What was missing were the champions. The feasts and feats, the singing and storytelling. There was only the bustle of servants
tending to King Conchobor, and long worried faces, and Cathbad sweeping around giving orders, and my mother...
My mother was driven by an invisible lash, night and day. She seemed never to rest, even when she was still—and she was so rarely still. I cannot say she neglected me, yet I could tell she did not
see
me. Her eyes were faraway, with my father. Cathbad worked as hard as she did, and without him perhaps all her efforts would have been in vain. He took a handful of his apprentices to the kitchens and set them to brewing huge batches of medicines, while my mother hovered at the king’s bedside, urging him whenever he seemed at all lucid to send messengers to all his chieftains’ men, summoning them to assemble for battle. But I heard her tell Cathbad afterward, almost beside herself with frustration, that he seemed unable to follow the thread of her account.
“He roused himself once and told me to summon Cuchulainn, for the love of all that’s holy!” And she gave a harsh caw of a laugh that brought the tears to my eyes and made my heart twist.
The next day, Cathbad sent two of his druids and all the apprentices—not the noble children he tutored in history and lore but some twenty destined for the druid’s feathered cape—back to Celthair’s dun. They led wagons filled with jugs and padded with blankets, and others piled with their own provisions, and each was instructed to take one man away from the squalor of the house and tend to him. I learned later that one of Cathbad’s medicines was nothing but a tea of slippery elm and raspberry leaf, a simple remedy that any country housewife might brew up for a child with the squiddles. The other, though, a chalky sludge with the rank smell of marsh-mud—that was a mystery. All I knew was that it had taken the combined might of Cathbad
and Berach both to force a half-cup of the foul mixture into King Conchobor when he hardly had strength to lift his head.
I had watched them load up the wagons that morning, careful to keep out of the way but still edging as close as I could. I was lonely, wanting my own home and my mother as she used to be, and then feeling guilty for such selfishness. It was comforting to be near these serious young men and their orderly preparations. Strangely enough, it was even comforting to be near Cathbad—my fear of him must have floated away on the shores of the River Quoile. He caught my eye once and nodded at me gravely as if I were a grown-up. I can’t find the words to describe how that made me feel, but I remember it made me sit up straighter and lift my chin, wanting to be the person he had greeted.
We watched the wagons rumble down the road, and then Cathbad turned to me. “How are you faring, Luaine, in all this turmoil?”
“Fine, sir,” I answered, but then I looked quickly at the ground, afraid his Druid’s Sight would recognize my lie.
He let me wriggle in it a while, and then he said, “The men of Ulster will rise, Luaine, and ride to Cuchulainn’s side, and when that is done your mother will come back to you.”
I nodded, still examining my feet, but his gnarled finger dipped under my chin and brought my eyes up to his. They were black and penetrating, impossible to escape, but I found I did not wish to. Those dark eyes bored into me; then he nodded slowly at whatever he read there. “A lonely long wait all the same for you, isn’t it?” And not waiting for my reply, he asked, “Tell me, do you like animals?”
I had barely drawn breath to answer when he forestalled me
with a smile. “I thought so. Well then, I have a friend for you. A little company for your stay here.”
If Cathbad had done nothing more for me—and he has done much—I would be in his debt still for this one thing. Little enough has come with me from my old life, but Fintan perches on my shoulder still.
I laughed when I learned his name.
“Fintan? It’s a lovely name, but for a raven?”
White fire
, for a bird as black as pitch. “Is it a riddle?”
“In a way.” Cathbad’s old eyes crinkled in amusement. “A secret, rather.” He smoothed down the glossy feathers, scratched the shaggy ruff under the bird’s heavy bill and spread out its left wing. I saw it then: a single white feather, a secondary that lay hidden behind its neighbors until the full stretch exposed it to view. Striking, the way each color seemed to intensify from the contrast against the other, the black dense and bottomless, the white leaping out against it brighter than snow or sea foam or the white gulls themselves. It drew my eyes and swelled in my vision until I could see nothing else.
“Come on, then. Come and meet him.”
