Monsters of Celtic Mythology

by Bernard Evslin

  “And what am I to do, young sir, while you go cavorting off on your adventures? What am I to do with that bag of bones that was my husband? It’s your fault I’m in such a plight. If you had not brought his mother to see me, I’d still be living happily with him on that wrecked ship. But no! You must try to act like a hero and meddle in my affairs, and bring that old witch raging down on us, so that the poor lad was torn apart.”

  “But I have promised to restore him,” said Finn. “I deny that he was sundered by my doing; nevertheless, I have taken it upon myself to see him whole again. It is only by the mighty magic of Angus Og that his poor frame can be reknitted.”

  “Exactly,” said Kathleen. “And you are supposed to be taking us to Angus Og. But now you abandon us. You choose to go waltzing off on some conceited errand to the northern wastes. I’ll not have it! You must keep your promise to me, and leave the God of the Sea to those better able to conduct such high business.”

  “Will you be silent, woman?” cried Finn. “Buzz, buzz, buzz—I can’t think! Nag, nag, nag—you drive me to distraction! Can’t you see that I have no choice, despite my promise? I am shown a larger danger, and I must choose it. To challenge the Winter Fiend and rescue the sea god is a deed worthy of Cuchulain himself, best of the ancient heroes. It puts me in a fever to think of such opportunity. So you must wait. Your husband must wait. My promise must wait.”

  “Wait how long?”

  “Till I return.”

  “And if you fail to return? If Vilemurk is powerful enough to capture the King of the Sea himself, what makes you think, puny mortal that you are, that he will not squash you like a bug?”

  “Without peril there is no honor.”

  “And so, you will be destroyed. And I will wait here with my sack of bones through the long years until I grow old and gray and withered, unloving, unloved. No, thank you. I’m your responsibility now. You thrust yourself into my business and made it yours. I am not so easy to get rid of, you will find. Go north if you must, but I go with you.”

  “Kathleen, be reasonable. I have fighting to do. I’ll have no time to take care of you.”

  “Perhaps I’ll take care of you. I can fight too, you know. And pretty well … pretty well. So you may as well stop arguing. You won’t budge me. Where you go, I go, and that’s that. As for this bag of bones that’s my husband—well, we’ll store it in a safe place and pick it up when we return, if we do. There’s a good flat rock. We’ll bury the bones under it, and they’ll be safe from prowling dogs. Start digging, Finn. The moon grows pale and the waters grieve, and we have much to do, you and I.”

  6

  Fire and Ice

  With Lyr imprisoned and helpless, the Pig’s Ploughman had his own way with the weather and clamped a weird frost upon Eire. Finn and Kathleen awoke to the coldest day in memory. The trees were clothed in ice, and a single sheet of ice stretched as far as the eye could see. A flight of wild geese froze solid in mid-flight and fell into the bay without losing its V-shape, making a great splash that froze into a net of ice.

  Boy and girl were amazed but strangely joyful. Weak sunlight fractured off the icy trees in a dance of light. They saw fiery splinters of green, yellow, white, blue, paler blue, storm-pink lilac, and the purples of wrath; the crystal trees bore fire-fruit where the sun touched them. And bending in the wind and shaking their boughs, they made a tinkling ice-music for light to dance by.

  That day which started so cold grew steadily colder, so cold that the sunset froze in the sky. Its weight overbalanced the horizon, and it slid down the tilted line of the sky to the North Pole, where it stuck, flashing there in a pageantry of frozen colors we call the northern lights.

  Finn knew that this frozen sunset was of the utmost importance to him, but he didn’t know why. He bit his thumb, muttering:

  Salmon, Salmon, I bite my thumb.

  Speak ye forth, be not dumb.

  Come to me this day of ice

  With fish-mouth words of wise advice.

  As he spoke, the words themselves froze in the air and fell to earth, rearranging their letters and spelling out new words. This is what he read:

  “Quickly! Visit the sunset before it slides away, and search its roots for the seeds of fire.”

