She smiled. “Not at all. My poems are about the way the birds sing and the shadows race each other across the face of the mountains I love beautiful things. I try to capture them in poetry.” Her voice faded. Suddenly she was aware she was talking to the fabled Rígfennid Fíanna himself and babbling on like a child.
But Finn did not seem to mind. His eyes kindled with interest. “Would you recite one of your compositions for me”
Ailvi stared at the sea of mud on which they stood, afraid to meet his eyes. Finn in turn studied the sweep of her lashes against her cheeks, seeing another from of beauty and, as always, captivated by it.
For Finn’s final night of the year at Tara, the king had ordered a special banquet served to the commander and his officers. To no one’s surprise, Cailte. Mac Ronan was the first of the rígfénnidi to arrive at the Banquetting Hall, carrying a hollow belly full of appetite. But though the trumpets were blown again and again and the servitors waited impatiently, Finn Mac Cool did not appear.
At last Cormac sent a runner to find him. “I will take no insult from any man, not even him,” the king said through tight lips.
But at that moment Finn entered the hall—through the Door of Equality, customarily used only by kings
Without apologizing for his tardiness, he took his seat on the carved bench and signalled to a cupbearer to serve him. Only when he had taken a brimming drink did he turn toward Cormac with a broad smile.
“It’s been a good day for me,” he announced warmly.
His voice infused with a commensurate degree of coolness, Cormac replied, “How very pleasant.” He surveyed the contents of a huge tray being proffered by two bondwomen: stewed eels, ham and bacon, pots of curds and cheese, cakes of oats and barley, blood puddings, and sausages of boar meat from the autumn’s hunting. He selected a sausage and a honey-cake filled with crushed nuts, took a bite of the cake, chewed, swallowed, washed it down with mead from his cup. Then he turned toward Finn. “And was your day so grand you forgot about the night entirely?” he enquired.
“Och, I didn’t forget.” Finn stretched out an arm and boldly helped himself to the tray being held for Cormac. He took the largest slab of bacon. “I’ve been looking forward to it because I have an announcement to make.”
Rising to his feet, he shouted to be heard above the din of feasting, “I’m going to take a second wife!”
Some people stopped in mid-chew to listen.
“I’m going to marry the High King’s daughter!” cried Finn Mac Cool.
23
CORMAC CHOKED ON A MOUTHFUL OF SAUSAGE.
Before he could stop himself, Goll Mac Morna laughed out loud.
A wave of astonishment swept the hall like air rushing to the eye of a storm.
At its centre stood Finn Mac Cool, clearly enjoying the moment.
Cormac spat the offending morsel into his palm. “What did you just say?” he asked in disbelief.
“I thought I spoke loudly enough for everyone to hear. I said I shall marry your daughter Ailvi.” Spreading the sweetest of smiles across his face until even his savage cheekbones seemed softer, Finn added in a carrying voice, “If you think me worthy of her, of course.”
His eyes locked with Cormac’s.
People held their breaths to listen.
I brought this on myself, the king thought ruefully. Goll warned me—how many seasons ago? That’s why he laughed just now, and I don’t blame him.
Finn knows perfectly well that after all he’s accomplished for me, I can hardly refuse him publicly. I’ve set the precedent of giving him anything he asks.
But … Ailvi! A girl I might happily have married to a foreign king, perhaps forming bonds with the tribes of Briton.
Ailvi married to a man of the Fir Bolg.
Cormac writhed inwardly.
A second thought came hard on the heels of the first. If Finn’s claim was true—and by now no one knew for sure—then Cormac’s daughter might someday bear a child with Danann blood. An infiltration of the enemy into the royal family of Tara … where they had once held sway.
There is a dreadful inevitability to this, Cormac told himself, it Finn is to be believed.
Is Finn to be believed?
He stared at his Rígfénnid Fíanna, who stared back placidly.
“Have you any objections?” Finn enquired. “I assumed I had your support in all things.” He opened his eyes very wide.
