If Finn is happy, the king told himself, he might be less of a thorn in my foot.
Cormac broached the question tactfully but got no response. Grania did not seem interested.
He spoke to her mother. “Finn wants a daughter of mine as wife, Carnait, and for various reasons, I need to give him what he wants. Our Grania is perfect for him in my judgment. Can you not bring a mother’s influence to bear on her? Remember, it was through Finn’s intercession that the mill down below was built and you ceased being Ethni’s grinding-woman.”
Carnait could hardly argue. She spoke long and earnestly to Grania, who at last approached the king. “I’ll talk with Finn Mac Cool,” the girl agreed. “But if he doesn’t please me, I won’t marry him!”
Cormac was relieved. “That goes without saying, and he knows it.”
He offered them the use of the House of the King for their first interview. Servants were ordered to keep out of sight. A huge fire was built in the central firepit, every bench was hand-rubbed to be certain there were no splinters, and cups of both mead and wine were poured out and left waiting beside platters heaped with apples.
Grania, attired in her second-best dress, waited for the Rígfénnid Fíanna with barely concealed impatience, tapping her foot and taking one bite out of every apple. None of them were sweet enough.
When Finn arrived at the House of the King, he paused for a moment in the open doorway, letting his eyes adjust to the change in light. Against a rectangle of sunny sky, he stood in huge silhouette, his silvery hair like a crown.
Grania stopped chewing her apple.
He strode into the room. The light of fire and lamp and candle was kind to a face scored by weather and war and the pillage of seasons.
As Finn looked down at Grania, sitting on her bench and staring up at him with a bulge in her cheek from uneaten fruit, he was struck by the difference in their ages. She was hardly more than a child.
But she was very pretty, as pretty as Carnait had been when she first attracted the High King’s attention.
It was almost too much to hope that Carnait’s daughter would prove to be an intelligent companion as well.
“What do you know of me?” Finn asked the girl.
She gave a couple of quick chews, swallowed the apple. “My father says you’re his sword arm.” She peered up at him; her eyes were slightly tilted, a pale grey-green. “Who do you say you are?” she asked disconcertingly.
Finn was pleased. She was quick. On long winter nights he would not be bored. “I’m a warrior,” he told Grania. “And a poet. And commander of the Fíanna. And a man with no wife. And possessor of a fine fort on a hill, and enormous prestige.”
“All of that? How impressive.”
He could not tell if she was really impressed or not. Her young face was as bland as the surface of an apple. She studied her fingertips, dyed with berry juice, then looked back up at Finn. “And are you a skillful lover?”
He was disconcerted. “I know how to pleasure a woman,” he replied gruffly. He undertook to sit down beside her and put an arm around her by way of a beginning. But when he raised his arm and tried to encircle her with it, the pain of damaged muscles ripped along his nerve endings. He could not complete the gesture.
She felt him hesitate and gave him a sharp look. Seen up close, his face was older somehow, with lines of tension around the eyes and mouth.
Finn forced himself to clasp Crania with his arm. The pain was intense. “It will pass in a few days if you keep hot compresses on your back,” Eogan had told him, but the injury was taking longer to heal than he had anticipated. In his youth, he had seemed to heal almost overnight.
He must not be old and crippled with this young one.
He squeezed her, hard. “I can give you all the pleasure you can stand.” he said.
In his youth, he would not have been so blunt. He would have used poetic phrases; he would have tried to read her eyes and see what she responded to, as he had always done with Sive. But seasons had passed and he was no longer young. He was impatient, and in pain.
“If you don’t give me sufficient pleasure,” Crania reminded him, “under the law, I can seek it with another man.”
“You can,” he agreed gravely. “But the other man must be of rank equal to mine, so that any children you bring into our family will be a source of pride.” He would show her he knew the law as well as she did.
By now, Finn Mac Cool knew the law very well indeed.
“When you many me, you will be chief wife of the Rígfénnid Fíanna,” he said, “as I have no other living contract wives. If I take any more women, I must have your permission to do so, and they will be second in rank to you. No one will stand above you. At Tara, you are just one of the king’s daughters. At Almhain of the White Walls, you will be the most important woman, with many bondservants to do your bidding and complete authority in the Grianan.”
“You have a Grianan?”
“I do of course. I have every luxury,” Finn boasted.
“Musicians? I love music.”
“Then we shall acquire more musicians,” he promised her. “You will have whatever you want, Grania.”
She sat in the curve of his embrace, warmed by his body, and considered.
Her sisters would be very jealous.
She tilted her head back and looked up at the massive cheekbones, the gentle mouth. “I shall be wife to you, Finn Mac Cool,” she promised.
Finn returned to Eogan. “You have to do something about my back. It still pains me, I can’t move freely, my fingertips are often cold and numb. I’m planning to take a new wife, Eogan, I can’t disgrace myself on my marriage bed!”
The royal physician laughed. “Your fingers aren’t your most important parts, not in the marriage bed. How’s your staff?”
“Nothing wrong there,” Finn assured him. “But how can I hug a woman, lift a woman, pleasure a woman, with a damaged back?”
