A Book of Myths
and their happy voices, their lovely faces like the faces of the
children of a god, and the proud and loving words with which their
father spoke of them were, to her, like acid in a festering wound. At
last there came a black day when jealousy had choked all the flowers
of goodness in her heart, and only treachery and merciless cruelty
remained. She rose from her couch and ordered the horses to be yoked
to her chariot that she might take the four children to the Great Lake
to see the king, her foster-father. They were but little children, yet
the instinct that sometimes tells even a very little child when it is
near an evil thing, warned Finola that harm would come to her and to
her brothers were they to go. It may also have been, perhaps, that she
had seen, with the sharp vision of a woman child, the thing to which
Lir was quite blind, and that in a tone of her stepmother's voice, in
a look she had surprised in her eyes, she had learned that the love
that her father's wife professed for her and for the others was only
hatred, cunningly disguised. Thus she tried to make excuses for
herself and the little brothers to whom she was a child-mother, so
that they need not go. But Eva listened with deaf ears, and the
children said farewell to Lir, who must have wondered at the tears
that stood in Finola's eyes and the shadow that darkened their blue,
and drove off in the chariot with their stepmother.
When they had driven a long way, Eva turned to her attendants: "Much
wealth have I," she said, "and all that I have shall be yours if you
will slay for me those four hateful things that have stolen from me
the love of my man."
The servants heard her in horror, and in horror and shame for her they
answered: "Fearful is the deed thou wouldst have us do; more fearful
still is it that thou shouldst have so wicked a thought. Evil will
surely come upon thee for having wished to take the lives of Lir's
innocent little children."
Angrily, then, she seized a sword and herself would fain have done
what her servants had scorned to do. But she lacked strength to carry
out her own evil wish, and so they journeyed onwards. They came to
Lake Darvra at last--now Lough Derravaragh, in West Meath--and there
they all alighted from the chariot, and the children, feeling as
though they had been made to play at an ugly game, but that now it was
over and all was safety and happiness again, were sent into the loch
to bathe. Joyously and with merry laughter the little boys splashed
into the clear water by the rushy shore, all three seeking to hold
the hands of their sister, whose little slim white body was whiter
than the water-lilies and her hair more golden than their hearts.
It was then that Eva struck them, as a snake strikes its prey. One
touch for each, with a magical wand of the Druids, then the low
chanting of an old old rune, and the beautiful children had vanished,
and where their tiny feet had pressed the sand and their yellow hair
had shown above the water like four daffodil heads that dance in the
wind, there floated four white swans. But although to Eva belonged the
power of bewitching their bodies, their hearts and souls and speech
still belonged to the children of Lir. And when Finola spoke, it was
not as a little timid child, but as a woman who could look with sad
eyes into the future and could there see the terrible punishment of a
shameful act.
"Very evil is the deed that thou hast done," she said. "We only gave
thee love, and we are very young, and all our days were happiness. By
cruelty and treachery thou hast brought our childhood to an end, yet
is our doom less piteous than thine. Woe, woe unto thee, O Eva, for a
fearful doom lies before thee!"
Then she asked--a child still, longing to know when the dreary days of
its banishment from other children should be over--"Tell us how long a
time must pass until we can take our own forms again."
And, relentlessly, Eva made answer: "Better had it been for thy peace
hadst thou left unsought that knowledge. Yet will I tell thee thy
doom. Three hundred years shall ye live in the smooth waters of Lake
Darvra; three hundred years on the Sea of Moyle,[11] which is
between Erin and Alba; three hundred years more at Ivros Domnann[12]
and at Inis Glora,[13] on the Western Sea. Until a prince from the
north shall marry a princess from the south; until the Tailleken (St.
Patrick) shall come to Erin, and until ye shall hear the sound of the
Christian bell, neither my power nor thy power, nor the power of any
Druid's runes can set ye free until that weird is dreed."
As she spoke, a strange softening came into the evil woman's heart.
They were so still, those white creatures who gazed up at her with
eager, beseeching eyes, through which looked the souls of the little
children that once she had loved. They were so silent and piteous, the
little Ficra and Conn, whose dimpled baby faces she often used to
kiss. And she said, that her burden of guilt might be the lighter:
"This relief shall ye have in your troubles. Though ye keep your human
reason and your human speech, yet shall ye suffer no grief because
your form is the form of swans, and you shall sing songs more sweet
than any music that the earth has ever known."
Then Eva went back to her chariot and drove to the palace of her
foster-father at the Great Lake, and the four white swans were left on
the lonely waters of Darvra.
When she reached the palace without the children, the king asked in
disappointment why she had not brought them with her.
"Lir loves thee no longer," she made answer. "He will not trust his
children to thee, lest thou shouldst work them some ill."
