But I saw neither feast nor fire, for my mother would not leave the Speckled House from the moment the sun began its long afternoon descent down the slope of the sky. Samhain would not begin until sundown, but Emer was taking no chances. With the veil between worlds becoming so thin, she said, the spirits of the dead and people of the Sidhe could intermingle freely with ourselves, and she feared my father’s spirit might forsake us and slip away.
“He is not altogether in this world as it is, Luaine,” she explained. “Even Cathbad cannot say what holds him to life. But if he were to leave us this night, and I not there to plead and fight for him to stay, the blame and grief would be with me to the end of my days.”
I remembered what she had said—how we needed each other— and resolved to sit vigil too. It was, in any case, better than wandering alone among the crowds of people filling the settlement.
It was an eerie sight, my father laid out on a pallet amidst the bristling paraphernalia of war. The walls were hung with shields of bronze, leather and wood, each painted or embossed with its owner’s device. Spears and swords thrust out from barrels. Certain weapons were given pride of place, carefully displayed: I recognized Conchobor’s famous shield, and my father’s massive barbed spear, the Gae Bolga. Those lethal barbs, hidden within the shaft, had killed Ferdia, and as I looked upon it I imagined for the first time, not my father’s prowess to wield such a thing, but the ruin it must make of a man’s body. The house was utterly silent—yet it seemed the air rang with the clash and riot of fighting. And there was Cuchulainn, his face so pale but for the livid wounds, the rents in his body hidden by the rich coverlet tented over him.
Servants felt it too, that eeriness. At dinnertime they brought our food in silence, eyes averted, and all but bolted for the door.
It was a raw windy day, the gusts stripping leaves off the trees and bringing sudden spatters of rain that blew over as quickly as they began. There would be neither star nor moonlight this Samhain. As darkness fell and people made their way to the hillside fire, the busy noise of Emain Macha was silenced. Now we could hear the soughing voice of the air and feel its chill as it whistled through the cracks in the heavy door and seeped in between wall and thatch. My mother lit candles and set them at my father’s head, and our shadows jumped and shrank in their wavering light.
My father’s lips moved, and he muttered in his sleep. My mother bent patiently to hear, as she had done so many times before, but there was no message for her in his restless whispers. She slipped her hand under the coverlet and wrapped her fingers around his shield-hand—the one place that had been protected from all injury.
What would she do when the time came to kill the summer light, I wondered. She would not want to leave my father to the dark—but how could we relight our lamps, sitting here alone? The ritual was both a promise to the people and a reminder to the spirit of the sun, that the dark season would not last forever but turn again to light and warmth. It was an act of faith, and I could not guess what might happen if we refused it.
“Cathbad will send an apprentice with a torch from the sacred fire,” my mother remarked, as if I had spoken aloud. Her voice was calm, her face peaceful as she turned to me. “You needn’t fear the dark time, dove. Cathbad has woven spells of protection
about this house, and we are strong and full of life. The spirits cannot harm us. My fear is only for Cuchulainn. Many strong warriors are dead on his account. He killed in honor, but there may yet be some restless dead who hunger for revenge.”
A gruesome picture came to my mind: the shriveled trophy heads that hung in the House of the Red Branch coming to life, calling my father’s name.
The night wore on, and my mother sat now with a blanket drawn about her against the cold, and I snuggled into the little bed that had been made for me, though I was determined not to sleep. At last the gong rang out, signaling the End of the Light, and my mother blew out the candles, the faint light fading to thickest black as one by one they died.
Eyes open, eyes shut; it made no difference. The dark was a dense shroud that seemed to muffle sound as well as sight. But as time passed, and no disembodied heads appeared, the tension strung through my body gradually gave way to fatigue. My eyes closed, and I drifted.
The oak door banged open with a force that thudded through the entire structure and rattled the shields. I jolted upright, crying aloud, and heard my mother’s voice ringing out with mine. Hearts thudding, we strained our eyes into the black as a cold wind swirled around us.
“It’s only the wind,” my mother assured me. Her voice was firm and confident, and I heard her grope her way carefully to the door and force it closed. “Go back to sleep, Luaine. It’s nothing, just the wind, and the light will come soon.”
