The High Deeds of Finn MacCool Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Author’s Note

  1. The Birth and Boyhood of Finn

  2. How Finn won his Father’s Place

  3. Finn and the Fianna

  4. Finn and the Young Hero’s Children

  5. Finn and the Grey Dog

  6. The Birth of Oisĩn

  7. The Chase of Slieve Gallion

  8. The Giolla Dacker and his Horse

  9. The Horses of the Fianna

  10. The Hostel of the Quicken Trees

  11. Dearmid and Grania

  12. Niamh of the Golden Hair

  13. The Death of Dearmid

  14. The Battle of Gavra

  15 The Return of Oisĩn

  About the Author

  Copyright

  THE HIGH DEEDS OF

  FINN MACCOOL

  ROSEMARY SUTCLIFF

  Illustrated by Michael Charlton

  Author’s Note

  If you already know the stories of Cuchulain and the Red Branch Warriors, you will notice a very great difference between them and these stories of Finn Mac Cool. Both concern the adventures of Irish heroes, their loves and hates, their battles with strange and supernatural beings. Yet they belong to two quite different worlds.

  It seems right and fitting that the Red Branch stories should be set in the wild harsh countryside of Northern Ireland. They are wild harsh tales. Their magic is darkly splendid, their people are very real, so that one loves and hates them and suffers and rejoices with them. They have the quality which we call Epic, which means that if we are deciding their right place on the bookshelves we should put them somewhere alongside Homer’s Iliad, which is the greatest epic of all.

  The stories of Finn Mac Cool belong to a later date, and are set in the South, many of them in the soft green Killarney countryside; and this again seems right and fitting. They belong, not to Epic, but to Folklore and Fairytale; and only here and there, as in the fighting for the river ford in The Hostel of the Quicken Trees something of the Hero Tale remains. The magic changes and shimmers and shifts on ahead of one, just a little out of reach, like the end of the rainbow. The Dananns, who in the Red Branch stories are still recognizably gods or half-gods, have become the Fairy Kind, with only a shred of their lost godhood clinging to them here and there. Time means nothing – Oisĩn the son of Finn is a young warrior when his son Osca is a young warrior. And in another way, also, time means nothing. For the Lochlan Raiders, whose battles with the Fianna come so often into the stories, are the Vikings, the Norsemen; and the Norsemen did not even begin to be sea raiders, let alone reach the Irish coast, till long after Finn’s day. It is just that later story-tellers picked them out of their own time and set them back five hundred years or so, into Finn’s, out of a feeling that the Sea Raiders were the Enemy and therefore the right people for the Fianna to fight.

  The stories of the Fianna are full of loose ends and contradictions, and unexplained wisps of strangeness that seem to have drifted in for no especial reason except that they are curious or beautiful and happened to be floating by.

  They are stories made simply for the delight of story-making, and I have retold them in the some spirit – even adding a flicker or a flourish of my own from time to time – as everyone who has retold them in the past thousand years or so has done before me.

  Rosemary Sutcliff

  1

  The Birth and Boyhood of Finn

  In the proud and far back days, though not so far back nor yet so proud as the days of the Red Branch Heroes, there rose another mighty brotherhood in Erin, and they were called the Fianna. They were a war-host whose task was to hold the shores of Erin safe from invaders, and they were a peace-host, for it was their task also to keep down raids and harryings and blood feuds between the five lesser kingdoms into which Erin was divided. Ulster, Munster, Connacht, Leinster and Mide had each their own companies of the Fianna under their own Fian Chiefs; but one Captain was over them all. And each and every man must take his oath of loyalty, not to his own king, nor to his own Fian Chief alone, but to the Captain and to the High King of Erin himself, sitting in his high hall at Tara with his right foot upon the Stone of Destiny.

  The Fianna came to their most full and valiant flowering and to their greatest power in the time when the hero Finn Mac Cool was their Captain, and Cormac Mac Art, the grandson of Conn the Hundred-Fighter, was High King of Erin.

