Verdict of the Court (2 page)

The minute they arrived at the stables a pair of red-headed boys burst out of the door to the castle, came flying down the steps and across to the courtyard to greet them. They were dressed completely alike, with short madder-red woollen cloaks and knee-length
léinte
whose linen had probably started the day snowy white but now were stained with smears of earth and of grass. Not really identical twins, thought Mara, studying them as they and Cormac went through an ecstatic greeting ceremony. Both had red-gold hair, both had fair skin covered in pale tan-coloured freckles and both had pale blue eyes, but Cian had a nose that already was aquiline and would, probably, in his adulthood, be of a considerable size, whereas Cael, the taller of the two, had a small and neat nose.

‘Look up,’ said Cael with dramatic emphasis and obediently the law-school party raised their eyes. Outside the front entrance to the castle was a tall oak tree, and from a branch about twenty feet above the ground dangled a figure with a rope around its neck, a large figure with an enormous stomach, dressed in a threadbare cloak with hood drawn over the head; stuffed with straw, reckoned Mara spotting a few stray stalks on the ground below. The face and eyes were roughly drawn with charcoal on a piece of white linen and a flowing white beard and giant pair of moustaches of sheep’s wool, as well as the hood, hid most of the features. A legal scroll, bound in linen tape, protruded from the edge of the cloak and even without this it was obvious to anyone who knew him that this was a crude attempt at a likeness of the venerable Brehon MacClancy.

‘Did you do this?’ Mara eyed the pair sternly and they both giggled and avoided the question.

‘It’s great, isn’t it? We’ve been firing knives at it from the top of the north-western tower. It’s good, isn’t it, Cormac?’

Thinking that she would do her best to keep Cormac away from them during their stay, Mara beckoned over a stable boy. He looked to be about sixteen, she thought, sturdy and well-grown. He had been grooming a restless stallion with an adroit determination which she admired and was now hanging up the brushes and leathers.

‘Could you climb that tree and cut down that nonsense before it offends anyone?’ she asked and when he nodded with a grin, she held out her hand to Cael.

‘Give me your knife.’

‘Not my knife! That’s a throwing knife. That rope will blunt it!’ The defiance was unmistakable and Cael backed away, slotting the knife back into the belt.

‘Give me that knife,’ said Mara steadily. That tone of voice always worked on the Burren, but somehow it didn’t seem to be effective with the red-haired twins.

‘No!’ yelled Cael and Cian added his voice and went so far as to stick out his tongue.

‘That’s their father,’ said the stable boy, grinning widely. He nodded in the direction of the castle steps where a middle-aged man came briskly down, skipping every second step in a youthful fashion. Mara had met him once, she thought, but not for some time, and she noticed that a large round bald spot had appeared on the crown of head of red-gold hair which she remembered.

‘Ah, Brehon,’ he said affably. ‘The King sent me to welcome you. He is just changing his dress – we’ve been riding. I see you’ve met my two rascals.’

‘We were having a discussion about removing that,’ said Mara crisply, indicating the swinging figure dangling from the branch.

To her surprise and fury, Maccon burst into an enormous laugh, the sound pealing against the stone walls all around.

‘By the lord, that’s good. It’s him to the life.’ He said the words with warm approval and the twins smirked.

‘We’ve been using it for target practice, Father,’ said Cian in the tones of one who knew that he could not fail to please.

‘That’s my knife through his heart,’ said Cael.

‘And mine through his neck – that’s just as good – that would kill him immediately – and there would be a fountain of blood,’ said Cian.

‘
Iontach!
’ exclaimed Cormac looking up with admiration at the knives inserted into the dangling figure in the oak tree.

‘I think it should be removed before it causes offence,’ said Mara firmly. She was tired after her long journey and had no great affection for Brehon MacClancy, but right was right. A man, and especially a Brehon, should not be exposed to ridicule in that fashion. In any case, badly behaved children always annoyed her.

Maccon ignored this. His attention was on a figure coming through the gate.

‘Fionn,’ he called, ‘come and see. Look at what my two scamps have made! Guess who!’

