Dr. Rookwood and the High King of Ireland

Two Years Ago, Inis Mór, Ireland

"Water?"

Josiah looked up and smiled briefly before glancing around nervously. "Trying to get me tossed over the cliff?"

Annabell laughed and leaned back against the low wall, providing the labouring linguist some much-desired shade. "I won't tattle." Her voice was heavily accented - not the dialectical English of her mainland counterparts, but actually accented by her native tongue. One of the handful of people in the whole country for whom her mother tongue was her first language. "Do you really think they'd send you to the mainland?"

Josiah shrugged. "I don't really want to risk it." He squinted in the sun and made some notes in a notebook that was falling apart at the seams. She slid down the wall to sit beside him in the grass.

"Doesn't it hurt your head to think all day as Gaeilge?"

"Does it hurt yours to think in English?" He brushed away a little more dirt to expose a bit more of the wall text.

"No," she sighed. "But I grew up with it. It's harder if you didn't."

Josiah frowned and blew out a breath. "Tá a fhios agam." She was practically quoting him. "I think this is a fairy tale, here," he said, changing the subject and gesturing to the wall. "Do you
recognise any of this?"

She took the notebook from him and glanced over the page. "Some words. It's old," she murmured. "Macha? She's the..."

"Horse goddess," Josiah finished for her when she didn't remember, peering at his notebook upside down. "I think she's the Irish cognate for the Greek Demeter Melaine. The king of Ireland was supposed to mate with her and then ... bathe in her blood to claim kingship." He
made a face, and she laughed at him. "Demeter Melaine had the head of a horse, and the concept of Demeter in general has a lot to do with rebirth and things." After a pause, he added, "If I'm right, it makes her a cognate of Isis, as well."

"You don't sound certain."

Josiah looked at her, shading his eyes with a hand. "I'm not certain."

"But you /are/ thirsty." She waggled a little thermos.

"Oh." He grinned sheepishly at her. "Yeah."

"And you missed lunch."

"Oh." He looked at his watch.

"It was three hours ago."

"Oops." No wonder he'd felt snippy. "She actually /is/ the land. That's where I keep getting hung up."

Annabell frowned. "What?"

"Macha. She /is/ Ireland. The king mates with Ireland, to... conquer her? So that he can protect her as her ruler?" He knitted his brows thoughtfully at the stone slab wall.

Annabell pursed her lips. "Mr Rookwood."

"That doesn't annoy me," he replied without looking away from the wall. It'd been a year since he'd replaced the "mister", so while it didn't annoy him, the fact that she /thought/ it'd annoy him just embarrassed him, because he himself couldn't yet say "Doctor Rookwood" without going all pink and mumbly about it. "It would make sense, though."

"That you're a mister?"

Josiah quirked a brow at her in confusion. "What? Oh. No. That in a society where women are still regarded as something to be possessed and protected, the king should possess his land in order to protect it..."

"So why are you getting hung up on it?"

"Because while Demeter protected the land, 'the bringer of seasons,' she wasn't the land itself. And whenever a man crossed her," he continued thoughtfully, brushing away more debris. "She..."

Annabell frowned and followed his gaze, but she didn't see the big deal. "What?"

He didn't look at her, only gently pulled his notebook from her uninterested fingers. He mumbled under his breath for a few minutes as she creased her brow, doing calculations using his own historical transformational rules. "Conas a dearfá..." He glanced up at the wall. "Conas a dearfá 'scaith,' as Béarla?"

Annabell blinked. "Scaith? Nothing. Do you mean... 'scaipthe?'"

The linguist wrinkled his nose. "What's that mean?" he murmured, running a pencil through his rule set again.

She shrugged. "Scattered."

"She made them.. scattered? That can't be right..."

Annabel sighed and shifted so she was leaning back against the wall again. He did this. He was such a kind, gentle guy, but when he got entrenched, he forgot anyone else was around. So detached.

"Oh."

She looked at him askance. "Not 'scaipthe?'"

"Not even 'scaith,'" he replied, correcting a couple of rules in the algorithm. He looked between his notes and the wall to translate the past into the present, step by step. "What's 'sc... scrio...s?'" He petered out, once he'd figured out just what he'd figured out. But it didn't fit. She didn't... He looked up at Annabell. "Conas a dearfá 'scrios,' as Béarla?" She didn't answer him right away, just looked surprised. "Ta Béarla 'destroy,' isn't it. She destroyed them."

Annabell nodded. "I thought you said she was the bringer of seasons."

"Ah, no," he murmured distractedly. "That's Demeter. This story here is about Macha... Demeter was nasty if you crossed her. Macha, though." It didn't fit. The horse goddess should have been the compliant, willing sacrifice to ensure Ireland's safety under a king. She wasn't supposed to have any other volition but to protect her soil. Of course, there /was/ the issue of the fifty some rock slabs in the western shore that'd been cut out but never hauled off. Someone stopped right in the middle of it, and no one really knew why. Macha? Someone pissed her off? That was silly. She was just a myth.

Josiah shook his head. "I think I'm hungry now," he said.

"Ah, ah," Annabell chided. "Gotta make up for all of that illegal English. En francais, sil vous plait."

Josiah rolled his eyes. "Tá ... ocras orm," he said, feigning heavy thought about it. "Was that right?" He blinked innocently.

"Yes. You get a cookie. Now hush up. You don't want to get thrown off the island, do you?"