Song of Ireland

by Juilene Osborne-McKnight

  Eriu drew her arms around Illyn and hugged her.

  “My mother said that she did not wish the Fomorians to find me. What made them so terrible, Sisters?”

  “Well, for one thing that they were tall and hairy with long beards, bad teeth, and great bouncing breasts,” said Banba.

  Illyn laughed aloud. “You make it sound like the beards and the breasts go together.”

  “Maybe they did; maybe that was what everyone found so scary.”

  “Banba!” said Eriu. She shook her head, then answered seriously. “From what we have seen of them, they took what they wanted—people, treasure, anything. And they were not above trickery and deceit.”

  “There is one thing we do not know,” said Fodla.

  “Why Nuada was rendered king again,” said Banba.

  “But I am willing to venture that we know one who knows,” said Eriu quietly.

  20

  “You restored Nuada’s arm.”

  “My father refashioned the Silver Arm for Nuada. He fit it to the stump of Nuada’s arm.”

  “No. You restored Nuada’s arm. His biological arm. You have the knowledge of the Braid.”

  Airmid lifted her chin. “My brother restored his arm. Miach. I helped him; I hid them and I hid the work. I am proud that I did.” Her eyes dropped in shame. “I am only sorry that Miach paid the price.” She sighed, a sound full of old sorrows. “And Nuada.”

  “Nuada died because of the Silver Arm?” Banba shook her head. “I did not remember that from the memories.”

  “Why must you ask me? These memories are painful,” the Ancient woman snapped.

  Eriu placed her hand gently on the woman’s arm. “We are looking for the way to protect our people from these Invaders. For the past two days we have done nothing but try to study and learn. We are young; forgive us.”

  “You are more than a thousand years old by human reckoning of time. You are only the third generation born on this world.”

  “Well for the first three hundred years we were children,” said Banba in exasperation. “Then, in our adolescence we were married to the Triad of Brothers that they might … train us … in the duties of Council of the Braid.”

  “They did not train you very well, did they?”

  “To be fair,” said Eriu, “they trained us well in the Journey of Exile and the duties of Council. They paid little attention to the history of this island. By their time, the Danu and the Fir Bolg lived in peace and the Fomor had disappeared. What was to fear on this isle?”

  “Well, they had the previous Triad to thank for that, didn’t they? Dagda, Nuada, and my father, Dian Cecht.”

  Banba started to speak, but Eriu held up her hand. “And so we come to you to learn of that, Ancient,” Eriu said gently. “Your wisdom and your memory contain it. But if the memories are too difficult for you, we can access them in Lia Fail Chamber.”

  “Have you begun to experience pain in the chamber?”

  “We have,” said Banba.

  Airmid sighed. “I am a selfish old woman. The Brothers wished to protect you from the price that the Chamber of Memory exacts. Now I am trying to protect myself from the price that my memories exact when my telling will limit your time in the chamber. I will tell you what you want to know. Ask, Eriu.”

  “We are not sure what to ask, Ancient. We have a new set of Invaders approaching. Should we simply seal the doorways shut between us? Should we bring out the Silver Arms? How should we prepare? We look to history to teach us now. And to you, Ancient. But we do not wish to make you sad.”

  Airmid sighed, a great wafting of breath. “Oh, Eriu, I have been sad for more than a thousand years. I will tell you what I know; the rest you will have to see in Lia Fail. Perhaps what I know can help you to decide.” She shrugged. She pressed a small triangle on her table, and a picture projected on the blank wall of her lab of three tiny men, pale and silver-haired with huge eyes and upspiraled ears.

  “There they are: The First Council Triad. They were Braid-Men, a Threeclone. Dagda, the Father of Our Freedom; Nuada, the first chief of Council; Dian Cecht, physician and healer, my father. They called themselves Brothers in the Braid. They were like you three, inseparable and strong. Because of them, Council is always headed now by a triad in each generation.”

  She shook her head.

