“They do,” Ailvi agreed. “Sometimes.”
“Do it soon, though. Cael and Creide will return to Kerry soon. Theirs is a marriage of the third degree, you know, the Marriage of the Strong Woman, and he has to defend and maintain her property for a certain portion of every year.”
“Would you like such a marriage?”
“Not me,” the bald man assured her. “I want a marriage where the woman does all the work and I don’t have to do anything but watch her do it.”
“You’re working now. You’re helping me.”
“I’m sitting down,” Conan pointed out.
When Ailvi emerged from her house one morning to find Cael and Creide organizing porters and pack horses for the journey to Kerry, she hastily ordered Garveronan to supply two bowls of hot broth and some honey-cakes, then invited Creide to sit with her beside her hearth for a time while Cael completed packing. “Let your man do the work,” Creide was urged with a smile.
They chatted of running households and of dealing with servants and of the scarcity of good wolf pelts the winter before. When Creide began to stir restlessly and glance toward the doorways, Ailvi summoned enough courage to ask, “Why would a woman as independent as yourself marry at all? Why did you many Cael?”
Creide sat still, her dyed eyebrows furrowing her forehead in thought for a moment. Then she smiled, and Ailvi realized she was beautiful.
“Because he makes me laugh,” she said. “I never laughed before he came to me, and if he were gone from me, I would never laugh again.”
That night as they lay in bed together, Ailvi said to Finn, “Do something for me.”
“What? This?” His hands moved on her.
“That too. But … mind Cael, will you? Don’t let anything happen to him.”
Finn stopped caressing her in surprise. “I don’t let anything happen to my friends,” he said.
But such confidence belonged with youth—and the years were passing.
Next battle season saw the boats of the foreigners beaching again on the coasts of Erin, with renewed hopes of conquest and plunder. That summer saw the hardest fighting the Fíanna had done in years. Although he had not reached fifteen winters, the customary age for taking up arms, young Oisin was aglow with the desire to take part and so Finn let him accompany the Fíanna, though with strict orders to stay out of spear distance.
“If you are killed, you’ll die twice, because I’ll be so angry I’ll kill you again myself!” he warned the lad.
A great battle was fought on the White Strand, and Goll Mac Morna distinguished himself above all others on the first day of it. “Sing praise-songs of him,” Finn commanded Fergus Honey-Tongue.
On the second day of battle, Finn realized Conan Maol was not actively leading his fíans but seemed to be hovering at the edge of the conflict. “Conan is resting more than he’s roaring,” Finn told Fergus. “Go to him and urge him into the heart of the battle. He’s setting a bad example to the other rígfénnidi. Men won’t follow a man who won’t lead, and if my officers get in the habit of being in the rear, the only move we can make is to retreat … and I won’t retreat.”
Fergus sought out Conan and did everything he could to urge the hairless man to action, but at best, Conan’s response was desultory. “I’m getting too old and too heavy for this,” he muttered to his second-in-command. “I’m going to have to let out my belt any day now.”
But there was no question of Cael Hundred-Killer letting out his belt. He was here, there, everywhere, sword flashing, voice shouting encouragement to his fíans. Because Creide was with the army to see and admire him, he excelled himself, desiring to hear Fergus sing praise-songs of him at the end of the day.
Sometime during the hottest part of the battle, Finn lost sight of him. There was a fierce skirmish fought above the beach, where trees gave way to sand like a receding hairline. Eventually the Fíanna drove the foreigners back into the surf, where they clambered frantically into their boats and lifted their oars, anxious to escape. But they left a number of bodies littering the beach and the woods above.
The women went out to claim them, to tend the wounded and mourn the dead and dying. Finn was crouching on the beach cleaning his sword of blood and gore by driving it repeatedly into the sand when he heard the terrible cry.
It splintered the air like the scream of the Sídhe.
He was on his feet in an instant. “Who’s dead?” he cried, fearing the answer. He had recognized that voice.
