Finn Mac Cool (37 page)
Authors: Morgan Llywelyn
“They are. I was there, I know. He's telling these outrageous stories and”
“He's always done that, it's part of his attraction.”
“But he hasn't always believed them! At least, not fully. He does now, though. And he'll tell them to the poets and believe he's describing events accurately. I can't let that happen.”
“You have a laudable sense of honour, Goll.”
“Are you patronizing me?”
“I am not, I was paying you a compliment. Are you so rarely complimented that you can't tell the difference?”
Goll was embarrassed. In a voice made hoarser than usual by the emotion, he muttered, “I don't need compliments. I'm just doing my duty.”
“You call that doing your duty? Accusing your commander of ⦠of what, Goll?”
Goll threw a furious look at Cormac. “All right then, defend him! But don't say you weren't warned!” He spun on his heel and strode away. Cormac was a player of games himself, but the king's games were too subtle, too shaped by the folds of the man's mind, for Goll to enjoy them.
Cormac returned to the Fort of the Synods and Flaithri. But later that day he drew his chief historian aside and had a few words with him in private. “My RÃgfénnid FÃanna is a very brilliant warrior,” he said, “but he has a tendency to exaggerate even more than most. It might be wise to remember that when committing his descriptions of events to memory. His are splendid tales for telling around a campfire, but I cannot
vouch for their accuracy, and our children's children might not be well served if the more outrageous stories were made part of our history.”
vouch for their accuracy, and our children's children might not be well served if the more outrageous stories were made part of our history.”
The chief historian, a thin-legged, round-bellied man with a prodigious memory, found this an astonishing conversation. “Are you telling me Finn Mac Cool would lie about the achievements of himself and the FÃanna?”
“He would not lie, I think. But he ⦠adds colour. A great deal of colour. He introduces elements into his narratives that exist only in his imagination.”
“What elements?” the historian wanted to know.
“I can't even tell you, I'm not certain myself. With him, it's hard to know what might be fact and what might be his own creation.”
The historian pondered the king's words in private, and made his own decision. He thereafter listened to the stories told by and about Finn with a critical ear. Only the bare facts, such as recountings of battles won and hostages taken, were memorized to be incorporated into the histories handed down from generation to generation. The tales in their vivid entirety became the property and pride of the bards, whose creativity fed upon them.
But no matter what version of the Finn Mac Cool stories was being told, there was one eager listener. Cruina of the Questions spent little time in the Grianan after the FÃanna arrived. She could usually be found within eye-distance of Finn, a rather forlorn shadow hoping to attract his attention but unwilling to come forward and demand it.
Finn knew she was there.
He had sent the agreed coibche to Lochan the smith every year; as far as he was concerned, he had done his duty by Cruina. She represented a bruise on his memory that he preferred to forget. Manissa was better; he was in control of the situation with Manissa.
“She's still there, you know,” Cailte remarked to him one day.
“Who?”
“The smith's daughter.”
“Is she?” Perhaps I should speak to her, Finn told himself; it would be kind. But he did not really want to.
As he had expected, Cormac had arranged for horses to be presented to the officers of the FÃanna during the period of the Great Assembly. The king summoned Finn to accompany him to the stables for a personal tour of inspection.
“They are very fine animals,” Cormac said proudly. “As good as a chieftain might ride.”
“Grand animals,” remarked Finn, recalling the shorter, sturdier horses Dorbha possessed. These were leggier, with finely carved heads and tapering muzzles. Their eyes were as large and liquid as a deer's. The
horses were tied by means of rope head-collars to iron rings set in pillars the length of the stable. The nearest animal to Finn was a sleek chestnut mare who turned her head as far as she could at the sound of his voice and looked at him.
horses were tied by means of rope head-collars to iron rings set in pillars the length of the stable. The nearest animal to Finn was a sleek chestnut mare who turned her head as far as she could at the sound of his voice and looked at him.
