But even if he killed Goll Mac Morna, he would not win this one. He would lose.
Either way, he would lose.
With a sense of sick despair, he prepared himself to end it.
Goll knew what was coming. After the night on the riverbank, he returned to his camp to tell his remaining followers and his wife good-bye. His men cried openly. He turned his wife to face the sunrise, so he could see its roseate glow give her face one last semblance of youth and beauty as he said, “My curse on the Clan of Baiscne, my blessing on the Clan of Morna. I have fought all my days, and the battles I won are without number. Remember them.
“Woman, take my best tunic with you and go now. You are lovely …” He traced his gnarled and roughened fingers down the side of her seamed cheek, and she seized them and pressed them against her face so her tears could flow over them.
Goll swallowed hard and went on. “When it is over, go to the camp of Finn and ask mercy of him. He is courteous to women. He will not harm you. You may even find, among his rígfénnidi, some strong man who will take you and protect you for the rest of your life, and if you do, I wish you joy of him.”
Goll’s wife was shaking her head in anguished negation. “What man would I wed? Who would I accept after you? It is harder for me to leave you than for you to leave me. From this night forward, I will be heavy-hearted and heavy-footed. I will belong to no man on the surface of the earth.
“Try to save yourself, my husband! If they attempt to starve you, eat the bodies of the dead on the battlefield, but live. Oh, do live!”
He thrust her away from him more violently than he intended. “Take her home,” he ordered his men in a choking voice.
When she was out of his sight, he gathered up his weapons, ate the last pitiful crumbs of food they had left, and set off again, knowing Finn would soon be after him.
For no reason he bothered to articulate to himself, Goll struck off toward the west, hack toward the cliffs above the ocean. Death and sunset and old age and the sea all came together in his mind. It was a fitting place for dying. Such a death would have style, like the swoop and sweep of blades in a beautifully fought battle.
The old one-eyed man smiled slightly as he trotted with the last of his strength toward the rim of the world, where the ocean breakers rolled, white-crested.
Finn’s men had long since slain his horses. His food was gone. He was alone. And in this solitude he found himself strangely content, accepting.
There are worse ways to die, he thought.
Finn also knew it would be the last day. He had already begun grieving for Goll in his heart, even before he caught up with him.
I am forced to do this, Sive; it is my duty to the men who follow me and demand his death.
My duty.
In a haze of pain, Finn followed Goll westward. He held his horse to a walk, forcing his followers to the same pace. There was no need to hurry. Let Goll get to wherever he was going, his chosen place for his final stand.
As they neared the cliffs, Finn understand how Goll wanted it.
I am still learning from him, he thought.
Turning his horse around, he held up his hand to signal a halt. He commanded his officers and men, “Stay here. I want none of you to come with me. This is between himself and myself, and you are not to approach until it is over.”
“A single combat, a battle of champions!” breathed Fergus Honey-Tongue, awed.
“A last meeting between two … friends,” Finn said.
He slid from the horse and handed the rein to Cailte, who was as always close beside him. “See that they obey my order,” he said.
During the day of leisurely pursuit, the sun had passed them and was now edging down toward the sea. Its light made a golden road from the rim of the world back across the water to the land. According to tradition, heroes passed after death along that road to the Land of Everlasting Youth.
Unexpectedly, Finn felt as if a dark cloud was beginning to lift from his spirit. Like the merry boy he had once been, he could see something ridiculous about the situation: two old men battering at one another like a pair of fighting dogs past the age for fighting, toothless and grizzled, comic and pathetic.
He wondered if Goll could see it too.
Silhouetted on the edge of the cliff ahead of him was a single dark figure. Finn blinked, reminded of a deer above a pool. But when he blinked a second time, he saw it was a man.
Goll Mac Morna lifted his arm to wave, completing the gesture he had aborted earlier. “Finn!” he called almost cheerfully.
“Goll.” Finn advanced slowly. He could see that Goll was drawing his sword. He paused to take Son of the Waves from its scabbard. He went forward again, carrying the weapon in front of him almost like a cupbearer with an offering.
When they were three strides apart, he stopped. He worked his throat, trying to summon a battle cry. Nothing happened. His mouth was dry.
“How can I kill you?” he croaked despairingly to the man who had his back to the setting sun.
Goll studied Finn’s face. He found no hatred there, no lust for vengeance; only regret.
“How can you not?” he replied in a hoarse whisper.
Finn did not move.
Goll waited.
The sun sank imperceptibly lower.
“Lift your sword in your two hands,” directed Goll Mac Morna.
Finn shifted weight slightly.
“Lift your sword, I say!” Goll cried in the tone of a man accustomed to being obeyed.
Finn lifted the sword.
Goll removed his bronze helmet. He fingered the worn leather chin strap almost lovingly before tucking the helmet beneath his arm. “Now strike, Finn. A mighty blow the poets will retell for centuries.” He stood with neck bared for the blade.
Finn raised the sword higher, then froze. His eyes glittered wetly.
“Strike now!” roared the unmistakable, irresistible bellow of command, the voice of a Rígfénnid Fíanna.
Finn brought the sword down in a great whistling arc.
