I had made a full-grown man afraid of me. And though there was nothing so remarkable about what I had done—I had used my sword as I had been taught and threatened him with my father’s retribution, the way any child might—I could not shake the feeling that it had not really been me who had done these things. I could not remember
intending
to act or speak, but I had
done so all the same, with an assurance I had never known. Was it perhaps my own version of the warrior’s frenzy that made me act so? I remembered again the rush of heat to my head, enough, it seemed, to make the roots of my hair catch fire. Did my father feel that too, and when the heat ebbed away did it leave him feeling so empty?
That day I felt the first stirrings of my own power and began the journey away from childhood.
Shall I tell you more about Fintan? Perhaps you have wondered why I set such store by a mere animal.
It is only slowly I discovered what Fintan—or rather Fintan and I together—could do, and I think now that Cathbad was wise to let us develop our abilities naturally rather than trying to teach me. I knew, of course, that the druids find auguries and omens in the calls and flights of birds. I thought that was what Cathbad meant when he said that Fin was not “ordinary.” But any bird will do for that sort of crude soothsaying.
I had always talked to Fin. I was a lonely, worried little girl when we met in Emain Macha, and I would have poured out my heart to a caterpillar. But after he had been with me in Dun Dealgan for some time, I began to see that he understood at least some of what I said and was able to respond in his own way. If I asked did he want to go down to the strand, he would fly off in that direction and wait for me at the head of the path where it started its steep descent. Or if he was not inclined to agree, he might waddle about on his perch to set his back against me, or fly in another direction and call as if to say, “No! Let’s head over to the horse pasture so I can hunt for dung beetles.” He responded to my moods too, and when I was upset would rattle softly in his throat and press up against me.
We continued like that for a long time, and I not really noticing how the link between our minds grew steadily stronger, how
Fintan’s understanding grew far beyond the few words a dog, say, may come to recognize. It unsettled Tullia, though. “You talk to that bird as if it were a person,” she would say, her voice scolding. She thought it high time I gave up such childish fancies. But if she had known the truth of it, she would have held her tongue for fear of him.
The truth is, Fin is a Messenger. The day I discovered it was one of the rare times Fin was not waiting for me when I came for him. I remember feeling frightened when I didn’t find him in any of his favorite places—not outside the kitchens, or in the rafters of the horse barn, or hunkered on the point of our roof like a brooding black sentinel. “He comes and goes as he pleases,” Cathbad’s voice reminded me, but oh—what if he had gone for good? I stood on the embankment facing north and whistled for him, wondering if he might have returned to Emain Macha, but then his raucous call turned me around to see him sailing in from the east, riding the sea breeze.
It was one of a string of fine late-summer afternoons, and after several days with no rain the plain was dry and springy underfoot. I was tired, body and mind, having been worked as hard by my tutors as by Berach. Lasair and Eirnin must have entered into a contest of their own, I thought, to see who could stuff the most knowledge into my head. It rang now with snatches of song and poetry, chanted histories and long recited lists, all scrambled together.
“We won’t go far today, Fin.” Dun Dealgan was built on a hill that gave views to the horizon in every direction, but I soon found a little hollow, free of gorse and thistle, that would keep me out of Tullia’s sight. I threw myself down with my face tipped up to
the sun, and Fin settled beside me. Closing my eyes, I looked up through red-lit eyelids, watching the little patterns and lights that played through my vision when I screwed up my eyes and then released them. The sweet grassy smell of the meadow rose around me. I flipped over on to my stomach, folded my arms under my head and let myself drowse.
The liquid call of a lark spiraled up into the air, too beautiful to ignore. I turned lazily to Fin. “No offense intended,” I joked, “but your own voice is sadly lacking by comparison. Perhaps some tutoring for yourself...”
He was preening his feathers, paying me no mind at all. One great black wing was stretched out across my vision, as he craned his neck behind to reach the base of his tail. The white feather hung stark against the black, leaping into the foreground, making its backdrop recede and blur. I lay watching it, fascinated as before with the startling effect of the contrast. I began to see more than a simple white patch: the intricate interlocking pattern of the ribs, the graceful line of the quill, the downy fluff at the base. Fin flexed the wing, and the white feather was rippled by blue shadow, and then it glowed again in the sun. Ripples and gleams of sunlight...
