He did not take the cup. “Will it bring Sive back?”
“She’ll come back if she can, you know she will,” Bebinn said soothingly. She pressed the cup to Finn’s lips and tilted it until he was forced to swallow.
Then her eyes met the druid’s. Slowly, with infinite regret, Cainnelsciath shook his head. She won’t, he mouthed silently.
19
FINN LOST HIS MIND. THERE WAS NO OTHER WAY TO describe what happened to him when he lost Sive. He lay in his house raging with fever, babbling incoherently most of the time, calling on Sive and for Sive and recognizing no one.
“His is a brain sickness,” Bebinn informed the others. “A fire in the mind. It may kill him; I’ve seen it happen before. I shall apply all the cures I know, and Cainnelsciath will sacrifice to the gods, but all we can really do is wait. Finn is strong, he may live.
“But he may not. You should know and he prepared.”
The fíans crowded around Almhain of the White Walls, keeping a vigil. Donn and Red Ridge denied themselves sleep to stand guard personally outside Finn’s door. They felt so guilty they could not articulate their emotions to one another. But they endlessly discussed the day of Sive’s disappearance, as if by going over each detail again and again, they could find some overlooked clue that would take them to her.
Poor Garveronan was subjected to so much questioning that his rasping voice dwindled to an anguished whisper. He could only keep repeating the same story: “I saw a fair man coming up the Hill of Almhain toward the fort. There were hounds with him. I thought he was Finn. There was a mist, but I thought I was seeing Finn return and I ran to tell Sive.”
“Perhaps it was one of her own kinsmen,” Donn suggested. “They might have learned where she was and decided to send someone for her, or for her honour price. A man who could be mistaken for Finn on a dull day in a lowering mist. Perhaps it wasn’t even an intentional deception, but coincidence.”
“Perhaps it was a white-haired man,” Red Ridge suggested. “Her father? Could it have been her father, Garveronan?”
“How would I know?” the steward replied, burying his face in his hands. His next muffled words were almost incomprehensible. “I’ve never seen her people, I know nothing about them. She never talked about them. I’ve thought about this so much it’s become a muddle in my mind and I don’t know anything anymore.”
Long days passed, and longer nights. At last a messenger had to be sent to the king of Tara to inform him Finn was ill.
Cormac promptly summoned Goll Mac Morna. “If Finn’s going to be incapacitated for any length of time, he’ll have to be replaced,” he told the one-eyed man. “Cailte’s an able second in command, but he’s not equipped to lead the Fíanna permanently. Will you accept that responsibility—at least until Finn returns?”
Those last words cut deep. Goll did not flinch, except inwardly, but he added them to the list of grudges he held against the king.
“So I’m second-best?” he said, tight-lipped.
“Of course not. You’re the best available.”
“The best available. I see.” Goll began pinching and rubbing the puckered skin of his facial scar. “Tell me this, Cormac—is it merely a ploy on your part? Do you hope to force Finn to leave a sickbed and come back to your service through jealousy of me?”
“Would I do that?”
“I would in your place. It’s a clever move.”
“Will you do it?”
“You have a brass neck, asking me that.”
“Will you do it?”
“Will I let you use me, you mean?”
“Will you do it?” the king repeated.
Cailte insisted on carrying the news to Almhain personally. When he arrived, a reluctant Garveronan finally admitted him to the lodge where an emaciated, pallid Finn lay tossing restlessly on a bed of matted furs.
Cailte. was appalled at the change in his friend. He bent over him. “Finn? Finn! Wake up! I bring word from Tara.”
Finn’s eyes opened slowly, pulling apart gummed lashes. “Wha … ?” His speech was slurred, his expression vacant. “Who … ?”
“I’m Cailte Mac Ronan,” the thin man said crisply, “and I’ve come to inform you that Cormac Mac Airt has appointed another commander for the Fíanna in your absence.”
A miniscule animation flickered across Finn’s features; faded. “So? Needed to be done, I suppose.” His eyelids began to drift shut.
