Ireland

by Frank Delaney

  Brian had great ambitions. He wanted nothing less than to rule all of Ireland, and he watched very carefully to see would such an opportunity come along. All the time he was growing up, most of Ireland was controlled by the ruling family of Ulster, the O’Neills. No decent Munsterman would want to be ruled by an O’Neill, so Brian set out to find out everything he could learn about them.

  The main thing he discovered was how they had acquired so much power. They did it by military force, and Brian decided that he would do the same and try and get control of all Ireland—in other words, that he would no longer wait for an opportunity; he would create one.

  Starting with the families who killed his brother in battle, he made war on many tribes. He agreed peaceful settlements with others, especially the ones who were afraid of him. Then he subdued the Vikings of Limerick and several Irish clans north of there. When he marched further up the country, the people of Leinster proved a difficult enemy, and they even enlisted the help of the Danes to fight Brian.

  In spite of great opposition, Brian fought hard and also worked a lot of politics, and in the year ten-oh-two he became High King of all Ireland. He ruled wisely and well, and by two different means he made sure that everyone obeyed him.

  First of all, he continued to maintain strong armies, and he needed them to keep under control the many warlike kings up and down the country. Secondly, he took a keen interest in the affairs of the church, and as king he insisted on appointing many of the abbots and bishops. This gave him a powerful influence over the church, who had to speak well of him, because he gave many of their leading figures their jobs. Thus he was able to get the church to tell the people he was a good leader, a factor that has been useful for leaders in Ireland up to the present day.

  About ten years after he became High King, it became apparent to Brian that the Norse threat seemed to be increasing again. The raids on coastal settlements became more numerous, and in some of these forays the Vikings even attacked their own people who had settled down. Many chieftains who had suffered and many abbots whose monasteries had been pillaged came to Brian and asked him, as High King of Ireland, to fight off the Danes.

  Brian had just subdued another king, his former enemy Malachy, part of the O’Neill family, who had fought Brian’s attempts to take over all Ireland. He approached Malachy and suggested that together they should fight the Danes and defeat them once and for all. Malachy agreed, and Brian let it be known that he and Malachy were marching on Dublin to fight the toughest Viking of them all, King Sigurd.

  The battlefield was set in Clontarf, a name that means “valley of the bulls.” Brian arrived with a large army, and the Vikings had already prepared their tents. On the eve of battle, as Brian sat in his tent with his generals, going over the last details of the battle plan, a messenger asked to see him, saying it was urgent. Brian asked to see the man personally, and the messenger, who was very embarrassed, told Brian he came from King Malachy, and the message was that King Malachy had decided that day to withdraw his army; he would not be fighting the Danes with Brian on the morrow.

  No reason was given, and after ordering that the messenger be given food and drink before returning to his own people, Brian went out and addressed his troops.

  “Listen,” he said to them, speaking from the saddle of his great white horse. “We’re alone tomorrow. Our allies have decided to turn and run. The men of the north, King Malachy’s soldiers, obviously fear battle. So we’ll have to show them what it’s like to fight and win. It means that we’ll have to be twice as strong, twice as swift, and twice as fierce. But we shall be twice as victorious.”

  Brian’s men, who knew that he was a wonderful general, cheered and cheered.

  Next day, the Vikings were still laying out their arms when Brian’s army attacked. It was a surprise raid; Brian wanted to use their own tactics against them. He reasoned that they had achieved their conquests in Ireland mainly through surprise. So he selected small bands of his best fighters to race across the grass, twelve at a time, attack the Danes, and return as swiftly as they came.

  The strategy proved very successful. Man after man from Brian’s army killed at least two and sometimes three and four Vikings before they had time to put on their horned helmets. One of their soldiering tricks was to look for a man with his back turned, tiptoe up behind him, and drive the point of the sword into the nape of his neck. It was very successful.

  Then Brian sent a messenger to King Sigurd, and asked him did he want to surrender. King Sigurd roared that he didn’t want to surrender to an old fool of a king like Brian, and he would have killed Brian’s messenger except that there was an unwritten law guaranteeing the safety of messengers.

