by Jules Watson
Clouds streaked the stars, a moon the hue of old bone gleaming through the rents. Ferdia was lacing his trews, his beaker gripped in his teeth.
“Ferdia mac Daman.”
He grabbed the cup from his mouth and peered at her, the yellow light falling upon his hollowed face.
She touched her brow in greeting. “I heard Fergus’s heart speaking beneath his words. I believe it when he says his pain absolves him of all loyalty to Conor mac Nessa. But that is him.” Maeve tilted her head. “What secrets are you willing to give me in exchange for your life?”
Ferdia gulped another slug of ale, making the plates of horn armor scrape together. “Don’t think you will use me against him,” he slurred. “I will not harm him.”
Maeve’s blood quickened, and she took a stab at the truth. “But Cúchulainn abandoned you. He rejected the bonds you share by clinging to Conor, even after Conor killed so many men you loved.” She swayed closer. “A man who is the sword-arm of a king acts in his name. By staying with Conor, Cúchulainn forgives him those deaths—”
“No!”
The guards bristled.
Behind Ferdia’s back, Maeve held up her hand. She bore her sword at her waist, and if a man managed to wrestle that off her, a blade was strapped along her thigh under her cloak, and another down her boot at all times. Her body had not forgotten the brutal touch of her brother’s men.
Ferdia lurched about, to face the dark plain beyond the rampart, speckled by campfires. “We thought … differently … about what was right.” His hand shook as he drained his beaker, the night wind lifting his hair.
“Which is why you are the greatest prize in all Erin. You alone are Cúchulainn’s equal.” She sidled nearer. “I am happy to offer you every honor and luxury. You will be safe with us.”
His head swung around. “I know what you do,” he mumbled. “You take men to your bed to make them yield things.” He tossed the cup into the ditch and threw an arm about her waist, dragging her against him. “So take me, then! I will stoop even to that if it will blight my mind. But I will not give you him.”
Maeve wriggled a hand up and gripped his jaw. The ridges of horn dug into her belly, and the fumes of his breath stung her eyes. Ferdia’s chin sprouted an untidy beard, though he’d always been clean-shaven like Cúchulainn. His face was thinner, his glazed eyes those of a trapped beast. She gave him a little shove.
He stumbled, chuckling and scraping his hair back with an unsteady hand.
“Why are you here?” Maeve demanded. “If you have not come for revenge, and you won’t give up your secrets, then why trail behind Fergus like a whipped cur? Why not wander Erin alone, or take service with other lords? Unless …” Her mind pounced. “Because here you can cling to the Red Branch, and you cannot bear to sever that last bond to him.” She smiled and pressed a hand over Ferdia’s heart. “Because you know that my army will carry you to him again.”
Ferdia struck her hand away. “You are a banshee, Maeve of Connacht.”
A banshee flew across the battlefields, screaming in victory over the dead. A chill invaded Maeve, and she flung her feathered hem about her neck. “I only know that Conor mac Nessa is the most dangerous man in Erin. And so we share something, you and I, for we hate him just the same.”
“But you must destroy Cúchulainn to get to him, and that I will never do.”
“Then why would I give you good food, a fire, and a bed?”
A stagger nearly toppled Ferdia, before he hiccupped and bared his teeth. “I don’t care if you throw me out in the cold.”
“Yes, you do.” Ferdia wanted to see Cúchulainn again, even if it was across a blade. Maeve caught her hair as it blew over her face, twisting it into a hank and holding it at her neck. “I will shelter you, Ferdia,” she murmured, “and you may find there is more to me than the she-wolf you and the Hound named me.”
That night, in a blazing trail of torches, Maeve took all two hundred of the Ulaid warriors to the temple of Lugh. There, in faltering voices, they swore on the altar of the god they shared—and again to Macha, their goddess—that their loyalties were now given to Connacht.
Ferdia was the last to swear, so drunk he could barely walk and had to be propped up by Fergus. As soon as Ferdia mumbled the words, he staggered out the door and retched them back up again on the grass.
