Finn Mac Cool

by Morgan Llywelyn

  “I see. Second degree, then?” Lochan had still not asked the name of the lucky woman.

  Finn told him, “I shall pay you one whole boar each year for twenty-one years, beginning today, if you agree.” With one hand he signalled for his men to untie a boar from the pole.

  Lochan was already reaching to help them. “I do of course!” he said enthusiastically. “And as for your wedding gift”

  “No wedding gift.”

  Lochan turned to face Finn as the heavy boar crashed to the ground. “No gift? But I have to give you a wedding gift! The father always gives a gift to the man who’s taking over responsibility for his daughter.”

  A muscle jumped in Finn’s jaw. “Didn’t you understand me? A member of the Fíanna takes nothing with a woman but herself. Nothing. No property of any sort. No gift. Nothing.”

  His men exchanged puzzled glances. “Is this some new rule he’s making?” Cael asked Donn.

  “Sounds like it.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Neither did Lochan. He scratched his head, his permanently black ened fingernails making furrows in his thick grey hair. “You’ll pay the coibche but you reject the wedding gift? A strange way to … if you’re sure that’s what you want … you’ll marry at Beltaine, I suppose? And take my daughter to your … which daughter did you say?” he suddenly thought to ask.

  Finn’s face was impassive, a block of granite behind which the real Finn Mac Cool hid. “I’ll pay the coibche but I reject the wedding gift. And I won’t take your daughter with me. I have no home to shelter her in. We live a free life. She will be better off staying with you.”

  Lochan was dumbfounded. “But you’re marrying her!”

  “I didn’t say that. I said I’m giving you coibche for one of your daughters.”

  “Which one?”

  “I didn’t say that, either. Just accept that I am doing what I believe to be honourable. No man can ever accuse Finn Mac Cool of dishonour.”

  Consternation reigned. Talk of Finn’s unprecedented behaviour spread like fire through Tara.

  Cormac summoned his commander. “What’s this about you paying coibche to Lochan? Are you marrying his daughter or not?”

  “One of the smith’s daughters may feel she has a grievance against me,” Finn said guardedly. “She is now compensated. That’s not a marriage.”

  “Is Lochan satisfied with this peculiar arrangement?”

  “He seems to be. He took the boar.”

  Cormac was baffled. “Do I also understand you’ve made a new rule for the Fíanna, something about taking no property with their women?”

  “I have.”

  “Why?”

  Firm met Cormac’s eyes squarely, the gaze of equals. “You’re making new rules for the kingship. Why should I not make new rules for the army?”

  “That roil of rowdies? They’re barely under control at the best of times. Any new rule you make is just one more for them to break, Finn. They’re fénnidi, you can’t expect too much of them.”

  The skin at the corner of Finn’s eyes tightened. “I am a fénnid,” he said quietly. “I am also Rígfénnid Fíanna, which means I share in the reputation of my warriors. I intend that reputation to be above reproach.”

  “In your dealings with women?”

  “Particularly in our dealings with women.”

  Cormac was forced to laugh. “What are you trying to do, turn the fénnidi into nobility?”

  He meant the question as a joke.

  Finn took it seriously. “We’re as good as anybody,” said Finn Mac Cool.

  11

  WHEN HE FOUND TIME TO BE ALONE WITH HIS THOUGHTS, Finn was bitter. Crimall should have told me. If what Goll says is true, Crimall should have told me.

  But when he had drunk the cup of bitterness to the dregs and taken no pleasure from it, he enlarged the horizon of his thought. Why would Grimall have told me? He loved Cuhal, and the story reflects badly on Cuhal Mac Trenmor. My uncle would not have wanted me to know something that would, perhaps, make me think less of my father. Instead, he told me the stories of battles fought and won, of great hunts, and of men singing my father’s praises.

  Still, someone should have told me.

  But who?

  The two old women? What could they have knows?

  And how did it happen that they took me in?

