Old Friends: The Lost Tales of Fionn Mac Cumhaill

by Tom O'Neill

  ‘Here, I have a job for you, Dark,’ Cash said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Since you are out here doing nothing only scratching yourself all day, you might as well take this yoke and follow the two thirty-five for me.’

  He pushed an iPhone into Dark’s hand.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Are you feckin’ dumb? Didn’t I say to you what I want? Take this feckin’ thing in your hands and watch the two thirty-five at Newcastle. And if Donder wins you can give me a thumb signal through the door of the class. I have a few bob on him and I might buy you a lollipop if he wins,’ he sneered.

  Cash doing the big man again. Just wanting to talk loud and let the others know his father was letting him back horses now. Dark took the thing though. Partly because he hadn’t played with an iPhone before and it was much nicer than his own phone.

  Unfortunately, after messing around with it a bit, he heard some commotion outside and forgot all about it. In the first place, he missed the race. But worse still, he had it in his hand when Magill came up the corridor. The principal got in such a rage at the sight of Dark tuned into horse-racing while he was supposed to be suffering that he hit the thing out of Dark’s hands and it fell to the ground. They both looked down. The screen was gone blank.

  ‘That wasn’t mine and I’ll be in trouble if it’s broken,’ said Dark.

  ‘Oh, in trouble, eh? Well, that’s very touching.’ Magill bent down and picked up the thing and put it back in Dark’s hand and walked off saying, ‘Still, maybe it’ll teach you to take better care of other people’s things.’

  Cash came out at the end of school, already in a rage because he had had no signal through the glass door of the classroom. Then Dark gave him back the iPhone and said, ‘It’s broken. I’m sorry about that.’

  That was all.

  He knew where Cash would be waiting for him on the way out. To show off to an audience you had to be predictable. There was a thick elder bush that he always hung around so everyone could see him go for a smoke after school. Dark decided to walk out the road. He didn’t want them to see him getting in his mammy’s car to get away from Cash. And he didn’t want her to arrive at the wrong time and see Cash on his case, and then have her getting on his case about what was going on and trying to take it up with the school and such. He didn’t get very far, though.

  Cash came running behind him and he just turned in time to catch the first dig on the side of his face. He fended off some of the hits and kicks. At least Cash seemed fairly clumsy and none of the blows were very hard. A crowd surrounded them in seconds. One box landed on his ear and it stung. He got mad for a second and kicked out. He made what felt like a very good contact with Cash’s thigh. Cash grimaced and stepped back a bit and then kept his arms sweeping in Dark’s general direction until a car slowed down and a man shouted, ‘Hey, you lads, go on home, will ye, and don’t be acting the maggot on the road.’

  ‘Let that be a lesson to you, Dark,’ said Cash. ‘You don’t screw around with the Cashman.’

  When he had gone away, Dark tried to straighten himself out a bit. He looked at his rucksack with its broken strap on the side of the road and all the books scattered everywhere. He left them there and started walking back to the car park entrance-way where his mother would normally collect him from.

  Tadhg gathered his few books and copybooks and came running after Dark with the rucksack.

  ‘Here you go, Art, bud. Cash might be ignorant, but he isn’t usually such a pig. Don’t know what got into him. Are you hurt?’

  ‘No, I’m grand,’ said Dark.

  That wasn’t quite true, but on the other hand, he wasn’t too sore. No worse than when he would take a few knocks in a game of hurling, back when he played.

  If his mother noticed, she didn’t say anything.

  When Dark got to the rath that night, he made no mention of any of this. He was tired of talking or thinking about school things and just wanted to be away.

  ‘How does life find you on this very lovely evening?’ asked the Old Man.

  ‘Alright,’ said Dark.

  ‘I always found it best to approach a very good day with suspicion,’ said the Old Man, ‘because such days often have an unpleasant surprise or two in store.’

  Other than the girl with the goblet, Dark noticed very few little people present tonight. Only Conán, the Old Man and the red-haired lady sat with him at the fire.

