The Children of Lir

by Marion Grace Woolley

  We had said not one word since we left Sidhe Fionnachaidh. It was only once we were in the air that I had allowed myself to cry, my tears falling through the clouds. All of our years upon Sruth na Maoile I had sustained myself with the thought of seeing our father again. I had dreamed of eating at his table, and of sleeping in my soft bed in the crannóg with my brothers beside me. Now I had to admit that this dream would never be; that all those I loved had truly left us.

  I did not wish to talk, or to think, or to feel.

  Far below, I noticed the river widening until it spanned like a wing, its shores built of beautiful white sand. Little streams of pearl marred the perfect blue, and beneath, small shadows that seemed to race one another. As the shadows leapt, causing spray to pepper the surface, I realised they were dolphins. For one brief moment, I lost myself in the joy of them. I swooped down as low as I dared, laughing in a kind of madness. Their smooth skin shone in the sun, their long beaks and graceful arches a sight to behold.

  “Wait for us!” my brothers called, swooping and soaring alongside me.

  The dolphins saw, and leapt even higher as though they wished to fly with us.

  Eventually, the dull ache of my heart began to lessen, and I knew that we were close enough to our destination to rest. It was then that I caught the scent of fresh-baked bread upon the breeze. A smell so familiar to my childhood: fresh-baked bread each morning when I woke, Sorcha stirring porridge over the embers of our fire. It caused my heart to twist as well as my belly, for it was a smell I had not known in over three hundred years.

  The river continued to widen as we sped towards the sea. To either side I saw settlements: clusters of roundhouses with thatched rooves and elaborate patterns in yellow and red across black daub.

  “It is the Fir Domnann,” Aodh said. “The Men of the God of the World.”

  Their people were not our own, yet we had lived alongside one another for many hundreds of years, long before we were swans, long before we were born. Their art was highly prized amongst the Tuatha Dé Danann. Their torcs and their anklets were beyond compare, twisted into delicate spirals like the scars that decorated their skin.

  “Let us rest here,” I said, seeing ahead only water and empty flatland.

  We settled beside a small village the Fir Domnann called The Dolphin’s Tail. It sat beside a stream that joined the Long Hound, its fresh waters bleeding into an oceanic drag. The stream was sweet enough to drink and the sand made a softer bed than the hard rocks of Carraig na Ron.

  “We must be careful,” I told my brothers. “These people are not our own, and we do not know what has come to pass between our tribes. We do not know that the Fir Domnann are truly our friends. Perhaps they are the reason for our people’s disappearance. Perhaps there was a war, perhaps they cast strange magic. It would be best that we do not announce ourselves to them.”

  “Agreed,” said Aodh. “We have gone this long without speaking to any but our own kind. Let us watch them and listen.”

  We swam close to the shore. When the tide was full we could swim almost to their doors. We looked inside their homes, which were much like the homes of the farmers who lived upon our father’s land. They were cosy, the thatch smoking as fires were lit, the smell of smoked fish causing our bellies to murmur. They hung bright weaves from their walls and stretched wolfskin and dear on frames outside.

  Wooden barges regularly traveled the river. Trees with their great girths hollowed and upturned, rowed by five or six men with paddles and nets. When those boats arrived, down came the furs from their frames, traded for decorated clay pots filled with grain.

  We had lived our human lives atop a hill and never seen the ways of the river tribes. It was an industrious community, with constant talk between traders, and new wears to admire. I liked it there. It acted as a soothing balm upon our solitude. At night, when the tide went out, many people came from the houses with wooden stools to sit upon the flats. They built fires whilst the children dug up sandworms for the morning’s fishing.

