by Jim Ware
With a great shout, Rury, Slanga, and Sengann lowered their blunt spears and charged, sending the herd clattering away into the forest. But as the deer fled, the green-eyed doe turned and darted a piercing glance in Eny’s direction. At the same instant a great black bird swept over Eny’s head and flew away into the high, creaking branches of the upper forest canopy. Eny’s eyes went dark and she fell heavily on her side.
“The girl!” she heard Crucha call as her head sunk into a cushion of soft needles. “Don’t you see, Rury? She’s done! She can no further go!”
Eny felt a cool hand laid across her forehead. “Och!” said the gentle voice of Liber. “It’s burning up she is!”
“Like an oven!” whispered Anust.
Rury was the next to speak. “Let me take your pack, Sengann. You will have to carry the girl. To the Baile we’ll go and throw ourselves on the mercy of the Daoine Sidhe. We have no other choice.”
The voices faded from her ears, and she knew no more.
“Here. You may lay her down on this mat.”
Eny opened her eyes as these words, spoken slowly and distinctly in a deep, melodious voice, broke in upon her consciousness. As her vision cleared, she saw a man’s face bending over her. It was a kind face, framed by dark red hair, with a long chin, a straight nose, a firm mouth, and a pair of blazing blue eyes. A golden brooch set with red rubies flashed at the man’s shoulder, and he wore a dark green cloak of some heavy material over a fine white silk shirt fastened with small silver buttons. He was kneeling beside her, supporting himself on the shaft of a long red spear set with tiny golden brads. Behind him and around him were ranged the frowning and worried faces of the Fir Bolg.
“She wakes!” said Crucha. “See—her eyes!”
A solemn expression came over the man’s face. “You spoke true,” he said, turning to Rury. “They are the eyes of Eithne.”
Eny tried to raise her head but immediately fell back against the straw mattress on which she was lying. She opened her mouth, but her throat and palate were too dry to speak.
“Give her water,” said the Danaan man—for that, Eny realized with wonder, was exactly what he was. “I doubt not she’ll be better in a day or two, but now she needs her rest.” He laid a hand on her forehead and stroked her hair. “Meanwhile, let you others come with me and take some refreshment.”
He rose and turned away. One by one, the Fir Bolg followed.
Liber leaned down and touched her hand. “Try to sleep,” she said. “We will return quickly.”
As the old woman moved off, Eny turned her head and tried to take in her surroundings. She seemed to be lying against the outer wall of a large rectangular hall. Overhead was a vast network of carved and brightly painted rafters, thick with dancing shadows. On the other side of her mat a row of cylindrical red pillars, covered from top to bottom with interlacing cords of twisted gold, ran from one end of the building to the other. Each of these pillars held a bronze sconce, and every sconce a blazing torch. Between the pillars and down a few shallow steps she could see the main floor of the hall, where tall men and bright-haired women in gaily colored cloaks and gowns sat elbow to elbow along a series of polished oak tables. In the center of the floor red embers glowed in the iron grate of an oblong fire pit. In front of the pit stood a raised wooden platform, and on the platform a white-haired man in a dark blue robe was tuning the silver strings of a golden harp.
“My noble friends!” she heard him say as he seated himself at his instrument. “A song!” He cleared his throat, stretched out his arms, and threw back the bell-like sleeves of his gown. “The Song of the Stone!”
Men pounded the tables and raised their silver cups. Women tossed their colored scarves into the air. A cheer went up, so loud that the walls and ceiling rang. And then, just as suddenly, a hush fell over the hall. Closing his eyes, the bard raised a hand and ran a finger over the strings of his harp. A bright chain of silvery notes burst into the silent air, went rippling around the bases of the red pillars, and flew up into the shadows among the painted rafters. At last the singer began to chant in a high and plaintive tone:
Beyond the wall of sea and sky,
Where hopes and fears and sorrows die
And cast-off dreams slip gently by
To join the day’s descending,
An island green laughs in the light
Of golden sun and silvery night,
Unveiling to the second sight
A joy that’s never ending.
There, where the sun goes down to sleep
Below the cellars of the deep
And fairy folk and angels keep
A vigil o’er its fire;
Out past the waves, beyond the pale
Of circling stream, where white ships sail,
Under the shade of Inisfail
Ends every heart’s desire.
So sweet was the sound of the voice, so soothing the subtle tones of the shining instrument, that Eny felt herself being carried away on the undulating strains of the song. She closed her eyes and let her thoughts flow out beyond the rafters, out into the night, out past the shining circle of moon and stars. In her mind’s eye she saw again a vision of an island—a green island at the meeting place of sea and sky. And still the stream of magical words swept on:
A piece of heaven touched the ground
At Heaven’s Gate, where Jacob found
A Pillow Stone; and to the sound
Of Seraphs on the stair
He lay him down and watched his dreams
Fly up to where the starlight gleams;
But when he woke, those golden beams
Had vanished into air.
Bold Gathelus, King Cecrops’ son,
In Egypt’s land where rivers run
Stretched out his hand to seize the Stone
From Israel in Goshen.
