The woman complied, dropping to her knees in front of Finn's bench. Her eyes, the observer noted, were blank and blue. Eyes should not be blue. Eyes should be brown. Sive's eyes were brown.
Does the Finn on the bench with the woman's hand at his crotch remember Sive? the observer wondered. Does he have my memories at all? Do we dream the same dreams? Or are his different from mine? When I go to sleep, is he awake?
This different person who is also meâwhere does he go when I can't see him?
Am I inside, and he outside?
Or is it the other way around?
The blue-eyed woman reached under Finn's tunic and smiled with astonishment. Over her shoulder she called, “This man deserves to command armies! This man deserves to be king! He is mightily armed!”
The Finn on the bench laughed and rumpled her hair and swept her into his arms, pressing her body against his. Dorbha looked on, approving.
At some point, observer and observed became one again, but a fracture had taken place. Insulated by pain, the man who loved Sive hardly felt what was happening. His body responded as nature dictated it must, but with neither joy nor grace.
In the false glow before dawn, Finn sought his bed and took with him the blue-eyed woman.
Her name, he learned tardily, was Manissa. She had strong white legs to wrap around his waist and she clutched him with rapturous delight, pulling him deeper and deeper inside her.
The observer returned. He seemed to be hanging in space somewhere above them, slightly to the left and behind Finn, looking down. Listening to the repetitive slap of flesh against flesh and the expected moanings and praisings. With a cold mind he judged the quality of the
passion the woman appeared to display, and found it lacking. She was not Sive. She was not anyone. Just a woman.
He wanted to cry, for her and for Finn.
In the morning, as the FÃanna were preparing to leave, Finn took Manissa aside. “I need a wife,” he said bluntly. “A marriage of the first degree, that's what's appropriate for the RÃgfénnid FÃanna. Your father is a man of rank and prestige, so we would have equal status, you and I. You would be my wife of equal dignity. Shall I arrange it?”
Manissa was taken aback. From a man known as a warrior-poet, she had expected something less brisk, less bald. But Finn stood before her with his face closed and his eyes guarded, obviously eager to be on the road, giving her this one chance to become a wife to the famed RÃgfénnid FÃanna or probably never see him again.
“I ⦠I am willing to be your wife,” she said with a dry mouth
“Good,” he said briskly, as if concluding a negotiation for a hunting dog. “Next Beltaine, then. We take no property with our women, so you won't require a dowry, but I shall offer your male kin appropriate coibche. What is your honour price?”
Under the circumstances, Finn announced they would stay with Dorbha for one more night. It seemed discourteous to rush off so abruptly after agreeing to marry the man's daughter. Dorbha was delighted with the arrangement, already imagining the benefits that would accrue from being the father of the RÃgfénnid's wife. No one would ever dare raid his herds again!
Finn's men, of course, were equally delighted to enjoy one more night of Dorbha's hospitality.
A fine banquet, surpassing those previous, was hastily arranged in Finn's honour. Dorbha gave him his own carved bench to sit upon, and Manissa seated herself on the floor between his knees, occasionally favouring the other women with a small, smug smile.
She wondered why he did not touch her as she sat thus.
When the first hunger was sated and the men were beginning to pick marrow out of bones and look for forgotten scraps of bread to throw the hounds, Dorbha ordered another log placed on the fire. “I have no bard of my own,” he lamented, “although my daughter is about to enter a society where every household has a bard. But I myself am able to recite aâ”
“I can be your bard for the night,” said Finn Mac Cool.
GLANCING DOWN INADVERTENTLY, FINN'S EYES FELL UPON the mantle of otter skin Manissa had draped around her shoulders against the cool of the evening. Then he cleared his throat.
His men exchanged knowing glances. “It's a long time since we heard him recite,” Blamec whispered to Conan.
“He saved all his pretty speeches for Sive, I suspect. But he's not saving any more!” the bald man sniggered.
Finn drew back an imperceptible degree from the woman at his feet. The silent observer who was also Finn understood and approved. He began speaking in a tightly controlled voice from which he withheld any trace of emotion, a voice that somehow made the story more powerful by contrast.
“Abhainn Mor, great river of black water, knows no time,” he said. “Rivers cannot die, so they need not measure nights and days. But there are spirits living in them that do recognize time, and for some of those, its passage is an agony. As it is for some of us,” he added in that uninflected voice.
“There is a story told of one such creature who lived in the bitterest loneliness in the darkest depths of the black water. Once the creature had walked the fern-soft earth of Erin in the sunlight, as one of the Tuatha Dé Danann. But when the Dananns were defeated by the Milesians, this particular spirit transformed itself and took refuge in the river rather than be slain or driven from the land.
“It lives there still.
“In order to experience some of the life it had once enjoyed, the creature assumed a body of muscle and bone. The Dananns had that gift, you know. They could take shapes for themselves. This particular one chose to appear as an otter, most of the time.”
