Then she removed his tunic and shirt.
Finn stood unable to move. His eyes never left her face.
With tenderness, she stripped him. She did not appear to notice the tremors running along his thigh muscles. With her cupped hands, she took warmed water from the cauldron and poured it over his body, then wiped away the blood with a dampened cloth. She began with his face and neck and worked her way down, across his shoulders, his chest, his belly. Touching him gently in his private places, lifting and cleansing him with grave reverence.
He had been frightened, terrified of the moment when his manhood would be tested. But Sive was so gentle she encouraged gentleness in Finn, and with it came patience. He was able to control himself and let his desire rise easily, like a flowering.
Sive knelt before him to bathe his legs.
After a few moments he reached down and lifted her to her feet. Taking the cloth from her, he dropped it into the cauldron. Then he removed her garments as she had removed his, fumbling only briefly with the complexities of female dress.
He did everything very slowly, with a sense that time had stopped.
When she was naked, he gazed at her in the firelight and she stood vulnerable to him, her arms hanging at her sides, palms outward.
She was, he thought, the most wonderful being he had ever seen.
He ran his fingers from her collarbone to her nipples, watching in amazement as the pink cones stiffened to his touch. “Like you,” she said, looking down. He followed her eyes and saw his erection like a lance between them. One tiny move and it was pressed against her, sinking into the softness of her belly.
They gasped one breath together.
Sive cupped Finn’s buttocks with her hands and drew him closer. Then she ran her warm palms up his body, up his rib cage, lifting them to frame his face so she could study his eyes.
He wondered what she saw.
He knew what others had seen, sometimes.
But Sive was not frightened. She looked deep into him, so deep, he thought, she must surely see the forest and the boglands and the wild mountains, must see the secrets of his spirit. “Come into me,” he said.
“Come into me,” she replied.
He lifted her in his arms. She weighed no more than a thought. A dream. Yet there was a warm, solid weight to her too, a smoothness of flesh and scent of hair that was unique to Sive. With his eyes closed, he would have known her among thousands. This is how Bran and Sceolaun knew her, he thought. She was as instantly familiar to them as she is to me.
He laid her down on his couch of furs. The passion roaring through him was hotter than the fire on the hearth, yet not out of control as it had been with Cruina. When he was with Sive, their every move together was like a dance they both knew, and he made no mistakes. “Let me touch you,” he whispered. “Let me look at you.”
She parted her legs for him and let him see her secret mouth, like petals in soft moss, moist and open to him. He touched her and she gasped again, spine arching. Reaching for him, she put her hands on his hips and guided him toward her. Slowly, slowly. Savouring.
When he touched her, he was shot through by lightning. But he could contain the lightning. He could hold it within him, waiting, as she waited, while he slid into that soft, warm secret mouth and felt its lips close around him. Then all was silken heat and he did not have to wait any longer.
She had been like a wild creature, living by her wits, running on the hills. Her muscles were firm and strong and very much at her command. She squeezed him deliberately, deep inside herself, wringing a cry of astonishment from him.
Then she did it again. When he looked down at her, her eyes were brimming with mischief. She licked her lips.
She squeezed him a third time and the throbbing thunder overtook them. They cried out with one voice then, sharing an explosion of sensation beyond bearing in its intensity.
Finn Mac Cool was shapechanged by ecstasy.
Later, much later, he was able to draw away from her an infinitesimal distance and study her by firelight as she slept. Her fair skin was caressed by the piled furs on which she lay.
In the glow from the hearth, her skin tones were not pale, however. They were golden … they were muddy … like the hide of a red deer burnished by the westering sun.
Dreams, thought Finn. And reality. Which is she? Does it matter? She’s here. She’s here. He touched her curving flank, he ran his fingertip along the knobs of her spine, between the strong back muscles.
She’s here.
Sive opened her eyes.
He continued his exploration of her, pausing when he found the first scar. “What’s this?” he asked in a hoarse whisper.
“I was in a forest, and some hunters came. They must have mistaken me for an animal. I ran from them, thinking my father had sent them, but they ran after me and hurled their spears at me. One spear took me there, in the side. It fell out when I kept running, but it left a scar.”
The sight of the mended flesh gave Finn a pain more physical than his own injuries had ever caused him. He could have lost her! Some hunter’s spear might have ended her life before he ever knew there was a Sive!
He seized her in his arms and pressed her against his chest as if he would fight off all the world for her.
She felt his heart beating against hers, with the same rhythm. Then the rhythm grew faster.
When at last they rested again, he continued his examination, questioning every scratch and scrape. There were pale white marks where briers had torn her legs; he kissed them. He kissed the calused soles of her feet, and discovered to his delight that the curve of her instep fitted the shape of his cheekbone.
Every part of Sive fitted every part of Finn.
Sometime before dawn he got up to feed the fire, and brought back the bathing cloth. He sat naked beside her on the furs and stroked her clean with aching tenderness, while she lay smiling.
“Is this a thing men do for their wives?” she asked him.
