“I wasn’t arguing. I never argue.”
“Send Lugaid. He’s the sort of man I want.”
“And what’s wrong with me?” Blamec bristled. “I’m here and I’m well armed and I’m as fresh as a new-laid egg!”
Finn said one word: “Lugaid.” But something in the way he pronounced the two syllables sent Blamec trotting back to the campfire to rouse his replacement.
Waiting for Lugaid to join him, Finn felt intensely alive. His hearing was preternaturally keen. His eyes stabbed through the darkness. As if his body were covered with cat’s whiskers, he could feel the tangible weight of danger.
That sound halfway down the mountain was it a stone dislodged by a careless foot?
That shadow a spear’s throw away had it shifted ever so slightly?
He drew his shortsword from his belt. A spear was no good at night. If they were attacked, it would be hand-to-hand combat.
Finn’s heart began to pound at the base of his throat.
“Come on,” he whispered into the night. His grip tightened on his sword. “Come on.”
3
“YOU WANTED ME FOR—”
Finn rounded on Lugaid. “Not so loud!”
“Sorry. What is it?” Lugaid asked softly as he came to stand beside Finn.
“There’s someone below us on the mountain.”
Whisper-footed, Lugaid drifted to the edge of the slope and peered down. Ridges of pale limestone glimmered up at him, but he saw nothing that could be construed as human.
“Where, Finn? I don’t see anybody.”
“I don’t see them either, but they’re there.”
“No one could sneak up on us up here.”
“One of our own men could do it,” Finn reminded Lugaid. “Every fénnid has proved he can run through a forest without snapping a single twig beneath his feet. If we can be that stealthy, so can others.”
Lugaid took another, longer look down the mountain. “I still don’t see anybody. But if you think there’s an attack coming, shouldn’t we alert the men?”
Finn skinned his lips back from his teeth in an expression that might have been a grin. “Have you forgotten the oath you took when joining the Fíanna?”
“What about it?”
“Part of that oath included swearing never to run from less than nine men. That means one of us is expected to be able to outfight nine men. There are two of us here right now, Lugaid, so between us, we should be able to handle two nines without calling on our comrades for help. Do you not agree?”
Lugaid swallowed hard. “I suppose so, I never quite looked at it that way. But—”
“No buts. Be ready now. Ease off in that direction so we’ll have them between us when they come up. They’ll follow the same path we did, it’s the only way in the dark. Careful now, go handy, Lugaid. The stones are treacherous. Farther. Farther still. About there. And wait for my signal.” Finn’s voice sounded faint and far away.
Shortsword in hand, Lugaid edged along the shoulder of the mountain, feeling fierce and foolish and frightened. He had been dozing with his belly full of food and his lungs full of mountain air, and wisps of sleep still clung to him like fog.
He shook his head to clear it. The shortsword—a larger version of the dagger, with a leaf-shaped iron blade—was a comforting weight in his hand. He gave it a couple of practice brandishes.
This is a waste of effort, he thought. There’s no one else up here.
Then he heard what might be a stealthy footfall behind him. He whirled, dropping into a crouch.
Nothing.
“Stupid,” Lugaid said aloud. The sound of his own voice was welcome company.
He tried to make out Finn, but his leader was a shadow among shadows in the distance, no longer discernible.
Lugaid might have been alone on the mountain.
Courage came as easily as breathing when you were boasting with your companions beside a warm campfire. When you were alone in the cold night, with your companions hidden from you by the curve of the mountain, it was different.
I don’t much like this, Lugaid told himself.
He was young and untried and he knew it. He belonged to the youngest band of nines in the Fíanna, which was why it had been assigned to Finn Mac Cool, the youngest officer. They were all considered expendable.
Although he claimed the title, Finn still had to earn his official designation as a rígfénnid by acquitting himself well on this venture. If Goll took back a favourable report to the king of Tara, Finn would be given command of a second and third nine, currently being held at Slieve Bloom. If he did not earn the right to command a company, however, he would be demoted to common fénnid and his men would go to some other leader.
