The Green Hero (3 page)

They played so beautifully that the birds stopped their own singing to listen. Even the owl left off hunting, forgot her bloody hunger for a bit, and stood on a limb listening, hooting the tune softly to herself. The deer came, and wolves. Weasels, foxes, stoats, rabbits, bears, badgers, chipmunks, wild pigs. They came and stood in silent ranks at night, forgetting their enmity and fear as the moonlight sifted through the leaves and touched different fur with silver. Finally, two huge snakes came slithering out of their fearful nest and sat among their coils, weaving a slow dance.

“Enough!” cried the Thrig of Tone. “Lesson’s over, young Finn. You’ve learned what I can teach. You can pipe and the devil can dance.”

“Thank you, sir,” said Finn.

“I have done my good deed without interruption, and am free at last, I hope, from the wicked enchantment which binds me to the dust and allows me to see the sun only once every thousand years.”

“I hope so indeed,” said Finn. “My thanks to you, O Thrig of Tone. Perhaps I can return the favor one day. Farewell.”

And he went piping off through the woods, followed by various beasts.

But it’s not so easy to get away with a good deed on this spinning egg of a world. Evil has lidless eyes and does not sleep. At the very moment that Finn was ending his lesson, Drabne of Dole, deep in her hole, a thousand miles down, was gazing at a hand mirror, combing her snaky hair with the backbone of a fish. Then the mirror darkened; she could not see herself. And she knew that somewhere on earth a good deed was being born. For good, the mere breath of it, always darkened her mirror. She gnashed her teeth and stamped her foot, crying:

Oh grief, oh woe

I’ll not have it,

No, no, no.

Not a shred of kindness

Not a ray of joy.

I’ll bend him, rend him,

Tame him, maim him,

Whatever he be,

Large or wee,

Man or boy.

So saying, she flapped her bat-wing sleeves and flew a thousand miles in a wink of an eye to the old oak tree where the Thrig of Tone stood gazing after Finn. She snatched him up and stuffed him into her purse, and flew back a thousand miles to her den. She took him to the stool where she sat to do her sewing, and bound him with thread, and stabbed him with a needle.

Stab and jab

jab and stab.

Better talk,

better gab

“No,” groaned the Thrig.

“Been doing good deeds again, haven’t you? Let you out of my sight for a minute every thousand years, and up you pop into the light trying to help some poor fool do the right thing instead of taking life as it is. Well, you’ll tell me now what you did, and I’ll undo it.”

“Never,” said the Thrig.

“Never’s a long time, little one, especially when there’s pain attached. You’ll tell me, for I’ll torment you till you do.

I come and I go,

I fly and I spy.

I am Drabne of Dole

I live in a hole,

And I need to know.

“That’s what witch means, small fool, Woman Who Knows. Now hear what I intend, Thrig of Tone, if you don’t tell me straight. I’ll round off your edges a bit and use you as a pincushion for the next thousand years. And it’ll be pain, pain, pain all the time. I have plenty of tatters that need mending. My master’s socks need doing too. His hooves, you know, they wear right through.”

Thereupon she poked and prodded and jabbed and stabbed the poor little fellow until he could bear it no longer, and told her what he had done.

“Aha,” she said. “It’s a very good deed, indeed, but not too late to stop.”

She threw him into her workbasket and stomped off to her big iron pot where it boiled over on its fire of brambles. She cast in the scale of a fishy thing that lives at the bottom of the sea and has neither sight nor touch nor any sense at all but is one blind suck. Henbane she added, and nightshade, wormwood, drearweed, and various poison fats that clog the sense, whispering all the while:

In this cauldron

stew and roast.

Hearing ail,

Music fail.

Make him then

Deaf as post.

A smoke arose from the witch’s brew, curling in the spirals of a most evil spell, and wafted itself out of her den and up the long way into the world. Flew into the wood and fumed around the flat head of one of the serpents who were following Finn, drawn by his music. This serpent straightway fell deaf, heard nothing any more, but followed along anyway, no longer dancing, only crawling, filling with stupefied wrath.

Finn knew nothing. He went skipping and piping through the wood until he came to his own village, silent now, for it was the hot golden after-lunch hour when giants nap. He climbed into his bullhide cradle and gazed upon young Murtha, sleeping sweetly as a folded flower.

