Finn Mac Cool

by Morgan Llywelyn

  The attendant complied. The horse swung too far and trod heavily on Conan’s foot, crunching bone. He howled in pain and outrage.

  “Your turn, Madan,” said the implacable Finn Mac Cool.

  Madan Bent-Neck surveyed his new mount. A brown mare so dark she was almost black, she looked back at him with equal curiosity.

  Cailte said, “It’s easy. Like sitting on a bench.”

  Madan swallowed hard, caught hold of the short black mane and swung himself up. The mare stood like an oak tree. When he found himself aboard her with no difficulty, he grinned hugely. “It is easy!” he agreed.

  At that moment the mare decided she disliked the whole procedure and gave her head such a toss she jerked the rein out of his hand. She promptly lowered her neck so she could begin grazing the sweet green grass of Tara. Madan found himself sitting on an unfamiliar animal over which he had no control. The rein trailed beside her head, on the grass.

  “What do I do now?” he asked the horseboy. “Hand me that rein again.”

  But the boy, who was enjoying this as much as Finn and Cailte were, began an intense conversation with his nearest fellow and pretended not to hear.

  Meanwhile, Finn closed his legs on the mare and urged her forward. “Right, you lot,” he said to the others. “Follow me.” The chestnut mare broke into a trot.

  Cailte’s grey followed close behind. The other horses, obeying their herd instinct, set off after them, subjecting their unprepared riders to a torment of jouncing and bouncing. Some dropped their reins; some grabbed hold of the mane for support. Some slid to one side and some to the other. Madan, who had never got hold of his rein in the first place, had the alarming feeling of being on a runaway and emitted a tiny squeak that would embarrass him in memory for years afterward.

  For the first time in history, a mounted company of rígfénnidi rode across Tara—in wildly haphazard fashion while following a silver-haired man who was fighting hard not to laugh aloud.

  By the end of the day, almost everyone but Finn and Cailte had fallen off at least once. As Goll had predicted, the horses were excellent for teaching humility. Goll, who had fallen like the rest, remembered those words ruefully as he rubbed his bruised backside.

  But the relentless Finn kept after them, and within seven nights, his rígfénnidi could ride, if not like princes, at least as well as himself and Cailte. Humility evaporated and arrogance returned, stronger than ever.

  “It should be the natural heritage of every man in Erin to ride a horse!” proclaimed the delighted Fergus Honey-Tongue.

  Finn wove a great tale around the acquisition of the horses, one in which the son of the king of the Britons had kidnapped Finn’s hounds and the Fíanna claimed them back, and the horses as well. It made splendid telling around the hearthfires of Erin, and in time was taken as truth by most people who had not been at Tara.

  Each accomplishment by himself or one of his Fíanna earned a tale by Finn. Every one was told as fact. The battles they fought grew larger in the telling, involving more enemy and more casualties, often including elements from the Otherworld, spangles of magic. Finn and the Fíanna won with incredible feats over impossible odds, or so the stories claimed.

  But no member of the Fíanna denied the tales. Indeed, Fergus Honey-Tongue, who recognized creative talent when he heard it, reworked the narratives into his own style until his recitations were considered works of art, and Finn named him officially as chief poet to the Fíanna.

  The truth, in the high summer of the Fíanna, took on a very strange shape.

  As Cormac commented to his latest wife, “It does no harm. Indeed, it does a great deal of good. The Fénian stories win battles for me without us even having to fight. The royal historians know the facts and the ordinary people know the wild tales, and that’s as it should be. It keeps both happy.”

  Finn married Manissa and installed her at Almhain, but spent little time with her. There was no repetition of the idyll with Sive. In his mind, he considered her as a requirement for the Rígfénnid Fíanna, as essential to the status of that office as the other aristocratic trappings he was accruing.

  In addition to a druid, a physician, a steward, and a chief poet, he had cupbearers at Almhain and doorkeepers and horn players and sewing-women and an official candlemaker, and assistants to all of them. His pack of dogs was enlarged to include a fine selection of greyhounds, not as large as Bran and Sceolaun but better for hunting small game.

