What Becomes Of Dahut?

Having destroyed Ys, Niall also destroys its ruins. He does not want the city to be rebuilt or even remembered. This is comprehensible if reprehensible. But something else is less comprehensible.

Where Ys had been, a siren swims and sings. Niall sees a white body and hears a song that "...was in and of the wind and the waves but more than they, from somewhere beyond." (Poul and Karen Anderson, The Dog And The Wolf (London, 1989), p. 35)

Here again, the Andersons convey Pagan religious experience: someone speaks, or in this case sings, in and through nature - the wind and waves. Perhaps a walker on the shore who was less attuned to such experience would hear the waves but not the song? Niall had earlier summoned a dead witch-queen and thus "...let the Otherworld into his life..." (p. 36)

The singer claims to be vengeance. Whose? We have already seen Niall's vengeance against Ys, the Ysan Gods' vengeance against King Gratillonius and Dahut's vengeance against Gratillonius. Does Dahut now seek vengeance for her betrayal by Niall? No, she claims still to love him and that this love is stronger than death. So is that what has brought her back? By the power of her love, she lays a gess, obligation, on Niall that he destroy the Ysan ruins. In fact, it is this vision, as he calls it, that motivates him to organise the systematic destruction of every remaining physical trace of the ruined city.

He tells his men that he does not want Ys to be rebuilt or remembered but does not mention that there is now also a gess on him to this effect. Does Dahut inflict on Ys her own vengeance, that of the Gods or of both? Such things happen in legendary stories even if the motivations of supernatural beings are not always clear.