A great hoarse shout broke from Cuchulain’s strained and tortured heart, and the sound of it came like a cry for aid to one of the Ulster men who had followed Fergus Mac Roy. Fiacha Son of Firaba had drawn close to watch the fight, and suddenly he felt the old loyalties of the Red Branch rise within him, and he drew his sword and sprang in to Cuchulain’s aid, and with one mighty blow struck off six and fifty claw-hands of Clan Calatin that were grinding his face into the murderous gravel.
Then Cuchulain leapt up, his face a streaming mask of blood, and with his own sword which had been prisoned under him, struck off the shrieking and snarling heads of the monster, and hacked it limb from limb that nothing might be left to tell Maeve of Fiacha’s part in the deed. ‘For it were poor thanks to a friend in time of need, that he and all his following should suffer death for it,’ he said.
That was the last fight but one of Cuchulain at the ford, and the last fight was the sorest one to him of all.
He knew in his own heart how it must be, and when that same night Laeg returned to him, he said, ‘Ach well, maybe I can finish the task without the men of Ulster. Now that the Clan Calatin is dead, I have fought and overcome all the greatest of Maeve’s warriors save one.’
‘And that one?’
‘Ferdia Mac Daman—after old Fergus, the greatest of them all,’ said Cuchulain, and he turned from his charioteer to the rough trunk of the alder tree against which he leaned, and hid his face in the crook of his arm.
And that same night, over in the camp of Maeve, which by now had crossed the river farther up into the hills where the rocks broke it, over in the camp of the joined war hosts of Ireland, when the evening meal was done—they, had eaten well, of Murthemney’s fattest cattle—Maeve sent for Ferdia Son of Daman to come to her beside her own fire. And he went with a heavy heart, knowing all too well what the summons meant.
Seated on her piled crimson chariot cushions. Maeve leaned back against the wheel of her chariot and looked up at him with the firelight in her pale hair and pale bright eyes, as though even she were not sure how to break in to the things that she would speak of.
‘Ferdia Mac Daman,’ she said at last, ‘I know how it is between you and this Hound of Ulster, and therefore, all this while I have not asked that you should go down against him in this long duel of champions. But you are the last left among the great warriors, and now it is you that must take your weapons and your turn.’
‘So, you know how it is between me and the Hound of Ulster,’ Ferdia said, standing before her. ‘You know then that I will not do as you bid me in this thing.’
‘Have you forgotten that you are a man of Connacht and I am Connacht’s Queen?’
‘I have not forgotten, but I will not go down weapon in hand against my friend.’
‘We are all the friends you have,’ said the Queen.
‘My brother, then,’ Ferdia said, his blue eyes levelled like a spear into her pale ones.
Maeve the Queen leaned forward. ‘I can give you sweeter than a brother.’
‘And what would that be?’
‘Does not Findabair my daughter seem to you fair? Take your weapons and go down against Cuchulain, and if you prevail, then you shall take Findabair of the Fair Eyebrows for your wife.’
Ferdia knew well enough what she offered, for to wed the Royal Daughter was to be King of Connacht when her time came to be Queen. ‘And be one day as great and powerful as Ailell? You are gracious, my Queen, but I’ve no wishes that way.’
There was a long silence, and the night wind played with the flames and the horses stamped in the picket lines. And Maeve’s eyes narrowed like those of a wild cat’s before it spits, and like a cat’s, too, they seemed to shine of themselves in the firelight. ‘So be it, then, since neither gifts of friendship nor your loyalty to Connacht can move you,’ she said, ‘let you think of this, Ferdia Mac Daman: you alone of all the warriors of Ireland have refused to go out against the Hound at my asking. You say it is because he is your friend—ach now, a fine and noble-sounding reason—but who’s to say it is the true one? Who’s to say the true reason is not that you are afraid?’
‘My comrades of the war host know me better than that,’ Ferdia said.
