“May I come in?” Luiseach asked, appearing in the doorway to the crannóg.
I sat up on my bed so fast I felt dizzy.
“You’re here,” I stammered.
Looking around the room, she seemed to acknowledge that nobody else was, and remained in the entrance.
“Please,” I said, “come in. You can use my sister’s room behind that partition.”
“I brought this.” She reached into her satchel and pulled out a long grey tunic that reached to her knees. “Will it do?”
“Perfect,” I replied. “Put it on and meet me by the shore.”
With that, I walked onto the back porch and summersaulted into the lake, for no other reason than to impress her.
For the next two afternoons we splashed in the shallows and laughed. I helped to teach her to float, my hand held steadily beneath her head as her arms billowed beside her in that thinly-woven gown. More than once I had to wade deeper into the water to cover the bulge in my braccae. I was almost fifteen, and she was a goddess.
On the second day of our lessons, I hauled myself out of the water and went to rest against a tree whilst Luiseach changed her clothes in the crannóg.
“Are you enjoying yourself?” a soft voice came in my ear.
It caused me to jump, for I had thought myself alone. Looking to either side I could see no one, until a stifled laugh caused me to reach back, meeting a hand on the other side of the tree. I pulled it towards me, expecting my sister’s light features to appear, ready to tickle her and tell her to stop teasing.
Instead, I found myself staring into Aoife’s dark eyes.
I was too surprised to speak, letting go of her hand and drawing myself tall.
“She’s pretty,” she said.
“Yes,” I replied, watching a slow smile spread across her lips.
She took the tip of her finger and placed it against my bare breast, tracing a line from my neck to my stomach.
“Are you in love, sweet boy?” she murmured, her gaze flicking back to mine as she removed her finger and took a step closer.
I was speechless. My father’s wife, daughter of Oilell of Aran, sister to my own mother, was close enough to kiss, her lips parted as though that is what she expected.
“Perhaps,” I answered, glancing around to make sure we were truly alone.
“Does she make your blood race?”
I do not know what caused me to say it, but she was playing with me and I did not like that. Perhaps, like all young men, I had a yearning to test my boundaries. Pushing my chest forward, so that she had to step back, I leaned in close and whispered.
“Does it make you jealous?”
Her face hardened, the flat of her hand landing sharply across my cheek.
My ears were left ringing as she walked away.
Fionnuala
I was sitting beneath Anamcha’s tree when Aodh found me, weaving plaits with strands of dried grass. Sorcha had not long since left, escaping the heat of the cook fires, hands sooty from the charcoal.
“Brother.” I smiled as he walked up the mound towards me. His hair had formed those thick curls they so often did after he had been swimming and allowed it to dry beneath the sun. I pushed out my feet so that he could lie against my lap, but instead he walked past me to the tree. He slumped down, arms folded across his raised knees, head resting there.
“What is it?” I asked, fearing another misunderstanding with the lovely Luiseach.
“Our father’s new wife,” he eventually said, propping his chin upon his arms and giving me a sullen look.
“Oh. What of Aoife?”
“I don’t like her.”
At this I laughed, for Aodh, although quiet, had never made a statement so bold about anyone I could remember.
“Why, what has she done?”
“Nothing.” He shrugged and looked away. “I just don’t trust her.”
I could tell that something had happened, but I was not about to press him. From the way he avoided my eyes, I knew whatever had passed had probably been of his making, some unmeasured words or a simple disagreement. It would pass.
“She is our mother’s sister, Aodh, and she has made our father happy. We should try to be happy also.”
Fleetingly, I wondered whether our mother would have approved of the wild parties our father now threw, and of the company he kept. Aobh of Aran had been much different from her sister. For a start, she had been a mother to us. Aobh had preferred family life to festivals, attending only when they promised to bring her closer to her kin. She had enjoyed the simple pleasures, kneading bread with her daughter, our fingers sticky in the dough. She had loved to tell us bedtime stories and chase the wildfowl round the fort, searching for hidden eggs. We had a game, whoever found the most hidden eggs got to eat the largest one for their breakfast. I remember once, Aodh finding an egg the size of his palm beneath one of the store huts. When we cracked it open there had been three yolks!
Although I was pleased that our home was so busy, and that guests clamoured to arrive where once they had skulked past in silence, deep down I longed for those peaceful days with our mother. I felt as though my father and Aoife belonged to a different time. As though they inhabited those years before we were born. As though their love and their pleasures had no space for us. We were simply witness to their lives, no longer part of them.
Still, these feelings were bound to pass. At least with Aoife and her constant distractions I did not pine for Sidh-ar-Femhin. Had we returned home without her, I’m sure my father would soon have slipped back beneath his grief. Our lives now would be far worse for it.
After a while, Aodh got to his feet and started for the Black Vale where he liked to watch the stags and the wild horses. I almost thought to go with him, but I was feeling lazy in the last of the day, and my brother seemed to prefer his own company.
For hundreds of years to come, I would ask myself if things might have been different had I followed him that day. Had I asked him what had truly happened. Had I listened to his fears.