I started and looked up to find Cathbad studying me. He nodded once, as if in answer to a question I had not asked. “He is no ordinary raven, but you need not fear him. Indeed I believe you will get on very well together.”
His plumage was soft and glossy, yet bristly stiff if you ruffled it the wrong way. Fintan allowed me to stroke him a few times, and then he tilted his head and fixed me with one brilliant black eye. He became agitated, clacking his beak and tossing his head up
and down like a nervous horse, so that I stepped back, alarmed, and asked Cathbad what was wrong. He just smiled and told me to be still.
Suddenly, with a great flurry of flapping wings, Fintan launched himself from Cathbad’s arm and landed on my shoulder. I staggered a little from the sudden weight—a full-grown raven is no small burden—and gasped at the hard clutch of his talons. But I held my ground, and as he sidestepped over to press against my ear I felt I might burst from the delight of it.
With an ear-splitting squawk, Fintan lifted his tail and let loose a white stream down my tunic. Cathbad laughed. “A sure sign that he likes you.”
The door banged open, and in the time it took Cathbad to whirl about, the kindly old man vanished. The very air about him crackled with cold outrage, and I saw that I had not been wrong to fear him. He was chief druid, and not even the king himself could barge headlong into his house without asking leave.
Apparently my mother could. She stood wild-eyed in the doorway, and Cathbad’s rage evaporated.
“What is it, Emer?”
Something terrible, that I knew. For days she had been wound like a spring, hounded with an overriding purpose. Now she looked beaten, sick with some grief that bled away her strength.
“The boys have gone.”
I did not know an old one could move so fast. His angry curse rang still in my ears, but Cathbad was already striding across the compound, pulling my mother along by the elbow.
Fintan and I were forgotten, but we could piece together well enough what had happened. The youth of Emain Macha, spurred on by my mother’s urgency or their own dreams of glory, had left their games and taken up arms, riding to join my father’s stand against Connaught.
I pictured them sneaking off at dawn, high-spirited and eager to prove themselves, and I wanted desperately to believe it would be as they imagined. But my mother’s face had told another tale, and so did the black fist that clutched my heart. No troop of boys, however courageous and full of promise, could match an army of seasoned soldiers.
“They will none of them return,” I whispered, and Fintan sat silent on my thin shoulder as I hid my face in my hands and cried for them all.
The boys were beyond recall, but their departure spurred Cathbad into decisive action. He sent out the summons himself, in the king’s own name. It made only a day’s difference, for by the next morning the king was lucid, able to order in the troops himself. That one day did not save the boys, but it may have saved my father.
Emer was giddy with relief as she told me. “Oh, the king was well enough to be red with indignation when he heard what Cathbad had done. But he soon saw the sense of it, and there is no doubt he is on the mend. I spooned the gruel into him myself, and it has all stayed where it belongs.” And then, as she had not done since we left Dun Dealgan, she scooped me up in her arms and swung me around in an extravagant hug. “It won’t be long now, dove.”
Nor was it. Only that afternoon men started trickling in from Celthair’s dun, pale and bandy-legged but determined. By the time they were fit to fight, their forces were camped all around Emain Macha. No longer would my father stand alone.
On the night before Ulster’s forces rode to war, Conchobor held a feast for his champions. And though I had tried hard to be obedient and uncomplaining on this journey, now that my mother’s burden was lessened it is shameless I was in begging to attend.
“Please, Ma!” I was losing hope but couldn’t give it up. I clutched at her hand, dragging against her brisk stride, and promised earnestly, “I’ll be no trouble. I won’t say a word. And I’ll go straight to bed after!”
Shucking me off with an impatient flick, my mother opened her mouth for the last denial I would get without a slap to help it sink in—and shut it again. She looked down at me, eager and jittery as a hound before it is loosed, and dimpled into a smile.
“Why not then, after all? You’ve been no trouble at all so far, with little enough attention from me. And Lugh knows, there will be no carousing into the wee hours this time.”
I was a little disappointed by that. “Why won’t there be?”
“Conchobor will need men with clear heads in the morning. Besides, there is too much to do.”
