Finn Mac Cool

by Morgan Llywelyn

  Goll lifted his upper lip in a sneer. “That’s the style of him. Whatever Finn does, he does totally, more than is required. He goes to extremes. That’s what he’s done here, in fact, making Tara more his than yours.”

  Cormac’s eyes turned into polished, opaque stones. “That is not true.”

  “You think not? I tell you, Finn’s a usurper just as Cuhal Mac Trenmor was. The command of the Fíanna should have gone to my clan, did you know that? But Cuhal dazzled people. Few could resist his extravagant behaviour. They mistook the boasting for the man. I see the same qualities in Finn, and in him they’re even more dangerous. Cuhal just wanted things: women, jewels, plunder. He used the Fíanna to get them. He encouraged a company of outlaws to steal for him when they weren’t stealing for the king of Tara.

  “But Finn Mac Cool’s doing something else with the Fíanna. He’s trying to make your army into … into … a hand of heroes. A hand of noble heroes!” Goll said indignantly.

  “What’s wrong with that?” Cormac asked.

  “You said it yourself, we aren’t nobility, we’re fénnidi. That should be good enough for him. It was always good enough for my people. But Finn’s trying to shapechange us into—”

  Cormac leaned forward, his face a study in intensity. “Shapechange? Why did you use that word?”

  Goll drew back from the avidity in the other man’s gaze. “I didn’t really mean—”

  “You did mean. That’s not a term one would use lightly. Do you think Finn can shapechange? Is it possible that he is what he claims to be descended from the Tuatha Dé Danann?

  “Tell me, One Eye, on your sword’s point: would Finn betray me to the Sídhe?”

  18

  HAD CORMAC NOT REFERRED TO GOLL AS “ONE-EYE,” he might have received a different answer. But Goll took the name in the way he had first heard Cormac use it: as an insult.

  With a sullen light burning in his single eye, he replied, “I cannot tell you more about Finn Mac Cool than you already know.”

  “That’s no answer.”

  “That’s all the answer I can give.”

  Cormac realized ground had been lost. Tardily, he recalled having just said One-Eye instead of giving Goll his true name, and also recalled that Goll was sensitive about the subject. Had I been less preoccupied with other problems, Cormac told himself, I would not have made that mistake.

  But it was too late. He could only smile warmly and say, “Goll, I have to trust you. Surely you realize that if Finn fails me in some way, he must be replaced. You are the obvious choice. If there is something about the man that will work against me and my kingship, I need to know and I rely on you to tell me.” He spoke in a low, intimate voice, encouraging confidences.

  But the effort was wasted. Goll said huffily, “Finn Mac Cool is giving the Fíanna a new reputation for honour. I belong to the Fíanna. You ask me if Finn Mac Cool might betray you, but in asking that, you are requesting that I betray Finn. You want us both lowered, King. You want to reduce us to simple fénnidi again, men of no property, spear targets who will betray one another for a cup of wine.

  “You make a mistake, Cormac.” Goll rose, turned his left side, the side of insult, very deliberately toward the king.

  He left the House of the King seething with anger. Wisely, Cormac did not try to stop him. To do so would have caused an explosion that would further damage their relationship.

  The explosion came anyway, however. Goll had no sooner emerged through the outer gateway of the House of the King than he met Finn Mac Cool, on his way to report to Cormac.

  Finn stopped short. Noting the direction from which Goll came, he said coolly, “So you’re here. And I see you reported to Cormac first, instead of to me.”

  Goll was taken aback. The accusation was unfortunately true, but he longed to make a satisfactory explanation. He simply could not think of one. As always, when he had his back to the wall, the one-eyed man reacted angrily, “Why shouldn’t I call on the king? My rank is not that much less than yours, I’m an officer in his service.”

  “In his service? When you are first sworn to me?”

  Goll stiffened. “Am I? When did I swear to you exclusively, Finn?”

  “That’s part of the oath all the Fíanna take.”

  “It is now. But it wasn’t when I joined the Fíanna. I never took that oath, it’s an innovation of your own.”

