We rode on, much slower once we reached the hill and found the narrow path that threaded its way between trees and head-high thickets of gorse, its flowers so intensely yellow when the sun caught them they almost hurt my eyes. As we rode, my mother told me at last what we were there for.
My parents had realized early on that a border fort like Dun Dealgan was vulnerable to sudden raids, and they had made a cache for their accumulated wealth. There were two such caches now, about a half-mile apart, and my mother took me to both, pointing out in each case the landmarks that would lead me there and the inconspicuous but unmistakable marker that pointed to the exact spot.
“The wealth we have at Dun Dealgan is only a portion of the war-prizes and rewards your father has claimed,” Emer explained to me. “Even if Dun Dealgan is burned to the ground and every goblet looted, what we have hidden away
here is enough to start again. There is a bride-portion for you here, and more. Do you understand me?” And her green eyes searched mine, luminous with a message of their own.
“Yes, Ma, I understand.” I didn’t though, not completely. Not until later. My mind was busy memorizing locations, and marveling at this sudden revelation of riches, and worrying about the threat to my father. I was too preoccupied to hear what was between my mother’s words.
My father knew well enough that death awaited him on our own plain of Muirthemne. There were omens and portents enough to write doom for any fool, and Cathbad’s warnings as well. Of course a champion will seek a great name, even to his downfall. But I do not believe it was a warrior’s bravado that made my father shake off our restraining hands. When he said to Cathbad, “I am glad and ready enough to go into the fight, though I know as well as you yourself I must fall in it,” I believe he spoke simple truth.
He had given his life to the warrior’s code, you see, to a dream of glory and honor and high deeds. But when Conlaoch died, the very foundations of that life were shattered. What was honor, or the truth of a warrior’s word, or great feats of arms—what were any of them worth, if what they led to was shame and horror? He had killed the boy he longed to love, the son he dreamed of, the one who should have been fighting at his side.
He was glad to go down fighting. Better the sword and the spear and the next life to come, than to carry such pain.
It is no honor to the tribes of Ireland, though, the way they killed my father. The poets are respected for their great
learning, and this is why no one should lightly refuse to grant a boon to them. And yes, perhaps they are feared a little too, for their satires bring dishonorable acts to light, and can bring down the highest leader. But it is Maeve used her poets for blackmail and deceit. And I myself have seen how this corruption has spread, and tasted its black fruits.
So she set her three poets against Cuchulainn in the battle. Each called out and asked for a boon, and each time the boon requested was his spear. For it was foretold that only Cuchulainn’s own spear could kill him. And they threatened to put a bad name on him and on his kin if he refused. And my father, knowing that death was on him, would not have his name sullied in any way, and so he gave up his spears—making sure each one found its mark in its new owner’s head as he threw it.
Those spears were given to Maeve’s greatest warriors. One killed Laeg, who had never wavered from my father’s side. The second pierced The Gray, a king among horses. The third, thrown by Lughaid, gave my father a deadly wound.
Still his enemies feared to come near him. My father was unhindered as he took his belt and bound himself to the tall pillar-stone that thrust like a giant’s finger out of the battlefield, the way he would die standing on his feet, a proud warrior to the end. And the men of Ireland circled around, but did not dare approach until the hero-light faded from Cuchulainn’s face and they were sure he was dead. They say that the Morrigu’s crow of death came and settled on Cuchulainn’s shoulder as he stood tied to his pillar, and that he gave a great laugh when he saw it, in defiance of death itself.
Crow, indeed.
That was my Fintan, sent to watch over my father and to bring word of the outcome to my mother and me, where we waited in Emain Macha. And the one small comfort I gain from this whole sad tale is that my father laughed at the sight of him. He recognized Fin. And if he recognized him, it may be he understood the message of love Fintan carried, from my heart to his.
I had never known my mother to act the way she did in Emain Macha, as we waited for news of my father. Silent, still and distant she was—so far from the bustling outspoken woman I had grown up with that I barely recognized her. Her entire mind and heart were given over to the waiting, and she spent most of every day on the ramparts gazing south. I trailed in her wake, watching over the watcher.
