“Ma, I am to take him out for exercise every day, but I think he would rather be in the trees. Could I not go a little ways into the orchards by the north wall?”
The orchards of Emain—acres and acres of them—drifted right up to the embankment on the northeast side, a quiet glory of white and pink bloom.
Getting to them was harder than I had expected. Rather than take the long way round from the south gate, I had planned to just climb over the wall. I had done it often enough at home.
Here, though, the ditch was on the inside of the wall instead of the outside—which was strange, for how would it hamper an attacking enemy that way? It certainly hampered me, for I had to scramble down, pick my way across the mucky bottom and climb all the way up the other side—the height of the ditch plus the earthen bank, that was—before I even got to the wall. It was a hard climb, and I was glad of the broad walkway at the top of the embankment where I could rest a moment. I eyed the heavy posts of the wall, looking for the best climbing spot, while Fintan poked his beak into likely crannies where beetles or field mice might hide.
The wall itself was not so difficult, but what I saw when I hoisted my head over the top was daunting: a steep drop down, with no ledge to land on at the foot of the stakes. The fence had been built right at the outside edge of the earthworks, three times a man’s height from the top to the ground. I would have to walk back to the gate, after all.
“Does your mother know you are after jumping the wall?”
A girl’s voice it was, so I was not scared, though I gave a guilty start all the same. As I squinted into the trees, a willowy figure emerged from the orchard.
“Well?”
I nodded. Even the way she walked was beautiful, I thought. I could look at nothing but her.
“You are sure?” She was so close now I could see the deep, deep blue of her eyes—almost violet, they were—and the dark fringe of lashes so startling against the pale gold of her hair. She seemed amused, and I was glad to have given her even this whisper of happiness.
I smiled and found my voice. “Yes, Lady Deirdriu. I have leave to come to the orchard to exercise my friend Fintan, here.”
Deirdriu soon solved my problem. She bade me walk along the embankment until I was directly behind the smokehouse, and when I peeked over the wall, there she was on the far side, tucking up her skirts and climbing—surprisingly quickly—up the embankment. In a moment I had another surprise: a little door in the fence, cut into the posts and so well matched I hadn’t even marked it, popped open, and Deirdriu’s face peeked through.
“You’re just the right size for this,” she said. “The guards have to crawl through on their knees.” There were pieces of chain staked into the hill to make handholds, and Deirdriu guided me so I was able to slither from one to the next. Soon we were sitting under clouds of pear blossom.
For a long time she was quiet, and so was I. The busy noise of the settlement faded away, replaced by a lazy murmur of bees overhead. Shafts of sunlight poked here and there among the branches, turning the gray bark gold and revealing a thousand dancing motes of dust and pollen in their path. Like a dreamworld, I thought, or a held breath, so quiet it was. I watched as Deirdriu gathered little heaps of white petals into her hand and let them flutter through open fingers onto the dark cloth of her skirt.
“Lovely, aren’t they?”
I nodded. Her eyes were faraway, and I did not want to bring her back by speaking. One finger stroked the single velvet petal remaining in the palm of her hand.
“I wish I could have covered him with these petals. He was like that, you know, so lovely—gold and green, like the spring. It was he showed me the little door, when we first loved each other. We used to meet in this orchard.” Now the brilliant eyes rested on me, bruised violets in the dew. I thought I would weep at the sight of them, but I could not look away.
Her voice was low and sad and private. “I begged him not to come back here. Did I not dream how it would end? Three birds I saw, bearing drops of honey in their mouths, sweet as Conchobor’s honeyed lies. But it was drops of blood the birds bore away with them. And now my Naoise is gone, and I am alone with my tears.”
“I’m sorry for your grief,” I whispered. I had never said those words to anyone before, never tasted the ash of them in my mouth. Deirdriu seemed to really see me then, see how young I was.
“It’s sorry I am, little one,” she said. “I should not burden you with such talk.”
