Lion of Ireland (28 page)

Her eyes were shadowed, smudged in their sockets. I have violated a child, he thought. And she lies there looking at me with such determination to trust! An unreasonable resentment took hold of him.

“It’s true,” he told her in a firm, deep voice. “Last night we became man and wife fully, under the Law; the marriage is consummated to the final degree. If you don’t remember anything about it I’m sorry, for I tried to make the experience as beautiful for you as I could.”

There, let her feel a little guilty, too!

“Oh, my lord, I’m so sorry!” The huge eyes glittered with the threat of tears. “But there will be other times, now that ... I mean, if it happened once, it will happen again, and next time I shall be less afraid.

And I’ll remember.”

She studied his face with its new, shuttered look, and realized that the time had passed forever when she might have told him. Once, when he was open to her and adoring, it might have been possible for her to tell him her dreadful secret, under just the right circumstances, but now their bodies had come together and she felt their souls had moved further apart. It could not be that he had discovered her lack of virginity, for undoubtedly he would have made an issue of it immediately, not lain there smiling at her. So something else had happened, something she could not even guess, one of the complicated things that went on beneath the surface of men and women; she imagined a vast multilayered structure of emotion and reaction with which she had no experience, and for which she lacked the emotional strength. The magical thread’ that had brought Brian to her along a highway of dreams had been broken somewhere, for some reason she could not understand, and the effort to reweave the torn fabric of her life was more than she could ever undertake.

Let it go, she thought, let it go. Everything hurts too much and frightens me. I will just try to be a good wife to him, and make him happy in whatever ways I can; my sufferings I will keep to myself.

They smiled at each other in their marriage bed. And all the unspoken words piled up between them to make a wall infinitely higher than Deirdre’s pitiful little barrier of blankets.

The wheel of the seasons turned, and turned. Lupin and stock and honeysuckle bloomed their time and faded away; the great loughs brooded serene, reflecting summer skies; the turnstone birds pottered about on the shore, then swerved out over the water in crescent flight, their wings a-glint with chevrons of silver feathers.

Limestone crumbled and sank into the mother earth; manding ivy spread its caress over ruins abandoned before Christ was born. Life was given and life was taken away. The cold wind howled in from the sea.

Even as the year died, something new was gathering strength in the land.

Olaf Cuaran, king of Dublin, was about to become a father. He paced restlessly outside the chamber where his young wife lay, listening to her occasional moans and trying to judge them in relation to the sounds of the wounded on a battlefield.

Other women shrieked and screamed; he had been told that childbirth was worse than an ax-wound, but his Irish princess cried out only once. Her courage was the equal of her beauty, then—and of her temper.

From a woman like that a man could expect a fine boy.

The midwife came smiling to the door, holding in her arms a bundle that mewled and squalled. “Lochlann and Ireland have produced a son!” she beamed.

Olaf looked down at the tiny wrinkled face, red and sour, a small fist jammed against its open mouth. Its cries of outrage were out of all proportion to its size. “Odin be praised!” Olaf said fervently, tying to take the baby in his arms, but the woman swung away with it.

“Your wife has asked that a priest bless her infant,” she told Olaf.

He scowled. “I thought she had forgotten all about that nonsense.”

“Well, she hasn’t.” The midwife smiled at him and winked conspiratorially. “A little oil on his forehead won’t make a Christ man out of a male child born to go viking—not with his father to guide him.”

Olaf winked back at her. “That’s the truth,” he agreed. “There’s no harm in giving in to a female’s whim this once, I suppose.” With another pleased look at his son he turned and went into the bedchamber to congratulate the mother.

The midwife squinted at his retreating back. “This once,” she said under her breath. “As if that red-haired demon in there would ever be satisfied with having her way just once.” She caught the eye of a guard slouching against the timbered wall, trying to be comfortable inside his chainmail tunic. “I never thought I’d see the day an Irish girl would make a wagtail puppy out of a Norseman.”

