Lion of Ireland (56 page)

Carroll and Brian exchanged glances. “Malachi is storing up trouble for us all,” Brian commented.

Trying to protect his men, trying to win victories by intimidation rather than slaughter wherever possible, Brian fought across Connacht and ravaged Brefni. The princes of the province, the under-kings fighting defiantly for their tribal honor, the warriors with nicks slashed in their belts to represent the number of their personal kills—they came to Brian, battle after battle, with bowed heads and swords laid horizontally across their extended palms, and knelt in submission.

To each of them he said the same thing: “You must not waste yourself and your good men fighting me.

We have a common enemy to fight and much work to be done together. Throw in your lot with me now, not for Munster, but for Ireland.”

One by one they bowed their necks and bent before him, and he laid the edge of his hand like the blade of a sword on the defenseless spine. “God bless thee, Irish man,” he said to each in turn.

When they raised their heads, there was something new in their eyes.

Believing Dublin to be pacified, Malachi and his retinue made the circuit of hospitality from Leinster to Ulster, sharing banquet tables, draining goblets, telling jokes, laughing and singing and sleeping in linen.

There were women to be enjoyed; soft, pliant women who were content to stay in the ladies’ chambers until their presence presence was requested. Women who were awed by the king of the kings. Respectful, quiet women.

Malachi thought for the first time in years of taking a new wife, and applied to the brehon for the final step in setting Gormlaith aside.

There were seanchaithe who sang of the long centuries of Hy Neill dominance in Ireland and did not mention the growing legends of Brian Boru. In the halls and at the hearths, Malachi was given the same advice again and again: “You must stand up to the Dalcassian and destroy his fighting ability now, before he actually marches on Tara and profanes the Stone of Fal with his unworthy body.”

In the spring of the year 996 the Ard Ri gathered his armies and marched in columns six men wide into Munster, taking advantage of the fact that Brian and his army were a safe distance away in the north. At Nenagh, Malachi drove the people from their homes and burned the community to the ground, its black smoke a stain of warning across the sky, drifting over the Shannon on the east wind, carrying its ugly message over Kincora.

Brian’s reaction was immediate. “We will begin immediately to fortify Thomond so extensively as to discourage any further attack. New garrisons, more men at arms. And I think perhaps we need more hostages of good conduct from Leinster, since they forget themselves in their cordiality to Malachi.”

“What about Murrough?” Flann asked his father. “Will you summon him?”

Brian kept his face closed. “He would demand to know why we were not hurrying to kill the Ard Ri,” he said, “and he would never allow himself to understand my answer.”

“There are many who agree with him, my lord,” Illan Finn commented.

Brian looked hard at his longtime friend. “Are you one of them?”

Illan Finn burned red from his throat to his hair line. “I’m a Dalcassian, Brian! We would, all of us, rather be run through by your own sword than fail you. I ... we ... that is, some of us just thought it might be better to summon Prince Murrough back to stand with you, where you can keep an eye on him ...”

Brian cut him off sharply. “My oldest son is like Ireland. He must come to me of his own free will.

Otherwise ...” He broke off abruptly, and when he spoke again his voice was firm and of a different tone.

“I take it I can count on all of you? We continue to be of one company, with the strong hand uppermost?”

They shouted it back to him. “The strong hand uppermost! Larnh laidir an uachdar!”

Brian had the motto etched on his sword. Someday, Murrough might see it there.

The tall woman walked alone, tramping the valley of the dark-watered Liffey in every weather, wrapped in her furred cloak and her anger. When the wind rose she threw back her shawl and let it whip her heavy hair into a tangled red curtain, obscuring her face. But her green eyes still blazed through, and cottagers stepped off the path to avoid her.

Sometimes Sitric lost patience with his mother and sent an escort to fetch her. After all, she was his responsibility now, set aside by her husband, turned out of her own home. But she, who refused any armed guard and spurned any offer of companionship, was equally haughty to her son’s messengers, sending them back to him with the strong injunction to leave her alone.

When she did return to her son’s hall she did not stay with the women, but strode across the yard to hang her cloak in front of Sitric’s hearth with the warriors. In the evenings she sat by the fire, brooding, and even the battlescarred jarls were uncomfortable in her presence.