  Finn bound long, straight branches to his feet like the runners of a sled. He slung his sword-belt to the falcon, who seized one end of it in her beak and drew Finn swiftly over the icy plain to the great frozen lake of flame. He felt small as a speck of dust, did Finn, when he came to the base of that pulsing, radiant wall of color. Cold light poured down, staining him with its rich dyes, and his blood sang at the loveliness. The falcon flew slowly, pulling him on his skis past arches and columns and ramparts of living color to the red roots of the sunset. He dug there with his knife and pried out the seeds of fire, white-hot little pearls of the primal flame that sprout with unbelievable speed when planted, and will nourish life or death according to the manner of their sowing, and must be handled only by heroes. He put them in his wallet and skied swiftly away as the sunset’s weight began to tilt the horizon.

  The vile weather held, shrinking the seas, stretching the polar ice cap. The north wind blew triumphantly, sweeping the warm sea southward and paving the path of its retreat with rockhard ice tundra.

  Vanquished Lyr, manacled hand and foot to the granite pillar of ice that supported the roof of the world, could not struggle free. His oceans shrank, and fishermen and sailors perished.

  It was only autumn, but the coldest autumn the island had ever known. The sun was all shriveled to a pinpoint of light, when it could be seen at all, but mostly it was not seen, for a queer, cold fog covered the shores, confusing day and night. As the month advanced, the cold rain turned to hailstones big as eggs that fell with such force as to kill cattle in the field. Men did not venture out unless they wore helmets. Their wives, when they left the house, wore iron pots on their head. Then, before October ended, the snow began to sift down out of the gray sky. And fell and fell and fell. No one knew what had happened to the weather, and why the Winter Fiend triumphed so and was able to torment these islands known as the jewels of the sea.

  Only Finn knew, he and Kathleen. And they were far to the north, fighting through a giant blizzard. They were clad in white fur, which made them very difficult to see against the snow. Finn had gone hunting and had come back with a pair of huge polar-bear pelts, which Kathleen had cut and sewn into two mantles and two hoods for herself and Finn. These furs kept them warm in the teeth of the savage wind.

  That night they held a council of war around their campfire. And how did they build a fire in a blizzard with no tree in sight, and no earth beneath their feet, only ice? Well, remember the seeds of fire that Finn had dug from the roots of the frozen sunset? Each night now he scraped a shaving off one of the pulsing, golden pods, and that shaving was enough to start a fire anywhere—for it was a particle of the primal flame itself, which is at the center of all life and drops to us from the sun. So each night Finn started a small blaze, which he fed with icicles, and the flame ate them as if they were twigs of wood, and leaped merrily, hissing and growing brighter as the snow fell upon it.

  It was a wonder to the girl. She loved to watch the seeds sprouting into magic flame. She and Finn sat at the fire on this night, then, and plotted what to do. The hawk perched on Finn’s shoulder, and the huge black tomcat lay in Kathleen’s lap. And their fire was the only spot of light in all that howling waste.

  “We’ve almost come to where I want to go,” said Finn. “But what to do when we get there I do not know.”

  “That sounds like a song,” said Kathleen. “A sad song.”

  “Yes, and I beg your pardon. A true hero should grow more joyful as the hour of peril approaches. But I am no true hero, you know.”

  “I didn’t know. How could I tell? You’re the only hero I’ve met, true or untrue.”

  “Well, take my word for it. By nature I’m a coward. I just pretend to be brave. And some
times the pretense wears thin. I hate fighting. I can’t bear the sight of blood. I don’t even like loud noises.”

  “What in the world are we doing here then, picking a quarrel with the Winter Fiend himself and all his fearsome friends? Why must you pretend to be brave if you’re really not?”

  “It’s a funny thing about courage. If you pretend hard enough it becomes real.”

  “Ridiculous! Why should you have to be a hero in the first place?”

  “I didn’t have much choice,” said Finn gloomily. “My father was a hero. And various uncles. And grandfathers and great-grandfathers by the bushel, stretching back to the original family of giants who bullied their way onto this island and chased smaller folk off. I was the runt of the litter. Everyone was disappointed in me, and no one expected much in the way of sword-play and such. But, as it happened, I was even more contrary than I was cowardly. I decided to change myself, and went to work becoming what everyone expected me not to be. I have sought dreadful adventures and have come through with honor. But before every battle, I’m afraid. I’m afraid right now. But maybe I’ll forget about it when the fighting starts.”

  “Are we close to fighting, then?”

  “Close enough. See that giant pile of ice glimmering off yonder? That’s the end of our journey. In the side of that ice mountain is the mouth of a cave. The cave winds down to the base of the mountain, which is the granite shaft to which Lyr is chained. The mouth of that cave is the doorway to our adventure.”

