Tale on a Parchment

As guest professors for one year at an English university, married couple Tara and Alex are delighted to find that shortly after arriving they are invited to a newly discovered seventh century dig site in the northwest corner of England. The site reveals some finds which require Alex's knowledge of dead and extinct Celtic languages and Tara's ability to interpret artefacts. The most exciting of the finds is a manuscript written in long-extinct and elusive Cumbric, a language which died out a thousand years ago and has little evidence surviving into the twenty-first century...until now. Alex begins the task of translation and finds that it is a learned monk telling his story of a most unusual person he tutored for many years in Ireland, teaching her from when she was a girl until she was a young woman. Sometimes at night Alex reads aloud to Tara what he has translated that day, and as she listens, she sometimes falls asleep...and as she sleeps, she dreams and remembers...and then we are pulled into that dreaming and remembering, and we come to know the story of Macha as the special child, the "old soul," and the wise and striking young woman who remembers much of the past and speaks to the wind in the forest. Almost all of Macha's story is based on historical facts, from the territory in which she was born and raised, to many of the people and events she encounters and the cultural environments in which she finds herself. And from Macha's tragedies to her golden moments, from loss to love and loss again, it becomes clear that people are not so different now from what they were in the past, and indeed there is much to learn from their own stories. As we read Macha's story and dream Tara's dream, we see how Tara's carries some of those memories into her waking life, and she begins to realize they are more than just dreams.