Finn Mac Cool

by Morgan Llywelyn

  So with an effort as mighty as any of his feats in battle, Finn choked back the furious response and stood his ground, meeting Cairbre’s challenge unblinkingly. “I lost my temper,” he said.

  “You owe me an apology.”

  In all their long years, Cormac Mac Airt had not asked Finn for an apology.

  But everything changes, Sive.

  “I apologize.” The words hurt him. His tongue did not know their shape.

  Life changed like a river, shifted in its bed, flowed in a different direction. Finn Mac Cool served as Rígfénnid Fíanna, but the army he commanded was only nominally his; he did not employ his entire will and energy in welding them into one weapons. Old arguments surfaced, factions developed. The men Cairbre had brought from Clan Morna kept apart from the others, causing problems.

  Finn felt the subtle dissolution as he felt the dissolution of his own body.

  He tried hard to care. But more and more he lay alone in the dark and talked to Sive in his head.

  Grania was not proving to be the feminine companion he might have hoped. No sooner had she moved into Almhain than she began making changes. Their lodge was too small, it must grow this way and that. The roof should be higher, more visible from a distance. More bondservants were needed. The midden heap should be moved farther from the door.

  Finn’s old companions should spend less time lounging around his guesthouses, or drinking ale in his banquetting hall.

  Only the most loyal ignored Grania’s increasingly sharp tongue and stayed with Finn whenever they liked. Cailte could be relied upon, always. Blamec and Fergus Honey-Tongue would not be driven away. And Oisin, though married and with a new son of his own now, came on occasion to Almhain of the White Walls, though Finn rightly suspected it was out of a sense of duty and not through any desire to be with his father.

  More and more frequently, Finn escaped by going off into his head with Sive.

  The others noticed, commented on it to one another. “He’s gradually slipping away from us,” Cailte said sadly to Fergus Honey-Tongue, but Blamec refused to accept it. “He’s tired and distracted, as who wouldn’t be with a wife who constantly demands this and that? It was a cold, wet night for Finn Mac Cool when he brought that woman to his bed!”

  In truth, Finn did not take Grania into his bed very often. Once or twice, more out of curiosity than desire, but he soon abandoned the habit. She was more grasping than responsive. She made him pay for his small pleasure.

  She was not the woman he had watched through the hole in a thatched roof.

  Where was that woman?

  In his head, he wandered off in search of her.

  But he was brought rudely back by a messenger from Tara. “The High King desires that his Rígfénnid Fíanna effect a reconciliation with the former Rígfénnid Fíanna, Goll Mac Morna, so that Erin will be a peaceable kingdom in the reign of Cairbre. Mac Cormac.”

  “I can’t believe it!” Cailte exploded. “The man has a brass neck, suggesting such a thing! Did Goll put him up to it, Finn? What do you think? Is this the same old Goll we always knew, trying to worm his way back into power? You should have pursued him long ago as you meant to do, and punished him for desertion.”

  Finn sighed and ran his fingers through his hair, still thick on his head but pure white now, as gleaming as the walls of Almhain. “Pursue him. Punish him. Why, Cailte? In the heel of the hunt, what would it have accomplished? Just what did those summers of pursuing Diarmait accomplish?”

  “It isn’t the same thing and you know it.”

  Finn shrugged.

  But Cairbre’s command would not be ignored. He sent a second messenger and then a third, so that at last Finn felt obliged to respond.

  “My joints are too stiff in the mornings for this exercise,” he admitted to Cailte as they mounted their horses and set off to ride to Connacht for a formal meeting with Goll Mac Morna.

  The meeting was a tense one on both sides. Goll had had considerable communication from Cairbre, but Cailte was wrong in his surmise. Goll had no desire to become Cairbre’s Rígfénnid Fíanna. He knew himself to be too old. Finn’s fires were banked. Goll’s had gone out. He only wanted to be let alone with his old wife and his sturdy fort and a few friends to challenge him to a game with the Gold and Silver Chess Set.

  It was not much to ask.