That I could believe. Emain Macha had buzzed like a beehive all day with the preparations. I could hear it buzzing still, through the little slit of a window that was fashioned into the
outer wall of our room: shouted instructions, hurried footfalls, the sibilance of blades on the whetstone, hammering from the smithies and the rumble of carts. There was no one sat idle that day.
I did not see her at first, so full were my eyes with everything else. Rows of bright banners hung from the ceiling rafters, which ran right across the vast hall to support the floor of the rooms above. Torches and candles fluttered with every movement, and my eyes were dazzled by the gold and copper and bright swatches of color on the guests.
My mother’s seat on the women’s side was near the king’s table, for Emer was first among Ulster’s women, as my father was first among the champions. The women’s side was not so crowded as the men’s, for not all the warriors’ wives had made the journey to Emain. My mother bent her head to me and pointed out the heroes I had heard my father speak of: Sencha, the spokesman and peacemaker of the men of Ulster; Conchobor’s sons Cuscraid and Finnchad; Laegaire and Conall Cearnach, both warriors of renown. I craned my neck, marking each, and asked, “Where is Fergus?”
My father had often spoken highly of Fergus, one of the men who had fostered him when he came to Emain Macha as a boy. So I was surprised to see my mother’s face harden.
“Do not speak of him here!” she cautioned, hissing the words between her teeth close in my ear. I nodded, bewildered, and fell silent.
My eyes must have drifted over the woman sitting at the king’s left hand several times before actually taking notice. So still and
plainly dressed she was, that she seemed to blend into the wood of the walls. It was as if a pocket of mist surrounded her, a mist that dimmed the clash of color in the hall and muted the laughter and boasting as it drifted past her.
She is alone among all these people, I thought, and it was the first time I understood that this could be so.
But once my eye found her, all I could look at was the young woman at the king’s side. Her head was bent, so I could see only a white brow and the river of her hair, pale and smooth as corn silk, shining in the torchlight. Her pale arms were thin—too thin—but she made no move to eat. Indeed she made no move at all, but merely sat there, her eyes glued to the hands that rested in her lap.
“Ma.” I tugged at her sleeve, a little afraid to ask. When she had swallowed her meat and bent her ear to me, I whispered my question. “Who is the lady beside the king?”
My mother sighed, and I could tell she regretted bringing me. There were too many expressions on her face to sort out. I thought I could read pity, but she seemed angry too. I had to strain to hear her reply through the din:
“That is the king’s young queen, Deirdriu. I had not thought she would be here.”
All through the long meal my eyes kept returning to the silent woman. Just once I saw her raise her head—when a table overturned at the back of the hall, and the crash and clatter of it startled her from her reverie.
I caught my breath at the sight of her face. The beauty of it was a bright star in a black sky. Her eyes scanned the hall, and I saw the pain undisguised in them and the purple smudges underneath,
but still she shone. I wondered if she was a woman of the Sidhe, a visitor from the enchanted land that lies below and beyond our own. The thought came to me unbidden: she is lovelier than my mother. Immediately I tried to take it back, but I couldn’t. My mother’s beauty glowed with life and strength, like the sun on a summer’s day. But Deirdriu had the fragile unearthly delicacy of the first blush of dawn or the first snowdrop of spring.
She dropped her head and the star winked out. But I could not forget what I had seen nor stop wondering what burden had left its dark mark on her eyes.
We rose at dawn to see the men off, and for the first time I understood what an army was. Men and horses, chariots and wagons, more than I had ever imagined, tossed and churned like a vast sea. An ocean of men, I thought, and indeed they did seem to float on the thick morning mist that steamed from the earth and hid the turf in a silvery drifting cloud. When the men clashed their weapons against their shields and shouted for Conchobor, the din seemed to shake the earth as well as the air, throbbing up through my legs and deafening my ears. On his word they thundered south across the plain, all in their companies, and it was not until the last tiny speck had vanished over the last hazy hill that my mother pulled her gaze back from the horizon. She smiled at me and squeezed my hand, but I could tell it was hard for her to turn away and walk back to the walls of Emain. Her heart had ridden out with Ulster’s champions to the Cooley Hills, and it was only I who kept her body from following.