“It cannot be so,” said the second fellow, “for if the Fianna ever existed, which is unlikely, then surely they were brutish ogres.”
Anger welled up in Oisin, on hearing Fionn and the Fianna being spoken of so disrespectfully, and by weaklings such as these. “We were not giants,” the young man said, contemptuous in his wrath, “but any one of us could have picked up that rock with one hand, and the strongest among us could have hurled it across the valley.”
Overcome with loathing for their ignorant sneering he spoke no other word, but turned his horse’s head toward the west and Tír na Nóg.As he wheeled about, one of the men yelled,“Prove what you say is true by lifting this rock for us, then we’ll listen to your stories of Fionn and the Fianna!”
“I’ll do that,” shouted Oisin fiercely, “to put right the facts of his tory. Then I’ll go back to Tír na Nóg, for there’s nought left for me in this country.”
Recalling Niamh’s warning about dismounting, he leaned down from the saddle and slid his hand under the huge boulder. However, when he began to lift it the girth of the saddle broke under the strain, and Oisin toppled to the ground. Capall Bán shied and galloped away, leaving him there—maybe in fright, or maybe because the faerie horse knew that now Oisin could never return to Tír na Nóg.
In that moment three centuries caught up with Oisin. He lay on the ground, an old man, weak and spent, wasted, blind, bereft of comeliness, deprived of strength and mental alertness. The glossy filaments of his sloe-black hair fell out of his scalp and shriveled as if torched. His teeth darkened to brown, as if baked in an oven, and several of them dribbled like stones from his puckering lips. The clear lines of his bone structure lost beneath a mass of sagging flesh; jowls, lids, and eye pouches. A wattle like that of a turkey wobbled at his throat. His skin, once pale bronze and flawless, turned freckled with splatters and spots of discoloration.Vacant grew his eyes, and as shallow as muddy puddles. No longer were his shoulders broad, his spine erect; his back was curved like the crescent moon, and skinny wrists stuck out from the sleeves of his rich raiment.
His sunken chest appeared motionless. It seemed he breathed no longer.
The men were terrified. They believed Oisin was dead, until they heard him muttering “Tír na Nóg!” upon which they lifted him up and carried him from the valley of Glenasmole.
“This is no ordinary man!” they said amongst themselves. “What shall we do with him?”
“It is not up to common folk like ourselves to decide such matters. We must take him to the wisest of the wise.”
“Saint Patrick?”
“The very one.”
Saint Patrick was dwelling in Ireland in those days, and his shelter was a cottage on a hillside, near the place where a church was being built. It was for the purpose of fashioning this church that the stones in Glenasmole were being removed.Already the bell tower had been completed, and the bells installed. Bell ringers hauled on the ropes several times a day, swinging the mighty domes on their axes, their metallic tongues calling people to prayer.
The brazen voices of the bells tolled out across the countryside as the stone-haulers bore the antiquated form of Oisin to Saint Patrick’s door. The priest stepped out, dressed in his austere robes. Patrick was no young man himself, but he remained sprightly and keen.
“Who is this grandfather you have brought to me?” he inquired.
“He is a stranger to us, Father, but he declared he is Oisin son of Fionn mac Cumhail.”
“Father Patrick, it was the strangest thing.When we first saw him he was a youth. Then he fell from his horse, and in the blink of an eye he turned into the old fellow you see before you.”
“It is the most astonishing sight we have ever seen, and the most fearsome.”
“What should we do?”
Patrick knew what they were talking about, and he was intrigued. He held great respect for the old traditions and folktales, and he was aware that Oisin was known as the poet and historian of the Fianna, and if anyone could tell him the ancient stories, it was Oisin.
“Bring him inside. Leave him with me. I shall take care of him.”
Greatly relieved, the men did as he bade them, and hastened away.
THE FIRST SOUND Oisin heard when he had recovered his wits was the pealing of the bells. He pulled himself up on his elbow and turned his balding head about distractedly. Naught could he see, for he was blind.
