Finn Mac Cool (53 page)

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Authors: Morgan Llywelyn

BOOK: Finn Mac Cool
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Blamec agreed. “When I was first with him, his poems were about blackbirds and red deer and wild geese and foaming waterfalls.”
“Now,” said Fergus Honey-Tongue portentiously, “he has the prophetic gift of the druid. Remember that he carries the blood of the Sídhe.”
Oisin swung his eyes toward Fergus. He frowned, unsure of what to believe.
But before he could decide, the voice of the hounds came clearly to them. They had picked up the trail of a boar and were in hot pursuit. Even Finn was startled out of his reverie, and they all set off at a gallop.
As the horses thundered up a rocky incline, Oisin found himself riding knee to knee with his father. The younger man's blood was running hot and high, infected with the excitement of the hunt. Without intending to, he grinned at his father.
Finn's answering grin was so radiant Oisin could not help challenging gaily, “I'll race you to the boar!”
“Done!” cried Finn Mac Cool.
He clamped his legs on his horse's sides with such force the animal leaped to the front and held the advantage. Oisin did his best but could not catch up. Finn raced away from the others and soon disappeared over the crest of a hill.
Meanwhile, Diarmait Mac Donn had succumbed to temptation. Giving a half-apologetic and rather sheepish smile to Grania, accompanied by a hasty hug, he had gathered his weapons and set off after the hunt himself.
Grania stood in the gateway, watching him go.
Her stomach clenched into a hard knot.
Diarmait knew the land as the others did not. Guided by the sound of the hounds, he took a shortcut through a narrow valley that led, eventually, to the flanks of Gulban's Mountain. There he found the boarhounds, which had outrun their keepers once the leads were slipped from them.
And there he also found Finn Mac Cool.
As Diarmait rode up, Finn warned him back with an impatient gesture. “He's just in there,” he said, pointing toward a stand of hazel. “The hounds drove him to cover, but it's not enough to protect him and he knows it. He'll come charging out soon enough.”
Diarmait slid from his horse. “I'll face him on foot,” he boasted.
“You'll do no such thing. He's my boar!”
Diarmait tensed, an inward clenching that reflected itself in fist and jaw. “I have the hunting of this territory,” he said.
Finn glared at the younger man, the man who had taken his wife. “It's my boar,” lie repeated, deadly quiet. “Don't try to take this from me.”
The hounds bayed their warning, but the boar was very fast. It broke from cover and charged toward the nearest figure with the blind rage of its kind, a murderous attack that could not be deflected.
“Behind you!” Finn roared at Diarmait. But even as Diarmait was turning around and hefting his javelin, the boar was upon him.
The hounds sprang upon the creature, trying to pierce its thick,
leathery hide with their fangs, but it ignored them. It flung itself at Diarmait with a grunting squeal, seeking his body with its tusks. He tried to dance out of the way but felt the great curving, yellow tusks rip into his lower belly.
Cursing at his terrified horse, who was trying to run backward out of reach, Finn slid to the ground. His great sword in its sheath banged against his leg, almost tripping him as he sought to draw it and attack the boar. There was a moment of frenzied confusion, with a blade flashing and the animal screaming and a man screaming too, high, terrible sounds that rang through the clear air.
But it was Diarmait's shortsword that somehow found its way into the boar's throat, inflicting a fatal wound.
And it was the tusks of the boar that tore out Diarmait's guts.
THE BOAR WAS ON THE GROUND, THE BOARHOUNDS WORRYING it while red froth bubbled from its mouth and nostrils. Finn drove the hounds back and finished killing the animal with a powerful blow from Son of the Waves. Then he dropped to his knees beside the crumpled body of Diarmait.
One glance told him the damage was mortal. The younger man's intestines lay glistening on the bloody earth like twisted grey snakes.
Finn seized them in his two hands and tried irrationally to stuff them back into the gaping belly wound, but he stopped when Diarmait groaned in agony.
He put his face close to Diarmait's. “What can I do for you? Tell me something I can do for you!”
The dying man opened his eyes to find the world had shrunk to a dim grey whirlpool with Finn Mac Cool's face at its vortex, slowly receding.
“Water,” Diarmait gasped.
Finn scrambled to his feet and ran in search of water. He had nothing on him to carry it in; he did not know where it might be found, but water had become the single imperative. His breath sobbed in his throat.
He burst through a tangle of scrubby undergrowth to find Oisin sitting on his horse, staring down at him. “What happened?” his son wanted to know. “There's blood on you!”
“Diarmait's,” Finn replied distractedly. “Which way to water? I must find water.”
“Diarmait! Where?” Oisin leaped from his horse and grabbed Finn's arm in iron fingers. “Where? What have you done to him?”
