Chapter 4
Ardeth had awoken the next day with a torrent of thoughts streaming through his head. He had had a dream within the half sleep he was able to force himself into after his shift. It seemed more like a hallucination; A woman with hair and skin an undistinguishable color was standing with her back to him. They were in the desert, the dunes shaping the landscape into a very bosom of the earth. Her dress was stained around her bottom with wet shadows, and as he neared, he noticed that her hair was also encrusted with the same dark paint. He reached out and spun her around, and found her face to be completely absent, as if blown off, and inside her skull he could see small bits of her brain still throbbing with functioning nerve-endings, while the rest was emptied pulp and flesh-dust.
He shook himself from the vision to see Boann calmly stroking the dust from Ciannait's coat. All of their cooking equipment was neatly packed away and set by the sooted logs to be packed onto the horses. Drostan, Evie, Rick, and two of his men were still asleep. The sun had just risen.
After having roused the rest, the seven travelers continued in the direction of the dig. For the entire morning and a bit of the early afternoon, Ardeth and Boann were wrapped in some of the most interesting and stimulating conversation that Ardeth had ever thought to have. They discussed with ease the ancient Egyptian and Celtic mythology, finding minute similarities, and Ardeth was very intrigued to find how intertwined the indigenous British religions were with early Christianity, specifically Catholicism. He wondered if the same were true for Egyptian faiths and Islam, but Boann very wisely pointed out that Catholicism was, for the most part, forced upon the Celts, and from what she could tell, Islam was much more by choice in the Middle East. (He corrected her, for they were not so much forced as strongly encouraged in Northern Europe. He was still impressed by her knowledge. For an illiterate street dweller, she kept a good ear for the – most likely, or at least assumed by Ardeth – pretentious conversations of others.)
Ardeth told her several stories about his family. As long as what he considered to be the rape of his mother – i.e., forced marriage and childbirth – was not mentioned, he was a very fluid anecdotal speaker on his families behalf. Boann learned that Ardeth had been raised by his father's first of five wives, primarily. A very graceful yet decidedly cold woman, she gave to Ardeth a sense of women that was absent in much of the desert culture. Not as much a respect as an understanding of how they might function. His father was the protagonist of several rather comical and adventurous tales, constantly getting in and out of trouble as a young man. Most of the stories of his father occurred before Ardeth was born, and must have been third hand accounts. Boann suspected that the rather unpleasant stories from his own childhood were not to be said out loud to her. She was content to know them from the inside.
But Boann gave away little of her own family. She spoke some of her life living above the bar her father frequented, but not much. Only that it was a place in which a "man was a man, and a woman a cunt." She mentioned her father briefly; he was, apparently, an ex-army official who had retired to a life of a construction worker in Dublin, and an insanely talented drinker. She avoided the topic with the same ease as Drostan had initially avoided mentioning Boann's defective eye, which was, again, well concealed. Her mother, however, made a respectively bigger appearance in her speech. Nothing too specific, but enough to see that she was spirited, and slightly crazy. Not one you would be surprised to find in Africa with two children and next to no money. But mostly Boann just listened to Ardeth talk. She would give small, but meaningly smiles. Her shoulders would sometimes shake with laughter without her face moving. Ardeth would catch himself in a gesture of concern at times, unsure if she were moving out of joy or if she were crying.
Possibly the most interesting conversation they had, as they had begun to fall backwards of the group, was on the subject of killing, once again.
"But don't you kill as many people here as you did in Ireland, just to stay alive?"
"Aye, but, that isn't as foggy, ye know?" Boann paused to catch her words, her hips bobbing with Ciannait's almost seductive trot. "It's more... personal, when you can see them and they can see you. Trust is established when you're not just blowing them up with bullets and metal for some foggy person's reasons. Even if it's from far away... and the reason, it's personal, and natural, it isn't something confusing and gray like freedom or faith. It's black and white, life or death. And while I know we all live in the gray areas, maybe that's why it's nice to be in the black-and-white ones.
"Death is a very important thing. It's an important part of life, and it's best to trust your killer, and to be trusted by them. Killing someone and making love to someone are almost the same thing to me, if that makes sense. If I know they are going to kill me, then I can trust them enough to kill them. You must always trust your killer, have faith in them to do it, and do it well."
