The Crow of Connemara

by Stephen Leigh

  “But it wasn’t that way with my grandfather?”

  His words stung. He saw it in her face. She gave a faint shake of her head, swaying the long strands of her hair. “’Twas nah. He was nah the same as yeh, Colin. Yer stronger and yet gentler than he ever was, and yeh know yerself better. Yer a true bard; he was an amateur. I might have come to love Rory in some way, but he left me before that could happen. I frightened him too much. I know yeh feel the same a bit, but yeh stayed when yeh could have left. He di’nah. I just hope yeh can still trust me, with all I’ve told yeh.”

  Colin blinked. He wanted to believe her, but the confusion in his mind was thicker than Keara’s fog. “Maeve . . .” he started to say, but he felt the shift in the air in the same moment, and turned to see Fionnbharr, clad in armor and with a spear in his hand, standing alongside the tree at the summit of the mound.

  “Morrígan,” he said, nodding first to Maeve. Then he glanced at Colin, his eyes glittering. “Well, would yeh look now, the leamh’s all dried off after his little swim.”

  “Fuck you, Fionnbharr,” Colin spat back, and crystalline laughter answered him from the mound, the sound of a thousand-voiced amusement.

  “So, does yer little play-toy know what’s expected of ’im?” Fionnbharr boomed over the laughter.

  “He does,” Maeve answered. She didn’t look at Colin now, and he remembered her words. Just pretend that yeh agree with me . . .

  “An’ does he know all that means? Och, nah, Morrígan,” Fionnbharr said, raising his spear and thumping the shaft on a stone at the base of the hawthorn. The booming sound that followed was like the stroke of a mallet on timpani. “Let himself answer, so I can hear ’im.”

  Maeve waited, still not looking at Colin and her chin lifted, as if she was entirely confident and certain of his answer. Colin could hear the cold Atlantic wind sighing in the branches of the hawthorn and the faint crash of waves against the rocks below the cliff; he could smell the brine. He started to speak, then halted, taking another breath. The hesitation seemed to go on for seconds. Finally, Colin spoke, his voice sounding thin against Fionnbharr’s growling bass. “I know the spell to open the Green Land to you requires blood magic. I know I was brought here for that purpose.”

  The words sounded ridiculous. Impossible. Why am I going along with this? I can’t trust her . . .

  “And so yer willin’ to be that for the Morrígan?” Fionnbharr continued, his tone mocking. “Then yer a greater fool than any.”

  “Not for the Morrígan,” Maeve answered before Colin could reply. “What Colin does, he’ll do for all of us, the aos sí as much as any.”

  Again, many-voiced laughter echoed from the mound. “Yer the ones threatened by the leamh,” Fionnbharr answered. “We aos sí are safe for now under the mound. Let them come ashore with their empty laws and their guns. They won’t find us in our caverns under the ground.”

  Maeve sniffed and turned to Colin. “May I borrow the cloch? For a moment only, I promise.” She held out her hand to him, palm up.

  He didn’t want to obey her. He didn’t want to feel the pain and the loss again; he knew now what it would cost him. He wondered whether, if he gave it to her, she would give it back or if he would lose it forever, as his grandfather had done to her. He looked at Maeve’s hand, then her face, trying to read what was there. I just hope yeh can trust me . . . Now that it came to it, he wasn’t sure he could. He fisted his hand around the stone, which lay on his chest: his grandfather’s stone. The Morrígan’s stone. Your stone. It’s yours and no one else’s.

  Reluctantly, he slipped the chain over his head and held his hands over hers. He had to fight his own fingers to loosen them. The stone fell, and Maeve’s hand closed around it. Colin gave a cry, a wail that died when it hit the wall of fog around the mound. Pain racked him, as if he’d just dropped his own heart into her palm. He had to clutch his arms to himself to stop him from clawing at Maeve’s hand to take back the cloch.

  Fionnbharr laughed.