At last Sitric’s forbearance deserted him, and he spoke directly to Gormlaith of the Ard Ri and the repudiation. She responded with a fist slammed on the table and a screamed profanity that emptied the hall. Warriors and servants alike recalled urgent business elsewhere.

In the flickering torchlight Sitric faced his mother. “Malachi set me aside!” she raged. “That puling whey-faced imitation of a man denied our marriage contract and had me put out of my own house as if I were some lowly servant!”

Sitric had grown to be a stocky, thoughtful man, his mother’s still remarkable beauty missing from his own serious face, his one claim to comeliness being the waving and luxuriant beard that had earned him the tide of Silkbeard. He met his mother’s violent outburst with a soft voice and an unruffled demeanor.

“He had grounds for denying the existence of a marriage, Gormlaith. I understand you had an assortment of lovers quite openly over the last years, and he could have taken you before the judges and applied to have you punished for your adulteries.”

“Adultery! I wish he had tried the case in person, I would have stood before the brehons and told them the real truth about their Ard Ri, what a dreary, unimaginative man he is, how incapable of pleasing a woman, how crippled in his manhood, and they would have all known that he is not fit to rule!”

“He must have some manhood left,” Sitric commented. “I hear he’s taking a new wife.”

“Phah! What could he hope to find in another woman to compare with what he had in me!” Gormlaith tossed her head so that the long, firm line of her white throat rose swan-like from the deep valley of her creamy breasts.

When looking at her, Sitric found it hard to remember the fact that he had actually been carried within the superbly molded body. The intensity of her anger gave her a vitality a much younger woman would have envied; indeed, had he not known her to be fifteen years his senior he would have thought her his contemporary. To discuss bed matters with such a female was an exciting experience as long as he forgot their relationship.

Somehow, Gormlaith knew what he was feeling. She always knew. Her voice sank to a deep purr, still rich with malice, but no longer strident. “I “want to see Malachi suffer for rejecting me publicly,” she said.

“What more can I do?” “Hurt him; destroy him!”

He looked at her and saw, to his surprise, a glitter in her eyes as if she were on the brink of tears. It momentarily unnerved him. “Malachi hurt you that badly?” he whispered.

She stiffened. “No mere man can hurt me! He insulted me, that’s all, but first he failed me in every way a man can fail a woman.”

Awkwardly, Sitric put one arm around his mother’s shoulders in a rare embrace. “I didn’t know you really cared for Malachi,” he said as sympathetically as he could.

Her voice sharpened with annoyance. “I don’t, I never did! You misunderstand me, just like every other man. I’m not one of those soft Irish virgins full of wistful sighs and airy fantasies; I had all that nonsense knocked out of me when I was still a breastless child, and my father married me to a Norseman four times my age in order to fatten his depleted fortunes. I’ve never suffered that misery the poets call ‘love’

and I pray God I never shall.

“But I was queen of Ireland, Sitric! Consort of the Ard Ri! I was no common wife to sit by the hearth and stir the pot, I should have been part of everything he did. Instead he left me to wilt of boredom while he jaunted about the countryside with his nobles, going to battles and feasts and having a fine time for himself. Of course I found ways to amuse my-self; I can’t tell you how miserable my life was. Malachi had everything and shared nothing. Why is it no man ever appreciates me?”

At close range Sitric saw that there were faint lines in the delicate skin around her eyes, me first soft fingerings of time, as if the weight of her heavy lashes was causing a slight sagging of the fragile flesh. She shrugged out of his embrace impatiently and turned her face away, unwilling to have it reveal secrets.

“I believe there is a soft spot in you somewhere after all, mother,” Sitric told her. “Didn’t your Malachi ever take time to learn that you have a passion for music, or a gift for writing poetry, or that you have a tender smile just here”—he reached out to trace the curve of her lips with his forefinger—“at the corner of your mouth?”

“Stop that! You take liberties, Sitric; my inner feelings are my own!” She pushed his hand away and turned from him, but the tender smile, he had mentioned played for a moment across her lips.