“Sleep, little beauty,” he said. “Sleep, my flower. Dream whatever dreams you do, and I shall sit here and my music shall steal through your ears and into your dreams, and when you awake you will hear the same music and not know whether you are awake or asleep, seeing me or dreaming still. And when the snakes come and frighten you, it will be with the slowness of nightmare, and in the darkened enchantment of that half dream you will hear me play and see me do, and watch the writhing evil dance to my tune. So you will know me for what I am, and love me forever. Sleep then, sleep until you awake.”

He sat cross-legged and began to pipe again. The wolves came, and the deer. Bear, fox, badger, rabbit, weasel. They stood at the foot of the tree, listening. Then, sure enough, he saw the serpents unreeling themselves through the branches of the tree, winding down toward his cradle.

“Strange,” he thought to himself, “they were mottled green, both of them, but now one has changed color. It’s a dull gray, like lead. Oh, well, I suppose he has changed his skin. Snakes do, I hear. What’s the difference? I’ll play and they shall dance.”

The green snake was already dancing, slowly winding fold upon mottled fold on the limb from which the cradle swung. But the gray snake had crawled into the cradle itself, filling it with great coils of dully glimmering metal hide.

Murtha was awake now, staring with stark-wide violet eyes at what had come into her sleep. And Finn thought that he was locked in nightmare. For this snake was not dancing. Its tiny eyes were poison-red and seemed to be spinning, making Finn’s head whirl with fear. Not dancing, this serpent, but oozing toward Finn. He curled the tip of his tail around the lad’s ribs and began to squeeze. Finn felt his bones cracking. He could do nothing else, so he kept playing. He sat there piping although the breath was being choked out of him. As his sight darkened he saw the snake above still dancing. And Finn, knowing that he was being killed, put all his pain and all his fear and all his loneliness into the pipe, and the pipe answered.

Now the green snake above danced on, filled with the wild sleepy magic of this music. The last exquisite strains of Finn’s fluting plaited the snake’s loops with slow joy, so that the coils he wove were made of living cable, stronger than steel. And when he heard the music growing dim and saw the gray serpent throttling Finn, he simply cast a loop about the strangler and pressed the life out of its body, all without ceasing his dance.

Finn felt the coils lose their deathly grip; his breath came free. In the huge joy of breathing he blew so loud a blast upon his reed that the giants awoke and came running to see.

What they saw was young Finn sitting in his bullhide cradle piping a tune, and a huge green serpent dancing, and another metal-colored snake hanging limp and dead, while violet-eyed little Murtha shook her shoulders and snapped her fingers and smiled like the sun upon water.

“Finn!” cried his mother, snatching him up and hugging him to her. “Are you all right? Has the murdering beast harmed you, child?”

“I’m fine, Mother. Put me back and let me play.”

Finn’s mother was not much for weeping, but she wept then.

“Don’t cry, Mother. Take the silver one, and skin off his hide and make yourself a belt.”

“I’ll do that, son. And know it for the finest girdle in all the world.”

The giants were whispering to each other. “ ’Tis a wonder now. A proud mother she is this day. Young Finn’s a hero for all his small bones.”

“Save a bit of the hide to make a drum for Murtha here,” said Finn. “Do that, Mother, and she will drum to my fluting, and all will be well.”

“Do it I will,” said his mother. “As soon as the beast can be peeled.”

“Answer me, darlin’,” said Finn to Murtha. “Will you have a silver drum and beat the measure as I play?”

The giants shouted their pride. The animals bayed and bellowed and trumpeted. A muffled shriek of pain came from Drabne of Dole, for witches suffer when wickedness fails. And the birds in the trees made a racket of glee.

Young Murtha though said nothing at all; she wasn’t one for answering questions. Besides, she was doing something new. She stood among the snake’s coils and danced along with him. He swayed, casting his green loops about her like a garland come to life. The giants then began to dance too, stomping the earth mightily, shaking the trees.

And Drabne of Dole, deep underground, whimpered and moaned and screamed, but no one heard her, for the day was full of joyful noise.