  The two men stood facing one another with only a few paces between them. In the bustling precincts of Tara, other men and women moved past them, going about their own business but instinctively giving them a wide berth. The air was hot and shimmering between them.

  “So your first loyalty is not to me,” Finn said slowly, keeping any inflection out of his voice. “Did you go to see Cormac to ask him for the position of Rígfénnid Fíanna?”

  Goll was infuriated that Finn would make such an assumption about him—especially when he had just been defending Finn to Cormac. He burst out, “I didn’t ask him for it, he offered it to me! So there! He said if you failed him, I was the most obvious choice to command the army!”

  A muscle jumped in Finn’s jaw. “That’s what you’ve been after all along, isn’t it? You’ve watched my back just to be sure you were there when the time came to stick a knife into it.”

  “And what have you wanted all along?” Goll shouted, too furious for caution, for game-playing. “You’ve been biding your time too, Finn Mac Cool, waiting for the opportunity to take revenge on me for the death of your father. Do you think I didn’t know? You made such a point of renouncing vengeance, you forced it on your men as well, you were excessive about it. That’s what gave you away, Finn. You’re always excessive! Such a man has no business commanding the Fíanna!”

  Goll’s one eye was starting from his head with the power of his emotion. He raised his clenched fists and shook them in the air, in the narrowing space that separated him from Finn as both men moved forward, seemingly without awareness or volition, until they were an arm’s length apart.

  One arm’s length.

  Finn’s hand was on his sword hilt.

  With an almost superhuman effort, Goll mastered his temper. “Kill me now,” he said. “Take your revenge on me here and now, with all these witnesses around us, so that everyone will know your true heart and not be blinded by the smoke you blow in their eyes.”

  Something flickered across Finn’s face, heralding a subtle change as if the bones beneath the skin shifted ever so slightly. While Goll stared incredulously, they realigned themselves in a new configuration. The face was no longer that of Finn Mac Cool. The hot, bright eyes looking out of it were not even human.

  In that moment Goll’s life was forfeit. The wild creature in front of him would kill him without conscience and enjoy the hot spurting of his blood. The wild creature in front of him had, indeed, always longed to take revenge for the death of Cuhal Mac Trenmor, and now Goll had foolishly invited its attack.

  In the moment before it tore him apart, he had one hysterical thought: it’s true, he can shapechange! Finn Mac Cool is one of the Tuatha Dé Danann!

  Against such ancient power Goll had only mortal courage. The glowing, intense eyes of the feral spirit facing him were burning that courage away as the sun burns moisture from stone. Goll lost the power to resist. He stood impassively, arms at sides, waiting.

  Waiting like a stag for the hunter. But in Finn’s head the image was not of a stag. He saw a doe. A red doe.

  Sive, he thought. The one cool word sliced through the hot cloud of his passions. Sive.

  The cloud lifted. His vision cleared and he saw Goll Mac Morna, who had helped him, taught him, fought beside him. Goll, who had slain his father, perhaps with justification, but never done Finn an injury. Goll, who surely had not betrayed him to Cormac, for what was there to betray?

  Finn drew a deep, shaky breath and made himself relax his white-knuckled grip on the sword hilt.

  “I desire no vengeance,” he said in a choked voice. “You
are mistaken, Goll. You do not understand other men as well as you think you do, obviously. For that reason, I should remain as commander of the Fíanna. But I would … I would appreciate having you remain one of my trusted rígfénnidi. I want no animosity between us.”

  Goll looked stunned.

  “Is your company with you?” Finn went on, his voice growing stronger. “They can be housed in the new quarters, you know. This summer the Hall of a Thousand Heroes was prepared for us. No army in Erin has ever been so well treated. We’ve earned it, of course.” Incredibly, he reached out and clapped Goll on the bicep. “You and I and the others, we’ve earned it,” he said heartily. “It’s over this way, if you want to inspect it first.”

  Turning his unshielded hack on Goll, Finn strode away in the direction of the warriors’ hall.

  Goll stared after his back. And in that moment loathed Finn and loved Finn and was very, very afraid of him.