She came walking down from the woods alone. On battle days Creide dressed for fighting, in a tunic like a man’s rather than in long robes that would hamper her movements. Her bare legs and feet were very white, but her face was paler still.
With her two hands she was pulling the hair out of her head in great bloody clumps.
Finn ran toward her. Her unseeing eyes looked through him.
He took her by the arm, fearful that she would walk past him into the sea. Her arm felt like cold stone. “I should never have let you come with us,” he said, as much to himself as to her.
When she spoke, her voice was as hollow as a cry from the depths of a cave. “And I not to have the dying of him?” she asked reproachfully. “And I not to take the last breath from his mouth into my mouth to keep safe for him?”
She shrugged free of Finn and walked back up the beach toward the trees. Helplessly, Finn followed her. There were other men dead and other women keening over them, but somehow the members of Finn’s original fían materialized, one at a time, and joined them, until they entered the sparse strip of woodland and came to the body lying there.
Creide dropped to her knees beside it. With pain etched on every face, Finn and his companions formed a protective circle around the pair of them.
Cael’s upturned face was calm, the fury of battle wiped clean. Creide had paused only long enough to straighten his limbs and spread his cloak over his body, leaving his sightless eyes uncovered to stare up into the branches of the trees. Then she had fled her pain.
But the pain had gone with her. Now she brought it back, brimming. If she bent over him, it would spill out.
She touched his sweat-soaked hair with a tentative hand. Turning her palm upward, she trailed her fingers down the side of his cheek in what was an old gesture between them.
The watching men felt the fingers and the pain.
Even Conan winced.
Creide was of the Gael, and poetry lay deep in her bones. For Cael, for what was loved and lost, she brought it to the surface. Bending over him so that pain poured from her with her tears, Creide wept her lament.
The harbour roars, the gulls cry, the waves are keening on the strand.
The hero has drowned in blood.
Sweet-voiced the crane, but she cannot save her nestlings.
The wild dogs take them.
Sorrowful is the wren in the meadow. Her mate lies dead on the grass.
Ochone, ochone, grief to me! My mate lies dead on the grass.
He lay living beside me, and his white body was my joy and delight.
His sweet mouth laughing.
Now waves weep on the shore, and my beauty flows away with the tide.
Ochone, ochone, song of grief! I will love no man after.
Creide bent lower still, so that what remained of her torn hair fell like a curtain. Stunned by the beauty of her poem, Finn noticed too late that there was a movement behind that curtain. His reflexes were fast, but not fast enough.
Creide drew not her shortsword, but Cael’s, and plunged it deep into her body before anyone could stop her.
24
“WE BURIED THEM BOTH IN THE SAME GRAVE,” A GRIEVING Finn told Manissa and Ailvi later.
“Many are killed in battle,” said the pragmatic Manissa. “It was a noble death.”
But Ailvi’s eyes glittered with tears.
The first death of one of his closest companions shook Finn more than he was willing to admit, even to his women. During the good years, the years
of triumph, he had come to believe they were indeed immortal. In his imagination they would go on forever, fighting great battles and always winning, wading through blood and carnage and coming home unscathed—or at least not fatally wounded. There was not one of them by now who did not carry many scars. The women tended them and the physicians treated them and the druids implored the forces of nature on their behalf, and in time they healed to fight again. Finn’s fían, the heart of the Fíanna.
Until Cael.
His death was like a fatal tear in the essential organ.
Unconsciously, Finn began being more careful with his men. They began losing occasional battles, mostly small skirmishes that were not important in themselves, but denied the infallibility of the Fíanna and encouraged their enemies.
Cormac criticized Finn and they argued, not once but several times, with increasing rancour.
“I won’t sacrifice my men just to please you!” Finn shouted at the king.
“They’re warriors, Finn! Spear targets! That’s what they’re for, to fight and die if need be.”
“If need be. But not when I can save them by being more careful with my strategies.”
“Being more careful is losing you battles.”
“We come back the next day and win.”
