Home, Finn called it. Home. Where Sive is.
He was running his fastest now, leaving the others behind. Only Bran and Sceolaun were able to keep up with him.
“Sive!” he shouted, all decorum forgotten. He had outrun the position of RÃgfénnid FÃanna. He was only Finn, going home. “Sive!” He would grab her in his arms, he would swing her high in the air, he would â¦
Red Ridge emerged from the gate behind the hawthorn and stared down at the silver-haired, grinning young man running up the hill toward him. “Finn?” he asked in a puzzled voice.
“Of course it's me. Where's my wife? Go back in and tell her I'm here. Bring her to me! Or better still, I'll go to her myself andâ”
“Wait, Finn.” Red Ridge put a delaying hand on his commander's arm. “She isn't in there.”
Finn paused, wrinkling his forehead. “Not in there?”
“We thought she was with you.” Red Ridge looked as baffled as Finn felt.
“How could she be with me and I away fighting?”
“But you came back. Yesterday.”
Finn stared at Red Ridge. “I came back just now. Not yesterday.”
“Your steward saw you You and the hounds. He told your wife you had come home, and she ran out to meet you with the baby in her arms.”
Finn's jaw dropped. “She what? Where were you when this happened ? Where was Donn? Why weren't you guarding her?”
“We were, Finn. Of course we were. But at the moment you arrived”
“I never arrived. Not yesterday,” Finn insisted, feeling his heart begin to thunder dangerously.
“At the moment the steward thought he saw you,” Red Ridge amended, “Donn had taken his company and gone hunting for meat; we were running low. My men were guarding the hill, of course, standing sentry duty, but somehow none of them noticed your arrival. We weren't aware anything had happened until after Sive went out to you and didn't come back.”
“
Didn't come back?”
Finn's words were hollow with horror.
Red Ridge would have given a year of his life to avoid having to meet Finn's eyes. But he was a brave man. He met them. Whatever he saw in them chilled him to the bone. “She never came back, Finn. We've been searching for her ever since, her and the infant. They've simply vanished.”
For a heartbeat Red Ridge thought Finn Mac Cool would kill him where he stood. Faster than the eye could follows, Finn had a sword in his hand. But he did not use it on the other man. He did not use it at all. He simply held, it, lifted it to eye level, stared at it blankly.
Put it away.
A sword was no use to him.
“Vanished,” he said.
Red Ridge hastened to explain, “We haven't stopped searching, we had parties out all through the night. I'm surprised you didn't meet some of them as you approached.”
“I wasn't looking for anyone else, 1 was just ⦠hurrying home.” Finn drew a deep breath. He was very pale, his face almost as colourless as his hair. Red Ridge began to think it would be a wise idea to send for Bebinn and have the physician close by in case Finn had some sort of seizure.
“Send my steward to me,” Finn ordered.
Garveronan of the Rough Buzzing had a voice that made men flinch, but he was a good steward. Finn had recruited him personally from a fÃan from the west, recognizing qualities of organization and responsibility in the man. He had entrusted Garveronan with running his household in his absence.
He had never expected betrayal.
“I didn't betray you!” the steward protested repeatedly, his rasping voice rising and falling like a storm of locusts. “I would never have let your wife go out to you if I had known it wasn't you! Mind her, you instructed me when you left, and mind her I did. No stray wind chilled her, no drop of rain fell on her. Wherever she went, she was accompanied. But when I saw you and the hounds coming up the hill, of course
I ran inside to tell her. And of course she brushed me aside and hurried out to you. What could be more natural?”
The man's face was so naked in its honesty that Finn could not doubt his words. He wanted to strike someone. He wanted to kill someone to redress the terrible loss he was already feeling. But he could not kill Garveronan, anymore than he could understand just what had happened.
He sent for Cainnelsciath the druid. Meanwhile, and on his own responsibility, Red Ridge had summoned Bebinn the physician. Druid and healer entered Finn's house together to find the RÃgfénnid FÃanna slumped beside his firepit, his eyes burning more hotly than the coals.
He glared at the two of them. “What do you know of my wife's disappearance?”
“Nothing,” admitted Bebinn with regret while professionally studying Finn's livid face, his hoarse breathing.
Cainnelsciath said, “I did not see her leave, but I know something of her going.”
Finn was on his feet in an eyeblink. “What?”
The druid ran his hands like ploughs through his ruddy hair. “I warned you not to build on this hill, Finn. It belonged to the Tuatha Dé Danann, and they do not welcome intruders.”
Finn thrust out his jaw at a belligerent angle. “I have as much right to this hill as anyone, then. Suppose I told you I inherited it from the Dananns themselves, through my mother!” Had he not been so distracted, he would never have dared lie to a druid, but he was in a mood to lash out at anyone, to deny anything, to make any claim. To tear down walls and negate distance and alter the progress of time if need be.
