by Jack Dann
‘You say I appear young for my age? That’s not so uncommon.’
‘But it is seldom so marked. Trust me on this, my lover. When it is seen, it leads to comment, to questions. The mortal folk are starting to notice. A few more years, and there would have been talk, foolish talk, then foolish action. You would have needed to take the blood of more Fenians with your sword and heavy arm — except that I came to you in time to put a stop to it.’
He thought of the battle of Gabhra, where Fenians had turned upon Fenians and almost destroyed each other. His eldest son, Osgar, had died in that battle.
‘Forget it for now,’ Niamh said — then she sang to him, songs of unending youth and joy. For days, they rode over the sea-swell, the sun rising and setting many times in a cloudless sky. One day, he heard the sound of a different music on the wind. The stallion’s ears pricked, and he galloped towards the sound. Grotesque trees with smooth bark and roots like stilts grew out of the water, first in ones and twos, then peculiar groves of them, then a whole forest marching out from the shoreline into the sea.
Brightly coloured birds and strange large insects flew around. One blue butterfly was as big as Oisin’s hand.
They rode to the shore and up the beach beyond the highest mark of the tide on the yellow sand. The air itself smelled sweet. Niamh released him from her embrace, then swung from the horse in an elegant motion, fluid as a sea wave. Oisin followed her, feeling clumsy beside her movements.
She tethered the horse to a tree, then faced her new lover, frankly looking him up and down in admiration. ‘As I told you,’ she said, ‘the blood of Manannan’s children must flow in your veins. Surely, it has dominated your mortal blood. Like me, you do not age. I claim you as one of our own.’
She took the flowers from her yellow hair, then gathered her hair in one hand as she raised the golden chain over her head. Gently, she laid it down at her bare feet, careful to get no sand inside the little silver horn. Then she smiled shyly, showing perfect white teeth. She crossed her arms: right hand on left shoulder, left on right. In another elegant motion, she peeled the gown down her body, then stepped out of it, her skin like alabaster. ‘I am yours, Oisin, and you are mine.’ She walked to him and began to undress him, starting with the cloak, which now seemed so out of place. Still it was like a dream. Then she added a single word, ‘Forever.’
They lay together in the sand, loving and sleeping and loving. Finally, the sky drew black, with the firefly lights of an ocean of stars overhead. Oisin slept dreamlessly, then awoke to a new day with the yellow sun already high above them. Niamh was running to him from the waves, but this was a different Niamh.
Her body was strangely altered — her skin had turned a golden brown. She was shorter and rounder, narrower across the chest, and her breasts were as flat as a young girl’s. Her neck had grown longer, and her arms and shoulders looked powerful. As she approached, she changed once more, becoming slimmer and taller, her chest-wall arching out and her breasts growing larger. She lay by his side — now restored to the form he already knew so well — laughing and wriggling against him.
A shapeshifter. So, what was she, really? Which was her true form? The Niamh who’d run to him from the sea just now was not an ugly creature, far from it, but that had not been his Niamh. She was truly inhuman. How could he make love to that?
But his body betrayed him. She took him deep into her, straddling him as she moved like the rolling waves. ‘Forever, my love,’ she said. ‘Forever.’
Oisin gazed out at the sea. There was nothing but the clear blue water and the strange trees, the forest of them growing thinner toward the horizon. ‘Where is this place?’ he said.
Niamh cast a pink seashell into the small, lapping waves. ‘You will not find it on the maps of mortals,’ she said. She hugged him, pressing her naked body close to his. ‘Our country is called Tir na n-Og. We live on the islands of the sea — or under the water itself!’
‘Under the sea?’
‘So I said, my love.’
‘But how can you live under the sea and breathe the sea’s waters? It’s not possible.’ But even as he said the words, he felt their foolishness. What did possible and impossible mean when it came to the deeds of this strange, beautiful creature? He had already seen the impossible many times. What was one more impossibility, that it should trouble his waking thoughts?
