Seven warriors return in a new box set

Those who follow this on-again off-again blog may have noticed an almost year-long pause in my writing. I’ve undergone two eye surgeries and have been forced to slow down just to see the page properly.

Finally, I’m ready to jump back in the M/M novel game, starting with one of my most inventive (and erotic) series. At last, seven warriors reunite under the covers of a box set. All four novels have been revised to meet my own high standards of good writing.

Seven unforgettable men in the still-pagan world of ancient Ireland:

Gristle… Tough and hard to swallow, he’s an embittered former soldier who has absolutely buried his own humanity

Wynn… A young Welsh pony trainer with a wicked sense of humor and an abiding love for a much older man

Tristus… The Man of Sorrow, Gristle’s first love—and a would-be acolyte of the man who will one day become a saint

Xan… A scatter-foot who follows only his thirst for the open road and his lust for desirable men

Dub… A scholar-warrior with a shrouded past who stands at the right hand of Ireland’s High King

Fergus… That same king’s bad-boy son—a drunk and a miscreant with designs on his father’s wise man, and on that man’s own attractive brother

Oisean… An innocent wilding trying to survive in a different new world, one of hidden evil and not-so-hidden desire

Seven unusual men meet and interact in one way or another during a dozen or so years of turbulent adventure in the badass time of St. Patrick. One critic has described the novels as “gay sexual journeys that are powerful—and absolutely breathtaking.”

The novels may be read as stand-alones. But the men’s stories are linked in a way that brings passion to a higher and higher level as the stories develop. As you read, I think you will want to experience the entire series as a crescendo of grief and joy and self-discovery.

Note that the new “boxed” version represents a 60% saving over buying each novel separately. 

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C6J651BS

Nuala’s Secret: Part 4

By now, Owen was about twenty years old. His oldest child, my grandson Muiredach, was about three. One day I went alone to the well to draw water for the household. Owen had gone to hunt a fine red deer for our provisions. As I was putting water jars into our wagon, a lone rider approached me.

She was a woman well past her prime, a score of years beyond my own age, one who should not have been traveling alone. She was dressed all in fine silk, and her shoes were inlaid with abalone shells. “O friend,” she called to me from her horse. “I have lost my way, and I am athirst. May I drink from your well?

Of course, I bade her dismount, and I poured a cup of water from a jug and proffered it to her. She drank willingly, and she thanked me kindly. “For whom do you draw water?” she asked me.

“For my family,” I told her, not wanting to speak of my son.

She nodded and proceeded to tell me about her own family—six strong grandsons. Their father, husband of her only daughter, was sojourning in a foreign land, she said, and his sons had traveled with him. She told me how she loved them and missed them.

“Do you also have strong sons?” she inquired of me.

Loath as I was to speak of Owen, I told her proudly that I had one strong son and three grandchildren. She replied with tears that she would be honored to meet such a family, for she missed her own very much. My heart reached out to her heart, as mother to mother, and I invited her to sup with us that evening.

When we rode up to our brugh, Owen had just returned from the hunt, a red deer thrown behind the saddle. He dismounted to lift the deer, and the woman beheld his face. At one look, she shrieked like any banshee. Her cry was enough to cloud the mind and stop the very birds in the sky.

As she screamed, Owen’s horse reared back in terror. I watched helpless as it came back down on top of my son, crushing him into the ground. And still the strange woman’s shrieks pierced the sky, and the horse began to struggle to find its legs. The more it struggled, the longer it ground Owen’s legs into the dirt.

Dear, dear God, forgive me!

Th Dying Gaul, Hellenestic statue

He lay there as if dead, in anguish of pain, and I fell at his side, sobbing and keening as if he truly were dead. The stranger, who had not once dismounted, sat high and proud on her horse, even as it reared and pranced in confusion.

“You now pay for your own folly,” she said. “I have searched for you more than twenty years, and I have my vengeance at last. Your son is now half a man—cloven in two, blemished for all time. No high king may bear a blemish, and so his fate is sealed. Now my own grandsons may be kings, and your son will die a cripple. So be it.”

“But at last,” I told her bitterly, “I may tell him about his father. And I myself may go to him finally, for he is the only love I have ever known.”

Crone image copyright Susan Seddon-Boulet

And then she laughed, more of a shriek than a laugh. “If I see your son’s face or your face, I hereby swear that I will end the life of your precious lover. I have my grandsons—that is all I want. His life became as spilled water or smoke from a fire pit from the moment his loins pierced your loathsome body and shunned my own daughter. Go to him, send your son to him—and know that he dies.”