  But the story has its beginning back in the days of Finn’s father Cool Mac Trenmor, lord of the Clan Bascna of Leinster, who was Captain before him, and of Aed Mac Morna, Lord of the Clan Morna and Chief of the Connacht Fianna, who sought the Captaincy for himself.

  At Cnucha, near where Dublin stands today, a great and bloody battle was fought between Clan Bascna and Clan Morna, as two bulls battle for the lordship of the herd. And one of Cool’s household warriors wounded Aed in the eye, so sorely that he went by the name of Goll, which means one-eyed, ever after. But this Aed, who was now Goll Mac Morna, dealt Cool Mac Trenmor a still fiercer blow that cost him not the sight of an eye, but life itself, and he took from Cool’s belt a certain bag of blue- and crimson-dyed crane-skin that was the Treasure Bag of the Fianna. And with the death of Cool and the loss of the Treasure Bag, the battle went against Clan Bascna, and there was a great slaughter, and those that were left of the Leinster Fianna, including Crimnal, the brother of Cool, as well as the Munster men who had stood with them, were driven into exile in the Connacht hills. And there was blood feud between Clan Bascna and Clan Morna from that day, which was to bring black sorrow upon Erin in the end.

  News of the battle and of Cool’s death was brought to his young wife, Murna of the White Neck, and she near her time to bear his child. And Murna, knowing that her lord’s enemies would not allow any child of his to live after him if they could help it, fled, taking two of her most trusted women with her, into the wild fastnesses of Slieve Bloom. And there, like a hind lying up among the fern in the whitethorn month when the fawns are brought into the world, she bore a man-child, and not daring to keep him with her for fear of the hunters on her trail, she called him Demna, and gave him to the two women, bidding them bring him up in the hidden glens of Slieve Bloom, until he was of an age to fight for his rightful place as Cool’s son. Then, sadly, she went her way alone, and no more is known of her save that at last, after many wanderings, she found shelter with a chieftain of Kerry.

  In the hidden glens of Slieve Bloom, Demna grew from a babe into a child and from a child into a boy; and the women trained him in all the ways of the wild, so that by the time he was a youth, he was such a hunter that he could bring a flying bird out of the sky with one cast of a sling-stone, and run down the deer on his naked feet without even a hound to help him; and he knew the ways of wolf and otter, badger and fox and falcon as a good hound-master knows the ways of his own dogs. As he grew older he began to range far and wide from the turf bothie that was all the home he knew, and so one day he came to the hall of a great chieftain, before which some boys of his own age were playing hurley. The game looked to him good, and he asked if he might join in; and they gave him a hurley stick and told him the rules. And so soon as he got into the way of it, he could play better than any of them, even taking the ball from their best and swiftest player.

  The next day he played with them again, and though they divided the teams so that a fourth of all their number were set to play against him, he won the game. The day after, it was half their number, and the day after that, their whole number played against him, but he won those games too. That evening in the hall, the boys told the chieftain of the strange boy who had joined them and beaten their whole double team at hurley.<
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  ‘And what is he like, this boy,’ asked the chieftain, ‘and what is his name?’

  ‘We do not know his name,’ said the leader among the boys, ‘but he is tall and strong, and the hair of him as bright as barley when it whitens in the sun at harvest time.’

  ‘If he is as fair as that, then there’s only one name for him,’ said the chieftain, ‘and that is Finn.’

  And Finn, which means fair, he became, from that day forward.

  The chieftain talked of the strange boy to a friend who passed that way on the hunting trail and lodged under the roof for the night, and the friend spoke of him to another, and so as time went by, rumours of his skill and daring spread like ripples on a pool when a stone is tossed into the water, until they came to the ears of Goll Mac Morna. And it seemed to Goll that if Cool had a son, he would be just such a one as this Finn . . . Murna of the White Neck had been heavy with child when she fled to the wilds; what if the child had been safely born and was a son? The boy would be fourteen by now, just coming to manhood. Goll Mac Morna smelled danger. He mustered the Connacht Fianna, and bade them hunt the boy down – they were great hunters as well as great warriors, the Fianna – and bring him back, living or dead.