‘The war host? Even those that lie dead now by the ford, because the honour of Connacht was more dear to them than life? In Tir-Nan-Og, in the Islands of the West, will they not say that Ferdia Mac Daman betrayed and deserted them? Will that not make a fine song for all the harpers of Ireland to sing at every chieftain’s hearth? You will not have the Queen’s daughter for your wife, but after this, what woman is there that will mate with you? What man will share the drinking horn with you, Ferdia Mac Daman who forsook his own people in their time of need?’
Ferdia stood while a man’s heart might beat seven times, staring across the fire at her, white as a ghost already, to the very lips. Then he turned and strode away in grief and bitter anger, to find his charioteer. ‘Have the team harnessed and all things ready by first light,’ he said. ‘We drive to the ford.’
The news ran through the camp like a thin whispering midwinter wind, and Ferdia’s own men were sick at heart, knowing that their lord would never in this world come driving back from Cuchulain’s ford.
The world still slept in shadow though the sky already rang with light, when Ferdia came to the ford, and finding no sign yet of Cuchulain, lay down on the cushions and skin rugs from the chariot, and slept the light ear-cocked sleep of the hunter until he should come.
It was full daylight when he woke to hear his charioteer calling him, and the nearing thunder of a war chariot that he knew for Cuchulain’s even before he looked.
Cuchulain came whirling down to the ford in a smother of dust and sprang from the chariot while the tall red-haired driver wheeled the team aside. And one on each bank of the river they stood and looked across to the other. ‘So you have come at last, Ferdia who I have called my brother,’ Cuchulain said sadly. ‘Every day I have wondered, but in my heart I believed you would not come.’
‘Why should I not come? Am I not a man of Connacht like the others?’ Ferdia shouted back with a wild defiance.
‘Aye—and yet when we were with Skatha and learned the warriors’ arts, were we not shoulder to shoulder in every fight? Did we not hunt together the same trails, and feast together and share the drink cup and the sleeping-place when the day was over?’
Ferdia sounded as though he sobbed. ‘You speak of our friendship, but all that is best forgotten. It shall not avail you now, Hound of Ulster, it shall not avail you now!’
Cuchulain made a gesture with his free arm that was strangely like to that of a bird with a broken wing. ‘So be it, it is forgotten. What weapons shall we use?’
‘We used to have something of skill with the light throw-spears,’ Ferdia said.
So each champion called to his driver to bring the javelins from his chariot, and all the first half of that day, standing one at each end of the ford, they sent the light throw-spears humming to and fro like darting dragon-flies across the water. But each was as skilled at catching the missiles on his shield as he was at casting them; and by noon, neither had drawn blood. Then they turned to the heavier bronze-tipped throw-spears, and by evening both had their wounds to show, but neither more than the other. And when the dusk under the alder trees grew too deep for clear aim, they broke off as by common consent, and tossed their weapons to the waiting charioteers.
‘That is over for one day,’ Cuchulain said.
And they went to meet each other in the midst of the ford and flung their arms about each other’s shoulders. Then they both returned together to the Ulster bank. And that night the two champions washed each other’s hurts and shared their food and spread their sleeping-rugs together between the two chariots, while their horses cropped together at the thin wintry grass and their drivers warmed themselves at the same fire.
At dawn they rose, ate a little bannock and cheese, and then went down again to the ford. And that day
Cuchulain had the choice of weapons, and all the daylight hours they fought from the chariots with the great broad-bladed spears for close combat and at sunset when the last wintry light glimmered up from the water, and the drivers and the horses were spent and staggering, and both champions were gashed and bloody as battle-torn boars, they flung aside their reeking spears and sprang down into the shallows to embrace each other; and that night all was as it had been the night before, and Cuchulain and Ferdia slept as they had done when they were boys, under the same rug.
The next morning as they took up their shields, Cuchulain burst out, gripping the other’s shoulder, ‘Ferdia, Ferdia, how could you come against me for the sake of a woman—and a woman who has been offered to half the champions of the host—even to me, if I would yield up the ford for her sake.’
‘For the Royal Daughter of Connacht?’ Ferdia said bitterly. ‘Never think it. I should have been shamed through Roscommon, through the whole of Connacht, if I had not come down to the ford. She would have made sure as to that, Maeve the Queen!’