  Maeve lifted her hand, and the wind failed in the hawthorn as Fionnbharr’s amusement went silent. Movement snagged Colin’s gaze, and he looked up to see yellow-green waves of lights shimmering among the stars, tendrils of that strange aurora he’d glimpsed once before stretching down toward Maeve’s hands and wrapping around her arm. In her fingers, he thought she was holding his cloch, but it was no longer just a pretty crystal; it was glowing itself in response to the sky’s light. Maeve spoke a single word—“Oscail!”—and the world shifted around them. She, Colin, and Fionnbharr were no longer standing on the mound, but in an immense cavern lit by thousands of torches and candles. Around the stones and through the earthen walls, the roots of the hawthorn were entwined, like the tangled base of some immense world-tree. Colin gasped, helplessly. Around them, the host of the aos sí were gathered, half-hidden in the shifting light and shadows.

  Leaning over Colin, she took his hand and gave him back the stone. Colin gasped with relief, at the sense of being whole once more, but he saw pain wrinkle Maeve’s face even as she released the cloch. He quickly put it around his neck once more.

  She sighed, shaking her head. “That was far harder than I thought ’twould be,” she whispered to Colin.

  Fionnbharr’s face was suffused with red, visible even in the light of the torches. He shook his spear toward Maeve. “Yer not permitted here, Morrígan.” His gaze went to Colin. “Nor is any mortal, on pain of death. Yeh should nah have done this.” His eyes narrowed. “Yeh should nah have been able to do this.”

  “Then send me away, Lord Fionnbharr. I’ve given you a glimpse of the power that my mere mortal holds. So show us yer great magic. Show me how powerful yeh are. Send us back.”

  Fionnbharr scowled; he lifted his spear as if he were about to cast it at Maeve, and she seemed to wave a casual hand, the aurora light still flickering around her fingers even though the stone was now in Colin’s hand. “Pléasc!” she uttered, and the shaft of the spear exploded into long splinters in Fionnbharr’s hands, the bronze head falling to ring impotently on the stones at his feet. Colin heard a collective gasp from the host as Fionnbharr tossed down the remnants of his weapon and spat on them. “Yer not a mortal, Morrígan. Yeh think this mortal lover of yers could’a done that? Could he have brought yeh down here?”

  “Yeh misjudge the power of the mortals in this world, Lord Fionnbharr. Yeh always have an’ that’s the foolishness of yer kind, as it’s been the foolishness of my own. I told yeh this before yeh rode: if yeh do nothing, then those mortals out there will cut down the hawthorn, dig up the sidhe, and salt the very earth, as Eithne’s husband did at Cnoc Meadha. Yeh might not believe me, but ’tis fact. If yeh do nothing here on Inishcorr, then yeh and all of yer kind will die here, too. This will truly be the last mound.”

  Colin saw Fionnbharr scowl again. His face seemed older now, as if the centuries were marking Fionnbharr’s face as they watched. “When I came here to Cnoc Deiridh, I brought the sacred earth from the heart of Cnoc Meadha, Morrígan. ’Tis that and our own spells will keep us safe.”

  “Scoff all yeh like, Fionnbharr. Yeh can cower here in your caverns while they turn Inishcorr into a park for the leamh and sell fairy trinkets and plastic swords in a bloody souvenir stand on top of yer precious Cnoc Deiridh. Yeh can comfort yerself with knowing that they will leech all the true magic from the earth and leave the aos sí nothing more than whispers and mist. Yeh need to have the gate open to Talamh an Ghlas as much as the rest of us, and yeh know it. If yeh fail to help us now, yeh will know the real death, eventually.”

  “An’ why are yeh here, Morrígan? Why aren’t yeh already crafting the spell to open the path? Why is the witch’s fog still all about the island? Why are yeh slabberin’ at me instead of acting?”

  “While the fog holds, no enchantment of mine can reach outside it, and the blood spell needs to go beyond to find the gateway. Which yeh alread
y know—’tis why I sent the wild ride to find Colin. When I tell Keara to stop her chanting, then the leamh are going to try to take the island and us, and the blood spell is long and difficult. I won’t be able to help hold them back. We’ll need the aos sí then, or it will all fail and Colin won’t be the only mortal a’standin’ in the sidhe caverns.”

  “There are more than mortals here, Morrígan.” Fionnbharr chuckled, and the host laughed with him. He waved his hand toward the dark recesses of the underground, and torches flared into life there. “Can yeh wake those who sleep? Does the bard’s cloch also give him that power?”