So, Lugaid realized, the son of the famous Cuhal would undoubtedly be willing to take considerable risks to prove himself. One of those risks could be Lugaid’s life.
I don’t want to die, Lugaid thought vehemently, to confirm Finn Mac Cool as a rígfénnid!
But I don’t want to dishonour my oath as a member of the Fíanna, either. Disobeying orders could get me expelled from the Fíanna, a shame beyond surviving. The poets would disremember my name and lineage. I would become nothing. No woman would look at me. The dogs in the road would lift their legs on me.
Lugaid drew a deep breath and shifted his sword from one hand to the other, taking a small comfort from the solid feel of the hilt slapping into his palm.
I could have been a stonemason, he thought. My uncle’s a woodworker, I could have gone into business with him. I’m good with my hands, and I like building things. I didn’t have to—
Then he heard the yell, and all the blood in his body seemed to drain to his feet and congeal there.
Too late, Finn Mac Cool had realized his error. The outlaws knew the Burren as he did not, and were familiar with alternate routes up Black Head in the darkness. They had angled across the mountain and come around behind him.
He heard them a heartbeat before they closed with him; heard them just as Bran streaked past him with a savage growl to hurl a hound’s full weight against the leader.
The man yelled as Bran knocked him flat. Two others rushed past while the dog seized him by the throat. They ran to attack Finn, who met them with legs braced and shortsword weaving patterns in the dark air.
“I’m coming!” Lugaid shouted. He ran in the direction of Finn, but one of his feet slipped into a crevice between two cakes of limestone and was trapped. Lugaid fell forward with a crash. It seemed to him that the stars had come out after all; he could see them whirling around his head as he lay dazed.
Meanwhile, Finn was fighting for his life. One man hacked at him with something that was not a sword; the other jabbed at him with a different form of weapon. Neither of the pair was observing the stylized rules of formal combat in which the Fíanna were trained.
They merely wanted to kill. Quickly if possible, brutally if necessary.
Finn did not call for help. Even if he had wanted to, he could not spare the breath. He was ducking, dodging, trying to land blows of his own, feeling backward with one foot for a patch of level ground to make a stand on, feinting with his sword at first one man and then the other, keeping his attackers at arm’s length.
One got close enough to slash his hand with something that burned like icy fire. Finn swore and tried to grab the weapon, but the man jerked it back out of reach.
The man Bran had attacked was still on the ground, making horrible noises as the hound tore at his throat.
Finn expected more outlaws. He tried to face in every direction at once. But no more arrived. The two with him were bad enough. If they had been able to coordinate their efforts, they might have proved deadly, but in the darkness and on the steep slope, they kept getting in each other’s way.
The one with the hacking weapon struck the one with the jabbing weapon by mistake and there was a new shriek of pain.
Finn seized the opportunity to jump backward and gather himself. Then
in one smooth movement, he shifted weight and came forward again, levelling his sword in front of him with a stiff wrist.
Lunging, he felt the sword enter flesh.
His opponent’s diaphragm muscles resisted momentarily, but Finn had momentum. Flesh yielded to iron. A man grunted, then doubled over, clutching at his midsection. With a powerful yank, Finn pulled his sword free as his opponent collapsed.
The other outlaw swung his weapon in a wide arc. Finn crouched. Something whooshed through the air above his head with killing force. He sprang up from his crouch with his sword at the ready and caught the man off balance at the end of his swing. The flat of Finn’s blade took him solidly between the legs.
The outlaw’s howl of agony was hardly human.
Running feet, confused shouts.
“What was that? What’s happening?”
“Over here!”
“Not that way, this way!”
“Where’s the sentry?”
“Are we attacked?”
“Finn! Finn Mac Cool! Are you dead?”
“I’m not dead,” Finn gasped. “At least I don’t think I am. I’m here. over here!”
He was wildly exhilarated. No measurable time had passed, three enemies were down, and he was still alive and on his feet. An exultant thunder rippled through him in waves.
