It was one of a string of fine late-summer afternoons, and after several days with no rain the plain was dry and springy underfoot. I was tired, body and mind, having been worked as hard by my tutors as by Berach. Lasair and Eirnin must have entered into a contest of their own, I thought, to see who could stuff the most knowledge into my head. It rang now with snatches of song and poetry, chanted histories and long recited lists, all scrambled together.
“We won’t go far today, Fin.” Dun Dealgan was built on a hill that gave views to the horizon in every direction, but I soon found a little hollow, free of gorse and thistle, that would keep me out of Tullia’s sight. I threw myself down with my face tipped up tothe sun, and Fin settled beside me. Closing my eyes, I looked up through red-lit eyelids, watching the little patterns and lights that played through my vision when I screwed up my eyes and then released them. The sweet grassy smell of the meadow rose around me. I flipped over on to my stomach, folded my arms under my head and let myself drowse.
The liquid call of a lark spiraled up into the air, too beautiful to ignore. I turned lazily to Fin. “No offense intended,” I joked, “but your own voice is sadly lacking by comparison. Perhaps some tutoring for yourself...”
He was preening his feathers, paying me no mind at all. One great black wing was stretched out across my vision, as he craned his neck behind to reach the base of his tail. The white feather hung stark against the black, leaping into the foreground, making its backdrop recede and blur. I lay watching it, fascinated as before with the startling effect of the contrast. I began to see more than a simple white patch: the intricate interlocking pattern of the ribs, the graceful line of the quill, the downy fluff at the base. Fin flexed the wing, and the white feather was rippled by blue shadow, and then it glowed again in the sun. Ripples and gleams of sunlight...
The ripples spread out as far as I could see, blue topped with frothy white. I lay relaxed, dreamy, enjoying the breeze in my hair and the sparkling pattern before my eyes. I gave the sight no more thought than the lights I had made dance on my closed eyelids—until I saw the birds. Sea birds, wheeling and crying below me! Around me. Gulls and gannets and terns and below us all the blue ripples were ocean. When I raised my eyes I saw rims of land like two arms spread out to the sea, dark hills rising to my left, a flat green spit on the right, and I recognized our own bay.
There were ships—three ships—cresting the horizon. I had never seen one before, but even from this strange high perspective it was obvious what they were. Sailing ships, coming to our shore.
With a gasp, I tore my eyes away and sat up. The change of perspective made me dizzy, so much green, too close, too solid. A secret, Cathbad had called Fintan’s white feather. Now I had glimpsed its full meaning. I stared at Fin, filled with the wonder of what had happened. He cocked his head, wings neatly tucked now, calm and superior.”Is it true, Fin? Are the ships real?”
I swear even Tullia would have heard the exasperation in his reply. He clacked his beak, rattled deep in his throat, and I translated: Stupid girl. Why else would I waste the effort?
He spread his wings and flapped off toward the fort. I followed at a run.
The ships carried long-awaited friends: Conall Cearnach and two allies from over the sea—Olaib of Norway and Baire of the Scigger Islands. Thanks to my warning, my father was waiting on Baile’s Strand to give them welcome. We watched the great ships, stripped now of their billowing sails, anchor in the bay; they hunkered down in the water like broody hens over their nests. The men—hundreds of them—rowed to shore packed into little boats that they pulled up onto the sand.
Conchobor had summoned them. After three years of peace, he had suddenly decided that the insult of Maeve’s invasion had not been sufficiently avenged, and that Ulster must have further satisfaction. For although we had prevailed, our brown bull Donn Cooley had been killed in that war. The famed bull’s loss must have had gnawed and eaten at Conchobor, at first nothing but a lingering resentment, but growing month by month into a ferocious anger, until he was sick with the need for vengeance.
If anyone questioned the wisdom of Conchobor’s campaign, I heard nothing of it. We are a people easily inflamed, and to our warriors, honor and vengeance might as well be the same word.