With Scota, his betrothed bride,
He dragged it over deserts wide
To Spain, far over the heaving tide
Of the dividing ocean.
Then over the deeps in ships they flew,
Gathelus’s Danaan crew,
Breaching bound’ries old and new,
Seeking the final shore;
From Falias and Gorias
To Finias and Murias,
And last to Eire’s sea of grass
Beyond the great Muir Mor.
On Tara’s plain they set the Stone,
And over it they raised a throne,
That it might roar and shriek and moan
Beneath the king’s true heir.
Eny’s brain grew gray and hazy, and she turned her face toward the wall. Slowly she descended into a silent blackness in which she dreamed of giants and crows and herds of red-eared deer. She saw herself sitting in the flickering light of a candle, listening intently as her mother read to her from a book. She heard the wildly soaring strains of Simon Brach’s red fiddle. She cowered beneath a towering cliff of black stone.
When at last she opened her eyes again, Crucha was sitting on the floor beside her. With a great effort, Eny lifted a hand and touched the old woman’s arm. Crucha smiled and laid a finger to her lips. And the poet went on singing:
But Ernmas’s daughter, Morrigu,
Crafty Anand, cruel, untrue,
Took up the quarrel with princely Lugh
And rose in stormy mutiny
When Ith, with all the sons of Mil,
Came oversea to raze and kill,
And Ollamh made of Lia Fail
The exiled Stone of Destiny.
“It must depart,” he said. “Its fate
Lies not with us; I’ll not debate
The point, for either soon or late
To Inisfail
it’s going:
Out past the twilight’s shimmering shore,
Out through the sunset’s glimmering door,
Where boiling oceans simmering pour
Down cliffs beyond all knowing.”
He turned away; she stormed and flew,
She raved and ranted, croaked and crew;
To Tory’s fastness she withdrew
Where giants keep the portals.
But Lia Fail passed out of Meath,
And Fairie slipped away beneath
The softness of the hills and heath,
Invisible to mortals.
“Lia Fail!” whispered Eny. Though her brow was burning and her hair soaked with sweat, she could feel an icy coldness gathering around the roots of her heart. Again she strove to raise herself from the mat. Again she found that she had no strength and fell back with her face toward the wall.
And now she keeps her vigil keen
And rules the Sidhe as tyrant-queen,
Watching town and hill and green,
To all the world an Enemy;
Thus to and fro she sends her spies
And scans the earth with hungry eyes
Seeking desperately the prize—
The fabled Stone of Destiny.
“Take some more water,” said Crucha, lifting the girl’s head into her lap and putting a cup to her lips. Eny gulped the crystal liquid, letting it dribble down over her chin and neck.
But if the ancient tales tell true,
The Fomor and the Morrigu
Must one day gnash their teeth and rue
The schemes of their devising;
For though at length they seize and bind it,
The Stone will crush them when they find it,
Leaving their shattered bones behind it,
Glorious in its rising.
Again she tried to sit up. “Morrigu!” she coughed, moaning and twisting her body from side to side. “What is it? What does it mean?”
Crucha, however, said nothing, but merely stroked the girl’s fevered head and hands.
As air beneath the water’s flow
Must bubble upward, even so
The heaven-born to heaven must go
To find a place of rest.
The Stone that fell from sky to earth
Cannot remain within the girth
Of narrow nature: true to its birth,
It seeks the utmost West.
And there beyond the sea and sky,
Where hopes and fears and sorrows die
And cast-off dreams slip gently by
To join the day’s descending,
Shall Lia Fail pass into light
Of golden sun and silvery night,
Where children of the second sight
Discern the joy unending.…
Once again the bard’s voice was fading. Once again Eny’s eyelids were growing irresistibly heavy. Seizing Crucha’s hand and gripping it tightly, she fell back and lay with the side of her face against the mat.
And then she slept a long, untroubled sleep.
Chapter Fourteen
The Fir Bolg
She came to her senses atop a heap of sheepskins and rags beneath a wide inverted cone of wooden poles and thatch. Turning her head to one side, she saw Liber crouched in front of a beehive-shaped oven in a low wall of earth and stone, tending a smoky fire of sticks and turf. Rury sat nearby on the hard dirt floor, cross-legged and stitching up a big leather bag with a needle of bone and a thread of tough sinew. Besides the firelight, the only illumination in the little hut came from the gray dawn outside the low-arched door, where Sengann, staff in hand, was standing watch. There was a tang of salt in the damp air. Somewhere in the near distance sea-waves thudded dully on a rocky shore.
“The girl wakes, Liber,” said Rury, rising softly and touching his wife gently on the arm. “It’s nourishment she’s needing. Let you bring food and drink.”
Liber stood up and undid the leather flap of the pouch that hung at her waist. Kneeling beside Eny, she reached into the bag and drew out bread and wine.
“Drink, child,” she smiled, putting the leather flask to Eny’s lips. “It’s a good long sleep you’ve had, being so wearied with adventure and battle and flight.”
