Finn Mac Cool (29 page)

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Authors: Morgan Llywelyn

BOOK: Finn Mac Cool

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“I don't know. I don't know what men do. I only know what I do,” said Finn Mac Cool.

“IS HE STILL IN THERE?” DONN ASKED.

“Still in there,” Conan muttered. “And ourselves out here waiting for orders.”

“Does he ever come out?”

“He opened the door yesterday and peered out long enough to ask for more food and drink and to glance at the sky, but before I could say anything to him, he closed the door in my face.”

“Did you pound on it?”

Conan stared at Donn. “Are you mad?” The hairless man settled himself more comfortably on the fasting bench outside Finn's door. There was no point in standing at attention. Finn was paying no attention to him.

Donn gave the closed door a long look, then walked away.

Before long, Red Ridge took his place. “It's battle season,” he in formed Conan unnecessarily. “I thought we'd be fighting someplace, or at least hunting.”

Conan picked his teeth with a sliver of fishbone. “You can go hunt if you want to. Or fight, come to that, if you can find someone to fight. But don't count on him in there.” He indicated the dwelling at his back with a jerk of his thumb.

“What if the king sends for him?”

“Has he done?” Conan asked irritably, suddenly faced with the propspect of action instead of sprawling in the sun.

“Not that I know of, but he might. We're his army, after all, and peace is a sometime thing.”

“If and when the king sends for him,” Conan drawled, “you can be the one to tell him. I prefer to keep the head down.”

Finn was aware of them outside his door. He was aware of the FÃanna
as he was aware of sky above and earth below, but he did not think of them. He thought only of Sive.

Once, with a start, he realized he had not thought of his mother in a very long time. He was relieved.

When they were not sharing each other's bodies, he shared his thoughts with Sive. At first, thinking to entertain and impress her, he told her the stories he told his FÃanna, the stories of battles fought and triumphs won and relationships that set him apart from other men.

Sive listened. She had the quality of listening, as if her ears could swivel to detect and concentrate upon the slightest sound.

Finn told her of his battle against the Cat-headed men and the Dog-headed men and the White-backed men. He described the taking of Lomna's head, and the rescue of ManannÃ¡n's daughter. He spun stories from the firelight and wove them around her head like a wreath, and she listened and smiled and murmured appreciatively in all the right places.

He was telling her, with great detail and impeccable timing, the story of Meargach of the Green Spears when he began to hear his words as she was hearing them. With a critical ear, he noted implausibility piled upon impossibility, and events stretched out of all shape in order to make room for more colour.

The spate of words slowed. Sive continued to watch his face, her luminous eyes fixed on his.

If she is inside my head, he thoughtâand she isâthen she can see what is real and what is not.

With great effort, he retraced the threads of his story. “Meargach didn't actually bring seven times seventy men against us,” he admitted. “There were â¦ seven or eight of them altogether, I suppose. And I didn't kill them all myself. In fact, I don't think I killed any of them, Meargach included. I know that Goll killed one of the man's sons and Conan struck the head from the other one, but now I look back on it, I think Meargach accidentally stepped in the line of one of his own spear throwers and took a fatal wound in the back.

“His wife came to the field of battle afterward. I couldn't tell her how he died, soâ”

“So you made it sound heroic,” Sive said gently.

“So I made it sound heroic,” he echoed. “And that was the truth of it in a way, don't you see? When I told her the tale of his death, I told it as he would have wished it to be, a glorious death in the midst of a mighty battle. What man wants to be remembered by the bards for having gotten in the way of his own spear thrower?”

Sive nodded. “Is there always a seed of truth in the tales you tell?”

He considered the question. She was not being judgmental, merely curious. “There is,” he said at last. “I am an honest man, you know.”

“I know,” Sive replied.

The next time he began to relate the details of some incident, he kept them stripped to the bare essentials, the verities he knew. Halfway through the narration, he saw her smile. “You can tell it better than that,” she said. “I love to hear the bard in you.”

Delightedly, Finn wove magic and mystery into his words at once, shapechanging a simple anecdote about hunting into a sprawling epic replete with every enhancement.

He knew, without being told, that she knew where the seed of truth lay. His tales were safe with her. And when he was with her, Finn gradually began to be able to tell reality from dreams â¦

â¦ except in the case of Sive herself. He never told her about that first meeting with the deer near the Hill of Almhain. He never asked her if she had been that deer.

There were some truths he did not want to know.

For the same reason, he did not query her about her past before they met. She had told him the essentials; he knew she was haunted and hunted, cursed by her father. It gave them a bond.

At last he found enough courage to explain that bond, without alluding to her own history. In Sive's presence, Finn found the courage to examine his history as he had never done before.

They had been together on furs piled beside the hearth, enjoying one another with a passion that never seemed to fade, even when their bodies were temporarily exhausted. As she lay in Finn's arms, he found himself telling her, “I grew up wild, you know. Really wild. Cailte told me that Cormac once called me his âwolf cub' behind my back, but there is more truth to that than the king knows. When I was born â¦” he paused and drew a deep breath, as if he were about to dive into a bottomless lake â¦ “when I was born, my mother abandoned me on the Bog of Almhain.”

Abandoned me.

Saying the words aloud did not hurt as much as he had expected. In fact, they hardly hurt at all. They simply dropped into the deep pool that was Sive and were absorbed, the pain drained away. She put her hand on his chest, over his heart.

