The Voyage of Bran

Bran mac Febal walked alone near his fortress when he heard music behind him. He turned, but the music was still behind him. He turned again and again, but always the music came from where he was not looking, until at last he fell asleep from the sweetness of it.

When he woke, a silver branch lay beside him, covered with white apple blossoms that gave off fragrance sweeter than any in Ireland. He carried it back to his hall, and as he entered, a woman appeared before all the company, though no one had seen her arrive.

She sang of the Land of Women, the Island of Joy, the Plain of Delights, places across the western sea where there was no sickness, no age, no sorrow. As she sang, the silver branch leaped from Bran's hand to hers, and she vanished, taking it with her.

"There is a distant isle," she had sung, "around which sea-horses glisten. A fair course runs against the white-swelling surge. Four pillars of gold uphold it."

Bran could not rest. The next morning, he gathered twenty-seven companions and set sail west.

Three days out, they saw a man approaching across the waves, driving a chariot as if the sea were solid ground. It was Manannan mac Lir, god of the sea and guardian of the Otherworld.

Manannan sang to them of what they could not see: that the sea beneath their boat was a flowering plain, that fish were calves and lambs, that the waves were bushes in bloom. What seemed water to mortals was land to the gods.

"You sail through my kingdom," Manannan told them. "Continue west, and you will find the Land of Women. But remember this: do not let any man's feet touch the soil of Ireland when you return."

He drove his chariot onward, and they saw him no more.

They passed the Island of Joy, where all the people stood laughing. Bran sent a man ashore to learn why, but the moment he touched the sand, he began laughing too and could not stop nor explain nor return to the boat. They left him there, laughing forever.

At last they reached the Land of Women, ruled by a queen of surpassing beauty. She threw a ball of thread at Bran's boat, and it stuck to his palm. She drew them to shore.

In that land, each of the twenty-seven men found a woman waiting for him. There was food without cooking, drink without pouring, pleasure without sorrow. Time itself seemed to stop in endless contentment.

They thought a year passed. It may have been a hundred. In the Otherworld, time is a river that does not flow straight.

One of Bran's men, Nechtan, grew homesick. He begged to return to Ireland, just to see it once more. The others, stirred by his words, began to remember their own homes, their families, the green hills they had left behind.

The Queen warned them: "You will regret going, and most of all, do not set foot upon the land of Ireland."

They did not listen. They sailed east.

When they reached Ireland, they found a crowd gathered on the shore, and Bran called out his name and lineage. The people stared.

"Bran mac Febal?" an old man said. "That is a name from our oldest stories. He sailed west many centuries ago and never returned."

What had seemed a year in the Land of Women had been hundreds of years in Ireland. Everyone Bran had known was dust.

Nechtan, the homesick one, could not bear it. He leaped from the boat and touched the sand of Ireland. The moment his feet touched the shore, all the centuries fell upon him at once. He crumbled into ashes and was gone.

Bran told the people on the shore all that had happened to him, and they wrote it down. Then he turned his boat west again and sailed back toward the setting sun.

No one knows if he reached the Land of Women, or if he sails still, or if the sea swallowed him at last. But the story remained, a warning and a wonder: that the Otherworld exists just beyond the horizon, that its gifts come with prices, and that those who go there can never truly come home.

From that hour his wanderings are not known. Thus far the Voyage of Bran.