  Brian then sent all his troops into battle, long lines of them across the low-lying fields of Clontarf. Both armies of soldiers had long swords and big, round shields. They were very evenly matched, and the battle raged all day. Brian, who by now was not a young man, rode up and down the battlefield, exhorting his troops and occasionally taking a swipe at a Viking. He took off one man’s nose, and he split another right through the forehead. By four o’clock in the afternoon, he could see that his army was winning. After one last exhortation to his men to take no prisoners—in other words, to kill everybody they could catch—he retired to his tent.

  It was a beautiful afternoon, and after some refreshment, Brian stood outside to watch the last moments of the battle. When he could see that the Danes were finally routed, he dropped to his knees on the grass and prayed his thanks to God. But a Norse soldier, fleeing the battlefield, came running by, saw the old king at prayer, and attacked him. Brian almost succeeded in defending himself—but, as the Viking soldier cut off Brian’s head, Brian’s heavy sword cut the man’s legs off at the knee.

  When Brian’s royal attendants came running, they found their king dead and a legless Dane beside him, whom they killed immediately. They roasted his body on a spit in revenge, and then fed it to their dogs.

  As you can imagine, the celebrations after the battle weren’t as lively as the soldiers had hoped they would be—everybody was very glum. A few weeks later, King Brian Boru was buried at Armagh, very near Saint Patrick’s grave. The funeral gathering went on for seven days and seven nights.

  As he spoke the last words, Ronan’s selfconsciousness returned. It proved needless; his classmates crowded around him. Boys who had mocked him, smirked at his books, jostled his bike—they changed. Some asked for help; one offered to pay if Ronan would write his essays—and a chorus called out to Mr. Cronin, “Sir?! Sir?! Can he do it again?”

  The teacher agreed, and with Ronan developed the exercise; either the horn-rimmed master wanted an unusually vivid piece of history retold as a story to energize the class, or he wanted a complex passage to be unravelled and spread out like a map.

  On such occasions he paid Ronan the unusual compliment of tutoring him personally in advance. When they finally brought it to the classroom, Mr. Cronin set out the dates and characters elegantly on the blackboard, and then asked Ronan to tell it as a colloquial story.

  When Ronan told Kate about this, she commanded a performance, calling it grandly, “The True Story of Brian Boru.” And she praised him for staying within the bounds of history while embellishing for the sake of color; “Makes it so memorable,” she said.

  His father also heard and brought the story home. This concentration upon history went down well with all three adults. His father’s interest in folklore and Kate’s background—she had taken a history degree—connected with his mother’s sense of the past never having ended; Alison repeatedly told family stories that sounded recent, but on examination came from as much as a century earlier. Thus it surprised none of them that, in school and state examinations, Ronan scored highest in history. It seemed unavoidable—predestined, almost—that he should pursue it at university and beyond.

  Ronan O’Mara passed into adolescence smoothly. He had no skin eruptions, no wild behavior—nothing beyond an increase
d fastidiousness and a rising interest in his own appearance. The tension of the household never arrested his maturing; John’s and Kate’s warmth, plus his own good management, wrapped him against Alison’s frosts.

  Puberty passed like a short season. Yes, he had a greater awareness of girls; school functions introduced him to the locals, but he liked very few. One or two, home from expensive boarding schools and thus a touch exotic, gave off some spark, but he never felt like kissing anyone.

  Many tried to get to him. They set up friends to say that such-and-such had fallen “terribly in love” with him (the phrase came from a novel they were all reading), but he took none of their bait. And they felt the loss more sharply because their mothers urged them toward Ronan. He was tall, clever, famously studious, well-mannered, and handsome—future perfect, so to speak, as a potential son-in-law.

