The Romance of Eowain

Chapter Twelve Scene Thirty-Three

Eowain looked over his sleeping encampment as he sat on a log. The night gathered, and rain continued to fall. The few fires were smoky and irritating. No one could find anything to burn that wasn't sodden by the cold, relentless precipitation that soaked them to their bones. He clutched down his bear-skin cloak over his shoulders.

He was proud of himself, proud of his men. They'd held back both the bandits and the Cailech tribesmen. Lorcán had embarrassed Toryn the Stout by tumbling his men back down into the stream gully and their own arcane gloom.

But he felt ill too. The mere scratch of Cael's blade had been enough to sicken him. The cut, though shallow, had grown black and swollen. Nausea roiled his guts. He felt pale and clammy to his own touch, and didn't know if it was the incessant cold and rain, or fever in his blood.

At least I finally have the eyes from Cael the Viper's head, as I swore to Eithne I would. He rolled the bloody eyeballs between his fingers, then turned to look through the flaps of his rough canvas tent. In the ancient days, it was said that Men had gained magickal powers in battle by throwing occult talismans at them, round balls known as tathlum, a slingstone made of cement.

Eowain had learned the ancient magick of making such a talisman from Medyr as one of the rites in becoming a young warrior. To make a tathlum, all one needed was a caustic bucket of noxious lime, a handful of prayers to invoke the spirits of Trógain Many-Skills and the Great Queen Mórrigú, and the hero's portion of the Mórrigú's acorn crop, the severed head of the chief man in one's calamities.

The ancient warriors used to make them from the brains of dead enemies hardened with lime.

A tathlum, heavy, fiery, firm,

Which the Tuath Thaynann had with them,

Was what broke fierce Balor's eye of old,

In the battle of the great armies.

The blood of toads and furious bears,

And the blood of the noble lion,

The blood of vipers and of Osmuinn's trunks;--

It was of these the tathlum was composed.

The sand of the swift Bælsasan sea,

And the sand of the teeming Tâmaryan Sea;--

All these, being first purified, were used

In the composition of the tathlum.

Briun, the son of Bethar, no mean warrior,

Who on the ocean's eastern border reigned;--

It was he that fused, and smoothly formed,

It was he that fashioned the tathlum.

To the hero Trógain was given

This concrete ball,—no soft missile;—

On the Plain of Towers amid shrieking wails,

From his hand he threw the tathlum.

The head was taken from one's victim, cracked open, and the brains rolled into the lime to make a concrete paste while the prayers were uttered. While the concrete was spun and mixed, the bones of the skull were cleaned and broken down into fragments. The bone was then mixed into the lime paste and rolled into a ball the size of a fist. A blessing was then said, calling for the battle-favor of Lord Trógain to reside there in the ball. The ball was then sprinkled with lustral water and left overnight to set.