They shifted behind their barricades; peered cautiously over; hefted their throwing spears.
On the far side of the river, Teigue looked first to the left and then the right, gathering the eyes of his officers. He was not a warrior by inclination or disposition, but the men with him were what remained of the army Brian had forged.
“Now,” he said.
They flowed forward to take the shape of a spearhead, each man half-shielded by the man in front of him. Meanwhile flankers moved wide to circle above and below the falls, closing in on the Owenacht camp from the rear.
There would be no expected broad frontal charge.
The point of the spear, as they began fording the river, was Teigue himself, riding a stocky bay horse with a black mane, descendant of the Norse horses imported two centuries earlier by the Vikings. His two largest captains rode behind him, and behind them were four almost as large. Instead of the traditional round shield, all carried shields specifically shaped to protect the upper body while on horseback. The shields were worn on the arm of the hand that held the rein, leaving the other hand free for weaponry. The warriors’ heads were protected by fitted leather helmets reinforced with metal plates, lighter than the old bronze Celtic helmet, more comfortable than iron Viking headgear.
As the leaders splashed through the shallows they formed an almost invulnerable wedge. Close behind them more Dalcassians maintained a tight formation. Ronan was among them, and Fergal. They had fought this way before, they knew exactly what to do. They roared across the river and hurled their human spearhead straight at the heart of the enemy.
A few Owenacht javelins found their targets, but the Dalcassians were so tightly packed and thoroughly shielded that for the most part they shed the missiles as a turtle sheds rain.
Donough rode in the third rank of the spearhead. From the moment his horse entered the river his fears were submerged beneath a wave of exhilaration. “Now,” Teigue had commanded. Now and now! Gallop forward now, scream now, hurl oneself at the enemy with the high, hot battle-lust pouring through the veins like wine …
With a mighty effort Donough controlled himself. The men around him did the same, their natural impetuosity curbed by years of training. Instead of a rash headlong charge into sure death they held to the rhythm of martial music, the rain of spears glancing off their shields providing a counterpoint to the thunder of the bodhran.
Vercingetorix of Gaul had once watched Caesar advance on him thus; cold, determined, implacable.
As the Dalcassians emerged from the river, Teigue reined his horse off to one side. “I will lead you, but I won’t personally kill an Owenacht,” he had informed his men when they set out that morning. “When I stand on the Rock of Cashel to receive my father’s crown as King of Munster, I don’t want the men of Desmond to refuse me because Owenacht blood is fresh on my hands.”
Out of the corner of his eye, Donough saw his brother ride clear of the action.
The position at the front was briefly vacated.
Before anyone else could fill it, Donough surged forward. Brandishing his short-sword he shouted, “Abu Dal gCais!” Then with sudden inspiration he bellowed his father’s personal war cry, the unforgettable cry that had not been heard in Ireland since the Ard Ri died.
“Boru!” roared the old lion’s youngest cub. “Boru! Boru! BORU!
Behind him the full force of the living spearhead drove into the Owenacht barricade.
Order and discipline vanished in the wink of an eye. The mounted Dalcassians sent their horses plunging through the flimsy barriers. Within moments the muddy earth was littered with everything from pitchforks and torn hides to spilled flour and broken wine casks.
The foot warriors flooded through the breach.
Throwing down their spears, the Owenachts met them with swords and axes and bare fists, fighting a desperate defensive action, but the momentum was with the Dalcassians.
Owenacht nerve broke. First one and then another threw down his weapons.
Domnall screamed at them, but it was no good.
Brandishing his two-handed sword, the warlord from Desmond rushed forward to attack his enemy with all the mad bravado of a mythic hero, shrieking the war cry of his tribe.
Some of his men followed.
Many did not.
Without hesitation, the Dalcassians cut them down.
Watching from upstream, Teigue was aghast to realize his younger brother had so swiftly assumed leadership. But it was too late to ride back and try to wrest it from him; too late, and the maneuver would be too obvious.
Donough fought as he had long dreamed of fighting, with reckless abandon, adding to the energy of his youth the force of his pent-up frustrations. He leaned from his horse to strike one man after another. But that was not good enough; he wanted to be immersed in battle. So he slid from his mount and fought on foot amid the press of struggling bodies.
