The Hound of Ulster

by Rosemary Sutcliff

  ‘No heath fire drove those, but the war hosts of Ulster closing in through their forests,’ said Fergus, smiling in his brown beard.

  ‘And then presently as I watched, there came a mist flowing down the glens and leaving only the hilltops clear like islands in the white sea of it. And I could not see what lay below the mist, but out of it there came thunder and flashes as of lightning, and then a great rushing wind that all but hurled me from my feet. And since there was no more to be seen, I came back to bring you the word.’

  ‘What is it that he tells us? Is it magic?’ Maeve demanded turning to Fergus beside her.

  And Fergus still smiled in his beard. ‘Ach no, the mist will be the deep breathing of the war host as they march, and the lightning the flashing of their angry eyes, and the thunder will be the clangour of their weapons and their war chariots and the drumming of the horses’ hooves.’

  ‘We have warriors of our own to meet them,’ said Maeve.

  ‘And assuredly you will be needing them,’ Fergus still smiled, ‘for I tell you, my Queen, that in all Ireland, in all the world, there are none who can lightly face the men of Ulster in their wrath.’

  And Queen Maeve rose to her feet. ‘That, we will be putting to the proof,’ she said.

  The two war hosts came together in the Plain of Garach, below Slemon Midi; the Irish host led by Maeve herself and by Fergus Mac Roy with his great two-edged sword which was said, when swung in battle, to leave a wake of coloured light like the arc of the rainbow.

  Charging three times into the heart of the enemy, he came face to face with Conor the King and rushed upon the gold-bordered shield with sword up to strike, crying, ‘This for Deirdre and the Sons of Usna! This for the sons of Fergus Mac Roy!’

  But Cormac Coilinglass the King’s son, though he fought at Fergus’s shoulder, sprang between them, crying, ‘No, Fergus of the Red Branch! Remember he is the King!’ and at the sound of the Prince’s voice, Fergus swung away, and found before him instead Conall of the Victories, red with wounds, and laughing at him along his sword blade.

  ‘Too hot!’ Conall cried, ‘Too hot is Fergus against his own people for a wanton woman’s sake!’ And Fergus rounded from him also, from all the Ulster warriors, with a groan, though indeed Deirdre had been the least of the reasons that cried in him for revenge. But his battle fury raged within him, and scarce knowing what he did, he struck with his rainbow sword among the hills; and it is said that that is why the three Maela of Meath are flat-topped as though their crests had been sliced off, to this day.

  Cuchulain in his mountain fastness, heard the crash of the weapon-blows among the hills, and they troubled his darkness and splintered it apart and called him up out of it, and at last he opened his eyes, and looked frowning about him, until he found Laeg the Charioteer squatting at the foot of his bed of piled bracken. ‘What is the meaning of this crashing among the hills?’

  And Laeg got up and bent over him. ‘The men of Ulster have roused at last from their stupor, and the battle is joined,’ he said, ‘and that you will be hearing is the sword play of Fergus Mac Roy.’

  ‘Then it is time that I was rousing also,’ Cuchulain said, and sprang to his feet, and he seemed to swell and grow taller, as in the onset of his battle frenzy, so that the strips of his spare cloak with which Laeg had bound his wounds burst and flew off him, and he shouted to his charioteer. ‘What do you stand there gaping for? Help me with my war gear, then let you go and yoke the team!’

  And so in a while the two battling war hosts alike heard the thundering of the war chariot of Cuchulain and saw it whirling towards them in the midst of its great shining cloud of dust, and cried out in triumph or despair, ‘The Hound of Ulster! It is the Hound of Ulster!’ And Cuchulain, yelling his war cry behind his flying team, crashed like a thunderbolt into the battle.

  In the raging heart of all things he came upon Fergus Mac Roy broadside on, and yelled to him, ‘Turn to me—to me, Fergus Mac Roy, and I will wash you as foam in a pool, I will go over you as the tail goes over the cat, I will smite you as a mother smites her bairn!’

  ‘Who calls so to me?’ shouted Fergus, snatching the reins from his driver and wrenching round his team.

  ‘Do you not hear them cry my name? Cuchulain the Hound of Ulster! Now let you keep your half of the bargain we made down yonder by the ford!’