She had, though. It’s true that young as I was, I could already draw peoples’ stories from them, just by listening and waiting. But there was a strange recklessness to Deirdriu also, despite her quiet manner. She did not hide her heart, not even from a child, and her grief touched me like cold fingers in my belly. They scrabbled and stretched, and I knew suddenly that there was more, and worse, to come.
I scrambled to my feet under pretext of looking for Fintan, trying to thrust aside the bad, scared feeling that was growing in me. I know that feeling now, and it no longer frightens me, but I will never welcome it.
Whistling, searching the trees, I called for Fin. Please don’t have flown off, I thought. I need you. I thought of him, I suppose, as a kitten you could cuddle for comfort after scraping your knee. That’s another thing I know now: Fintan is no kitten.
He burst out of the leaves in an untidy flapping jumble, landing on a branch behind and above Deirdriu’s head. Making me see, he was.
She was backlit in the afternoon sun, her hair a golden halo around her. But her face—it was all darkness, a fractured black emptiness. The cold fingers clenched, and I saw blood spatter in the darkness, and I heard my own stricken cry.
“Lady! What is it that cloaks you in blackness?”
Her voice, floating out of the shadow, was calm and dreamy. “Conchobor says he will give me to the man who killed my Naoise if he does not get my welcome on his return. But Eoghan will never lie with me. This I have sworn.”
I turned tail and ran, ran from the black clutch of the icy fingers and the desolation that swept over me.
CHAPTER 7
CAUGHT BETWEEN WORLDS
The men of Ulster returned to Emain victorious, but my father returned with barely a thread of breath connecting him to his life.
Have you ever been in a crowd cheering home an army? I stood pressed against my mother, submerged in the high voices of the women, and I heard like a bad string in a sweet harp the edge of anxiety shrilling through them all. We cheered for victory, but there was not one among us whose eyes did not search for a husband, a son, a father, a lover, even when all we could yet see were the bright banners above a dark moving mass of faceless men.
The king, riding at the head of his proud host, had hardly come into clear view when my mother gave a great cry. I peered up at her, smelling the wave of sour sweat that came on the heels of her fear, but I saw only her back. She was leaving me, thrusting her way through the noisy crowd back toward the gates. I called out to her, tried to push past the thronged bodies to follow and ran finally into the dimpled arms of Miach, Sencha’s wife. Her gray braids hung like old ropes in front of my face as she bent to hold me.
“Stay here, little one. Your ma will be riding out to meet the army, and you cannot follow.”
“Why is she going?” I demanded, and Miach’s kind blue eyes slid away from my own.
“Cuchulainn is the champion of Ulster,” she said. “He should have been riding by the king’s side.”
The poets say now that my father had “not the place the point of a needle but had some hurt on it,” and that is near to the truth. I thought he was dead when they carried him into Emain Macha, for how could a man survive such butchery? The sight of his mangled body froze my limbs with fear, so that they all—the men carrying him and my mother hurrying at their side—swept past me while I stood rooted to the ground. But Miach saw me and brought me to my father’s side, explaining that he still lived.
It was Laeg told us how it had been, while my father lay silent and
suffering with his wounds. Cuchulainn had not wasted his few men in head-on battle, but had harried the edges of Maeve’s army day and night.
“He has such an arm on him, that throws farther than any other man and never misses, that with only his sling he caused such destruction that every man on the outer fringe feared constantly for his life,” said Laeg. He gave that grin, the wolf grin, which had frightened me back in Muirthemne. “And then,” he said, “betimes we would hitch up the chariot and cut through them in a great swathe, leaving the dead thick on the ground behind us, and none had speed to follow us.”
At night Cuchulainn’s hero-cry tore through the darkness, and by the light of morning so many lay dead on the ground that Maeve’s army seemed to be melting away.
Day by day, Maeve’s men became more nervous and demoralized, and soon she was ready to make terms. My father offered to fight a one-on-one combat each day. While they fought, her army could advance. But if Cuchulainn defeated Maeve’s champion, they would have to make camp until the following day, and he would leave them in peace.
