Lion of Ireland (44 page)

Afterward, when she tried to draw a deep breath there was a raiding in her chest.

The physician gave her nostrums and syrups but the cough overrode them. “All those medicines taste so bad, Brian,” Deirdre objected fretfully. “I can’t believe they do me any good when they are so vile; they only make me want to vomit and then I feel worse.”

“Take the medicine anyway,” he urged.

In the long days of summer, when fresh food and the sweet produce of Thomond plumped the cheeks and brightened the eyes of others, Deirdre began to grow thinner. She picked at her food. She had never been a hearty eater, as easily thrown off her feed as a nervous horse, but now she ate almost nothing.

The skin of her hands became so white and translucent the bones could be seen starkly beneath.

Brian railed at the physician. “You are on ollamh, your knowledge is supposed to be the most complete in your profession, and yet the queen is wasting away before our eyes. Do something, man!”

“I’m doing everything I know, my lord,” the physician protested.

“Well, it isn’t enough! I will have a new and better practitioner of your skills in Kincora by harvest time, I promise you that!”

Brian went to the priests, he consulted with the herbalists himself, he sent Padraic to make sumptuous offers to any physician who could come to Kincora with a cure for Deirdre. And daily the enemy gained ground.

The king began to spend time on his knees in prayer.

Summer faded away in a grayness and a softness, a gentle browning of leaves, and the calls of the birds going south. Formations of geese moved through the sky, their cries haunting and full of leavetaking.

Brian felt a dread of the first frost that he had never known before.

“Everything’s dying,” he said to Padraic.

“It’s autumn, my lord; there will be rebirth in the spring, and Resurrection at Easter.”

Brian found that he could not clearly visualize the spring. So many magical returns of that season had he lived through, and yet his memory of it was blurred, unreal. He knew there would be tender green leaves and a thousand starry flowers within arm’s reach, and the wind would be warm and sweet, but somehow he did not really believe it anymore. There was a vast cold chasm between him and spring; he feared winter with the old pagan dread, and was afraid of its permanence.

He tried to find more time to spend with Deirdre. But now, more than ever before, the business of state made its insatiable demands on him. There was no hour that did not require his personal attention, no act that could be completed properly without his supervision. He felt frustrated by circumstance that conspired to keep him from her side, and at the same time relieved that he had no long hours to spend with her, listening to her breathing. She, whom he had never been able to grasp totally, was moving away from him on an invisible invisible tide, and the only sign it gave was the labored drawing of her breath.

Everyone knew she was dying. There was color in her face where no color had been before—a red, hectic stain below the cheekbones, unhealthy against the pallid skin. Her breath was bitter, and her eyes burned dryly with fever. She tried to make a joke of it, a small, Deirdre-sized joke. “I won’t need to put berry juice on my cheeks now, my lord,” she said to Brian, “nor those stinging drops in my eyes to make them bright. What a saving of effort!”

“You were always beautiful without that,” he told her, touching her hot face with the back of his hand.

She no longer shrank away from his touch, even in the invisible way within herself. Her body was safe from the hungers of his, protected by the onset of its own disintegration. No desire was left in him, only a terrible sadness that burned in his belly like unshed tears.

When she would no longer take food they found the only way to get any nourishment into her was to wrap her in warm robes and place her on Brian’s lap. He would share his goblet with her, a sip at a time.

He never thought that the killer might move from her lips to his; she was the one who was going away, and he would be left behind.

When she had taken an amount far too small to sustain life she would give a little sigh and her head would droop onto his shoulder. “One more swallow, for my sake,” he pleaded, but she only smiled, and that hurt him worse than the sound of her coughing.

“Maybe later,” she promised.

It became a desperate race, unnamed but recognized by everyone at Kincora, to keep her alive until spring.

“If she can see the geese return she will live,” the old women prophesied.

“The disease will not take her after the last frost,” someone else said.

But the winter was their enemy now. It invaded the valleys with glittering fingers; its cold breath whistled through the hills. An unusually harsh, long winter. The insects burrowed deep into the soil and beneath the bark of trees, and the small animals slept on in their sleep that is the brother to death. Spring became a fable, promised but not delivered.

