The High Deeds of Finn MacCool (6 page)

And the lords of the High Table looked at each other with savage and silent laughter.

In the distance, the dog howled a third time.

Finn heard it, and his belly knotted itself up small under his breastbone. But he thought, ‘If I start my fight here, with the door shut, and all these men about me, then I shall be a worse fool than I was for coming here in the first place. Maybe somewhere between here and Glen More I will be getting my chance.'

So he stood unresisting while they bound his wrists, only he tightened all his muscles and made his wrists as thick as might be, so that when he let go, the bonds were slacker than the men who had bound him could possibly have guessed. And as they began to thrust him towards the door, he shouted up to the High Table, ‘If this is Lochlan faith and Lochlan hospitality,
then give me the faith and hospitality of wolves, which is altogether a truer and a kindlier thing!'

Then someone cursed, and struck him across the mouth, and he was hustled out through the door, which some of them ran to unbar, and away over the hills in the evening light, with never a chance to break out from among them, until they came to Glen More.

Glen More was a narrow gash among the hills, walled on either side by sheer rock and scree which there could be no climbing. And somewhere ahead of them the unearthly howling of Grey Dog echoed back from the rocks; a sound to make the bravest man's hair rise on the back of his neck. In the mouth of the Glen they passed a tiny bothie where an old man and wife lived, whose daily task was to feed Grey Dog. But even they did not dare to approach the terrible creature, and only went each morning to a certain hazel tree beside the burn, and flung the lumps of raw meat as far as they could up the Glen from there, and then ran back and barricaded the door of the bothie until the sounds of snarling and worrying told them that Grey Dog had come for his food, and the silence afterwards told them that he had gone back again into the further fastnesses of the Glen.

The men in charge of Finn urged him on, past the hazel tree, to the place where blood and bits of splintered bone showed where Grey Dog had devoured the whole of a buck flung out for him that day. But his howls that now seemed to echo all about them had not the sound of a creature full-fed and contented, but rather of a lost soul in torment and savage with hate of all the world.

‘And this is far enough for us to be going,' said one
of the men, ‘
I've
no mind to go the way of today's fat buck.'

‘Nor I,' said another. ‘The sooner and the further we are away from here the happier I shall be.'

‘A pity it is that we cannot be staying a while to watch,' said the prince regretfully.

‘Neither you nor us,' said the first. ‘You would be welcome to stay and watch alone – it is not us that would be spoiling your pleasures, my young fighting-cock – but the King your father might not be best pleased to lose his son, and it is us that would suffer for it.'

Then Finn heard running feet behind him, growing smaller into the distance, and knew that he was alone, with his hands bound, and the wind blowing up the Glen, so that it must carry his scent to Grey Dog.

‘Well,' he said to himself, ‘there's no climbing out of his place. If I run, the men will kill me, and if,
as it seems, I am to die anyway, I had sooner die from the fangs of this Grey Dog than at the hands of the Lochlan men. But the first thing is to get my own hands free.'

And he made his hands as narrow as might be, and pulled and strained and twisted until the veins of his forehead stood out, and the red blood sprang from his galled wrists, and at last he dragged his hands free, and dropped the binding-thongs to the ground behind him. And there he stood and waited for the next thing. And then far up from the Glen he heard Grey Dog coming, and soon he broke from cover into sight. Then Finn wondered if it would not have been better to run after the Lochlan men and die fighting them with his naked hands, after all. Grey Dog himself seemed no more than a shadow padding down between the rocks, and a snarling and a baying that grew louder every moment, but the breath that came from his snarling muzzle was a flame of fire that scorched and shrivelled everything in his path.

The blast of it caught Finn while the hound was still afar off, and his skin reddened and blistered and cracked. But he stood his ground, and suddenly he remembered the words of the jester, beside the hearth fire at Almu of the White Walls. ‘Take Bran's golden chain with you,' and he knew what he must do.

He waited until Grey Dog was close upon him and he could bear the fiery breath no longer; and then he tore the golden chain, already glowing red-hot, from about his waist and shook it towards Grey Dog, as a man shakes the leash towards his hunting dog when he wants him for the chase, or the bridle towards his horse when he wishes him to come to the chariot yoke.

Grey Dog stopped in his tracks, and the fire of his breath sank low. Finn shook the chain a second time, and Grey Dog crouched on his belly, his muzzle in his paws while the flame of his breath died quite away. Finn shook the chain a third time, and Grey Dog cocked his ears, then sprang up and came with his tail waving behind him, to lick Finn's burns with a gentle tongue so healing that the pain went out of them on the instant. Then Finn stooped and fondled his ears as he might have done Bran's, and Grey Dog rubbed and butted his head against Finn's knees. And while he did so, Finn put Bran's golden chain round his neck and said, ‘Come then, Skolawn.'

And they went down the Glen together.

As they came towards the bothie at the Glen foot, the old woman, who was standing in the doorway, ran in to her husband by the hearth.

‘Husband! Husband! I have just seen such a sight as I never thought to see!'

‘And what sight was that, then?' asked the old man, not even troubling himself to look up from the straw that he was braiding into a new ox collar.

