by Jack Dann
The woman shook her head. ‘Flee while you can.’
He swung the heavy sword and cleaved one of the chains where it fastened to a ring of iron set into the dragon statue. Now the woman could move, though she was surely sore and stiff. There was still an iron band on her wrist, dangling its length of rusted links. With a second powerful stroke, Oisin cleaved the other chain, and the woman was free. He sheathed his sword and looked carefully at the bands on both the woman’s wrists. The bands were not perfect, fused circles, but thick strips of metal bent round until their ends almost touched. Oisin gestured for her to be still, and he pulled at one of those metal strips with all the force in his immensely strong arms.
Slowly, he unbent the metal, then threw it clanking on the stone floor. He rested to get his breath, then opened up the other strip of iron — grunting with the effort — and slid the narrowest part of the woman’s wrist through the gap he’d made.
‘You’re doomed,’ the woman said. ‘You should have run.’
‘We’ll see about that,’ Oisin said. ‘Come with us if you wish.’
They approached the door to yet another hall. It opened before them, and they entered. This hall was the largest yet. Like the others, it was full of statues of dragon creatures and other ancient monstrosities.
‘Take that door,’ Niamh said, pointing.
Oisin went alone this time, drawing out his sword once more, and pointing its naked blade ahead of him. The door swung open, and he found himself in the open air, on a grassy plain overlooking a cliff. He could hear the sound of waves crashing below. The sun was rising in a misty sky. Oisin scanned the plain, finding nothing but more statues: dragons, three-headed giants, grotesque creatures of every sort. Then there was a sound from somewhere nearby. It was almost like a dog’s barking, but somehow different, not like any dog Oisin had heard in mortal lands. Then it came again — louder this time. The evil sound put a shiver up his back. He turned slowly, waving his sword from side to side. One of the statues was coming to life.
It was a scaly creature, larger than any man, even the greatest heroes of the Fenians — larger than Finn himself, larger, indeed, than mighty Bran, who was too big to sit on a horse. The creature was obscenely naked and unarmoured, but it carried a sword in one hand and a battle-axe in the other. Its upper body moved and it made that barking sound once more. Its lower quarters were still immobile, but it gradually moved more and more of its parts, testing itself for life, as if it grew out of the stone. It uttered a different sound this time, a plaintive wolf howl, as if frustrated at the slowness of the change from statue to living thing.
Suddenly, it could twitch its legs. Its next sound was a bark of triumph. The creature gathered into itself, opening its slavering, toothy mouth. Its eyes — the same black as the rest of its body — turned white, then red. They fixed on Oisin, and the nameless creature barked sharply. It lifted its powerful arms with their bladed weapons, then jumped towards Oisin with the hopping motion of a gigantic sparrow.
As the sun made its long climb through the sky, Oisin exchanged blows with the creature. Sword rang on sword and battle-axe. Like Manannan’s children, the creature was a shapeshifter and a master of illusions. One moment, its body was a hideous writhing like a mass of eels, the sharp blades of sword and battle-axe whirling from the midst of it. Then it leant into Oisin in the form of a drowned sailor, water dripping from its body, swinging its blades at the last moment when Oisin hesitated. It appeared as a giant fir tree with bladed branches — this was a feat beyond any mere shape shifting. It became a clawed dragon, then took the graceful form of Niamh herself. Oisin ignored all these changes. As the red sun sank into night, he prevailed.
With a sudden lunge, he broke through the creature’s wall of ribs and his sword blade found its heart. The creature screamed and barked and fell. Oisin swung his sword this time, chopping the creature’s head from its body. With a backbreaking effort, he lifted his enemy’s huge body, which was even weightier than it looked. He carried it to the edge of the cliff, then hurled it into the sea-surge below.
Holding the severed head as a trophy of victory, he returned to Niamh and the other woman. They searched his body for wounds, rubbing them with lotions. The three of them feasted on stewed meat and roots from a black iron cauldron that the woman found in one dark corner, and drank red wine from a stone jar.
