Old Friends: The Lost Tales of Fionn Mac Cumhaill Page 5

  But in fact, this slaying was no act of heroism. A seven-year-old, after his first week of sword training, would have been able to slay the unfortunate ‘beast’.

  Soon another child would be born of the love of the new sleeveen for the queen. This child, as always, would be a miniature of the teenager just killed. The reason the queen’s children were all so horrific-looking was that they showed on the outside the ugly betrayal that their father bore in his heart. But on the inside, unlike him, they were pure of heart.

  Before sealing the deal and allowing the new ‘hero’ to seize the throne and extinguish the life of the old king, she would make sure he understood all of this. She would show him his own baby. She would tell him that despite the warts, scars and deformities, this was a good child. Just like the son of the old king whom he had just murdered. She would make him curse his own child and say that he was happy that this child too would be killed by a new man in nineteen years’ time. Once the ‘hero’ agreed to her conditions, he would be allowed to drag the corpse of the dead ‘beast’ down to show the people and he would be declared the glorious defender of the people of Angledaneland, and it would be several years before his own reign started to become insecure.

  What was in this for the demon queen is not certain. Having a son killed every twenty years seemed to cause her no distress. It seemed that the pleasure of her life lay in revealing to humans that for all their talk of defending the good and the right, most were no better than she was herself. And there was no shortage of men ready to prove her right. To prove, in fact, that they were even worse than she was. At least she told no lies. She kept her wicked word down to the last detail, without mercy. She didn’t pretend to be anything better than she was.

  As it happened, the man in charge in Angledaneland at the time of Eibhlín’s misadventure was known in Fionn’s part of the world. He had originally departed in disgrace from an island near Éirinn. His family name was Sionnach, meaning fox, and indeed he had earned his first name – Glic, meaning cunning – though he did not like it. He thought the fox was too lowly an association for him, so once he became king in Angledaneland, he had changed his name to ‘Wolf Beo’ meaning live wolf. But he was always known only as Glic in these parts.

  This King Glic was currently the supposed great warrior king of Angledaneland. He liked to keep absolute power. He took more than his share of everything his people produced, and left them always near starvation. He boasted that when they were hungry, it made them meaner. And when they were meaner, they showed no mercy when he led them in raids on neighbouring lands, plundering anywhere he heard of good fortune or wealth.

  Under the careful tutoring of the demon queen, Glic kept power over his people by keeping alive their ancient fear that if they were not obedient to him, he might allow the dreaded beast to return again. It wasn’t that they were a particularly dull people. Their folk stories told them that after more than ten years in power, every leader becomes weakened and the beast then somehow starts to come back to life. They had no reason to think otherwise, since each horrendous teenager that was sent loping across the hill looked the same as the previous one to them. After fifteen years, as the unfortunate teenager grew, the sightings would become more regular. And it wasn’t just sightings. The queen and her king would give them every reason to believe that the beast was a cruel killer.

  The ‘beast’ would always be sent out at night time. A terrifying shadow, a horrendous gangly black and purple deformity, moving across the hillsides from the disused caverns where people long ago had made stone axes. Glic, like the previous kings, had persuaded the people that he alone could protect them from this horrible beast and that once it appeared, they should all go to their huts and extinguish all lights and pray for his success. Sure enough, Glic was the only one with the courage to go out looking for it. But instead of killing any monster, it was Glic himself who killed a cow here and a goat there, and any stray people he came across.

  It was easy enough for the sly king to perform this butchery. Glic was certainly not the glorious warrior that the Angledane praise-singers bellyached about. He was barely able to lift a sword. His weapon of choice in conflict was an arrow fired into the back of an unsuspecting adversary. All of his subjects had been warned to kneel facing the ground when they saw the king’s white horse approach. This made short work of disposing of those unfortunates who hadn’t heard the warning to go indoors on the night of a beast appearance. As the white horse appeared, they would kneel and bow to the ground, and they would receive a blow from his axe in return for their obedience.

  Glic would drag the dead off to the queen’s den and then return to the people, covered in blood, claiming that after a ferocious fight, the beast had fled, seriously wounded.

  The people and animals discovered to be missing the next morning would be considered proof of the foul deeds of the monster.

  Much of this was known or suspected outside of Angledaneland, and if Eibhlín had not been too proud to ask, Dreoilín or Mac Cumhaill could have warned her.

  The problem Glic was facing at the time that Eibhlín was preparing for her trip was that he had already been many years in power. He remembered only too well the deal he had agreed with the queen. At the time he was making the deal, twenty years of absolute power seemed like forever. Now, it seemed like most of it had flown past in a blur. He had been especially loyal to her and had done more killing and looting for her than any previous king he had heard of – and there had been plenty of bad ones in the past. So he hoped maybe she would let him run on for longer. Some other kings had lasted for maybe twenty-two years before she had settled on a suitably worse replacement. Though some had only made seventeen years before she got fed up of them.

  He had been to talk to her a few times recently. He would say, ‘My lovely mistress, you don’t have to keep doing this forever.’

  ‘What silliness is on your mind now, little man?’ she said.

