The Pirate Queen (8 page)

The
Shamrock I
was approaching Clare Island. Again I saw Grace's castle, and felt a thrill, though, like Grace, I now preferred the fortress at Rockfleet. Mary pulled into the harbor and dropped me off. I planned to walk to the abbey to see the spot where Grace was said to be buried, and then to make my own way back to Westport. Mary said she'd pick me up in town the following day and drive me to Mulrany, for an evening of local music away from the tourist venues. I watched the
Shamrock I
motor out to sea again. Another storm was coming, and Mary wanted to get the boat to Achill Island. She'd be up at four tomorrow morning to take out a party of anglers.

A
FTER THREE
or four, I stopped counting, but Mary and her friend Geraldine continued to put away Bacardi-and-Cokes. They had stronger heads than I did. Myself, I stuck with what the men at the bar had lined up in pints before them: Guinness with a creamy head, expertly pulled and a new one plunked down as the last of the old went down. I managed one pint for every three of theirs.

I'd taken a short nap today in my hotel, knowing the evening would go late. Mary and I arrived at Neven's Pub, on the north side of Clew Bay, around eleven, shortly before the Mulloy Brothers started up in the back room. As Mary had promised, there were none of the German tourists that you'd
find in the pubs in Westport, nursing a Heineken, good-naturedly and stolidly enjoying the Irishness of it all. This was the real thing, lots of music and lots of drink, and everyone lived nearby. The Mulloy Brothers, beloved locals, were in their fifties and looked not at all related: one round-faced, another black-bearded, a third thin and wrinkled.

“Let's have a dance, Geraldine,” Mary urged. Even though she'd been up since dawn, her feet were tapping. Her friend was a youthful-looking mother of seven, red-haired, brown-eyed, cigarette-voiced, a willing dreaminess about her. She teased Mary for a bit, then got up without a word. Mary had said they were both mad for set dancing, whether any partners turned up or not. Mary took off her short leather jacket, the one her son had just brought back from his trip to India, and stepped out onto the small space in front of the musicians. Geraldine smiled indulgently and tossed her red hair. She wore a white blouse and skirt and heels. The two of them crossed their arms high on their chest and lifted their feet. They were quick and precise, circling shoulders or kicking in time. Mary had the same serious face I'd seen yesterday on the boat: modest pride at doing something perfectly. After the jig they waltzed, with narrow-hipped Mary taking a proper lead. They were a joy to watch (though most of the men just quietly drank their beers), their faces flushed and shining.

After a few sets, Geraldine bowed out for a cigarette. I had the feeling Mary could have danced for hours. She turned instead to one of the men and they began to discuss fishing.

Geraldine and I got on the topic of religion, and that led to her telling me about a recent pilgrimage to Lourdes. She'd gone with her sister, not because they were sick or crippled, just because it was a long-held dream. “It's something I just can't
describe . . . the way it made me feel to see Bernadette's Grotto, to bathe in the waters,” she said, looking about fifteen as she finished another drink and smoked another Winston. I wondered how old her children were. She had also climbed Croagh Patrick, the Holy Mountain, overlooking Clew Bay.

“So have I, many times,” said Mary, coming over for another round. “My brother and I thought nothing of running up it of a summer evening, just to see the view.”

I asked if they'd ever climbed without shoes, the way people used to, to show their faith. “I haven't done anything bad enough to go barefoot for penance,” said Mary, but Geraldine, said smiling, “I'd like to go up it barefoot. I may yet do that.”

I thought about the Gaelic phrase,
an thuras,
“the journey,” which I'd come across in reading about Celtic pilgrimages. The notion of this particular kind of pilgrimage was still current in certain holy places in the Celtic world, such as Iona, and belonged to an earlier form of Christianity, before such popular Catholic stations-of-the-cross hikes like the one up Croagh Patrick.
An thuras
meant to make a circuit, usually counterclockwise, around a number of related sites. Each site—a cross, a stone, a chapel, or a shrine—was intended to be a trigger for a certain ritual or prayer. “Mnemonic devices,” they've been called,
mnemonic
meaning to aid the memory. Perhaps it was the Guinness, but I suddenly thought I could see my upcoming journey around the North Atlantic in that light. Beginning with Grace, her castles and even the dioramas and paintings of the Granuaile Heritage Centre, I'd be looking not only for stories but for physical clues about the lives of maritime women from myth and history. My journey wasn't religious, but it was a pilgrimage of sorts, from site to site in search of relics, statues, homes, castles, and coastlines.

The evening was breaking up. It was now after two. The nondrinking, singing Mulloy brother, Tom of the black beard, the one who'd once been a carpenter and then had fallen and broken half the bones in his body, began taking people off in his taxi. In fifteen minutes he came back for me, and waving goodbye to Mary and Geraldine, I got in. Tom ran me at high speed back to Westport and gave me a tape from a box in the trunk.

The night porter showed no sign of disapproval at a woman on her own getting in after three in the morning. Instead he asked if I'd had a good time.

I told him about my evening in Mulrany with the Mulloy Brothers.

“Ah,” he nodded. “They're grand.”

I
WENT
back to Carraigahowley Castle at Rockfleet the next day. This time the tide was low, the boulders covered with crinkled ochre and bronze leaves and bulbs glistening wet. Sea gulls sat in all their pristine whiteness on the tangle of seaweed. I'd borrowed a key to the castle, and I went inside, up the cold steps to the fourth floor. The view was excellent, in spite of the fact that castles lacked picture windows in those days. There was a hole in the stone up there, even smaller than the slits that passed for windows in Irish castles. It's said this was the opening through which Grace threaded the rope that anchored her favorite ship to the leg of her bed. As she slept, she must have felt the galley moving in her dreams.