It was done. Maeve had Red Branch in her hands.
A great sword to lift to Conor, to turn his own blades from her people.
Her blood thrumming, she halted beside Ferdia as she went to leave. He was now sprawled on the temple steps. Her torch-bearer paused with her, and the ruddy light of the flame fell upon the Ulaid warrior’s face.
Ferdia looked up. The glaze of ale fell away, and Maeve saw a moment of clarity in his eyes, at last.
Filled with utter despair.
Somehow it invaded her, and as she made her way to the women’s lodge in near-darkness, she stumbled, stopping in the shadows and gazing up at the stars.
There was no point in dwelling on the struggle inside her: how every morning she longed to curl away from the voices and clank of metal, the weight of words on her lips that sent smiths to the forges and warriors to the sparring green. She wanted to sink back into dreams where she was light and fluid, swimming through bright water.
There was no point.
For now, the gods themselves had truly spoken.
Red Branch.
The will of the divine ones swept them all up, as the stars themselves swung and wheeled, reshaping the world.
CHAPTER 25
Deirdre is dead.
The night whispered it to Levarcham, creeping around her in the Ulaid forest. It trailed its cloak of dark and cold about her until she could not breathe or think or see.
No.
Through the rocks beneath her and the mound of fresh-turned earth, she could surely hear a heartbeat. Deirdre must be alive under there, in Naisi’s arms. She was alive.
Levarcham’s ragged nails broke on the stones as she once more scrabbled to shift them, blood sticky between her fingers. They would not move. At last she collapsed over them, gasping. Cúchulainn had built the grave mound so high she could not crawl in to join Deirdre.
Wild-eyed, Levarcham turned her cheek to the stone, straining to hear. She did not recall stumbling all the way from Emain Macha, but her bruised soles now stung, and her shoes were torn.
Through a haze, she did remember reaching this shadowed, dripping glade near the seashore. The Hound had snarled at her like a wolf, and all she could do as the day lengthened was watch him pour his shame out in tears and sweat as he labored over the mound, his rage let loose in growls.
Only afterward did Cúchulainn tell her everything, his pictures so vivid she could not rid herself of them even though she ground her palms into her eyes.
Deirdre trapped in a chariot between Conor and Naisi’s killer.
Their cart flying along the low sea-cliffs on the Ulaid coast.
Deirdre, lifting her arms into wings …
… leaping onto the rocks below.
No. No … no.
Levarcham twisted onto her back. Cúchulainn was gone now. The dark sky was billowing with low clouds underlit by a crescent moon, and the wind burrowed through her threadbare robe. The plangent call of an owl dragged her spirit back into her body.
Cúchulainn said that after he lifted Deirdre’s body from the sea, three swans glided in, a fourth rising from the shore to join them. Did Deirdre remember her teaching, Levarcham wondered, sending her spirit into a swan as her body fell? As if Deirdre were there, Levarcham reached up to brush her face now, remembering it glowing with excitement the night the girl’s spirit-self first flew with an eagle over the forest.
Levarcham’s hand closed on air.
She curled on her side, gullet spasming—all that was left of her screams. I failed her. She must weep blood to release the guilt, and then slip into the cold and dark beneath the ground, yes.
A restle
ss stirring in her belly would not subside, however, something forcing its way up. At last Levarcham crouched on all fours. “What do you want with me?” she hissed to the sídhe, staring into the forest. Let me go to her.
Then her back went rigid, her eyes unfocused. If she died, too, Conor’s triumph would be complete. He would extinguish all memory of Deirdre’s radiance.
Levarcham gasped.
She had to live beyond him, so that light at last would eclipse his darkness. For Deirdre.
At dawn Levarcham dragged herself up on unsteady legs and staggered back through the woods toward the distant ramparts of Emain Macha. They drove her, the sídhe … the gods.
She had to obey.
Conor mac Nessa struggled within another tortured dream. He was surrounded by flame and screams, and the glint of swords. There … something white and blurred rolled to his feet. Fiacra’s head, his fair skin bloodied, his neck split by his own brother’s sword.