  “So you mean to go down there and rescue him,” said Kathleen. “Is that it?”

  “Ah, I wish it were as easily done as said. You see, I haven’t told you about the dragon.”

  “What dragon?”

  “The one that stands guard over Lyr.”

  “There’s a dragon down there?”

  “There is.”

  “That’s all that’s needed to make a bad case worse.”

  “Yes …”

  “Actually, I don’t really know what a dragon is. I’ve heard about them in the old tales, but I’ve never seen one.”

  “Well, those who have don’t usually last long enough to tell about it.”

  “Are they that bad?”

  “Worse. Imagine a lizard. You’ve seen a lizard, haven’t you?”

  “Yes. Nasty, scuttling, little reptiles with long tongues like springs that uncoil to catch bugs on the wing.”

  “Well,” said Finn, “imagine a lizard grown as large as a barn, with teeth the size of plowshares, sharp as knives. And great leathery wings to fly with. All of him covered with leather scales so thick and tough he cannot be wounded by sword or spear wielded by the mightiest warrior. Now, this creature has a tail half the length of his body. This tail, when he lashes it, becomes an enormous flail. He can knock over houses with it. Wreck ships. Beat a whole team of oxen flat and smash the wagon. And that’s not all. Eight legs the beast has, each of them armed with a set of ripping talons. With a single swipe of his paw he can shred an oak tree.”

  “Any other features a girl should know about?”

  “One more. And that, perhaps, is the worst. His breath. It is cold, deathly cold, colder than the essence of frost. When he breathes upon a living creature, its marrow freezes. It turns to ice. This particular dragon has been seen hunting walruses. He breathes their way, and petrifies them at a distance of half a mile. Turns them into blocks of ice, then ambles up to them and gobbles them down. That’s the creature, my dear, who is guarding Lyr down in the cave.”

  “And you want to go down there and trick the dragon in some way and strike the manacles off the sea god? All by your little self? Confess—isn’t that your clever plan?”

  “I’m not exactly by myself,” said Finn. “I have you, and you have been explaining to me for a thousand miles how dangerous you are when aroused. And I have my two trusted friends, the hawk and the cat. I have the sword given me by my father and the mission given me by fate.”

  “I still say it’s a mismatch,” said Kathleen.

  “When mismatched,” said Finn, “and that’s the case usually with me, well, when facing up to a foe overwhelmingly strong, then, I’ve learned, you must use his own strength against him. That’s the secret of winning against odds.”

  “What exactly do you propose?”

  “I don’t know exactly. That’s why I’m discussing it with you. I’ll tell you what there is of my plan, and invite your opinion.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Now it is clear,” said Finn, “that we cannot possibly conquer the Winter Fiend. No, it takes a god to conquer another god. Therefore, what we must do is release Lyr so that he may use his power against Vilemurk.”

  “Release Lyr, is it? That’s what I said you were after. I knew that before you started this heavy discussion. But how do you propose to do it?”

  “Let’s turn our mind to it,” said Finn. “We know that Lyr is manacled to a massive pillar under earth, and that he is to be reached by entering the cave whose mouth opens out on that slope of ice mountain yonder. We also know that he is guarded by a dragon.”

  “It is that dragon that gives me such a poor opinion of our chances,” said Kathleen. “You must admit you have painted a fearsome picture of the beast. All he has to do is breathe on us, and there we are, ice statues standing in a cave forever. And that’s the best that can happen to us.”

  “We face a battle,” said Finn. “And we have to know the worst so that we can do our best.”

  “I haven’t had an easy life,” said Kathleen. “But this worst is worse than any worst I’ve ever known.”

  “Well, now, the question is, what do we do?” said Finn.

  “’Tis the question indeed. I’m all agog waiting for your answer.”

  “We have discussed the dragon’s powers,” said Finn. “Now we must think about his appetites, for therein may lie a weakness. For instance, what does he eat, besides walruses, which are not his favorite food.”

  “I can just imagine,” said Kathleen, shuddering. “He counts as delicacies, no doubt, lad and lass, cat and hawk.”

  “No doubt, but we’d make only a mouthful for him. He needs a more substantial dish. He eats seals by the hundreds. Hunts whale and octopus and giant turtle. As for land creatures, he prefers oxen and such huge viands. Here on the icy plains where game is hard to come by, his favorite meat is polar bear.”

