To the surprise of no one, Blamec, complained. “I'm a rÃgfénnid now with men of my own to command, why do I have to go back to being a carpenter? It's demeaning.”
“No work well done is demeaning,” Finn said sternly. “Besides, I need you. This fort must be completed by Beltaine, and while it won't be as large as Tara, I want it to be as finely made, as dazzling with limewash and golden thatch, as ⦠as kingly as Tara. And for that, I need it to be built by the men who made Tara what it is today.”
Later, Cael confided to Blamec, “I heard Finn say that if he isn't satisfied with the work we do, he'll cut us into three pieces just for sword practice. Head to heart, heart to knees, knees to toes.” Cael made suitably descriptive gestures with his hands as he spoke. “It's a new feat he's developing.”
Blamec paled. “Are you serious?”
Madan gave a snort of laughter. “Can't you tell yet when he's joking?”
“I can. I can of course.”
“Well, I can't,” said Red Ridge. “And I wouldn't be surprised if Finn had made that very threat. He's serious about this fort of his.”
Fergus Honey-Tongue commented, “Very serious is Finn Mac Cool, his fine skull filled with wisdom.”
“His fine skull filled with thoughts of a woman,” growled Conan Maol to himself.
After a diligent search, Finn had found safe shelter for Sive with a family of stonemasons at the edge of the Bog of Almhain. There he visited her almost daily while his fort was being built. Sometimes he had only time to greet her and ask about her health, her warmth, the quality of food she was receiving, before he had to turn and dash off again, his time filled to overflowing with a thousand busynesses. But he never failed to think of her during the day, even when he could not manage to steal a few moments to be with her.
One day she noticed that he was shivering when he arrived. It was a day of unprecedented cold, with a wind like glass knives and a sky like black hatred. Finn had run so hastily to Sive that he had neglected to bring the heavy clothing the weather demanded. Before he left her, she begged a blanket from her hosts and gave it to him. “I sleep with this on my bed at night,” she said, handing it shyly to him. “Wrap it around you.”
That night Finn slept with the blanket on his own bed. He had not yet touched her in an intimate way. There was a fear in him that he would not express even to himself, a Cruina-shaped shadow that threatened him with failure. So he put off the moment when he would claim Sive's body, though his own ached for hers. But he could lie with her blanket wrapped around him ⦠and never think of how Cruina must have lain wrapped in his cloak.
Sometime during the night he awoke with a start. He thought someone called his name, a voice like a bell chiming. The call had cut through his sleep like a blade. He lay immobile, scarcely daring to breathe, waiting to hear it again.
“What?” he murmured softly. “What?”
He pressed his face against his bed, waiting.
Then he knew.
Her scent was in his bed; faint, fading, but as clear as a call to him. He lay with his face pressed down against the blanket, trying to capture the elusive fragrance of her.
He knew he was alone in the bed, but he did not feel alone. He felt like a piece of soft wax worked by a candlemaker, with the imprints of the maker's fingers embedded in its surface. He was not the man he had been. He was reshaped.
She was part of him. Though her body was not in his bed, she was there. She was in him and of him, and wherever he went, he carried her with him.
As he rose and prepared for the day, he talked to her inside his head as if she were an arm's length from him. Some of the things he said were
profound; some were the trivia that flickers through a man's mind while he scrubs his teeth with a hazel twig. The content was unimportant. The conversation itself was crucial.
Finn's silent monologue to Sive continued through every aspect of his day. He gathered his officers, issued orders; simultaneously he was talking to Sive. A senior rÃgfénnid reported a problem and Finn listened gravely, eyes hooded, considering the man's words and making a decision; talking to Sive. Ate, drank, walked, surveyed the lowering weather with a practised eye; talked to Sive. Selected ridgepoles, ordered the edge restored to his blades, sent runners east and south with messages for various fÃans, emptied his bladder, had a protracted discussion with Red Ridge and Cailte about the condition of the roads and trackways; talked to Sive.
How strange, he thought, that none of them see her beside me or realize she's breathing the breath I breathe.
Sive had become more real to Finn than he was to himself, though in a rare moment of leisure he discovered he was no longer envisioning her physical face as an arrangement of certain features, or her body as a pleasing design of curves and planes. He was seeing the elemental Sive in his mind as she had looked when she was born, and as she would look if she lived a hundred years. He would never again see her any other way.
The elemental Sive.
SUPERSTITION PRECLUDED ANY LOCALS FROM WORKING on Finn's new fort, so all the construction was done by the FÃanna, which meant the building took longer than he would have liked. Still, it would be finished by Beltaine. He had given the order.
He brought Sive to see it when it was nearing completion. “My stronghold will be as fine in its own way as Cormac's at Tara,” he boasted. “Tara expresses him. This is me.”
Her eyes wandered over stout-timbered palisades erected upon banks of stone, their supports sunk deep. “It looks very strong,” she said, because he obviously expected her to say something.
“It is very strong. Impregnable, almost. To keep you safe.”
“I see no way in.”
Finn grinned with boyish glee. “You don't of course! It's around on the other side where no one would expect it to be, screened with a thicket of hawthorn. There's only one gate, so it's easy to guard.”