And so we left the promontory and traveled south to the great lake of Foyle, seeking the safety of a new home. From that day to this, I have not told anyone what happened, or why.

Archetypal maiden, mother, crone by Amalur

Father, Heavenly Father, forgive me for what I have done!

~oooOooo~

This is not the end of Nuala, or her story. It continues as the story of her crippled son Owen  in the Dawn of Ireland novels of Erin O’Quinn.

Detail from Oisin in Tara by Jim FitzPatrick

Note: Wakening Fire is the second of The Dawn of Ireland trilogy by Erin O’Quinn

The trilogy is here: http://amzn.to/2pxBRGY

Nuala’s Secret: Part 3

Brother Jericho took a few moments to clear his mind. Then, leaning forward on the fur-lined couch, he spoke again as though it were from the mouth of Mother Sweeney herself.

Our life with the priests was serene. I soon learned to love our Lord, and the monks baptized me, calling me “Noella,” for I had come to them close to the birth day of our Lord. I taught my son to respect learning, and he did learn quickly under the teaching of the priests. I told him that his father had wanted him to be an ollamh and even a king. 

I am shamed to say that I never told him the truth about his father. I was terrified lest he should find out, and go to find his father, and be torn in half by the vengeful mother of Rídach. And so I told him that his father had died in a great battle, in a faraway land. I told him his father was of high birth, regarded as a king in Éire, but that he wanted to be left unmourned and his grave unknown when he died.

My son rebelled against the priests’ attempts to convert him. Even from an early age, Owen was headstrong. He told me often that there could be no blessed heavenly father, for he himself had no father. What kind of heavenly father would take away a child’s father before he could know him? I blame myself for his unbelief. Surely I alone kept him from knowing the comfort of our Lord.

Father, forgive me!

At last, when Owen was sixteen years old and he had come to the age of Self-Will in Gallia, he declared that he would leave the monastery where we lived, and he would sail for his home country. Even though born on the soil of Gallia, he considered himself an Éireannach, and he had learned the language from monks and native speakers alike.

“Oisin at Tara,” detail from the work by Jim FitzPatrick

And thus with a heavy heart, I sailed with my son back to Éire. He wanted to go to the land of his father. And so I chose a part of Éire, far out on the great peninsula near the Bay of Trawbreaga, where I thought we could live in peace. Owen went from settlement to settlement, asking about his father. He studied every cairn, every heap of rubble, every bit of ogham scratched into stone to find a clue to his father. I wept then, and I weep now, to think of it.

Of course, no one knew the name “Rory Sweeney,” for the name Sweeney had come from my own area of Dál Riata, a name from the land of the Picts. And the name “Rory” was my own invention, for I knew it held the word “king” embedded in its meaning.

Soon after we arrived, Owen met and fell in love with a beautiful tall, dark-haired woman named Aileen. She loved him totally, and she was as devoted to him as I was myself. Within three years, she had borne him two sons and a daughter. But as day rolled into day, I saw my beloved son begin to lose his reason. Aileen saw it, too, and she mourned with me as we saw him shouting and drunk, verbally abusing us, disappearing for weeks on end.

She often pleaded with me to tell him more about his father. “Nuala, for his sanity, for his health, will you not relent and tell your secrets? For the sake of his children, who may grow up to fear and hate their own father?”

I hung my head. I could tell no one the dread secret. I had even kept it from the priests, for I knew not whether one of them would reach Éire and let slip where Owen may be found.

And so, to save the life of my son, I slowly lost the life of my son. I shed bitter tears every day of my life to think of it.

Lord God, forgive me!

At last, to stop his searching, I relented just a bit and told him that his father hailed not from Éire but from Alba, across the expanse of the leaden North Sea. I even believed it, for I thought he was traveling from Alba when I met him. At my words, he went completely wild, raging and shouting. “How will I ever find him in that vast, barbaric land?”

He left us for more than three months. I thought he had perhaps hired a currach and sailed to Alba in search of his father. But one day he came back home, looking haggard and old, hardly talking. I found later that he had gone on a “booley,” a kind of lonely trek to the mountains like the sheep herders, in search of his own sanity. After he returned, he never again spoke of his father. To this day, I know not what took place inside his mind, for something else happened after he returned that became the focus of our lives.

Brother Jericho stopped talking. He knit his brows. “This part is where she began to cry. It was hard to understand many of her words. Clearly she is tormented to the point of despair.”

