Now both eyebrows raised, and I braced myself for the clout on the head my impudence might have earned. Instead I got one of his slow nods.
“Look to your mother,” he said. “She is as proud a woman as walks Ireland. Yet she did not hesitate in Celthair’s dun to set her hands to work the servants quailed from. Am I not correct?”
I nodded, trying to grasp his lesson.
“When laziness, or weakness, or meanness hides behind pride, it is like a rich cloak used to cover filthy rags. True pride reflects true worth. Your mother knows the difference.”
Tullia’s voice came again.
“Go now, to your grinding,” said Cathbad. “Tell them the chief druid said Fintan is to keep you company.”
I turned to go, then spun back one last time. Fintan squawked irritably as he overbalanced first one way, then the other, and the clenching grip of his talons made me feel his annoyance right through my heavy winter tunic. But my time in Emain Macha had changed me. I was no longer such a little girl that I did not know how to receive a gift.
“I thank you, Cathbad, for bringing Fintan to me,” I said. “I promise I will care for him well.”
I worked harder that day and complained less. I took pride in my work.
That winter my training began in earnest. I was no longer playing at sewing or getting underfoot in the scullery; I was expected to work carefully and with some skill. Some days I was kept so busy I was grateful to have Fin as my excuse for some free time. Even after I had stopped shutting him inside except at night, I insisted that Cathbad expected me to spend time with Fintan every day. Fin expected it, in any case. He was always waiting for me when I came, and I can chart my growing into womanhood by the way I looked forward to my rambles with Fin. At first they brought me a chance to return to the childish freedom I had known; later it was the privacy and solitude I was grateful for.
And then there was Eirnin. My mother must have taken Cathbad’s words about my education seriously, for she went herself to speak with the druid, traveling in wintertime across the plain of Bregia to her childhood home. He had been her own tutor, back when he was merely old rather than ancient. She had long labor to persuade him to come to us at Muirthemne, but early that spring he appeared at our gates with an ox-pulled wagon piled high with his possessions, and he stayed at Dun Dealgan until his death.
He was the oldest man I had ever seen—and the grouchiest. At first I could see nothing but that: he was all gray beard and stringy hands and sunken eyes and glaring impatience. Unlike the servants and my other teachers, he did not smile and praise me when my answer was right; he only set me harder questions and waited malevolently to pounce on my least mistake. He made my stomach twist into knots, with his glittery eye and harsh words.
I hated him. But as I began to see the worlds Eirnin could unlock for me, my feelings changed.
The turning point was the Ogham. I was waiting for Eirnin in the stuffy back room that served as a classroom, feeling my stomach jump and complain, wishing I could be anywhere else. The minutes stretched on, until it was I who was impatient, and I began to wonder what puzzles he would set me that day. Like my mother, I have a competitive mind. I did not—and do not to this day—like even a druid to get the better of me.
Eirnin shuffled into the room at last, clattering with every step. His arms were filled with a bundle of pale sticks, each as big around as my wrist and over half my height. He dumped them onto the table, selected one and laid it before me.
“Do you know what this is?” His pale eyes glowered at me under great sprouting eyebrows.
I looked at the stick in front of me. It was peeled and polished smooth, so that the rounded back felt almost silky in my hands. The front was carved to have two flat sides that met at a square angle. This long square edge was marked with clusters of notches: little brown lines tilted this way and that, marching up the wood. They formed no picture, and if they were decorative it was a poor attempt, for they had no flow or grace of composition.
I shook my head, so intrigued I forgot to be nervous. “No, sir. What are the marks for?”
Perhaps he saw, when I looked up at him, that he had ignited something, for he grinned at me, showing long yellow teeth. “They make a message. Each mark has its own pattern, its own meaning. Learn the marks, and you will know the message.”
I ran my hand over the row wonderingly. Like little people calling to me, I thought, only their voices are silent.
It was hard to take my eyes away, to look back at Eirnin. He too was silent, waiting.
“Teach me,” I said. I had never wanted anything so badly.
Two weeks later, I wanted to take those sticks and hurl them into a fire.
