The Children of Lir Read online

  “I know you are there,” she said, approaching the shore. “You’ve always been there, and yet you refuse to speak. Well then, if you shall not come to me, I must then come to you.”

  I watched as my sister undressed, her pale skin shimmering beneath the moon, dimpled with cold, blue eyes burning like the winter wind.

  As the water encircled her ankles, she paused. As it rose to her thighs, she shivered. As it gripped her belly, she gasped.

  I did not move.

  Already I knew that it was not her time, yet she betrayed herself well enough. At the point where the water reached her nose, the next step certain to plunge her beneath the surface, she paused to take a breath. No person intent on taking their own life ever breathes in before that final step.

  Tired of the show, I flicked my finger, sweeping the sand from beneath her feet. She disappeared, then reappeared a moment later thrashing towards the shore.

  After coughing up saltwater and shivering in a posture much like that of our father, she rose and began to pull on her clothes. Once dressed, she inclined her head as though to look for me, then turned and walked away.

  “Wait,” I said, stepping forward. Our eyes met, hers wide as the western ocean, mine black as the bottomless depths. “You must be cold.”

  She nodded, and I set the sand aflame so that she might sit and warm herself.

  “My brother?” she asked, her voice full of wonder.

  “What do you want of me?”

  She stared into the fire. “I do not know,” she replied. “I have thought of this moment so often, yet now that we are face to face, I am lost.”

  From the flames I made a fish leap, transforming into a bird which faded as it rose towards the night’s sky. She laughed and for the first time I looked at her – truly looked. My father’s daughter, possessing none of his former strength, nor mine. Simply a fragile clay pot which any heavy rock might fracture. Until that day, I would not have cared had an avalanche of rocks buried her. I might even have rolled the first down the hill myself. Yet standing there, wrapped in her shawl, smiling into the sky where thin tendrils of smoke drifted like feathers, I felt Fate close in about her. Though she possessed no magic of her own, something powerful had singled her out.

  I knew then that I must decide either to hate her or to love her, for the lines of battle were being drawn, laced in perfume as putrid as carrion, as seductive as sage.

  This child and her siblings who sat each night at my father’s table, whilst I retreated beneath the waves. I resented her that. Even though I had stopped loving my father many lifetimes past.

  “Is it true,” she asked, “that my father made love to the sea, and that is how you were born?” I stared at her until she lowered her eyes, self-consciously tugging her shawl a little tighter about herself. “Would you prefer I go?”

  “Yes,” I replied.

  “Why?”

  “We belong in different worlds.”

  “Yet here our worlds meet.”

  She came close again, raising one hand, inviting me to press my palm against hers. For a moment, I gave to my own curiosity.

  “It’s warm.” – “It’s cold!” we spoke at once.

  I drew back, catching the fascination in her eyes, not wishing to speak of our differences any longer.

  “I must go,” I told her.

  “Wait! I have a question.”

  “Make it brief.”

  “My father, he comes here on the high tide to speak with my mother, yet I only ever see a boat and she is never in it. Is she truly there?”

  “Your mother is in the Land of the Forever Young, beyond my kingdom of Tír fo Thuinn, far beyond the last wave.”

  “What is life like there?”

  “You will see someday.”

  “Is she happy? May I speak with her?”

  “No. I have made no oath with you.”

  “Have you no compassion, brother?”

  “Has not your father’s fate taught you to forget the dead, sister?”

  I could see that she understood me.

  “I am warm enough now,” she whispered. “I will leave you.”

  As she began to walk back along the path, I called out. “Fionnuala, we shall meet again someday, you and I.”

  Her smile was only half a smile, as though she had not heard yet felt I expected some response. Perhaps she, too, felt the breath of Fate through the ages.

  Aodh

  We were sitting in my father’s hut, my sister Fin and me. It was just like any other afternoon. Sorcha played with Conn and Fiachra whilst we ate up at the fort. My father was rich enough to slaughter a hog a day if he so wished, yet instead he fed us bread with slices of meat and cheese. We didn’t even speak, just sat there like bronze spears, decorating his hut.

