The boy cried out as his father grabbed the Cauldron and doused him in its tepid liquid, the contents choking him, its vapor assaulting his senses. He was momentarily blind, his skin steaming and pulsating with heat. He could hear nothing now but hooves galloping directly behind him as his father cried, “Danu, protect your son! The power is now his, may he deliver us from darkness!”
He felt his body being hoisted into the air as they murdered his father, and he thrashed wildly against his captor’s grasp. The memory of the bulls twisting in agony came to him, desperate to shed their bounds as their helpless cries pierced the air. He let out his own scream before they lifted a club to his head, and his entire world faded to black.
Pain jarred him from unconsciousness. It stabbed at his head as he struggled to see, squinting in the dim light for any hint to his whereabouts. His body was rocking back and forth against a wall that he quickly discovered he was bound to. He pulled at the chains in vain. “What is happening?” he cried out.
“They are Romans, and we are prisoners on their ship,” a woman’s gentle voice responded. He faintly made out her silhouette, positioned adjacent to him and also chained to the ship’s wall. Her face was concealed by shadows.
“What are Romans?” The stench of the spoiled offal and dried blood that still clung to his clothes from his father's concoction drifted upward towards his nostrils. He quelled the urge to vomit.
“They are a great world power,” she replied. “They have already conquered many tribes throughout Gaul. It was only a matter of time until they found us, yet we did not anticipate it would be so soon. We were hopelessly unprepared.” She let her head fall back to rest upon the wood of the boat.
“Why are we still alive?”
“They spared us to sell as slaves in their homeland. That is where we are headed now. You have been asleep for several moons, though it is hard to accurately note the passage of time down here.”
The boy felt weak, realizing he hadn’t eaten or drank for days. Flashes of his burning village and the deaths of his mother and father danced tauntingly in his mind, pulling muffled sobs from his chest.
“Shhh, young one,” the woman soothed. “I shall sing to you.”
Her sweet voice filled his ears, calming him with the songs of their ancestors. He let his throbbing head rest against the ship as tears slipped quietly down his cheeks. Her voice reminded him of his mother’s.
The voyage seemed endless, the only glimpse of sun was when it rose in the early hours, filtering through the worn wooden planks above them. They were fed sparingly, either scraps of stale, moldy bread or jerky made from rat meat. The boy’s skin began to wear painfully at his shackled wrists, his muscles seizing with spasms from lack of movement. It was all he could do some nights not to scream out in agony. His only consolation was the woman sitting nearby, his constant companion.
All throughout the night, she whispered to him the tales of their people. He surmised there were other prisoners aboard the vessel, but she was the only one close enough for conversation. In the darkness, he imagined that she looked like his mother, with lovely golden hair and bright sapphire eyes that peered out from sun-splotched skin. She had taken to calling him Daghda, the son of the goddess Danu and the ancestor king of the Celtic people. Her stories kept his mind from going mad, as she described in vivid detail the great battles that won land for their tribe, far before their expansion and his own clan’s migration to Gaul. He enjoyed imagining the warfare and the duels between bloodlines. He envisioned the great king Daghda with his giant club, defending their lands against the Fomorians, a race of grotesque and hideous giants. He saw the brilliant Lugh lunging forward with his spear and Ogma in his lion skin cloak, his bow and arrow poised for attack.
She told him how the gods still lived among them in the Otherworld, watching over them, provided they kept their stories alive. Some nights she sang, explaining that music was its own magic, a great tribute to the gods. The days passed easily with the sound of her voice, giving the boy a reason to live on.
Late one night, he was jolted awake by a Roman clumsily keying at his locked shackles. The man could barely keep himself upright, reeking of sweat and strong ale. He mumbled in his strange language, grinning stupidly at him, the stench of decaying teeth wafting from his mouth. The boy’s body stiffened in horror as he realized the man’s intentions. He struggled to see the silhouette of the woman, frantically wondering if she was still alive.
“You will not touch him,” a low, unfamiliar voice growled in the darkness.
The man looked around him, bewildered.
The boy shared his confusion, but was too afraid to react. The palpable sensation that they were no longer alone settled over him.
The lumbering man moved to investigate, and the boy realized his shackles were now loose. He sighed with relief as they fell away from his raw and chaffing skin, but he forced himself to stay still. The man began swatting around the cabin, barking in frustration.
His voice was suddenly drowned out by the roar of flapping wings, as if the hold had miraculously filled with thousands of birds. The boy raised his arms up to shield himself, watching as the murky darkness shifted and twirled with indiscernible bodies, their screeches piercing his ears. The man shrieked as they attacked him, the sounds of ripping flesh tearing through the hold. They ignored the boy completely, dismembering the man with their tapered beaks as if he was nothing more than discarded carrion.
Then, not long after it started, the calamity ceased. The boy let his arms fall away from his eyes, observing the immobile lump that was once a man, collected at the far end of the hold. Gore curdled the air.
The woman was now visible to him in the scant rays of early morning light, her arms still affixed behind her back. She stared at him, calmly. The boy blinked, for he was nearly certain her eyes gleamed a shiny black, blood smearing a mouth that was turned upright into a tight-lipped, maniacal smile. He shivered as the hairs on his arms stood upright.
“He left my hands free,” the boy stammered, finding his voice at last.
“Stay seated where you are,” she instructed him. “Do not let them know you are unbound. They will be frightened when they see what is left of their fellow soldier.”
“What … what happened?”
“Rest now, Daghda. Daylight is fast approaching and you will need your strength. I shall tell you another story.”
The boy nodded, afraid to say anything more.
“Perhaps the most feared of our ancestors was the goddess Morrigan,” she began. “Her beauty was legendary, the only descendant of Danu with glorious raven hair. Some say she was a radiant maiden, but others witnessed her as a ghastly crone. On our blessed day of Samhain, when the last of the crops had been harvested and our people prepared for winter’s chill, she appeared as a beautiful enchantress to the King Daghda. Naked and bathing in her beloved waters, he happened upon her and when he caught sight of her dark, loosened locks billowing down her snowy skin, he fell instantly in love. Their devotion to each other would prove eternal, the Morrigan joining him in battle to defeat the Fomorian king. Yet as many times as the lovers coupled, the Morrigan could never bear them a child. Legend says that their souls return to earth in an endless cycle to find each other, destined to repeat the dance until at last their union is fruitful and a child is born. It is this child who will ensure that the sons and daughters of Danu live undisturbed for eternity.”
The boy relaxed at her words, finally able to recline his aching body across the floor of the hold. His eyes closed, the soft lull of the ship rocking him into submission.
“Morrigan’s love for Daghda empowered him, and his for her, her magics growing more powerful as the years passed on. She could appear in all three aspects to enemies: the seductive war goddess, the maiden, or the dreadful crone. Her presence unsettled all who crossed her path, and it was said that one look from her ice blue eyes would cause your legs to buckle beneath you. Her shape-shifting magics soon evolved beyond human form, and stories swirled about her appearing as a horse, a wolf … or a carrion crow ...”
The boy found he could no longer fight his impending slumber. He drifted off to the sound of her voice, dreams of lovely black ravens swirling in his head.
He woke abruptly.
The boat had stopped.
Unable to stand, he pulled himself up to the slight opening where the daylight streamed through. Squinting his eyes against its brightness, he peered out into the distance to see what he surmised was true. They had reached land.
“We have arrived,” he called down to the woman.
She did not respond.
He fell back from the roof to discover she had vanished. A pair of empty rusted shackles rested limply against the hull, but nothing else remained. The hold was completely empty, save for the heap of bloody pulp which the ship rats had picked clean. He hurried back to his shackles, clasping them around his wrists just as the Romans appeared to collect him.
His heart hammered in his chest as they noticed the carcass, but after exchanging words accompanied by confused glances in his direction, the matter was overlooked. It was as if they knew the boy couldn’t have possibly done such damage, and the man’s death was not worth further investigation.