  “Does he find them way down there at the bottom of the cave?” asked Kathleen.

  “No,” said Finn. “And you have put your finger on the very thing that may give us our chance. To hunt his food he must leave off guarding Lyr and climb to the mouth of the cave, and out upon the ice. There he lies in wait until he spots a polar bear, or a pair of them, and then he dines.”

  “Stop right there!” said Kathleen.

  “What?”

  “I’m beginning to get a glimmer of your idea, and I don’t like it a bit.”

  “What don’t you like?”

  “What you’re thinking.”

  “What am I thinking?”

  “That you and I in our polar-bear cloaks and polar-bear hoods—why, we’d look like the dragon’s favorite dish ourselves. Isn’t that what you’re thinking?”

  “You’re a clever girl.”

  “Not for long. Soon I’ll be a dead girl if I don’t look out. Dead and devoured and digested. Oh, why didn’t I stay in my father’s midden? Why did I have to leave the safety of that stinking barnyard and go husband hunting across the river? Now look at me: a thousand miles away from home, and freezing cold and widowed almost before I was wed, and about to become dragon fodder. Oh, woe and wail away!”

  “Are you done with your lamenting?”

  “Only for the moment.”

  “Well, do you want to hear the rest of my plan?”

  “Might as well. Don’t have anything better to do, and soon things will be much worse.”

  “Listen, then. In a few hours the dragon will get hungry. He will climb up out of his hole, up
through the mountain, out the mouth of the cave, and onto the ice. And what will he see? Well, he will see two polar bears asleep. That’s what he’ll think he sees, for it is dark, and dragons are nearsighted anyway. So he’ll come toward these two sleeping polar bears, who will be us, of course—and we shall be waiting for him.”

  “Without any eagerness whatsoever,” said Kathleen. “Speaking for myself, that is.”

  “All right. He’ll come up to the first one, who will be me, and open his great jaws and prepare to dine.”

  “Must you go into all this horrible detail?” cried Kathleen. “I get the picture.”

  “Not yet you don’t. Look at this.”

  With a swift movement Finn shed his white cloak and hood, and stood in a black sealskin cape and cap. Kathleen could see only the glimmer of his eyes and the shine of his smile. When he tossed his mantle on the ice, why, it lay there plumply, looking for all the world like a polar bear.

  “I’ve stuffed it with feathers,” said Finn, “that the hawk has been collecting from every bird she strikes down and that I have been saving for this purpose. Look—does it not seem like a polar bear asleep?”

  “Yes, it does. And that’s about all I can say for it.”

  “The hide will hold not only feathers,” said Finn. “When I finally doff it, it will hold something else, which the dragon will swallow down also. And that something else will be this.”

  He whipped something from his belt and held it toward Kathleen. She peered at it in the firelight.

  “Your pouch—bearing the seeds of fire!” she cried.

  “Exactly. That is what the dragon will swallow. And, perhaps, it will give him the biggest bellyache since bellies were made.”

  “What about the second sleeping polar bear?” asked Kathleen. “The one who’s me. Or am I stuffed with feathers and fire too, and hiding in the shadows in a sealskin cape, which, by the way, you haven’t given me.”

  “No,” said Finn. “It will be you crouching in your white cloak. And I have a special task for you. And the dragon will never reach you, if my plan works at all. Once he swallows the seeds of fire he should be very busy for a while. And I will deal with him, and try to direct his wrath for our own purpose. And you, you will slip into the mouth of the cave and descend to the depths of the cavern, taking my sword with you. There you will strike a blow for the shining waters of the world. You will raise my sword, which has been magically honed and can cut through any manacle—you shall wield my sword, you yourself, Kathleen ni Houlihan, too long a daughter, too soon a widow, you Kathleen, beautiful girl, brave and lovely one, who has chosen to leave the bag of bones that was her husband, and come adventuring with Finn McCool into this dire peril. Yes, you will use the sword that passed to me from my father, the great Cuhal, and you will strike the manacles off the God of the Sea, and release him to resume the war against the foul-weather fiend and his cohorts, who hold the sea in bondage and shrink the sun, and starve our folk. You shall do this and I do that. Between us—if fortune smiles, and we do not blacken her smile with our own fears—between us we shall conquer.”