In the morning, the dark-haired woman was gone, taking up the freedom she’d been granted, whatever it meant to her. Niamh and Oisin found a rug of otter skins. There they made love with a joy enriched by victory. She wrapped her soft limbs around him, and shuddered and cried out as they joined together.
For three more days, they feasted, slept and loved. The cauldron and the jug never emptied. On the fourth morning, they walked together on the plain of statues and heard that barking sound. A shiver went up Oisin’s spine, and he turned to face the scaly creature. It was moving slowly, but then more quickly, its eyes turning to white, then red. With a grim joy in his heart, Oisin drew out his sword. Blade beat on blades once more, until the end of the day, when the Fenian prevailed and cast his enemy into the sea below.
For one hundred years, Oisin feasted and battled and loved his beautiful Niamh, his taste for victories never quenched. But then, as he cast his enemy into the sea one more time, he saw how the breakers tossed up a green beech bough on the rocks below.
And he remembered.
He remembered a time with Finn, his father, sheltering under a beech at Almhuin — and then memory grew from memory in a flood that overwhelmed him and brought him weeping to his knees. Niamh appeared and ran to him, cradling him in her white arms and comforting him, kissing his eyes and cheeks. But nothing could make the tears stop.
She left him, then returned with the black stallion. They mounted in silence, and the magical horse leapt over the edge of the cliff, then ran like a long-legged fly on the surface of the water.
For days they rode. ‘We go to the Island of Forgetfulness,’ Niamh said, ‘for your memories defeat our happiness.’
Oisin shook his head. ‘I was happy for one hundred years, then for another hundred.’
‘But our lives go on forever,’ she said behind him. ‘One hundred years, or two hundred, is nothing to us. We have the great Forever to fill up.’
‘To dance or love or fight forever is vanity. There must be something more.’
‘Though we live for ten thousand years, or ten thousand times ten thousand, we can never see or know all that there is,’ she said, ‘for the universe can never be bounded.’
‘Not even by the gods?’
‘If Manannan truly exists, he is the god of a greater ocean than mortals imagine. I mean the ocean of infinite space, of the neverending islands of stars. But that is as it should he, for a greater universe means a greater god. A god who made the confined little universe that mortals believe in would not be worthy of our worship.’
‘Then we should stride out into Manannan’s universe. We have magical powers. Is it so difficult?’
‘No, my love, we cannot do that, at least not yet. We have certain powers, all of them natural to us, none of them magical. The stars must be infinite in number, and the universe an endless ocean of them, but they are not for us. Not now. We know of no way to travel on that vaster sea.’ She pressed more tightly into his back, as if she feared losing him. ‘We are bound to this Earth, and I fear we’ve already drunk its pleasures.’
‘But not the knowledge of it, Niamh.’
‘No,’ she said thoughtfully, ‘not the great knowledge it contains. As I told you, the very small eludes our attempts to understand it — as much as the infinitely great.’ She let him go, leaning away, just touching him lightly with her delicate hands. ‘Perhaps you would find the search for knowledge and wisdom less vain than years of dancing or victories.’
‘I am a warrior,’ he replied sadly. ‘That quest is not for me. Take me to the Island of Forgetfulness.’
Niamh wept for a time, but th
en she sang — sad songs of loss and old memories.
Again, they journeyed for days, through a mist that became thicker and colder as the time passed. At last, they found themselves wading through white foam along the edge of a desolate stony shore. Where a stream flowed into the ocean water, the black stallion began to walk up the shoreline and into a forest of immense, wrinkled trees, each of them wider than a house. Hanging from the boughs of these trees was a long, gourd-shaped fruit that smelled as sweet as honey. For hours, the stallion walked on dark tracks that became steeper the longer the journey went. Then he stopped, as they left the forest and found themselves at the top of a hill looking down on a valley floor — on a wide, grassy plain.
The horse whinnied and picked his way down.