‘I have seen the man again, the man who the King's warriors were thrusting in their midst when they passed this way a while and a while back. The tallest and best-to-look-at man that ever I saw; the hair of him like barley under a white sun-haze, and the eyes of him grey as a gull's wing; and him coming down the Glen with Grey Dog on a golden chain pacing at his heels as quiet and friendly as our old Lop-Ear herself!'

Then the husband abandoned his ox collar and scrambled to his feet. ‘That must be Finn Mac Cool, for of all the men of Lochlan and of Erin, only Finn
could tame Grey Dog, and with Bran's golden chain to help him.'

So they went out of the bothie to meet Finn as he came down the Glen with Skolawn pacing at his heels.

Finn greeted them and told them of all that had happened, and asked for a meal and a place to lie down and rest, hidden from his enemies.

‘As to yourself, you are most welcome to enter, and to share our fire and all that we have, even for a year and a day,' said the old man, ‘but as for the dog – Grey Dog . . .'

‘His name is Skolawn,' Finn said, ‘and he will be no more trouble nor danger to you than any other hound entering your houseplace at his master's heels.'

So Finn entered, and Skolawn behind him, and there they remained for a year and a day with the old man and his wife; and none of the Lochlan nobles knowing that Finn was not dead, but lying hid there.

At the end of the year and a day, the old woman was standing on the hillock close by her houseplace. And looking towards the sea, she saw a thing that sent her screeching back to the bothie like a hen with the eggs stolen from under her.

‘There are stranger war-boats all along the strand, and a great army landing from them on the beach!'

‘Who leads them?' said Finn, who was sitting by the hearth, helping the old man to mend a fishing net.

‘A tall proud man with one eye. By the look of him I'd say he has no equal for fighting under the stars.'

‘That will be Goll Mac Morna,' said Finn, ‘and the fighting men he leads are mine, the Fianna of Erin. But do not be afraid, no harm shall come to you, for the year and a day that I have eaten your food and slept
safe by your hearth.' And whistling Skolawn to heel, he strode out to meet his old companions.

They raised a great shout at sight of him, and came running up from the shore. But away ahead of them, travelling in long leaps and bounds with his plumed tail flying like a banner behind him, came his great hound Bran. Skolawn sprang forward snarling, then checked as the brindled one came up, and they walked round each other stiff-legged, their hackles stirring and half lifting on the backs of their necks. Then Bran gave a deep and joyful bark, and crouched on his front paws, stern in the air like a pup that wants to play, and next instant he and Skolawn were spinning in circles round each other, with yelpings and small excited whines – for they were litter brothers, though they had been parted from each other when they were so young that they still suckled at their mother's flank; and they were not as other hounds, but had each a man's heart in them, so that after the first few moments of their meeting they knew their brotherhood to each other.

Then both together they flung themselves joyfully upon Finn, leaping about him and rearing up to plant their forepaws on his shoulders, and lick his face, so that any ordinary man would have been flat on his back before they were finished.

But by then the men from the war-boats had come up, and there were greetings and rejoicings all round.

‘Here we are come to avenge you, and you strolling down to meet us, strong and well as though you had feasted every night in your own hall!' shouted Goll, with his arm across Finn's mighty shoulders. But the joy of the Fianna turned to anger when Finn told them
how he had been received in the King of Lochlan's palace, and swords were out on the instant, and the men swearing vengeance after all.

And the vegeance of the Fianna started at one end of Lochlan and did not end until it came to the other. Only the old man and woman in the bothie at the foot of Glen More suffered no harm.

And that was how Finn Mac Cool came by the second of his two favourite hunting dogs.

Again, Finn and his companions rode hunting in their home woods, and as they returned at evening towards Almu of the White Walls, suddenly a young dappled hind sprang up from the fern and foxgloves of a little clearing, almost under the nose of Finn's horse, and bounded away into the trees.

Finn's companions set up a great burst of hunting cries, and slipped the hounds from leash, and the hounds, weary as they were, sprang away on the track of the fleeing hind, and instantly the whole hunt swept after them, all the weariness of the day forgotten in the music of the hounds and the rush of the horses' speed and the excitement of the new chase.

But Finn noticed a strange thing, that however much the hind doubled and twisted in her track, she was drawing steadily nearer to the Hill of Almu itself. Almost it seemed as though she were trying to reach the place, like one running for sanctuary, yet what sanctuary could a hunted hind look for in the dun of the hunter?

On they sped, the hind well ahead, seen and lost among the trees, the hounds streaking on her trail, the horsemen thundering after. But the hind was as swift as the cloud shadow on a March day, and soon only Finn himself and his two great hounds still had her in sight, while the rest of the hunt fell farther behind, and
at last all sound of them was lost in the wind-rustle and bee-drone and cuckoo-call of the summer woods.

Once the hind checked her speed and glanced back, as though to see who rode close on her trail, then fled on again, with Bran and Skolawn close behind her.

For a few moments the three were lost to view, where the alder and hazel and quicken trees clustered thick along the fringes of the forest, and then, as he crashed out through the undergrowth on to the open moors that surrounded the Hill of Almu, Finn came upon the strangest sight that ever he had seen. For there in a little hollow set about with fern and shadowy with harebells, the hind lay panting from her long run, and Bran and Skolawn were standing over her, licking her face and her trembling limbs as though to tell her that she was safe with them and had nothing now to fear.