by Tom O'Neill
The night went no better than the previous one, with a small number of Fianna killed, many injured and a great deal of energy and spirit drained away from people. Dawn again brought respite.
Goll said, ‘We can’t go on like this. They only have to kill or wound a handful of us for every hundred of them we cut down, and we will still lose over time.’
Conán said, ‘If we follow your plan, that will be a very short time.’
‘If I was leading again,’ said Goll very slowly and deliberately, ‘we’d be down there sorting them out right now. That’s all I’ll say for now.’
‘We’re not going down among them Goll,’ said Mac Cumhaill.
By the third morning, many of the volunteers were starting to look weak. They were not ready for such adversity. Goll now had a few other men behind him when he again came to Mac Cumhaill. This time he was demanding that a daytime attack be made.
‘We can’t go down,’ said Fionn. ‘You and I might survive it, but many others here wouldn’t. Tired legs in soft ground will just make us easy for them to harvest.’
‘If we had gone down when I first said it, we wouldn’t have had so many tired legs,’ said Goll, with his hairless head reddening.
‘We wouldn’t have had so many legs at all,’ said Conán, always ready to spring to Mac Cumhaill’s defence.
‘We can’t go on like this. Working hard and going nowhere. It’s stupid,’ shouted Goll, pushing his face up close to Conán’s. ‘There isn’t a single one of them dead yet.’
Mac Cumhaill pushed them apart and held Goll by the neck, the old anger momentarily clouding his mind. His hand was on the handle of his dagger. Conán’s sword was already drawn. All of Goll’s defenders stepped back. But then the gods must have intervened.
‘Indeed there are – thirteen of them,’ came a voice.
They all looked around. It was the boy.
‘I thought I sent you home,’ said Diarmuid, glad of someone else to vent the anger and frustration on.
A woman rushed forward, saying, ‘You don’t speak harshly to my nephew. His load is already more than his share.’
‘What did you say, lad?’ asked Mac Cumhaill, and turning back to Diarmuid, ‘Who is this boy?’
The boy was led up the hill to Mac Cumhaill.
The woman took Mac Cumhaill aside and said to him, ‘When he was only four he saw a pirate crew raid his fishing village. Most of his people were murdered. My sister and her husband included, may Daghda treat them kindly. Others dragged away as slaves. Four days later he was found still hiding in the fox den that had protected him. He has been with me since. He rarely talks but mostly he is well and happy. Except that whenever there is a battle anywhere in the country, big or small, he disappears. At first I thought he was so fearful that he would go into hiding like a dog at the sound of thunder. Only recently he told me that he always goes to the fighting rather than hiding from it. He finds cover behind rocks or bushes. He has a spell upon him that forces him to witness every horror. He believes that if he forces himself to watch and record, he will one day somehow prevent worse things happening and that day his spell will be broken.’
Mac Cumhaill thanked the lady, saying, ‘Maybe this is the day.’
Then he went back and looked at the boy. ‘What did you mean, son?’
‘Thirteen of them are dead. Look over there. And there, and out beyond there.’ He started pointing to places in the bog-water, and sure enough, he was right. Amongst the rushes it looked like there were bodies of the buan Ó Lochlainns that were still lying there.
‘What do we want with the advice of a garsún?’ fumed Goll, a man who regarded any threat to his point of view as a threat to himself. ‘They’ll be up soon, and back with the others.’
‘The fighting stopped hours ago,’ said Mac Cumhaill, ‘and those certainly have the look of men who are in no hurry to come back into this world.’
‘Well, that’s no good to us. So few of them. Maybe they were killed by their own and that’s why they’re not bothering to get up.’
‘Any fewer is progress,’ said Conán. ‘And I certainly didn’t set eyes on them turning on their own.’
‘It was dark, you big stuachán,’ said Goll. ‘We couldn’t see well what was going on beyond the bottom of the eiscir. This is no good to us, because even if it happens that we did kill them, we don’t know how.’