“At first Cuchulainn won his combats in minutes, so that Maeve’s army crawled forward at an ant’s pace,” said Laeg. “But still no reinforcements came, and between combat and night patrols there was little rest to be had. Then Maeve began to cheat. She sent assassins into our camp by night and made a mockery of the rules of single combat.
“She sent twelve against him,” Laeg told us, the anger hard in his eyes, “and claimed that since they were all of one family it would count as but one man. And still Cuchulainn prevailed, but it was long and weary work, and meantime the army advanced. And we learned afterward that while they were far ahead of us and Cuchulainn hard pressed, Maeve sent part of her army in a loop toward Cooley, and that is the arm that the young lads from Emain encountered. And the vengeance Cuchulainn took, when word came to us of their slaughter, is beyond anything I can describe. The wrath of the Morrigu herself would not have been more deadly.”
Still my father suffered little hurt until he faced his final challenger.
“It was Ferdia who came at last,” Laeg told my mother, the words so bitter in his mouth you would think it was poison he tasted. “Ferdia, his own sworn arms-brother, his fellow in training with Scathach. And I swear,” he said, “it was not Ferdia’s strength and skill in arms but his betrayal that cut the Hound to the quick. Nothing would have turned him against Ferdia—not the riches Maeve offered, nor the promise of her daughter, nor the taunts and threats of her satirists either.”
They fought for three days, and each morning my father tried to turn Ferdia from the deadly path he had chosen, but it could not be done. And Ferdia, who had learned so many of the same feats and tricks as my father, was a fierce opponent. “Never have I seen men so wounded and fighting still,” said Laeg. “From dawn till dark they hacked at each other, until their bodies ran red with blood and the ground beneath them was slick with it. At times I had to goad and mock Cuchulainn, to stir up his strength and anger, yet it was weeping with pity I was, for all the hurts that were upon him.”
When they fought in the River Dee, at the ford they now call Ath Ferdia, it was clear that both men were near to death. Only in the last extremity did my father call for the Gae Bolga, his deadliest spear. And when my father finally killed Ferdia, launching the Gae Bolga from under the water with his foot and ramming it up under Ferdia’s iron apron, it is then he fell down weeping for the death of his friend and began to sink into a stupor from his wounds and sorrow and exhaustion.
Laeg managed to rouse him and drag him away from the open riverbank to safety, and there my father lay, unable to bear even the weight of a cloth upon his wounds, until the sounds of battle roused him. The men of Ulster had come at last, and when Cuchulainn heard the cry of the Ochain, Conchobor’s magic shield, his anger came upon him and he rose up despite his injuries, and fought alongside his people until Maeve’s army was utterly smashed.
He had not so much as lifted his head since.
The long months that my father lay in the Speckled House—for he had roused only long enough to insist he be taken to sleep there among the weapons and shields of the Red Branch—were the strangest I had yet known. To be sure, there was grieving for the dead and doctoring for the living, but life soon returned to its normal bustle for everyone, it seemed, except me. My mother spent her days at my father’s side, trying to coax him out of the uncanny sleep that held him suspended between the world of the living and that of the dead. And just as my father neither died nor woke, so his wounds did not fester, but neither did they heal.
And I—I hung suspended also. I had no nurse, no chores, no lessons. For the first time I missed old Tullia, for all her fussy protectiveness. She would have scolded my idleness and found some task to keep me occupied. As it was, I had Fintan for company. Of course there were other children there, and I did sometimes join in their games, but I believe there was something—perhaps awe of my father’s state, or the druid’s raven on my shoulder—that made them wary of me, for I made no true friends.
We had lit the Beltane fires a couple of weeks before the army’s return. It hadn’t been much of a Beltane, not with so many of the men gone and more than a few women too, but we had put a brave show on it and honored the sun’s return as best we could.