  Did my mother give me into their care, as they let me believe? Or is it as Goll said … abandoned her Fir Bolg baby on the Bog of Almhain.

  The words hurt like knives and he flinched from them, yet he could not help repeating them to himself.

  I don’t believe it. Abandoned her baby.

  I won’t believe it. Abandoned.

  He tried to remember something, anything, that one of the old women might have said that could reinforce the story he wanted to believe. At the same time, he kept pushing away the one memory that did surface, the clarifying memory of his only meeting with the woman called Muirinn of the White Throat.

  Any fiction was preferable to remembering the words Muirinn had said to him when he appeared, young and excited and eager, flushed with his success at finding her, expecting to be welcomed by his long-lost mother.

  With all his strength, Finn slammed doors in his mind.

  I remember what she said. Of course I do. I Remember clearly. She said, My beloved son, my cherished child. Do this for me. Avenge your father’s murder. My dearly beloved son.

  That was what she said. My loving mother, that was what she said, it was! It was!

  Without realizing it, Finn was pounding one fist into the palm of his other hand with such force that Cailte thought a fight was taking place. He trotted into the gloom of the stable only to find Finn there quite alone, in the middle of the day, with his features contorted by some emotion.

  “Are you all right?” Cailte asked anxiously.

  Finn looked at him through a red haze. “All right?”

  “Hurt? Sick? Finn, what’s wrong with you?”

  “I … nothing’s wrong with me. I’m grand entirely.”

  “But you’re standing in here all by yourself beating your fist against your hand!”

  “So? Is there a law against it?”

  “It just seems a strange thing to be doing.”

  “I was … pounding home a resolution I just made.”

  Cailte continued to watch Finn with a worried expression. “What resolution?”

  “To put every member of the Fíanna beyond reproach. To make fénnidi the most admired and respected of men.”

  Cailte said loyally, “We are now.”

  But there were some fictions even Finn could not accept. “We aren’t. A roil of rowdies, that’s what the king called us. We’re outcasts, we’re all expendables. Tools to be used by the nobles and chieftains and thrown away when the blades are broken. A cattle lord wouldn’t give his daughter to a fénnid any more than he would many her to the blade of a plough. But things are going to change, Cailte.

  “Didn’t you tell me you had difficulties getting the women you wanted? I promise you the day will come when women will swarm around you like bees. Not just servant women, but cattle lords’ daughters and chieftains’ sisters!” Finn flung out both arms wildly. His voice rang, his eyes flashed fire.

  Suddenly aware that his vehemence bordered on irrationality, he turned away from Cailte and shook himself all over, like a hound. When he turned back, his eyes were calm, his voice soft. His whole appearance was changed. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” he asked with a boyish grin. “To have the pick of the women? To have the best of them begging to bear the children of Cailte Mac Ronan because it would be a great honour to marry any one of the Fíanna?”

  “Sounds grand,” Cailte replied dubiously. “But I shan’t hold my breath until it happens.”

  “It will happen,” Finn promised. The boyish look was gone. Once more he pounded his fist into his palm. “It will happen.”

  Like a woodcarver whittling pegs, wi
nter had whittled down the days until only a splinter of light remained between one night and the next. Ceaseless construction took place on Tara Hill during the brief period of daylight, but when light faded, fénnidi—their strength unspent—were forced by darkness to set aside their tools and find other ways to occupy themselves during the long nights. Young men, overtrained and underexerted, simmered on the verge of exploding. During the day they were tractable. At night they were a challenge beyond the skills of the most experienced officer.

  Fiachaid approached Finn about the problem. “Your Fíanna are picking fights with my guard every night,” he complained. “Stupid fights about nothing. I won’t have it, Finn. My men are the younger sons of chieftains of the Milesian blood, the noble guard of a noble prince, chosen from his own people. I can’t allow them to be mauled by …” He hesitated.

  Finn had a dangerous glint in his eye. “Mauled by what, Fiachaid?” he asked with deceptive softness.

  “You … ah, you know what I mean.”