  ‘There were two rotten surprises indeed,’ the Old Man started, ‘two bad eggs that crossed paths one time. In this case, though, one of them turned out to be definitely a fair bit worse than the other. Since Bal is away with most of the little people tonight at a Bealtaine festival in the north of the country, I can tell you this one.’

  Bad and worse

  Balor was a little red-faced lad. A fear dearg. He may have got both the name and his bad temper because he had lost the use of one eye in a row with a crow when he was trying to steal her eggs.

  He was considered small even by other púcas. And that was saying something, because it was widely known that it was the smallest men amongst the little people who were more likely to turn to the mischievous ways of a púca. He was also considered unpleasant even by other púcas. Not a trivial observation, considering that being troublesome was a matter of boastful honour amongst púcas.

  Balor was foul-mouthed. He was contrary. He was a bad-tempered prickly fellow who never tried to tame the tides of anger that overcome everyone from time to time. He liked spreading misery. He was inclined to steal. Whenever he visited a house, the family he visited would always be poorer after he left. He’d have taken eggs. Or a freshly-baked cake. Or whatever nice thing the family had been looking forward to. What was worse, they might find the stolen thing thrown in the ditch the next day, for it was known that Balor stole more for annoyance than out of need.

  People hated the sight of Balor, though they didn’t often see him in person. He was very fond of the form of a slightly fat badger. And it must be said that he certainly didn’t do the reputation of that solid, shy family any good at all. It got to the point that whenever people spotted a gentleman of the badger clan wandering around in broad daylight or sniffing about in places they thought no real badger would ever visit, people would say, ‘Shut your doors. The little red fairy man who would steal the sugar out of your tea or the white out of your eye is abroad.’

  And mischief was indeed his main satisfaction. When he couldn’t annoy people by stealing, he would annoy them by playing unsavoury tricks. When he was hanging around at night he might decide, for no good reason, to scare the daylights out of a herd of cows by making a perfect imitation of a warble fly, so that the farmer might only find them days later, still with their tails in the air, many miles away. Or he might spend a whole night tying knots in sheep’s wool so that the farm family might have to spend weeks trying to undo the thousands of odd-looking plaits that his nimble little fingers had created on their animals’ backs. And of course, as they worked hard trying to undo the damage, they would often hear the wicked chuckle from the bushes and rabbit burrows nearby.

  The trick that won him the greatest dislike was when he tampered with a good well, making the water go brown or giving it a smell of rotten flesh. Many’s the person who seriously said, ‘May the curses of all the gods and all the powers of the otherworld fall heavily upon that mouldy little cur’. But these prayers never seemed to bring Balor a bit of harm.

  Nobody was safe. Balor was as likely to annoy the powerful as he was the poor. One morning at a dwelling near Tara where Cormac was staying, there was a howl of disgust from Cormac’s breakfast table. Servants came running to see what was wrong. The first of his three eggs had given off a horrendous pong when cracked. Rotten through. Not good, but explainable. Maybe someone had allowed one of the younger children to collect the eggs and they’d found an old nest, as children are good at doing. But then when he opened the second egg and found it empty and the third and found cab
bage in it, everyone knew immediately.

  ‘Curses on Balor, that hairy little red rat-dropping, may his blood turn lumpy!’ bellowed Cormac. ‘If I get my hands on him I’ll kick him to the tops of the trees and let him live with the crows.’

  At around the time that Balor was at his worst, a stranger arrived in Dunmore. He was a gaunt, crooked man with a very pale complexion and hungry eyes. He introduced himself as Saile. Though nobody knew it, Saile was a wizard with a lot of history behind him, none of it good. In the country he’d come from, he was considered to be of the lowest character. He had heard somewhere that there was a lot of gold in Éire and that it wasn’t very closely guarded – it was a substance that never helped the pot to boil and showing it off was considered by many in Éire as a mark of folly. Only the dead wore it.

