CHAPTER 13
EMER’S GRIEF

I had never known my mother to act the way she did in Emain Macha, as we waited for news of my father. Silent, still and distant she was—so far from the bustling outspoken woman I had grown up with that I barely recognized her. Her entire mind and heart were given over to the waiting, and she spent most of every day on the ramparts gazing south. I trailed in her wake, watching over the watcher.

We were seated there together when Fintan returned to me. We watched his heavy wingbeats flap across the fields, my mother in a sudden agony of anxiety.

“What does he say?”

Fintan had barely landed when my mother’s urgent question prodded me into action. For my part, I was suddenly reluctant to ask. Fintan’s visions are not always easy to see, and the darkness that had been growing in my own heart was squeezing at it cruelly now. I knew, with sick certainty, what was to come.

But the sight of it—it doesn’t matter what omens or forebodings come before, nothing can prepare a person to witness a loved one’s death. To see my father sagging against the Old Ones’ stone, his guts spilling from his body, his enemies circling like a pack of wolves...it was unbearable. When Lughaid’s sword swept off his head I cried out against it as though I stood there beside him, and the shrill sound of my own voice wrenched me from the bloody scene.

“What?” my mother demanded. She shook me, heedless of my sobs. “What is it?”

“He is dead, Ma.” I choked out the words, unable to stop crying. I thought I had been prepared for his death—we all knew this was his most perilous challenge, and knew too the prophecy foretelling his early end—but watching it had made it too real, too brutal. The image of him tied there, with The Gray slipping in his own blood but defending my father with teeth and hooves to the last, burned behind my eyes. I was overcome with pity, with pride in their courage, with my own loss.

I reached out to my mother, thinking to comfort each other, and was met with a resounding slap that all but knocked me down. I stared at her, shocked beyond words, my stinging cheek unheeded.

Her eyes sparked like green fire. She hissed at me, a wildcat in human form. “How dare you speak such lies to me! You and that black apparition! You would have me give up hope on the say-so of some carrion crow? And you but an untrained girl!”

She turned her back on me, returning her gaze to the gentle roll of the hills. “My faith is with Cuchulainn,” she snapped. “And I will not break it.”

Hot indignation rose in me at the injustice of it. It was my mother who had urged me to send Fintan, and now...

It is as well I was beyond speech then, for whatever I might have said I would regret now. Instead I watched her, and slowly I began to feel the effort of will that straightened my mother’s back and firmed her trembling lip. The will that would hold onto hope until its last shred crumbled to dust and seeped from her grasp.

Fintan and I had been close for years. Experience had taught me to trust his messages. But my mother? I saw now that my news had frayed what little hope was left to her, without giving her the certainty that would allow her to let it go. I wished now I had found a way to keep Fin’s news to myself.

I left my mother then and ran to my chamber, so as not to hurt her more with my tears. I curled up like a wounded animal and wept, not for the great champion of Ulster, but for the man who sliced apples with his sword, took a small girl flying across the plains, and laughed with a sound like chimes.

I was but a young child when I first saw trophy heads hanging from my father’s girdle, swinging in gory counterpoint to his stride. The House of the Red Branch in Emain was festooned with them, and they gave me little pause. I had never questioned our practice of taking enemy heads.

The day my father came home without his, I felt differently. They tried to lay him out with dignity, there on the lawns before the Speckled House, but for all their drums and weeping and reverence, they could not change brute reality. The fact is, a man without his head hardly seems human at all.

He looked like a butchered animal, lying there. He had gone to his last battle in the old style he preferred, naked but for his weapons harness and his gold. His fair skin had been bled white as marble and blotched with bruising; his limbs had stiffened so that he did not rest on the ground but lay braced against it. A bloody cloth wound about his belly, holding together the mess that lay beneath. I tried, the gods know I tried, to see my father in that body, but I could not seem to see beyond the dark crusted stump of his neck.

I turned away, trying to stifle the groan of revulsion that escaped my throat.

My mother, though. My mother never flinched from Cuchulainn’s ravaged body. She stood full of calm dignity, now that all guessing and hope were past, and her eyes caressed his poor limbs as though she saw no horror, but only her own beloved. They were dark with sorrow and luminous with love, unmarred by tears.

