to his children. At that singing all awoke, and the heart of each man
was heavy because of the doom that had fallen upon the children of Lir.
He sang of the fateful hour when he had taken Aeifa to wife, and of the
cruel hardness of her heart, that thus out of jealous rage she could
work so great and unmerited evil. And what rest could there be for him,
he chanted, since whenever he lay down in the dark he would see his
loved ones pictured plain before him: Fionula, his pride and joy; Aed,
so agile and adventurous; the laughing Fiachra; and little Conn, with
his curls of gold.
Then with a heavy heart indeed Lir went on his way. Before he and his
company entered the great pass at the western end of Lough Darvra, he
looked back longingly. In the blue space of heaven he saw four white
cloudlets drifting idly in a slow circling flight.
“O Fionula,” he cried, “O Aed, O Fiachra, O Conn, farewell, my little
ones! Well do I know that you have risen thus in high flight so that my
eyes may have this last glimpse of you. Nevertheless I will come again
soon.”
It was a weary journey thence to the dun of Bove Derg, but all
weariness was forgotten in wrath against Aeifa.
No sooner had Lir spoken to the king, no sooner had the king looked at
the face of Aeifa as she heard the accusation, than Bove Derg knew that
the truth had been told, and that Aeifa was guilty of this cruel wrong.
Turning to his foster-daughter, he exclaimed, in the hearing of all:
“This ill deed that thou hast wrought, Aeifa, will be worse for thee
than all thou hast put upon the children of Lir. For in the end they
shall know joy and peace, while as long as the world lasts thou shalt
know what it is to be lonely and accursed and abhorred.” Then for a
brief time Bove Derg brooded. There was naught in all the world so
dreaded in the dim ancient days as the demons of the air, and no doom
could be more dreadful than to be transformed into one of those dark
and lonely and desperate spirits that make night and desolate places so
full of terror. At last the king rose. Taking his druidical magic wand,
he struck Aeifa with it, and therewith turned her into a demon of the
air. A great cry went up from the whole assemblage as they saw Aeifa
spread out gaunt shadowy wings, and struggle as in a sudden anguish of
new birth. The next moment she gave a terrible scream, and flew upward
like a swirling eagle, and disappeared among the dark lowering clouds
which hung over the land that day.
Thus was it that Aeifa became a demon o the air. Even now her screaming
voice may be heard among the wild hills of her own land, on dark windy
nights, when tempests break, or in disastrous hours.
But out of a wrong done the gods may work good. So was it with the
Dedannans.
For not only Lir, and all his people, but Bove Derg and a great part of
the nation assembled by the shores of Lake Darvra, and there pitched
their tents, which afterwards grew into a vast rath, wherein the king
builded a mighty dun.
For Lir and Bove Derg had vowed that henceforth they would live their
years by the shores of Darvra, where they might converse with their
dear ones, and where they might listen to the sweet oblivious songs
which Fionula and her brothers sang to the easing of the heart, and the
silence of all pain and weariness.
But so great was the rumour of this marvel that all Erin heard of it.
The Milesians in the south agreed to a long truce of three hundred
years; and came and dwelt in amity with the Dedannans, for they too
loved the sweet and wonderful music of the white swans that were the
children of Lir.
“Three hundred years yet may we live,” said Bove Derg to Lir, “and as
I am a king, I swear never to leave the lough of Darvra while the four
swans that are thy sons and daughter inhabit it. The heavy years shall
pass for us, listening to their beautiful sweet singing; and therein we
shall know peace and joy.”
“So be it,” said Lir, and he spoke the truth, for in that day the
Dedannans lived to a great age; some say to three hundred, some to
five, some to seven hundred years.
The years went by, one after the other, and by tens and by scores, and
still Lir and Bove Derg and the Dedannans and Milesians dwelled by the
shores of Lake Darvra. For never in the world’s history has there been
chronicle of so sweet a singing as that of the four children of Lir.
All day the swans discoursed lovingly with their father and Bove Derg,
and their kith and kin, and all who sought them; and each night they
sang their slow, sweet, fairy music--a music so wonderful and passing
sweet, that all who listed to it forgot weariness and pain and bitter
memories and the burden of years, and fell into a deep restful slumber,
whence they awoke each morrow as though they had drunken overnight of
the Fountain of Youth.
The hair of Lir and Bove Derg was long and white, and almost had the
Dedannans and the Milesians forgotten their ancient enmity, when a day
of the days came whereon Fionula called aside her three brothers.