Deep within them, Something … shifted.
Cormac saw it.
Now is my chance, he thought. Now is my chance to put him in his place and keep him there, before he makes my place his. My Tara his …
The Thing in Finn’s eyes shifted again. Cormac had the sudden chilling conviction that the Rígfénnid Fíanna was reading his thoughts as a wolf reads the thoughts of the stag at bay.
The assemblage in the crowded hall leaned forward to a man, waiting to hear what the king would say.
Cormac was skewered by his own sense of fairness. Finn had done nothing to merit either distrust or abandonment. In fact, he had behaved exactly opposite. No king with a reputation for justice could deny him now.
“I have no objections,” Cormac said in a voice that did not quaver.
“If she is willing, my daughter Ailvi may be wife to Finn Mac Cool.”
The news would sweep the land like flame. The Rígfénnid Fíanna was marrying a king’s daughter—and not just the daughter of a tribal king, a rig tuatha, but the daughter of a man he had publicly described as the High King. The Ard Rig, overlord of Erin. King of the kings.
In one bold step, Finn had elevated Cormac to unprecedented rank, then claimed kinship with that rank through marriage. He had changed Erin as surely as Cormac had done.
“We’re all princes now!” Donn boasted to Cael.
“Fosterlings of the overlord Finn Mac Cool,” growled Conan.
Fergus reproved him. “That’s an incautious and ungrateful remark.”
“We don’t have to be cautious. We’re the Fíanna.”
“You’re what Finn made you,” Goll interjected, deliberately leaving himself out of that description. “And you need to be more cautious than ever now. Finn’s given you a lot to live up to. You can’t just bash right and left with no thought of the consequences, any more than Cormac can.”
Blamec laughed. “I wonder if Cormac considered the consequences when he began being so generous with Finn.”
Goll said soberly, “He did, but not thoroughly enough. Now Finn’s outplayed him. Step by step and move by move—and it looking almost accidental—Finn’s outplayed him. I am frankly astonished.”
“You always did underestimate him,” Cailte remarked.
“Did I? I don’t think so. I knew from the beginning that he had a certain wild cunning.”
“He has more than that. He’s very clever.”
“And he can do magic,” Cael asserted. “He could not have accomplished what he has without the aid of magic.”
Allthe while, the stories told of Finn and his Fíanna were multiplying. With each telling, the storyspinners—who had not the noble poets’ obligation to truth—added their own vivid imaginings, making of Finn and his companions the men they would like to be themselves. So the tales grew.
It was told as truth that Finn fought a great battle on the White Strand against the Dog-headed people and the Cat-headed people and defeated them every one with tricks and guile.
It was told that his rígfénnidi, Dubh and Dun and Glas, attacked the stronghold of the Sídhe on the river Boyne and seized a bottomless cauldron, which they gave to their commander.
It was told that for Finn’s wedding, the fifty best sewing-women in Erin were put into a fort with a thousand beeswax candles and were labouring night and day to make new garments for Finn and all the Fíanna.
It was told, and told, and told …
Finn took Ailvi as a wife of the first degree on Beltaine. No one challenged his claim to equal rank, and if he had demanded equal p
roperty of her, Cormac could have provided it, though he was glad the demand was not made.
Manissa was not displeased with the match. She liked Ailvi, who was cheerful and young and would be a great help in caring for the children who multiplied like Finn Mac Cool stories, with more fosterlings coming to Almhain every season.
“I wish Finn really had been given a bottomless cauldron,” she confided to Garveronan the steward. “Sometimes I think we have enough children to make a new army.”
“If we do,” the steward told her in his rasping voice, “young Oisin. will be its commander.”
Oisin attended Finn’s wedding to Ailvi. In that moment when Finn joined the young woman and the brehon beside the Beltaine pole, his eyes inadvertently fell on Oisin’s face.
Sive’s face.
The words he meant to speak dried on Finn’s tongue.
“Are you ill?” the brehon asked, seeing him go pale.
The reply was swift and harsh. “I’m never ill. Proceed!”