“Bring water, and his best cloak.” Emer’s maid, Osnait, hovered at her elbow, sobbing convulsively. I could see that only her duty to my mother kept her from giving way altogether and throwing herself to the ground. All around us people wailed and sobbed and tore at their hair—a seductive hysteria that pulled at me as well. You can lose yourself in a great outpouring of grief, so that it becomes a kind of shelter. But my mother’s curt command pulled Osnait back from the brink, and after one last, wild-eyed look at my father’s body, she hurried into the great house.

Emer washed him as tenderly as a baby, right there in front of Conchobor’s household, and we might as well have been wisps of mist for all she minded us. Even when I knelt beside her and tried to help, she said nothing, but brushed me off as absently as if I were one of the flies that feasted on my father’s wounds.

I stood at the edge of the solitude my mother had created for herself, and the fist around my heart squeezed with such a complexity of pain that I could not pull breath into my lungs. Grief for my father’s death was almost eclipsed by the awful sight of Emer struggling to wrap my father in his cloak with his weaponry. It was not a job for one person, but she snarled at the warrior who bent to help her lift up Cuchulainn’s body, and he withdrew instantly. Cuchulainn had been Ulster’s darling in life, but in death my mother claimed him as hers alone. There was no one else in the world for her at that moment, and that knowledge filled me with pity.

And yes, I was angry at her too, though it was years before I could admit it even to myself. She pushed me away in her grief, and it was the hurt and loneliness of it—that she had no thought to spare for her living child, but only for her dead husband—that sucked the very air away from me.

I was actually bent over, gasping for breath and fighting back the black dots that danced before my eyes, when I heard a commotion behind me. There was jostling and muttering, and finally a clear voice broke through. “Make way, for pity’s sake, or I swear I will kick you from my path!”

It was Roisin, and I have never been so glad to hear sauce from an underling. I had given her a free day rather than have her sit around watching me wait with my mother. But when the news reached her, she came running. Her strong young arms wrapped around me from behind, her voice murmured in my ear, and finally the knot in my windpipe loosened. I straightened up with a deep breath that released with a racking sob, turned into the warmth of her breast, and wept against her.

A stir rustled through the crowd, and Roisin’s voice identified its cause. “A rider, Luaine. A warrior.”

In full battle gear he was, his horse streaked with sweat and foamy in the mouth from hard riding. He pulled up hard, dismounted, strode straight to my mother, and knelt in deference.

My mother was fussing with a brooch, working to fasten the cloak smooth and tight with the brooch perfectly placed, oblivious to the grisly stump it adorned. I could tell the warrior, war-hardened as he was, was discomfited by this homely tenderness. He cast his eyes to the ground and waited for her acknowledgment.

He waited a long time, while my mother ignored him utterly. I was appalled to find myself amused at his nervous glances, the war between impatience and hesitation that played out on his features. What kind of unfeeling daughter could I be? But it is the way our human heart is made, the laughter and the tears lying so close together that they sometimes blend into each other against our will.

Finally the messenger steeled himself to reach out and touch her shoulder.

“Lady Emer.”

Her head snapped up, and I wondered if she would strike him, but he hurried on and the words he spoke were enough to earn her attention:

“I bear a message from Conall Cearnach, who bids you not put Cuchulainn into his grave until he returns to you. For he has sworn to avenge the death of his dear foster-son, and it is your husband’s head he will return with, and the head of Lughaid who took it from him, and heads from every tribe of Ireland besides, until the men of Munster and Connaught and Leinster will be crying for the rising they made against him.”

My mother stood then, so regal in her bearing, and lifted the messenger also to his feet.

“Tell Conall we will wait,” she said gravely. “For it is good there is one still in Ulster with the courage to bring home what is due to me now, and to my lord’s memory.”

And she sent him off, without so much as a fresh horse or a drink of water.

So we were once again in the Speckled House, my father laid out with candles all about him, my mother keeping vigil and drifting ever deeper into a world apart.

I do not mean to say she was mad. People came by to pay their respects, and she received them graciously. She discussed plans for the burial rites with Conchobor, and I do not believe he noticed anything amiss—unless that she was remarkably composed.

But Osnait and I, who knew her well, we noticed. She was not mad—she was absent. Her eyes looked through us, never making real contact. She did not refuse the broth and tidbits of food Osnait pressed on her, or the sleeping draughts from Cathbad; she accepted them with thanks and left everything untouched. For three days and nights, she did not eat, did not sleep, did not bathe or change her clothes or arrange her hair or speak one word of what was in her heart. And gradually my worry for her turned to a whispery cold fear.