Eny drank greedily. The wine was rich, heady, and full-bodied. Almost immediately she could feel its bubbling effervescence warming her body and sending out tingling shoots of vibrant strength into her arms and legs and fingers and toes. Eagerly she gulped the sweet liquid, letting the excess spill over her chin and down her neck.
Soon she was sitting up on the pile of fleeces, munching on a hunk of brown-crusted bread, gazing out the door of the hut to where the ocean breakers gleamed in the rising sun and spread their foamy skirts over the red rocks and glistering sand. In the distance the purple swells rippled away to a blazing coppery horizon under a banner of crimson clouds. Across the whole of its restlessly heaving span the surface of the sea was broken only by the abruptness of a single small island of dark rock. The instant she saw it, Eny’s heart jumped into her throat.
“That island!” she said, her mouth full of bread. “Is it—?”
“Na, na,” laughed Rury, laying his stitching in his lap. “It’s only Rachra you’re seeing. Tory lies many leagues to the north, over Beinn Meallain, across Mag Adair, through the Hill Forest, and beyond the waters of Camas Morraigu. It’s far away you are from them that would do you hurt.”
“Where are we?”
“Luimneach, the dun of my brother Semeon. As I told you not three days gone.”
“Three days! Have I been sleeping that long?”
“Sleeping and waking, but knowing neither. Sengann and Slanga took it in turns to carry you when you fell senseless. Even among the Danaans, in whose hill-fort we lay hid for two nights, you seemed to see nothing. You lay in a fever and spoke as if you were out of your head.”
“Danaans!” Eny felt her jaw drop. “Do you mean to tell me—?”
A shadow fell across the doorway as Slanga, Crimthann, and Anust entered the hut. Anust, her sweet round face radiant as a sunbeam, came and knelt beside the bed of sheepskins. Eny smiled and took the little woman’s outstretched hand; but her thoughts were busy chasing after the tail of Rury’s last words.
“I’ve heard lots about the Danaans,” she said. “My mom’s always talking about them. But she’s never once said a word about the Fir Bolg.”
“And no wonder,” said Rury, “we being a shamed and subject people.”
“Slaves, more like,” corrected Slanga.
“But what does it mean?” asked Eny. “‘People of the Bags?’ What are those sacks you carry on your belts?”
“A wandering race we are,” said Liber, offering another sip of wine. “In these bags we carry our very lives.”
“They’re our homes,” said yellow-haired Crimthann. “Our barns and our pantries. The tools of our trade. Boats or baggage they might be. Shelter from the storm. Look now!”
With that, he undid his rope belt, removed the bag, loosened a few cords, and began to unfold the leather before her eyes. To Eny’s great surprise, it expanded almost magically in his hands. One fold, one crease at a time, he opened it out and spread it over the hard-packed earth until it lay before her, a great mass of supple, workable cowhide.
“It’s according to need they serve us,” said Anust. “A tent this bag might be. A shield from wind and rain. A creel, perhaps, for gathering food and fuel or transporting wool or fish.” As she spoke she unlatched her own leather sack, lifted it with both hands, and dumped its contents—a load of red and purple fruit—out upon the floor. Then, deftly folding and stitching it together, she converted it into a small pouch and reattached it to h
er belt.
“But a curse these bags became to us long ago,” said Sengann, ducking inside from his post at the door, “the time Semeon son of Erglan led the three Nonads of our people into the land of Greece. Then it was with these same bags that the king of that land forced us to carry earth from the low valleys to the high mountains, to make him fields and farms on the tops of the rough-headed hills!”
“Forgetful you are, Sengann,” chided Rury, “that these same bags were also our deliverance from that place. Currachs they became in our hands, the way that we escaped in them from the land of Greece, sailing over the dark sea in our leather boats.”
“Oh, ay,” sneered Slanga. “Escape we did—only to find enslavement again in Eire! First under the boots of the cursed Fomorians. Then at the hands of the cruel Milesians, what time Lia Fail vanished and all the fairy folk were driven underground. And now the Morrigu!”
Eny shivered. The word sounded familiar somehow, though she could not remember having heard it before. Something about it sent a chill into the marrow of her bones. “The Morrigu?” she said, drawing one of the fleeces up over her shoulders. “What’s that?”
Rury looked up from his stitching with a frown. “I have spoken of her before, not mentioning her name,” he said grimly. “Sure it is she who sent her henchmen to fetch you to her tower on Tory Island. She it is, no doubt, who brought you into the Sidhe from the first.”
“The daughter of Ernmas she was,” said Liber, seating herself beside her husband, “one of the most powerful women of the Tuatha De Danann, and ever more powerful she sought to become. Then came the time that Ollamh Folla, lieutenant to the Danaan Chief Lugh, sent Lia Fail out of the land to protect it from the conquering Milesians. The Morrigu was inflamed with rage. She betrayed Lugh and Ollamh, though he had been her lover. To Tory she went, making herself mistress of the Fomorians, a race of shape-changing giants. With their help she utterly destroyed Tara. As it is written in the ancient book,
Badb and Macha, greatness of wealth; Morrigu, springs of craftiness:
