Airman (Part 2)

Irish hero Cúchulainn leads a flight into enemy territory in the conclusion to the saga.

Before reading this concluding part, be sure to read the First Part

---

Dawn patrol was a routine sweep along the coast to watch for bandits infiltrating from the Outer Hebridean Isles, then a counter-incursion into the enemy's heartland if conditions allowed. Flights the day previously had confirmed that indeed the Dál Riada now had the latest Saxonish planes, the Sopwith Dolphin model, which could twist and leap like its namesake beast of the ocean.

Four men of the Ulaid had died consequently, two of them having their fine young heads taken by the outsiders, before weather closed in and further air action became unthinkable, forestalling a vengeance sortie.

This day the weather was good, with high cloud and excellent visibility. From the patrol zones over the straits you could see across to the Mull of Kintyre and Skye to the north. It was thus made likely that the patrol would venture into those lands today.

Longboats of the Ulaid raiders were already launched from the eastern beaches below near the Giant’s Causeway and would be expecting some air support when landing on the far shore. Cúchulainn’s dawn pilots were eager to spill blood and watched over their shoulders in fear of dark clouds closing in on them and taking away their chances for combat.

Cúchulainn led the flight in his three-winger, with Laeg in the wingman spot to his right, Laoghaire the Triumphant to his left, and Conall Cearnach, the Angular, the Crook-Neck, in the rear place; each of these three in an Abatros. A diamond of four deadly sons of war to cleave the clouds they were, bitter shards of crystalline regret for any foeman who might happen upon them.

As they crossed over the shoreline, Cúchulainn saw the waves of their boats ahead of them to the east. No enemy fighters were airborne yet. He gestured to the others, waving them on ahead to cross over the sea and to enter the tribal airspace of their ancestral enemies.

---

That day it was foreordained that Cúchulainn the Hound of the Red Hand, great warrior and fighter ace of the clan of the Ulaid, would meet one of his own blood in battle. Sixteen years before this time, he had gone to train in the mysteries of arms with Scathach the Shadow, who knew of the handling of weapons and of their secret thirsts and wants. For the sorcery of killing is all in the satisfaction of your weapon’s whispered needs, and Scathach knew how to listen.

Cúchulainn had crossed the sea by ship that today he flew over. When he had disembarked he walked over the Bridge of Students which whipped and whirled and threw off those who were not versed in weapon lore, and he had finally entered the apprenticeship of that dark and cunning woman who was Shade Queen of the Dál Riada.

While he studied with Scathach, learning from her the spear feat and the salmon leap and all manner of tricks beside, it so happened that the Shade Queen was at war with her own sister Aoife in some neighbouring Pictish clanship.

It moreover befell that the youthful Cúchulainn came to lay with Aoife, by what path of twistings and obscure occurrences nobody could ever say. Some said he was sent to slay her, or she him, but that their tryst came about when love struck at them in their hearts instead of intended daggers of homicide.

Some said in truth the sister had never existed, that Scathach made war with herself, and that Cúchulainn made love with a phantasm of Aoife that was but a deceptive cloaking to the Mistress of Weapons and Dark Weavings. That she desired a child fathered by the youth destined to be the greatest warrior of all the Ulaid and so contrived it thus.

Such confusions and such unknowings crowded always about Scathach, even before she had consorted with Bricriu the Deceiver some years later. However it may have been, Aoife - or Scathach if you would credit these latter tales - came to bear Cúchulainn a bastard boy child, who was named Connla.

Before he returned to his own people, Cúchulainn presented to the child's mother a ring, by which the boy should be known to his father when he might visit the Ulaid lands once come unto his manhood. It was of ancient making, and had a crafty and mystic design upon it unique to itself and no other.

Now that design, the black obsidian raven on an agate field of flecked azure, which betokened the Morrigan of War and her unending lust for the bodies of strong warriors fallen in battle, was painted on the wings and fuselage of a Sopwith Dolphin fighter fast closing upon the flight of the Ulaid warriors.

A hand which wore the ring itself gripped the aircraft's control stick. It was Connla himself, son of Cúchulainn, that piloted that fighter toward the three-winger of his own father.

---

When the flights met over the Mull of Kintyre, the normal thing would have been for them to engage, manoeuvring for advantage of height and angle of incidence of the sun, and then closing for the dogfight.

But Cúchulainn with his famed eye saw the flecked azure and the sable raven painted on the wings and fuselage of Connla's aircraft. He signalled then for his flight to hold fire, and waggled his wings at the approaching Sopwiths as a sign to parley.

Connla likewise shooed his supporting flight away and closed with the plane of his father that they might then parley. They met and fell into a parallel course in low flight above the beach at Keil, where the zealot monk Saint Colmcille first walked this island and then cursed the Pictmen and Saxons with adoration of the Nazarene sorcerer Íosa or Jesu.

Some say that it would be impossible for men to talk over the noise of the engines and the rushing of the wind. But these were not ordinary men but heroes with clarion voices, and it was of course possible for them to speak to one another. And the proof that it was indeed possible is that I am telling you now what they said on that very day.

"Why do you trouble our shores with your raids and your wanton troublings, wayward father I have never seen? Avaunt ye hence and you need not die this day!"

"Why do your people's planes cloud our skies, whelp of a she-bitch? It is here we have come for honour’s satisfaction. With our planes and our longships have we come to draw blood of your clan, and I will not hence till blood is taken. Fly far from here if you would live!"

"Shall we then contest for lives this day? A strong taboo there is against the drawing of a kinsman's blood and the snuffing-out of his life."

"I shit on that taboo, and piss on the weak words of holy men, and the cautions of suchlike weaklings with their waterish blood! I am Cúchulainn, and my honour shall not suffer a stain from running home in the face of a challenge."

"Let it be so, father. How then shall we fight? Name your conditions."

"Conditions! How fight? More words! This mockery of a parley is at an end, bastard discharge of a witch whore!"

Cúchulainn banked his three-winger wrathfully then, and drove it straight toward Connla's plane as if to ram him.

But the swift-witted youth banked his own Dolphin, and instantly it plunged toward the waves lapping on the beach. The Dolphin was indeed a nimble steed, bucking the waves leapingly, and then completing a half-loop in the style of the Alemannic warrior Immelmann. He now came up behind Cúchulainn before the older man could know it.

The Sopwith's guns coughed their rapid hack-hack-hacking and twin ropes of slugs unreeled from Connla's plane to his father's, a coursing double helix moving against the paternal current.

Ballistics and fate together mastered the lightning course of these strong skeins and they found their destined home in the fuselage and left wing of the Fokker. Cúchulainn seemed to recoil away from it, banking upward and to the right. Connla followed him upward.

Long these warriors contended in the air above the strand of Keil, while their liegemen circled and watched from above. Meanwhile the ships of the Ulaid neared, and the warriors of the Dál Riada massed on the shore to repel them.

These men on land cheered the blue-flecked fighter with the obsidian raven painted on its wings; the men in the boats cheered the blood-vermillion three-winger, its wings now clipped by bullets and its course dogged by filial hate.

Finally Cúchulainn looked down at the fuel gauge and saw that he was all but empty, biongó as the airmen said in his land for a thirsty bird. His adversary, the bastard whelp Connla, had flown so much less further and was sure to be holding more in his tank. Already Cúchulainn’s wingmen up above were peeling away for the nearest friendly aerodrome where they would dispute with meadhorns and not Mauser machineguns.

Cúchulainn knew then that he had only fuel and time remaining for one last desperate move. He tugged the crippled Albatros in a tight loop and coursed directly, nor for the tail, but for the front mass of his son’s Sopwith Dolphin.

He charged head-on and opened up his guns. Connla did the same. The two fighters passed each other by in a cloud of fragments, canvas rags and broken struts. Parabellum bullets chunked dully into the airframe or else ziowwed rebounding from the metal engine block. The smoke began to billow in fat fingers as the planes died.

Both aircraft, flaming, fell towards the beach. A hail of bullet-broken pieces fell after them as they plunged. Connla's plane hit the sand and exploded. Towers of seawater and flame hung a moment, then black smoke coursed around them and the towers were lost. Pieces rained down on the strand, chunks of man and machinery confounded in their chaos.

Cúchulainn's Fokker belly-flopped onto the waves. A wing-strut collapsed sideways and pierced his side. The wreckage of the plane sank but the water was shallow, and Cúchulainn's speared body yet lived and was lapped at softly by the waves.

Now the men on the shoreline and the men in the boats fell silent. The Dál Riada pilots overhead lost heart and turned away inland. The sky darkened and stormclouds crowded in fast.