Here were a thousand men and women, not unlike the folk of the Island of Dancing, but sleeping silently on the ground. Now and again, one moaned and woke for a moment, made some gesture or dumb action, then fell back into a slumber. On the ground beside the men were weapons of all kinds: swords and spears, arrows, battle-axes, war hammers and maces, shields and armour, battle conches and horns. Scattered across the valley, rising from the lush, tall grasses, were more of the gigantic honey trees, and the honey-sweet smell was all around, heavy as the taste of mead.
As the sky darkened and the stars came out, birds and animals moved fearlessly among the sleeping Immortals. One of the sleepers was vast in size, larger than any mortal — as large, perhaps, as the nameless creature that Oisin had slain so many times on the Island of Victories. This enormous sleeper was covered with gold jewellery. Niamh and Oisin stopped by his side and dismounted from the black horse. Niamh blew a single note on her horn, and the sleeper woke. He raised his hand as if in blessing, and Oisin felt all his memories of battles, victories, betrayals rise within him in a riot. With them came the memory of endless vain revels on the Island of Dancing, endless futile combat on the Island of Victories. All of it seemed to flash before him at once, then dissolve like a summer cloud. He felt purified.
‘Forget,’ the sleepy giant said. ‘Forget it all.’ He lay back in the grasses, returning to his slumbers.
Niamh and Oisin let the stallion go free to do as he would. They breathed the honeyed air and lay down in the grass, too sleepy even to make love. In his dreams, Oisin forgot everything of heroism, war, merriment, and sexual joy. His dreams were as peaceful as a blanket of snow or the slow-growing ivy on a wall.
At times, the brightness of the noon sun brought him awake, or the presence of some animal — then he breathed the sweet air and smiled on his Immortal lover, sleeping by his side. But after a hundred years, he and Niamh chanced to wake at the same time, disturbed by a raven eating a ripe honey fruit where it had fallen. The bird scuffled about busily, showing no sign of drowsiness. Then there was another such bird, and yet another. No more — only the three. But that was enough.
Oisin remembered.
The ravens were like those that had feasted on the endless dead when kinfolk fought with kin on the field of Gabhra. Oisin’s eyes met Niamh’s. ‘I can never forget,’ he said.
She nodded sadly, or so it appeared. But then she said, ‘It is just as well. I am glad of it. Come.’ The black stallion ran towards them, unchanged in another hundred years, and they mounted on its back.
‘Where do we go now?’ Oisin said.
‘You are ready to return to the land of mortals.’
‘No. I have forsaken it for you.’
‘There is something I must show you.’
Yet again, they rode for days, speaking earnestly of their future. This time, Niamh did not sing, but only talked and listened. But she gave him a warning. ‘Touch nothing, my love. If once you give way, then you will never return to the Islands of Dancing and Victories. Your soul will be weighed down with time.’
They rode on waves the size of mountains, past innumerable islands, past sights stranger than mortals’ eyes had ever seen: many-limbed kraken, each of these monsters larger than a mortal village; even vaster leviathans that chewed on the kraken like crusts of bread.
One day, there was the sound of horses and geese. Niamh and Oisin had reached the lands of mortals. They crossed the country of Erin from west to east. All was changed as they rode through the countryside. The battle camps of the Fenians were gone. The great fortress of Dun Ailleann was a mound of broken stone. Villages paid worship to a strange god of death and rebirth, while hard-handed folk tilled the soil, skilled with ploughs, not shield and sword and spear. For all their toil, they were puny, considered beside the least of the heroes of old.
‘Three hundred years have passed,’ Niamh said, ‘and the Nazarene god has triumphed.’
Oisin shook his head, disconcerted. ‘What god is this? I know of no Nazarene god.’
These farmer folk with their insipid deity worked and loved and hoped; they were not entirely contemptible. For all that, Oisin wept. Three hundred years all gone … The land was no longer fit for heroes.
In a field at Glenasmole, two men carried a heavy rock, staggering and sweating with its weight, trying to load it onto a wagon. Oisin did not hesitate, though he never knew whether he acted out of pity or contempt — or simply out of pride that a use could still be found for his heroic strength. Leaning from the horse, he seized the rock from them and flung it easily on to the wagon. Then he remembered Niamh’s warning.
