CHAPTER I

IRISH FAIRY TALES

By James Stephens

CONTENTS

THE STORY OF TUAN MAC CAIRILL

THE BOYHOOD OF FIONN

THE BIRTH OF BRAN

OISI’N’S MOTHER

THE WOOING OF BECFOLA

THE LITTLE BRAWL AT ALLEN

THE CARL OF THE DRAB COAT

THE ENCHANTED CAVE OF CESH CORRAN

BECUMA OF THE WHITE SKIN

MONGAN’S FRENZY

THE STORY OF TUAN MAC CAIRILL

CHAPTER I

Finnian, the Abbott of Moville, went southwards and eastwards in great

haste. News had come to him in Donegal that there were yet people in his

own province who believed in gods that he did not approve of, and the

gods that we do not approve of are treated scurvily, even by saintly

men.

He was told of a powerful gentleman who observed neither Saint’s day nor

Sunday.

“A powerful person!” said Finnian.

“All that,” was the reply.

“We shall try this person’s power,” said Finnian.

“He is reputed to be a wise and hardy man,” said his informant.

“We shall test his wisdom and his hardihood.”

“He is,” that gossip whispered--“he is a magician.”

“I will magician him,” cried Finnian angrily. “Where does that man

live?”

He was informed, and he proceeded to that direction without delay.

In no great time he came to the stronghold of the gentleman who followed

ancient ways, and he demanded admittance in order that he might preach

and prove the new God, and exorcise and terrify and banish even the

memory of the old one; for to a god grown old Time is as ruthless as to

a beggarman grown old.

But the Ulster gentleman refused Finnian admittance. He barricaded

his house, he shuttered his windows, and in a gloom of indignation and

protest he continued the practices of ten thousand years, and would

not hearken to Finnian calling at the window or to Time knocking at his

door.

But of those adversaries it was the first he redoubted.

Finnian loomed on him as a portent and a terror; but he had no fear of

Time. Indeed he was the foster-brother of Time, and so disdainful of the

bitter god that he did not even disdain him; he leaped over the scythe,

he dodged under it, and the sole occasions on which Time laughs is when

he chances on Tuan, the son of Cairill, the son of Muredac Red-neck.

CHAPTER II

Now Finnian could not abide that any person should resist both the

Gospel and himself, and he proceeded to force the stronghold by peaceful

but powerful methods. He fasted on the gentleman, and he did so to such

purpose that he was admitted to the house; for to an hospitable heart

the idea that a stranger may expire on your doorstep from sheer famine

cannot be tolerated. The gentleman, however, did not give in without a

struggle: he thought that when Finnian had grown sufficiently hungry he

would lift the siege and take himself off to some place where he might

get food. But he did not know Finnian. The great abbot sat down on a

spot just beyond the door, and composed himself to all that might follow

from his action. He bent his gaze on the ground between his feet,

and entered into a meditation from which he would Only be released by

admission or death.

The first day passed quietly.

Often the gentleman would send a servitor to spy if that deserter of the

gods was still before his door, and each time the servant replied that

he was still there.

“He will be gone in the morning,” said the hopeful master.

On the morrow the state of siege continued, and through that day the

servants were sent many times to observe through spy-holes.

“Go,” he would say, “and find out if the worshipper of new gods has

taken himself away.”

But the servants returned each time with the same information.

“The new druid is still there,” they said.

All through that day no one could leave the stronghold. And the enforced

seclusion wrought on the minds of the servants, while the cessation

of all work banded them together in small groups that whispered and

discussed and disputed. Then these groups would disperse to peep through

the spy-hole at the patient, immobile figure seated before the door,

wrapped in a meditation that was timeless and unconcerned. They

took fright at the spectacle, and once or twice a woman screamed

hysterically, and was bundled away with a companion’s hand clapped on

her mouth, so that the ear of their master should not be affronted.

“He has his own troubles,” they said. “It is a combat of the gods that

is taking place.”

So much for the women; but the men also were uneasy. They prowled up and

down, tramping from the spy-hole to the kitchen, and from the kitchen

to the turreted roof. And from the roof they would look down on the

motionless figure below, and speculate on many things, including

the staunchness of man, the qualities of their master, and even the

possibility that the new gods might be as powerful as the old.

From these peepings and discussions they would return languid and

discouraged.

“If,” said one irritable guard, “if we buzzed a spear at the persistent

stranger, or if one slung at him with a jagged pebble!”

“What!” his master demanded wrathfully, “is a spear to be thrown at

an unarmed stranger? And from this house!” And he soundly cuffed that

indelicate servant.

“Be at peace all of you,” he said, “for hunger has a whip, and he will

drive the stranger away in the night.”

The household retired to wretched beds; but for the master of the house

there was no sleep. He marched his halls all night, going often to

the spy-hole to see if that shadow was still sitting in the shade, and

pacing thence, tormented, preoccupied, refusing even the nose of his

favourite dog as it pressed lovingly into his closed palm.

On the morrow he gave in.

The great door was swung wide, and two of his servants carried Finnian

into the house, for the saint could no longer walk or stand upright by

reason of the hunger and exposure to which he had submitted. But his

frame was tough as the unconquerable spirit that dwelt within it, and

in no long time he was ready for whatever might come of dispute or

anathema.

Being quite re-established he undertook the conversion of the master of

the house, and the siege he laid against that notable intelligence was

long spoken of among those who are interested in such things.

He had beaten the disease of Mugain; he had beaten his own pupil the

great Colm Cille; he beat Tuan also, and just as the latter’s door had

opened to the persistent stranger, so his heart opened, and Finnian

marched there to do the will of God, and his own will.

CHAPTER III

One day they were talking together about the majesty of God and His

love, for although Tuan had now received much instruction on this

subject he yet needed more, and he laid as close a siege on Finnian

as Finnian had before that laid on him. But man works outwardly and

inwardly. After rest he has energy, after energy he needs repose; so,

when we have given instruction for a time, we need instruction, and must

receive it or the spirit faints and wisdom herself grows bitter.

Therefore Finnian said: “Tell me now about yourself, dear heart.”

But Tuan was avid of information about the True God. “No, no,” he

said, “the past has nothing more of interest for me, and I do not wish

anything to come between my soul and its instruction; continue to teach

me, dear friend and saintly father.”

“I will do that,” Finnian replied, “but I must first meditate deeply on

you, and must know you well. Tell me your past, my beloved, for a man is

his past, and is to be known by it.”

But Tuan pleaded: “Let the past be content with itself, for man needs

forgetfulness as well as memory.”

“My son,” said Finnian, “all that has ever been done has been done for

the glory of God, and to confess our good and evil deeds is part of

instruction; for the soul must recall its acts and abide by them, or

renounce them by confession and penitence. Tell me your genealogy first,

and by what descent you occupy these lands and stronghold, and then I

will examine your acts and your conscience.”

Tuan replied obediently: “I am known as Tuan, son of Cairill, son of

Muredac Red-neck, and these are the hereditary lands of my father.”

The saint nodded.

“I am not as well acquainted with Ulster genealogies as I should be, yet

I know something of them. I am by blood a Leinsterman,” he continued.

“Mine is a long pedigree,” Tuan murmured.

Finnian received that information with respect and interest.

“I also,” he said, “have an honourable record.”

His host continued: “I am indeed Tuan, the son of Starn, the son of

Sera, who was brother to Partholon.”

“But,” said Finnian in bewilderment, “there is an error here, for you

have recited two different genealogies.”

“Different genealogies, indeed,” replied Tuan thoughtfully, “but they

are my genealogies.”

“I do not understand this,” Finnian declared roundly.

“I am now known as Tuan mac Cairill,” the other replied, “but in the

days of old I was known as Tuan mac Starn, mac Sera.”

“The brother of Partholon,” the saint gasped.

“That is my pedigree,” Tuan said.

“But,” Finnian objected in bewilderment, “Partholon came to Ireland not

long after the Flood.”

“I came with him,” said Tuan mildly.

The saint pushed his chair back hastily, and sat staring at his host,

and as he stared the blood grew chill in his veins, and his hair crept

along his scalp and stood on end.

CHAPTER IV

But Finnian was not one who remained long in bewilderment. He thought on

the might of God and he became that might, and was tranquil.

He was one who loved God and Ireland, and to the person who could

instruct him in these great themes he gave all the interest of his mind

and the sympathy of his heart.

“It is a wonder you tell me, my beloved,” he said. “And now you must

tell me more.”

“What must I tell?” asked Tuan resignedly.

“Tell me of the beginning of time in Ireland, and of the bearing of

Partholon, the son of Noah’s son.”

“I have almost forgotten him,” said Tuan. “A greatly bearded, greatly

shouldered man he was. A man of sweet deeds and sweet ways.”

“Continue, my love,” said Finnian.

“He came to Ireland in a ship. Twenty-four men and twenty-four women

came with him. But before that time no man had come to Ireland, and in

the western parts of the world no human being lived or moved. As we drew

on Ireland from the sea the country seemed like an unending forest. Far

as the eye could reach, and in whatever direction, there were trees; and

from these there came the unceasing singing of birds. Over all that land

the sun shone warm and beautiful, so that to our sea-weary eyes, our

wind-tormented ears, it seemed as if we were driving on Paradise.

“We landed and we heard the rumble of water going gloomily through the

darkness of the forest. Following the water we came to a glade where

the sun shone and where the earth was warmed, and there Partholon rested

with his twenty-four couples, and made a city and a livelihood.

“There were fish in the rivers of Eire’, there were animals in her

coverts. Wild and shy and monstrous creatures ranged in her plains and

forests. Creatures that one could see through and walk through. Long we

lived in ease, and we saw new animals grow,--the bear, the wolf, the

badger, the deer, and the boar.

“Partholon’s people increased until from twenty-four couples there came

five thousand people, who lived in amity and contentment although they

had no wits.”

“They had no wits!” Finnian commented.

“They had no need of wits,” Tuan said.

“I have heard that the first-born were mindless,” said Finnian.

“Continue your story, my beloved.”

“Then, sudden as a rising wind, between one night and a morning, there

came a sickness that bloated the stomach and purpled the skin, and on

the seventh day all of the race of Partholon were dead, save one man

only.” “There always escapes one man,” said Finnian thoughtfully.

“And I am that man,” his companion affirmed.

Tuan shaded his brow with his hand, and he remembered backwards through

incredible ages to the beginning of the world and the first days of

Eire’. And Finnian, with his blood again running chill and his scalp

crawling uneasily, stared backwards with him.

CHAPTER V

“Tell on, my love,” Finnian murmured

“I was alone,” said Tuan. “I was so alone that my own shadow frightened

me. I was so alone that the sound of a bird in flight, or the creaking

of a dew-drenched bough, whipped me to cover as a rabbit is scared to

his burrow.

“The creatures of the forest scented me and knew I was alone. They stole

with silken pad behind my back and snarled when I faced them; the long,

grey wolves with hanging tongues and staring eyes chased me to my cleft

rock; there was no creature so weak but it might hunt me, there was no

creature so timid but it might outface me. And so I lived for two tens

of years and two years, until I knew all that a beast surmises and had

forgotten all that a man had known.

“I could pad as gently as any; I could run as tirelessly. I could be

invisible and patient as a wild cat crouching among leaves; I could

smell danger in my sleep and leap at it with wakeful claws; I could bark

and growl and clash with my teeth and tear with them.”

“Tell on, my beloved,” said Finnian, “you shall rest in God, dear

heart.”

“At the end of that time,” said Tuan, “Nemed the son of Agnoman came to

Ireland with a fleet of thirty-four barques, and in each barque there

were thirty couples of people.”

“I have heard it,” said Finnian.

“My heart leaped for joy when I saw the great fleet rounding the land,

and I followed them along scarped cliffs, leaping from rock to rock like

a wild goat, while the ships tacked and swung seeking a harbour. There I

stooped to drink at a pool, and I saw myself in the chill water.

“I saw that I was hairy and tufty and bristled as a savage boar; that I

was lean as a stripped bush; that I was greyer than a badger; withered

and wrinkled like an empty sack; naked as a fish; wretched as a starving

crow in winter; and on my fingers and toes there were great curving

claws, so that I looked like nothing that was known, like nothing that

was animal or divine. And I sat by the pool weeping my loneliness and

wildness and my stern old age; and I could do no more than cry and

lament between the earth and the sky, while the beasts that tracked me

listened from behind the trees, or crouched among bushes to stare at me

from their drowsy covert.

“A storm arose, and when I looked again from my tall cliff I saw that

great fleet rolling as in a giant’s hand. At times they were pitched

against the sky and staggered aloft, spinning gustily there like

wind-blown leaves. Then they were hurled from these dizzy tops to the

flat, moaning gulf, to the glassy, inky horror that swirled and whirled

between ten waves. At times a wave leaped howling under a ship, and with

a buffet dashed it into air, and chased it upwards with thunder stroke

on stroke, and followed again, close as a chasing wolf, trying with

hammering on hammering to beat in the wide-wombed bottom and suck out

the frightened lives through one black gape. A wave fell on a ship and

sunk it down with a thrust, stern as though a whole sky had tumbled at

it, and the barque did not cease to go down until it crashed and sank in

the sand at the bottom of the sea.

“The night came, and with it a thousand darknesses fell from the

screeching sky. Not a round-eyed creature of the night might pierce an

inch of that multiplied gloom. Not a creature dared creep or stand. For

a great wind strode the world lashing its league-long whips in cracks

of thunder, and singing to itself, now in a world-wide yell, now in an

ear-dizzying hum and buzz; or with a long snarl and whine it hovered

over the world searching for life to destroy.

“And at times, from the moaning and yelping blackness of the sea, there

came a sound--thin-drawn as from millions of miles away, distinct as

though uttered in the ear like a whisper of confidence--and I knew that

a drowning man was calling on his God as he thrashed and was battered

into silence, and that a blue-lipped woman was calling on her man as her

hair whipped round her brows and she whirled about like a top.

“Around me the trees were dragged from earth with dying groans; they

leaped into the air and flew like birds. Great waves whizzed from the

sea: spinning across the cliffs and hurtling to the earth in monstrous

clots of foam; the very rocks came trundling and sidling and grinding

among the trees; and in that rage, and in that horror of blackness I

fell asleep, or I was beaten into slumber.”

CHAPTER VI

“THERE I dreamed, and I saw myself changing into a stag in dream, and

I felt in dream the beating of a new heart within me, and in dream I

arched my neck and braced my powerful limbs.

“I awoke from the dream, and I was that which I had dreamed.

“I stood a while stamping upon a rock, with my bristling head swung

high, breathing through wide nostrils all the savour of the world. For

I had come marvellously from decrepitude to strength. I had writhed from

the bonds of age and was young again. I smelled the turf and knew for

the first time how sweet that smelled. And like lightning my moving nose

sniffed all things to my heart and separated them into knowledge.

“Long I stood there, ringing my iron hoof on stone, and learning all

things through my nose. Each breeze that came from the right hand or the

left brought me a tale. A wind carried me the tang of wolf, and against

that smell I stared and stamped. And on a wind there came the scent of

my own kind, and at that I belled. Oh, loud and clear and sweet was the

voice of the great stag. With what ease my lovely note went lilting.

With what joy I heard the answering call. With what delight I bounded,

bounded, bounded; light as a bird’s plume, powerful as a storm, untiring

as the sea.

“Here now was ease in ten-yard springings, with a swinging head, with

the rise and fall of a swallow, with the curve and flow and urge of an

otter of the sea. What a tingle dwelt about my heart! What a thrill spun

to the lofty points of my antlers! How the world was new! How the sun

was new! How the wind caressed me!

“With unswerving forehead and steady eye I met all that came. The old,

lone wolf leaped sideways, snarling, and slunk away. The lumbering bear

swung his head of hesitations and thought again; he trotted his small

red eye away with him to a near-by brake. The stags of my race fled from

my rocky forehead, or were pushed back and back until their legs broke

under them and I trampled them to death. I was the beloved, the well

known, the leader of the herds of Ireland.

“And at times I came back from my boundings about Eire’, for the strings

of my heart were drawn to Ulster; and, standing away, my wide nose took

the air, while I knew with joy, with terror, that men were blown on the

wind. A proud head hung to the turf then, and the tears of memory rolled

from a large, bright eye.

“At times I drew near, delicately, standing among thick leaves or

crouched in long grown grasses, and I stared and mourned as I looked on

men. For Nemed and four couples had been saved from that fierce storm,

and I saw them increase and multiply until four thousand couples lived

and laughed and were riotous in the sun, for the people of Nemed had

small minds but great activity. They were savage fighters and hunters.

“But one time I came, drawn by that intolerable anguish of memory, and

all of these people were gone: the place that knew them was silent: in

the land where they had moved there was nothing of them but their bones

that glinted in the sun.

“Old age came on me there. Among these bones weariness crept into my

limbs. My head grew heavy, my eyes dim, my knees jerked and trembled,

and there the wolves dared chase me.

“I went again to the cave that had been my home when I was an old man.

“One day I stole from the cave to snatch a mouthful of grass, for I was

closely besieged by wolves. They made their rush, and I barely escaped

from them. They sat beyond the cave staring at me.

“I knew their tongue. I knew all that they said to each other, and all

that they said to me. But there was yet a thud left in my forehead, a

deadly trample in my hoof. They did not dare come into the cave.

“‘To-morrow,’ they said, ‘we will tear out your throat, and gnaw on your

living haunch’.”

CHAPTER VII

“Then my soul rose to the height of Doom, and I intended all that might

happen to me, and agreed to it.

“‘To-morrow,’ I said, ‘I will go out among ye, and I will die,’ and at

that the wolves howled joyfully, hungrily, impatiently.

“I slept, and I saw myself changing into a boar in dream, and I felt in

dream the beating of a new heart within me, and in dream I stretched my

powerful neck and braced my eager limbs. I awoke from my dream, and I

was that which I had dreamed.

“The night wore away, the darkness lifted, the day came; and from

without the cave the wolves called to me: “‘Come out, O Skinny Stag.

Come out and die.’

“And I, with joyful heart, thrust a black bristle through the hole of

the cave, and when they saw that wriggling snout, those curving tusks,

that red fierce eye, the wolves fled yelping, tumbling over each other,

frantic with terror; and I behind them, a wild cat for leaping, a giant

for strength, a devil for ferocity; a madness and gladness of lusty,

unsparing life; a killer, a champion, a boar who could not be defied.

“I took the lordship of the boars of Ireland.

“Wherever I looked among my tribes I saw love and obedience: whenever

I appeared among the strangers they fled away. And the wolves feared me

then, and the great, grim bear went bounding on heavy paws. I charged

him at the head of my troop and rolled him over and over; but it is not

easy to kill the bear, so deeply is his life packed under that stinking

pelt. He picked himself up and ran, and was knocked down, and ran again

blindly, butting into trees and stones. Not a claw did the big bear

flash, not a tooth did he show, as he ran whimpering like a baby, or

as he stood with my nose rammed against his mouth, snarling up into his

nostrils.

“I challenged all that moved. All creatures but one. For men had again

come to Ireland. Semion, the son of Stariath, with his people, from whom

the men of Domnann and the Fir Bolg and the Galiuin are descended. These

I did not chase, and when they chased me I fled.

“Often I would go, drawn by my memoried heart, to look at them as they

moved among their fields; and I spoke to my mind in bitterness: ‘When

the people of Partholon were gathered in counsel my voice was heard; it

was sweet to all who heard it, and the words I spoke were wise. The eyes

of women brightened and softened when they looked at me. They loved to

hear him when he sang who now wanders in the forest with a tusky herd.’”

CHAPTER VIII

“OLD age again overtook me. Weariness stole into my limbs, and anguish

dozed into my mind. I went to my Ulster cave and dreamed my dream, and I

changed into a hawk.

“I left the ground. The sweet air was my kingdom, and my bright eye

stared on a hundred miles. I soared, I swooped; I hung, motionless as a

living stone, over the abyss; I lived in joy and slept in peace, and had

my fill of the sweetness of life.

“During that time Beothach, the son of Iarbonel the Prophet, came to

Ireland with his people, and there was a great battle between his men

and the children of Semion. Long I hung over that combat, seeing every

spear that hurtled, every stone that whizzed from a sling, every sword

that flashed up and down, and the endless glittering of the shields. And

at the end I saw that the victory was with Iarbonel. And from his people

the Tuatha De’ and the Ande’ came, although their origin is forgotten,

and learned people, because of their excellent wisdom and intelligence,

say that they came from heaven.

“These are the people of Faery. All these are the gods.

“For long, long years I was a hawk. I knew every hill and stream; every

field and glen of Ireland. I knew the shape of cliffs and coasts, and

how all places looked under the sun or moon. And I was still a hawk when

the sons of Mil drove the Tuatha De’ Danann under the ground, and held

Ireland against arms or wizardry; and this was the coming of men and the

beginning of genealogies.

“Then I grew old, and in my Ulster cave close to the sea I dreamed my

dream, and in it I became a salmon. The green tides of ocean rose over

me and my dream, so that I drowned in the sea and did not die, for I

awoke in deep waters, and I was that which I dreamed. I had been a man,

a stag, a boar, a bird, and now I was a fish. In all my changes I had

joy and fulness of life. But in the water joy lay deeper, life pulsed

deeper. For on land or air there is always something excessive and

hindering; as arms that swing at the sides of a man, and which the

mind must remember. The stag has legs to be tucked away for sleep, and

untucked for movement; and the bird has wings that must be folded and

pecked and cared for. But the fish has but one piece from his nose to

his tail. He is complete, single and unencumbered. He turns in one turn,

and goes up and down and round in one sole movement.

“How I flew through the soft element: how I joyed in the country where

there is no harshness: in the element which upholds and gives way; which

caresses and lets go, and will not let you fall. For man may stumble in

a furrow; the stag tumble from a cliff; the hawk, wing-weary and beaten,

with darkness around him and the storm behind, may dash his brains

against a tree. But the home of the salmon is his delight, and the sea

guards all her creatures.”

CHAPTER IX

“I became the king of the salmon, and, with my multitudes, I ranged on

the tides of the world. Green and purple distances were under me: green

and gold the sunlit regions above. In these latitudes I moved through a

world of amber, myself amber and gold; in those others, in a sparkle

of lucent blue, I curved, lit like a living jewel: and in these again,

through dusks of ebony all mazed with silver, I shot and shone, the

wonder of the sea.

“I saw the monsters of the uttermost ocean go heaving by; and the long

lithe brutes that are toothed to their tails: and below, where gloom

dipped down on gloom, vast, livid tangles that coiled and uncoiled, and

lapsed down steeps and hells of the sea where even the salmon could not

go.

“I knew the sea. I knew the secret caves where ocean roars to ocean; the

floods that are icy cold, from which the nose of a salmon leaps back as

at a sting; and the warm streams in which we rocked and dozed and were

carried forward without motion. I swam on the outermost rim of the great

world, where nothing was but the sea and the sky and the salmon; where

even the wind was silent, and the water was clear as clean grey rock.

“And then, far away in the sea, I remembered Ulster, and there came on

me an instant, uncontrollable anguish to be there. I turned, and through

days and nights I swam tirelessly, jubilantly; with terror wakening in

me, too, and a whisper through my being that I must reach Ireland or

die.

“I fought my way to Ulster from the sea.

“Ah, how that end of the journey was hard! A sickness was racking in

every one of my bones, a languor and weariness creeping through my every

fibre and muscle. The waves held me back and held me back; the soft

waters seemed to have grown hard; and it was as though I were urging

through a rock as I strained towards Ulster from the sea.

“So tired I was! I could have loosened my frame and been swept away;

I could have slept and been drifted and wafted away; swinging on

grey-green billows that had turned from the land and were heaving and

mounting and surging to the far blue water.

“Only the unconquerable heart of the salmon could brave that end of

toil. The sound of the rivers of Ireland racing down to the sea came to

me in the last numb effort: the love of Ireland bore me up: the gods of

the rivers trod to me in the white-curled breakers, so that I left

the sea at long, long last; and I lay in sweet water in the curve of a

crannied rock, exhausted, three parts dead, triumphant.”

CHAPTER X

“Delight and strength came to me again, and now I explored all the

inland ways, the great lakes of Ireland, and her swift brown rivers.

“What a joy to lie under an inch of water basking in the sun, or beneath

a shady ledge to watch the small creatures that speed like lightning on

the rippling top. I saw the dragon-flies flash and dart and turn, with

a poise, with a speed that no other winged thing knows: I saw the hawk

hover and stare and swoop: he fell like a falling stone, but he could

not catch the king of the salmon: I saw the cold-eyed cat stretching

along a bough level with the water, eager to hook and lift the creatures

of the river. And I saw men.

“They saw me also. They came to know me and look for me. They lay in

wait at the waterfalls up which I leaped like a silver flash. They held

out nets for me; they hid traps under leaves; they made cords of the

colour of water, of the colour of weeds--but this salmon had a nose that

knew how a weed felt and how a string--they drifted meat on a sightless

string, but I knew of the hook; they thrust spears at me, and threw

lances which they drew back again with a cord. Many a wound I got from

men, many a sorrowful scar.

“Every beast pursued me in the waters and along the banks; the barking,

black-skinned otter came after me in lust and gust and swirl; the wild

cat fished for me; the hawk and the steep-winged, spear-beaked birds

dived down on me, and men crept on me with nets the width of a river,

so that I got no rest. My life became a ceaseless scurry and wound and

escape, a burden and anguish of watchfulness--and then I was caught.”

CHAPTER XI

“THE fisherman of Cairill, the King of Ulster, took me in his net. Ah,

that was a happy man when he saw me! He shouted for joy when he saw the

great salmon in his net.

“I was still in the water as he hauled delicately. I was still in the

water as he pulled me to the bank. My nose touched air and spun from it

as from fire, and I dived with all my might against the bottom of the

net, holding yet to the water, loving it, mad with terror that I must

quit that loveliness. But the net held and I came up.

“‘Be quiet, King of the River,’ said the fisherman, ‘give in to Doom,’

said he.

“I was in air, and it was as though I were in fire. The air pressed on

me like a fiery mountain. It beat on my scales and scorched them. It

rushed down my throat and scalded me. It weighed on me and squeezed me,

so that my eyes felt as though they must burst from my head, my head as

though it would leap from my body, and my body as though it would swell

and expand and fly in a thousand pieces.

“The light blinded me, the heat tormented me, the dry air made me

shrivel and gasp; and, as he lay on the grass, the great salmon whirled

his desperate nose once more to the river, and leaped, leaped, leaped,

even under the mountain of air. He could leap upwards, but not forwards,

and yet he leaped, for in each rise he could see the twinkling waves,

the rippling and curling waters.

“‘Be at ease, O King,’ said the fisherman. ‘Be at rest, my beloved. Let

go the stream. Let the oozy marge be forgotten, and the sandy bed where

the shades dance all in green and gloom, and the brown flood sings

along.’

“And as he carried me to the palace he sang a song of the river, and a

song of Doom, and a song in praise of the King of the Waters.

“When the king’s wife saw me she desired me. I was put over a fire and

roasted, and she ate me. And when time passed she gave birth to me, and

I was her son and the son of Cairill the king. I remember warmth and

darkness and movement and unseen sounds. All that happened I remember,

from the time I was on the gridiron until the time I was born. I forget

nothing of these things.”

“And now,” said Finnian, “you will be born again, for I shall baptize

you into the family of the Living God.” ---- So far the story of Tuan,

the son of Cairill.

No man knows if he died in those distant ages when Finnian was Abbot of

Moville, or if he still keeps his fort in Ulster, watching all things,

and remembering them for the glory of God and the honour of Ireland.

THE BOYHOOD OF FIONN

He was a king, a seer and a poet. He was a lord with a manifold and

great train. He was our magician, our knowledgable one, our soothsayer.

All that he did was sweet with him. And, however ye deem my testimony

of Fionn excessive, and, although ye hold my praising overstrained,

nevertheless, and by the King that is above me, he was three times

better than all I say.--Saint PATRICK.

CHAPTER I

Fionn [pronounce Fewn to rhyme with “tune”] got his first training among

women. There is no wonder in that, for it is the pup’s mother teaches it

to fight, and women know that fighting is a necessary art although men

pretend there are others that are better. These were the women druids,

Bovmall and Lia Luachra. It will be wondered why his own mother did not

train him in the first natural savageries of existence, but she could

not do it. She could not keep him with her for dread of the clann-Morna.

The sons of Morna had been fighting and intriguing for a long time to

oust her husband, Uail, from the captaincy of the Fianna of Ireland,

and they had ousted him at last by killing him. It was the only way

they could get rid of such a man; but it was not an easy way, for what

Fionn’s father did not know in arms could not be taught to him even by

Morna. Still, the hound that can wait will catch a hare at last, and

even Manana’nn sleeps. Fionn’s mother was beautiful, long-haired Muirne:

so she is always referred to. She was the daughter of Teigue, the son of

Nuada from Faery, and her mother was Ethlinn. That is, her brother

was Lugh of the Long Hand himself, and with a god, and such a god, for

brother we may marvel that she could have been in dread of Morna or his

sons, or of any one. But women have strange loves, strange fears, and

these are so bound up with one another that the thing which is presented

to us is not often the thing that is to be seen.

However it may be, when Uall died Muirne got married again to the King

of Kerry. She gave the child to Bovmall and Lia Luachra to rear, and we

may be sure that she gave injunctions with him, and many of them. The

youngster was brought to the woods of Slieve Bloom and was nursed there

in secret.

It is likely the women were fond of him, for other than Fionn there

was no life about them. He would be their life; and their eyes may

have seemed as twin benedictions resting on the small fair head. He was

fair-haired, and it was for his fairness that he was afterwards called

Fionn; but at this period he was known as Deimne. They saw the food they

put into his little frame reproduce itself length-ways and sideways in

tough inches, and in springs and energies that crawled at first, and

then toddled, and then ran. He had birds for playmates, but all the

creatures that live in a wood must have been his comrades. There would

have been for little Fionn long hours of lonely sunshine, when the world

seemed just sunshine and a sky. There would have been hours as long,

when existence passed like a shade among shadows, in the multitudinous

tappings of rain that dripped from leaf to leaf in the wood, and slipped

so to the ground. He would have known little snaky paths, narrow enough

to be filled by his own small feet, or a goat’s; and he would have

wondered where they went, and have marvelled again to find that,

wherever they went, they came at last, through loops and twists of the

branchy wood, to his own door. He may have thought of his own door as

the beginning and end of the world, whence all things went, and whither

all things came.