  “When the Fir Bolg cut off Nuada’s arm, my father affixed the Silver Arm to Nuada’s stump. I remember well how bravely Nuada bore the pain! The stump was barely healed; even timeshift had not given it enough time, and the arm rubbed the skin until it was raw and bleeding. But back he went among the Fir Bolg. He fought and negotiated as though he were whole and strong. There was a man of the Danu! But when he returned among us, the stump made him ineligible to be Triad chief. That was the way. Physical imperfection was unnecessary and therefore unacceptable. The kingship was given to Bres the Beautiful, whose mother had returned to us after many months as captive of the Fomor.”

  “Why Bres?” asked Banba. “Why not Dagda or your father?”

  “My father was a healer, unsuited to the job. As for Dagda, he bore a weakness that none of our people knew. In the BraidRising on the Homeworld, Dagda had been blinded in one eye. My father replaced the eye with one so realistic that you could not tell, but Dagda was unfit to rule and knew it well. So he … provided. Anything the Danu needed, he found it, made it, wheedled it, purchased it. That is why even now the people call him the Great Provider.”

  “But surely your father had knowledge of the ReBraiding. He was the Great Physician. Why did he not replace the eye with a real eye?”

  “That was my father’s weakness. Or perhaps his strength,” said Airmid. “He believed that no ReBraiding should be permitted by the law. He said that by Braiding, UnBraiding, and ReBraiding, the Homeworld had brought upon itself its own downfall, creating a perfect race and then treating it with fear and loathing. He vowed that he would never UnBraid or ReBraid again.”

  “And Dagda and Nuada? They agreed?” asked Eriu.

  “Dagda agreed. He had been the architect of the BraidRising. He had suffered greatly for being a Braided One.”

  “And Nuada?”

  “We persuaded Nuada.”

  “We?”

  “Miach and I. My brother.” She tapped her console. The picture appeared of a handsome man of the Danu. Airmid stared at it for so long that Eriu began to suspect she had forgotten their presence.

  “You persuaded him, Ancient?” she said gently.

  “We had no choice,” Airmid said in a broken voice. “The Fomor came below.”

  “Below?! Here into our cities?” The sisters were thunderstruck.

  Airmid nodded. “Few know it now, and those who know are silent on the subject. Why terrify the Danu? The Fomor are gone.”

  “Bres showed them the way?”

  “He did and more. He began by allowing them to tax us. The tax was not heavy, and he claimed that he had negotiated with them that the tax would be sufficient, that it would keep them from our door.”

  “This we have seen in the Lia Fail Chamber,” said Fodla.

  The Ancient shrugged. “Then you know that when the Danu first moved to the Green Isle we lived on the surface. We did not live in fear; the Fir Bolg war was over. We lived in peace with the Bog People. We offered them healing and food and knowledge of provision. They spoke often of the Fomor, but we had never seen them. Then one night, in darkness, the Fomor slipped among us. In the morning, dozens of our people were gone. Just gone. Men, women, and children. At first we suspected the Fir Bolg. We took a war party among them, but when we arrived we found them in chaos and disarray, women screaming for their vanished children, men brandishing spears and shouting vengeance for their missing women. That was when we knew that the Fomorians had come among them as well.”

  “And so we built our cities beneath the surface?” asked Banba.

  “Or so it seems to us; they are on a different petal of time. But we left the doorways between the wor
lds open. By that time, we had some obligation to the Fir Bolg. We could not abandon them. The years of no summer had come; the Fir Bolg were starving, their children freezing to death. Oh, if only we could have closed the doors! Nuada would be among us still. And my brother Miach.”

  Eriu lifted her arm across the Ancient’s shoulders. “Even we Danu cannot see far into what the future will bring.”

  “No,” said the Ancient softly. “That is how the Mother protects us from sorrow, I suppose.”

  Banba had been quietly thinking over the story. “And so when Eri returned heavy with child and gave birth to that redheaded boy, you all knew that he was Fomor.”

  “We knew. But we decided that he was half Fomor, half Danu. We held him in our regard like the race of Penitents and Exiles, the ancestors of you three. We raised him in that way among us.”

  “And yet no Danu women would mate with him.”

