“What is wrong?” Aodh asked one evening, as I floated along beneath the stars.
“You would not understand,” I told him.
“I see the way you look at Aednat now that she is a woman,” he said. “You think I did not harbour dreams of my own?”
“Women’s bodies are different to men’s, she is old enough to bear children of her own now.”
He softly nuzzled his head beneath my beak.
“Oh, sweet sister. Do you not remember our time on Loch Dairbhreach? Those days I watched as my childhood friend grew tall and strong? As his chin became rough with stubble and his arms able to wield both sword and shield together?”
“How you must have envied him,” I replied.
“No. How I loved him.”
“I am sorry.”
“Love and envy, it is a similar sort of sadness. But, oh, how low we have come to pity one another for feeling.”
And he was right, for to feel was to inflict pain upon ourselves. Every joy and pleasure was fleeting. The nights were always longer than the days. The things we delighted in: the flowers of spring, the lambs and the chicks, they all grew old and eventually died. To love anything was only to delay our sorrows, and to cause our wounds to bleed worse for the waiting.
These Fir Domnann were not like the tribes of the River Goddess. They did not live nearly so long. Hundreds would come to be born, and die, within a single Danann lifetime.
Indeed, we saw many do so.
Aednat
It was my fifteenth spring when Uaine Foxtail came to me with his tail between his legs.
“I’ve not given you much reason to like me, have I?” he asked.
“Aye, but you’ve given me plenty reason to enjoy your absence.”
Those golden eyes glanced away as he scratched the back of his shaggy head, rose-red apples blooming on his cheeks.
“I was just a boy,” he muttered. “It’s what boys do.”
“Oh!” I laughed. “And what, now you come to tell me you’re a man?”
“I bloody well am!” he said, standing up straight and pushing out his chest.
I laughed again and shook my head, returning my attention to the daisy chain I was sewing. He went away after that, and I couldn’t help but look after him. Had I been unkind? It was no more than he deserved. When I thought back on how we had been as children, how he had pulled my hair and left sandworms in my shoes, my guilt soon left me.
As a girl, whenever I had wanted time to myself, he had always been there to tease me. Yet, whenever I had work to do and could use a helping hand, he was nowhere to be seen.
What an awful lot of attention to spend upsetting one person.
He didn’t talk to me at all after that. Whenever we were by the fire together, he would chew his food in silence and cast his trencher into the fire before leaving. When the nights grew wild on the full moon, and we danced beneath her brilliant light, Uaine would always choose another to dance with, never me. Not that I was fussed. Meryl Brightsea was far lighter on his feet, and Rónán the Rock had arms as thick as an ox’s thigh. He could lift me clean into the air and swing me about without breaking a sweat. None of the girls paid Uaine much heed. My best friend Hilde once remarked that he was comely enough, yet the women turned from him like a fox in a hen coop.
That winter was one of the harshest we’d ever had. It came on early, freezing the last of the crops in the field, and left late, taking with it many of the elderly in our village. There was so little food to go around by the end, and hardly enough dry wood to kindle the fires.
I saved what little bread I had. One mouthful for myself, and one to divide between the swans. I would go to the lake every morning, just before dawn, so that no one would see me throwing good food away. Even though they must have hungered as I did, they never fought for these scraps. A thumbful each they took and were glad of it.
Then, one morning, as I approached the frozen banks of the Hound, I chanced to see two shadows duck between the reeds. Their boots cracked the thin ice that gathered there, and I heard one curse beneath his breath.
“Who is it? Who’s there?” I asked.
“Get away back to your bed, girl,” came a gruff voice.
Fear gripped me then, for I understood what they were doing.
“You’d better be hunting ducks,” I said.
“Aye, hunting ducks in the dark,” one of the shadows laughed. “That’d be right.”
“You can’t hunt swans! The King would have your heads.”
“Would he now?” One of the shadows revealed himself. He was a thick, stout man with a belly like a pregnant woman. I did not know his face, so I supposed he had come from a village downstream. “You think, in these rough times, the King gives a fuck what his people eat? You think he doesn’t eat swan himself if he can catch it? A nice, juicy plump bird, eh? You think he wouldn’t rejoice to see us licking our fingers so that we might raise a sword for him when the Romans come?”
The man frightened me and I began to shiver beneath my shawl.
“Please,” I begged. “You can’t kill them. They’ve lived here for years. They protect the village.”
“You think they should live whilst we starve, is that it?”
“Yes,” I said solemnly. “If it comes to that.”
His hand landed square across my cheek and I tasted blood.
The next thing I knew, the man was sprawled on the ground in front of me, grappling with a dark figure. At first, I thought it was a wolf. I leapt back, raising my hands to protect my face. Then I thought his companion had jumped upon him and was throwing punches, until I saw that same companion slink away through the rushes. That’s when I realised the man he was fighting was someone else entirely.
I turned to run, but something pulled me back. Perhaps it was the sound of his grunts as he heaved the man to his feet. Perhaps it was his smell, a scent I had known all my life yet never realised I had known. Perhaps it was my own curiosity, transfixed by a person who would risk himself to save me.