“It didn’t need to be Goll Mac Morna,” Cailte said in a voice like a whiplash.
For a moment he did not think Finn had heard him—or cared.
Then Finn’s breathing deepened. He lay still as if gathering himself.
“Who did you say?”
“Goll Mac Morna.”
Finn’s eyes met Cailte’s. They were clearer now. “Goll is acting as Rígfénnid Fíanna?”
“He is.”
“Och. Goll Mac Morna.” Finn closed his eyes again and seemed almost asleep. But he was not asleep. The watching Cailte saw his face slowly … change.
He stood up in one smooth motion, so unexpectedly that Cailte jumped backward in spite of himself. The man before him was obviously weak, shaky, but on his feet. And recognizably Finn Mac Cool. He cleared his throat. “Garveronan? Bring me food. A lot of food. Meat. Pots of cheese. Buttermilk. Why are you standing there staring at me, Cailte? Help him fetch it. Run!”
Cailte. ran.
With single-minded determination, Finn Mac Cool healed himself in a matter of days. Bebinn watched in disbelief as he did through willpower what all her herbal concoctions could not. Cainnelsciath the druid was equally astounded. “The omens said he would die,” the man kept repeat ing, shaking his head.
Every night found Finn heavier and stronger than the night before. Part of the cure was not to allow himself to think of Sive. Or of Oisin. Relentlessly, he put them in a box at the back of his mind and forced the lid closed while he ate and slept and began practicing his battle skills again to restore his reflexes.
“Finn Mac Cool is back!” a relieved Red Ridge soon reported to the rest of the Fíanna at Almhain.
“We’re going to Tara at the next change of the moon,” Finn announced to them the very next morning, “so the king can see for himself that I’m able to resume command of the army. And,” he added with a sudden, unexpected grin, a flash of white teeth, merry and impish, “we’ll go singing.”
Of all those who heard him, and cheered him, only Cailte noticed that it was not quite the same old grin.
The youth had gone out of it.
The morning before they were to depart for Tara, Finn left Almhain of the White Walls. He went alone, to the distress of his men, who kept insisting he should take a bodyguard. But Finn was in no mood to take advice from anyone.
He went alone, to track the waveless ocean of the Bog of Almhain and search one more time for Sive.
As always when his spirit was in chaos, he instinctively sensed order in the patterns of nature. He could find no peace under a roof, any more than he could find Sive there. He needed sky over him and earth under him.
A man from a different background might have chosen other, more reliable earth. The hog was a land that quivered and quaked, more water than soil, dotted with countless tiny islands and hillocks that were only nominally more substantial. Stepping-stones through a treacherous morass. Beautiful, humming with reed-song, billowing with bog cotton, glinting with pools that reflected the perfection of the sky, the bog was deadly to all but the feet that knew it best.
Finn walked with the ease of familiarity. The bog’s fluid surface was more stable to him than the fluctuating borders of reality.
Perhaps Sive had drowned in one of these pools. Perhaps she had lost her way. He must admit it to himself just once, in total privacy.
Perhaps she and Oisin were dead and gone and he was left in a world without them.
If that were true, he could fight battle after battle until a sword or spear took him, and he would never care when that day came.
He would be the greatest warrior Erin ever produced simply because he had nothing left to fear.
Simply because he had nothing left.
Or perhaps Sive had been taken by the Sídhe. As Finn saw it, this was a possibility.
She might reappear.
He might find her.
If that could happen, then life was very precious and every moment, every breath, mattered, because they underpinned the future he would share with Sive.
Which was true?
How could he know?
He walked on across the bog, lost in thought. Accompanying him as always, Bran and Sceolaun had stayed close to him for a while. When they realized he was not hunting, they gradually began wandering away from him, doing a little hunting on their own as was their wont, not out of hunger, but out of love of the sport.
Finn paid no attention. He knew they would come back.
But would Sive?
The land sank beneath his feet. He found himself on the brink of a reedy pond, the reflective residence of a blue heron that stood one-legged on the far side, eyeing the interloper with regal disdain.