He did not want the fight to end. He wanted to brace his feet wide on the stony soil of Black Head and let enemies come to him in endless procession, with himself cutting them down, cutting them down, letting the cleansing anger pour out of him at last, hewing and hacking and cutting them down …
“Finn!” Goll Mac Morna was shaking him. “Don’t you know me? Answer me, are you all right? What happened?”
A great shudder passed through Finn. Exhilaration fell away, leaving him giddy with reaction.
“Your dog’s tearing someone apart over here,” Blamec reported in a slightly queasy voice.
“Bran!” Finn shouted. The hound ran to him. When he reached down, he felt something wet and sticky on Bran’s muzzle.
Suddenly he remembered Lugaid. Where was he? “Lugaid!”
“Over here,” came a faint reply.
By the time Lugaid joined the others, Donn and Iruis were giving the men on the ground as thorough an examination as they could in the dark. The others stood around them, talking in excited bursts.
“Where were you?” Finn asked Lugaid.
“I was coming to help you, but I had trouble.”
“Were you attacked? How many were there? And where are they?”
Lugaid longed to announce that he had killed nine outlaws all by himself. Instead, after a pause, he said, “I caught my foot between two stones and fell flat. Stunned myself.”
Conan sniggered.
Finn did not laugh. “I’m glad you’re all right,” he said simply.
His voice sounded hollow in his ears. His head felt hollow, come to that, and there were bells ringing someplace. His breathing was shallow and rapid.
Goll Mac Morna recognized the signs. He remembered his own early combats. Briskly, he ordered the fénnidi, “Drag these men over by the fire so we can get a good look at them.”
“Any that are alive, go easy with,” Finn added. He swayed on his feet. Goll’s iron grip clamped his arm, steadying him. “It passes,” said the older man. “Breathe deep.”
Two of the outlaws were still alive, while the man Bran had savaged was unarguably dead. They dragged him by his heels with his head bumping along the ground and Bran prancing proudly alongside. Sceolaun trotted after them, trying to look as if she had helped make the kill.
Firelight revealed one man dying from Finn’s sword thrust, but the other was suffering only from crushed testicles. He kept up a continuous moaning until Conan growled, “Stop that noise or we’ll hit you in the same place again.”
Finn asked Iruis, “Do you know these mean?”
“I do know them. The one the dog killed has been the head and tail of trouble here for years. The others are his clansmen. They raid our cattle and corn and anything else they fancy. Nothing’s safe with them around. But with their leader dead, they won’t be so bold, I’d say.”
Coughing up a great gob of blood, the man with the sword wound died as Finn and Goll were interrogating the third outlaw.
He gave his name as Ceth the Clever—“Obviously misnamed,” Conan sneered—and justified his actions by accusing Huamor’s people of having taken all the good grassland, leaving his clan with no subsistence but for the fish they caught. The two clans had been warring sporadically for a long time. “We had a plan,” Ceth said, “an excellent plan that would have worked but for you interfering. We were going to take Huamor’s oldest son hostage and demand a great ransom for him.”
“Just the three of you?”
“Three is enough to handle any number of Huamor’s kind!” was the scornful rejoinder.
Iruis muttered something and doubled his fists. Fergus Honey-Tongue said, “That’s as may be, but apparently one Finn Mac Cool is quite enough to handle three of your kind.”
“Two,” Finn corrected. “Bran did for one.”
They bound their prisoner with strips of leather and raised a cairn of stone over the dead men. “Your people can come up here if they like and carry the bodies home,” Iruis told Ceth, “but it’s the last time any of you are to set foot on this mountain. As you see, we have the Fíanna here to punish outlaws.”
Ceth swept his gaze from face to face. “I don’t see any fénnidi. All I see are pimpled boys.”
“It takes this one a while to learn, doesn’t it?” Conan asked no one in particular. Drawing back his foot, he kicked Ceth between the legs.
This time the man’s scream was totally inhuman.