  The Samhain Assembly in the constantly expanding Tara was spectacular that year. More people attended than ever before. A city of leather tents sprang up beyond the palisades to accommodate those who wanted to establish some connection with the king of Tara. Traders came by the score, by the hundred, following the five royal roads first laid down by Conn of the Hundred Battles.

  The warriors of the Fíanna met them all and examined them thoroughly before admitting them to the stronghold of the king.

  At the final banquet, Finn Mac Cool himself stood guard at the principal doorway of the great hall while the Feast of the Dead took place inside. He stood immobile, sword in hand, staring off into space. But he was not thinking of Cuhal Mac Trenmor this time. His attention was not focused on the unseen spirits at all. His thoughts were far away on the Hill of Almhain, with Sive and his unborn child, the new life about to come into his world.

  From time to time, in the privacy of the darkness, he smiled.

  The next morning he left Tara.

  “I shall garrison as many of the Fíanna as you require here with you through the winter,” he assured Cormac, “hut you don’t actually need me here. I have things to do elsewhere.”

  The king did not try to detain him. “Who will yon leave in charge of your men here? Goll Mac Morna?”

  Finn raised an eyebrow. “Goll? Och, what makes you think of him? He has a home of his own to go to, and a woman as well. I wouldn’t think of keeping him from them. I’ll leave Cael in charge, he’s a good man.”

  Cormac looked dubious. “He laughs a bit much for a warrior.”

  “The merry-hearted boys make the best men,” Finn assured the king. He grinned. Merrily.

  He left Tara at the trot and never looked back, and to those who remained behind, it seemed that some of the shimmer went out of the sunlight. Cruina of the Questions strolled down to the gateway through which he had departed and stood there for a long time, following the road with her eyes.

  When he reached the Hill of Almhain, Sive was waiting for him at the gate behind the hawthorn trees. She had needed no herald to announce his coming. Big-bellied and beautiful, she ran into his arms and he lifted her high and cried out with joy.

  When her labour began, the women wanted to send Finn away. “This is female work,” they told him. “Go and sharpen your swords or drill your men or throw rocks in the bog pools, but leave us to it.”

  “Is that what other men do?”

  “It is,” they assured him.

  Finn did not leave. He fixed Sive’s attendants with a strange stare that made them lick their lips nervously and avert their eyes, and when Sive’s baby was born, Finn was crouching beside her as she squatted, panting. The bloody little bundle was delivered into his hands, and he felt his soul expand until it was too large for his body.

  “I have a son!” cried Finn Mac Cool.

  Cainnelsciath conducted the naming ceremony. The infant, who had his mother’s huge eyes, did not cry, though he was held aloft to be presented to the sky and laid on the ground to meet the earth. He was handed through the smoke of a fire, and sweet cold water was touched to his lips, and still he was quiet and trusting. Although Bebinn, the female physician, insisted that babies his age could not really see, he seemed to keep his eyes on either Sive or Finn throughout the ceremony.

  They named him Oisin; Little Deer.

  An exultant Finn ordered Garveronan his steward to make his entire store of mead and ale available to the Fíanna. The celebrating roared on for days. Finn made a token appearance, then promptly vanished into his house with his wife and his son and his joy.

  As he and Sive lay on their bed with small Oisin between them at his mother’s breast, Finn remarked lazily, “It would be good to die now. Nothing will ever be better than this.”

  Sive was appalled. “I forbid you to speak of dying, ever! I never talk of anything unpleasant and neither should you. Why do you think of it at all?”

  “Warriors think of death,” he told her. “And I was raised with it as a constant companion. I grew up the hard way, with every day a struggle. Two old women and a small boy, outcasts, hiding out, living rough, do not easily provide for themselves. Death was always at our elbow, waiting. The two who raised me were as tough as boiled leather, there was no gentleness in them, but I’m grateful to them. They taught me to face death without flinching.”

  “I can’t,” Sive said. “Not your death.” She reached out to cup the back of his head with her hand. Gently, insistently, she drew Finn’s face down beside Oisin’s and pressed his mouth to her other breast.

  “Take my life into you and live always,” Sive whispered with infinite tenderness.

  There was a glow around the bed where the three of them lay. Finn could feel its magical warmth as he took her small pink nipple into his mouth.