  We only stayed until the milk pitcher was empty, so I drank as fast as I could. Fiachra had found an ant’s nest that morning and I wanted to get back to it before nightfall, to see whether they were walking down the roads of twigs I had laid out, or whether they had climbed over and made a new trail.

  Fin would stay sitting with our father until Sorcha tucked us in, then she would appear by our bedsides to tell us stories of warriors and witches, where good always triumphed over the wicked. Sorcha had taught her to make shadows against the wall, and some nights it seemed as though those dragon hands of hers were truly breathing fire.

  Lately, Fin had been different. Some nights I would wake to find her gone. At first I was afraid one of the wicked chieftains from her stories had come to steal her away. I didn’t want to wake the twins, for I knew they would start to cry and their wails would wake the whole valley. Instead, I returned to my own bed and lay there curled up beneath my sheets until I heard her return. I was so angry with her that tears dampened my pillow. Fin was all I had left in the world and for that short moment, when I felt as though I had lost her, I could see little point in ever rising from my bed again.

  That evening at my father’s hut I kept thinking about the ants, and about the tiny chick we had found in the woods. It had fallen out of its nest and Conn came to fetch me. Neither of the twins were tall enough to reach the hole in the trunk, so I rubbed my hands in moss and lifted it carefully homewards. My brothers thought me a hero. We walked down to the lake where we shared a skin of crushed apple, watching swift-wings skimming insects from the water.

  It was because my mind was so far from my flesh that my elbow caught the edge of my plate and sent it clattering to the floor, food and all.

  “Aodh!” came my father’s voice, louder than I’d heard it in years. “Pay attention to yourself.”

  He stared at me from the other side of the fire, flames reflecting in his eyes. For one moment the image of the wicked chieftain returned, only this time he was not a shadow cast across the wall by my sister’s hand, he was my father.

  “It was only an accident!” I yelled, uncrossing my legs and fleeing.

  “Aodh, wait!” my father called, but I refused to turn back.

  In those first few moments I fled like the hare, racing across open ground, leaping ditches, my hair unknotting itself and streaming out behind. I hated him, I hated him, I hated him, and all that he was. I fell down on the earth, pulling up tufts of grass with my fists, wishing that Fin and I had been fostered out to another family.

  “Why, young Aodh,” Mother Moira said, smiling gummily down from a large rock. “Whatever is the matter?”

  “Nothing,” I sighed, pulling up another fistful of grass.

  “I wasn’t born last summer. Come, what say you help me down from here and I make you a nice cup of honeyed milk whilst you tell me all about it?”

  Truly, I had no desire to go with Mother Moira. She turned up in the strangest of places, on top of rocks, under bridges, behind haystacks, and the faint stench of raw meat always seemed to accompany her. If it weren’t for that, she might have been a jolly old woman, but that fragrance, combined with her strange ways, meant that I always did my best to stay ou
t of her path.

  “Fine,” I agreed.

  Mother Moira’s hut was padded from floor to thatch with animal pelts collected over a lifetime. It was rumoured that her husband had once been a master skinner, but I suspected Moira herself was pretty handy with a knife. Some of those furs seemed fresher than the years since her husband had passed.

  “Now, little one. Tell me all about your troubles.”

  “I’m not troubled.”

  “Well, all the rest of us are, so you’d be the first born without any cares.”

  “What are you troubled about?” I asked, glancing up from the warm clay wrapped between my fingers.

  “Probably the same thing you are.” She looked at me knowingly, but I was not about to help her out. “Our king has grown tired of late, his hair greyer than his years. It must be difficult for you and your sister?” I shrugged into my milk. “Does he ever talk of Lady Aobh?”

  “No,” I admitted.

  “Do you?”

  I glared at her. “That’s none of your business.”

  “No, of course not. I do apologise for an old woman’s wandering mind.” She came behind me and rested one withered hand on my shoulder, squeezing like a raven’s claw. “Blow on your milk to cool it, dear.”

