Úna Ní Dhálaigh

Úna Ní Dhálaigh is Mairéad Ní Dhálaigh's daughter, a child of the holding below the tree line at one of Tír na nÓg's two Conjunction sites, in the Celtic Union. The record does not give her age. It meets her once, in the autumn of 2826 UCSD, on a Conjunction night it does not date: told bed, she went, which was not every night, and the shutter on her room stayed as she had been told it would, a hand's width, and the moon came in the gap and put a white bar across the ceiling that did not move. She was nearly asleep when the ceiling round it began to come up. In the morning the ceiling was the ceiling, and she looked at it for a while anyway. The record renders her as she.

Known History

• A child of the holding in 2826 UCSD, the one season the record holds her at. Her mother keeps the holding, which was her grandmother's. Whether she has seen a Conjunction night before this one, the record does not say.
• Autumn 2826 UCSD: the white bar of the moon on the ceiling, which she knew. Then the ceiling round it coming up, warmer than the moon's white and with no bar to it, lying over the whole ceiling at once and moving slowly, the way the light off the river moves on the underside of the bridge in the afternoon, except that the river is below the house and this came from the top field, which has no water in it. It breathed. Somebody was humming, a long way off, with the mouth closed, one note, and when the note went up the ceiling went up with it. She thought about getting up and did not. It went the way it came, down into the white bar, and the white bar was the moon, and the moon was ordinary. Then the front door, her mother's step, words said quietly to nobody, and the step going to the bed and not to her room, which meant she was supposed to be asleep. She was, soon. See Before the Close (S01E00C13).
• The morning after: Were they there? over the bowl, in the plain way she asks where the dog is, and The moon was. She considered it. I saw the ceiling. So did I, once.

The Work

A child's part of the custom is the part done without being told what it is. She goes to bed when she is told, on that night if not on every night. She leaves the shutter as it was left. And she stays where she is. The window was right there and the shutter was a hand open and she could have put her eye to it, and she had been asked not to, not in words, in the way the shutter had been left and the way her mother had said bed, and she lay and looked at the ceiling instead. The ceiling was enough. The record has it as the best thing she had seen on a ceiling, and has her sorry when it started to go.

She knows the moon, the river below the house and the bridge the afternoon light moves under, the top field and that it has no water in it, and that a step going to the bed and not to her room means she is supposed to be asleep.

Character Notes

She reads an asking that is not in words and keeps to it, and the record offers no reason for her beyond the shutter and the one word. She asks a plain question plainly, the way she asks where the dog is, and takes a plain answer, and considers it before she says what she has to say back, which is what she saw and not what she wanted to know. What she saw was a ceiling, and she says so, and it is enough to be answered with once. The record has her in one posture: on her back in the dark, looking up.

What the Record Does Not Hold

Her age, which the record leaves at a child; that her mother worked out the shutter at about the age Úna was now sets Mairéad's age then beside Úna's now and gives neither in years. Her birth year and what she looks like. Her father, and whether she has brothers or sisters. Whether she had seen the ceiling come up before that night, and whether she will one day stand at the gate. Whether she knows the words her mother says at the door. The dog's name. Any chapter after the morning she looked at the ceiling anyway.

See also

• Before the Close (S01E00C13), the ceiling, the humming and the morning after, in her viewpoint and her mother's
• Mairéad Ní Dhálaigh, her mother, who kept the gate
• Tír Tairngire: The Harmonic Membrane, the window whose light reached a ceiling
• Luminescent Ethereal Beings, the light and the voice that lights it
• Tír na nÓg, the moon that put a white bar on the ceiling