  When Finn was not fighting, he was hunting. Manissa complained that he hunted to excess. “It is not normal,” she told her attendants, “for a man of rank to spend all his time out on the bog or the mountain, following hounds. Surely he has plenty of others who could keep us well supplied with game.”

  When she said the same thing to Finn, he gave her a look so chilling she never mentioned it again. There was something wild in his eyes, something she could not begin to understand.

  She was not sure she wanted to. Living with Finn Mac Cool was like living with something only half-tamed, elusive and unpredictable—and probably dangerous.

  Manissa was careful not to rouse his temper.

  Sometimes he was gone for a fortnight at a time, with just Caurag his chief huntsman and the hounds. He did not take porters on these expeditions, nor did he bring back game. But Manissa, fearing him though he had never raised a hand to her, did not question him. “There are some things,” she advised her attendants, “it’s better for a wife not to know.”

  Even Caurag did not know the entire reason for those driven, solitary forays. He knew only that he had strict orders about what hounds to bring, and how to treat any animal they flushed. He knew that Finn continued, summer and winter, to search with an unreasoning passion for a particular red doe.

  When Cainnelsciath informed Finn, “Bebinn says your wife is with child, and the portents indicate a daughter,” Finn’s reaction was typically unpredictable. He went at once to his chief huntsman.

  “Prepare for a long hunting trip,” he ordered Caurag.

  He did not want to watch Manissa swell with his child. He remembered Sive carrying Oisin. That was the image burned in his brain. He was, he realized, pleasantly fond of Manissa; she was warm and kind and calm and undemanding. He had no quarrel against her, and he would be proud to have children.

  But she was not Sive.

  The anguish flared up in him, the need to know if Sive lived, if she had been taken from him, if she had deserted him. He had never stopped asking himself those questions. Only in the heat of battle was he able to forget them, but on starry nights or full-moon nights, or when the soft green wind blew in the tops of the trees, pain came flooding back. Pain and the need to go on looking for her.

  Over a long period of time, Finn had been systematically quartering Erin, seeking some trace. Although she had never been willing to talk about her people, her accent was undeniably western. So when he sought Sive, he always faced the setting sun.

  Having exhausted the midlands, he determined this time to go all the way to the great sea, the western coast of the island, and follow the limestone north from the Burren and Galway Bay, through the homeland of Clan Morna and even farther north. It was late in the year; he expected no battles to break out to interfere with his plan.

  Having horses to ride made such long journeys easier. He rode the chestnut mare and took a second horse to be a pack animal so that Caurag could devote all his attention to the hounds.

  “Are you certain you don’t want at least an escort of three fíans?” his steward asked worriedly.

  “I do not, Garveronan. Do you think there’s a warrior in Erin by now who doesn’t know who I am? I’m safe enough, particularly so because I travel alone. It’s obvious I’m not seeking battle.”

  Garveronan was not reassured, but like Manissa, he did not argue. He had seen Finn angry and did not want to repeat the experience.

  It was the season when flax was rotting in the ponds preparatory to being gathered and separated into st
rands for weaving into linen. The appalling stench of the disintegrating fibres hung in the air like a miasma as Finn made his way west across the central plain, then slanted northward.

  “Have you a particular hunting ground in mind?” Caurag asked, thankful that his bandy legs were tireless. The hounds trotting in a pack around him lifted their ears at the sound of his voice.

  Bran was closest to Finn’s horse. Rather than look back at Caurag, the hound automatically looked up at Finn’s face, anticipating an answer.

  Finn half-turned on the mare’s back. “I’ve heard talk of fine herds of red deer around Beann Gulban, Gulban’s Mountain,” he said.

  “Ben Bulben?” Caurag repeated in his own accent. “That’s a desperate long way to go for deer when there are plenty to be found closer to home.”

  “We’ve spoken of this before,” Finn said over his shoulder. “The true hunter is always seeking something … exceptional.”

