CHAPTER 11
THE STRANGER ON THE STRAND
I paid little enough attention to the news of a young stranger landing in our bay. Ordinarily I would have been curious, for we’d had no visitors at all since the ships of the previous summer. But it was the day of Beltane—my coming of age Beltane—and the only response I remember was disappointment that my father would not be there to sing me across the fire.
“If he is only a boy, why can’t the other men deal with him?” I pouted. “For that matter, why should he not choose to keep his name to himself? What harm is there in it?”
“It is the king’s command that any who land on our shores give an account of themselves,” said my mother. “It is little enough to ask of an uninvited guest.” She gave my hair a critical once-over, entirely unmoved by my petulance, and nodded approval to the new girl she had hired to attend me. I still had Tullia, of course, “to watch over your proper behavior,” as my mother put it, but I loved having a young companion. Roisin was a hard worker and clever with hair, but she was good company too and only a little older than me. I soon came to value her lively spirit more than the work she saved me.
“And,” Emer continued, forestalling my next objection, “boy though he be, he has already handily defeated Conall, who is no poor fighter. It’s looking for a fight he is, and he will not rest until he gets it.”
I shrugged, a childish ungracious gesture. But I soon got over my resentment. My mother would be at the ceremony, and it’s a girl’s mother, after all, who guides her to womanhood. And excitement, kept to a seemly murmur through the day, was starting to sing loud in my veins. Beltane was my favorite festival. The sun was very low in the sky now. At dusk it would begin.
I went to my coming-of-age ceremony dressed more beautifully than ever before in my life, with real gold at my arm and throat and golden tips to my braids. By the time the sun rose I would have become a woman in the eyes of my people.
The Samhain fire is built always at the top of an open hill, where it will be a beacon visible far and wide. For Beltane we seek out a more sheltered spot, an open clearing skirted by woodland. Fertility celebrations demand more comfort!
This night, though, I would not be among the children playing tag or rolled into a blanket to sleep under the stars, nor among the older lads and lasses flirting in the pole dance or trysting in the woods. For the first time since my naming-day, I would enter the Sacred Grove and keep vigil there until dawn. The other girls and I would return in time to join in singing the Welcome to the Sun, and then we would do the women’s shuffle dance around the dying fires, and leap, one by one, over the coals.
The grove was only about a mile from the Beltane grounds, but it could have been a world away. We were a group of nearly fifteen, all of us giggly and high-strung, heady with our new finery and fighting unadmitted nerves about the night to come—yet as we stepped into that grove we fell completely silent.
The clearing was set within a ring of rowan trees, speckled now with their bitter-smelling white blossoms. Torches flared on stands around the lawn, a central fire burned, and two tall cloaked figures, the druid Daigh and his wife, awaited us on the far side. So simple it was, unimpressive really, but the entire space throbbed silently with a power I could sense with each breath and footstep. We walked through the trees and into the presence of the Sacred, and I felt the thrum of it deep in my own body, like the lowest notes of a drum. Nothing in my experience could really compare, but I was reminded of walking into a thick fog. In that blind swirling world, you feel like you are walking into mystery and could as easily find yourself in the land of the Sidhe or someplace utterly unknown, as on your own laneway.
If the grove was more than I could have imagined, it must be said that the teachings were rather less. We were not initiated into mystery so much as instructed, exhaustively, on the many duties of a wife, a mother and a noblewoman. Any girl with a half-decent upbringing had heard most of it before—though the parts about lying with a man certainly caught our attention! By the time Daigh’s earnest wife droned to a close, even the charged atmosphere of the grove couldn’t relieve my boredom.
The next part of the ceremony, though, was anything but dull. We were stripped of all our fine clothes and jewels, left with only our cloaks (and how glad I was my mother had insisted I take the heavy warm one rather than the prettier summer weight), and led to a deep pool that bubbled up from the secret depths of the earth. One by one we stepped naked into the icy water, sank below its dark surface and emerged gasping with cold. When my turn came I gritted my teeth and rushed in. Whether I truly left my childhood behind in that black water I do not know, but I thought for some time afterward that I must have left behind a layer of skin, for when I clambered out I could not feel my face or feet or hands, and the rest of my body tingled as if pricked by a thousand tiny needles.
When we came back to the grove, our cloaks wrapped tight as cocoons about us, Daigh had built the fire into a high roaring furnace. We were seated around the fire, blessed with a sprig of rowan, and told to spend the rest of the night in silent meditation, preparing ourselves for our lives to come.
I settled myself into my cloak, lifting my face to the heat of the fire, watching the flames. They said girls sometimes saw their future husbands in those flames. I didn’t care so much about that—he would be who he would be, whether I saw him or not—but I did want to make something worthwhile of this night.
I was distracted at first. Some of the girls were fidgety and restless, for we were all uncomfortable. The blaze of fire seared us in front, and the cold breath of night chilled backsides already damp from wet hair.
But the power of that place seeped into me, and little by little the shuffling and complaints faded away, and my own body quieted, until there was only the deep silence of the grove and the leap and dance of the flame. I did look ahead to my future, and I thought again on the teachings we had been given. There was a pattern, I saw, beyond the dull string of individual instructions, and the pattern was a lovelier, more inspiring thing than its small homely parts. We all aspired to be women of honor and respect, to be admired and proud of our accomplishments. But such a life doesn’t happen just from wishing it. A destination is reached through many small steps, and what our teachers had tried to give us, in their stolid way, was a map to guide us on our journey.
