Connla looked desperately around. There was no one to advise him; even the druid lay dead and safely out of it.
Then he heard the voice, the soft sigh on the wind.
At first he thought it might be Blathine’s voice, for it was definitely female. But when he concentrated he recognized his mother’s tones, less faint and faraway than they had been when she had spoken to him before.
So Cormac had not been entirely right. There was someone who still remembered him. She was dead too, his mother, but her love lived on and remembered.
I sought to save you, she whispered for his ears alone. I sought to restore you to your own.
“You have done,” he replied, so low that no one else could hear.
Then I can go in peace, the voice said.
“But I am not at peace!” her son protested.
Ah, life is hard ... came the answer, fading, fading.
The voice was gone.
Connla felt horribly alone.
He saw Gerrish looking at him. “I will not desert you,” the little man called out. “I cannot fight for you, but I will not desert you. When you need me you can find me in the cottage of”—he looked up at the plump woman and she said something to him—”of the widow Derforgall.”
So the man who had been Whimsical had no intention of returning to the Isles of the Blest, even if it were possible to do so. He had willingly stepped back into the river of time and would let it carry him. He had made a choice; a very human choice.
Connla felt Cormac’s blade shift slightly beneath his chin. “Will you fight me?” the king asked.
Erin or the Isles of the Blest.
“I have never wanted to be a warrior,” Connla replied. “Nor a king. If the people are happy with your leadership and prosperous under your guidance, I am content to leave things as they are.”
Cormac’s face darkened like the coming of a storm. “Are you saying you refuse to fight me? To give me the satisfaction of proving myself?”
“Why should I fight for something I do not want?”
“Because I want it!” roared Cormac mac Airt. “Enough of this talk. You are trying to confuse me by pretending you have no desire to take my place. But I am not easily confused, Fiery Hair. I have won many battles and planned many strategies, and no matter how clever you are, I am more clever.
“I do not believe you have come here all alone with just one balding dwarf for company. You have an army hidden somewhere. I can almost smell them. Your plan was to gain access to the fort of Usna and then, in the middle of the night, open the gates to your men and take it over. From this stronghold you could have attacked me. But I will not give you the chance; I am too shrewd for you!
“Send for your armies now, and I will send for mine. By first light tomorrow we will meet in this same place and either have a pitched battle or fight one-to-one, I care not which. Either way I will defeat you, Connla.
“And that is a promise.”
He leaped back into the chariot, said a word to his driver, and the team of bay horses reared as the whip cracked over their backs. People scattered to get out of their way. The animals broke into a gallop and the chariot hurtled down the road and out of sight.
The crowd surged back to stare at Connla, to whisper about him, to reach out and touch him as the Sidhe had done when he first arrived on the Isles of the Blest. These people, too, reached out as if they wanted to steal a bit of his magic.
But he did not feel like a possesser of very much magic. He had even begun to wonder if he could, really, defeat Cormac mac Airt in battle. The man looked fit and formidable, and Connla was beginning to feel age seeping into his bones.
How long would he last among mortal men? How quickly would time reclaim him?
“‘Balding dwarf’ indeed!” someone sniffed at his elbow. Gerrish had come up to him, prickling all over with insult. “Perhaps I can learn to fight well enough to at least take a swing at that overpuffed warlord,” he said to Connla. “We have until tomorrow—how quickly can you teach me?”
“There is not going to be a battle,” Connla replied.
“No battle? But Cormac seems determined.”
“Ssshhh. Come away.” Connla plucked at his friend’s cloak and led him a distance apart from the others, who did not follow them but continued to watch curiously.
“When the sun has set we will leave here, Gerrish. We will make our way, under cover of darkness, back towards the west. If we have good fortune we may get all the way to the beach where we left the crystal boat, and set sail for the Isles of the Blest.”
Gerrish frowned. “What do you mean, ‘we’? I thought you understood, I mean to stay here.”
“Even if I leave?”
Gerrish considered his answer for a while, but then replied with certainty. “Travel is tiring and I am not as young as I used to be. If I go back to the Isles of the Blest it will just be the same thing over and over again. At least here, I can expect every day to be different and there will be surprises. I think that the one who calls herself Derforgall will be quite filled with surprises.”
“You will die, you know. Probably very soon.”
“And why not?” Gerrish asked with a shrug.