“I've done nothing, I have to get water—”
“Take me to him,” Oisin grated. He forced Finn to lead him back to where Diarmait lay.
At the sight of his friend on the ground, Oisin gave a cry of pain. “So
you've finally done it!” he cried at his father. “You finally achieved what you failed to do years ago!”
“Not me,” Finn protested. “It was the boar—”
“Water,” came Diarmait's hoarse gasp. They both turned to him. “Please … water …”
Oisin's face was terrible to behold as he shouted at Finn, “Get him water, then! Bring it back to him in your two hands! You claim to be of the Tuatha Dé Danann, you claim to be magical. Well then, use your magic to heal the damage you've done this good man! There's a stream not a spear's throw from here.” He pointed the way he had come. “So bring water!”
Finn forced his legs to run once more. He came to the stream soon enough and knelt beside it, filling his cupped hands. Then he ran back. But as he ran, the water, against his will, trickled through his fingers.
By the time he reached Diarmait and knelt beside him, his hands were empty. He held only moist fingers to the dying man's mouth. Diarmait's lips almost touched them … then he gave a soft sigh and seemed to grow smaller.
Finn and Oisin looked at each other across his dead body.
“I did not want his death,” Finn said, willing his son to believe him.
“Did you not? But it was very convenient, wasn't it, the two of you here alone, no witnesses—”
“Look there, there lies the boar that killed him!”
“His guts could have been torn out by any weapon,” Oisin replied. “Tusks or a blade. Who's to know?”
“
I
know. I don't lie!”
“Do you not? I've heard the stories you tell!”
They were shouting at each other. Then Oisin broke. He dropped down beside Diarmait and gathered the dead man's head in his arms, cradling it against his breast and weeping.
That was how the rest of the hunting party found them.
“The boar killed him,” Finn said dully. He would not look at Diarmait and Oisin, nor at anyone else, until Cailte stood beside him. Then he turned agonized eyes on the thin man. “The boar killed him!”
“I know, Finn.”
“You believe me?”
“I do of course.”
Finn drew a deep breath. “We'll have to take him back to … to Grania. I hope she'll believe me.”
“Does it matter?” Cailte asked.
Finn was surprised at the question. “It does, very much. My own son somehow does not seem to believe anything I say.”
They carried Diarmait Mac Donn back to Rath Grania across the back
of a horse, his legs dangling on one side and his arms on the other. It was not a noble carrying, but at least he was on a princely horse—Oisin's own.
Oisin insisted on leading the animal himself. When the horse shied from the smell of death and excrement and would not let them put the body on it, Oisin tore a strip from his own tunic and bound it over the animal's eyes, blinding it to make it docile.
It was a sombre party that returned to Diarmait's fort. Grania met them at the gate as if she had been waiting for them. Her small children clustered about her, staring with wide eyes at the still body, the dangling limbs protruding from beneath a covering cloak.
“What happened?” she asked in a whisper.
“The boar killed him,” Finn said. “But he killed the boar.”
“Where is it?”
“We didn't bring it back. We didn't think you would want it,” Cailte told her gently.
She went to the horse and felt beneath the cloak for Diarmait's dead face. “His skin is not yet cold,” she said, wondering. With a sudden impulse, she threw back the cloak and pressed her mouth to the dead mouth.
Finn and Cailte exchanged stricken glances, but it was Oisin who put his arms around her and pulled her away.
That night she sat beside the body until dawn, keening. The rise and fall of her voice rubbed Finn's nerves raw. He had to leave the tort and stand beneath the Connacht stars, looking blindly into the sky. “I didn't kill him,” he told the moon.
I did not kill him, Sive. But he could not find her face in the sky.
Diarmait Mac Donn was buried beneath a cairn, and a stone each was taken from the cairn to be given to Donn and to Diarmait's foster father, Angus.
“He was the noblest of us all, and the most fortunate,” Oisin said. “Everyone who knew him loved him.” He paused. “Except one.”
His words were a stone in Finn's heart. I have lost Oisin forever now, he thought.
I'm sorry, Sive.
When they were preparing to leave, Finn went to Grania. “The fort is yours, of course, and the landholding with it. When we return to Tara, I can have whatever you need sent to you, and I shall leave some men here with you to be your guards and sentries since you have no man now.”
Her face was puffy and her eyes red and swollen from weeping, but underneath the soft skin were hard bones, and a strong, practical woman's mind lived inside her skull. Grania pushed her hair back from
her brow and straightened her posture. She had no intention of being left alone in the wilds of Connacht with Diarmait gone.
“I have a man,” she said to Finn. “I was your contract wife.”
He was astonished. “You can't mean that you—”
“I simply mean I expect you to be responsible for me now and take me back east with you. I don't want to stay here alone and my heart's blood dead and gone.”