Conán was heading for Goll again now and the atmosphere was not good. Many soldiers were looking on, confused.
‘Four times,’ said the boy.
‘Whisht!’ shouted Mac Cumhaill at Conán and Goll. ‘Listen to this.’
‘On the fourth time you kill them, their bodies lie down drained of life, the same as any other poor creature that’s been hacked and broken down by sword or axe,’ said the boy.
Everyone was silent now. Nobody cross-questioned him. Not even Goll. There was a certainty in his voice that told anyone with an ear to listen that the boy had been paying close attention, absorbing every cruel slash and blow, silently watching every soldier who fell. The horrible reality of it all was in the boy’s eyes.
After a silent while, Mac Cumhaill quietly said, ‘Good enough. That’s the way, then.’
The defenders were gathered and the situation was explained to them.
‘Here is the story,’ said Mac Cumhaill with a laugh, ‘we only have to be about twelve times as good as them.’
One man was sent along the eiscir to spread this news to the groups all along its length.
Under normal circumstances, such news would have seemed a fearsome challenge. But that day it was news that lifted spirits. The bickering and dread evaporated. The people became of one purpose again. People slept well and gained new strength and resolve for the night.
A bitter wind took up that night and carried driving sleet. It seemed to get worse with every buan that was permanently dispatched to a place beyond resurrection. Even the top of the ridge turned to muck. When day came the cruel weather continued and nobody could keep warm or sleep properly. Fionn ordered that all of the older people be sent home, as there was coughing and sickness starting to spread. The relentless harshness of the skies was becoming as much of a danger to their lives as the invaders’ blades. Despite all that, the people fought with great heart. Having looked into annihilation there was no discomfort that could break their spirits.
It went on for twenty more nights. By then several good men of the Fianna had been taken away dead or injured but more than half of the buan Ó Lochlainns were lying in the bog, killed four times, never to stir again. They were clearly losing now, but they showed no signs of a change of strategy or a retreat. They never shouted or laughed or cried. They just made the same grunting noise all of the time, traipsing through the cold, wet gory mess below, to come up the hill again and again. Every single fight was ferocious and bitter. If this went on, it wasn’t going to end until every one of them was dead.
Early on the twenty-first night, when the fighting had just resumed, Mac Cumhaill took a look at the weary, hunched soldiers along the eiscir trying to fight bravely despite the relentless, driving rain and waves of buans still undeterred. He decided to try to bring an end to it. On the rare occasions that the moon glimmered through the clouds, he had noticed one of the buans that never stirred from beneath a sceach bush a bit back from the base of the eiscir. Mac Cumhaill was inclined to think that he was a leader of some sort. Of course, he might simply have been elderly or injured, as there were no obvious differences from the other grey men.
He himself was tired and didn’t want a long discussion. The others would have tried to stop him on the basis that his plan was at least as likely to leave the Fianna without a leader as it was to leave the buans without one.
His plan was not a complicated one. He was going to head down into the bog to bring the fight to this particular buan and see how his brethren might appreciate that.
Mac Cumhaill came over the brow of the hill and started to head down towards the
sceach bush. Several of the warriors came at him, seeing what he was doing. But he slashed out in every direction and mercilessly cut down any of them that came within range. When he got to the bush, he gained more confidence in his theory that the sceach buan indeed had every appearance of being an eminent member of this heinous mob. The unnatural beast had a sharp hook in one hand and a sword with a very long dancing blade in the other. Conán and Fiachra now saw and followed, keeping other buans away from Mac Cumhaill as he engaged their leader.
‘Give up now,’ said Mac Cumhaill, ‘and we will let you and your remaining men go home in peace.’