‘We have certain powers,’ Niamh said. ‘I shall teach them to you. We can shape our own bodies as you have seen me do, but that is not all. We can also shape the world around us, at least as it appears to others.’
‘Illusions? Glamour?’
‘You can call it by such words, if you wish. One day, such things will seem like foolish tricks. They will seem like nothing at all to you.’
She stretched out beside him, head resting on her palm, her fine body balanced on elbow and hip. Even as he admired her beauty, she changed again, becoming the version of Niamh who had run to him from the waves the previous day: darker, more rounded, yet more muscled in the places where she needed strength for swimming.
‘Our control of our bodies is not entire,’ she said, ‘not total. There comes a certain point, if we seem to change, when it is what you call glamour. There are parts of us too fine to change — fine-grained, I mean, like timber. Flesh and hair and bone are made of very tiny stuff. The tiniest parts we can merely shift about.’
‘Shift about?’ he said, feeling stupid.
‘Yes, my love — like building blocks smaller than grains of sand.’
She returned to her long-limbed, more human form, taking only seconds to shift shape, then stood and shrugged into her gown. As Oisin tugged on his sturdy breeches, Niamh wandered down to the waves, lifting her hem and skipping in the shallows.
‘One day we will understand more,’ she said, as he followed her to the edge of the water. ‘Perhaps we can leave the wide Earth itself and let mortals squabble over it. Meanwhile, many of us find life under the sea freer and richer than on dry land. My father has a great underwater city, hidden from mortal eyes. This island is a different part of our kingdom. It is the Island of Dancing.’
She walked back to the little horn, where she’d left it on the sand. She stooped to pick it up, then raised it to her red lips, blowing one long note.
From the woods above the sand, there came a note in answer.
Moments later, a band of young men and women filed out of the woods, two by two and hand-in-hand. They wore simple cloaks and gowns of a pale sea green, with crimson embroidery like Niamh’s. The leading couple stepped up to her and bowed. They led the way through the woods to a large clearing with huts, a well, and a sandy square. Here, a young man greeted them, almost a male version of Niamh, with the same red lips and blue eyes. ‘Joy fills the stars!’ he said.
Niamh kissed him on the cheek then stepped back, taking Oisin’s hand. ‘Joy fills our hearts,’ she replied calmly.
Some of these children of Manannan had silver instruments: horns, harps, and many bizarre devices that Oisin did not recognise. They played and danced, mocking the power of death and time, their dance winding through the woods to the yellow sands, down to the sea, then back once more. All day long they danced, then feasted in the evening on fruits and fish, talking and laughing and sometimes glancing upward at the clear sky and the glittering stars.
That night, Niamh led Oisin back to the beach, where they lay together in the warm sand. In the morning, they ran to shore, Niamh changing form and Oisin finding he could do the same when she commanded it. They plunged into water as warm as blood, letting it flow into their bodies through their open mouths — then out of them through fishy gills they had grown on their long necks. Soon, they swam out to deeper waters, past the stilt-like trees. They explored shelves of bright coral, and made love under water.
Afterwards, they walked on the shore in their human forms, not bothering to dress, and Niamh told him more stories of the land of Tir na n-Og.
They danced with Manannan’s
children. Late that night, Oisin asked her about something that disturbed him. ‘You and all the dancers appear young, but all about the same age — between the years of twenty and thirty, I would think.’
‘And you appear the same,’ she said, ‘though you have seen fifty winters. We reach the time of our perfection, then age no more. Sometimes we go secretly in the lands of mortals, looking for those who belong to us.’
‘But where are your own children?’ Oisin said. ‘With all this merriment and lovemaking, why are there no children here on the Island of Dancing? Don’t you miss their pranks and laughter?’
Niamh sighed. ‘In Tir na n-Og, we choose not to have them,’ she said. ‘You know that we have power over our bodies. To conceive or not, at our own will, is easily within our powers.’
‘Then you are not barren?’
