He did not know if she was beautiful. His standards of beauty had until this moment been those of other men, but what he was seeing now, other men would not see. He could only stare and wonder that he had thought himself alive before this day.
Now I am alive, he thought. Because she is alive.
He knew she would not run from him. She waited calmly, watching him. But he did not take the final few steps to her. He dared not reach out and touch her for fear his fingers would deny the evidence of his eyes. He could only stand and envy the hounds she was caressing so tenderly, and it was as if he felt her touch on his skin too.
How long he stood, he did not know. He only knew that her eyes never left his face.
From far away came the sound of a hunting horn. Bran and Sceolaun lifted their heads. Finn’s men had reached the campsite and were calling him.
At the sound of the horn, fear leaped into the brown eyes.
“Don’t …” Finn said, reaching toward her then, but in one bound she was on her feet. Trembling.
“They won’t hurt you. I’ll never let them hurt you.”
She took half a step backward.
Bran and Sceolaun looked from her to Finn, uncertain what was required of them. The horn sounded again, insistently.
She took a full step backward.
“Don’t leave me!” he implored, holding out both hands.
She tried to obey, but could not. The trembling became great shudders that ran through her body.
Before he could say anything more, she turned and was gone, vanishing among the trees without disturbing a leaf.
His trance broke, and he ran after her faster than he had ever pursued a quarry before. His feet did not seem to touch the ground. No twig snapped under them, no branch brushed his face. He ran frantically, desperately, longing to call her name but not knowing the name to call.
His hounds ran with him, but Bran, still suffering from the fearful injuries of the dogfight, soon fell back. Finn glanced over his shoulder. The gallant dog was making every effort to keep up, and suffering for it. No matter how far or fast Finn ran, Bran would try to stay with him, to the death if necessary.
Finn groaned.
Slowing his pace, he peered ahead. She was out of sight. She could be anywhere, the deer, the woman. She had vanished as if she never existed. Yet his hounds had seen her. She had to he real.
And if she was real, he could find her again.
He stopped running and crouched on his heels. Bran and Sceolaun came to him, pressed against him. Bran was gasping for breath. “Remember her,” he commanded them. “Know her when you see her again. Let no harm come to her.”
He lifted Bran into his arms and stood up.
With frequent glances over his shoulder, he retraced his steps until he came to the small patch of flattened grass where she had rested. Setting Bran down, he knelt and felt the earth with his hand.
Under his palm, there was heat.
14
WHEN CORMAC RETURNED TO TARA, BRONZE TRUMPETS blared a welcome from every gateway and sentry platform. Resplendent in a pleated linen gown girdled with gold, Ethni the Proud paced with stately tread to her husband’s side, gave him a dignified smile, then turned to face his people with him.
His greeting to her was equally calm, Finn noticed.
If I were coming home to my woman, thought the Rígfénnid Fíanna, I would seize her in my arms and lift her into the sky and shout for joy.
People swirled around him, welcoming the returnees. Officials and servants alike were questioning, gesticulating, importuning, offering ale and cakes and wreaths of flowers. The other fénnidi pushed past Finn, eager to enter the precincts of Tara and accept the accolades that were their due. Voices competed until they rose into one great yammering clamour that had no meaning at all for Finn …
… but in the heart of the clamour was a stillness.
And in the heart of the stillness was a deer in a sun-dappled meadow, watching him across time and space.
Finn stood alone in his bubble of wonder. People glanced at him, but no one spoke to him. There was a wall around him that they could not see or touch, but sensed. Finn was alone in the crowd, and the crowd could not intrude.
This is Tara, he said to her in his head. I helped build this place.
He invited her to look through his eyes at limewashed walls and golden thatch. I am part of this, my sweat and effort were spent here, he told her.
He looked at the craftsmanship of pillar and post so she could see them too. Running his fingers across the deep carving, he gave her access to the touch of the polished wood. He cocked his head to listen to the first strains of music as the musicians prepared to play in honour of the returned king, and he thought of her inside his head, listening with him.