“Only one gate? What about fire?”
“Och, there's an escape tunnel, a souterrain, under the palisade. We can use it for cold storage as well. It comes out at the base of the hill, well clear of the fort. We can never be trapped here, Sive.”
He took her to the surprisingly well-concealed gateway and gave a low whistle, a series of notes like the cry of a nightjar. Oak gates opened fractionally on oiled iron hinges. Conan Maol peered out.
“It's me,” said Finn.
“Is it?” Enjoying the moment, Conan favoured Finn with a long, suspicious stare before finally stepping aside and letting him enter. “And who's this with you?”
“The woman I'll marry on Beltaine,” said Finn. “I've brought her here to show her the home I'll give her.”
“And what's she giving you?”
“She doesn't have to give me anything, Conan. You know my rule.”
“So what sort of a marriage is it to be, then?”
“The marriage of equals,” said Finn Mac Cool.
Glowing with pride, he led Sive from building to building, starting with the outhouses and storehouses and working his way up to the great round structure, stone-based, fragrant with adzed cedar, which would be their dwelling.
“This is the first roof that's ever been my own,” he told her.
Inside, he showed her the numerous small tables, the benches, the couches draped with hides and furs, the carved boxes and chests, the wall hangings, the unlit fire laid on the hearth, waiting the touch of his wife to bring life to the house. “Firedogs,” he said, showing her. “Shears, on a rope. A loom, for you. A henbox for fowl, so we can have fresh eggs. New pots and baskets. Platters. Everything we need.”
She dutifully examined each item, praising its workmanship or convenience or ingenuity. “You've thought of everything, Finn. I've nothing left to desire.”
Light shifted in his eyes. Desire, said a voice in his mind. Desire.
He had sent a request to Tara for the king's own brehon to witness their marriage contract. After Fithel's death, the position had been taken by his oldest son, a man called Flaithri, whose only resemblance to his father was in the extravagance of his gestures. Still, he had been trained by Fithel himself and was now the foremost living expert on the law.
No one else would do for Finn on his wedding day.
The Beltaine pole was raised beside the gate of the new stronghold and painted in vivid colours and explicit symbols of virility and fertility. Finn invited the entire FÃanna to attend his wedding, an event that would therefore see them conveniently assembled in one place at the start of battle season, so orders could be issued to the whole army at one time.
The night before the wedding, Cailte, at Finn's request, sat watch with the RÃgfénnid FÃanna. They built a small fire outside the new residence, which would not be occupied until Sive came to live there. She was still sleeping with the mason's family. In the morning Finn would send a guard of honour to bring her to him.
He was so nervous that Cailte had to bite the inside of his cheek to keep from laughing at the spectacle of the feared RÃgfénnid FÃanna, pale and tense, a muscle clenching in his jaw, trying to pretend he was not anxious.
“Relax,” the thin man advised. “You aren't going into a battle, you're just taking a wife.”
“I know what to do in battle,” Finn said hoarsely.
“You know what to do with a wife, too.”
Finn turned an anguished face toward him.
“Don't you?” Cailte asked.
“I ⦠I haven't had any noteworthy success with women so far,” admitted Finn.
“None?”
“None.”
“In all this time?”
“In all this time.”
Cailte was thunderstruck. “Why, Finn? Surely the women are throwing themselves into your path like hailstones, you have only to reach out and take one. You must haveâ”
“I haven't. And tomorrowâ”
“You at least know what to do,” Cailte said. “I mean, you've seen animals. , .”
“I'm not an animal.”
“And neither is she,” Cailte replied, trying to lighten the moment. To his astonishment, Finn groaned as if in pain.
“Is it different?” he asked Cailte. “Between people and animals, I mean. Is it different?”
“What are you talking about?”
“I ⦠nothing. Pay no attention to me, I've lost the run of myself tonight. I'll be all right tomorrow.”
Cailte said, “You'd better be. This is something you'll have to do yourself, you know. No one can help you.”
“No one can help me,” Finn echoed in the voice of a man anticipating his doom.
Long before dawn, Finn Mac Cool began preparing for his wedding day. He selected his clothing, changed his mind, made new selection. Cailte. had to plait and re-plait his hair, though there was no difference between the precision of the first plait and the second). But Finn was not satisfied.
He sent for Flaithri to discuss the matter of contract and vows yet again, having done so seven times previously. Flaithri was out of patience. “There's no point in continuing to plough the same ground, Finn! The contract you've described is very clear and boringly simple. Your rights, her rights, the rights of any children ⦠without arrangements for property, there's hardly anything to contract. But I must say, it's highly irregular. A marriage of the first degree, the most prestigious, with no property even mentioned ⦔
“Each marriage is shaped by its own requirements,” Finn said. “Is that not part of Brehon Law?”
“It is,” Flaithri agreed, having become aware that the RÃgfénnid FÃanna had made a more extensive study of the law than one would have expected of a man of his station. “Tell me, Finn, since I have not spoken
with the woman herself. Is she satisfied with this contract? If not, she is free to refuse it, you know.”
