‘Are you cold, Lady Finola?’ came Blat’s voice and Blat’s older face was in front of her, ‘Have some nice broth now.’
It seemed perfectly natural to be two people, one big, one small; sleepily still unaware of what she was experiencing, she asked Blat: ‘What’s the name of the dog? The one that pushed me in the water and you rescued me.’
The soup bowl fell onto the ground. ‘Finn?’ whispered Blat. ‘Is that you, Finn?’
Just as they had dragged her up from the lake all those years ago, Blat’s arms gathered her up from exile into the warm hug of home.
* * *
Her mother, Anhin, had been the daughter of Iogenán, King of the Partraige, and, said Blat, ‘as beautiful as the dawn.’ So beautiful that she had attracted, while he was visiting the lake, the attention of Aedh, a nephew of the old King of Connaught, Turlough O’Conor, and he had married her and become Finn’s father.
‘Often and often you stayed here in this house when you were little,’ Blat told her, ‘for Niall of the Poems is your first cousin on your mother’s side, if that’s any comfort to you, and I’m your second.’
As a prince of Connaught, Aedh had official duties and one night, ‘one black night,’ said Blat, he gave a feast of welcome to some important merchants who had arrived in the harbour of Galway to set up trade between Connaught and their home port of Nantes in Anjou. ‘They were Gauls by nationality,’ said Blat, who refused to differentiate between foreigners, ‘and demons by nature.’
Their leader, a young man – ‘he called himself Robert de Chêne’ – had become besotted by the beauty of Finn’s mother. ‘Not a morsel did he eat all through the feast, though he drank enough for ten, and just stared at her like the pig he was.’ Since he was a guest and a foreigner who knew no better, Aedh ignored the rudeness. Next day he and Anhin and the child Finola went down to the quayside to speed their guests goodbye as they left in the rowing boats that would take them out to their ship in the bay. Suddenly an armed party, led by Robert de Chêne, fell on Aedh and his unarmed courtiers, killing Aedh and two others, and dragged Anhin into their boat, with the child Finola clinging so strongly to her mother that they’d taken her as well.
The Irish leaped into curraghs and gave chase, but the rowing boat had reached the ship long before them, and they were forced to watch her sail out of the bay.
‘Your mother’s body came floating ashore at Barna three days later,’ said Blat, weeping, ‘and whether the bastard killed her, or she killed herself, we never knew. And only God knows what she suffered before that.’
It was her daughter who was finely qualified to guess. Kneeling in front of her with her hands in hers, Blat saw the impassive face crumple into that of a child, open its mouth and bawl with terror as if she were again the little girl flapping her hands in her powerlessness to stop her mother being hurt.
Blat held her until she was calmer, knowing it would help her to have her cry out, and wiped her face. ‘Every ship in Connaught went off in search of you – even the O’Flaherties – and the O’Conors sailed to Nantes and questioned everybody they could find, but no word was there of you nor the devil who took you. And in time we came to think that you, too, had gone under the water, for who would have imagined the man had enough mercy in his soul to keep you alive?’
‘She’s Irish,’ said Finn, softly, hiccuping from her sobs, ‘She’s been abandoned. Pray for me for I have sinned.’
‘And wasn’t that another sin with him to say that,’ raged Blat, ‘as if your own people would abandon you. And what’s “Irish” when it’s at home? You are a Connaughtwoman of the Partraige.’
‘Yes,’ said Finn, ‘I know I am,’ and went into the first sleep since the rape in which, though the dreams were still ugly, she did not feel alone.
* * *
Now that they had been restored to her, she moved within the parameters of her first six years, receptive to kindness, experiencing smells and tastes as if for the first time, and hearing music with ears that seemed to have opened after a long deafness, as obedient as a child. She grieved for her mother and father but, with the knowledge that they had not abandoned her, she laid them gently to rest.
