The Old Nurse's Story: What Happened After the Fall Nuada in the Hall of the Golden Army
So, humans and their great red demon thought they could kill the Lord and Lady of the Land and watch as two of the Old Ones, the Tuatha de, who are the fairest and most talented beings, were turned to stone and ashes.
So much do the humans know. So little do they ever understand. And why would they understand? Hollow, small things that are, as short-lived as birds and comprehending as little.
I am writing this to be left with the Old Man in the store of Maps in the market so that this shadowed world will know what is true and understand that, far from being leaderless, our lord and his lady live and ill return in our time of greatest need.
Of course, you may think that this is a time of true need, fools that all creatures are now that every inch of the world is shot through with the narrow limits of human understanding.
Forget all that you have learned in their dirty streets on their smothered earth. Listen instead to these true words told by one who was there.
To my great sorrow, I saw what passed between my lady Nuala and her lord the night Nuada found his brideshirt and knew at last (as any had known who had ever looked full upon my lady that she loved him as a man.
But they were still themselves, so after the first excitement-- the kissing and the touching and the pledges of forever, they two knew they could never mate.
It is one thing to live forever with the man or woman you love and want as mate, but cannot take because they are good and love you as a sibling--because, in fact, you are their sibling--and quite another to live with a woman or a man who has speaks your name aloud as only a lover may do and has told you, between kisses, of their love.
And so Nuada and Nuala now lived.
This was near the end of the Great War. We were winning, but somehow King Balor was fashioning defeat from our victory. There was even talk of returning to the forest. Still we stayed where we had lived since before all the waters in the world had names.
Humans had come close enough to kill a few guards and scouts who watched the palace. The threat was so great that Nuada slept where he could see Nuala's bed for fear that when the attack came he would feel her fear, but be unable to protect her.
At first, he slept by the dying fire like the mauthe dhoo, the great black dog who roams the battlefield.
As time passed, he moved closer to her bed until he lay beside her on the floor where she could touch by stretching out her hand.
The lady Nuala slept sound, so safe did she feel when the Prince was near, but still as he was, it was clear the Prince himself was never full asleep.
Always there would be the gleam of gold as he moved his eyes listening to her breathe, or a whisper of silver from the movement of his spear.
At last, three days before King Balor's Rash Act, Nuada disappeared for a full night and most of the next day.
Word soon came to the palace that he had been seen by two off-duty members of the King's Butcher Guard on the road to one of the red houses that fringe the market town that catered to soldiers and their followers at Dadh Si.
Certainly, that night something happened, for so late that night that it was the morning of a new day, my lady sat straight up in her bed calling his name with a sound like warm honey covering us all.
My old mother warned me against the saying, or even thinking, the names of those I loved, but to hear my lady cry out was like staring into the bedchamber of another's soul.
One of the two guards (Diramud his name was and he would be killed that day when Nuada killed the king, his father) said that in that town there was "a sound like a name, but what name no one could say," that made all who heard it feel like "a man who dove into a sun-warmed pond and sits laughing on the grass afterward."
Whatever happened, when the Prince returned the two of them hurried to his rooms and came out red-eyed (my lady) and white-lipped (the black lord) but somehow more at peace with each other and the world.
And yet it was this day that the Prince's true madness began.
Let those who write the public histories tell you it was the suppression of the Golden Army and the submission of King Balor that drove the Prince to exile. What do they know, these historians scritch-scratching their quills in the cold mist of the North Sea?
Let me tell you, for I was there, more's the pity, and saw through tears in my own eyes why the Lord of the Land would leave us.
He had known a part of life that he could not share with his sister, and so he cast about in his mind for a reason to leave their world and protect their honor.
And I suppose you young folks with your modern lives will ask, "If he wanted her and she wanted him, why did they not just mate?"
All the more reason to leave this record of how a life of true honor should be lived. Surely our folk have fallen into dark times when the young so little understand the demands of honor.
But all this blather does little to explain what happened to the Black Lord. Honor doubly bound him to exile--his true exile from Nuala, for little did he care to leave the palace. The public histories will say it is because of the king's well-intentioned and generous but ultimately disastrous submission to our true enemies.
However, in his heart, Nuada exiled himself because he could not bear to live with what he could see and speak to, but never hope to possess.
The Prince left on foot at twilight on the second day after the Sorrow. He stood at the Forest Gate (called in the Old Times the Prince's Gate, for he was ever observant of things as they should be) of the Palace to take his leave from my lady and go to the upper world.
"So you would leave me?" Even I, who knew her in the cradle and whose finger guided her first trembling step, would not have known the lady so desperate had her appearance become.