“Dear brothers,” she said, as she looked sadly at the three beautiful
white swans, and at the four drifting shadow-swans in the depths of
the lake, “dear brothers, do you know that the time has come when we
must put away our happiness as a dream that has been dreamed? For now
the three hundred years of our sojourn here are at an end, and at dawn
to-morrow we must arise and wing our sad flight across the dear lands
of Erin, till we come to the wild and stormy waters of the sea-stream
of the Moyle.”
Aed and Fiachra and Conn made so loud and bitter lamentation at this
that all heard, and soon the whole host that was encamped there filled
the region with long keening cries of grief, and a sorrowful mourning
strain as of the melancholy wind among the hills.
But once more all were soothed that night into deep slumber and happy
peace, because of the slow, sweet, fairy music of the chanting swans.
At dawn, the four swans arose, and with their white pinions circled
high above the lake, glittering as they soared into the sunflood as it
swept across the summits of the eastern hills.
“Farewell! farewell! farewell!” they chanted, and at that sad sound all
the Dedannan host and all the Milesians, headed by Lir and Bove Derg,
kneeled along the lake pastures and amid the reeds and sedges.
Then Fionula, as she and her brothers slowly descended in wide-sweeping
curves, sang this song:
“Farewell! Farewell! Farewell!
Far hence we lost ones go:
Hearken our knell,
Hearken our woe!
Farewell! Farewell! Farewell!
With breaking hearts we flee:
For none can tell
Our wild home on the sea.
For ages on the Moyle,
In loneliness and pain,
Our feet shall tread no soil,
Wild wave, wild wind, wild rain.
For ages in the west,
Fierce storms and fiercer cold
Shall be alone our rest,
While ye grow old.
Let not our memories pass,
O ye who stay behind--
Who are as the grass
And we the wind.
Farewell! Farewell! Farewell!
Far hence we lost ones go:
Hearken our knell,
Hearken our woe!”
As Fionula ceased this song, she and her brothers swept so close to
the water’s edge that their white wings made a little dazzle of spray.
Then with swift pinions they rose again, and soared in great spirals
of flight, till they gleamed against the morning blue like four white
banners adrift before a skiey wind.
Then for a brief while they suspended on outspread wings, and looked
longingly down upon the dear ones and all their kith and kin, who on
their part could scarce see the four white swans for the mist of tears
that was before all faces.
Suddenly they swung hither and thither, like foam tossed by a tidal
wind, and then flew straight to the northward. Soon they were but white
specks; then the blue closed in upon them, as the wastes of the sea
close at last behind the hulls of drifting ships.
Before the torch of a stormy sun sank that night amid the tossed green
billows of the Moyle, there where the sea flows to and fro betwixt Erin
and Alba, the children of Lir drooped their weary wings. Their home
now was the running wave. In darkness and loneliness and sorrow, they
floated close to each other, waiting for the dawn to steal into that
first night of bitter exile.
From that day they were severed from those who loved them. Of a truth,
there was keening and lamentation and sorrow by the shores of the
lough of Darvra. At the last, as the snow melts, the great host of the
Dedannans and Milesians passed away: to the westward, some; others, to
the south.
As for Bove Derg and Lir, their white hairs and the grey ashes of
their lives were the mournful refrain of many a song on the lips of
wandering bards.
* * * * *
There were tears in the eyes of Peterkin when Ian Mor ceased speaking.
His heart was sore because of Fionula and Aed and Fiachra and Conn.
Nevertheless, he too would be glad to be a swan for a time, if only so
as to be able to soar into the blue spaces of the sky, and to spread
white wings over the dancing waters, and to move through them swifter
than any boat. With what joy he had once climbed on to the fan of an
old windmill, and slowly revolved through the hot August air, which
winnowed around him a coolness like the flowing of wind over the summit
of a hill.
A bright shining came into his eyes, then laughter bubbled to his lips.
Eilidh looked at him, half in mock reproof, half rejoicingly.
“Peterkin, why do you laugh?”
“Oh, for sure, dear, it’s not laughing I am at the poor swans, but
at the face of Old Nanny, my nurse, when she came out of the cottage
in the glen and saw me lying flat and holding on to the fan of the
windmill, with my hair all blown back, and both my legs hanging in the
air.”
“Some day you will kill yourself, Peterkin,” said Eilidh gravely.
“Then I’ll be a swan! and I’ll fly round and round Iona, and whenever
you or Ian want to go to the mainland, I’ll take you on my back.”
