by Erin O'Quinn
I guided Macha near the spot where he was working and sat for a moment watching him. His leather leggings and bríste—tight fitting breeches—revealed his long calf and thigh muscles as he bent and rose, lifting and fitting individual rocks from a stack of water-smooth stones. He wore no tunic, and his sunbrowned skin glistened with sweat even at this early hour. I felt a little thrill looking at his darker brown nipples, surrounded by downy, golden hairs. And I loved seeing how the locks of auburn hair fell from the crown of his head over his forehead, contrasting with the lighter golden brown of the rest of his hair and his short beard and mustache.
I could have sat and watched him for a long time, for I was somewhat aroused by this unaccustomed glimpse of him at work, but he caught my eye and stopped. He straightened, twisting his mouth in that special half smile, and walked toward me. Stopping at Macha’s red mane, he looked up at me and said only, “A chuisle.”
The sound was “ah khoos-la,” a blurry, husky way of saying the word for “heartbeat” or “sweetheart.” I thrilled every time he talked, for the sounds were sensuous and musical. In spite of my resolve, I started to blush, feeling a sudden hardening of my nipples and a tightening between my legs. Seeing my flush, Liam’s grin widened, and he reached up and grasped my waist with both hands. Then he pulled me off Macha and set me down next to him.
Liam knew full well that I was loath to show intimacy in front of other people, and I thought it only strengthened his desire to test my modesty. He gathered me so close that I could feel a rising in his breeches, and he rubbed his soft beard on my chin and cheeks. “Liam, a ghrá, wait until we get hmmn—” His tongue stopped my words, pushing and licking into my mouth with a kind of impudence, and so I pushed against him and stepped back.
“Ah, Liam. Your brother wants us to come to supper tonight. At the dwarf enclaves.”
“Tá tú iontach álainn.”
I reached up and stroked his silken beard. “And you are beautiful, too, Liam. Please, wait until we are alone.”
“Very well, Cat,” he said, laughing. “I…come home early. But not so many clothes, all right?” He fingered the linen léine just above my breasts.
“Tá go maith. Come home very early.” I turned and mounted my mare so quickly that he had no time to wreak further damage, and I urged her into a gallop straight for home.
Our little wattle-and-daub house stood on an expansive tract of land, its front door hidden by a copse of tall pine trees. Fifty feet beyond the teach, somewhat lower than the land where our house stood, the swift Foyle crashed and swirled over smooth, black rocks, lunging toward the great Lough Foyle, one of the largest lakes in Éire. Between the house and the river stood a haggard where our horses and one pony ate. Beyond lay my pride and joy, the garden where we grew everything we ate except the fish and wild game.
I did not have to guide Macha to the haggard. She stopped and browsed the fodder while I unsaddled her and began to curry comb her smooth flanks and neck. “Macha, darling, did you get pregnant when I was away at Tara?” NimbleFoot, dancing nearby, seemed to answer my question. “You little devil! How did you reach her?”
NimbleFoot was a true pony, only eleven hands high. I knew he would have had a bit of a stretch to reach his lady love—but reach her he did. I thought she would foal sometime in March or April of next year. The colt from a gorgeous, red-maned chestnut mare and a white-maned palomino pony would be special. I wondered idly whether he had roamed afield and impregnated Clíona also, for the lengthening days had quickened the fires of my other pretty mare, too.
I smiled a secret smile, thinking about my own quickening fire. It had happened on the road from Limavady, during February’s festival of Oimelc—the festival of the running of milk in the sheep. Liam and I had found a patch of soft ground near a stand of bright-berried hollies. And I knew, as only a mother knows, exactly where we had created a child.
Little Holly, I said to myself. Then aloud, “Cuileann, my daughter.” One hand lightly pressed to my abdomen, still smiling, I walked to the front door and entered our little house.
Chapter 2:
The Hunting Ground
The word teach almost summed up the nature of our house. Pronounced somewhat like “chalk,” it was as small and blunt as the Gaelige word itself. Four workmen had taken less than a week to erect it two years ago, and its construction was exactly the same as even the much larger church. The builders first set a wooden framework into the ground in a circular shape, then interlaced it with supple young rowans. After filling the interior latticework with straw and mud, they bent and pushed until they had created two squares for shuttered windows, east and west, before the clay-like mortar had dried.
