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Authors: Morgan Llywelyn

Finn Mac Cool (38 page)

BOOK: Finn Mac Cool
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When she said the same thing to Finn, he gave her a look so chilling she never mentioned it again. There was something wild in his eyes, something she could not begin to understand.
She was not sure she wanted to. Living with Finn Mac Cool was like living with something only half-tamed, elusive and unpredictable—and probably dangerous.
Manissa was careful not to rouse his temper.
Sometimes he was gone for a fortnight at a time, with just Caurag his chief huntsman and the hounds. He did not take porters on these expeditions, nor did he bring back game. But Manissa, fearing him though he had never raised a hand to her, did not question him. “There are some things,” she advised her attendants, “it's better for a wife not to know.”
Even Caurag did not know the entire reason for those driven, solitary forays. He knew only that he had strict orders about what hounds to bring, and how to treat any animal they flushed. He knew that Finn continued, summer and winter, to search with an unreasoning passion for a particular red doe.
When Cainnelsciath informed Finn, “Bebinn says your wife is with
child, and the portents indicate a daughter,” Finn's reaction was typically unpredictable. He went at once to his chief huntsman.
“Prepare for a long hunting trip,” he ordered Caurag.
He did not want to watch Manissa swell with his child. He remembered Sive carrying Oisin. That was the image burned in his brain. He was, he realized, pleasantly fond of Manissa; she was warm and kind and calm and undemanding. He had no quarrel against her, and he would be proud to have children.
But she was not Sive.
The anguish flared up in him, the need to know if Sive lived, if she had been taken from him, if she had deserted him. He had never stopped asking himself those questions. Only in the heat of battle was he able to forget them, but on starry nights or full-moon nights, or when the soft green wind blew in the tops of the trees, pain came flooding back. Pain and the need to go on looking for her.
Over a long period of time, Finn had been systematically quartering Erin, seeking some trace. Although she had never been willing to talk about her people, her accent was undeniably western. So when he sought Sive, he always faced the setting sun.
Having exhausted the midlands, he determined this time to go all the way to the great sea, the western coast of the island, and follow the limestone north from the Burren and Galway Bay, through the homeland of Clan Morna and even farther north. It was late in the year; he expected no battles to break out to interfere with his plan.
Having horses to ride made such long journeys easier. He rode the chestnut mare and took a second horse to be a pack animal so that Caurag could devote all his attention to the hounds.
“Are you certain you don't want at least an escort of three fíans?” his steward asked worriedly.
“I do not, Garveronan. Do you think there's a warrior in Erin by now who doesn't know who I am? I'm safe enough, particularly so because I travel alone. It's obvious I'm not seeking battle.”
Garveronan was not reassured, but like Manissa, he did not argue. He had seen Finn angry and did not want to repeat the experience.
It was the season when flax was rotting in the ponds preparatory to being gathered and separated into strands for weaving into linen. The appalling stench of the disintegrating fibres hung in the air like a miasma as Finn made his way west across the central plain, then slanted northward.
“Have you a particular hunting ground in mind?” Caurag asked, thankful that his bandy legs were tireless. The hounds trotting in a pack around him lifted their ears at the sound of his voice.
Bran was closest to Finn's horse. Rather than look back at Caurag, the hound automatically looked up at Finn's face, anticipating an answer.
Finn half-turned on the mare's back. “I've heard talk of fine herds of red deer around
Beann Gulban
, Gulban's Mountain,” he said.
“Ben Bulben?” Caurag repeated in his own accent. “That's a desperate long way to go for deer when there are plenty to be found closer to home.”
“We've spoken of this before,” Finn said over his shoulder. “The true hunter is always seeking something … exceptional.”
“Exceptional.” Caurag said under his breath to the pack of hounds surrounding him, “By the seven stars, I hope someday to see the deer exceptional enough to satisfy Finn Mac Cool.”
The hounds laughed up at him.
As they approached the northwestern coast, Finn chose to go as far as the sea before turning to travel northward. The limestone Burren and Galway Bay lay behind him, and dark clouds were massing in the north, but the sky over the ocean was still clear, its Atlantean light illuminating the green-and-grey hills as they rolled toward Gulban's Mountain, which waited like a crouching lion with its feet buried in heather.