The narrow strip of beach beyond the reach of high tide was crusted with tents and men and campfires like a layer of barnacles. The men waited for Conchobor’s forces to join them en route to Connaught, and for several nights our hall was filled with guests who came to eat and stayed drinking until nearly morning.
I was not allowed to go down to the strand. My mother mistrusted the Norwegians and warned me to stay away from them. “They are rough men,” she said darkly, “and no one to know what they might do.”
Naturally I snuck off to spy on them. It was easy to stay hidden and unnoticed. But there was nothing I could see that distinguished the foreigners from our own men, who spent their days sleeping and brawling and drinking in more or less equal measures.
Conchobor was well pleased with his raid. They struck at Rosnaree, and Conall Cearnach and my father together could not be withstood.
Strange to say, we at Dun Dealgan were hardly touched by these goings-on. Quite different, it is, when you are not on the receiving end of a raid! My mother was well used to my father being away on his quests and adventures and battles, and she saw to it that our lives continued in their daily pattern. Cuchulainn returned to the same orderly household and well-tended lands he had left, to a welcome that was warm but matter-of-fact. In those days, my father’s victory in a fight was no more a matter for doubt than the rising and setting of the sun.
My first bleeding came in late winter of that year. We’d had snow in the night—real snow, not just a light dusting that melted off by midmorning, but snow that made a white crystal mystery of the world—and I remember it pleased me to have such dramatic weather mark my passage to womanhood. As my mother took away my childish tunics and dressed me in the new adult clothes she had made for this day—a long linen shift, embroidered at the neck and sleeves, covered by a deep blue woolen overmantle striped with red—I felt an unsettling mixture of excitement and regret.
Tullia sat me down and dressed my hair, still damp from the bath, braiding the front sections and tying the rest in curling cloths. When it had dried, and Tullia had released the curls and fussed some more, my mother gave me a polished bronze mirror in which to admire the results.
I had peeked before, of course, in my mother’s mirror. I thought I knew how I looked. So I was unprepared for the serious young woman who stared back at me. I had always thought my dark hair unlovely; it was not bronze-gold like my mother’s or even the rich auburn of my father’s beard, but a deep oak-leaf brown. But now it cascaded down my shoulders in thick luxurious waves, framing my fair skin and blue eyes like a glossy dark sea. I did not live up to my parents’ beauty—I had, perhaps, too much of my father’s firm jaw and not enough of my mother’s dimpled cheek—yet I liked what I saw well enough.
“The finishing touch,” said my mother as she fastened a delicate girdle of linked copper and silver leaves around my waist.
I grinned at her. It was my first piece of precious jewelry, and it made me feel more grown-up than all the rest put together.
“There is more,” she said. “Some for your coming of age, and some to put away for your marriage portion.”
Marriage portion. There was a sobering thought. I had been looking ahead to the spring Beltane fires—my thirteenth birthday—when I would be presented at the coming-of-age ceremony. It would be grand, I thought, to jump the coals with the other girls who were becoming women that year, while the bystanders sang and cheered. It would be grander still to be old enough to be attending the feasts and gatherings. Only I hadn’t thought ahead to the next part. Marriage. It is why men bring their daughters to feast-days, to show them off to potential suitors.
“Don’t look so gloomy.” My mother sat me down beside her. “You needn’t
worry yourself—we aren’t about to marry off a girl who hasn’t even lost her milk teeth.”
I glowered at that, feeling she was making me into a baby for the sake of the two stubborn dogteeth that remained anchored firmly in my top gums. And that like to set the tone of the year to come, for it seems I spent it seesawing between alarm when I was taken for an adult and indignation when I was not.
CHAPTER 11
THE STRANGER ON THE STRAND
I paid little enough attention to the news of a young stranger landing in our bay. Ordinarily I would have been curious, for we’d had no visitors at all since the ships of the previous summer. But it was the day of Beltane—my coming of age Beltane—and the only response I remember was disappointment that my father would not be there to sing me across the fire.
