The High Deeds of Finn MacCool

by Rosemary Sutcliff

  ‘What is your name? And why do you come and seat yourself unannounced among my household warriors?’ demanded the King.

  And Finn flung up his pale bright head and gave him back stare for stare. ‘I am Finn the son of Cool who was once Captain of all the Fianna of Erin, Cormac High King, and I am come to carry my spear in your service as he did; but for me, I will carry it in the ranks of your household warriors, and not with the Fianna.’ This he said because he knew that to join the Fianna he would have to swear faith to Goll Mac Morna, and he was no light faithbreaker.

  ‘If you are the son of Cool, then you may be proud of your birth,’ said the King. ‘Your father was a mighty hero, and his spear I trusted as I would trust my own – and as I will trust yours.’

  Then Finn swore faith to Cormac the High King; and Cormac gave him a place among his household warriors, and the feasting went on as it had done before, and the King’s harper beat upon his curved harp while the mead horns passed from hand to hand, and the great hounds fought over the bones among the rushes on the floor.

  But little by little the drink began to pass more slowly, the laughter grew fitful and the harp-song fell away, and men began to half glance into each other’s eyes and break off the glance quickly, as though afraid of what they might see.

  And indeed they had good reason.

  Every Samhein for the past twenty years, Tara had been weirdly and terribly visited. Fiend or Fairy no one knew what the strange-comer was, only that his name was Aillen of the Flaming Breath, and every Samhein at midnight he came upon them from the Fairy hill close by, and burned the royal dun over their heads. No use for any warrior, however valiant, to try to withstand him, for he carried a silver harp, and as he came he drew from its strings the sweetest and most drowsy music that ever breathed upon the ears of men, and all who heard it drifted into a deep enchanted sleep. So each Samhein it was the same; he came upon Tara with no one left awake to withstand him, and he breathed where he would with a licking breath of fire until thatch and timber blackened and scorched and twisted, and kindled into leaping flame. So every year Tara must be rebuilt, and every year again – and yet again.

  When the sounds of feasting had died quite away, and an uneasy hush with little stirrings and little eddies in it held the King’s hall, Cormac rose in his High Place, and offered a mighty reward in gold and horses and women slaves to any warrior who could prevail against Aillen of the Flaming Breath, and keep the thatch on Tara till the next day’s dawn. He had made the same offer, and his father before him, twenty Samhein nights, and after the first few times, no man, not the boldest of his warriors, had come forward to answer, for they knew that neither courage nor skill nor strength would avail them against the wicked silvery music. So Cormac made the offer, and waited, without hope.

  And then Finn rose in his place, and stood to face the troubled King. ‘Cormac Mac Art, High King of Erin, I will forgo the gold and the horses and the women slaves, but if I prevail against this horror of the night, and keep the thatch on Tara till tomorrow’s dawn, will you swear before all these in your hall to give me my rightful heritage?’

  ‘It is a bold man, I’m thinking, who seeks to bargain with the High King,’ said Cormac. ‘What heritage is that?’

  ‘The Captaincy of the Fianna of Erin.’

  ‘I have given you the place that you asked for among my own warriors,’ said Cormac, ‘and is that not good enough for you?’

  ‘Not if I keep that thatch on Tara,’ said Finn.

  Then a murmur ran round the hall, and men looked at each other and at Goll Mac Morna, who sat looking straight before him with his one bright falcon’s eye.

  ‘I swear,’ said the King, ‘and let all those gathered here, the kings and chiefs of Erin, warriors of my household and of all the Fianna, witness to my swearing. If you overcome Aillen of the Flaming Breath, you will have earned the Captaincy in your own right, and in your own right, as well as by heritage, you shall hold it.’

  So Finn left the King’s hall, and took up his spear that he had laid by when he entered, and went up to the rampart walk that crested the encircling turf wall. He did not know at all how he should succeed when so many had failed before him, but his faith was in his destiny, and he did not doubt that he would prevail. And while he paced to and fro, waiting and watching, and listening more than all, one of the older warriors came after him, carrying a spear with its head laced into a leather sheath.