The guard rolled his eyes. “I never thought I’d see any girl like that one, Irish or otherwise. She’s .. .” he searched his vocabulary for a word to fit OlaPs bride, then shrugged in defeat.

The midwife laughed. “Aye, she is!” she agreed.

In the small, dank bedchamber, heavy with the smells of smoke and blood and damp wood, Olaf stood gazing down at his wife. Gormlaith looked up at him with green eyes that blazed with life, her face untouched by the ordeal of childbirth save for a faint softening of weariness. The bed about her head and shoulders seemed to be covered by a rippling sea of dark red flame.

“Your hair is wet,” he heard himself say inanely.

She laughed. He had so obviously come in here to make an epic speech about fatherhood and Norse power and all of that nonsense, and, as usual, the sight of her had broken his train of thought. What did he know of real power? She took a deep breath and arched her back, ignoring the stab of pain it caused in her pelvic region, and saw his gaze slide helplessly down her throat to her upthrust breasts, swollen for the baby. “I’m wet all over,” she said in her husky voice.

Olaf stared at her. What other woman would have the audacity to be seductive while she lay in childbed?

He had bartered for the girl with her father, a prince of Leinster, as a move to improve his position with the Irish surrounding Dublin, and her beauty had come as an extra gift. But since their marriage she had not only grown more beautiful with her ripening; she had proved to be a lusty, eager bedmate, with an added flair of drama and imagination that must have come from her Celtic blood. She was, truly, a wife for a king. Yet there were moments when she made him doubt in his secret heart if he were king enough—or man enough—for her.

“Do I get a birth-boon?” she asked him.

He made himself look up from her breasts. (So full, so round, the blue veins beneath the soft flesh . . . )

“You’ve already had it, Gormlaith,” he told her. “Our son is with your Christian priest right now, being blessed or some such.”

“Oh, I don’t mean that. That was part of our marriage contract anyway; you had to agree to it before my father would sign. Have you forgotten what you promised me?”

“Forgotten what?”

She reached out her hand and trailed her fingers down his thigh, letting her nails scratch lightly through the wool of his trousers. “You great bear, you have forgotten. You promised me that if I bore you a healthy son you would share some of your responsibilities with me—now do you remember?”

I said that? he wondered. But who knows what a man will say when the rutting-madness is on him; still, it’s hard to believe I made such a rash statement.

“Aaahhh, my dear, why do you want to trouble your head with such matters? Surely you have enough to keep you occupied now, with a new baby as well as your other duties.”

Her lower lip thrust out beyond the upper in a practiced pout. She never looked less childish than at such a moment, but the very perversity of her expression excited him. As she knew. “You promised,” she said again, her voice low in her throat. “I need things to think about, Olaf, not just all the dreary routine of women. I find myself rummaging around in my mind for something interesting to keep me from being bored. You wouldn’t want me to be bored, would you? When you’re busy elsewhere?”

Olaf gave a deep sigh. This woman obviously would not be content with motherhood alone, as his previous wives had been. But then, she was nothing like his other women, anyway. Maybe it would help to get her involved in some of his affairs—minor things, of course.

“Are you certain this is what you want, Gormlaith?”

Her eyes blazed at him. Why wasn’t she weak, like other

females at such a time? “Absolutely,” she told him firmly. “And I can do it, too. Among my people, women have always held rank and positions of power. Some of the greatest interpreters of the Brehon Law have been women, and we own our own property and are free to engage in trade. Indeed, it was less than three centuries ago that women were exempted from warfare at the Synod of Tara. I’m sorry about that; I should have enjoyed carrying a sword.”

Olaf had been surprised on more than one occasion by her knowledge of history. The Irish were obsessed with it, forever dredging up the glories of the past as an escape from their decaying civilization in the present, but to find such an interest in a mere woman baffled him. Her mind was like a voracious animal, ceaselessly hunting. Best to throw some bone to it before it turned on him.

“Very well, Gormlaith you can sit in council with me if you promise to say nothing; and if you are truly interested I will have someone explain our trade situation to you, and our holdings across the sea in Northumbria. But you must give yourself a chance to regain your full strength first.” “I’ve never lost it,”

she murmured.

