Chapter 10: Considering the Otherworld

Caoimhe is full of beans and breathless in describing her dancing with the witches under the light of the moon. I haven’t seen her so enthusiastic about anything for years and is acting more like a child again instead of her usual ‘serious widower’s housekeeper’, a mantle which she had seemed to adopt in recent years.

“I held hands with Dubheasa, then Alannah spun me around until I was giddy and then I danced with Auntie Katie and even though she was a beautiful young woman now if I closed my eyes she seemed just the same kind and loving old woman that I had know ever since I was born.” Pauses for breath. “You should have seen her, Dad, she was amazing!”

She turns to Etain, “Now, please tell me again who is who? I get so mixed up, and they are all so beautiful in all their lovely dresses. Who’s the really blond girl?”

Etain smiles indulgently at my eager little girl. “Caoilfhoinn. She was always very fair and very beautiful, she would sing all the time and accompanied herself on the harp. I was about four years old when I was told by my mother that she had been snatched by pirates, but really, her father had returned from Tir na nÓg for her and took her away to learn the ways of the Faeries.”

“So tell me all about your sisters, please, please?” She pleads.

“My mother Sabhadama was married seven times to who she thought were seven different men and she had seven daughters but most of them left home while they were about your age or even younger. And we last three were taken from her and banished by the High King.”

“So who was the first of the seven daughters?” Caoimhe asks.

“Afric was the eldest, whose father Crédne worked as a carpenter who built grand longhouses and he left his wife and child for several months to built a palace for the High King, but he never returned. Afric moved away herself when she was 12 (when I was only a wee babe in my cot, so I never knew her at all). As you saw last night she is dark-haired and brown eyed and she is simply brimming over and full of fun. I recently found out on first meeting her that Afric also worked as a messenger for the King, we sisters were all keen and efficient runners. She was captured and imprisoned, kept chained up for months for not giving up her message to her captors.”

“And she was only about my age?”

“Aye, we didn’t really count the days, only the seasons, so birthdays never amounted to anything. I think she was maybe a year or two older than you, but boys and girls worked at very young ages back then. So she was a very young girl anyway to be locked up in a dungeon. She told me she was very afraid, but resolved never to tell her captors her secret message, hoping that, if no word was heard from her, the King would assume the message was intercepted so would have changed his plans accordingly, and with her messages losing value, that she would be released.”

“Was she released?”

“No, well not by those that held her. But, one moonlit night a band of silent Faeries made the prison walls disappear just like that,” Etain loudly clicks her fingers, “and they took Afric to the Otherworld where she has lived happily ever since. As the daughter of a Tuath Dé Danann she was entitled by right of birth to enter the portals and stay within the Otherworld for eternity. She rarely ventures out of Tir na nÓg nowadays but she answered my invitation to our dance gladly, if only to meet you, Caoimhe.”

“She was so sweet and kind,” Caoimbhe recalls, “and so light on her feet, too. Who was the next sister in line?”

“Aah. The blond Caoilfhoinn was next. Mother remarried a merchant when it was clear that Crédne had abandoned her and Afric. A woman on her own with a baby would find it difficult, with only the income from potions coming in. Caoilfhoinn was born about three years behind Afric and she was very fair skinned and strawberry-blond headed, she was taken by pirates when she was ten and, to be honest, I barely remember her from my childhood. But when we were first banished to Slievenamon our mother admitted to us that Caoilfhoinn’s father was a Tuath Dé Danann, and that they were not of this world and do not belong here so therefore they cannot stay for long because of the old laws that were signed more than three thousand years ago and those laws cannot lightly be broken. The Tuatha Dé Danann are powerful god-like people who tend to come and go between this World and the Otherworld as they please. They are able to use real magic and much more powerful than whatever we witches can do. When her merchant husband left to return from whence he came, he took his daughter Caoilfhoinn with him. The pirate story was simply a story our mother told to Afric and she in her turn told the younger babies as they came.”

“So who was that new merchant husband?” I ask.

Etain smiles. “Crédne returned himself but he fogged Mother’s mind so that she didn’t recognise that he was her first husband returned, but he did tell her half the truth, that he was from the Otherworld and that he couldn’t stay long.”

‘And she fell for him all over again?”

“Aye, the Tuath Dé live under fewer constraints than us witches. We cannot use our magic to make someone fall in love with us, but the Tuatha Dé can, and they do so effortlessly because, to us they are perfect and god-like—”

“Ha!” I interject, “even though they lie and trick you with disguises and run away when the Otherworld police show up with an arrest warrant?”

“True, they are beautiful and irresistible and they are also selfishly shallow and care little about the mayhem they cause, but love them we do, and Sabhadama was a witch who fell in love with the same suitor every time but she was also determined that she could never to go to the Otherworld. Her first husband Crédne never invited her, but, according to my other sisters in the Otherworld, he had asked her every other time and she never went with him.”

“So where is your mother?”

“She lies under one of the four cairns on Slievenamon mount. She was brought to us on a donkey cart to spend her last days with us. She was old and frail, her hair as white as whale bone, but Bebhinn’s honey potions and Kaetlynn’s healing hands made her last two days and nights in this world a happy time. She had no regrets, knowing that by then we three sisters had already become immortal in this world due to our birthright and having stayed for sufficient time in the Otherworld for our bodies to change enough without permanently committing ourselves to the Otherworld. And when her time came to an end we laid her to rest on the highest but one spot on the Mount, a place where the setting sun would rest to warm the stones before sinking into the ocean and we three sisters piled up the cairn stone by stone and issued a curse on any man who disturbed her rest.”

“Wow!” I breathe out slowly, my mind imagining the scene, hearing them sing that curse in their ancient tongue as they gathered and carefully placed each stone. I can’t envisage the words of their incantation but I can ‘hear’ the keening and feel the love and see it manifest even now as a single tear rolls down Etain’s face.