  “No. Nor marry. Eri herself, his mother, had seen to that. For her stories of her Fomorian captors terrified her listeners, their immense size and the painful ways they had used their Danu women captives.” Airmid shook her head. “She doomed her own boy to loneliness among us with the tales. Only Nuada truly loved him; to Nuada he was like a younger brother.”

  “And he betrayed Nuada.”

  “He did,” the Ancient said softly. “That was when Miach and I decided. After he betrayed us, we knew that we had to do something, that the Fomorians would enslave or kill us all if we did not find a way. So we called Nuada to us. We proposed to ReBraid his arm, to grow for him a true arm. But we would need his cooperation to do that. He declined. But then the Fomor came below. On the next day Nuada came to us; he agreed to our work.”

  She began to weep in earnest now, her hands clutching her table, but she kept talking through her sobs.

  “My brother put all of himself into that work. All of his love for the Danu. And when the arm was ready—I remember it well—he incanted, ‘Let this be joined sinew to sinew and nerve to nerve so that there is movement and feeling in every joint.’ We worked the arm then, exercising it, submerging it in water. And when it was ready, Nuada stood before the assembly, whole and complete, and the Danu named him as their king.”

  She was silent.

  “And Bres? And your father, Dian Cecht? And Miach?”

  “Go and see it, Daughters. Uncolored by my own beliefs or by the tricks of memory. See it as true history. And when you have seen it, tell me if I judged aright. If you say no, I request that I receive the same penalty as my brother. It is, perhaps, what I deserve.”

  21

  “Now you come up here,” said Bres, drunkenly. He caught at the hair of one of the three Fomor women who were swarming over him and pulled her up. She started to put her lips to his, but he flicked his thumb and forefinger over her nipple and pulled it into his mouth. He licked and swirled at the breast and sighed in satisfaction.

  “We’ve done all right by you then, lad?”

  Bres turned lazily toward the side of the room where the giant Balor was bouncing a woman up and down on his lap. His head rested comfortably against the wall; his giant arms supported the woman as she bounced. He had removed the patch from his missing eye; the blue-white orb was grotesque in appearance.

  “You have, Balor. The mead, the women, the gifts.” Bres sighed lazily as one of the threesome bent to her labors. “I think I could never have enough of women.”

  “Boy, I say again that it’s not right that these Danu women won’t mate with you. And head of Council? What is that? You should be king.”

  He grunted with satisfaction and lifted the woman from his lap, pointed down at Bres. “Take care of our lad there; he needs more of you,” he said, and she scurried to join the group.

  Balor quaffed a giant tankard of mead. “They’ve paid their tax, but they’ve paid you no respect. You are Fomorian; they owe you respect.”

  “This mating is fine,” Bres said. “They will never mate with me.”

  “It’s a shame,” said Balor softly. “The little Danu women.” He shook his head. “Light as a feather. Bounce on the lap. You could even take one to wife; she would be smaller than you and half like you. You deserve a Danu wife, lad. Or several Danu women if you wish. You deserve whatever you wish.”

  “Why should I need a Danu wife when I have all of these?” Bres ran his hands lazily over the flanks of one of the women, bounced the large breasts of another.

  “These do my bidding,” said Balor. He clapped his hands; the foursome sat up and moved away. Bres raised himself drunkenly on his elbows, his face suffused with lust and anger.

  “But a little Danu woman or two,” Balor continued, “now they would do your bidding. We would see to that, your brother Fomorians. We could take a selection of Danu, men, women, children. You would have wives, servants, slaves, all Danu. All saying ‘Yes, my lord.’ It’s what they owe you, nothing less.”

  Bres closed his eyes, the look on his face greedy. “How could this be done?” he asked.

  “Can you get us into their cities?”

  “Easily,” said Bres. “But I wouldn’t want them harmed.”

  “No harm,” said Balor. “Just a selection of ten or so. All for you. All yours to command. Consider what women you would want. We would collect them for you. As many as you need. We will build you a great lodge on Tober Mor. There you will rule your household.”

  “No harm?”

  “None.”

  Bres watched the Fomor women, who had begun to nuzzle each other. He moaned a little.

