ONE
The Fuathas
It was the old hiding game, and they laughed, did Meadhbh and Ceallach, while Muirne searched. They watched the skinny woman up close by the keep looking this way and that among the bushes and covered their mouths to keep from setting one another to laughing aloud. Then Ceallach threw a stone and made the bushes rattle far over to the right so that Muirne spun and looked in that direction.
"Come out," Muirne cried. "Come out this instant. Hear me?"
She was angry now. Meadhbh slid backward through the brush and tugged at Ceallach's sleeve.
Ceallach followed. "You hear me?" Muirne went on shouting while they slid and slithered away on the slope. "Don't play such games!"
But a path appeared in their way as they got up and scrambled crouching through the trees. It was a strange place to find a path, because no one came and went in the world except by the great dusty road, and no one went off this direction from Caer Wiell, toward the river and the vast and haunted woods—excepting sometimes their father, who went alone and without any armor at all, and taking no one with him, not even Beorc, who went everywhere else. The pair had asked why, of course. They asked everything, why birds flew and why the sun rose and where the wind came from. But no one told them any of these things, and no one told them why their father went walking down by the Caerbourne where no one else would dare to walk, no, not even Beorc, who was a huge red-haired man that no one would ever call afraid.
So a thrill went up their backs when they suddenly found that path so close to them all their lives and unsuspected. One keen quick thought brought their eyes to each other and a secret excitement brought their hands together, fingers locked in fingers, Ceallach tug ging on his sister's hand when he had the lead. Then as he helped Meadhbh down over an old log, Meadhbh seized the first place and dragged him along. So they went, one and then the other, their eyes afever with the secrets of this path that seemed to welcome them. It was the way their father came. They were sure of that, and for that reason they had no fear of treading on it, never once thinking that he could lead them where he could not, if danger came on them, save them.
It was so sure in their minds that they exchanged only glances as they went, unraveling this path to its ending, one pulling the other, skipping over the old rocks, the bones of the ancient hill on which Caer Wiell was reared. They dodged through thickets which should have torn their skin yet magically refrained. It was a moment of magic. They were sure of that in the same fashion they were sure each what the other thought, as if some golden thread bound their minds so close there was no need of talking.
And never once did they think that where that path led might be farther than their young legs could run without stopping. They skipped and ran and fended the branches away, took wild chances with their leaping and dodging.
It was Meadhbh who slowed first, who first began to doubt the way that they were tending. She resisted Ceallach's tugging at her hand ever so slightly just as he had lighted on soft ground, so that he slipped and brought both of them reeling down an unexpected slope in the bracken. Meadhbh sat down at the bottom, plump among her woolen skirts, barking her skin on the tangle of roots and stones, and Ceallach slid past her right to the edge of the brambles.
"Ow!" said Ceallach. "What did you stop for?"
"Hush," Meadhbh said, shivering. "We've come near the river. Hear it?"
"We mustn't lose the path," Ceallach said. The brush seemed darker all about, and the water whispered like the breeze that sported in the conspiring leaves. "Come on, Meadhbh—it has to be just up there."
But Meadhbh bit her lip and tugged up her skirt to look at her shins, where her woolen hose were torn. The wounds stung. Every thing was wrong suddenly. The woods were dark and the river was chuckling nearby, so that it was hard now not to think of the strict warnings they had had about the deep forest. "We had better go back," she said. "Muirne will come looking." She said it even hoping at the moment that Muirne would turn up suddenly and rescue them. She gave her hand to Ceallach to be helped up, ready to run as hard to be out of this place as she had run to get into it, although now her side and her shins were hurting and she was far from sure in which direction home lay.
"Ah," a moan came to them. "Ah, ah, ah—"
They froze like fawns, and turned wide eyes in the direction of the voice, which was mixed with the sound of the river.
"Ah me," it said. "Ah me, so lost."
"Listen," Ceallach said.
"I don't know whether it means it's lost or we are," Meadhbh said, and her teeth began to chatter as if with winter cold. Her shins stung, reminding her of misfortune. She and Ceallach held onto each other with a grip that hurt her hand. "I don't think we ought to answer it."
"O lost," it cried. "O me, o me, o where?"
"It's a girl," said Ceallach then, with a fresh breath of courage. "Come on, Meadhbh, it's only someone, after all." He stood up, tugging at her hand.
"O, o!" it wept. "O, I'm caught, o the hurt, the hurt. . . ."
The sounds of sobs came to them, loud as the river, a crying that was everywhere, and Meadhbh, who was pulling back to look for the path again, stopped pulling at Ceallach's leading—not that she thought better of it, but that the someone was crying as if a heart were breaking, and that sobbing tugged as surely at her heart as at Ceallach's. She stopped pulling back at all and followed Ceallach down past the brambles and down and down where the river ran.
"I don't like this," Meadhbh found the heart to say, when they came on that black water, and Ceallach seemed daunted too. The water was sinister and wide, and gnarled old trees hung over it with a stillness that prickled through the snuffling and the weeping. "Ceal lach, let's be going home."
"Look," Ceallach said, and held onto her as she held to him, because of a sudden there was someone sitting on the black rocks, like someone wrapped up in weeds still glistening from the river water. That someone lifted a pale beautiful face and hair gold as pollen fell onto its shoulders among the weeds. This someone sat with legs curled sideways on the rock and arms holding the cloak of slickish weeds about her. Eyes dark as the riverwater looked at them both very solemnly. Then weed-covered arms lifted and flowed to ward the water in one smooth motion as that someone dived, so subtly it was like the pouring of water into water.
"Oh," Meadhbh said, and pulled at her brother to make him run away.
But a face bobbed up in the water, flowerlike, with the pale hair flowing about in the river currents and the eyes staring at them and the mouth making a round of surprise and wonder.
"I am lost," the someone said. "Oh, please, I am lost, quite lost."
"Where are you trying to go to?" Meadhbh asked, curious in spite of herself and quite forgetting to run.
"Lost," the someone insisted. The bright head sank beneath the dark water and came up again with her hair sheeting away in the currents. "Who are you?"
"Flann," said Ceallach thinking quickly. "Floinn," said Meadhbh with a very uncomfortable feeling, because she had not been taught to lie, but names were not for giving away, and Flann and Floinn were safe at home, being two fat bay ponies and not at all in ques tion. "Who are you?" It seemed completely mad to be talking to a creature floating in the river as if she were someone they had met in the field, as if she were someone dressed in honest clothes and not all in river weeds.
But the creature bobbed higher in the water as if she were standing up and brought her hands into sight, cupped as if she held some precious thing. "I shall give you a gift—see, pearls. Have you ever seen pearls or heard of them?"