By high summer my father was no better, and for once at Lughnasadh the games and contests were all won by other men. My mother left the Speckled House for the whole day to take me there, and she tried her best to hide her worries for my sake. “It is Lugh of the Long Hand your father loves above all gods,” she said. “It would not do for you to come all the way to Emain and miss his great festival. I promise you, you will never see the like in Muirthemne.”
We passed the day in a glorious confusion of color, noise and smell. The sun shone hot in a clear sky and lit up the bright clothing we all wore to celebrate first harvest. Even the farmers and craftsmen sported ribbons and sashes to add color to their plain tunics, while their women wove flowers into their hair and wrapped swatches of dyed cloth around their waists. We had to yell to hear each other, for all around us people called to their friends, onlookers cheered the games, bards told their tales in voices that carried halfway across a field, traders haggled over their wares, musicians piped and drummed. People danced and laughed and fought and drank and ate a seemingly endless supply of food. The wafted smells of roasting meat, fresh-baked bread and barley beer mingled with the sharper odors of sweat and manure until I was light-headed with breathing them.
I was in a silly mood, jigging and gamboling about my mother like a pup on its first hunt. She only laughed at me, though, and even caught my hands and swung me into the air. I suppose we both exaggerated our high spirits that day. It had been too long since there was anything to laugh about.
But when I whirled about to see Cathbad’s feathered cloak in front of me, I was embarrassed at my foolishness. I felt my cheeks grow hot as his eyes rested on me. He exchanged greetings with my mother, and then he studied me again.
“How old are you, Luaine?”
A spring baby, I added to my count of years each Beltane. “This is my eighth summer,” I confessed. Too old for such nonsense, I imagined his voice saying.
Of course he said no such thing. All around me, grown men and women were acting just as giddy. In the right place, laughter honors the gods as well as solemnity. Cathbad turned to my mother.
“A child that age should be starting her education and training, Emer, surely.”
My mother looked startled, then flustered. “Yes, Cathbad, of course. At home she has begun her training already.”
It was quite true. I may have been raised in the quiet countryside of Muirthemne, but my mother, the druid’s daughter, saw to it that my education was not neglected.
Of women’s arts, I had already started to learn the needlework: spinning and weaving, sewing and embroidery. These my mother taught me herself, for her own needle was renowned. I never grew to love the w
ork as she did—though I did enjoy the embroidery, the colors taking shape and meaning under my fingers—but thanks to her efforts, I eventually became a fast and precise seam-stress. I had also begun learning household management. Though we had servants, I would still have to learn what each task was, how to do it properly and when it should occur, so that I would be able to oversee my own household one day. So far my training had consisted mostly of being sent to help with various chores, but in the years to come I would spend many weeks with our cook, learning how the foods were stored, how to take inventory and calculate how long supplies would last, how to tell what was fresh and succulent, how to prepare dishes, how to plan menus for a feast or great gathering. I would pass as many days following the housekeeper, learning everything from how to bank the peat fire to hold heat through the night, to how to keep moths from the blanket chests and bugs from our mattresses.
The household tasks I endured and learned, but with little enthusiasm. Riding and horse husbandry I loved better, and better still the lessons I had started in singing and poetry. Like most of the great families, we had our own poet. It is Lasair, in fact, who is responsible for some of the more outrageous verses about my father. He must have been delighted to have such a man for a patron, for he was never lacking for material or stuck with the task of singing undeserved praises. When he wasn’t traveling after Cuchulainn, he was my teacher, setting me to learn by heart the long histories of Ireland, the stories of our gods and goddesses and kings and champions. He taught me the proper forms of poetry as well as the art of riddles, rhetoric and repartee.
But a season and more had passed since we had left Dun Dealgan, and I heard Cathbad say to Emer, “It is not good for her to spend so much time alone. And who can say when your life at home will resume? There are many noble families who would gladly foster her.”
It was common for girls to be fostered at my age, though it was most often boys who were sent to be instructed by uncles or allies. But my mother shook her head, and I knew by the stubborn lift of her chin that not even the chief druid would prevail over her in this matter.
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