Mara knew Fionn O’Brien well. He was a cousin of Turlough’s – a hanger-on, she thought of him, someone whose people passed him over in favour of his younger brother and who had spent the next twenty years trying to pass his time by visiting more fortunate relations. Last year he had married a daughter of one of the MacNamaras – an only child – and had inherited a castle at Cratloe and some land with her. Mara had not met his wife but hoped that she was satisfied with her bargain. Not to her surprise, Fionn found the swinging effigy of Brehon MacClancy to be very funny also. Mara decided that the most dignified thing was to walk away as soon as possible.

‘Let’s go and greet the King,’ she said to her scholars. She had meant to make them attend to their own ponies, as they did back at the law school, but felt that it was bad for them, especially Cormac, to witness the amusement at the rather unpleasant prank of Maccon MacMahon’s twins. She hoped that someone would have the sense to remove it before the elderly Brehon of Thomond caught sight of it, but decided that it was really none of her business.

(ranks in society)

The lowest grade of king has an honour price of 42 séts and he has direct control only over his own kingdom. A king who has control over three kingdoms has an honour price of 48 séts and can be called a great king.

The highest king in the land has an honour price of 84 séts. He rules over a province and can be described as a king of great kings.

T
he castle of Bunratty, seat of the court of the O’Briens, Kings of Thomond, Corcomroe and Burren, was the largest and finest in the whole three kingdoms. Unlike most castles it had two main halls – the great hall, where the King and his family and particular friends, as well as the most important members of his household, could dine and then below it the main guard hall, where the rest of the household could feast and dance and listen to music. The food for the main guard hall was cooked in the separate kitchen house within the enclosure, but the King’s meals were served in the great hall from a small pantry and buttery which had a hatch into the fifty-foot-long room, and that was where they feasted that night of Christmas Eve. There were only twenty of them to dine with the King that evening so they were all seated at one table which stretched across the width of the raised platform at the top of the hall. It was a magnificent room, one stone wall hung with an elaborately stitched tapestry, purchased by Turlough’s uncle from a French ship. The floor was paved with marble tiles and during daylight hours the room was full of light from five twenty-foot-high windows, facing south, east and west, that were set into recesses in the depths of the thick walls. Now, on this winter’s evening, the hall was lit by candles and by the enormous fire where a whole tree trunk, balancing on iron supports above fast-blazing smaller logs, sent out light as well as heat to the whole hall.

‘Murrough did not come,’ said Mara in a low tone to Conor. Murrough was Conor’s younger brother.

‘I sent a message by young Raour, but he refused to come. He is very high in the favour of the King of England, Raour said.’ Conor spoke in a low voice in Mara’s ear. There would be little apprehension that Turlough could hear the words above the tumult of voices and laughter and shouted remarks, but Mara could understand why Conor, a sensitive young man, made sure that his remarks reached her ear only.

Murrough, a couple of years younger than Conor, had been Turlough’s favourite son but had been banished from the kingdom of the Burren and from his father’s court when he committed a heinous crime. Turlough, a man of strong affections, had by now forgiven his son and blotted out from his memory any wrongdoing of the handsome young man, but Murrough preferred to remain in London and to court King Henry VIII. He had reappeared once and had done his best to induce Turlough to accept King Henry’s proposition of ‘surrender and regrant’ which would have entailed the surrender of his three kingdoms and his title of king and
taoiseach
to his clan in exchange for an English earldom and the regrant of most of his land. Mara smiled to herself at the memory of Turlough’s rage and then grew serious as she took one look at Conor’s white face and emaciated form. Conor was Turlough’s heir, the
tánaiste
, but Conor was a sick man plagued by recurring bouts of the wasting disease which consumed his health and the clan would have been very happy to accept the vigorous and warlike Murrough, physically so like his popular father, in his place.