Aoife
When I was a child, I wished for a dress of spiders’ webs. Have you ever looked at a spider’s web – truly looked? They are the most beautiful of all fabrics. In the misty mornings at Sidh-ar-Femhin they collected dew like jewels, the weak sun captured in those gems and mirrored back a thousand times. Here, at my husband’s fort, they turned to strings of pearls with the frost. Flakes of snow would catch on them in winter. Whilst they melted on my warm tongue, they simply rested there upon the webs, as though the spiders had captured winter itself and would never release it.
How could one simple strand, thinner than my own hair, capture a moth or a bumblebee and clutch it so tightly? Had I a dress woven of spiders’ webs, I was convinced nothing could penetrate it; that my enemies would never be able to touch me, and that I would have all the wonder of the morning sun and the winter’s weeping white to protect me.
I had the Queen ask each of her dressmakers whether they could weave such a dress, but each of them laughed.
“I will collect you the cobwebs from beneath my bed,” one of them told me, assuming herself witty. “If only I could weave it, the cheapest cloth and the most plentiful.”
Some people do not understand beauty, or the power in things.
There was power in my husband’s rugged lands. They held a beauty quite unlike my own, for there were no soft edges around the Black Vale. The winds ripped through the fort like bean sí. In winter the maids had to smash ice from the top of the wells and in summer the heat burned the heather brown. The men of Sidhe Fionnachaidh were browner and fuller-bearded than those of my homeland. They were hard men who did hard work in the fields. Their braids were often unruly and they cared little for cleaning the dirt from beneath their nails or picking the food from their teeth.
I barely noticed those first few months. The cold did not touch me, tucked up in my husband’s bed, and when I walked, I walked alone and rarely close enough to others to see the fi
neness of their features.
As the months passed, I did begin to make comparison. We saw so many chieftains pass through our doors. Tribes from every corner of Éire. The dark-haired farmers and the golden-haired hunters, and the short mountain folk and the tall grasslanders. I drank with them all. I outdrank some and was outdrunk by others. I tasted the meats and the fruits they brought as gifts, and I learned the wild, whirling dances of their clans and the different preparations they taught for their particular flavour of dark juice or flying ointment.
When Blind Sile of the Nagnatae came, one of her Ovates left me a pot of cream to rub against my thighs on a starless night. I did so beneath Anamcha’s tree and it turned me into a bird. A great black hawk. I soared so high I could see Sile and her people halfway back to their homelands. I could see everything, the whole world below. For the first time in my life I felt truly free. I swooped and screeched and chased terrified mice through the corn, my talons sharp and curved like the crescent moon.
Then a shadow fell across the sky and the air felt colder than before. When I soared higher in search of stars, I saw that great clouds had gathered. Lightning danced within them like silverfish caught in a billowing mesh of smoke.
I became afraid then.
I looked below but could not find my home. I cried out and knew myself to be alone in the sky. With every turn of my wing I felt further from the people I knew; lost in that dark night.
When the effects of the cream wore off, I filled what remained in the pot with stones and threw it into the Blue Lake. I never wished to be lost in the sky again.
Often I felt lost around Lir’s children. I knew that they looked at me and saw nothing of their mother. The twins came to me at first, clutching their dirt-caked hands to my skirts. Running to me to show the grubs they had pulled from the earth and reciting songs they had heard by the fireside, forgetting the words and making up new ones.
It was not that I disliked them, but that I did not know what to say in return. I was the youngest of my sisters, you see. They had nursed me into womanhood, and I had never been asked to see to the children of others, for they had mothers and maids of their own. These were not babes I could hold in my arms or young men I could hunt with. They were of an age where they did not know what they needed, and what they thought they needed they found in one another.
Fionnuala was a pretty girl, much like my sister had been at her age. She was graceful and our guests were drawn to her, yet she was quiet and could not hold an audience. She loved the loom and the healer’s hut, neither of which had ever interested me. The only thing we shared a passion for was walking, and both of us preferred to walk alone.
Now and then she would ask about my life with the Red King, what it had been like to grow up there at Sidh-ar-Femhin and call Medb my mother. What could I answer her? There was nothing of my old life that I particularly missed, except perhaps Youghal’s manhood between my legs on those full moons when we tried to be silent beside the pool. I rarely thought of him, yet now and then, when the breeze blew from the woods, the scent reminded me.
How could I tell her such a thing? That my only thoughts of that time were of a man who was not her father, that my pleasures had been riding through the woods, that I spoke to the stones more than I spoke to the Queen, and that most of my childhood had been spent standing atop the walls, gazing out across the valleys, imagining another life.
Aodh was the only one of the four to fascinate me. That day he had entered the hut from swimming, shameless and proud. The water had been cold enough to turn him pink, yet it had not affected the part of him my eyes were drawn to.
Some days I would watch him sparring with the boys from the valley. Topless, wearing leather about his loins to protect himself. Not that he needed much protection. His wooden blade rarely missed, and rarer still was it that anyone could bruise his body.
He never spoke to me, though sometimes I caught him watching. Silent glances at mealtimes, longer ones through the fire.
