Oisín Leathshúileach
ua Duibhne
I am Oisín Leathshúileach ua
Duibhne. I was born XX miles north of the Vallum Hadriani, in a town of five
hundred that no longer stands, in the MCXXIth year of Rome, which is year
CCCLXVIII by the Christian
reckoning, and an Ash year by that of my own people. It was an appropriate
tree for the year, for the shadow of an ash tree is blight upon crops, and
that was a year of great sorrow, when the wild Cruithne of the highlands, and
their allies the Ulaid from Eire, came in terrible force against the north.
My father was the son of the local chieftain, a descendant of the Brigantes of
old. His mother was Eirsh, from the Ua Duibhnae of Connaught, and my father in
turn married an Ua Duibhne woman, a niece of their king--if the stories are to
be believed, then we are descendants of Conn Cétchathach himself, Conn of the
Hundred Battles, who was king in Connaught before he was king of all Eire in
Tara. It was an ancient alliance, between the Brigantes and the Ua Duibhnae,
and had been this way since before the Romans ever set foot in Britain. I
myself was taken to foster among the Ua Duibhne, where I earned my names: Oisín,
they called me, little stag, for my keen eyes and swift feet. Leathshúileach,
they called me, half-sighted, for when I first drank of the warriors' mead, I
was wounded by the fire and blind in one eye for a time.
I returned to my place of birth with an Eirsh name when I came into my
manhood, already trained as a warrior. That winter I turned 16 and, like my
father and his father before me, enlisted into the auxilia, and was trained as
a border scout.
Now, I have no love of Romans. Their administrators are greedy, their
magistrates cruel, and their soldiers arrogant. But there, that far north,
there were few Romans. Many people were citizens--I could in truth call myself
civitas, and have, on occasion. Few were truly Romans, though. Even the men of
Legio VI Hispania stationed at Eboracum and along the Vallum, spoke a mongel
tounge with as much Breton in it as Latin. Only the legates, the officers, and
the Dux Brittanicus himself are really Romans. And us auxilliaries? We were
trained (once) by centurions of the legions, but we fought in much the same
way that our ancestors had--not wildly and without discipline as Caesar would
tell you, but with order and tactics that once burned Rome herself. We carried
swords and wore armor made by our own people, we rode horses who knew no
Latin, and we protected our villages and towns. Did we bear Roman ranks and
report to a legate? So what. Such was life.
All this changed when I was 19 years old. It was a dark night, and cold, when
my life changed. I was a principal then, promoted quickly because my family
was important and my swordarm swift, and in theory I commanded twenty
horsemen, although usually I had closer to fifteen, all born within two days'
easy ride either side of the wall. We were a day's ride west from my home, and
I had not visted in two months. Although we had passed through many villages
during our patrol, rarely had we stayed longer than an hour, and rarely had we
slept under a roof. We all knew that we would spend the next evening with mead
and venison and the red ale of warriors in my grandfather's hall and the night
with a pretty girl in a soft bed, so of course our spirits were high. Why
should they not be? We sat by the fire we had built in a little hollow to hide
the light, mending our clothes, shining our helmets and spears, polishing our
leather. We were fifteen young men, returning from the border, and though most
of us carried the heads of Cruithne raiders, all of our saddles were still
full.
I do not recall now exactly what happened. The emotions of the night have
clouded my memory. I do remember, though, that it was Dumnovallos who was on
watch. He called me over, twenty paces down the hill on which we were
encamped, and after my eyes adjusted to the dark he pointed out down the
valley into the night, saying nothing. For a few seconds, I too saw nothing,
and then I saw how the wide valley east of us was swarming and moving. There
were men down there, thousands of them. We could not make them out clearly,
but they were moving south. I cursed, looked again, and told Dumnovallos to go
and wake the horses. I returned to camp, gave the orders to break it, and
within a quarter of the hour, we were riding south, hard towards the wall. I
do not know how so many men came so far south undetected, but we were the
first to raise the alarm. The whole night was spent in preperations for an
attack that was expected the next day. I worked as hard as anyone, but I spent
the night with a sick feeling deep in my stomach--I knew my home was somewhere
across the plain that had been covered in men.
The attack came in the hour before dawn. They were Cruithne, scattered with
Saxon mercenaries, far north of their usual landing grounds along the forts of
the Saxon Shore, and a few of the Ulaid. For three days we fought them, and on
the last day I rode with others of the auxilia cavalry and the legionarry
cataphracts in a wide sweeping flank attack from the west that cut down the
attackers in their hundreds. We carried long spears like Alexander's men, and
we crushed them beneath the mass of our horses, and then turned to pursue them
as they fled.
I was with the scouting party that was the first to return to the town of my
family. A light rain the day before had extinguished most of the fires, but
the wood and thatched buildings, half burnt, still smoldered. From the bodies
still scattered about, as well as from a few prisoners we took and tortured,
it was learned that the town had been taken with little resistance, and none
had been left alive and unenslaved. Later, the Roman navy would rescue a few
women from aboard a Saxon galley: hungry, cold and raped. I found the bodies
of my father and grandfather side by side with a few of their warriors in the
half-burnt doorway into the hall--many of them were my friends. My mother was
behind them, her bow still clutched in her cold hands. Most of the women of
the household had swallowed poison rather than be taken alive, but their
bodies had been abused and desecrated anyway.
I took few things from the ruin. My mother's bow, my grandfather's
stag-handled dagger, my father's bronze-plated sword belt and torc. I bent in
half the swords of my father and grandfather and those who had died with them,
buried them all near our ancestors, and burned the hall to the ground. There
was nothing left for me there. I rode again for three more months, hunting the
tribes who had come against my family, fighting and killing like a madman.
When it was done, I resigned my post and sailed with a merchant ship to Eire,
to return to the halls of the Ua Duibhne, to the kin of my mother and my
grandmother, to my brother who still fostered among them. We were both adopted
by my uncle and his brother the king, but I was landless and my soul was
restless. One night, when Finn and his warriors visited our hall, I asked
leave of the clan to go with the Fíanna, and was granted permission of the
king and the warriors and my uncle. I left with them the next morning, and
have ridden with them since. They are my brothers in the sword, and my
comrades these past years.
That is the tale of how I came to be a Fení of the Fíanna Cú Ruadh. There
are many more tales to be told of the time since then--perhaps, some day, I
shall you them. But for now, I rest my tongue.
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