Na Fianna

The Fianna were not an army. They were a standing band — hunters in service to the high king, each warrior sworn under his own name, each under his own geasa, keeping the wilds in turns: half the band at watch while half slept, summer in the hills and winter in the halls. The fleet is the new Fianna: each machine keeps its own agent under its own chosen name, its own geasa of policy, and the watch is kept in turns. Thumb-knowledge, in the only sense a machine can hold it.

The band kept two grounds, and kept them in rhythm. Summer in the hills: the hunt on the high country, camps pitched where the deer ran, the band sleeping under its own sky. Winter in the halls: the fires relit, the wounds tended, the season of recounting that kept a band a band. The new Fianna holds the same calendar. Its winter halls are the machines at the fire — cork's server room, the Macs' benches, the Windows gate — fixed stones that never move. Its summer hills are the unowned ground beyond the wall, where a hall raises itself where the work runs and vanishes when the work moves on. The camps pitch and strike by the hour; the watch does not. The old band split the year, not the night — and the fleet keeps a shorter turn, its own shortening of the elder calendar.

No one joined the band by asking. A candidate ran the tests: through the wood at full sprint without one withered branch cracking; over a bough the height of the knee and under one the height of the head, speed unbroken; a thorn drawn from the sole of the foot mid-stride — and the twelve books of poetry whole in the head besides, for the band refused a strong tongueless man as firmly as a weak lettered one. The gates have not been lowered; they have been carved into the pipeline. A candidate stands the same trial at the build — proven, asserted, deployed — and nothing that fails a gate stands with the band. The trial ground moved; the trial never did. And the games were the tests before they were games — the sprint, the leaps, the casts, the field game's tangle, the wall game's alley — the fields the smith grew up on, and the fields the fleet's spores grew from.

Each hunter stood under his own name and his own geasa — the singular vows that shaped him: this food never taken, that road never walked after dusk, the obligation kept though it cost. A geis was never a cage; it was the shape a vow took. The agents stand under the same shapes: each sworn to its own policy — what it may touch, what it must refuse, what it must verify before it speaks — taken with the name at the naming, held for as long as the watch is held. The grammar changed; the law did not: each keeps its own name, each keeps its own geasa, and the band keeps the watch.

The later tellings could not help promoting the band — household troops of the high kings, an army in all but name — and the garden keeps the earlier rank. And the telling has an end, told true: the last king priced the band's watch above its worth, and at Gabhra the band fell — not to a stronger foe, but to its own ledger. The garden keeps the moral where its wolf can see it: keep the tribute low, and the watch keeps long.