  For an instant amid the swirling tumult of battle they looked at each other across the chariot rims, and then Fergus said, ‘I have not forgotten my half of the bargain,’ and bade his charioteer to swing the team again and bring them out of battle.

  And as the word went round, under the dust storm of the fighting, the men of Leinster and the men of Munster also went after him, so that before the shadows began to lengthen, Maeve could number to her standard none but her own seven sons and the war bands of Connacht alone. Yet what were left of them fought on like heroes, like boars brought to bay.

  It was high noon when Cuchulain entered the fight, and when the sunset light ran royal gold through the blackened heather, his great war chariot was but two wheels and a tangle of splintered ribs and torn oxhide, and the host of Connacht was in full flight towards Roscommon.

  Cuchulain, leading one wing of the pursuit, came upon a wild woman crouching under a broken chariot with two dead horses in the yoke-harness, who cried to him with outstretched hands, ‘Your mercy upon Maeve of Connacht!’

  ‘I am not wont to kill women,’ Cuchulain said, ‘even Queens deserted by their host.’

  ‘The Curse of the Morigon upon them! Upon Ailell most of all!’

  ‘Too long you have kept that one like a hound in leash. And now that the leash is broken, what does he owe you, that he should stay to die standing over you?’

  But he called up his own warriors and, no man looking at her, they mounted her into the chariot of Conall of the Victories, and closed up about her, and so got her safely to the Shannon and across it into Athlone. ‘For I do not think that Connacht will lightly come cattle raiding into Ulster again for a while and a while,’ Cuchulain said.

  So ended the Cattle Raid of Quelgney. And after it all, the Brown Bull was never any gain to the Connacht herds, for the White Bull of Ailell knew of his coming, and broke his shackles and came thundering to fight for the lordship of the herd, and in Maeve’s cattle run the two brutes fought until the earth shook and the hills shuddered and rang with their tramplings and bellowings. And the Brown Bull killed the White and kneeled on him and trampled him and tore him apart with his horns, and flung the rags of him about so that they fell from Rath Cruachan to Tara of the Kings. Then he rushed bellowing about the land until his heart burst and he fell dead, vomiting black blood, at the place which is called the Ridge of the Bull to this day.

  Back at the Royal Palace of Rath Cruachan, Ailell said to Maeve—and himself speaking in a voice that he had never used to her before—’Now we will make a seven years’ peace with Ulster, in my name as well as in yours.’

  And Maeve, not daring to be revenged on him as she would have liked, for she knew how thin in that hour was her hold on her people, said, ‘We? Are you so sure, then, that you will still be King of Connacht in seven years?’

  ‘No man—and no woman—may be sure that he will still draw breath in seven years, yet whether I am still King of Connacht or no the empty places beside the hearths of Connacht shall call to men’s minds that it was you that ordered this raid on Ulster, and if you seek to do the thing again you may find your hold upon the war host something less sure than once it was!’

  14. The Coming of Connla

  FOR A LONG time after the fight at the ford and the death of Ferdia, for a long while after the wounds of his body were healed, it was as though Cuchulain were wounded in his mind; he had no joy left to him even in hunting, no joy in harp song, nor in the touch of Emer’s hands. But little by little, as the months passed into years, that wound also healed, though maybe the scar of it never quite ceased its aching, and he returned to his old ways. The
fire of life burned high in him again, and he answered as of old to the call of any adventure that came his way.

  And many and many were the adventures that came, and if they did not come, he went out to seek them. Once he even went down into Tir-Nan-Og, the Land of Youth, to fight for Labraid of the Quick Sword, among the Fairy Kind. That was the time he met with Fand, who was wife to Manannan the Lord of the Sea, and loved her from one new moon until the next. For always he was quick to fall in love, but always he forgot the new love in a while and a while, and came back to Emer as a man comes again to his own hearth after a day’s hunting. And that time too, he came back to her, and she waiting as she had learned to wait until he chose to come, among the apple trees of Dūn Dealgan.