  “Mauled by their inferiors? Is that what you mean?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “You didn’t have to. But I appreciate your not using the term. I’ll … control them.”

  “Can you?” Fiachaid asked doubtfully.

  “I can,” said Finn Mac Cool.

  That very evening he announced a new series of tests that every member of the Fíanna would be expected to pass. Blamec was the first to protest. “But we passed the initiation tests when we joined the army! We ran, we demonstrated with sword and spear, we even recited. We proved we have good heads on strong bodies. What more do you want?”

  Finn smiled slightly. “Everything,” he said.

  He knew these men. The same fires were smouldering in them as in himself. Even the most civilized of the fénnidi were half-wild, raised in relative poverty in a land fat with cattle and gleaming with gold. Oppressed, denigrated, subservient, they seethed. Given the slightest provocation, they would throw off all restraint, fighting and pillaging, not for spoils or glory, but merely to ride the cresting wave of their own uncontrolled passions. And the officers were little better than the men.

  The Fíanna Finn now commanded were controlled by the most tenuous of bonds. Fíanna discipline, such as it was, was instilled in them by such rituals as bathing and suppling before meals, or memorizing epic poems of barbaric battle, which only succeeded in encouraging their basic natures.

  Finn, however, determined to go much farther in dominating and shaping them into models of himself as he wished to be. A cold, hard resolve to this end had been born in him, and would last all his life. He would re-create the Fíanna in his enhanced image, replete with unquestioned honour.

  He began by giving his men physical challenges that seemed beyond human capability. When they protested, he performed the feats himself, every one, with an ease that embarrassed the fénnidi.

  If they were to hold up their heads in his presence, they must emulate him or die in the attempt.

  One cold evening Cormac came down to the training ground Finn had prepared. There an exercise was being undertaken beneath whipping torchlight in a bitter north wind.

  “You’re going to kill those men,” Cormac observed mildly.

  “I doubt it. They can do this, they just don’t know they can,” said Finn.

  He had ordered a trench dug deep enough to shelter a standing man to his waist. In turn, each of his warriors was sent to stand in the trench, armed only with his small round shield and a staff of hazel wood the length of his arm. Nine more warriors armed with javelins were commanded to face him from a good throwing distance. At Finn’s signal, they were to cast their spears simultaneously at the man in the trench.

  “If you receive a single wound,” Finn said sternly to the current victim, Lugaid, “you are not fit to be in my Fíanna.”

  Staunch, grim-eyed, Lugaid stood in the trench with his shield raised and the hazel staff in his hand. Finn whistled. The spears sang through the flickering torchlight. Some thudded against the shield and fell. Two distinct cracking sounds told of the skill with which Lugaid deflected two more of the spears with his wooden staff.

  He emerged from the trench unscathed.

  “See?” Finn said to Cormac. “It can be done.”

  “What if he’d been killed?”

  “He wasn’t. I knew he wouldn’t be. He’s too good.”

  “But what if he wasn’t as good as you think?” Cormac insisted.

  “Then I’d need to know that, would I not?”

  “You’re a hard man.”

  “I am Rígfénnid Fíanna.”

  The king shook his head.

  Finn would not give him the satisfaction of the answer he wanted, though it was a question Finn had asked of himself. Though he knew very little about the emotion of love, he realized he had come to love these men. He wanted no harm to touch any of them, ever. To that end, he would protect them by making them invincible. And by making the Fíanna invincible, he would make them more noble than any fénnidi had ever been.

  On a level he could not articulate to himself, he understood that this was how kings were made from common clay.

  Winter was passing. Buildings were nearing completion. The light was gaining strength, pushing back the night—and Cormac’s wife Ethni, with her retinue, at last arrived on the Hill of Tara.

  She had taken her time about making the journey. Born a princess, she let no one dictate to her. On a day of her own choosing she set out with an accompaniment of servants, her two young daughters and infant son, and a picked bodyguard of the best of Fiachaid’s men, sent to her by Cormac for the occasion.