‘And so for your own honour, you would slay me,’ Cuchulain said, the voice of him heavy with grief.
And Ferdia raised his head and looked at him without a word. But it was as though he said, ‘It was not I that was champion of all Skatha’s boys.’
‘The choice of weapons is yours,’ Cuchulain said.
And that day, all the wintry daylight hours, they fought in midstream with their heavy leaf-bladed iron swords, and though they wounded each other sorely again and again, still neither gained any advantage. But that night when the first fierce stars of Orion shone frost bright through the alder branches, the champions slept apart, and their horses grazed on different pastures and their charioteers warmed themselves at separate fires.
In the next dawn, when Ferdia rose, he knew that this would be the last day’s fighting, and he knew very surely what the end of it would be. He armed himself with especial care, and over his striped silken tunic and leather loinguard he bound a great flat stone across his belly, and over that an iron apron, for he knew that Cuchulain would use the Gae Bolg today. He put on his crested war-helm rich with enamelling; and belted on his sword and took up his bullshide buckler with the fifty bronze bosses. Then he went down to the ford and crossed over to his own side. And waiting there, with a sudden wild defiant gaiety, he fell to tossing up his mighty spears and catching them again, idly, like a juggler playing with apples.
And on his own side of the ford, Cuchulain the Hound of Ulster stood watching, then said over his shoulder to Laeg his charioteer, ‘Laeg, will you do a thing for me? If I give ground today, do you give me your scorn to spur me on. Mock at me and burn me up with shame,’ and even as he said it, he thought how Ferdia had done that thing for him when first he strove to cross the Bridge of Leaps, and he could have wept like a woman.
Then he called across the river. ‘What weapons shall it be today?’
‘Today the choice is yours,’ said Ferdia.
‘Then let it be all or any,’ Cuchulain said.
And all that morning until the sun stood at noon, they fought with the spears, yet neither could overcome the other. Then Cuchulain drew his sword and set on with that, striving to strike in over Ferdia’s guard. Three times he leapt in the air to drive the deadly blade down over the rim of Ferdia’s buckler, but each time Ferdia caught him on the broad face of the shield itself, and flung him off into the deep water beside the ford; and Laeg cried out, fiercely mocking, ‘See now! He casts you off as the river casts a rotten stick, he grinds you as the quern stone grinds a grain of barley! Little manikin, never call yourself a warrior, lest the women of Ulster should make themselves sick with laughing!’
And at the sound of Laeg’s mockery, at last Cuchulain’s battle frenzy came upon him, and he seemed all at once taller than tall Ferdia, and the Hero light blazed about his head, and springing in upon each other the two champions were locked together, reeling and trampling to and fro, while the demons and banshees and all unearthly things of the glens whirled and shrieked about their leaping blades, and the very waters of the river took fright and rolled and boiled back from the ford, so that for a while and a while they fought on dry land.
Presently Cuchulain stumbled on a shifting stone, and in the moment that he was off guard, Ferdia drove in his sword and wounded him in the shoulder so that the blood splashed down on to the stones of the ford, and the river ran skeined with scarlet; and as though the sight of the blood maddened him, he began to press upon Cuchulain, striking and thrusting like some great fair-haired fiend of battle, until at last Cuchulain could bear it no more and shouted to Laeg to throw him the Gae Bolg.
Ferdia whipped down his shield to guard his loins and belly, but even as he did so, Cuchulain had caught the dreadful spear as Laeg flung it to him, and leapt and thrust it downward over Ferdia’s guard so that it split asunder the flat stone and pierced through Ferdia’s armour, and plunged in between belly and breast, deep into his body, so that it burst his great heart, and his life came pouring out.
‘It is finished,’ cried Ferdia. ‘Grief upon me! I have my death at your hand, Cuchulain my brother, and to you is the victory!’
Cuchulain caught him as he fell, and carried him to the bank—to the Ulster bank, that he might not die on the hated Connacht shore—and laid him down. And then with a roaring as of many seas in his ears and a blackness before his eyes, sank forward across the body of his friend, with his arms still about him.