  He never knew whether her smile was close to violence or affection.

  ‘Well, O lovely one, why keep changing every twenty years?’

  ‘You know I like a fresh man,’ she crooned, ‘and a new baby. That’s how it’s always been.’

  ‘But you could get fresh blood by expanding into new territories. I could do that for you. I could build an army for you and take over a new country every year for you.’

  ‘You could?’

  ‘And we could strike terror in each place.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘And you could install a new prince in each place and make each of these your lovers as pleased you. I wouldn’t mind.’

  ‘You wouldn’t? That’s generous of you.’

  ‘No, I’d just oversee the army and, well, I suppose, all of these princes in each area would answer to me?’

  ‘So you’d be, we might say, king of all these expanded territories?’

  ‘Serving you, of course.’

  ‘So you could have expanded my territory widely, and you say you could have added a new country every year of your reign. But you didn’t?’

  ‘Well, I was getting ready to.’

  ‘You’ve had sixteen years.’

  It was now easy to see which kind of smile she was wearing. A violent lash was only one more wrong word away from Glic’s back.

  ‘And then there’s the problem of this great oaf of a son of yours. Funny, I’ve had a slight fondness for some of them, but not for yours. When he is twenty we’ll have to have someone get rid of him, won’t we? I think I’ll have him chopped like a bush and then skewered like a pig. What do you think of that?’

  Glic didn’t wince.

  He replied, ‘I could do that myself. I’ve done it with handsomer men. And then we could have another child together and I could carry on for another twenty years pretending to the fools below that I’d slain another monster.’ Glic knew he was babbling now.

  The lash of her whip cut his breast plate in ribbons and stripped flesh from his belly.

 
‘I don’t doubt that you would rip the very heart out of your own son if I offered you one extra minute on the throne. Do you think I don’t know that much about you, after all these sixteen years? Quiet now,’ she said, as he curled in cries of pain on the floor. ‘You have another few years and be glad of them.’

  ‘Thank…thank you, mistress,’ said Glic, as he crawled out of her cavern.

  From that day onwards, the sightings of the ‘beast’ became ever more regular. The queen would send her son out almost every evening, unkindly telling the doomed lad that if he roamed around he might soon meet a companion his own age, someone like himself. Her real intention was to amuse herself at the sight of Glic squirming in her ever tightening claw.

  Glic could see the trap closing on him. Every time the ‘beast’ appeared, he had to set out and kill more. If he didn’t bring any kill to the queen, she would have his own life instantly. All would be over. But the more people and animals that disappeared at night, the more his subjects started to feel that their king was getting old and weak and that the beast was getting the better of him now.

  By the time he reached year eighteen of his reign, there were beast sightings followed by killings every second night. The people were in terror. They were beginning to murmur that their king was no longer able to keep the beast at bay, and praying for the day that a new warrior would arrive.

  Three days before Eibhlín arrived, Glic had already decided to try to kill the demon queen and to reign forever himself. Of course, he wasn’t the first king to have decided to try this approach. She herself had told him that much, without giving him any details.

  ‘Terrible how little respect some men have for their honour and how easily they try to break a deal with a queen who has been so good to them and given them such good fortune,’ she said one day, reading his thoughts.

  ‘Well, you know I am a man of honour, and I keep my deals,’ he said, without enquiring about the details of any of the previous kings’ attempts. He didn’t want to heighten her suspicions.

  ‘All men of honour, of course, just like yourself. High honour. Men who have sold me their souls and agreed to have their own sons sacrificed like, well... like beasts. Just so they can have a few short years of absolute power. It would hardly be a major bridge to cross for such an honourable man to consider breaking a deal with a wicked old queen, now would it?’

  When she asked questions like this, Glic felt her eyes could look right through him and he thought there was no way he could ever have a moment of courage against her.

  However, in the daytime, away from her den, when the sun was shining in his castle yard, he felt braver. Brave enough to think the unthinkable. Although he didn’t know the details, Glic knew that some of the previous kings who had challenged her had been quite passable swordsmen, unlike himself; most of them were stronger than he was, which wouldn’t have been hard; and a few of them even more sneaky, wicked and bloody than him. He would need something special.

  It was in the middle of these thoughts that Eibhlín arrived. She was after twenty hard days on the sea. The boatmen skirted the ribcage of the boat around the cruel seas to the north of Cornobha, sometimes with four men rowing, other times using two small sails to catch the wind. They managed her skilfully through storm and calm, all the time trying to keep land in sight. During the journey, Eibhlín stood all day at the front of the boat with her legs slightly apart for balance, holding onto the head of the wolf that was carved into the oak nose of the boat when the sea was rolling badly, staring straight ahead as if she could will the boat to reach new land quicker. She was stern and unfriendly. They wanted her to sit safely down on the floor of the boat, but she wouldn’t, except when she had to sleep. She only spoke to them when she felt the need to criticise the way they were calculating their directions from the stars and the sun.

  When they eventually made anchor and sent two men in a small currach to take Eibhlín and her wares ashore, the other boatmen were very glad to see the back of her. Yet, when she put foot on shore, her attitude changed completely. She was suddenly all smiles and pleasantness to the poor half-starving Angledanes that came down to meet her.

