by Erin O'Quinn
We knew beyond a doubt that Ursus was leaving to buy and sell captive women—to throw them into his ox cart, just as he had done with Mama and her four companions, and to sell them to a prearranged buyer. We had to confront him once and for all, no later than Friday morning, before he left for the area I had reckoned was Inishowen, for Mama’s story led straight to that area. We had two days to travel and only a brief time to take Ursus into custody before he pointed the ox cart north to the promontory.
Before I could say a word, Liam stood. “We leave now. Cat, leave Macha behind. Ye must ride wi’ me. Thom, Black Knife, find fresh horses. Brindl, ye best ride wi’ Thom.”
That quickly, Liam put himself in charge of the new expedition. After a few words to Simmi, to Weaver, and a few others, we were riding swiftly back to our familiar bally, to put an end to our quest for justice.
* * * *
We arrived in Derry early Thursday morning. Brindl and I realized that the Triús would gather that very morning on the camán field at her teach. A wicked plan began to form in my mind, and I talked with my companions as we rode for their small house.
By the time we got there, our plan was agreed on. If the other women would agree to it, the Terrible Triús would ride again! The first—and last—time we had gathered on a real adventure, we had gone to Claudy to track down Owen Sweeney. He had been taken by the high king’s former druids Loch and Lucet, and five small women were able to subdue them rather quickly, frightening the superstitious cowards into thinking that we were vengeful goddesses and banshees come to destroy them.
Now as we rode up, I saw Brigid, Swallow, and tiny Magpie all standing together on the camán field. They ran to us as we dismounted. Before Liam could lift me off the back of Fintan, Magpie was looking up at me with a devilish expression. “SoothTeller. You are here to lead us to Big Bear.”
When Liam set me gently on the ground, I hugged her little body close to me. “Hush, you scamp! Do not give away the secret just yet. Wait until we are all inside the house.”
Later, when the five of us women along with Liam, Thom, and Black Knife were gathered inside the teach, I outlined a plan. When I finished, we all stood, each of us clasping the hands of the other in a mutual promise. For the women of Tory!
* * * *
That night Liam and I lay in our welcome bed for the first time in weeks. I was feeling a bit guilty about leaving the women behind at Lake Swilly. He lay propped on one elbow, and he was stroking my face and neck, consoling me.
“What we do is…for them, Cat. Just as good. B’fhéidir…even better.”
“Liam, tomorrow must be perfect. We must trap the bear.”
“An’ we will, a mo ghrá.” He pulled my chin toward his face gently, not forcing me to respond, and I willingly opened my mouth to his.
“Liam, Liam, love me,” I moaned, glad for our privacy, pushing my breasts against his chest. We were naked, glad to shed our travel clothes. I tried to pull one of the animal skins across my chest, and he laughed softly.
“Ye cover your…top, but not bottom,” he teased me, putting his hand between my legs and rubbing me with my own milkiness. I arched my back, silently signaling for more, and his fingers began to stroke in his practiced way. He pushed the soft pelt aside with his nose and began to suck my nipples.
I rocked and moved—forward and back, up and down—delighting in the simultaneous sucking and rubbing. “More, more,” I breathed.
“Tell me, Cat.” His husky voice was demanding the words that would fire him to a peak of desire.
“Suck me, take me,” I cried. “Oh, put it in me.” I was moaning loudly, and I knew he loved that. Soon he was leaning over me, pushing his groin inside me, even with the great obstacle of my stomach trying to get in the way.
“Anois, anois, a Cháit,” he moaned, and the blurred, throaty edges of his words fired me in a deep, mysterious way I would never understand.
“Oh! Now!” I cried out, and together we ebbed and flowed in heady pleasure, both of us climaxing loudly together. And then we lay embracing so closely that we seemed one large, trembling body.
Almost asleep, I ran our plans through my mind again as I lay embracing Liam. “We leave at dawn,” I murmured after a while, reminding him of tomorrow.
“Dawn,” he mumbled, and then he was fast asleep.