“I don’t know. I don’t know what men do. I only know what I do,” said Finn Mac Cool.
17
“IS HE STILL IN THERE?” DONN ASKED.
“Still in there,” Conan muttered. “And ourselves out here waiting for orders.”
“Does he ever come out?”
“He opened the door yesterday and peered out long enough to ask for more food and drink and to glance at the sky, but before I could say anything to him, he closed the door in my face.”
“Did you pound on it?”
Conan stared at Donn. “Are you mad?” The hairless man settled himself more comfortably on the fasting bench outside Finn’s door. There was no point in standing at attention. Finn was paying no attention to him.
Donn gave the closed door a long look, then walked away.
Before long, Red Ridge took his place. “It’s battle season,” he in formed Conan unnecessarily. “I thought we’d be fighting someplace, or at least hunting.”
Conan picked his teeth with a sliver of fishbone. “You can go hunt if you want to. Or fight, come to that, if you can find someone to fight. But don’t count on him in there.” He indicated the dwelling at his back with a jerk of his thumb.
“What if the king sends for him?”
“Has he done?” Conan asked irritably, suddenly faced with the propspect of action instead of sprawling in the sun.
“Not that I know of, but he might. We’re his army, after all, and peace is a sometime thing.”
“If and when the king sends for him,” Conan drawled, “you can be the one to tell him. I prefer to keep the head down.”
Finn was aware of them outside his door. He was aware of the Fíanna as he was aware of sky above and earth below, but he did not think of them. He thought only of Sive.
Once, with a start, he realized he had not thought of his mother in a very long time. He was relieved.
When they were not sharing each other’s bodies, he shared his thoughts with Sive. At first, thinking to entertain a
nd impress her, he told her the stories he told his Fíanna, the stories of battles fought and triumphs won and relationships that set him apart from other men.
Sive listened. She had the quality of listening, as if her ears could swivel to detect and concentrate upon the slightest sound.
Finn told her of his battle against the Cat-headed men and the Dog-headed men and the White-backed men. He described the taking of Lomna’s head, and the rescue of Manannán’s daughter. He spun stories from the firelight and wove them around her head like a wreath, and she listened and smiled and murmured appreciatively in all the right places.
He was telling her, with great detail and impeccable timing, the story of Meargach of the Green Spears when he began to hear his words as she was hearing them. With a critical ear, he noted implausibility piled upon impossibility, and events stretched out of all shape in order to make room for more colour.
The spate of words slowed. Sive continued to watch his face, her luminous eyes fixed on his.
If she is inside my head, he thought—and she is—then she can see what is real and what is not.
With great effort, he retraced the threads of his story. “Meargach didn’t actually bring seven times seventy men against us,” he admitted. “There were … seven or eight of them altogether, I suppose. And I didn’t kill them all myself. In fact, I don’t think I killed any of them, Meargach included. I know that Goll killed one of the man’s sons and Conan struck the head from the other one, but now I look back on it, I think Meargach accidentally stepped in the line of one of his own spear throwers and took a fatal wound in the back.
“His wife came to the field of battle afterward. I couldn’t tell her how he died, so—”
“So you made it sound heroic,” Sive said gently.
“So I made it sound heroic,” he echoed. “And that was the truth of it in a way, don’t you see? When I told her the tale of his death, I told it as he would have wished it to be, a glorious death in the midst of a mighty battle. What man wants to be remembered by the bards for having gotten in the way of his own spear thrower?”
Sive nodded. “Is there always a seed of truth in the tales you tell?”
He considered the question. She was not being judgmental, merely curious. “There is,” he said at last. “I am an honest man, you know.”
“I know,” Sive replied.
The next time he began to relate the details of some incident, he kept them stripped to the bare essentials, the verities he knew. Halfway through the narration, he saw her smile. “You can tell it better than that,” she said. “I love to hear the bard in you.”
Delightedly, Finn wove magic and mystery into his words at once, shapechanging a simple anecdote about hunting into a sprawling epic replete with every enhancement.
He knew, without being told, that she knew where the seed of truth lay. His tales were safe with her. And when he was with her, Finn gradually began to be able to tell reality from dreams …
… except in the case of Sive herself. He never told her about that first meeting with the deer near the Hill of Almhain. He never asked her if she had been that deer.
There were some truths he did not want to know.
For the same reason, he did not query her about her past before they met. She had told him the essentials; he knew she was haunted and hunted, cursed by her father. It gave them a bond.
At last he found enough courage to explain that bond, without alluding to her own history. In Sive’s presence, Finn found the courage to examine his history as he had never done before.
They had been together on furs piled beside the hearth, enjoying one another with a passion that never seemed to fade, even when their bodies were temporarily exhausted. As she lay in Finn’s arms, he found himself telling her, “I grew up wild, you know. Really wild. Cailte told me that Cormac once called me his ‘wolf cub’ behind my back, but there is more truth to that than the king knows. When I was born …” he paused and drew a deep breath, as if he were about to dive into a bottomless lake … “when I was born, my mother abandoned me on the Bog of Almhain.”