The roof was made of interwoven reeds and straw in a conical shape, and the center was left open to emit the smoke from a fire pit.
The outside of all our clay-and-wattle buildings had been covered with a lime-and-chalk mix that shone bright white and protected the homes from weather damage—except that my dwarfish friend Magpie and her sisters had added their own secret mixture of plants to the clay surface of my house, coloring the outside a soft saffron red, unique in all of Derry. “Like your hair,” Magpie had giggled, she of the duplicate fiery locks.
Inside, the teach was drab except for the burnished-oak floors that I had insisted on. The glow of the wood reminded me strongly of the lovely villa in Britannia where I had grown up, recently torched by Hibernian raiders and since rebuilt. I had not decorated the walls with tapestries, nor had I insisted on extravagant furnishings. We had three smallish benches, a table for eating, and a table to hold a water basin and ewer. There was a small cabinet for my gathered treasures, a large chest and a large clothes cabinet for our clothing, and a unique bathing tub set upon its own low table. The center was dominated by a waist-high fire pit surrounded by smooth, interlaced stones, much like Liam’s own stonework at the bally trench.
And that was all—except for The Bed. Our one extravagance, the oaken bed was twice the size of almost any I had seen, and it stood almost two feet in height. A wedding gift from my old friend Luke, it had to be brought into the house in three sections and bolted together.
Liam and I had covered it in the many soft pelts of animals we had both felled for our supper over the many months we had been together, so that whether we slept or played, we were always surrounded by a certain resilient wildness that seemed a reflection of our very nature. I smiled to think about the many times one of us had shadowed the other across that expanse.
Strangers to our home often wondered, in a polite way, why Liam and I did not live in an extravagant dwelling. After all, he was the son of the high king of Éire. And I, a few years back, had wrangled a duchy for myself in Britannia. In addition to our personal wealth, we had access to a vast treasure that was being brought to the surface daily from the building of the underground dwarf enclaves. That fortune was reserved mostly for Father Patrick, to help him win over the entrenched, stubborn pagans who kept a firm grip on almost every corner of the island and who answered to the high king only in complicated legal ways. But a part of that fortune had also been ceded to me by the grateful dwarves, who considered me their deliverer. I was the one who had led them to this Promised Land, and they would have given me anything I asked for.
I had asked for a brugh—a sprawling, lavish homestead even now being built by a master builder, Liam’s own cousin Michael. The new holdings had been under construction for around seven or eight months, and they promised to be almost as beautiful as the king’s own—and far more unusual. I had not been to the construction site for a long time, not wanting to seem to smother Michael, whose genius and judgment I trusted completely.
I thought that I would subtly nudge him, now that our child was due around late October. This tiny home could hold one more person—a very small, baby-like person—but not for too long.
I shrugged out of my linen léine and hung it next to the others in our tall clothes chest along with my pretty undertuni
c. I pulled out my ancient deerskin tunic, so full of patches that it seemed to embarrass everyone but myself. I supposed I should hold my nose and burn it, but it held so many memories that I was loath to discard it. Here was the tunic I was wearing the day I first met Liam, a bewildered warrior standing at the little cove where our emigrants had first set foot on the shores of Éire. This was the tunic I had worn across the Sea of Éire with my boatload of pilgrims, and the same tunic that I had worn at the Great Standing Stones and on the Saxon shore of my old homeland.
The tunic went back even further than that—to my days of marine training with Brindl and to the abbey in my old home town where I finally vanquished the enemies who had arranged to have Mama’s villa burned to the ground, who had tried to ensure that she was killed, the same as my father.
Yes, I would hold onto this tunic. I remembered—even at that moment with a blush—how it had torn so that my left breast was exposed to Liam’s impudent eyes, then his questing mouth, and how he later made up for his brazenness by repairing it himself. I eyed the rude plaiting of a thin leather strip that marked his repair work, and I brought it up to my cheek in a brief gesture of deep affection.