  But there were harsh words remembered and anger unforgotten lying between Finn and Goll, and they circled one another warily like a pair of hostile dogs, hackles erect as they assessed the situation. Go for the throat? Or wag the tail?

  In a few terse words, Finn explained his mission.

  “It is friendship between us, then?” Goll said. “Cairbre wants us to be … to be what, Finn?”

  “Not enemies.”

  “Were we enemies?”

  “Were we friends?”

  Both questions were unanswerable. Fortunately, however, the Gaelic laws of hospitality were strict, and even men whose relationship was as undefined as Finn’s and Goll’s could share a cup of ale and sit together by a fire. In fact, it was mandatory that they do so.

  Goll’s wife, a stringy old woman with a permanently pursed mouth, served them herself, while several of Goll’s daughters and other female kinfolk served the warriors accompanying Finn. There was hardly room in Goll’s small fort for more than the senior rígfénnidi. The others made camp for themselves beyond the walls, listening tensely for any signs of trouble within.

  Goll and Finn discussed everything but the subjects that mattered. They spoke of Cormac and Cairbre and the new king’s rule; they talked of the Fíanna and politics and battles. Goll never said “oath-breaker,” and Finn never said “deserter.”

  But the words were in the air.

  At last Goll could not stop himself from saying, “I heard you killed Diarmait Mac Donn after all, and took his woman.”

  Finn’s eyes flashed. “That’s a lie. He died in a hunting accident. Afterward, Cormac asked me to take Grania under my protection and I agreed, though it was not what I wanted.”

  “Really?” Goll’s lip curled just enough to be insulting.

  “Really.”

  “Even if what you say is true, Diarmait was a fool to go on a hunt with you.”

  “He didn’t go with me, he joined us later. He caught up with us just in time to encounter the boar, in fact, and he was dead before I could, save him.”

  “Ah. I repeat, he was a fool to go on a hunt with you.”

  Finn’s eyes narrowed to slits. “Would you be afraid to go on a hunt with me, Goll Mac Morna?”

  Goll meant to scoff at the very idea, but he had been a warrior all his life, responding to challenges. “I wouldn’t be afraid of anything you might throw at me, Finn Mac Cool.”

  “Then let’s do it. To show Cairbre and the others that we are not enemies.”

  At once Goll was apprehensive. Here was, his instincts assured him, a most blatant trap, the trap he had expected from Finn for decades.

  In a way it was almost a relief to say, “I shall go hunting with you, Finn. whenever you say and for whatever game you choose.”

  Goll’s response was so unhesitating that Finn felt an old surge of admiration for the man. Whatever his faults, Goll had courage.

  There was no trap involved. A hunt was simply the most obvious step to take, in Finn’s mind; a way of re-establishing the best of the past and summoning back, if possible, some rapport with the man who had been his best teacher. Finn no longer had the enthusiasm for tricks and manipulations. He longed for things to be simple.

  He longed for yesterday.

  They agreed upon a boar hunt, which struck both men as truly Gaelic irony. But even as they were setting out in search of their prey, Goll’s men and Finn’s fell to quarrelling. At first it was over little things, but the argument soon heated. It was as if every old grudge of the last three generations surfaced.

  Men of Clan Baiscne heard Cuhal’s perfidy recited with relish. Men of Clan Morna were accused
of failing to meet their obligations. Blows were soon exchanged.

  The boar was forgotten.

  At the end of the day, an exasperated Goll came upon Finn’s favourite hound, Conbec of Perfect Symmetry, alone in a glade, and chopped him down with his blade for no reason at all other than an excess of anger.

  Cailte was nearby and heard the dog’s last, truncated cry. He knew the voice. “Conbec!” He ran forward, spear in hand, in time to find Goll straightening above the body. The one-eyed man liked dogs and was instantly remorseful, but the damage was done.

  Cailte hurled his spear straight at Goll’s head.

  32

  GOLL MAC MORNA WAS A SURVIVOR BY NATURE. WHEN on a boar hunt, he wore his old bronze helmet from his days as Rígfénnid Fíanna, just in case. Cailte’s impulsive speat throw missed his one good eye and glanced off the helmet with a clang, making his ears ring but doing no damage.