  As I blew, the skin slipped across the surface like the cloudy eye of a soothsayer. I saw my sister reflected back, and my breath caught in my throat.

  “I’m sorry,” my father said, hunched on the ground as Fin knelt beside him, wrapping her arms about his neck. “I don’t know what came over me.”

  “Grief,” my sister replied, softly.

  “He is only a boy, a small boy. He did not deserve–”

  I was glad Fin cut him short by kissing his brow. My chest puffed out before me. I knew that I was small for my age, yet I never thought of myself as such. I was just as strong as the other boys. I won almost every fight I got into. The fact that my father also thought of me as small wounded my pride something rotten.

  “You have to stop this,” Fin told him. “We can’t go on living in the half-light.”

  “I don’t know how to go on at all, not in the half-light, not in the full light, not in any light. I open my eyes yet all around is darkness. Each night I wake calling her name. I wait the rest of the day for a reply that never comes.”

  “And it never will, father. Not whilst we walk on land, feel hunger and thirst. Not whilst we live.”

  “Then—” Lir began, and I knew what he was about to say. He was about to say Then I no longer wish to live, but he stopped himself, looking up into Fionnuala’s eyes, holding her face in his hands. “Then,” he tried again, “you must teach me to live.”

  Fin hugged him tightly, there on their knees, on the floor of my father’s hut. I felt a sharp sort of resentment that my father would open his heart to Fin, yet direct only his anger at me. I realised then how desperately alone my father felt, and that it was not only me who was not enough for him, but all of us: Conn, Fiachra, even Fionnuala. We would never be enough to replace our mother, no matter how hard we tried. In realising that, my own hurt left me like a cold tide, replaced by pity.

  I pitied my father.

  Sorcha

  Oh, I could tell you, but you’d never believe me.

  How fine the furs were, how high the fires, how succulent the meat that roasted on the spit. Sidh-ar-Femhin was a fort fit for the Dagda himself. More families lived there than in all the other settlements put together. In the centre, his great hall towered the height of half-a-dozen men, the pit always stoked with scented wood. You could smell Sidh-ar-Femhin from valleys away, long before you ever saw it. For me it was the scent of home. I breathed it in my sleep.

  I had first come into Bodb’s service as a young girl. Shortly after he tricked his father from Sí an Bhrú and took up residency in that great place. I had been fostered out to my aunt who worked as a weaver, spinning fine cloth for the Dagda’s queen and her daughters. I had little skill for the task though, always getting yarn caught between my fingers and carding wool the wrong way. Eventually they put me to work on the most menial of tasks, believing me to have no aptitude for delicate labour. I scrubbed the firedogs and dug ash into the earth to help the crops grow. I didn’t mind. Whereas some women shy from hard work, I always felt invigorated by it. I liked the sense of lying down at night, closing my eyes and feeling that heavy flush of sleep which starts in your toes, flooding right up your neck to your head. I never woke in the night like others. I could sleep even when Old Meg took to snoring like the oxen.

  Then, one day, the Dagda’s daughter, Ainge, saw me telling stories to the younger children, casting my shadows across the walls. Nobody ever taught me how to do that, it was just something I learned for myself. I could make rabbits and dragons, unicorns, seal tails for selkies, and galloping hooves for horses.

  That night I was telling the story of a hare that could turn itself into a bear when it felt threatened. The hunters would creep up on it smugly, thinking they would eat game for their supper, only to follow it into the deep, dark woods and find themselves the prey.

  The children laughed so much, and I caught their laughter, hardly able to continue. Afterwards, when the boys had run screaming into the night to exhaust their excitement before bed, a couple of the older girls came to sit beside me, asking me to show them how I made all of those animals.

  We were practicing butterflies when Ainge came to us. I knew who she was, and fell silent, for there were rumours about her. It was said that whenever she walked in the woods, flowers would spring in her footsteps, and all the animals fell hushed and obedient.