“Be certain you do,” said Cormac Mac Airt.
Winning got harder to do; wounds took longer to heal. When Finn inadvertently glanced into one of Ailvi’s mirrors, he saw a man he did not recognize, a man with his seasons carved on his face and reflected in his tired eyes.
But when he looked at Oisin, he saw himself renewed. He began spending much of his time training the boy, making of him as fine a warrior as Finn Mac Cool ever was.
Trying to make him immortal.
He took Oisin everywhere with him, except hunting. A certain sort of hunting.
Like Manissa before her, Ailvi had learned that there were times when a silent mood overtook Finn and he left Almhain without saying good-bye to anyone, taking only his huntsman and his hounds with him.
He never stopped looking for her. As the years passed, the hunt became more dreamlike, less immediate and urgent, a sort of ritual to which Finn was addicted. He could go for a cycle of the moon or more without thinking of Sive if battle season was sufficiently demanding, but then she would drift through his thoughts like a stray beam of sunlight and he would stop where he was, transfixed, and have to fight his way back to the matter at hand.
As soon as circumstances allowed, he would go hunting for her again.
Though the years were passing for Finn, he never imagined Sive as other than he had seen her last. In his mind, she was caught like a fly in amber, glowing with youth. With Bran and Sceolaun, he scoured Erin for a young doe, never an aging one.
Bran and Sceolaun were aging too. They were not as quick to pursue anything that ran; time had substituted wisdom for impetuosity. When they did give chase, however, nothing escaped them. Working together, they were an invincible pair.
Even Caurag, whose favourites were Finn’s pack of greyhounds, had to admit that Bran and Sceolaun had no equals in Erin. Because he was an experienced huntsman who took pride in his profession, he could also admit what Finn would not.
“They’re getting old,” he began telling the Rígfénnid Fíanna. “Grand dogs they are and they’ve outlasted any I ever heard of, but just look at them, Finn. Sceolaun’s gone quite grey around the face, and as for Bran—”
“Bran is perfect,” Finn said shortly.
“Perfect indeed, but stiffer on every cold morning. The dawn will come very soon when I blow the horn and old Bran there will not get up,”
“Bran runs as fast as ever.”
“Because Bran’s heart is as big as ever. But it will burst, Finn. Mind my words. Let that dog stay at Almhain by the fire the next time you go hunting, or prepare for sorrow.”
But Finn could not leave Bran and Sceolaun behind. Only they could be trusted to recognize Sive in her deer shape. Other hounds might kill her before Finn could stop them.
Together they had hunted her from Ceshcorran to Glenasmole over the years; from the hogback hills of Ulidia to the wolfs tooth mountains of Muma. There were few trails left in Erin that had not felt the feet of Finn Mac Cool, and stories sprang up behind him like crushed grass springing back where a giant has walked.
But he had not found Sive. Of her he had only Oisin, who was dearer to him every day. Even when Ailvi bore him a son they called Cairrel, Oisin was still first in his heart.
After Sive.
Autumn found him in the west again. In the Burren, he and Caurag claimed hospitality of Iruis in his fine stone fort atop Black Head, but Finn was restless. When Iruis asked him to tell stories of the Fíanna to entertain the women and children, Finn responded halfheartedly.
“Is he ill?” Iruis asked Caurag privately. “This is not the man I remember.”
“He’s not ill with any ailment the physicians can identify,” the huntsman replied. “Our Bebinn back at Almhain is as fine a healer and herbalist as any in Erin, but when Finn gets in one of his moods, there’s no helping him. It’s up then and away, and we must hunt from dawn till dark until he’s worked it out of him somehow.”
“Hunt for what?”
“A red deer. A doe, to be precise.”
“Surely you’ve found hundreds upon hundreds of deer almost anywhere you looked. This island teems with game.”
“It does. But none of them good enough for Finn. He’ll go out in spitting sleet or howling wind when the mood is on him,” Caurag said sadly, hunching closer to the fire while he had the chance.