  Colin took a step toward what the light had revealed, and the host parted reluctantly in front of him. Down a long passage, ornate, decorated niches had been carved into the living rock and painted brightly; there, on beds of silk-covered rushes, lay bodies. The nearest one to Colin was a stocky, muscular man, arrayed in mail and a cloak of blue. Where his arms were exposed, the jagged lines of old battle wounds were visible, as was a long scar from his chin to his temple on the left side of his face. Locks of golden hair touched with white fell around his shoulders, and a long spear, the leaf-shaped blade inscribed with the incised lines of ogham lettering, had been placed alongside him, his hand grasping the yew staff. A brown, lean grayhound slumbered at his other side, its long and narrow muzzle resting on the man’s shoulder. Colin thought the man a corpse, but as he stared down at him, he saw the chest rise and fall in a slow breath.

  “That’s Lugh,” he heard Maeve say behind him. “Son of Cian and Ethniu, grandson of Balor of the Fomorians. He’s been this way for two centuries and more, though once he was vibrant and alive. Now he sleeps like the others who have been brought here, all those we could find in the old places.”

  “Places like Rathcroghan, where you met my grandfather?”

  “Aye, there and a hundred other places as well. Now they sleep here, where we remember them.” Maeve began to intone their names, and Colin heard Fionnbharr’s voice join her, and those of the host as well, until the cavern swelled with the sound, the names like a litany chanted in a church, each name an echoing thunder stroke: Nuada of the silver arm, Allai, Indai, Ériu, Banba, Fodla, Aengus, Manannán mac Lir, Brigid, and dozens more—names that Colin knew from old texts: the Book of Leinster, the Lebor na hUidre, the Táin Bó Cúailnge; all the other manuscripts that comprised the three cycles of Irish myth. The syllables the aos sí intoned shivered the walls and made the flames of the torches gutter in the wind they created. With every name, one of the niches farther along the passage would erupt in shafts of gold-green light like the afternoon sun through a canopy of leaves, then fade again.

  When it ended, the silence pressed down on Colin, smothering and oppressive. Maeve touched his shoulder as he stared down at Lugh’s slumbering form. “It’s your time,” she said to Colin. “Show them what you can do.”

  He shook his head, confused. “I don’t know how.”

  “Hold the cloch,” she told him, “and sing.”

  “Sing what?”

  Her lips curled into smile. “The words will come to you, love. Don’t worry. Trust me, as I said.”

  She stepped aside and back, close to where Fionnbharr also stood. Colin glanced at the stone in his hand, standing at the foot of Lugh’s bed and looking down on the sleeping god’s figure. Feeling both foolish and self-conscious, he took the pendant from his neck and put it in his right hand, lifting it as he’d watched Maeve do, imagining the cloch glowing again as it had when she had held it. For a moment, nothing happened, but then his perception shifted, as if he were seeing double, and he saw the scene around him outlined in green, coruscating light as the shimmering curtains of aurora-like radiance filled the cavern above the upheld cloch, drifting downward to wrap around his arm and hand. Colin gasped at the touch of the light: frigid, burning his skin like ice. Curling lines like white, raised scars traveled down his arm to the wrist, burrowing past the cuff of his sweater. He could feel the cloch, he could hear voices inside it, and they gave him words and a song, and he opened his mouth, letting their words fall from his lips to become wrapped in the aurora light, his voice sounding deeper and more resonant: a stranger’s voice more than his own.

  Brosdaighthear, ar Tuath Dé Danann

  doirseóir Teamhra,

  d’ionnsoighidh na craoibhe cubhra,

  aoighe Eamhna.

  Mása thú an tIoldánach oirrdhearc

  an airm ghlaisghéir

  is mo chean duid, ar an doirseóir,

  a bhuig bhaisréidh.

  Damadh é Lugh, leannán Fódla

  na bhfonn sriobhfhann,

  do bheith ann, ar Tuath Dé Danann,

  dob é a ionam.

  As the last words echoed in the cavern, Colin felt he could no longer bear the bright cold that wrapped around his arm. As the scar-like lines deepened on his hand and arm, Colin saw Lugh’s eyes open for a moment, startling clear and blue, and Colin’s grip on the cloch loosened. He cried out as he nearly dropped the pendant. He felt more than saw Maeve move past him to bend over Lugh’s body. She touched the god’s face with her hand, the fading green light of the cloch still falling on Lugh’s features. She spoke to him in quick, ancient Gaelic, far too fast for Colin to understand. Lugh answered in a single word in a voice that was graveled and slow: “Tuigim.”

