“Witch of Lámhfada,” my father said, rising to greet her.
She stood a foot taller than he, her bone-white skin taught across sharp features. Her nose and chin pinched, yet almost pretty in their exactness. I felt as though she and I were formed of a natural symmetry. Bold sculptures amidst the flesh of men. Our forms were crafted that we might fly, and swim and sing. What, I wondered, had her form been crafted to?
“Lir, Lover of Saltwater.” She bent her knee a fraction.
Was she mocking my father?
He had loved the ocean once. His people called him the King of the Sea. Yet the only saltwater he had known these past years were his tears.
“Are these they?” she asked, turning her bottomless eyes towards us.
“These are my children, yes.”
She walked to the water’s edge and stared for a moment.
Pulling her brown robes above her head, she stepped naked into Loch Dairbhreach. Her figure was slender, her ribs defined beneath the droop of her bosom. About her neck hung a hundred talisman: tooth, claw and paw, beaded with wood and metal, strung from leather. They tinkled as she came forward, her toes sinking in the mud.
My brothers and I circled as she swam out into the lake. There was a thick scent to the air, as though the heat of her body formed a perfume so sweet we were drawn to it.
“Dear swans,” she said, in a language that was not our own. “Do you know who I am?”
“You’re a witch,” Conn said, his seven years now ten since our transformation, yet his experience of the world no different.
She laughed at this and ducked beneath the water.
Some way off a fish leapt, leaving ever-expanding circles on the surface of the lake. For a moment, I thought she had transformed herself, until the dark seaweed of her hair caught between my feet and she appeared before me.
“The last of the great bantuathaid, for my sisters are long dead.”
“You fought for us,” Aodh said. “Sorcha used to tell your story. You fought for us with your sisters, Dianann and Bé Téite.”
“Aye,” she replied. “We turned blades of grass into blades of bronze, and made swift horses of the fallen leaves. We helped win this land for the Men of Dea.”
“So why do they fear you so much?”
On that, she remained silent, the sound of water dripping from her graceful fingers as she arched one arm over the other, floating backwards with her eyes to the sky.
“Tell me, children,” she asked. “What think you of the form of swans?”
“I miss home,” Conn said. “It’s cold out here, and there are things in the night that would eat us.”
“We can’t play at swords, or hunt,” Fiachra agreed.
“You would hunt the things that hunt you?” Bé Chuille asked.
“It makes our father sad,” I offered. “He does not see his children when he looks upon us.”
“We are not really swans,” Aodh said. “I mean, we look like swans, and we swim like swans, but we are not free to fly like swans. Perhaps it would be different if we could see the world. But we cannot. We are tied here with invisible rope, nothing to do but swim around and around in circles. That is no life.”
“I would agree,” she nodded. “It is no life at all when you do not have your freedom, whatever form you acquire.”
We continued to float for a while. We felt comforted by her presence. So many had come to the water’s edge to feed us and to ask us to sing, yet none except Caílte ever entered the water to swim beside us.
“They say you can see the future,” I said.
“That I can.”
“Please, tell us what you see.”
“I see the fall of the Tuatha Dé Danann,” she replied. “It has already begun. I see an army of olive-skinned invaders, accents thick as ash. I see the thrones of Uisneach and Navan crushed, the throne of Tara hauled across the waves, lost to its people. And, beyond that, I see ships to the East. Supple tree trunks that hurl rocks into walls. Villages aflame, children screaming. I see a shadow rising in place of the sun.”
“What of us?” I asked, quietly. “What of our story?”
“Your story is but one verse in a song sung to the end of time.”
“It may only be one verse,” I replied. “But I would know the words.”
Her hand slid out of the water to stroke Aodh’s throat. His head dipped to press against her cheek, as though her touch held some enchantment.
“You are a sweet boy,” she said.
I remembered then what was said of Bé Chuille. She had married twice, and twice she had left her husbands for their sons.