  How he tantalized them, not just with his reserve but because he had one extra quality that the mothers adored—ambition. He enthused about people who reached pinnacles; he discussed their achievements with passion; he had heroes. They all knew that he too would aim for success—and they guessed he’d succeed at anything he went for. Adding everything up, he had the makings of a true “catch,” even at the age of seventeen. Yet, no matter how the mothers fed or feted him, he slipped past the arts of their daughters.

  It wasn’t that he didn’t want to kiss them, which was what the girls claimed; nor did he lack interest in girls, as they also hinted. In fact they had long ago entered his secret life; through Kate’s fashion magazines, he knew about amazing underwear. In newspaper advertisements some of it seemed like armor, but in the women’s magazines it felt more intimate and immensely thrilling.

  Hollywood in the Alexandra cinema raised the stakes—form-fitting slips, akimbo thighs, devastating bosoms; Lana Turner proved helpful, Jane Russell more urgent. And Barbara Stanwyck walked naked (rear view only) into a river in Cattle Queen of Montana. And in a laneway not far from the school he had found a mildly lewd magazine called Confidential Detective, which contained many photographs of tough-looking American ladies in black negligees or swirling, conical brassieres.

  Where he differed from the usual boiling adolescent boy was in his control. He filtered all thrills through a disciplined brain, in which his Storyteller quest still absorbed him. Every day he did something toward finding the old man: a letter to someone, a newspaper cutting of a discovery from the past, a poem he felt the Storyteller might like. And every month he visited a new phase of Irish history, selected for color as much as for fact. If he had to measure, he might have said that the history now outweighed the search—until the thirteenth of August, 1960, when his life changed again.

  Autumn came in gorgeously that year; wood smoke in the air; hazelnut bunches under leaf clusters; a smell of apples and fall, and the chuckling of pheasants in the woods.

  The Saturday afternoon began vividly, and heightened. Ronan set out for one of his hiding places—a disused badger sett, over which he had dragged a flat stone and ancient branches. On his way from the house, he came down through the high wood, where the wild strawberries grew every summer like small red gems. Ahead of him on a rock stood an iridescent blue-green bird, unafraid and resting, wings puffed. Ronan guessed immediately—a homing pigeon, fallen out of some race or blown off course by a storm out at sea forty miles away. Sometimes the seagulls drifted this far inland, and his mother prayed, “Heaven help the sailors on a night like this.”

  He dropped to his haunches and edged toward the pigeon. The bird showed little alarm, merely hopped a few feet away. Ronan saw but could not read the green ring on its leg. He waited and watched; the pigeon ducked its beak into a small pool on top of the rock. Ronan then knew the bird had measured its own safety; pigeons need to rest and drink, then they resume the journey home. He walked away, content.

  A hundred yards on, as he cleared the wood, he saw the hawk. It wheeled, fawn and lethal. Climbing, climbing, it made its point high above and hovered, wings shimmering on some thermal pad. Then it dropped like stone propelled by rockets. Suddenly Ronan understood and dashed back—but too late; the hawk had taken the pigeon. One small blue feather floated in the pool of rock water.

  As he stood there and swore, his wider sight picked up a movement. The hawk had not taken off again but stood in the ferns fifty yards away, holding down the pigeon with one talon; Ronan registered the classic pose, the steady, violent glare, the rich mottled gauntlets. All the same, he ran at the hawk. The predator took off, carrying the pigeon, but couldn’t rise far.

  Ronan lost sight of them in the thickets but kept running along the line of flight. In the deeper woods he saw the hawk again, now attacking. On the pigeon’s breast feathers sat one drop of blood, a dark bead. Ronan picked up a dead branch and threw it lightly. The whirling stick caught the hawk on the side of the head and forced him off the pigeon. As the hawk turned to assess Ronan, the pigeon rose amazingly and flew out of the wood. It wheeled two large circles in the sky, determined a direction, and flew away to the north.

  When Ronan turned back, the hawk thought to attack but instead lurched deeper into the wood. It had trapped itself in a dense bramble; there it sat, pinned, one wing splayed. Ronan knew he had to gamble; he wanted to release the hawk, but he might be attacked—and, he argued with himself, the hawk might eventually free itself anyway.