Perhaps he did not see the lark for a long time, but he would have heard

him, far out of sight in the endless sky, thrilling and thrilling until

the world seemed to have no other sound but that clear sweetness; and

what a world it was to make that sound! Whistles and chirps, coos and

caws and croaks, would have grown familiar to him. And he could at last

have told which brother of the great brotherhood was making the noise

he heard at any moment. The wind too: he would have listened to its

thousand voices as it moved in all seasons and in all moods. Perhaps a

horse would stray into the thick screen about his home, and would look

as solemnly on Fionn as Fionn did on it. Or, coming suddenly on him,

the horse might stare, all a-cock with eyes and ears and nose, one

long-drawn facial extension, ere he turned and bounded away with

manes all over him and hoofs all under him and tails all round him. A

solemn-nosed, stern-eyed cow would amble and stamp in his wood to find a

flyless shadow; or a strayed sheep would poke its gentle muzzle through

leaves.

“A boy,” he might think, as he stared on a staring horse, “a boy cannot

wag his tail to keep the flies off,” and that lack may have saddened

him. He may have thought that a cow can snort and be dignified at

the one moment, and that timidity is comely in a sheep. He would have

scolded the jackdaw, and tried to out-whistle the throstle, and wondered

why his pipe got tired when the blackbird’s didn’t. There would be flies

to be watched, slender atoms in yellow gauze that flew, and filmy specks

that flittered, and sturdy, thick-ribbed brutes that pounced like cats

and bit like dogs and flew like lightning. He may have mourned for the

spider in bad luck who caught that fly. There would be much to see and

remember and compare, and there would be, always, his two guardians. The

flies change from second to second; one cannot tell if this bird is a

visitor or an inhabitant, and a sheep is just sister to a sheep; but the

women were as rooted as the house itself.

CHAPTER II

Were his nurses comely or harsh-looking? Fionn would not know. This was

the one who picked him up when he fell, and that was the one who patted

the bruise. This one said: “Mind you do not tumble in the well!”

And that one: “Mind the little knees among the nettles.”

But he did tumble and record that the only notable thing about a well

is that it is wet. And as for nettles, if they hit him he hit back. He

slashed into them with a stick and brought them low. There was nothing

in wells or nettles, only women dreaded them. One patronised women and

instructed them and comforted them, for they were afraid about one.

They thought that one should not climb a tree!

“Next week,” they said at last, “you may climb this one,” and “next

week” lived at the end of the world!

But the tree that was climbed was not worth while when it had been

climbed twice. There was a bigger one near by. There were trees that no

one could climb, with vast shadow on one side and vaster sunshine on

the other. It took a long time to walk round them, and you could not see

their tops.

It was pleasant to stand on a branch that swayed and sprung, and it was

good to stare at an impenetrable roof of leaves and then climb into it.

How wonderful the loneliness was up there! When he looked down there

was an undulating floor of leaves, green and green and greener to a very

blackness of greeniness; and when he looked up there were leaves

again, green and less green and not green at all, up to a very snow and

blindness of greeniness; and above and below and around there was sway

and motion, the whisper of leaf on leaf, and the eternal silence to

which one listened and at which one tried to look.

When he was six years of age his mother, beautiful, long-haired Muirne,

came to see him. She came secretly, for she feared the sons of Morna,

and she had paced through lonely places in many counties before she

reached the hut in the wood, and the cot where he lay with his fists

shut and sleep gripped in them.

He awakened to be sure. He would have one ear that would catch an

unusual voice, one eye that would open, however sleepy the other one

was. She took him in her arms and kissed him, and she sang a sleepy song

until the small boy slept again.

We may be sure that the eye that could stay open stayed open that night

as long as it could, and that the one ear listened to the sleepy song

until the song got too low to be heard, until it was too tender to be

felt vibrating along those soft arms, until Fionn was asleep again, with

a new picture in his little head and a new notion to ponder on.

The mother of himself! His own mother!

But when he awakened she was gone.

She was going back secretly, in dread of the sons of Morna, slipping

through gloomy woods, keeping away from habitations, getting by desolate

and lonely ways to her lord in Kerry.

Perhaps it was he that was afraid of the sons of Morna, and perhaps she

loved him.

CHAPTER III

THE women druids, his guardians, belonged to his father’s people.

Bovmall was Uail’s sister, and, consequently, Fionn’s aunt. Only such

a blood-tie could have bound them to the clann-Baiscne, for it is not

easy, having moved in the world of court and camp, to go hide with a

baby in a wood; and to live, as they must have lived, in terror.

What stories they would have told the child of the sons of Morna. Of

Morna himself, the huge-shouldered, stern-eyed, violent Connachtman; and

of his sons--young Goll Mor mac Morna in particular, as huge-shouldered

as his father, as fierce in the onset, but merry-eyed when the other

was grim, and bubbling with a laughter that made men forgive even his

butcheries. Of Cona’n Mael mac Morna his brother, gruff as a badger,

bearded like a boar, bald as a crow, and with a tongue that could manage

an insult where another man would not find even a stammer. His boast was

that when he saw an open door he went into it, and when he saw a closed

door he went into it. When he saw a peaceful man he insulted him, and

when he met a man who was not peaceful he insulted him. There was Garra

Duv mac Morna, and savage Art Og, who cared as little for their own

skins as they did for the next man’s, and Garra must have been rough

indeed to have earned in that clan the name of the Rough mac Morna.

There were others: wild Connachtmen all, as untameable, as unaccountable

as their own wonderful countryside.

Fionn would have heard much of them, and it is likely that he practised

on a nettle at taking the head off Goll, and that he hunted a sheep

from cover in the implacable manner he intended later on for Cona’n the

Swearer.

But it is of Uail mac Baiscne he would have heard most. With what a

dilation of spirit the ladies would have told tales of him, Fionn’s

father. How their voices would have become a chant as feat was added

to feat, glory piled on glory. The most famous of men and the most

beautiful; the hardest fighter; the easiest giver; the kingly champion;

the chief of the Fianna na h-Eirinn. Tales of how he had been way-laid

and got free; of how he had been generous and got free; of how he had

been angry and went marching with the speed of an eagle and the direct

onfall of a storm; while in front and at the sides, angled from the prow

of his terrific advance, were fleeing multitudes who did not dare to

wait and scarce had time to run. And of how at last, when the time

came to quell him, nothing less than the whole might of Ireland was

sufficient for that great downfall.

We may be sure that on these adventures Fionn was with his father, going

step for step with the long-striding hero, and heartening him mightily.

CHAPTER IV

He was given good training by the women in running and leaping and

swimming.

One of them would take a thorn switch in her hand, and Fionn would

take a thorn switch in his hand, and each would try to strike the other

running round a tree.

You had to go fast to keep away from the switch behind, and a small boy

feels a switch. Fionn would run his best to get away from that prickly

stinger, but how he would run when it was his turn to deal the strokes!

With reason too, for his nurses had suddenly grown implacable. They

pursued him with a savagery which he could not distinguish from hatred,

and they swished him well whenever they got the chance.

Fionn learned to run. After a while he could buzz around a tree like

a maddened fly, and oh, the joy, when he felt himself drawing from the

switch and gaining from behind on its bearer! How he strained and panted

to catch on that pursuing person and pursue her and get his own switch

into action.

He learned to jump by chasing hares in a bumpy field. Up went the hare

and up went Fionn, and away with the two of them, hopping and popping

across the field. If the hare turned while Fionn was after her it was

switch for Fionn; so that in a while it did not matter to Fionn which

way the hare jumped for he could jump that way too. Long-ways, sideways

or baw-ways, Fionn hopped where the hare hopped, and at last he was the

owner of a hop that any hare would give an ear for.

He was taught to swim, and it may be that his heart sank when he fronted

the lesson. The water was cold. It was deep. One could see the bottom,

leagues below, millions of miles below. A small boy might shiver as he

stared into that wink and blink and twink of brown pebbles and murder.

And these implacable women threw him in!

Perhaps he would not go in at first. He may have smiled at them, and

coaxed, and hung back. It was a leg and an arm gripped then; a swing for

Fionn, and out and away with him; plop and flop for him; down into chill

deep death for him, and up with a splutter; with a sob; with a grasp

at everything that caught nothing; with a wild flurry; with a raging

despair; with a bubble and snort as he was hauled again down, and down,

and down, and found as suddenly that he had been hauled out.

Fionn learned to swim until he could pop into the water like an otter

and slide through it like an eel.

He used to try to chase a fish the way he chased hares in the bumpy

field--but there are terrible spurts in a fish. It may be that a fish

cannot hop, but he gets there in a flash, and he isn’t there in another.

Up or down, sideways or endways, it is all one to a fish. He goes and

is gone. He twists this way and disappears the other way. He is over

you when he ought to be under you, and he is biting your toe when you

thought you were biting his tail.

You cannot catch a fish by swimming, but you can try, and Fionn tried.

He got a grudging commendation from the terrible women when he was able

to slip noiselessly in the tide, swim under water to where a wild duck

was floating and grip it by the leg.

“Qu--,” said the duck, and he disappeared before he had time to get the

“-ack” out of him.

So the time went, and Fionn grew long and straight and tough like a

sapling; limber as a willow, and with the flirt and spring of a young

bird. One of the ladies may have said, “He is shaping very well, my

dear,” and the other replied, as is the morose privilege of an aunt,

“He will never be as good as his father,” but their hearts must have

overflowed in the night, in the silence, in the darkness, when they

thought of the living swiftness they had fashioned, and that dear fair

head.

CHAPTER V

ONE day his guardians were agitated: they held confabulations at which

Fionn was not permitted to assist. A man who passed by in the morning

had spoken to them. They fed the man, and during his feeding Fionn had

been shooed from the door as if he were a chicken. When the stranger

took his road the women went with him a short distance. As they passed

the man lifted a hand and bent a knee to Fionn.

“My soul to you, young master,” he said, and as he said it, Fionn

knew that he could have the man’s soul, or his boots, or his feet, or

anything that belonged to him.

When the women returned they were mysterious and whispery. They chased

Fionn into the house, and when they got him in they chased him out

again. They chased each other around the house for another whisper. They

calculated things by the shape of clouds, by lengths of shadows, by the

flight of birds, by two flies racing on a flat stone, by throwing bones

over their left shoulders, and by every kind of trick and game and

chance that you could put a mind to.

They told Fionn he must sleep in a tree that night, and they put him

under bonds not to sing or whistle or cough or sneeze until the morning.

Fionn did sneeze. He never sneezed so much in his life. He sat up in his

tree and nearly sneezed himself out of it. Flies got up his nose, two

at a time, one up each nose, and his head nearly fell off the way he

sneezed.

“You are doing that on purpose,” said a savage whisper from the foot of

the tree.

But Fionn was not doing it on purpose. He tucked himself into a fork the

way he had been taught, and he passed the crawliest, tickliest night he

had ever known. After a while he did not want to sneeze, he wanted to

scream: and in particular he wanted to come down from the tree. But he

did not scream, nor did he leave the tree. His word was passed, and he

stayed in his tree as silent as a mouse and as watchful, until he fell

out of it.

In the morning a band of travelling poets were passing, and the

women handed Fionn over to them. This time they could not prevent him

overhearing.

“The sons of Morna!” they said.

And Fionn’s heart might have swelled with rage, but that it was already

swollen with adventure. And also the expected was happening. Behind

every hour of their day and every moment of their lives lay the sons of

Morna. Fionn had run after them as deer: he jumped after them as hares:

he dived after them as fish. They lived in the house with him: they

sat at the table and ate his meat. One dreamed of them, and they were

expected in the morning as the sun is. They knew only too well that the

son of Uail was living, and they knew that their own sons would know

no ease while that son lived; for they believed in those days that like

breeds like, and that the son of Uail would be Uail with additions.

His guardians knew that their hiding-place must at last be discovered,

and that, when it was found, the sons of Morna would come. They had

no doubt of that, and every action of their lives was based on that

certainty. For no secret can remain secret. Some broken soldier tramping

home to his people will find it out; a herd seeking his strayed cattle

or a band of travelling musicians will get the wind of it. How many

people will move through even the remotest wood in a year! The crows

will tell a secret if no one else does; and under a bush, behind a clump

of bracken, what eyes may there not be! But if your secret is legged

like a young goat! If it is tongued like a wolf! One can hide a baby,

but you cannot hide a boy. He will rove unless you tie him to a post,

and he will whistle then.

The sons of Morna came, but there were only two grim women living in a

lonely hut to greet them. We may be sure they were well greeted. One can

imagine Goll’s merry stare taking in all that could be seen; Cona’n’s

grim eye raking the women’s faces while his tongue raked them again; the

Rough mac Morna shouldering here and there in the house and about it,

with maybe a hatchet in his hand, and Art Og coursing further afield and

vowing that if the cub was there he would find him.

CHAPTER VI

But Fionn was gone. He was away, bound with his band of poets for the

Galtees.

It is likely they were junior poets come to the end of a year’s

training, and returning to their own province to see again the people at

home, and to be wondered at and exclaimed at as they exhibited bits of

the knowledge which they had brought from the great schools. They would

know tags of rhyme and tricks about learning which Fionn would hear of;

and now and again, as they rested in a glade or by the brink of a river,

they might try their lessons over. They might even refer to the ogham

wands on which the first words of their tasks and the opening lines of

poems were cut; and it is likely that, being new to these things, they

would talk of them to a youngster, and, thinking that his wits could be

no better than their own, they might have explained to him how ogham was

written. But it is far more likely that his women guardians had already

started him at those lessons.

Still this band of young bards would have been of infinite interest to

Fionn, not on account of what they had learned, but because of what they

knew. All the things that he should have known as by nature: the look,

the movement, the feeling of crowds; the shouldering and intercourse of

man with man; the clustering of houses and how people bore themselves

in and about them; the movement of armed men, and the homecoming look

of wounds; tales of births, and marriages and deaths; the chase with its

multitudes of men and dogs; all the noise, the dust, the excitement of

mere living. These, to Fionn, new come from leaves and shadows and the

dipple and dapple of a wood, would have seemed wonderful; and the tales

they would have told of their masters, their looks, fads, severities,

sillinesses, would have been wonderful also.

That band should have chattered like a rookery.

They must have been young, for one time a Leinsterman came on them, a

great robber named Fiacuil mac Cona, and he killed the poets. He chopped

them up and chopped them down. He did not leave one poeteen of them

all. He put them out of the world and out of life, so that they stopped

being, and no one could tell where they went or what had really happened

to them; and it is a wonder indeed that one can do that to anything let

alone a band. If they were not youngsters, the bold Fiacuil could not

have managed them all. Or, perhaps, he too had a band, although the

record does not say so; but kill them he did, and they died that way.

Fionn saw that deed, and his blood may have been cold enough as he

watched the great robber coursing the poets as a wild dog rages in a

flock. And when his turn came, when they were all dead, and the grim,

red-handed man trod at him, Fionn may have shivered, but he would have

shown his teeth and laid roundly on the monster with his hands. Perhaps

he did that, and perhaps for that he was spared.

“Who are you?” roared the staring black-mouth with the red tongue

squirming in it like a frisky fish.

“The son of Uail, son of Baiscne,” quoth hardy Fionn. And at that the

robber ceased to be a robber, the murderer disappeared, the black-rimmed

chasm packed with red fish and precipices changed to something else, and

the round eyes that had been popping out of their sockets and trying

to bite, changed also. There remained a laughing and crying and loving

servant who wanted to tie himself into knots if that would please the

son of his great captain. Fionn went home on the robber’s shoulder, and

the robber gave great snorts and made great jumps and behaved like a

first-rate horse. For this same Fiacuil was the husband of Bovmall,

Fionn’s aunt. He had taken to the wilds when clann-Baiscne was broken,

and he was at war with a world that had dared to kill his Chief.

CHAPTER VII

A new life for Fionn in the robber’s den that was hidden in a vast cold

marsh.

A tricky place that would be, with sudden exits and even suddener

entrances, and with damp, winding, spidery places to hoard treasure in,

or to hide oneself in.

If the robber was a solitary he would, for lack of someone else,

have talked greatly to Fionn. He would have shown his weapons and

demonstrated how he used them, and with what slash he chipped his

victim, and with what slice he chopped him. He would have told why a

slash was enough for this man and why that man should be sliced. All men

are masters when one is young, and Fionn would have found knowledge here

also. He would have seen Fiacuil’s great spear that had thirty rivets

of Arabian gold in its socket, and that had to be kept wrapped up and

tied down so that it would not kill people out of mere spitefulness. It

had come from Faery, out of the Shi’ of Aillen mac Midna, and it would

be brought back again later on between the same man’s shoulder-blades.

What tales that man could tell a boy, and what questions a boy could ask

him. He would have known a thousand tricks, and because our instinct is

to teach, and because no man can keep a trick from a boy, he would show

them to Fionn.

There was the marsh too; a whole new life to be learned; a complicated,

mysterious, dank, slippery, reedy, treacherous life, but with its own

beauty and an allurement that could grow on one, so that you could

forget the solid world and love only that which quaked and gurgled.

In this place you may swim. By this sign and this you will know if it is

safe to do so, said Fiacuil mac Cona; but in this place, with this sign

on it and that, you must not venture a toe.

But where Fionn would venture his toes his ears would follow.

There are coiling weeds down there, the robber counselled him; there are

thin, tough, snaky binders that will trip you and grip you, that will

pull you and will not let you go again until you are drowned; until

you are swaying and swinging away below, with outstretched arms, with

outstretched legs, with a face all stares and smiles and jockeyings,

gripped in those leathery arms, until there is no more to be gripped of

you even by them.

“Watch these and this and that,” Fionn would have been told, “and always

swim with a knife in your teeth.”

He lived there until his guardians found out where he was and came after

him. Fiacuil gave him up to them, and he was brought home again to

the woods of Slieve Bloom, but he had gathered great knowledge and new

supplenesses.

The sons of Morna left him alone for a long time. Having made their

essay they grew careless.

“Let him be,” they said. “He will come to us when the time comes.”

But it is likely too that they had had their own means of getting

information about him. How he shaped? what muscles he had? and did

he spring clean from the mark or had he to get off with a push? Fionn

stayed with his guardians and hunted for them. He could run a deer down

and haul it home by the reluctant skull. “Come on, Goll,” he would say

to his stag, or, lifting it over a tussock with a tough grip on the

snout, “Are you coming, bald Cona’n, or shall I kick you in the neck?”

The time must have been nigh when he would think of taking the world

itself by the nose, to haul it over tussocks and drag it into his

pen; for he was of the breed in whom mastery is born, and who are good

masters.

But reports of his prowess were getting abroad. Clann-Morna began to

stretch itself uneasily, and, one day, his guardians sent him on his

travels.

“It is best for you to leave us now,” they said to the tall stripling,

“for the sons of Morna are watching again to kill you.”

The woods at that may have seemed haunted. A stone might sling at one

from a tree-top; but from which tree of a thousand trees did it come? An

arrow buzzing by one’s ear would slide into the ground and quiver there

silently, menacingly, hinting of the brothers it had left in the quiver

behind; to the right? to the left? how many brothers? in how many

quivers...? Fionn was a woodsman, but he had only two eyes to look with,

one set of feet to carry him in one sole direction. But when he was

looking to the front what, or how many whats, could be staring at him

from the back? He might face in this direction, away from, or towards a

smile on a hidden face and a finger on a string. A lance might slide at

him from this bush or from the one yonder.. In the night he might have

fought them; his ears against theirs; his noiseless feet against their

lurking ones; his knowledge of the wood against their legion: but during

the day he had no chance.

Fionn went to seek his fortune, to match himself against all that might

happen, and to carve a name for himself that will live while Time has an

ear and knows an Irishman.

CHAPTER VIII

Fionn went away, and now he was alone. But he was as fitted for

loneliness as the crane is that haunts the solitudes and bleak wastes

of the sea; for the man with a thought has a comrade, and Fionn’s mind

worked as featly as his body did. To be alone was no trouble to him who,

however surrounded, was to be lonely his life long; for this will be

said of Fionn when all is said, that all that came to him went from him,

and that happiness was never his companion for more than a moment.

But he was not now looking for loneliness. He was seeking the

instruction of a crowd, and therefore when he met a crowd he went into

it. His eyes were skilled to observe in the moving dusk and dapple of

green woods. They were trained to pick out of shadows birds that were

themselves dun-coloured shades, and to see among trees the animals that

are coloured like the bark of trees. The hare crouching in the fronds

was visible to him, and the fish that swayed in-visibly in the sway and

flicker of a green bank. He would see all that was to be seen, and he

would see all that is passed by the eye that is half blind from use and

wont.

At Moy Life’ he came on lads swimming in a pool; and, as he looked

on them sporting in the flush tide, he thought that the tricks they

performed were not hard for him, and that he could have shown them new

ones.

Boys must know what another boy can do, and they will match themselves

against everything. They did their best under these observing eyes, and

it was not long until he was invited to compete with them and show his

mettle. Such an invitation is a challenge; it is almost, among boys, a

declaration of war. But Fionn was so far beyond them in swimming that

even the word master did not apply to that superiority.

While he was swimming one remarked: “He is fair and well shaped,” and

thereafter he was called “Fionn” or the Fair One. His name came from

boys, and will, perhaps, be preserved by them.

He stayed with these lads for some time, and it may be that they

idolised him at first, for it is the way with boys to be astounded and

enraptured by feats; but in the end, and that was inevitable, they grew

jealous of the stranger. Those who had been the champions before he came

would marshal each other, and, by social pressure, would muster all the

others against him; so that in the end not a friendly eye was turned on

Fionn in that assembly. For not only did he beat them at swimming, he

beat their best at running and jumping, and when the sport degenerated

into violence, as it was bound to, the roughness of Fionn would be ten

times as rough as the roughness of the roughest rough they could put

forward. Bravery is pride when one is young, and Fionn was proud.

There must have been anger in his mind as he went away leaving that lake

behind him, and those snarling and scowling boys, but there would have

been disappointment also, for his desire at this time should have been

towards friendliness.

He went thence to Lock Le’in and took service with the King of

Finntraigh. That kingdom may have been thus called from Fionn himself

and would have been known by another name when he arrived there.

He hunted for the King of Finntraigh, and it soon grew evident that

there was no hunter in his service to equal Fionn. More, there was no

hunter of them all who even distantly approached him in excellence. The

others ran after deer, using the speed of their legs, the noses of their

dogs and a thousand well-worn tricks to bring them within reach, and,

often enough, the animal escaped them. But the deer that Fionn got the

track of did not get away, and it seemed even that the animals sought

him so many did he catch.

The king marvelled at the stories that were told of this new hunter, but

as kings are greater than other people so they are more curious; and,

being on the plane of excellence, they must see all that is excellently

told of.

The king wished to see him, and Fionn must have wondered what the king

thought as that gracious lord looked on him. Whatever was thought, what

the king said was as direct in utterance as it was in observation.

“If Uail the son of Baiscne has a son,” said the king, “you would surely

be that son.”

We are not told if the King of Finntraigh said anything more, but we

know that Fionn left his service soon afterwards.

He went southwards and was next in the employment of the King of Kerry,

the same lord who had married his own mother. In that service he came to

such consideration that we hear of him as playing a match of chess with

the king, and by this game we know that he was still a boy in his mind

however mightily his limbs were spreading. Able as he was in sports and

huntings, he was yet too young to be politic, but he remained impolitic

to the end of his days, for whatever he was able to do he would do, no

matter who was offended thereat; and whatever he was not able to do he

would do also. That was Fionn.

Once, as they rested on a chase, a debate arose among the Fianna-Finn as

to what was the finest music in the world.

“Tell us that,” said Fionn turning to Oisi’n [pronounced Usheen]

“The cuckoo calling from the tree that is highest in the hedge,” cried

his merry son.

“A good sound,” said Fionn. “And you, Oscar,” he asked, “what is to your

mind the finest of music?”

“The top of music is the ring of a spear on a shield,” cried the stout

lad.

“It is a good sound,” said Fionn. And the other champions told their

delight; the belling of a stag across water, the baying of a tuneful

pack heard in the distance, the song of a lark, the laugh of a gleeful

girl, or the whisper of a moved one.

“They are good sounds all,” said Fionn.

“Tell us, chief,” one ventured, “what you think?”

“The music of what happens,” said great Fionn, “that is the finest music

in the world.”

He loved “what happened,” and would not evade it by the swerve of

a hair; so on this occasion what was occurring he would have occur,

although a king was his rival and his master. It may be that his mother

was watching the match and that he could not but exhibit his skill

before her. He committed the enormity of winning seven games in

succession from the king himself!!!

It is seldom indeed that a subject can beat a king at chess, and this

monarch was properly amazed.

“Who are you at all?” he cried, starting back from the chessboard and

staring on Fionn.

“I am the son of a countryman of the Luigne of Tara,” said Fionn.

He may have blushed as he said it, for the king, possibly for the first

time, was really looking at him, and was looking back through twenty

years of time as he did so. The observation of a king is faultless--it

is proved a thousand times over in the tales, and this king’s equipment

was as royal as the next.

“You are no such son,” said the indignant monarch, “but you are the son

that Muirne my wife bore to Uall mac Balscne.”

And at that Fionn had no more to say; but his eyes may have flown to his

mother and stayed there.

“You cannot remain here,” his step-father continued. “I do not want you

killed under my protection,” he explained, or complained.

Perhaps it was on Fionn’s account he dreaded the sons of Morna, but no

one knows what Fionn thought of him for he never thereafter spoke of his

step-father. As for Muirne she must have loved her lord; or she may have

been terrified in truth of the sons of Morna and for Fionn; but it is so

also, that if a woman loves her second husband she can dislike all that

reminds her of the first one. Fionn went on his travels again.

CHAPTER IX

All desires save one are fleeting, but that one lasts for ever. Fionn,

with all desires, had the lasting one, for he would go anywhere and

forsake anything for wisdom; and it was in search of this that he went

to the place where Finegas lived on a bank of the Boyne Water. But

for dread of the clann-Morna he did not go as Fionn. He called himself

Deimne on that journey.

We get wise by asking questions, and even if these are not answered we

get wise, for a well-packed question carries its answer on its back as

a snail carries its shell. Fionn asked every question he could think of,

and his master, who was a poet, and so an honourable man, answered them

all, not to the limit of his patience, for it was limitless, but to the

limit of his ability.

“Why do you live on the bank of a river?” was one of these questions.

“Because a poem is a revelation, and it is by the brink of running water

that poetry is revealed to the mind.”

“How long have you been here?” was the next query. “Seven years,” the

poet answered.

“It is a long time,” said wondering Fionn.

“I would wait twice as long for a poem,” said the inveterate bard.

“Have you caught good poems?” Fionn asked him.

“The poems I am fit for,” said the mild master. “No person can get more

than that, for a man’s readiness is his limit.”

“Would you have got as good poems by the Shannon or the Suir or by sweet

Ana Life’?”

“They are good rivers,” was the answer. “They all belong to good gods.”

“But why did you choose this river out of all the rivers?”

Finegas beamed on his pupil.

“I would tell you anything,” said he, “and I will tell you that.”

Fionn sat at the kindly man’s feet, his hands absent among tall grasses,

and listening with all his ears. “A prophecy was made to me,” Finegas

began. “A man of knowledge foretold that I should catch the Salmon of

Knowledge in the Boyne Water.”

“And then?” said Fionn eagerly.

“Then I would have All Knowledge.”

“And after that?” the boy insisted.

“What should there be after that?” the poet retorted.

“I mean, what would you do with All Knowledge?”

“A weighty question,” said Finegas smilingly. “I could answer it if I

had All Knowledge, but not until then. What would you do, my dear?”

“I would make a poem,” Fionn cried.

“I think too,” said the poet, “that that is what would be done.”

In return for instruction Fionn had taken over the service of his

master’s hut, and as he went about the household duties, drawing the

water, lighting the fire, and carrying rushes for the floor and the

beds, he thought over all the poet had taught him, and his mind dwelt on

the rules of metre, the cunningness of words, and the need for a clean,

brave mind. But in his thousand thoughts he yet remembered the Salmon of

Knowledge as eagerly as his master did. He already venerated Finegas

for his great learning, his poetic skill, for an hundred reasons; but,

looking on him as the ordained eater of the Salmon of Knowledge, he

venerated him to the edge of measure. Indeed, he loved as well as

venerated this master because of his unfailing kindness, his patience,

his readiness to teach, and his skill in teaching.

“I have learned much from you, dear master,” said Fionn gratefully.

“All that I have is yours if you can take it,” the poet answered, “for

you are entitled to all that you can take, but to no more than that.

Take, so, with both hands.”

“You may catch the salmon while I am with you,” the hopeful boy mused.

“Would not that be a great happening!” and he stared in ecstasy across

the grass at those visions which a boy’s mind knows.

“Let us pray for that,” said Finegas fervently.

“Here is a question,” Fionn continued. “How does this salmon get wisdom

into his flesh?”

“There is a hazel bush overhanging a secret pool in a secret place. The

Nuts of Knowledge drop from the Sacred Bush into the pool, and as they

float, a salmon takes them in his mouth and eats them.”

“It would be almost as easy,” the boy submitted, “if one were to set on

the track of the Sacred Hazel and eat the nuts straight from the bush.”

“That would not be very easy,” said the poet, “and yet it is not as easy

as that, for the bush can only be found by its own knowledge, and that

knowledge can only be got by eating the nuts, and the nuts can only be

got by eating the salmon.”

“We must wait for the salmon,” said Fionn in a rage of resignation.

CHAPTER X

Life continued for him in a round of timeless time, wherein days and

nights were uneventful and were yet filled with interest. As the day

packed its load of strength into his frame, so it added its store of

knowledge to his mind, and each night sealed the twain, for it is in the

night that we make secure what we have gathered in the day.