Without thinking, I pecked at her shoulder. It was only a soft peck, yet I drew blood.
Pressing her finger to the mark, Bé Chuille sucked her own blood from her fingertip, and the wound healed.
“All that is sung of you, you have already heard,” she said. “There is nothing more to tell than what was told. Nothing more to say than what was said.”
“No way to break the curse?”
“None.” She shook her head.
That was the end of hope. The cunning women could not break the curse, the druids could not, and neither could the greatest of the sorcerers. From that day onward, the lamps by the side of the lake grew fewer each night. Music no longer played and people no longer danced. When it became clear that there would be no reprieve for the children of Lir, the common folk came to see us as a reflection of their deepest sorrows, and they no longer wished to look upon us.
Bodb, in his shame, left also. For it was his daughter who had done such a wicked thing. In some part he came to feel responsible. Ailbhe and Eoghan went with him, taking the wails of their son far from Lir’s hearing, that it may not cause him to think on his loss. Though that loss was all that our father thought on. Day and night. In truth, he had never stopped thinking on the loss of his first wife, our mother, Aobh. Some nights he would kneel in the hills and cry her name, unaware that his voice carried down to the lake. We would sing, covering his grief with our own. Eventually, only a handful of lamps remained.
The Fianna had left with their king, yet Caílte mac Rónáin remained. He had given over his sword for a harp, and sat of an evening on the shore, composing poems for us. Some were funny, and some were rude. None were ever sad. Caílte’s great gift was humour, and he would have us laugh sooner than weep.
Sorcha also stayed. She cast stories against the firelight as she had when we were small. One night she told us the story of Bé Chuille. She and her sisters were born of the forest goddess Flidais, able to speak the language of wild beasts.
During the invasions, they helped the Tuatha Dé Danann to defeat the Fomori, conjuring great armies of illusion from the shadows of the trees. The Fomori thought themselves outnumbered and ran into the sea.
Many years after the Danann victory, Bé Chuille joined an army led by Lugh. They marched to war against an Athenian sorceress called Carman. She had invaded Éire with the help of her three sons, Dub the Black, Dother the Dark-hearted and Dian the Vengeful. They lay waste to each of the forts they took, burning them or stripping them bare. No one except Bé Chuille possessed enough cunning in magic to match Carman’s forces.
Bé Chuille was indeed cunning. Whilst Lugh and his men threw their full force at Carman, attempting to exhaust her and run her through with their spears, Bé Chuille sent savage curses against her sons, felling each one with pox and misfortune.
In the end, it was grief that killed Carman.
Aodh
The night we finally left Loch Dairbhreach came as a relief to me. There was nothing left for us there. Only memories, as hard as cherry pips to swallow.
All we loved had eventually left us.
Fionnuala’s heartache came first, in the form of Conall of the Red Rock. He rode down through the pass, draped in fine furs, dripping with gold. His chestnut mount pranced along the path, Conall’s supercilious smile fixed to his lips. I never missed my fists as much as I did
that day.
“Look, my dear,” he said to the woman by his side. “These are the children of Lir.”
“I don’t believe it,” Luiseach replied. “Prove it to me.”
As hard as it was for her to believe I was a swan, I found it harder still to believe she had married Conall.
A memory stirred in me. Teaching her to swim beneath the crannóg of my father’s fort. That approving look in her father’s eyes as he supped wine at our table, his mottled hair and slow grin making me wary. Another memory. The day I won the race beneath the rocks at Sidh-ar-Femhin. Garrett drenched in surf and sand, so sure of Luiseach’s feelings for him. It must have hurt him worse than me, to know that his own brother had stolen her from under his nose. Yet none were hurt more than my sister. Of that I was sure.
“It’s said they sing,” he told her. “If we wait until nightfall we shall hear them, and you can be sure Aodh’s voice will be among them.”
Luiseach stared at me, floating in the water a little beyond the reeds.