Suddenly Peterkin sprang to his feet, and jumped to and fro, clapping
his hands.
“Ah, how I would love it!” he exclaimed.
“Love what, dearie?”
“Love to see Ian fall off my back and go plump in among the herrings in
the Sound! _What_ a splash he would make!”
“And poor Ian---- Why, he might be drowned, Peterkin!”
“Oh, no; I would swoop down the way a gannet does when it sees a fish,
and would scoop him up with my bill.”
The picture was too much for Peterkin. The thought of grabbing the
dripping half-drowned Ian in his bill, and of soaring away with him to
the white dry sands, was better than any dream of the fairies he had
ever had, even than that when he rode a fairy horse in the guise of a
white mouse, with grasshoppers for hounds, and a great bumble-bee as
a wild boar for the occasion. He threw himself on the floor in front
of the hearth, and rolled over and over, contorting his small body
into alarming convulsions, clapping his hands, and laughing, laughing,
laughing.
Eilidh, too, let the laughter take her, and then Ian found it sweet;
and soon the little room was full of joyous laughter upon laughter, and
of the leaping flame-light from the blazing log on the peats, and of
the dancing of the shadow-men in the corners and up and down the walls.
“The swans! The swans!” cried Peterkin suddenly, as he grabbed wildly
at some shadowy shapes which slid along the floor. But these swans
proved as tantalising as the wind-shadows on the grass which so often
he chased, and suddenly in a flash they disappeared altogether. They
seemed to spring right into Ian Mor; at any rate it was in his arms
that Peterkin found himself.
“Where are the shadows? Where are the shadows, Ian?” he cried: “I
believe you are hiding them inside yourself! Where are they? Where are
they?”
“Why, you boykin, where could they be?”
“They are in your heart, Ian! I know they are! I see them! I see them!”
Ian glanced at Eilidh. Then, putting his arm round Peterkin, he laid
his lips against his downy cheek and whispered:
“Yes, my little lad, you’ve guessed right.”
“Then why don’t you chase them out, Ian?”
Again Ian Mor glanced at Eilidh.
“They live there, lennavan-mo. They jumped out because of your
laughter, but they are back now.”
“Then I’ll be laughing often, Ian dear, and some day I’ll catch them
and drive them out into the sunshine, and then they’ll melt--ay, ay,
they’ll melt for sure, Ian, and what will you be after doing then?”
“Well, like Fionula and the wild swans, Peterkin, I’ll rise up and soar
away on the great flood of the sun across the sea till I come to Hy
Brásil, the Isle of Youth far away in the West.”
“Yes, I know,” Peterkin said gravely: “Hy Brásil: Eilidh told me that
is where she and you are going to live. Will you take me there too?”
“Yes, you will come there too, mochree, some day.”
“But with you -- when you and Eilidh go?”
“Perhaps we’ll not be going there together, Peterkin. But we won’t be
forgetting our dear little Peterkin. We’ll be on the shore looking out
for you when you come.”
“Why are your eyes wet, Ian, and Eilidh’s too?”
“Why, you unfeeling little wretch, it’s because we have left the poor
swans, Fionula, and Aed, and Fiachra, and Conn, alone on the rough seas
of the Moyle all this while.”
“Tell me, tell me now about the children of Lir. Did they see any one
up there? Were they ever happy?”
“Eilidh knows the rest of the story as well as I do, Peterkin, so go
and sit in her lap while she tells it to you and to me.”
With that, Ian Mor rose and put another log on the red peats. A shower
of sparks shot up into the dark hollow of the chimney. Peterkin laughed.
“Hush!” whispered Eilidh, with smiling eyes: and then in her sweet,
low voice resumed the tale of the Children of Lir, from where Ian had
stopped.
It was at the edge of winter when Fionula and her brothers reached the
wild bleak seas of the Moyle.
At first there was no too bitter cold or too fierce tempestuousness
to make their evil lot still more hard to bear; but sad indeed were
their hearts as day after day they saw nothing but the same grey skies,
the same grey wastes and dark sullen waves, the same bleak, rocky
coasts inhabited only by the cormorant and the sea-mew. Never to see a
familiar face, never to hear a familiar voice: to dwell from morning
dusk till evening dark in loneliness and sorrow--that, indeed, was a
hard fate upon the four children of Lir. From hunger and cold, too,
they suffered much. No longer could they be cheered as they were on
Lough Darvra, and often and often they lamented that their doom could
not have permitted them to remain as swans indeed, but as swans on that
now dear and home-sweet inland sea of Darvra.