If he had told of these days he would have told of a succession of meals

and sleeps, and of an endless conversation, from which his mind would

now and again slip away to a solitude of its own, where, in large hazy

atmospheres, it swung and drifted and reposed. Then he would be back

again, and it was a pleasure for him to catch up on the thought that was

forward and re-create for it all the matter he had missed. But he could

not often make these sleepy sallies; his master was too experienced a

teacher to allow any such bright-faced, eager-eyed abstractions, and as

the druid women had switched his legs around a tree, so Finegas chased

his mind, demanding sense in his questions and understanding in his

replies.

To ask questions can become the laziest and wobbliest occupation of a

mind, but when you must yourself answer the problem that you have posed,

you will meditate your question with care and frame it with precision.

Fionn’s mind learned to jump in a bumpier field than that in which he

had chased rabbits. And when he had asked his question, and given his

own answer to it, Finegas would take the matter up and make clear to him

where the query was badly formed or at what point the answer had begun

to go astray, so that Fionn came to understand by what successions a

good question grows at last to a good answer.

One day, not long after the conversation told of, Finegas came to the

place where Fionn was. The poet had a shallow osier basket on his arm,

and on his face there was a look that was at once triumphant and gloomy.

He was excited certainly, but he was sad also, and as he stood gazing on

Fionn his eyes were so kind that the boy was touched, and they were yet

so melancholy that it almost made Fionn weep. “What is it, my master?”

said the alarmed boy.

The poet placed his osier basket on the grass.

“Look in the basket, dear son,” he said. Fionn looked.

“There is a salmon in the basket.”

“It is The Salmon,” said Finegas with a great sigh. Fionn leaped for

delight.

“I am glad for you, master,” he cried. “Indeed I am glad for you.”

“And I am glad, my dear soul,” the master rejoined.

But, having said it, he bent his brow to his hand and for a long time he

was silent and gathered into himself.

“What should be done now?” Fionn demanded, as he stared on the beautiful

fish.

Finegas rose from where he sat by the osier basket.

“I will be back in a short time,” he said heavily. “While I am away you

may roast the salmon, so that it will be ready against my return.”

“I will roast it indeed,” said Fionn.

The poet gazed long and earnestly on him.

“You will not eat any of my salmon while I am away?” he asked.

“I will not eat the littlest piece,” said Fionn.

“I am sure you will not,” the other murmured, as he turned and walked

slowly across the grass and behind the sheltering bushes on the ridge.

Fionn cooked the salmon. It was beautiful and tempting and savoury as

it smoked on a wooden platter among cool green leaves; and it looked all

these to Finegas when he came from behind the fringing bushes and sat

in the grass outside his door. He gazed on the fish with more than his

eyes. He looked on it with his heart, with his soul in his eyes, and

when he turned to look on Fionn the boy did not know whether the love

that was in his eyes was for the fish or for himself. Yet he did know

that a great moment had arrived for the poet.

“So,” said Finegas, “you did not eat it on me after all?” “Did I not

promise?” Fionn replied.

“And yet,” his master continued, “I went away so that you might eat the

fish if you felt you had to.”

“Why should I want another man’s fish?” said proud Fionn.

“Because young people have strong desires. I thought you might have

tasted it, and then you would have eaten it on me.”

“I did taste it by chance,” Fionn laughed, “for while the fish was

roasting a great blister rose on its skin. I did not like the look of

that blister, and I pressed it down with my thumb. That burned my thumb,

so I popped it in my mouth to heal the smart. If your salmon tastes as

nice as my thumb did,” he laughed, “it will taste very nice.”

“What did you say your name was, dear heart?” the poet asked.

“I said my name was Deimne.”

“Your name is not Deimne,” said the mild man, “your name is Fionn.”

“That is true,” the boy answered, “but I do not know how you know it.”

“Even if I have not eaten the Salmon of Knowledge I have some small

science of my own.”

“It is very clever to know things as you know them,” Fionn replied

wonderingly. “What more do you know of me, dear master?”

“I know that I did not tell you the truth,” said the heavy-hearted man.

“What did you tell me instead of it?”

“I told you a lie.”

“It is not a good thing to do,” Fionn admitted. “What sort of a lie was

the lie, master?” “I told you that the Salmon of Knowledge was to be

caught by me, according to the prophecy.”

“Yes.”

“That was true indeed, and I have caught the fish. But I did not tell

you that the salmon was not to be eaten by me, although that also was in

the prophecy, and that omission was the lie.”

“It is not a great lie,” said Fionn soothingly.

“It must not become a greater one,” the poet replied sternly.

“Who was the fish given to?” his companion wondered.

“It was given to you,” Finegas answered. “It was given to Fionn, the son

of Uail, the son of Baiscne, and it will be given to him.”

“You shall have a half of the fish,” cried Fionn.

“I will not eat a piece of its skin that is as small as the point of its

smallest bone,” said the resolute and trembling bard. “Let you now eat

up the fish, and I shall watch you and give praise to the gods of the

Underworld and of the Elements.”

Fionn then ate the Salmon of Knowledge, and when it had disappeared a

great jollity and tranquillity and exuberance returned to the poet.

“Ah,” said he, “I had a great combat with that fish.”

“Did it fight for its life?” Fionn inquired.

“It did, but that was not the fight I meant.”

“You shall eat a Salmon of Knowledge too,” Fionn assured him.

“You have eaten one,” cried the blithe poet, “and if you make such a

promise it will be because you know.”

“I promise it and know it,” said Fionn, “you shall eat a Salmon of

Knowledge yet.”

CHAPTER XI

He had received all that he could get from Finegas. His education was

finished and the time had come to test it, and to try all else that he

had of mind and body. He bade farewell to the gentle poet, and set out

for Tara of the Kings.

It was Samhain-tide, and the feast of Tara was being held, at which all

that was wise or skilful or well-born in Ireland were gathered together.

This is how Tara was when Tara was. There was the High King’s palace

with its fortification; without it was another fortification enclosing

the four minor palaces, each of which was maintained by one of the four

provincial kings; without that again was the great banqueting hall, and

around it and enclosing all of the sacred hill in its gigantic bound ran

the main outer ramparts of Tara. From it, the centre of Ireland, four

great roads went, north, south, east, and west, and along these roads,

from the top and the bottom and the two sides of Ireland, there moved

for weeks before Samhain an endless stream of passengers.

Here a gay band went carrying rich treasure to decorate the pavilion of

a Munster lord. On another road a vat of seasoned yew, monstrous as a

house on wheels and drawn by an hundred laborious oxen, came bumping and

joggling the ale that thirsty Connaught princes would drink. On a road

again the learned men of Leinster, each with an idea in his head that

would discomfit a northern ollav and make a southern one gape and

fidget, would be marching solemnly, each by a horse that was piled high

on the back and widely at the sides with clean-peeled willow or oaken

wands, that were carved from the top to the bottom with the ogham signs;

the first lines of poems (for it was an offence against wisdom to commit

more than initial lines to writing), the names and dates of kings, the

procession of laws of Tara and of the sub-kingdoms, the names of places

and their meanings. On the brown stallion ambling peacefully yonder

there might go the warring of the gods for two or ten thousand years;

this mare with the dainty pace and the vicious eye might be sidling

under a load of oaken odes in honour of her owner’s family, with a

few bundles of tales of wonder added in case they might be useful; and

perhaps the restive piebald was backing the history of Ireland into a

ditch.

On such a journey all people spoke together, for all were friends, and

no person regarded the weapon in another man’s hand other than as an

implement to poke a reluctant cow with, or to pacify with loud wallops

some hoof-proud colt.

Into this teem and profusion of jolly humanity Fionn slipped, and if his

mood had been as bellicose as a wounded boar he would yet have found

no man to quarrel with, and if his eye had been as sharp as a jealous

husband’s he would have found no eye to meet it with calculation or

menace or fear; for the Peace of Ireland was in being, and for six weeks

man was neighbour to man, and the nation was the guest of the High King.

Fionn went in with the notables.

His arrival had been timed for the opening day and the great feast of

welcome. He may have marvelled, looking on the bright city, with its

pillars of gleaming bronze and the roofs that were painted in many

colours, so that each house seemed to be covered by the spreading wings

of some gigantic and gorgeous bird. And the palaces themselves, mellow

with red oak, polished within and without by the wear and the care of

a thousand years, and carved with the patient skill of unending

generations of the most famous artists of the most artistic country of

the western world, would have given him much to marvel at also. It

must have seemed like a city of dream, a city to catch the heart, when,

coming over the great plain, Fionn saw Tara of the Kings held on its

hill as in a hand to gather all the gold of the falling sun, and to

restore a brightness as mellow and tender as that universal largess.

In the great banqueting hall everything was in order for the feast. The

nobles of Ireland with their winsome consorts, the learned and artistic

professions represented by the pick of their time were in place. The

Ard-Ri, Corm of the Hundred Battles, had taken his place on the raised

dais which commanded the whole of that vast hall. At his Right hand his

son Art, to be afterwards as famous as his famous father, took his seat,

and on his left Goll mor mac Morna, chief of the Fianna of Ireland, had

the seat of honour. As the High King took his place he could see every

person who was noted in the land for any reason. He would know every one

who was present, for the fame of all men is sealed at Tara, and behind

his chair a herald stood to tell anything the king might not know or had

forgotten.

Conn gave the signal and his guests seated themselves.

The time had come for the squires to take their stations behind their

masters and mistresses. But, for the moment, the great room was seated,

and the doors were held to allow a moment of respect to pass before the

servers and squires came in.

Looking over his guests, Conn observed that a young man was yet

standing.

“There is a gentleman,” he murmured, “for whom no seat has been found.”

We may be sure that the Master of the Banquet blushed at that.

“And,” the king continued, “I do not seem to know the young man.”

Nor did his herald, nor did the unfortunate Master, nor did anybody; for

the eyes of all were now turned where the king’s went.

“Give me my horn,” said the gracious monarch.

The horn of state was put to his hand.

“Young gentleman,” he called to the stranger, “I wish to drink to your

health and to welcome you to Tara.”

The young man came forward then, greater-shouldered than any mighty

man of that gathering, longer and cleaner limbed, with his fair curls

dancing about his beardless face. The king put the great horn into his

hand.

“Tell me your name,” he commanded gently.

“I am Fionn, the son of Uail, the son of Baiscne,” said the youth.

And at that saying a touch as of lightning went through the gathering

so that each person quivered, and the son of the great, murdered captain

looked by the king’s shoulder into the twinkling eye of Goll. But no

word was uttered, no movement made except the movement and the utterance

of the Ard-Ri’.

“You are the son of a friend,” said the great-hearted monarch. “You

shall have the seat of a friend.”

He placed Fionn at the right hand of his own son Art.

CHAPTER XII

It is to be known that on the night of the Feast of Samhain the doors

separating this world and the next one are opened, and the inhabitants

of either world can leave their respective spheres and appear in the

world of the other beings.

Now there was a grandson to the Dagda Mor, the Lord of the Underworld,

and he was named Aillen mac Midna, out of Shi’ Finnachy, and this Aillen

bore an implacable enmity to Tara and the Ard-Ri’.

As well as being monarch of Ireland her High King was chief of the

people learned in magic, and it is possible that at some time Conn had

adventured into Tir na n-Og, the Land of the Young, and had done some

deed or misdeed in Aillen’s lordship or in his family. It must have been

an ill deed in truth, for it was in a very rage of revenge that Aillen

came yearly at the permitted time to ravage Tara.

Nine times he had come on this mission of revenge, but it is not to be

supposed that he could actually destroy the holy city: the Ard-Ri’

and magicians could prevent that, but he could yet do a damage so

considerable that it was worth Conn’s while to take special extra

precautions against him, including the precaution of chance.

Therefore, when the feast was over and the banquet had commenced, the

Hundred Fighter stood from his throne and looked over his assembled

people.

The Chain of Silence was shaken by the attendant whose duty and honour

was the Silver Chain, and at that delicate chime the halt went silent,

and a general wonder ensued as to what matter the High King would submit

to his people.

“Friends and heroes,” said Conn, “Aillen, the son of Midna, will come

to-night from Slieve Fuaid with occult, terrible fire against our

city. Is there among you one who loves Tara and the king, and who will

undertake our defence against that being?”

He spoke in silence, and when he had finished he listened to the same

silence, but it was now deep, ominous, agonized. Each man glanced

uneasily on his neighbour and then stared at his wine-cup or his

fingers. The hearts of young men went hot for a gallant moment and were

chilled in the succeeding one, for they had all heard of Aillen out of

Shl Finnachy in the north. The lesser gentlemen looked under their brows

at the greater champions, and these peered furtively at the greatest of

all. Art og mac Morna of the Hard Strokes fell to biting his fingers,

Cona’n the Swearer and Garra mac Morna grumbled irritably to each other

and at their neighbours, even Caelte, the son of Rona’n, looked down

into his own lap, and Goll Mor sipped at his wine without any twinkle

in his eye. A horrid embarrassment came into the great hall, and as the

High King stood in that palpitating silence his noble face changed

from kindly to grave and from that to a terrible sternness. In another

moment, to the undying shame of every person present, he would have been

compelled to lift his own challenge and declare himself the champion of

Tara for that night, but the shame that was on the faces of his people

would remain in the heart of their king. Goll’s merry mind would help

him to forget, but even his heart would be wrung by a memory that he

would not dare to face. It was at that terrible moment that Fionn stood

up.

“What,” said he, “will be given to the man who undertakes this defence?”

“All that can be rightly asked will be royally bestowed,” was the king’s

answer.

“Who are the sureties?” said Fionn.

“The kings of Ireland, and Red Cith with his magicians.”

“I will undertake the defence,” said Fionn. And on that, the kings and

magicians who were present bound themselves to the fulfilment of the

bargain.

Fionn marched from the banqueting hall, and as he went, all who were

present of nobles and retainers and servants acclaimed him and wished

him luck. But in their hearts they were bidding him good-bye, for all

were assured that the lad was marching to a death so unescapeable that

he might already be counted as a dead man.

It is likely that Fionn looked for help to the people of the Shi’

themselves, for, through his mother, he belonged to the tribes of Dana,

although, on the father’s side, his blood was well compounded with

mortal clay. It may be, too, that he knew how events would turn, for he

had eaten the Salmon of Knowledge. Yet it is not recorded that on this

occasion he invoked any magical art as he did on other adventures.

Fionn’s way of discovering whatever was happening and hidden was always

the same and is many times referred to. A shallow, oblong dish of pure,

pale gold was brought to him. This dish was filled with clear water.

Then Fionn would bend his head and stare into the water, and as he

stared he would place his thumb in his mouth under his “Tooth of

Knowledge,” his “wisdom tooth.”

Knowledge, may it be said, is higher than magic and is more to be

sought. It is quite possible to see what is happening and yet not know

what is forward, for while seeing is believing it does not follow that

either seeing or believing is knowing. Many a person can see a thing and

believe a thing and know just as little about it as the person who does

neither. But Fionn would see and know, or he would under-stand a decent

ratio of his visions. That he was versed in magic is true, for he was

ever known as the Knowledgeable man, and later he had two magicians

in his household named Dirim and mac-Reith to do the rough work of

knowledge for their busy master.

It was not from the Shi’, however, that assistance came to Fionn.

CHAPTER XIII

He marched through the successive fortifications until he came to the

outer, great wall, the boundary of the city, and when he had passed this

he was on the wide plain of Tara.

Other than himself no person was abroad, for on the night of the Feast

of Samhain none but a madman would quit the shelter of a house even if

it were on fire; for whatever disasters might be within a house would be

as nothing to the calamities without it.

The noise of the banquet was not now audible to Fionn--it is possible,

however, that there was a shamefaced silence in the great hall--and the

lights of the city were hidden by the successive great ramparts. The sky

was over him; the earth under him; and than these there was nothing, or

there was but the darkness and the wind.

But darkness was not a thing to terrify him, bred in the nightness of

a wood and the very fosterling of gloom; nor could the wind afflict his

ear or his heart. There was no note in its orchestra that he had not

brooded on and become, which becoming is magic. The long-drawn moan of

it; the thrilling whisper and hush; the shrill, sweet whistle, so thin

it can scarcely be heard, and is taken more by the nerves than by the

ear; the screech, sudden as a devil’s yell and loud as ten thunders; the

cry as of one who flies with backward look to the shelter of leaves and

darkness; and the sob as of one stricken with an age-long misery, only

at times remembered, but remembered then with what a pang! His ear

knew by what successions they arrived, and by what stages they grew and

diminished. Listening in the dark to the bundle of noises which make a

noise he could disentangle them and assign a place and a reason to each

gradation of sound that formed the chorus: there was the patter of a

rabbit, and there the scurrying of a hare; a bush rustled yonder,

but that brief rustle was a bird; that pressure was a wolf, and this

hesitation a fox; the scraping yonder was but a rough leaf against bark,

and the scratching beyond it was a ferret’s claw.

Fear cannot be where knowledge is, and Fionn was not fearful.

His mind, quietly busy on all sides, picked up one sound and dwelt on

it. “A man,” said Fionn, and he listened in that direction, back towards

the city.

A man it was, almost as skilled in darkness as Fionn himself “This is no

enemy,” Fionn thought; “his walking is open.”

“Who comes?” he called.

“A friend,” said the newcomer.

“Give a friend’s name,” said Fionn.

“Fiacuil mac Cona,” was the answer.

“Ah, my pulse and heart!” cried Fionn, and he strode a few paces to meet

the great robber who had fostered him among the marshes.

“So you are not afraid,” he said joyfully.

“I am afraid in good truth,” Fiacuil whispered, “and the minute my

business with you is finished I will trot back as quick as legs will

carry me. May the gods protect my going as they protected my coming,”

said the robber piously.

“Amen,” said Fionn, “and now, tell me what you have come for?”

“Have you any plan against this lord of the Shl?” Fiacuil whispered.

“I will attack him,” said Fionn.

“That is not a plan,” the other groaned, “we do not plan to deliver an

attack but to win a victory.”

“Is this a very terrible person?” Fionn asked.

“Terrible indeed. No one can get near him or away from him. He comes out

of the Shi’ playing sweet, low music on a timpan and a pipe, and all who

hear this music fall asleep.”

“I will not fall asleep,” said Fionn.

“You will indeed, for everybody does.”

“What happens then?” Fionn asked.

“When all are asleep Aillen mac Midna blows a dart of fire out of his

mouth, and everything that is touched by that fire is destroyed, and he

can blow his fire to an incredible distance and to any direction.”

“You are very brave to come to help me,” Fionn murmured, “especially

when you are not able to help me at all.”

“I can help,” Fiacuil replied, “but I must be paid.”

“What payment?”

“A third of all you earn and a seat at your council.”

“I grant that,” said Fionn, “and now, tell me your plan?”

“You remember my spear with the thirty rivets of Arabian gold in its

socket?”

“The one,” Fionn queried, “that had its head wrapped in a blanket and

was stuck in a bucket of water and was chained to a wall as well--the

venomous Birgha?” “That one,” Fiacuil replied.

“It is Aillen mac Midna’s own spear,” he continued, “and it was taken

out of his Shi’ by your father.”

“Well?” said Fionn, wondering nevertheless where Fiacuil got the spear,

but too generous to ask.

“When you hear the great man of the Shi’ coming, take the wrappings off

the head of the spear and bend your face over it; the heat of the spear,

the stench of it, all its pernicious and acrid qualities will prevent

you from going to sleep.”

“Are you sure of that?” said Fionn.

“You couldn’t go to sleep close to that stench; nobody could,” Fiacuil

replied decidedly.

He continued: “Aillen mac Midna will be off his guard when he stops

playing and begins to blow his fire; he will think everybody is asleep;

then you can deliver the attack you were speaking of, and all good luck

go with it.”

“I will give him back his spear,” said Fionn.

“Here it is,” said Fiacuil, taking the Birgha from under his cloak. “But

be as careful of it, my pulse, be as frightened of it as you are of the

man of Dana.”

“I will be frightened of nothing,” said Fionn, “and the only person I

will be sorry for is that Aillen mac Midna, who is going to get his own

spear back.”

“I will go away now,” his companion whispered, “for it is growing darker

where you would have thought there was no more room for darkness, and

there is an eerie feeling abroad which I do not like. That man from the

Shi’ may come any minute, and if I catch one sound of his music I am

done for.”

The robber went away and again Fionn was alone.

CHAPTER XIV

He listened to the retreating footsteps until they could be heard no

more, and the one sound that came to his tense ears was the beating of

his own heart.

Even the wind had ceased, and there seemed to be nothing in the world

but the darkness and himself. In that gigantic blackness, in that unseen

quietude and vacancy, the mind could cease to be personal to itself. It

could be overwhelmed and merged in space, so that consciousness would

be transferred or dissipated, and one might sleep standing; for the mind

fears loneliness more than all else, and will escape to the moon rather

than be driven inwards on its own being.

But Fionn was not lonely, and he was not afraid when the son of Midna

came.

A long stretch of the silent night had gone by, minute following minute

in a slow sequence, wherein as there was no change there was no time;

wherein there was no past and no future, but a stupefying, endless

present which is almost the annihilation of consciousness. A change

came then, for the clouds had also been moving and the moon at last was

sensed behind them--not as a radiance, but as a percolation of light,

a gleam that was strained through matter after matter and was less than

the very wraith or remembrance of itself; a thing seen so narrowly,

so sparsely, that the eye could doubt if it was or was not seeing, and

might conceive that its own memory was re-creating that which was still

absent.

But Fionn’s eye was the eye of a wild creature that spies on darkness

and moves there wittingly. He saw, then, not a thing but a movement;

something that was darker than the darkness it loomed on; not a being

but a presence, and, as it were, impending pressure. And in a little he

heard the deliberate pace of that great being.

Fionn bent to his spear and unloosed its coverings.

Then from the darkness there came another sound; a low, sweet sound;

thrillingly joyous, thrillingly low; so low the ear could scarcely note

it, so sweet the ear wished to catch nothing else and would strive to

hear it rather than all sounds that may be heard by man: the music of

another world! the unearthly, dear melody of the Shi’! So sweet it was

that the sense strained to it, and having reached must follow drowsily

in its wake, and would merge in it, and could not return again to its

own place until that strange harmony was finished and the ear restored

to freedom.

But Fionn had taken the covering from his spear, and with his brow

pressed close to it he kept his mind and all his senses engaged on that

sizzling, murderous point.

The music ceased and Aillen hissed a fierce blue flame from his mouth,

and it was as though he hissed lightning.

Here it would seem that Fionn used magic, for spreading out his fringed

mantle he caught the flame. Rather he stopped it, for it slid from the

mantle and sped down into the earth to the depth of twenty-six spans;

from which that slope is still called the Glen of the Mantle, and the

rise on which Aillen stood is known as the Ard of Fire.

One can imagine the surprise of Aillen mac Midna, seeing his fire caught

and quenched by an invisible hand. And one can imagine that at this

check he might be frightened, for who would be more terrified than a

magician who sees his magic fail, and who, knowing of power, will guess

at powers of which he has no conception and may well dread.

Everything had been done by him as it should be done. His pipe had been

played and his timpan, all who heard that music should be asleep, and

yet his fire was caught in full course and was quenched.

Aillen, with all the terrific strength of which he was master, blew

again, and the great jet of blue flame came roaring and whistling from

him and was caught and disappeared.

Panic swirled into the man from Faery; he turned from that terrible spot

and fled, not knowing what might be behind, but dreading it as he

had never before dreaded anything, and the unknown pursued him; that

terrible defence became offence and hung to his heel as a wolf pads by

the flank of a bull.

And Aillen was not in his own world! He was in the world of men, where

movement is not easy and the very air a burden. In his own sphere, in

his own element, he might have outrun Fionn, but this was Fionn’s world,

Fionn’s element, and the flying god was not gross enough to outstrip

him. Yet what a race he gave, for it was but at the entrance to his

own Shi’ that the pursuer got close enough. Fionn put a finger into

the thong of the great spear, and at that cast night fell on Aillen

mac Midna. His eyes went black, his mind whirled and ceased, there

came nothingness where he had been, and as the Birgha whistled into his

shoulder-blades he withered away, he tumbled emptily and was dead. Fionn

took his lovely head from its shoulders and went back through the night

to Tara.

Triumphant Fionn, who had dealt death to a god, and to whom death would

be dealt, and who is now dead!

He reached the palace at sunrise.

On that morning all were astir early. They wished to see what

destruction had been wrought by the great being, but it was young Fionn

they saw and that redoubtable head swinging by its hair. “What is your

demand?” said the Ard-Ri’. “The thing that it is right I should ask,”

said Fionn: “the command of the Fianna of Ireland.”

“Make your choice,” said Conn to Goll Mor; “you will leave Ireland, or

you will place your hand in the hand of this champion and be his man.”

Goll could do a thing that would be hard for another person, and he

could do it so beautifully that he was not diminished by any action.

“Here is my hand,” said Goll.

And he twinkled at the stern, young eyes that gazed on him as he made

his submission.

THE BIRTH OF BRAN

CHAPTER I

There are people who do not like dogs a bit--they are usually women--but

in this story there is a man who did not like dogs. In fact, he hated

them. When he saw one he used to go black in the face, and he threw

rocks at it until it got out of sight. But the Power that protects all

creatures had put a squint into this man’s eye, so that he always threw

crooked.

This gentleman’s name was Fergus Fionnliath, and his stronghold was near

the harbour of Galway. Whenever a dog barked he would leap out of his

seat, and he would throw everything that he owned out of the window in

the direction of the bark. He gave prizes to servants who disliked dogs,

and when he heard that a man had drowned a litter of pups he used to

visit that person and try to marry his daughter.

Now Fionn, the son of Uail, was the reverse of Fergus Fionnliath in this

matter, for he delighted in dogs, and he knew everything about them from

the setting of the first little white tooth to the rocking of the last

long yellow one. He knew the affections and antipathies which are proper

in a dog; the degree of obedience to which dogs may be trained without

losing their honourable qualities or becoming servile and suspicious;

he knew the hopes that animate them, the apprehensions which tingle in

their blood, and all that is to be demanded from, or forgiven in, a

paw, an ear, a nose, an eye, or a tooth; and he understood these things

because he loved dogs, for it is by love alone that we understand

anything.

Among the three hundred dogs which Fionn owned there were two to whom

he gave an especial tenderness, and who were his daily and nightly

companions. These two were Bran and Sceo’lan, but if a person were to

guess for twenty years he would not find out why Fionn loved these two

dogs and why he would never be separated from them.

Fionn’s mother, Muirne, went to wide Allen of Leinster to visit her son,

and she brought her young sister Tuiren with her. The mother and aunt

of the great captain were well treated among the Fianna, first, because

they were parents to Fionn, and second, because they were beautiful and

noble women.

No words can describe how delightful Muirne was--she took the branch;

and as to Tuiren, a man could not look at her without becoming angry

or dejected. Her face was fresh as a spring morning; her voice more

cheerful than the cuckoo calling from the branch that is highest in the

hedge; and her form swayed like a reed and flowed like a river, so that

each person thought she would surely flow to him.

Men who had wives of their own grew moody and downcast because they

could not hope to marry her, while the bachelors of the Fianna stared at

each other with truculent, bloodshot eyes, and then they gazed on Tuiren

so gently that she may have imagined she was being beamed on by the mild

eyes of the dawn.

It was to an Ulster gentleman, Iollan Eachtach, that she gave her love,

and this chief stated his rights and qualities and asked for her in

marriage.

Now Fionn did not dislike the man of Ulster, but either he did not

know them well or else he knew them too well, for he made a curious

stipulation before consenting to the marriage. He bound Iollan to return

the lady if there should be occasion to think her unhappy, and Iollan

agreed to do so. The sureties to this bargain were Caelte mac Ronan,

Goll mac Morna, and Lugaidh. Lugaidh himself gave the bride away, but

it was not a pleasant ceremony for him, because he also was in love with

the lady, and he would have preferred keeping her to giving her away.

When she had gone he made a poem about her, beginning:

“There is no more light in the sky--”

And hundreds of sad people learned the poem by heart.

CHAPTER II

When Iollan and Tuiren were married they went to Ulster, and they lived

together very happily. But the law of life is change; nothing

continues in the same way for any length of time; happiness must become

unhappiness, and will be succeeded again by the joy it had displaced.

The past also must be reckoned with; it is seldom as far behind us as we

could wish: it is more often in front, blocking the way, and the future

trips over it just when we think that the road is clear and joy our own.

Iollan had a past. He was not ashamed of it; he merely thought it

was finished, although in truth it was only beginning, for it is that

perpetual beginning of the past that we call the future.

Before he joined the Fianna he had been in love with a lady of the Shi’,

named Uct Dealv (Fair Breast), and they had been sweethearts for years.

How often he had visited his sweetheart in Faery! With what eagerness

and anticipation he had gone there; the lover’s whistle that he used to

give was known to every person in that Shi’, and he had been discussed

by more than one of the delicate sweet ladies of Faery. “That is your

whistle, Fair Breast,” her sister of the Shi’ would say.

And Uct Dealv would reply: “Yes, that is my mortal, my lover, my pulse,

and my one treasure.”

She laid her spinning aside, or her embroidery if she was at that, or if

she were baking a cake of fine wheaten bread mixed with honey she would

leave the cake to bake itself and fly to Iollan. Then they went hand in

hand in the country that smells of apple-blossom and honey, looking on

heavy-boughed trees and on dancing and beaming clouds. Or they stood

dreaming together, locked in a clasping of arms and eyes, gazing up

and down on each other, Iollan staring down into sweet grey wells that

peeped and flickered under thin brows, and Uct Dealv looking up into

great black ones that went dreamy and went hot in endless alternation.

Then Iollan would go back to the world of men, and Uct Dealv would

return to her occupations in the Land of the Ever Young.

“What did he say?” her sister of the Shi’ would ask.

“He said I was the Berry of the Mountain, the Star of Knowledge, and the

Blossom of the Raspberry.”

“They always say the same thing,” her sister pouted.

“But they look other things,” Uct Dealv insisted. “They feel other

things,” she murmured; and an endless conversation recommenced.

Then for some time Iollan did not come to Faery, and Uct Dealv marvelled

at that, while her sister made an hundred surmises, each one worse than

the last.