It was impossibly complicated. There were twenty different patterns of notches, making twenty different symbols. A single symbol was distinguished not only by the number of notches (one to five) but by their angle and by whether they crossed or stayed to one side of the midline. And each symbol represented a tree: birch, rowan, alder and so on. This much I managed to grasp,
learning a few more symbols each day until I could “read” them from the bottom to the top of each of Eirnin’s sticks.
“But, sir,” I finally asked, having completed this task, “how can a list of trees be a message?”
“Ah. The trees are just their names. Each symbol also makes a sound, and the sounds together make the message.”
“The trees are just their names?” Surely I had misunderstood.
“Eight of the trees, to be precise, give their names directly to the symbols. The other symbols have names which are associated with the trees.”
My mind balked, and I shouted in my frustration. “Where is the use in that?” All I could think was how hard I had worked to memorize those hateful trees, apparently for nothing.
Eirnin pressed his lips into a tight line. He gathered up his Ogham sticks and stalked out of the room, leaving me to war within myself between indignation and my own desire to learn.
The next day I apologized. Eirnin made me wait one more day, and then we began on the sounds that went with each symbol.
Years later I learned that the tree names do have a purpose of their own. The druids will teach the Ogham to any likely student, but the sacred symbology of the trees is for their initiates only. So the system is not so pointless as it once seemed to an impatient girl.
I had no brothers or sisters. Just before Maeve’s invasion, my mother had lost another baby boy: Born before the swell of her belly could be seen under her skirts, he was far too tiny to live. Her first boy, born when I was barely old enough to remember, had been healthy and strong. He had just started to smile, beaming
and dimpling at anything that caught his eye, when he died in his sleep one afternoon for no reason at all. I’m told the nurse who found him cold and lifeless left Dun Dealgan with only the clothes on her back rather than face Cuchulainn after such news. I was old enough now to realize that my father longed for a son. He had a great gift, and he looked to pass it on.
So when he announced, early in my tenth year, that my training should include the arts of war, I confess I had a sudden vision of myself fighting at my father’s side, the two of us shining with glory. There are women warriors among our people who are counted among the great: Scathach, mighty in skill and magic, who trained my father; and her rival Aoife, the great warrior queen. Queen Maeve herself rode into battle with her troops and was a mighty figure among them. I saw myself in a chariot bristling with weapons, thundering across a plain, the hero light about me...
My mother shot Cuchulainn a look from under her eyebrows. “What is this, then, Cuchulainn?” Doubtless she had glimpsed the same vision and had a rather different reaction.
But he said only, “It is well for a woman to know the sword as well as the needle. The time may arise when she has need to defend herself or her children.” Emer could not argue against the reason of his words. Indeed, she herself, like most noble women, had some training with the sword.
For myself, I was eager to start. How not? I was Cuchulainn’s daughter.
If many girls have some arms training, few receive it from the likes of Berach. My father’s arms master had trained a good
number of the men in my father’s troops, and proven himself in many a battle too.
This my father told me as he led me to the training ground that had been set up behind the house. “And while you are under his tutelage,” he reminded me, “you will call him Master.”
Berach was a formidable man, especially from the vantage point of a child. The first thing I encountered was a pair of massive red hands, big-knuckled, resting one atop the other on the pommel of the long sword that thrust down into the earth. My eyes traveled up along the ropy scarred arms, heavily furred with copper hair. When they reached his face—a face like an ax-head it was, broad and weathered with a thick neck and jaw, pale cold eyes and a bristling mustache to match the flaming orange of his hair—he smiled and bowed.
“Mistress Luaine.” Oddly, the smile changed his looks a great deal, adding warmth and good humor to the stony features. I understood why my father had chosen this man. He was hard as iron, but I trusted him right away.
We got on well, Berach and I, and I think he was pleased at my progress. Strong and well-coordinated for my age, nimble on my feet, I did not fear the sting of the flat side of his blade or to lose my wind in a fall. I did not want him to think he need baby me for being a girl, so even when the hurt made me howl and cry, I would make myself get up and wipe the snot from my face and try again.