A shuddering was felt by by men on land and at sea as a great beast heaved its heavy head from the waves. It was a monstrous figure too great for the telling and too dire for the imagining. Quickly it consumed the ships like a gull would a herring, and then reached out greedy claws for the scattering troops of wailing warriors along the shore.

Its jaws chewed and spat, chewed again and spat. Great gobbets of men and rent limbs fell splashing into the sea all around Cúchulainn.

The creature had the gift that it could be seen and not seen. All there could perceive it with the edges of their eyes, but their soul would not acknowledge the grotesquery of the thing they saw.

Only those who were dying, and those gripped by the melancholy of the gift that is no gift, could admit this thing was really before them. So it would come to move through the nations in the time of great killing engines to come, and but a scant few would remark its presence until the hour of their ending when they saw it clear but were too late to call out a warning to their fellows.

The thing now addressed him in a voice that was heard and was not.

You could hear the voice but not the words.
You could understand the words but not hear the voice.

Both. Neither.

It spoke now to the mangled hero as he lay in the waves dying lonely as a starved pup, with the wing strut of his war machine all skewered in his ribs:

Great was your sin, Cúchulainn, when you sought to bring death on your son Connla. Cursed is the father who seeks the harm of his child. Now you have killed each the other, son and father, and your bloodline will be ever lost to the ages. No great loss, to be sure.

Yet the curse does not end with your downfall or the loss of your only blood to time's oblivion. For the race of great heroes is now snuffed out, Cúchulainn, it was just a dream you dreamed.

Now the little men merely of the machine will exist on this earth only as time goes on plummeting towards its hard hard landing on a bleak strand on a grey spring day.

This day is April 29th, 1916. The killing that the leaders of men shall do from this day to the end of days will not be the joyous killing of the warrior glad in the game of death between strong foes that you sing of. But now the desperate killing of thousands, and of millions, in fires and ovens and grey fields of slime-choked throats and charred treestumps.

Those bitter old men, that Saxon King Seoirse and that Teuton Caesar Liam, and those so so many like them, they will bring in the infants and the women and the men, and they will starve them to bones and they will char them to embers in dark fires burning in their secret places with no gladness in them.

Heralds then shall call on the people to rejoice. And the people will indeed rejoice until it is their turn to lament and to starve and to be charred.

Your joyful feats and glad subterfuges are no more, great hound of the Red Hand. Your dawns in the glistening brooks cavorting with nereids, no more.

This is your doing, Cúchulainn, for you did not limit your joy in the swift trade of war even as it brought you machines of excitement with which you could exchange transactions of death with your own blood.

Thus you wasted your birthright, thus you brought the whole race of man beneath the suffering dominion of grim mechanisms.

Die, then, accursed man lower than the lowest dog. Become my tough meat and my bitter drink as I, the dull unseen monster of atrocity, lay hands on all those in this your saddened earth.

NOTE

If you’re intrigued by the world of the Irish epic, in particular the strange, humorous and heroic tales of Cúchulainn, first of all remember there are no fighter planes.

The most incredibly awesome way in is to listen to Ronnie from The Dubliners reading a tale or two:
Ronnie Drew reads Cúchulainn

A good simple development is this nice reading of the Tain, the most epic of the tales, but incomplete:
Reading of the Tain Bo Cualinge in English (3 parts only)

Beyond that there’s Lady Augusta Gregory’s collection Gods and Fighting Men. There are other more faithful and more modern translations of the tales, but you’d have to buy them. Gutenberg is of course free:
Augusta Gregory, Gods and Fighting Men at Gutenberg.org

If you’re curious how it fits in to modern Irish history, particularly the Independence struggle of 1916-1922, the key figure is Padraig Pearse. Of course he and the other rebels were assisted in the effort by the German Kaiser, at war with the Brits.

Where Pearse declared the Irish Republic at the Dublin GPO in 1916 now stands a statue of Cúchulainn. In Beckett’s Murphy, a deranged character tries to beat his own brains out on the statue’s arse:

Neary minus his whiskers was recognized… in the General Post Office contemplating from behind the statue of Cuchulain. Neary had bared his head, as though the holy ground meant something to him. Suddenly he flung aside his hat, sprang forward, seized the dying hero by the thighs and began to dash his head against his buttocks, such as they are.