I will never, Finn told himself, understand women. They seem soft and men seem hard, but in truth, it may be the other way around. Is it, Sive?
“I will deliver you safely to your father the king, if that is what you want,” he promised.
“It is what I want.” Her head was high; her slanted eyes met his with an inscrutable look that made him uncomfortable. “And I want my children … Diarmait's and mine … to be fostered by chieftains. Can you see to it?”
“I can of course,” Finn agreed. He waited for her to continue, with the firm conviction there was something else she wanted to say, but she clamped her lips together and turned away from him as if she did not want him trying to read her thoughts.
What had she not said? I hate you?
On the morning of departure, Finn made a point of speaking with Cuarag. “As soon as we get home, I want you to send those so-called boarhounds back to the Britons. They failed miserably, they did nothing I expected of them. If we'd had Bran with us, Diarmait would be alive today.”
During the journey eastward, Finn, trying to keep from thinking too much about Diarmait, regaled his companions with one tale after another about Sceolaun and Bran and other hunts with happier outcomes.
Only Oisin did not listen. His ears were stoppered against anything his father might say.
They were on the Slige Asal almost within sight of Tara when Finn realized something was seriously wrong. They had begun meeting the usual sentries at intervals—and none of them were his own men. Or Fiachaid's.
None of them were men he knew.
He signalled for a halt, then led his party off the road altogether and across a sweep of grassland to shelter behind a belt of woodland, out of sight of the road.
Grania was indignant. “What's this about? I demand to be taken to my father now!” She was tired and querulous.
“I'll take you to him,” Finn told her, “but not until I'm certain it's
safe. Red Ridge, you and Blamec will be in charge here. Cailte, I want you and your men to come with me.” He kicked his horse and rode away.
Cailte galloped beside him, their fíans, afoot, trotting after. The closer they got to the great stronghold on the ridge, the more apprehension Finn felt.
Unfamiliar sentries manned the gateway and scowled at him suspiciously as he rode up. “The Rígfénnid Fíanna is here to report to the Ard Ríg!” he cried formally.
For a moment he thought they would not open the gates to him. Then there was a creak of timber and a groan of iron hinges, and he and Cailte were allowed to enter. But the foot warriors were held outside.
“Trouble,” said Cailte softly. It was not a question.
They rode forward at the walk. Finn's eyes flicked continually from right to left and back again, noting every change. The most troubling one was the fact that the banners of Cormac Mac Airt no longer flew from ridgepoles. New banners had replaced them, gaudy with fresh dye.
He halted his horse at the gateway to the House of the King and dismounted, giving a surreptitious hand signal to Cailte, warning him to stay on his animal and be ready.
The sentry on duty passed Finn into the House of the King without challenge. But the man was another stranger.
The man who waited inside, sitting at arrogant ease on the carved bench Cormac had occupied for so long, was no stranger. Finn knew the proud eyes and the petulant mouth all too well.
“Cairbre,” he said tersely, the least possible greeting. “Where's your father?”
“Not here, obviously,” Cairbre replied, enjoying this.
“You should not be sitting on the High King's bench, whether he's here or not.”
“He's not High King anymore.”
Finn felt as if someone had hit him in the belly with a knotted fist. “What?”
“While you were away, doing whatever it is you went to the west to do—”
“Cormac dispatched the Fíanna to settle a quarrel, you knew that.”
“And did you bring Goll Mac Morna back with you, since you were in his territory?”
“We did not go to Goll.”
“Pity. I should have liked to have him here now. He's a man I feel I can rely on.”
Finn's temper flared. “Where's Cormac?” He took an angry step toward Cairbre. At once three spearmen had the points of their weapons aimed at the throat of the Rígfénnid Fíanna.
Finn's shock was enormous.
Cairbre made a gesture of studied magnanimity. “Let him go, I'm sure he won't hurt me. Finn would never lay hands on the next High King.”
Watching Finn's eyes, Cairbre's bodyguards were not so sure. They lowered their spears reluctantly, but only halfway.
“What happened to Cormac, and what makes you think you can replace him?” Finn demanded to know.
“While you were not here to defend him, as you should have been doing, there was a battle. A small rising, nothing important, but my father felt it incumbent upon himself to defend Tara and his kingship and prove he was still the man he used to be. He rode out with the warriors, he got embroiled in the fighting, and he took a slingstone in the eye. He's as blind as Goll Mac Morna now. And no man can be king who is so blemished, according to the law.
“Even as we speak, Finn, I'm waiting upon a gathering of the elders of our clan and the brehons to elect Cormac's successor. I expect they will choose me. I am the eldest of his sons, the one with the most experience acquired at his elbow, and the other eligible men of our clan know much less about the kingship he's created here.

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