Ardeth meditating on this for a very long time. Boann was a very head-on fighter, he could see. This could have partly been from her beliefs, but, most likely, from the fact that she had no depth perception to speak of. Headlong was the safest way to ensure that any distance was covered. It meant that she liked to get close, as she did with the bandits. As close as possible, even when she didn't need to. He could see how she would need this.
"I understand, but I do not agree. I think the exact opposite, actually. Death is worse when you are trusted..." Ardeth continued to think on the subject, his brow furrowing in a delightful way, Boann found.
"I still can't believe you were going to be a doctor," she said with a dry chuckle.
"Why not?" Ardeth said with a white white smile.
"I dunno. You're such a... a ruffian. You're too noble looking," she said, her words seeping from a decidedly forced smile. "And, ye know, how you must have to hold your faiths now between being a doctor and being a warrior of God and of ancientness and all things not-doctor-like."
"But I think they are very doctor-like. In both, I am saving people... I just happen to like saving people in a more... primitive way..." Ardeth did not elaborate on this point, but continued to explain the logistics of science and faith.
"Science is just as much a faith as religion, and as mythology. It's a leap no matter which way you go."
"But with science, there is proof."
"Dear Ann, I have enough proof of the existence of the supernatural to laugh in any scientist's face," he said with a quiet roar. "But when you go to a doctor, you have faith in them, just as you go to God, or a Medjai warrior, or an evil force of the Underworld, you have faith in them. It's very similar, you see."
"Yes, I understand. But, then do you believe in all 'f it? Do you have faith in all 'f those things at the same time?"
"Like you said, we all live in the gray, constantly. People were not meant to have faith in just one thing. I believe in, and love Allah, but I also believe that Horus and Anubis and Bast and Amun-Ra have a place in this world. I also believe that medicine does as well. People have God and love and science and wars that they honestly believe in them equally all at once; they were designed to. Just as you believe in the goddess Boann, and God at the same time."
"I always thought that you can't just have faith in God," Boann said. "I mean, to have faith in God, you have to have faith in yourself. Or else, how can you trust yourself to trust God, right?"
Ardeth laughed understandingly, "I don't know, Boann. It's all theory."
Boann nodded, and deliberated, before asking, "Why you 'came chief, is what I don't understand, I think. Why you did that over your father."
Ardeth shrugged after a moment. "Neither do I. A gut feeling, I suppose. Perhaps I lost one of my faiths."
Boann then took from her saddlebag Drostan's dark bottle of liquor. She uncorked it and took a long swig.
"Sorry, sometimes if I think a lot I have to drink, or else I won't stop," she said, rather cryptically. She did not offer him any, showing respect for the Muslim policy of obstinance from alcohol.
"Have you found, as a Christian, it hard to live in an Islamic country?"
"No. I actually have very little quarrel with other people's religions. Muslim, Protestant – I have enough trouble with my own faith to deal with someone else's..." she paused for a moment, as if sensing what he Ardeth was thinking. "I guess I joined the IRA not because I hated Protestants or even the English, for that matter. I just... hated the idea of not being free..."
"But the desert peoples..." Ardeth had almost forgotten her reluctant prejudice of traveling with them. In fact, he know realized that she had refused to eat their food, and had spoken little to any of the others from his tribe, save a few words to Adil, who shared a more tender fascination of the woman and her misfortunes.
Boann paused. Ardeth saw her face go soft and was unsure her veil could hold the skin on her face. "The desert tribes are... a different story all together."
But not one she would tell him that story.
At that point, Adil rode up with Drostan sitting behind him on his horse. The latter had a rather solemn face for his usual composure, and he began speaking to Boann in what Ardeth had discovered was Gaelic mixed with a bit of Arabic and English. He was rather astonished at their power with language, though, he knew language was one of the greater survival skills, and in the development of the human race, had become as essential to staying alive as eating.
After several minutes of speaking to each other, Drostan began to lift himself off of Adil's horse. Adil helped him with one hand to climb onto the back of Boann's.
"Oh, Ta , sir," Drostan said, and Adil gave him a curt nod, obviously glad to loose the extra weight.
Without much acknowledgment of Ardeth's presence, Boann began to ride upwards, towards the front of the caravan. But as she left, Ardeth saw Drostan staring at him, his left hand wrapped around Boann's waist, his other protectively placed on her upper thigh, giving him a poisoned look with his squished little sun-burnt face. Ardeth was slightly taken aback by the seemingly good-natured man's expression. He tried to brush it off, thinking instead of Boann's hair, and the world she must keep within it.