They camped for the night beside a narrow strip of white-gold beach and moved on with first light. Finn rode slowly as the day grew brighter, enjoying the late-season beauty of the countryside. A poem began to stir in him. It struggled to break through the trapped pain that was always inside him; always Sive.
He held the mare to an easy walk so he could take time to appreciate the moss campion and mountain avens, past their bloom but still interesting to him in structure and shade of leaf. His eyes delighted in the brilliant purple saxifrage contrasting with rich green ferns. Immersed in beauty, he began to weave words in his mind as the flax-makers would weave flax.
The chestnut mare snorted loudly and shied to her left. Finn halted her and stroked her neck while his eyes searched for the source of her fright.
“What is it?” called Caurag, hurrying up to him.
“I don't know, I don't see … I do! There! Over there, trying to hide in the heather!”
Finn slid from his horse and walked forward very slowly, holding out his hand. At that moment Bran and Sceolaun bonded past him, barking with recognition and joy.
A small figure emerged from concealment in the heather. It was a nearly naked little boy … with Sive's features.
CAURAG HAD NEVER SEEN—OR EVEN IMAGINED—FINN Mac Cool crying. He stared thunderstruck as Finn swept the boy into his arms and wept uncontrollably.
At first the child struggled, but when his strength could not prevail against Finn's, he subsided. Caurag glimpsed the curve of his brow and one huge dark eye peering past the man's heaving shoulder.
Sceolaun stood on her hind legs with her forefeet braced against Finn's body as she attempted to lick every portion of the boy's uncovered flesh. Bran, more dignified, waited quietly, but the hound's feathery tail was waving a wild welcome.
“Do you know this little lad?” an astonished Caurag asked.
Finn did not hear him. He was aware of nothing but the child in his arms who smelled like Sive. Something tore in him, a sheet of white pain like ice breaking on a frozen river.
“Where is your mother?” he asked through his tears.
The boy began to squirm again. “Put me down.”
Finn struggled to regain control of himself. “Where is your mother?” he asked again, more insistently.
“Put me down!” The boy's piping voice was clear and sharp with a note of command out of all proportion to the speaker.
“You must have a mother. Tell me where she is so I can take you to her.”
The child redoubled his efforts to break free. With calculated cunning, he drove one knee into Finn's midriff and kicked hard lower down with his other foot.
The child was stronger than he looked. Finn grunted with pain. Caurag fought to keep from laughing, but Bran, whose loyalties were never divided, snarled at the boy.
Keeping a tight hold on the child's arm, Finn set the buy down. “I
must know where your mother is,” he demanded. “I have to find her, don't you understand?”
The little boy whipped his scrawny body back and forth in Finn's grip until the single piece of deerskin clumsily arranged around his hips fell away.
“Bring something to wrap him in and something to tie him with,” Finn ordered Caurag.
When the child was bound with leather thongs and enveloped in Finn's spare tunic, which was large enough to hobble him effectively, Finn vaulted back onto the mare and Caurag handed the boy up to him.
He sat the boy crosswise on the mare's withers and fixed him with a stern look. “Now direct us to your people. I am Rígfénnid Fíanna, and I command it.”
The term obviously meant nothing. The child glared at him.
Finn tried a change of tactics. “How old are you? Six winters? Seven summers, would that be right?”
“Don't know,” the lad muttered.
“Seven summers,” Finn said as if to himself, his thoughts drifting. “Seven summers since Sive …” She ran through his mind in a shaft of sunlight, and the pain that leaped in him was so sudden and sharp he winced.
The boy took advantage of Finn's lack of concentration to hurl himself from the horse. But Bran instantly caught him by the back of Finn's tunic and held him until Caurag picked him up. This time, once the boy was seated in front of him, Finn took an additional strip of leather and bound the two of them together.
“You wanted something exceptional,” Caurag commented. “I would say you've found it.”
“Tell me where you live, and with who,” Finn asked the boy one more time. “I mean you no harm, nor them either. Just take me to them. To your mother. I beg of you, take me to her!”