Lir was often away from Sidhe Fionnachaidh once our marital bed had cooled. The fire I had instilled in his heart had spread throughout, as the summer sun melts mountain ice and causes an unstoppable river to surge. Like that river, he flowed across his lands, renewing relations with long-forgotten friends.
Sometimes I rose with him, but many times I woke to find him already gone. He would always bring me gifts on his return. Cakes baked by the farmers’ wives and fresh ale made with blessed water. Sometimes a fine cloak or a fur hood. A fitting payment for a few days’ absence.
As the months went by, my rooms began to fill with these gifts. I gave many to Guennola, though it was a struggle for her to agree to take anything I offered. Others I gave to Sorcha and Fionnuala, who had more than enough of her own.
The furs began to mount in piles in the corner, and the mead was sent to the gates to sate the guards who slept there. Jewels, and slippers, and musical instruments, cloaks, and gloves, and hairgrips.
Yet the one gift I waited for never seemed to come.
I cannot say that I loved my husband’s children, not in the way their mother had. Yet I knew with sharp certainty that if I were to have a child of my own, I would love it more fiercely than the moon loves the sun.
Every month, I wept silently when my blood came.
Ailbhe
By summer’s end I had grown round as a whale. Wherever I waddled, I had to cradle my belly in my hands, sweating with the evening heat and stopping to pee a dozen times a day. The Feast of Age fast approached and I could not wait for my child to be born. Once it came into this world, it would no longer be inside me, and I would once again be free to walk with ease.
My husband, Eoghan, and I had been fasted not long after Lir and Aoife. We had been joined by Bodbmall, down by the silent pool. My sister and her husband had attended, though they left the children behind, warm by the fires as the weather turned white.
It had been a year since I last saw them. Their faces brought such joy that tears fell from my eyes. In those last few months of my pregnancy, I found it impossible to control my moods. Some days Eoghan could rouse me to such rage merely by walking ahead of me too fast, yet the simplest kindness could reduce me to a bawling mess. I was forever apologising to one person or another.
Fionnuala ran to me, hardly able to reach her arms about my neck for the bump between us.
“Is it safe to hug you?” she asked.
“Please, squeeze tightly, it might encourage him to come out.”
“You know it is a boy?”
“No,” I sighed. “But if it is a girl, she’ll be a giantess.”
Fionnuala laughed and I held her face in my hands. She was still as beautiful then as before, if her bosom a little larger and her hips a year more shapely.
Aodh was the bigger surprise. He was now his sister’s height, give or take a couple of fingers. His hair was an unruly mop of golden curls, the fledgling blond of childhood given way to a darker shade that matched the fine hair on his upper lip.
The twins were taller too, though still small compared to their sister and brother. They were lively as fox cubs, rough-and-tumbling their way about the fort, catching cats and chasing dogs, though only ever to pet them. They were sweet-natured, with more of their mother in them than their father.
“There is someone who has been waiting to see you,” I smiled at my eldest nephew. “I believe he’s waiting for you by the wrestling pit.” Aodh grinned that wolfish grin of his and made off in the direction I had suggested, whilst Fionnuala lingered, her eyes downcast, hiding her hope. “Yes, he’s here as well,” I told her, though my heart was less sure I should have.
It was such a joy to see Sorcha again, for I had truly enjoyed her company during those long days by the coast. I was unable to travel that year due to my size, and Sorcha stayed with me to talk and tend my condition. The elder children were big enough now to take care of the twins, and they travelled with my father’s best men for protection, so we women indulged ourse
lves in their absence, feasting and talking until the sun went down.
“Tell me,” I asked, “how does my sister fair at Sidhe Fionnachaidh? Is she happy there?”
“Never happier, I would guess,” Sorcha replied. “She has transformed the place. We have had more clans through our gates in the past year than we have in the past seven.”
“Aye, she always could hold an audience.”
“It’s as though a breath of life blew through the fort. Our harvest this year was the best I can remember, just as Elatha predicted.”
“Bodbmall predicted a great harvest too, and we have had one. Yet she also predicts a long winter ahead.”
“We’ll be ready for it. The woodpile’s stocked high and the grain pits are full.”
“And what of the children?” I asked. “Do they call her mother yet?”
“From the first day she entered the fort.”
“They are good children, they do what their father asks of them. Is she worthy of the name?”
Sorcha stared at me for a moment, until I reached forward and placed my hand on her arm to reassure her.
“They loved their mother very much,” she replied. “Aoife is simply not her, though she tries her best.”
“Does she?”
“I don’t understand your question, my lady.”
“Come now, Sorcha. I am no more your mistress than you are my servant. We are friends, you and I. And I happen to know that my younger sister rarely does anything that does not suit her.”
My companion looked away for a moment, before meeting my eyes.
“Well, I will admit, she is not the most natural of mothers to them.”
“And had Lir been looking for a mother for his children, he would not have chosen her.” We smiled at one another. “Aoife is a wild thing. She loves to hunt, to ride her horses, and to dance beside the fire. That is what Lir loved about her, for that was what was missing from his own life.”
The Children of Lir Page 10