“Do your best, dear brother,” I urged him. He nodded and continued.

 

This part of the odyssey of Owen Sweeney will conclude next week.

Nuala’s Secret: Part 2

Forty years ago, I was a young woman. Even a beautiful maiden, if you believe the poets. Everyone called me “Nuala.” I lived in the land called Dál Riata, part in Éire and part stretching all the way into Alba, across the few miles of sea. I was a daughter of the Cenél Loairn, the clan families who ruled the middle part of that great kingdom, and my home lay on the lovely green isle.

One day, I was walking through a glen with my wolfhounds, playing and laughing, when a file of horsemen broke through the far line of trees. I could see at once that they were men of high birth, for the bridles of their horses were silver and the robes of the riders were trimmed in sable.

They stopped near me, and the lead rider dismounted. He was a man tall as an oak sapling, lithe and fair of skin. His eyes, and his hair, were golden brown, like my favorite horse. He stood and looked upon me, and he put his arms around my waist. “I have not seen such ivory skin, nor such raven hair, in all my life. Who is your fortunate husband?”

I admit that I felt my own blush, for I had never known a man. “My father Loam has not yet promised me to any swain,” I told him.

He looked at his fellows and his laughter rang through the glen. “This one is mine,” he told them. “I will make her my second wife.”

“But your first wife Rídach is still alive,” one of them reminded him. 

“Then Nuala shall be my mistress, my wife of the day, while I lie with Rídach at night.”

To tell a long story shortly, the noble youth spoke to my father. He plighted such a sum of cattle and coins that my father willingly sent me south with the stranger. The man told me to call him “Cloud,” for he said he was a changeling, never the same from moment to moment, except with me.

Our trip to his home lasted seven days and seven nights. The nights were fair, and each night he would take me under a tree and lay with me. His hands were gentle, and his loins were strong. By the time we reached his homeland, I loved him more dearly than all my dogs and horses and all my silken robes.

He had a small teach built just for me, and every afternoon he came to visit me. “When will I see your own home?” I would ask him.

“Soon, Nuala,” he would tell me. “My wife will be loath to meet you, and so you must remain my secret for now. Will you wait for me?”

“I love you,” I told him. “And I will wait, no matter how long it may take.”

Day after day, Cloud lay with me, and we loved each other more every day. One day, I found that I was heavy with his child. When I told my lover, he was filled with dread. “O Nuala, I fear for the safety of our child,” he cried to me. “For Rídach will suffer no child, except from her belly, to call himself my own. I fear she will set her own mother on you, a woman of cunning and wicked ways.”

That same day, an old woman came to my house. She looked so much like my handsome Cloud that I knew it was his very mother. “Child,” she told me, “you bear within yourself the son of a king. But he must not be allowed to live here, near the queen Rídach and her ambitious mother. For she will have only her own sons be in line for the throne. If ever she finds out about your child, surely his life is forfeit.”

The old woman reached into her bosom and withdrew a large pouch of precious gems. “I give you this treasure willingly,” she told me, “but it must be spent in another land, far from here. You must go, your unborn son within you, and flee to far Gallia. There you will be taken in, and taught, by the bald priests of the one they call Christ.

“His father wants your son to know that his name will be Eóghan, and he will be an ollamh, a great scholar, and some day even a king. But if ever he learns about his father, he will be cloven in two like a hoof, by the hand of Rídach’s own mother. Such is her hatred, and such is her power. Go, then, child. Escape while you can.”

And thus I found myself in the far, cold land they call Gallia, and I gave birth to a beautiful, dark-haired boy I named Owen. I called myself Suibhne…Sweeney…a name from my people’s land of far-off Alba.

Nuala’s Secret: Part 1

In my series of novels based in St. Patrick’s Ireland, each one bears the following dedication:

Dedication

I dedicate this entire series to the magic realm called Ireland: her language, her people, her history, and her wealth of unique treasures buried in the ancient past, even before a bishop named Patrick dressed her in the robes of religion and civilization.

There are voices that sing, pure and sweet, in the rivers and the mountains…in the lightning and the stones…in the mythos which created Cú Chulainn and many other larger-than-life Irish spirits. Sometimes I have awakened them from slumber. I beseech their forgiveness.

In this historical romance series called “The Dawn of Ireland,” the reader will find myths and short tales, poetry, songs—and a story that weaves through all of them. It’s the saga of a man named Owen Sweeney. In the next several blogs,you’ll read a fantasy tale called “Nuala’s Secret” excerpted from the novel Wakening Fire.