Finn made his vow to Ailvi in a tight, clipped voice, not lingering over words or meaning. She took more time with her vows, savouring them. From time to time she glanced up at him, admiring the magnificent Rígfénnid Fíanna with his colourful cloak trimmed with wolf fur, his massive brooch on one shoulder, his startlingly silver hair. His strong, weathered face.
“She looks like a child beside him,” one of her attendants murmured to another.
“Och, he’s old, that one. I’ve been hearing stories about Finn Mac Cool for years.”
Finn’s keen ears heard them. Old, he mused. And I a young man still.
Almost. Thirty winters. Is that old?
Is that old, Sive?
That night he stayed at the wedding feast until almost dawn. When at last he went to the new house where Ailvi was waiting, his path led him past the door of the house still occupied by Manissa. He found her standing in the doorway, watching for him. “I wish you joy of her,” she called softly to him, “and many sons.”
Finn walked over to her. Feeling slightly awkward, he said, “You’re a good woman, Manissa.”
Her voice was wistful in the fading night. “Is that all I am? A good woman?”
He did not want to hurt her, so he chose not to understand. “That is everything a woman should be,” he said positively. “Go back to your bed now. It may be Beltaine, but there’s an edge to the wind and I don’t want you chilled.”
She turned obediently and went inside. The oak door creaked on its iron hinges.
There was a calm pool at the center of Manissa that reminded Finn of Sive, but she was not Sive. This new one … would he find something of Sive in her?
His steps quickened as he approached the new house.
Ailvi had fallen asleep waiting for him. She lay stretched on the bed with her head pillowed on one outflung arm. Befitting her new married status, her attendants had bound her hair. As she waited during the long night, her hair had become disarranged, and curls and tendrils were escaping the thin gold fillets that circled her brow.
Gold because she was a king’s daughter.
I have married the daughter of the High King of Erin, Finn reminded himself, exulting.
He studied the lines of her body, revealed by the light of bronze lamps and the dying fire on the hearth. Lying on her side, Ailvi was a mountain range, with shoulder and hip for peaks and a deep valley at the waist.
The silent observer in Finn dispassionately considered the slight roundness of her belly, evidenced by the shadowing of the fine linen gown she wore. Her hips were wide, her belly deep; she could bear many children. She shifted in her sleep as if subliminally aware of his presence. Her eyelids fluttered as she rose toward wakefulness, and her movements caused her gown to drag slightly over what must be a bush of pubic hair.
The silent observer in Finn noted the stirrings of lust.
Finn strode to the bed and rested one knee on it as he leaned forward to take her by the shoulders. “Ailvi? Wife?”
Her eyes opened. They were very large, and for just a moment he thought they were dark brown.
He swiftly closed his own eyes before he could see that they were dark blue after all.
She was not like Manissa. Her textures were different, her responses her own. The entrance to her body was guarded by a dense thicket, and he remembered suddenly, agonizingly, that Sive had scant body hair.
Then he plunged into Ailvi and sought forgetfulness.
The silent observer watched. Saying nothing. Feeling little. Watching.
Finn was a mature man by now, with more control of his physical passion, and he took time with Ailvi. He could feel when she wanted him to be gentle and he obliged her; as she grew more accustomed to him, he could tell when she wanted strength and he gave that too. She was good in bed, he found; better than Manissa, her dimensions more suited to his.
But she was not Sive. He could almost hate Sive for having been so perfect for him that no other woman could equal her.
Or did he just remember her that way? Was time blurring truth, so that he was remembering his own version of Sive, as he remembered his own version of so many other things?
The silent observer seemed to be inside him now, thinking these thoughts to the exclusion of everything else, until he found himself lying on his back with one forearm across his eyes and Ailvi leaning over him anxiously, saying, “What’s wrong? Did I do something wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong,” he replied thickly. “I’m just catching my breath.” He moved his arm and made himself smile up at her. There was strong sunlight filtering through the cracks around the closed door. It must be morning.