“Get gone, y’hear? Show your face round here again and even your mother won’t recognise you.”
It wasn’t until he spoke that I was certain.
“Uaine?” I whispered, as the fat man took off across the fields.
“Aednat, are you hurt?” he asked, coming close and raising my chin in his hand. “He drew blood!”
“I’m fine,” I lied, sweeping his hand aside. Yet, as it dropped, I did not let go. “What about you, are you hurt?”
He smiled, as though he had only just realised we were talking and not exchanging insults.
“No,” he said, running a hand through his mane and stepping back.
“You were so brave,” I said.
“It was nothing.”
“It was everything. Don’t you understand, they were going to kill the swans. You saved them.” A thought struck me. “What are you doing here, anyway?”
“I was just walking.”
“The sun isn’t even up.”
“What are you doing here, then?” he asked.
“I came to give bread to the swans.”
“In the middle of a famine?”
I looked down, ashamed.
“I know you come here,” he said. “Every morning you come with bread for your swans. I sit up there and watch you.” He pointed to a rock halfway up the bank.
“Why would you do that?”
“Same as you, I suppose. I need a reason to get up each day. Something beautiful.”
He withdrew from me then. The bold fox retreating into his hole, turning tail and slipping off along the bank. After he had left, the swans appeared, their slender necks entwined with the reeds, a rough rush of air from their beaks, as though they were laughing at me.
The next night, and the one after that, I could not sleep. I felt embarrassed to go to them, in case Uaine was watching. But they needed feeding, and when I glanced up to the rock, Uaine was not there.
Aodh
We
watched the story of Aednat and Uaine unfold as surely as a legend told. Our mistrust of him softened after that night, for we owed him our lives. Those rogues had snuck upon us in our sleep. The first we knew of it was a net poised above our nest. Had Aednat not discovered them, and Uaine not protected her, our tragic lives may have ended prematurely in some poacher’s cookpot.
Not long after, the sun began to show, melting the ice. White gave way to the first intrepid flowers of spring. Whilst Aednat came to feed us each morning, Uaine came to sit with us each evening. He was not as silver-tongued as she. He told no stories and sung no songs, but sometimes he built castles in the sand, scoring stick-drawn roads which filled with water as the tide turned.
“Why doesn’t he come in the morning?” asked Conn. “It’s plain to see that it’s Aednat he wishes to sit with, not us.”
“He’s just shy,” I replied.
The poor boy’s tortured face reminded me of the terror Caílte mac Rónáin had once instilled in me. How I had both longed to see him, and dreaded it. As though each moment, every heartbeat, carried consequence.
Beneath the blaze of his eyes I felt as though everything I said, everything I did, had to impress him, and I lived in fear that I would slip; that his easy smile might turn to a frown. That was what Uaine Foxtail felt now. I could see it in him.
“He doesn’t know she feels the same,” my sister said, coming to rest beside us.
“Does she?” asked Conn, with that sweet innocence he had never lost.
“Aye,” the three of us replied as one.
“Maybe she doesn’t know it yet,” Conn said.
“More likely she won’t admit it,” our sister finished.
Some weeks later, as the weather warmed, Aednat chanced to take off her cap as she rested by the water. She had brought a little more bread than usual, now that summer was assured and the rations had grown generous. Eventually she stood and stretched, saying her goodbyes. Yet she forgot to take her cap.
We kept it safe in our nest until that evening, when we hung it upon the reeds where Uaine would be sure to spot it. Plucking it up, he folded it over and over in his hands before slipping it into his pocket. The next morning, when Aednat came to feed us, he was already perched upon his rock. She did not see him at first and began to sing to us, a simple song the fishermen sang as they reeled in their catch. As she came to the chorus, Uaine raised his voice to meet hers, and she stopped.
“I’m sorry if I startled you,” he said, climbing down from his seat. “I just came to give you this.”
She took the cap from his hand, holding it close to her chest.
“Thank you, I hadn’t realised I’d lost it.”
He shrugged and gestured towards us. “You should probably thank the swans. I think they were keeping it safe for you.”
“Well, it was very kind of you all.”
They stood in silence a little longer, then he clasped his hand against the back of his neck and began to walk away. We held our breath, as still as lilies on the water. Would there ever be such an opportunity again?
He stopped, silhouetted like a standing stone.
Twisting on his heels, he strode back towards her.
“Aednat.” His voice rang clear through the morning.
“Yes?” She turned, looking up from her cap.
He cupped both hands about her face and drew her to him.
We could not contain ourselves. We flapped our wings and raised our voices, taking to the air to chase our reflections across the surface of Sruth Fada Con. The young lovers laughed, Uaine bending to retrieve the cap Aednat had dropped in her surprise. He waved it above his head as they watched from the shore.
That was to be the first day of many that Aednat and Uaine came to the river together. They wed soon after, Aednat’s hair pinned with a hundred swan feathers that she had collected over the years. The village took to calling her the Swan Bride, and her husband The Goose. Each morning they came together to feed us, and for many weeks after the wedding we dined on oatcake and barley bread.