Old Secrets: from Chapter 20 of Wakening Fire

[Caylith is on a mission: to uncover the secrets of an old woman who holds the key to a man’s past, and even to his survival.]

And last, almost reluctantly, my eyes were drawn to the small, clotted figure of a woman lying as if curled in pain, a flyspeck on a large table. It was Mother Sweeney. I saw that she was sleeping, if fitfully, her mouth thin, her jaw clenched in her habitual silence. Even in slumber, she was refusing to speak her secrets.

Brother Jericho stood on one side of the bed. I put the cup of healing potion on the bedside table and knelt on the side opposite the monk. I reached out my hand and lightly drew her thin, shining hair back from her high forehead, seeing her entire face for the first time. When I was here before, she had kept a cowl over her head. And even after the prisoners had been freed, she wore a kerchief that shrouded her eyes and cheeks.

Now I saw that she had long, dark eyelashes and improbably dark, glossy hair. She had high cheekbones, and I could see the way her delicate bones molded her face that she must have been beautiful as a young woman. I wondered whether, if she ever unclenched her jaws, her mouth would be soft and yielding. 

Image of Celtic goddess Brigid, multiple sources

As I stroked her finely textured hair, her eyes flew open. Her thin body, already drawn into a ball, could not recede any farther, and so she let her eyes show her fright.

“Mother,” I said crooning softly. “Mother Sweeney, it is I, Caylith. Do you remember me?”

She closed her eyes tightly, and then again they fluttered open. “Fág anseo,” she said weakly, and she closed her eyes again. She was bidding me leave.

I looked up at Brother Jericho, who was regarding her with tortured eyes. His hands were writhing together as if to underscore his feeling of uselessness. “She is reliving the night I came here. She is afraid for me. Or afraid for her son.” I took the cup in my hands and told Brother Jericho to prop up her head.

He took her little head in his hands and looked into her eyes. Speaking in Gaelic, he said, “Mother, it is the monk Jericho. I have come to help you.”

She looked at him calmly. “Is cuimhin liom. I…remember.”

“You must drink from this cup,” I urged her softly. “It will make you feel better.”

Obediently, she let me tip the cup a bit into her mouth. I did it several times until I assured myself that the potion was sufficient for now. The monk gently let her head fall back and leaned close to her, almost whispering. I had to strain to catch what he said, for it was in Gaelic and barely audible.

“A mháthair, abair scéal,” he said. I remembered what Brigid had said last night, when I proposed that a story be told. It was the age-old exhortation to tell a tale. Would she respond as generations had before her, telling a story of her youth, a story of her son?

She spoke, and I thought she said, “To you alone.”

“Caylith,” said Brother Jericho, “I must ask you to leave us. I think she realizes that this may be her last chance to talk to the Lord, through me. It is not a time to share with anyone but the priest.”

Image from witchesofwalthamabbey.com

“Forty years of silence, now broken for the sake of Christ and her own soul. Brother, I will happily talk to you later.”

I rose and left the room, reluctantly pulling the door closed behind me. I longed to hear her words as she spoke them, but even if I were there, I would understand only a word or two. I knew that Jericho would tell me later, as true to her own words as possible.

[After a while, the priest comes back to where Caylith and her friends are waiting.]

I saw Brother Jerome enter the room, a look of relief on his face. I rose. “I will now try to find what her silence has been hiding. Please excuse me.”

…

“O Brother, let us sit here on a comfortable tolg.” I gestured to one of the couches. “What can you tell us?”

“Caylith. Liam. I will tell you her story as she told it to me.” Jericho sat on a nearby couch, and Liam and I sat across from him, leaning forward in expectation. He cleared his throat a bit hesitantly and began to speak.

Story to be continued…

The trilogy Dawn of Ireland is here:

http://amzn.to/2pxBRGY

 

 

Cernunnos: ancient and modern

I recently wrote a couple of novels* in which I called on the mythopoeic image of a horned god, or an antlered man. In my stories, the man was just that—a mortal, one perhaps dangerous, the embodiment of the Scottish saorsa, the wild place.

The ancient idea of an antlered deity still intrigues me. This article is no more than a brief look at of the horned god as he appears in western (especially Celtic) tradition and persists even into modern times. The concept of a man-beast begs for an explanation…

From what I can gather, one of  the most potent and long-lived symbols of a horned deity is one born from the ancient Greeks—the deity Pan, god of wild places, of fertility, of man’s impetuous nature. Pan is usually portrayed as a satyr, a man with cloven feet, often with horns, playing a reed instrument.

