The Hound’s time on the island was nigh to ending when news of Princess Aife’s invasion reached the castle. The whispers were that she had come to avenge some slight from when Scathach trained her as a warrior. Scathach never spoke of it, so the pupils never knew what the slight might have been. They were young, and rumors ran wild, fuelled by the occasional nod or wink from Uathach. All the would-be warriors knew was they were the new elite of the Shadowy Isle and would be responsible for repelling the invasion. Despite thinking the invasion some elaborate ploy, when Scathach gathered them all in the feast hall and told them they were her army, the protectors of her honor, and her lands, Setanta gazed at the assembled warriors, thinking he would show them who was best.
I do not care what her reasons might be. I will prove my worth.
He felt his blood rise as Uathach stood on the dais with her hands on her hips and yelled, “Tomorrow, we fight. Tonight, we feast.”
The words were met with a cheer from warriors who had no real idea what they were cheering.
The following morning, listening to the jingles of horse bits and the scuffling of nervous feet, Setanta realized she had not meant feast but drink until vomiting—or passing into a stupor. He had no recollection of food or, indeed, much of anything, not even returning to his cell. When he woke, rubbing his eyes vigorously, he thought someone must have carried him. His stupor was so complete he nearly missed the departure of the army. Setanta awoke only because a raven decided that the morning was the time to perch on his cell window and caw at the rising sun.
With a mouth that felt full of moss and his head ringing, he climbed from his cot, intent on crushing it into silence, but it had flown with a final caw by the time he reached the window. A jangle of metal caused him to look down and see the small army of Scathach marching over the bridge.
“You are late, boy,” the sorceress smiled as he caught them up.
“I am not a mead drinker, Scathach. If you knew, you would have barred me from the feast hall.”
“Or maybe I did know, and I didn’t want you coming to the battle and making the rest of us look inadequate.” The warriors in hearing all laughed, and Setanta felt the customary redness creep up inside his aventail as he fell into step behind her horse.
The mood of the young warriors was good. They were all anticipating the thrill of a hard-fought battle. When they caught sight of Aife’s army gathered on the plain, their enthusiasm waned. There must have been three hundred mounted warriors within an arrow flight of where they came to a halt. Setanta frowned because even though the enemy was within range, they had brought no bows, only their swords and the short spears for stabbing from the first row of the shield wall and the long spears for stabbing over the top of the enemy’s shields.
“Come, Uathach, the day is long in the tooth. Let us go and see if the kitten wants to fight now or wait until morning,” Scathach said, digging her heels into her horse’s flanks.
As they rode towards the opposing army, the young warriors watched and fidgeted, made nervous by their sudden reality. Coming to understand that they were only two hundred and fresh from the castle of pupils. The enemy consisted of hardened warriors who had experienced battle.
“We fight,” Scathach said when she arrived back. “Form a shield wall. Interlocking shields. No one breaks ranks. If anyone backs out, the wall will be torn apart.”
Forming the wall, the warriors watched the army opposite dismount as though they had arrived at the festival of Beltane and were tethering their horses.
“When they near, one step forward, brace and roar.” No one acknowledged the words. “I cannot hear you.”
“Yes, Scathach.”
“Louder.”
“Yes, Scathach,” they roared.
The wall was formed without fuss because they had trained incessantly from one summer to the next but for a handful of days. Setanta was in the front row, secure in the knowledge that the warrior to his right would protect his side, even though he could not see who it was. Their helmet was low, their aventail finely meshed, and their eyes were to the front, watching the army form ranks on the other side of the plain.
Setanta passed his long spear to the rear, held the stabbing spear in his right hand, and hooked his round wooden shield onto his left forearm. He could feel the weight of the wood trying to pull his arm down, giving him a sense of how it would stop an ax blow.
“Front row warriors, put your shields on the ground and crouch slightly,” Uathach called. “Warriors on the second row, place your shields above. Third row, prepare to relieve the front row when there is a break in battle.”
Setanta stared between the gap in the shields at the enemy’s approach. It seemed to take forever. When they were no more than fifty paces away, they stopped, roared, and began banging their weapons on their shields. The cacophony stopped with a final roar, and they charged.
