Lion of Ireland (30 page)

Mahon sought out Brian in the latter’s tent at the base camp. Brian spent much of his time there now; his only certain appearances on the Rock were on the Lord’s Day and when Deirdre herself requested to see him. The last months of pregnancy had had a soothing effect on her; the spells of hysteria had abated, and she seemed content to spend her days alone with her maid, drowsing in her chamber or drifting through the lady-garden as in a dream.

Brian’s tent was made of oiled hides. It smelled in the sun, but it turned the rain and kept his books and papers dry; he noticed the way Mahon’s nose wrinkled in distaste, however, so he bowed his brother out and sent for stools to be set up beneath a tree.

There must be a way of saying this without touching a spark to his temper, Mahon thought. “Since you assumed your share of the command, we have been very fortunate in our forays against the Northmen,”

he said to Brian, “and I feel we have come to be a power to be reckoned with.”

Brian said nothing. He waited, watching his brother

closely. To move or make a gesture was to give away part of yourself; if you remained immobile the other person would reveal his inner feelings to you without being aware of it. Mahon, for example, had begun to pick at the cuticle of his nails. He was nervous, then; the outcome of the conversation was uncertain, and he had misgivings about it.

Mahon cleared his throat. “I am aware that you have formed a close personal bond between yourself and the common soldiers,” he said carefully, “and I can see the advantage to that.”

“It was the custom of Julius Caesar,” Brian replied.

“Yes, well, I’m certain it’s a wise idea, when possible. But don’t you think it would be equally wise to form the same ties of friendship between yourself and my officers?”

Brian sat a little straighten “I haven’t been unfriendly to them; I make the same effort to treat them with courtesy as they do to me.”

Mahon picked more diligently at his nails. They seemed to occupy his full attention; he did not look at Brian as he replied. “I am speaking of friendship, Brian.”

Brian’s gray eyes were disdainful. “Friendship is a matter of policy, brother. I won’t waste training time entertaining officers at Cashel, if that’s what you mean, or force my wife to endure the company of their gossiping wives. I give them the best effort that is in me, as I do to every man, and that should be enough.”

Mahon looked up then. With a mighty effort he brought the weight of the kingship into his voice, and noticed that Brian did not react to it at all. “I must tell you frankly, brother, that you have alienated some of the senior officers, and unless you make a serious effort to win their unquestioned support we might not be able to count on them on the battlefield.”

Brian’s lower lids tightened, narrowing his eyes to gray slits. “They want me to continue to fight by the old methods, because they themselves are afraid of change.”

“And you, Brian—are you afraid of conciliation and compromise?”

”The time for conciliation is when you have the upper hand, Mahon, not when you’re crushed beneath an invader’s

heel.”

Mahon rose, the interview concluded and not to his satisfaction. “You have a long way to go before you understand the skills of the diplomat, little brother.”

“When I need them, I’ll learn them,” Brian answered. “Right now all my effort is given toward learning how to win.”

Friendship, Brian thought. Mahon always extols the soft virtues. I would rather have their respect than their friendship, and respect cannot be won by putting my arm around some grizzled captain’s shoulder and listening to his war stones.

He sat on a stool in front of his tent, patiently working tallow into a strap of new leather. A few rods across the trampled and muddy earth he could see a group of officers gathered under the trees, hunched over chessboards and drinking cups while their body servants tended to the maintenance of their equipment.

Brian refused to have a body servant for himself in camp. Watching the men at their games he noted that even Ardan was with them, content for once to enjoy himself and leave the worrying to someone else.

Friendship, like love, led to pain and loss. Sometimes in his dreams they walked away from him, Cennedi and Fiacaid and Nessa and those comrades who lay in unmarked graves in Thomond, and he watched them recede into the distance until he was all alone.

The memory strayed across his mind of a night when he had lain beside Deirdre as she tossed in her nightmares. He had reached out to hold her, offering comfort; and in her sleep she had struck out at him with her small fist, an ineffectual blow that did not hurt his shoulder but went straight to his heart.

