“Are the Other People angry with us?” Cormac asked. “Never. They’ve come to accept everything. They understand human weakness. But they can be rogues themselves. There are so many old people down there—those who’ve lived long lives—that they miss certain beautiful sounds and faces. That’s why they sometimes steal children. Once in a great while, for a joke, they’ll steal your food.”
“Do they marry and have their own children, the way we do?”
“Never. They can’t have children. That was part of the bargain with the gods. That’s one thing they gave up when they chose to live forever.”
“And do they live only in the shee?”
“No, Cormac. The shee is the entrance. That would be like trying to live in a doorway.”
The Otherworld, she explained, stretched everywhere. There was an entrance in the Cave of Cruachain, where it was possible during the feast of Samhain to enter the Otherworld. But no human should go before it was time. That was one reason for the rule against suicide. And there was a dark part of the Otherworld too, she said, ruled over by Donn, the lord of the bad Irish dead, full of immense serpents, red horsemen, the walls hung with severed heads. She didn’t dwell on this, and Cormac was pleased; it sounded too much like the Rev. Robinson’s Christian Hell.
“When your time arrives,” she said, “and you have lived your full portion, and added to decency in this world, then you too can live in the Otherworld. You can unite with all those you once loved here in the world. You can share the music, the feasting, and the emerald light. But,” she went on, “if you add to evil, if you defy time, you’ll find yourself in the land of Donn.”
Hearing these tales, Cormac looked differently at the land, imagining those who lived beneath him, including his mother and his two lost brothers, and he often ached to be with them. He also woke sometimes at night in a sweat and trembling, in the slippery grip of the enraged and punishing Donn. He wanted then to pray, to find the strength that Joseph found in the land of the Pharaohs, but he felt there was no god who would hear his prayers. He said his mother’s name and his father’s, Thunder’s name and Bran’s, and swore to whoever might hear him that he would avenge all injustices, starting with what had happened to his mother.
Most of the time he was free of nightmares. And in his waking hours, his head was full of other visions, exuberantly brimming with drama and magic. From leathery Mary Morrigan, he heard wondrous tales of Cuchulain and his great warrior rages. And of Finn MacCool and how he assumed the leadership of the Fianna by getting rid of the killer of his father. This wasn’t easy to do, for his father’s killer was smart and hard and vicious. But Finn was special. A druid gave him a crane bag containing a shield, a sword, a helmet, and a pigskin belt. A great bard allowed him to eat the Salmon of Knowledge, which gave him wisdom and the gift of poetry. With armor and poetry, Finn became the man who saved Tara. He was the man who married Sava, who had been magically transformed into a fawn and became human again at the sight of Finn, and who gave birth to their child, Usheen (which Cormac later learned was spelled Oisin). But Finn was not perfect. No god was perfect. No warrior or poet was perfect. And as he grew older, imperfect Finn made a terrible mistake: He fell in love with a woman named Grainne while he was still married to Sava. But there was a younger, shrewder rival for the love of Grainne, a man named Diarmuid. At this time, Finn’s wife prophesied that if Finn ever drank from a horn, he would die. After treacherously arranging for the death of Diarmuid, Finn went off, bursting with vanity and dishonor, to leap the River Boyne in one bound. But first, in his defiant arrogance, he sipped liquor from a horn. And then fell into the river and drowned.
“A fool,” said Mary Morrigan, telling him the story for the first time. “A great man was Finn MacCool, a hero. But also a bloody fool. You see the point? Love can do that to any one of us.”
“Has it done it to you?” Cormac asked.
She looked at him for a long time, then stared into the fire.
“Of course,” she said, but offered no details.
Cormac loved the story of the stupid end of Finn MacCool and believed it completely, and sometimes laughed out loud at the ending. He wished there were books in Irish so he could read these tales, but all were spoken by Mary Morrigan. More than all other tales, he was entranced by the story of Usheen. As told by Mary Morrigan, Usheen was the son of Finn and Sava, but he never knew his mother. She had come as a fawn from the Otherworld and was reclaimed after the birth of Usheen. But the boy was brought up among the Fianna and became one if its bravest warriors. Then he met a beautiful woman: Niave of the Golden Hair. She was the daughter of the king of Tir-na-Nog, the Land of the Ever Young. Usheen was entranced by her and followed her across distant seas to this magical land in the West. For a very long time, he was blissfully happy. There was an abundance of food and flowers, and weather that was an eternal springtime. But after several hundred years, during which he didn’t age a single day, Usheen got homesick, wanting desperately to see Ireland. Once again, stupidity played its part. Usheen had been warned upon arrival in Tir-na-Nog that if he ever again set foot upon the soil of Ireland, he would die. He ignored the warning, or deceived himself about its terms, thinking that if he went on horseback, and remained on his horse, he could avoid touching Irish soil and thus remain alive. He was prepared to live forever with Niave in Tir-na-Nog, but first he must rid himself of the aching longing for his first home, for his comrades in the Fianna, for the place where he once was a great warrior. So he set off on horseback for Ireland. And when he arrived, everything had changed.
The great old houses had crumbled into rubble. His comrades were dead. Tara was gone with the wind. The warriors, poets, and women he knew had vanished. He learned from strangers that almost three hundred years had passed since he left with Niave of the Golden Hair. He sobbed for all that was gone and turned his horse to return to his much-loved woman in Tir-na-Nog. Then he saw a famished woman on the road, apparently dying of thirst. Touched by pity, distracted by his sense of loss, he leaned over awkwardly to give her a drink, slipped from the horse, and landed hard on the earth of Ireland. Before the old woman’s horrified eyes, Usheen instantly withered into bone and skin, giving off the sweet, sickening odor of death and decay.
Cormac asked Mary Morrigan to tell him that story over and over again. Where was Tir-na-Nog? To the West. Was it an island? Yes, she said, it’s an island. But sometimes it’s under the sea, she said, and sometimes it’s in a far part of the Otherworld.
“Can it be in America?” Cormac asked.
She looked at him in a dubious way.
“Why do you ask that?”
“So many people are leaving Belfast for America,” he said. “Maybe—”
“No,” she said, her voice as old as tombs. “I don’t think it’s in America.”
18.
Then came the night near the end of his second summer in the Irish grove. Cormac noticed Mary Morrigan staring long and hard at the fire in a kind of absolute solitude. Her shawl was pulled tight against her lean, hard frame. He asked what was the matter. She didn’t answer. He waited. Over two years, she had taught him to wait. Finally her voice rose whispery and distant from someplace deep within her.