The hunters exchanged a different sort of glance now. There was not a man among the rÃgfénnidi who had not speared at least one otter during their stay at Dorbha's fort.
Glas the Grey whispered urgently to Fergus Honey-Tongue, “Is Finn trying to tell us we've done something wrong, killing otters?”
“You never know exactly what Finn's saying with these stories,” Fergus replied. “Just listen to him. I think they have hidden meanings only he knows.”
Goll said nothing, but kept his eyes on Finn.
“The Danann became a she-otter,” Finn was saying, “a supple, shining animal with large ⦠brown ⦠eyes. But it was not like the other otters and they recognized this; none would mate with it. The Danann otter remained alone and lonely in her river.
“Then one day a shepherd drove a flock of sheep to the Blackwater for a drink, and knelt on the bank himself to cup his hands in the water. From concealment beneath an overhang, the otter saw him. There was something almost familiar about him, some plane of cheek or brow she thought she knew from another time.
“She swam to him and lifted her head above the water very close to his. They stared at one another. The shepherd's first thought was of the value of an otter skin. He had no weapon within reach, but she seemed almost tame; he began to hope he could lure her onto the bank and catch her there.
“He spoke softly to her and she moved closer, trying to remember when she had seen him last. When she had loved him last, in what lifetime â¦
“He made a grab for her but she grabbed him first, with a hand that closed over his wrist as no otter's ever could. She held him fast and began to pull him into the water with her.
“The shepherd struggled but it was of no use; the creature who was not an otter was incredibly strong. He began to shout then, but all he did was frighten his sheep and they bolted. There was no one close enough to hear his cries for help and save him.
“The creature who was not an otter drew him deeper, deeper into the water, and even though he was beginning to drown, he did not know he was drowning. A wild joy overcame him. He allowed himself to be locked in her embrace and it felt like coming home. He surrendered everything to her.
“And she took him down, down into the black depths of the black water where she had once fled for sanctuary. She took him with her, but at some point she must have decided he was not the one she remembered, not one of her own kind after all, and she released her hold on him.
“She abandoned him to the current and he began to move upward again, borne by the water. But it was too late. The life had already gone out of him, and when his body reached the surface, it floated lifeless on the breast of the river.”
A stunned silence followed.
Members of Finn's audience looked at each other as if uncertain of how to react.
“What sort of tale is that?” wondered Fidach the Foreigner. “I was expecting a bardic epic.”
Conan said tersely, “You didn't get one.”
Rousing herself with a little shiver, Manissa half-turned so she could look up at Finn. Unshed tears glittered in her eyes.
“Ochone,
alas! What a terrible story. Where did you learn it?”
Finn did not look down at her, but instead gazed straight at Goll Mac Morna. “My mother taught it to me when I was a child,” he claimed. “She taught me all the legends of the Tuatha Dé Danann, which she knew well, being descended from that race herself.”
Contradict me if you date, his eyes coldly challenged Goll.
The one-eyed man refused to accept the bait. Who would choose to believe him over Finn Mac Cool? “You have a very interesting genealogy,” was all he said. “When the historians recite it, do they mention your mother's descent from the SÃdhe?”
Without hesitating, Finn answered smoothly, “I've not requested the historians to recite my genealogy yet, as until the last few years I've had no property that my offspring might someday inherit, nor have I inherited any from my ancestors. With the exception of the treasure bag of my father's clan, of course.” He smiled with one side of his mouth. “And it also contains magic,” he said softly.
Watching him, listening to him, assessing his words, Goll was convinced that Finn really believed what he was saying; believed it totally, no matter how preposterous. And if he did, he was mad. Surely, truly mad.
But he was not always mad, Goll had to admit to himself. As commander of the FÃanna, he was sharply sane, a brilliant strategist and gifted leader of men in spite of the shadows at the edges of his mind.
If Finn is mad, I will someday replace him, Goll thought. And if Finn is mad, what a waste, what a loss!
As always, Goll was torn between love and hate when it came to Finn Mac Cool.
With some reluctance, the army got underway next morning. Finn was not the only one who had found himself a woman, and there were several painful farewells. To Manissa's disappointment, however, Finn seemed able to leave her without regret. In fact, his last words were not to her, but to her father. “I'll arrange for the coibche to be sent to you
as soon as I get to Almhain,” he promised. “I'm stopping there before we go on to Tara. And you're to send Manissa to me next Beltaine. We'll wed then because it's a contract marriage.”
Manissa was not pleased to think she must wait through autumn and winter before joining Finn, but he obviously had no intention of taking her with him now. Though there were women with the FÃanna, as she knew.
She thought, briefly, of disguising herself and joining these women, going to Tara with them as just another of the army's followers. Then she recalled that she was a chieftain's daughter and restrained herself.