“What is that noise?” he shrieked with his cracked and ancient voice. “So loud, so harsh. It is clanging through my skull like ham-merblows!”
“Hush,” said the priest. “They are the church bells chiming for prayers.”
But Oisin moaned, and sank back onto his pallet and would not be appeased. “Och! Here I lie, listening to the voices of bells. It is long the clouds are over me tonight.”
Patrick allowed Oisin to sleep in his cottage and gave him food to eat. When Oisin had recovered sufficiently from his terrible ordeal, the priest asked him to relate the old stories so that he might write them down, thus preserving them for future generations.
It came to Oisin that this was the only way to correct the lies that people were telling about the Fianna, so he agreed. But as he related the stories to Patrick, he relived the memories, and he could not help but sometimes break off to give vent to his despair.
“Oh, how I wish I could see my father once more! It was a delight to Fionn, the cry of his hounds on the mountains, the wild dogs leaving their harbors, the pride of his armies, those were his delights.My grief! I to be stopping after him and without delight in games or in music; to be withering away after my comrades; my grief is to be living. If you had been in company with the Fianna, Patrick of the joyless clerks and of the bells, you would not be attending on schools or giving heed to your God.”
Clang! clang! The church bells reverberated sonorously across the countryside.
“I would rather hear the blackbird’s song,” said Oisin, heaving a sigh. “Blackbird of Doire an Chairn, your voice is sweet; I never heard on any height of the world music that was sweeter than your voice. If myself and the Fianna were on the top of a hill today drawing our spear heads, we would have our choice of being here or there in spite of books and priests and bells.”
Patrick replied softly, “You were like the smoke o’ a wisp, or like a stream in a valley, or like a whirling wind on the top of a hill, every tribe of you that ever lived.”
But Oisin continued his lament. “The time Fionn lived and the Fianna, it was sweet to them to be listening to the whistle of the blackbird; the voice of the bells would not have been sweet to them. If you knew the story of the bird the way I know it, you would be crying lasting tears, and you would give no heed to your God for a while. In the country of Lochlann of the blue streams, Fionn, son of Cumhal of the red-gold cups found that bird. Doire an Chairn, that wood there to the west where the Fianna used to linger; it is there they put the blackbird, in the beauty of the pleasant trees.
Clang! droned the bells. The reverberations hummed through the stones, the earth, the very bones of the living and the dead.
“The stag of the heather of quiet Cruachan,” whispered Oisin, turning his empty eyes toward the window he could not see. “The sorrowful croak from the ridge of the Two Lakes; the scream of the eagle on the edge of the wood, the voice of the cuckoo on the Hill of Brambles. The voice of the hounds in the pleasant valley; the early outcry of the hounds going over the Strand of the Red Stones. These are the sounds more delightful to Fionn and our fellowship.”
But after enduring Oisin’s nostalgic plaints for so long, Patrick was growing impatient. “It is a silly thing, old man, to be always talking of the Fianna. Remember, your end is come, and take the Son of God to help you.”
With some effort, Oisin rose to his feet, staggering a little and putting out his scrawny hand to steady himself against the chimneypiece.
Dismayed at his own weakness, he grieved anew. “This is not the way I used to be; without fighting,
without playing at nimble feats, without young girls, without music, without harps, without bruising bones, without great deeds, without increase of learning, without generosity, without drinking at feasts, without courting, without hunting, the two trades I was used to: without going into battle and the taking of spoils. Ochone! The want of them is sorrowful to me.” As he spoke, he groped his way to the door of the cottage. “Without rising up to do bravery as we were used, without playing as we had a mind; without swimming of our fighting men in the lake; it is long the clouds are over me tonight!”
Oisin stumbled forth onto the path beside the weedy turnip patch, and turned his raddled face to the west. Bitter currents of air lifted and combed the last silver threads of his hair. Suddenly his eyes flew wide and he stabbed his finger at the horizon, gasping, “There it is! It lies ahead, where the sea meets the sky!” His eyes stared sightlessly into the distance; his scrawny hands reached out, but grasped only the wind.