  “Exceptional.” Caurag said under his breath to the pack of hounds surrounding him, “By the seven stars, I hope someday to see the deer exceptional enough to satisfy Finn Mac Cool.”

  The hounds laughed up at him.

  As they approached the northwestern coast, Finn chose to go as far as the sea before turning to travel northward. The limestone Burren and Galway Bay lay behind him, and dark clouds were massing in the north, but the sky over the ocean was still clear, its Atlantean light illuminating the green-and-grey hills as they rolled toward Gulban’s Mountain, which waited like a crouching lion with its feet buried in heather.

  They camped for the night beside a narrow strip of white-gold beach and moved on with first light. Finn rode slowly as the day grew brighter, enjoying the late-season beauty of the countryside. A poem began to stir in him. It struggled to break through the trapped pain that was always inside him; always Sive.

  He held the mare to an easy walk so he could take time to appreciate the moss campion and mountain avens, past their bloom but still interesting to him in structure and shade of leaf. His eyes delighted in the brilliant purple saxifrage contrasting with rich green ferns. Immersed in beauty, he began to weave words in his mind as the flax-makers would weave flax.

  The chestnut mare snorted loudly and shied to her left. Finn halted her and stroked her neck while his eyes searched for the source of her fright.

  “What is it?” called Caurag, hurrying up to him.

  “I don’t know, I don’t see … I do! There! Over there, trying to hide in the heather!”

  Finn slid from his horse and walked forward very slowly, holding out his hand. At that moment Bran and Sceolaun bonded past him, barking with recognition and joy.

  A small figure emerged from concealment in the heather. It was a nearly naked little boy … with Sive’s features.

  22

  CAURAG HAD NEVER SEEN—OR EVEN IMAGINED—FINN Mac Cool crying. He stared thunderstruck as Finn swept the boy into his arms and wept uncontrollably.

  At first the child struggled, but when his strength could not prevail against Finn’s, he subsided. Caurag glimpsed the curve of his brow and one huge dark eye peering past the man’s heaving shoulder.

  Sceolaun stood on her hind legs with her forefeet braced against Finn’s body as she attempted to lick every portion of the boy’s uncovered flesh. Bran, more dignified, waited quietly, but the hound’s feathery tail was waving a wild welcome.

  “Do you know this little lad?” an astonished Caurag asked.

  Finn did not hear him. He was aware of nothing but the child in his arms who smelled like Sive. Something tore in him, a sheet of white pain like ice breaking on a frozen river.

  “Where is your mother?” he asked through his tears.

  The boy began to squirm again. “Put me down.”

  Finn struggled to regain control of himself. “Where is your mother?” he asked again, more insistently.

  “Put me down!” The boy’s piping voice was clear and sharp with a note of command out of all proportion to the speaker.

  “You must have a mother. Tell me where she is so I can take you to her.”

  The child redoubled his efforts to break free. With calculated cunning, he drove one knee into Finn’s midriff and kicked hard lower down with his other foot.

  The child was stronger than he looked. Finn grunted with pain. Caurag fought to keep from laughing, but Bran, whose loyalties were never divided, snarled at the boy.

  Keeping a tight hold on the child’s arm, Finn set the buy down. “I must know where your mother is,” he demanded. “I have to find her, don’t you understand?”

  The little boy whipped his scrawny body back and forth in Finn’s grip until the single piece of deerskin clumsily arranged around his hips fell away.

  “Bring something to wrap him in and something to tie him with,” Finn ordered Caurag.

  When the child was bound with leather thongs and enveloped in Finn’s spare tunic, which was large enough to hobble him effectively, Finn vaulted back onto the mare and Caurag handed the boy up to him.

  He sat the boy crosswise on the mare’s withers and fixed him with a stern look. “Now direct us to your people. I am Rígfénnid Fíanna, and I command it.”

  The term obviously meant nothing. The child glared at him.

  Finn tried a change of tactics. “How old are you? Six winters? Seven summers, would that be right?”