Music was everywhere. Ceaseless droplets of pipe notes came from the herders on the hills and from the bells round the necks of the sheep and cattle. When the families of the Partraige clan rowed to the inlet to call in and embrace with tears ‘little, lost Finn’ they sang themselves home again, their voices coming back to her over the water in cheery, half-toned song.
Niall returned to say that he and ‘the Pilgrim’ had met the King of Connaught while chasing wild boar over by Lough Carra and that the king had invited Sir John to go on an extended hunting tour with him, and then he sat down to compose a poem in honour of his restored cousin, and sang it to his harp so beautifully that even Blat, though grudgingly, said, ‘You’d go nine miles of a dark night only to hear him.’
Too polite, as the other members of the Partraige had been, to question a guest, he privately asked Blat: ‘Has she said what she’s been doing these years?’
‘She’ll tell us when she’s ready and not before,’ said Blat. But when she knew Finn was ready, even if Finn didn’t know it, she took her fishing out on the lake.
Lough Mask was still that afternoon, but gaudy, with bright blue water and varied green islands splashed with the red of the rowan trees. The herons along the shore had their exact doubles reflecting back at them in the surface of the lake. Blat rowed out to clear water in the leather curragh which rocked unnervingly as she plunged her spear into passing char.
‘I’m going to divorce the bastard,’ said Blat, conversationally, knowing that to receive a confidence you must first give one.
‘Divorce?’ The left-over bits of Boniface were shocked until the new woman reminded herself that God’s rules no longer applied. But it was still a surprise, though the marriage was manifestly unhappy. Niall knocked Blat around when he was drunk. He made fun of her in public and imposed work on her that would have killed a lesser woman. But she had assumed that Blat was content with it.
‘Are you jealous of Almaith then?’ Almaith was Niall’s second wife, who lived further along the shore to the south.
Blat snorted, stabbed down with her spear into the clear water and brought up a fat, flapping fish. The cormorants sitting on an overhanging branch at the lakeside made a poor attempt at looking uninterested. ‘Her? The poor thing can’t say boo to a blanket.’
‘What then?’
‘I don’t like the man. Apart from he will keep gambling away all me hard-earned wealth, there’s no curb to his tongue. I’m a figure of fun to his friends with his lampoons on me. Loyalty is only one way to him and all going in his direction.’
‘Can you divorce him just like that? Where I was only royalty can get divorces.’
Blat shrugged ‘That’s a strange place, then, where you were. Do women have no rights there?’
‘No.’ It was true now she thought about it. Perhaps it was why there were so many nuns in Europe; women escaped into the convent out of a rightless world. Here among the Partraige women had a different attitude, looking out with authority, walking straighter. A more feminine world altogether. ‘How will you manage?’
‘Some way. The children are grown up now, and I’ll take me dowry back.’
Two coots chased each other past the boat in a spray of quarrelsome pursuit. Each day there were more birds on the lake as the swimmers and divers came down from the north for the winter. Blat was worried about the winter, which promised to be hard. ‘They say it’s a judgement on all Ireland for the insult offered by damned Leinstermen to the Comarba of St Brigid at Kildare.’
They had to know; they were her family. But she felt deathly tired.
‘That was me,’ she said. ‘I was Comarba of St Brigid.’
As she talked, the sun began to set, giving the lake a candied appearance so that its islands looked like frosted cakes set out on a polished table
. She kept pausing, more out of the weariness she felt for the history than for any difficulty in its telling. And while she told it, Blat kept patting her and crying.
‘That bloody Dermot,’ sobbed Blat, when Finn had no more to tell, ‘That crooked bastard. If he swallowed a nail he’d shite a screw.’
And, for one abrupt moment, Finn laughed.
Iogenán, Finn’s grandfather and the King of the Partraige, had already visited her unofficially at Blat’s and Niall’s house, sneaking in somewhat shamefacedly because he hadn’t been able to wait to collect his nine attendants – since they were attending to his and their herds at the time – when he received the message that his long lost granddaughter had returned to her clan. Politely, since he was without his royal entourage and therefore not officially recognisable, Blat and Niall had ignored his presence and Finn had woken up to find a nice old man bending over her bed, weeping, and saying, ‘Well now, and welcome home Finola of the Partraige.’