“Where did you get them?” he asked Cormac. “I've seen no horses like these in Erin.”
The king grinned. “They didn't come from Erin. After you threw such a fright on the raiders from Alba, a tribe of Britons sent a delegation over here to discuss peaceful trade with meâwhile you were in the south this summer, in fact. They brought horses and left with hounds instead, and thought themselves well served. They had seen nothing as large and fine as our hounds, which they say will be prized among the Britons.”
Finn looked the length of the stable. “You have only ten horses of this breed?”
“That's all they were willing to trade me. But I have a selection of good strong hill ponies for the rest of your officers. Every man will be mounted, I promise you.”
Without waiting for Cormac's permission, Finn began untying the chestnut mare. “I'll take this one.” He led her outside.
The king followed. “I've spoken to one of my kinsmen about demonstrating the finer points of riding to you.”
“Och, he'd waste his breath entirely. Didn't you know? I can ride as well as you.”
Cormac said sternly, “There's just yourself and myself here right now, Finn, so don't tell your tales to me. You've never sat on a horse in your life and I know it.”
“Have I not?” Finn gave Cormac a smile so dazzling, so full of youth and joy and mischief, that the king was momentarily disconcerted. In that moment Finn gave a leap and threw one leg across the mare's back. He tugged her head around with the rope affixed to her head-collar and tightened his legs on her sides, at the same time thrusting his pelvis forward against her spine.
The mare obediently moved off in a soft little jog-trot, with Finn sitting as relaxed and boneless as a sack of meal on her back. He looked like a man born to ride.
Cormac stared after him. “What to believe?” the king murmured to himself.
A horseboy emerging from the stable overheard him and asked anxiously, “Did you speak to me?”
“I spoke to myself,” Cormac replied gently. “I was telling myself not to be too quick to judge others.”
Perplexed, the horseboy went on about his affairs, wondering at the inscrutability of kings.
Finn galloped the mare in and out between the forts and halls and limewashed walls of Tara, glorying in the sensation of control she gave up to him so willingly. Even with no bit in her mouth, the mare obeyed every pressure of his legs and shift of his weight. She was lighter on her feet than the grey horse had been, and her supple joints cushioned the impact of her feet with the earth. Riding her was almost like floating. In one circuit of Tara, she taught Finn why kings ride horses.
He guided her back to the stable. Cormac was gone, but his chief horsemaster was soon located and ordered to bring the horses designated for the rÃgfénnidi down to their training ground.
It was only a short distance, but Finn rode.
He assembled his officers and arbitrarily assigned a horse to each. One tall grey stallion he indicated, with a nod of his head, was for Cailte. “You're both lean and grey, it's a good match,” he said, neglecting to add aloud that the animal was obviously the pick of the lot.
Cailte obediently took the rein from the horseboy holding the grey and vaulted aboard. The other rÃgfénnidi watched, awaiting their turn.
“I told you it was easy,” Madan said to Glas. “See how Cailte did it?”
They soon discovered it was not as easy as it looked. The horse assigned to Glas tried to kick him when he missed his first jump and kneed the animal in the belly.
Blamec's horse tore its rein out of its horseboy's hand and ran backward with Blamec running after it, shouting slanders on its ancestry.
The unfortunate Conan Maol was given the sturdiest horse, a broad brown animal with a convex nose and a bristling mane, but the two took an instant dislike to one another. Conan made repeated attempts to vault onto the horse, but each time it sidestepped just out of his reach. “Go around to the other side and swing him toward me,” Conan ordered the horseboy.
The attendant complied. The horse swung too far and trod heavily on Conan's foot, crunching bone. He howled in pain and outrage.
“Your turn, Madan,” said the implacable Finn Mac Cool.
Madan Bent-Neck surveyed his new mount. A brown mare so dark she was almost black, she looked back at him with equal curiosity.
Cailte said, “It's easy. Like sitting on a bench.”