I climbed down from the top floor of Carraigahowley, and walked around the castle as the wind freshened. I was still a little tired from my late night with Mary and Geraldine, still a
little overwhelmed from all the traveling to get here; yet, in touching the old stone of Grace's castle, new energy coursed through me. I imagined the Pirate Queen staring out to sea from her tower, or sleeping with her ship tied to her bedpost. The name of this bay abounding in islands came from the Irish god, Cuan Mo. But I thought that
clew
in the old meaning suited it best. For a clew was a ball of thread, the thread that Ariadne gave Theseus to guide him through the labyrinth, the source of our word
clue:
anything that points to the solution of a mystery.

I felt as if, by starting the first stage of my journey,
mo thuras,
here on Clew Bay, where a fierce little girl had grown up and a wild, canny woman had remained a pirate until late in life, I'd taken hold of a thread, and was ready to follow it, wherever it led. If it was tied to a pirate's galley, so much the better.

CHAPTER III

AT THE EDGE OF THE SEA CAULDRON

From Oban to the Pentland Firth

L
EAVING
I
RELAND
, I flew to Edinburgh to visit friends, then traveled by train to Oban on the west coast of Scotland. I wanted to slip back in time, further back than Grace O'Malley's day, to the mythological realm, where sea goddesses stirred up cauldrons of whirling water, storm kettles of surge and drag. In Gaelic these cauldrons are called
coire,
and one of the most famous of them lies not far from Iona and Mull in the Hebrides, between the sparsely inhabited islands of Scarba and Jura. There, the Atlantic tide comes and goes so quickly and voluminously that the narrow gap between the islands becomes a watery conflagration of currents, creating waves that slap up twenty feet tall. It is called Corryvreckan or
coire breckan,
“the cauldron of the plaid.”

This tub of violence is where the great winter hag Cailleach was said to wash her cloak. When storms came on, especially in autumn, people told each other, “The Cailleach will tramp her blankets tonight.” She washed her plaid and when she drew it up, it was white and the hills were covered with snow. They used to say that, before a good washing, the roar of the coming tempest was heard by people on the coast for a distance of twenty miles. It took three days for the cauldron to boil.

Oban is the end of the rail line from Glasgow, the terminus for ferries to the Inner and Outer Hebrides. I looked longingly
at the harbor, where the white ships of the Caledonian MacBrayne line were moored, but they couldn't take me close enough to catch a glimpse of Corryvreckan. At the Oban tourist office I found an appealing brochure for a small cruise operation farther down the coast, run by a young man and woman. They ran tours out to the whirlpool in the tourist season. I called and reached a machine, left a message, then turned my attention to finding a room for the night.

It was raining—no, not just raining, but pissing down. I stood dripping in the tourist office with other wet visitors to Oban while a staff member fixed me up with a room for the night. I made my way along the dreary esplanade to a group of tall guesthouses built in the town's Victorian heyday. Ten days into my trip, my green rain slicker was beginning to feel like a second skin.

The prospect of viewing a thundering whirlpool in this rainstorm seemed unlikely, as well as perhaps unwise; however, it was perfect weather, I thought as I took off my wet clothes and settled myself into a chair in my garret room at the top of six flights of stairs, to think about storm goddesses. I put on the kettle and blessed the Scots for having the right idea about comfort: plenty of tea, biscuits, and tiny containers of milk.

L
EAN AND
mean, that's the Cailleach, blue-faced, rust-haired, one-eyed, with a single tooth. Stories of this ancient goddess are found in the west of Ireland and the Highlands of Scotland, and are particularly common around the firths of Oban. It's said that she created the mountains and the islands by dropping stones from the creel she carried on her back. Many mountains have their own Cailleach. The Cailleach nan Cruchan is said to have
lived on the summit of Ben Cruchan, not far from Oban. When anything put her in a temper, she gathered a handful of whirlpools and descended the mountain in a fury. She crossed Loch Etive in a single stride, and doing so, lashed it into a tempest that prevented all passage at Connel Ferry. Connel, from “cona thuil,” which means whirling floods, was also said to be the place through which the Cailleach drove her goats, that is, her frisky waves. The Cailleach is much connected with the Isle of Mull in the Inner Hebrides. The frothy swells off its coast are called her sheep and goats. Where waves billow and the coastline seethes white is her stomping ground.

Donald Mackenzie, who collected Scottish folklore in the first part of the twentieth century, has an entire chapter about the Cailleach in one of his books. He calls her the Scottish Artemis, who roamed the mountains with her animals, and carried a magic wand to control the weather. As with most ancient goddesses, her early power was elemental and to be revered as much as feared. Later she turned into a sea witch responsible for storms and drownings. But she was always associated with the coldest, stormiest part of the year. Her strength grew as autumn arrived; she reigned supreme until spring. Some later stories sentimentalize her as a beautiful girl who turned into a hag in winter, then succumbed each spring to another beautiful girl who replaced her. Other stories tell how she kept her youth by never failing to drink from the waters of life in the moment before the sun rises, once a year. When once she was prevented or forgot, she fell dead, and didn't rise again.

I prefer the older stories, of the Cailleach and her ocean form, Muileartach, who appears in Irish poetry and lore. Muileartach came from the west, over the waves; she lived in the ocean with her lover, and enjoyed having her body massaged by
sea merchants. The only way to kill her, it's said, was to bury her up to her shoulders in soil.

       
Her face was blue-black of the luster of coal,