The Hound of Ulster (17 page)

The next morning as they took up their shields, Cuchulain burst out, gripping the other's shoulder, ‘Ferdia, Ferdia, how could you come against me for the sake of a woman—and a woman who has been offered to half the champions of the host—even to me, if I would yield up the ford for her sake.'

‘For the Royal Daughter of Connacht?' Ferdia said bitterly. ‘Never think it. I should have been shamed through Roscommon, through the whole of Connacht, if I had not come down to the ford.
She
would have made sure as to that, Maeve the Queen!'

‘And so for your own honour, you would slay me,' Cuchulain said, the voice of him heavy with grief.

And Ferdia raised his head and looked at him without a
word. But it was as though he said, ‘It was not
I
that was champion of all Skatha's boys.'

‘The choice of weapons is yours,' Cuchulain said.

And that day, all the wintry daylight hours, they fought in midstream with their heavy leaf-bladed iron swords, and though they wounded each other sorely again and again, still neither gained any advantage. But that night when the first fierce stars of Orion shone frost bright through the alder branches, the champions slept apart, and their horses grazed on different pastures and their charioteers warmed themselves at separate fires.

In the next dawn, when Ferdia rose, he knew that this would be the last day's fighting, and he knew very surely what the end of it would be. He armed himself with especial care, and over his striped silken tunic and leather loinguard he bound a great flat stone across his belly, and over that an iron apron, for he knew that Cuchulain would use the Gae Bolg today. He put on his crested war-helm rich with enamelling; and belted on his sword and took up his bullshide buckler with the fifty bronze bosses. Then he went down to the ford and crossed over to his own side. And waiting there, with a sudden wild defiant gaiety, he fell to tossing up his mighty spears and catching them again, idly, like a juggler playing with apples.

And on his own side of the ford, Cuchulain the Hound of Ulster stood watching, then said over his shoulder to Laeg his charioteer, ‘Laeg, will you do a thing for me? If I give ground today, do you give me your scorn to spur me on. Mock at me and burn me up with shame,' and even as he said it, he thought how Ferdia had done that thing for him when first he strove to cross the Bridge of Leaps, and he could have wept like a woman.

Then he called across the river. ‘What weapons shall it be today?'

‘Today the choice is yours,' said Ferdia.

‘Then let it be all or any,' Cuchulain said.

And all that morning until the sun stood at noon, they fought with the spears, yet neither could overcome the other. Then Cuchulain drew his sword and set on with that, striving to strike in over Ferdia's guard. Three times he leapt in the air to drive the deadly blade down over the rim of Ferdia's buckler, but each time Ferdia caught him on the broad face of the shield itself, and flung him off into the deep water beside the ford; and Laeg cried out, fiercely mocking, ‘See now! He casts you off as the river casts a rotten stick, he grinds you as the quern stone grinds a grain of barley! Little manikin, never call yourself a warrior, lest the women of Ulster should make themselves sick with laughing!'

And at the sound of Laeg's mockery, at last Cuchulain's battle frenzy came upon him, and he seemed all at once taller than tall Ferdia, and the Hero light blazed about his head, and springing in upon each other the two champions were locked together, reeling and trampling to and fro, while the demons and banshees and all unearthly things of the glens whirled and shrieked about their leaping blades, and the very waters of the river took fright and rolled and boiled back from the ford, so that for a while and a while they fought on dry land.

Presently Cuchulain stumbled on a shifting stone, and in the moment that he was off guard, Ferdia drove in his sword and wounded him in the shoulder so that the blood splashed down on to the stones of the ford, and the river ran skeined with scarlet; and as though the sight of the blood maddened him, he began to press upon Cuchulain, striking and thrusting like some great fair-haired fiend of battle, until at last Cuchulain could bear it no more and shouted to Laeg to throw him the Gae Bolg.