  However, the more he scrutinized it, the deeper seemed the hawk’s trap; coils of briar had snared the splayed wing. He asked himself what his father would do, or want him to do. And so, though rightly afraid—hawks attack the head and eyes—he moved behind the bird and began to ease the bush. He got so close, he could have stroked the feathers; instead, he forced the branches apart, and the hawk struggled free. The bird soared to a safe, high bough, and Ronan felt a surge of power, a dizzying self-approval.

  He returned to his task and reached the cache. As ever, he studied the exterior to see whether it might possibly have been uncovered. The branches had been moved—animals could have done that. And the stone? Had it? Not sure. He hauled it back. Inside, wrapped in the remnants of an old leather satchel, lay some of his treasures; the radio director’s letter about the Storyteller, his copy of Confidential Detective—and now, something else. An ancient shirt nestled under the leather satchel, and something was wrapped inside it.

  Who had been here? Impossible! Nobody knew of this cache. He opened the shirt without removing it from the shallow pit. Inside, he found a small clutch of papers, un-dated, unsigned, and written at random, some inscribed on the lined sheets of school notebooks or on scraps of the blue writing paper that Irish people once commonly used for correspondence; two pages were jotted down on a brown paper bag. A few of the entries seemed almost indecipherable; water stains had made the ink run. Ronan weighed them in his hand. The papers felt thin and haphazard—but they had ragged physique and a power.

  He took them out in the open air, shielding them from the sun as though they might rot. Sitting against the warm brick walls of an old kitchen garden, he sat and read.

  I AM WRITING THESE PASSAGES IN A BARN IN Rathdrum, county Wicklow. Outside, the rain is pouring down as straight as stair rods, and the raindrops are hopping like frogs off the stones in the yard. I am reasonably comfortable, thanks to a hospitable man and his wife here, Mr. and Mrs. Dunne, whose only note of doubt was a warning to me not to let my candle burn down to the straw or, to quote Mr. Dunne and his vocabulary (unusual for a Wicklow farmer), “We’ll all be immolated.”

  Tonight I told them one of my stories, and as often happens, I cannot now sleep. My mind is galloping with details I might have included and errors I made in the telling. Every night, I am despondent at such failures; if I perform in a way that does not grip my listeners, I’m out next morning. Additionally, I take my life’s work very seriously, and that is why I want to write down why I became a storyteller, and what it means to me.

  First a note on a most important aspect of my life—the business of walking: Pace is
all. Rhythm is master. Consistency is your friend. In the morning, setting out for a new destination, I take five or ten minutes to find my legs, so to speak. I will trot a little, followed by a saunter; or I’ll stride to warm the tendons and then slow down, then speed up again. Soon, I will have found that day’s speed, although days can vary, and then I settle into it and do not deviate from that speed for five or ten miles.

  Stopping, or rather the control of stopping, has an importance. I walk at the rate of four and a half miles an hour. After one and a half miles, that is to say twenty minutes, I always stop to empty my bladder and feel pleased that I can return a contribution to the earth. But I learned not to make this stop a long one, because the concentration required of walking, once lost, cannot easily be recovered.

  Within seconds, I have hit my stride again and have found my rhythm. The regular movement has small qualities of what I imagine hypnosis to be—a pleasant feeling with a gentle hint of what a trance might feel like. This comes best on a level surface such as a good road; in a field, the rough ground can jolt one’s concentration—and can assist it too, so that an ankle is not twisted or a sinew forced.

  The first wave of fatigue comes early in the third hour, at about the ten-mile mark. At that moment, a decision is always called for—how considerable is the destination, and how sensible to press on? In other words, should I divert to some nearer place or keep going? By now I know a considerable number of destinations, although I have a principle of adding some new houses every year. This has its dangers; what do I do if it proves not merely an unfriendly house but one hostile to me and my tradition, and worst of all, one who knows my story?