“It will heal, I assured you it would. You’re just rushing the season. We can strap you up, though, with linen bandages, to keep you from moving those muscles more than you need to. That will help you heal faster.”
Eogan duly applied a broad webwork of linen to Finn’s torso, binding him tightly. It did ease the pain.
But the next time Finn put his arms around Crania, she felt the bulky bandaging under his tunic and knew a sudden stab of revulsion.
He’s old! she thought. He’s so old they’ve tied him together like a pudding for the boiling!
The enormity of the promise she had given and the life it presaged began to frighten her.
Whenever she saw Finn in daylight, she looked not at his broad shoulders or his gleaming hair, but at the lines in his face and the careful way in which he moved. And every time, he seemed older to her.
She was relieved when he bade her farewell and returned to Almhain, for the winter.
“I’ll be back to marry you at Beltaine,” he promised.
He decided to leave an honour guard of the Fíanna at Tara as a tribute to his intended wife. Cormac was pleased by the gesture. “A large honour guard,” he said to Finn. “Enough men to discourage any more uprisings like the last one.”
Finn grinned. “The Ulidians won’t make another attempt on Tara for quite some time.”
“Even so. From now on, I want a lot of your men here in every season, Finn.” Cormac spoke firmly, enforcing his authority. The garrisoning of the army must not be left up to its commander, not entirely. He was resolved to take more of the control of the Fíanna into his own hands, being all too aware of the danger of losing it to Finn entirely.
By mutual agreement between commander and king, Conan Maol and Conn Crither were senior officers for the garrison left at Tara. Finn returned to Almhain for the winter, taking with him, among others, Cailte and Oisin and Donn and Donn’s son.
The days of winter, usually so brief, seemed long to him as he waited for spring. The nights were endless and leaden. He thought of taking various wo
men to warm his bed, but the thought never prompted the deed. It almost seemed too much trouble, though his body was eager enough. Still, the burning hunger he had known for Sive was only a memory now, a memory of youth.
On a night when the wind howled and beat against the white walls and his hounds piled atop one another to keep warm, Finn lay sleepless as so often before. Memory stirred and rustled in his mind like insects in thatch.
Once this fort smelled new, he thought. Dazed wood, limewash. Clean, fresh smells. Now it seems musty. The very air feels tired.
Why doesn’t it smell new anymore?
He longed to sleep out under the windblown stars and awake in a wild world that always smelled new.
But when he went to the doorway, the young fénnid standing sentry looked at him quizzically. “You wouldn’t go out on a night like this surely,” the sentry said. “The wind would blow your eyeballs to the back of your skull.”
Once Finn would have laughed and strode past him into the full force of the gale. Now he hesitated, considered, then at last shrugged and went back inside.
But once he was lying on his bed under piles of fur and woven wool, he was angry with himself for having given in. He fought off the covers and whistled softly. “Conbec!” he called to the Hound of Perfect Symmetry. “Here to me now!”
The great dog, so like Bran, eagerly joined Finn in his bed and nestled close against him with a contented sigh. Finn stroked the coarsehaired skull absentmindedly and dreamed of the old days’ hunting. Of the red deer …
Winter passed, as it must. But never a winter so slow as that one.
The Festival of Imbole celebrated the lactation of the ewes, return of life to a slumbering world. Beltaine loomed on the horizon three cycles of the moon later.
Finn began preparing for his marriage to the High King’s daughter.
Cailte, as always, was with him. One night the thin man reported back to his wife, “Finn’s more nervous about this than he was about the first one.”
“Nervous? Of taking a wife? Why should any man be nervous of something so natural?”
“Och, Finn isn’t like any man. He always wants everything to be perfect. And in his control, that’s very important to him.”
Cailte’s wife laughed. “No man who wants everything under his own control should have anything to do with a woman!”
The passage of the seasons had given Finn time to ponder on Crania, time to recall her every gesture and word to him. Again and again he heard her asking, “Are you a skillful lover?”
The question was a reasonable one. In Gaelic society, women, especially of the upper classes, had as much sexual freedom as men. Young women often sampled several suitors before agreeing to a contract marriage. Such behaviour was not discouraged. If a woman knew what to expect in the marriage bed, she would he more likely to please her husband—and less likely to want other lovers after marriage, because her youthful curiosity had been satisfied while at its peak.
So, young as she was, Grania might well have welcomed one or more men into her bed already. Finn did not begrudge them. He did, however, feet the gnawings of his own curiosity. How would he compare with other, surely younger, men she might have known?
At last he brought himself to broach the subject with Cailte. obliquely. “What do you know of the arts of pleasing a woman’s body?”
“What any other man knows, I suppose,” the thin man replied.
“Would you say some men are better at it than others?”
Cailte considered the question. “I suppose some would be, just as some are better at running and others excel at spear throwing. Why?”
“No particular reason. I just wondered. Ah … who would you say. among the men here at Almhain, is most expert at pleasing women?”
Cailte gave Finn a long look. “Are you seeking a tutor?”
“Of course not! I need no help there, or anywhere else. I mastered all physical skills long ago. I was just asking. For the sake of curiosity.”