* * * *
Long before the sun rose on Friday morning, we were already on the road to the sprawling holdings of the man Ursus. We ate chunks of pan bread as we rode, not taking the extra time to sit at our table and eat a proper morning meal. We met our coconspirators near the long path that led to his brugh. We left our horses tethered inside a stand of rowan trees, and together the eight of us blended into the shadows of predawn.
As our marine scouts had reported, a large farm cart stood near his door, ready to be hitched to an ox. One by one, Liam, Thom, and Black Knife jumped into the back of the cart. Luckily, there was a large piece of tarred cloth in the cart, and we pulled it over them. Then the wait began.
We stood near the large oak door of Ursus the pious citizen, politely waiting for him to emerge. Brindl and I were both dressed in a simple léine, our batas resting in our belt behind us, out of sight. Brigid, Swallow, and Magpie, all clad in their distinctive triús, had positioned their weapons in the same manner—hidden behind their backs. They stood as we did, with hands demurely clasped in front, heads slightly lowered as if in prayer.
I had already heard the subtle call of birds signaling the dawn, and I began my slow breathing. We had planned that all of us would do the same, so that when the moment of confrontation arrived, we would be centered and calm. Somewhere in my mind’s eye I saw the sun light the treetops around Ursus’s large holdings. And then the unexpected happened.
The oaken door began to swing outward, and at the same moment I heard a gabble of voices behind us. I turned my head quickly and saw what we had not planned for. Half a dozen hired men were approaching, one leading a horse and another a stubborn ox. And in that very second, a large, imposing figure stepped from the door of the brugh.
Thinking quickly, I half turned so that my hidden weapon was not visible either to the large man or to his lackeys. And I saw that my companions, reacting with the quickness born of their recent training, had done the same. Surely our postures looked suspicious! But I was counting on the element of surprise to mask our unusual appearance.
“Well! What have we here?”
The voice was large like the man, booming and jovial. The approaching men had stopped, unsure of whether to continue their assigned task or to challenge us. We needed above all to seem normal until the men were distracted with hitching the ox and tethering the horse. And so I spoke, mustering my sweetest voice.
“Ah—good morning, kind sir. We are come from the church to beg a boon of thee.”
Brindl fell in behind my lead without hesitation. “Brother Galen has told us to seek you out this morning. We apologize for our early visit.”
Ursus stood looking at each of us with a puzzle in his eyes. I almost quailed to look at him, and I could well imagine why Windy, and even my mother, had been reluctant to talk about him. He was big as a Saxon mercenary without the long hair and mustache. Instead, he was shaved close, revealing a large, meaty chin and thin, colorless lips. His dark brown hair, somewhat frizzed, fell just to his ears, framing his face as I imagined the great shaggy mane of a bear would surround its blunt muzzle.
His brows, bushy as his hair, rose until they seemed to meet his hairline. “Yes, early it is, my little beauties. Should you not be home in bed?”
Ignoring the lascivious undertone, I ventured again, “We are come to ask for a donation to our church’s Union of Women—a worthy cause indeed. Would you be interested in giving food or other goods?”
By now I clearly saw that the hired men had turned to their tasks, and I walked closer to Ursus. Each of my companions did the same, slowly and almost imperceptibly, drawing within a bata’s reach of his body.
“Why do you not visit me next week? Let us say a week from now? I will be returned from my trip, and I will have the time to give you my, ah, full attention.”
“But the Union of Women seek justice,” said Brigid evenly. “They will not be placated by delay.”
Little Magpie raised her freckle-dusted face up to him. “They cry for retribution.”
Beautiful Swallow looked at him with her wide, luminous eyes and smiled as she said, “Now is the time.”
With those words, each of us drew our batas and advanced on Ursus. The men hidden in the cart were positioned there to help us in case of a misstep. But now we had to rely on them instead to subdue six stunned hired hands as we tried to take down the quarry ourselves.
I saw it happen as though in a dream, as in a deep-breathing vision that showed every detail in harsh clarity.