  ‘Long ago your father saved my life,’ said the man ‘and now is the time to be repaying my debt. Take the spear, to aid you in your fight.’

  ‘I have a good spear of my own,’ Finn said.

  But the other shook his head. ‘Not such a spear as this, that must be kept hooded like a hawk lest it run wild and drink blood of its own accord. It was forged by Lein, the Smith of the Gods, and he beat into it the fire of the sun and the potency of the moon. When you hear the first breath of the fairy music, lay the blade to your forehead, and the fierceness and the bloodlust in it will drive away all sleep from you. Take it.’

  Finn took the spear and loosed the thongs and slipped off the cover. He saw a spearhead of iron as sheeny-blue as the moonlight, and studded with thirty rivets of bright Arabian gold.

  ‘Take it,’ said the man once more.

  And Finn hooded the spear again, but left the thongs loose. And carrying it, he returned to his pacing up and down, looking always out over the plains of Mide, white under the moon, and listening, listening until the silence in his own ears sounded loud as the hushing of the sea in a shell.

  And then it came, the faintest gossamer shimmer of distant harp-music. Nearer and clearer, even as he checked to listen, clearer and nearer; the fairy music lapped like the first gentle wavelets of sleep about him. It was the light summer wind through the moorland grasses of Slieve Bloom, it was the murmur of bees among the sun-warmed bell heather; it was all the lullabies that ever his foster mothers had sung to him when he was too young to remember . . .

  Finn tore himself free of the enchantment that was weaving itself around him, and with fingers that seemed weak and numb, dragged the leather hood from the spear and pressed the blade to his forehead. Instantly he heard the voice of the spear more clearly than the voice of Aillen’s harp; an angry hornet note that drove all sleep away from him. His head cleared, and looking out once more towards the Fairy hill, he saw a thing like a mist-wraith floating towards him along the ground. Nearer and nearer, taking shape and substance as it came, until Finn was looking at the pale airy shape of Aillen of the Flaming Breath, so near and clear now that he could even catch the silver ripple of the harpstrings on which the thing played with long white fingers as he came. Now Aillen had reached the stockade which crowned the turf walls, and a long tongue of greenish flame shot from his mouth and lapped at the timbers.

  Finn tore off his mantle of saffron-dyed ram skins, and with one sweep of it, beat the flame into the ground.

  With his flame beaten out, Aillen gave a terrible wailing cry, and turned over and back, streaming through himself like a wave flung back by a rocky shore, and fled away towards the Fairy hill. But Finn, with the hornet-shouting of the spear loud and urgent in his ears, leapt the stockade and was after him, as swift as he.

  The doorway of the Fairy hill stood open, letting out a green twilight, and as Aillen fled wailing towards it, Finn made one mighty cast with the spear, and the spear flew on its way rejoicing, and passed through the creature’s body and out at the other side. And there on the threshold of the Fairy hill – or where the threshold had been, for now the door was gone, and only the frost-crisped grass and brambles gleamed faintly under the moon – Aillen of the Flaming Breath lay dead, like a heap of thistledown and touchwood and the fungus that grows on the north side of trees, tangled together into somewhat the shape of a man.

  Then Finn cut off the head and set it on the point of his spear and carried it back to Tara and set it up on the walls for all to see.

  When morning came, and Ta
ra still stood as it had stood last night, all men knew that Finn must have prevailed against Aillen of the Flaming Breath, and led by the High King they went out to the ramparts; and there they found Finn leaning wearily on the stockade and waiting for their coming, and nothing to show for the happenings of the night but the scorch marks on his saffron cloak which he had wrapped close about himself against the dawn chill, and the strange and ghastly head upreared on his spear point against the morning sky.

  ‘I have kept the thatch on Tara,’ Finn said.