“That one is him,” she said. “I can tell. He looks the strongest.” Conall’s face darkened, as though he should possibly be jealous of a wild beast. “It is said they talk, also.”
“You there!” Conall called to Sorcha, who was collecting firewood for the few tents that remained. “Do the swans talk?”
He did not recognise her, but she recognised him. Sorcha’s red hair was shot with silver by then. She stooped a little even when she straightened. Her hands were becoming less supple, the jaws of her dragons more firmly fixed. Yet her mind was as sharp as ever. She glanced at me and then back.
“No,” she said softly. “That is a rumour the superstitious folk tell.”
Luiseach’s shoulders sagged with disappointment. She was still fair-looking, even then. Though the same could not be said of Conall, who cradled a paunch before him like a pregnant sow. Even so, I knew my sister would recognise him, and that she would remember.
We never spoke about that night, and thankfully they stayed only one. A diversion between some fine fort and the next, between a horn of hazel mead and a chalice of gooseberry wine, between a warm hearth and a soft bed.
*
Some years later, Sorcha left us. She had been old by then. A maid when our own mother was still such. Her blood was not touched by that of the gods. Her flesh aged as fast as the common folk. We watched the colour of her hair fade like the brilliant dyes of a favoured shirt. The weather wore her down. The chores of keeping the camp. The damp air of the lakeside. Many times we asked her to leave us, to go to Sidh-ar-Femhin and raise Ailbhe’s children, but she would not hear of it, waving away our words with the flick of her wrist.
One morning we awoke, yet she did not.
“I am still a young man,” Caílte told me, time and time again. “If you can live nine hundred years, then so can I. When the curse is lifted and you regain your true form, you will find me here, waiting for you. I’ll be an old man by then, nothing that would turn your head as you turned mine. But I’ll be here. I’ll never love another.”
He would lie there in the grass most evenings, and I would tuck myself against his chest, my beak beneath my wing, feeling the rise and fall of breath leaving his body.
“You will forget me.”
“Never!” he cried. “To say such a thing cuts deep, Aodh. I will not forget you, I cannot, and I’ll make sure that no one else does either. I’ll sing of you until my throat is raw. I’ll tell the tale of Aoife’s wicked deed until my fingers bleed from plucking the strings.”
His words brought me some comfort. I never questioned whether I believed them or not, it was enough that he spoke them, and that they were mine.
Three hundred years passes. Not quickly, not in the cycle of a moon, but in the cycle of many moons. When every day is much as the one before, time itself is measured by the rains and the summers, by the hungry herons and the cries of wolf pups.
My father sat every day on the same rock, his chin resting on his fist. He barely spoke to anyone. He barely ate. He barely seemed to exist.
With Caílte for company he kept his vigil. My lover had become almost a son to him. He brought him food, brushed out his hair and re-braided it. People still came to the lake to gaze upon us, and sometimes we still sang.
When we sang to the sick, they slept and awoke healed. For this reason, Loch Dairbhreach had become a place of pilgrimage. All tribes, even the raucous tribes of Gaul, kept their peace in our presence.
That final summer fell upon us like spring snow, unexpected and deathly.
Each evening the bulrushes beat together in the breeze, reminding us of flight. We answered by stretching our wings, folding air beneath them, causing the water to ripple. Subtly our hearts became heavier, like stone. It felt as though we were sitting lower in the water, and to avoid the pull of the depths we paddled our feet harder each day, restlessly swimming from one side of the lake to the other.
Caílte had grown from a boy to a man by then, his square jaw rough with stubble, thin lines furrowing his brow and creasing his eyes when he smiled. His thick hair had faded from rust to rye as he aged, plaited to the back of his knees like a horse’s tail.
In his turn, my father had faded from tar to silver, only a few lines of dark remained. Hair sprouted from his ears and his nose, and his spine grew twisted from the years spent sitting on that stone seat, staring at his children. Whether it was duty or love that kept him there, I could not say. Most likely he could see nothing for himself in any other direction, neither east nor west, past nor future.