“She left it up to me,” Finn replied.
Flaithri was astonished. In his experience, women were not that passive. The construction of their marriage contracts was of paramount importance to the sex whose biology demanded practicality. Marriages, even of the first degree, lasted only as long as the partners desired, but the futures of children must be safeguarded before they were ever conceived.
But the only time Finn had mentioned the contract to Sive, her reply had been a simple shrug of one shoulder and the words, “What are contracts to me? You have said you will take care of me, that's all I need to know. I have no property of my own, and it's safe to say I have no family either. I am free,” she added in a tone that might have been joy or regret.
I made you out of my dream, Finn said to her in his mind. Of course you have no family, no property. And I provided for that eventuality long before I found you!
When the sun was halfway between horizon and midpoint, an honour guard led by Finn's original fÃan, together with the cream of their companies, marched away from the Hill of Almhain to bring Sive to Finn Mac Cool.
No sooner were they out of sight than another group of warriors approached from the opposite direction.
Finn was the first to see them, having mounted the sentry platform above the gateway so he would have the first glimpse of Sive. Instead, he saw hostile warriors approaching at the trot. He gave a howl of disbelief. “Someone's breaking his pledge to the king of Tara!” He leaped from the platform without bothering with the ladder and ran for his weapons.
The choicest warriors had gone to escort Sive, hut Finn swiftly rallied the rest.
“Whoever the warlord is who has broken his peace agreement wirlr Cormac,” he vowed grimly, “he made a mistake by doing it on my wedding day. He'll not leave the Hill of Almhain alive.”
The attack was led by a disaffected clan chieftain called Ilbrecc, who had chosen to disregard the arrangements made between Cormac and the kings of the Laigin. He had a long-standing quarrel with the king of his tribe anyway, and considered the man a traitor for giving in so easily to the power of Tara. He had chosen his time with great care for expressing his feelings. Like the Ulaid, he attacked just outside the recognized boundaries of battle season to take advantage of the element of surprise.
He received some surprises himself, however.
The first came when his scouts could not find a way into Finn's
stronghold. They reported, “There's a wall all the way around but we see no gates.”
“There have to be gates! There are always gates!”
“This is the site of an ancient stronghold of the Tuatha Dé Danann,” one scout said nervously, showing white all the way around his eyes. “Perhaps they worked their magic, perhaps they're in league with Finn Mac Cool.”
“Nonsense. There's a gate, I tell you. Find it and break it down!” Ilbrecc commanded.
They marched uncertainly forward to be met by a rain of spears hurled over the wall.
“If men are inside, they had to have some way to get in,” Ilbrecc reasoned. “And if they got in, so can we!”
A second attack was mounted. This time, more by chance than cleverness, they stumbled upon the gates concealed by the hawthorn. Logs were brought up to use as a battering ram.
“Open to them before they damage my new gates,” Finn ordered.
The gates swung open. Ilbrecc rushed forward firstâto find himself facing a single, startling apparition, a tall, silver-haired man who stood with legs braced wide and a sword in his hand. And clothes on his body fit for a king.
Finn smiled pleasantly. “You are very welcome, stranger,” he said in a dangerously quiet voice, “if you come as a guest to my wedding.”
Ilbrecc was disconcerted. He skidded to a halt, his men crowding against his back. “I've come to kill you!”
“Have you now?” Finn asked in the same quiet voice. He did something with his swordâa move so swift that witnesses afterward could never agree on what it wasâand Ilbrecc's head rolled across the grass.
The body stood on its legs a moment longer, then fell backward into the press of men behind it.
They scattered like sheep to let it fall.
A fountain of blood erupted from the severed jugular, drenching Finn in his wedding clothes, crimson dripping from linen, soaking into wool, as he hurled himself over the still-falling body and flung himself upon Ilbrecc's retreating men, scything his sword.
The deliberate narrowness of his gateway meant that no more than four men could enter the fort abreast at any one time. Added to this was the cluster of hawthorn shielding the gateway, a serious impediment to men trying to get their weapons into the clear for fighting. It seemed in retrospect, when the survivors told of it later, that the hawthorn actually conspired with Finn to block their way and entangle their sword arms, while allowing Finn to move freely. He hacked and hewed and Ilbrecc's men fell, unable to strike him in return.
One of them began to scream. “The SÃdhe!” he howled in terror. “The SÃdhe!”
His companions in the front line whirled and tried to run, only to find their way blocked by the men behind them. They attacked their own allies in their panic, desperate to escape Finn and the hawthorn and the mindless fear from the past that rose like dark clouds over the Hill of Almhain.
Inside the palisade, Finn's own men were jostling for position and trying to get outside to help him. But the congestion of packed and struggling bodies at the gate stoppered them like a cork stoppering a bottle. They could only rage impotently and call to Finn, who was too busy to answer.
The stopper gave way. The survivors fled the hill, shrieking. Finn Mac Cool clambered over piled bodies to watch them go and shake his sword in the air at their fleeing backs. “It was my wedding day!” he cried in outrage. “It was
my wedding day!”