Bebinn saw with her healer's vision that a sharp yellow light was pulsing from Finn, unmistakable aura of a spirit in torment. She slipped from the room to prepare a decoction to soothe him, if possible.
Finn did not see her leave. All his attention was focused on his agony.
“Whether you inherited rights to this hill or not,” the druid was saying diplomatically, “you should never have tried to live here. At least, you should never have planted a family here. I cannot be certain, Finn, but the signs indicate that the SÃdhe have extracted compensation from you in the form of your wife and child.”
It was a safe guess, neither provable nor unprovable, but it was the last thing Finn wanted to hear.
He groaned. “What makes you think so?”
“Because a figure that was the image of you lured Sive away. That sounds like SÃdhe magic. It was at least good enough to fool your steward on a misty day.”
Finn's breath caught in his throat. “Mist?”
“Indeed, there was a cloud of it obscuring the hill yesterday. You could hardly see your own toes if you took a long step. It came up suddenly, that mistâjust before the man Garveronan mistook for you arrived.”
“Mist.” Finn gazed thoughtfully into inner space, then put his thumb into his mouth and began to chew on it. After a time he said “mist” again and removed the thumb. He stared at it intently, studying the gleam of saliva on flesh.
“There was a mist when we fought the invaders,” he said. “It worked in our favourâthen. A sea mist, rising suddenly, swirling around us, hiding us when we needed to be hidden, lifting just enough to reveal the enemy to us when we were ready to fall upon them.
“Now another mist has worked against me. The Tuatha Dé Danann, you suggest.” He raised wondering eyes to the druid's face. “Is it possible, Cainnelsciath?”
In spite of his unlined complexion, the druid was not young. During his years he had learned the arts of survival as well as Goll Mac Morna, though his were different arts. He would not dream of denying the existence of magic. “Anything is possible,” he replied somberly.
“Compensation,” said Finn, as if he had never heard the word. “Everything must balance. Isn't that what the law requires? Ah. So. Cuhal took Muirinn from her father, Muirinn took me from mine. I took the Danann hill, they took ⦔
His throat closed; he could not finish. When he clenched his fists, it was an impotent gesture, there was no reality for him to grasp. With Sive he had begun to appreciate a reality superior to his fantasies, but now that vision had been torn from him, lost in swirls of mist.
He was human, he was Danann, he was Fir Bolg, he was prince. He was warrior and bard. His mother was a deer. His wife was a deer. His son was stolen from him as his mother had stolen him from â¦
Finn groaned again, a tortured sound. “My head aches,” he muttered, shoulders slumping.
Bebinn returned, carrying a silver pitcher with a square of bleached linen folded over the top. Beads of moisture ran down the pitcher's sides. Edging past the druid, she took a cup from a table and poured out a fragrant liquid that she offered to Finn. “This will ease you,” she promised.
He did not take the cup. “Will it bring Sive back?”
“She'll come back if she can, you know she will,” Bebinn said soothingly. She pressed the cup to Finn's lips and tilted it until he was forced to swallow.
Then her eyes met the druid's. Slowly, with infinite regret, Cainnelsciath shook his head. She won't, he mouthed silently.
FINN LOST HIS MIND. THERE WAS NO OTHER WAY TO describe what happened to him when he lost Sive. He lay in his house raging with fever, babbling incoherently most of the time, calling on Sive and for Sive and recognizing no one.
“His is a brain sickness,” Bebinn informed the others. “A fire in the mind. It may kill him; I've seen it happen before. I shall apply all the cures I know, and Cainnelsciath will sacrifice to the gods, but all we can really do is wait. Finn is strong, he may live.
“But he may not. You should know and he prepared.”
The fÃans crowded around Almhain of the White Walls, keeping a vigil. Donn and Red Ridge denied themselves sleep to stand guard personally outside Finn's door. They felt so guilty they could not articulate their emotions to one another. But they endlessly discussed the day of Sive's disappearance, as if by going over each detail again and again, they could find some overlooked clue that would take them to her.
Poor Garveronan was subjected to so much questioning that his rasping voice dwindled to an anguished whisper. He could only keep repeating the same story: “I saw a fair man coming up the Hill of Almhain toward the fort. There were hounds with him. I thought he was Finn. There was a mist, but I thought I was seeing Finn return and I ran to tell Sive.”
“Perhaps it was one of her own kinsmen,” Donn suggested. “They might have learned where she was and decided to send someone for her, or for her honour price. A man who could be mistaken for Finn on a dull day in a lowering mist. Perhaps it wasn't even an intentional deception, but coincidence.”