Next morning the sleet was indeed spitting. Finn was no sooner awake than he was preparing to go out. Iruis, taking pity on Caurag, took Finn aside and said, “Your man there is exhausted, Finn.” He did not point out that Finn’s face was also grey with fatigue. “Would it not be wise to let him stop inside on a day like this?”
Finn seemed surprised by the suggestion. He reflected a moment, looking over Iruis’s shoulder. “I suppose it would,” he decided. “Have your women get some hot broth into him, would you? I’ll be back … later.” He strode through the door with his hounds at his heels before Iruis could think of any other protest to offer.
The day was hitterly cold, precursor of a hard winter. Bran and Sceolaun struck off toward the southeast, and twice they seemed to hit on some sort of spoor only to pull up again, looking back at Finn apologetically.
He was on foot. It was foolish to ride a horse in the Burren, where a misstep could break a leg, so Finn and Caurag had left their animals with a fisherman whose hut was on the black, stony beach of Galway Bay. But as the great broken cakes of limestone receded and Finn and his dogs advanced onto hilly grassland, he began to wish he had the mare under him.
“Once,” he confided to Bran when they stopped to make camp in the lee of a hill, “I could have run twice this far by midday and still fought a good battle. But now … now it seems wiser to stop for the night and start fresh in the morning, if you’re convinced we’re going in the right direction.”
Bran, who had collapsed at his feet, looked up adoringly at Finn and waved a feathery tail in agreement. Sceolaun already lay stretched with her head on her forepaws, snoring in little snuffles.
Her face was very white, where once it had sported strong red markings from the ears to the eyes.
Finn slept fitfully. In his dreams he was in bed with Sive and her hot hands moved over his body. He groaned once, softly. With a deep sigh, Bran arose and came over to lie down close against him, sharing comfort and warmth.
They renewed the hunt at first light.
Late morning found them rounding the flanks of heather-carpeted Mount Callan. The dogs were panting and slow. Finn reluctantly paused to camp again for a time and let them rest, but then he insisted they push on. He could feel Sive’s presence very strongly for some reason, as if she had followed him to this remote place where she had never been and was now experiencin
g it with him. Was now standing almost at his shoulder, if he could just see her … around a hill … look along a stream …
The day passed fruitlessly. Toward evening Finn had to admit to himself that the chase was accomplishing nothing, merely frustrating him and exhausting his dogs. He resolved to cast them one final time, then make camp for the night and return to Black Head.
But when he whistled and signalled with his arm, Sceolaun merely looked at him. Her expression was eager enough, but her body was past obeying. She sat down on her haunches and whined.
Bran went to her and sniffed her solicitously. Then, with an effort, the giant dog moved off alone in the direction Finn had indicated.
A moment passed before Finn trotted after. “Wait for us here,” he ordered Sceolaun. She lay down with a grateful sigh.
Finn followed Bran as dusk settled around them. The sense of Sive’s nearness returned. Once or twice Bran looked back, but each time Finn gave the signal to go on. Just beyond this strip of trees, only a little farther …
A range of hills called Ceentlea, tree-mantled and craggy, rose before them. Bran stopped, head lifted, then gave tongue again with such rising excitement that Finn began to run.
Following his hound, he bounded up the slopes like a young man. Ahead of him in the twilight, he caught a flash of red.
Red deer, red deer!
He ran faster.
Bran was belling with every stride, the deep, melodious voice of the true hound that knows the reason for its creation. No horn designed by man could match that song of nature, of freedom and excitement. Finn’s heart leaped in response.
Running cleared his brain. He told himself quite sensibly, even if we don’t find Sive, we’ll have had one last good hunt together, the old dog and I. I shan’t ask this of Bran again.
He burst through a stand of pines to find himself approaching the summit of a steep slope. Ahead, the ground soon fell away abruptly to form the brow of a crag that overhung a small lake far below. Beyond that point there was only empty sky.
And the deer.
Finn Mac Cool Page 37