“If he is only a boy, why can’t the other men deal with him?” I pouted. “For that matter, why should he not choose to keep his name to himself? What harm is there in it?”
“It is the king’s command that any who land on our shores give an account of themselves,” said my mother. “It is little enough to ask of an uninvited guest.” She gave my hair a critical once-over, entirely unmoved by my petulance, and nodded approval to the new girl she had hired to attend me. I still had Tullia, of course, “to watch over your proper behavior,” as my mother put it, but I loved having a young companion. Roisin was a hard worker and clever with hair, but she was good company too and only a little older than me. I soon came to value her lively spirit more than the work she saved me.
“And,” Emer continued, forestalling my next objection, “boy though he be, he has already handily defeated Conall, who is no poor fighter. It’s looking for a fight he is, and he will not rest until he gets it.”
I shrugged, a childish ungracious gesture. But I soon got over my resentment. My mother would be at the ceremony, and it’s a girl’s mother, after all, who guides her to womanhood. And excitement, kept to a seemly murmur through the day, was starting to sing loud in my veins. Beltane was my favorite festival. The sun was very low in the sky now. At dusk it would begin.
I went to my coming-of-age ceremony dressed more beautifully than ever before in my life, with real gold at my arm and throat and golden tips to my braids. By the time the sun rose I would have become a woman in the eyes of my people.
The Samhain fire is built always at the top of an open hill, where it will be a beacon visible far and wide. For Beltane we seek out a more sheltered spot, an open clearing skirted by woodland. Fertility celebrations demand more comfort!
This night, though, I would not be among the children playing tag or rolled into a blanket to sleep under the stars, nor among the older lads and lasses flirting in the pole dance or trysting in the woods. For the first time since my naming-day, I would enter the Sacred Grove and keep vigil there until dawn. The other girls and I would return in time to join in singing the Welcome to the Sun, and then we would do the women’s shuffle dance around the dying fires, and leap, one by one, over the coals.
The grove was only about a mile from the Beltane grounds, but it could have been a world away. We were a group of nearly fifteen, all of us giggly and high-strung, heady with our new finery and fighting unadmitted nerves about the night to come—yet as we stepped into that grove we fell completely silent.
The clearing was set within a ring of rowan trees, speckled now with their bitter-smelling white blossoms. Torches flared on stands around the lawn, a central fire burned, and two tall cloaked figures, the druid Daigh and his wife, awaited us on the far side. So simple it was, unimpressive really, but the entire space throbbed silently with a power I could sense with each breath and footstep. We walked through the trees and into the presence of the Sacred, and I felt the thrum of it deep in my own body, like the lowest notes of a drum. Nothing in my experience could really compare, but I was reminded of walking into a thick fog. In that blind swirling world, you feel like you are walking into mystery and could as easily find yourself in the land of the Sidhe or someplace utterly unknown, as on your own laneway.
If the grove was more than I could have imagined, it must be said that the teachings were rather less. We were not initiated into mystery so much as instructed, exhaustively, on the many duties of a wife, a mother and a noblewoman. Any girl with a half-decent upbringing had heard most of it before—though the parts about lying with a man certainly caught our attention! By the time Daigh’s earnest wife droned to a close, even the charged atmosphere of the grove couldn’t relieve my boredom.
The next part of the ceremony, though, was anything but dull. We were stripped of all our fine clothes and jewels, left with only our cloaks (and how glad I was my mother had insisted I take the heavy warm one rather than the prettier summer weight), and led to a deep pool that bubbled up from the secret depths of the earth. One by one we stepped naked into the icy water, sank below its dark surface and emerged gasping with cold. When my turn came I gritted my teeth and rushed in. Whether I truly left my childhood behind in that black water I do not know, but I thought for some time afterward that I must have left behind a layer of skin, for when I clambered out I could not feel my face or feet or hands, and the rest of my body tingled as if pricked by a thousand tiny needles.