The answer from the ghost leader was a lightning-fast strike from the long blade, which almost seemed to move on its own guidance. In an instant, the sleet stopped and the clouds parted fully for the first time since the battles had started. The full moon that was revealed shone light on every detail. The warriors from both sides stopped their own bloody contests and stood watching. Mac Cumhaill put his head down barely in time to save it. He was not slow to violence in these situations and as the long blade was completing its empty swing, Mac Cumhaill’s sword was shearing the ghost chief ’s sneery head from his torso. Within seconds it was back and Mac Cumhaill had it off again. The creature became angry now and stood back, flailing in every direction. Mac Cumhaill came back at him, avoiding every swing. The leader retreated towards a pile of boulders. As he did, Fionn Mac Cumhaill’s sword pierced a third fatal message through his back into his heart. He fell and arose again. He started running away faster. Mac Cumhaill hesitated. It did occur to him that if he let him go now he would lead his buans away, for fear of losing his own last miserable life. That is what should have happened. Instead Mac Cumhaill allowed his anger to overcome him. He followed behind the rocks out of view of everyone else.
Unfortunately, the ghost leader was not enthusiastic about dying altogether and decided against a fair contest for his fourth life. He had stopped on the other side of one of the boulders and was waiting for Mac Cumhaill to come running. He skillfully tripped Mac Cumhaill with his hook in such a way that he fell onto the upturned long sword.
Fionn Mac Cumhaill let out a terrible groan as the blade went straight through his side. Everyone in the place heard it. But he still had strength and struck the final blow against the ghost leader, who was defenceless as he tried to pull back his long sword from Mac Cumhaill’s oozing wound. Quietness fell across the land. All of the ghost soldiers became confused. They started falling slowly back. They must have known their leader was not emerging from behind those stones.
Many on the Fianna side were equally afraid of what they might see behind those boulders. They had all heard Mac Cumhaill’s cry. There had been no sound coming from there since then. No sign of Mac Cumhaill rising up to give his famed signal that this saga was finally closed. The weary and bereaved did not see what they so badly wanted: Mac Cumhaill holding his cherished spear above his head and quietly proclaiming a return to civilised ways.
Indeed, for most of the people, the troubles with the buans were past. But for Mac Cumhaill himself and for some of his loyal followers, even harsher trials were still to come.
Behind the rocks there was only one body. That belonged to the leader of the buan Ó Lochlainns. There was no sign of Mac Cumhaill, though there was a lot of blood spilled. It was a sorry sight.
At first no one spoke. Conán kicked the body of the ghost leader. Then a soldier by the name of Féilim Ó Broinn wailed loudly, ‘Go bhfóire Daghda orainn, surely the great man is dead.’
‘Go easy, man,’ said Diarmuid. ‘You don’t know that.’
‘Oh, for certain, for certain,’ another person, one of the volunteers, joined in the wailing. ‘Oh how boundless is our loss!’
‘Where are the bounds of his body then?’ said Conán.
‘Oh,’ says Ó Broinn, a man more dramatic than analytical, crying hysterically now, ‘sure he must have been dragged away by some fierce wolves.’
Conán started waving his fist at Ó Broinn.
‘Shut your gob, you amadán. How many wolves would it take to drag a man that size? And what are you howling about, anyway? Sure you hardly even knew Fionn Mac Cumhaill.’
‘Oh, he’s a great loss to us all,’ continued Ó Broinn. ‘The whole nation will be lost in mourning.’
‘I’ll give you a reason to cry,’ said Conán, now in an uncontrollable rage. He started hitting Ó Broinn very hard around the mug and chest and anywhere he could land a punch or a kick. Ó Broinn was on the ground in a minute and it took five men to hold Conán back from knocking the man out altogether.
Diarmuid called for the boy, guessing that he was still somewhere on the battleground, even though Mac Cumhaill had sent him home again. Sure enough, he came forward from a cluster of rushes when he was called.
‘What do you think, son?’ asked Diarmuid.
‘I didn’t see.’
‘All the same, what is it that you are thinking?’
‘He’s alive,’ said the boy. ‘You must look for him.’
‘Thank you,’ said Diarmuid.