“Tír na Nóg is gone,” said Patrick, not unkindly. “It disappeared when Christianity arrived at these shores.”
“That’s ridiculous!” snapped Oisin. “How could it disappear, when it exists forever?”
But he lowered his arm, and two clear drops budded beneath his lids. “Never more shall I see Fionn and the Fianna. Never again shall I behold my sweet Niamh, and my children playing on the hills of Tír na Nóg. For now I am a shaking tree; my leaves are gone from me. I am an empty nut, a horse without a bridle, a people without a dwelling place. I, Oisin, son of Fionn.” Lifting his blind visage, he shouted to the skies in cracked and accusing tones, “It is long the clouds are over me tonight! It is long last night was. Although this day is long, yesterday was longer again to me. Every day that comes is long to me!”
Whenever the booming stridor of the bells winged its way across the valley, Patrick would find Oisin in the cottage with his gaze fixed on emptiness. Once he heard him mourn, “I am the last of the Fianna, great Oisin, son of Fionn, listening to the voice of bells.”
“Come outside! Do not stay here staring at the walls,” urged Patrick.
“It is not walls I see,”murmured Oisin.
Despite himself, Patrick felt drawn to approach his guest, and ask, “What is it you do see?”
“I see a horse,” answered Oisin, “moving swiftly over the ocean.
And he is made of steam that is the color of snow, and his mane streams out along the wind like milk, and his hooves skip lightly across the waves.” He paused a moment, before continuing. “But it is without saddle he is, and without a rider. Alone he gallops into the west.”
On an impulse, the priest gently placed his hand on the shoulder of the old man. At this gesture of kindness, something inside Oisin seemed to break. As if finally defeated, he bowed his ancient head.
“And oh, Patrick, it is long the clouds are over me tonight.”
REFERENCES AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This work is inspired by Lady Gregory’s famous translation of the history of Oisin. In the interests of authenticity, the dialogue is partially quoted from this source.
The Swan Pilot
BY L. E. MODESITT, JR.
Ieased myself into the control couch of the ISS W. B. Yeats, making certain that all the connections were snug, and that there were no wrinkles in anything. Then I pressed the single stud that was manual, and the clamshell descended.
You could call a trans-ship a corade or a cockle guided by will across the sea of endless space. You could, and it would be technically wrong. Technically wrong, but impressionalistically right, and certainly the way it feels when you’re alone in the blackness, balancing the harmonics and threading your way from the light matter and through the dark matter and faerie dust of overspace, guiding the ship and all it contains out from light and into darkness and then on to another minute isle of solid warmth once again. Or you could refuse to call it a ship at all, nor the ocean it sails a sea. There is no true sea, the theorists say, just a mist of the undermatter that fills overspace, a mist that stretches to eternity, in which float the brilliant blocks of light matter that can incinerate you in a nanoinstant or the solid dark blocks upon which you can be smashed into dust motes tinier than the stitches on a leprechaun’s shoes.
A pilot is more like a light-blinded night bird with gossamer wings that soars across the mists of undermatter against and through the darkness and light that are but the representations of the universe above. Or perhaps those denizens of overspace perceive us as under-space, blocky and slow and awkward. I could call every flight a story of the twelve ships of the Tir Alir, and that would be right as well.
How many ways are there to explain the inexplicable? Shall I try again?
None of what I experience would make sense to, say, François Chirac, or Ahmed Farsi, and what they would experience would not make sense to me, either. But I’m Sean Shannon Henry, born in Sligo and a graduate of Trinity, and in the universe of the trans-ships, that has made all the difference, for the sky roads are not the same for each of the swan pilots, though the departures and the destinations—and the routes—are exactly the same. Nor can there be more than one pilot-captain on a ship. A second pilot wouldn’t help, because if a pilot fails for a nanoinstant, the ship is lost as well. Oh, the scientists have their explanations, and I’ll leave those with them.
With the clamshell down, I was linked to all the systems, from the farscanners to the twin fusactors, from the accumulators to the converters and the translation generators, and from the passenger clamshells to the cargo holds. I ran the checklist, and everything was green, and both cargo and the handful of passengers were secured.
“Alora,” I pulsed to the second, who handles cargo and passengers from the clamshell in the compartment aft of mine, “systems are go.”
“Ready for departure, Captain.”
A last scan of the systems, and I pulsed control. “High control, Yeats, systems green, ready for delocking and departure this time.”
“Yeats, wait one for traffic in the orange.”
“Yeats standing by.”
Another wedge shape, formed of almost indestructible adia-mante composite, so solid in the underspace we inhabit, slipped out from the glowing energy of Hermes Station, out toward the darkness up and beyond, where it would rise through the flames of translation, phoenix-swan-like, to make its way to another distant stellar hearth, and there untranslate, and glide like a falling brick back into the safe dullness of the reality we require.
“Yeats, clear to delock and depart.”
“Control, delocking and departing this time.” After releasing the couplers and giving the faintest touch of power to the steering jets, I eased the Yeats—a mere thousand tons of composite and cargo—away from Hermes Station, that islet of warmth in the black sea of oblivion that is space.
Like a quarrel arrowing through space, where there is no up or down, the Yeats and I accelerated away from Hermes Station and the world of Silverston. Once we were clear of satellites and traffic, I spread the photon nets, like the butterfly soul of the proud priest of ancient Ireland.
“Stand by for translation.”
“Ready for translation,” answered Alora.
I twisted the energies pouring into the translator. The entire universe shimmered, then turned black, and the Yeats and I fused into one entity, no longer pilot and ship, but a single black swan flying through deeper darkness.
A deep chime rolled from below, and crystalline notes vibrated from above, shattered, and fell like ice flakes across my wings, each flake sounding a different note as it struck my wings, and as each note added to the melody of the flight, it left a pinprick of hot agony behind.
I continued to fly, angling for the distant droning beacon that was Alustre, with the sure knowledge that there would be at least one timeless interlude. One was standard, two difficult.With three interludes began high stress on both the ship and the pilot, and a loss level approaching 50 percent. Only one trans-ship had been known to survive four interludes
; the pilot had not.
Unseen cymbals crashed, and the grav waves of a singularity shook me. Black pinnae shivered from my wings, wrenched out by the buffeting of a black hole somewhere in the solid underspace I flew above/between.
Brilliant blue, blinding blue, enfolded me—and passed—and I stood on the edge of a rock, wingless, now just a man in a mackintosh, looking at the gray waves sullenly pounding on the stone-shingled beach less than two yards below. A rhyme came to mind, and I spoke it to the waves on that empty beach.
“Captain Sean went to the window
and looked at the waves below
not a mermaid nor a merrow
nor fish nor ship would he know . . .”
“So you’d not know a merrow? Is that what you’re saying, captain of a ship that is not a ship?”
I turned. To my right, where there had been no one, was a man sitting on a spur of rock. Although he wore brown trousers, and a tan Aran sweater, his webbed feet were bare, and he was not exactly a man, not with a scaly green skin, green hair, and deep-set red eyes that looked more like those of a pig than a man. He had a cocked red hat tucked under his arm.
“It’d seem to me that I know you, by your skin and hair, but mostly by the hat.”
“For a drowning sailor, you’re a most bright fellow.”
“Bright enough to ask your name,” I answered, not terribly worried about drowning. Overspace captains drown all the way through every voyage. We drown in sensation, and in the unseen tyranny of underspace that presses in on the overspace where we translate from system to system, world to world.
“ ’Tis Coomra, or close enough.” He smiled, and his teeth were green as well. Beside his feet was a contraption of wood and mesh. The mesh was not metal, but glimmered as if it were silver coated in light. It probably was. “And your name is . . . ?”
“Sean.”
“A fine Irish name that is.” He laughed.
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