  Around these fires, old women told stories. Their accents were thick, and some of the words they used I had not heard before, though the more we listened, the more we understood. Some of those stories were local, such as Deep-water Girtha, who ate children who swam alone at night. Stories told to teach those who needed teaching. Other stories were older and far stranger, the Hanged Man and the World Tree, whose roots reached to the beginning of time, and whose branches reached to the end. Stories of the histories and heroes of the Fir Domnann. Then came stories we recognised. Stories of Cú Chulainn and Ferdiad, stories of Óengus and Ibormeith, and eventually stories of our own kind, of Manannán and his boat Wave Sweeper, of Fand the Great White Gull, and even of Lir and his children, turned to swans by their wicked stepmother.

  At this story, my heart stopped. To hear my own life told as a legend felt as though I were a ghost, a silent spectre at the Feast of Age. I desperately wanted to call out to them, to tell them that we still lived, that we might yet walk among them again.

  “Look,” a voice cut through the dark. “There in the shadows! I see them! The Children of Lir!”

  It was a little girl in a roughspun dress that ended above her muddied knees. Her dirty brown hair fell from beneath her cap in unruly ringlets.

  All of the adults laughed as she pointed her finger towards us.

  Aednat

  I remember the first night I saw the swans. Seanmháthair Kyna was telling her story by the fire on the flats. I loved Kyna, for she told the best stories. They said she was my mammy’s sister’s mammy, though she looked nothing like me. She had a big flat nose and her eyes were always red around the grey in them. Her hair was the colour of goosedown and she wore it pinned up beneath a cloth wrap. Her nails were ridged and yellow and her hands as rough as split logs, though I loved the feel of them. They were warm and reminded me of all the years of work she had put into raising us.

  That night she told the story of the Children of Lir. They said that many lives ago there were men in Éire who walked twice as tall as any man and lived thrice as long. It was said they couldn’t be killed unless they chose to die, and that they had stolen the land from a vicious, dark people called the Fomori, who were so afraid of the giants’ light that they swam to the depths of the sea to hide.

  When I asked Seanmháthair Kyna what had happened to these giants, she always told that their power had bled from them, as they had bled from the land. She told that one day they woke up old. When the people of the mainland came to settle, they had gathered the last of their strength and run to the hills. She told that they lived there still, deep beneath the earth, where they held beautiful feasts. She said they sipped from the light of the morning star and drank dew from flower cups. She told me that if ever I go to sleep out of doors, I must never take the Old Stones for my shelter, nor fall asleep inside a fairyring. If I did, she told me, the hours would become long and eventually I would grow hungry. With one cautioning finger wagged beneath my nose, she frightened me with stories of people who ate from the Small People’s table and could never return.

  “They remain there forever,” she said. “Once you taste of the fruits of their feast, no food will satisfy the same again. Even if you could find your way back to your mama and papa, you would starve.”

  The story of the Children of Lir was not so scary, though. Parts of it were sad: that the children lost their mother when they were babes, and that their father was always weeping. But in the end I almost envied them, for they had been turned into swans, and I could think of nothing I loved better than swans.

  I thought them the most beautiful of all the birds. Their white plumage as sumptuous as snowfall. Whenever I chanced to find a swan feather among the reeds, I would tuck it into my hair and take it home. I had dozens of feathers beneath my pillow. I dreamt that one day, if I collected enough, I would be able to sew wings for myself and fly up to the sun. I would be able to follow it over the hills and see where it slept at night.
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br />   When Seanmháthair Kyna finished telling her story that night, I looked up to see four swans nested on the sand. Though they were far beyond the firelight, I could see them for their bright coats, and I could tell by the way their heads were cocked that they were listening.

  “Look!” I cried. “There they are, the Children of Lir!”

  Everybody fell about laughing, but I did not understand why.

  “Ah, my sweet one,” Kyna said, stroking my hair. “The children have been dead a long many time.”

  “How?” I asked. “What happened to them?”

  “Well,” she said, thinking a moment. “After their nine hundred years were done, they turned back into children and went home to their father.”

  I stared at her hard, and she looked away. Seanmháthair Kyna knew that was a silly end to her story, but I could see that she was tired and had no energy left to imagine. Perhaps she did not know the true ending to the story, or perhaps she had forgotten, though I had never known her to forget a single verse before.