It was the first time I had known my mother’s words to be false. Not that she lied, not deliberately. But she was wrong. It wasn’t
the wind. Something had entered the Speckled House. It sat with us now in the dark.
I cannot say now, looking back to the child I was, if it was awe or a reluctance to alarm my mother that stilled my tongue. But I said nothing and waited in silence, for I knew it was no gory head that had floated in on the wind. The presence in the room was foreign, but it was not evil.
I did not know I could sense such things until that moment. And when Cathbad’s young man finally pushed open the door and the blaze of his torch thrust into the corners of the room, I knew—as did he with his druid’s eyes—that it was no human woman sitting there so quietly at my father’s other side. She was one of the Tuatha Da Danaan—a woman of the Sidhe. I stared in wonder, and she smiled at me, acknowledging my recognition. It was as the poets said: She had the appearance of an earthly woman. Yet there was no mistaking what she was.
At least not for me. As the apprentice touched his forehead in respectful greeting, my mother spoke up sharply.
“And who are you at all? Why do you come sneaking by night to my husband’s sickbed?”
I wondered at her tone. She was badly frightened, covering it with bluster.
The woman was Liban, and she brought the strangest message.
“It is for my sister, Fand, I have come to this man. For Manannan, Son of the Sea, is no longer her husband, and her love has fallen on Cuchulainn. And the coming of Cuchulainn would bring great joy to her heart.”
The anger in my mother was a bristling heat in the room. I thought she might attack the woman with her bare hands, until Liban’s next words caught her startled attention.
“It is not long his sickness would be, if Cuchulainn would come to the Happy Plain. He will be healed, and what is lost of his strength will be given back to him again. It is Fand and myself will cure his sickness and wake him from his long sleep.”
The silence stretched on, and still my mother did not speak. She didn’t seem to know where to look, or what to do with herself. I was too young to understand the turmoil of emotions warring within her, but I could see how she struggled to keep her composure.
She turned to Cathbad’s apprentice and told him to take me to the Royal House.
“You go to bed now, Luaine. I must speak with Liban.”
It was a voice that brooked no argument. I pulled my cloak tight about my shoulders and followed the young man out the door.
We left Emain Macha the next day, after another hurried preparation. I don’t suppose my mother was anxious to endure everyone’s curious eyes and prying questions. I can only imagine what it cost her to swallow her pride and jealousy and give my father to another woman, not knowing if he would ever return. She was distant that morning, her face set in a mask, her eyes hiding something close to grief.
Doubtless there had been other women before Fand. If you believe the bards, Cuchulainn lay with half the women of Ireland. But if he did, it was far from home, and always he gave Emer pride of place. There had never been any question of losing him.
So it was a bleak setting off we had, on a dark and drizzly day. I
remember wondering how Liban had transported my father back to her Otherworld home. Had she carried him in her arms? Turned him to vapor and vanished down one of the deep rock clefts that lead to the land of the Sidhe?
The wind was cold, and I was glad when we entered the humpy wooded hills that fan west from the Cooley Mountains. The broad track from Emain Macha narrowed to thread its way through oak and hawthorn trees, and I remember the clatter of the chariot seemed so loud in that shadowy world. But then we emerged onto a long bare slope with a little rushing creek at its feet—and there, where the track turned aside to avoid the water, stood the king’s chariot. My mother and Berach kicked their horses forward, no doubt expecting nothing but a broken wheel or similar trouble, and without thinking, my driver followed.
And there was Deirdriu. She lay sprawled at the foot of a great standing stone, her skull smashed, her silken hair clotted with blood and brains. Her lovely face gone. Conchobor and Eoghan were there. I heard their voices, angry and confused, but I never gave them a glance. My eyes were trapped, stuck like a fly in pine resin, on the terrible sight.
Conchobor had been taking her to Eoghan’s dun, but Deirdriu had held to her vow. She killed herself, driving her head against the Old Ones’ stone as the chariot flew by.
