Morrigan and war omens

At a Glance

• Central figures: The Morrigan, shape-shifting war goddess of the Tuatha Dé Danann; Cú Chulainn, champion of Ulster; and the washerwoman at the ford.
• Setting: Ireland, in the time before and during the Táin Bó Cúailnge, along the rivers and fords of Ulster and the plain before the final battle of Mag Tuired.
• The turn: Cú Chulainn refuses the Morrigan’s aid and insults her; she turns against him, attacking in three animal forms during his combat at the ford, and he wounds her each time without knowing what he has done.
• The outcome: The Morrigan tricks Cú Chulainn into blessing her three wounds, healing her, then appears to him as a washerwoman at his final battle - washing his own bloodied armor in the river.
• The legacy: The Morrigan’s cry before battle became the omen that warriors listened for, and the image of the washerwoman at the ford - the bean nighe - passed into Irish and Scottish tradition as the figure who washes the garments of those about to die.

A crow sat on a standing stone near the ford of Áth da Ferta, and it did not move when the chariot passed. Láeg noticed it first. He said nothing, because a man does not point at a crow before battle and expect his driver to keep steady hands on the reins. But Cú Chulainn saw it too, and the crow turned its head to watch him with one eye, then the other, the way a woman studies a man she has already decided about.

That was the first time. There would be others.

The Woman on the Road

The night before Cú Chulainn rode out to hold the ford alone against the armies of Connacht, a woman appeared on the road ahead of his chariot. She was tall, red-haired, wrapped in a cloak the color of old blood. She stood in the track and did not step aside.

Cú Chulainn pulled the horses up short. She told him her name and her lineage - a king’s daughter, she said, who had watched him from a distance and come to offer her love and her help in the fighting to come. Her voice had something wrong with it, a resonance beneath the words like a second voice speaking in a lower register.

He told her to go home. He said he had no time for women, that he was fighting alone against an army, that he did not need help and had not asked for it.

She looked at him the way the crow had looked at him.

Then you will have me against you, she said, and you will know me by the shapes I take.

He laughed, or he tried to. She was already gone. The road was empty, and a crow lifted from the ditch beside the track, climbing until it was a black point against the clouds.

Three Shapes at the Ford

The next day at the ford, Cú Chulainn fought a warrior from Connacht’s army in single combat, waist-deep in the current. Midway through the fight, an eel coiled around his legs beneath the water and pulled him off his feet. He stumbled. The Connacht warrior drove a spear into his side. Cú Chulainn wrenched free, stamped down hard, and broke the eel’s ribs. It slid away downstream.

He killed the warrior and stood bleeding in the ford. A grey she-wolf came from the treeline and drove a herd of cattle across the water at him - a stampede through the shallows that knocked him under and tore the wound wider. He slung a stone from his sling and struck the wolf in the eye. She yelped and fled into the brush.

He dragged himself upright. A red heifer without an ear-mark charged him from the bank, coming in low and fast. He broke her leg with a cast of his sling-stone, and she limped away bellowing.

Three attacks. Three shapes. He did not recognize any of them as the woman on the road, though each strike came at the moment his guard dropped, and each time the Connacht warrior nearly killed him because of it.

The Old Woman and the Three Blessings

After the fighting, Cú Chulainn found an old woman sitting by the road, milking a cow with three teats. She was blind in one eye. One of her legs was crooked. Her ribs showed through her dress on one side, badly healed.

She offered him milk. He was thirsty - the fighting had drained everything from him - and he drank from the first teat and said, Bless you, old woman. Her ribs straightened. He drank from the second teat and blessed her again, and her leg went straight. He drank from the third, blessed her a third time, and her eye cleared.

She stood up whole and tall and red-haired, and he knew her then.

You said you would not bless me, the Morrigan said. You said you would not heal me. But you have done both.

Cú Chulainn said nothing. There was nothing to say. She had taken the wounds he gave her in the three animal shapes, carried them to him as an old woman’s afflictions, and drawn the healing out of his own mouth with three cups of milk. The debt was settled and reversed in a single sitting. He had wounded the goddess and healed the goddess and understood neither action while he performed it.

She walked into the field and did not look back.

The Washerwoman at the Ford

Years later - or perhaps only months; time in the stories does not always keep its count - Cú Chulainn rode out for the last time. His gessa had been turned against him one by one. He had been forced to eat dog meat, which he was forbidden to do. He had been forced to refuse hospitality, which he was also forbidden to do. The contradictions had hollowed him out, and he knew what was coming because he had always known.

At the river crossing he saw a woman kneeling at the water’s edge, washing linen. The linen was red. The water ran red downstream from her hands. She scrubbed and wrung and scrubbed, and when he came close enough to see what she was washing, he recognized his own battle-shirt, his own armor, his own cloak. All soaked through with blood that had not yet been spilled.

The bean nighe - the washerwoman at the ford. She did not look up. She did not need to. He knew her shape by now, every shape she had ever taken.

He rode past her and into the fight.

The Crow on the Shoulder

They found him lashed to a standing stone with his own belt so he would die on his feet. His enemies did not approach the body for three days, because a crow sat on his shoulder and they were afraid of it. Only when the crow finally lifted and flew did a warrior come forward and cut the belt.

The crow circled once, low over the plain, and the shadow it cast was larger than any bird’s shadow ought to be. Then it climbed into the grey sky above Mag Muirthemne and was gone, and the sound it made as it went was not a bird’s call but something closer to laughter, or to keening - the distinction between those two sounds being, in the Morrigan’s country, not always clear.