  It was many years now since his warrior training, and Cuchulain would have forgotten Aifa of the Golden Hair as completely as the others that came after, save that, as time passed and Emer bore him no child, he would wonder now and then, when he saw the boys at hurley, whether he had a son growing up for him somewhere away beyond the Land of Shadows. And at such times Emer would know what was in his mind, and it would be to her as though a small sharp dagger were turning in her heart.

  And then one summer day, when King Conor Mac Nessa and some of his lords had been racing their horses together on the hard white wave-rippled sand of the coast below Dūn Dealgan they beheld, coming in to shore, a little boat that lifted and dipped gull-wise into the troughs of the waves. It was sheathed in plates of bronze instead of dressed skins; and in it sat a boy with gilded oars in his hands, and his head shone in the sunlight and dancing water-light, more golden than the oars. There was a small pile of stones in the boat, and ever and again as the King and his nobles watched, the boy would fit a stone into his sling and cast at one of the sea birds that swooped and circled overhead, and always he cast in such a way that he did not kill the bird but brought it down alive to his feet; and then he would take it up and caress it, and cast it back none the worse into the blue air. And all kinds of other strange and fantastic things he did, showing off joyously for the watching men on the shore.

  But Conor shook his head that was beginning to be grey streaked like a badger, watching still as the boat came into the shallows, and he said, ‘If the grown men of that boy’s country were to come against us they would grind us as the quern stone grinds barley. Woe to any land into which that boy shall come, for when he is grown to manhood it is in my mind that no land will be large enough to hold him!’ And as the keel ran up on to the white sand, he said to Cethern Son of Findtan, who stood beside him, ‘Go you and bid him turn back along the sea trail by which he came.’

  But when Cethern delivered the King’s word, the boy only laughed and tossed up his head like a high-spirited colt, and said, ‘Surely here is a poor welcome for a stranger! But I will not turn back for you.’

  ‘It is not my word, but the King’s,’ Cethern said.

  And the boy replied, ‘Then I will not turn back for the King, nor for any man!’

  So Cethern returned to the King and told him what the boy had said.

  Then Conor Mac Nessa turned to Conall of the Victories. ‘Go you and see if you can make my message clearer—also something sharper if need be.’

  So Conall drew his leaf-shaped bronze sword and strode into the shallows, but the boy saw him coming and fitted a stone into his sling and let fly at him with a high triumphant shout; and the wind of the sling stone passing by his cheek knocked Conall down, and before he could rise again, spitting out salt water, the boy was upon him and had wrenched his arms behind his back and bound them with his own shield strap.

  Then the King, more certain than ever of the danger that lay in a boy of such powers, sent another of his champions to demand where he came from, and another and another; and each as he came, the boy treated as he had treated Conall of the Victories.

  When upward of a score of the Red Branch Warriors had suffered in the same way, the King spoke again urgently to Cethern Mac Findtan. ‘Ride to Dūn Dealgan and bring me back Cuchulain to do battle against this boy whom even Conall of the Victories is powerless to overcome.’

  So Cethern mounted his horse and rode to Dūn Dealgan a few miles off, in a smother of blown dune sand.

  Cuchulain was in the women’s chambers with Emer his wife when the King’s summons reached him, and he would have caught up his weapons and gone at once in answer, but Emer swept up from the cushioned bench on which she had been sitting at her embroidery frame, and caught him by the arm. ‘Cuchulain, let you not go!’

  He looked at her, and the laughter flashed up in the sad face of him. ‘Not go, when the King summons?’

  ‘You are ill,’ Emer said quickly. ‘Only a while since you were complaining of pain in your head. It is in my mind that you should go to bed now, and I will send word to the King for you.’

  ‘Emer, you say foolish things. There is no pain in my head. Why should I not go?’

  ‘I do not know, but there is a shadow on me, and it comes from you . . . It is in my mind that the son Aifa promised you might be just such a one as this boy!’

  Cuchulain reached for his sword to belt it on, and she saw that he meant to go for all that; and she clung round his neck as she had used to do in their first years together. ‘Listen, my Hound, do not you go out to the King, for the fear is in me that if you do, it may be to slay your own son!’

  But Cuchulain kissed her and pulled her arms away. ‘Ach now, leave be, my girl; the King sends for me to do battle with this stranger, and though it be young Connla himself, I must slay him if need be, for the honour of Ulster.’