He fell from the horse’s back and it flew westward across the mortal land, heading for Tir na n-Og, bearing Niamh with it.
Heavy with the weight of three hundred years of memories, Oisin seemed to fall down a steep-sided abyss, as deep as the tower on the Island of Victories was tall — its bottom lost from sight. Down, down, into oblivion.
He swooned, then awoke, then swooned again. Yet once more he awoke, but was somehow less than himself, some of his faculties missing, though how could he tell such a thing if it were the case? Some power outside himself seemed to be assessing him and making its report.
Oisin gave in and slept.
The next time he woke, he was alone on a grassy hillside in cold mist. Gradually the mist parted, and a figure came toward him. It was Niamh.
‘I thought I’d never see you again,’ he said.
‘I never said that, my only love. I said your soul would be weighed down with time. Did I not speak truly?’
‘Where are we?’
‘In my father’s kingdom. Come with me.’ She stretched out her hand, and he took it, standing with her help, then finding he needed no help at all. He shook her hand away; he was assessing himself. He felt strong and light. All his powers seemed to be back. All of them? Could he still shift shape, as he’d learned on the Island of Dancing? He held out his right hand as an experiment, inspected its back, reacquainting himself with each nail, every freckle and hair, stretching out his fingers like a spider. Concentrating as he’d been taught, he made the fingers grow longer, joint by knuckled joint, then shaped his nails into retractile claws like a cat’s. Niamh watched patiently as he returned the hand to human shape.
‘How did we get here?’ Oisin said.
‘We rode for three hundred days over land and sea, using roads and bridges and ships. I assure you, my horse cannot fly over the waves as I made it seem, but what I told you is true. This kingdom is very far from the land of Erin. It is everything I said — a kingdom of islands and ocean.’
As the mist vanished, the day grew warmer and clearer. Supernaturally clear — he had never seen with such clarity, not in his days as a hero among mortals, not on the three enchanted islands.
At times since he’d met Niamh, he’d felt as though living in a dream. This was the opposite. Everything before this moment now seemed dreamlike.
‘I don’t understand,’ he said, thinking back through his adventures. ‘You’re leaving out the Island of Dancing, the Islands of Victories and Forgetfulness. It’s three hundred years or more since I first met you in my own land. You showed me what it has become.’
‘It has
not changed,’ she said. ‘Not yet.’
‘But I saw it.’ Yet that, too, seemed like a dream.
Niamh shook her head and smiled sweetly. ‘I am sorry to have deceived you. I merely showed you its future.’
‘You can see the future?’ he said, incredulous.
‘Its possible future.’ Once more, she took his hand. He neither returned her reassuring grip nor broke away, letting his hand become a dead thing in her grasp while he thought about what she was saying. ‘We believe,’ Niamh said, ‘that the cult of the Nazarene god will triumph through all the great empire of the Romans. Then it will find its way to the Fenians’ land. I showed you what your home may look like in three hundred years. Mortals prefer such faiths to the wild gods of heroes. Eventually, one god will be universal, at least among the Romans and their neighbours.’
‘What about your god, Manannan?’
‘We are not so attached to our god, or to the idea of a god. We worship the endless sea of stars. If Manannan made them, well and good: in that case, he is a greater god than any other. But we don’t know the origin of the stars. We don’t even know our own origin, for all that we call ourselves Manannan’s children.’ She released his hand and walked away slowly, as if hoping he would follow.
But a bitterness entered his heart. So much vanity! Even the icy clarity of his senses might be some new kind of illusion.
Niamh stopped and turned back to him. Her breast rose and fell beneath the embroidered gown. ‘There is so much that we don’t know,’ she said. We are scarcely more advanced in our philosophy than the mortals. I told you how little we understand of conception, the inheritance of our natures, the growth and development of life.’
Her words were meaningless, like lumps of stone dropped in an icy lake. ‘The last three hundred years that I seemed to live were some kind of trick, weren’t they?’ he said. ‘That’s what you’re telling me. More of your glamour. None of it ever happened.’