But later, etiquette demanded that she be formally presented to the king and received into her family, the derbhfine.
With Blat and Niall she was rowed to the north shore of the Lough and disembarked before the great earthen ramparts that had once dominated it but were now falling down into dips where hawthorn bushes made havens for birds and foxes. Her hand held high in Niall’s, Finn walked through ten-foot gateposts so old that the carving on them had weathered almost smooth and up an avenue built for chariot races to what had once been an immense wooden palace housing two hundred people, but where now Iogenán and his queen camped out in the hall with a dozen family and servants.
Finn looked at it unmoved. The old numbness had come over her again in the last few days.
‘Weren’t we the great people in them days,’ Niall said, partly to himself, partly to Finn, ‘when it was us ruled over Connaught.’
‘When was that?’
Niall was vague. ‘Sometime after the age of Noah,’ he said.
A trumpeter sounded their approach with a cracked fanfare, and then rushed inside the doors to take off his hat and receive them in his other role, as Iogenán’s chamberlain.
The hall was pillared with columns around which curled carved gargoyles, beaked birds and monsters who seemed frozen in the act of looking at her. Along one side on a bench sat the women, on the other the men, all of them dressed in their patched best and displaying the remnants of their jewels. But it was the faces that commanded attention: weatherbeaten, lined with hard work, but every one, both male and female, handsome. ‘What a good-looking people we are,’ thought Finn, hardly realising that she had begun to think of herself and the Patraige as ‘we’.
Green light from the overcast day outside came through the luxury of thick, ancient glass windows, dulling the brightly-coloured robes of the men and women into old tapestry. The only candles stood in wrought-iron holders on the dais to highlight the importance of the man who sat on a canopied throne. She could hardly recognise Iogenán in his crown and holding a white, carved wand. Beside the king, in only a slightly smaller seat, was his brehon with silver collar round his neck that would magically tighten if ever he gave a false judgement, just as blotches would appear on his cheeks from the same cause. Moran’s complexion, though old, was clear and the collar fitted with ease.
Niall led his cousin up the hall in a silence broken only by Blat, who had taken her place on the women’s side and couldn’t resist encouraging her with a cheer. Finn smiled at her. Niall hissed at his wife for spoiling the gravity of the occasion and Blat said: ‘Oh shut up.’
‘Recite your ancestry, my child,’ said the brehon Moran.
Iogenán waved his wand to silence the women and then pointed it at Finn. His face was tortured with wrinkles as if he had been carved himself, though he was not an old man.
And so, to a different king in a different land, Finn found her tongue, mouth and throat again performing movements they had been taught to make probably in this very hall. Strictly speaking, she should have begun with Japhet, son of Noah, who came to Ireland after the Flood, but that would have taken the rest of the day, so she began with Muirgius, once High King of Connaught before the Vikings came, through names which, perhaps because she did not really care who she was, came unfalteringly, down side-branches away from the High Kingship into the backwater of the Partraige again and eventually to her great-grandfather, Flaithbertach, who was either the great-grandfather or grandfather or father of every man in the room.
The king nodded when she had finished, and the men slapped their knees in approval, but, typical brehon that he was, Moran wanted more proof of her identity. ‘Has she any distinguishing marks now?’
‘Will you listen to the old fool?’ shouted Blat, and the other women protested with her. Banba, the priest’s wife, called out: ‘Are you blind not to see who she is? I’d know her as her mother’s daughter with her skin hanging on a gorse-bush.’
The king muttered to his brehon, who shrugged and gave way. Iogenán called her forward and put his hand on Finn’s head. ‘You are of the derbifhine.’
Ther was a cry of ‘Welcome’ that shook the pillars.
