Finn seemed to be looking through, and past, Cormac Mac Airt. “There is a place ⦠a hill, near the Bog of Almhain. Once it was the home of the SÃdhe, they say. It is deserted and avoided now, for that reason. No one dare live there. But I should like to build a fort upon it.”
Cormac felt as if a cold wind had unexpectedly blown over him. “You want me to give you an old Danann stronghold?”
“The Laigin certainly won't object,” Finn argued reasonably. “None of them wants it.”
“Is there not another place that would suit you better?”
Finn pulled his eyes into focus and fixed them squarely on the king's face. “There is not. I want the Hill of Almhain. I have given you great service, I'm entitled to the reward of my choice.” His eyelids tightened slightly, a minute change that alerted Cormac in time for the king to avert his gaze so that he did not have to see what looked out of Finn's eyes.
“You are of course,” the king said in a voice he was able to keep steady with some effort.
Messengers were sent, arrangements made. At the end of battle season, Finn went to see his new landholding.
He travelled with something of a retinue of his own by now, including not only a number of companies of the FÃanna, but porters, a keeper of hounds, a smith whose only occupation was forging and repairing weapons, and a steward who had charge of the ale supplies.
He left them all behind in camp, however, when he went to examine
the new territory carved out for him by Cormac, and including the Hill of Almhain.
“Keep everyone in camp,” he told Cailte, who with his own men was a permanent part of Finn's retinue. “See that no one follows me. All the companions I want are my hounds.”
“You plan to do some hunting?” Cailte asked, brightening. “For that, you'll want the pack, and I couldâ”
“Not the pack, Cailte, nor you either. Just myself, and Bran and Sceolaun. While I am gone you and the other rÃgfénnidi can drill the men, or do a bit of hunting yourselves if you want. Just go in the opposite direction from the one I take, and if you see any deer, keep the hounds away from them. We hunt no deer in this territory.”
He did not explain, nor did Cailte ask for an explanation. The thin man had long since learned that Finn rarely told his reasons for anything.
Slowly, almost reluctantly, Finn approached the hill that dominated the surrounding countryside and bogland. He did not know what he expected. Bog to the north and west, tree-covered hills to the south, mountains to the east ⦠the hill was remote, and wild.
Finn was remote, and wild.
He wondered if They were watching. They, the Tuatha Dé Danann. By now they had become as palpable a presence in his mind as they were in the mind of Cormac Mac Airt, though for a different reason. Finn had incorporated them into the creation of Finn Mac Cool.
This hill could have belonged to ancestors of mine, he told himself. Those tumbled stones where the hawthorn grows, that could be the ruins of their fort. That dark hole could be the entrance to their underground kingdom, screened now by briers. If I stop, and stand, and listen, I just might hear the strains of their faraway music â¦
He stopped and stood and listened, and his hounds stood with him. Even Finn's preternaturally keen hearing detected only the wind soughing through the grass. But then ⦠then there was something else. Something moving toward him. Something coming so slowly, so delicately, he knew of its approach not by sound, but by a sense of space being occupied.
He turned his head.
The woman emerged from the tumble of stones where the hawthorn grew.
Finn's first reaction was a feeling of profound disappointment. He had truly expected magic. But this was not a deer, merely a human woman: a slender human woman with a light step and regal head carriage, walking forward across the grass. Her hair was the colour of a red deer's coat.
Then Bran and Sceolaun raced toward her, wagging their plumed tails.
Suddenly Finn's heart was pounding so hard he could not breathe.
His hounds threw themselves at the woman's feet and wriggled with ecstasy as she stopped to rub their upturned bellies. Still bending over as if on all fours, she lifted her head and looked toward Finn across the intervening space.
There was no intervening space.
She was inside his head.
“I know you,” he heard himself say.
She straightened thenâa movement of ineffable graceâand smiled. “Have we met before?”
“We have surely. In this very place.”
“I don't come here often. I would remember if I'd seen anyone else here, it is rarely visited.”
“I know. I was here, though, toward the end of last summer. And I saw you over there, emerging from the woods on the slope just as you emerged from ⦠those stones.”
“I didn't come out of the stones,” she said, laughing.
“Did you not?” The question was serious.
She hesitated before answering. Her large brown eyes searched his face, as if wondering how far she could trust him.
Walk toward me, he pleaded in his mind. Just walk toward me, that's all you have to do. But don't run away. Don't reject me.
Don't reject me, he begged with desperate urgency in the black silence of his mind.
His hounds got to their feet and pressed against the woman's legs, looking up at her as devotedly as they had always looked at Finn. When she started to walk, they walked with her, toward him.
“I was back in there,” she said with a nod of her head to indicate the pile of stones, “looking for berries.”
Finn was a man of forest and field; he knew at a glance there were no berries in that tangle of hawthorn and ruins. Only the tree sacred to the SÃdhe grew there, guarding the entrance to their destroyed stronghold with its thorns and its magic.
His heart leaped and lurched in his breast, threatening to break out through his ribs. “Did you find any?” he asked in a choked voice.
“I did not. Perhaps it's past the season.”
“Perhaps,” he agreed, wondering why they were speaking inanities. Wondering why they were speaking at all. They did not need to speak.
Or perhaps they did. He had to have a name for her, in case they were separated again, so he could ask after her and find her and bind her to him. “What are you called yourself?” he asked in that same choked voice.
“I am called Sive,” she replied. “And yourself?”