  But one of Finn’s two foster-mothers was a Wise Woman, and she saw in a pool of black bog-water in the cupped palms of her hands how the Fianna of Connacht were hunting the hills for him. And she told the other woman, and together they spoke to Finn.

  ‘The hunt is out for you, fosterling. Goll Mac Morna has heard more of you than is for your own good, and his men are questing through the woods to kill you, for you and not Goll are by rights the Captain of the Fianna of Erin. Therefore the time has come for you to leave the glen.’

  Then Finn took the spear which they gave him, and his sling and his warmest cloak, and set out on his wanderings.

  To and fro and up and down the length and breadth of Erin he wandered, taking service with now this king or chieftain and now that, and so getting his weapon-skill and his warrior training, against the day when he should stand out into the open and fight for his rightful place in the world. He began to gather to him a band of young men of much his own kind, fierce and gay and daring; and when he felt that the time was come, he led them into Connacht to seek out any of his father’s old followers who might yet be living in the hills.

  The day after they crossed the Connacht border, they came upon a woman bowed altogether with grief, and keening over the body of a young man outstretched on the stained and trampled grass.

  Finn stopped when he saw her, and asked, ‘What ill thing has happened here?’

  She looked up at him, and her grief was so terrible that the tears falling from her eyes were great drops of blood. ‘Here is my son Glonda, my only son, dead! Slain by Lia of Luachair and his followers. If you are a warrior as you seem, go now and avenge his death, since I have no other man to avenge it.’

  So Finn went after this Lia of Luachair, and found him, and slew him in single combat, the followers of both standing by. And when Lia lay dead, Finn saw that a strange-seeming bag of crane-skin dyed blue and crimson was fastened to his belt. He knelt and untied the belt-thong, and opened the bag. Inside was a spearhead of fine dark blue iron, and a war-cap inlaid with silver, a shield with bronze studs around the rim, and a gold-clasped boar’s-hide belt. Finn had no knowledge as to why the man should be carrying these things, but they looked worth keeping, so he put them back in the bag, and tied the thong to his own belt, and he and his companions went on their way.

  Beyond the Shannon, in the shadowed depths of the Connacht forests, he came upon a clearing in the woods, and in the clearing a cluster of branch-woven bothies; and as he looked, out from the low door-holes, one after another came old men, gaunt as wolves in a famine winter, bent and white-haired and half clad in animal skins and rags of old once-brilliant cloth. But each man carried in his hand an ancient sword or spear, for it seemed to them that the strange-comers could only be young warriors of the Clan Morna who had discovered their refuge at last; and they chose to meet their deaths fighting, rather than go down tamely without a blow. And something about their bearing and the way they handled their weapons even now, told Finn that they were the men he had come to seek, and he could have howled like a dead man’s dog, thinking of the tall and splendid warriors that they had been on the morning that they stood out to fight at Cnucha.

  Then he swallowed the grief in him and cried out to them with joy, ‘You are the Clan Bascna! Which of you is Crimnal the brother of Cool?’

  Then one of the old men stepped foward, sword in hand – and he not yet knowing whether or no he faced Clan Morna – and said fearlessly, ‘I am Crimnal the brother of Cool.’

  Finn looked in his old tired eyes, and said, ‘I am Finn, the son of Cool.’ And he knelt and laid the crane-skin bag at the old man’s feet for a gift, since he had nothing else to give.

  Crimnal looked at the bag, and cried out in a great voice to come from such a thin and bent old body, ‘The Treasure Bag of the Fianna! Brothers, the time of our waiting is over!’

  He opened the bag, and one by one drew out the things that it contained, the old men and the young men standing round to watch. And it seemed to Finn that the eyes of the old men grew brighter and their backs straighter and the grip of their weapon hands stronger with each object that appeared; the spearhead and the war-cap, the shield and the boar’s-hide belt.