His tears blinded him. The blow was not a clean decapitation as he intended, but glanced off Goll’s bony shoulder, sending up a spray of blood as it skidded across the collarbone.
Goll made no sound, delivered no counterblow. He simply tumbled backward over the cliff.
Finn leaped to the edge. Goll’s body was rolling down the steep face, rebounding from projecting ledges, twisting and turning on its way to the white foam of the sea.
Finn stared down. He had fulfilled his obligation at last. His oldest obligation.
Revenge.
Revenge.
You are revenged, Cuhal Mac Trenmor. Father.
But Cuhal had never been a father to him.
The nearest thing he had to a father had been Goll Mac Morna.
Finn felt empty. Burned out, scooped out, hollow.
Then into that void flooded the greatest loneliness he had known in his life.
33
FINN RETURNED TO HIS MEN, CARRYING A DENTED OLD bronze helmet by its worn leather strap. He spoke to no one, but took the rein of his horse from Cailte, mounted, and turned the animal’s head east, toward Almhain.
His men followed him in sombre silence. When it was too dark to go farther, they stopped and made camp.
Finn slept by himself, far from the fire.
Cailte kept an eye on him but said nothing to him. Oisin also said nothing to his father. He avoided him as he would avoid something rotten. “I follow the commander because I am sworn to,” he said through gritted teeth to Lugaid’s son, “but I am no kin to that liar and murderer who calls himself Finn Mac Cool.”
He never knew if Finn heard him. Nor did he care.
Finn did not go to Tara, but sent Cailte there for him to relate the manner of Goll’s dying. Cailte reported it in simple syllables to Cairbre, who was obviously angered. “Finn has killed a better man than himself out of pure spite and jealousy!” he complained.
Fergus accompanie
d Cailte to Tara and recited his own colourful version of that last pursuit and battle to all who would listen. The historians discounted it, but the common people swallowed it whole and repeated it with delight.
Finn did not tell anyone what had transpired on the edge of the sea. When he reached Almhain, he wanted only to go to bed and pull the covers over him.
But Grania would not hear of it. She saw his haggard face and bloodshot eyes and had no mercy. She started on him at once, urging him to do this and that, complaining about the other, her voice an irritant that forced its way into his mind like sand shifting between cracks of stone and wearing down the surfaces.
She never criticized Finn to others. Grania was a king’s daughter, and her father had been the ultimate supporter of the law. She gave Finn not the slightest reason for setting her aside as wife, not the slightest reason under the law.
But she had her revenge in full measure. Loyal, loving, devoted Grania. who had forgiven her lover’s killer and so was admired by everyone, tormented Finn to the fullest in ways only he and she knew.
“Finn, don’t just sit there! The limewash on the walls is badly stained and you know the men will obey only yourself. Get someone out there or we will no longer be known as Almhain of the White Walls.
“Finn, those wretched hounds of yours are quarrelling again and Caurag can’t seem to do anything with them. Go at once and stop them. I have the most dreadful headache.
“Finn, since Donn left you, no one can prepare food my stomach will accept. You have to find someone for me, I can hardly cook my own food, I’m the daughter of a king!”
She goaded and prodded until they snapped angrily at one another from dawn until dark, but she always kept her actions within those permitted by the law. She supported him before others. She never denied him her bed, though he no longer sought it.
When he was at Almhain, he began sleeping outside on the ground in all weathers, making his bed of branches in the old way. He could lie in the quiet night and if there were no clouds, look at the stars.
But he was less and less frequently at Almhain. He spent his time with the Fíanna, or with what the Fíanna was becoming, and there too he had little sense of being at home.
Loneliness bit deep into him. Even Cailte’s company did not relieve it. “I seem to be growing morose with age,” he once admitted to the thin man.
“Och, not at all. You’ve just been through a bad time.”
“My whole life,” Finn replied, knowing it was not true.
He did not know what was true. When people asked him to tell of his adventures, he told increasingly florid tales, piling exaggeration upon exaggeration because that seemed to be what they wanted to hear.
Oisin was silently, icily scornful. “Finn Mac Cool is an echoing cave,” he told his wife. “The man is empty, he has no heart. All he contains is a lie.”
Finn returned to Almhain at the end of a battle summer marked by frequent bloody skirmishes on Cairbre’s behalf, arguments Cormac would have resolved by negotiation. He was weary beyond measure, but knew Grania would give him no peace. Still, he must be seen to keep Almhain as his stronghold. He really had no other.
He entered his dwelling to find Cormac’s daughter busily directing her servants in yet another refurbishment and rearrangement All the familiar furnishings were gone, even cook pots and benches that had been there since the place was new.
Grania wanted everything different.
“Where’s my favourite bench?” Finn asked, looking around.
“Burned,” was the crisp reply. “A leg was broken and the seat was a mass of splinters.”
“The seat was worn smooth by my rump, and it fitted me.”
“You’re mistaken.” She turned her back on him and went on ordering the servants.
Finn, head down, wandered out of doors. He drifted aimlessly across the footbeaten earth, wondering if it was worth fighting about.
Probably not.
What was worth fighting about?
Probably nothing.