Madan swallowed hard, caught hold of the short black mane and swung himself up. The mare stood like an oak tree. When he found himself aboard her with no difficulty, he grinned hugely. “It is easy!” he agreed.
At that moment the mare decided she disliked the whole procedure and gave her head such a toss she jerked the rein out of his hand. She promptly lowered her neck so she could begin grazing the sweet green grass of Tara. Madan found himself sitting on an unfamiliar animal over
which he had no control. The rein trailed beside her head, on the grass.
which he had no control. The rein trailed beside her head, on the grass.
“What do I do now?” he asked the horseboy. “Hand me that rein again.”
But the boy, who was enjoying this as much as Finn and Cailte were, began an intense conversation with his nearest fellow and pretended not to hear.
Meanwhile, Finn closed his legs on the mare and urged her forward. “Right, you lot,” he said to the others. “Follow me.” The chestnut mare broke into a trot.
Cailte's grey followed close behind. The other horses, obeying their herd instinct, set off after them, subjecting their unprepared riders to a torment of jouncing and bouncing. Some dropped their reins; some grabbed hold of the mane for support. Some slid to one side and some to the other. Madan, who had never got hold of his rein in the first place, had the alarming feeling of being on a runaway and emitted a tiny squeak that would embarrass him in memory for years afterward.
For the first time in history, a mounted company of rÃgfénnidi rode across Taraâin wildly haphazard fashion while following a silver-haired man who was fighting hard not to laugh aloud.
By the end of the day, almost everyone but Finn and Cailte had fallen off at least once. As Goll had predicted, the horses were excellent for teaching humility. Goll, who had fallen like the rest, remembered those words ruefully as he rubbed his bruised backside.
But the relentless Finn kept after them, and within seven nights, his rÃgfénnidi could ride, if not like princes, at least as well as himself and Cailte. Humility evaporated and arrogance returned, stronger than ever.
“It should be the natural heritage of every man in Erin to ride a horse!” proclaimed the delighted Fergus Honey-Tongue.
Finn wove a great tale around the acquisition of the horses, one in which the son of the king of the Britons had kidnapped Finn's hounds and the FÃanna claimed them back, and the horses as well. It made splendid telling around the hearthfires of Erin, and in time was taken as truth by most people who had not been at Tara.
Each accomplishment by himself or one of his FÃanna earned a tale by Finn. Every one was told as fact. The battles they fought grew larger in the telling, involving more enemy and more casualties, often including elements from the Otherworld, spangles of magic. Finn and the FÃanna won with incredible feats over impossible odds, or so the stories claimed.
But no member of the FÃanna denied the tales. Indeed, Fergus Honey-Tongue, who recognized creative talent when he heard it, reworked the narratives into his own style until his recitations were considered
works of art, and Finn named him officially as chief poet to the FÃanna.
works of art, and Finn named him officially as chief poet to the FÃanna.
The truth, in the high summer of the FÃanna, took on a very strange shape.
As Cormac commented to his latest wife, “It does no harm. Indeed, it does a great deal of good. The Fénian stories win battles for me without us even having to fight. The royal historians know the facts and the ordinary people know the wild tales, and that's as it should be. It keeps both happy.”
Finn married Manissa and installed her at Almhain, but spent little time with her. There was no repetition of the idyll with Sive. In his mind, he considered her as a requirement for the RÃgfénnid FÃanna, as essential to the status of that office as the other aristocratic trappings he was accruing.
In addition to a druid, a physician, a steward, and a chief poet, he had cupbearers at Almhain and doorkeepers and horn players and sewing-women and an official candlemaker, and assistants to all of them. His pack of dogs was enlarged to include a fine selection of greyhounds, not as large as Bran and Sceolaun but better for hunting small game.
When Finn was not fighting, he was hunting. Manissa complained that he hunted to excess. “It is not normal,” she told her attendants, “for a man of rank to spend all his time out on the bog or the mountain, following hounds. Surely he has plenty of others who could keep us well supplied with game.”
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