, Eochaid joined the two in marriage.

Ariu still rose early in the morning to fetch the people their water. This left Curnan alone to wander the streets of town, waiting for her return. Soon, he got it into his head that the water gods would steal her away from him, so much more did they own her than he himself. Thus he lamented; from every street corner he could be heard crying,

Come forth, come forth, ye valiant men,
To build your boats, and build ye fast!
I see the water surging out, a plume! a torrent deep and vast,
Our chief and all his men o’erwhelmed beneath the wave,
And Ariu too, my best beloved: I cannot save!
I cannot save!

(But Eochaid’s daughter yet shall swim…
Long ages on the ocean’s rim,
By mystic shores and islets dim,
And down in the deep sea cave!)

When rumors of her husband’s conduct reached Ariu, she was greatly embarrassed and angered. She took his hand and brought him to the house of the spring, led him through the gate and showed him the trickling water. But he would not go near it; he pressed his back to the locked gate. Ariu demonstrated that there was no danger: she approached the spring with her shoes on, and walked around it counter-clockwise, but none of this would quell Curnan’s fear. Finally, she took her husband’s hand and set it in the bubbling waters, but he slipped away from her and ran from the house, breaking the lock on the gate. She followed, leaving the gate open and dangling behind her.

Curnan sprinted into Eochaid’s castle and flew up the stairs to the turret of the highest tower. Airu, exhausted, followed him as far as the courtyard, and there caught her breath. When Curnan saw her from the turret, he shouted with all his might, “Airu! <gasp> Airu! Hurry up the tower before the waters come!”

It was about noon, and nearly the whole town was in the courtyard, buying and selling. So when they heard Curnan’s shout, they all looked up and laughed. Ariu, overcome with anger, ordered him to come down.

Meanwhile, the spring waters were quickly rising, and soon a steady river poured from the gate. From his vantage point, Curnan saw this, and shouted again from the turret. This only provoked the town’s laughter and Ariu’s angry sobs. Again and again he called for her to climb, but she would not.

Finally, the full force of the water burst forth, flooding the countryside and filling the castle walls. The townspeople tried to shelter themselves from the heavy rain, and Eochaid himself appeared, wide-mouthed, on the balcony. Curnan was still on the turret and Airu in the courtyard, but they could no longer hear one another.

Meanwhile, Eochaid’s other daughter, Liban, was out in the rocky plain, sitting on the branch of a withered tree with her lap-dog, Pelt, sleeping in her hands. The distant burst of water sounded like the thud of a drum. She looked over her shoulder to see her father’s castle devoured by a little plume of white water, then quickly woke her lap-dog, and scampered out of the tree.

When she reached the ground, a great, round wave was already spreading out on the plain, roaring as it widened, so she ran for high ground. The closest hill was Hermit’s Mound, a hollow, solitary peak shaped like an up-standing finger. Before she was halfway there, the wave caught her and swept her along, miraculously into the mouth of a cave at its base and all the way up a narrow shaft to a cavern just below its summit.

That was the day that the Plain of the Grey Copse filled up and became known as the lake Lough Neagh, as it is today. Alone in the wide, flat waters poked the highest turret of Eochaid’s castle, and on it Curnan the Simpleton was preserved as in a boat anchored to the lake bottom. He splashed the waters around him, vainly trying to push it aside for any sign of Airu. There was none. For the rest of the day, wooden beams and other floating things drifted up and broke through the surface, and every time, Curnan’s hope reemerged and was dashed. As the sun set, he drew a few logs together into a raft. All night he drifted away from the castle turret, surrounded above and below by stars, but his heart was empty.

In the morning, Curnan’s raft tangled in weeds and reeds by the side of the shore. Under a bright blue sky with crisp, painfully white clouds, Curnan dug in the earth and raised a mound by the side of the lake. It was a burial mound for Airu, though her body could not be found to be put under it. At noon, under a pleasant breeze, he climbed the mound and hugged it. His heart broke, and he died.

Meanwhile, Liban awoke in a dim cavern under the lake. God was there. She called out to him and the cave filled with a ruddy, warm glow. The cave was round inside like a bubble in the rock, with a little sunny-house on one side and a pool of water on the other. The pool was the top of a long shaft through the center of the mountain, through which she had been remarkably thrust without harm. Pelt barked like a little bird and trotted all about, exploring his new home. Liban did the same.