He did not notice Oisin. enter through the gateway, glance coldly at his father, then turn and go in the opposite direction. But he did hear Crania’s carrying voice escape the confines of his lodge and come to him like a knife to the brain. “Throw out that and that and that,” she was saying. “Take it all away. Throw it out on the midden where you put those smashed pots and baskets and that broken comb.”
Finn stopped walking. He felt as if a cold wave flooded over him.
“What broken comb?” he said aloud to no one.
What had Grania found in her relentless emptying of his house?
He reached to his throat, found the worn leather thong and followed it down to the crane-skin neck bag, thin with decades of abrasion against his chest, under his clothing.
With fingers that trembled, he opened the bag and drew out his own comb. His broken half of a comb carved of bone and snapped in two long ago while taking the tangles from a woman’s hair.
If Grania had found a broken comb, it must be the other half.
Sive’s half.
Somehow lost and overlooked all these years in the accumulating rubble of a Gaelic fort.
He knew this with as much certainty as he knew the weather and the shape of the hills.
“Sive!” he cried in sudden agony.
Like a young man, he sprinted across the open space toward the midden heap beyond the stables. He flung himself upon it, digging furiously. He tossed aside broken vessels and scraps of food and gnawed knuckle bones and wicker baskets too frayed for use. He dug like a hound seeking a choice morsel. He dug with a frenzy he had not felt in years.
Coming around the corner of the stables, Oisin was startled to see his father there, grubbing in the rubbish. Had the man finally gone completely and permanently out of his head?
From a sense of duty rather than love, Oisin hurried toward him. But just as he reached Finn, his father seized a fragment from the midden and held it aloft in triumph.
A radiant smile lit the face of Finn Mac Cool.
“It’s hers!” he cried.
Then he realized Oisin was beside him.
He twisted his body to hold up the comb so the younger man could see it. “This was your mother’s,” he said in a voice softened by love. “It was mine once, Just after you were born I used it to comb her hair for her—her hair was so thick and heavy—and the comb snapped in two. She kept this half for herself and used it ever after. I thought it had vanished with her, Oisin, but she’s left it here for me to find, to have, to keep. She’s left it here for me!”
Finn drew a deep breath then. The light in his eyes was not mad, but sane. “She left me this comb … and you,” he told Oisin.
“My mother’s comb?”
“Indeed. Here. Take it.” Finn pressed it into Oisin’s hand.
What a tenuous connection with the past, the younger man thought, turning it over in his palm. Yellowed with the years, the carving worn dim along its spine, it still showed clearly where the fracture had taken place. When he held it up to the sunlight, he discovered a few strands of hair caught in the teeth.
My mother’s hair.
Hair the exact colour of a red deer’s coat.
Sive had not been real to him until that moment. She had been one of Finn’s wild tales, magical entertainments that became increasingly discredited as he grew older and lost faith in Finn.
Now he held her comb in his hand. Now he was looking at her hair.
Finn was musing aloud, “So many women have been in the fort since then, changing it to suit themselves. So many people coming and going. Yet no one found the comb before, isn’t that extraordinary? It wasn’t found until now. Now when I need it most.” His voice caught in his throat. “But that’s Sive. She always has been magic.”
She always has been magic. Oisin lifted his gaze from the comb and met his father’s eyes.
In them was wildness and sanity and total belief. In them was magic.
Re
luctantly, Oisin held out the comb. “You may have this back now,” he said.
Finn closed his fingers over his son’s hand, trapping the comb in Oisin’s palm. “You keep it to remember her by,” he said. “I have you.”
Their eyes held. A great bubble rose in Oisin’s chest, threatening to cut off his breath. It made an aching at the base of his throat. He closed his eyes for a moment.
Then he said, “Indeed, Father. You have me.”
Oisin did not return to his own fort and family until ice glittered on the bog pools below the Hill of Almhain. Instead, he found himself increasingly shouldering many of the responsibilities Finn was increasingly willing to shed. It was Oisin who saw to the winter’s provisioning of Almhain, assigned housing for the season’s guests, tested applicant for the Fíanna, led the hunt in search of game.
Finn was still Rígfénnid Fíanna and did what was required of him, but he was inclined at the end of the day to wander off across the bog, living in some reality of his own.
When Finn did not return until extremity late one night, it was Oisin. who, quite unintentionally, overheard Crania berating him in private as she never would in public.
The next morning Oisin called on Crania in her lodge and gave her a tongue-lashing such as he had never given anyone. For many nights thereafter, she walked softly around Finn and his son both.
“You’re a good son to hint,” Cailte told Oisin approvingly.
“I wasn’t.”
“That was then and this is now,” said the thin man.
When Oisin knew he must stay at Almhain no longer, but return to his own family, he made his preparations with mixed feelings. Cailte and the other old companions of Finn’s held a last feast in his honour in the old Fénian way, building a huge fire outside the walls of Almhain to keep from setting thatched roofs afire, and cooking enough meat to feed half an army, or so Fergus claimed.
Through they would not eat until after sunset, the cooking went on all day. Grania, who was not eager to cross swords with Oisin again, stayed within the walls and let the men do everything in their own way.
Finn Mac Cool Page 50