As soon as Swallow said the word now, all five of us had our batas placed on a strategic point of his body. My own was pressing into his neck, and Brigid had her weapon jammed up against his cheekbone. Swallow pushed her gleaming shillelagh into his chest, while Brindl and Magpie were just tall enough to rest their weapons lightly on his groin.
“Down,” I told him, as though talking to a rowdy dog. And he sat.
His legs splayed out in front of him, he was blubbering and crying at the top of his voice like an overgrown child wailing to his mother, “Help! Help me, damn all of you for worthless sheep! Help!”
I saw that Liam and the others had already felled the hired men, who had no heart for a fight. And so I turned back to the blubber baby on the ground in front of us.
“Speak, you vile pig. Do you not know that slave trading is a high crime?”
“What—what mean you?” he cried. “I am innocent! I will have you stoned and imprisoned! Do you not know who I am?”
“Yes,” said Brindl evenly. “We know exactly who you are. You are the one who has made sure that innocent women are taken, and defiled, and sold to anyone with enough cows or coins to make you a good profit.”
“That is preposterous! You cannot possibly prove it!”
“I think we can,” said Brigid. “And by the way, I lack two years’ training to wear the laurel of a brehon. Now I am a mere apprentice of my father, the renowned judge Cian O’Kelley. Perhaps you have heard of him? Or of the most celebrated ollamh in all this land—Dubthach Mac Lugair? My Uncle Dub?”
She paused, as if for effect. “I am ready to stand in any moot court anywhere, or before Leary himself, to show proof of your crime. Or perhaps I will ask my father—or even my uncle—to do it for me.”
Ursus sat there, clearly stunned, looking from one of us to the next. I could barely stand to gaze on him, so repulsed by him that I actually felt my stomach rising into my throat. But I managed to address him in an even tone of voice. “You have victimized women, probably for years. And now you are become the victim of women. The Lord provides.”
Chapter 30:
A New Family
“Any day now,” Persimmon told me, patting my hand. “Perhaps any hour. Rest quietly, Caylith.” She left, closing the door softly behind her.
The room I lay in was called in Gaelic a grianán, a sunroom. Michael had told me that usually the roof of a sunroom was covered in decorative bird feathers and was located often in a lady’s garden, a kind of summer house. I had imagined my own chamber—on the very roof of the house—to be a completely private place for Liam and me to be alone in our oversized bed. How ironic, I thought, that Liam had lately been supplanted by Persimmon, Brigid, and Mama, each one fussing over me as I lay close to childbirth.
I lay back on pelt-stuffed pillows, looking into the glass skylight above me. I was bathed in a soft, aqua-toned light that filled the entire chamber. Just outside, I knew, were the comforting arms of a huge, ancient oak that sprawled around our new brugh, not quite hanging over the clever shingled roof but affording dappled shade to our living quarters.
Liam and I had been in our new holdings from the first week we had returned from Tory Island. He had lovingly built a large, handsome fire pit from carefully selected river stones, each one streaked or whorled with green or pale gold to match our glass windows and the oak-and-cedar floors. Our bedchamber, this spacious room, had its own ever-burning brazier to afford warmth and light at night.
The baths, too, were finished. The Feather clan seemed to have put an army to working on the underground steam vents and the three small pools, fed and freshened from the river, that shone in the light from the large glass window on the east wall of the baths.
The day I saw it completed, I had stood in mute wonder at the loving craftsmanship. One entire wall was a mosaic of a tangle-haired young woman, not quite a mermaid, who rode the back of a leaping dolphin. Her red locks streamed at all angles from her face, and her green eyes were emeralds that sparkled in the reflected light. So beautiful and impish was she that I thought then—and even now—that it was Magpie’s depiction of herself and not a fanciful rendering of Caitlín O’Neill.
I remembered how, back in January, I had quailed to hear Brigid speak to Mama about Roman baths. Back then, I stubbornly wanted the baths to be mine alone. I cursed myself now for my selfishness. What was I thinking? How could I deny my mother the rare pleasure that Roman baths would bring? To her, they were the ultimate sign of cultivation and civil order. There was only one thing she longed for more than baths—and that was a grandchild, an extension of our family’s proud Roman heritage. Now I could give her both.