“Perhaps it was a white-haired man,” Red Ridge suggested. “Her father? Could it have been her father, Garveronan?”
“How would I know?” the steward replied, burying his face in his
hands. His next muffled words were almost incomprehensible. “I've never seen her people, I know nothing about them. She never talked about them. I've thought about this so much it's become a muddle in my mind and I don't know anything anymore.”
Long days passed, and longer nights. At last a messenger had to be sent to the king of Tara to inform him Finn was ill.
Cormac promptly summoned Goll Mac Morna. “If Finn's going to be incapacitated for any length of time, he'll have to be replaced,” he told the one-eyed man. “Cailte's an able second in command, but he's not equipped to lead the FÃanna permanently. Will you accept that responsibilityâat least until Finn returns?”
Those last words cut deep. Goll did not flinch, except inwardly, but he added them to the list of grudges he held against the king.
“So I'm second-best?” he said, tight-lipped.
“Of course not. You're the best available.”
“The best available. I see.” Goll began pinching and rubbing the puckered skin of his facial scar. “Tell me this, Cormacâis it merely a ploy on your part? Do you hope to force Finn to leave a sickbed and come back to your service through jealousy of me?”
“Would I do that?”
“I would in your place. It's a clever move.”
“Will you do it?”
“You have a brass neck, asking me that.”
“Will you do it?”
“Will I let you use me, you mean?”
“Will you do it?” the king repeated.
Cailte insisted on carrying the news to Almhain personally. When he arrived, a reluctant Garveronan finally admitted him to the lodge where an emaciated, pallid Finn lay tossing restlessly on a bed of matted furs.
Cailte. was appalled at the change in his friend. He bent over him. “Finn? Finn! Wake up! I bring word from Tara.”
Finn's eyes opened slowly, pulling apart gummed lashes. “Wha ⦠?” His speech was slurred, his expression vacant. “Who ⦠?”
“I'm Cailte Mac Ronan,” the thin man said crisply, “and I've come to inform you that Cormac Mac Airt has appointed another commander for the FÃanna in your absence.”
A miniscule animation flickered across Finn's features; faded. “So? Needed to be done, I suppose.” His eyelids began to drift shut.
“It didn't need to be Goll Mac Morna,” Cailte said in a voice like a whiplash.
For a moment he did not think Finn had heard himâor cared.
Then Finn's breathing deepened. He lay still as if gathering himself.
“Who did you say?”
“Goll Mac Morna.”
Finn's eyes met Cailte's. They were clearer now. “Goll is acting as RÃgfénnid FÃanna?”
“He is.”
“Och. Goll Mac Morna.” Finn closed his eyes again and seemed almost asleep. But he was not asleep. The watching Cailte saw his face slowly ⦠change.
He stood up in one smooth motion, so unexpectedly that Cailte jumped backward in spite of himself. The man before him was obviously weak, shaky, but on his feet. And recognizably Finn Mac Cool. He cleared his throat. “Garveronan? Bring me food. A lot of food. Meat. Pots of cheese. Buttermilk. Why are you standing there staring at me, Cailte? Help him fetch it. Run!”
Cailte. ran.
With single-minded determination, Finn Mac Cool healed himself in a matter of days. Bebinn watched in disbelief as he did through willpower what all her herbal concoctions could not. Cainnelsciath the druid was equally astounded. “The omens said he would die,” the man kept repeat ing, shaking his head.
Every night found Finn heavier and stronger than the night before. Part of the cure was not to allow himself to think of Sive. Or of Oisin. Relentlessly, he put them in a box at the back of his mind and forced the lid closed while he ate and slept and began practicing his battle skills again to restore his reflexes.
“Finn Mac Cool is back!” a relieved Red Ridge soon reported to the rest of the FÃanna at Almhain.
“We're going to Tara at the next change of the moon,” Finn announced to them the very next morning, “so the king can see for himself that I'm able to resume command of the army. And,” he added with a sudden, unexpected grin, a flash of white teeth, merry and impish, “we'll go singing.”
Of all those who heard him, and cheered him, only Cailte noticed that it was not quite the same old grin.
The youth had gone out of it.
The morning before they were to depart for Tara, Finn left Almhain of the White Walls. He went alone, to the distress of his men, who kept insisting he should take a bodyguard. But Finn was in no mood to take advice from anyone.
He went alone, to track the waveless ocean of the Bog of Almhain and search one more time for Sive.
As always when his spirit was in chaos, he instinctively sensed order in the patterns of nature. He could find no peace under a roof, any more
than he could find Sive there. He needed sky over him and earth under him.
A man from a different background might have chosen other, more reliable earth. The hog was a land that quivered and quaked, more water than soil, dotted with countless tiny islands and hillocks that were only nominally more substantial. Stepping-stones through a treacherous morass. Beautiful, humming with reed-song, billowing with bog cotton, glinting with pools that reflected the perfection of the sky, the bog was deadly to all but the feet that knew it best.