Finn sank slowly until he was crouching on his heels at eye level with the heron across the bog pool. The bird did not take fright but continued to regard him, turning its head to look at him first with one fierce yellow eye, then with the other.
The heron’s single-eyed stare reminded Finn of Goll Mac Morna.
“I’m not hunting today,” he told the bird. “You know that, don’t you? That’s why you’re not flying away.”
The bird did not reply, but it appeared to listen.
As Sive listened.
A spasm of anguish gripped Finn’s gut.
“I need to talk to someone,” he admitted to the heron. “It’s a habit I’ve developer, In my head, mostly,” he added with an apologetic little laugh.
The heron raised a thin crest of dark feathers along the top of its skull, then let them sink back.
“If I’ve really lost her, I’m alone.” Finn said miserably. “Alone in my head.”
The heron lowered one leg and raised the other without ever ceasing its unblinking scrutiny of Finn.
Finn went on reflectively. “I didn’t know that I minded being alone, until Sive. I didn’t know how alone I’d always been. I loved the silences of forest and mountain. I loved standing, listening, letting the world fill me with poems. Then Sive filled me with herself. She became all my poems. Sive …”
Her name caught in his throat. He swallowed, hard. “I’ve been trying not to think of her,” he confessed to the heron. “When I let myself think of her and my son, it cripples me. I feel as if a mountain has fallen on me. I’ve dug myself out from under the mountain, you see … but I shan’t stop looking for her. I’ll always be looking for her. I can’t accept that she’s …”
Finn could not say the word. The heron was looking at him very intently, extending its slender neck as if to hear his softest whisper. Suddenly he was convinced the bird understood him and might even know.
“Where is she?” he asked hoarsely. “Where is Sive, where is my son? Do they live? Can I find them?”
For one agonizing heartbeat he thought the heron would answer. It actually opened its beak while reality spun and spiralled and Finn was willing to believe anything, even a talking heron that would guide him to his wife. He willed it to be with all the fierce intensity of a will forged in iron and loneliness.
“If her people came for her, tell me who they are and where to find them!” he commanded the heron. “She would never tell me; she would never talk of them. I think they had made her very unhappy. But if I knew where they were, I could go and get her, you see? Just tell me. You fly across Erin, surely you know, you’ve seen her, a woman with soft brown eyes and a child, a little boy with pale hair …”
In an excess of longing, Finn stretched out his arms toward the heron.
The bird’s beak yawned wider. Finn yearned toward it across the pond. “Just tell me she didn’t leave me on purpose,” he pleaded. Then he expressed his innermost fear, the one that unmanned him. “Tell me she didn’t abandon me of her own will on the Bog of Almhain!”
But before the bird could answer—and Finn would go to his death believing it could have answered—Sceolaun came bounding toward them, bringing Finn some small furred creature she had caught and wagging her tail in anticipation of his praise.
The heron squawked and leaped onto the wind, carrying Finn’s answer away on whispering wings.
The man let out a howl that shivered the surface of the bog pool.
Alarmed, Sceolaun dropped her catch and pressed close to him, trying to lick his face in an excess of sympathy. He struck out at her savagely. The astonished bitch shrank back from the blow. Finn had never hit his hounds. She sank to her belly and crawled toward him, pulling herself forward with her elbows, making small conciliatory noises in her throat that were drowned in the terrible sound of his choking sobs.
Next day Finn and his men left Almhain of the White Walls. He marched resolutely away without looking back. He could feel the fortress like a presence behind him, a presence without a heart.
He looked back only when they reached the edge of the bog and the land solidified beneath his feet. He paused then and half turned, so the fénnid behind him thought he was about to issue an order. But he said nothing. Instead, he just gazed back at the Bog of Almhain where yet another woman had rejected him, or so he believed.
Then he turned his face toward the north, and Tara.