“One step forward,” Scathach called. The wall roared and lunged as one. The noise as shields clashed was ear-splitting. It was not one sound but multiple strikes of wood on wood. Like vast lumps of ice in a hailstorm hitting the wooden roof of a cowshed. Setanta could feel himself buckle from the weight, but he managed to dig in his heels and keep his enemy away, jabbing his spear through the gap. At first, there was only grunting, jabbing, pushing, and being pushed. The smell of sweating bodies was foremost. It was not long, though, before other smells crept in, other sounds, other sensations. The fallen were screaming; the air was starting to stink as the dead lost control of their bowels and bladders. The metallic scrapes of iron on the shield boss or edge replaced the thunderous hailstorm. Warriors began to do strange things. Setanta saw one lift their shield high, looking for the severed foot of a neighbor before taking a sword in the guts. And then the pressure eased as the attackers reached an unspoken agreement and took a step backward and then another.
“Third row to the front,” Scathach called.
The front row retreated. Setanta slumped down onto the turf and pulled off his helmet.
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“You did well,” Ferdia said from beside him.
“Thank you. You, too. It is different from what I expected.”
“Yes. Did you see who was lost?”
Setanta shook his head. There was no way to see who had fallen in the first assault. From the screams, it sounded like many.
“They are back,” Scathach called from somewhere in the wall. “Brace.”
And so it went on until it was too dark to continue. Most youngsters who stood in that wall expected the battle to be glorious. None had expected a fight of attrition—two armies nibbling away at each other until there were not enough warriors left to keep the wall intact. The reality of battle came as a shock, like the smells and the screams. No one had warned them about those. Come the end of that small battle, it smelled like they were kneeling in a midden trench.
Setanta was sorely tired and sitting in the rear, once again relieved from the front when the walls had broken apart. Ferdia was beside him, helmet off, hair matted to his head with sweat. They were listening to the sounds of battle, the grunts and thumps of the shield on the shield, when a female voice called from the rear of the opposing wall, “Scathach, we will withdraw. Night is upon us.”
“You have had enough then, Aife?”
“We will return with the light, Scathach, as you well know.”
Ferdia and Setanta stood and watched Aife’s wall back away, one pace at a time.
“Fall back and make camp,” Scathach called.
The wall’s withdrawal uncovered the dead lying where they had fallen. Despite a feeling of the opposite, the battle had not lasted long, and yet twenty warriors lay dead. Many more were injured. Some would not survive the night.
In a somber mood, Ferdia and Setanta walked to a place where a fire could be lit, silence born of a shared experience in the shield wall. They heated oats and mutton on the fire and shared a flagon of mead. Twelve of the twenty dead belonged to their army, and they had many more walking wounded. When the fight resumed, they could not long sustain that level of losses before the wall would collapse.
“Scathach is badly wounded,” was the whisper spreading around the camp.
“I will go and see,” Setanta said. Ferdia nodded, staring into the flames, evidently suffering with memories of the short fight.
When Setanta reached them, he saw Scathach was indeed carrying a severe wound. The shoulder of her sword arm was open to the bone.
“I cannot fight tomorrow,” she said to Uathach, who nodded as she leaned towards their fire to thread a bone needle.
“Do not worry, mother. I will think of something,” Uathach said as I backed into the deeper shadows.
“Scathach’s sword arm is useless,” Setanta said to Ferdia when he returned to the fire.
“She cannot lead us then.”
“If we do not fight, we will lose all honor.”
“I think Uathach will lead in her stead, so fear not for your honor, Hound.”
Unable to sleep, Setanta stared into the slowly dying flames, wondering what the chances would be without Scathach leading. Uathach was little more than a blunt tool her mother used to beat resistance out of her pupils. She would not command the same respect. Already weakened by the dead and wounded, being further weakened could only mean disaster for the morning’s battle.
With those thoughts ringing through his head, when Uathach ordered the warriors to form a shield wall, Setanta kept walking across the plain.
“Who’s that?” Uathach shouted.
No one knew or spoke. In full armor, it could have been any one of the survivors.
Fifty paces from the enemy army, he stuck his stabbing spear into the turf and shouted, “Aife, I challenge you to single combat.”