His eyes were open, looking at his father.
Conor cried out and shocked himself awake, a dagger clasped to his breast.
An acrid smell assaulted his nose, and for a moment he was disoriented. He was sleeping in different places each night, afraid to be caught in his own hall by burning cinders or cold blades. There were many empty houses now—the homes of dead men, or warriors who had left him.
He lay beneath a bundle of blankets in a grain hut, he remembered. It was on stilts, a trapdoor set in the floor to let out the threshed grain. A way to escape, should someone stalk him and overpower his guards. Fergus. Cormac.
Cúchulainn.
The room was being tossed on a river of ale. Gripping the sides of his cot to keep it from bucking, Conor strained to hear the warriors warding the door outside. The old guard of Emain Macha had been overturned. Fergus and his Red Branch traitors had left him, but the lower-ranked warriors who remained were afraid and confused, and did not question his orders. They looked to him to take control, and he would. He bared his teeth, blinking. He was still Conor the wily—most powerful king in Erin.
The last drops of seal-oil flickered on the wick of the stone lamp. He could not abide darkness. The pool of light drew in from the edges of the hut.
He was being watched.
Conor opened his mouth to call his guards.
No sound came out, though, as a wraith stepped from the shadows toward him. The King of the Ulaid was paralyzed.
Her hair was twisted into long hanks with blood and earth, and the stink of burning wafted from her filthy gray rags. All he could see were white eyes gleaming from an inhuman face caked in ash.
Conor’s drunken mind gibbered. She had come for him—the three-faced goddess of battle and death—cloaked in funeral ash and wreathed in the smoke of the temple in which he’d promised to honor Deirdre. This was not the glow he felt that day in the Dagda’s shrine, the sense of compassion, the love.
This was Her darkness. The Goddess of Three.
Nemain, of the frenzied death. The Morrígan, foreteller of a man’s demise. And Badb, battle-crow, whose wings brushed a man’s cheeks as the blade entered his heart.
Conor whimpered, desperate to brace his dagger but unable to move.
The apparition glowed, it seemed to him, with a baleful light, the figure towering to the roof. She pointed fingers of bone at his breast, blood-tipped. “You have betrayed the Goddess, for your greed slew her fairest daughter.” It was a voice torn by battle-screams, harsh as a raven caw. “You used your strength not to honor womankind, but to destroy Her. For this, She will have revenge. You will not die in battle, honored and bard-sung, or in a soft bed.” She thrust her chin forward, teeth glinting. “You are cursed, Conor mac Nessa, to die by the hand of Woman … shamed and reviled for all time!”
Conor gurgled his horror, and with a great effort twisted his back until he managed to throw himself onto the floor. His blade clattered to the boards as he scrabbled to roll over, blinded by his hair and the lurching of his ale-sodden senses.
A moment of silence outside was followed by exclamations, and the guards scraped back the door and rushed in, their feet slipping on scattered grain. Conor wiped his mouth, peering through his stringy hair. The wraith was gone.
The pool of lamplight flared in the draft, banishing shadow. His gaze raked the dusty walls. They closed in, collapsing on him …
“Back to my hall,” he stammered. He didn’t care about anything but cowering in his own bed now. At least there were servants there.
The next day, sick to the belly, Conor hobbled feverishly between the huts of the crafters, the lodges of the warriors, the stables, dairy, and weaving sheds. His voice was shrill, the orders clear. All women were hereby banished from the king’s fort. The female servants, and the wives of the nobles and fighting men, the jewelers, smiths, iron and leather workers, bone- and wood-carvers—all had to leave, with their brats.
You will die by the hand of Woman.
If any men balked at this decree, Conor growled that the old ways were gone. There were absent places beside him now, waiting to be filled by those who were loyal.
The king stormed to his mother’s house. “You will also be gone, woman, and never come back.”