The days at last began to grow longer, though the sun was without warmth and the light that filtered through the windows was sickly and yellow. They all told themselves that Deirdre looked stronger, but when Brian held her on his lap she was without weight, a spirit only.

In his heart she had already died, and the days spent with her fading shell were agonizing.

And then one evening there was a new scent in the air, a whiff of warming earth and greening grass, and the next day the sunrise was vibrant with life and the birds were singing. The children burst from the palace, unable to bear a moment longer within walls.

“Take me outside too, my lord,” Deirdre asked. “Please. The little tree beyond my chamber window looks as if it has buds on it and I would give anything to see them!”

Her maid wrapped her in a robe of wool dyed a rich royal purple, and Brian saw the color reflected in her eyes. She smiled at him. “Have I become so very old and ugly my lord?”

“No, truly. I was just noticing your eyes—they’re like amethysts today.”

“Did I ever tell you I don’t like amethysts?” she asked in a slightly petulant voice. “People always give them to me for some reason, but I’ve never really cared for them.” She paused to cough and he was concerned for her, but she smiled and went on. “What I really love is massive gold jewelry—you know the kind?--barbaric! Like that collar you brought back from Limerick. Fithir said it was too heavy for me, and my maid put it at the bottom of my jewel chest and then always took out other things instead. But I liked it best.”

“I never knew that. I thought you didn’t wear it because”—he hesitated, then found he could say the words after all. Because she was dying something had changed and at last they could speak to one another—“because it was a gift from me.”

Had the fever not burned all moisture from her there would have been tears in her eyes. “Ah, Brian! That was the very reason I loved it most! And you never knew . . .” Her sigh died away against his shoulder as he carried her out into the morning.

The fresh air seemed to do her good, although the physician fussed and Brian took her back in quickly lest she be chilled. Throughout the day she coughed less than she had in months, and at dinner she ate a tiny bit of fish and a quarter of a cutting of a honeycomb. But as the shadows stretched toward evening her small vitality seemed to drain away, and at last she asked Brian to carry her to her chamber. It was always Brian she asked for now. The distance from the banquet hall to the bedchambers was not long, but because of Deirdre it was kept well-lit. Brian would allow no shadows at Kincora. As he walked with his wife in his arms, he heard her soft voice against his chest. “Why so many lamps, my lord? Isn’t that wasteful?” He smiled down at the top of her head. “Lamps give a clearer light than torches. I’m the king, Deirdre; I can have all the lamps I want, and I want as many as will give you comfort.”

She shifted delicately in his arms. He could barely hear her voice. “But it really isn’t necessary,” she said very faintly. “I’m not at all afraid of the dark.”

When he reached the door of their chamber, Brian Boru

was alone.

“This place gets less like a palace and more like a garrison every day,” Liam complained, kicking at a hound that had grown too bold and tried to snatch food from the table. “The bread’s not fit to eat, the chambers are filthy, and I swear there are weeds starting to grow through the walls!”

“Don’t complain to me,” Conaing told him.

“Well, I can’t complain to the king about it!”

The hound grew more insistent, and Conaing whirled around on his stool and slapped the dog’s drooling jaws. “Why not, won’t he see you?”

“Oh, he’ll see me, he’ll see anybody, he just doesn’t pay any attention. Ever since she died, talking to Brian has been like talking to a rock. You recall that Malachi replaced Olaf Cuaran with that vicious son of his, Gluniarand—why, I can’t imagine—and Brian was very concerned at the time over the fact that Malachi was going to leave a Norseman with a reputation for cruelty in charge of Dublin. Messengers came yesterday when you were out with the patrol; they had ridden hard to bring the news of Olaf Cuaran’s death on lona, and to tell of a rumor that Malachi intended to wed the Norseman’s Irish widow.

“All of those affairs would have been of great interest to the Brian we have always known and followed, and yet the king didn’t even have any questions for them. He halfway listened, and then he thanked them in a vague sort of way as if they had brought no more news than a comment on the weather. If rumors of his state of mind should reach the ears of our enemies ...”