  Then Cormac Mac Art set his arm across the young man’s shoulders, and turned with him to face the mighty gathering in the forecourt below. ‘Chiefs and kings and warriors, last night ye bore witness when I swore in the mead hall that if this Finn son of Cool should prevail against Aillen of the Flaming Breath, I would set him in his father’s place as Captain of the Fianna of Erin. Last night it was in my mind that it was small chance he had, where so many had failed before. But he has prevailed; he has slain the fire fiend and saved Tara, and therefore I give him to you of the Fianna for your Captain, according to my word and yours. Any of you that will not serve under him, let you leave Erin, freely and without disgrace; there are other war bands and kings’ bodyguards overseas in other lands.’ He turned to the tall one-eyed man who stood out before the rest. ‘That is for you also, Goll Mac Morna, for you who have been the Fian Captain these eighteen years past. Will you strike hands with Finn Mac Cool, and lead the Connacht Fianna under him? Or will you cross the sea and carry your sword into the service of another king?’

  ‘I will strike hands with Finn the son of Cool my old enemy,’ said Goll Mac Morna, though the words stuck a little in his throat, and he and Finn spat in their palms and struck hands like two men sealing a bargain.

  No man went out from the High King’s forecourt to carry his sword overseas, and the feud between Clan Morna and Clan Bascna, though it was not healed, was skinned over and remained so for many years to come.

  So Finn Mac Cool become Captain of the Fianna of Erin, as his father had been before him.

  3

  Finn and the Fianna

  It is time to tell something of the Fianna and the life they lived. In peace time it was like this: in winter they went to their own homes, or assembled in the halls of some greater chieftain, and in the summer they gathered for training, whole battalions of them living together in the open, sleeping in branch-woven cabins if they slept under cover at all, or out on the bare mountain-sides with no cover but their cloaks between themselves and the grey dew, and living off the land wherever they might be. The hunting was rich, for in those days much of Erin was fleeced with forest, and in the forests ran boar and wolf and red deer. The Fianna were famous as hunters as well as warriors; sometimes on horseback, sometimes on foot, they hunted with their great wolfhounds who stood as tall at the shoulder as a yearling colt, and the hounds were not more fleet-footed than their masters. It was said that in a single day’s chase, they could hunt from Killarney in Kerry to Ben Eader near the East coast, climbing the mountains and cutting across the trackless bogs with no more thought of a check or a way round, than if they had been the Wild Hunt itself.

  Finn’s boyhood among the wild glens of Slieve Bloom had fitted him for this life as no other kind of boyhood could have done. He knew the ways of all furred and feathered things. He could make the cry of a dog-fox so truly that a vixen would answer him; he could move through the forest with no more sound than a shadow makes in moving.

  Many – very many – years after his death, his son Oisĩn, who was a poet and a harper as well as one of the greatest of his warriors, told of him in a song, that Finn’s favourite music was,

  ‘The babble of wild duck on the lake of the three narrows,

  The scolding talk of the blackbird of Derry cairn.

  The cattle lowing in the Glen of the Thrushes.’

  And again, in another song:

  ‘These are the sound that were dear to Finn –

  The din of battle, the banquet’s glee,

  The bay of his hounds through the rough glens ringing

  And the blackbird singing in Letter Lee.

  ‘The shingle grinding along the shore

  When they dragged his war-boats down to the sea;

  The dawn wind whistling his spears among

  And the magic song of his minstrels three.’

  Many things were told of Finn by the warriors who served under him, for he was such a Captain as men will tell of to their grandsons, and their grandsons’ grandsons pass on the tale. It was told of him that his sense of justice was so sure and so unbreakable that if he had to give judgement in a quarrel between a stranger and his own son, he would be as fair to the stranger as to his son – and as fair to his son as to the stranger. It was told of him that he was so generous that if the leaves falling from the trees in autumn were gold and the foam on the salt sea waves was silver, Finn would give it all away to any who asked him. It was told of him also that he had another side, a dark-of-the-moon side, and could forgive an injury, laughing, but knew also how to nurse an old hate through the years, to the death of the man he hated.

  This was the new Captain of the Fianna of Erin, with nothing yet told of him at all save his wild boyhood deeds, and that he had overcome Aillen of the Flaming Breath and that he was the son of Cool Mac Trenmor.