“He is not dead or he would be here,” she said. “He has forgotten you,

my darling.”

News was brought to Tlr na n-Og of the marriage of Iollan and Tuiren,

and when Uct Dealv heard that news her heart ceased to beat for a

moment, and she closed her eyes.

“Now!” said her sister of the Shi’. “That is how long the love of a

mortal lasts,” she added, in the voice of sad triumph which is proper to

sisters.

But on Uct Dealv there came a rage of jealousy and despair such as no

person in the Shi’ had ever heard of, and from that moment she

became capable of every ill deed; for there are two things not easily

controlled, and they are hunger and jealousy. She determined that the

woman who had supplanted her in Iollan’s affections should rue the day

she did it. She pondered and brooded revenge in her heart, sitting in

thoughtful solitude and bitter collectedness until at last she had a

plan.

She understood the arts of magic and shape-changing, so she changed

her shape into that of Fionn’s female runner, the best-known woman in

Ireland; then she set out from Faery and appeared in the world. She

travelled in the direction of Iollan’s stronghold.

Iollan knew the appearance of Fionn’s messenger, but he was surprised to

see her.

She saluted him.

“Health and long life, my master.”.

“Health and good days,” he replied. “What brings you here, dear heart?”

“I come from Fionn.”

“And your message?” said he.

“The royal captain intends to visit you.”

“He will be welcome,” said Iollan. “We shall give him an Ulster feast.”

“The world knows what that is,” said the messenger courteously. “And

now,” she continued, “I have messages for your queen.”

Tuiren then walked from the house with the messenger, but when they had

gone a short distance Uct Dealv drew a hazel rod from beneath her cloak

and struck it on the queen’s shoulder, and on the instant Tuiren’s

figure trembled and quivered, and it began to whirl inwards and

downwards, and she changed into the appearance of a hound.

It was sad to see the beautiful, slender dog standing shivering and

astonished, and sad to see the lovely eyes that looked out pitifully

in terror and amazement. But Uct Dealv did not feel sad. She clasped

a chain about the hound’s neck, and they set off westward towards the

house of Fergus Fionnliath, who was reputed to be the unfriendliest man

in the world to a dog. It was because of his reputation that Uct Dealv

was bringing the hound to him. She did not want a good home for this

dog: she wanted the worst home that could be found in the world, and she

thought that Fergus would revenge for her the rage and jealousy which

she felt towards Tuiren.

CHAPTER III

As they paced along Uct Dealv railed bitterly against the hound, and

shook and jerked her chain. Many a sharp cry the hound gave in that

journey, many a mild lament.

“Ah, supplanter! Ah, taker of another girl’s sweetheart!” said Uct Dealv

fiercely. “How would your lover take it if he could see you now? How

would he look if he saw your pointy ears, your long thin snout, your

shivering, skinny legs, and your long grey tail. He would not love you

now, bad girl!”

“Have you heard of Fergus Fionnliath,” she said again, “the man who does

not like dogs?”

Tuiren had indeed heard of him.

“It is to Fergus I shall bring you,” cried Uct Dealv. “He will throw

stones at you. You have never had a stone thrown at you. Ah, bad girl!

You do not know how a stone sounds as it nips the ear with a whirling

buzz, nor how jagged and heavy it feels as it thumps against a skinny

leg. Robber! Mortal! Bad girl! You have never been whipped, but you will

be whipped now. You shall hear the song of a lash as it curls forward

and bites inward and drags backward. You shall dig up old bones

stealthily at night, and chew them against famine. You shall whine and

squeal at the moon, and shiver in the cold, and you will never take

another girl’s sweetheart again.”

And it was in those terms and in that tone that she spoke to Tuiren

as they journeyed forward, so that the hound trembled and shrank, and

whined pitifully and in despair.

They came to Fergus Fionnliath’s stronghold, and Uct Dealv demanded

admittance.

“Leave that dog outside,” said the servant.

“I will not do so,” said the pretended messenger.

“You can come in without the dog, or you can stay out with the dog,”

said the surly guardian.

“By my hand,” cried Uct Dealv, “I will come in with this dog, or your

master shall answer for it to Fionn.”

At the name of Fionn the servant almost fell out of his standing. He

flew to acquaint his master, and Fergus himself came to the great door

of the stronghold.

“By my faith,” he cried in amazement, “it is a dog.”

“A dog it is,” growled the glum servant.

“Go you away,” said Fergus to Uct Dealv, “and when you have killed the

dog come back to me and I will give you a present.”

“Life and health, my good master, from Fionn, the son of Uail, the son

of Baiscne,” said she to Fergus.

“Life and health back to Fionn,” he replied. “Come into the house and

give your message, but leave the dog outside, for I don’t like dogs.”

“The dog comes in,” the messenger replied.

“How is that?” cried Fergus angrily.

“Fionn sends you this hound to take care of until he comes for her,”

said the messenger.

“I wonder at that,” Fergus growled, “for Fionn knows well that there is

not a man in the world has less of a liking for dogs than I have.”

“However that may be, master, I have given Fionn’s message, and here at

my heel is the dog. Do you take her or refuse her?”

“If I could refuse anything to Fionn it would be a dog,” said Fergus,

“but I could not refuse anything to Fionn, so give me the hound.”

Uct Dealv put the chain in his hand.

“Ah, bad dog!” said she.

And then she went away well satisfied with her revenge, and returned to

her own people in the Shi.

CHAPTER IV

On the following day Fergus called his servant.

“Has that dog stopped shivering yet?” he asked.

“It has not, sir,” said the servant.

“Bring the beast here,” said his master, “for whoever else is

dissatisfied Fionn must be satisfied.”

The dog was brought, and he examined it with a jaundiced and bitter eye.

“It has the shivers indeed,” he said.

“The shivers it has,” said the servant.

“How do you cure the shivers?” his master demanded, for he thought that

if the animal’s legs dropped off Fionn would not be satisfied.

“There is a way,” said the servant doubtfully.

“If there is a way, tell it to me,” cried his master angrily.

“If you were to take the beast up in your arms and hug it and kiss it,

the shivers would stop,” said the man.

“Do you mean--?” his master thundered, and he stretched his hand for a

club.

“I heard that,” said the servant humbly.

“Take that dog up,” Fergus commanded, “and hug it and kiss it, and if I

find a single shiver left in the beast I’ll break your head.”

The man bent to the hound, but it snapped a piece out of his hand, and

nearly bit his nose off as well.

“That dog doesn’t like me,” said the man.

“Nor do I,” roared Fergus; “get out of my sight.”

The man went away and Fergus was left alone with the hound, but the poor

creature was so terrified that it began to tremble ten times worse than

before.

“Its legs will drop off,” said Fergus. “Fionn will blame me,” he cried

in despair.

He walked to the hound.

“If you snap at my nose, or if you put as much as the start of a tooth

into the beginning of a finger!” he growled.

He picked up the dog, but it did not snap, it only trembled. He held it

gingerly for a few moments.

“If it has to be hugged,” he said, “I’ll hug it. I’d do more than that

for Fionn.”

He tucked and tightened the animal into his breast, and marched moodily

up and down the room. The dog’s nose lay along his breast under his

chin, and as he gave it dutiful hugs, one hug to every five paces, the

dog put out its tongue and licked him timidly under the chin.

“Stop,” roared Fergus, “stop that forever,” and he grew very red in

the face, and stared truculently down along his nose. A soft brown eye

looked up at him and the shy tongue touched again on his chin.

“If it has to be kissed,” said Fergus gloomily, “I’ll kiss it; I’d do

more than that for Fionn,” he groaned.

He bent his head, shut his eyes, and brought the dog’s jaw against his

lips. And at that the dog gave little wriggles in his arms, and little

barks, and little licks, so that he could scarcely hold her. He put the

hound down at last.

“There is not a single shiver left in her,” he said.

And that was true.

Everywhere he walked the dog followed him, giving little prances and

little pats against him, and keeping her eyes fixed on his with such

eagerness and intelligence that he marvelled.

“That dog likes me,” he murmured in amazement.

“By my hand,” he cried next day, “I like that dog.”

The day after that he was calling her “My One Treasure, My Little

Branch.” And within a week he could not bear her to be out of his sight

for an instant.

He was tormented by the idea that some evil person might throw a stone

at the hound, so he assembled his servants and retainers and addressed

them.

He told them that the hound was the Queen of Creatures, the Pulse of his

Heart, and the Apple of his Eye, and he warned them that the person who

as much as looked sideways on her, or knocked one shiver out of her,

would answer for the deed with pains and indignities. He recited a list

of calamities which would befall such a miscreant, and these woes began

with flaying and ended with dismemberment, and had inside bits of such

complicated and ingenious torment that the blood of the men who heard it

ran chill in their veins, and the women of the household fainted where

they stood.

CHAPTER V

In course of time the news came to Fionn that his mother’s sister

was not living with Iollan. He at once sent a messenger calling

for fulfilment of the pledge that had been given to the Fianna, and

demanding the instant return of Tuiren. Iollan was in a sad condition

when this demand was made. He guessed that Uct Dealv had a hand in the

disappearance of his queen, and he begged that time should be given him

in which to find the lost girl. He promised if he could not discover

her within a certain period that he would deliver his body into Fionn’s

hands, and would abide by whatever judgement Fionn might pronounce. The

great captain agreed to that.

“Tell the wife-loser that I will have the girl or I will have his head,”

said Fionn.

Iollan set out then for Faery. He knew the way, and in no great time he

came to the hill where Uct Dealv was.

It was hard to get Uct Dealv to meet him, but at last she consented, and

they met under the apple boughs of Faery.

“Well!” said Uct Dealv. “Ah! Breaker of Vows and Traitor to Love,” said

she.

“Hail and a blessing,” said Iollan humbly.

“By my hand,” she cried, “I will give you no blessing, for it was no

blessing you left with me when we parted.”

“I am in danger,” said Iollan.

“What is that to me?” she replied fiercely.

“Fionn may claim my head,” he murmured.

“Let him claim what he can take,” said she.

“No,” said Iollan proudly, “he will claim what I can give.”

“Tell me your tale,” said she coldly.

Iollan told his story then, and, he concluded, “I am certain that you

have hidden the girl.”

“If I save your head from Fionn,” the woman of the Shi’ replied, “then

your head will belong to me.”

“That is true,” said Iollan.

“And if your head is mine, the body that goes under it is mine. Do you

agree to that?”

“I do,” said Iollan.

“Give me your pledge,” said Uct Dealv, “that if I save you from this

danger you will keep me as your sweetheart until the end of life and

time.”

“I give that pledge,” said Iollan.

Uct Dealv went then to the house of Fergus Fionnliath, and she broke the

enchantment that was on the hound, so that Tuiren’s own shape came back

to her; but in the matter of two small whelps, to which the hound had

given birth, the enchantment could not be broken, so they had to remain

as they were. These two whelps were Bran and Sceo’lan. They were sent

to Fionn, and he loved them for ever after, for they were loyal and

affectionate, as only dogs can be, and they were as intelligent as human

beings. Besides that, they were Fionn’s own cousins.

Tuiren was then asked in marriage by Lugaidh who had loved her so long.

He had to prove to her that he was not any other woman’s sweetheart,

and when he proved that they were married, and they lived happily ever

after, which is the proper way to live. He wrote a poem beginning:

“Lovely the day. Dear is the eye of the dawn--”

And a thousand merry people learned it after him.

But as to Fergus Fionnliath, he took to his bed, and he stayed there for

a year and a day suffering from blighted affection, and he would have

died in the bed only that Fionn sent him a special pup, and in a week

that young hound became the Star of Fortune and the very Pulse of his

Heart, so that he got well again, and he also lived happily ever after.

OISIN’S MOTHER

CHAPTER I

EVENING was drawing nigh, and the Fianna-Finn had decided to hunt no

more that day. The hounds were whistled to heel, and a sober, homeward

march began. For men will walk soberly in the evening, however they go

in the day, and dogs will take the mood from their masters. They were

pacing so, through the golden-shafted, tender-coloured eve, when a

fawn leaped suddenly from covert, and, with that leap, all quietness

vanished: the men shouted, the dogs gave tongue, and a furious chase

commenced.

Fionn loved a chase at any hour, and, with Bran and Sceo’lan, he

outstripped the men and dogs of his troop, until nothing remained in the

limpid world but Fionn, the two hounds, and the nimble, beautiful fawn.

These, and the occasional boulders, round which they raced, or over

which they scrambled; the solitary tree which dozed aloof and beautiful

in the path, the occasional clump of trees that hived sweet shadow as

a hive hoards honey, and the rustling grass that stretched to infinity,

and that moved and crept and swung under the breeze in endless, rhythmic

billowings.

In his wildest moment Fionn was thoughtful, and now, although running

hard, he was thoughtful. There was no movement of his beloved hounds

that he did not know; not a twitch or fling of the head, not a cock

of the ears or tail that was not significant to him. But on this chase

whatever signs the dogs gave were not understood by their master.

He had never seen them in such eager flight. They were almost utterly

absorbed in it, but they did not whine with eagerness, nor did they cast

any glance towards him for the encouraging word which he never failed to

give when they sought it.

They did look at him, but it was a look which he could not comprehend.

There was a question and a statement in those deep eyes, and he could

not understand what that question might be, nor what it was they sought

to convey. Now and again one of the dogs turned a head in full flight,

and stared, not at Fionn, but distantly backwards, over the spreading

and swelling plain where their companions of the hunt had disappeared.

“They are looking for the other hounds,” said Fionn.

“And yet they do not give tongue! Tongue it, a Vran!” he shouted, “Bell

it out, a Heo’lan!”

It was then they looked at him, the look which he could not understand

and had never seen on a chase. They did not tongue it, nor bell it, but

they added silence to silence and speed to speed, until the lean grey

bodies were one pucker and lashing of movement.

Fionn marvelled. “They do not want the other dogs to hear or to come on

this chase,” he murmured, and he wondered what might be passing within

those slender heads.

“The fawn runs well,” his thought continued. “What is it, a Vran, my

heart? After her, a Heo’lan! Hist and away, my loves!”

“There is going and to spare in that beast yet,” his mind went on. “She

is not stretched to the full, nor half stretched. She may outrun even

Bran,” he thought ragingly.

They were racing through a smooth valley in a steady, beautiful, speedy

flight when, suddenly, the fawn stopped and lay on the grass, and it lay

with the calm of an animal that has no fear, and the leisure of one that

is not pressed.

“Here is a change,” said Fionn, staring in astonishment.

“She is not winded,” he said. “What is she lying down for?” But Bran and

Sceo’lan did not stop; they added another inch to their long-stretched

easy bodies, and came up on the fawn.

“It is an easy kill,” said Fionn regretfully. “They have her,” he cried.

But he was again astonished, for the dogs did not kill. They leaped and

played about the fawn, licking its face, and rubbing delighted noses

against its neck.

Fionn came up then. His long spear was lowered in his fist at the

thrust, and his sharp knife was in its sheath, but he did not use them,

for the fawn and the two hounds began to play round him, and the fawn

was as affectionate towards him as the hounds were; so that when a

velvet nose was thrust in his palm, it was as often a fawn’s muzzle as a

hound’s.

In that joyous company he came to wide Allen of Leinster, where the

people were surprised to see the hounds and the fawn and the Chief and

none other of the hunters that had set out with them.

When the others reached home, the Chief told of his chase, and it was

agreed that such a fawn must not be killed, but that it should be kept

and well treated, and that it should be the pet fawn of the Fianna.

But some of those who remembered Brah’s parentage thought that as Bran

herself had come from the Shi so this fawn might have come out of the

Shi also.

CHAPTER II

Late that night, when he was preparing for rest, the door of Fionn’s

chamber opened gently and a young woman came into the room. The captain

stared at her, as he well might, for he had never seen or imagined to

see a woman so beautiful as this was. Indeed, she was not a woman, but

a young girl, and her bearing was so gently noble, her look so modestly

high, that the champion dared scarcely look at her, although he could

not by any means have looked away.

As she stood within the doorway, smiling, and shy as a flower,

beautifully timid as a fawn, the Chief communed with his heart.

“She is the Sky-woman of the Dawn,” he said. “She is the light on the

foam. She is white and odorous as an apple-blossom. She smells of spice

and honey. She is my beloved beyond the women of the world. She shall

never be taken from me.”

And that thought was delight and anguish to him: delight because of such

sweet prospect, anguish because it was not yet realised, and might not

be.

As the dogs had looked at him on the chase with a look that he did not

understand, so she looked at him, and in her regard there was a question

that baffled him and a statement which he could not follow.

He spoke to her then, mastering his heart to do it.

“I do not seem to know you,” he said.

“You do not know me indeed,” she replied.

“It is the more wonderful,” he continued gently, “for I should know

every person that is here. What do you require from me?”

“I beg your protection, royal captain.”

“I give that to all,” he answered. “Against whom do you desire

protection?”

“I am in terror of the Fear Doirche.”

“The Dark Man of the Shi?”

“He is my enemy,” she said.

“He is mine now,” said Fionn. “Tell me your story.”

“My name is Saeve, and I am a woman of Faery,” she commenced. “In the

Shi’ many men gave me their love, but I gave my love to no man of my

country.”

“That was not reasonable,” the other chided with a blithe heart.

“I was contented,” she replied, “and what we do not want we do not lack.

But if my love went anywhere it went to a mortal, a man of the men of

Ireland.”

“By my hand,” said Fionn in mortal distress, “I marvel who that man can

be!”

“He is known to you,” she murmured. “I lived thus in the peace of Faery,

hearing often of my mortal champion, for the rumour of his great deeds

had gone through the Shi’, until a day came when the Black Magician

of the Men of God put his eye on me, and, after that day, in whatever

direction I looked I saw his eye.”

She stopped at that, and the terror that was in her heart was on her

face. “He is everywhere,” she whispered. “He is in the bushes, and on

the hill. He looked up at me from the water, and he stared down on

me from the sky. His voice commands out of the spaces, and it demands

secretly in the heart. He is not here or there, he is in all places at

all times. I cannot escape from him,” she said, “and I am afraid,” and

at that she wept noiselessly and stared on Fionn.

“He is my enemy,” Fionn growled. “I name him as my enemy.”

“You will protect me,” she implored.

“Where I am let him not come,” said Fionn. “I also have knowledge. I am

Fionn, the son of Uail, the son of Baiscne, a man among men and a god

where the gods are.”

“He asked me in marriage,” she continued, “but my mind was full of my

own dear hero, and I refused the Dark Man.”

“That was your right, and I swear by my hand that if the man you desire

is alive and unmarried he shall marry you or he will answer to me for

the refusal.”

“He is not married,” said Saeve, “and you have small control over him.”

The Chief frowned thoughtfully. “Except the High King and the kings I

have authority in this land.”

“What man has authority over himself?” said Saeve.

“Do you mean that I am the man you seek?” said Fionn.

“It is to yourself I gave my love,” she replied. “This is good news,”

Fionn cried joyfully, “for the moment you came through the door I loved

and desired you, and the thought that you wished for another man went

into my heart like a sword.” Indeed, Fionn loved Saeve as he had not

loved a woman before and would never love one again. He loved her as he

had never loved anything before. He could not bear to be away from her.

When he saw her he did not see the world, and when he saw the world

without her it was as though he saw nothing, or as if he looked on a

prospect that was bleak and depressing. The belling of a stag had been

music to Fionn, but when Saeve spoke that was sound enough for him. He

had loved to hear the cuckoo calling in the spring from the tree that

is highest in the hedge, or the blackbird’s jolly whistle in an autumn

bush, or the thin, sweet enchantment that comes to the mind when a lark

thrills out of sight in the air and the hushed fields listen to the

song. But his wife’s voice was sweeter to Fionn than the singing of a

lark. She filled him with wonder and surmise. There was magic in the

tips of her fingers. Her thin palm ravished him. Her slender foot set

his heart beating; and whatever way her head moved there came a new

shape of beauty to her face.

“She is always new,” said Fionn. “She is always better than any other

woman; she is always better than herself.”

He attended no more to the Fianna. He ceased to hunt. He did not listen

to the songs of poets or the curious sayings of magicians, for all of

these were in his wife, and something that was beyond these was in her

also.

“She is this world and the next one; she is completion,” said Fionn.

CHAPTER III

It happened that the men of Lochlann came on an expedition against

Ireland. A monstrous fleet rounded the bluffs of Ben Edair, and the

Danes landed there, to prepare an attack which would render them masters

of the country. Fionn and the Fianna-Finn marched against them. He did

not like the men of Lochlann at any time, but this time he moved against

them in wrath, for not only were they attacking Ireland, but they had

come between him and the deepest joy his life had known.

It was a hard fight, but a short one. The Lochlannachs were driven back

to their ships, and within a week the only Danes remaining in Ireland

were those that had been buried there.

That finished, he left the victorious Fianna and returned swiftly to the

plain of Allen, for he could not bear to be one unnecessary day parted

from Saeve.

“You are not leaving us!” exclaimed Goll mac Morna.

“I must go,” Fionn replied.

“You will not desert the victory feast,” Conan reproached him.

“Stay with us, Chief,” Caelte begged.

“What is a feast without Fionn?” they complained.

But he would not stay.

“By my hand,” he cried, “I must go. She will be looking for me from the

window.”

“That will happen indeed,” Goll admitted.

“That will happen,” cried Fionn. “And when she sees me far out on the

plain, she will run through the great gate to meet me.”

“It would be the queer wife would neglect that run,” Cona’n growled.

“I shall hold her hand again,” Fionn entrusted to Caelte’s ear.

“You will do that, surely.”

“I shall look into her face,” his lord insisted. But he saw that not

even beloved Caelte understood the meaning of that, and he knew sadly

and yet proudly that what he meant could not be explained by any one and

could not be comprehended by any one.

“You are in love, dear heart,” said Caelte.

“In love he is,” Cona’n grumbled. “A cordial for women, a disease for

men, a state of wretchedness.”

“Wretched in truth,” the Chief murmured. “Love makes us poor We have not

eyes enough to see all that is to be seen, nor hands enough to seize the

tenth of all we want. When I look in her eyes I am tormented because I

am not looking at her lips, and when I see her lips my soul cries out,

‘Look at her eyes, look at her eyes.’”

“That is how it happens,” said Goll rememberingly.

“That way and no other,” Caelte agreed.

And the champions looked backwards in time on these lips and those, and

knew their Chief would go.

When Fionn came in sight of the great keep his blood and his feet

quickened, and now and again he waved a spear in the air.

“She does not see me yet,” he thought mournfully.

“She cannot see me yet,” he amended, reproaching himself.

But his mind was troubled, for he thought also, or he felt without

thinking, that had the positions been changed he would have seen her at

twice the distance.

“She thinks I have been unable to get away from the battle, or that I

was forced to remain for the feast.”

And, without thinking it, he thought that had the positions been changed

he would have known that nothing could retain the one that was absent.

“Women,” he said, “are shamefaced, they do not like to appear eager when

others are observing them.”

But he knew that he would not have known if others were observing him,

and that he would not have cared about it if he had known. And he knew

that his Saeve would not have seen, and would not have cared for any

eyes than his.

He gripped his spear on that reflection, and ran as he had not run in

his life, so that it was a panting, dishevelled man that raced heavily

through the gates of the great Dun.

Within the Dun there was disorder. Servants were shouting to one

another, and women were running to and fro aimlessly, wringing their

hands and screaming; and, when they saw the Champion, those nearest to

him ran away, and there was a general effort on the part of every

person to get behind every other person. But Fionn caught the eye of his

butler, Gariv Crona’n, the Rough Buzzer, and held it.

“Come you here,” he said.

And the Rough Buzzer came to him without a single buzz in his body.

“Where is the Flower of Allen?” his master demanded.

“I do not know, master,” the terrified servant replied.

“You do not know!” said Fionn. “Tell what you do know.”

And the man told him this story.

CHAPTER IV

“When you had been away for a day the guards were surprised. They were

looking from the heights of the Dun, and the Flower of Allen was with

them. She, for she had a quest’s eye, called out that the master of the

Fianna was coming over the ridges to the Dun, and she ran from the keep

to meet you.”

“It was not I,” said Fionn.

“It bore your shape,” replied Gariv Cronan. “It had your armour and your

face, and the dogs, Bran and Sceo’lan, were with it.”

“They were with me,” said Fionn.

“They seemed to be with it,” said the servant humbly

“Tell us this tale,” cried Fionn.

“We were distrustful,” the servant continued. “We had never known Fionn

to return from a combat before it had been fought, and we knew you could

not have reached Ben Edar or encountered the Lochlannachs. So we urged

our lady to let us go out to meet you, but to remain herself in the

Dun.”

“It was good urging,” Fionn assented.

“She would not be advised,” the servant wailed. “She cried to us, ‘Let

me go to meet my love’.”

“Alas!” said Fionn.

“She cried on us, ‘Let me go to meet my husband, the father of the child

that is not born.’”

“Alas!” groaned deep-wounded Fionn. “She ran towards your appearance

that had your arms stretched out to her.”

At that wise Fionn put his hand before his eyes, seeing all that

happened.

“Tell on your tale,” said he.

“She ran to those arms, and when she reached them the figure lifted

its hand. It touched her with a hazel rod, and, while we looked, she

disappeared, and where she had been there was a fawn standing and

shivering. The fawn turned and bounded towards the gate of the Dun, but

the hounds that were by flew after her.”

Fionn stared on him like a lost man.

“They took her by the throat--” the shivering servant whispered.

“Ah!” cried Fionn in a terrible voice.

“And they dragged her back to the figure that seemed to be Fionn. Three

times she broke away and came bounding to us, and three times the dogs

took her by the throat and dragged her back.”

“You stood to look!” the Chief snarled.

“No, master, we ran, but she vanished as we got to her; the great hounds

vanished away, and that being that seemed to be Fionn disappeared with

them. We were left in the rough grass, staring about us and at each

other, and listening to the moan of the wind and the terror of our

hearts.”

“Forgive us, dear master,” the servant cried. But the great captain made

him no answer. He stood as though he were dumb and blind, and now and

again he beat terribly on his breast with his closed fist, as though he

would kill that within him which should be dead and could not die. He

went so, beating on his breast, to his inner room in the Dun, and he was

not seen again for the rest of that day, nor until the sun rose over Moy

Life’ in the morning.

CHAPTER V

For many years after that time, when he was not fighting against the

enemies of Ireland, Fionn was searching and hunting through the length

and breadth of the country in the hope that he might again chance on his

lovely lady from the Shi’. Through all that time he slept in misery each

night and he rose each day to grief. Whenever he hunted he brought only

the hounds that he trusted, Bran and Sceo’lan, Lomaire, Brod, and Lomlu;

for if a fawn was chased each of these five great dogs would know if

that was a fawn to be killed or one to be protected, and so there was

small danger to Saeve and a small hope of finding her.

Once, when seven years had passed in fruitless search, Fionn and the

chief nobles of the Fianna were hunting Ben Gulbain. All the hounds of

the Fianna were out, for Fionn had now given up hope of encountering

the Flower of Allen. As the hunt swept along the sides of the hill there

arose a great outcry of hounds from a narrow place high on the slope

and, over all that uproar there came the savage baying of Fionn’s own

dogs.

“What is this for?” said Fionn, and with his companions he pressed to

the spot whence the noise came.

“They are fighting all the hounds of the Fianna,” cried a champion.

And they were. The five wise hounds were in a circle and were giving

battle to an hundred dogs at once. They were bristling and terrible, and

each bite from those great, keen jaws was woe to the beast that received

it. Nor did they fight in silence as was their custom and training, but

between each onslaught the great heads were uplifted, and they pealed

loudly, mournfully, urgently, for their master.

“They are calling on me,” he roared.

And with that he ran, as he had only once before run, and the men who

were nigh to him went racing as they would not have run for their lives.

They came to the narrow place on the slope of the mountain, and they saw

the five great hounds in a circle keeping off the other dogs, and in

the middle of the ring a little boy was standing. He had long, beautiful

hair, and he was naked. He was not daunted by the terrible combat and

clamour of the hounds. He did not look at the hounds, but he stared like

a young prince at Fionn and the champions as they rushed towards him

scattering the pack with the butts of their spears. When the fight was

over, Bran and Sceo’lan ran whining to the little boy and licked his

hands.

“They do that to no one,” said a bystander. “What new master is this

they have found?”

Fionn bent to the boy. “Tell me, my little prince and pulse, what your

name is, and how you have come into the middle of a hunting-pack, and

why you are naked?”

But the boy did not understand the language of the men of Ireland. He

put his hand into Fionn’s, and the Chief felt as if that little hand had

been put into his heart. He lifted the lad to his great shoulder.

“We have caught something on this hunt,” said he to Caelte mac Rongn.

“We must bring this treasure home. You shall be one of the Fianna-Finn,

my darling,” he called upwards.

The boy looked down on him, and in the noble trust and fearlessness of

that regard Fionn’s heart melted away.

“My little fawn!” he said.

And he remembered that other fawn. He set the boy between his knees and

stared at him earnestly and long.

“There is surely the same look,” he said to his wakening heart; “that is

the very eye of Saeve.”

The grief flooded out of his heart as at a stroke, and joy foamed into

it in one great tide. He marched back singing to the encampment, and men

saw once more the merry Chief they had almost forgotten.

CHAPTER VI

Just as at one time he could not be parted from Saeve, so now he could

not be separated from this boy. He had a thousand names for him, each

one more tender than the last: “My Fawn, My Pulse, My Secret Little

Treasure,” or he would call him “My Music, My Blossoming Branch, My

Store in the Heart, My Soul.” And the dogs were as wild for the boy as

Fionn was. He could sit in safety among a pack that would have torn any

man to pieces, and the reason was that Bran and Sceo’lan, with their

three whelps, followed him about like shadows. When he was with the pack

these five were with him, and woeful indeed was the eye they turned

on their comrades when these pushed too closely or were not properly

humble. They thrashed the pack severally and collectively until every

hound in Fionn’s kennels knew that the little lad was their master, and

that there was nothing in the world so sacred as he was.