  The next morning, I saved a little of my bread. I took it down to the water’s edge to look for the swans. It was not hard to find them, for there were lengthy stretches of the year when there were no swans on the Long Hound. That was such a time, and they were the only four swans to be seen, tucked up between the withering reeds.

  “Good morning,” I said. “Are you hungry?”

  I named them Fionnuala, Aodh, Fiachra and Conn. Every morning The views up the valley were beautiful, and often we met people from other villages and stopped to exchange news. My least favourite chore was carding wool for the weaver women. When the sheep had been fleeced, all the wool had to be combed through to make it soft and to remove the moss and twigs. I loved the finished wool, it was fluffy as a cloud in the palm of your hand, but carding was an endless task that went on for weeks and caused my hands to blister.

  “It’s worth a few aches and pains to put clothes on your back,” my mother always chided. Still, I did not enjoy it.

  I told to the swans this, and more.

  One day, Uaine Foxtail found me by the river, telling them the story of Seanmháthair Teamhair, an old lady who could turn herself into a hare in order to steal milk from the cows of King Cormac mac Airt, the greatest king who ever lived. Instead of punishing her for her cunning, the king was so impressed that he granted her the gift of youth and set her to work as his head cowherd. She could drink all the milk she wanted, until a young farmer, recently widowed, took her to wife. She gave him three sons, each able to turn themselves into hounds who hunted with the king and brought home plump, juicy game.

  “Hah! Aednat’s truly lost her mind if she’s talking to fowl,” Uaine said, throwing a rock into the water so that the birds swam away.

  “Stop that!” I cried, angry as a devil crab.

  “I’m sorry. Are those the only friends you have?”

  “You know it’s a crime to kill a swan.”

  “I wasn’t even aiming at them.”

  Uaine got his name Foxtail for the fact he could run and hide so well between the reeds. He was really good at raiding water nests for eggs, because they never saw him coming. But I thought a better name for him was Pigsnout, because his face wrinkled up so bad when he sulked.

  He spread it round the village that I preferred to talk to swans because they couldn’t talk back, and were the only living beings who could put up with me for so long. Nobody listened though, because they all preferred me to him. He was always saying something about someone, and people just learned to ignore him. They made excuses for him, saying he was young, and reminding me that his mother died when he was only little, but secretly I think they were simply grateful for the eggs he brought them.

  As the years turned, people in the village began to remark on the swans. They remembered the night they had arrived, after Seanmháthair Kyna had told her story, and they also saw that the swans never left the river.

  They stayed there all year through, from spring to harvest. In the winter it became too cold to sit out on the flats, even with a fire to warm us, so we took to telling tales along the riverbank. The swans seemed to become less afraid, and even the dogs paid them no attention. Though they slept on the river to avoid the foxes, they often came to warm themselves beside our fires. Sometimes, when winter was particularly cold, we’d find them nested in the byre.

  They had become so used to my face that when they saw me walking along the river, they came to swim beside me. It earned me the nickname Sister of Swans, and I embraced it with all my heart. They were truly the most beautiful creatures I had ever seen.

  “Here,” Uaine said, finding me one summer’s eve beside the rushes. “For the swans.” He held out his hand and gave me a thick lump of squashed bread. “I wasn’t hungry.”

  He’d grown tall over the past few years. His face had grown wider and his chin longer, and he no longer looked like a pig’s snout when he frowned.

  “Thanks.” I began tearing off pieces from the ball and throwing them to the swans. The larger swans would always let the two smaller ones feed before feeding themselves. “Would you like to help?” I asked, splitting the bread in two and handing half to him.

  He took it awkwardly and watched for a while before copying.

  “You really like them swans, don’t you?”

  “They keep me company.”

  “Aye, but you have a whole village keeps you company. Why’d you prefer to come out here and waste your breath on birds who can’t reply?”