For about a year I used a wooden practice sword and shield. Then I graduated to a plain iron blade, its edge blunted for practice, and a shield bossed in bronze. Iron was much heavier than wood, I discovered, and by the end of our first session my arms
burned and trembled with exertion. My mother came to watch me that day. She shook her head at the sight of me as I trudged off the field, streaked all over with sweat and mud. I wondered at first was she displeased, but then she laughed and put her arm around my shoulders. “You are a tough little nut,” she said, and I took it as high praise.
My father did not come to the training ground until the spring of my twelfth birthday, and when he did it was not to watch me train but to enter the ring with me. He took a wooden sword from the barrel that held our training arms and said mildly, “Well then, Luaine, come and show me how you are getting on.” Nothing more—yet I knew, deep in my bones, that this was a test. He made me show him the strokes I had learned as well as the defenses and the positions of the shield; I recited for him how each would be used, and I could tell Berach was pleased with me. And then my father set me to spar. He was careful, not pressing me past my abilities but making me work my very hardest, so that by the time we were done I could scarce draw air into my lungs.
I stood there, gasping for breath, wiping the sweat off my forehead, and I saw in his eyes that my best had not been enough. My father had been only seven when he bested all the boys in the Emain Macha playing field. I would not be following in his footsteps.
Then he smiled at me, and his face showed only pleasure. “You have earned your sword, Luaine. It’s proud I am of you this day.” And he went to a bundle he had left lying by the wattle fence, and drew out the beautiful tooled scabbard I had worn as a little girl careening off to Emain Macha in a chariot. Berach had stored it
away on our safe return, but now, once again, my father buckled it around me. This time it hung at my side as if it belonged there. It’s strange, but I knew that he spoke truth. I had done well, and he
was
proud of me. Only he was sad to have no heir to his brilliance.
Cuchulainn turned from me then and threw his arm around Berach; the two ambled off deep in talk. I watched them walk together for a bit, then I limped over to the barrel and tossed in my training sword. I ladled out water from the trough and poured it over my head.
“That’s good, little chick.”
The voice was insolent, even hostile. I glanced around quickly and saw it belonged to the man who came after our sessions to gather up the weapons and store them away. He looked at me with a sneer that made my cheeks burn hot.
“Your mighty da give you a little gift, did he? And a fine prize for a young chick, it is too. Something wasted on a bit of a girl like you, though.” He chewed at his mustache, considering me, and then suddenly he was up close against me, the odor of ale and sweat rank in my face.
“But that’s all right, isn’t it?” he breathed. “You won’t be a girl much longer, and soon enough your prize will go to a man who knows what to do with it.” His face twisted into a gap-toothed leer, and his hand grabbed the slim curve of my behind and pulled me against him.
I was speechless with the shock of it. But the heat that roared into life within me was immediate and searing. Flames licked at the inside of my skull, and the world around me darkened and receded. All I could see was the shining point of my blade where
it pressed against his neck. I had no memory of grasping for it. The rage throbbed through me, and with it the desire to push the silvery weapon through his white flesh and release his blood. I was only vaguely aware that his hand had dropped away from my body and that he stood stock-still against the fence.
I forced my eyes upward, to his face, pasty now with fear.
“You had best not have the bad judgment to touch me or even speak to me again.” The words were spoken from my lips, but they seemed to come from someone else—someone older. Someone with power. “For as you see, young as I am I do not wear this sword as an ornament. But if you bother me in the least way again, it’s the Hound himself will be baying after you, and I promise you will not live to bother me one more time.”
He swallowed, and I let the point of the sword ride up and down with the knob of his throat.
“Get out of here,” I said, and he gathered up his legs and ran.
I was left weak and shaky, as though I had been ill. And I was desperate to be alone, for I was confused—both shamed and elated by what had happened. Ignoring my dirty clothes and the rest of the day’s lessons, I hurried to the stables and helped myself to the lazy old horse I had learned to ride on. It was a long walk to the bay where the River Nith empties into the sea, but there is nothing like the steady rhythmic rush of the ocean for thinking.