Core said, “It’s a shame the lady Fithir chose to remain at Cashel; the king always seemed to think highly of her.”

“Brian needs something more than a near-sister right now,” Liam remarked.

A tall man in a hooded robe of monks’ cloth leaned forward to enter the conversation. “You warriors—you think a woman is the answer to everything, don’t you?”

“A woman may not be the answer, Celechair,” Liam told him, “but it’s been my experience that women always have an answer. But I suppose you wouldn’t know about that, being an abbot.” He gave Celechair a broad wink which the other man ignored.

“Clerics have feelings like everybody else, Liam. Anchorites have feelings may take to the celibate life, and the bishop of Rome may like to think that all the clergy does likewise, but you know as well as I do that the Church in Ireland has overlooked more than one married priest, and many a likely lad has followed his father into God’s profession.”

Core grinned. “And what about you, Celechair?”

“I keep my private life private. Unlike some.” The abbot

sniffed.

Laoghaire the Red moved down the table to get closer to the discussion. “You’re talking about women?”

he asked with a gleam in his eye. “Wait and I’ll go and get young Murrough; that is his favorite topic these days, since his beard grew.”

“We’re talking about the king,” Conaing said coolly.

“Oh. That’s another problem.”

“Yes, and one that must be solved soon, or all Munster will suffer.”

Padraic, who sat throughout the meal with his eyes downcast and his hands on his food, slipped quietly from his stool and left the hall.

He found Brian sitting on a stone outcropping overlooking the river, his harp lying forgotten in his lap. The gray eyes glanced without interest in Padraic’s direction and looked away again. “What is it?” Brian asked, uncaring.

“There is talk in the hall, my lord . ..”

“There is always talk in the hall.”

“Your men are worried about you.”

“It’s not necessary.” Brian’s fingers touched the strings carelessly and the little harp made a strange, discordant

sound.

Padraic tried again. “They say the year of your grief has

ended, my lord, and they would be relieved to see you rouse yourself from it and consider some of our problems—call a

meeting of your council, perhaps.”

Brian would not look at him. “What problems?”

“Our position in relation to the other provinces, for one.

You’ve brought such prosperity to Munster that both the elders and the army fear invasion. Leinster has always been inimical to us, and then there’s Meath .. . Some say that now that Malachi is Ard Ri, he may undertake to enrich his own home province at the expense of others.”

Brian allowed himself a small sigh. The never-ending conflicts could not be resolved; they just grew more tedious. Seen from the remote viewpoint of a height above the river, it was all like the scurrying of ants in tall grass. What difference would it make in a hundred years? Everyone would be dead, the dreams forgotten. Or not dead—otherwise—otherwhere . . . He began speaking in a faraway voice.

“You know, Padraic—the Druids believed that nothing was ever lost, that every raindrop and rose petal contained its own tiny spark of immortality, and would continue without end in some spiral of existence.

They did not believe in death, those practitioners of the Old Religion; they merely believed in a change of condition.

“The priests tell me Deirdre is at peace with Christ, and yet I find greater comfort in the belief of the Druids. It would hurt less if I knew her tender spirit continued in the world, even if it’s a world I cannot see. I want to think that she’s just over the horizon—or in another room—anywhere, so long as she still is.

“I never really got to know her, Padraic; I always thought there would be time for us in the future, when I had made everything else right. But there is no future if Deirdre is dead.”

“If she is dead?”

“To go to heaven, out of this world altogether, one must die. But in the Old Religion there was no such thing as death, merely a passage into another existence, hidden from us by the thinnest of walls. It was believed that it was possible to pass back and forth between those worlds under certain circumstances.

The ancient priests believed they could communicate with those in other life forms; they could speak to their gods, and bring messages to the living from the not-living.

“They did not fear death because it was not an insurmountable barrier to them, and they were somehow attuned our problems to a larger scale of existence than we know today. But we have lost that, over the centuries . . .”