She wore no color but the raven black her brother wore, her skin as white as a snow covered flint, her face shadowed so deeply that her eyes seem to peer from the caves where her mind was now trapped.
I tell you, it broke my heart to hear and to see them thus, but by the triple god, I could not help but watch and try to hear—-although it was clear they felt themselves unobserved.
"I will never leave you." It was all the Prince said, but as I watched the Princess as she turned to him, her face shining with love and hope, I knew somehow that, for them, it was true. Only their bodies would be apart. I prayed it would be as they hoped.
The Ages passed. The King grew older, his head now heavy with his crowned of antlers, heavier as each age passed.
The anthill pilings of men were built up and then knocked down again. And my lady Nuala became more like a mystic or a seer than a royal princess, walking as she did so deep in her own counsel we sometimes had to speak to her that many times before her eyes cleared with recognition.
My lady read and studied and called the three great craftsmen of her race: Goibnu, the smith; Credne who worked wonders in gold, and Luchta, called a carpenter but well able to craft any thing. She met with them at length. After that she visited all of the treasures of her people. She even went to the hill where the shouts of the three brothers were claimed by the merciless Lug as forfeit for the stoning death of his father.
So distant from our daily life had she become, that I was both thrilled and startled when one night in the early spring she crept by my pallet and woke me,
"Fianna, wake up, I need your help."
So glad was I to see her looking herself again, her hair shining and flecks of gold in her eyes, that I answered,
"Anything, Lady"
And, by the three gods, it was true.
Although, at her next words, my blood thickened and my heart grew heavy,
"I need to go see the Old Woman, Mor—"
"Pray do not say her name here, lady. I will go with you."
We left the palace without challenge. For no one watched the gates now that the humans had charge of the world. Short lived (and god help us should they lived longer, for who can measure the damage they wreck even in their short lives?), they lived in larger and larger numbers on the green land.
These hollow hordes spent their days and years destroying the balance of life and convincing themselves that the Fair Folk, the powerful Tuatha de, were just a story they used to frighten children.
My Lady and I went to the marches, the border between the lands.
When we reached the standing stones, The old woman seemed like my own bad dream: grey and white and living in a place of true darkness. My lady, whom they called the Golden Lady, was unafraid as she spoke to the old woman:
"Old Woman, Grandmother, I would give my life to live with the man I love."
"And what good would it do you to have this man when you have no breath in your body or blood in your veins?"
"That is why I sought you, Mother."
The Old Woman laughed and looked pleased, but the sweat pricked beneath my hair and I saw gooseflesh creep on my lady's arms.
"And what of your beloved? Will he give his life as the price as well?"
It was well known that the old creature, whatever she was, however powerful a goddess she had been in the Other Times, now loved nothing more than to see a young creature die by its own act. She loves self-slaughter the way bees hum in a lavender hedge.
"No" the Princess said staring at the splashes of dried blood on the stones at the Old Woman's feet, "And I will not ask it of him. All I ask is that when he releases his dream for this life that I may pay with my blood so we can live another dream that we two dreamt long ago."
And the Old Woman chortled, for it was well known that the Twins would both bleed if one was pierced.
I remembered so many nights in the long ago times when the Lord and Lady were still children. In bed, unable to sleep because of the long blue-purple twilights of high summer in these high Northern places, they told each other stories.
They lay together, so young that there was only down on my Lord's cheek, and there was no hint of the heartbreak that would shadow their lives.
"When I grow up and am the king--" Nuala smiled. I smiled too, sitting just beyond their sight the needlework still in my lap. Nuada's stories always began, "When I am king—"
They lay like spoons in a drawer, he behind her, their white faces shining like twin moons in the firelight. He would sometimes tease her about how her hair tickled him, but this night they were as serious as the man and woman they would become.
Nuada pushed himself up so he could reach around her and took her hand,
"Then I will be king and you will be queen and we will live forever, protecting all of our subjects and healing all the land."
Then Nuala asked in a small voice, "Must I be queen here?"
"Of course, where else?" Nuada looked intent, as though he thought she was about to say she would be another's queen.
And Nuala made it worse by blushing.
Then I knew-- as if I had that tie that allowed them to know each other's words without speaking-—what Nuala would say. For wasn't I the one who took them to run in the green lands?
Not far from the mound that marked the limit of Balor's kingship there was a great hill that swept down to the sea. There was a ruined tower and an ancient gate. Nearby, between the mound and the sea, was a low white cottage with windows looking across the headland to the shining water.