  Goll reached down with a grunt and hefted the spear. “You want me dead, Cailte?” he asked in his shredded voice.

  “You murdered Finn’s hound. You owe compensation,” Cailte replied, already regretting his unthinking deed.

  “Is my life the compensation? I do not think so, under the law.”

  “Finn will demand—”

  “I know what Finn will demand. Not compensation. Revenge. He’s waited a long time for it, and nothing will deny him. He had his revenge of Diarmait, didn’t he?”

  “It wasn’t like that.”

  “Och, you’d defend him no matter what really happened. He’s going to need you to defend him again the next time he and I meet, Cailte. Tell him that when he’s ready, I’ll be waiting for him. We might as well get it over.” Goll smiled thinly, broke Cailte’s spear shaft across his knee, tossed the two halves to Cailte, and walked away with more dignity than one scrawny old man should possess.

  Cailte went to find Finn. “There will be no peace between you now, and I’m to blame.”

  “You are not to blame. It was impossible in any case. Come with me and we’ll bury Conbec, then prepare ourselves.”

  Cailte did not need to ask what they would be preparing for.

  At Finn’s command, his men buried Conbec deep in the soft earth of Erin and erected a stone cairn above the hound. As the stones were being piled high, Finn twice referred to the dog as Bran, but no one corrected him.

  Meanwhile, Goll returned to his fort. His wife knew by the look on his face that something had gone wrong. “What will you do?” she asked.

  “Fight. It’s all I know how to do.”

  “But are you certain he wants battle between you?”

  “From the moment I killed his father, it was inevitable.”

  It was the first time she had ever heard Goll say his was the hand that struck down Cuhal. The words were like a sentence of doom; the outcome now seemed inevitable indeed.

  She began gathering her cloaks and linen.

  “What are you doing, wife?”

  “Going with you, wherever you go.”

  “I won’t hear of it. I’ll gather the men of Clan Morna and we’ll make a stand against Finn and his men. There are enough of us for a good showing, I won’t embarrass you in the manner of my dying.”

  She threw him a fond glance. “You have never embarrassed me,” she said. “You never will, I know.”

  But she went with him.

  Finn and his followers encamped in a ravine amid slabs of massive grey stone. Sentries were posted at either end of the ravine, anticipating some effort on Goll’s part at a surprise attack. Finn crouched beside a small campfire, warming his hands. The night air was chill.

  His thoughts were colder, and darker.

  I did not mean it to come to this, Sive. I honestly did not. Had so much anger been festering between us for so long that we had no other choice?

  But I don’t have to kill him, Sive, do I?

  Finn stood up. He brushed off his hands, very methodically, and began kicking dirt on the fire. Lugaid’s son came to him.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Breaking camp. We’re going to pull out and go back to Almhain.”

  The younger man was distressed. “Without punishing the deserter? I thought that was the point of this exercise! You’d let him kill your favourite dog and do nothing, would you? Sneer at you, laugh at you? Where’s the Finn Mac Cool my father spoke of?”

  The others, overhearing, crowded around, adding their arguments to the dialogue. Everyone seemed to want to go after Goll. Denied the boar hunt, they hungered to hunt a man.

  The old dark chaos rose up in them, demanding.

  Soon enough they were shouting and pounding their spear shafts on the ground. If he were younger, wilder than they, Finn would have roared them into submission. But for some reason, he could not. They would not listen. The yelling and the pounding and the noise went on and on until it lifted him like the crest of a wave, then dropped him back into the dark trough of chaos and madness, and by morning they were hunting Goll Mac Morna in earnest, all of them.

  Hunting him to the death.

  Led by Finn Mac Cool.

  Later, looking back, there was much of it Finn could not remember. He knew the details of that final pursuit only through the tales of the storyspinners, the poems of the bards. There would be many versions, some of them the creations of the men who were with him. Fergus Honey-Tongue would become famous for his.

  But for Finn it would remain an episode shrouded in darkness, a clouded time, like the harrying of Diarmait and Grania. The darkness was relieved by a few brightly lit, specific moments: a skirmish on a cliff top with some of Goll’s men, a spear wound in Red Ridge’s thigh that would ultimately cripple him, three old women of Clan Morna who conspired to mislead Finn and tried to trick some of his men into falling into the sea.