In no long time the five wise hounds could have given over their

guardianship, so complete was the recognition of their young lord. But

they did not so give over, for it was not love they gave the lad but

adoration.

Fionn even may have been embarrassed by their too close attendance. If

he had been able to do so he might have spoken harshly to his dogs, but

he could not; it was unthinkable that he should; and the boy might have

spoken harshly to him if he had dared to do it. For this was the order

of Fionn’s affection: first there was the boy; next, Bran and Sceo’lan

with their three whelps; then Caelte mac Rona’n, and from him down

through the champions. He loved them all, but it was along that

precedence his affections ran. The thorn that went into Bran’s foot ran

into Fionn’s also. The world knew it, and there was not a champion but

admitted sorrowfully that there was reason for his love.

Little by little the boy came to understand their speech and to speak it

himself, and at last he was able to tell his story to Fionn.

There were many blanks in the tale, for a young child does not remember

very well. Deeds grow old in a day and are buried in a night. New

memories come crowding on old ones, and one must learn to forget as well

as to remember. A whole new life had come on this boy, a life that was

instant and memorable, so that his present memories blended into and

obscured the past, and he could not be quite sure if that which he told

of had happened in this world or in the world he had left.

CHAPTER VII

“I used to live,” he said, “in a wide, beautiful place. There were hills

and valleys there, and woods and streams, but in whatever direction I

went I came always to a cliff, so tall it seemed to lean against the

sky, and so straight that even a goat would not have imagined to climb

it.”

“I do not know of any such place,” Fionn mused.

“There is no such place in Ireland,” said Caelte, “but in the Shi’ there

is such a place.”

“There is in truth,” said Fionn.

“I used to eat fruits and roots in the summer,” the boy continued, “but

in the winter food was left for me in a cave.”

“Was there no one with you?” Fionn asked.

“No one but a deer that loved me, and that I loved.”

“Ah me!” cried Fionn in anguish, “tell me your tale, my son.”

“A dark stern man came often after us, and he used to speak with the

deer. Sometimes he talked gently and softly and coaxingly, but at times

again he would shout loudly and in a harsh, angry voice. But whatever

way he talked the deer would draw away from him in dread, and he always

left her at last furiously.”

“It is the Dark Magician of the Men of God,” cried Fionn despairingly.

“It is indeed, my soul,” said Caelte.

“The last time I saw the deer,” the child continued, “the dark man was

speaking to her. He spoke for a long time. He spoke gently and angrily,

and gently and angrily, so that I thought he would never stop talking,

but in the end he struck her with a hazel rod, so that she was forced

to follow him when he went away. She was looking back at me all the time

and she was crying so bitterly that any one would pity her. I tried to

follow her also, but I could not move, and I cried after her too, with

rage and grief, until I could see her no more and hear her no more. Then

I fell on the grass, my senses went away from me, and when I awoke I was

on the hill in the middle of the hounds where you found me.”

That was the boy whom the Fianna called Oisi’n, or the Little Fawn. He

grew to be a great fighter afterwards, and he was the chief maker of

poems in the world. But he was not yet finished with the Shi. He was to

go back into Faery when the time came, and to come thence again to tell

these tales, for it was by him these tales were told.

THE WOOING OF BECFOLA

CHAPTER I

We do not know where Becfola came from. Nor do we know for certain where

she went to. We do not even know her real name, for the name Becfola,

“Dowerless” or “Small-dowered,” was given to her as a nickname. This

only is certain, that she disappeared from the world we know of, and

that she went to a realm where even conjecture may not follow her.

It happened in the days when Dermod, son of the famous Ae of Slane, was

monarch of all Ireland. He was unmarried, but he had many foster-sons,

princes from the Four Provinces, who were sent by their fathers as

tokens of loyalty and affection to the Ard-Ri, and his duties as a

foster-father were righteously acquitted. Among the young princes of his

household there was one, Crimthann, son of Ae, King of Leinster, whom

the High King preferred to the others over whom he held fatherly sway.

Nor was this wonderful, for the lad loved him also, and was as eager and

intelligent and modest as becomes a prince.

The High King and Crimthann would often set out from Tara to hunt and

hawk, sometimes unaccompanied even by a servant; and on these excursions

the king imparted to his foster-son his own wide knowledge of forest

craft, and advised him generally as to the bearing and duties of a

prince, the conduct of a court, and the care of a people.

Dermod mac Ae delighted in these solitary adventures, and when he

could steal a day from policy and affairs he would send word privily to

Crimthann. The boy, having donned his hunting gear, would join the king

at a place arranged between them, and then they ranged abroad as chance

might direct.

On one of these adventures, as they searched a flooded river to find the

ford, they saw a solitary woman in a chariot driving from the west.

“I wonder what that means?” the king exclaimed thoughtfully.

“Why should you wonder at a woman in a chariot?” his companion inquired,

for Crimthann loved and would have knowledge.

“Good, my Treasure,” Dermod answered, “our minds are astonished when we

see a woman able to drive a cow to pasture, for it has always seemed to

us that they do not drive well.”

Crimthann absorbed instruction like a sponge and digested it as rapidly.

“I think that is justly said,” he agreed.

“But,” Dermod continued, “when we see a woman driving a chariot of two

horses, then we are amazed indeed.”

When the machinery of anything is explained to us we grow interested,

and Crimthann became, by instruction, as astonished as the king was.

“In good truth,” said he, “the woman is driving two horses.”

“Had you not observed it before?” his master asked with kindly malice.

“I had observed but not noticed,” the young man admitted.

“Further,” said the king, “surmise is aroused in us when we discover a

woman far from a house; for you will have both observed and noticed that

women are home-dwellers, and that a house without a woman or a woman

without a house are imperfect objects, and although they be but half

observed, they are noticed on the double.”

“There is no doubting it,” the prince answered from a knitted and

thought-tormented brow.

“We shall ask this woman for information about herself,” said the king

decidedly.

“Let us do so,” his ward agreed

“The king’s majesty uses the words ‘we’ and ‘us’ when referring to

the king’s majesty,” said Dermod, “but princes who do not yet

rule territories must use another form of speech when referring to

themselves.”

“I am very thoughtless,” said Crimthann humbly.

The king kissed him on both cheeks.

“Indeed, my dear heart and my son, we are not scolding you, but you must

try not to look so terribly thoughtful when you think. It is part of the

art of a ruler.”

“I shall never master that hard art,” lamented his fosterling.

“We must all master it,” Dermod replied. “We may think with our minds

and with our tongues, but we should never think with our noses and with

our eyebrows.”

The woman in the chariot had drawn nigh to the ford by which they were

standing, and, without pause, she swung her steeds into the shallows and

came across the river in a tumult of foam and spray.

“Does she not drive well?” cried Crimthann admiringly.

“When you are older,” the king counselled him, “you will admire that

which is truly admirable, for although the driving is good the lady is

better.”

He continued with enthusiasm.

“She is in truth a wonder of the world and an endless delight to the

eye.”

She was all that and more, and, as she took the horses through the river

and lifted them up the bank, her flying hair and parted lips and all the

young strength and grace of her body went into the king’s eye and could

not easily come out again.

Nevertheless, it was upon his ward that the lady’s gaze rested, and if

the king could scarcely look away from her, she could, but only with an

equal effort, look away from Crimthann.

“Halt there!” cried the king.

“Who should I halt for?” the lady demanded, halting all the same, as is

the manner of women, who rebel against command and yet receive it.

“Halt for Dermod!”

“There are Dermods and Dermods in this world,” she quoted.

“There is yet but one Ard-Ri’,” the monarch answered.

She then descended from the chariot and made her reverence.

“I wish to know your name?” said he.

But at this demand the lady frowned and answered decidedly:

“I do not wish to tell it.”

“I wish to know also where you come from and to what place you are

going?”

“I do not wish to tell any of these things.”

“Not to the king!”

“I do not wish to tell them to any one.”

Crimthann was scandalised.

“Lady,” he pleaded, “you will surely not withhold information from the

Ard-Ri’?”

But the lady stared as royally on the High King as the High King did on

her, and, whatever it was he saw in those lovely eyes, the king did not

insist.

He drew Crimthann apart, for he withheld no instruction from that lad.

“My heart,” he said, “we must always try to act wisely, and we should

only insist on receiving answers to questions in which we are personally

concerned.”

Crimthann imbibed all the justice of that remark.

“Thus I do not really require to know this lady’s name, nor do I care

from what direction she comes.”

“You do not?” Crimthann asked.

“No, but what I do wish to know is, Will she marry me?”

“By my hand that is a notable question,” his companion stammered.

“It is a question that must be answered,” the king cried triumphantly.

“But,” he continued, “to learn what woman she is, or where she comes

from, might bring us torment as well as information. Who knows in what

adventures the past has engaged her!”

And he stared for a profound moment on disturbing, sinister horizons,

and Crimthann meditated there with him.

“The past is hers,” he concluded, “but the future is ours, and we shall

only demand that which is pertinent to the future.”

He returned to the lady.

“We wish you to be our wife,” he said. And he gazed on her benevolently

and firmly and carefully when he said that, so that her regard could

not stray otherwhere. Yet, even as he looked, a tear did well into those

lovely eyes, and behind her brow a thought moved of the beautiful boy

who was looking at her from the king’s side.

But when the High King of Ireland asks us to marry him we do not refuse,

for it is not a thing that we shall be asked to do every day in the

week, and there is no woman in the world but would love to rule it in

Tara.

No second tear crept on the lady’s lashes, and, with her hand in the

king’s hand, they paced together towards the palace, while behind them,

in melancholy mood, Crimthann mac Ae led the horses and the chariot.

CHAPTER II

They were married in a haste which equalled the king’s desire; and as he

did not again ask her name, and as she did not volunteer to give it, and

as she brought no dowry to her husband and received none from him, she

was called Becfola, the Dowerless.

Time passed, and the king’s happiness was as great as his expectation

of it had promised. But on the part of Becfola no similar tidings can be

given.

There are those whose happiness lies in ambition and station, and to

such a one the fact of being queen to the High King of Ireland is a

satisfaction at which desire is sated. But the mind of Becfola was not

of this temperate quality, and, lacking Crimthann, it seemed to her that

she possessed nothing.

For to her mind he was the sunlight in the sun, the brightness in the

moonbeam; he was the savour in fruit and the taste in honey; and when

she looked from Crimthann to the king she could not but consider that

the right man was in the wrong place. She thought that crowned only with

his curls Crlmthann mac Ae was more nobly diademed than are the masters

of the world, and she told him so.

His terror on hearing this unexpected news was so great that he

meditated immediate flight from Tara; but when a thing has been uttered

once it is easier said the second time and on the third repetition it is

patiently listened to.

After no great delay Crimthann mac Ae agreed and arranged that he and

Becfola should fly from Tara, and it was part of their understanding

that they should live happily ever after.

One morning, when not even a bird was astir, the king felt that his dear

companion was rising. He looked with one eye at the light that stole

greyly through the window, and recognised that it could not in justice

be called light.

“There is not even a bird up,” he murmured.

And then to Becfola.

“What is the early rising for, dear heart?”

“An engagement I have,” she replied.

“This is not a time for engagements,” said the calm monarch.

“Let it be so,” she replied, and she dressed rapidly.

“And what is the engagement?” he pursued.

“Raiment that I left at a certain place and must have. Eight silken

smocks embroidered with gold, eight precious brooches of beaten gold,

three diadems of pure gold.”

“At this hour,” said the patient king, “the bed is better than the

road.”

“Let it be so,” said she.

“And moreover,” he continued, “a Sunday journey brings bad luck.”

“Let the luck come that will come,” she answered.

“To keep a cat from cream or a woman from her gear is not work for a

king,” said the monarch severely.

The Ard-Ri’ could look on all things with composure, and regard all

beings with a tranquil eye; but it should be known that there was one

deed entirely hateful to him, and he would punish its commission with

the very last rigour--this was, a transgression of the Sunday. During

six days of the week all that could happen might happen, so far as

Dermod was concerned, but on the seventh day nothing should happen at

all if the High King could restrain it. Had it been possible he would

have tethered the birds to their own green branches on that day, and

forbidden the clouds to pack the upper world with stir and colour. These

the king permitted, with a tight lip, perhaps, but all else that came

under his hand felt his control.

It was his custom when he arose on the morn of Sunday to climb to the

most elevated point of Tara, and gaze thence on every side, so that

he might see if any fairies or people of the Shi’ were disporting

themselves in his lordship; for he absolutely prohibited the usage of

the earth to these beings on the Sunday, and woe’s worth was it for the

sweet being he discovered breaking his law.

We do not know what ill he could do to the fairies, but during Dermod’s

reign the world said its prayers on Sunday and the Shi’ folk stayed in

their hills.

It may be imagined, therefore, with what wrath he saw his wife’s

preparations for her journey, but, although a king can do everything,

what can a husband do...? He rearranged himself for slumber.

“I am no party to this untimely journey,” he said angrily.

“Let it be so,” said Becfola.

She left the palace with one maid, and as she crossed the doorway

something happened to her, but by what means it happened would be hard

to tell; for in the one pace she passed out of the palace and out of the

world, and the second step she trod was in Faery, but she did not know

this.

Her intention was to go to Cluain da chaillech to meet Crimthann, but

when she left the palace she did not remember Crimthann any more.

To her eye and to the eye of her maid the world was as it always had

been, and the landmarks they knew were about them. But the object for

which they were travelling was different, although unknown, and the

people they passed on the roads were unknown, and were yet people that

they knew.

They set out southwards from Tara into the Duffry of Leinster, and after

some time they came into wild country and went astray. At last Becfola

halted, saying:

“I do not know where we are.”

The maid replied that she also did not know.

“Yet,” said Becfola, “if we continue to walk straight on we shall arrive

somewhere.”

They went on, and the maid watered the road with her tears.

Night drew on them; a grey chill, a grey silence, and they were

enveloped in that chill and silence; and they began to go in expectation

and terror, for they both knew and did not know that which they were

bound for.

As they toiled desolately up the rustling and whispering side of a

low hill the maid chanced to look back, and when she looked back she

screamed and pointed, and clung to Becfola’s arm. Becfola followed the

pointing finger, and saw below a large black mass that moved jerkily

forward.

“Wolves!” cried the maid. “Run to the trees yonder,” her mistress

ordered. “We will climb them and sit among the branches.”

They ran then, the maid moaning and lamenting all the while.

“I cannot climb a tree,” she sobbed, “I shall be eaten by the wolves.”

And that was true.

But her mistress climbed a tree, and drew by a hand’s breadth from the

rap and snap and slaver of those steel jaws. Then, sitting on a branch,

she looked with angry woe at the straining and snarling horde below,

seeing many a white fang in those grinning jowls, and the smouldering,

red blink of those leaping and prowling eyes.

CHAPTER III

But after some time the moon arose and the wolves went away, for their

leader, a sagacious and crafty chief, declared that as long as they

remained where they were, the lady would remain where she was; and so,

with a hearty curse on trees, the troop departed. Becfola had pains in

her legs from the way she had wrapped them about the branch, but there

was no part of her that did not ache, for a lady does not sit with any

ease upon a tree.

For some time she did not care to come down from the branch. “Those

wolves may return,” she said, “for their chief is crafty and sagacious,

and it is certain, from the look I caught in his eye as he departed,

that he would rather taste of me than cat any woman he has met.”

She looked carefully in every direction to see if one might discover

them in hiding; she looked closely and lingeringly at the shadows under

distant trees to see if these shadows moved; and she listened on every

wind to try if she could distinguish a yap or a yawn or a sneeze. But

she saw or heard nothing; and little by little tranquillity crept into

her mind, and she began to consider that a danger which is past is a

danger that may be neglected.

Yet ere she descended she looked again on the world of jet and silver

that dozed about her, and she spied a red glimmer among distant trees.

“There is no danger where there is light,” she said, and she thereupon

came from the tree and ran in the direction that she had noted.

In a spot between three great oaks she came upon a man who was roasting

a wild boar over a fire. She saluted this youth and sat beside him. But

after the first glance and greeting he did not look at her again, nor

did he speak.

When the boar was cooked he ate of it and she had her share. Then he

arose from the fire and walked away among the trees. Becfola followed,

feeling ruefully that something new to her experience had arrived;

“for,” she thought, “it is usual that young men should not speak to me

now that I am the mate of a king, but it is very unusual that young men

should not look at me.”

But if the young man did not look at her she looked well at him, and

what she saw pleased her so much that she had no time for further

cogitation. For if Crimthann had been beautiful, this youth was ten

times more beautiful. The curls on Crimthann’s head had been indeed as

a benediction to the queen’s eye, so that she had eaten the better and

slept the sounder for seeing him. But the sight of this youth left her

without the desire to eat, and, as for sleep, she dreaded it, for if she

closed an eye she would be robbed of the one delight in time, which was

to look at this young man, and not to cease looking at him while her eye

could peer or her head could remain upright.

They came to an inlet of the sea all sweet and calm under the round,

silver-flooding moon, and the young man, with Becfola treading on his

heel, stepped into a boat and rowed to a high-jutting, pleasant island.

There they went inland towards a vast palace, in which there was no

person but themselves alone, and there the young man went to sleep,

while Becfola sat staring at him until the unavoidable peace pressed

down her eyelids and she too slumbered.

She was awakened in the morning by a great shout.

“Come out, Flann, come out, my heart!”

The young man leaped from his couch, girded on his harness, and strode

out. Three young men met him, each in battle harness, and these four

advanced to meet four other men who awaited them at a little distance on

the lawn. Then these two sets of four fought togethor with every warlike

courtesy but with every warlike severity, and at the end of that combat

there was but one man standing, and the other seven lay tossed in death.

Becfola spoke to the youth.

“Your combat has indeed been gallant,” she said.

“Alas,” he replied, “if it has been a gallant deed it has not been a

good one, for my three brothers are dead and my four nephews are dead.”

“Ah me!” cried Becfola, “why did you fight that fight?”

“For the lordship of this island, the Isle of Fedach, son of Dali.”

But, although Becfola was moved and horrified by this battle, it was in

another direction that her interest lay; therefore she soon asked the

question which lay next her heart:

“Why would you not speak to me or look at me?”

“Until I have won the kingship of this land from all claimants, I am no

match for the mate of the High King of Ireland,” he replied.

And that reply was llke balm to the heart of Becfola.

“What shall I do?” she inquired radiantly. “Return to your home,” he

counselled. “I will escort you there with your maid, for she is not

really dead, and when I have won my lordship I will go seek you in

Tara.”

“You will surely come,” she insisted.

“By my hand,” quoth he, “I will come.”

These three returned then, and at the end of a day and night they saw

far off the mighty roofs of Tara massed in the morning haze. The

young man left them, and with many a backward look and with dragging,

reluctant feet, Becfola crossed the threshold of the palace, wondering

what she should say to Dermod and how she could account for an absence

of three days’ duration.

CHAPTER IV

IT was so early that not even a bird was yet awake, and the dull grey

light that came from the atmosphere enlarged and made indistinct all

that one looked at, and swathed all things in a cold and livid gloom.

As she trod cautiously through dim corridors Becfola was glad that,

saving the guards, no creature was astir, and that for some time yet

she need account to no person for her movements. She was glad also of

a respite which would enable her to settle into her home and draw about

her the composure which women feel when they are surrounded by the walls

of their houses, and can see about them the possessions which, by the

fact of ownership, have become almost a part of their personality.

Sundered from her belongings, no woman is tranquil, her heart is not

truly at ease, however her mind may function, so that under the broad

sky or in the house of another she is not the competent, precise

individual which she becomes when she sees again her household in order

and her domestic requirements at her hand.

Becfola pushed the door of the king’s sleeping chamber and entered

noiselessly. Then she sat quietly in a seat gazing on the recumbent

monarch, and prepared to consider how she should advance to him when

he awakened, and with what information she might stay his inquiries or

reproaches.

“I will reproach him,” she thought. “I will call him a bad husband

and astonish him, and he will forget everything but his own alarm and

indignation.”

But at that moment the king lifted his head from the pillow and looked

kindly at her. Her heart gave a great throb, and she prepared to speak

at once and in great volume before he could formulate any question.

But the king spoke first, and what he said so astonished her that the

explanation and reproach with which her tongue was thrilling fled

from it at a stroke, and she could only sit staring and bewildered and

tongue-tied.

“Well, my dear heart,” said the king, “have you decided not to keep that

engagement?”

“I--I--!” Becfola stammered.

“It is truly not an hour for engagements,” Dermod insisted, “for not

a bird of the birds has left his tree; and,” he continued maliciously,

“the light is such that you could not see an engagement even if you met

one.”

“I,” Becfola gasped. “I---!”

“A Sunday journey,” he went on, “is a notorious bad journey. No good can

come from it. You can get your smocks and diadems to-morrow. But at this

hour a wise person leaves engagements to the bats and the staring owls

and the round-eyed creatures that prowl and sniff in the dark. Come back

to the warm bed, sweet woman, and set on your journey in the morning.”

Such a load of apprehension was lifted from Becfola’s heart that she

instantly did as she had been commanded, and such a bewilderment had yet

possession of her faculties that she could not think or utter a word on

any subject.

Yet the thought did come into her head as she stretched in the warm

gloom that Crimthann the son of Ae must be now attending her at

Cluain da chaillech, and she thought of that young man as of something

wonderful and very ridiculous, and the fact that he was waiting for

her troubled her no more than if a sheep had been waiting for her or a

roadside bush.

She fell asleep.

CHAPTER V

In the morning as they sat at breakfast four clerics were announced, and

when they entered the king looked on them with stern disapproval.

“What is the meaning of this journey on Sunday?” he demanded.

A lank-jawed, thin-browed brother, with uneasy, intertwining fingers,

and a deep-set, venomous eye, was the spokesman of those four.

“Indeed,” he said, and the fingers of his right hand strangled and did

to death the fingers of his left hand, “indeed, we have transgressed by

order.”

“Explain that.”

“We have been sent to you hurriedly by our master, Molasius of

Devenish.”

“A pious, a saintly man,” the king interrupted, “and one who does not

countenance transgressions of the Sunday.”

“We were ordered to tell you as follows,” said the grim cleric, and he

buried the fingers of his right hand in his left fist, so that one could

not hope to see them resurrected again. “It was the duty of one of

the Brothers of Devenish,” he continued, “to turn out the cattle this

morning before the dawn of day, and that Brother, while in his duty, saw

eight comely young men who fought together.”

“On the morning of Sunday,” Dermod exploded.

The cleric nodded with savage emphasis.

“On the morning of this self-same and instant sacred day.”

“Tell on,” said the king wrathfully.

But terror gripped with sudden fingers at Becfola’s heart.

“Do not tell horrid stories on the Sunday,” she pleaded. “No good can

come to any one from such a tale.”

“Nay, this must be told, sweet lady,” said the king. But the cleric

stared at her glumly, forbiddingly, and resumed his story at a gesture.

“Of these eight men, seven were killed.”

“They are in hell,” the king said gloomily.

“In hell they are,” the cleric replied with enthusiasm.

“And the one that was not killed?”

“He is alive,” that cleric responded.

“He would be,” the monarch assented. “Tell your tale.”

“Molasius had those seven miscreants buried, and he took from their

unhallowed necks and from their lewd arms and from their unblessed

weapons the load of two men in gold and silver treasure.”

“Two men’s load!” said Dermod thoughtfully.

“That much,” said the lean cleric. “No more, no less. And he has sent us

to find out what part of that hellish treasure belongs to the Brothers

of Devenish and how much is the property of the king.”

Becfola again broke in, speaking graciously, regally, hastily: “Let

those Brothers have the entire of the treasure, for it is Sunday

treasure, and as such it will bring no luck to any one.”

The cleric again looked at her coldly, with a harsh-lidded, small-set,

grey-eyed glare, and waited for the king’s reply.

Dermod pondered, shaking his head as to an argument on his left side,

and then nodding it again as to an argument on his right.

“It shall be done as this sweet queen advises. Let a reliquary be formed

with cunning workmanship of that gold and silver, dated with my date and

signed with my name, to be in memory of my grandmother who gave birth to

a lamb, to a salmon, and then to my father, the Ard-Ri’. And, as to the

treasure that remains over, a pastoral staff may be beaten from it in

honour of Molasius, the pious man.”

“The story is not ended,” said that glum, spike-chinned cleric.

The king moved with jovial impatience.

“If you continue it,” he said, “it will surely come to an end some time.

A stone on a stone makes a house, dear heart, and a word on a word tells

a tale.”

The cleric wrapped himself into himself, and became lean and menacing.

He whispered: “Besides the young man, named Flann, who was not slain,

there was another person present at the scene and the combat and the

transgression of Sunday.”

“Who was that person?” said the alarmed monarch.

The cleric spiked forward his chin, and then butted forward his brow.

“It was the wife of the king,” he shouted. “It was the woman called

Becfola. It was that woman,” he roared, and he extended a lean,

inflexible, unending first finger at the queen.

“Dog!” the king stammered, starting up.

“If that be in truth a woman,” the cleric screamed.

“What do you mean?” the king demanded in wrath and terror.

“Either she is a woman of this world to be punished, or she is a woman

of the Shi’ to be banished, but this holy morning she was in the Shi’,

and her arms were about the neck of Flann.”

The king sank back in his chair stupefied, gazing from one to the other,

and then turned an unseeing, fear-dimmed eye towards Becfola.

“Is this true, my pulse?” he murmured.

“It is true,” Becfola replied, and she became suddenly to the king’s eye

a whiteness and a stare. He pointed to the door.

“Go to your engagement,” he stammered. “Go to that Flann.”

“He is waiting for me,” said Becfola with proud shame, “and the thought

that he should wait wrings my heart.”

She went out from the palace then. She went away from Tara: and in all

Ireland and in the world of living men she was not seen again, and she

was never heard of again.

THE LITTLE BRAWL AT ALLEN

CHAPTER I

“I think,” said Cairell Whiteskin, “that although judgement was given

against Fionn, it was Fionn had the rights of it.”

“He had eleven hundred killed,” said Cona’n amiably, “and you may call

that the rights of it if you like.”

“All the same--” Cairell began argumentatively.

“And it was you that commenced it,” Cona’n continued.

“Ho! Ho!” Cairell cried. “Why, you are as much to blame as I am.”

“No,” said Cona’n, “for you hit me first.”

“And if we had not been separated--” the other growled.

“Separated!” said Cona’n, with a grin that made his beard poke all

around his face.

“Yes, separated. If they had not come between us I still think--”

“Don’t think out loud, dear heart, for you and I are at peace by law.”

“That is true,” said Cairell, “and a man must stick by a judgement. Come

with me, my dear, and let us see how the youngsters are shaping in the

school. One of them has rather a way with him as a swordsman.”

“No youngster is any good with a sword,” Conan replied.

“You are right there,” said Cairell. “It takes a good ripe man for that

weapon.”

“Boys are good enough with slings,” Confro continued, “but except for

eating their fill and running away from a fight, you can’t count on

boys.”

The two bulky men turned towards the school of the Fianna.

It happened that Fionn mac Uail had summoned the gentlemen of the Fianna

and their wives to a banquet. Everybody came, for a banquet given by

Fionn was not a thing to be missed. There was Goll mor mac Morna and his

people; Fionn’s son Oisi’n and his grandson Oscar. There was Dermod of

the Gay Face, Caelte mac Ronan--but indeed there were too many to be

told of, for all the pillars of war and battle-torches of the Gael were

there.

The banquet began.

Fionn sat in the Chief Captain’s seat in the middle of the fort; and

facing him, in the place of honour, he placed the mirthful Goll mac

Morna; and from these, ranging on either side, the nobles of the Fianna

took each the place that fitted his degree and patrimony.

After good eating, good conversation; and after good conversation,

sleep--that is the order of a banquet: so when each person had been

served with food to the limit of desire the butlers carried in shining,

and jewelled drinking-horns, each having its tide of smooth, heady

liquor. Then the young heroes grew merry and audacious, the ladies

became gentle and kind, and the poets became wonders of knowledge and

prophecy. Every eye beamed in that assembly, and on Fionn every eye was

turned continually in the hope of a glance from the great, mild hero.

Goll spoke to him across the table enthusiastically.

“There is nothing wanting to this banquet, O Chief,” said he.

And Fionn smiled back into that eye which seemed a well of tenderness

and friendship.

“Nothing is wanting,” he replied, “but a well-shaped poem.” A crier

stood up then, holding in one hand a length of coarse iron links and in

the other a chain of delicate, antique silver. He shook the iron chain

so that the servants and followers of the household should be silent,

and he shook the silver one so that the nobles and poets should hearken

also.

Fergus, called True-Lips, the poet of the Fianna-Finn, then sang of

Fionn and his ancestors and their deeds. When he had finished Fionn and

Oisi’n and Oscar and mac Lugac of the Terrible Hand gave him rare and

costly presents, so that every person wondered at their munificence, and

even the poet, accustomed to the liberality of kings and princes, was

astonished at his gifts.

Fergus then turned to the side of Goll mac Morna, and he sang of the

Forts, the Destructions, the Raids, and the Wooings of clann-Morna; and

as the poems succeeded each other, Goll grew more and more jovial and

contented. When the songs were finished Goll turned in his seat.

“Where is my runner?” he cried.

He had a woman runner, a marvel for swiftness and trust. She stepped

forward.

“I am here, royal captain.”

“Have you collected my tribute from Denmark?”

“It is here.”

And, with help, she laid beside him the load of three men of doubly

refined gold. Out of this treasure, and from the treasure of rings and

bracelets and torques that were with him, Goll mac Morna paid Fergus for

his songs, and, much as Fionn had given, Goll gave twice as much.

But, as the banquet proceeded, Goll gave, whether it was to harpers or

prophets or jugglers, more than any one else gave, so that Fionn became

displeased, and as the banquet proceeded he grew stern and silent.

CHAPTER II

[This version of the death of Uail is not correct. Also Cnocha is not in

Lochlann but in Ireland.]

The wonderful gift-giving of Goll continued, and an uneasiness and

embarrassment began to creep through the great banqueting hall.

Gentlemen looked at each other questioningly, and then spoke again on

indifferent matters, but only with half of their minds. The singers, the

harpers, and jugglers submitted to that constraint, so that every person

felt awkward and no one knew what should be done or what would happen,

and from that doubt dulness came, with silence following on its heels.