Nessa remained striking even at sixty-five, but the past weeks had leached the remaining beauty from her. Her back was bowed, her painted face ravaged. “My son—”
Conor struck her across the cheek. “I will not let you twist me again, trick me again, rule me again. I will triumph now as myself alone—without you!”
His spearmen bundled Nessa and her servants out of her lodge, throwing her glossy furs, Roman glass jugs, silver platters, and jewelry into the mud. Blood trickled down Nessa’s face where Conor’s ring had cut her. Without a word, she gestured to her women to gather up her belongings, and they hastened toward the stables where the chariots were kept.
Finally, Conor staggered to the temple of Macha.
His chief druid, Cathbad, had died the night of the battle at the Red Branch hall, and the druids were all in disarray. The only one who ever defied Conor was Levarcham, and he was told she had already fled. If she showed her face, this time he would kill her with his bare hands.
Conor singled out a thin, clever druid who had been angling for Cathbad’s position for some time. “Fergus and his men have turned on me. Such dangers need to be met with extraordinary measures, and the warriors must hoard their strength. All women are therefore now banished, including your druids.” The priests clamored in dismay, all arguing at once. Conor struck the roof-post of the temple with his sword, making the timbers shiver. “This is my will!” he bellowed. The terror kept choking him; he needed to vomit it up. “The priest who obeys me now will be my new adviser, set above all others.”
A crafty excitement passed over the face of Conor’s candidate—someone was always hungry for power. With shaking hands and a sour mouth, Conor crawled back into his den.
Emain Macha would henceforth be a fort of men, all of them united against the Red Branch traitors and any who sheltered them.
A stronghold of war.
Days later, King Conor fumbled with the strap of his sword-belt, trying to still the abominable tremor in his hands. At last he settled the sheath over his thigh and drew the seal-pelt around his neck. Bracing his shoulders, he stabbed the pins in, one on each side, and smoothed his gray hair.
There were no women here to dress him, and that was how it would be.
He straightened his linen tunic, and head erect, descended the stairs to his hall. The firelight lanced his eyes, but he drove through the pain. The Red Branch tree was hewn, the branches splintered. He must now resurrect it. He would be the power behind a new Red Branch.
The assembled messengers watched him glide to his great chair. They had helmets tucked under their arms, riding boots laced up their legs. They had young, bright faces, eager to jostle for favor now that so much had changed.
Conor crooked a finger at them one by one. At first his voice faltered
as the drink left him, but soon it was swelling with his old power. His orders flowed out on a tide of fervor.
Every man across the Ulaid who could fight was commanded to Emain Macha.
The warriors would have the chance to prove themselves in a feast of games and sparring, where the prizes would be more than bronze rings and carved spears. The reward for the most skilled, the bravest, would be … elevation to a new Red Branch.
All those warriors who had previously been defeated by its near-impossible initiation feats and mystical challenges would now enjoy the glory that had once belonged to Naisi, Fergus, and Ferdia.
Riches and women, a place beside the gods when they died—and the honor of being reborn into an even more wonderful life.
Conor knew warriors. Such a rare opportunity would draw fighters away from their own lords, these chiefs who nursed their grievances against him. And then once he had them, the oath this new Red Branch took would be to him alone. From now on it would be more binding than the oath to their clans, and more sacred than the vow of Red Branch brotherhood that had wrought this disaster.
They would be avowed to the king and no one else.
In twos and threes the riders bowed to him and swished out of the hall, heading for all points of the Ulaid.
Conor beckoned stewards forward, and his new chief druid. The coffers and storehouses of the chiefs still loyal to him must yield an extra tithe, the tribute from every cattle-lord and crafter must be increased. He would assemble the greatest treasure the Ulaid had ever known—by order of the priests, for the safety of the people.
Next, Conor waved toward him a clutch of weathered men, sailors of trade ships and fisher-boats. To warriors and disaffected clansmen in Alba and the British lands, he threw out a challenge.
“The Ulaid of Erin have an army to build, and riches to pay it with.”
The boatmen trooped out, muttering in wonder.