Old Friends: The Lost Tales of Fionn Mac Cumhaill

by Tom O'Neill

  Art cowered a little as he realised he had gone too far. He witnessed the big man biting back a rage.

  Eventually Mac Cumhaill spoke slowly and dangerously: ‘Listen to me now and look at me when I am telling it to you. If you ever speak ill again of our king, our little brethren, or indeed of our Aoife, you will not have to worry about any of them. I will consider then that you have proven something I do not want to think of you and I will end your time in this world without any further warning to you.’

  Art did listen well. He was a good learner. He immediately apologised and snapped back into the role of the good, obedient soldier, learning his trade. After some months, Mac Cumhaill went back to assuming that it had all just been the folly of a young man with his brain bent out of shape by his first love. He even wondered if he hadn’t taken it too seriously and spoken too harshly to Art.

  Mac Cumhaill was in this frame of mind when Art came to him and asked that he be allowed to stay on in the Fianna rather than going home, as he was fitting in so well. Mac Cumhaill did not regard this with much suspicion. To show the young lad that he appreciated how he had reformed, he went to Cormac on Art’s behalf with this request.

  What Mac Cumhaill didn’t know was that Art had not moved the smallest fraction from the views he had expressed in his meetings with Mac Cumhaill. The only wisdom that had penetrated his bear-like stubbornness was that it would be better for his own health not to seek Mac Cumhaill’s assistance again. Every night after training he would head off on his own, telling the other lads that he just wanted to do more running to keep his fitness levels high.

  In fact, he always ran to one spot:. a clump of yew trees that overlooked Aoife’s dwelling place. There he would hide himself and stay awake as much of the night as he was able, watching the comings and goings.

  Since the dwelling was next to the fairy fort, the night time was when things really came to life. At first he was shocked to have what Mac Cumhaill had told him confirmed. He saw various fairy people leaving their fort at all hours and going in and out of the human dwelling. And many were the evenings he also saw Aoife’s mother slip from human form back to fairy form and wander down into the hollows of the earth.

  And much less often, he saw a chariot arrive late at night with one man in it. The unmistakable man would be greeted at the entrance to the fort and presented with a tiny, golden goblet. He would then go into Aoife’s mother’s dwelling. He would only emerge in the late hours of the morning when the sun was well up, shamelessly unconcerned about who might report him back to his human wife, chatting away to the fairy wife and giving instructions to the children as he was leaving. Though there were no fancy robes or formal tunics, neither was there the slightest attempt at disguise. Obviously, Cormac assumed that none of his people would see anything wrong with this. Art’s anger with Aoife turned into a frenzy of disgust at all these happy, normal goings on. He convinced himself that this was a breach of the laws of the world and an offence to Lugh and Daghda and all the gods.

  It seems that Art started to believe then that he was a holy agent of the gods and that anything he would do against such wrongdoing would be blessed. That allowed him to absolve himself of any feeling of guilt for what he was about to do next and indeed for many of the less than admirable things he was to do in his later life.

  Incidentally, the person that Art decided to target to channel his divine vengeance upon was the young fairy man whom he saw as his competition. Art had seen the slight fellow come shyly knocking on the door of Aoife’s house every evening. The tiny but beautiful young man would walk out with her to a spot just in front of the yew trees and sit there talking, laughing, weaving fantastic images in the air and holding her hand for hours every evening. When they touched, the faint background magic music from the earth beneath the fort seemed to somehow get louder and sweeter. It was driving Art into spasms of rage. But he would go back there the next night for more. And he would sit, quietly paralysed, watching and eavesdropping on every bit of idle talk.

  His first attempt to do something about this was clumsy. One evening, he heard the fairy man saying he would not be able to visit the next night, as there was a grand wake at another fort. The sí were no different than the big people in regard to wakes. Everyone was deeply interested in the shadow of death and all the young people had to leave the fort to participate in the festivities in their cousins’ domain.