Connla could think of no answer. “I will bid you farewell now,” he said. “And thank you for your friendship. You have been a grand companion to me as Whimsical and as Gerrish, and if a man has one such friend in a lifetime I think he is well served. I will remember you, whatever happens.”
“Even in the Isles of the Blest?”
“Even in the Isles of the Blest. I do not know if they will take me into the Sidhe, now, and relieve me of memory. But I must try to reach them. I have no choice after all, Gerrish. I am still human, but even humans do not always have choices.”
The little man was moved by the sadness in Connla’s voice. “You could stay with us,” he said. “I could ask Derforgall to hide you in her cottage.”
“I have never been one to slink and hide and I will not begin now.” Connla lifted his head. “I will at least go bravely, in whatever direction I go.”
“Then I wish you well,” said Gerrish. “And I will remember you.”
Connla hesitated. “Perhaps it would be better for me if you did not.”
The day passed, the sun rose and fell, many people came to see the miraculously returned Connla of the Fiery Hair. There was much talk on the Hill of Usna about the upcoming battle between Cormac and Connla. People began choosing sides and talking with excitement about weapons and chariots. The heat of contest ran through them like fire in dry grass, though many might die and many might weep afterward.
No one was left alive who actually remembered Connla, but there were many who had heard stories of him. Some of these brought him food and sat at his feet, begging him to tell them about his adventures.
He found their attention flattering but was reluctant to do as they asked. If he should describe the Isles of the Blest too glowingly, others might wish to go there. Might try to find ways to reach such a paradise, and have to pay a price they could not understand in advance.
But little by little they wheedled some of the story out of him, and once he had begun telling it he could not stop.
More listeners came, until a huge audience was gathered around him, drinking in his every word. Gerrish had long since gone off with Derforgall, mindful that he might have little time left and anxious to make the most of it. Connla sat on a tree stump and talked until his voice was hoarse and the sun sank low in the sky, and people listened and listened, their eyes full of dreams.
When the long twilight began they at last crept away to their own houses, their own snug fires and filled cauldrons, and left Connla of the Fiery Hair alone.
He spread out his coppery cloak and lay on it, looking up at the stars. The night was clear, but he knew this land. Between the batting of his eyelids clouds could scurry over the faces of the stars and rain could begin to fall. Yet he did not build a fire to keep himself warm, nor did
he seek out any roof to shelter him.
This was his homeland, his birthplace. He might never see it again. He wanted to experience it as fully as possible, this one last time.
Time.
Time passed.
Connla did not sleep, but lay with his arms folded behind his head and his ears attuned to the sounds of the night. On the Isles of the Blest there was no night, so the small pipings of the evening insects were never heard, nor the faint music of nightbirds, nor the soft padding of night’s predatory feet as agile killers stalked their prey through grass and woodland. Night had a different smell and a different sound from day, one that Connla had never appreciated before.
He tried to feel it all.
And then the first faint grayness showed in the eastern sky, soon to be replaced by a throb of rose light. Before that sunrise he must be on his way.
Connla was angry with himself for having waited so long. He got up as quietly as possible, shook out the folds of his cloak and wrapped it about himself. Walking on the balls of his feet he slipped away from his place outside the gate. The guards were dozing; they did not see him go.
He moved stealthily, keeping to the shadows, until he was beyond sight of the fort. And then he began to run.
Now he wished for the return of Fiachna’s enchantment, and for feet that could fly like birds. Age was advancing steadily in his bones and he knew if someone saw him and sounded the alarm he could be caught, by even the slowest chariot.
He heard his feet thudding and his breath rasping in his throat. The two together seemed to make such noise he thought everyone must hear it. He pumped his arms and lifted his knees and ran as hard as he could. If someone saw him, he never knew. If an alarm was sounded, he never heard it.
When he could not run anymore, he fell panting into a swale of grass and lay there for a time, trying to get his breath back. Then he crawled on his belly to the edge of the grass and looked back the way he had come.
He saw no one following him. “Thank you for sheltering me,” he said to the grasses.
But they made no answer. Yet, with the perceptions he had carried with him from the Isles of the Blest, he knew he was not alone and found that thought some small comfort.
When he had regained enough strength he went on.