  Finn Mac Cool accepted without comment that men of the Fíanna were not chosen for this purpose, were not deemed a proper escort for a king’s wife.

  Someday, he promised himself. Someday.

  Ethni the Proud was tall and broad-shouldered and strode like a man. When Cormac went to meet her, she advanced toward him with dignity and an impassive face, deliberately slowing her pace so he must come to her.

  If she had been worried about him at any time since he left her to fight Feircus Black-Tooth, no sign of that worry was on her face now or in her eyes. As calmly as if they had parted from each other the day before, she greeted Cormac by saying, “How kind of you to welcome me, husband.”

  Without instructions from the king, Finn had arranged his men into two lines, forming a corridor of honour from the gates toward the new fort known as Cormac’s House. Every fénnid was polished until he shone, brushed and burnished and gleaming. The warriors stood at rigid attention, sternly forbidden by Finn to do more than flicker an eyelash.

  “Don’t look like a roil of rowdies,” he warned them, “or you’ll suffer for it. I want you to look like an avenue of oak trees.”

  He stationed himself at the head of the row, standing tall in his checkered cloak, with his silvery hair catching the light of the strengthening sun.

  In spite of herself, Ethni glanced at him.

  “Who is that?” she asked Cormac as the royal couple passed Finn and made their way up the human avenue, between two rows of vertical spears.

  “Finn Mac Cool. My Rígfénnid Fíanna.”

  Ethni walked on a pace or two, then slowed her step and glanced back. Finn felt her eyes on him. She examined him with the same degree of detachment she would have shown to a horse or a servant.

  “He’s very tall for a Fir Bolg, is he not?” she asked her husband as if Finn were deaf and could not hear her. “I thought they were short, dark people.”

  “Some are.” Cormac was aware that Finn was listening, must be listening. He took his wife by the elbow and tried to guide her into walking on again. But Ethni planted her feet and stood where she was. “Then why is this one tall and fair?”

  “His father was tall and fair. They aren’t all identical, Ethni, any more than we are.”

  “Oh?” She raised one carefully soot-blackened eyebrow and looked at Finn again. “How interest
ing.” She sounded as if she did not find it interesting at all.

  Ethni walked on then, with Cormac beside her. Finn’s eyes remained fixedly staring straight ahead rather than following them. But Cailte, who was standing next to him, was aware that the spear Finn held upright was trembling.

  Cormac took his wife on a tour of Tara, proudly showing her the royal magnificence he had created. Always they were accompanied by Fiachaid’s men, almost like a human wall between Ethni the Proud and the Fíanna. This was so much a matter of routine that none but Finn gave any thought to it.

  “This is the Assembly Hall,” Cormac said, showing his wife the centrepiece of the new Tara. “It used to be just a rectangular wattle-and-daub structure capable of holding at most a hundred men. Now it is capable of containing the largest banquets ever served in Erin. The length is three hundred cubits, the width fifty, the height thirty. A bronze lamp is always kept burning inside. It can hold one hundred and fifty benches for feasting, plus one hundred and fifty warriors to attend me, and a cupbearer for every man I entertain here.”

  “Do you need so many doorways?” asked Ethni. “Doesn’t that create a chilling draught?”

  “The doorways are traditional. Even when this was a much cruder structure, there were fourteen of them, one for each of the reasons a visitor might approach the king here.”

  Ethni swept a coolly appraising eye over the new structure, which ran north and south along the slope of the hill. Its woodwork was carefully joined and finely planed. All the doorways were elaborately carved. The new thatch gleamed like a roof of gold, with layered patterns along the ridgeline of the roof where the thatch had been worked into swags and scallops. Turning slightly, she surveyed the other buildings now crowding the interior of the palisade until Tara resembled a town rather than a fort; a brand-new town, perfect and prosperous and impregnable.

  “You are king of all this?” she asked her husband.

  Cormac nodded gravely.

  “And our eldest son Cairbri will be king here after you?”