  Art decided to disguise himself as a púca. He huddled himself in smelly goatskins and cut himself a blackthorn walking stick. It was not a bad disguise. His face was naturally hairy and malevolent. When he hunched, he was almost small enough to pass as a large, over-fed fairy man. He went to knock on the door of Aoife’s house at the same time that her fairy buck would usually do so. She opened.

  ‘Yes, sir, what were you looking for?’

  ‘Come outside to talk to me,’ he said in the squeakiest voice he could muster.

  ‘No, but you can come in if you’re hungry or tired. Our house and table are always open to weary travellers.’

  ‘It’s me; it’s me, Séafra,’ said Art.

  She laughed first and then she looked again.

  ‘What foolery is this?’

  ‘No foolery, starlight,’ said Art, who had all of the lovers’ terms of affection burned into his brain, ‘I am your own sunbeam. I’ve been turned into a leaprachán by a bandraoi.’

  She looked doubtful. But she had to admit that through the ugly beard and long hair, there was something familiar about his face. She didn’t fully believe, but she started thinking how awful it would be to reject her own love, if it really were true. She decided to go and sit with him in their usual place and to listen to what he had to say. She would test him to see if he knew any of the secrets that only two people in the whole world could know.

  ‘So, aren’t our stars looking good tonight?’ he said, pointing up.

  ‘Yes, but why are you pointing at the bear, my dear? Ours are over to the west.’

  ‘Of course. I just started thinking recently that the bear is a particularly fine arrangement.’

  She edged a little away from him.

  ‘Anyway,’ he continued, ‘let’s talk some more about what we’ll name our beautiful children.’

  ‘Yes, what had we decided on again for the first-born? All the confusion tonight must be making me forgetful,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, now, let me see,’ said Art, enjoying this bit. ‘The trauma of the body change has also made me forgetful. Was it Bréagán?’

  ‘Aha,’ she said.

  ‘Or Fionnán?’

  ‘I don’t think you are … ’

  ‘Or, let me see now, was it Senan?’

  She looked very disappointed. It was of course what they had agreed and she couldn’t now doubt that this sneering lump was what remained of her lovely Séafra.’

  Now, sensing victory, he tried to hold her hand.

  ‘I’m sorry, ehh, Séafra; for some reason I don’t feel like that tonight.’

  ‘But what has changed?’ said Art in mock indignation.

  ‘Nothing really, it’s just that…’

  ‘You said to me once that it didn’t matter what I looked like; you’d still love me because our souls are intertwined.’

  Aoife was shocked. This was another of the things that nobody else could have known.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she stammered. ‘You are right.’ And she slid her hand awkwardly into his.

  He gripped it very tightly and she looked at him again, starting to realise there was a reason he looked so familiar. She tried to pull her hand away.

  ‘What is it, my dear?’ smiled Art.

  ‘If you are Séafra, you have changed in many ways.’

  ‘In what ways would those be?’ said Art, still smiling.

  ‘Well, you are hurting my hand. And…I don’t know; even though I can see you are bigger than him, you somehow seem much shorter.’

  Art stopped sneering. A sudden rage welled up and overwhelmed him and
he cast off the stinking goatskins, threw back his shoulders, and said, ‘Arthur, the most heroic, at your service. You have misunderstood me before and now I will tell you the truth of what a fine man I am and of how lucky you are that I will still take you, forgiving you for having engaged with a weasel, a dancing deceiver. I will never forget though, that you have crossed into forbidden worlds and I will always ensure that as my wife you never do this again.’

  Aoife was shocked. At first, she was stuck to the spot by fear.

  Casting off the disguise didn’t matter to him now, as his plan hadn’t included staying in disguise very long anyway. He had only intended to stay in disguise long enough for other fairy people passing from the fort to the house and back, to see him with her and carry the news.

  ‘No need to stare at me like that,’ said Art. ‘You will come to like me. But now you can go inside and gather your things and we will leave.’

  ‘What are you thinking? What are you talking about?’ Aoife suddenly found her voice and started shouting.