Once more he avoided the scattered settlements he came across as he made his way west. The land was not empty; there were many farmsteads and smallholdings, and trading centers at crossroads, and every evidence of a prosperous way of life. The Erin that Connla sought to leave was surely as rich, in its own way, as the Isles of the Blest he hoped to reach.
I should never have left the first time, he told himself sadly.
But I did not know.
How could I know?
At last he came to the western shore and the dark cliffs he remembered so well from the day of his arrival. He approached them cautiously, almost afraid to look. He could not remember if, in his excitement, he and Whimsical—Gerrish—had moored the boat or not. Perhaps they had just left it bobbing on the tide, free to drift away.
I am not as brave as I thought I was, Connla said to himself.
But at last he went to the edge of the cliff and looked down.
There was no boat waiting at the water’s edge.
He stood for a long time, just staring, as if he could make it appear if he wanted it badly enough. Sea birds called and the dark, sleek head of a seal rose above the surf, but there was no boat to be seen anywhere.
Connla slumped down and leaned his back against a rock. “I am to stay here after all, then,” he said aloud, longing for the sound of a human voice.
He looked at the empty sea and the empty sky and felt empty himself. Where had all the magic gone? The shimmer, the sweetness, the unreal reality? Like youth, it had simply vanished, leaving an aging man behind, with no home and no destination.
“At least I can die,” Connla said. “I have that. What was it my mother called it? Ah, indeed ... the blessing of death. A way to throw off all memories, those that hurt and those that do not.
“Yet my mother came to me after she died, so she had not forgotten everything; she had not forgotten me. Is death as unpermanent here, then, as on the Isles of the Blest?”
Connla looked at the sea again, at the head of the seal coming in closer to land, and for a moment some trick of the light and his own eyes made the seal resemble a human. He thought he saw a face, a friendly smile, and automatically he raised one hand in a wave.
Then it was just a seal again.
Yet for an instant, there had been magic.
Magic in Erin.
“Is Erin really so different from the Isles of the Blest?” Connla wondered aloud.
He resumed staring out at the sea. He was waiting, just waiting, though he did not know what he waited for. To finish getting old and to die, perhaps. He looked down at his hands and saw the freckles on the backs of them. Soon those freckles would spread and become the spots an old man wore, the wide brown blotches of age. If he watched long enough he would see it happen.
But he did not want to see it happen. He looked up once more, westward again, across the sea...
...and saw something in the far distance. A tiny speck, it might be a trading vessel. Or another trick of the eyes.
As he watched, the speck grew larger. His heart was beating hard again, but for no reason. There was nothing unusual about the arrival of a trading vessel on the coast of Erin.
Connla got to one knee and shaded his eyes with his hand.
The dark speck became a recognizable shape. It was indeed a boat of some size, not large enough to carry traders and merchandise, however. A boat with a single mast and a—could it be?—a striped sail.
Connla of the Fiery Hair was on his feet. Through the sheer force of his eyes and his will he drew the boat toward him. Then all at once he flung himself at the edge of the cliff and began scrambling down its side, waving his arms, yelling, slipping and sliding and regaining his balance and plunging on down toward the beach.
Afterword
The Isles of the Blest is based on the ancient Irish tale of Connla of the Fiery Hair, which, according to renowned British folklorist Joseph Jacobs (1854-1916), was “the earliest fairy tale of modern Europe.” It contains an archaic account of one of the most characteristic Celtic conceptions, that of an earthly paradise where heroes fight and die gloriously and live again, and no one ever grows old. This vision so impressed itself on the European imagination of the pre-Christian era that it ultimately appears in the Arthurian cycles as The Vale of Avalon.
But like any paradise, the Irish one has its price. The Isles of the Blest are not easily entered nor easily left. The man who would aspire to such a place must be prepared to face many trials and give up more, eventually, than it is mortally possible to surrender.
The hero of the story in the pagan version was Connla; with the advent of Christianity in Ireland he became known as Ossian and a new element was introduced into the fable. The clash of the old and the new, of paganism and Christianity in the form of St. Patrick, became a feature of the earlier myth.
But without this morality play Connla’s story still depicts a struggle in and for the human spirit, and is a spectacular example of man’s earliest enchantment with the idea of an Otherworld.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1989 by Morgan Llywelyn
Cover design by Open Road Integrated Media
ISBN 978-1-4976-3114-4
This edition published in 2
014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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The Isles of the Blest Page 17