None of this seemed strange to him. She had always been there. He simply had not known.
Companioned by her nameless presence, he sat that night in a place of honour in the new Assembly Hall and took his turn at reporting the events of the summer. For once, he did not exaggerate. She was in his head, listening. He could tell her only the truth. She would know the difference.
“What’s wrong with Finn?” Madan asked Cailte. “He doesn’t sound like himself at all. You’d think he’d be overflowing with tales of our victories. Instead, we get a few terse words, then down he sits as if his jaws were locked.”
Leaning across to them, Conan suggested, “Perhaps he has that girl on his mind, the smith’s daughter. Has he seen her since we’ve been back?”
“She was in the crowd down at the gate,” Cailte replied, “but as far as I could tell, Finn never looked at her. He walked right past her. If I didn’t know better, I’d say he’s taken a blow to the head.”
The three turned as one and looked up the hall to their Rígfénnid Fíanna. He did not notice.
Cailte frowned, beginning to worry. “Perhaps he did take a blow to the head in some battle and said nothing about it. That would be like him.”
That evening Cormac reported to the assemblage in the hall, “We have the sworn support of the most powerful king in Muma, Oilioll Olum, who is married to Sabia, daughter of Conn of the Hundred Battles. We have the sworn support of several powerful kings of the Laigin, and of many Connachta chieftains.”
“The king of the Erainn stands with you because he’s married to your aunt,” one of the local brehons spoke up, “but Oilioll Olum is not a young man. When he dies, the king who follows him may not have such a connection with your line. Conn and the king of the Erainn were once great enemies who divided Erin between them. What makes you think you can always hold the south, never mind the Connachta and the Laigin?”
“Because I am careful and clever,” Cormac replied candidly, with no trace of arrogance. “I did not rely on ties of blood or fosterage, but on those things that appeal to men on a different level entirely.”
“What?”
Cormac’s lips twitched. “I took gifts from one king and gave them to the next. Although none knew this, I kept hardly anything for myself. I bought them, if you like, these allies of mine. And I paid a high price for them in cattle and gold and servants.”
The brehon pulled his lower lip and looked disapproving. “I would not,” he said ponderously, “trust any man who could be bought.”
Cormac threw back his head and laughed. “And I would not trust any man who claimed he could not be bought! You know the law. I know men.”
“They succumbed to your bribery, then?”
“Not all of them. But for those who at first resisted, I had Finn and the Fíanna. They gave in soon enough.”
Finn’s men grinned and elbowed one another. As fénnedi, they were not allowed seats in the king’s presence, but as the companions of Finn Mac Cool, they would not be kept out of any place they wished to go. They stood shoulder to shoulder around the walls of the hall, a circle of strength.
The others in the hall were very aware that the status of members of the Fíanna had improved
, though nothing was said. The mere fact of their unchallenged presence at an official occasion was enough.
When everyone else had been served the king’s wine, cups were passed to Finn’s men. Cups of gold and precious woods.
In spite of the summer’s successes, Cormac knew the matter of Ulidia was unresolved and festering. The provinces had enjoyed a long and honourable tradition of warring on one another, the legacy of a warrior aristocracy dating back to the Milesians. It was unrealistic to suppose that tradition had ended just because Cormac Mac Airt held Tara …
… and had the Fíanna.
They, the king admitted to himself but to no one else, were the real reason for his success during the summer. Finn Mac Cool had exceeded his fondest expectations. Not only was Finn endowed with exceptional strength and reflexes, he also had the nebulous quality known as leadership, and an innate organizational ability uncommon among his kind. In one battle season, he had made a loose confederation of semi-outlaws—devoted to roving and pillaging when they were not fighting—into a disciplined army by challenging them beyond their abilities and compelling their obedience.
It was as if Finn had envisioned an army in his mind and deliberately imposed its pattern on the chaos of fénnidecht.