Finn walked with the ease of familiarity. The bog's fluid surface was more stable to him than the fluctuating borders of reality.
Perhaps Sive had drowned in one of these pools. Perhaps she had lost her way. He must admit it to himself just once, in total privacy.
Perhaps she and Oisin were dead and gone and he was left in a world without them.
If that were true, he could fight battle after battle until a sword or spear took him, and he would never care when that day came. He would be the greatest warrior Erin ever produced simply because he had nothing left to fear.
Simply because he had nothing left.
Or perhaps Sive had been taken by the SÃdhe. As Finn saw it, this was a possibility.
She might reappear.
He might find her.
If that could happen, then life was very precious and every moment, every breath, mattered, because they underpinned the future he would share with Sive.
Which was true?
How could he know?
He walked on across the bog, lost in thought. Accompanying him as always, Bran and Sceolaun had stayed close to him for a while. When they realized he was not hunting, they gradually began wandering away from him, doing a little hunting on their own as was their wont, not out of hunger, but out of love of the sport.
Finn paid no attention. He knew they would come back.
But would Sive?
The land sank beneath his feet. He found himself on the brink of a reedy pond, the reflective residence of a blue heron that stood one-legged on the far side, eyeing the interloper with regal disdain.
Finn sank slowly until he was crouching on his heels at eye level with the heron across the bog pool. The bird did not take fright but continued to regard him, turning its head to look at him first with one fierce yellow eye, then with the other.
The heron's single-eyed stare reminded Finn of Goll Mac Morna.
“I'm not hunting today,” he told the bird. “You know that, don't you? That's why you're not flying away.”
The bird did not reply, but it appeared to listen.
As Sive listened.
A spasm of anguish gripped Finn's gut.
“I need to talk to someone,” he admitted to the heron. “It's a habit I've developer, In my head, mostly,” he added with an apologetic little laugh.
The heron raised a thin crest of dark feathers along the top of its skull, then let them sink back.
“If I've really lost her, I'm alone.” Finn said miserably. “Alone in my head.”
The heron lowered one leg and raised the other without ever ceasing its unblinking scrutiny of Finn.
Finn went on reflectively. “I didn't know that I minded being alone, until Sive. I didn't know how alone I'd always been. I loved the silences of forest and mountain. I loved standing, listening, letting the world fill me with poems. Then Sive filled me with herself. She became all my poems. Sive ⦔
Her name caught in his throat. He swallowed, hard. “I've been trying not to think of her,” he confessed to the heron. “When I let myself think of her and my son, it cripples me. I feel as if a mountain has fallen on me. I've dug myself out from under the mountain, you see ⦠but I shan't stop looking for her. I'll always be looking for her. I can't accept that she's ⦔
Finn could not say the word. The heron was looking at him very intently, extending its slender neck as if to hear his softest whisper. Suddenly he was convinced the bird understood him and might even
know.
“Where is she?” he asked hoarsely. “Where is Sive, where is my son? Do they live?
Can I find them?”
For one agonizing heartbeat he thought the heron would answer. It actually opened its beak while reality spun and spiralled and Finn was willing to believe anything, even a talking heron that would guide him to his wife. He willed it to be with all the fierce intensity of a will forged in iron and loneliness.
“If her people came for her, tell me who they are and where to find them!” he commanded the heron. “She would never tell me; she would never talk of them. I think they had made her very unhappy. But if I knew where they were, I could go and get her, you see? Just tell me. You fly across Erin, surely you know, you've seen her, a woman with soft brown eyes and a child, a little boy with pale hair ⦔
In an excess of longing, Finn stretched out his arms toward the heron.
The bird's beak yawned wider. Finn yearned toward it across the pond. “Just tell me she didn't leave me on purpose,” he pleaded. Then he expressed his innermost fear, the one that unmanned him. “Tell me she didn't abandon me of her own will on the Bog of Almhain!”
But before the bird could answerâand Finn would go to his death believing it could have answeredâSceolaun came bounding toward them, bringing Finn some small furred creature she had caught and wagging her tail in anticipation of his praise.
The heron squawked and leaped onto the wind, carrying Finn's answer away on whispering wings.
The man let out a howl that shivered the surface of the bog pool.
Alarmed, Sceolaun dropped her catch and pressed close to him, trying to lick his face in an excess of sympathy. He struck out at her savagely. The astonished bitch shrank back from the blow. Finn had never hit his hounds. She sank to her belly and crawled toward him, pulling herself forward with her elbows, making small conciliatory noises in her throat that were drowned in the terrible sound of his choking sobs.