  ‘You have no future here now, as you have been seen with a púca, the one night that your lover is away. They’ve seen you.’

  ‘You boar,’ she screamed. ‘I will explain to them and to Séafra.’

  Art laughed. ‘They don’t trust humans anyway. Not even half humans or whatever it is you are, I would say. So they will never believe whatever fanciful stories you tell them about being tricked. Now, I’m your best hope. You ought to be very grateful that I have stuck by you despite your unreliability and your doubtful ancestry. So go and get your things before those wicked little ferrets come to get their vengeance on you.’

  Of course, Art’s arrogance had been growing much faster than his knowledge or wisdom and now overshadowed all his other mental powers. He in fact had no idea of how the little people would react to what they had seen, yet he thought he could speak with authority. When Aoife went inside, supposedly to get her things, needless to say, she did not come back out again.

  After the first hour, he thought she might just have a lot of womanly things to gather. After another two hours, as the early summer dawn was arriving, he finally started to admit that this plan was not going right. They were not kicking her out.

  But maybe, he thought, when Séafra returned, he would reject her and then she would come out to him. He would go there the next night to be ready to forgive and rescue her. The next night, he got his answer and it wasn’t the one he had been expecting. He went to his usual spot in the yew trees, not figuring out that they would have realised this was where he had been sitting when he had eavesdropped on all their intimate secrets. He had just settled into his nest of yew needles when a small whirlwind struck up, filling the air with these needles, hitting against him like tiny darts. He knew they were deadly poisonous and that if he got some of them in his mouth or nose he could be in serious trouble. He held his nose and ran out with the whirlwind following him for several hundred paces before it stopped, dropping the needles to the ground.

  Art lay low for a few days, somewhat frightened by this experience. Even he, at first, accepted that they had probably not done their worst to him. But then the dark nature that was hardening into his personality started to get the better of him again. He started telling himself that as a divine agent he could not give up; that it was probably his divinity that had protected him; that they would truly not be able to do anything worse to him; that he must go back and take more drastic steps. He told himself that he had made a fair attempt to do things nicely. Now, he decided, it was time to stop tinkering and to make these people – Aoife included – respect and fear a warrior of his stature.

  That evening, after training, he raised some eyebrows with his colleagues when he collected his hatchet and spear before heading off on his ‘further training routine’.

  ‘What do you want them with you for?’ asked Conán, who had been working with the young men that day.

  ‘Oh, just in case I see a weasel or some other vile creature on the path,’ said Art, grinning.

  ‘What do you mean, boy?’ said Conán. ‘Who in their right mind would go chasing a weasel with a hatchet?’

  ‘Only joking,’ said Art. ‘I think there’s a boar that crosses one of the paths I run at night and I was thinking I might be able to bring you all back a nice surprise for our feed tomorrow morning.’

  ‘Right then,’ said Conán, still not fully persuaded. There was a glazed look in Art’s eyes that Conán did not care for.

  When he was telling Mac Cumhaill later, Conán said, ‘It was like the look of a preachy druid that thinks he’s the only one that can know the wishes of the gods.’

  ‘Don’t worry about him’, said Mac Cumhaill. ‘I had a good talk with him a while back and he has settled well since then.’

  ‘All the same,’ said Conán, ‘I asked Donn and Uileog to follow him at a distance.’

  ‘Good enough,’ said Mac Cumhaill.

  But indeed it wasn’t good enough. Not by a long shot. Art moved very quickly. He headed straight for some bushes directly in front of the well-beaten path between the fairy fort and Aoife’s mother’s dwelling. By the time the other Fianna men got there, only a hundred paces after him, they couldn’t see him. They could see tracks where he had left the path but lost them after he entered a stream. But they guessed he was around this settlement somewhere, as the land beyond was open country. So they went to hide in the yew trees to see if he got up to anything.

  Everything happened very fast then. It turned out that the little people were expecting Art. Aoife had persuaded them that he would not give up. She knew he would be back. They had set a net in the yew trees. The trap snapped shut; two hazel trees swung back into an upright position, closing the net on their prey and lifting it completely off the ground.