  ‘Goll Mac Morna took this from your father’s body after the slaying; and for eighteen years it has been lost to us. Now it returns again to Clan Bascna and with it will return also the lordship of the Fianna. Go you and take your father’s place for it is yours, Finn Mac Cool.’

  ‘Keep the Treasure Bag for me, then,’ said Finn. ‘My comrades I leave with you, to guard both it and you until I send you word to bring it out to me.’

  And again he went his way, alone as at the first time.

  But he knew that there was yet one more thing he had to learn before he was fitted to take his father’s place; and he went to study poetry and the tales in which lay the ancient wisdom and history of his people with a certain Druid by the name of Finegas, who lived on the banks of the River Boyne.

  Seven years Finegas had lived beside the Boyne, and all that while he had been striving by every means that he could think of to catch Fintan the Salmon of Knowledge, who lived in a dark pool of the river, where a great hazel tree bent its branches and dropped nuts of knowledge into the water. Fintan ate the nuts as they fell, and their power passed into him, and whoever ate of Fintan would possess the wisdom of all the ages. In seven years, a man – and he a Druid – may think of many ways to catch a salmon, but Fintan the Salmon of Knowledge had escaped them all, until Finn came treading lightly through the woods to be the old man’s pupil.

  Soon after that, Finegas caught the Salmon quite easily, as though it had simply been waiting its own chosen time to be caught.

  Finegas gave the Salmon to Finn to cook for him. ‘And look that you eat nothing of the creature, not the smallest mouthful, yourself, but bring it to me as soon as it is ready, for it’s wearying I’ve been for the taste of it, this seven long years past.’

  Then he sat down in the doorway of his bothie, and waited. And a long wait it seemed to him. At last Finn brought the Salmon, steaming on a long dish of polished maple wood. But as he set it down, Finegas looked into his face, and saw there was a change in it, and that it was no longer the face of a boy. And he asked, ‘Have you eaten any of the Salmon in spite of my words to you?’

  And Finn shook his head. ‘I have not. But when I turned it on the spit I scorched my thumb, and I sucked it to ease the smart. Was there any harm in that, my master?’

  Finegas sighed a deep and heavy sigh, and pushed the dish away. ‘Take the rest of the Salmon and eat it, for already in the hot juice on your thumb, you have had all the knowledge and power that was in it. And in you, and not in me as I had hoped, the prophecy is fulfilled. And when you have eaten
, go from here, for there is nothing more that I can teach you.’

  From that day forward, whenever Finn wished to know how some future thing would turn out, or the meaning of some mystery, or to gain tidings of events happening at a distance, he had only to put his scorched thumb between his teeth and the knowledge would come to him as though it were the Second Sight.

  And another power came to him also at that time, so that he could save the life of any sick or wounded man, no matter how near to death, by giving him a drink of water from his cupped hands.

  2

  How Finn won his Father’s Place

  Now, when he left his Druid master beside the Boyne, Finn knew that the time was fully come for him to be claiming his father’s place, and he set out for Tara of the High Kings.

  It was Samhein, the time of the great autumn feast, and as he drew nearer, his road, and the four other roads that met at Tara, became more and more densely thronged with chiefs and warriors, on horseback or in chariots decorated with bronze and walrus ivory, with their women in gowns of green and saffron and crimson and heather-dark plaid and the golden apples swinging from the ends of their braided hair, and their tall feather-heeled hounds running alongside. For at Samhein all the kings and chiefs of Erin came together, and all men were free to sit at table in the High King’s hall if they could find room – and so long as they left their weapons outside.

  So up the Royal Hill and in through the gate, and across the broad forecourt went Finn, amid the incoming throng, and sat himself down with the King’s household warriors, ate badger’s meat baked with salt and honey, and drank the yellow mead from a silver-bound oxhorn, and watched the High King and the tall scarred man close beside him, who he knew from his lack of an eye must be Goll Mac Morna, and waited for the King to notice that there was a stranger among his warriors.

  And presently the High King did notice him, and sent one of his court officials to bid him come and stand before the High Table.