Around one in the afternoon, the group stopped at a large oasis to rest and eat. As Adil and the other's set up camp, Ardeth again approached Boann, who was unsaddling Ciannait.
"Sorry about Drostan. I think he was getting a bit flustered with your man."
"No, that's alright. I understand that you are important to him."
"Only because he thinks I need him. He's the kind of guy who needs to be needed, I think."
"You do need him," Ardeth said, without thinking. To that, Boann's eye became agitated, and stormed with dark clouds and waters. She was silent after that, and Ardeth realized that he had again crossed her dark borders. She was so yielding at times, it seemed. So eager to listen to what he had to say to her, to what he might have to give. So eager to be appreciated, and yet, her mind was unable to open to what her heart may have wanted. She was unable to let her body part for her lifepump to accept that to be accepted, one must be raw.
Ardeth attempted to salvage the situation: "I can show you how to use a sword now, if you like. You said you might like to learn..."
"No, thank you."
"Oh. Alright." And Ardeth fell silent, content to just stand there in the awkwardness, staring at the half-woman before him.
As Boann took down the saddlebags, a fairly large wooden frame came loose from underneath one flap and hit the sand with a shake. At the sound, Ciannait began to fret her legs about, nearly stepping on the frail fibre that covered the frame. Boann roughly snapped at the horse in the Gaelic mix to stop, and she slowly came to a standstill.
"It's almost like the horse understands you, sometimes." Ardeth remarked quietly.
Boann promptly slapped the horse on the nose. "In Ireland, white animals are thought to be fairy-folk... but if she is a mind-reading fairy, ye'd think she'd bloody read me Bodhran's mind!" And Boann gently pushed Ciannait's face from hers.
Ardeth picked up the fallen object from next to the horse's hoof. It was quite clearly some sort of drum.
"How would you play it?" He asked, drumming a few long finger on it's surface.
"I don't know, it was me ma's" Boann said. He knew why she was lying, though.
"You think I'm going to ask you to play."
"No, no I don't..."
"Yes you do, you're lying so you won't have to play."
"Oh please, Ardeth don't!"
"Ann! Come on! I know you know how! You wouldn't carry it into the middle of the desert if you didn't enjoy playing it."
"I carry it into the middle of the desert because it is all that I have ever truly owned." At that, she snatched it away from him. Ardeth's eyes met her one eye, and he watched her shoulders slump.
And Boann began to think there was something in them, something, something hidden in those thin thin skins of his eyes. She would play him, play him, she would play him a bit of her.
She walked him over into the thrush of the oasis, by the water, a ways away from the others. There she found a flattish rock on which to sit. She set the drum, and the strange, short stick she also carried onto it.
As Ardeth sat on the stiff and sparse grass, he watched as Boann began to peel off her many black and gray robes. She finally dwindled herself down to a white and thin blouse and black trousers. The shirt was slightly too big for her – possibly stolen – and the trousers well torn.
Her body was incredibly strong, though, that much Ardeth could see. She had a small waist that grew up like two flowers from one stem into her ribcage and shoulders. Her thighs were thick and strong through the cloth of her pants, and her arms were sculpted into bulbs and strips of lean meat. The second IRA tattoo was now visible, on her upper arm, a symbol of the Nationalist army. And what the pleasingly low range of unbuttoned buttons showed was that a very large tattoo also graced her chest and most likely, part of her back. Ardeth at first thought that it might be a branch of some sort, growing from her back, over her left shoulder and over her sternum in a single line. But upon closer observation, realized that it was a snake, done in black, fine detail.
The last thing she discarded was her veil. The thin strap covering her eye was even more pitiful than he remembered from the night before. Bits of scar flesh hung out of it like a harlot's breasts in all directions.
When she relaxed, her breasts fell in an attractive concave to her ribcage, and the dark of her nipples was slightly visible through the worn shirt. Her bountiful curls were being pinned up by the undulating muscles of her arms, and the dark stains of sweat were sheering out the fibers, making the dark bushels of hair under her arms also visible through the cloth.