  Saile had seen lands far to the east where gold in any form could buy him the wives, fine clothes and great mansions that he fancied. He had started collecting gold many decades ago. He had long since acquired more than would buy him every mansion in those faraway lands. He was supposed to have stashes of it buried in many remote corners of marshland in faraway countries. But his interest in the mansions and the estates that it could gain him had long been overtaken by his desire to just go on grabbing more gold. Any method for gaining more gold, hard or easy, was of interest to him. Naturally, easy was preferable to him, since it involved less risk of him getting hurt. He had been lying low for several years, hatching his plan for acquiring easy gold in Éire.

  In his first months in Dunmore, he pretended to be a simple traveller. He would move from place to place taking meals that were offered generously by the hospitable people of the countryside. He would chat away with families as they sat eating their meals, talking about the weather and the crops. And he would listen to them and their neighbours who might ramble in to them in the evening for a chat. He was thought peculiar because he never smiled. Nevertheless, hospitality would be extended, as was customary, even to the least pleasant visitors. A bed would be made up for him in the straw. Next morning, he would move on without a word of farewell or thanks. Meanwhile, all he was trying to do was to get to know the country and, what was most important, he was trying to find an accomplice. He needed someone as bad and as greedy as himself to help gather the gold and get it quickly away.

  One long summer’s evening he was standing under a tree with a group of men in Loígis. The men were taking a small drink after a hot day of haymaking. They gladly shared the cake and cider with the traveller. The talk was free and easy. Saile’s ears pricked up when talk turned to stories of Balor.

  ‘Oh, that little vagabond!’ said one man. ‘He whispered some spell in my donkey’s ear and from that day onwards, the donkey will only walk backwards.’

  ‘That’s nothing,’ said another. ‘He knows no limits. He has no fear. He stole all the garments and sacred stones belonging to my cousin, Fenagh the Druid. Just for the craic.’

  Saile entered the conversation, certain he had found his accomplice.

  ‘Ahem, my good gentlemen,’ he said, ‘this awful little man sounds like someone I should avoid.’

  ‘He certainly is that,’ said two of the other men together.

  ‘Well, could you tell me where I can meet him? Eh, I mean tell me where he stays so I can be sure to avoid that place and never be in danger from him.’

  ‘Well, he travels a lot, because he rarely has fewer than a hundred angry people looking for him with the aim of bringing an end to his miserable trade,’ said a stout man.

  ‘That may well be,’ said the tallest man there. He spoke as someone who liked to be the authority on all things. ‘But a little bird, I won’t divulge who, told me for a fact that he has a deep cave where he often sleeps. That would be on the dark side of Sliabh na mBan. That would be a place to be avoided for certain.’

  Saile drifted away from the company without a word of thanks, as usual, losing interest now that he had all he could get out of them. As soon as he was out of their sight, he picked up great speed. He was excited and couldn’t wait to find his partner. He had already decided what portion of the gold to offer the little rascal. And he was already making plans on how he would dispose of Balor once the job was done.

  When Saile got to the dark side of Sliabh na mBan he had no idea where to look. But his luck was in. After a few hours of waiting, he heard a low growl, like a bear, but he knew there were none of them in this land. When he went closer, he could hear that it was the voice of a man. And that the sound was a peculiar mixture of grumbling, swearing and giggling. The grumbling was about everything. The sun was too warm – even here in a trench on the north side of the mountain where it never reached. The days were lasting too long. The trees were bigger than they used to be. The rabbits were stupider and there was hardly any fun in catching them. The swearing was about a wide variety of names of big people, little people, animals and plants against whom Balor had some grudge or other. And the giggling was about various bits of mischief he’d done in recent times.

  Saile stepped out into the shadows of Balor’s fire. Balor turned on him as fast as a cat and before asking any question, landed a huge slimy spit right between Saile’s eyes. Saile almost vomited and threw a spell, but he remembered his mission.

  ‘Good day to you, sir’, he stammered, with the stuff dribbling down his cheeks.

  ‘Who in the name of the damned and the dead are you, you long streak of misery, and who gave you permission to enter my private mountain?’

  Saile sat down without invitation because he knew he would get no invitation. And he started babbling off his plan. He wanted an accomplice to help steal all the gold in the country.