  And now, Finn Mac Cool must have a living place, a great hall and strong point where he could gather his chief warriors about him. So Cormac the High King gave him the strong Dun of Almu, in Kildare. Today the place is called the Hill of Allen, and there is nothing to be seen there but the wave-lift traces of encircling turf banks under the heather and bramble-domes, no sound but the wind blowing over and the green plover crying; but when Finn was its lord, the hill was circled by massive walls of turf and timber, gleaming white with lime-wash the hall standing high and mighty above the byres and barns and chariot sheds and the sleeping-places of warriors; and the weapon stone stood tall in the forecourt and many proud chiefs and champions sharpened their weapons on it in time of war.

  Of these champions, the kin and the hearth-companions of Finn Mac Cool, the foremost and hardest fighter despite his one eye, was his old enemy Goll Mac Morna, a hero savage as a wild boar to his foes, staunch and faithful to his friends.

  Then also, there was Conan, son of that lord of Luachair whom Finn had slain with the Treasure Bag of the Fianna upon him, and who, for seven years after his father’s death, was an outlaw, raiding against the Fianna, slaying here a man and there a war dog, firing the thatch of a chieftain’s hall. Conan Mac Lia stole at last upon Finn himself when he chanced to be alone after a day’s hunting, and flung his arms round him from behind in a grip so strong that it could hold even the Fian Captain fast and motionless. Finn knew that there was only one man in Erin strong enough to do that, and he said, ‘What do you want of me, Conan Mac Lia?’

  ‘To swear fealty to you, and carry my spear among the Fianna, for I am weary of playing wolf on your flanks.’

  So Finn laughed and said, ‘As you will, Conan Mac Lia. Let you keep your faith with me and I will keep mine with you.’ So Conan swore fealty and served loyally with the Fianna for thirty years.

  Then there was another, Conan of the Clan Morna, a fat man growing bald, no great fighter but great at belittling other men’s deeds. No man had much liking for Conan Maol, but Finn kept him with him because he had a hard core of common sense and his advice was often worth listening to. It was told that when he was stripped he showed a black ram’s fleece down his back instead of human skin, and this is the way he came by it. One day when Conan and some others of the Fianna were out hunting they came upon a stately dun, with walls lime-washed as white as a war shield, and roofs of many-coloured thatch, and being hungry and weary they entered in search of hospitality. They found themselves in a chieftain’s hall with silken hangings and pillars of cedar wood upholding the roof. There was no sign of any living creature, man, woman, child or hound, b
ut in the midst of the hall a table was set for a feast, with boar’s flesh and venison, yew-wood vats of crimson foreign wine and drinking cups of gold and silver. They set themselves down to eat and drink, stretching weary legs beneath the table, and cheerful as groomsmen at a wedding feast. But midway through the meal, one of them sprang to his feet with a startled cry of warning, and as the rest looked up, they saw the place changing around them, the walls to rough wattle, the fine thatched roof with its painted rafters to smoke-blackened turf such as might cover a herdsman’s bothie!

  ‘Enchantment!’ someone cried out, and they all sprang to their feet, making for the doorway which was shrinking to be no bigger than the mouth of a fox’s earth. But Conan was still so busy with the food and drink that he noticed nothing of this until they shouted to him; and then, when he woke at last to his danger, and tried to rise and follow, he found himself stuck to his chair like a bird caught in lime. Terrified now, he howled to them for help, and two of them rushed back and seized him by an arm each, and pulled with all their might. They tore him free, but in parting from his chair, he left behind the better part of his tunic and breeks and all the skin of his back and hams. They hauled him through the narrowing doorway and laid him face down outside, wailing like a banshee with the pain of his hurts.

  Then, for they could think of nothing else to do for him, they brought a black ram from a man herding his flock on the next hill, killed and flayed it, and clapped the skin upon Conan’s raw back. And there it took root and grew, and was with him to the day of his death.

  Another of the Fianna was Keelta Mac Ronan, famous for his fleetness of foot. It was himself that ran down and slew a wild boar which the Fianna had hunted for years without being able to touch so much as a bristle of its ugly hide. He had the gift of minstrelsy, and there were few who the Fianna liked better to listen to after supper when the mead jars went round and it was time to wake the music of the harp. Unless of course it was Oisĩn, in later years, for there was never a harper to touch Oisĩn, who could play and sing the very larks out of the blue sky.