The ripples spread out as far as I could see, blue topped with frothy white. I lay relaxed, dreamy, enjoying the breeze in my hair and the sparkling pattern before my eyes. I gave the sight no more thought than the lights I had made dance on my closed eyelids—until I saw the birds. Sea birds, wheeling and crying below me! Around me. Gulls and gannets and terns and below us all the blue ripples were ocean. When I raised my eyes I saw rims of land like two arms spread out to the sea, dark hills rising to my left, a flat green spit on the right, and I recognized our own bay.
There were ships—three ships—cresting the horizon. I had never seen one before, but even from this strange high perspective it was obvious what they were. Sailing ships, coming to our shore.
With a gasp, I tore my eyes away and sat up. The change of perspective made me dizzy, so much green, too close, too solid. A secret, Cathbad had called Fintan’s white feather. Now I had glimpsed its full meaning. I stared at Fin, filled with the wonder of what had happened. He cocked his head, wings neatly tucked now, calm and superior.”Is it true, Fin? Are the ships real?”
I swear even Tullia would have heard the exasperation in his reply. He clacked his beak, rattled deep in his throat, and I translated: Stupid girl. Why else would I waste the effort?
He spread his wings and flapped off toward the fort. I followed at a run.
The ships carried long-awaited friends: Conall Cearnach and two allies from over the sea—Olaib of Norway and Baire of the Scigger Islands. Thanks to my warning, my father was waiting on Baile’s Strand to give them welcome. We watched the great ships, stripped now of their billowing sails, anchor in the bay; they hunkered down in the water like broody hens over their nests. The men—hundreds of them—rowed to shore packed into little boats that they pulled up onto the sand.
Conchobor had summoned them. After three years of peace, he had suddenly decided that the insult of Maeve’s invasion had not been sufficiently avenged, and that Ulster must have further satisfaction. For although we had prevailed, our brown bull Donn Cooley had been killed in that war. The famed bull’s loss must
have had gnawed and eaten at Conchobor, at first nothing but a lingering resentment, but growing month by month into a ferocious anger, until he was sick with the need for vengeance.
If anyone questioned the wisdom of Conchobor’s campaign, I heard nothing of it. We are a people easily inflamed, and to our warriors, honor and vengeance might as well be the same word.
The narrow strip of beach beyond the reach of high tide was crusted with tents and men and campfires like a layer of barnacles. The men waited for Conchobor’s forces to join them en route to Connaught, and for several nights our hall was filled with guests who came to eat and stayed drinking until nearly morning.
I was not allowed to go down to the strand. My mother mistrusted the Norwegians and warned me to stay away from them. “They are rough men,” she said darkly, “and no one to know what they might do.”
Naturally I snuck off to spy on them. It was easy to stay hidden and unnoticed. But there was nothing I could see that distinguished the foreigners from our own men, who spent their days sleeping and brawling and drinking in more or less equal measures.
Conchobor was well pleased with his raid. They struck at Rosnaree, and Conall Cearnach and my father together could not be withstood.
Strange to say, we at Dun Dealgan were hardly touched by these goings-on. Quite different, it is, when you are not on the receiving end of a raid! My mother was well used to my father being away on his quests and adventures and battles, and she saw to it that our lives continued in their daily pattern. Cuchulainn returned to the same orderly household and well-tended lands he had left, to
a welcome that was warm but matter-of-fact. In those days, my father’s victory in a fight was no more a matter for doubt than the rising and setting of the sun.
My first bleeding came in late winter of that year. We’d had snow in the night—real snow, not just a light dusting that melted off by midmorning, but snow that made a white crystal mystery of the world—and I remember it pleased me to have such dramatic weather mark my passage to womanhood. As my mother took away my childish tunics and dressed me in the new adult clothes she had made for this day—a long linen shift, embroidered at the neck and sleeves, covered by a deep blue woolen overmantle striped with red—I felt an unsettling mixture of excitement and regret.