I had been chilled already, the wind nipping my fingers and nose as we traveled, but now I shivered and could not stop. But my mother came back to herself then, and back to me. She laid her hand over my eyes and drew me away, against her own chest. She wrapped her arms around me and chafed my hands, and then she pulled me onto her own red mare.
“Come now, dove. We’ll go home,” she said, and the word sounded so sweet it filled me with longing.
I will never forget how it looked when we finally emerged from the hummocky north country and looked down on the long slope of the Muirthemne plain. The autumn sun suddenly sailed free of the clouds to light up the patchwork fields, as if the earth were giving up a harvest of jewels. The wind carried just a hint of the sea—the smell of home—and it seemed all the troubles and horror and fear we had had were eased, and I could be a little girl again.
My father spent one month in the land of the Sidhe, and then one day he walked in our door as strong and full of life as ever before.
Emer and I flung ourselves at him, and he laughed and held his arms wide so he could hold us both at once. All that day my mother could not stop looking at him, her eyes shining with the wonder of it. “Not even a scar,” she marveled, stroking her hand along his arm. “Not the tiniest mark.”
At first it seemed like everything was back to normal. Only slowly did I notice the tension in the silences, the forced quality of the talk, the way my father would seek out solitude and my mother’s unhappiness when he did so.
Then came a morning when my mother blazed around the house in a white fury, gathering her women all about her and arming each with a knife sharpened to a murderous edge. I could get no hint of what drove her—she snapped at Tullia to keep me at home and they all swept off toward the strand.
I did think of defying Tullia—she was old, and at eight I could already outrun her—but my mother’s dark rage would not have brooked it. So I waited, in an agony of confusion and anxiety, and when at last I saw my parents making their way home together, and neither one visibly bloody, I hoped that our happiness at Dun Dealgan would finally be restored.
But it was not. It was only some weeks later, after a visit from Cathbad, that the strange uneasiness in our family melted away.
I did not understand what had actually happened until long after, when I pried the story from one of my mother’s women. My father had come home, but he could not forget the woman of the Sidhe who had healed him. And Fand loved him still as well. So they arranged to meet on Baile’s Strand, but my mother discovered their rendezvous and was overcome with jealousy.
Yet when she arrived there and looked on Fand, her heart changed. She saw that Fand’s yearning for my father was as strong as her own, and the rage melted away into sorrow.
She put down her bright knives, stood before the woman who loved her husband, and she said, “I will give him up to you.”
But it was Fand who released her claim to Cuchulainn and returned to her husband Manannan, and to her own shining country. For, as she said to Emer, “The man is yours, and you are worthy.” And Cathbad, in his turn, mixed for my parents a draught of forgetfulness, the way my father would forget his longing for Fand, and my mother forget her jealousy.
When Cathbad came to Dun Dealgan with the draught for my parents, he brought something for me as well: he brought Fintan. I count it the most valuable gift I have ever received, or am ever likely to.
“He has been restless since you left, Luaine,” he said, hoisting down the wicker travel cage from a cart with slow care. “I believe he is meant to stay with you.” And indeed, when Cathbad opened the cage door and Fintan waddled through, he did not hesitate
but launched himself straight toward my shoulder. I braced myself against his ungainly landing and laughed as he set straight to nibbling at my ear.
Tullia’s call interrupted our reunion.
“It seems you are wanted,” said Cathbad gravely.
I sighed. “I am to help with the grinding.” Grinding grain is a laborious business, and the person who spends an afternoon cranking the heavy millstones wakes up with an ache across her shoulders to prove it. I was not big enough to take my turn at grinding, but was put to work scooping the dusty meal into sacks nearly as big as myself. It was not my favorite job.
“I am glad to see you working alongside your people,” Cathbad remarked. “One should never be too proud to work.”
I colored, for in truth it rankled me to be set to menial tasks in the kitchen, and I a chieftain’s daughter.
“Sir,” I ventured. I wasn’t sure if I was allowed to question the teaching of the chief druid, but I did it anyway. He cocked an eyebrow at me. “I don’t understand. How is it wrong, to be proud?” Pride was the life-blood of our warriors and noble women—their spur to great accomplishments, the wellspring of their courage. I had not thought there could be any such thing as “too proud.”