It is better to be alone, he thought. To know you are alone, and accept it. Mahon must always feel that he is loved, but I can live without that if I have to. If I must.

I have myself, and that will have to be enough. He looked at the pastel plain, dotted with trees and rich with life; he saw the empurpled, distant mountains. I have this land, if I can take and hold it.

In the booleying time, when the cattle were moved with the change of the seasons to fresh pasture, Ivar crossed into Thomond with an army intent upon exterminating the Dal Cais in their ancestral lands. He remorselessly put to death some of those very Irish chieftains who had been allied with him through threat of force or the desire for commerce, but who protested his attack on the farmers of Thomond.

Two Irish under-kings stood with him, however; Molloy of Desmond and Donovan of Hy Carbery were delighted to vent their spleen on the Dalcassians without actually having to face Mahon’s new army. They directed Ivar and his son Harold to Boruma itself, so that once more it was burned to the ground, and they sacked the monastery at Killaloe.

Excitement raced through the army camp near Cashel like a grass fire, pulling men into anxious clusters where everyone tried to talk at once, and many clenched fists were raised into the air.

“That Ivar is a treacherous hound; leave it to a Northman to slaughter women and children in a pasture.

He will pay dearly for that!” Mahon vowed, his voice shaking with emotion. “The time has passed when we could be content to kill them in the tens and twenties; my brother is right, we must make war on Limerick itself, and wipe out that deadly lair from the river to the forest.”

“Yea, brother!” Brian agreed. He stood a little apart from the others, his hands knotted into fists, his jaw muscles clenched beneath the red-gold beard. “We can send to Malachi of Meath; I suspect he would like to have a part in this, or at least send some of his fighting men to add to our own.

“And you, Cullen, isn’t your wife from Dungannon and a close cousin of the Hy Neill chieftains in Ulster?

Could you get support for us from the north?”

“I don’t know that we want to go that far,” Olan interjected.

”If we invite the Ulstermen into the south we may never get them out again. An ally can become an enemy when his usefulness is over.”

“Better Ulstermen than Northmen,” Brian replied, and Mahon supported him. The encampment became a swarm of activity within minutes, with riders galloping off by every road and trailway to carry the message of Munster’s urgent summons to the men of Ireland.

Brian went to Deirdre to say his farewells. He found her lying on the bed, a wolfskin robe tucked under her chin, her eyelids closed in what appeared to be a peaceful sleep. The mound of her belly rose beneath the furs in a swelling promise. He stared at it thoughtfully, wishing he could leave without awakening her, but then her eyes fluttered open and she spoke his name.

“I have to go,” he told her briefly. “The whole army is marching at dawn; we intend to put an end to the devastation of the Northmen from Limerick once and for all. This is the opportunity I have waited for, to settle old scores with Ivar.” At the sound of Ivar’s name, Deirdre’s eyes opened to their fullest width and something mad crept into them.

“You’re going to kill Ivar?” she asked tensely. “And all of them—you’ll kill all of them? Every one?” Her thin fingers began to pluck at the wolfskin robe, and her eyes cast about the room like a trapped animal’s. Then they focused on Brian with a strange and terrible intensity.

He tried to reassure her. “We’ll break Ivar’s strength so that he won’t be a threat to anyone any longer.”

“That’s not enough, you must kill him! Kill him! Kill that other one, that Northman!” She shrieked aloud, gone suddenly wild, and struggled to sit up in bed, beating the air with her fists. “Kill him! Kill him!”

Brian stared at her, heartsick, a dreadful possibility beginning to suggest itself to him. But then her servants rushed to her, crowding around her bed and pushing him bodily out of the chamber. Even so, her cries followed him, drilling into his skull. “Kill! Kill! KILL!”

*

Their easy victory across the Shannon had made them confident, and their blood ran hot for battle.

Joined by Danish mercenaries and bands of the hated Norse-Irish outlaws, they headed for the heart of Munster.

The Irish marched to meet them. Almost at the last moment before departure Mahon’s troops had been cheered by the arrival of a fully armed and unexpected detachment from Delvin More, led by a famous warrior, King Cahal, come unsolicited to swell their ranks.

