“Where are my brothers?” I asked, attempting to pull myself up.
“Your brothers are safe. They sleep by the fire in the hall.”
“May I sleep with them?”
He sighed and placed the cloth in the bowl.
“I have been a poor brother,” he confessed. “Especially to one who has endured the same father all these years.”
“What of our father?” I asked, tears coming quick to my eyes, for my pain was both of the flesh and the heart. I had loved my father fiercely, and I did not care for the way Manannán spoke. At this, he raised his face, his hood falling back to reveal those glowing blue eyes. I understood myself to be in the presence of a god, and drew back, afraid.
“I do not wish to argue with you. I offer my sympathies, do not throw them back in my face.” I nodded. “I would have brought you here sooner, only my wife refuses all female company, and I would not allow her to send for the boys whilst you lay abandoned on the rocks. You have mothered them through all of this, and it is time you were mothered yourself. As Fand will not, I must.”
“Why does she hate me so?”
“She does not hate you, no more than she hates any of your sex. She was betrayed many years ago by her own flesh and blood, and now she trusts no one. Yet she is no demon, she does feel. When I showed her your suffering each night in the fire, she relented. You have her to thank for your food and mead, for she sent the selkie. Each full moon you may come here. We will carve the map upon the rocks of Carraig na Ron, and when the light hits it full and bright, it will show you the way to my door. You may dance as children for an hour or two, eat from my table and warm yourselves by my fire.”
“Only for an hour or two?”
“Fionnuala, you are not in the land of the living anymore. Your enchantment is broken only because you stand so close to death. The games of the mortal world above have no place in Tír fo Thuinn. If you stay longer, you will never be able to return.”
“What is wrong in that? Better here for an eternity, dry and comforted, than suffering above, stuck by my skin to the rocks.”
“Aye,” he smiled. “If that be your fate, I’d agree.” He glanced down and began to bandage my feet with strips of clean cloth.
“Is there something I do not know?”
“Nothing I care to speak of,” he replied.
I was too tired to question further. My eyes closed and I slept for a long time. When eventually I woke, he was gone.
Aodh
I do not know how long it took for our wounds to heal, yet it was with heavy heart we returned to the surface. My brothers struggled against it, screaming and crying, clutching at anything they could take hold of. Though it was no use, we each had to enter the fire in our turn, to find ourselves once again as swans.
When we returned to the world above, we found the rocks of our shabby island were deeply grooved, covered in swirls and spirals like those of the druid’s cave Sorcha had once shown us. We made a game of it, tracing the patterns with our beaks. Losing, should our beaks travel the same course and touch.
Come the full moon, the silver of its light flooded those grooves and the pattern began to glow. Where it reflected on the water below, it created wide, rippling circles. Without being told, we knew that we should dive deep beneath those circles. In so doing, we entered Tír fo Thuinn, up through the fireplace and onto the floor, spluttering and wet in our childhood forms.
There was always a pile of dry clothes beside the hearth, and plates of every ocean delicacy on the long driftwood table that stood in shadow, lit by the glow of jellyfish who floated above as though in water. There was something beautiful about my brother’s home, despite its desolation. When I remembered the great festivals of Sidh-ar-Femhin, and the splendour of the Feast of Age, I truly pitied Manannán, for he had a caiseal more striking than any I had seen on land, yet no one would ever visit.
Fand came to tell us stories some nights, wrapping us in blankets after we had eaten and lying there on the rug beside us. Her stories were never as exciting as Sorcha’s had been, they were always about lovers rather than heroes, and they always had a happy ending, but she could conjure images in the flames more intricate than anything Sorcha had pulled from the shadows. In time, my brother’s wife even seemed to soften to Fin. She ceased to look upon her with suspicion and began to talk to her as a daughter.
We lived for those nights by their hearth. It was our only respite from the wind and the biting cold. Our time on Sruth na Maoile was worse by far than anything we had endured on Loch Dairbhreach. Had it not been for our brother of salt-blood, it would have been worse still. We may only have spent a few hours of each full moon there, yet when we returned it seemed as though several days had passed. Time itself moved differently beneath the tide, and for that we were grateful.
Like Fin, I had once asked Manannán why we could not stay forever at his caiseal. I did not understand, in a hall of a hundred rooms, why there would be no space for us. Perhaps because I was almost a man, he answered me better than my sister. We were alone by the fire whilst they feasted at table.
“If it were my choice, Aodh, I would keep you here and raise you as my own—”
“Is it Fand?” I asked. “Does she still not trust my sister?”
“No,” he said, giving the rarest of smiles. “Would that it were only a woman’s scorn. That, I might manage.” I saw the reluctance in his eyes, and told him that there was little he could say more terrible than the curse I already bore. “Aye, perhaps. Though it is not something I care to speak of to anyone. There’s a prophecy Bé Chuille tells.”
“A shadow rising in place of the sun?”
He looked pained.
“It has already begun, child. The world that we have known is coming to an end.”
“I do not understand,” I said. “Where better to hide than here, beneath the sea?”
“The walls of my caiseal weaken, brother. Tales be true, it would seem you are destined to outlive us all.”