There is nothing more terrible than silence. Shame grows in that blank,

or anger gathers there, and we must choose which of these is to be our

master.

That choice lay before Fionn, who never knew shame.

“Goll,” said he, “how long have you been taking tribute from the people

of Lochlann?”

“A long time now,” said Goll.

And he looked into an eye that was stern and unfriendly.

“I thought that my rent was the only one those people had to pay,” Fionn

continued.

“Your memory is at fault,” said Goll.

“Let it be so,” said Fionn. “How did your tribute arise?”

“Long ago, Fionn, in the days when your father forced war on me.”

“Ah!” said Fionn.

“When he raised the High King against me and banished me from Ireland.”

“Continue,” said Fionn, and he held Goll’s eye under the great beetle of

his brow.

“I went into Britain,” said Goll, “and your father followed me there. I

went into White Lochlann (Norway) and took it. Your father banished me

thence also.”

“I know it,” said Fionn.

“I went into the land of the Saxons and your father chased me out of

that land. And then, in Lochlann, at the battle of Cnocha your father

and I met at last, foot to foot, eye to eye, and there, Fionn!”

“And there, Goll?”

“And there I killed your father.”

Fionn sat rigid and unmoving, his face stony and terrible as the face of

a monument carved on the side of a cliff.

“Tell all your tale,” said he.

“At that battle I beat the Lochlannachs. I penetrated to the hold of the

Danish king, and I took out of his dungeon the men who had lain

there for a year and were awaiting their deaths. I liberated fifteen

prisoners, and one of them was Fionn.”

“It is true,” said Fionn.

Goll’s anger fled at the word.

“Do not be jealous of me, dear heart, for if I had twice the tribute I

would give it to you and to Ireland.”

But at the word jealous the Chief’s anger revived.

“It is an impertinence,” he cried, “to boast at this table that you

killed my father.”

“By my hand,” Goll replied, “if Fionn were to treat me as his father did

I would treat Fionn the way I treated Fionn’s father.”

Fionn closed his eyes and beat away the anger that was rising within

him. He smiled grimly.

“If I were so minded, I would not let that last word go with you, Goll,

for I have here an hundred men for every man of yours.”

Goll laughed aloud.

“So had your father,” he said.

Fionn’s brother, Cairell Whiteskin, broke into the conversation with a

harsh laugh.

“How many of Fionn’s household has the wonderful Goll put down?” he

cried.

But Goll’s brother, bald Cona’n the Swearer, turned a savage eye on

Cairell.

“By my weapons,” said he, “there were never less than an hundred-and-one

men with Goll, and the least of them could have put you down easily

enough.”

“Ah?” cried Cairell. “And are you one of the hundred-and-one, old

scaldhead?”

“One indeed, my thick-witted, thin-livered Cairell, and I undertake to

prove on your hide that what my brother said was true and that what your

brother said was false.”

“You undertake that,” growled Cairell, and on the word he loosed a

furious buffet at Con’an, which Cona’n returned with a fist so big that

every part of Cairell’s face was hit with the one blow. The two then

fell into grips, and went lurching and punching about the great hall.

Two of Oscar’s sons could not bear to see their uncle being worsted, and

they leaped at Cona’n, and two of Goll’s sons rushed at them. Then Oscar

himself leaped up, and with a hammer in either hand he went battering

into the melee.

“I thank the gods,” said Cona’n, “for the chance of killing yourself,

Oscar.”

These two encountered then, and Oscar knocked a groan of distress out of

Cona’n. He looked appealingly at his brother Art og mac Morna, and that

powerful champion flew to his aid and wounded Oscar. Oisi’n, Oscar’s

father, could not abide that; he dashed in and quelled Art Og. Then

Rough Hair mac Morna wounded Oisin and was himself tumbled by mac Lugac,

who was again wounded by Gara mac Morna.

The banqueting hall was in tumult. In every part of it men were giving

and taking blows. Here two champions with their arms round each other’s

necks were stamping round and round in a slow, sad dance. Here were two

crouching against each other, looking for a soft place to hit. Yonder a

big-shouldered person lifted another man in his arms and threw him at a

small group that charged him. In a retired corner a gentleman stood in

a thoughtful attitude while he tried to pull out a tooth that had been

knocked loose.

“You can’t fight,” he mumbled, “with a loose shoe or a loose tooth.”

“Hurry up with that tooth,” the man in front of him grum-bled, “for I

want to knock out another one.”

Pressed against the wall was a bevy of ladies, some of whom were

screaming and some laughing and all of whom were calling on the men to

go back to their seats.

Only two people remained seated in the hall.

Goll sat twisted round watching the progress of the brawl critically,

and Fionn, sitting opposite, watched Goll.

Just then Faelan, another of Fionn’s sons, stormed the hall with three

hundred of the Fianna, and by this force all Goll’s people were put out

of doors, where the fight continued.

Goll looked then calmly on Fionn.

“Your people are using their weapons,” said he.

“Are they?” Fionn inquired as calmly, and as though addressing the air.

“In the matter of weapons--!” said Goll.

And the hard-fighting pillar of battle turned to where his arms hung on

the wall behind him. He took his solid, well-balanced sword in his fist,

over his left arm his ample, bossy shield, and, with another side-look

at Fionn, he left the hall and charged irresistibly into the fray.

Fionn then arose. He took his accoutrements from the wall also and

strode out. Then he raised the triumphant Fenian shout and went into the

combat.

That was no place for a sick person to be. It was not the corner which

a slender-fingered woman would choose to do up her hair; nor was it the

spot an ancient man would select to think quietly in, for the tumult of

sword on sword, of axe on shield, the roar of the contending parties,

the crying of wounded men, and the screaming of frightened women

destroyed peace, and over all was the rallying cry of Goll mac Morna and

the great shout of Fionn.

Then Fergus True-Lips gathered about him all the poets of the Fianna,

and they surrounded the combatants. They began to chant and intone

long, heavy rhymes and incantations, until the rhythmic beating of their

voices covered even the noise of war, so that the men stopped hacking

and hewing, and let their weapons drop from their hands. These were

picked up by the poets and a reconciliation was effected between the two

parties.

But Fionn affirmed that he would make no peace with clann-Morna until

the matter had been judged by the king, Cormac mac Art, and by his

daughter Ailve, and by his son Cairbre of Ana Life’ and by Fintan the

chief poet. Goll agreed that the affair should be submitted to that

court, and a day was appointed, a fortnight from that date, to meet

at Tara of the Kings for judgement. Then the hall was cleansed and the

banquet recommenced.

Of Fionn’s people eleven hundred of men and women were dead, while of

Goll’s people eleven men and fifty women were dead. But it was through

fright the women died, for not one of them had a wound or a bruise or a

mark.

CHAPTER III

AT the end of a fortnight Fionn and Goll and the chief men of the Fianna

attended at Tara. The king, his son and daughter, with Flahri, Feehal,

and Fintan mac Bocna sat in the place of judgement, and Cormac called on

the witnesses for evidence.

Fionn stood up, but the moment he did so Goll mac Morna arose also.

“I object to Fionn giving evidence,” said he.

“Why so?” the king asked.

“Because in any matter that concerned me Fionn would turn a lie into

truth and the truth into a lie.”

“I do not think that is so,” said Fionn.

“You see, he has already commenced it,” cried Goll.

“If you object to the testimony of the chief person present, in what way

are we to obtain evidence?” the king demanded.

“I,” said Goll, “will trust to the evidence of Fergus True-Lips. He is

Fionn’s poet, and will tell no lie against his master; he is a poet, and

will tell no lie against any one.”

“I agree to that,” said Fionn.

“I require, nevertheless,” Goll continued, “that Fergus should swear

before the Court, by his gods, that he will do justice between us.”

Fergus was accordingly sworn, and gave his evidence. He stated that

Fionn’s brother Cairell struck Cona’n mac Morna, that Goll’s two sons

came to help Cona’n, that Oscar went to help Cairell, and with that

Fionn’s people and the clann-Morna rose at each other, and what had

started as a brawl ended as a battle with eleven hundred of Fionn’s

people and sixty-one of Goll’s people dead.

“I marvel,” said the king in a discontented voice, “that, considering

the numbers against them, the losses of clann-Morna should be so small.”

Fionn blushed when he heard that.

Fergus replied:

“Goll mac Morna covered his people with his shield. All that slaughter

was done by him.”

“The press was too great,” Fionn grumbled. “I could not get at him in

time or---”

“Or what?” said Goll with a great laugh.

Fionn shook his head sternly and said no more.

“What is your judgement?” Cormac demanded of his fellow-judges.

Flahri pronounced first.

“I give damages to clann-Morna.”

“Why?” said Cormac.

“Because they were attacked first.”

Cormac looked at him stubbornly.

“I do not agree with your judgement,” he said.

“What is there faulty in it?” Flahri asked.

“You have not considered,” the king replied, “that a soldier owes

obedience to his captain, and that, given the time and the place, Fionn

was the captain and Goll was only a simple soldier.”

Flahri considered the king’s suggestion.

“That,” he said, “would hold good for the white-striking or blows of

fists, but not for the red-striking or sword-strokes.”

“What is your judgement?” the king asked Feehal. Feehal then pronounced:

“I hold that clann-Morna were attacked first, and that they are to be

free from payment of damages.”

“And as regards Fionn?” said Cormac.

“I hold that on account of his great losses Fionn is to be exempt

from payment of damages, and that his losses are to be considered as

damages.”

“I agree in that judgement,” said Fintan.

The king and his son also agreed, and the decision was imparted to the

Fianna.

“One must abide by a judgement,” said Fionn.

“Do you abide by it?” Goll demanded.

“I do,” said Fionn.

Goll and Fionn then kissed each other, and thus peace was made. For,

notwithstanding the endless bicker of these two heroes, they loved each

other well.

Yet, now that the years have gone by, I think the fault lay with Goll

and not with Fionn, and that the judgement given did not consider

everything. For at that table Goll should not have given greater gifts

than his master and host did. And it was not right of Goll to take by

force the position of greatest gift-giver of the Fianna, for there was

never in the world one greater at giving gifts, or giving battle, or

making poems than Fionn was.

That side of the affair was not brought before the Court. But perhaps it

was suppressed out of delicacy for Fionn, for if Goll could be accused

of ostentation, Fionn was open to the uglier charge of jealousy. It

was, nevertheless, Goll’s forward and impish temper which commenced the

brawl, and the verdict of time must be to exonerate Fionn and to let the

blame go where it is merited.

There is, however, this to be added and remembered, that whenever Fionn

was in a tight corner it was Goll that plucked him out of it; and, later

on, when time did his worst on them all and the Fianna were sent to hell

as unbelievers, it was Goll mac Morna who assaulted hell, with a chain

in his great fist and three iron balls swinging from it, and it was

he who attacked the hosts of great devils and brought Fionn and the

Fianna-Finn out with him.

THE CARL OF THE DRAB COAT

CHAPTER I

One day something happened to Fionn, the son of Uail; that is, he

departed from the world of men, and was set wandering in great distress

of mind through Faery. He had days and nights there and adventures

there, and was able to bring back the memory of these.

That, by itself, is wonderful, for there are few people who remember

that they have been to Faery or aught of all that happened to them in

that state.

In truth we do not go to Faery, we become Faery, and in the beating of a

pulse we may live for a year or a thousand years. But when we return

the memory is quickly clouded, and we seem to have had a dream or seen a

vision, although we have verily been in Faery.

It was wonderful, then, that Fionn should have remembered all that

happened to him in that wide-spun moment, but in this tale there is yet

more to marvel at; for not only did Fionn go to Faery, but the great

army which he had marshalled to Ben Edair [The Hill of Howth] were

translated also, and neither he nor they were aware that they had

departed from the world until they came back to it.

Fourteen battles, seven of the reserve and seven of the regular Fianna,

had been taken by the Chief on a great march and manoeuvre. When they

reached Ben Edair it was decided to pitch camp so that the troops

might rest in view of the warlike plan which Fionn had imagined for the

morrow. The camp was chosen, and each squadron and company of the host

were lodged into an appropriate place, so there was no overcrowding and

no halt or interruption of the march; for where a company halted that

was its place of rest, and in that place it hindered no other company,

and was at its own ease.

When this was accomplished the leaders of battalions gathered on a

level, grassy plateau overlooking the sea, where a consultation began

as to the next day’s manoeuvres, and during this discussion they looked

often on the wide water that lay wrinkling and twinkling below them.

A roomy ship under great press of sall was bearing on Ben Edair from the

east.

Now and again, in a lull of the discussion, a champion would look and

remark on the hurrying vessel; and it may have been during one of these

moments that the adventure happened to Fionn and the Fianna.

“I wonder where that ship comes from?” said Cona’n idly.

But no person could surmise anything about it beyond that it was a

vessel well equipped for war.

As the ship drew by the shore the watchers observed a tall man swing

from the side by means of his spear shafts, and in a little while this

gentleman was announced to Fionn, and was brought into his presence.

A sturdy, bellicose, forthright personage he was indeed. He was equipped

in a wonderful solidity of armour, with a hard, carven helmet on

his head, a splendid red-bossed shield swinging on his shoulder, a

wide-grooved, straight sword clashing along his thigh. On his shoulders

under the shield he carried a splendid scarlet mantle; over his breast

was a great brooch of burnt gold, and in his fist he gripped a pair of

thick-shafted, unburnished spears.

Fionn and the champions looked on this gentleman, and they admired

exceedingly his bearing and equipment.

“Of what blood are you, young gentleman?” Fionn demanded, “and from

which of the four corners of the world do you come?”

“My name is Cael of the Iron,” the stranger answered, “and I am son to

the King of Thessaly.”

“What errand has brought you here?”

“I do not go on errands,” the man replied sternly, “but on the affairs

that please me.”

“Be it so. What is the pleasing affair which brings you to this land?”

“Since I left my own country I have not gone from a land or an island

until it paid tribute to me and acknowledged my lordship.”

“And you have come to this realm,” cried Fionn, doubting his ears.

“For tribute and sovereignty,” growled that other, and he struck the

haft of his spear violently on the ground.

“By my hand,” said Cona’n, “we have never heard of a warrior, however

great, but his peer was found in Ireland, and the funeral songs of all

such have been chanted by the women of this land.”

“By my hand and word,” said the harsh stranger, “your talk makes me

think of a small boy or of an idiot.”

“Take heed, sir,” said Fionn, “for the champions and great dragons of

the Gael are standing by you, and around us there are fourteen battles

of the Fianna of Ireland.”

“If all the Fianna who have died in the last seven years were added to

all that are now here,” the stranger asserted, “I would treat all of

these and those grievously, and would curtail their limbs and their

lives.”

“It is no small boast,” Cona’n murmured, staring at him.

“It is no boast at all,” said Cael, “and, to show my quality and

standing, I will propose a deed to you.”

“Give out your deed,” Fionn commanded.

“Thus,” said Cael with cold savagery. “If you can find a man among your

fourteen battalions who can outrun or outwrestle or outfight me, I will

take myself off to my own country, and will trouble you no more.”

And so harshly did he speak, and with such a belligerent eye did he

stare, that dismay began to seize on the champions, and even Fionn felt

that his breath had halted.

“It is spoken like a hero,” he admitted after a moment, “and if you

cannot be matched on those terms it will not be from a dearth of

applicants.”

“In running alone,” Fionn continued thoughtfully, “we have a notable

champion, Caelte mac Rona’n.”

“This son of Rona’n will not long be notable,” the stranger asserted.

“He can outstrip the red deer,” said Cona’n.

“He can outrun the wind,” cried Fionn.

“He will not be asked to outrun the red deer or the wind,” the stranger

sneered. “He will be asked to outrun me,” he thundered. “Produce this

runner, and we shall discover if he keeps as great heart in his feet as

he has made you think.”

“He is not with us,” Cona’n lamented.

“These notable warriors are never with us when the call is made,” said

the grim stranger.

“By my hand,” cried Fionn, “he shall be here in no great time, for I

will fetch him myself.”

“Be it so,” said Cael. “And during my absence,” Fionn continued, “I

leave this as a compact, that you make friends with the Fianna here

present, and that you observe all the conditions and ceremonies of

friendship.”

Cael agreed to that.

“I will not hurt any of these people until you return,” he said.

Fionn then set out towards Tara of the Kings, for he thought Caelte mac

Romin would surely be there; “and if he is not there,” said the champion

to himself, “then I shall find him at Cesh Corran of the Fianna.”

CHAPTER II

He had not gone a great distance from Ben Edair when he came to

an intricate, gloomy wood, where the trees grew so thickly and the

undergrowth was such a sprout and tangle that one could scarcely pass

through it. He remembered that a path had once been hacked through the

wood, and he sought for this. It was a deeply scooped, hollow way, and

it ran or wriggled through the entire length of the wood.

Into this gloomy drain Fionn descended and made progress, but when he

had penetrated deeply in the dank forest he heard a sound of thumping

and squelching footsteps, and he saw coming towards him a horrible,

evil-visaged being; a wild, monstrous, yellow-skinned, big-boned giant,

dressed in nothing but an ill-made, mud-plastered, drab-coloured coat,

which swaggled and clapped against the calves of his big bare legs. On

his stamping feet there were great brogues of boots that were shaped

like, but were bigger than, a boat, and each time he put a foot down it

squashed and squirted a barrelful of mud from the sunk road.

Fionn had never seen the like of this vast person, and he stood gazing

on him, lost in a stare of astonishment.

The great man saluted him.

“All alone, Fionn?” he cried. “How does it happen that not one Fenian

of the Fianna is at the side of his captain?” At this inquiry Fionn got

back his wits.

“That is too long a story and it is too intricate and pressing to be

told, also I have no time to spare now.”

“Yet tell it now,” the monstrous man insisted.

Fionn, thus pressed, told of the coming of Cael of the Iron, of the

challenge the latter had issued, and that he, Fionn, was off to Tara of

the Kings to find Caelte mac Rona’n.

“I know that foreigner well,” the big man commented.

“Is he the champion he makes himself out to be?” Fionn inquired.

“He can do twice as much as he said he would do,” the monster replied.

“He won’t outrun Caelte mac Rona’n,” Fionn asserted. The big man jeered.

“Say that he won’t outrun a hedgehog, dear heart. This Cael will end the

course by the time your Caelte begins to think of starting.”

“Then,” said Fionn, “I no longer know where to turn, or how to protect

the honour of Ireland.”

“I know how to do these things,” the other man commented with a slow nod

of the head.

“If you do,” Fionn pleaded, “tell it to me upon your honour.”

“I will do that,” the man replied.

“Do not look any further for the rusty-kneed, slow-trotting son of

Rona’n,” he continued, “but ask me to run your race, and, by this hand,

I will be first at the post.”

At this the Chief began to laugh.

“My good friend, you have work enough to carry the two tons of mud that

are plastered on each of your coat-tails, to say nothing of your weighty

boots.”

“By my hand,” the man cried, “there is no person in Ireland but myself

can win that race. I claim a chance.”

Fionn agreed then. “Be it so,” said he. “And now, tell me your name?”

“I am known as the Carl of the Drab Coat.”

“All names are names,” Fionn responded, “and that also is a name.”

They returned then to Ben Edair.

CHAPTER III

When they came among the host the men of Ireland gathered about the vast

stranger; and there were some who hid their faces in their mantles so

that they should not be seen to laugh, and there were some who rolled

along the ground in merriment, and there were others who could only hold

their mouths open and crook their knees and hang their arms and stare

dumbfoundedly upon the stranger, as though they were utterly dazed.

Cael of the Iron came also on the scene, and he examined the stranger

with close and particular attention.

“What in the name of the devil is this thing?” he asked of Fionn.

“Dear heart,” said Fionn, “this is the champion I am putting against you

in the race.”

Cael of the Iron grew purple in the face, and he almost swallowed his

tongue through wrath.

“Until the end of eternity,” he roared, “and until the very last moment

of doom I will not move one foot in a race with this greasy, big-hoofed,

ill-assembled resemblance of a beggarman.”

But at this the Carl burst into a roar of laughter, so that the eardrums

of the warriors present almost burst inside of their heads.

“Be reassured, my darling, I am no beggarman, and my quality is not more

gross than is the blood of the most delicate prince in this assembly.

You will not evade your challenge in that way, my love, and you shall

run with me or you shall run to your ship with me behind you. What

length of course do you propose, dear heart?”

“I never run less than sixty miles,” Cael replied sullenly.

“It is a small run,” said the Carl, “but it will do. From this place

to the Hill of the Rushes, Slieve Luachra of Munster, is exactly sixty

miles. Will that suit you?”

“I don’t care how it is done,” Cael answered.

“Then,” said the Carl, “we may go off to Slieve Luachra now, and in the

morning we can start our race there to here.”

“Let it be done that way,” said Cael.

These two set out then for Munster, and as the sun was setting they

reached Slieve Luachra and prepared to spend the night there.

CHAPTER IV

“Cael, my pulse,” said the Carl, “we had better build a house or a hut

to pass the night in.”

“I’Il build nothing,” Cael replied, looking on the Carl with great

disfavour.

“No!”

“I won’t build house or hut for the sake of passing one night here, for

I hope never to see this place again.”

“I’Il build a house myself,” said the Carl, “and the man who does not

help in the building can stay outside of the house.”

The Carl stumped to a near-by wood, and he never rested until he had

felled and tied together twenty-four couples of big timber. He thrust

these under one arm and under the other he tucked a bundle of rushes for

his bed, and with that one load he rushed up a house, well thatched and

snug, and with the timber that remained over he made a bonfire on the

floor of the house.

His companion sat at a distance regarding the work with rage and

aversion.

“Now Cael, my darling,” said the Carl, “if you are a man help me to look

for something to eat, for there is game here.”

“Help yourself,” roared Cael, “for all that I want is not to be near

you.”

“The tooth that does not help gets no helping,” the other replied.

In a short time the Carl returned with a wild boar which he had run

down. He cooked the beast over his bonfire and ate one half of it,

leaving the other half for his breakfast. Then he lay down on the

rushes, and in two turns he fell asleep.

But Cael lay out on the side of the hill, and if he went to sleep that

night he slept fasting. It was he, however, who awakened the Carl in the

morning.

“Get up, beggarman, if you are going to run against me.”

The Carl rubbed his eyes.

“I never get up until I have had my fill of sleep, and there is another

hour of it due to me. But if you are in a hurry, my delight, you can

start running now with a blessing. I will trot on your track when I

waken up.”

Cael began to race then, and he was glad of the start, for his

antagonist made so little account of him that he did not know what to

expect when the Carl would begin to run.

“Yet,” said Cael to himself, “with an hour’s start the beggarman will

have to move his bones if he wants to catch on me,” and he settled down

to a good, pelting race.

CHAPTER V

At the end of an hour the Carl awoke. He ate the second half of the

boar, and he tied the unpicked bones in the tail of his coat. Then with

a great rattling of the boar’s bones he started.

It is hard to tell how he ran or at what speed he ran, but he went

forward in great two-legged jumps, and at times he moved in

immense one-legged, mud-spattering hops, and at times again, with

wide-stretched, far-flung, terrible-tramping, space-destroying legs he

ran.

He left the swallows behind as if they were asleep. He caught up on

a red deer, jumped over it, and left it standing. The wind was always

behind him, for he outran it every time; and he caught up in jumps and

bounces on Cael of the Iron, although Cael was running well, with

his fists up and his head back and his two legs flying in and out so

vigorously that you could not see them because of that speedy movement.

Trotting by the side of Cael, the Carl thrust a hand into the tail of

his coat and pulled out a fistfull of red bones.

“Here, my heart, is a meaty bone,” said he, “for you fasted all night,

poor friend, and if you pick a bit off the bone your stomach will get a

rest.”

“Keep your filth, beggarman,” the other replied, “for I would rather be

hanged than gnaw on a bone that you have browsed.”

“Why don’t you run, my pulse?” said the Carl earnestly; “why don’t you

try to win the race?”

Cael then began to move his limbs as if they were the wings of a fly,

or the fins of a little fish, or as if they were the six legs of a

terrified spider.

“I am running,” he gasped.

“But try and run like this,” the Carl admonished, and he gave a

wriggling bound and a sudden outstretching and scurrying of shanks, and

he disappeared from Cael’s sight in one wild spatter of big boots.

Despair fell on Cael of the Iron, but he had a great heart. “I will run

until I burst,” he shrieked, “and when I burst, may I burst to a great

distance, and may I trip that beggar-man up with my burstings and make

him break his leg.”

He settled then to a determined, savage, implacable trot. He caught up

on the Carl at last, for the latter had stopped to eat blackberries from

the bushes on the road, and when he drew nigh, Cael began to jeer and

sneer angrily at the Carl.

“Who lost the tails of his coat?” he roared.

“Don’t ask riddles of a man that’s eating blackberries,” the Carl

rebuked him.

“The dog without a tall and the coat without a tail,” cried Cael.

“I give it up,” the Carl mumbled.

“It’s yourself, beggarman,” jeered Cael.

“I am myself,” the Carl gurgled through a mouthful of blackberries,

“and as I am myself, how can it be myself? That is a silly riddle,” he

burbled.

“Look at your coat, tub of grease?”

The Carl did so.

“My faith,” said he, “where are the two tails of my coat?” “I could

smell one of them and it wrapped around a little tree thirty miles

back,” said Cael, “and the other one was dishonouring a bush ten miles

behind that.”

“It is bad luck to be separated from the tails of your own coat,” the

Carl grumbled. “I’ll have to go back for them. Wait here, beloved, and

eat blackberries until I come back, and we’ll both start fair.”

“Not half a second will I wait,” Cael replied, and he began to run

towards Ben Edair as a lover runs to his maiden or as a bee flies to his

hive.

“I haven’t had half my share of blackberries either,” the Carl lamented

as he started to run backwards for his coat-tails.

He ran determinedly on that backward journey, and as the path he had

travelled was beaten out as if it had been trampled by an hundred bulls

yoked neck to neck, he was able to find the two bushes and the two

coat-tails. He sewed them on his coat.

Then he sprang up, and he took to a fit and a vortex and an exasperation

of running for which no description may be found. The thumping of his

big boots grew as con-tinuous as the pattering of hailstones on a

roof, and the wind of his passage blew trees down. The beasts that were

ranging beside his path dropped dead from concussion, and the steam that

snored from his nose blew birds into bits and made great lumps of cloud

fall out of the sky.

He again caught up on Cael, who was running with his head down and his

toes up.

“If you won’t try to run, my treasure,” said the Carl, “you will never

get your tribute.”

And with that he incensed and exploded himself into an eye-blinding,

continuous, waggle and complexity of boots that left Cael behind him in

a flash.

“I will run until I burst,” sobbed Cael, and he screwed agitation and

despair into his legs until he hummed and buzzed like a blue-bottle on a

window.

Five miles from Ben Edair the Carl stopped, for he had again come among

blackberries.

He ate of these until he was no more than a sack of juice, and when

he heard the humming and buzzing of Cael of the Iron he mourned and

lamented that he could not wait to eat his fill He took off his coat,

stuffed it full of blackberries, swung it on his shoulders, and went

bounding stoutly and nimbly for Ben Edair.

CHAPTER VI

It would be hard to tell of the terror that was in Fionn’s breast and

in the hearts of the Fianna while they attended the conclusion of that

race.

They discussed it unendingly, and at some moment of the day a man

upbraided Fionn because he had not found Caelte the son of Rona’n as had

been agreed on.

“There is no one can run like Caelte,” one man averred.

“He covers the ground,” said another.

“He is light as a feather.”

“Swift as a stag.” “Lunged like a bull.”

“Legged like a wolf.”

“He runs!”

These things were said to Fionn, and Fionn said these things to himself.

With every passing minute a drop of lead thumped down into every heart,

and a pang of despair stabbed up to every brain.

“Go,” said Fionn to a hawk-eyed man, “go to the top of this hill and

watch for the coming of the racers.”

And he sent lithe men with him so that they might run back in endless

succession with the news.

The messengers began to run through his tent at minute intervals calling

“nothing,” “nothing,” “nothing,” as they paused and darted away.

And the words, “nothing, nothing, nothing,” began to drowse into the

brains of every person present.

“What can we hope from that Carl?” a champion demanded savagely.

“Nothing,” cried a messenger who stood and sped.

“A clump!” cried a champion.

“A hog!” said another.

“A flat-footed.”

“Little-wlnded.”

“Big-bellied.”

“Lazy-boned.”

“Pork!”

“Did you think, Fionn, that a whale could swim on land, or what did you

imagine that lump could do?”

“Nothing,” cried a messenger, and was sped as he spoke.

Rage began to gnaw in Fionn’s soul, and a red haze danced and flickered

before his eyes. His hands began to twitch and a desire crept over him

to seize on champions by the neck, and to shake and worry and rage among

them like a wild dog raging among sheep.

He looked on one, and yet he seemed to look on all at once.

“Be silent,” he growled. “Let each man be silent as a dead man.”

And he sat forward, seeing all, seeing none, with his mouth drooping

open, and such a wildness and bristle lowering from that great glum brow

that the champions shivered as though already in the chill of death, and

were silent.

He rose and stalked to the tent-door.

“Where to, O Fionn?” said a champion humbly.

“To the hill-top,” said Fionn, and he stalked on.

They followed him, whispering among themselves, keeping their eyes on

the ground as they climbed.

CHAPTER VII

“What do you see?” Fionn demanded of the watcher.

“Nothing,” that man replied.

“Look again,” said Fionn.

The eagle-eyed man lifted a face, thin and sharp as though it had been

carven on the wind, and he stared forward with an immobile intentness.

“What do you see?” said Fionn.

“Nothing,” the man replied.

“I will look myself,” said Fionn, and his great brow bent forward and

gloomed afar.

The watcher stood beside, staring with his tense face and unwinking,

lidless eye.

“What can you see, O Fionn?” said the watcher.

“I can see nothing,” said Fionn, and he projected again his grim, gaunt

forehead. For it seemed as if the watcher stared with his whole face,

aye, and with his hands; but Fionn brooded weightedly on distance with

his puckered and crannied brow.