  ‘Honour!’ cried Emer, and the eyes of her flashing battle sparks. ‘Always this talk of honour with you men! It is more to you than truth, more than love; you must be for ever slaying each other and being slain; and what is it to your lordly selves, the hearts of the women you break behind you?’

  ‘It was not so you spoke when I came wooing you under the apple trees, Emer.’

  ‘I was a little green hard apple—I have learned somewhat since those days—I might have been the boy’s mother.’

  But Cuchulain scarcely heard her, for he had gone striding to the door and was calling for Laeg to yoke his chariot.

  And when it was done, and the horses brought trampling round into the forecourt, he sprang in and taking the reins himself, as he often did when he did not need his hands for spear and shield, he drove out after Cethern Mac Findtan.

  They followed the coast until they came to the stretch of hard white sand, and there they found the King and his hearth companions standing with their horses and looking on with a grim air of waiting, some of them cherishing wounds or the red weals of their lately loosed bonds, while the boy, seemingly as fresh as in the moment when he sprang ashore, stood at the surf’s edge, tossing up his throw-spears in shining arcs and making them spin in the sunshine like whirling lesser suns, to amuse himself and pass the time.

  Cuchulain sprang down from the chariot, and bidding Laeg to wait with the rest, he strolled forward alone. ‘That is a pretty play that you make with your weapons, child; do they teach all the babes to play so, in the land that you come from?’

  ‘Only to those that are not cross-eyed,’ said the boy, laughing. ‘For the game has its hazards,’ and he sent the spear again spinning skyward, and caught it when the down-wheeling point was within a finger’s breadth of Cuchulain’s breast.

  ‘That was neatly done at all events,’ said Cuchulain, who had not moved. ‘Tell me now, who you are and what place you come from.’

  ‘That is a thing that I may not tell.’ The boy let the spear rest quiet now, in his hand.

  ‘No man who sets foot within the borders of Ulster and refuses to tell either his name or the place whence he comes, is likely to be living long afterwards.’

  ‘That’s as maybe,’ said the boy. ‘Still I may not tell.’

  ‘Then best be making ready to die with it untold.’

  ‘I am ready,’ said the boy; and
with the words scarcely spoken they sprang together in the shallows. For a while they fought with their swords, so that the sparks flew up from the blades on the sea wind, as the salt spray flew about their legs. And Cuchulain knew that he had met one whose sword-play matched his own, and his heart leapt in the fierce joy of equal combat, until the boy with a swift outward flick of the wrist, delicately shored off a lock of his dark flying hair.

  Then Cuchulain laughed sharp in his throat, and flung his sword away back to the sand behind him. ‘That is enough of blade-play between you and me,’ and leapt upon the boy like a mountain cat. And the boy sent his own sword spinning in the same way and sprang on to a low slab of rock near by in the surf that gave surer foothold than the shifting sand; and there they grappled together, each struggling with his bare hands to throw the other, but the boy planted his feet so strongly that they sank deep into the rock—for which reason, that place was called the Strand of the Footprints ever after—and for all his mighty strength, Cuchulain could not shift him a hair’s breadth.

  Long and long they fought, as when two mighty stags battle for the lordship of the herd; until at last even they began to weary, their footing grew less firm-gripped to the rock, and suddenly with a cry and a clanging of war gear and a slipping and slithering splash, they went down locked together into the foam-laced shallows. But the boy fell uppermost and his arms were still fast about Cuchulain, and his knee on Cuchulain’s chest, holding him down. The Champion was near to drowning, and then, at his final gasp, with fire in his breast and the blood roaring in his ears and his eyes full of a dazzling darkness, he heard, very dimly, a shout from the shore, and something flew humming towards where they threshed about. With a supreme effort he tore one arm free, and reaching out, caught the shaft of a great spear that came like a long tailed fish cleaving the bright boil of water above him; and the instant his hand closed on it, he knew that Laeg had flung him the Gae Bolg. Struggling half over, he drew back his arm and made the death thrust. And he felt—the sick memory on him—how it tore into the boy’s belly as it had done into Ferdia’s by the ford, and all the shallows about them were red with blood.