Laeg stooped and tried desperately to rouse him. ‘Up! Up Cuchulain! The hosts of Ireland will be upon us now that their last champion is dead!’
‘Why should I rise again? I have killed my brother,’ Cuchulain said, and the darkness closed over him, so that he never heard the thunder of hooves nor the shouted triumph of the war songs as the hosts of Queen Maeve poured through the glens into Ulster. Nor did he know when Laeg lifted him into the chariot and goaded the team into a racing gallop for the refuge of Sleive Fuad’s northern glens.
13. The End of the Cattle Raid
‘THE MEN OF Ulster are being slain and the women carried away and the cattle driven, and Cuchulain alone holds the Gap of the North against the four Provinces of Ireland!’ Laeg had cried through Emain Macha; but it had seemed that the stupefied warriors scarcely heard him; only some wagged their heads a little, as though he had cried that the geese were in the kale plot.
But when in despair he had snatched a fresh horse from the Red Branch stables and gone flying back to rejoin his lord, the women took up his cry: ‘Do you not hear? Rouse up! Conor Mac Nessa, if ever you were a fighting man before this sickness came upon you, rouse up and rouse your warriors and go to aid Cuchulain! Do you not understand that the war hosts of all Ireland are at the gates of Ulster, and none but the Hound of Ulster to stand alone in the gate?’
And slowly, as the Curse of Macha started to wear thin, the words of the women began to pierce through to the dazed minds of the warriors, and their eyes, which had been empty or full of clouds, began again to be the eyes of the Red Branch Heroes that their women and their enemies knew. And at last Conor Mac Nessa rose like one still heavy with a draught of poppy juice, and steadying his weight against the main roof-tree of his hall, he swore a mighty oath. ‘Dead men are beyond our recall, but the heavens are above us and the earth beneath us and the sea around us; and surely unless the earth gape and swallow us and the seas roll in and engulf the land, and the heavens fall and crush us beneath their weight of stars, I will set every woman by her own hearth again and every cow in her own byre.’
Then, even as Maeve had done in Connacht, he called for the black goat to be slain and the Cran-Tara sent out through the length and breadth of Ulster from east to west, and from the northmost headlands to the borders of Murthemney. And many of his warriors he called on by name to answer the summons; those long dead as well as those yet living, for the clouds of the Great Weakness still clung about his brain.
And as the Weakness passed fro
m all Ulster, the warriors flocked in, grimly joyful, to answer the summons. And from end to end, the province rang with the sharpening of sword and spear on weapon-stone, the buckling on of war gear and the harnessing of chariots.
In a few days all was ready, and half the host under the King himself swept from Emain Macha southward, and the other half led by Celthair Son of Uthica Hornskin came thundering from the west along the very track of Queen Maeve. And on the way the King’s host fell in with a rieving band of eight score of the men of Meath, driving away in their midst many women roped together and herded like driven cattle, and they warmed their sword hands for the sterner work in store by slaying every one of the rievers and freeing the women to go back to their own hearths.
Maeve and her hosts had had word of their coming, and they were already falling back towards Connacht, for they were in no case now to meet the unscathed war host of Ulster. But when they reached Slemon Midi, the Hill of the Slain, the two halves of the Ulster host were near to outflanking them on either side, and they knew that they must stand and give battle. And Maeve with a wild and heavy heart, sent Mac Roth who had been her scout before, to view the Ulster horde on the Plain of Garach and bring her word as to its size and strength.
Mac Roth went, and from the northern slopes of Slemon Midi looked out over the Plain. He looked long and hard under his hand, and then went back, deeply troubled, to Maeve with word of what he had seen.
She was sitting beside one of the watch fires, for though the evening was a soft one for the edge of winter, suddenly she was cold to her heart’s core. And Fergus Mac Roy lounged beside her on a black wolfskin rug, with his sword across his knees.
‘Well, and what did you see?’ demanded the Queen.
‘At first when I looked out over the Plain, I saw it full of deer and other wild things, all heading south as though they would be running from a heath fire in the hot days of summer.’
The Hound of Ulster Page 12