We were seated there together when Fintan returned to me. We watched his heavy wingbeats flap across the fields, my mother in a sudden agony of anxiety.
“What does he say?”
Fintan had barely landed when my mother’s urgent question prodded me into action. For my part, I was suddenly reluctant to ask. Fintan’s visions are not always easy to see, and the darkness that had been growing in my own heart was squeezing at it cruelly now. I knew, with sick certainty, what was to come.
But the sight of it—it doesn’t matter what omens or forebodings come before, nothing can prepare a person to witness a loved one’s death. To see my father sagging against the Old Ones’ stone, his guts spilling from his body, his enemies circling like a pack of wolves...it was unbearable. When Lughaid’s sword swept off his head I cried out against it as though I stood there beside him, and the shrill sound of my own voice wrenched me from the bloody scene.
“What?” my mother demanded. She shook me, heedless of my sobs. “What is it?”
“He is dead, Ma.” I choked out the words, unable to stop crying. I thought I had been prepared for his death—we all knew this was his most perilous challenge, and knew too the prophecy foretelling his early end—but watching it had made it too real, too brutal. The image of him tied there, with The Gray slipping in his own blood but defending my father with teeth and hooves to the last, burned behind my eyes. I was overcome with pity, with pride in their courage, with my own loss.
I reached out to my mother, thinking to comfort each other, and was met with a resounding slap that all but knocked me down. I stared at her, shocked beyond words, my stinging cheek unheeded.
Her eyes sparked like green fire. She hissed at me, a wildcat in human form. “How dare you speak such lies to me! You and that black apparition! You would have me give up hope on the say-so of some carrion crow? And you but an untrained girl!”
She turned her back on me, returning her gaze to the gentle roll of the hills. “My faith is with Cuchulainn,” she snapped. “And I will not break it.”
Hot indignation rose in me at the injustice of it. It was my mother who had urged me to send Fintan, and now...
It is as well I was beyond speech then, for whatever I might have said I would regret now. Instead I watched her, and slowly I began to feel the effort of will that straightened my mother’s back and firmed her trembling lip. The will that would hold onto hope until its last shred crumbled to dust and seeped from her grasp.
Fintan and I had been close for years. Experience had taught me to trust his messages. But my mother? I saw now that my news had frayed what little hope was left to her, without giving her the certainty that would allow her to let it go. I wished now I had found a way to keep Fin’s news to myself.
I left my mother then and ran to my chamber, so as not to hurt her more with my tears. I curled up like a wounded animal and wept, not for the great champion of Ulster, but for the man who sliced apples with his sword, took a small girl flying across the plains, and laughed with a sound like chimes.
I was but a young child when I first saw trophy heads hanging from my father’s girdle, swinging in gory counterpoint to his stride. The House of the Red Branch in Emain was festooned with them, and they gave me little pause. I had never questioned our practice of taking enemy heads.
The day my father came home without his, I felt differently. They tried to lay him out with dignity, there on the lawns before the Speckled House, but for all their drums and weeping and reverence, they could not change brute reality. The fact is, a man without his head hardly seems human at all.
He looked like a butchered animal, lying there. He had gone to his last battle in the old style he preferred, naked but for his weapons harness and his gold. His fair skin had been bled white as marble and blotched with bruising; his limbs had stiffened so that he did not rest on the ground but lay braced against it. A bloody cloth wound about his belly, holding together the mess that lay beneath. I tried, the gods know I tried, to see my father in that body, but I could not seem to see beyond the dark crusted stump of his neck.
I turned away, trying to stifle the groan of revulsion that escaped my throat.
My mother, though. My mother never flinched from Cuchulainn’s ravaged body. She stood full of calm dignity, now that all guessing and hope were past, and her eyes caressed his poor limbs as though she saw no horror, but only her own beloved. They were dark with sorrow and luminous with love, unmarred by tears.