Finn's pride suffered a blow. “You don't know who I am?”
“I do not. I trust you will tell me.”
He stood his tallest, his shoulders their widest, his silvery hair gleaming in the autumnal sun. “I am called Fionn Mac Cuhal, and I am RÃgfénnid FÃanna.”
There were trumpets in his voice.
For a moment her eyes widened as if in fear. He thought she might run. With one swift step he covered the unimportant space between them and put his hand on her arm ⦠gently, gently but firm enough to hold her. “Don't run,” he said in an urgent whisper. “Nothing will harm you, I'll never let anyone or anything harm you. I
can
protect you, I'm the RÃgfénnid FÃanna,” he repeated.
She was trembling. He could feel the tremors run through her body into her arm, into his hand, up his arm, through his body â¦
“Is the FÃanna nearby?” she asked anxiously.
From no more than the inflection of her voice he understood. She was a noblewoman, her very grace and posture made that plain. The fénnidi had a less than savoury reputation with women or had done, until Finn Mac Cool.
“No member of the FÃanna will hurt you,” he told her. “Not now, not ever. I have sworn them to respect all women and treat them gently.” As if I knew about you, he added silently in his head.
She was still trembling. So was Finn.
It did not feel like fear.
Glancing toward the stone ruins, he asked, “Is your family nearby? Can I take you to them?”
He felt her tense beneath his hand. “My people ate far away: I've wandered a great distance from them.”
“Why?”
She dropped her voice so low he could barely hear her, even with his exceptional hearing. “I refused to marry a man to whom my father owed a debt. I ran away with my father's curse on me. They've been hunting me a weary time.”
It took all the strength Finn had to refrain from gathering her protectively into his arms. “No one will harm you now; you're with me. With the FÃanna,” he added. “And I promise you the FÃanna will not hurt you. How could your father dare try to force you to marry? Does that not go against the law? You're a free woman surely, you have the right to refuse.”
“My father,” Sive replied, “obeys only those laws that suit him.”
Finn said with a bitter laugh, “He's not alone in that habit. No matter how carefully the law is crafted, there is always someone displeased.”
She looked up into his face, and for the first time, he realized just how small she was compared to himself. “You know about law?” she asked wonderingly.
“I know about a lot of things,” said Finn Mac Cool.
He took herâcajolingly, step by stepâto meet his men. Bran and Sceolaun frisked beside her, choosing her over Finn, which for some reason pleased him inordinately.
When they saw him approaching, Cailte and Fergus trotted out to meet him, slowing their pace when they realized he had a woman with him. They looked from his face to hers and back again, then stared in wonder at the hounds pressing their bodies against Sive's legs.
“This woman is under our protection,” was all the explanation Finn offered.
Methodically, he stripped the camp of everything rich and fine. The warmest furs were collected for her bed, the best food, the golden ale cups that had been a gift from the kingâFinn gave it all to Sive.
“He's given a new meaning to the word âprotection,'” Conan remarked to Cael.
Finn appropriated Donn to do the cooking for Sive, taking him away from his own company without a moment's hesitation. “Add his men to yours for the time being,” he told Red Ridge. “I need the best cook there is, and that's Donn.”
To Donn he said, “Prepare anything she likes, but don't offer her deer meat.”
Donn lifted his eyebrows. “I can cook deer meat three hundred ways! It's the best thing I do! Why can't I prepare some for her? Even if she claims not to like it, I can make it so delicious that ⦔
His words ran down, overwhelmed by the weight of Finn's scowl.
“Very well, if you insist. I'll cook her anything she wants, but I won't offer her deer meat. Seems a pity, though,” Donn could not resist adding.
That winter Finn did not return to Tara. He sent Cailte to explain to the king, an explanation Cormac did not find convincing. “Finn thinks you would be better served by his remaining among the Laigin,” the thin man said. “There are rumblings of discontent, some of the tribal kings may rebel against your authority. He says that if the FÃanna are highly visible there during the winter, the kings will probably have second thoughts.”
“Companies of the FÃanna have always been quartered in that territory. There's no need for Finn specifically to stay there,” Cormac argued.
Cailte replied, “He thinks there is.”
The king started to issue an order demanding his RÃgfénnid FÃanna return to Tara for the winter, but then he thought better of it. What if
Finn refused? Would that not force a confrontation better avoided? As long as Cormac did not ask something Finn would refuse, he could maintain the illusion of total control, though he knew to the depths of his being that he did not have total control over Finn Mac Cool. No one did, he thought. No one could.
Although Cormac did not give him credit for it, Finn had told the truth. The various Laigin kings were growing restive. When they sent their tributes to Tara after the harvest, they had resented Cormac's demands, and as the winter progressed, they resented them more. The presence of a sizable contingent of the FÃanna in Laigin territory, and under the very visible command of the RÃgfénnid FÃanna himself, served to keep their fires smouldering rather than bursting into flame.
Even in the season of shortest days, Finn demanded that the FÃanna drill incessantly. Trumpets summoned them from their various quarterings to gather on a training ground and practice with sword and shield and javelin until their arms ached and their backs knotted with muscle. Fondly they recalled the relative ease of battle season, when fighting was a sport like hunting and the sun shone warmly.
Most of Finn's time, however, was spent overseeing the construction of his new fort on the Hill of Almhain. For this work, he demanded the services of his original fÃan, who had learned the arts of the builder while working on Tara.