“Why does she not weep?” I demanded of Roisin. I sat up in my bed, unable to sleep for the crawling anxiety in my gut. “She holds in her grief. She allows no one to hold or comfort her.” Not even me, the bitter thought followed unbidden.

It was not a thing I was used to. We are hardly a people to hide our feelings. It did not frighten me to see a grown man roar with anger, or a woman fall down shrieking with grief. But this...this made the black fist writhe in my belly.

“I don’t know, Mistress.” Roisin’s voice was reassuringly real in the dark. I heard the whisper of her blankets and then the rustle of straw as her weight settled beside me. She rarely called me “Mistress” anymore, except in public. Roisin was a woman with a natural gift for helping and an aversion to serving, and she was too close to the sister I never had for me to want to change her. Tonight, though, hearing my title bolstered me. She was reminding me of who I was, and the strength that should match my position.

We sat in silence, and I let the warm relaxed weight of her arm across my shoulders seep down and settle my jumpy nerves. I was feeling that I might sleep, after all, when she spoke again.

“I have seen something like it in an animal, I think.” Her voice was tentative, fearing perhaps to give offense. I kept silent, inviting her to continue.

“It was a pair of hounds we had, reared from pups together. They were old—maybe close to ten years—when the bitch died. And the dog acted so strange. He guarded her body, would let no one near it without growling. My pa was going to kick him off, but my ma said to let him be. And the next morning he let us bury her.”

I thought about her story, trying to find the window into my mother’s heart. There was a similarity, but was there a meaning?

“Maybe your ma is not ready to let go of him,” Roisin suggested. “Maybe she is saving her grief for the burial rites.”

She had not studied with druids and poets, but Roisin was wise in understanding nonetheless.

I could take no satisfaction in the heads Conall presented to us. He laid them out in rows on the lawn, grisly fruits in a warrior’s garden. More death, more butchered bodies sent home to their families, more vengeance to be exacted. Will there be a warrior left standing, I wondered wearily, when all accounts are paid? But my mother praised Conall for his courage and loyalty and prowess, and listened rapt to the account of his one-handed duel with Lughaid, and to see her face alert and interested again gave me hope.

Finally he laid in her arms a bundle, apologizing for the rough wrapping. Cuchulainn’s head. My own tears welled up as Emer cradled and stroked it, and I came forward, longing suddenly to see him, touch him even, however disfigured the poor face. The memory of him swept over me so clearly then: his long easy stride, the sparkle of his eyes, the strong circle of his arms, the way the sun brought out all the colors in his hair. I could not let him go to the ground without even looking upon his end.

But my mother stood suddenly and called Osnait to her, and they hurried off to the great house. And there she did all that the poets recount: bathed Cuchulainn’s head and combed out the bright hair; wrapped it in rich silk as green as the barley fields in spring. But she did it alone, locked into the room we had once shared, and she did not come out until it was time for my father’s last farewell and all but her gathered at the graveside, waiting.

She was transformed, her hair arrayed in shining braids and loops, her dress immaculate, the gold gleaming at her throat and arm and waist. She was beautiful beyond words, like a queen of the Sidhe, and she bore her burden of green silk as if it were a crown for a king.

But as she approached, the dark fingers clawed and clutched in my guts and my mouth filled with the taste of fear. I looked to Cathbad, somber in his splendid robe, and found only dark sorrow in the eyes that followed Emer’s journey. Perhaps that was all I felt as well—the full fierce grasp of grief. And why not? All around me, men and women wept openly for my father.

My mother gave no sign that she noticed anyone or anything but the body that lay on its burial board, surrounded by weapons and riches, and the head that lay heavy in her hands. The emerald eyes that had once flashed with wit and pride were soft and lost and blind. I understood then that she had not dressed for a public appearance. She had dressed for her lover alone.

She laid my father’s head against his body in regal silence. And then, at last, she fell upon him and gave way to weeping. And the lament she spoke for him as they lowered him into the grave was as beautiful and spirited as Emer herself.

But I could not listen. I could hardly hear her words, so loud did the fear clamor in my head, so black was the darkness that filled me. If Roisin’s hand had not held firm to my girdle, I could not have stayed up on my own legs.

My mother pulled herself away and stood silent as they lowered my father’s body. And then it happened. As he came to rest at the bottom of the grave, she leapt down to him. The bright knife flashed in her hand. Red blood spilled from her throat as she fell.

I watched my mother take her own life and die with the man she loved. And all I could think at first, through the shock and my own horror, was that she had cast me away on the winds of the world.