Tullia sat me down and dressed my hair, still damp from the bath, braiding the front sections and tying the rest in curling cloths. When it had dried, and Tullia had released the curls and fussed some more, my mother gave me a polished bronze mirror in which to admire the results.
I had peeked before, of course, in my mother’s mirror. I thought I knew how I looked. So I was unprepared for the serious young woman who stared back at me. I had always thought my dark hair unlovely; it was not bronze-gold like my mother’s or even the rich auburn of my father’s beard, but a deep oak-leaf brown. But now it cascaded down my shoulders in thick luxurious waves, framing my fair skin and blue eyes like a glossy dark sea. I did not live up to my parents’ beauty—I had, perhaps, too much of my father’s firm jaw and not enough of my mother’s dimpled cheek—yet I liked what I saw well enough.
“The finishing touch,” said my mother as she fastened a delicate girdle of linked copper and silver leaves around my waist.
I grinned at her. It was my first piece of precious jewelry, and it made me feel more grown-up than all the rest put together.
“There is more,” she said. “Some for your coming of age, and some to put away for your marriage portion.”
Marriage portion. There was a sobering thought. I had been looking ahead to the spring Beltane fires—my thirteenth birthday—when I would be presented at the coming-of-age ceremony. It would be grand, I thought, to jump the coals with the other girls who were becoming women that year, while the bystanders sang and cheered. It would be grander still to be old enough to be attending the feasts and gatherings. Only I hadn’t thought ahead to the next part. Marriage. It is why men bring their daughters to feast-days, to show them off to potential suitors.
“Don’t look so gloomy.” My mother sat me down beside her. “You needn’t worry yourself—we aren’t about to marry off a girl who hasn’t even lost her milk teeth.”
I glowered at that, feeling she was making me into a baby for the sake of the two stubborn dogteeth that remained anchored firmly in my top gums. And that like to set the tone of the year to come, for it seems I spent it seesawing between alarm when I was taken for an adult and indignation when I was not.
I paid little enough attention to the news of a young stranger landing in our bay. Ordinarily I would have been curious, for we’d had no visitors at all since the ships of the previous summer. But it was the day of Beltane—my coming of age Beltane—and the only response I remember was disappointment that my father would not be there to sing me across the fire.
“If he is only a boy, why can’t the other men deal with him?” I pouted. “For that matter, why should he not choose to keep his name to himself? What harm is there in it?”
“It is the king’s command that any who land on our shores give an account of themselves,” said my mother. “It is little enough to ask of an uninvited guest.” She gave my hair a critical once-over, entirely unmoved by my petulance, and nodded approval to the new girl she had hired to attend me. I still had Tullia, of course, “to watch over your proper behavior,” as my mother put it, but I loved having a young companion. Roisin was a hard worker and clever with hair, but she was good company too and only a little older than me. I soon came to value her lively spirit more than the work she saved me.
“And,” Emer continued, forestalling my next objection, “boy though he be, he has already handily defeated Conall, who is no poor fighter. It’s looking for a fight he is, and he will not rest until he gets it.”
I shrugged, a childish ungracious gesture. But I soon got over my resentment. My mother would be at the ceremony, and it’s a girl’s mother, after all, who guides her to womanhood. And excitement, kept to a seemly murmur through the day, was starting to sing loud in my veins. Beltane was my favorite festival. The sun was very low in the sky now. At dusk it would begin.
I went to my coming-of-age ceremony dressed more beautifully than ever before in my life, with real gold at my arm and throat and golden tips to my braids. By the time the sun rose I would have become a woman in the eyes of my people.
The Samhain fire is built always at the top of an open hill, where it will be a beacon visible far and wide. For Beltane we seek out a more sheltered spot, an open clearing skirted by woodland. Fertility celebrations demand more comfort!
This night, though, I would not be among the children playing tag or rolled into a blanket to sleep under the stars, nor among the older lads and lasses flirting in the pole dance or trysting in the woods. For the first time since my naming-day, I would enter the Sacred Grove and keep vigil there until dawn. The other girls and I would return in time to join in singing the Welcome to the Sun, and then we would do the women’s shuffle dance around the dying fires, and leap, one by one, over the coals.