They looked again.

“What can you see?” said Fionn.

“I see nothing,” said the watcher.

“I do not know if I see or if I surmise, but something moves,” said

Fionn. “There is a trample,” he said.

The watcher became then an eye, a rigidity, an intense out-thrusting and

ransacking of thin-spun distance. At last he spoke.

“There is a dust,” he said.

And at that the champions gazed also, straining hungrily afar, until

their eyes became filled with a blue darkness and they could no longer

see even the things that were close to them.

“I,” cried Cona’n triumphantly, “I see a dust.”

“And I,” cried another.

“And I.”

“I see a man,” said the eagle-eyed watcher.

And again they stared, until their straining eyes grew dim with tears

and winks, and they saw trees that stood up and sat down, and fields

that wobbled and spun round and round in a giddily swirling world.

“There is a man,” Cona’n roared.

“A man there is,” cried another.

“And he is carrying a man on his back,” said the watcher.

“It is Cael of the Iron carrying the Carl on his back,” he groaned.

“The great pork!” a man gritted.

“The no-good!” sobbed another.

“The lean-hearted.”

“Thick-thighed.”

“Ramshackle.”

“Muddle-headed.”

“Hog!” screamed a champion.

And he beat his fists angrily against a tree.

But the eagle-eyed watcher watched until his eyes narrowed and became

pin-points, and he ceased to be a man and became an optic.

“Wait,” he breathed, “wait until I screw into one other inch of sight.”

And they waited, looking no longer on that scarcely perceptible speck in

the distance, but straining upon the eye of the watcher as though they

would penetrate it and look through it.

“It is the Carl,” he said, “carrying something on his back, and behind

him again there is a dust.”

“Are you sure?” said Fionn in a voice that rumbled and vibrated like

thunder.

“It is the Carl,” said the watcher, “and the dust behind him is Cael of

the Iron trying to catch him up.”

Then the Fianna gave a roar of exultation, and each man seized his

neighbour and kissed him on both cheeks; and they gripped hands about

Fionn, and they danced round and round in a great circle, roaring with

laughter and relief, in the ecstasy which only comes where grisly fear

has been and whence that bony jowl has taken itself away.

CHAPTER VIII

The Carl of the Drab Coat came bumping and stumping and clumping into

the camp, and was surrounded by a multitude that adored him and hailed

him with tears.

“Meal!” he bawled, “meal for the love of the stars!”

And he bawled, “Meal, meal!” until he bawled everybody into silence.

Fionn addressed him.

“What for the meal, dear heart?”

“For the inside of my mouth,” said the Carl, “for the recesses and

crannies and deep-down profundities of my stomach. Meal, meal!” he

lamented.

Meal was brought.

The Carl put his coat on the ground, opened it carefully, and revealed

a store of blackberries, squashed, crushed, mangled, democratic,

ill-looking.

“The meal!” he groaned, “the meal!”

It was given to him.

“What of the race, my pulse?” said Fionn.

“Wait, wait,” cried the Carl. “I die, I die for meal and blackberries.”

Into the centre of the mess of blackberries he discharged a barrel of

meal, and be mixed the two up and through, and round and down, until

the pile of white-black, red-brown slibber-slobber reached up to his

shoulders. Then he commenced to paw and impel and project and cram the

mixture into his mouth, and between each mouthful he sighed a contented

sigh, and during every mouthful he gurgled an oozy gurgle.

But while Fionn and the Fianna stared like lost minds upon the Carl,

there came a sound of buzzing, as if a hornet or a queen of the wasps or

a savage, steep-winged griffin was hovering about them, and looking away

they saw Cael of the Iron charging on them with a monstrous extension

and scurry of his legs. He had a sword in his hand, and there was

nothing in his face but redness and ferocity.

Fear fell llke night around the Fianna, and they stood with slack knees

and hanging hands waiting for death. But the Carl lifted a pawful of his

oozy slop and discharged this at Cael with such a smash that the man’s

head spun off his shoulders and hopped along the ground. The Carl then

picked up the head and threw it at the body with such aim and force

that the neck part of the head jammed into the neck part of the body and

stuck there, as good a head as ever, you would have said, but that it

bad got twisted the wrong way round. The Carl then lashed his opponent

hand and foot.

“Now, dear heart, do you still claim tribute and lordship of Ireland?”

said he.

“Let me go home,” groaned Cael, “I want to go home.”

“Swear by the sun and moon, if I let you go home, that you will send to

Fionn, yearly and every year, the rent of the land of Thessaly.”

“I swear that,” said Cael, “and I would swear anything to get home.”

The Carl lifted him then and put him sitting into his ship. Then he

raised his big boot and gave the boat a kick that drove it seven leagues

out into the sea, and that was how the adventure of Cael of the Iron

finished.

“Who are you, sir?” said Fionn to the Carl.

But before answering the Carl’s shape changed into one of splendour and

delight.

“I am ruler of the Shi’ of Rath Cruachan,” he said.

Then Fionn mac Uail made a feast and a banquet for the jovial god, and

with that the tale is ended of the King of Thessaly’s son and the Carl

of the Drab Coat.

THE ENCHANTED CAVE OF CESH CORRAN

CHAPTER I

Fionn mac Uail was the most prudent chief of an army in the world, but

he was not always prudent on his own account. Discipline sometimes

irked him, and he would then take any opportunity that presented for an

adventure; for he was not only a soldier, he was a poet also, that is, a

man of science, and whatever was strange or unusual had an irresistible

at-traction for him. Such a soldier was he that, single-handed, he could

take the Fianna out of any hole they got into, but such an inveterate

poet was he that all the Fianna together could scarcely retrieve him

from the abysses into which he tumbled. It took him to keep the Fianna

safe, but it took all the Fianna to keep their captain out of danger.

They did not complain of this, for they loved every hair of Fionn’s head

more than they loved their wives and children, and that was reasonable

for there was never in the world a person more worthy of love than Fionn

was.

Goll mac Morna did not admit so much in words, but he admitted it in

all his actions, for although he never lost an opportunity of killing

a member of Fionn’s family (there was deadly feud between clann-Baiscne

and clann-Morna), yet a call from Fionn brought Goll raging to his

assistance like a lion that rages tenderly by his mate. Not even a call

was necessary, for Goll felt in his heart when Fionn was threatened, and

he would leave Fionn’s own brother only half-killed to fly where his arm

was wanted. He was never thanked, of course, for although Fionn loved

Goll he did not like him, and that was how Goll felt towards Fionn.

Fionn, with Cona’n the Swearer and the dogs Bran and Sceo’lan, was

sitting on the hunting-mound at the top of Cesh Corran. Below and around

on every side the Fianna were beating the coverts in Legney and Brefny,

ranging the fastnesses of Glen Dallan, creeping in the nut and beech

forests of Carbury, spying among the woods of Kyle Conor, and ranging

the wide plain of Moy Conal.

The great captain was happy: his eyes were resting on the sights he

liked best--the sunlight of a clear day, the waving trees, the pure

sky, and the lovely movement of the earth; and his ears were filled with

delectable sounds--the baying of eager dogs, the clear calling of young

men, the shrill whistling that came from every side, and each sound of

which told a definite thing about the hunt. There was also the plunge

and scurry of the deer, the yapping of badgers, and the whirr of birds

driven into reluctant flight.

CHAPTER II

Now the king of the Shi’ of Cesh Corran, Conaran, son of Imidel, was

also watching the hunt, but Fionn did not see him, for we cannot see the

people of Faery until we enter their realm, and Fionn was not thinking

of Faery at that moment. Conaran did not like Fionn, and, seeing that

the great champion was alone, save for Cona’n and the two hounds Bran

and Sceo’lan, he thought the time had come to get Fionn into his power.

We do not know what Fionn had done to Conaran, but it must have been bad

enough, for the king of the Shi’ of Cesh Cotran was filled with joy

at the sight of Fionn thus close to him, thus unprotected, thus

unsuspicious.

This Conaran had four daughters. He was fond of them and proud of them,

but if one were to search the Shi’s of Ireland or the land of Ireland,

the equal of these four would not be found for ugliness and bad humour

and twisted temperaments.

Their hair was black as ink and tough as wire: it stuck up and poked out

and hung down about their heads in bushes and spikes and tangles. Their

eyes were bleary and red. Their mouths were black and twisted, and in

each of these mouths there was a hedge of curved yellow fangs. They had

long scraggy necks that could turn all the way round like the neck of

a hen. Their arms were long and skinny and muscular, and at the end of

each finger they had a spiked nail that was as hard as horn and as sharp

as a briar. Their bodies were covered with a bristle of hair and fur

and fluff, so that they looked like dogs in some parts and like cats

in others, and in other parts again they looked like chickens. They had

moustaches poking under their noses and woolly wads growing out of their

ears, so that when you looked at them the first time you never wanted

to look at them again, and if you had to look at them a second time you

were likely to die of the sight.

They were called Caevo’g, Cuillen, and Iaran. The fourth daughter,

Iarnach, was not present at that moment, so nothing need be said of her

yet.

Conaran called these three to him.

“Fionn is alone,” said he. “Fionn is alone, my treasures.”

“Ah!” said Caevo’g, and her jaw crunched upwards and stuck outwards, as

was usual with her when she was satisfied.

“When the chance comes take it,” Conaran continued, and he smiled a

black, beetle-browed, unbenevolent smile.

“It’s a good word,” quoth Cuillen, and she swung her jaw loose and made

it waggle up and down, for that was the way she smiled.

“And here is the chance,” her father added.

“The chance is here,” Iaran echoed, with a smile that was very like

her sister’s, only that it was worse, and the wen that grew on her nose

joggled to and fro and did not get its balance again for a long time.

Then they smiled a smile that was agreeable to their own eyes, but which

would have been a deadly thing for anybody else to see.

“But Fionn cannot see us,” Caevo’g objected, and her brow set downwards

and her chin set upwards and her mouth squeezed sidewards, so that her

face looked like a badly disappointed nut.

“And we are worth seeing,” Cuillen continued, and the disappointment

that was set in her sister’s face got carved and twisted into hers, but

it was worse in her case.

“That is the truth,” said Iaran in a voice of lamentation, and her face

took on a gnarl and a writhe and a solidity of ugly woe that beat the

other two and made even her father marvel.

“He cannot see us now,” Conaran replied, “but he will see us in a

minute.”

“Won’t Fionn be glad when he sees us!” said the three sisters.

And then they joined hands and danced joyfully around their father, and

they sang a song, the first line of which is:

“Fionn thinks he is safe. But who knows when the sky will

fall?”

Lots of the people in the Shi’ learned that song by heart, and they

applied it to every kind of circumstance.

CHAPTER III

BY his arts Conaran changed the sight of Fionn’s eyes, and he did the

same for Cona’n.

In a few minutes Fionn stood up from his place on the mound. Everything

was about him as before, and he did not know that he had gone into

Faery. He walked for a minute up and down the hillock. Then, as by

chance, he stepped down the sloping end of the mound and stood with his

mouth open, staring. He cried out:

“Come down here, Cona’n, my darling.”

Cona’n stepped down to him.

“Am I dreaming?” Fionn demanded, and he stretched out his finger before

him.

“If you are dreaming,” said Congn, “I’m dreaming too. They weren’t here

a minute ago,” he stammered.

Fionn looked up at the sky and found that it was still there. He stared

to one side and saw the trees of Kyle Conor waving in the distance. He

bent his ear to the wind and heard the shouting of hunters, the yapping

of dogs, and the clear whistles, which told how the hunt was going.

“Well!” said Fionn to himself.

“By my hand!” quoth Cona’n to his own soul.

And the two men stared into the hillside as though what they were

looking at was too wonderful to be looked away from.

“Who are they?” said Fionn.

“What are they?” Cona’n gasped. And they stared again.

For there was a great hole like a doorway in the side of the mound, and

in that doorway the daughters of Conaran sat spinning. They had three

crooked sticks of holly set up before the cave, and they were reeling

yarn off these. But it was enchantment they were weaving.

“One could not call them handsome,” said Cona’n.

“One could,” Fionn replied, “but it would not be true.”

“I cannot see them properly,” Fionn complained. “They are hiding behind

the holly.”

“I would be contented if I could not see them at all,” his companion

grumbled.

But the Chief insisted.

“I want to make sure that it is whiskers they are wearing.”

“Let them wear whiskers or not wear them,” Cona’n counselled. “But let

us have nothing to do with them.”

“One must not be frightened of anything,” Fionn stated.

“I am not frightened,” Cona’n explained. “I only want to keep my good

opinion of women, and if the three yonder are women, then I feel sure I

shall begin to dislike females from this minute out.”

“Come on, my love,” said Fionn, “for I must find out if these whiskers

are true.”

He strode resolutely into the cave. He pushed the branches of holly

aside and marched up to Conaran’s daughters, with Cona’n behind him.

CHAPTER IV

The instant they passed the holly a strange weakness came over the

heroes. Their fists seemed to grow heavy as lead, and went dingle-dangle

at the ends of their arms; their legs became as light as straws and

began to bend in and out; their necks became too delicate to hold

anything up, so that their heads wibbled and wobbled from side to side.

“What’s wrong at all?” said Cona’n, as he tumbled to the ground.

“Everything is,” Fionn replied, and he tumbled beside him.

The three sisters then tied the heroes with every kind of loop and twist

and knot that could be thought of.

“Those are whiskers!” said Fionn.

“Alas!” said Conan.

“What a place you must hunt whiskers in?” he mumbled savagely. “Who

wants whiskers?” he groaned.

But Fionn was thinking of other things.

“If there was any way of warning the Fianna not to come here,” Fionn

murmured.

“There is no way, my darling,” said Caevo’g, and she smiled a smile that

would have killed Fionn, only that he shut his eyes in time.

After a moment he murmured again:

“Cona’n, my dear love, give the warning whistle so that the Fianna will

keep out of this place.”

A little whoof, like the sound that would be made by a baby and it

asleep, came from Cona’n.

“Fionn,” said he, “there isn’t a whistle in me. We are done for,” said

he.

“You are done for, indeed,” said Cuillen, and she smiled a hairy and

twisty and fangy smile that almost finished Cona’n.

By that time some of the Fianna had returned to the mound to see why

Bran and Sceo’lan were barking so outrageously. They saw the cave and

went into it, but no sooner had they passed the holly branches than

their strength went from them, and they were seized and bound by the

vicious hags. Little by little all the members of the Fianna returned to

the hill, and each of them was drawn into the cave, and each was bound

by the sisters.

Oisi’n and Oscar and mac Lugac came, with the nobles of clann-Baiscne,

and with those of clann-Corcoran and clann-Smo’l; they all came, and

they were all bound.

It was a wonderful sight and a great deed this binding of the Fianna,

and the three sisters laughed with a joy that was terrible to hear and

was almost death to see. As the men were captured they were carried by

the hags into dark mysterious holes and black perplexing labyrinths.

“Here is another one,” cried Caevo’g as she bundled a trussed champion

along.

“This one is fat,” said Cuillen, and she rolled a bulky Fenian along

like a wheel.

“Here,” said Iaran, “is a love of a man. One could eat this kind of

man,” she murmured, and she licked a lip that had whiskers growing

inside as well as out.

And the corded champion whimpered in her arms, for he did not know

but eating might indeed be his fate, and he would have preferred to be

coffined anywhere in the world rather than to be coffined inside of that

face. So far for them.

CHAPTER V

Within the cave there was silence except for the voices of the hags and

the scarcely audible moaning of the Fianna-Finn, but without there was

a dreadful uproar, for as each man returned from the chase his dogs came

with him, and although the men went into the cave the dogs did not.

They were too wise.

They stood outside, filled with savagery and terror, for they could

scent their masters and their masters’ danger, and perhaps they could

get from the cave smells till then unknown and full of alarm.

From the troop of dogs there arose a baying and barking, a snarling and

howling and growling, a yelping and squealing and bawling for which no

words can be found. Now and again a dog nosed among a thousand smells

and scented his master; the ruff of his neck stood up like a hog’s

bristles and a netty ridge prickled along his spine. Then with red eyes,

with bared fangs, with a hoarse, deep snort and growl he rushed at the

cave, and then he halted and sneaked back again with all his ruffles

smoothed, his tail between his legs, his eyes screwed sideways in

miserable apology and alarm, and a long thin whine of woe dribbling out

of his nose.

The three sisters took their wide-channelled, hard-tempered swords in

their hands, and prepared to slay the Fianna, but before doing so they

gave one more look from the door of the cave to see if there might be a

straggler of the Fianna who was escaping death by straggling, and they

saw one coming towards them with Bran and Sceo’lan leaping beside him,

while all the other dogs began to burst their throats with barks and

split their noses with snorts and wag their tails off at sight of the

tall, valiant, white-toothed champion, Goll mor mac Morna. “We will kill

that one first,” said Caevo’g.

“There is only one of him,” said Cuillen.

“And each of us three is the match for an hundred,” said Iaran.

The uncanny, misbehaved, and outrageous harridans advanced then to meet

the son of Morna, and when he saw these three Goll whipped the sword

from his thigh, swung his buckler round, and got to them in ten great

leaps.

Silence fell on the world during that conflict. The wind went down; the

clouds stood still; the old hill itself held its breath; the warriors

within ceased to be men and became each an ear; and the dogs sat in

a vast circle round the combatants, with their heads all to one side,

their noses poked forward, their mouths half open, and their tails

forgotten. Now and again a dog whined in a whisper and snapped a

little snap on the air, but except for that there was neither sound nor

movement.

It was a long fight. It was a hard and a tricky fight, and Goll won it

by bravery and strategy and great good luck; for with one shrewd slice

of his blade he carved two of these mighty termagants into equal halves,

so that there were noses and whiskers to his right hand and knees and

toes to his left: and that stroke was known afterwards as one of the

three great sword-strokes of Ireland. The third hag, however, had

managed to get behind Goll, and she leaped on to his back with the bound

of a panther, and hung here with the skilful, many-legged, tight-twisted

clutching of a spider. But the great champion gave a twist of his hips

and a swing of his shoulders that whirled her around him like a sack.

He got her on the ground and tied her hands with the straps of a shield,

and he was going to give her the last blow when she appealed to his

honour and bravery.

“I put my life under your protection,” said she. “And if you let me go

free I will lift the enchantment from the Fianna-Finn and will give them

all back to you again.”

“I agree to that,” said Goll, and he untied her straps. The harridan did

as she had promised, and in a short time Fionn and Oisi’n and Oscar and

Cona’n were released, and after that all the Fianna were released.

CHAPTER VI

As each man came out of the cave he gave a jump and a shout; the courage

of the world went into him and he felt that he could fight twenty. But

while they were talking over the adventure and explaining how it had

happened, a vast figure strode over the side of the hill and descended

among them. It was Conaran’s fourth daughter.

If the other three had been terrible to look on, this one was more

terrible than the three together. She was clad in iron plate, and she

had a wicked sword by her side and a knobby club in her hand She halted

by the bodies of her sisters, and bitter tears streamed down into her

beard.

“Alas, my sweet ones,” said she, “I am too late.”

And then she stared fiercely at Fionn.

“I demand a combat,” she roared.

“It is your right,” said Fionn. He turned to his son.

“Oisi’n, my heart, kill me this honourable hag.” But for the only time

in his life Oisi’n shrank from a combat.

“I cannot do it,” he said, “I feel too weak.”

Fionn was astounded. “Oscar,” he said, “will you kill me this great

hag?”

Oscar stammered miserably. “I would not be able to,” he said.

Cona’n also refused, and so did Caelte mac Rona’n and mac Lugac, for

there was no man there but was terrified by the sight of that mighty and

valiant harridan.

Fionn rose to his feet. “I will take this combat myself,” he said

sternly.

And he swung his buckler forward and stretched his right hand to the

sword. But at that terrible sight Goll mae Morna blushed deeply and

leaped from the ground.

“No, no,” he cried; “no, my soul, Fionn, this would not be a proper

combat for you. I take this fight.”

“You have done your share, Goll,” said the captain.

“I should finish the fight I began,” Goll continued, “for it was I who

killed the two sisters of this valiant hag, and it is against me the

feud lies.”

“That will do for me,” said the horrible daughter of Conaran. “I will

kill Goll mor mac Morna first, and after that I will kill Fionn, and

after that I will kill every Fenian of the Fianna-Finn.”

“You may begin, Goll,” said Fionn, “and I give you my blessing.”

Goll then strode forward to the fight, and the hag moved against him

with equal alacrity. In a moment the heavens rang to the clash of swords

on bucklers. It was hard to with-stand the terrific blows of that mighty

female, for her sword played with the quickness of lightning and smote

like the heavy crashing of a storm. But into that din and encirclement

Goll pressed and ventured, steady as a rock in water, agile as a

creature of the sea, and when one of the combatants retreated it was

the hag that gave backwards. As her foot moved a great shout of joy rose

from the Fianna. A snarl went over the huge face of the monster and

she leaped forward again, but she met Goll’s point in the road; it went

through her, and in another moment Goll took her head from its shoulders

and swung it on high before Fionn.

As the Fianna turned homewards Fionn spoke to his great champion and

enemy.

“Goll,” he said, “I have a daughter.”

“A lovely girl, a blossom of the dawn,” said Goll.

“Would she please you as a wife?” the chief demanded.

“She would please me,” said Goll.

“She is your wife,” said Fionn.

But that did not prevent Goll from killing Fionn’s brother Cairell later

on, nor did it prevent Fionn from killing Goll later on again, and

the last did not prevent Goll from rescuing Fionn out of hell when the

Fianna-Finn were sent there under the new God. Nor is there any reason

to complain or to be astonished at these things, for it is a mutual

world we llve in, a give-and-take world, and there is no great harm in

it.

BECUMA OF THE WHITE SKIN

CHAPTER I

There are more worlds than one, and in many ways they are unlike each

other. But joy and sorrow, or, in other words, good and evil, are not

absent in their degree from any of the worlds, for wherever there is

life there is action, and action is but the expression of one or other

of these qualities.

After this Earth there is the world of the Shi’. Beyond it again lies

the Many-Coloured Land. Next comes the Land of Wonder, and after that

the Land of Promise awaits us. You will cross clay to get into the Shi’;

you will cross water to attain the Many-Coloured Land; fire must be

passed ere the Land of Wonder is attained, but we do not know what will

be crossed for the fourth world.

This adventure of Conn the Hundred Fighter and his son Art was by the

way of water, and therefore he was more advanced in magic than Fionn

was, all of whose adventures were by the path of clay and into Faery

only, but Conn was the High King and so the arch-magician of Ireland.

A council had been called in the Many-Coloured Land to discuss the case

of a lady named Becuma Cneisgel, that is, Becuma of the White Skin, the

daughter of Eogan Inver. She had run away from her husband Labraid and

had taken refuge with Gadiar, one of the sons of Mananna’n mac Lir, the

god of the sea, and the ruler, therefore, of that sphere.

It seems, then, that there is marriage in two other spheres. In the

Shi’ matrimony is recorded as being parallel in every respect with

earth-marriage, and the desire which urges to it seems to be as violent

and inconstant as it is with us; but in the Many-Coloured Land marriage

is but a contemplation of beauty, a brooding and meditation wherein all

grosser desire is unknown and children are born to sinless parents.

In the Shi’ the crime of Becuma would have been lightly considered, and

would have received none or but a nominal punishment, but in the second

world a horrid gravity attaches to such a lapse, and the retribution

meted is implacable and grim. It may be dissolution by fire, and that

can note a destruction too final for the mind to contemplate; or it may

be banishment from that sphere to a lower and worse one.

This was the fate of Becuma of the White Skin.

One may wonder how, having attained to that sphere, she could have

carried with her so strong a memory of the earth. It is certain that she

was not a fit person to exist in the Many-Coloured Land, and it is to be

feared that she was organised too grossly even for life in the Shi’.

She was an earth-woman, and she was banished to the earth.

Word was sent to the Shi’s of Ireland that this lady should not be

permitted to enter any of them; from which it would seem that the

ordinances of the Shi come from the higher world, and, it might follow,

that the conduct of earth lies in the Shi’.

In that way, the gates of her own world and the innumerable doors of

Faery being closed against her, Becuma was forced to appear in the world

of men.

It is pleasant, however, notwithstanding her terrible crime and her

woeful punishment, to think how courageous she was. When she was told

her sentence, nay, her doom, she made no outcry, nor did she waste any

time in sorrow. She went home and put on her nicest clothes.

She wore a red satin smock, and, over this, a cloak of green silk out of

which long fringes of gold swung and sparkled, and she had light sandals

of white bronze on her thin, shapely feet. She had long soft hair that

was yellow as gold, and soft as the curling foam of the sea. Her eyes

were wide and clear as water and were grey as a dove’s breast. Her teeth

were white as snow and of an evenness to marvel at. Her lips were thin

and beautifully curved: red lips in truth, red as winter berries and

tempting as the fruits of summer. The people who superintended her

departure said mournfully that when she was gone there would be no more

beauty left in their world.

She stepped into a coracle, it was pushed on the enchanted waters, and

it went forward, world within world, until land appeared, and her boat

swung in low tide against a rock at the foot of Ben Edair.

So far for her.

CHAPTER II

Conn the Hundred Fighter, Ard-Ri’ of Ireland, was in the lowest spirits

that can be imagined, for his wife was dead. He had been Ard-Ri for nine

years, and during his term the corn used to be reaped three times in

each year, and there was full and plenty of everything. There are few

kings who can boast of more kingly results than he can, but there was

sore trouble in store for him.

He had been married to Eithne, the daughter of Brisland Binn, King of

Norway, and, next to his subjects, he loved his wife more than all that

was lovable in the world. But the term of man and woman, of king or

queen, is set in the stars, and there is no escaping Doom for any one;

so, when her time came, Eithne died.

Now there were three great burying-places in Ireland--the Brugh of the

Boyne in Ulster, over which Angus Og is chief and god; the Shi’ mound

of Cruachan Ahi, where Ethal Anbual presides over the underworld of

Connacht, and Tailltin, in Royal Meath. It was in this last, the sacred

place of his own lordship, that Conn laid his wife to rest.

Her funeral games were played during nine days. Her keen was sung by

poets and harpers, and a cairn ten acres wide was heaved over her clay.

Then the keening ceased and the games drew to an end; the princes of the

Five Prov-inces returned by horse or by chariot to their own places;

the concourse of mourners melted away, and there was nothing left by

the great cairn but the sun that dozed upon it in the daytime, the heavy

clouds that brooded on it in the night, and the desolate, memoried king.

For the dead queen had been so lovely that Conn could not forget her;

she had been so kind at every moment that he could not but miss her at

every moment; but it was in the Council Chamber and the Judgement

Hall that he most pondered her memory. For she had also been wise, and

lack-ing her guidance, all grave affairs seemed graver, shadowing each

day and going with him to the pillow at night.

The trouble of the king becomes the trouble of the subject, for how

shall we live if judgement is withheld, or if faulty decisions are

promulgated? Therefore, with the sorrow of the king, all Ireland was in

grief, and it was the wish of every person that he should marry again.

Such an idea, however, did not occur to him, for he could not conceive

how any woman should fill the place his queen had vacated. He grew more

and more despondent, and less and less fitted to cope with affairs of

state, and one day he instructed his son Art to take the rule during his

absence, and he set out for Ben Edair.

For a great wish had come upon him to walk beside the sea; to listen

to the roll and boom of long, grey breakers; to gaze on an unfruitful,

desolate wilderness of waters; and to forget in those sights all that

he could forget, and if he could not forget then to remember all that he

should remember.

He was thus gazing and brooding when one day he observed a coracle

drawing to the shore. A young girl stepped from it and walked to him

among black boulders and patches of yellow sand.

CHAPTER III

Being a king he had authority to ask questions. Conn asked her,

therefore, all the questions that he could think of, for it is not every

day that a lady drives from the sea, and she wearing a golden-fringed

cloak of green silk through which a red satin smock peeped at the

openings. She replied to his questions, but she did not tell him all the

truth; for, indeed, she could not afford to.

She knew who he was, for she retained some of the powers proper to the

worlds she had left, and as he looked on her soft yellow hair and on her

thin red lips, Conn recognised, as all men do, that one who is lovely

must also be good, and so he did not frame any inquiry on that count;

for everything is forgotten in the presence of a pretty woman, and a

magician can be bewitched also.

She told Conn that the fame of his son Art had reached even the

Many-Coloured Land, and that she had fallen in love with the boy. This

did not seem unreasonable to one who had himself ventured much in Faery,

and who had known so many of the people of that world leave their own

land for the love of a mortal.

“What is your name, my sweet lady?” said the king.

“I am called Delvcaem (Fair Shape) and I am the daughter of Morgan,” she

replied.

“I have heard much of Morgan,” said the king. “He is a very great

magician.”

During this conversation Conn had been regarding her with the minute

freedom which is right only in a king. At what precise instant he forgot

his dead consort we do not know, but it is certain that at this moment

his mind was no longer burdened with that dear and lovely memory. His

voice was melancholy when he spoke again.

“You love my son!”

“Who could avoid loving him?” she murmured.

“When a woman speaks to a man about the love she feels for another man

she is not liked. And,” he continued, “when she speaks to a man who has

no wife of his own about her love for another man then she is disliked.”

“I would not be disliked by you,” Becuma murmured.

“Nevertheless,” said he regally, “I will not come between a woman and

her choice.”

“I did not know you lacked a wife,” said Becuma, but indeed she did.

“You know it now,” the king replied sternly.

“What shall I do?” she inquired, “am I to wed you or your son?”

“You must choose,” Conn answered.

“If you allow me to choose it means that you do not want me very badly,”

said she with a smile.

“Then I will not allow you to choose,” cried the king, “and it is with

myself you shall marry.”

He took her hand in his and kissed it.

“Lovely is this pale thin hand. Lovely is the slender foot that I see in

a small bronze shoe,” said the king.

After a suitable time she continued:

“I should not like your son to be at Tara when I am there, or for a year

afterwards, for I do not wish to meet him until I have forgotten him and

have come to know you well.”

“I do not wish to banish my son,” the king protested.

