“They call her Deirdriu of the Sorrows.”
On the slow walk back to the gates, Emer consented to speak of the queen.
“I would rather you had not known of her. But if we are to stay in Emain, doubtless you will hear talk.” We walked in silence for some time. I suppose my mother was searching for a way to tell the story that would not upset a young girl, but it couldn’t be done. And yet I knew if I waited long enough, she would continue, and so she did.
“There was a prophecy about Deirdriu, before she left her mother’s belly, that she would be beautiful beyond all others, and that she would bring death and jealous discord to Ulster,” my mother said. “So Conchobor, thinking perhaps to forestall any fighting over her, had her raised in an isolated place, out of sight of all men, to be his bride when she grew to womanhood. And in due time, she was brought to the king to be wed, barely out of her girlhood and innocent of the world.”
My mother sighed. “And then the prophecy came true.”
As soon as he laid eyes upon Deirdriu, the king was desperate with desire. But Deirdriu’s eyes, which had never seen a man her own age, rested upon the lovely face and limbs of the young warrior Naoise. She loved him deeply, and he her, and so they fled Emain Macha together, sailing finally to the shores of Alba where they lived together for some years.
Conchobor’s men bitterly resented the banishment of Naoise and his two brothers, who had gone with him, for they all three were loved and admired by all of Ulster. But Conchobor burned for Deirdriu. And so he sent Fergus as a messenger to Naoise, saying that he was forgiven and that he and his brothers—and
Deirdriu too, of course—were welcome back in Ulster. And Fergus, unaware of the king’s treachery, gave his bond for their safety.
Perhaps you have guessed how this story ends. I did, but then I had Deirdriu’s pale, still face to help me. Conchobor set his men upon Naoise and his brothers and killed them, and the king took Deirdriu to his marriage bed. And that is why Fergus was not among the men of Ulster. Outraged at the king’s betrayal of his honor, he had left Emain Macha and ridden to Connaught, where he offered his service to Maeve and Ailill.
“But Deirdriu will give the king no pleasure,” concluded my mother. “She will not eat with him, or speak with him, or smile in his presence, or even look upon him. Her heart is with Naoise, you see, whatever the king wills.”
I pondered this in puzzled silence. I had been raised to revere the king. He was my father’s uncle, who had protected and favored him since his boyhood. Cuchulainn was loyal to Conchobor, that I knew—but here was my mother, trying to guard her words but without a doubt blaming Conchobor for Naoise’s death.
A terrible thought came to me.
“Ma, was—” I swallowed. “Was my father one of the men?” She knew which men I meant.
“Your father would have no part of it,” she replied. She knelt before me in the wet grass and held my shoulders, her green eyes steady on mine. “He would not raise his hand in treachery against his own comrades, not even for a King,” she said. “Remember that.”
I spoke with Deirdriu once. It’s a memory that haunts me to this day. Strange, isn’t it, that a quiet talk in an orchard would upset me more than what I saw later, but it did.
Cathbad had charged me with Fintan’s care while he was off with the armies and, most especially, for taking him out of his dark roundhouse into the light and air every day.
“What if he should fly off and not return?” I asked anxiously.
Cathbad was unconcerned. “If he flies off, it is for his own reasons, Luaine. Fintan stays or goes as he wishes. If I return and find him starved, though, that will be on your head!”
So I learned to crook out my elbow and offer my arm to the big bird, and he never refused but hopped up to my shoulder and dug in his strong toes. And because of Fin, I gained a little extra freedom.
I had been told to stay always within the embankments of Emain Macha. They were big enough for a little girl—it was a good long walk all around the walls, with more people and buildings inside than I had ever seen. But at Dun Dealgan we had looked out over a plain that sloped away from sight like a rolling green ocean, while on the other side the sea itself swept in and out of our bay in its ceaseless tides, and yellow gorse lit up the flanks of the Cooley Hills. Inside Emain it was all buildings and dirt paths; even the playing field’s turf was gouged brown and muddy from the boys’ games. It all pressed on me somehow.
When my mother first saw me with Fintan on my shoulder, her nose wrinkled in distaste. “Luaine, where did you find that dirty creature? It looks like the old crone of death herself looming over you.” When she heard it was Cathbad’s bird, though, her eyes went wide.