Day after day passed, but while their misery and want did not grow less
they were not yet tortured by wintry storms and bitter frosts.
But one forlorn afternoon a terrible congregation of clouds, black and
heavy and flanked with livid gleams, appeared above the horizon and
slowly invaded the whole west, and then all the sky northward and all
southward.
Fionula saw that a great tempest was nigh, so she called Aed, and
Fiachra, and Conn, to come to her side.
“Dear brothers,” she exclaimed, “the storm that will soon be upon us
will be worse than any we have yet known. Hardly can we hope not to
be driven far apart. Let us agree, therefore, to meet somewhere, if
so be that we are not utterly destroyed. For though Aeifa, our cruel
stepmother, doomed us to these long ages of suffering, it may well be
that even her potent spell is not strong enough against death: and
death may come to us through famine, or cold, or in the drowning wave.”
At first the brothers could answer nothing. Then Aed spoke. “Thou
art wise, dear Fionula. Let us, then, fix upon the rocky isle of
Carrick-na-ron, as that place is well known to each of us, and can be
descried from a great way off.”
Thus it was that Carrick-na-ron was made their place of meeting, if so
be that in the blind fury and confusion of the tempest they should be
driven the one from the other.
This was well: for that night, with the darkening of the night into a
hollow of starless blackness, a terrible tempest swept over the seas,
and lashed them into foam and into vast heaving, rolling, swaying
billows. Amid the noise of the waves, and behind the screaming of the
wind, the four weary rain-drenched bewildered swans could hear the
crashing of the thunder and see the wild fitful blue glare of savage
lightnings.
Before midnight they were whirled this way and that by the fierce paws
of the gale. Soon they were separated, and with despairing cries,
each swept solitary through the night. In the heart of each of the
children of Lir there was little hope of any morrow. All nearly died of
weariness and despair. Nevertheless dawn broke at last, and with the
first coming of light the tempest passed away.
When the sun rose the waters were almost smooth again. A sparkling came
into the crest of every wave. The sea blued.
Fionula was the first to descry the rocky isle of Carrick-na-ron, and
gladly she swam towards it, for she was now too weary to fly. Eagerly
she hoped to find her brothers there, safe-havened. Alas, there was not
a sign of any, not even when she flew to the summit of the highest
rock and looked far and wide across the wilderness of waters.
Great sorrow was hers, for sure, when she beheld nothing but wave upon
wave, wave upon wave, till on the far horizon the long low line of sea
climbed into the sky.
A song of mourning broke from Fionula, so sad and sweet and despairing
that the gannets and sea-mews and dark fierce cormorants wheeled around
Carrick-na-ron, wondering at the marvel of this wild swan, with the
strange remote voice of the human kind. It was a song of farewell.
When Fionula ceased her lament she looked once more across the wastes
of the sea. Suddenly she uttered a glad cry, for she descried Conn
swimming slowly towards the rocky isle, slowly, and with drooping head,
for he was drenched with the salt brine, and so weary that he could
scarce move.
Hardly had she welcomed him with joy, and helped him to reach a flat
ledge of rock whereon the sunlight poured with healing warmth, than she
saw Fiachra desperately striving to make his way towards them, but so
far spent that it seemed as though death would overtake him before he
reached the foam-edged rocks. Fionula sprang into the running wave,
and soon was beside Fiachra, aiding him to her utmost. With difficulty
she helped him to the ledge where Conn crouched in the sun, but so weak
was he that when he was spoken to he could utter no word in reply.
Fionula looked with pity upon her two young brothers. It was hard for
her to see their unmothered pain and weariness. So she spread out
her broad white pinions, and gave the warmth of her body to the two
drenched and shivering swans.
“Ah!” she exclaimed, as she crouched on the ledge, with Fiachra
nestling by her right side and Conn by her left; “ah! if only Aed were
here too, all might yet be well. And even if it be death, sweeter
far that we might all perish together.” It was as though her loving
prayer were answered, for before long she descried Aed swimming swiftly
through the sunny foam-splashed seas. He, at least, she saw with joy,
had not suffered as his younger brothers had done, for he came on with
head erect and his white plumage all unruffled and dazzlingly ashine.
Nevertheless, Aed, too, was glad to rest in the sunshine, so Fionula
placed him under her breast.
