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- Author: James Stephens
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They were called Caevo’g, Cuillen, and Iaran. The fourth daughter, Iarnach, was not present at that moment, so nothing need be said of her yet.
Conaran called these three to him.
“Fionn is alone,” said he. “Fionn is alone, my treasures.”
“Ah!” said Caevo’g, and her jaw crunched upwards and stuck outwards, as was usual with her when she was satisfied.
“When the chance comes take it,” Conaran continued, and he smiled a black, beetle-browed, unbenevolent smile.
“It’s a good word,” quoth Cuillen, and she swung her jaw loose and made it waggle up and down, for that was the way she smiled.
“And here is the chance,” her father added.
“The chance is here,” Iaran echoed, with a smile that was very like her sister’s, only that it was worse, and the wen that grew on her nose joggled to and fro and did not get its balance again for a long time.
Then they smiled a smile that was agreeable to their own eyes, but which would have been a deadly thing for anybody else to see.
“But Fionn cannot see us,” Caevo’g objected, and her brow set downwards and her chin set upwards and her mouth squeezed sidewards, so that her face looked like a badly disappointed nut.
“And we are worth seeing,” Cuillen continued, and the disappointment that was set in her sister’s face got carved and twisted into hers, but it was worse in her case.
“That is the truth,” said Iaran in a voice of lamentation, and her face took on a gnarl and a writhe and a solidity of ugly woe that beat the other two and made even her father marvel.
“He cannot see us now,” Conaran replied, “but he will see us in a minute.”
“Won’t Fionn be glad when he sees us!” said the three sisters.
And then they joined hands and danced joyfully around their father, and they sang a song, the first line of which is:
“Fionn thinks he is safe. But who knows when the sky will fall?”Lots of the people in the Shi’ learned that song by heart, and they applied it to every kind of circumstance.
CHAPTER III
BY his arts Conaran changed the sight of Fionn’s eyes, and he did the same for Cona’n.
In a few minutes Fionn stood up from his place on the mound. Everything was about him as before, and he did not know that he had gone into Faery. He walked for a minute up and down the hillock. Then, as by chance, he stepped down the sloping end of the mound and stood with his mouth open, staring. He cried out:
“Come down here, Cona’n, my darling.”
Cona’n stepped down to him.
“Am I dreaming?” Fionn demanded, and he stretched out his finger before him.
“If you are dreaming,” said Congn, “I’m dreaming too. They weren’t here a minute ago,” he stammered.
Fionn looked up at the sky and found that it was still there. He stared to one side and saw the trees of Kyle Conor waving in the distance. He bent his ear to the wind and heard the shouting of hunters, the yapping of dogs, and the clear whistles, which told how the hunt was going.
“Well!” said Fionn to himself.
“By my hand!” quoth Cona’n to his own soul.
And the two men stared into the hillside as though what they were looking at was too wonderful to be looked away from.
“Who are they?” said Fionn.
“What are they?” Cona’n gasped. And they stared again.
For there was a great hole like a doorway in the side of the mound, and in that doorway the daughters of Conaran sat spinning. They had three crooked sticks of holly set up before the cave, and they were reeling yarn off these. But it was enchantment they were weaving.
“One could not call them handsome,” said Cona’n.
“One could,” Fionn replied, “but it would not be true.”
“I cannot see them properly,” Fionn complained. “They are hiding behind the holly.”
“I would be contented if I could not see them at all,” his companion grumbled.
But the Chief insisted.
“I want to make sure that it is whiskers they are wearing.”
“Let them wear whiskers or not wear them,” Cona’n counselled. “But let us have nothing to do with them.”
“One must not be frightened of anything,” Fionn stated.
“I am not frightened,” Cona’n explained. “I only want to keep my good opinion of women, and if the three yonder are women, then I feel sure I shall begin to dislike females from this minute out.”
“Come on, my love,” said Fionn, “for I must find out if these whiskers are true.”
He strode resolutely into the cave. He pushed the branches of holly aside and marched up to Conaran’s daughters, with Cona’n behind him.
CHAPTER IV
The instant they passed the holly a strange weakness came over the heroes. Their fists seemed to grow heavy as lead, and went dingle-dangle at the ends of their arms; their legs became as light as straws and began to bend in and out; their necks became too delicate to hold anything up, so that their heads wibbled and wobbled from side to side.
“What’s wrong at all?” said Cona’n, as he tumbled to the ground.
“Everything is,” Fionn replied, and he tumbled beside him.
The three sisters then tied the heroes with every kind of loop and twist and knot that could be thought of.
“Those are whiskers!” said Fionn.
“Alas!” said Conan.