  ‘So pleased to finally be in a land of sophisticated people,’ she said in their language. Being such a clever person, she had managed to learn a good amount of this language merely from a few conversations with an Angledane man who was traveling on the same boat.

  ‘Take me to your glorious king. I’ve heard such great things about him,’ she continued. ‘Finally, someone who will appreciate fine war crafts.’

  When news of this strange arrival was brought to Glic, all he heard was the part about ‘fine war crafts’. Though he wasn’t a religious man, he began to hope that maybe a merciful god of some kind was sending him a solution to his problem. He sent for the foreign woman to be brought to his palace immediately. He also ordered that no further mention of her arrival be made anywhere. He hoped the demon queen would not hear anything until he got a chance to look at what kind of lucky cards he had been dealt.

  Eibhlín approached the castle, escorted by two castle workers to whom she payed no attention. Had she looked, she would have noticed that they were mere skin and bone. Five more followed, carrying her caskets and sacks of wares. People working on their knees in the rows of crops at the side of the pathway didn’t look up at the curious clanging and tinkling sounds the objects made as they were carried.

  She also didn’t take much note of the fact that the castle wasn’t as grand as she had heard of in the great tales of Angledaneland. The circular structure had walls of reeds and mud with a straw roof, not very much taller than the roofs on some of the huts they had passed along the way. The guards at the entrance were snoozing in the sunshine. She was able to walk right into the building without anyone checking who she was or what her business was. She assumed this was because the king had summoned her and told his fine guards not to bother her on the way in.

  There weren’t many people about inside the entrance chamber of the castle either. There were some hens that had come in and were picking through the sand on the floor, looking for crumbs. She didn’t notice any of this. She was standing waiting to be taken through to the main chamber. There were a few women fussing over a small pot. There was one tall man picking his teeth looking vacantly at the women and talking in a kind of deranged verse.

  ‘A Thane of Higalic heard of a man of valour.

  Nægling, Wolf Beo's own sword, was shivered in pieces;

  It was not granted to him that the edges of steel blades might help him in the fight;

  The champion of the Scyldings smote the fiendish monster…’

  Eibhlín was warmed to see that the great king gave shelter to such an unfortunate raving lunatic, probably a hero who had lost his mind in some gallant battle.

  There was another man lying on a pile of straw eating an apple. None of them moved very much, even to look at her. By now, her impatience was starting to return.

  ‘Can you go and tell your glorious king that Eibhlín has arrived, my good man,’ she said, settling her gaze on the insolent, lazy git lying on the pile of straw.

  She stepped closer to him and realised that the foul smell she had thought was coming from the cooking pot actually seemed to be coming off this loutish guard on the straw. The king’s staff obviously didn’t have a great fondness for water. To make things worse, he appeared to have his body smeared in some kind of pig lard, such as she used on the blades of new swords to keep them from rusting. She wondered how any king could keep such people in his service. She thought to herself, If the poor man is taken advantage of by such slack servants it must only mean that his heart is too kind.

  The man sat up and brushed some straw off his food-stained cape. Then he stood. He was so short that the top of his perfectly bald and lard-covered head barely reached Eibhlín’s shoulder. He was so fat, she was calculating that if you needed to get to the other side of him, it would probably take less energy to jump over him than to
walk around him. This dirty little man was, of course, Glic himself.

  When he said, ‘At your service missus’, Eibhlín nearly fell in a heap.

  ‘You’re looking a bit pale, my dear; I suppose it was a long journey,’ said the king in his politest voice, and screamed over his shoulder, ‘Get this one something to drink, you lazy trollops.’

  The water in the earthenware pot they brought her had a foul smell. But she was so thirsty she drank it anyway. That was all she was offered. No mention of a place to rest after her long journey. No mention of a meal.

  ‘Now,’ said the king, after a few minutes, ‘let’s talk business.’

  He sat back down on his pile of straw. He pointed for her to sit too, but there was nothing to sit on except the ground. She sat there in the sand. She said nothing.

  ‘What have you brought for me, woman?’ said the king in a much sharper tone.

  For the first time, she noticed a leather whip that hung by his side where most warriors kept swords. He touched its stem with his short fingers.

  Tough and hard though she was, sheer cold panic was starting to spread through Eibhlín’s body. What on earth had she got herself into? What was going to happen next? What could she do to get home? Home! All of a sudden, it seemed so nice. Even the simplest hut in her clan’s enclosure was nicer than this. Even with all her sharpness, her own king had treated her properly. And why could she not just have swallowed her pride and listened to the tall, pale boy that Mac Cumhaill had sent to shout at the departing boat, warning her to turn back, as this was not a good place? She needed to keep a cool head now if she was ever to come out of this situation, but she was finding it very hard not to cry.

  ‘I came, Your Highness, to offer for sale some new military inventions,’ she said bravely.

  ‘Sale?’ the king laughed. ‘Where do you think you are?’

  He nodded to the other man in the room, who continued mumbling his verses as he went to move rough-hewn boughs of a tree across the main entranceway.