The Salmon of Knowledge

13 min read · Celtic romance · Free, complete, 18+

The man in the well field was barefoot, it was the last week of November, and he had a salmon the length of Eithne Gallagher’s arm in a net of plaited rushes.

She held the torch on him from the gate. Eleven at night, a hard frost coming down on Carbury Hill, the ruined castle on top of it black against the stars, and the whitethorn over the well hung with the rags pilgrims tied there, gone stiff as card in the cold. He was kneeling where the young Boyne left the stone basin of Trinity Well, a stream you could step across, and he was holding the net down in the water so the fish could breathe.

“Put it back,” she said.

He looked up into the light without squinting. Grey hair cut short, a long weathered face, a coat that had been a good coat a long time ago. His feet were in the water to the ankle and he did not seem to know it.

“Good evening,” he said. “You’ll be the keeper.”

“I’ll be the woman ringing the fisheries board. That’s a wild salmon in the closed season and you’re kneeling in a holy well.”

“Beside it. I’ve been careful.” He had. The cup on its chain was where she had left it, and nothing on the thorn was disturbed. “I’ll let her go the moment you tell me to. I’d only ask you to look at her first.”

Eithne came down the field with the frost cracking under her boots and looked. A hen fish, dark with the season, her belly slack: she had already cut her nest in the gravel and spawned. Along her flank ran the dark spots every salmon carries. Eithne counted them because her mother had taught her to count them, the way other mothers taught times tables. Nine.

One spot for every hazelnut, the old women said. Nine hazels had stood round this well when it was called Segais, and their nuts fell into the water, and the salmon that ate them knew everything there was to know.

She was forty-one. She had kept this well for nine years, since her mother died, and her mother for thirty-one before that, and every Gallagher woman had said the same seven words over it on the night she took it on. Nothing goes from the source but water.

“Let her go,” she said.

He opened the net at once. The salmon lay still in the shallows, then turned and went up into the basin and settled over the gravel where the spring came up, as though she had been born there. She probably had.

“Thank you.” He stood, and the water ran off his feet onto the frost, and he did not so much as shift his weight. “My name is Finegas. I’ll be on your wall, if that suits. I’ll not touch her without your word.”

Every child in Ireland knew that name. Eithne had learned it in junior infants, from a felt salmon on a felt board.

“Finegas the poet,” she said. “With the burnt thumb.”

“The thumb was never mine,” he said. “That was the whole trouble.”

---

Linn Féic

He would not come up to the house. He could not, he said: the river held him within a stone’s throw of its water, and her kitchen was a long throw. So on the second night she brought the soup down to the wall in a flask, and a blanket he did not use, and sat on the cold capstones an arm’s length from him while he told it.

“I had a pool on the Boyne,” he said, “down below the mound at Newgrange. Linn Féic. There was a salmon in it that had eaten the nine hazelnuts of Segais, and it was foretold that Finn would eat her, and after that there would be nothing Finn did not know.” He turned the cup of the flask in his hands. “My name was Finn. Finn Éces, Finn the poet. You’d not credit how sure a man can be of a prophecy with his own name in it.”

“Seven years,” Eithne said. She knew this part from the felt board.

“Seven years. And the summer I caught her I had a boy with me, learning his verses. Deimne, his name was. I gave him the fish to cook and told him not to eat a scrap of it. He brought her to me on a hazel spit with his thumb in his mouth. A blister had come up on the skin while she cooked, and he had pressed it down and scalded himself, and put the thumb in his mouth. The way anybody would.”

“And you asked him had he eaten any.”

“I asked him had he eaten any, and he said no, only the thumb. So I asked him his name. Deimne, he said. But the lads called him Finn, for his fair hair.” Finegas watched the black water going away down the field. “I gave him the whole fish. It was his. The prophecy had never meant me at all.”

The boy grew up to be Fionn mac Cumhaill, and whenever he wanted to know a thing after that he put his thumb in his mouth, and knew it. That was where the felt-board story ended.

“What the manuscripts haven’t got is the geis. Before the seven years I laid one on myself. I was forty, and a poet, and poets did that when they wanted the world to take them seriously. That I would not leave the Boyne until the salmon of Segais had passed my lips.” He drank the soup. “Then I gave her to a boy with a burnt thumb. And here I am.”