I owned no shiny metal plate for gazing at myself, as so many women had. I knew not at that moment whether my hair was standing straight up in the back, or whether I wore smudges on my face from handling the horses’ gear. I would like to see myself as other eyes might, to judge whether my stomach seemed out of proportion to the rest of my slim body. Was Cuileann beginning to show? Liam would only stubbornly insist that I was “beautiful,” so it was no use asking him. I sighed—for the third time that day—and looked down at myself. I could easily see the patch of tight-coiled, red hair that lay beneath my navel. I supposed that meant that my stomach was still flat. I was torn between wanting to keep my slender form and longing to swell out, making room for an active, mischievous child.
I wondered whether she would share my deep green eyes. Grandfather—God bless his soul—had told me once that the green eyes appeared in every other generation of our family. Thus our own child would probably carry Liam’s lustrous brown eyes and even his shining auburn waves and long, curled lashes. Yes, she would be beautiful.
I slipped the tunic over my nakedness, cinched the leather belt, then laced my ankle-high leather bróga. I always tried to devote at least one hour each to our horses and to our burgeoning garden, and before I walked outside I selected a widemouthed woven basket to hold vegetables and herbs.
Once I stepped outside, the lengthening day bid me stand and admire the cloud-streaked sky, alive with waterfowl soaring toward the nearby lake. By now—just past midmorning—the sun’s warmth had begun to lull even the chittering birds, and I saw that many of the small wrens and finches had found pine branches to roost on. I took turns currying our splendid horses, leaving out only Macha, for she had already been soothed and smoothed after our early outing.
I took the basket to the side of the little round-house where Liam had built us a small stone structure similar to the root cellar I had known as a child. With no lit candle to guide my fingers, I felt around on the wooden shelves until I found a store of dried apples from last autumn’s harvest. I put three of them and a handful of cool turnips into my basket and carried my prizes to the horses. One by one, NimbleFoot, Clíona, and Macha relished their treats, and I left them so I could tend the garden.
The garden had swelled to twice its size since Liam had come to live here last July, eleven months ago. He had built a sturdy cultivator for me, and even small work tools that fit my hands and my height. He had lent his strong shoulders to digging and weeding and turning under the unyielding earth, leaving the layout and the planting to me.
Half the plot was devoted to vegetables—bulbs and root vegetables, summer melons and beans of all kinds. The other half, taller and more wild, held the herbs I was so fond of—from tough rosemary to clumps of summer savory, from oregano to thyme and parsley, mint, and dill. I had recently been experimenting with herbs that might lend their hidden properties to soap making so that in the wintertime Liam and I could cleanse ourselves better in our overgrown bathing tub. I saw with approval that the selected plants were beginning to put on vigorous new growth—soapwort, red campion, and catchfly.
I tilled and weeded, happily letting the sun soak into my skin. One hour in the garden slipped by like a wily thief, and I still had not gathered any vegetables that might be overripe.
I felt the squash, hanging plump on the ingenious trellis structures that had been Grandfather’s invention, and I pulled off the most ripe ones. I gathered orange-fleshed rockmelon, along with swan-neck squash and dwarf beans, a long-ago heritage gift from Magpie’s gardener husband Raven. I filled the basket. Then, satisfied, I took it inside and set in on the table as the basis for tomorrow’s supper.
I did not know when Liam would come home, but I decided to take my earthenware jug to the river and wash myself before he saw me all streaked with soil and somewhat tart to the smell. I stood calf-deep in the Foyle’s brisk currents only a foot from the bank, feeling buffeted by an intensity of water and foam. Dunking the jug into the water, I poured its contents over my head, letting rivulets stream down my bare shoulders and into the hollows of my thighs.
We were fortunate that not only our door, but also this part of the river, was shielded from the gaze of any who might pass by our teach. Otherwise, I thought, I might have to erect my own screen, for nothing would keep me from frisking unclad in the cold, welcome water of our marvelous river. I loved baths as only one could who grew up in an Italian-style villa complete with Roman-style baths under the eye of a Romanophile mother who considered bathing as one of the two pillars of civilization. The other pillar, written scholarship, was one I had successfully avoided so far in my life. Better to have one than none at all—that was my considered opinion.