  Initially Balor warmed up.

  ‘So, we’d go around at night taking bracelets and neckties off of all the frauds and wasters who think they are special and robbing the ornaments from the tombs of those who were thought to be a cut above buttermilk?’

  ‘Well, yes.’

  ‘And that will cause great and terrible fuss.’

  ‘I’m sure it may do, but we’ll be gone by then.’

  ‘And we could just throw the things in hedges and potato pits where they’ll eventually find them, but curse us for the deed.’

  ‘Are you mad?’ exclaimed Saile. ‘Of course not. We’ll take them away. All. Every piece of gold in the country.’

  ‘Hold your horses there, grandmother,’ said Balor. ‘A lot of the gold ornaments are in Tara and protected by the Fianna. You won’t be taking them too easily.’

  ‘Oh, I will.’

  ‘And how?’ asked Balor, ‘Since the Fianna are not likely to let us walk away with such stuff without making many spear holes in our backsides.’

  Then Saile told Balor of his plot. He had a powder that could cause a great flash of light, blinding all people in the area. When facing the Fianna, he would release it and then take their weapons.

  Balor was getting quieter now. ‘Take their weapons, eh? And what then?’

  ‘Then of course we’d kill them for the sport of it, so that we could come back any time we wanted.’

  ‘There would be no need to do that,’ said Balor, surprising himself.

  ‘What need do we need? We’d just be getting rid of dogooders.’

  ‘Hmmm,’ muttered Balor.

  ‘What? Are you getting scared?’

  Balor was quiet. He wasn’t scared. He had never been scared of anything in his life. It was another feeling that was bothering him. But he couldn’t quite say what it was.

  ‘Oh, not scared then, well I know what your problem is. You are worried about your share.’

  Balor wasn’t the slightest bit worried about his share. He had no interest in taking stuff to keep. What good would that do him? He was as unhappy as could be with his little cave and the clothes on his back. Having more would only give him more causes than he had time in the day to grumble about. He had never before stolen anything to keep for himself. But he said nothing. He just looked at Saile and
still said nothing.

  ‘Don’t worry, you’ll get half of all the gold.’

  Balor’s little face was getting redder and his frown was growing deeper. Saile lost his patience.

  ‘Well, look here, if you don’t do this then all the stories I’ve heard about you being a villain are just rubbish.’

  Balor was confused. He asked Saile to come back in the morning when he’d had a good sleep. When Saile went, he couldn’t sleep in his own cave, so he ventured off into the woods. Soon he found a bed of pine needles made by some good little people. He chased them away, as was one of his favourite tricks, by making wolf sounds. He had a little chuckle at his fleeing relatives. That made him feel better. Back to his old self, he settled into the comfortable bed.

  But Balor still couldn’t sleep. He kept turning and grumbling. He was sweating and feeling slightly ill in his stomach. About two hours before dawn he jumped up and shouted, ‘To blazes with it all.’

  He mightn’t like it to be widely known, but he had never killed anyone. He didn’t like Fionn or the Fianna and he could maybe get used to the idea of them being blinded for a while. But he had to admit to himself that he did not like the idea of them being slaughtered. Who would he have left to torment? And besides it all, he simply didn’t like Saile.

  And so he headed off for Tara as fast as he could run, hop and fly. At the gate he met a sour captain called Cullen.

  Cullen, unfortunately, recognised Balor. When Balor pleaded breathlessly and as politely as he could, ‘Let me in you thick clump of bog grass, I’ve an important message for the amadán Mac Cumhaill,’ Cullen shouted back, ‘Hey, aren’t you the rogue who put lizards into a hatch of eggs when I was a boy? Yes, yes,’ said the soldier very excitedly, ‘it’s you, you little blackguard! My mother nearly had a heart attack when the eggs hatched and the lizards crawled out.’

  As the point of Cullen’s spear barely missed him, Balor decided that there was nothing to be gained by being good. It was just tedious. He went back to his forest bed, feeling better that at least he’d tried to warn the louts.