  She sat beside me, her little legs curled up beneath her, tucking a strand of dark hair behind her ear. After a short while we were laughing and pranking as though we’d known one another a lifetime. The next day she introduced me to her brother, Bodb, who was delighted by my stories. He hired me to serve in the hall during the day and entertain with my fables at night. For, as you well know, it’s ill luck to tell stories by daytime. You must wait for that listening time when hush falls. Stories hold no power in the daylight.

  I was in Bodb’s service many years. Naturally my talents were replaced by others and I drifted into the background of clan life, but I was happy there. I knew my purpose, and I enjoyed my work. When Bodb gave his father back his fort at Sí an Bhrú and moved to Sidh-ar-Femhin, I went with him. When he married, I helped his new bride dress for their binding. When his son was born, I, along with three other women, took turns in watching him and helping his mother to regain her strength.

  I remember the day that the Daughters of Oilell of Aran arrived. Oilell was a proud woman, straight as an ash, her dark hair elaborately braided in chains that fell about her shoulders. I remember thinking then that she was strangely beautiful, with more than a touch of old blood about her. I worried Queen Medb might grow jealous, yet Bodb had chosen his wife well. Where she might have perceived a rival, her heart opened to receive a grieving mother.

  The daughters were little things, like three hatchlings in a nest, their eyes wide and defenceless. Aobh, Ailbhe and Aoife. Two dark of hair, one fair, all as finely cut as the mother.

  I knew little of Lir or the invasion he planned, only what was whispered by the fireside. He was said to be a giant of a man, one of the Ageless from the same ancient lineage as Bodb. Their skin remained soft, their eyes bright and their teeth white far longer than those of us mortal stock. Some said it was magic, or a blessing from foreign gods, the likes of which we might never know by name.

  I cared little for the length of his life, only for how short he wished to cut ours. They said he rode towards us on beasts that breathed fire, his spear glowing with the heat of the forge, and a lust for the blood of infants that could never be quenched. For weeks we cowered in fear, despite Bodb’s hearty laughter echoing from hut to hut, over the hills to where the deer drank by the calm stream. Wars throughout the whole of history are worst when they pit kin against kin.

  W
e expected Lir to fall upon us like the night, swift and relentless, extinguishing the bright lights of Sidh-ar-Femhin. Instead, he came bound in rope, head high but eyes cautious. There had been no battle it was later told. His armies had been small, and Bodb’s large. They surrounded him long before he reached our gates, disarming his men with little bloodshed and bringing him straight to his nephew.

  Neither Bodb nor Lir were seen for many nights after that. When, eventually, they emerged, peace was declared to the astonishment of all.

  Worse, a betrothal was announced.

  Aobh, my precious Aobh, eldest of Oilell’s three daughters, whose hair shone radiant as the sun. My heart cracked like a pot-boiler in my chest, as though cold water had touched its burning love and shattered it.

  I adored all of the daughters, not a soul would say otherwise, yet I kept a special affection for Aobh. As the eldest, it had fallen to her to keep her head high and comfort the others. If Aobh had not acted with such courage as a small child, the lot of her sisters might have been very different. If she had rebelled against Bodb, harboured resentment for her mother’s misfortune, allowed herself to be overcome by homesickness and heartache, well, then another story might now be told.

  That’s why I asked Bodb myself whether I could be the one to accompany her. I knew that she would only be allowed to take one, and I knew that I should be that one. For I knew that I could make her laugh with my stories, and laughter would bring her health in all the ills to follow.

  That day, as we rode out together to an unknown future, I watched Lir upon his fine horse and knew him to be a coarse man. He never once glanced back to see how his new bride was faring. He never offered a word of kindness or a sign of remorse for the sweet child he had separated from her fortunes.

  Who could have known in those first few months? Who could ever have guessed that their love would blossom? Certainly not I. If she had asked it of me, I was ready to saddle a horse and gallop her home to her father. When that old witch came the night of the bright moon and told her what she must do for her master, I was quietly stroking the blunt blade of a vegetable knife through my sleeve.