I told my sister of this when we returned to the rock, for we kept no secrets. Though we did not tell the twins. They had grown wise over time, but not old. They would have been as afraid as us, yet not have been able to control their fear. It was enough they cried from the cold, there was no kindness in scaring them with our stories.
I was about to ask my sister whether she thought our father still lived, when the look in her eye caused me to follow. There, on the horizon, I saw a sight that curdled my heart. It was a sight we had seen once before, many years past. The clouds were building quickly into a tower of twisting black tendrils, eclipsing the light of the sun. Waves broiled, smashing themselves upon the rocks and rising higher until they met our feet.
It scared me to see the terror in my sister’s eyes, she who had protected us and given us strength all those many long nights. I thought on how different our world might have been had we lived our natural lives. I would have become a warrior, riding proud alongside Caílte, able to protect Fionnuala with a sword in one hand and a spear in the other. She would have feared nothing.
Thinking on that brought me strength.
As the storm approached, it was I who spread my wings, sheltering my brothers beneath them and Fin at my breast.
Bé Chuille
Carraig na Ron was soon eclipsed by sea spray, my old eyes unable to pick out its form. A dozen lapwings skimmed the cresting foam of tumultuous waves as they fled for the safety of Reachlainn.
“Please, please…”
The voice had woken me from my dreamless sleep, and I knew that Aoife had returned for the children. “Please, please…” she cried, over and over. Please, what? I wondered. Please take away my pain? Please forgive me? Please love me?
By the time I slid down the rocks, the shore was already dark, a maelstrom of bruised clouds suffocating those below.
“She cannot kill them,” a voice came beside me.
I looked across to see a great white bird melt into the form of my sister.
“Aye,” I replied. “But she will make them long for death.”
We sat for a time, watching the weather worsen.
“Those are your husband’s kin, and it is for your sake they take this form. Why not shelter them?” I asked.
“In truth, many reasons.”
“The girl is no threat to your sons. They flew many years past.” Fand flinched at this, eyes narrowing. “Your husband is a lecher, but he would not touch his own sister if that is what you fear.”
“Enough!” she said. “Do not push yourself, sister. I have come to my end here, as have we all.”
“All but they,” I said, wiping mist from my face. “Is that what troubles you, the prophecy?”
“You know it is more than that. Even as a child your dreams were never wrong. You and Dianann saw things I never could. For all the looking, I saw the lies and you the truth.”
“I would have preferred the lies, I think.” Fand almost smiled. “The gods grow weak and run to the hills. I have seen it, I can feel it. Far to the East an army rises, their ships scratching the surface of the waves like cat claws. Village after village, town after town, falls before them. They are headed this way, and when they arrive there will be no Tuatha Dé Danann left to turn them back.”
“Oh, how the Fomori weep,” she said with sarcasm. “Would that we were girls again, soft-sleeping amidst the leaves of the forest, with deer and wolf and bear as our companions.”
“It was a good life, was it not?”
She turned her eyes – my own eyes – upon me, and I saw there the devastation of the years.
“What remains of your life, sister?” she asked.
I had thought on this many nights. “A warm bed, a comfortable fire, food brought by the Fir Bolg whenever I am hungry, in return for the plants and the prayers I can offer.”
“A cunning woman, less cunning in life than in love.”
I spat towards her.
“Love is love. It requires no cunning.”
A clap of thunder rolled across the sky, and far out to sea lightning struck.
“I cannot undo it,” Fand said, suddenly flushed with worry. “Cú Chulainn does not live, and She does not forgive. I know that it is my fault, but I know not what to do.”
“Would you save the children if you could?”
“Of course! They are but babes.”
“They are older than some gods.”
“Aye, but no wiser. They haven’t grown a day since the spell was cast.”
I thought on this hard, for Gaidiar had not grown a day since taking his own life. I felt all of my sister’s guilt and more for that. Sometimes Wave Sweeper haunted my dreams. Manannán sat to one side, his son on the other, as he floated him through the gates of Tír na nÓg. How he had not killed me for that, I could not say. Had I been a mother, my hand would not have stayed.
“You weren’t to know,” I said. The first kind words that had passed between us since she took my godhood.
“Had I your insight, I might have done.”
“It does not work that way. If it did, I should never have…”
I could not finish the sentence, yet we both knew what I meant.
The wind screamed above us, blowing a thousand leaves over the cliff and out to sea. When I saw them, I flicked my wrist and they transformed into an army on horseback, galloping towards the waves as though charging down their foe.
“She has won, you know,” my sister said. “Through her jealousy and her cruelty, through her disregard for others, she has won. Long after we are dead they will remember her.”
“Hush now, enough talk of death.”
“It is true, though. They will not remember the love Cú Chulainn and I shared, the comfort we found in one another. Neither will they remember Emer, her loyalty and how hard she fought beside her husband. All they will remember is Her. How she set against him, how she pursued him and how he refused her. How she took her revenge. People only remember the fierce stories.”
I stood then, wind ripping through my clothes, spreading them like banners about my rigid frame.
“Then I have one fierce story left for the telling.”