All day she talked to God. Before the flood, she like to walk in the wilds beyond the village, since God was there. Soon she settled into a round of meditation, praying day after day. At first she was filled with warmth and assurance, but gradually she found herself shaking with dread. Beauty crawled upon the Earth, but something ominous behind him hid the stars in its rising. The man of beauty challenged the darkened form; he raised both fists and was tied to a pole. The unseen shape lunged forward and crushed him, splitting the earth all the way through. Up from the wound drifted the Dead. A battle had begun for dominion over creation, a battle waged deep in the bottom of every soul. Liban always rose from these meditations weary and sad, overwhelmed by nostalgia. Time was relentless and inhuman in its churning on and could not stop to for what was lost. Eochaid was lost, as was Airu her sister, and all her village in the unstoppable wave. Life itself, even a life of comfort in her sunny-house, seemed like an unbearable wave, grinding on with mechanical hooves.

Whenever she felt depressed, God sent salmon to swim up into Liban’s pool to sparkle and play in the light. The joy of their frolicking brought tears that sadness couldn’t, as did Pelt’s clownish attempts to catch them. She was so overjoyed once that she said, “Oh Lord, make me a salmon.” The fish swam away, and night came.

The next morning, Liban resolved to pray to God that she be turned into a salmon, that she might swim with the others through the clear green sea. She prayed all day. When she slept, she dreamed that she was a salmon, and in her dream, she had no distractions, made no judgements or any thoughts at all; she just felt and perceived, as a salmon would. She woke gasping for breath. And yet, the following day she prayed again, “Lord, make me a salmon, that I might swim with the others through the clear green sea!” There was again no response, and this time, she dreamed nothing. She fell asleep, and woke the next instant. Again she prayed that she might be changed into a salmon and be made innocent. At the end of the day, the light in her cave went out abruptly. It was utterly dark.

Unseen, something clutched Liban’s feet: she grasped at it and found nothing. What she did find was that her feet were not feet. They were thinner and flatter, stiff bristles, and her ankles were scaled. Terrified, she shook herself out of her dress. In the darkness, Pelt barked and growled at something. As the change crept up and fused her legs into a single tail, she wondered at the wisdom of her choice, but whispered nothing more than “a Dhia dhílis!” She dragged herself into the pool just as her arms fused to her side, her hands becoming little fins at her hips. With a violent flap of her tail, she splashed into the water and sank.

Listlessly, she descended; the water was cold around her. She found her new muscles with her mind and wriggled her body down into the depths. She tried to swim slowly. Several times a rock bruised her in the uneven shaft. She never knew if she was in danger of getting wedged in the cave or if she was in wide open water, visible to all that lurked in the depths.

So troubled, she failed to hold a shout in her lips, and for a brief moment, saw the shout around her, illuminating all the walls with a springy sound. She was near the bottom of the cave, in the final corridor where the fish swam in and the fish swam out. In terror, she slipped outside with a jerk of her tail and broke into a flying sprint. Water streamed along her body, and she opened her eyes to see shafts of green and blue light shimmering from the sky. She laughed and shouted again, becoming aware of thousands of salmon, swarming like a slow hurricane around her. Pelt flapped at her side as an otter, peering at the salmon with a greedy eye. Glancing back at her own body, Liban saw that she wasn’t entirely turned into a fish, but only half-changed— the Creator’s first mermaid.

For three hundred years, Liban swam with the salmon and her otter, Pelt. She returned to the castle of her father, now empty and poked through with holes. She breached the surface of Lough Neagh, and investigated its coastline, all busy with fishermen. She swam down the River of Rushes, Sixmilewater, to the Bay of Belfast, and out from there into the wide ocean. She had many adventures, visiting all the wonders of the earth: flying islands, creatures that spin around under their skin, and lonely hermits, each stranded on his little rock surrounded by miles of ocean.

Meanwhile, the Christians came to Ireland. They were austere and crazy for their love of God: they crept into the hollows of cliffs, living stooped and naked on the edge of the spitting sea, or sank themselves into cold forest waters and prayed. They were desert ascetics in a lush, green country, and they converted the people by their exuberance and by the purity of the sound of bells.

It was in this time that Comgall built his monastery at Bangor, restraining monastic excesses with rule and order. There, the whip of self-discipline was constrained by Roman bureaucrats. Sometimes, however, controversies broke out over the interpretation of the rules, and Comgall sent emissaries to Rome for clarification. On one such occasion, Comgall sent Beoc.

When he was out on the sea with twelve companions, cramped in a boat made from a layer of ox hide, he and his company heard the sounds of angels. Or rather, while they thought it was angels, it was actually Liban singing under the sea. As soon as Beoc realized that the music was coming from below, he plunged his head over the side of the boat and shouted in the bubbling water, “Who’s there?”

Far off, a little head poked through the waves: it was Liban, her hair drenched and sticking to her face. The men in the boat became restless and shuffled to the other side. Only Beoc spoke. “Who are you?”