“I must behave with dignity,” she assured herself, gazing into the polished metal mirror her mother had given her on her Day of First Bleeding. “Finn Mac Cool's a self-controlled man, an unemotional man. He will want the same of me. He will want a wife of calm demeanor, nothing impetuous, nothing wild.”
Pleased with her judgment of the man, Manissa settled herself resolutely to await the passing of the seasons.
As the FÃanna swept northward, they fought one more battle, a brief, bitter skirmish on a morning of alternating rain and sun, when shadows chased golden light across the rolling grassland and birds flew up in alarm at the clash of swords.
For Conn Crither, the battle seemed only the continuation of a dream. Together with his three nines, he had spent the previous night bedded down in a hollow. a little distance removed from the main body of the army. The night had been disturbed; he saw visions of three women in battle dress approaching him, promising to create additional warriors for him out of stalks of grass. His brain was still cobwebbed with sleep when a hostile band encountered the encamped FÃanna and battle broke.
Yelling at his men to follow, Conn Crither ran to join the fighting. He somehow thought he had more men behind him than just his three fÃans, and ran into the very thick of the battle as if he were invincible. So boldly did he attack that he found himself facing the leader of the opposition, and without pausing to draw breath, he beheaded the man with his sword.
It was an act of conspicuous bravery.
“I thought I was leading a whole army,” Conn Crither told Finn later. “I had this dream, you see ⦔
Finn listened sympathetically. He knew about dreams and how they impinged on reality.
Reaching Almhain, he paused only long enough to ascertain that no one had heard anything of Sive, and to send the coibche to Dorbha.
Then, ordering Red Ridge and Donn to leave enough men behind to guard the fort and follow him themselves, he set out again for Tara.
Everyone of any importance must be at Tara this year for the Great Assembly.
“There will be a fortnight of sport before the Assembly itself begins,” Finn reminded his men, “and I expect the FÃanna to win every contest. The serious part of the Assembly starts three days before Samhain and lasts three days after, and every king in Erin will be there, in addition to all the brehons and the chief poets and historians ⦠anyone who matters. I want every officer of the FÃanna there too, very much in evidence. We can hold our own with the nobility.”
“Arrogant,” said Goll to himself, since no one else was interested.
No sooner did they arrive at Tara than Finn began telling a highly coloured version of their most recent battle, one in which Conn Crither's dream became part of the reality and the battle took place partly in the Here and Now and partly in the Celtic Otherworld. It was a spectacular tale, making of Conn Crither a hero out of legend, and he was the last to contradict Finn.
Goll did not attempt to correct Finn either. He merely listened, his one eye narrowed thoughtfully.
Feis Teamhrach,
the Great Assembly of Tara, was an occasion for arguing and proclaiming law, for making new regulations when required, for updating tribal history by having recent events related by the participants, and for correcting and adding to the all-important genealogies upon which rank and inheritance depended. The entire proceedings were scrupulously committed to memory by professional poets steeped in the oral tradition, using the rhythm and metre of their art to carve words ineradicably in the mind.
At the Great Assembly, Finn would be expected to relate the activities and victories of the FÃanna, to become part of the history of Erin.
After debating with himself for some time. Goll went to see Cormac, whom he found with Flaithri, inspecting the Fort of the Synods. “Now that I've built a similar fort for the poets,” Cormac told his chief brehon, “I want to be certain the structures reflect the exact status and prestige of the two professions.”
Flaithri, scowling at an iron door hinge that seemed slightly less elaborate than those on the Fort of the Poets, was about to comment when Goll joined them. Instead of criticizing door hinges, the brehon said acidly, “There is nothing in the law that permits rÃgfénnidi access to this building whenever they like.”
“This is important,” Goll said. “I need to speak to the king.”
“Ah, isn't it always important?” Flaithri rolled his eyes roofward and turned his palms up in an eloquent gesture reminiscent of his father.
Studying Goll's face, Cormac gave a short, sharp nod. “This is important,” he decided. “Wait for us, Flaithri.” He followed Goll from the fort.
A thin, cold wind was blowing across Tara. Goll turned his back to it deliberately, letting the king take it in the face. Cormac smiled. “You interpose your body between me and the wind,” he said. “A thoughtful gesture.”
Disconcerted, Goll blinked rapidly and regathered his thoughts. “What I wanted to say to you is ⦠is ⦔
“About Finn Mac Cool?” Cormac guessed.
“About Finn Mac Cool,” Goll conceded. “Are you aware that he's ⦠not himself?”
Cormac smiled again. “On the contrary, I think he's very much himself. He's strutting around Tara and boasting like a rooster that's laid an egg. Isn't that the Finn we know?”
Trying not to feel disloyal, Goll said, “Those boasts are lies, Cormac. Outright lies, most of them.”
Cormac's face was impassive. “Are they?”