Ferdia whipped down his shield to guard his loins and belly, but even as he did so, Cuchulain had caught the dreadful spear as Laeg flung it to him, and leapt and thrust it downward over Ferdia's guard so that it split asunder the flat stone and pierced through Ferdia's armour, and plunged in between belly and breast, deep into his body, so that it burst his great heart, and his life came pouring out.

‘It is finished,' cried Ferdia. ‘Grief upon me! I have my death at your hand, Cuchulain my brother, and to you is the victory!'

Cuchulain caught him as he fell, and carried him to the bank—to the Ulster bank, that he might not die on the hated Connacht shore—and laid him down. And then with a roaring as of many seas in his ears and a blackness before his eyes, sank forward across the body of his friend, with his arms still about him.

Laeg stooped and tried desperately to rouse him. ‘Up! Up Cuchulain! The hosts of Ireland will be upon us now that their last champion is dead!'

‘Why should I rise again? I have killed my brother,' Cuchulain said, and the darkness closed over him, so that he never heard the thunder of hooves nor the shouted triumph of the war songs as the hosts of Queen Maeve poured through the glens into Ulster. Nor did he know when Laeg lifted him into the chariot and goaded the team into a racing gallop for the refuge of Sleive Fuad's northern glens.

‘
THE MEN OF
Ulster are being slain and the women carried away and the cattle driven, and Cuchulain alone holds the Gap of the North against the four Provinces of Ireland!' Laeg had cried through Emain Macha; but it had seemed that the stupefied warriors scarcely heard him; only some wagged their heads a little, as though he had cried that the geese were in the kale plot.

But when in despair he had snatched a fresh horse from the Red Branch stables and gone flying back to rejoin his lord, the women took up his cry: ‘Do you not hear? Rouse up! Conor Mac Nessa, if ever you were a fighting man before this sickness came upon you, rouse up and rouse your warriors and go to aid Cuchulain! Do you not understand that the war hosts of all Ireland are at the gates of Ulster, and none but the Hound of Ulster to stand alone in the gate?'

And slowly, as the Curse of Macha started to wear thin, the words of the women began to pierce through to the dazed
minds of the warriors, and their eyes, which had been empty or full of clouds, began again to be the eyes of the Red Branch Heroes that their women and their enemies knew. And at last Conor Mac Nessa rose like one still heavy with a draught of poppy juice, and steadying his weight against the main roof-tree of his hall, he swore a mighty oath. ‘Dead men are beyond our recall, but the heavens are above us and the earth beneath us and the sea around us; and surely unless the earth gape and swallow us and the seas roll in and engulf the land, and the heavens fall and crush us beneath their weight of stars, I will set every woman by her own hearth again and every cow in her own byre.'

Then, even as Maeve had done in Connacht, he called for the black goat to be slain and the Cran-Tara sent out through the length and breadth of Ulster from east to west, and from the northmost headlands to the borders of Murthemney. And many of his warriors he called on by name to answer the summons; those long dead as well as those yet living, for the clouds of the Great Weakness still clung about his brain.

And as the Weakness passed from all Ulster, the warriors flocked in, grimly joyful, to answer the summons. And from end to end, the province rang with the sharpening of sword and spear on weapon-stone, the buckling on of war gear and the harnessing of chariots.

In a few days all was ready, and half the host under the King himself swept from Emain Macha southward, and the other half led by Celthair Son of Uthica Hornskin came thundering from the west along the very track of Queen Maeve. And on the way the King's host fell in with a rieving band of eight score of the men of Meath, driving away in their midst many women roped together and herded like driven cattle, and they warmed their sword hands for the sterner work in store by
slaying every one of the rievers and freeing the women to go back to their own hearths.

Maeve and her hosts had had word of their coming, and they were already falling back towards Connacht, for they were in no case now to meet the unscathed war host of Ulster. But when they reached Slemon Midi, the Hill of the Slain, the two halves of the Ulster host were near to outflanking them on either side, and they knew that they must stand and give battle. And Maeve with a wild and heavy heart, sent Mac Roth who had been her scout before, to view the Ulster horde on the Plain of Garach and bring her word as to its size and strength.