  And Goll. He would remember seeing Goll far ahead of him on the skyline, turning to look back. And himself shouting, “Goll!” And Goll, just for one moment, half-lifting an arm to wave, then turning and fleeing instead. And standing to fight later in a desperate battle Finn would hardly remember at all. The battle took place in a stony field called Corcomrua, and afterward there were more men dead than Finn wanted to think about.

  Goll fought hard for his life at the end of it.

  One night in camp, Oisin approached Finn. He would not meet his father’s eyes, but looked over his head as he spoke. “Do you want me to go to Goll and effect a truce? This is a mad thing we are doing, killing good men. You and he were friends once. Can’t we end it now, before one of you kills the other?”

  Finn’s heart leaped in gratitude. He stood up, wishing to embrace the young man with Sive’s face, but Oisin pulled away before his father could touch him.

  At once Finn drew back as well. “Go and effect a truce it you can,” he said in a formal voice, the order of an officer. “You have my permission.”

  Taking Lugaid’s son and two fíans with him, Oisin made his way through the night to Goll’s camp. But they were not as careful as they should have been. A warrior in one of the fíans made a noise that Goll’s men heard, and a spear was thrown.

  It arced through the night and struck, quivering, into Oisin’s shield.

  The men with him interpreted this as an attempt to kill Finn’s son and fell on Goll’s camp with savage cries. Goll barely escaped with his lite that night.

  So there was to be no truce. Everything conspired against it.

  “I am the hunter, yet I feel like the prey,” Finn confided to Cailte. “I’m being driven into this.”

  “Refuse. Turn around. Go back.”

  But Finn knew that was impossible. He was the commander; duty and obligation demanded he lead, not retreat.

  Men were dying. Men he knew. Sons and foster sons on both sides were slain; blood cried out for blood until the air was thick with the smell of it, and still the hunting and the fighting went on. Goll’s supplies were almost gone.

  Sometimes Finn did not know if it was night or day, or who he w
as fighting or why. When he was least himself, Cailte stayed with him and cared for him, but eventually he would gather his weapons and go on again.

  The old quarrel between Clan Morna and Clan Baiscne had been revived at the rim of the world, with new and younger men carrying on the enmity when older men were gone.

  Against his wish, Goll’s wife stayed with him. She made nothing easier, but she would not leave. In camp she fussed over the wounded and complained of the lack of food, the weariness, the danger. But she stayed.

  One night when Goll could not bear to hear her asking him yet again if he was all right, he slipped away and went down by the riverbank to sleep in peace.

  That same night Finn, tormented by his own thoughts, rose and wandered along the riverbank, seeking some surcease. By the light of the stars he spied a form huddled by itself on a bed of moss. At once he rose onto the balls of his feet and advanced in the Fénian way, soundless.

  He stood silently over the huddled figure and looked down at Goll Mac Morna.

  The one-eyed man lay curled into himself like an infant, with his cloak dragged around his shoulders for warmth. Seen that way, he was smaller than Finn had ever thought him.

  And he was totally vulnerable. His weapons lay beside him. His hand had even slipped from the hilt of the sword he held next to him.

  Finn’s hand strayed to the hilt of his own sword, drew back. He turned, still on the balls of his feet, and moved away.

  The hoarse, familiar whisper floated to him on the night air. “Good style, that, sparing a sleeping enemy. Well done, Finn Mac Cool.

  “But the next time we meet, the circumstances will surely be different, and I advise you to kill me then if you can.”

  Finn froze. His back was toward Goll, but he did not turn around. He knew with perfect certainty Goll would not put a spear in his back.

  He waited until the echoes of the whisper had died, then made his way back to his own camp. Once he got there, he realized he was shaking all over, as with a fever.

  For years he had tried to fight back the chaos, in his head and outside it, in every way he knew. Sometimes he had won. More recently he had lost, and the battles were harder. With Sive beside him, he could have won them, he believed.