This was before Cas Corach, who sang sweeter than the gentle rill of a brook bright with summer rain, was killed at The Second Battle of Mag Tuirid.
Cas, gentle soul as he was, wanted only to leave the court and live with me on the green hill and watch the endless dance of the sea. So, didn't I, in the manner of young women since the gods divided the sky from the hills, wish to go and look at the place I thought would be the home of my future happiness?
And, because the Lady Nuala was so like a woman grown--even though I had sometimes had to carry her when the ground was too rough for her little legs—I spoke to her of my dreams for the life to come.
No ground was too rough for the little lord, nor would he have been carried if it were. He walked beside us, his hands in her hair, complaining in that way of his because he was not the one to carry her when she tired. Remember, my honey, this was before he was old enough to hold a true sword.
Well, this was before I knew that the prince and princess were the only children I would ever hold in my arms. Even so, to care for the royal children is to enter a lonely world—-lonely for them as well as for me.
So, I put them to bed with stories of the croft by the sea and, whenever we could slip away, I took them to stand with me and watch clouds blow over the ruined tower.
So when Nuala said,
"I wish to live in our house by the sea and live as a man and a woman and raise our children there,"
I was unsurprised, but I could see this was not any answer that her brother wished.
However, even then he was loath to hurt her, and so he said generously, in the boyish version of the man he would become (but alas, not always be),
"Sister (for he still called her sister then) I tell you, on my honor, that when I have raised my army and put the world in thrall, I will go with you and live by the sea."
And she, piece of sunlight as she seemed then, kissed him gently and smoothed her pillow and went to sleep. While we listened to her small breaths, Nuada and I stared at the fire. He did not seem to be aware of me, so deep in thought he was staring into the heart of the fire. At length, I saw his head drop beside hers and I was left alone to spin pictures made of fire of my future life with the curly- headed Cas Corach of the sweet voice and wild smile.
Later, I spoke to Ogma who was the Prince's tutor and the only person besides my lady who could ever make Dark Lord smile, that same Ogma who was the only one to go out from our world and find the Prince during his Time of Exile.
When Ogma found his former pupil, lean and bitter and living beneath a human city, the only thing that the Prince would speak of was that white cottage thatched with heather. Ogma said that somehow, in the Prince's mind, the croft had become a part of the lady Nuala. For it is true that her name means fair or white and her hair is white gold.
At the time I thought little of the old warrior's tales for I knew that whatever he spoke about it would be in the company of as much uisce beatha—the water of life-- whiskey in the corrupt language that the young use to mimic the humans--as the prince had money to buy for the two of them.
But I mustn't blather on so or you will never know the true tale of my lady's cleverness.
However, it is my eyes that start with tears and my head that is filled with every foolish fancy when I remember how I once thought to be happy. This made it so much the worse that my would-be daughter was to also know the breaking of her heart because of my fancies.
And wasn't it the innocent dream of that little house and the wind fresh from the sea that had brought my lady out to the marches and into the company of Morrigan –-for such was the old woman's name, loath as I am to remember it--of the wild arts.
And the old woman came to my lady with a flint knife and cut her palm (and there was mark on the Prince's hand to witness it) and caught my lady's gold blood in a bronze bowl.
"That is to make the magic." The old woman said simply,
"and what do you give as payment, lady?
Before my lady could speak, the old woman held up the bowl. In it we saw the Prince fighting—-no, fencing-—with a child, and it was clear it was their child-- on the green hill above the sea.
And seeing that my lady cried out,
"Anything, tell me what it is you wish," and her eyes stayed fixed on the laughing child and the Prince, his hair flying, until the image vanished leaving behind it only the bowl of her own blood and her desire for that happiness.
And the old woman said,
"I would have a bit of your blood and a bit of your hair and a bit of your bone, for I am lonely and would have a daughter fair."
The blood and hair were easily taken, but the old woman wished the tip of my lady's little finger—-white as the moon on the water with a little seashell of a nail—to provide the bone. Remembering Nuada's spear arm and sword hand, the lady offered her left hand to pay the tiend.
(When the Prince returned, he too was missing the tip of his finger, but if ever they spoke of it, I was not there to overhear.)
The tiend paid, the old woman said, "and what will be the means of the change?"
The lady presented a gold dagger I had never seen before except on her brother's belt.
"Ah and it is his. Fitting, my lady, very fitting. Come back when the moon sets tomorrow and all will be ready."
I took the Princess by her good hand and led her back to the palace.
All that night, awake or asleep, she would only repeat The Black Lord's name. The strength of this frightened all who heard it until, at last, the king, her father, came to her rooms and bid her to stop.