Day by day and step by step, he had made more demands of and for the Fíanna, tightening his control as he enhanced their lustre. As the army grew, so did the respect in which people held it. Men began flocking to join in ever greater numbers. Every young man with hot blood in him yearned to have his name called in the pantheon of Finn’s warriors who were cutting a memorable swathe across Erin.
They were not once defeated, that battle summer.
By the time Cormac returned to Tara, he knew he had such an army as no king in Erin had ever possessed.
That, he told himself, is why the Ulaid are holding off. They’ve heard tales that make them wary.
The tales were growing faster than the Fíanna, taking on lives of their own. Finn Mac Cool could now tell any sort of story about his own prowess or that of his men and have it accepted.
Yet he was growing strangely disinclined to outrageous tales. At the end of the day he preferred to sit quietly by the fire, staring into space, while others enhanced the growing legends of Bran and Sceolaun and Cailte and Goll and the rest.
As they settled into Tara and began anticipating the Samhain Assembly, Cormac grew increasingly worried.
“Finn’s too quiet,” he told Ethni the Proud on their pillow.
“I shouldn’t say so,” his wife replied. “I heard him yelling orders on the training ground today and the blast from his lungs would blow you away.”
“That isn’t what I mean. He has usually been … exuberant. I am used to him that way. Aggressive, vivid, giving off sparks. This Finn who sits and thinks makes me …”
“What?”
“Nervous,” admitted Cormac Mac Airt. He did not go further, however. He was the king, the glory and the problems were his. He did not confide to his wife that Finn was possibly of the Tuatha Dé Danann, and an enemy spy.
But he had not forgotten the possibility.
Goll Mac Morna was also puzzled by the change in Finn’s behaviour, and disturbed. Any shift in strategy on the part of an opponent always disturbed him. Finn was his opponent, he had no doubt of it, and the only way he could prepare himself for whatever Finn might do was to stay close to him, study him, understand him, anticipate him.
He was finding Finn a difficult man to understand.
One evening he deliberately sat down next to the Rígfénnid Fíanna and stared into the fire with him. Bran, who lay between them, pressed closer to Finn.
Goll remarked, “Your dog doesn’t like me.”
“It isn’t that. Bran only likes me, it’s nothing personal against you.”
“Your dog, your cousin. If that story of yours was true. Which it isn’t.”
Finn said nothing.
Realizing he was not rising to the bait, Goll changed strategies “I hate to see the end of battle season.”
“Even though it means you will soon be free to go to your home and your wife?”
“Even though. The wife and I have been together too long, we’re too used to each other. I can tell you exactly what she’ll say when she sees me next. ‘How much was your share of the loot?’ Those will be the first words out of her mouth.”
“You should go to her though,” said Finn. “We’ll make our winter quarters here in Tara again this year, I think, but there’s no need for you to stay.”
“You’re always trying to get rid of me. Do you doubt my loyalty to you?”
Finn turned and looked straight into Goll’s one eye. “Should I?”
Perhaps, thought Goll, honesty was best. Honesty was disarming. “I want to be commander of the Fíanna.”
“Of course you do. And so do I. But remember what you told me? You get what you have the strength to take, you keep what you have the power to defend. I’ve learned a lot from you, Goll.”
Goll—almost—smiled. “You may yet learn a lot more from me,” he said. “But while we wait, tell me something. Tell me why you sit here staring into the fire night after night.”
Finn’s body tensed by an infinitesimal degree. He saw the question for what it was: an attempt to gain access to his innermost thoughts. But there was no way he would allow Goll Mac Morna into his mind.
Someone else was already there.
His features reformed in a radiant, boyish smile. “I’ve been composing a poem,” he said.
Goll’s one eye blinked. He felt the earth shift under him while he tried to adjust his thinking, but Finn had already begun to recite,
Many were the battles we broke in the summer
Against the warriors of Loch Luig,
The inhospitality of Lios of the Wells.