Iogenán stood up. ‘I receive this woman Finola back into the Partraige after long exile. She shall have a seat by my fire for as long as her need runs. By her right as a member of the tuath of Partraige, she shall have one killing of a salmon in its every waters, a share in its wild garlic, the quick sweeping of every stream, a night’s supply of kindling and cooking material and the nut-gathering from every common wood, and she may race her horse on the common green and run it on the common mountain.’
Feeling touched Finn for a moment, like the twitch of a paralysed hand. ‘Bless them,’ she thought. They were trying to make up to her the years after her abduction by giving her back her roots; she found herself blinking away tears, grateful not so much for the gift of rights, delightful as it sounded, as for wanting to link her up in the long chain of family that led down into the rich earth of Connaught.
‘Ach, the old fool’s forgotten the island,’ muttered Melg, Iogenán’s queen, from the women’s side. ‘Are we not giving her an island for herself, Iogenán-ri?’
‘I know,’ shouted Iogenán, irritably, ‘Where was I? Now then, and for yourself you shall have the island in Lough Mask known as Swan Island, because it was where your father first beheld your mother, may God rest her sweet soul.’
But there was more. She had been raped and, by having her, a virgin of their clan, raped, Dermot of Leinster had offered an insult to the honour of her people. No matter that the Hy Kinsella could eat the clan Partraige for breakfast, vengeance was called for.
Finn was allowed to sit down with the rest of the women while her male relatives discussed the matter and tried to ignore such gratuitous advice as ‘Cut the bastard’s balls off’ from their wives. Cuddled between the ample hips of Queen Melg and the bony frame of Blat, with the other women reaching out now and then to pat her, Finn found the occasion oddly without sting. It appeared that among the Partraige there was procedure for everything, even to what had happened on that night in Kildare.
More candles had to be lit as the discussion went on and it grew dark. Finn watched new light flicker on cobwebs in the corners, felt a draught from a broken window, and saw that the pillar next to her was riddled with woodworm and had the gold leaf peeling off it. ‘Bless them,’ she thought, again, ‘they are ridiculous.’ They were a powerless people, clinging onto a remnant of ancestral land which diminished yearly under the growing expansion of clans like the O’Malleys and the O’Flaherties. Iogenán was only a king because the Partraige treated him as one, and because his overlord, the O’Conor, allowed him to be one out of respect for his forebears; in Anjou he would be merely the lord of a manor.
It was like receiving support from half-visible, half-believed fairy folk. They were as vulnerable as she herself. Boniface would have been amused by their presumption, might even pitied them and busied herself to take them under her wing; the new
, patched-up woman was grateful but hopeless.
Whatever those men decided would make no difference to what she had to do; she had been isolated from the clan too long, educated away from it, ever to be dependent on it. The formula for dealing with Dermot would have to come from herself, but where she would find enough initiative in the emptiness of her soul she had no idea.
But her menfolk went on discussing the matter as if they were still a power in the land; it was the women who had a better idea of the realities. ‘Should we go to war over it?’ asked Orlam, who doubled as Iogenán’s marshal and charioteer.
‘Will you listen to the man?’ screeched Melg. ‘Isn’t Connaught at war with him already.’
She was ignored. ‘Would Dermot pay her honour price, do you think?’ asked Nessa, another of Finn’s male first cousins, anxiously, and there were more snorts of derision from the women’s side. But the men discussed both possibilities with gravity, and Finn fell asleep against the queen’s shoulder with the words enech and eric – shame and reparation – sounding in her ears.
She woke up to a sudden silence: ‘Where have we got to?’
Blat hushed her: ‘Niall’s had a good idea for once. He’s going to rhyme Dermot to death.’
‘He’s what?’
‘Don’t you be laughing. It’s been done.’
Finn peered into the hall. Niall was lying on his back in the middle of the floor with his eyes closed and a boy was tenderly holding over his head the musical branch made of silver and decorated with bells which Niall carried with him on official occasions as the court poet.
‘Can you do it, Niall, do you think?’ Iogenán asked anxiously.
‘To the death?’ asked Niall, still supine and with his eyes closed.
‘To the death or exile.’
Daughter of Lir Page 15