“He gave you his raven?” She eased herself slowly onto a bench, considering me as I stood puffed with pride, ignoring the pinch of Fin’s talons.
“Luaine.” I could see she chose her words deliberately. “A druid’s raven is very...valuable, and it is not for everyone to even touch it. You must take very good care to follow Cathbad’s instructions.”
I had my opening.
“Ma, I am to take him out for exercise every day, but I think he would rather be in the trees. Could I not go a little ways into the orchards by the north wall?”
The orchards of Emain—acres and acres of them—drifted right up to the embankment on the northeast side, a quiet glory of white and pink bloom.
Getting to them was harder than I had expected. Rather than take the long way round from the south gate, I had planned to just climb over the wall. I had done it often enough at home.
Here, though, the ditch was on the inside of the wall instead of the outside—which was strange, for how would it hamper an attacking enemy that way? It certainly hampered me, for I had to scramble down, pick my way across the mucky bottom and climb all the way up the other side—the height of the ditch plus the earthen bank, that was—before I even got to the wall. It was a hard climb, and I was glad of the broad walkway at the top of the embankment where I could rest a moment. I eyed the heavy posts of the wall, looking for the best climbing spot, while Fintan poked his beak into likely crannies where beetles or field mice might hide.
The wall itself was not so difficult, but what I saw when I
hoisted my head over the top was daunting: a steep drop down, with no ledge to land on at the foot of the stakes. The fence had been built right at the outside edge of the earthworks, three times a man’s height from the top to the ground. I would have to walk back to the gate, after all.
“Does your mother know you are after jumping the wall?”
A girl’s voice it was, so I was not scared, though I gave a guilty start all the same. As I squinted into the trees, a willowy figure emerged from the orchard.
“Well?”
I nodded. Even the way she walked was beautiful, I thought. I could look at nothing but her.
“You are sure?” She was so close now I could see the deep, deep blue of her eyes—almost violet, they were—and the dark fringe of lashes so startling against the pale gold of her hair. She seemed amused, and I was glad to have given her even this whisper of happiness.
I smiled and found my voice. “Yes, Lady Deirdriu. I have leave to come to the orchard to exercise my friend Fintan, here.”
Deirdriu soon solved my problem. She bade me walk along the embankment until I was directly behind the smokehouse, and when I peeked over the wall, there she was on the far side, tucking up her skirts and climbing—surprisingly quickly—up the embankment. In a moment I had another surprise: a little door in the fence, cut into the posts and so well matched I hadn’t even marked it, popped open, and Deirdriu’s face peeked through.
“You’re just the right size for this,” she said. “The guards have to crawl through on their knees.” There were pieces of chain staked into the hill to make handholds, and Deirdriu guided
me so I was able to slither from one to the next. Soon we were sitting under clouds of pear blossom.
For a long time she was quiet, and so was I. The busy noise of the settlement faded away, replaced by a lazy murmur of bees overhead. Shafts of sunlight poked here and there among the branches, turning the gray bark gold and revealing a thousand dancing motes of dust and pollen in their path. Like a dreamworld, I thought, or a held breath, so quiet it was. I watched as Deirdriu gathered little heaps of white petals into her hand and let them flutter through open fingers onto the dark cloth of her skirt.
“Lovely, aren’t they?”
I nodded. Her eyes were faraway, and I did not want to bring her back by speaking. One finger stroked the single velvet petal remaining in the palm of her hand.
“I wish I could have covered him with these petals. He was like that, you know, so lovely—gold and green, like the spring. It was he showed me the little door, when we first loved each other. We used to meet in this orchard.” Now the brilliant eyes rested on me, bruised violets in the dew. I thought I would weep at the sight of them, but I could not look away.
Her voice was low and sad and private. “I begged him not to come back here. Did I not dream how it would end? Three birds I saw, bearing drops of honey in their mouths, sweet as Conchobor’s honeyed lies. But it was drops of blood the birds bore away with them. And now my Naoise is gone, and I am alone with my tears.”