My end of days was already upon me. Whilst the Men of Dea were destined to slip quietly to the shadowlands, I knew that I would not live to join them.
“I am Bé Chuille,” I declared to the wind. “Witch of Lámhfada. I won the wars for the Tuatha Dé Danann. I vanquished the She Devil of Athens and all of her sons. Though I am mortal, my magic holds strong, and I refuse to be forgotten.”
With that the wind turned. It wrapped my hair about my neck like a noose, fists of air forcing their way into my throat until I could hardly breathe. I laughed in my discomfort. I heard my sister begin to chant beside me, her tongue curling around ancient words, a language older than the rocks.
“Take my form, sister,” Fand said, reaching out and holding my hand. I was startled to feel her skin against mine. It had been so many years. As our eyes met, I saw the faintest of smiles on her lips. The colour faded from her as my fingers turned to feathers. “When you are ready, reach down.”
As a giant gull, I took to the sky and raced towards those thunderous clouds. The waves below were as high as ships, endlessly rocking and capsizing. Sea spray blinded me until I knew my way by the strength of the wind pushing against me. My wings screamed for rest, yet I could not.
“Aoife!” I cried out, gaining height. “Aoife!”
She did not answer, and when I was high enough to escape the waves, I opened my eyes and saw why. There, far down below, a figure formed and reformed in the clouds. A twisted figure with streaming hair and outstretched arms. At the tip of its fingers was a single swan, caught, as I had been, against the wind.
From that distance, I could not tell which of the children it was, yet I could guess.
“Please, please…” the squall wailed, over and over.
As I began to dive, she sensed me. Her face turned upwards, trails of cloud caught in her swift movement, forming a hurricane of anger. Fear gripped as that great, inhuman mouth opened to swallow me.
Pain and rage, black and red.
My skin burnt, the thoughts in my head curling like lit parchment, turning to ash, rising like smoke. When, at last, I drew breath, I stood a thousand feet tall, my hand around Aoife’s neck, slamming her against the wind.
“Let him go!” I screamed, saltwater saliva dripping from my jaw.
I felt the power of the ages course through me.
“Please, please…” she cried, her eyes wide and black, sucking in all that she saw. “Please, please…”
“No more please,” I spoke in her ear, tightening my grip.
She dissolved into rain and fell through my fingers.
Cursing, I cast about and found Aodh. Free of Aoife’s grip, he had flown for the blue skies above, wild with panic.
I took him in my hand and brought him gently to my lips.
“Don’t fear, child. I have fought far worse and won.”
“Behind!” he cried, taking flight.
As I turned, Aoife took shape: a woman a hundred times taller than she had been in life, her body a mass of cloud, a tempest that never stilled. She tailed out toward Reachlainn, the waves like hands, reaching up to touch her.
“The boy is mine!” she screamed.
“The boy is his own,” I said, bracing myself against her.
As she came upon me, I reached down to the depths of the ocean and clasped my hand around Fragarach. Feeling the force of Mother Danu pulse through its blade, I thrust it beneath Aoife’s ribcage.
Her scream felled birds from the sky. It shattered the rocks of Carraig na Ron and sent the Fir Bolg running for the hills. Yet still I held the blade tight, pushing deeper as she clung to me.
“It was not your fault,” I whispered. “You loved a man who loved another.”
As I held Aoife in her death throes, the thick scent of carrion assaulted me.
In my compassion, I did not
feel Aoife raise her arm. I could not see as she took her mighty fang in one fist and broke it free of her gum. I only felt it, as she drove that spear of ice through my back; through my heart.
Thrusting away, I wheeled Fragarach in a great arc and took off her head.
*
The waves fell, the wind fell.
Aoife scattered as sleet to the black waters below.
The clouds began to part and the sun shone through. I reached and clasped, but the spear had melted away. I could not remove it. I could not close my wound. Fragarach dropped to the depths as I began to shrink. For a moment, my hand clasped the whole of Carraig na Ron, then a clump of seaweed the next. My life drained thick about me and each breath became a struggle.
“Don’t move,” Aodh said, spreading his blood-stained wing across my chest to hide the wound. “It won’t be long and your kin will come for you.”
“Aye,” I said, crimson spit upon my lips. “They’ll come for me in a boat with blue eyes.”
“Better those who love you than a stranger.”
“Those who once loved me have become strangers of late.”
“Those who know each other well enough to hate, have never truly stopped loving.”
I smiled at this, rolling my head so that my lungs might empty of blood. Even though we know we are dying, we fight every last moment for life.
“Thank you Bé Chuille,” he said. “You have saved us from Aoife’s cruelty.”
“I am glad.” I reached to touch his cheek with the last of my strength. “Perhaps one day, when the curse is lifted, you would be good enough to tell the bards with their harps and their flutes. Tell them of the sacrifice I made. See that my name is not forgotten.”
I closed my eyes and felt a strong hand pull me to my feet.
“Don’t look back,” a voice said, thick as the rolling tide.
I followed Manannán to the boat, where my sister sat. She wore a veil white as saltwater, yet thin enough that I could see her dark eyes beneath.
The Children of Lir Page 24