“Bring water, and his best cloak.” Emer’s maid, Osnait, hovered at her elbow, sobbing convulsively. I could see that only her duty to my mother kept her from giving way altogether and throwing herself to the ground. All around us people wailed and sobbed and tore at their hair—a seductive hysteria that pulled at me as well. You can lose yourself in a great outpouring of grief, so that it becomes a kind of shelter. But my mother’s curt command pulled Osnait back from the brink, and after one last, wild-eyed look at my father’s body, she hurried into the great house.
Emer washed him as tenderly as a baby, right there in front of Conchobor’s household, and we might as well have been wisps of mist for all she minded us. Even when I knelt beside her and tried to help, she said nothing, but brushed me off as absently as if I were one of the flies that feasted on my father’s wounds.
I stood at the edge of the solitude my mother had created for herself, and the fist around my heart squeezed with such a complexity of pain that I could not pull breath into my lungs. Grief for my father’s death was almost eclipsed by the awful sight of Emer struggling to wrap my father in his cloak with his weaponry. It was not a job for one person, but she snarled at the warrior who bent to help her lift up Cuchulainn’s body, and he withdrew
instantly. Cuchulainn had been Ulster’s darling in life, but in death my mother claimed him as hers alone. There was no one else in the world for her at that moment, and that knowledge filled me with pity.
And yes, I was angry at her too, though it was years before I could admit it even to myself. She pushed me away in her grief, and it was the hurt and loneliness of it—that she had no thought to spare for her living child, but only for her dead husband—that sucked the very air away from me.
I was actually bent over, gasping for breath and fighting back the black dots that danced before my eyes, when I heard a commotion behind me. There was jostling and muttering, and finally a clear voice broke through. “Make way, for pity’s sake, or I swear I will kick you from my path!”
It was Roisin, and I have never been so glad to hear sauce from an underling. I had given her a free day rather than have her sit around watching me wait with my mother. But when the news reached her, she came running. Her strong young arms wrapped around me from behind, her voice murmured in my ear, and finally the knot in my windpipe loosened. I straightened up with a deep breath that released with a racking sob, turned into the warmth of her breast, and wept against her.
A stir rustled through the crowd, and Roisin’s voice identified its cause. “A rider, Luaine. A warrior.”
In full battle gear he was, his horse streaked with sweat and foamy in the mouth from hard riding. He pulled up hard, dismounted, strode straight to my mother, and knelt in deference.
My mother was fussing with a brooch, working to fasten the cloak smooth and tight with the brooch perfectly placed,
oblivious to the grisly stump it adorned. I could tell the warrior, war-hardened as he was, was discomfited by this homely tenderness. He cast his eyes to the ground and waited for her acknowledgment.
He waited a long time, while my mother ignored him utterly. I was appalled to find myself amused at his nervous glances, the war between impatience and hesitation that played out on his features. What kind of unfeeling daughter could I be? But it is the way our human heart is made, the laughter and the tears lying so close together that they sometimes blend into each other against our will.
Finally the messenger steeled himself to reach out and touch her shoulder.
“Lady Emer.”
Her head snapped up, and I wondered if she would strike him, but he hurried on and the words he spoke were enough to earn her attention:
“I bear a message from Conall Cearnach, who bids you not put Cuchulainn into his grave until he returns to you. For he has sworn to avenge the death of his dear foster-son, and it is your husband’s head he will return with, and the head of Lughaid who took it from him, and heads from every tribe of Ireland besides, until the men of Munster and Connaught and Leinster will be crying for the rising they made against him.”
My mother stood then, so regal in her bearing, and lifted the messenger also to his feet.
“Tell Conall we will wait,” she said gravely. “For it is good there is one still in Ulster with the courage to bring home what is due to me now, and to my lord’s memory.”
And she sent him off, without so much as a fresh horse or a drink of water.
So we were once again in the Speckled House, my father laid out with candles all about him, my mother keeping vigil and drifting ever deeper into a world apart.