  “Maybe I don’t talk to get a reply. Maybe I just like to sit here quiet and watch them. Don’t you ever just like to sit quiet and watch things?”

  “Maybe,” he said, his brow knitting above his golden eyes, which had come to resemble the wily fox of his namesake. They were strange eyes. Always looking, never still, never quite at ease.

  We were silent for a long time after the bread was finished.

  Feeling as though I should say something, I turned, but he was gone.

  Fionnuala

  At first, we were so happy upon the Long Hound. Because of little Aednat, we had bread each morning, sometimes dipped in fish oil. We had stories and songs to entertain us, and when it grew cold in winter we had a warm barn and a fire to huddle beside. These people were not our own, yet they welcomed us and cared for us almost as well as our own kin once had, upon the shores of Loch Dairbhreach.

  Though many a time we were tempted, we kept our silence, for we did not know how the people would respond to our human voices. Perhaps they would weep and realise that Aednat had been right. Perhaps they would acknowledge us as the lost children of an ancient king. Perhaps they would take us into their homes to sleep upon soft beds, protected from the wolves and the wild weather.

  Or perhaps they would be afraid. Likely they would look upon it as sorcery. Maybe even seek to kill us. We had no way of knowing, and no escape should they turn upon us. The curse was still strong enough that, should we try to fly beyond our western bounds, our hearts gripped painfully at our chests until we turned back.

  We could scarce take our eyes from Aednat, as she could scarce take her eyes from us. She truly was the sweetest of small creatures. She reminded me of the daughter of one of my father’s finest hunters. Her name had been Ena, and no one had told her that she was not a boy. She climbed trees and played at warriors with broken branches. She had been so full of fire.

  As Aednat grew taller, her fire burned to a soft glow. The dirt was washed from her hair, which shone pale as autumn barley. The scabs on her shins healed and were covered by long, full skirts which fell heavy to her ankles. Yet, whilst the weather was warm, she still walked barefoot, and when nobody was watching she would come right down to the bank and squish her toes in the mud.

  Some years later, her beloved Seanmháthair Kyna died, and she came to the water to weep. I had never wanted to offer comfort so much in all my life. I wished to go to her and to spread my wing across her, and to whisper to her that her grandmothe
r would be well in the Land Beyond the Waves.

  But I could not.

  My brothers and I waited all that night to see whether Manannán would come to collect Kyna. In the morning, they wrapped her body in a long strip of white cloth, placed her on a litter and carried her in procession far off across the flatlands until they were out of sight. They did not return for three days, and we began to fear they had abandoned the village entirely.

  “What do you think it means?” Fiachra asked.

  “I do not know,” replied Conn. “Their ways seem to part from our own, and in their stories they speak of a grey-bearded man as though he were Lord of the Sea in place of our brother. It frightens me.”

  When at last they did return, a feast was held with no less than three oxen slaughtered, their blood seeping into the sands of the Long Hound, staining the banks brown. Ornate drinking horns were fashioned from the animals’ ivory and handed to people of special privilege, perhaps those who had known the old woman best. Her daughter received one, and Aednat another.

  Though Seanmháthair Kyna had passed, her stories remained, embodied in her granddaughter. She would practise telling them to us each evening, so they should never be forgotten. It was our privilege to listen. There is a power in stories. For as long as she remembered ours, we lived.

  The years continued to turn, and for me it became harder. The young girl grew tall and slender, her delicate shoulders and her graceful neck reminded my brothers of me at that age, and they would often remark that a second Fionnuala haunted the waters.

  Up until then, I almost believed she was my sister, as though I were with twin like Conn and Fiachra, able to look upon a mirror image of myself, even if she could not do the same. But then the moon turned another cycle and Aednat surpassed me. Once a month she would come to the waters with the other womenfolk, to scrub clean her rags. Her hips began to widen and her breasts and stomach swelled. I watched her body transform in a way mine never had.