  But after he spoke, his eyes closed once more as the light from the cloch faded entirely. Colin brought down his arm, cradling it against his body as he went to his knees in the cavern. His arm was stiff and aching, and his fingers were clawed around the silver cage that held it.

  The host of the aos sí and Fionnbharr maintained a reverent silence, while the echo of the thundering light and his own voice reverberated in Colin’s memory. “What . . .” His voice sounded hoarse and broken after the song, and he licked his lips and tried again. “What did you say to him?” Colin asked.

  “I told him that ’twas time for him to take up his spear once more. I told him that we needed him to come when we called, and he said that he understood.” She glanced over to Fionnbharr. “Great Lugh will come,” she said. “Colin the Bard has awakened him again, and he will answer the call.” Maeve paused, and Colin saw her look past Fionnbharr to the gathered shadowy host. “So, what of the rest of yeh? Are yeh willin’ to ride out now that it’s time to do battle, or nah?”

  “Aye . . .” The word came first as a whisper from one, then it was joined by other voices until it sounded like a gale off the North Sea, and finally Fionnbharr himself joined in. “Aye, Morrígan,” he bellowed, and the host behind him went silent. “We will, and perhaps we can rouse others here besides Lugh. But I tell you this, Morrígan. ’Tis given to me as the Lord of the Aos Sí to glimpse the future, an’ the future I see yer nah part of.”

  Maeve nodded. “Then so be it,” she answered. She crouched down alongside Colin. “Take up the cloch and take us away from here,” she said in his ear. “Yeh must do it; I do’nah think I can bear to handle it again only to give it back. Not again. So unless yeh want me to take it from yeh forever . . .”

  “No!” He nearly shouted the word; the thought of losing the stone unbearable. He closed his fist around it, hiding it from her against his body. “It’s mine.”

  “Aye,” she told him. “’Tis. An’ yeh must use it now.”

  “How?”

  “Hold it up as yeh did before and just think of us outside once more. It will hear you and do the rest.” She put her hands under his arms, and he started to pull away again. “Let me help yeh stand,” she whispered. “Yeh can’t appear weak to Fionnbharr. ’Twill be easier this time, I promise.”

  Grimacing, Colin stood again, Maeve helping him up. With a long, shuddering sigh, he lifted his right hand once more. Using the cloch was easier this time: the doubled vision came quickly, and as he thought of the path leading to the mound from Maeve’s cottage, it was as if the place
appeared solid and complete in front of him. A word in Gaelic drifted through his consciousness: Filleadh. He sang/spoke the word, and the green-gold light of the stone erupted between his fingers once more, as a gust of cold air struck him so hard that he closed his eyes in response.

  When he opened his eyes again, he and Maeve were once more standing on the grass at the foot of the mound. Fionnbharr and the others had vanished. Colin heard Maeve laugh even as he sagged in weariness and pain, as exhausted as if he’d run miles. His right arm ached, a cold and dead weight at his side. Maeve must have noticed, for he felt her put her arm around his waist to hold him up. He placed the hand in his jean pocket, and as he did he saw the patterns on his arm, mounded like white, angry scars but already beginning to fade. He released the cloch, letting it fall into the nest of his pocket.

  “That’s done, then,” she said. “The host will come out when we call. Yeh did grand in there, Colin. Just grand.”

  “I still don’t know what I did,” he told her, “or how. It hurts, Maeve.”

  “I know,” she told him. “But it will pass soon.”

  “We told Fionnbharr a lie. I haven’t agreed that I was willing to be part of this spell of yours.”

  “Nah, yeh haven’t,” she agreed.

  “So what happens now?”

  “I don’t know,” she told him. “I truly don’t know.” The weariness overwhelmed him again; he seemed to be holding himself up only by sheer force of will and Maeve’s arm. “Help me,” he husked, and Maeve put both arms around him tightly as his knees buckled. She kept him upright, his arms draped over her shoulders, her body warm against his cold one, her face nestled against the curve of his neck. “Let’s go home,” she whispered into his ear.

  Leaning against Maeve, the two of them made their way back down the path into the fog and to her cottage.

  31

  The Twisting of the Rope