  “Lad, are the cities beautiful?” Balor asked.

  “Most beautiful,” Bres said distractedly. “Return these to me, Balor: I am full to bursting. Come; you said they were a gift.”

  “And treasure?”

  “Great treasure. Now may I have them?”

  Balor smiled. He gestured to the women. They descended on Bres, hands and tongues working busily. They fed him delicacies and poured mead down his throat. He moaned and leaned back on the pillows.

  “You!” Bres gestured to the smallest of the girls. “Up on my lap. We will pretend you are one of my Danu women.”

  “There’s my good lad,” said Balor. “More Fomorian than Danu by any measure, boy.”

  “Well, it’s an old enough story,” said Eriu.

  “Mead and meat and women and riches,” said Banba dryly. “And slowly, by degrees, suborn the willing to your purpose. And the heart becomes dark. And greed grows. And each time the lost one is willing to give away more of his spirit.”

  “They also offered him acceptance,” said Fodla quietly. “You are one of us. You belong with us. More important than all the rest.”

  “You are wise as always, Fodla,” said Eriu. “I begin to see why Airmid and Miach made the choice they did.”

  “But the histories tell us that Nuada paid the price of his life. Did he defeat them? And if so, how?”

  Eriu rested her hand on the speckled stone. “Sisters, shall we rest or shall we continue?”

  “There is no time to waste,” said Fodla. “In our hours here, the Invaders approach even closer on the sea.”

  “We shall see more,” Banba said softly. “Now.”

  At the doorway into the passage, Bres pressed his triangle into the recess in the wall. White light snapped, and then a blue oval coalesced before them. Balor bent low.

  Bres held him back. “You will not fit in the passages,” he said softly. “The tallest of the Danu only reach five feet; even I have to crouch to reach the city.”

  With his giant forefinger, Balor pointed at ten men, each under six feet tall. “Will they suit?”

  Bres grinned. “Even they are a little large. But they will be fine in the city below.”

  Balor’s voice adopted a wheedling tone. “I should love a piece of treasure, boy. Something I could wear around my neck.”

  “That is easily done. I owe you that much at least.”

  Balor grinned, the yellowed teeth half obscured beneath
the giant, shaggy mustache. “Good lad,” he said. “Now go. And you need not stop at ten. Bring back as many as the group of you can gather. As many as you wish. Or wish to share.”

  The group disappeared into the passageway, bending low.

  In the Chamber of Memory, Eriu spoke softly. “They do not know the price that they will pay, these Fomor. Our price is but small compared to theirs.”

  “No,” said Banba. “They are not Braid or Hybrid. But this is what they deserved. I should laugh to see them tomorrow by their fire, young men gone gray and wrinkled, their eyes rheumy, their pates bald.”

  “I wonder what he will think,” said Fodla, pointing toward Balor.

  As if he had heard them, Balor watched the company go and shrugged. “And if he does not bring enough, we can always come back for more,” he said. “The boy is mine. Slaves and treasure will follow.”

  He sat down against the wall; he belched in satisfaction and leaned his head back against the rock.

  Deep below the passageway, an alarm began to sound, the deep thrum of bells and drum. The sound of screams echoed up the long walkway.

  “Good lad,” said Balor. “You’ll make a fine Fomor when all of this is over.

  The scene shifted.

  The Sisters were now observing a surgery.

  Under an arc of blue-white light, Nuada was stretched on a table. Around the table a nimbus of electricity crackled and sparked.

  Airmid held up an instrument and read it. “The field is sterile, Miach.”

  From the table Nuada spoke softly. “Beloved Niece and Nephew. I ask you once more. Are you certain of this course of action? I should not wish for you to pay the price for this action. Dagda and most especially Dian Cecht will not approve of this course.”

  “The Danu have paid the price for our inaction. Even now our city smolders and mothers cry out for their missing children. We have no other choice,” said Miach.

  “How could he have done this thing?” asked Airmid. She was young, her wide eyes full of sorrow.

  “We kept him apart from us. An honored guest. But not a brother.”