Abandoned me.
Saying the words aloud did not hurt as much as he had expected. In fact, they hardly hurt at all. They simply dropped into the deep pool that was Sive and were absorbed, the pain drained away. She put her hand on his chest, over his heart.
“Two old women found me,” he went on. “I think they were kin to me, probably from my father’s tribe. They never told me, though. They never told me anything. I was the result of a disgrace, a shame on my father’s head, that his people wanted to forget. They raised me as best they could, though they had little to offer except the secrets of survival that sustained them. I learned well,” he added musingly.
“Mostly I ran like a wolf cub, untaught and unfettered. As soon as I could survive on my own, I left the old women altogether. I was tired of the sight of them and the smell of them, tired of chewing their food for them because they had no teeth, tired of threading bone needles for them because their eyesight had failed. To me they were old sticks in bags of wrinkled leather, they even smelled old. They smelled of death. I wanted something else. Something alive.
“I wandered. In time I met a man who recognized my father in my face and told me who he thought I was. He told me of my mother as well, and I set out to find her.
“I thought she would want me, Sive. I thought she would be as overjoyed to meet me as I would be to meet her. I didn’t know she’d abandoned me, you see—I learned that only later. So I rushed across Erin to be reunited with a mother I expected to meet me with open arms.”
“And she didn’t?”
“She didn’t. When I finally found her, she …”
Under Sive’s hand, Finn’s heart was racing. “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to,” she said gently.
“I do want to tell you. I have to say it sometime, and I can say it only to you.” Drawing another deep breath, Finn summoned all his courage and laid it at Sive’s feet, like a gift.
“When I found my mother, she had married a chieftain of Kerry. She had jewelry, servants; her eyebrows were dyed and her fingertips were reddened. She looked like a princess. She had come from people of high rank, you see—originally. My father had stolen her, and himself only a Fir Bolg. His touch, unwanted, had defiled her. When I suddenly appeared at her chieftain’s gateway, wearing my father’s face, my mother was appalled.
“She ran toward me, I remember, and I knew at once who she was. She had brown eyes like yours, and a look that went right through me. I couldn’t understand why she was shouting at me. ‘Go away!’ she kept saying. ‘Go away!’
“I protested that I was her son and that I had been looking for her. ‘I haven’t been looking for you,’ she said. ‘Go away before my husband returns and finds you here. I don’t want you. I don’t want you!’
“That was what my mother told me, Sive. “I don’t want you.’”
Her eyes filled with tears. “Oh, Finn.”
He closed his eyes and saw once more, on the inside of the lids, the chieftainly stronghold in Kerry, with its stone walls, the houses, the sheds, cauldrons of dye boiling over an open fire.
His mother standing glaring at him, demanding he go away.
Truth was ugly
But with Sive in his arms, he could face it.
That summer no battles broke in Erin; at least, none involving the interests of the king of Tara. As if an enchantment lay on the land, Finn was left undisturbed on the Hill of Almhain with his wife. His men, colossally bored, organized hunting expeditions, sporting competitions, and vigorous faction fights that kept their battle skills polished. Reports on these activities were dutifully submitted to the Rígfénnid Fíanna, but he seemed singularly disinclined to take part. He spent his time with Sive, and few other people even saw him.
There was a rumour that he was dead.
“Finn Mac Cool is not only alive, but immortal!” Fergus Honey-Tongue proclaimed to all who would l
isten.
The summer passed, the celebration of Lughnasa was held in honour of the sun, autumn began. Samhain lay ahead.
Finn could not spend Samhain at his fort, not if he wanted to remain Rígfénnid Fíanna, and he knew it. With reluctance, he began making preparations to attend the Samhain Assembly at Tara.
Sive asked, “Shall I go with you?”
“I’ve been having a think about that. Everyone comes to the Assembly—at least everyone who’s important in Cormac’s territory. If you’re there, someone will surely recognize you and word will get hack to your people. They might even,” he added, aware of the irony, “assume I’d stolen you.”
“Are you saying I can’t go with you?”
“I want you with me, I want you everywhere I go. But I want you safe; that’s more important. I’ve decided it’s best you stay here. I’ll leave Donn and Cael and Red Ridge and their companies here to protect you, and I’ll come straight back to you when the Assembly disperses.”
Sive did not argue. She never argued with Finn. She had weapons more potent than her tongue. Reaching out. she captured one of his hands and pressed it against her belly.
“Come back to us,” she said.
His face went blank. “Us?”
“Us. Your child and me.”
“My child?” Finn said the words but they had no meaning. He repeated them slowly. “My child.”
A bolt of tenor went through him.
My child!
How does one have a child? How does one be parent to a child? He had never known a parent. The nearest approximation had been the two old women who raised him, and he had walked away from them without a backward look.
I abandoned them, he realized, suddenly horrified by a thought he had not entertained before.
Will my children abandon me when I am old?
My children.
My child. A child. A person. A separate person.
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