A few days after we returned, I had asked Liam to bring Mama for a visit. I found that I could not ride by myself without canting and rolling like a pear on a barrel, as Liam had wryly described. And it had become almost impossible to mount and dismount even my diminutive mountain pony.
When Mama knocked, I welcomed her with a simple, long embrace, pressing my head into her chest. Unlike her usual dry response, she smoothed my hair over and over again, the same way she had done the night she was released from Sweeney’s shieling. We stood together for a long moment, neither of us speaking.
At last I broke away, looking at her calm face. She seemed less restive than usual, and I admired her smooth, beautiful face and the way the light from the windows caught her high cheekbones and resolute jaw. She was dressed in a long silken toga, pale blue, drawn together with a fringed belt.
She eyed my drab, beltless tunic, no more than a shift to pull over my swollen belly.
“Darling, you look marvelous. How do you feel?”
“Mama, I feel very well. Cuileann is behaving herself today. Please find a comfortable bench while I bring a comfort tea.”
This was her first visit to our new holdings, and she looked around approvingly. “I see you are starting to make a real home, Caylith. I like the woven rugs, I like the wall hangings. And I admire the floors. Very beautiful. And fragrant, like a forest.”
“Here is what I really want to show you, Mama. Come with me.” Before she could sit, I took her by the hand and led her to the door that opened into our baths, and I ushered her inside. As she stood marveling at the mosaics and gazing at the pools, I said, “These baths are yours to use, too, Mama. Until your own are built.”
“My own? Whatever do you mean?”
“The Feather clan is set to begin as soon as you say the word.”
“Yes, Caylith. Oh, yes,” she said with a slow smile, and she embraced me again. “How can I thank you?”
“By saying nothing, Mama. I love you.”
Since that day, Mama had visited me every afternoon, and I hoped that when she had her own baths she would visit just as often. Of course she would, I thought, for by then she would have a grandchild to visit, too.
Liam and I had bathed there at least once a day, and always in the morning. Even now, when he had to carry me down the stairs for fear of my falling, every day we lay together in the hot pool and made love in the tepidarium, the warm pool, until my skin was creased like a sun-dried grape. Thinking about my new
home, I nestled down even more into the animal pelts under my body, feeling like a queen and not at all like a woman who could bear her child any moment.
Persimmon had been steadfast in her resolve to stay with both me and Liath, our fragile treasure from Tory. Liam had made each woman a fragrant reed-and-herb bed in one of the adjoining rooms, and thus we had a solution to a problem that had perplexed me. How could we keep Liath well and improving, and how could we be sure that I had experienced help when my time of childbearing came?
The rest of the former captives were well on their way to complete physical health, cared for by more than a dozen well-meaning local women and by our new friends Bunny, Mari, and Akantha. They were housed, ironically enough, in the abandoned house of Ursus the slave monger while he lived elsewhere, under guard. His own former men, glad to keep their land and livestock, provided food, wood for the fires, and any task asked of them.
Liath was watched over not just by Simmi but by Silver Weaver, who visited every day, often with a spray of small flowers, always with his lute hung across his back with a leather thong. Even as I thought about Weaver, I heard the soft strains of a lovely air, dampened by the closed door but still full of unmistakable hope and joy.
I remembered back when I had first heard him play, the plaintive thrumming of a loveless wanderer searching for substance in his life. Now, it seemed, he had found it—even if the object of his quest was mute as a deep, dark pool in a sunlit forest.
I heard a light tap on the door and Liam came in. He stood by the bed a moment and then knelt beside it. I reached out my hand to him, touching his face, stroking his soft beard. He took my hand. “Cat, conas tá tú, a chuisle?”
“Tá mé go maith,” I reassured him. “Not ready, dear love. No baby yet.”
He brought my hand to his mouth and began to kiss my fingers, one by one. “Cat, do ye feel up to…visitor tonight?”