Chapter 6: The Curse

“You want my help with what?” I ask of this crazy young lady.

Etain is an attractive young woman in the full bloom of youth, with long black hair, clear skin mercifully clear of acne and the deepest blue eyes I’ve ever risked falling headlong into the depths of.

She looks at me shyly, which sets me back a little, as the information that had just flowed from her like a ruptured fire hydrant was delivered as if it needed to be relieved from the pressure on her chest. Now she appears a little deflated and rather hesitant and her eyes hooded as though she is reluctant to look me in the eye as she translates her request into words that I can understand more readily.

“I want you to make love to me, and make love with me, Richard,” she whispers, so feint, it is only because a silence had settled between us that I can hear her at all. “You have been married before and you are a father. I was a maiden when cursed on Slievenamon, my life as I knew it ended and ... I am a maiden still, Richard.”

She looks up at me now and her doe eyes are without guile, as innocent and sweet as a child, or, it seems, more as a woman not yet seen in her own eyes as fully integrated into womanhood.

If she is honest and truthful about everything she has blurted out, confessed?; then maybe the other elements of her story are true too, however crazy they sound to my ears.

I am torn between wanting to believe her and not easily able to even take in what fantasy she has come out with.

I feel like I am in one of those classic cartoon panels you see, featuring a man in the the midst of the horns of a dilemma, with an imaginary Angel sitting on one shoulder and the Devil perched on the other, each urging him this way or the other.

My instinct tells me to simply get up and run as far away from this girl as possible, but I can’t leave Caoimhe at this mad person’s mercy.

Oh Damn! I need to calm this whole situation down, humor the poor girl and keep my wits about me. After all she’s slightly built, I can take her if she attacks me. I have height, reach and weight advantage. Yeah, I could certainly take her out, even though I’m a complete nerd and not been in a fight with a girl since back in third grade. OK, I heavily lost that bout to a fat girl who stole my cotton candy at the county fair and I haven’t made a comeback to the ring since.

Yeah, Etain is built like a blade of grass.

Damn it though, she’s a blade of grass that says she’s a witch. What can witches do? Can she turn me into a toad?

“Will you hold my hand, Richard,” she says, a faint smile returned to her lovely, innocent-looking face. “I have the healing hands and if we hold hands you could calm your heart and your breathing.”

Yeah, I guess I must look bug-eyed and terrified.

She holds out both her hands and I respond by grasping them. I instantly feel calmer, my pulse rate slows and I can feel the swollen veins in my temples reduce. I take a deep breath in and breathe out. I wonder if she does have healing hands or that simply human contact with her is enough to soothe me. I realise that, since Covid struck all those months ago, Caoimhe is really the only little bit of human skin to skin contact that I have had for about 18 months. Everyone else of my acquaintance has been socially distanced and contact reduced to forearm bumps.

“So, Etain, tell me more about this curse, er, Finn McCool, the legendary giant, am I right?”

“Aye, Fionn himself. He was a big man, a legendary giant even in his own time, a hero and the King’s champion. He was probably six inches taller than ye, Richard, and almost double your width. He was too big to sit ahorse and used a chariot drawn by two huge horses to get around the place, so. He was the King’s Champion and the King Cormac, the King of All Ireland, had it proclaimed around the realm that it was his royal wish that his Champion be married again to sire more giant champions. There were indeed that many requests by maidens and the many, many widows of Ireland, that the King decreed that the bride would be the winner of a race from the foot of Slievenamon Mountain to the peak at the top, where the prize himself would be found seated.”

“Sounds interesting,” I am relaxed enough to chuckle, “was there a big turnout of athletic maidens?”

“Thousands of wee girls all the way up to widows older than my Mam, who had been widowed seven times, turned up on the day of the race.”

“That was bad luck for your Mam,” I say in sympathy.

“They were hard times, Richard, every tide brought a new invader fiercer, more determined and better armed that the wave before. This wee green jewel of an isle was the envy of the hungry everywhere, the whole country was an army at war on every front.”

“And what did you and your sisters do to be cursed forever to your mountain?” I ask, “Did you cheat in the race?”

“No!” Etain snaps, “We did not cheat, but there was cheating going on. I’ll just step back to how we, my two closest sisters and I, set out to take part in the race. You see, as well as being Witches and witches are one of those invaders of Ireland many hundreds of years before, we were also great runners. We worked for the King as messengers.”

“Messengers? What, like couriers carrying letters?” I ask.

“Well, we didn’t really have much of a written language in Ireland then, there were runes but few could read them, and Latin from missionaries or Roman traders. No, it was oral messages for us messengers and, in order to remember a message, that might take three days or a week to get to who it was going to, we had to commit it to memory as rhymes. We were well used to that as witches, as spells and remedies, the ingredients and quantities had to be remembered, so many of our potions were remembered as wee poems.”

“So what were the messages that the King needed to send out?”

“Orders for men needed for an army, orders for goods, schedules for manor courts, requests for collection of taxes, court rulings on breitheamh law—”

“What law?”

“Brehon law was the law in Ireland of the Celtish and Saxon people, which was the common law throughout the island until the Norman king Henry II introduced the Anglo Norman laws 850 years ago. As a royal messenger my payment was two cows and one heifer a year. Kaetlynn was four years older than me and married with a child so she was paid five cows.”

“Was that good money or pay in kind?”

“Well, in order to take a message I would have to turn it onto verse so that I could remember it and then when I recited the verse I had to interpret it for the recovery of the core of the message, so between two and five cows wasn’t much when you consider the King’s poet and harp player were paid 21 cows each.”

“Not so good then.”

“No, and life was more dangerous for messengers than poets. We carried a bronze token from our master to guarantee our safety, but enemies of our master might trap us, torture us to get the message or kill us.”

“I hadn’t thought about that,” I admit, “so what was the outcome of the bride’s race?”

“As we were the best runners in the race, we three sisters were out of sight of the others, but as we neared the summit, a girl who was waiting for us, dashed out from cover as fresh as a daisy and ran to Fionn and jumped into his waiting arms. We walked up to the couple, knowing that we had been cheated, and by then some of the other runners came up behind us. They recognised the girl as Gráinne, the favourite daughter of King Cormac and another runner told us that Fionn was sweet on the girl. We looked at the couple, the Princess, no older than I, looking so smug that she had stolen the prize from under our noses, while the giant hero Fionn was old, old enough to be my Mam’s Da or Grandpa, with a fat red face, white hair, white beard and a gut so big on him that his chariot would need six oxen to pull him along.”

“So, not much of a prize, then?”

“No, not a prize at all. But Bebh and I were single, so not too bothered, but Kaetlynn was a widow and in sore need of a husband. It was Kaetlynn who was better at the spells than either Bebh or I, but we put our heads together and recited a spell which made Gráinne fall in love with first of Fionn’s warriors she meets on their wedding morn and elope with him. Immediately we could see her future, happy with her husband and five children. Meanwhile Fionn was heartbroken and spent years trying to find them, but when he did, he forgave them. But there was no forgiveness for we three witch messengers.”