We knew that it was time, yet we could not admit it to ourselves.
It was our grandfather who came at last. By his side stood Ailbhe and her six children. Their eldest boy, Bevan, who had been but a babe in arms when we were transformed, had grown into a handsome man. He had his mother’s dark hair, but our own mother’s eyes. Tall, like his father, with something indefinable about him; a way of walking, or a turn of his head, that I could not place. Perhaps an echo of Aran, lost to time.
The mighty King of the Tuatha Dé Danann grew as round as an apple in his final years. His beard was redder than Lir’s was grey, yet his cheeks were redder still, polished by Roman wine.
“It is time,” he told Lir. “I have been counting the days, and it is time.”
Our father barely moved.
My sister approached the shore and spoke. “We have spent all we have to spend of our time here, but this one night alone.”
Still, our father did not move.
After a long silence, Bodb clapped his hands together. “Let us turn our thoughts to happiness, not heartache,” he bellowed. “If it must be that you shall spend such time away from us, let it not be in silence, but with the ringing of our voices in your ears to keep you company!”
He took the horn from about his waist and blew it over and over. From every direction an army arose, dressed in colourful cloth with bells at their ankles and smiles on their faces. The paths between the mountains turned to rivers of revelry. Flutes and drums and voices rose, and every bird of the woods took flight in fright.
“It is like the old days,” Fiachra said, coming close to me. “I thought they had forgotten us.”
“I believe our grandfather has reminded them,” I replied.
Soon enough, the clans Bodb had rallied were upon us with their laughter and cheer, their clapping and singing, their cakes and their mead. For a moment, I lost myself, forgetting the reason for their visit.
“Silence!” our father cried, clawing his bent body to the top of his seat. “No more music! No cheer!” Everyone fell silent. “These are my children before you. My children. Do you not understand? They are the last of all that I once had. I will not stand here and watch as they leave me. I will not be party to your pleasure in my loss.”
“Lir—” Bodb stepped forward, desperate to mend his offence.
Our father brushed him aside.
“Hear this! Hear me as clearly as you hear your ow
n mother’s voice. I pass a law across this land, on this day, at the hour of my grief. I pass a law, and Bodb, by the gods you will keep it for me. Should any man, woman or child in these kingdoms deign to kill a swan, I shall have their head taken from their body and weighted to the bottom of this loch!” His bony finger pointed to where we watched. “Do you understand me? Do my words reach your ears?”
Silence remained, yet every head began to nod.
With that, he was gone.
That is the last time I ever looked upon my father. I had been running from him all my life, yet in the end it was he who ran from me. I looked to Fionnuala, and to the twins. I could see in their glassy eyes and gaping mouths that they had not felt the same as me. They had loved him, whereas I had tried and failed. They felt his abandonment after all those years, whereas I felt release. For a moment, though, I thought on Sidhe Fionnachaidh. I knew that when my father died, I was heir to his lands. I wondered who would take my place now that none of his sons remained.
It was in the very early hours of the morning that the urge to spread our wings overwhelmed us. Most of the revellers were asleep by their fires, lamps lit along the shore like the comforting edge of a blanket we might pull over ourselves for protection. Some were still awake, drinking from horn cups and talking softly among themselves.
“Remember me, Aodh mac Lir,” Caílte said, stepping into the water. “I’ll be waiting.”
“If you find any way to send word,” our grandfather said, joining him in the shallows, “we’d give thanks every day to hear it.” He reached down to stroke the fine, white plumage of the twins. “It grieves me more than I have words for, what has happened to you and what must happen next.”
“Do not grieve,” Fionnuala told him, her words braver than her trembling voice. “Whatever should happen to us now, we carry you with us in our hearts. You have kept us company these many long years, you have protected us, and you have loved us.”
The Children of Lir Page 20
