Bean SíThe mournful wailing froze Conn O'Neill's blood, as it always did. People said the sound the Stuka dive bombers made came from sirens the Germans fitted to their planes. Well, maybe. But Conn, fighting for Allied forces in northern France, knew there was more to it.
He'd been seven when he first heard that howl echoing through the air, stilling the birds in the trees into silence. The cry of the bean sí. The banshee. When he returned home that day, his mother's eyes were red and his brother, Finbar, lay under a white shroud, the waters of the lough filling his lungs.
It was partly to escape the stifling pagan darkness of the old country that Conn left Ireland as a young man, and ended up fighting in a war that wasn't his war. It was good to put the clutch of that history behind hi
