PART III
OISIN
TWENTY-ONE
The boy is naked, curled against the cold dawn wind that sweeps across the mountain’s flat top. He shivers in his sleep, and his fingers grope against the ground as if searching for a lost blanket or companion. They close briefly around a tuft of wiry grass before tucking back in against his chest.
He is only young, small but sturdy, with long golden hair. When he awakens in the first slanting light of the rising sun, he sits slowly, as one still in a dream. His eyes— beautiful eyes, clear as deep water and blue as the spring bluebell—are unfocused and confused. As he takes in his surroundings, his chin begins to tremble. He has no idea where he is.
A sound, musical and savage, rises through the mist that hides the mountain’s feet. He knows that sound. Hounds, on the hunt.
Oisin Remembers
I may be one of the mighty men of the Fianna now, and Finn mac Cumhail’s son, but for all that I still have nightmares about the day I woke up on the great slouching mountain men call Ben Bulben. I thought the Dark Man had sent me to the desolate ends of the earth, a world empty of everything but cutting wind and seeping mist and a monstrous upheaval of rock. I was only six summers old and had never been out of my mother’s sight. No army or battle since has matched the terror of that morning.
THE MOUNTAIN WAS a great looming ledge. Its head thrust up from the land, bare sides scored as though by a giant bear claw. The long tail sloped back more gently, though it was hardly the smooth grassland it appeared from a distance. Crisscrossed with deep ravines and unclimbable overhangs, Ben Bulben was tough-going from any point. Finn was, in fact, growing tired of hauling himself up and down its flanks.
Yet there was something about this hulk of a mountain, and not just the wild boar that hid in its cracks and gullies, that called to him. Two days ago he had perplexed his men by hiking right to the summit and walking the length of Ben Bulben’s flat, wind-scoured top. Had it been lopped off by the Dagda’s war club in a fit of rage, as some believed? Finn had his doubts. He had met some of the Sidhe—killed one, for that matter—and seen their magic too. He didn’t think there were many with a swing that vast, magic club or no.
Now Finn shook the clouds from his head and concentrated on the chase. Boar hunts his men understood; it was the nearest hunting came to military training, an exercise in discipline and trust as well as skill. When a big boar broke cover, you needed to count on the comrades at your side.
Boar was Finn’s quarry of choice for personal reasons too. He had finally, reluctantly, after earnest counseling from Caoilte and Lughaid and other wise friends, stopped searching for Sive. How many times had he quartered the island? In how many places and ways, when he had at last concluded she was not to be found in his own land, had he tried to get into hers? Yet despite his wisdom, his learning, his far-seeing, despite his kinship with Lugh and his bag of power which had once been Manannan’s, he had not found a way.
He had given up that hunt. But he would never again in his lifetime join a deer hunt without fear that it would be Sive that was found and killed before he could intervene. Foolish, that fear. His men knew well to spare all spotted does. If Sive were hunted to her death, it would not be by the Fianna.
The hounds’ steady baying shattered into a frenzy of barking. They had something. Finn heard an excited shout from one of the men, hollered back and forced his legs to climb the steep slope faster.
The dogs were in view, a ring of lunging, eager back ends on the far side of a shallow gorge. A deep bass growl rumbled beneath the chorus of barks. Only Finn’s two wolfhounds, his Bran and Sceolan, had such voices, growls that throbbed deep in your chest and carried beyond the racket of lesser dogs. He quickened his pace, picturing his beloved companions cornered and in danger.
His men were converging now, and they covered the last distance together, scrambling and sliding into a seam sliced into the mountain’s side, shoving through the gorse-choked bottom and finally coming up, winded and sweat-streaked, behind the ring of hounds.
It was a sight he never expected to see: Bran and Sceolan faced off against their own fellows. Hackles up, lips drawn back from their great teeth, growls swelling from their throats like thunder—this was no play-fight or squabble over a bone. This was deadly menace.
It’s Sive. The thought was instant and inescapable. What else would they be protecting? Finn’s heart, already pounding with exertion, thudded into a painful, lurching gallop, and he began hauling dogs back by their collars, flinging them one after another back to the men.
“Call them off!” he roared. “Tie them!”
He heard Caoilte’s voice behind him, repeating the order and urging the men to action. Bless the man. More than anyone, he knew the pain Finn had lived with these long years.
The dogs’ clamor faded back, and the wolfhounds quieted, ears softening, tails gently waving.
“What have you found?” Finn, with hardly spit in his mouth to speak, rasped the words out. He tried to see beyond the two dogs but could make out only a dark wall of rock.
They sidled apart to make way for him as he stepped forward. He observed, as if watching another, that his legs were shaky with tension. His heart drummed in his ears and broke his vision into sharp, shattered glimpses.
There was a recess in the cliff wall, a little scooped-out cavity in the rock. And yes, there was a figure inside its shadowed shelter. Finn lurched forward.
Not Sive. He knew before he could really make out the features that it was not Sive. No grown woman was ever that small.
Finn squatted down and peered in at the seated figure in wonder. A child looked back at him, a naked, crosslegged child with long blond hair and eyes that…oh, those eyes! As blue as his own, they were not Finn’s eyes, nor the eyes of any son of the Gael he had ever met. They shone like jewels and shimmered with the secret depths of a sun-kissed lake.
Finn’s head swam with questions, but he settled on one: “How did you get here, lad?”
The boy—he could not be more than six or seven summers old—searched Finn’s face without replying, and Finn began to wonder if he was simple or could not speak. Then the corners of his mouth twitched into a shy smile, and Finn’s hot skin puckered up in sudden gooseflesh. He knew that smile, had seen it the very first night he and Sive had met, and he had kissed its lovely corners more times than he could count. Then at last the child spoke.
“Find Finn.”
The boy had the high, fluty voice of a child still, but Finn could hear the music in it. Tears started into his eyes as he opened his arms wide.
“You’ve found him, lad. I’m Finn. You’re safe now. You’re with your father, and you’re safe.”