Few people heard what the boy said. The words of Ó Broinn were the ones that swept around the country like a mountain fire.
As for Mac Cumhaill, while all this was going on he was already far away. One minute he was pressing a potion from his purse into the wound left by the long blade and trying to stand up to call for help; the next, he was lying on a heap of stones in a cold, grey world being kicked and prodded with spears by a circle of buans that surrounded him. In an instant he had somehow been taken, along with the retreating buansoldiers, to the bleak world of the buan Ó Lochlainns, where an abominable fate awaited him.
He tried to sit up and look around. Everywhere, shades of grey. Thousands of these soldiers stood in every direction. No women or children anywhere in the landscape. This was their horrendous world and they were his new masters.
At first he didn’t fight them, because he had no strength and in truth his mind was not in a great state. He put his thumb in his mouth and all he saw was greater confusion. He was reasonably sure he hadn’t died. But wherever he was now, it wasn’t earth. It didn’t seem like there would be anywhere for him to run even if he could muster the strength to clobber some of these foul oafs.
That day, nine of them dragged him to a low, grey castle and pulled him down many steps to a dungeon, which was to be his sleeping quarters. He tried to bandage his wound with what was left of his tunic and then tried to rest. But he was hardly there an hour, lying still, bleeding on the wet stone floor, when he heard the door being banged open. He couldn’t see a thing because it was as dark out in the passage as in the dungeon. As he soon learned, the buans saw best in black darkness. Their kicks, which he couldn’t even see coming, landed very accurately on his head and groin.
At first he thought they were enraged at him for killing their big man and that he was being dragged out to be tortured and killed. But he soon learned they bore no particular grudges. The fierce kicking and beating was just an idle pastime with the oafs. From the other underground chambers they were pulling many other people and peculiar creatures of all sorts, creatures taken from other worlds, Mac Cumhaill assumed, and kicking and beating them all just as savagely as they did him. Instead of killing him they were dragging him off to work their grey lands. This was going to be his daily routine.
They only fed him a small handful of some kind of black porridge, spilled on the floor of his dungeon every night. On that feed, they demanded forty hours of labour every long day in their world. Because he was bigger than their other captives, they set him to pulling a plough through their hard black soil and when that was all done, he was set to lifting huge boulders so they could extend the walls of the castle. His strength became a curiosity for them and they would gather around as they set him ever harder tasks: digging wells, splitting boulders, pulling loads that their horses weren’t able to pull. He completed all tasks rather than appeal to them for any leniency. Wit
hout reacting, he endured whipping on his back till it was bare of skin.
He kept some composure by patiently observing them, counting how many were about the castle at any time, watching for weaknesses in the way they defended, taking note of the regular bad-tempered fights that broke out between them, and estimating which of the other captives he might be able to get to rise up with him. He observed the other peculiar slaves going about, planting, building and washing things for the buans, who seemed incapable of anything other than hitting and grunting. He was trying to make contact with a few of the others, who nodded to him in greeting, and he was waiting for some inspiration on how to escape this woeful place.
Day and night, he would sing as loud as he could, songs of home. During the day, songs of war and songs of triumph. At night he had time for sorrow and regrets, and the old songs of grief and lament would not stay off his tongue.
In the beginning, somewhere in the back of his mind, he thought that he would have only a few days of this. He believed his people would not rest till they found out where he was and came to collect him.
But then, after some weeks or months – he had no idea of time there – Mac Cumhaill felt a dark despair start to creep into his soul. He was losing his fight with it. No matter how loudly he sang. Although at that stage he assumed everyone would continue looking for him, he began to lose hope that they might ever be able to find a way to him. Also, his strength to plan insurrection was waning. The buans seemed to be in great supply and his fellow captives were so crushed that few looked like they had the energy to lift a sword let alone strike a buan down four times. And besides, there was nowhere to flee to.
These thoughts began to consume him. His spirit began to fail. As he worked on the tiny amounts of food, his weakening mind started to be followed by his body.