“What a place you must hunt whiskers in?” he mumbled savagely. “Who wants whiskers?” he groaned.
But Fionn was thinking of other things.
“If there was any way of warning the Fianna not to come here,” Fionn murmured.
“There is no way, my darling,” said Caevo’g, and she smiled a smile that would have killed Fionn, only that he shut his eyes in time.
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After a moment he murmured again:
“Conan, my dear love, give the warning whistle so that the Fianna will keep out of this place.”
A little whoof, like the sound that would be made by a baby and it asleep, came from Cona’n.
“Fionn,” said he, “there isn’t a whistle in me. We are done for,” said he.
“You are done for, indeed,” said Cuillen, and she smiled a hairy and twisty and fangy smile that almost finished Cona’n.
By that time some of the Fianna had returned to the mound to see why Bran and Sceo’lan were barking so outrageously. They saw the cave and went into it, but no sooner had they passed the holly branches than their strength went from them, and they were seized and bound by the vicious hags. Little by little all the members of the Fianna returned to the hill, and each of them was drawn into the cave, and each was bound by the sisters.
Oisi’n and Oscar and mac Lugac came, with the nobles of clann-Baiscne, and with those of clann-Corcoran and clann-Smo’l; they all came, and they were all bound.
It was a wonderful sight and a great deed this binding of the Fianna, and the three sisters laughed with a joy that was terrible to hear and was almost death to see. As the men were captured they were carried by the hags into dark mysterious holes and black perplexing labyrinths.
“Here is another one,” cried Caevo’g as she bundled a trussed champion along.
“This one is fat,” said Cuillen, and she rolled a bulky Fenian along like a wheel.
“Here,” said Iaran, “is a love of a man. One could eat this kind of man,” she murmured, and she licked a lip that had whiskers growing inside as well as out.
And the corded champion whimpered in her arms, for he did not know but eating might indeed be his fate, and he would have preferred to be coffined anywhere in the world rather than to be coffined inside of that face. So far for them.
CHAPTER V
Within the cave there was silence except for the voices of the hags and the scarcely audible moaning of the Fianna-Finn, but without there was a dreadful uproar, for as each man returned from the chase his dogs came with him, and although the men went into the cave the dogs did not.
They were too wise.
They stood outside, filled with savagery and terror, for they could scent their masters and their masters’ danger, and perhaps they could get from the cave smells till then unknown and full of alarm.
From the troop of dogs there arose a baying and barking, a snarling and howling and growling, a yelping and squealing and bawling for which no words can be found. Now and again a dog nosed among a thousand smells and scented his master; the ruff of his neck stood up like a hog’s bristles and a netty ridge prickled along his spine. Then with red eyes, with bared fangs, with a hoarse, deep snort and growl he rushed at the cave, and then he halted and sneaked back again with all his ruffles smoothed, his tail between his legs, his eyes screwed sideways in miserable apology and alarm, and a long thin whine of woe dribbling out of his nose.
The three sisters took their wide-channelled, hard-tempered swords in their hands, and prepared to slay the Fianna, but before doing so they gave one more look from the door of the cave to see if there might be a straggler of the Fianna who was escaping death by straggling, and they saw one coming towards them with Bran and Sceo’lan leaping beside him, while all the other dogs began to burst their throats with barks and split their noses with snorts and wag their tails off at sight of the tall, valiant, white-toothed champion, Goll mor mac Morna. “We will kill that one first,” said Caevo’g.
“There is only one of him,” said Cuillen.
“And each of us three is the match for an hundred,” said Iaran.
The uncanny, misbehaved, and outrageous harridans advanced then to meet the son of Morna, and when he saw these three Goll whipped the sword from his thigh, swung his buckler round, and got to them in ten great leaps.
Silence fell on the world during that conflict. The wind went down; the clouds stood still; the old hill itself held its breath; the warriors within ceased to be men and became each an ear; and the dogs sat in a vast circle round the combatants, with their heads all to one side, their noses poked forward, their mouths half open, and their tails forgotten. Now and again a dog whined in a whisper and snapped a little snap on the air, but except for that there was neither sound nor movement.
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It was a long fight. It was a hard and a tricky fight, and Goll won it by bravery and strategy and great good luck; for with one shrewd slice of his blade he carved two of these mighty termagants into equal halves, so that there were noses and whiskers to his right hand and knees and toes to his left: and that stroke was known afterwards as one of the three great sword-strokes of Ireland. The third hag, however, had managed to get behind Goll, and she leaped on to his back with the bound of a panther, and hung here with the skilful, many-legged, tight-twisted clutching of a spider. But the great champion gave a twist of his hips and a swing of his shoulders that whirled her around him like a sack. He got her on the ground and tied her hands with the straps of
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