And if that happened, thought Mara, it might be one more nail in the coffin of Gaelic Ireland and would certainly mean an end to Brehon law and all that she believed in so intensely. Though sorry that Turlough did not have both his sons with him to celebrate his twenty years of kingship, she was glad that Murrough stayed in London. And Conor had rallied before and could surely rally again. His disease was lingering but he was better than he had been ten years ago. She turned to Aengus MacCraith, the poet, who was seated across the table from her and began to discuss the ancient
feiseanna
of the past and their possible revival at the time of the horse fair at Coad. She kept that conversation going for a while until Conor had regained his cheerfulness and wanted to talk about his son Raour, recently returned from fosterage and looking to be a very promising young man with none of his father’s constitutional weakness. In fact, thought Mara, the young man could do with losing some weight. However she was sorry for Conor and praised his son enough to satisfy the proud father. And then he turned to Fionn O’Brien’s wife and made the same remarks to her. Raour was obviously the light of Conor’s life at the moment, the hopeful promise of the future. Aideen looked bored, arched her very black eyebrows, sighed, sipped from her glass, but Conor still continued, relating anecdotes about Raour’s prowess with the spear, his ability to judge a horse, his astuteness in business matters, his ability to master any stallion in the land. Mara smiled to herself, wondering how long Aideen, as a childless woman, would stand this outpouring of praise. It would be different if she, like many others, could wait for a gap in the conversation, and then insert a few anecdotes about her own children.

And then she realized that Aideen was not in fact listening to Conor, but had her eyes fixed on the bottom of the table where Brehon MacClancy sat. What had attracted her attentive gaze in that direction? The Brehon was old, not attractive, not even a very pleasant man. Conor, for all his faults of partiality towards his own son, was an agreeable and a pleasant dinner companion.

Mara sipped her wine, made light conversation, listened and thought her own thoughts until they had reached the second course of the elaborately cooked meal.

The toasts to Turlough’s health and to another twenty years of reign had been numerous, but these were informal. The formal praise came when Seán Brody left his place at the table and went to stand beside his harp. Aengus MacCraith joined him, and, had, to the accompaniment of the harp, sung and spoken of the great love that all in the kingdom bore to Turlough Donn, descendent of the great High King, Brian Boru. Turlough, a modest man, had signalled to Rosta to serve the next course.

And that was when Brehon MacClancy, sitting at the bottom of the table, suddenly exploded.

‘Ye all sit there and ye nod your heads and ye smile,’ he said maliciously when Aengus MacCraith finished and cheers had risen to the rafters. ‘Everyone loves the King; that’s what all the poets say, but I know better,’ he continued, gazing around, as knives ceased to work and Maccon MacMahon, sitting a few places down the table from the King, paused in his selection from a tray of roast goose.

‘I know that there’s one of ye here, one whom the King trusts and loves, and who declares his love for the King on all occasions, there is one person here tonight who is secretly cheating him and when Judgement Day comes then the name of that person will be revealed and the King will know the truth. And don’t think that I won’t inform him of all the scandals and evil-doing that go on in this place, too.’ Brehon MacClancy gave a triumphant sound which was half a grunt and half a suppressed giggle. Mara wondered whether the man’s wits were becoming addled with age. Why this public expression of malice? Perhaps he had seen the hanging effigy and that had angered him into this display. Perhaps it was aimed at Maccon; after all he was a great friend of the King’s. And Maccon, she thought severely, should keep those badly behaved twins of his under control. She looked at the Brehon’s assistant, Enda, who had once been a scholar at her school, but Enda’s eyes were averted from her and were fixed studiously on the polished oak surface of the table. One finger was tracing a circular motion, perhaps around a knot in the wood, and his slim young body seemed stiff with tension, as if awaiting some further revelation from his master.

But Brehon MacClancy had finished. He beckoned impatiently to Rosta, the King’s cook, to bring him some of the goose, and the conversation resumed.

There was an uneasy note in the voices, though. The harpist, Brian MacBrody, endeavoured to break the tension by strumming a few notes from the strings of his instrument and beckoned to Mara’s grandson and the eldest scholar at her school to come across to try out his harp, telling him how the instrument had been made from one piece of wood as the front was carved from a branch protruding from the tree trunk which formed the back of the harp.

‘Feel those strings,’ he said to Domhnall. ‘What do you think that they are made from?’