Cailte was astonished to think that Finn—the Finn he had known for the better part of his life, the man he had followed and admired and tried to emulate, the man who had proven himself superior in any way, again and again—would now be looking for instruction in so simple a thing as bedding a woman to her satisfaction.
With a stab of alarm, Cailte wondered if he himself had been as good at it, all these years, as he had assumed.
Would the wife tell him?
Aloud, he said, “The man at Almhain who has the most women following him is young Diarmait, Donn’s son. Every female old enough to bleed sighs when he walks by, and I know for a fact that he spends very few nights sleeping among the unmarried warriors. He appears with the dawn and disappears at sunset. I’d say he’s an expert, in spite of his youth.”
“Or because of it,” Finn said gloomily. Somehow he could not bring himself to go to Diarmait Mac Donn and ask for his secrets for pleasing women.
As Beltaine approached, he turned his mind to other matters, to the acquisition of fine clothing for himself and his party, to the collection of an acceptable coibche to give to Cormac, and to the assigning of companies of Fíanna around the periphery of Míd to assure that no unwanted hostilities broke out while Finn was occupied with marriage. He drove himself relentlessly.
Cailte was not the only one observing the excessive activity the prospect of marriage had engendered in the commander. The officers and men talked of it among themselves, with wry and ribald commentary. When Oisin overheard one man saying to another, “You’d think the commander had never had a woman before, he’s making such an effort to impress this one!”, Finn’s son caught the offender by the neck and bashed his head against the nearest post until the man howled for mercy.
Within half a day the incident was the talk of Almhain. Hearing of it, Finn thought bitterly, I’m making a fool of myself. It isn’t as if I never took a wife before. I must be more casual about the whole thing.
But with the single exception of Sive, Finn had never known exactly how to behave toward women. His contemporaries, nurtured by the many female members of their clans almost impartially, slid without difficulty into comfortable relationships with bedmates and wives. But Finn’s sole female contact during his childhood had been with two leathery old women who never caressed him, never sang to him, hardly even talked to him, because they did not know how to talk to a young boy. They merely kept him alive.
Finn had been nurtured by the hills and forests, the wild places. Only wild Sive fitted the shape of his soul. Otherwise, women would always be a mystery to him.
When the time came to depart for Tara, he found himself growing increasingly tense. He hid the tension behind a grim visage, refusing to give anyone reason to laugh at him again. From his horse’s back he talked to his men of war and weaponry throughout the trip northward, as if women were the furthest thing from his mind.
A welcoming party, alerted by runners, was at the Slige Dala gate to meet them. Finn sent back an order to the fénnidi to halt and stand, and prepared to ride forward the last little distance alone to meet his intended wife. He could see her waiting beside Cormac.
Not entirely alone, he decided. In a harsh whisper, he called, “Cailte, ride with me! I should have an attendant.”
Cailte was hardly the appropriate choice for an attendant, being a senior officer of the Fíanna. But he understood. He kicked his horse forward until it was shoulder to shoulder with Finn’s.
“There she is,” Finn said in a low voice. “Gowned in yellow, with flowers in her hair. What am I going to say to her, Cailte?”
“Try hello,” the other advised seriously.
They rode forward.
Grania watched their approach, shading her eyes with her hand against the strong sunlight of imminent summer. She let herself look at Cailte first, thin and grey-haired and easy on his horse. Then she slid her eyes sideways to Finn Mac Cool.
He was dressed as splendidly as a king, with a fur-lined cloak in spite of the
warmth of the day, and a great golden torc around his neck. But he looked so … so grim! So forbidding!
Crania glanced toward her father for reassurance, but Cormac was already hastening forward with his hands outstretched in welcome.
Finn gave Grania a brief greeting with all emotion strained from it. Appearing casual.
She murmured something in return, then fell to talking with her sisters and female companions, “Isn’t the Rígfénnid Fíanna magnificent!” one of them enthused. But another, stung with jealousy, hissed to Grania, “He’s old enough to be your father.”
Grania promptly looked at Cormac and then back to Finn, comparing the two.
Cormac Mac Airt was older than Finn but had spent his recent years in the ease and luxury of Tara for the most part. Finn had spent the same years either fighting or hunting. His face chronicled the weather of Erin. The two men looked to be of an age. If anything, Finn looked older at the moment, his features deliberately set in a stern mold.
Grania bit her lip.
As he had done before, Finn delivered the coibche to Cormac Mac Airt in a formal ceremony, then met with Grania at the ritual Beltaine pole to recite their promises to each other. As before, it would be a marriage of the first degree, though with the man claiming no property with his wife.
Finn did not want property. He wanted to be married to a daughter of the High King.
And, looking down at her piquant face in the sunshine, he realized he really did want her, want her body.
He could feel a welcome stirring below his tunic, as if something long hibernating were coming to life again.
He smiled down at Grania, but she did not notice. Her eyes were fixed obediently on the brehon, Flaithri, as he recited their obligations to each other. Only once or twice did Grania look away. She briefly peered from beneath her eyelashes at the ring of spectators attending the ritual. As if against her will, her eyes were drawn to the youngest, freshest faces.
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