When we came back to the grove, our cloaks wrapped tight as cocoons about us, Daigh had built the fire into a high roaring furnace. We were seated around the fire, blessed with a sprig of rowan, and told to spend the rest of the night in silent meditation, preparing ourselves for our lives to come.
I settled myself into my cloak, lifting my face to the heat of the fire, watching the flames. They said girls sometimes saw their future husbands in those flames. I didn’t care so much about that—he would be who he would be, whether I saw him or not—but I did want to make something worthwhile of this night.
I was distracted at first. Some of the girls were fidgety and restless, for we were all uncomfortable. The blaze of fire seared us in front, and the cold breath of night chilled backsides already damp from wet hair.
But the power of that place seeped into me, and little by little the shuffling and complaints faded away, and my own body quieted, until there was only the deep silence of the grove and the leap and dance of the flame. I did look ahead to my future, and I thought again on the teachings we had been given. There was a pattern, I saw, beyond the dull string of individual instructions, and the pattern was a lovelier, more inspiring thing than its small homely parts. We all aspired to be women of honor and respect, to be admired and proud of our accomplishments. But such a life doesn’t happen just from wishing it. A destination is reached through many small steps, and what our teachers had tried to give us, in their stolid way, was a map to guide us on our journey.
It was beautiful, what I saw now, how all the small gestures and events and words of a person’s life created a pattern completely unique and individual, yet interlaced with the pattern of every other person she touches. My mind was filled with a vision of growing, glowing tendrils of unfolding life, and I sat for a long time feeling the thrust of my own existence and resolving to make of it a bright and beautiful thing.
I was so entranced with my little revelation that it took a long time for the other voice, the dark voice, to be heard. So I cannot say that my happiness gradually became uneasiness. It was more like waking from a pleasant dream to find your house on fire. When the clamor of doom became loud enough to shatter my pretty reverie, the black fingers were already scrabbling deep in my guts, digging and tearing. I bent over, retching—but you cannot vomit away knowledge.
It had never come to me like this, so terribly. So strong and frightening it was, I thought it might be myself who was dying.
You cannot read the message on an Ogham stick while you are being beaten with it. It was like that with me—I was too overwhelmed with the pain to understand what it told me. I did not know then how to step back from the dread and search for its cause. So I lay gasping and groaning in the dark, overcome by some horror I could not
name.
May all the gods bless him, it was Fintan who released me. I felt him coming to me even before he arrowed into the grove and plummeted right into my arms. I clutched at him and whispered, “Fin, help me.”
I did not need the white feather, not in that place. His black eye, gleaming in the firelight, told me everything. He had been to the strand and seen it all...
The boy looks so slight before my father. He is only a gangly youth, not many years older than me. It is shameful, I think, for my father to fight someone who stands so little chance against him. But the boy stands forth, and when they begin to fight, it is astonishing, for his skill at arms is wonderful and Cuchulainn is hard-pressed by him. They fight for a long time, with neither gaining great advantage over the other, until at last they pull out their spears. My father’s Gae Bolga has never failed, and I am glad he will prevail—but I am so sad for the boy. Such courage and skill, such a bright spirit, should not be wasted so.
They wind up for the cast, and here is another marvel, for at the last moment the boy’s eyes widen, and he checks his throw, and sends his spear spinning wide of the mark. And as the Gae Bolga sinks deep into his side I am weeping, weeping for them both, for I know what the boy has seen. He has seen his own father.
I saw no more, for the frightened girls had finally run to alert Daigh, and whether by incantation or simply shaking me silly I do not know, but he pulled me out of my vision. I blinked up at him through eyes that swam with tears, disoriented and resentful. His druid’s eyes took in Fintan, now stationed protectively in my lap, and my own unfocused gaze, and he promptly sent his wife and the other girls to the far side of the fire. Then he eased himself down beside me.
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