According to his scouts’ reports, it appeared to Brian that the two vast armies would meet near the woods of Sulcoit, a level district almost midway between Cashel and Limerick. Mahon ordered the army to be encamped for the night, so that they might face Ivar with the rising sun at their backs.

Brian had his charts and diagrams with him, his carefully drawn battle plans spread out before him on the table in the king’s tent when the chieftains gathered to discuss the next day’s attack.

As the senior officers crowded around Mahon, each clamoring for a good position for his own forces, Brian stood up and cleared his throat. “I have a plan!” he cried in a ringing voice. “Please be silent and let me explain our battle order.”

Their reaction was what Mahon had expected and feared. Brian’s plan was to place a phalanx of foot soldiers armed with swords, axes, and hammers directly behind the front line of javelins. His proud new cavalry would ride at the wings, joined to the main body by “hinges” composed of Ardan’s slingers, and followed by a flying column of .both horse and infantry. If the broad fine of the Northmen did not succeed in enveloping the Irish, the reserve columns, which would be at an angle, would be in position to wheel inward and reinforce any weak point in their own line. The plan seemed to please no one.

“My men have always fought together as one unit!” Cahal

complained. “I cannot break them up now to put them into

some unfamiliar formation with strangers!”

“We will doubtless be fighting in the woods as well as in the open,” Kernac argued. “All this emphasis on mounted men is an insult to us Celts, who have always fought on foot, and besides, they’ll be quite useless in the trees.”

“All these maneuvers have been practiced many times in camp,” Brian reasoned with them. “The men are thoroughly familiar with the formations, and those who are new to our ranks should have little difficulty in following the order if it is explained to them clearly in advance, by leaders they know. It is imperative that we work together as a unit here; we are facing all the strength Ivar can bring to bear against us, and we must make no mistakes.”

“Following this bizarre plan of yours would be our biggest mistake,” an unidentified voice snarled from the rear of the tightly packed group.

Brian’s eyes narrowed and Mahon laid a restraining hand on his arm. “Please,” the king said, “I ask you to remember that my brother has had no little success against the Northman. He knows how to make ten swords serve as a hundred, and his men love him and will fight for him to the death.” “Then let him lead them,” another hostile voice shot back. “I came willingly enough to fight with him, but I don’t intend to die using some untried technique against five thousand angry Northmen!”

Brian held his nervous hands against his sides where they could not be seen, and forced his voice to be calm and steady. “I am not offering you an untried technique,” he replied, “but a battle plan that has proven its value many times. Alexander of Greece fought thus against the Persians at Arbela, on a piece of ground much like Sulcoit, and he defeated a vast and powerful force.”

“Who’s that he’s talking about? Who’s Alexander?” they

asked one another.

The grumbling was ominous now, a discontent that swelled the walls of the large tent outward. With the reality of a major battle so close at hand every man sought the security of the familiar. It was Brian’s spirit they wanted, but not his ideas.

Mahon went from one man to another, soothing, placating, urging them to give the plan a chance. Brian left the command tent and went out into the night alone to stand under the stars—the stars that had looked down upon Alexander, and Xenephon, and Caesar.

At last the senior command officers filed from the tent, most of them refusing to look at Brian as they passed him, and then Mahon came out, slump-shouldered, to stand beside his brother.

“Must you always have it your way, Brian?” he asked.

“My way is the right way; I am sure of it.”

“I hope you are right, for the outcome of the battle tomorrow depends on it.”

“I thank you, brother, for standing behind me in this.”

“I gave you my word I would back you, and I have, Brian, but my word does not extend to such men as Cahal and the kings of the other tribes. The orders are being given now and the men are being placed for the night according to their battle formations, but there are no guarantees as to what will happen at dawn.

Some of the officers may well refuse to follow you, or even me, now, and if that happens your plan will be destroyed. There is doubt and dissension in the camp tonight, and those are a soldier’s worst enemies, Brian.”

“Let me speak to them in the morning,” Brian said.