The sexual overtones are obvious in this piece originally discovered at Pompeii [Wiki, copy of marble sculpture by Heliodorus. Ca. 100 BCE. Object in the collection of the Naples Museum of Archeology. Photo, 1999]

 In many myths (and images) his sexual potency is celebrated with nary a blush.

One sculpture whose photo I ran across—and have mercifully hidden from viewers’ eyes—shows the Roman cognate Faunus actively stropping a goat. Such activity obviously runs in the family. How else to explain the cloven footgear?

The most persistent image and mythos of an antlered god (aside from the modern Wicca tradition) is Cernunnos. This deity has the body of a man and horns of a stag; he’s often depicted wearing a torc, an ancient necklace with knobby ends fashioned of twisted metallic threads. Scholars think the torc may represent wealth or status.

[The “Cernunnos” type antlered figure or horned god, on the Gundestrup Cauldron, on display at the National Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen. Wikipedia.] Clearly, Cernunnos was seen as the heart of all animals, large and small.

In my novel Warrior, Come Again the scholar Jaythor describes the god to a fidgety audience:

“Cernunnos is part of the ancient Celtic lore. A half-man, half stag, one whose legacy goes back as far as the Greek Pan. Or perhaps even farther. One endowed with horns, who lives in the shelter of trees, and takes his strength from the power of Earth itself. He embraces the notion of fertility as well as the end of days. There is something about the potency of wilderness that nests between his huge horns… Perhaps man’s seeking after the bestial side of his nature. Who knows?”

I have Jaythor surmise that the name “Cernunnos” may be a later distortion of a local (Scottish) tribe, a fact I picked up somewhere in my research. Who better to pontificate about this obscure fact than Jaythor  the Mentor?

“One of the splinter tribes of the Brigantes are called the Carvatii. I am certain the name is a Britonnic form of the Latin cervus, ‘deer.’ They are said to carry totems of an antler-headed god and actually worship a Cernunnos-style of deity. They are blue-painted with the woad plant , covered head to toe by markings to resemble a stag. And their leader is said to be twice the size of a normal man.”

What I want to emphasize in this short piece is the persistence of an ancient archetype. It may have started with the Greeks, or it may even be a separate tradition with the first Italic tribes (their god Faunus), then traveled over to Gaul and other Celtic locales with the spread of Roman civilization-cum-conquest, and lasted at least until the last century. 

Consider the celebrated poem “Afternoon of a Faun” by Mallarmé, whose frontispiece was illustrated by artist Manet; and Claude Debussy’s later orchestral homage.

Frontispiece by Édouard Manet (1832-1883) for the poem L’après-midi d’un faune by Stéphane Mallarmé 

No less an author than Kenneth Grahame used the mysterious character of a woodland deity in his influential children’s book The Wind in  the Willows.

Original cover of wind in the willows. [Wiki: “Grahame’s Pan, unnamed but clearly recognisable, is a powerful but secretive nature-god, protector of animals, who casts a spell of forgetfulness on all those he helps. He makes a brief appearance to help the Rat and Mole recover the Otter’s lost son Portly”.]

Note of interest: those who read (or who’d like to try) transgressive homoerotica, take a look at the short story “Amadan na Briana”  by Sessha Batto, which I discuss on another blog, here: https://gaylitauthors.wordpress.com/review-sex-ray-specs-by-sessha-batto/  Her brilliant work brings the ancient mythos into sharp modern (and mythic) focus.

This image of a squatting Cernunos with his torq, dark as it is, may be the best representation of the archetype that lurks in our collective psyche.

Man marries beast. Pan and his tansmutations are, for me, a reflection of our deepest fantasies. Through the centuries Pan has merged with Cervus/Cernunnos who has merged with an archetype we can clearly see in dreams but cannot put a finger on. Jung was right—such mythic images ride wild in the ganglia of all our brains, facets of our human nature.

*My own tale of Stag Heart deviates from the mythopoeic. I keep the sensuality but couple it with a kind of wild innocence in the form of a young Scottish man. His name Oisean is itself taken from a Celtic myth about a boy disguised as a fawn.

My own mashup of a man and a forest, in which the tree trunks become “horns.”

For readers of M/M romance-adventure, my books are:

The Iron Warrior (specifically Warrior, Come Again)

http://amzn.to/2n3sTgh

Stag Heart

Kindle US https://is.gd/G6elnN