Goll Mac Morna was drilling several companies of the Fíanna on the training ground when the storm that was Finn Mac Cool broke over his head. Finn came striding through the gateway, paused only long enough to cock his head and locate the source of the sound he heard, weapons clashing, then rushed toward it. When he saw Goll pacing back and forth, correcting and criticizing, he flung himself at the one-eyed man and hurled him to the ground before Goll knew what hit him.
“Who gave you the right to order my men?” Finn roared.
Goll stared up at him. “The king did. They’re my men now. By his order.” He could feel his own anger growing. Finn had no right to humiliate him in front of the Fíanna. He got to his feet with alacrity, half-expecting Finn to hit him again and fully prepared to strike back with a blow of equal intensity.
But Finn did not hit him. Instead, he regarded Goll coldly, turning his head as if to look at him first with one eye, then with the other. In a voice as cold as the longest night of winter, he said, “I seem to have lost my wife and son. I’m not going to lose the Fíanna too, if I have to kill you to reclaim it.”
Goll, who had not been told the particulars of Finn’s recent illness, was taken aback. “Your wife and son? Finn. I didn’t know …”
“No reason for you to know. It concerns no one but myself.” Finn said in that same cold voice. “But the Fíanna’s different. That concerns you and me. The command is mine, not yours, and either you surrender it to me right now or I take it from you the way you took it from my father.”
Refuse. Finn was thinking. The desire was naked on his face.
He wants me to refuse, Goll realized, so he can kill me. He’s more angry than I’ve ever seen him, but it’s not about the Fíanna. This is a different game—one I dare not play.
Goll gave a brief, tight nod. “I never meant to replace you permanently,” he said. “You are of course Rígfénnid Fíanna. It will be my pleasure to go to the king this instant and inform him of the happy news of your return to active service.”
He took a step backward, still facing Finn. Every line of his posture bespoke the demeanor of subservience. Then he turned and went to find the king. But though Goll kept his face carefully impassive, a passing porter was startled to hear his teeth grinding like boulders rubbed together.
Goll found Cormac at the royal stables, inspecting a score of horses that had just been delivered from the south, tribute of a Laigin prince. Cormac glanced up briefly as Goll entered the long
, low shed where the animals were stabled, then turned back to perusing them. But only for a moment. His mind registered something amiss.
Turning back toward Goll, the king said, “Is there a problem?”
“Not for you. Finn’s come back.”
“Is that a problem for you?”
“He wanted to kill me.”
“He what?”
“He wants to kill someone, anyone, I think. He says he’s lost his wife and child.”
Cormac’s eyes widened. “I’d better see him at once.” He brushed past Goll, headed for the doorway. “Where is he?”
“Here,” said a voice.
Finn blocked the doorway. with his massive shoulders. In the dimly golden light filtering through the wickerwork walls of the stable, he was little more than a dark silhouette with pale hair. Yet he seemed to fill the entire building.
Cormac went up to him and said, as kindly as he could, “Goll just told me you’ve lost your wife?”
“Lost?” Finn’s voice was strange, distant. “I didn’t lose her. She’s just … gone.”
“Kidnapped, you mean? Or sick? Died? What is it, Finn? What’s happened? I knew you were ill but I didn’t realize that you’d suffered such a—”
“I’m back,” said Finn curtly. “The reasons for my illness are unimportant except to myself.”
“But what happened to your …”
Finn’s eyes burned through the dimness. The barely contained fury in them dried Cormac’s question on his lips.
“Obviously, you don’t want to discuss it,” the king said. “If you change your mind, though … if there’s anything we can do to help …”
“If there’s anything to do, I’ll do it. In the meantime, I shall continue to command the Fíanna,” said Finn Mac Cool.
He had not been a day in Tara before everyone knew he was a changed man. He radiated a white heat. If before he had been ambitious for himself and his fénnidi, now he was manic, demanding more than was humanly possible even for them. He fell upon the men Goll had been satisfactorily drilling and forced them to double their exertions, driving them out of some exploding force of his own that eventually communicated itself to them until they were as frantic as he. Javelins were hurled farther that day on the Hill of Tara than any javelin had ever been hurled in Erin.
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