Noon found them thus: Fionula with sad eyes staring out across the
wastes of windy seas; under the warm feathers of her breast, Aed; and
close nestled to the warm down of her sides, Fiachra and Conn. She
heard their low breathing as they slept, and that they might sleep the
deeper and longer she sang her low, sweet, fairy music:
Sleep, sleep, brothers dear, sleep and dream,
Nothing so sweet lies hid in all your years.
Life is a storm-swept gleam
In a rain of tears:
Why wake to a bitter hour, to sigh, to weep?
How better far to sleep----
To sleep and dream.
To sleep and dream, ah, that is well indeed:
Better than sighs, better than tears;
Ye can have nothing better for your meed
In all the years.
Why wake to a bitter hour, to sigh, to weep?
How better far to sleep----
To sleep and dream, ah, that is well indeed!
This and other songs Fionula chanted low throughout the day, till at
last she too was overcome by her weariness; and she slept.
At the rising of the moon, all awoke. Full glad were Aed and Fiachra
and Conn that their tribulation was over; only Fionula knew that the
doom which Aeifa had put upon them held worse things, and many, in
store for them.
For some days thereafter there was peace. Then a snow-whisper came, and
the inland hills and the peaked summits of the isles were white. The
cold grew deeper day by day; at each dawn the frost bit with a keener
grip. The bitter hardships of the children of Lir were now more almost
than they could bear. Nevertheless, they had a yet more dreadful trial
to endure: for at mid-winter there came a tempest of whirling snow and
icy wind so fierce and terrible, that for a day and a night the waves
were strewn with the dead bodies of sea-mews and terns. Nothing the
four swans had ever suffered was like unto what they suffered at this
time.
But when Fionula had again found and sheltered her dear ones, and
mothered them with her great love, she knew that whatever their
sufferings they would now surely endure until the end. Had they been
subject to the mortal law, they could not have survived that dreadful
day, and still more awful night.
And so another year passed. The worst sorrow of the children of Lir was
their great loneliness, a thing more bitter than hunger or thirst or
any privation. They longed for their kind as the first white flowers of
the year long for the sun. When mid-winter came again a terrible frost
arose. All the north isles were like black bosses in a gleaming shield,
for sheets of ice covered the seas, and each island was gripped as in
an iron vice. Day by day the cold grew more terrible. On the morrow of
the ninth day the four children of Lir thought that the end of their
misery was at hand. The whole sea was one solid floor of ice; the isle
of Carrick-na-ron, where they were, was like a black iceberg; into ice
lapsed each faint failing breath that they drew with ever greater pain.
Each morning they had waked to find their feet frozen to the rock,
and even the edges of their wings; and a bitter thing it was to tear
themselves free, and to leave clinging to the rock the soft feathers of
their breasts and the outer quills of their wings and the skin of their
feet.
How fain each was of death! How gladly they would have passed away
from the world of the living, though in exile, and longing with aching
hearts to see once more their own dear land and the faces of those whom
they loved! But their doom was on them, and they could not leave the
sea of Moyle, nor could they win death.
The brave heart of Fionula knew this. She knew too what cruel pain it
would give her and her brothers to swim through the salt seas with
their bleeding wounds, for the brine would enter them and cause agony.
Nevertheless, she led them forth towards the coast of the mainland.
There they found a fjord and a haven amid the pine-clad shores, and
before long their wounds were healed, and the feathers on their wings
and breasts grew again.
But of what avail to tell the tale of all their years? Fionula saw that
while they must ever return each night to the sea of Moyle till the
three hundred years were over and done, they might fly as far and wide
as they could between dawn and dusk. Mighty and strong were they now
upon the wing, and fit to endure the slashing of rains, the buffetings
of wild winds, the whirling briny sleet of the seas, and the cold of
the high forlorn spaces of the lonely sky.
Far and wide therefore they roamed, sometimes along the foam-swept
headlands of Alba, sometimes by the stormy coasts of Erin, sometimes
for leagues and leagues out into the vast dim wilderness, wherein, so
men said, Hy Brásil lay--Hy Brásil, the Isle of Rest, the Isle of Joy,
the Isle of Youth Eternal.
One day, far in the oblivion of these selfsame years, they chanced to
be flying past the mouth of the Bann, on the north coast of Erin: and
Aed gave a cry of joy, and bade Fionula and his brothers look inland,
for there, coming out of the south-west, was a stately cavalcade, the
horsemen mounted on white steeds, beautifully apparelled, and with
weapons gleaming in the sun.
How joyous it was to see their own kind again! All gave a cry of
rapture, their hearts aching the while that they could not set foot
upon the land, as that was forbidden to them, though they might
adventure to the shore.