She continued to walk the fields alone, wrapped in her bitterness and her hurt pride. On wild and windy days when spume blew inland from the bay, she imagined attacking the Ard Ri with his own sword, and laughing when he begged for mercy. On soft mornings when the mist could be tasted on the tongue and the lowing of cattle came like music from the meadows, she walked in silence, her head down and her fists clutched to the emptiness in her bosom. In the evenings, as warm light winked from every cottage doorway, she returned to the fortress of Dublin one reluctant step at a time, her eyes measuring every man she passed. They were all small men, as Malachi had been.

She sat at her son’s table and watched with remote green eyes as the jarls raised their drinking horns to her. I am the last of a race of giants, Gormlaith thought. I will live and die alone.

The king of Munster spent the remainder of that year and the next spring consolidating his strength. All Munster now lay beneath his hand, obedient to his order. Only northern Connacht was still in question, but Brian and Donogh mac Connlaoch marched northward at the head of a large army and King Conor capitulated without forcing another battle. “It seems there are more nobles in Connacht willing to march beneath your banner than beneath mine,” he told Brian. Conor’s face was as long and sad as ever, but there” was no enmity in it. “You fight in more ways than I know how, Boru,”

he said honestly. “I invite you to make the circuit of hospitality in my kingdom while the weather is fine and the milk is sweet. The princes of Connacht will make you welcome from Lough Allen to Lough Corrib. Go where you will, Brian Boru; Connacht is yours.”

Conor himself escorted the king of Munster’s party on a tour Brian had particularly wanted to make, to the Cave of the King on the northeast flank of Keshcorran Mountain. The two monarchs entered the cave together, leaving their companions waiting nervously outside. The entrance was all but obscured by a forest of luxuriant ferns sprouting from the damp earth, but once inside one could turn and see an unimpeded view of the gently rolling plain. The wind sang through the narrow aperture, whistling timeless tunes. The damp stone walls leaned toward them. “Cormac mac Airt spent his childhood here,” Brian said reverently, not looking at Conor. “So the histories say.”

“King of all Ireland two hundred years after Christ was crucified. Carroll says he was a pagan, but he could read and write, and the land bloomed rich in his reign. He founded three colleges at Tara: one for history, one for military science, and one for the study of the law.

“What must life have been like in those days, Conor; do you ever wonder? No Northmen to ravage the land, and the gentle Saint Patrick still two centuries in the future. Our ancestors worshiped a pantheon of gods and the Tuatha de Danann still ventured occasionally from their underground hiding places. Our Golden Age, Conor, when poetry and law were sacred. All we have left of it are caves and standing stones and legends that grow dimmer with the years, and a future lit by Norse flames.”

His deep voice boomed eerily in the cave, and an uncontrollable shudder ran down the spine of Conor of Connacht. “You talk like a poet yourself, Boru—or a prophet,” he said uneasily, “but I cannot make out if you speak of the past or the future.”

“Sometimes I cannot tell the difference,” Brian replied.

As Brian’s entourage prepared for the next leg of their journey, word came from Ulster that dragonships were sighted near the Inishtrahull Islands, off the northern coast between Lough Foyle and Lough Swilly, and others were anchored ominously in the lakes themselves. A larger force of Northmen was following the coastline of Dalriada, apparently headed for Bangor.

“It is the Norse jarl, Gilli of the Hebrides,” runners reported. “He sails with Sigurd Hlodvisson of the Orkneys. They envy Olaf Tryggvesson of Lochlann, who is making a name for himself as a raider of the Saxon lands, and the fearsome Svein, son of Harold of Denmark. The Norsemen think to build an empire here to rival the one forming across the Irish Sea.”

Conor was pale. “The nightmare is coming again!” he said, signing the Cross on his chest.

“No,” said Boru.

They returned to Thomond to prepare for the harvest and rearm. Brian accepted an invitation to spend a few days at the tuath of a king of the tribe Corcu Baiscind, in the empty windswept land south of Galway Bay and below the Burren—the Meeting Place of the Birds. It was a wildly desolate place, but strangely peaceful, and its silences called to Brian.

He spent little time in his host’s hall. With only Padraic as guard, he spent long hours exploring the countryside, standing with his face to the west and the sea wind lifting his hair, or skirting the edge of the one small patch of woodland that clung determinedly to that inhospitable soil. Then he returned to the guest chamber and his bed, and prayed for strength to come to him when he needed it, as it always had before.