He thought she was probably overtaxing her abilities in order to show off for him. He would quiet her with a tidbit now or she would never rest and his son’s milk would be unhealthy. “You might think on this, woman,” he offered. “One of your so-called under-kings, a young fool named Malachi, of Meath, has been fighting the Danes and has attacked an anchorage of ours in the Boyne River and burned our ships to the waterline, as well as stealing a fine cargo of furs.

“The situation must be handled carefully, as we have too many of our men in the Saxon land right now to be able to afford a major confrontation with Meath, but I have to get those furs back. I’ve already sold them for a sizable amount of Irish gold to my cousin at Waterford. When you want something to occupy your thoughts, think on how I can recover my property without stirring up a hornet’s nest in Meath or Waterford.”

He had hardly reached the door when she called after him,

“Tomorrow, send me someone who can tell me all about Malachi!”

He checked in midstride. The woman never let up! When he was out of her immediate range her allure lost a little of its potency, and his physical reaction to her changed to a vague unease. She was like a turbulence in the air, a storm over the horizon that might come howling to rip your sail from its mast.

He turned back to face her, determined to regain the feeling of superiority she consistently undermined.

“Who could possibly explain the character of an Irishman, Gormlaith?” he asked with deliberate contempt.

He left her then, glad to be out of the fetid chamber, eager for open air. He left the timbered hall which served as the Norse king’s palace in Dublin and walked across the courtyard toward the high wooden palisade. In the watchtowers at each corner guards stood, their eyes forever scanning the ‘ green countryside, alert to the increasing threat of the discontented Irish.

Brian strode briskly after the hurrying page and tried to control his annoyance. These spells of Deirdre’s were becoming more frequent; it was almost as if she timed them to coincide with his most urgent business, such as the planning of a company of warriors on horseback to augment the traditional Celtic foot soldier. The campaign against the foreigners had begun to bear fruit, demanding increased aggression on the part of the Munstermen in order to take advantage of Ivar’s first falterings; there was no time to be wasted on distractions.

The page led him past the clustered buildings of Cashel to that chamber known as the grianan. The sunny room was filled with the scent of flowers and the sound of sobbing. Fithir’s ladies stood about, rolling their eyes and wringing their hands. The grianan had been shuttered to keep out the insistent rain, but was brightly lit for sewing; even the corner where Deirdre crouched was free of shadows.

She was huddled on the floor, beating her open palms in a meaningless rhythm on her bent knees and crying with painful dry sobs. Fithir knelt helplessly beside her, patting at the girl’s trembling shoulders.

She looked up in relief as Brian entered.

He went immediately to his wife and bent over her. “What caused it this time?” he asked the room at large.

Fithir could only shake her head. It was Una the maidservant who answered, coming to stand beside her sobbing mistress. “The ladies were all sewing, and she seemed to be in a cheerful humor; I thought she was all right. Then the first thing I noticed, she had bowed her head and there were tear stains on the cloth. I tried to say something to her, but she pulled away and hit out at me as if I were a stranger. Me!

Who has looked after her since she was a mite of a thing!” “She wouldn’t let anyone get near her, Brian,”

Fithir said then. “She called us such vile names,-and she accused us all of things ... I can’t tell you ...”

“You don’t have to,” Brian interrupted her. “I’ve heard her before. This happened not a fortnight ago, and when it passed she had no memory of it at all.”

Fithir looked pleadingly around the room. “You mustn’t hold it against her,” she implored them all. “She doesn’t know what she’s saying.” She moved aside to give Brian room, and he scooped one arm under Deirdre’s slight body and lifted her effortlessly. As he did, her sobs turned to shrieks and she rocked violently in his arms, trying to hit his face with her fists. Walking carefully, head turned aside to dodge her blows, he made his way from the room.

Fithir stood staring after them. “Maybe it’s just the baby,” she said, in a voice that lacked conviction.

“Maybe once it’s born, she’ll be herself again.”

*