The child stared up at his face and said nothing.
“We'll find them on our own, then. Bran! Sceolaun! I need your noses! Backtrack this child!”
Had any other man issued such an order to any other hounds, Caurag would have laughed. But he had observed Finn's relationship with these two over many hunting seasons and he knew they understood him as if all three spoke the same language.
Bran and Sceolaun promptly began quartering through the heather, searching. When Bran gave tongue and set off at a run, the others followed, Caurag running almost as fast as Finn's galloping mare.
The trail flanked Ben Bulben and led at last to a wide, well-concealed valley fringed by trees, with a small stream fed by a waterfall at its head.
As Finn galloped into the valley, he saw the last of a herd of deer scattering into the woods beyond the waterfall.
“My people!” the child cried.
Finn reined in the mare. “What do you mean, your people?” His heart shook his body with its thundering.
The child clamped his stubborn little jaws and did not answer.
“Have you a name?”
Continued silence.
Finn drew a deep breath. “If I called you Oisin, would it mean anything to you?”
Caurag came panting up just in time to hear this last. “Do you think it could be?” he gasped, gulping air.
The child, silent, fiddled with the knots of the thongs.
Finn and Caurag and the hounds methodically searched the valley and the woods beyond, but the only trace they found of any human agency was a smear of soot on stones where a fire had once burned. A few charred sticks, a couple of gnawed bones, and broken nutshells were all that remained of whoever had camped there. The ashes were cold and scattered.
But Bran sniffed around the site a long time. Then the great hound sat down and emitted a howl that raised the hackles on Caurag's neck.
“What happened here? You must tell me!” Finn demanded of the child.
Something in his tone at last loosened the little boy's tongue. “There was … a man,” he said slowly, searching for words from a limited vocabulary. “A dark man. With us. Sometimes. He had a stick. He hit her …”
“Her!” The word leaped from Finn's mouth. “Who? Your mother? What was her name? You must tell me her name! And who struck her?
Ochone,
who could ever strike her!” The very thought was a torment to him.
The child frowned in concentration, pleating with wrinkles that forehead so like Sive's. “The man … shouted at her. Sometimes. He went away. He came back. He hit her. One day … he made her go with him. She did not want to. He hit her, he made her go and leave me. She looked back at me with rain on her face.” His narrative powers exhausted, the child fell silent and stared up at Finn.
The tortured man wanted to beat his head with his fists. But he fought to remain calm as he asked, “Do you think he killed her? That dark man who took her away?”
“Don't know,” the boy muttered. He seemed to shrink into himself. “She never came back for me.”
“Fire and water, earth and sky!” groaned Finn Mac Cool.
In spite of their most diligent searching, he and Caurag could find no trace of the child's past, or of his kin. At last, defeated by time, Finn knew they must return east and prepare for the winter to come.
He took the little boy with him.
Time spent in Finn's company began to smooth away some of the child's wildness. He grew accustomed to having enough food to eat, and to sleeping beside Finn at night, the two of them wrapped in one mantle. He spoke little, but he listened to the two men talking and began to add some of their words to his own small supply. The woman he referred to as “her” he never called by name, as if unaware she had one.
He accepted Finn's calling him Oisin.
They took him home to Almhain of the White Walls.
On the way, Finn told the boy stories. The child sat on the mare's withers and listened, absorbing everything.
“Almhain will be your inheritance,” Finn promised. “It was mine. I am entitled to build my stronghold there because it comes to me through the blood. That entitlement will be yours. We shall tell the historians your genealogy, so you can prove your right to all that is mine.
“You will be a man of high rank, Oisin. I've made certain of that, even before I knew there was … an Oisin. As son of the Rígfénnid Fíanna, you will be welcomed in every dwelling in Erin and permitted to stand at the right hand of every king. Och, you're going to have a good life!”
The child listened gravely, his huge eyes never leaving Finn's face.
When they reached Almhain, Finn proceeded to introduce Oisin as his son. He explained, “A dark druid stole Sive and her infant from me, but I never ceased looking for them. The druid put her under an enchantment to hide her from me, but I knew Bran and Sceolaun would recognize her no matter what shape she took. When at last they did find something of her, it was this boy they found, however. Oisin, who was born here, has come home!”