After issuing his challenge, Setanta crossed his arms and waited. He was beginning to think the princess would not come, when a horse galloped out of the enemy ranks with a mounted warrior, who had to be Aife. When she reached Setanta, the princess did not rein in her horse but leaped from the saddle with sword held high, stumbled slightly on landing, and then rushed him, screaming her war cry. She swung her sword in a high arc, meaning to cut him from shoulder to navel with one stroke. Setanta stepped in under the swing and grabbed her sword arm in the elbow crook. Being so close, her sword was a useless weapon, and he saw her eyes register the meaning in the instance before he pressed his spear point in under her aventail and up into the flesh under her chin. When the point met resistance, he embraced her with his left arm to get leverage and pushed with everything he had. Pushing through the cartilage of her throat, he saw the shock in her eyes and the resignation of her fate. When the strength left her legs, he lowered her to the plain, took off her helmet, and watched her trying to draw breath through the hole where the spearhead had been. Blood was pulsing from the wound. She tried to speak, which prompted a gush of blood from her mouth.
Setanta picked up her sword and placed it in her hand. The last thing to show in her eyes before death was gratitude. When she had passed, he rifled her belt and her saddlebags. All were the spoils of battle except the sword the princess needed to access Donn’s mound. Setanta became not only a tested warrior but also a wealthy man. When he looked towards Aife’s army, most warriors were mounting and riding away. Two were riding towards him. They were not hurrying. Their swords were sheathed. They were merely coming to claim the body of their princess.
Setanta turned and looked at Scathach’s army.
They were standing in silence, unsure how to react. He mounted Aife’s horse and walked it back to the shield wall. As he neared, the warriors started cheering and waving their spears. Setanta felt a warm feeling develop in his guts, which evaporated when he saw Uathach and Scathach. They were staring at him from their horses with ill-concealed loathing.
***
Shortly after Aife’s death, Scathach called Setanta to her chamber. He found her sat before the fire with a cup of mead. Despite the season, she was wrapped in a hide. Without her armor and in obvious pain from her shoulder, the warrior witch did not seem so frightening, almost human. Uathach stood by one of the windows, looking down into the bay.
“You wanted to see me,” he said.
“Why did you do it?” she asked.
He did not need to know what she meant. Since the morning of the single combat with Aife, Scathach had barely spoken to him. At first, he was hurt and confused, unsure why she was treating him so after he saved her small army from annihilation. Given time to think, he realized he had impinged on her honor by fighting her battle.
“He did it, Mother, because someone told him he is a demigod, and The Hound thinks he is better than the rest of us,” Uathach hissed without looking into the room.
Setanta shrugged and said nothing. Scathach took a long pull on her cup and tossed it into the fire.
“Your training is up. There is a ship on the beach. It sails for Lúr Cinn Trá on the evening tide.”
“So, that is it then? I am now a warrior and can go on my way?”
“If you like.”
“How is it that I arrived in the summer, and now it is only spring. I thought my training was to last from summer to summer?”
“I have nothing left to teach you,” Scathach sighed.
Uathach said nothing, just stared out at the bay’s greyness.
“What of you, Uathach, have you nothing left to teach?” he asked.
“If I were you, boy, I would take my smart-mouthed head and leave while it was still on my shoulders,” Uathach said, still not looking into the feast hall.
Glowering at Scathach staring into the fire, Setanta saw something new in her eyes, something he had not seen in the months under her thrall. As he looked, I realized it was fear. Scathach, the mighty sorceress, was afraid of him. He started to laugh and continued laughing as he packed his meager belongings, took the bags with his battle-wealth, and headed for the beach.
He was wading through the surf, intent on the longship, when he heard Ferdia calling from the shore. With a frown, he turned back.
“What is it?” Setanta asked as he reached Ferdia.
“I wanted to say farewell. For an Ulaid, you are not all bad.”
“You dragged me back to shore to say farewell? Could we not have said our farewells at a distance?”
“No. Not properly.”
“You should know, I am not a Ulaid, Ferdia.”
“Well, wherever you are from, you are a friend.”
“I have known worse Connacht men than you, too,” Setanta said with a smile.
“I will always be your brother, Hound. Remember that.”
“And I yours, Ferdia.”