“Two old women found me,” he went on. “I think they were kin to me, probably from my father's tribe. They never told me, though. They never told me anything. I was the result of a disgrace, a shame on my father's head, that his people wanted to forget. They raised me as best they could, though they had little to offer except the secrets of survival that sustained them. I learned well,” he added musingly.

“Mostly I ran like a wolf cub, untaught and unfettered. As soon as I could survive on my own, I left the old women altogether. I was tired of
the sight of them and the smell of them, tired of chewing their food for them because they had no teeth, tired of threading bone needles for them because their eyesight had failed. To me they were old sticks in bags of wrinkled leather, they even smelled old. They smelled of death. I wanted something else. Something alive.

“I wandered. In time I met a man who recognized my father in my face and told me who he thought I was. He told me of my mother as well, and I set out to find her.

“I thought she would want me, Sive. I thought she would be as overjoyed to meet me as I would be to meet her. I didn't know she'd abandoned me, you seeâI learned that only later. So I rushed across Erin to be reunited with a mother I expected to meet me with open arms.”

“And she didn't?”

“She didn't. When I finally found her, she â¦”

Under Sive's hand, Finn's heart was racing. “You don't have to tell me if you don't want to,” she said gently.

“I do want to tell you. I have to say it sometime, and I can say it only to you.” Drawing another deep breath, Finn summoned all his courage and laid it at Sive's feet, like a gift.

“When I found my mother, she had married a chieftain of Kerry. She had jewelry, servants; her eyebrows were dyed and her fingertips were reddened. She looked like a princess. She had come from people of high rank, you seeâoriginally. My father had stolen her, and himself only a Fir Bolg. His touch, unwanted, had defiled her. When I suddenly appeared at her chieftain's gateway, wearing my father's face, my mother was appalled.

“She ran toward me, I remember, and I knew at once who she was. She had brown eyes like yours, and a look that went right through me. I couldn't understand why she was shouting at me. âGo away!' she kept saying. âGo away!'

“I protested that I was her son and that I had been looking for her. âI haven't been looking for you,' she said. âGo away before my husband returns and finds you here. I don't want you. I don't want you!'

“That was what my mother told me, Sive. “I don't want you.'”

Her eyes filled with tears. “Oh, Finn.”

He closed his eyes and saw once more, on the inside of the lids, the chieftainly stronghold in Kerry, with its stone walls, the houses, the sheds, cauldrons of dye boiling over an open fire.

His mother standing glaring at him, demanding he go away.

Truth was ugly

But with Sive in his arms, he could face it.

That summer no battles broke in Erin; at least, none involving the interests of the king of Tara. As if an enchantment lay on the land, Finn
was left undisturbed on the Hill of Almhain with his wife. His men, colossally bored, organized hunting expeditions, sporting competitions, and vigorous faction fights that kept their battle skills polished. Reports on these activities were dutifully submitted to the RÃgfÃ©nnid FÃanna, but he seemed singularly disinclined to take part. He spent his time with Sive, and few other people even saw him.

There was a rumour that he was dead.

“Finn Mac Cool is not only alive, but immortal!” Fergus Honey-Tongue proclaimed to all who would listen.

The summer passed, the celebration of Lughnasa was held in honour of the sun, autumn began. Samhain lay ahead.

Finn could not spend Samhain at his fort, not if he wanted to remain RÃgfÃ©nnid FÃanna, and he knew it. With reluctance, he began making preparations to attend the Samhain Assembly at Tara.

Sive asked, “Shall I go with you?”

“I've been having a think about that. Everyone comes to the Assemblyâat least everyone who's important in Cormac's territory. If you're there, someone will surely recognize you and word will get hack to your people. They might even,” he added, aware of the irony, “assume I'd stolen you.”

“Are you saying I can't go with you?”

“I want you with me, I want you everywhere I go. But I want you safe; that's more important. I've decided it's best you stay here. I'll leave Donn and Cael and Red Ridge and their companies here to protect you, and I'll come straight back to you when the Assembly disperses.”

Sive did not argue. She never argued with Finn. She had weapons more potent than her tongue. Reaching out. she captured one of his hands and pressed it against her belly.

“Come back to us,” she said.

His face went blank. “Us?”

“Us. Your child and me.”

“My child?” Finn said the words but they had no meaning. He repeated them slowly. “My child.”

A bolt of tenor went through him.

My child!

How does one have a child? How does one be parent to a child? He had never known a parent. The nearest approximation had been the two old women who raised him, and he had walked away from them without a backward look.

I abandoned them, he realized, suddenly horrified by a thought he had not entertained before.

Will my children abandon me when I am old?

My children.

My child. A child. A person. A separate person.

The concept staggered him.

Until Sive, he had lived for no one but himself. The FÃanna were his responsibility, one he sought with all the determination he possessed, but he had taken them on as an adjunct and enhancement to himself, and as a way of mantling himself with his father's heritage. Finn was young, so very young that until this moment he had thought himself the centre of the cosmos. Himself â¦ and Sive.

And now a child.

He started to say something, stuttered, lost the thought, stared at Sive.

She laughed.

Like everything else she did, Sive laughed gently, without cruelty. “It's all right, Finn,” she said.

“What am I supposed to do?” he asked in bewilderment.

Sive laughed again. “You've already done it, I'd say. It's up to me now.”