*
As the months passed and Aednat’s belly ripened, my sister took to swimming further out to sea. She rode the outgoing tide and did not return until nightfall. After eating, she returned to her nest or put her head beneath the water, stopping her ears with the river that none of us might talk with her.
“I don’t like it when you go off without us,” I told her. “You travel so far, I fear you might not return.”
“That is silly,” she snapped. “Of course I will always return. How far can I go when my heart hurts to travel? I am a prisoner on this river, as much as you.”
“Aye, but what if those farmers find you, the ones who came during the frost? If you’re by yourself, who will defend you? Who will cry for help?”
“After all this time, you imagine I still care so much for life?”
“What of the twins?” I replied, growing desperate in the face of this stranger, for my sister had never spoken so bitterly before. “Would you leave them without a mother?”
The moment I said it, I knew it had been the wrong choice of words. Tears streamed from her black eyes and she lunged for my neck, tearing a beakful of down which left me stinging. I did not know what to do for my sister. This child she had once considered a friend had grown to be a mother, and my sister felt the passage of time fiercely. Perhaps it was harder on her than for me, not because she was a woman and I a man, but because I had at least been able to consummate my love. Caílte and I had lain together many times before my transformation. We had affirmed our desire for one another in the flesh, and somehow I was satisfied. It had made our love seem real. At night, if I closed my eyes and thought back all those centuries past, I could still feel the touch of his skin against mine, and smell the sweet scent of his sweat.
Fionnuala had never had that. The first boy she took a fancy to had been a treacherous ingrate, unworthy of her affection. He had betrayed his own brother to bed Luiseach. My sister did not even have his memory to draw comfort from.
As those years sped by, my sister kept to herself more and more, whilst Aednat’s brood grew tall and strong. She bore Uaine three sons and two daughters, and each was as lovely as she. If their mother noticed our sister’s absence, she did not dwell on it, for she was too busy working the fields to feed them and carding wool for their clothes. As the children grew, they came in the early morning to throw bread to us, and in the evening to splash in the shallows of the river and build castles of sand with their father.
“These swans have lived a long time,” he said to himself. “Sometimes I think they will outlive me.”
*
In his forty-second year, Uaine succumbed to fever. Aednat, who had nursed him to the end, was inconsolable, and when they wrapped him in white and bore him out across the plain, they did not return for six days. When at last they did, she looked gaunt, older than she had ever looked.
Aednat found comfort in telling stories. Now that her children were grown and able to work the fields, she took to lighter tasks: milking cows, skinning game and sharpening knives for the other wives of the village. As her hair began to lose its colour and her breasts drooped beneath her simple shawls, she once again remembered the stories she had loved so much in her youth. With each passing year she resembled more her beloved Seanmháthair Kyna.
It was then that Fin returned to us. She came to listen to the stories Seanmháthair Aednat told, and to watch this elderly woman she had known as a child go about her work.
“Tell me, sister,” I said one night, as we waited beneath the stars for the oil lamps to burn low. “What do you envy her now?”
Aednat
Cormac mac Airt, Fionn mac Cumhaill and Benandonner, even the Druids of Mona were the company I kept in later years. There amongst Fomori demons and ancient kings, I found my place. There were the stories of war, and the stories of love, the chronicles and the histories. My favourite were the tales of the small folk. Jenny Greentooth, who hid ben
eath the river bends, her green hair streaming out, entangling heedless children and dragging them under. Or Black Benna, who waited in the estuary pools at midnight for unsuspecting boys and girls. I told these stories well enough to scare the children. Occasionally they would cry out in the night from the dreams it gave them, yet they stayed alive to dream. They did not swim in the green river bends, and they did not walk out across the machair at night.
Not a day went by that I did not miss my Goose. When I thought of all those years we had spent as children, despising one another. Had you told me then that he would be my beloved, I would have laughed aloud and told you to stop smoking henbane. Yet, stranger than any story, it had come to pass.
I had lived a blessed life, I often thought, sitting beside the flowing waters with a thick shawl about me for warmth. When I looked back, I often smiled. Not many mothers could claim all of their children still living. I had more grandchildren than I could count on both my hands, and they were kind of heart, every one. They brought me herbs when I fell ill, new shoes when mine wore out, thick broth and soft cheese when my teeth had all but worn away.
Sometimes, when the younger ones came chasing about my house and the elder took to drinking wine by my fire, I would steal myself away to sit quietly beside the river. Oft times the sound of the water seemed louder than their voices, as though I had walked away into a forest of rushes that hid me from the shore.
I would watch the fish leap and the bulrushes bend, but mostly I watched the swans.
My husband had been right. Those were unnatural creatures to live so long. Never to leave our waters like the swans that came each summer. Never to fall sick, or to die, or to hatch signets of their own.
Every time I told The Children of Lir, they would come to sit close. In my heart of hearts, I had never doubted who they were, though I doubted the tale they could talk, and I doubted it more that they had ever returned to their father, as Kyna once told it.
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