  That glow would haunt him the rest of his days.

  For love of Sive and in gratitude for their son, Finn began showering his wife with gifts. He gave her amethysts from Kerry and gold ear rings from the craftsmen at the Tailltenn Fair.

  But he gave her what would prove to be the most important gift of all quite by accident.

  He was sitting on a couch, watching her comb her thick russet hair. The locks were determinedly wild in spite of her best efforts; her little silver comb would not unsnarl the tangles.

  Reaching into his neck bag, Finn took out his own comb. It was larger than hers and carved of bone, with wide-set teeth and a design on the spine. “Try this,” he offered, handing it to her.

  She smilingly accepted. He sat fascinated by the lovely, crisp crackle as the implement moved through her hair. “Let me try,” he said.

  She gave the comb back to him. Her hair flowed like water across his hands. But the last snarl would not be separated. When he gave a tug too impatient, the comb, brittle from long use, snapped in half.

  Finn was stricken. “Did that hurt you?”

  Sive laughed up at him. “Not at all. And aren’t you cleaver! Where there was one comb, now there are two. Here, give the smaller one to me and I shall keep it near me always.”

  “I’ll get you a better one.”

  “I want this one, this part of one. Just because it was yours,” she assured him. “You keep the other part. Together they make a whole, as we do.”

  The peace that Cormac had been enjoying, and claiming credit for among his people, came to an abrupt end. Oisin was only a few nights old when a runner arrived at Almhain to announce, “The king needs you and the Fíanna! A band of foreigners has come from across the sea to pillage and plunder the east coast, and they must be driven away. You are commanded to assemble the Fíanna and march upon them at once.”

  Such a clarion call would have made Finn’s heart leap with joy—had that heart not been given to Sive and his new son. He found leaving them physically painful. Other warriors, he observed, seemed able to step from one aspect of their lives into another without hesitation, closing doors behind them and instantly forgetting, but he was made of different cloth.

  He was partly Sive, and she him.
Any sort of separation was an amputation.

  But he was Rígfénnid Fíanna. He put on his sternest face, had his weapons sharpened, and he and his men prepared to march off to war on a day of driving rain. Usually, Erin’s rains were soft; this one was like hurled lances. Carrying Oisin, Sive followed Finn as far as the gateway, though the rain drenched them both within moments.

  “Go back,” Finn told her. “You might make yourself sick.”

  Sive merely laughed. “And how could rain hurt me? Water is holy, and sweet. Water on my head will do me no harm—nor Oisin either.”

  “Go back,” Finn repeated, the words strangely thick in his throat. He was suddenly afraid he could not march away at all, not if she persisted in standing there where he could see her.

  She read the pain in his eyes and understood without words. Smiling, she stepped back inside the gateway. But her voice floated out to him. “I wish I were one of your hounds so I could go with you,” she called.

  Finn walked blindly through the rain, and all the moisture on his cheeks did not come from the clouds. Bran and Sceolaun were at his heels, but it was not enough.

  I am not as hard as other men, he thought, surprised by this discovery. But no one knows—except Sive.

  The plunderers had beached their boats along the rim of the great curving bay below Ben Edair, a prominent headland connected to the mainland by an isthmus. Cormac Mac Airt made the journey from Tara to join Finn and his men on the banks of the river Liffey, a short march from the bay itself. “I have a need to observe just how Finn is conducting his battles these days,” he remarked to his attendants.

  As Cormac and the royal retinue joined the encamped Fíanna, columns of black smoke were rising into a grey sky all up and down the coast, testifying to plundering and pillage. “I know how a woman must feel when she’s raped,” the king said grimly, his eyes on the smoke. “That’s my land, my people. Destroy the foreigners, Finn. Destroy them utterly.”

  His servitors pitched the royal tents on a height overlooking the bay, from which vantage point the king watched with mounting excitement as Finn organized various companies of the Fíanna, issuing orders to their rígfénnidi according to some plan in his own brain. It was obvious he meant to separate the raiders from one another, cut them off from their ships, then drive them like panicked sheep straight into a wall of Fíanna spears.