“I’m sorry for your grief,” I whispered. I had never said those words to anyone before, never tasted the ash of them in my
mouth. Deirdriu seemed to really see me then, see how young I was.
“It’s sorry I am, little one,” she said. “I should not burden you with such talk.”
She had, though. It’s true that young as I was, I could already draw peoples’ stories from them, just by listening and waiting. But there was a strange recklessness to Deirdriu also, despite her quiet manner. She did not hide her heart, not even from a child, and her grief touched me like cold fingers in my belly. They scrabbled and stretched, and I knew suddenly that there was more, and worse, to come.
I scrambled to my feet under pretext of looking for Fintan, trying to thrust aside the bad, scared feeling that was growing in me. I know that feeling now, and it no longer frightens me, but I will never welcome it.
Whistling, searching the trees, I called for Fin. Please don’t have flown off, I thought. I need you. I thought of him, I suppose, as a kitten you could cuddle for comfort after scraping your knee. That’s another thing I know now: Fintan is no kitten.
He burst out of the leaves in an untidy flapping jumble, landing on a branch behind and above Deirdriu’s head. Making me see, he was.
She was backlit in the afternoon sun, her hair a golden halo around her. But her face—it was all darkness, a fractured black emptiness. The cold fingers clenched, and I saw blood spatter in the darkness, and I heard my own stricken cry.
“Lady! What is it that cloaks you in blackness?”
Her voice, floating out of the shadow, was calm and dreamy. “Conchobor says he will give me to the man who killed my Naoise
if he does not get my welcome on his return. But Eoghan will never lie with me. This I have sworn.”
I turned tail and ran, ran from the black clutch of the icy fingers and the desolation that swept over me.
The men of Ulster returned to Emain victorious, but my father returned with barely a thread of breath connecting him to his life.
Have you ever been in a crowd cheering home an army? I stood pressed against my mother, submerged in the high voices of the women, and I heard like a bad string in a sweet harp the edge of anxiety shrilling through them all. We cheered for victory, but there was not one among us whose eyes did not search for a husband, a son, a father, a lover, even when all we could yet see were the bright banners above a dark moving mass of faceless men.
The king, riding at the head of his proud host, had hardly come into clear view when my mother gave a great cry. I peered up at her, smelling the wave of sour sweat that came on the heels of her fear, but I saw only her back. She was leaving me, thrusting her way through the noisy crowd back toward the gates. I called out to her, tried to push past the thronged bodies to follow and ran finally into the dimpled arms of Miach, Sencha’s wife. Her gray braids hung like old ropes in front of my face as she bent to hold me.
“Stay here, little one. Your ma will be riding out to meet the army, and you cannot follow.”
“Why is she going?” I demanded, and Miach’s kind blue eyes slid away from my own.
“Cuchulainn is the champion of Ulster,” she said. “He should have been riding by the king’s side.”
The poets say now that my father had “not the place the point of a needle but had some hurt on it,” and that is near to the truth. I thought he was dead when they carried him into Emain Macha, for how could a man survive such butchery? The sight of his mangled body froze my limbs with fear, so that they all—the men carrying him and my mother hurrying at their side—swept past me while I stood rooted to the ground. But Miach saw me and brought me to my father’s side, explaining that he still lived.
It was Laeg told us how it had been, while my father lay silent and suffering with his wounds. Cuchulainn had not wasted his few men in head-on battle, but had harried the edges of Maeve’s army day and night.
“He has such an arm on him, that throws farther than any other man and never misses, that with only his sling he caused such destruction that every man on the outer fringe feared constantly for his life,” said Laeg. He gave that grin, the wolf grin, which had frightened me back in Muirthemne. “And then,” he said, “betimes we would hitch up the chariot and cut through them in a great swathe, leaving the dead thick on the ground behind us, and none had speed to follow us.”
At night Cuchulainn’s hero-cry tore through the darkness, and by the light of morning so many lay dead on the ground that Maeve’s army seemed to be melting away.
Day by day, Maeve’s men became more nervous and demoralized, and soon she was ready to make terms. My father offered to fight a one-on-one combat each day. While they fought, her army
could advance. But if Cuchulainn defeated Maeve’s champion, they would have to make camp until the following day, and he would leave them in peace.