As for the Thrig of Tone, the witch’s grief was his chance. He undid his bonds and escaped from her workbasket and made his way back to the wood. There he lives to this day, they say, doing sometimes good and sometimes mischief according to his mood, but mostly good nowadays for the balance is so much the other way. Children still get lost in that wood, and when they are found, say that a manikin with a face like a nut taught them to take music out of a reed. He wears a crown, they say, which is a single crystal, tear-shaped, full of moon-fire. Their parents laugh and tell them they were never lost at all but only asleep, dreaming. The children do not argue, but they know what they know. And it’s a fact that children so lost and so found grow up fond of strange places and adventure. They go about the world confusing wind and laughter, tears and moon-crystals, teasing music out of reeds, heroes out of shadows, stories out of grief.

T
HE CRONE-KIN ARE NOT
to be comfortably defied; they feed on foundered dreams and drink young tears like wine. So Drabne of Dole passed the word to her sister, the Fish-hag: “Finn’s the one now. Catch him.”

The Fish-hag was no idle witch, though. She had a job to do in the scheme of things. She guarded the Salmon of Knowledge to see that this important fish was not hooked by the wrong people or things learned by those meant to be ignorant. It was a hard job. Many there were who hunted the Salmon—Ireland has always been a land of scholars—and the Fish-hag had little time for tormenting a frisky boy. But Drabne was the elder of the sere sisters and had to be obeyed, so the Fish-hag set out baits for Finn.

She studied him awhile from hidden places and found that he belonged to that curious breed whose weaknesses do not matter because they are most surely betrayed by their gifts. Now Finn had many gifts, but they were still raw. An imagination that darkened the horses of the sun for night use, so that they galloped through his sleep, bearing him to certain hills and valleys where he knew he had been before. This was a gift, but raw. For he insisted on searching for these hills and valleys and green-lit meadows and echoing caves even when he was awake, and could not accept it when they were not to be found. Also, from the first he suffered from fear of being a coward, pushing himself to rash acts that were to pass for courage. And this trait of his was useful to the Hag, but she needed something else—and found it in his feeling for Murtha, which was his most advanced gift. For he was too young to be doing what he was doing, and that was attaching the idea of all grace and surprise to the image of one girl.

Upon a summer day then, Murtha, while wandering in a wood, heard a little voice speak her name.

“Murtha. Murtha.”

“Who calls me?”

“Myself.”

“Where are you?”

“Not where you’re looking. Lift your eyes.”

Murtha looked up. There, seated on a low limb of an alder tree, was an ugly gray bird with a pouchy beak.

“Good morning to you,” said Murtha. “What sort of bird do you call yourself?”

“Pelican.”

“Why is your beak made like that?”

“For carrying fish back to my nest.”

“Are you a fishing bird then?”

“Am I not? The very best.”

“What do you do so far from the sea? There are no fish here.”

“I have come to see you, Murtha.”

“Well, that’s friendly of you. How is it you can talk at all, by the way? Is it common among pelicans?”

“Not very. But I’m a special bird, if I say so myself. I’m not only good at speaking but at guessing. I know, for instance, what you would like best in the world—an opal necklace with stones as big as hazelnuts, full of drowned lights.”

“The very thing!” cried Murtha, clapping her hands. “I didn’t know it was what I wanted most in the world, but now that you mention it I can’t wait till I get one.”

“And I’m here to tell you how,” said the pelican, who was really the Fish-hag in disguise, of course. “A bit of way it is, past three meadows and a wood, up one hill and down two to a secret place. There stand nine hazels circling a spring. At the bottom of that spring is a bed of opals. Here must Finn McCool come in the first dawn, and if he questions me courteously, I will tell him how to dive for those opals, and you shall have a necklace finer far than any worn by any princess of any realm.”

“I’ll get them myself. I can swim and dive better than Finn.”

“No, it must be he.”

“Oh, pooh, why?”

“It is the way of things. The jewel a girl wears must be given her by a lad or it loses its luster. Now don’t be wasting my time. Do you want those opals or not?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Then go tell Finn what to do. Off with you!”

“Thank you, Mr. Pelican.”

“
Miss,
dear. But you are welcome indeed.”

The pelican rose heavily and flapped away. And Murtha, seeing the ragged wings and the stiff tail and the humped beak, felt her heart squeezed by a fear, for it seemed the shape of a witch riding a broomstick and not a bird at all. But then she saw the opals sliding their lights about the slenderness of her neck, and she forgot her fear and ran off to tell Finn.