Liban swam nearer, tiny and rolling up and down on the swarming water. “I am Liban,” she called out, spitting hair from her mouth. “The daughter of Eochaid, son of Marid MacCarido. It was my song you heard, not that of angels.”

Beoc and his company could see that this was not a drowning woman, but something supernatural. “Why have you come to us?”

“I have lived three hundred years beneath the sea!” She swam a little closer. “And I have come here to fix a day and place of meeting with you. Go to Rome. When you return, bring Comgall and all the saints of Bangor to the mouth of the Larne River, one year hence, where you will meet me and draw me from the sea. Do not miss it for the sake of all the saints!”

“I— I won’t do it,” replied Beoc, leaning over the edge of the boat, his companions tugging at his robes. “Unless you grant me a reward.”

Liban threw her head back in laughter. “What do you seek?”

“For you to be buried with me in my own monastery.”

She laughed again and said, “It will be granted!” She swung around and plunged into the water, drenching Beoc with a clap of her tail.

Beoc and his companions continued in their little boat to Italy, and from there traveled on foot to Rome. The ancient city, filled with wonders of marble beyond imagining, held no amazement for Beoc, so distracted was he by Liban’s appearance. He brought his brothers’ complaints to an officer of the pope, had a brief audience, and all was settled in a perfunctory way: sleeping in brambles was to be limited to no more than three times a week, and should in no way be a source of boasting, but purely for focusing the mind on God. With a stamped letter to this effect, Beoc left Rome sooner than his friends wished.

On his return to Bangor, Beoc immediately informed Comgall of his vision, and a year later to the day, the mouth of the Larne Water was filled with fishing boats of all kinds. This river delta was so full that the boats tapped and bumped as they bobbed on the waves, like a sink full of saucers. Suddenly a great cry rose up from Fergus of Miluc and his friends, as they pulled aboard a huge salmon with the head, shoulders, and breast of a young woman.

For her comfort, they half-filled their boat with water, so that she could swim around as they pulled to shore in the midst of a crowd. Liban’s lap-dog was also swimming about, greatly enjoying the excitement. In the crowd were many monks from Bangor, but also villagers of the Chonaing clan and its chief. This war-champion noticed Liban eyeing him intently, and asked her why.

“It is your cloak,” she replied. He wore a purple mantle on his shoulders.

“Do you wish it? It is yours.”

“No— keep your cloak: it reminds me of my father. He wore a cloak like that.”

As she said this, another warrior leapt like a bird from post to post along the dock and hurled his spear at Liban. She thrashed to avoid it; the spear struck her otter instead, pinning him to the inside of the boat, killing him. When she realized what had happened, she cried in anguish, “Curse you!” and the warrior fell from his perch. “Your heroism will be stained by the baseness of your mind! You and all your clan!” She spat. “You will have no victories!” She grieved for her little otter, and all who were present were moved to grieve with her. Ashamed, she added, “Until you do penance. By fasting, at my shrine.” With that, the fallen warrior genuflected, and so did all present.

That night, a fight broke out over the mermaid. Early in Christian history, saints were not simply thought to be good for the world in an abstract sense, but were roughly sought by the common folk. John Cassian, for instance, only lived on top of a tall pole because when he lived in a cage, he was beleaguered by grabbing hands. This is the spirit in which Comgall, Beoc, and Fergus, the fisherman who drew Liban in from the sea, argued over her, to whom she belonged.

It was a brawl for holiness, so when they all caught their breath, they agreed that it should be settled by prayer. The three fasted and prayed before an altar, and waited until an angel appeared before them. The angel prophesied that two white stags would come charging from Lough Neagh. These should be yoked to a cart, and they will carry Liban to the house of the one the Lord chooses.

The next morning, a white mist rose up from the water, and all the village was stilled. Down-river from the mound of Airu came two oxen, so white that no one doubted these were the stags of the angel’s prophesy. They yoked the oxen to a cart, sealed the inside with skins and filled it with water. Four fishwives carried Liban on their shoulders amid children whispering in the fog, and slid her into the rolling tub. The oxen tugged and drew the cart, spilling water, before Liban was most of the way in. The whole village and the monks of Bangor followed it into open countryside, until it was clear that the procession was heading in the direction of Beoc’s country. Some followed him a little ways, but eventually all returned home.

Inside the chapel of Tec-da-Beoc, a white beehive of stacked stones, it is cool like a basement. Liban awaits her baptism, a tiny sprinkling from a clamshell, she on her side, fins almost touching in prayer. Beoc sees that she has a choice: to live on earth another three hundred years, and go to heaven, or to die immediately and go to heaven. Liban dies. The door opens, and she is received before God.