It was beautiful, what I saw now, how all the small gestures and events and words of a person’s life created a pattern completely unique and individual, yet interlaced with the pattern of every other person she touches. My mind was filled with a vision of growing, glowing tendrils of unfolding life, and I sat for a long time feeling the thrust of my own existence and resolving to make of it a bright and beautiful thing.
I was so entranced with my little revelation that it took a long time for the other voice, the dark voice, to be heard. So I cannot say that my happiness gradually became uneasiness. It was more like waking from a pleasant dream to find your house on fire. When the clamor of doom became loud enough to shatter my pretty reverie, the black fingers were already scrabbling deep in my guts, digging and tearing. I bent over, retching—but you cannot vomit away knowledge.
It had never come to me like this, so terribly. So strong and frightening it was, I thought it might be myself who was dying.
You cannot read the message on an Ogham stick while you are being beaten with it. It was like that with me—I was too overwhelmed with the pain to understand what it told me. I did not know then how to step back from the dread and search for its cause. So I lay gasping and groaning in the dark, overcome by some horror I could not name.
May all the gods bless him, it was Fintan who released me. I felt him coming to me even before he arrowed into the grove and plummeted right into my arms. I clutched at him and whispered, “Fin, help me.”
I did not need the white feather, not in that place. His black eye, gleaming in the firelight, told me everything. He had been to the strand and seen it all...
The boy looks so slight before my father. He is only a gangly youth, not many years older than me. It is shameful, I think, for my father to fight someone who stands so little chance against him. But the boy stands forth, and when they begin to fight, it is astonishing, for his skill at arms is wonderful and Cuchulainn is hard-pressed by him. They fight for a long time, with neither gaining great advantage over the other, until at last they pull out their spears. My father’s Gae Bolga has never failed, and I am glad he will prevail—but I am so sad for the boy. Such courage and skill, such a bright spirit, should not be wasted so.
They wind up for the cast, and here is another marvel, for at the last moment the boy’s eyes widen, and he checks his throw, and sends his spear spinning wide of the mark. And as the Gae Bolga sinks deep into his side I am weeping, weeping for them both, for I know what the boy has seen. He has seen his own father.
I saw no more, for the frightened girls had finally run to alert Daigh, and whether by incantation or simply shaking me silly I do not know, but he pulled me out of my vision. I blinked up at him through eyes that swam with tears, disoriented and resentful. His druid’s eyes took in Fintan, now stationed protectively in my lap, and my own unfocused gaze, and he promptly sent his wife and the other girls to the far side of the fire. Then he eased himself down beside me.
“What did you see, child?”
His voice was gentle and respectful, but underlaid with that quality druids have which compels a response. Though the tears spilled hot down my cheeks, I found my voice and answered his question.
“My brother is dead.”
What veil was drawn over my father’s eyes, that he did not know his own son when the signs were so plain before him?
He had waited years for this very day, when the child he had left in Queen Aoife’s belly should be old enough to cross the sea from Alba and meet his father. But he had not counted, I suppose, on the resentments a woman can nurse in her breast, and on the terrible fruit such long brooding can bear.
He had conquered her when he fought as Scathach’s champion, and however the poets dress it up it seems likely to me that it was the point of his sword, not her own desire, that compelled her to lie with him. Later, perhaps, she did come to love him—Cuchulainn was an easy man to love—but that too ended in bitterness, for he left her to return to Ireland and marry my mother. Perhaps he was shocked to find that she harbored such jealousy and hatred toward him; there was, after all, no promise between them and they parted, as he thought, in friendship. He left her a ring, and bade her name their son Conlaoch and to put him under the tutelage of Scathach when he became of an age to bear arms. She was to send him to Ireland when the ring fit his finger, the way Cuchulainn would recognize him by that token. And if he did not care to tell his new bride about the child he had fathered in Alba, he would not be the first man to keep such news to himself.
And so Aoife did all as Cuchulainn charged her, but she added a charge of her own. For she sent her own son against Cuchulainn as a weapon, to bring about his overthrow. And to ensure the weapon would find its target she laid three geasa, or taboos, upon the boy: never to give way to any living person, but to die sooner than turn back; never to refuse a challenge from any man, even the greatest champion alive; and third, never to reveal his name on any account, even under threat of death.
And if only Cuchulainn had seen the ring in time, as Conlaoch recognized the famous Gae Bolga, things might have come out differently. But a ring is such a small token. Only when Conlaoch lay dying in his arms did my father know his child. The anguish that came over him then, knowing it was his own hand had cut down his only son and that they would never embrace again in this life, was a crueler vengeance than his own death would have been.
I never did leap the coals of the Beltane fire and complete my journey to womanhood. Dawn found me standing on the strand beside my mother. We watched as my father, waist-deep in the ocean, raged and wept and thrashed his sword wildly against the tireless waves. It was a sight to make the sternest heart break, and the pain and pity of it a thing I still cannot bear to recall.
We kept vigil for three days there on the beach with my father’s men. There was no approaching him, but we thought at least to keep him from drowning. And when at last he had exhausted his arms, if not his grief, his men waded through the water and brought him safely home.
Our eyes met as he stumbled onto shore, held on each side by one of his captains. I wanted to look away, pretend I hadn’t seen, but I couldn’t. I was his only living child, and he would not see me flinch from his suffering.
His eyes held the same bruised despair I’d seen in Deirdriu’s years before. But there was something else, something somehow worse. My father’s shoulders were as broad and powerful as before, his cheeks still smooth and unlined—but his eyes had changed. His eyes were old.