  Several little soldier men who had been standing invisibly waiting for their quarry, now appeared. They cheered at their success. At the back of them appeared Séafra. He was a timid young man and not much for this kind of thing. He was happier with a fiddle than a sword. He felt a bit sorry for Art in the net because he knew how crazy the love of Aoife could make a person. On the other hand, he was angry with Art for scaring Aoife and for spying on them and he wanted him given a serious talking to.

  As he turned to walk back inside to Aoife, someone shouted, ‘There are two of them!’

  And then a human voice: ‘We mean you no harm.’

  And another fairy voice: ‘It’s not him at all, they’re both too big.’

  In an instant Séafra heard another human voice right above him. He looked up just in time to see the raging head of Art as he swung the axe with all his might, bringing it down at the speed of light, aiming to split Séafra in two. Séafra didn’t get out of the way in time and left one foot behind. He filled with pain and his blood gushed out. His chances of escaping one-legged from the second murderous blow were very slim. As the axe was no more than the thickness of a hair from his neck, it stopped dead. It was caught in a web. Séafra looked back along the web to see Aoife’s mother on the other end. He had never in his life seen her perform fairy magic before; always, he thought, acting more like a human wife for Cormac than a fairy wife. But he was very glad she had chosen today to reveal her skills.

  Everyone closed in on Séafra and watched Aoife’s mother tend to his wound. There was nothing she could do to re-attach the little severed foot, as it was too badly broken by the blunt axe blow. All she was able to do was to stop the blood flowing, ease the pain and make it heal immediately.

  In the commotion, Art broke from the web and fled. Despite his pig-headedness, he had a good sense of preserving his health. Nobody bothered chasing him. That would come.

  For now, they cut down the two Fianna men and found out from them why they had been sent. Stories were exchanged between them and the little people, piecing together all of the evening’s events.

  When things quietened down, the anger started to well up in the fairy fort. Cormac was warned that he w
ould be better to stay away from his fairy wife that evening. Mac Cumhaill came down to talk to the local fairy chief, a man who went by the name of Ceann. At first he would not even receive Mac Cumhaill. When, eventually, he relented, he made no secret of the fact that he was a very angry little man.

  Mac Cumhaill could see where he got the name from. He had a head on him as big as a fine turnip, even though his little body was no bigger than a mediocre carrot. Mac Cumhaill thought it would be wise to keep his amusement at this sight to himself.

  ‘You have every right to be angry,’ said Mac Cumhaill. ‘I can only apologise a thousand times for this.’

  ‘But you knew and didn’t stop him,’ said the chief.

  ‘I didn’t know he was capable of any real wrongdoing,’ said Mac Cumhaill.

  ‘Why, then, did you send your two men to follow him?’

  ‘We were just curious really to see what he was hunting, but we had no suspicion he had anything more on his mind.’

  ‘But you knew all along about him tormenting Aoife and did nothing. She’s like one of ours and you did nothing to protect the child from this foul man.’

  ‘She is like one of ours too,’ Mac Cumhaill said, feebly, ‘and I did punish him and forbid him to go near her again.’

  ‘Forbid! He obviously took a lot of heed. Coming here every night without you knowing it. And you never even thought to warn me!’

  ‘I thought he was honourable,’ said Mac Cumhaill, ‘but I see now that I made a mistake with him. I can’t undo that.’

  ‘There are no words of regret that can undo what has been done wrong here. A payment will be sought. My guards are already preparing to fly. Art will be killed and anyone who attempts to protect him will be killed too.’

  ‘Art has invited whatever misfortune befalls him,’ said Mac Cumhaill, ‘but let us deal with him and do not allow your soldiers to kill other humans or we may be into a terrible war that no amount of talking between myself and King Luan can prevent.’

  ‘Luan does not come into this. Every local chief of my people has full authority to deal with situations like this as he sees fit.’