She laughed at that. ‘Is that what you thought, my love? Of course not!’
‘In my land,’ Oisin said slowly, choosing his words with care, ‘they say that the Immortals can have children only if their men lie with mortal women.’
‘That is a silly story invented out of jealousy,’ Niamh said. ‘We choose not to have children — but it was not always so. Centuries past, when the first of us were discovering each other, before Tir na n-Og was founded, things were different. We made love and gave birth to children just as mortals did. But when Manannan’s children lay with each other, sometimes they birthed a mortal child — imagine that, if you will, in a country where the parents live forever.’ For a fleeting moment, infinite sadness crossed her face. ‘We can’t prevent it happening. There is some … some mechanism’ — she said the word distastefully, as if she despised it but could find no better one — ‘of our bodies, too fine-grained for us to understand and control. It is something deep within how we are. Until we have mastered that, our women choose never to have children at all.’
She was silent, and he realised that he pitied her. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, feeling the inadequacy of words.
‘No, my love,’ she said, ‘don’t misunderstand me. We have many, many consolations.’
‘But how can you find out more if you devote your lives to revelry?’
She gave an almost secret smile. ‘There’s so much to tell you. I brought you to the Island of Dancing because it is a paradise. Not every part of Tir na n-Og is like this. But stay with me here. I love you.’
One hundred years passed on the Island of Dancing. Oisin swam in the sea, revelling in his new powers, fishing with bare hands among the coral. In the nights and mornings, he made love with his Niamh. They danced through the day, then feasted in the warm, sweet evenings, returning to the beach to sleep together in the starry night.
Then it changed. One day, they ran down to the water’s edge, shifting their bones and muscles as they changed to their watery forms. But something washed up on the beach at their feet. Oisin looked more closely and saw that it was a broken wooden lance. He held it up in the bright daylight. How far had it drifted? Across what seas? The shaft was ingrained with dirt from some warrior’s hands. The iron point was rusted, but dried blood remained on the shaft.
And he remembered.
He remembered battles, fighting side by side with Finn and Bran, and other great Fenian heroes. He recalled how the dead lay heaped on one another in that last mutual slaughter between Fenian and Fenian on the field at Gabhra, how the horses had seemed to wade in blood, how it had dripped from their legs and bellies at the end of the terrible battle. An emptiness stole into Oisin’s heart like winter, and suddenly he found himself weeping, weeping openly for Osgar and all the other Fenians who had died, or been hacked and mutilated — the ones who’d wished they were dead, who’d thought the dead were the lucky ones.
Niamh held him as he wept and sobbed on her shoulder, grief-stricken beyond any consolation.
When their bodies parted, he realised that they could not stay on the Island of Dancing. They dressed in silence — Oisin’s heavy winter clothes lay untouched and unharmed on the beach, as if mere days had passed, and not: a century — then found the black stallion where they’d left him that first day on the island. Like them, the horse was no older, and it was no worse for being tethered for all that time. Strange that Oisin had never seen him since they’d come ashore — but now, when they needed him, there he was. Silently, the two Immortals mounted the black stallion, then sped across the waves.
‘Don’t be sad, my love,’ Niamh said. ‘We shall never die till the day Manannan reaches out from the sea of stars, and the sun grows old and huge like your father, Finn, and consumes the Earth forever. Perhaps we can cheat that fate as well. Perhaps we need never die.’
‘But to what purpose?’ Oisin said. ‘We create no life, we accomplish nothing. We just go on like this forever.’
‘We will learn to understand life,’ she said as they rode along. ‘Mortal sages have tried to understand it, but we will outshine all their learning.’
‘Who has tried to understand it?’
‘The Hellenes and Romans — peoples you do not know — have teachings about life and the seeds of life. They tell how life begins in the woman’s womb, how it grows and changes, how the child resembles both father and mother, sometimes leaning to one, sometimes the other way. Have you never wondered at that? We strive to improve the teachings of mortals. If life can be understood at all, then the children of Manannan will find out how. Nothing is more important to us. And, after all, we have eternity.’