Cainnelsciath was not totally happy with this version of recent history. He approached Finn in private and told him. “You make a mistake by accusing a druid of stealing your wife. Why are you doing that?”
“I'm only telling what I know,” Finn explained patiently. “Sive, like me, has the blood of the Tuatha Dé Danann in her. She must have; it's the only thing that explains her magical abilities.”
“Magical abilities?” Cainnelsciath raised an eyebrow. “I never saw any indication that—”
“She could shapechange,” Finn confided.
“She could? How do you know?”
“And me married to the woman? I knew everything about her!” Finn declared hotly. “Because she was of Danann blood, the druids feared her. Not you, I'm not blaming you for any of this, Cainnelsciath. Other
druids.” Finn waved his hand vaguely. “They took her from me with a powerful enchantment. She would never have left me otherwise.
“The dark man who held her and made her abandon our child struck her with a stick, Oisin tells me. It must have been a druid's rod; nothing else would have had power over her. They made her abandon the child because it was my child. But I found him anyway, and I've brought him home. Rejoice for us, Cainnelsciath!”
Later, speaking of this to Red Ridge, Cainnelsciath said, “I've read the signs and I find nothing in them to confirm this tale of Finn's. It doesn't even make sense … except to him.”
“If it makes sense to him,” Red Ridge replied, “then I accept it.”
So did Manissa. While she was astonished to see her husband arrive at Almhain with a little boy riding in front of him, she was mindful of the law. “I shall foster this child as if it were my own,” she promised Finn.
Under Brehon Law, the institution of fosterage underpinned much of Gaelic society. The personal relationships upon which both tribal and military alliances depended were developed and reinforced through fosterage. Members of the warrior aristocracy routinely exchanged children, and foster parents were often regarded with more affection than birth parents. The lower classes also practiced fosterage, however, including the taking in of orphans. Gaelic society, in which clan and tribe became extended family, was structured to prevent any child's living as an orphan. Even Finn Mac Cool had been fostered by two old women.
There were two forms of fosterage, fosterage of affection and paid fosterage. In either case, the fosterers were required by law to maintain and educate the child according to its rank in society.
Determining Oisin's rank in society provided a problem for the brehons. When the situation became known, Flaithri had a private discussion with Cormac Mac Airt.
“Your Rígfénnid Fíanna insists the boy is a child of his siring,” the chief brehon said, waving his hands in the air. “We accept his word, of course. Normally, any claimed child of a father begins life in the same level of society as that father, and may expect to command a commensurate honour price. However, with Finn Mac Cool, we have something of a problem.”
“Always,” Cormac interjected dryly.
“Finn began life as a Fir Bolg,” Flaithri continued, “member of a subjugated race, commanding no higher honour price than one of the unfree. When he joined the Fíanna, his honour price increased to the value of his weapons, but his rank in society did not increase. Even a Rígfénnid Fíanna had never been accorded the privileges one of the nobility expects.
“But Finn Mac Cool has drastically altered the standing not only of
the Fíanna, but of their commander. His men are respected and welcomed everywhere, and he is given hospitality by princes. He lives and behaves like a member of the nobility. Furthermore, Cormac, you have made no effort to discourage this behaviour. If anything, you have encouraged it.”
“I need Finn,” Cormac said simply. “I do what I can to reward him for his services.”
“Your rewards are quite unprecedented, if I may say so.”
“It is not the function of the brehons to criticize my handling of the Fíanna,” Cormac replied, his voice hardening. “You make and interpret law, you do not run the military.”
Flaithri nodded. “Agreed. But the law permeates society and regulates its members at every level. In order to be of valuable service to the people for whom it was designed, the law must be flexible; it must grow and change with changing circumstances. Finn Mac Cool is a perfect example. We need to rethink his personal position, as well as that of members of the Fíanna. Until a new definition of rank applying to him and to them is determined, we cannot assign rank and honour price to his claimed son.”
BOOK: Finn Mac Cool
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