Mac Roth went, and from the northern slopes of Slemon Midi looked out over the Plain. He looked long and hard under his hand, and then went back, deeply troubled, to Maeve with word of what he had seen.

She was sitting beside one of the watch fires, for though the evening was a soft one for the edge of winter, suddenly she was cold to her heart's core. And Fergus Mac Roy lounged beside her on a black wolfskin rug, with his sword across his knees.

‘Well, and what did you see?' demanded the Queen.

‘At first when I looked out over the Plain, I saw it full of deer and other wild things, all heading south as though they would be running from a heath fire in the hot days of summer.'

‘No heath fire drove
those,
but the war hosts of Ulster closing in through their forests,' said Fergus, smiling in his brown beard.

‘And then presently as I watched, there came a mist flowing down the glens and leaving only the hilltops clear like islands in the white sea of it. And I could not see what lay below the mist, but out of it there came thunder and flashes as of lightning, and then a great rushing wind that all but hurled me from
my feet. And since there was no more to be seen, I came back to bring you the word.'

‘What is it that he tells us? Is it magic?' Maeve demanded turning to Fergus beside her.

And Fergus still smiled in his beard. ‘Ach no, the mist will be the deep breathing of the war host as they march, and the lightning the flashing of their angry eyes, and the thunder will be the clangour of their weapons and their war chariots and the drumming of the horses' hooves.'

‘We have warriors of our own to meet them,' said Maeve.

‘And assuredly you will be needing them,' Fergus still smiled, ‘for I tell you, my Queen, that in all Ireland, in all the world, there are none who can lightly face the men of Ulster in their wrath.'

And Queen Maeve rose to her feet. ‘That, we will be putting to the proof,' she said.

The two war hosts came together in the Plain of Garach, below Slemon Midi; the Irish host led by Maeve herself and by Fergus Mac Roy with his great two-edged sword which was said, when swung in battle, to leave a wake of coloured light like the arc of the rainbow.

Charging three times into the heart of the enemy, he came face to face with Conor the King and rushed upon the gold-bordered shield with sword up to strike, crying, ‘This for Deirdre and the Sons of Usna! This for the sons of Fergus Mac Roy!'

But Cormac Coilinglass the King's son, though he fought at Fergus's shoulder, sprang between them, crying, ‘No, Fergus of the Red Branch! Remember
he is the King
!' and at the sound of the Prince's voice, Fergus swung away, and found before him instead Conall of the Victories, red with wounds, and laughing at him along his sword blade.

‘Too hot!' Conall cried, ‘Too hot is Fergus against his own people for a wanton woman's sake!' And Fergus rounded from him also, from all the Ulster warriors, with a groan, though indeed Deirdre had been the least of the reasons that cried in him for revenge. But his battle fury raged within him, and scarce knowing what he did, he struck with his rainbow sword among the hills; and it is said that that is why the three Maela of Meath are flat-topped as though their crests had been sliced off, to this day.

Cuchulain in his mountain fastness, heard the crash of the weapon-blows among the hills, and they troubled his darkness and splintered it apart and called him up out of it, and at last he opened his eyes, and looked frowning about him, until he found Laeg the Charioteer squatting at the foot of his bed of piled bracken. ‘What is the meaning of this crashing among the hills?'

And Laeg got up and bent over him. ‘The men of Ulster have roused at last from their stupor, and the battle is joined,' he said, ‘and that you will be hearing is the sword play of Fergus Mac Roy.'

‘Then it is time that I was rousing also,' Cuchulain said, and sprang to his feet, and he seemed to swell and grow taller, as in the onset of his battle frenzy, so that the strips of his spare cloak with which Laeg had bound his wounds burst and flew off him, and he shouted to his charioteer. ‘What do you stand there gaping for? Help me with my war gear, then let you go and yoke the team!'