I had brought an undertunic to the riverbank, and as soon as I turned to slip it on I saw Liam’s gelding Angus tethered to the hay haggard. I had not heard him ride up, and I was a bit angry at myself for allowing anyone—even my darling husband—to sneak up on me. I knew that if it had been a friend, he or she would have set up a shout to save me from embarrassment. But I also knew from long acquaintance that Liam would merely find a quiet place to watch from, then wait for me to notice him.
Sure enough, as soon as I turned and saw his horse, Liam’s voice, close by, rose over the roar of the river. “Álainn, álainn. Come, a chuisle.”
I had no time to chide him, for he was holding me against his taut body, his tongue seeking entrance to my mouth. “Mmnn, póg dom, póg dom,” he murmured into my mouth, and all my passion flared in spite of his insolence.
“Yes, I will kiss you—but beware my fangs. Inside, Liam. Get me inside first.” I pushed against his large chest, to no avail.
“Inside,” he teased. “Oh, I want that—to be inside.”
Sensing my mortification—or more likely seeing my deep flush of embarrassment—he picked me up and carried me all the way to our door. Then, somehow opening it and holding me also, he carried me to the bed and laid me down.
He stood looking down at me, naked and defenseless, trying to shield my garden’s melons from his hungry eyes. “Is tú mo ghrá. I love ye, Cat.”
“And I love you, my bold warrior. But please, will you close our door?”
He grinned and turned to the door while I quickly pulled a pelt of winter-white mountain hare over my exposed body. He stood again in front of the bed and untied the thong that held his bríste, letting them fall around his ankles. Liam was as immodest about his glorious body as I was shy about my own. I lay very quiet under the pelt as he knelt over me on the hunting ground of our bed.
“I need ye, Cat.” He leaned over me, using his elbows to prop himself up, and he licked and sucked at my lips. “Kiss me back, ye wench, or I shall have to take ye by force.” His erection was moving unbidden, like a weapon.
Teasing him, I turned my face away,
and he turned it back, his fingers under my chin. “I warned ye.” He thrust his tongue deep into my mouth, forcing my lips apart, and it plunged again and again until I was writhing under him. Could he feel my heart pounding like a warning drum?
He drew back suddenly and fingered the animal pelt. “What is this, Cat? Ye hide what I need. Oh, I need…suck ye, take your nipples.”
He knew, he knew through all those days and nights of passion, how I loved him to take my nipples, to suck them first gently, then with increasing boldness, until I shouted my urgent need. He had also taught me how to ask for what I wanted, for it aroused him in some deep place I could not imagine.
“Take them, Liam. Suck them. Bite my breasts, suck my nipples.” I thrust them toward his mouth, and from that moment I was lost in a pleasure so consuming that I hardly knew what I did, what I said. Just as the passion almost spilled over, I seized his erection with both hands and guided it between my legs.
“Tell me, Cat. Tell me. What do ye want?” He stopped his rhythmic movements, and I almost shouted, “Do-not-stop. Oh, I need you.” I dug my nails into his buttocks, so frustrated was I by his stopping.
“Say it. Tell me.” And so I cried out the words he needed to hear, and he plunged hard—twice, three times—and then we were both convulsing and shouting with the release of pent-up desire.
We lay together for a long time, he stroking my hair and I with my mouth nuzzling the hairs around his nipples. “Conas tá tú?” he asked softly. I knew he meant the baby.
“She is—he is fine, a ghrá.”
“Do ye think I…hurt him?”
“If she is daunted by your weapon, she is no daughter of mine.” And then I laughed as he rolled me over and looked into my eyes. “Ye are skilled with bata, Cat. But me son will be like me. King of bata.”
To Liam, a bata meant his burnished shillelagh. But to me, it would always mean my husband’s secondary—yet far more powerful—weapon. “Yes, darling. Yes, you are. King of bata.”