“Ah.” She accepted his words. She nestled into his shoulder sweetly and he put his arm around her, grateful that she had not chosen the side Sive liked to lie on.
I have to stop this, he thought. It’s no good. It wasn’t good for Manissa either.
Perhaps these are just the wrong women. Perhaps the bits of Sive I find in them aren’t enough. No! Stop that!
Finn Mac Cool lay on his back in the new house at Almhain with a king’s daughter in his arms and tried to convince himself he was happy.
Next day he took the hounds and went hunting.
Life at Almhain settled into a new routine that was but an extension of the former one. Ailvi blended seamlessly into Finn’s household, which was not so very different from the one she had known at Tara. The Rígfénnid Fíanna was becoming very prosperous, enabling her to continue to live in much the same style she had enjoyed at Tara. The attendants she had brought with her were augmented by Finn’s own bondwomen. The only labour required of Finn’s second wife was embroidery or helping Manissa with the children.
“So many children!” Ailvi said laughingly to the older woman. “How many of these are Finn Mac Cool’s?”
“Most of them are fosterlings,” Manissa replied. “The lad called Oisin is his, as are my own brood. Perhaps one or two from marriages of lesser degree, I wouldn’t know and he never says. Oisin is his unquestioned favourite, though.”
“Is he not fond of children, to have so many fosterlings?”
Manissa considered the question. “I could not say that either. He doesn’t talk to me about his feelings. The majority of the fosterlings are the children of chieftainly families who hope sending a son or daughter to Finn Mac Cool will give them advantageous ties with the Fíanna. But that one …” she pointed a henna-stained fingertip, “and that one there, and those three over there … they are motherless.
“When Finn hears of a child who has no mother, he insists on it being sent here, even if the child’s father and kin are able to care for it. Under the law it should go to the father, but Finn insists, and who’s to stand against him?”
“Why, I wonder?”
“I don’t know that either,” Manissa sighed. In silence, the two women watched the scurry of children through Almhain. Then Manissa said softly, “If Finn is fond of me at all, I think it is because I am good at mothering.”
With the exception of Conan Maol, Finn’s original nine had by now taken wives. Conan responded predictably to the jibes they made at his expense. “Women are nothing but trouble,” he insisted, “and I get enough trouble following Finn Mac Cool’s banner during battle season.”
But he seemed to like Ailvi, to his friends’ amusement.
During the winter Finn invited his first companions to make their homes at Almhain and garrison their fíans beyond its walls. The famous white walls were opened again and yet again to allow for expansion as new dwellings were constructed and wives and households installed.
Ailvi enjoyed the company of Finn’s men and their women. As a child growing up at Tara, she had been familiar with the names and faces of the more famous members of the Fíanna, but they had not seemed quite real to her, their lives being too different and separate. Now, meeting them in a domestic setting, she found them to be human. She liked surly Conan best of all, for he was a challenge. In an effort to win him and make him smile, she recited bad poetry and told bad jokes until he was devoted to her as he would never be to any other woman.
Of the officers’ wives, Ailvi was most intrigued by Creide.
Creide was a woman quite outside the experience of a king’s sheltered daughter.
“She carries weapons like a man,” Ailvi commented to Conan one day as he watched her carding wool to loom a square for her embroidery. “Yet she talks and behaves like a noblewoman and her clothes are as fine as my own.”
Conan, who was sprawled on a bench in the sun outside Ailvi’s house, shifted position and pulled away a wisp of wool a passing breeze had stuck to his lip. “Creide likes fighting. I vow by the seven stars, she actually enjoys bashing men. I couldn’t tell you why. Most other women who accompany the army are content to forage for us and bind up our wounds, but Creide will wade into a battle as readily as into a river, and she’s more ferocious than anyone but Finn himself.”
“Yet she’s so loving with Cael!” Ailvi marvelled.
“Ask her about it sometime. I suppose women speak of things like that among themselves, don’t they?”
Finn Mac Cool Page 36