But her father did not believe her lying words. Speedily he sent
messengers to Shee Finnaha that they might bring back the children who
ever carried joy with them. Amazed, Lir received the message, and when
he learned that Eva had reached the palace alone, a terrible dread
arose in his heart. In great haste he set out, and as he passed by
Lake Darvra he heard voices singing melodies so sweet and moving that
he was fain, in spite of his fears, to stop and listen. And lo, as he
listened, he found that the singers were four swans, that swam close
up to where he stood, and greeted him in the glad voices of his own
dear children. All that night he stayed beside them, and when they had
told him their piteous tale and he knew that no power could free them
till the years of their doom were accomplished, Lir's heart was like
to break with pitying love and infinite sorrow. At dawn he took a
tender leave of them and drove to the house of Bodb the Red. Terrible
were the words of Lir, and dark was his face as he told the king the
evil thing that Eva had done. And Eva, who had thought in the madness
of her jealousy that Lir would give her all his love when he was a
childless man, shrank, white and trembling, away from him when she saw
the furious hatred in his eyes. Then said the king, and his anger was
even as the anger of Lir:
"The suffering of the little children who are dear to our souls shall
come to an end at last. Thine shall be an eternal doom."
And he put her on oath to tell him "what shape of all others, on the
earth, or above the earth, or beneath the earth, she most abhorred,
and into which she most dreaded to be transformed."
"A demon of the air," answered the cowering woman.
"A demon of the air shalt thou be until time shall cease!" said her
foster-father. Thereupon he smote her with his druidical wand, and a
creature too hideous for men's eyes to look upon, gave a great scream
of anguish, and flapped its black wings as it flew away to join the
other demons of the air.
Then the king of the Dedannans and all his people went with Lir to
Lake Darvra, and listened to the honey-sweet melodies that were sung
to them by the white swans that had been the children of their hearts.
And such magic was in the music that it could lull away all sorrow and
pain, and give rest to the grief-stricken and sleep to the toil-worn
and the heavy at heart. And the Dedannans made a great encampment on
the shores of the lake that they might never be far from them. There,
too, as the centuries went by, came the Milesians, who succeeded the
Dedannans in Erin, and so for the children of Lir three hundred years
passed happily away.
Sad for them and for Lir, and for all the people of the Dedannans, was
the day when the years at Darvra were ended and the four swans said
farewell to their father and to all who were so dear to them, spread
their snowy pinions, and took flight for the stormy sea. They sang a
song of parting that made grief sit heavy on the hearts of all those
who listened, and the men of Erin, in memory of the children of Lir
and of the good things they had wrought by the magic of their music,
made a law, and proclaimed it throughout all the land, that from that
time forth no man of their land should harm a swan.
Weary were the great white wings of the children of Lir when they
reached the jagged rocks by the side of the fierce grey sea of Moyle,
whose turbulent waves fought angrily together. And the days that came
to them there were days of weariness, of loneliness, and of hardship.
Very cold were they often, very hungry, and yet the sweetness of their
song pierced through the vicious shriek of the tempest and the sullen
boom and crash of the great billows that flung themselves against the
cliffs or thundered in devouring majesty over the wrack-strewn shore,
like a thread of silver that runs through a pall. One night a tempest
drove across and down the Sea of Moyle from the north-east, and lashed
it into fury. And the mirk darkness and the sleet that drove in the
teeth of the gale like bullets of ice, and the huge, irresistible
breakers that threshed the shore, filled the hearts of the children of
Lir with dread. For always they had desired love and beauty, and the
ugliness of unrestrained cruelty and fury made them sick at soul.
To her brothers Finola said: "Beloved ones, of a surety the storm must
drive us apart. Let us, then, appoint a place of meeting, lest we
never look upon each other again."
And, knowing that she spoke wisely and well, the three brothers
appointed as their meeting-place the rock of Carricknarone.
Never did a fiercer storm rage on the sea between Alba and Erin than
the storm that raged that night. Thunderous, murky clouds blotted out
stars and moon, nor was there any dividing line between sky and sea,
but both churned themselves up together in a passion of destruction.
When the lightning flashed, it showed only the fury of the cruel seas,
the shattered victims of the destroying storm. Very soon the swans
were driven one from another and scattered over the face of the angry
deep. Scarcely could their souls cling to their bodies while they
struggled with the winds and waves. When the long, long night came to
an end, in the grey and cheerless dawn Finola swam to the rock of
Carricknarone. But no swans were there, only the greedy gulls that
sought after wreckage, and the terns that cried very dolorously.
Then great grief came upon Finola, for she feared she would see her
brothers nevermore. But first of all came Conn, his feathers all
battered and broken and his head drooping, and in a little Ficra
appeared, so drenched and cold and beaten by the winds that no word
could he speak. And Finola took her younger brothers under her great
white wings, and they were comforted and rested in that warm shelter.
"If Aed would only come," she said, "then should we be happy indeed."
And even as she spoke, they beheld Aed sailing towards them like a
proud ship with its white sails shining in the sun, and Finola held