The night was ruined for sleeping. As they waited for dawn, they sat and told and retold versions of Finn’s battle; Cael’s descriptions were the most effusive. Scraps of meat were flung to the hounds, and dry brush was found to feed the fire with.
By the time an angry red flush appeared in the east, the fénnidi had begun singing triumphant marching songs and teaching the words to Red Ridge.
Finn and Goll sat a little apart from the others. “Not a bad beginning for you,” Goll was saying. “A bit nasty, a bit crude, that part with the dog. There’s no style in a killing like that, no art. But I’d say you’ve made an impression.”
“If you were in charge, would you track down the rest of the clan?”
“Why? To batter them into submission unnecessarily? Let me tell you something, Finn. The best commanding officer isn’t the one who breaks the most battles on his enemies. He’s the one who wins the most victories with the least effort.
“You won such a victory tonight. The leader of the outlaws is dead, and Ceth will tell a tale that grows in the telling until his people think the entire Fíanna was on Black Head tonight. They’ll be considerably discouraged from their predations for some time to come. You can report to Huamor that his troubles with them are over, at least for this season.”
“And you’ll report to the king of Tara.”
“I’ll report to Feircus Black-Tooth,” Goll agreed. “Favourably, if you’re wondering.”
Finn’s eyes sparkled with gratitude, though he said nothing. For a while they listened together to the singing. Then Finn said in a low voice, “I’m sorry about Luachra.”
Goll shrugged one shoulder. “He probably deserved it. That sounds like him, killing a widow’s only son and leaving her to cut her own wood and fetch her own water. Even if he was my brother, I have to say it. Luachra loved killing for its own sake.”
“And you don’t?”
Goll evaded by asking, “Did you enjoy killing Luachra the Large?”
With a burst of candour, Finn replied, “I didn’t mean to kill him. It was an accident.”
“Are you serious? What about the widow and her son?”
“Och, that was true enough. She cried on me for vengeance and I promised it to her to com
fort her. But as I rambled on my way, I forgot about her. Then one night as I lay on the ground asleep, a twig snapped near my head. I thought it was an outlaw hoping to rob me. I grabbed my spear and lunged upward. By a lucky chance, I took Luachra in a vital spot and he was dead before I was fully awake.”
“Then how did you know he was Luachra?”
“I didn’t, not then. I only knew he answered the widow’s description of her son’s killer. But when I finally found my uncle Crimall and told him the story—and showed him the bag I’d taken from the man’s body” Finn remembered to add, “he identified the dead man as Luachra and the bag as having belonged to my father. He told me its history.”
In a husky whisper, Goll said, “If you took that bag off a dead man, you’d done no more than Luachra did to Cuhal. But I don’t think my brother was trying to rob you the night you killed him. He was probably just trying to get close enough to you to identify you.
“The members of Clan Morna had been watching for you for a long time, Finn. For years we’d heard rumours of a lad who looked like the very reflection of Cuhal Mac Trenmor in a still pond.
“Luachra probably caught sight of that freakish silver hair of yours and followed you, hoping to get a good look at your face to be sure. Cuhal had the same hair, you know. No other man in Erin possessed such a mane. But it was Luachra’s misfortune to be clumsy as well as large. If he hadn’t snapped that twig, you’d be …”
“I’d be what?”
“Dead,” Goll replied succinctly. “We assumed you had sworn to avenge your father’s death. Killing you before you could kill us would have been a matter of self-preservation.”
“But when you finally did meet me, you didn’t kill me.”
In spite of himself, Goll chuckled. “I did not. Imagine my surprise when an overgrown lad dressed in untanned skins came swaggering into Tara one day, crying ‘I am Fionn son of Cuhal!’”
“Was I too presumptuous?” Finn asked innocently.
“Presumptuous!” Goll laughed again. “You should have been killed on the spot. My hand was on my sword hilt to do the deed, but then I had a rush of common sense and waited to see how Feircus would react to you.
Finn Mac Cool Page 4