Where we went was red blood and white heat
And our enemies ran from us.
Ran like the blood red and hot in us,
The, wind to our backs, the sun on our heads,
The trumpet calling, its voice
Bronze and mighty, summoning, but one
Did not run, in the summer.
Finn felt silent. Goll waited. At last he enquired, “Is that all?”
“It is.”
“There’s no more?”
“There’s not.”
“What does it mean, then?”
“It’s a poem. If you have to ask what it means, you cannot understand it.”
“Oh, I understand battles well enough, and red blood and white heat—I remember them well. But who did not run when the trumpet blew?”
“Did not run … at first,” Finn said softly.
This, Goll realized, was a mystery Finn was keeping to himself. No explanation would be forthcoming.
One of Goll’s strongest traits was a gift for fortitude and endurance. He had endured much since he was first assigned to Finn’s company, always in the hope that someday he would gain his own back at the younger man’s expense … if Finn did not succeed in killing him first, which he fully anticipated. But his patience was wearing thin. Every new honour heaped on Finn Mac Cool seemed taken from Goll’s own shoulders. Having to sit by the fire listening to this pretentious, dreamy youngster recite overblown poetry that he could not understand was quite unbearable.
Goll got to his feet and brushed himself off. “I think I will go home,” he said. “You can send Cailte for me when you need me again. I’ll winter with the wife.”
Finn looked up at him. “I’m grateful for all you did for me this past year,” he said truthfully.
Goll did not want gratitude, not from Finn. It made him even more angry. His lips narrowed to a thin line. “I only did my duty. I always do my duty.” He stalked away.
From the other side of the fire, Finn’s original companions watched him go. “That’s one less knife to shield your back against,” commented Conan.
Finn replied airily, “Goll Mac Morna’s not going to hurt
me.” He put his thumb in his mouth, chewed on it for a while, then winked at his men with a sudden, sunny smile. “I’ll outlive him!” he announced.
They laughed. But Cailte’s eyes followed Goll until the darkness swallowed him, and there remained a thin line of worry etched between Cailte’s eyebrows.
One day after Goll Mac Morna left Tara, the Ulaid made their move.
Battle season was over, but the autumn had proved unusually warm and golden and the earth was still dry and firm enough for marching when the army of the north came howling down the Slige Midluachra.
Cormac was in the House of the King, conferring with Maelgenn his druid, when the sentries on the gate shouted the first news. Dubdrenn, Cormac’s chief steward, ran white-faced into the House of the King to be first to tell of the bad tidings. “The Ulaid! They’re coming this way! An army!”
Cormac got to his feet. “Maelgenn, did you not foresee this?”
The royal druid licked his lips nervously. “I did of course. I told you nights ago of the signs I had read in the entrails of the red squirrel.” He did not dare suggest the king had forgotten; nor did he dare remind the king of how ambiguous the prophecy had been. But it was always safe to prophesy some sort of attack, sometime. This was Erin.
By the time Cormac reached the northern gateway, Finn and his men were already there, armed and preparing for battle.
“Why do you think they waited until now?” the king wondered aloud.
Finn was adjusting the scabbard of his great hacking sword. Without looking up, he replied, “I’m sorry Goll isn’t here, that’s the sort of question he could answer.”
“Isn’t here? Where is he?”
“I told him he could go home.”
“Without my permission?”
Finn raised his eyes to Cormac’s then. “The Fíanna is mine to command,” he said.
Once again Cormac had the profound conviction that Finn was deliberately going too far, testing the limits. But this was not the time for a confrontation with him, not with an enemy marching toward the gates of Tara.
“You anticipated my suggestion,” Cormac said smoothly. “I meant to have Goll sent to his fort this winter. He’s not exactly in the same situation as the rest of you and there’s no harm in showing him a little extra courtesy.”
Finn Mac Cool Page 21