‘These Hellenes and Romans —’ Oisin said.
‘Yes?’
‘What do they say about life? What have they learned about it?’
‘That does not matter so much, my love. Our own philosophers have disproved their teachings.’
‘What?’
She told him how a philosopher of the Immortals had once asked Aengus to remove a dozen does from the bucks during the rutting season on an island of Tir na n-Og. ‘Our woodsmen secluded a dozen of the does after they all had mated,’ she said.
Later on, half the does had been killed and cut open. Strangely, no trace of male seed had been found within them. Later still, the does that had been kept alive were all found to be carrying fauns.
‘Do you see, my love?’ Niamh said. ‘All the slain does must have conceived as well, but where was the male seed?’
Oisin pondered it. He could neither dispute her reasoning nor see where it should lead him.
‘Among the Romans,’ she said, ‘they who rule the greater part of the mortal world, some say that a child grows from a mix of male and female fluids in the womb. Others say that the male seed shapes the female blood. But we have never observed such things. So much for the fancies of mortals about life and birth. They are entirely disproved.’
‘At least for deer,’ Oisin said, trying hard to understand.
‘If for deer, my love, why not for other such beasts? Why not for mortal humans? Why not for Manannan’s children as well?’
‘So, what does it mean?’
‘It all means nothing, I suppose.’ Her tone had a sour trace. ‘It shows how little is known, even by the wisest of the mortals, and even by Immortals like us. Yet — somehow — life must form from the mingling of male and female together. We believe that the male seed quickly leaks out, or is absorbed in the womb, but a small amount remains, so tiny that our eyes could never see it, however much we try to improve them with our shape shifting. We take our characters from living particles so fine that even we can scarcely imagine them. That is why we cannot control them. And so the women of my country choose not to bear children.’
She spoke no more as they crossed the sea, which grew cold and misty. Instead, she sang to him — heroic songs of old battles and heroes.
Oisin could not see in the mist to know how often the sun rose and fell, but many days must have passed as they journeyed. At last, they heard the sound of breakers crashing on rocks. Soon, all round them, the water was smashed into white foam, and a black tower rose abruptly from
it, looming sheer from a base of dark, twisted rocks. The tower’s sides approached each other at an angle, as if it might be, in reality, a prodigiously stretched pyramid rising to a point far above. But its top was obscured from sight in the sea mist. For all Oisin could tell, the tower might have risen forever into the sky and the ocean of stars.
The black stallion strode over the breakers and spray, then onto the rocks. ‘Where are we now?’ Oisin said.
‘Hush, my love. You’ll see.’
They reached a huge, battered wooden door. It looked like great siege engines had pounded it, but never broken through. The stallion shivered, and Oisin could see no way forward — but then the door opened inwards like an invitation to the land of the dead. They entered the dark tower, and the door clanged shut behind.
Niamh dismounted, her bare feet silent on the hard floor. Oisin followed quickly. They were in a huge hall full of statues carved from the twisted rock, and he loosely tethered the horse to one of them. There were no windows or torches in here, but the hall was lit with a green phosphorescence that was everywhere and nowhere.
More huge doors led out of the hall in every direction, and they approached one on the right-hand side. It opened before them, then shut behind. They entered further halls, Oisin trying to memorise the pattern of doors that had opened for them, for when they needed to find their way back.
In the fifth hall, a dark-haired woman in a pale green gown was chained by her outstretched arms between another two statues. One of these was a laughing giant, the other a great dragon with teeth longer than daggers. It strode on two legs, like a bird of prey, with huge, scaly wings. The woman’s head was bowed, but she looked up as they approached. She was weeping softly, her face set in a sad smile even, as tears welled out of her ice-blue eyes and rolled down her pretty cheeks.
Niamh spoke quietly. ‘We will free you.’
Oisin drew his sword. ‘Who has chained you like this? Who must I slay?’