The lady looked at him like she had just been distracted by a butterfly on a forest path.
"Of course I will do as you bid, father, but, tell me, what I have done?"
And I knew that since the old woman had taken the tip of her finger, that my lady had been acting her part in the spell. What happened to the prince to hear her love and desire ringing in his mind for a full night, I never knew.
The next day her father, the King, sent Goibnu who had helped craft the face of the world, to fashion a fingertip for her. And so like it was that you could look at my lady's hand for a year and an hour and never see a flaw.
That night we two collected the dagger from the old woman.
Not long after, he Prince returned to us full of ambition and hate and cruelty. Her first words to him, "Please, brother, surrender it" asking that he abide by the ancient rule of the king's hall, set his temper.
His response, "For you, sister," (how his voice hung on this word) made my heart small enough to store in an acorn's breadth, "anything."
I watched her face as his silent words played across her face in a wash of blushes and leaving her eyes bright with unshed tears. Wherever he had been, whatever he had done, he had not returned to be called brother and no more.
What happens next you well know: the Prince killed the King his father, and Nuala fled to the upper world attracting the notice of the red demon and his ilk.
At the end, when the Prince was bested, not by the red demon, but by the machinery which my lord viewed with such suspicion and hate, my lady knew her time to act had come.
She slipped the knife into her breast like a girl testing water with a slim foot.
Oh gods, that I could never again recall his face when he thought she betrayed him.
I watched her too, wondering if even the "one mind" as they called it, would be enough to make him understand her dream, her sacrifice, her wish for their happiness.
And, although I cannot know for certain, not being privy (and a great pity I have felt it then and still feel it now) to their private thoughts, it is my opinion that so great was her power and passion at that moment that she was able to tell him all of her heart with that single look.
Even if nothing else convinced me, what he did next would leave no room for any other ideas in my mind. For he, devil that he was, decided to toy with the humans and their pet before he left them. For it is true and many times recorded that the Prince loved to show off or tease his opponents in battle or in an argument.
And truly his death was so like her favorite story of the dying swan--and he had sat by often enough as I told her the tale of Lir and his children enchanted into the shape of swans—that I knew he was playacting to please her as he had sometimes done when they were not children, but not adults either.
When there bodies began to be that of a man and a woman instead of children together, she would sometimes just sit for a whole day staring out the window.
And he who was so full of his own dignity and pride would come and sit, his leg bent under him so they mirrored one another, telling her tales that called for him to make silly sounds of men. And truly, to hear him who had the sweetest voice in all the world (although his voice was ever cold except with her), tell her stories of battles and make the sounds of mock dying was a sight that brought almost the whole palace to stand in the corridor and listen and watch as I did every day.
It was this scene that he playing out for her -- only now with a man's sense of solemn mockery.
It was clear to me (and by the gods it was good to have the use of my heart again, so relieved was I) that he understood her wishes as reached out his hand and draped himself on the demon.
But I always say those that are rascals as babes are rascals always, do what you will.
The slow smile my lady gave to that blue creature was not for him--although of course even a slimy thing such as that would crave my lady's favor-- was that same smile the Prince had worked so hard to win when they were young together.
When the princess's blood (and the prince's with it) through Queen Morrigan's (for so I will call her although all the world has left her for other gods) magic put the proper statues in place of the lady and her lord, I knew that the old mother's work had sent them to that low, white house by the sea.
And all worked as it should, so.
The only flaw was that the Prince's image--cast only from the idea of him—-shattered even as it was made. More's the pity, for the Princess's likeness is a joy to look upon.
And the Prince and Princess are now live as a true man and true wife (although they are not human nor ever will be)-—bless the world to keep them safe and they two to guard the world.
And knowing little of the ways of a croft, my lady brought with her three of the treasures of her people: the skin of the pig of King Tuis of Greece that will cure all wounded and diseased persons and will turn water into wine; the puppy of Failinis, and the cauldron of the Dagda that would hang itself over the fire and forever have in it delicious, endless food.
And so my children of the Tuatha De, know that they two, the King and his Queen of you who are left to hear this, are still on that hill, ageless and beautiful as they have been since the trees sang in words.
My lady is the color of flesh now, and my lord practices the spear only to show their daughter and son the ways of the warrior past.
So they will live until this shadowed world is in its time of greatest need. Then they will come back and protect us all and heal the world.
May they watch over and keep us all until the world falls into the Western Sea.
This is,
I truly bond
And cry,
a true account,
Fianna mac Fethnat