“It would not really be a banishment,” she said. “A prince’s duty could

be set him, and in such an absence he would improve his knowledge both

of Ireland and of men. Further,” she continued with downcast eyes,

“when you remember the reason that brought me here you will see that his

presence would be an embarrassment to us both, and my presence would be

unpleasant to him if he remembers his mother.”

“Nevertheless,” said Conn stubbornly, “I do not wish to banish my son;

it is awkward and unnecessary.”

“For a year only,” she pleaded.

“It is yet,” he continued thoughtfully, “a reasonable reason that you

give and I will do what you ask, but by my hand and word I don’t like

doing it.”

They set out then briskly and joyfully on the homeward journey, and in

due time they reached Tara of the Kings.

CHAPTER IV

It is part of the education of a prince to be a good chess player, and

to continually exercise his mind in view of the judgements that he will

be called upon to give and the knotty, tortuous, and perplexing matters

which will obscure the issues which he must judge. Art, the son of Conn,

was sitting at chess with Cromdes, his father’s magician.

“Be very careful about the move you are going to make,” said Cromdes.

“CAN I be careful?” Art inquired. “Is the move that you are thinking of

in my power?”

“It is not,” the other admitted.

“Then I need not be more careful than usual,” Art replied, and he made

his move.

“It is a move of banishment,” said Cromdes.

“As I will not banish myself, I suppose my father will do it, but I do

not know why he should.”

“Your father will not banish you.”

“Who then?” “Your mother.”

“My mother is dead.”

“You have a new one,” said the magician.

“Here is news,” said Art. “I think I shall not love my new mother.”

“You will yet love her better than she loves you,” said Cromdes, meaning

thereby that they would hate each other.

While they spoke the king and Becuma entered the palace.

“I had better go to greet my father,” said the young man.

“You had better wait until he sends for you,” his companion advised, and

they returned to their game.

In due time a messenger came from the king directing Art to leave Tara

instantly, and to leave Ireland for one full year.

He left Tara that night, and for the space of a year he was not seen

again in Ireland. But during that period things did not go well with the

king nor with Ireland. Every year before that time three crops of corn

used to be lifted off the land, but during Art’s absence there was no

corn in Ireland and there was no milk. The whole land went hungry.

Lean people were in every house, lean cattle in every field; the bushes

did not swing out their timely berries or seasonable nuts; the bees went

abroad as busily as ever, but each night they returned languidly, with

empty pouches, and there was no honey in their hives when the honey

season came. People began to look at each other questioningly,

meaningly, and dark remarks passed between them, for they knew that a

bad harvest means, somehow, a bad king, and, although this belief can be

combated, it is too firmly rooted in wisdom to be dismissed.

The poets and magicians met to consider why this disaster should have

befallen the country and by their arts they discovered the truth about

the king’s wife, and that she was Becuma of the White Skin, and they

discovered also the cause of her banishment from the Many-Coloured Land

that is beyond the sea, which is beyond even the grave.

They told the truth to the king, but he could not bear to be parted from

that slender-handed, gold-haired, thin-lipped, blithe enchantress, and

he required them to discover some means whereby he might retain his wife

and his crown. There was a way and the magicians told him of it.

“If the son of a sinless couple can be found and if his blood be mixed

with the soll of Tara the blight and ruin will depart from Ireland,”

said the magicians.

“If there is such a boy I will find him,” cried the Hundred Fighter.

At the end of a year Art returned to Tara. His father delivered to him

the sceptre of Ireland, and he set out on a journey to find the son of a

sinless couple such as he had been told of.

CHAPTER V

The High King did not know where exactly he should look for such a

saviour, but he was well educated and knew how to look for whatever was

lacking. This knowledge will be useful to those upon whom a similar duty

should ever devolve.

He went to Ben Edair. He stepped into a coracle and pushed out to the

deep, and he permitted the coracle to go as the winds and the waves

directed it.

In such a way he voyaged among the small islands of the sea until he

lost all knowledge of his course and was adrift far out in ocean. He was

under the guidance of the stars and the great luminaries.

He saw black seals that stared and barked and dived dancingly, with the

round turn of a bow and the forward onset of an arrow. Great whales came

heaving from the green-hued void, blowing a wave of the sea high

into the air from their noses and smacking their wide flat tails

thunder-ously on the water. Porpoises went snorting past in bands and

clans. Small fish came sliding and flickering, and all the outlandish

creatures of the deep rose by his bobbing craft and swirled and sped

away.

Wild storms howled by him so that the boat climbed painfully to the sky

on a mile-high wave, balanced for a tense moment on its level top, and

sped down the glassy side as a stone goes furiously from a sling.

Or, again, caught in the chop of a broken sea, it stayed shuddering and

backing, while above his head there was only a low sad sky, and around

him the lap and wash of grey waves that were never the same and were

never different.

After long staring on the hungry nothingness of air and water he would

stare on the skin-stretched fabric of his boat as on a strangeness, or

he would examine his hands and the texture of his skin and the stiff

black hairs that grew behind his knuckles and sprouted around his ring,

and he found in these things newness and wonder.

Then, when days of storm had passed, the low grey clouds shivered and

cracked in a thousand places, each grim islet went scudding to the

horizon as though terrified by some great breadth, and when they had

passed he stared into vast after vast of blue infinity, in the depths

of which his eyes stayed and could not pierce, and wherefrom they could

scarcely be withdrawn. A sun beamed thence that filled the air with

sparkle and the sea with a thousand lights, and looking on these he was

reminded of his home at Tara: of the columns of white and yellow bronze

that blazed out sunnily on the sun, and the red and white and yellow

painted roofs that beamed at and astonished the eye.

Sailing thus, lost in a succession of days and nights, of winds and

calms, he came at last to an island.

His back was turned to it, and long before he saw it he smelled it and

wondered; for he had been sitting as in a daze, musing on a change that

had seemed to come in his changeless world; and for a long time he could

not tell what that was which made a difference on the salt-whipped wind

or why he should be excited. For suddenly he had become excited and his

heart leaped in violent expectation.

“It is an October smell,” he said.

“It is apples that I smell.”

He turned then and saw the island, fragrant with apple trees, sweet with

wells of wine; and, hearkening towards the shore, his ears, dulled yet

with the unending rhythms of the sea, distinguished and were filled

with song; for the isle was, as it were, a nest of birds, and they sang

joyously, sweetly, triumphantly.

He landed on that lovely island, and went forward under the darting

birds, under the apple boughs, skirting fragrant lakes about which were

woods of the sacred hazel and into which the nuts of knowledge fell and

swam; and he blessed the gods of his people because of the ground that

did not shiver and because of the deeply rooted trees that could not gad

or budge.

CHAPTER VI

Having gone some distance by these pleasant ways he saw a shapely house

dozing in the sunlight.

It was thatched with the wings of birds, blue wings and yellow and white

wings, and in the centre of the house there was a door of crystal set in

posts of bronze.

The queen of this island lived there, Rigru (Large-eyed), the daughter

of Lodan, and wife of Daire Degamra. She was seated on a crystal

throne with her son Segda by her side, and they welcomed the High King

courteously.

There were no servants in this palace; nor was there need for them. The

High King found that his hands had washed themselves, and when later on

he noticed that food had been placed before him he noticed also that

it had come without the assistance of servile hands. A cloak was laid

gently about his shoulders, and he was glad of it, for his own was

soiled by exposure to sun and wind and water, and was not worthy of a

lady’s eye.

Then he was invited to eat.

He noticed, however, that food had been set for no one but himself, and

this did not please him, for to eat alone was contrary to the hospitable

usage of a king, and was contrary also to his contract with the gods.

“Good, my hosts,” he remonstrated, “it is geasa (taboo) for me to eat

alone.”

“But we never eat together,” the queen replied.

“I cannot violate my geasa,” said the High King.

“I will eat with you,” said Segda (Sweet Speech), “and thus, while you

are our guest you will not do violence to your vows.”

“Indeed,” said Conn, “that will be a great satisfaction, for I have

already all the trouble that I can cope with and have no wish to add to

it by offending the gods.”

“What is your trouble?” the gentle queen asked. “During a year,” Conn

replied, “there has been neither corn nor milk in Ireland. The land is

parched, the trees are withered, the birds do not sing in Ireland, and

the bees do not make honey.”

“You are certainly in trouble,” the queen assented.

“But,” she continued, “for what purpose have you come to our island?”

“I have come to ask for the loan of your son.”

“A loan of my son!”

“I have been informed,” Conn explained, “that if the son of a sinless

couple is brought to Tara and is bathed in the waters of Ireland the

land will be delivered from those ills.”

The king of this island, Daire, had not hitherto spoken, but he now did

so with astonishment and emphasis.

“We would not lend our son to any one, not even to gain the kingship of

the world,” said he.

But Segda, observing that the guest’s countenance was discomposed, broke

in:

“It is not kind to refuse a thing that the Ard-Ri’ of Ireland asks for,

and I will go with him.”

“Do not go, my pulse,” his father advised.

“Do not go, my one treasure,” his mother pleaded.

“I must go indeed,” the boy replied, “for it is to do good I am

required, and no person may shirk such a requirement.”

“Go then,” said his father, “but I will place you under the protection

of the High King and of the Four Provincial Kings of Ireland, and under

the protection of Art, the son of Conn, and of Fionn, the son of Uail,

and under the protection of the magicians and poets and the men of art

in Ireland.” And he thereupon bound these protections and safeguards on

the Ard-Ri’ with an oath.

“I will answer for these protections,” said Conn.

He departed then from the island with Segda and in three days they

reached Ireland, and in due time they arrived at Tara.

CHAPTER VII

On reaching the palace Conn called his magicians and poets to a council

and informed them that he had found the boy they sought--the son of a

virgin. These learned people consulted together, and they stated that

the young man must be killed, and that his blood should be mixed with

the earth of Tara and sprinkled under the withered trees.

When Segda heard this he was astonished and defiant; then, seeing that

he was alone and without prospect of succour, he grew downcast and was

in great fear for his life. But remembering the safeguards under which

he had been placed, he enumerated these to the assembly, and called on

the High King to grant him the protections that were his due.

Conn was greatly perturbed, but, as in duty bound, he placed the boy

under the various protections that were in his oath, and, with the

courage of one who has no more to gain or lose, he placed Segda,

furthermore, under the protection of all the men of Ireland.

But the men of Ireland refused to accept that bond, saying that although

the Ard-Ri’ was acting justly towards the boy he was not acting justly

towards Ireland.

“We do not wish to slay this prince for our pleasure,” they argued, “but

for the safety of Ireland he must be killed.”

Angry parties were formed. Art, and Fionn the son of Uail, and the

princes of the land were outraged at the idea that one who had been

placed under their protection should be hurt by any hand. But the men of

Ireland and the magicians stated that the king had gone to Faery for a

special purpose, and that his acts outside or contrary to that purpose

were illegal, and committed no person to obedience.

There were debates in the Council Hall, in the market-place, in the

streets of Tara, some holding that national honour dissolved and

absolved all personal honour, and others protesting that no man had

aught but his personal honour, and that above it not the gods, not even

Ireland, could be placed--for it is to be known that Ireland is a god.

Such a debate was in course, and Segda, to whom both sides addressed

gentle and courteous arguments, grew more and more disconsolate.

“You shall die for Ireland, dear heart,” said one of them, and he gave

Segda three kisses on each cheek.

“Indeed,” said Segda, returning those kisses, “indeed I had not

bargained to die for Ireland, but only to bathe in her waters and to

remove her pestilence.”

“But dear child and prince,” said another, kissing him likewise, “if any

one of us could save Ireland by dying for her how cheerfully we would

die.”

And Segda, returning his three kisses, agreed that the death was noble,

but that it was not in his undertaking.

Then, observing the stricken countenances about him, and the faces of

men and women hewn thin by hunger, his resolution melted away, and he

said:

“I think I must die for you,” and then he said:

“I will die for you.”

And when he had said that, all the people present touched his cheek with

their lips, and the love and peace of Ireland entered into his soul, so

that he was tranquil and proud and happy.

The executioner drew his wide, thin blade and all those present covered

their eyes with their cloaks, when a wailing voice called on the

executioner to delay yet a moment. The High King uncovered his eyes and

saw that a woman had approached driving a cow before her.

“Why are you killing the boy?” she demanded.

The reason for this slaying was explained to her.

“Are you sure,” she asked, “that the poets and magicians really know

everything?”

“Do they not?” the king inquired.

“Do they?” she insisted.

And then turning to the magicians:

“Let one magician of the magicians tell me what is hidden in the bags

that are lying across the back of my cow.”

But no magician could tell it, nor did they try to.

“Questions are not answered thus,” they said. “There is formulae, and

the calling up of spirits, and lengthy complicated preparations in our

art.”

“I am not badly learned in these arts,” said the woman, “and I say that

if you slay this cow the effect will be the same as if you had killed

the boy.”

“We would prefer to kill a cow or a thousand cows rather than harm this

young prince,” said Conn, “but if we spare the boy will these evils

return?”

“They will not be banished until you have banished their cause.”

“And what is their cause?”

“Becuma is the cause, and she must be banished.”

“If you must tell me what to do,” said Conn, “tell me at least to do

something that I can do.”

“I will tell you certainly. You can keep Becuma and your ills as long as

you want to. It does not matter to me. Come, my son,” she said to

Segda, for it was Segda’s mother who had come to save him; and then

that sinless queen and her son went back to their home of enchantment,

leaving the king and Fionn and the magicians and nobles of Ireland

astonished and ashamed.

CHAPTER VIII

There are good and evil people in this and in every other world, and the

person who goes hence will go to the good or the evil that is native

to him, while those who return come as surely to their due. The trouble

which had fallen on Becuma did not leave her repentant, and the sweet

lady began to do wrong as instantly and innocently as a flower begins

to grow. It was she who was responsible for the ills which had come on

Ireland, and we may wonder why she brought these plagues and droughts to

what was now her own country.

Under all wrong-doing lies personal vanity or the feeling that we are

endowed and privileged beyond our fellows. It is probable that, however

courageously she had accepted fate, Becuma had been sharply stricken in

her pride; in the sense of personal strength, aloofness, and identity,

in which the mind likens itself to god and will resist every domination

but its own. She had been punished, that is, she had submitted to

control, and her sense of freedom, of privilege, of very being, was

outraged. The mind flinches even from the control of natural law, and

how much more from the despotism of its own separated likenesses, for if

another can control me that other has usurped me, has become me, and how

terribly I seem diminished by the seeming addition!

This sense of separateness is vanity, and is the bed of all wrong-doing.

For we are not freedom, we are control, and we must submit to our own

function ere we can exercise it. Even unconsciously we accept the rights

of others to all that we have, and if we will not share our good with

them, it is because we cannot, having none; but we will yet give what

we have, although that be evil. To insist on other people sharing in

our personal torment is the first step towards insisting that they shall

share in our joy, as we shall insist when we get it.

Becuma considered that if she must suffer all else she met should suffer

also. She raged, therefore, against Ireland, and in particular she raged

against young Art, her husband’s son, and she left undone nothing that

could afflict Ireland or the prince. She may have felt that she could

not make them suffer, and that is a maddening thought to any woman. Or

perhaps she had really desired the son instead of the father, and her

thwarted desire had perpetuated itself as hate. But it is true that Art

regarded his mother’s successor with intense dislike, and it is true

that she actively returned it.

One day Becuma came on the lawn before the palace, and seeing that Art

was at chess with Cromdes she walked to the table on which the match was

being played and for some time regarded the game. But the young prince

did not take any notice of her while she stood by the board, for he knew

that this girl was the enemy of Ireland, and he could not bring himself

even to look at her.

Becuma, looking down on his beautiful head, smiled as much in rage as in

disdain.

“O son of a king,” said she, “I demand a game with you for stakes.”

Art then raised his head and stood up courteously, but he did not look

at her.

“Whatever the queen demands I will do,” said he.

“Am I not your mother also?” she replied mockingly, as she took the seat

which the chief magician leaped from.

The game was set then, and her play was so skilful that Art was hard put

to counter her moves. But at a point of the game Becuma grew thoughtful,

and, as by a lapse of memory, she made a move which gave the victory to

her opponent. But she had intended that. She sat then, biting on her lip

with her white small teeth and staring angrily at Art.

“What do you demand from me?” she asked.

“I bind you to eat no food in Ireland until you find the wand of Curoi,

son of Dare’.”

Becuma then put a cloak about her and she went from Tara northward and

eastward until she came to the dewy, sparkling Brugh of Angus mac an Og

in Ulster, but she was not admitted there. She went thence to the Shi’

ruled over by Eogabal, and although this lord would not admit her, his

daughter Aine’, who was her foster-sister, let her into Faery.

She made inquiries and was informed where the dun of Curoi mac Dare’

was, and when she had received this intelligence she set out for Sliev

Mis. By what arts she coaxed Curoi to give up his wand it matters not,

enough that she was able to return in triumph to Tara. When she handed

the wand to Art, she said:

“I claim my game of revenge.”

“It is due to you,” said Art, and they sat on the lawn before the palace

and played.

A hard game that was, and at times each of the combatants sat for an

hour staring on the board before the next move was made, and at times

they looked from the board and for hours stared on the sky seeking as

though in heaven for advice. But Becuma’s foster-sister, Aine’, came

from the Shi’, and, unseen by any, she interfered with Art’s play, so

that, suddenly, when he looked again on the board, his face went pale,

for he saw that the game was lost.

“I didn’t move that piece,” said he sternly.

“Nor did I,” Becuma replied, and she called on the onlookers to confirm

that statement.

She was smiling to herself secretly, for she had seen what the mortal

eyes around could not see.

“I think the game is mine,” she insisted softly.

“I think that your friends in Faery have cheated,” he replied, “but the

game is yours if you are content to win it that way.”

“I bind you,” said Becuma, “to eat no food in Ireland until you have

found Delvcaem, the daughter of Morgan.”

“Where do I look for her?” said Art in despair.

“She is in one of the islands of the sea,” Becuma replied, “that is

all I will tell you,” and she looked at him maliciously, joyously,

contentedly, for she thought he would never return from that journey,

and that Morgan would see to it.

CHAPTER IX

Art, as his father had done before him, set out for the Many-Coloured

Land, but it was from Inver Colpa he embarked and not from Ben Edair.

At a certain time he passed from the rough green ridges of the sea to

enchanted waters, and he roamed from island to island asking all people

how he might come to Delvcaem, the daughter of Morgan. But he got no

news from any one, until he reached an island that was fragrant with

wild apples, gay with flowers, and joyous with the song of birds and the

deep mellow drumming of the bees. In this island he was met by a lady,

Crede’, the Truly Beautiful, and when they had exchanged kisses, he told

her who he was and on what errand he was bent.

“We have been expecting you,” said Crede’, “but alas, poor soul, it is

a hard, and a long, bad way that you must go; for there is sea and land,

danger and difficulty between you and the daughter of Morgan.”

“Yet I must go there,” he answered.

“There is a wild dark ocean to be crossed. There is a dense wood where

every thorn on every tree is sharp as a spear-point and is curved and

clutching. There is a deep gulf to be gone through,” she said, “a place

of silence and terror, full of dumb, venomous monsters. There is an

immense oak forest--dark, dense, thorny, a place to be strayed in,

a place to be utterly bewildered and lost in. There is a vast dark

wilderness, and therein is a dark house, lonely and full of echoes, and

in it there are seven gloomy hags, who are warned already of your coming

and are waiting to plunge you in a bath of molten lead.”

“It is not a choice journey,” said Art, “but I have no choice and must

go.”

“Should you pass those hags,” she continued, “and no one has yet passed

them, you must meet Ailill of the Black Teeth, the son of Mongan Tender

Blossom, and who could pass that gigantic and terrible fighter?”

“It is not easy to find the daughter of Morgan,” said Art in a

melancholy voice.

“It is not easy,” Crede’ replied eagerly, “and if you will take my

advice--”

“Advise me,” he broke in, “for in truth there is no man standing in such

need of counsel as I do.”

“I would advise you,” said Crede’ in a low voice, “to seek no more for

the sweet daughter of Morgan, but to stay in this place where all that

is lovely is at your service.”

“But, but--” cried Art in astonishment.

“Am I not as sweet as the daughter of Morgan?” she demanded, and she

stood before him queenly and pleadingly, and her eyes took his with

imperious tenderness.

“By my hand,” he answered, “you are sweeter and lovelier than any being

under the sun, but--”

“And with me,” she said, “you will forget Ireland.”

“I am under bonds,” cried Art, “I have passed my word, and I would

not forget Ireland or cut myself from it for all the kingdoms of the

Many-Coloured Land.”

Crede’ urged no more at that time, but as they were parting she

whispered, “There are two girls, sisters of my own, in Morgan’s palace.

They will come to you with a cup in either hand; one cup will be filled

with wine and one with poison. Drink from the right-hand cup, O my

dear.”

Art stepped into his coracle, and then, wringing her hands, she made yet

an attempt to dissuade him from that drear journey.

“Do not leave me,” she urged. “Do not affront these dangers. Around the

palace of Morgan there is a palisade of copper spikes, and on the top of

each spike the head of a man grins and shrivels. There is one spike only

which bears no head, and it is for your head that spike is waiting. Do

not go there, my love.”

“I must go indeed,” said. Art earnestly.

“There is yet a danger,” she called. “Beware of Delvcaem’s mother, Dog

Head, daughter of the King of the Dog Heads. Beware of her.”

“Indeed,” said Art to himself, “there is so much to beware of that I

will beware of nothing. I will go about my business,” he said to the

waves, “and I will let those beings and monsters and the people of the

Dog Heads go about their business.”

CHAPTER X

He went forward in his light bark, and at some moment found that he

had parted from those seas and was adrift on vaster and more turbulent

billows. From those dark-green surges there gaped at him monstrous

and cavernous jaws; and round, wicked, red-rimmed, bulging eyes stared

fixedly at the boat. A ridge of inky water rushed foaming mountainously

on his board, and behind that ridge came a vast warty head that gurgled

and groaned. But at these vile creatures he thrust with his lengthy

spear or stabbed at closer reach with a dagger.

He was not spared one of the terrors which had been foretold. Thus, in

the dark thick oak forest he slew the seven hags and buried them in the

molten lead which they had heated for him. He climbed an icy mountain,

the cold breath of which seemed to slip into his body and chip off

inside of his bones, and there, until he mastered the sort of climbing

on ice, for each step that he took upwards he slipped back ten steps.

Almost his heart gave way before he learned to climb that venomous hill.

In a forked glen into which he slipped at night-fall he was surrounded

by giant toads, who spat poison, and were icy as the land they lived

in, and were cold and foul and savage. At Sliav Saev he encountered the

long-maned lions who lie in wait for the beasts of the world, growling

woefully as they squat above their prey and crunch those terrified

bones. He came on Ailill of the Black Teeth sitting on the bridge that

spanned a torrent, and the grim giant was grinding his teeth on a pillar

stone. Art drew nigh unobserved and brought him low.

It was not for nothing that these difficulties and dangers were in his

path. These things and creatures were the invention of Dog Head, the

wife of Morgan, for it had become known to her that she would die on the

day her daughter was wooed. Therefore none of the dangers encountered

by Art were real, but were magical chimeras conjured against him by the

great witch.

Affronting all, conquering all, he came in time to Morgan’s dun, a place

so lovely that after the miseries through which he had struggled he

almost wept to see beauty again.

Delvcaem knew that he was coming. She was waiting for him, yearning for

him. To her mind Art was not only love, he was freedom, for the poor

girl was a captive in her father’s home. A great pillar an hundred feet

high had been built on the roof of Morgan’s palace, and on the top of

this pillar a tiny room had been constructed, and in this room Delvcaem

was a prisoner.

She was lovelier in shape than any other princess of the Many-Coloured

Land. She was wiser than all the other women of that land, and she

was skilful in music, embroidery, and chastity, and in all else that

pertained to the knowledge of a queen.

Although Delvcaem’s mother wished nothing but ill to Art, she yet

treated him with the courtesy proper in a queen on the one hand and

fitting towards the son of the King of Ireland on the other. Therefore,

when Art entered the palace he was met and kissed, and he was bathed and

clothed and fed. Two young girls came to him then, having a cup in

each of their hands, and presented him with the kingly drink, but,

remembering the warning which Credl had given him, he drank only from

the right-hand cup and escaped the poison. Next he was visited by

Delvcaem’s mother, Dog Head, daughter of the King of the Dog Heads, and

Morgan’s queen. She was dressed in full armour, and she challenged Art

to fight with her.

It was a woeful combat, for there was no craft or sagacity unknown to

her, and Art would infallibly have perished by her hand but that her

days were numbered, her star was out, and her time had come. It was her

head that rolled on the ground when the combat was over, and it was

her head that grinned and shrivelled on the vacant spike which she had

reserved for Art’s.

Then Art liberated Delvcaem from her prison at the top of the pillar

and they were affianced together. But the ceremony had scarcely been

completed when the tread of a single man caused the palace to quake and

seemed to jar the world.

It was Morgan returning to the palace.

The gloomy king challenged him to combat also, and in his honour Art

put on the battle harness which he had brought from Ireland. He wore a

breastplate and helmet of gold, a mantle of blue satin swung from his

shoulders, his left hand was thrust into the grips of a purple

shield, deeply bossed with silver, and in the other hand he held the

wide-grooved, blue hilted sword which had rung so often into fights and

combats, and joyous feats and exercises.

Up to this time the trials through which he had passed had seemed so

great that they could not easily be added to. But if all those trials

had been gathered into one vast calamity they would not equal one half

of the rage and catastrophe of his war with Morgan.

For what he could not effect by arms Morgan would endeavour by guile,

so that while Art drove at him or parried a crafty blow, the shape of

Morgan changed before his eyes, and the monstrous king was having at him

in another form, and from a new direction.

It was well for the son of the Ard-Ri’ that he had been beloved by the

poets and magicians of his land, and that they had taught him all that

was known of shape-changing and words of power.

He had need of all these.

At times, for the weapon must change with the enemy, they fought with

their foreheads as two giant stags, and the crash of their monstrous

onslaught rolled and lingered on the air long after their skulls had

parted. Then as two lions, long-clawed, deep-mouthed, snarling, with

rigid mane, with red-eyed glare, with flashing, sharp-white fangs, they

prowled lithely about each other seeking for an opening. And then as two

green-ridged, white-topped, broad-swung, overwhelming, vehement billows

of the deep, they met and crashed and sunk into and rolled away from

each other; and the noise of these two waves was as the roar of all

ocean when the howl of the tempest is drowned in the league-long fury of

the surge.

But when the wife’s time has come the husband is doomed. He is required

elsewhere by his beloved, and Morgan went to rejoin his queen in the

world that comes after the Many-Coloured Land, and his victor shore that

knowledgeable head away from its giant shoulders.

He did not tarry in the Many-Coloured Land, for he had nothing further

to seek there. He gathered the things which pleased him best from among

the treasures of its grisly king, and with Delvcaem by his side they

stepped into the coracle.

Then, setting their minds on Ireland, they went there as it were in a

flash.

The waves of all the world seemed to whirl past them in one huge, green

cataract. The sound of all these oceans boomed in their ears for one

eternal instant. Nothing was for that moment but a vast roar and pour

of waters. Thence they swung into a silence equally vast, and so sudden

that it was as thunderous in the comparison as was the elemental rage

they quitted. For a time they sat panting, staring at each other,

holding each other, lest not only their lives but their very souls

should be swirled away in the gusty passage of world within world; and

then, looking abroad, they saw the small bright waves creaming by the

rocks of Ben Edair, and they blessed the power that had guided and

protected them, and they blessed the comely land of Ir.

On reaching Tara, Delvcaem, who was more powerful in art and magic than

Becuma, ordered the latter to go away, and she did so.

She left the king’s side. She came from the midst of the counsellors and

magicians. She did not bid farewell to any one. She did not say good-bye

to the king as she set out for Ben Edair.

Where she could go to no man knew, for she had been ban-ished from the

Many-Coloured Land and could not return there. She was forbidden entry

to the Shi’ by Angus Og, and she could not remain in Ireland. She went

to Sasana and she became a queen in that country, and it was she who

fostered the rage against the Holy Land which has not ceased to this

day.

MONGAN’S FRENZY

CHAPTER I

The abbot of the Monastery of Moville sent word to the story-tellers of

Ireland that when they were in his neighbourhood they should call at

the monastery, for he wished to collect and write down the stories which

were in danger of being forgotten.

“These things also must be told,” said he.

In particular he wished to gather tales which told of the deeds that had

been done before the Gospel came to Ireland.

“For,” said he, “there are very good tales among those ones, and it

would be a pity if the people who come after us should be ignorant of

what happened long ago, and of the deeds of their fathers.”

So, whenever a story-teller chanced in that neighbourhood he was

directed to the monastery, and there he received a welcome and his fill

of all that is good for man.

The abbot’s manuscript boxes began to fill up, and he used to regard

that growing store with pride and joy. In the evenings, when the days

grew short and the light went early, he would call for some one of these

manuscripts and have it read to him by candle-light, in order that he

might satisfy himself that it was as good as he had judged it to be on

the previous hearing.

One day a story-teller came to the monastery, and, like all the others,

he was heartily welcomed and given a great deal more than his need.

He said that his name was Cairide’, and that he had a story to tell

which could not be bettered among the stories of Ireland.

The abbot’s eyes glistened when he heard that. He rubbed his hands

together and smiled on his guest.

“What is the name of your story?” he asked.

“It is called ‘Mongan’s Frenzy.’”

“I never heard of it before,” cried the abbot joyfully.

“I am the only man that knows it,” Cairide’ replied.

“But how does that come about?” the abbot inquired.

“Because it belongs to my family,” the story-teller answered. “There

was a Cairide’ of my nation with Mongan when he went into Faery. This

Cairide’ listened to the story when it was first told. Then he told

it to his son, and his son told it to his son, and that son’s

great-great-grandson’s son told it to his son’s son, and he told it to

my father, and my father told it to me.”

“And you shall tell it to me,” cried the abbot triumphantly.

“I will indeed,” said Cairide’. Vellum was then brought and quills. The

copyists sat at their tables. Ale was placed beside the story-teller,

and he told this tale to the abbot.