  “Don’t know,” the lad muttered.

  “Seven summers,” Finn said as if to himself, his thoughts drifting. “Seven summers since Sive …” She ran through his mind in a shaft of sunlight, and the pain that leaped in him was so sudden and sharp he winced.

  The boy took advantage of Finn’s lack of concentration to hurl himself from the horse. But Bran instantly caught him by the back of Finn’s tunic and held him until Caurag picked him up. This time, once the boy was seated in front of him, Finn took an additional strip of leather and bound the two of them together.

  “You wanted something exceptional,” Caurag commented. “I would say you’ve found it.”

  “Tell me where you live, and with who,” Finn asked the boy one more time. “I mean you no harm, nor them either. Just take me to them. To your mother. I beg of you, take me to her!”

  The child stared up at his face and said nothing.

  “We’ll find them on our own, then. Bran! Sceolaun! I need your noses! Backtrack this child!”

  Had any other man issued such an order to any other hounds, Caurag would have laughed. But he had observed Finn’s relationship with these two over many hunting seasons and he knew they understood him as if all three spoke the same language.

  Bran and Sceolaun promptly began quartering through the heather, searching. When Bran gave tongue and set off at a run, the others followed, Caurag running almost as fast as Finn’s galloping mare.

  The trail flanked Ben Bulben and led at last to a wide, well-concealed valley fringed by trees, with a small stream fed by a waterfall at its head. As Finn galloped into the valley, he saw the last of a herd of deer scattering into the woods beyond the waterfall.

  “My people!” the child cried.

  Finn reined in the mare. “What do you mean, your people?” His heart shook his body with its thundering.

  The child clamped his stubborn little jaws and did not answer.

  “Have you a name?”

  Continued silence.

  Finn drew a deep breath. “If I called you Oisin, would it mean anything to you?”

  Caurag came panting up just in time to hear this last. “Do you think it could be?” he gasped, gulping air.

  The child, silent, fiddled with the knots of the thongs.

  Finn and Caurag and the hounds methodically searched the valley and the woods beyond, but the only trace they found of any human agency was a smear of soot on stones where a fire had once burned. A few charred sticks, a couple of gnawed bones, and broken nutshells were all that remained of whoever had camped there. The ashes were cold and scattered.

  But Bran snif
fed around the site a long time. Then the great hound sat down and emitted a howl that raised the hackles on Caurag’s neck.

  “What happened here? You must tell me!” Finn demanded of the child.

  Something in his tone at last loosened the little boy’s tongue. “There was … a man,” he said slowly, searching for words from a limited vocabulary. “A dark man. With us. Sometimes. He had a stick. He hit her …”

  “Her!” The word leaped from Finn’s mouth. “Who? Your mother? What was her name? You must tell me her name! And who struck her? Ochone, who could ever strike her!” The very thought was a torment to him.

  The child frowned in concentration, pleating with wrinkles that forehead so like Sive’s. “The man … shouted at her. Sometimes. He went away. He came back. He hit her. One day … he made her go with him. She did not want to. He hit her, he made her go and leave me. She looked back at me with rain on her face.” His narrative powers exhausted, the child fell silent and stared up at Finn.

  The tortured man wanted to beat his head with his fists. But he fought to remain calm as he asked, “Do you think he killed her? That dark man who took her away?”

  “Don’t know,” the boy muttered. He seemed to shrink into himself. “She never came back for me.”

  “Fire and water, earth and sky!” groaned Finn Mac Cool.

  In spite of their most diligent searching, he and Caurag could find no trace of the child’s past, or of his kin. At last, defeated by time, Finn knew they must return east and prepare for the winter to come.

  He took the little boy with him.

  Time spent in Finn’s company began to smooth away some of the child’s wildness. He grew accustomed to having enough food to eat, and to sleeping beside Finn at night, the two of them wrapped in one mantle. He spoke little, but he listened to the two men talking and began to add some of their words to his own small supply. The woman he referred to as “her” he never called by name, as if unaware she had one.