He had been, by his own account, a ferryman at Oldbridge, a ghillie to three big houses, a lock-keeper on the Boyne Navigation and, briefly, a monk at Bective, which had suited neither him nor the monks. He did not feel the cold. He did not sleep much. He had watched for her in every pool from the sea at Drogheda up to here, because salmon go home to spawn in the gravel they were born in, and this one had been born in the well, and it had taken him this long to work out where home was.

“I’m not giving you that fish,” Eithne said.

“I know. Tell me why. Not the seven words. The why.”

So she told him about Boann. How this was Nechtan’s well once, and nobody might go near it but Nechtan and his three cupbearers; how Boann, who was Nechtan’s wife, walked round it three times the wrong way to show it she was not afraid. How the water came up out of the stone and took her eye and her hand and her thigh, and chased her all the way to the sea, and drowned her there, and kept her name. That was the Boyne. Every yard of it was a woman running.

“The water takes what’s taken from it,” she said. “That’s the why.”

She knelt and cleared the leaves out of the basin with her bare hand. The water was warm to her as a bath. It always had been. Gallagher water, her mother had called it: cold as November to anyone else, warm to the keeper.

Finegas watched her hand in the well.

“And you,” he said. “What does it keep you to?”

She had not meant to answer. A keeper slept every night of her life within sound of the spring. Her mother had never once spent a night away from it in thirty-one years, not for a wedding, not for the hospital at the end. Eithne drove the school bus because the route was eleven miles long and never took her out of sight of the hill.

“So we’re both on a lead,” Finegas said.

She told him to mind his own business, and he laughed, a real laugh with surprise in it, and the salmon turned once in the well at the sound.

---

The Keeper’s Oath

He was on the wall the third night, and the fourth. He corrected her Irish, which nobody had dared since school, and he was right. He made her a quatrain about the school bus, in the old metre, that she pretended not to like and said over to herself the next morning on the Broadford road.

On the fourth night the frost was so hard the stars seemed nailed in place, and she was sitting nearer than an arm’s length.

“I want to kiss you,” he said. “You can say no, and I’ll still be on this wall tomorrow, saying nothing about it.”

“That’d be a first.”

“It would.” He waited.

“Yes,” she said.

His mouth was warm, which she had not expected, and he kissed her slowly, the way a man fishes a pool he knows. She put her hand flat on his chest to feel whether a heart went on in there at all. It did, fast. She was glad of that.

When they drew apart she kept her hand where it was and asked what she had not asked in four nights.

“What happens to you? If you eat her.”

He was quiet long enough that she knew before he spoke.

“I don’t know,” he said. “The geis breaks. After that I don’t know. You’ll have heard of the boy’s own son, who went to the Land of Youth and came home after three hundred years, and leaned from his horse, and fell, and the moment he touched the ground the three hundred years came down on him all at once.” His voice did not change. “It might be like that.”

“Seventeen hundred years.”

“It might be.”

She took her hand back. “You were going to let me break my oath and kill you with it.”

“I was going to tell you before you lifted her. I wanted you to decide about the oath first. And about me after.”

“And if it comes out wrong, I’m left in a field with an old man’s bones.”

“Yes,” he said. “That’s the truth of it. I’d still take it. I would rather all of it fell on me in your field than live one more year on that bank.” He stood up off the wall. “I’ll go down to Linn Féic. It’s a night and a day on foot, and that suits me. You’ll not decide anything fairly with me sat here like a heron, watching your well.”

“Don’t you dare go for my sake.”

“I’m going for mine. I want whatever you decide to be yours.”

He went down the field in the starlight, barefoot, following the stream, and the dark took him at the first bend.

The fifth night the wall was empty.

She sat with the keeper’s book on her knees in the kitchen. It was a ledger from the creamery, half a century old, and every keeper had written one line in it every night: the date, and the state of the water. Her grandmother’s hand, then her mother’s, then her own. Thirty-one years of her mother’s small upright writing, and every line said the same.

Water clear.

That was her mother’s life, as far as the book was concerned. Eleven thousand nights of the water being clear and nobody taking anything. Eithne turned back through it and could not find a single line where her mother had wanted something and been allowed it.

At midnight she wrote the date and, under it: Salmon taken. E. Gallagher.

Then she went down to the well with the landing net and the priest from her father’s tackle box, and knelt on the stone, and lifted the spent salmon out of the source.

The water rose.