As she finally situated herself in a comfortable state within her own skin. She sat down with the leather-skinned drum on her lap. The leather was cut very thin, and the frame was not very deep. A wooden bar stretched across the back of the drum, by which she would soon hold it propped on her leg. She took the double sided stick in one hand, and the drum in the other, her collarbone flexing and protruding beneath her thin skin, as if a prisoner trying to escape as she did so. She was so thin... He could take a scissors and snap her ribs, one by one, to reveal her heart without much effort at all, he though.
"Um..." she began, brushing a stray curl from her increasingly reddening face. "Me ma first taught me how to play when I was wee, and she learned it in 'er village, and I got taught more when I was older living on the island but in truth I'm no good. But, um. this is an old folk song, and it's meant to be played with a fiddle and whistle, and a war drum as well. But, I'll make do..." She very solemnly picked a spot on the ground to focus her one eye on. It was a beautiful eye, in truth. Beautiful, as if a small indented hole out of which a diamond once popped out of, poorly glued.
She began with a strong thud of the stick against the skin. Ardeth had an idea of how it would be used, a similar sort of drum existing in the Middle Eastern cultures, only without a drumstick. But how she played it was much different, and how it sounded was as well. Her wrist glided over the skin of the Bodhran as if tracing the lines of a lovers legs, his hands, the veins under his eyes. The stick bobbed in all the right places under her skilled hand as if barely touching the surface, yet producing the most complicated and invigorating rhythms Ardeth had ever heard. It was a muted sound, not meant to be the greatest component out of the arrangement, he thought. But it could be powerful when she wanted it to, and yielding at her same whim.
After several minutes of the this trance-like observation, she began to sing. Her voice was thick, but articulate in its sounds. It was deep and powerful, and rather off-key as she let slip each ancient word. She was rocking now, as she played. Her entire upper body rocking to the rhythm of her drum and her singing, all the time focusing on the one spot in the sand.
They must have been their like that for at least twenty minutes, the song seemingly never ending. Perhaps Ardeth simply never wished it would end. He felt like he was making love to her, right then. Just by watching her play. She was, at that moment, more naked than if she were balded from head to big toe.
When she finished, Ardeth wasn't sure if he should clap. Do you clap after you make love to someone? Boann wiped the sweat and tears from her face with the back of her sleeve as Drostan stepped from behind a stunted tree.
"You brought out Kell's old drum, eh Annie?"
Boann nodded as Rick and Evie also stepped out behind Drostan.
"Oh that was lovely, Boann," Evie exclaimed.
"Ta," Boann replied quietly.
"Won't you play something else?"
"No, I think I'm done in."
"Oh no you're not," laughed Drostan. "Play us a jig Ann, lass."
"No"
"Oh come on!"
"Oh, please do, Boann," Evie chimed.
Ardeth was silent, content with whatever decision she might make.
"I'm not playing a fucking jig Drostan." To which Drostan gave his best puppy-dog face, which, Ardeth had to admit, was quite good.
Boann surrendered, and kicked into a much more structured and jolly pattern of beats. To this Drostan took Evelyn's hands, much to Rick's chagrin, and began to dance with her next to the water. Evie giggled and Drostan cackled, and despite himself, Rick smiled at seeing his wife smile. Ardeth also chuckled at the sight.
"Oh God I do love that music. Makes me sick I love it sumuch."
Drostan spun Evie around himself and kicked up his heels as he continued to talk through stunted breaths.
"I used to play fiddle with 'er, in the bar we lived above, and Brady'd sometimes come in wit' the whistle or sing or such, before 'e died and all. But then I had to sell the fiddle."
Evie gave a sympathetic "Oh!" in between steps and giggles.
"Yes'm. Had to get the money to bail out Boann's da."
Evie continued to dance, but she had lost a bit of mirth at this. Ardeth's ears had also perked at the mention of Boann's father.
"Damn sod got 'imself locked up. Threw a chair at a man's head for lookin' up Annie's skirt while she played on the stage."
He again took Evie by the waist and spun her around the axis of his body. Ardeth's eyes had driven themselves headlong into Boann's face, which was becoming as blank as the desert sand.
"The lad died the next day, if I remember. Concussion and all."
Boann was staring at her spot on the ground. She was staring so intently, Ardeth thought she might burn her way through tot he Underworld. He was staring at her, a mixture of anger and pity and love mixing in his head. But she said nothing. Just stared at her spot. Her hair quivering as her head shook with anger, shook with dread. She was shaking with anger and with dread.
Drostan and Evie kept on dancing. Rick soon joined in.