It came up out of the basin silently, as if the hill had breathed in. It ran over the lip of the stone and round her knees and across the field in a sheet that took the starlight, and she stood in it with the fish against her chest and did not run, and thought of Boann’s eye and Boann’s hand, and waited to find out which.

It fell back. It went down into the stone as quietly as it had come and left the grass glittering.

She looked at her hands. Both there. She blinked, and saw the thorn, the cup, the castle on the hill. Then she put her hand into the well, and it was cold.

Only cold. November water, the same as for anyone. Three keepers in the book and nobody knew how many before it, and she was the one who had ended it.

She knelt there until her fingers ached, and then she did what her father had taught her on the Blackwater, quickly, with the priest, and broke three or four of the fisheries regulations along with her oath.

---

The Burnt Thumb

It was an hour and a half down the valley in the old car, through Trim and Navan and Slane, the salmon in a cool box on the passenger seat. She parked at Rosnaree in a gateway and walked the last field with the box in her arms and a bundle of hazel sticks from her own hedge, because nothing else from the well field was hers to take.

He was on the bank below the mound, where she had known he would be. He heard her and stood, and saw the box, and his face went still.

“What did it take?”

“The warm,” she said. “That’s all. It’s just water now, to me.”

He took the box out of her arms and set it down, and held her by both shoulders and searched her eyes, her hands, as she had searched herself in the field.

“Your mother’s well,” he said.

“My well. I decided.” She knelt and started breaking hazel. “Make yourself useful. You’ve had seventeen hundred years to learn to light a fire.”

He lit it. She cleaned the fish with her own knife and put her on a hazel spit, the way the boy had done at this same pool, and turned her over the flames while the river went past in the dark below Newgrange. Finegas sat on his heels across the fire and did not take his eyes off her.

The skin crackled. A blister rose on it, glossy, the size of a fingernail.

She pressed it down with her thumb.

The pain was bright and particular, exactly what it was supposed to be. She drew her hand back and every nerve she had told her to put the thumb in her mouth, the way anybody would.

“Do it,” Finegas said. He had not moved from his heels, but his hands were fists on his knees. “Eithne. You’ll know whether I live.”

She pushed her thumb into the frost on the grass instead and held it there.

“I don’t want to know,” she said. “I want to find out.”

She gave him the fish on the lid of the cool box. He ate, skin and all, with his eyes closed.

“Well?”

He opened his eyes. “It tastes of salmon,” he said, and she laughed so hard she had to sit down in the frosted grass.

The knowledge had gone into the burn, as it went into the boy’s. Of course it had. It had never once gone to the person who wanted it.

He finished it. Then he stood and held out his hand, and she got up and took it, and they walked up the bank away from the river. Ten yards. Twenty. She knew where the stone’s throw ended because he stopped there, at a tussock no different from any other, and his hand closed hard on hers.

“Together,” she said.

He stepped over.

She watched his face, his hair, his hands. Nothing came down on him. He stood in the field above Linn Féic with his eyes shut and the stars over him and was, as far as she could tell, the same man.

“I was here for every one of those years,” he said. “All of them, as they came. There’s nothing owed.” Then his eyes opened wide and he looked down at his bare feet in the frost.

“Eithne.” He sounded astonished. “That’s cold.”

She kissed him in the middle of the field, both hands in his coat, and he kissed her as if he were learning how, and his feet were freezing and he kept saying so.

In the car she put the heater on full and pointed every vent at his feet.

“Come home with me,” she said, at the Navan roundabout. “Not to the wall. Into the house. Into my bed, if you want it, and if you don’t, there’s the couch and nobody will mind.”

“I’ve said no to everything but one fish for seventeen hundred years,” Finegas said. “Yes. Into the house. Into your bed.”

The kitchen was warm. He stood at the range with his hands spread over it and his eyes shut, like a man listening to music. Upstairs she undressed him slowly, button by button of the old coat, and he let her, and when he laid her down and asked, at every step, if she wanted the next one, she said yes each time and meant it. His feet were like ice against her calves, and she swore at him, and he laughed into her shoulder until she pulled him closer.

Near dawn she lay awake. The spring ran on at the bottom of the field, as it had every night of her life, and she was not listening to it. She was listening to him breathe, and to the range ticking as it cooled.

Under the blister on her thumb lay all the knowledge in the world. She let it heal.