From his observation point Teigue glimpsed his younger brother’s head towering above the others. Then it vanished.
In that moment Teigue forgot the friction between them and shouted “Donough!” When moments later Donough reappeared at the center of the melee, apparently unscathed, he felt limp with relief.
I’ll let him have Kincora, he thought. I’ll let him have anything he wants, if only he survives this!
Some instinct deep within him, however, prevented his making it a sacred vow.
Through the stink of sweat and the smell of blood, feet slipping on mud compounded by spilled wine, ears deafened by screams and shrieks and the clang of metal, Donough fought.
He had no sense of time passing.
A battle axe swung toward him like death’s reaper. He ducked instinctively, lifting his shield, and felt the power behind the thwarted blow shiver into his bones. He lowered the shield just enough to counterattack and caught his opponent off-balance. With a lunging thrust Donough drove his short-sword into the man’s exposed armpit.
As Teigue watched, regretting every decision he had made, the battle spilled out of the broken barricades and spread up and down the banks of the river. By this time the flankers had crossed successfully and were moving in from the rear. Screams of anger changed to howls of fear as the Owenacht warriors realized the hopelessness of their situation. Some tried to run.
Donough saw a tall man who appeared in a fleeting glimpse to be Domnall Mac Donohue, sprinting toward a stand of trees.
Coward. Donough ran after him.
The forest swallowed them.
Teigue, watching, could stand no more. He galloped back and joined the fighting.
As he ran through the woods in pursuit of the Owenacht, Donough thought of the Norseman Brodir, fleeing after the Battle of Clontarf. Running for his life until he came across a tent in Tomar’s Wood where the aging High King waited and prayed for Irish victory.
Brodir had halted to kill Brian Boru.
Anger lent wings to Donough’s feet. In his imagination he was not pursuing an Owenacht, an Irish man like himself, but his father’s killer. “Boru!” he screamed into the darkness of the trees.
In the cabin smothered by ivy, Cera had been fretting for days. Padraic could feel her anxiety. Her knitted brow formed a pattern that disturbed the air around him.
“You need to be away from here for a while,” he told her.
“Not at all! Have I not just been away? As far as Kincora, which is farther than I’ve ever traveled before.”
“And you’ve not been the same since,” he father pointed out. “What troubles you?”
“Nothing troubles me.”
“You can tell me. Do I not always understand?”
“Nothing troubles me!” She did not like the feeling of mental fingers teasing at the edges of her mind, seeking a way in. Padraic had learned too much in his time with Niamh.
Cera plied her twig broom on the earthen floor so ferociously that she stirred up a cloud of dust, making her father cough. She burned the stirabout in its iron pot and the cabin r
eeked of scorched oatmeal. She put too much wood on the fire, until Padraic complained of the heat and went outside into the rain.
When his sons returned that evening he suggested to Torccan, the eldest, “Perhaps you might take some of our produce south to the market at Limerick. It’s a bad year, we won’t get anything for it around here, but the Vikings will always buy wool. And, ah, while you’re about it, take Cera with you. I don’t think I can survive another day in the house with her.”
In the far distance, someone was playing music. For a time Donough was content to lie dreamily, listening. Harp music. A small bardic harp with brass strings, like the one his father had played occasionally in the hall at Kincora.
His senses sharpened. That was no harp, but the pounding of the bodhran. He felt a vague disappointment and tried to go back to sleep. But he could not. The pounding was not that of a drum, but his own head, throbbing agonizingly.
Keeping his eyes closed, he tried to assess the situation. He seemed to be lying on the ground—he could feel twigs beneath him. Yet his head was pillowed.
His pounding, aching head.
In spite of himself, he moaned.
Instantly a cool hand touched his forehead. “Sssshhh, that only makes it worse.”
The hand moved and was joined by another hand, one on each side of his head, bracketing the tormented skull between them, pressing very gently as if to press out the pain.
Donough tensed, but the pain grew no worse. In fact, it lessened. Then he heard a sound like humming and a vibration passed through his body.
The pain eased more.
He was able to open his eyes.
Light stabbed his pupils; he closed his lids quickly, then opened them a hair’s breadth at a time, peeping out.
At first everything was blurred. His vision slowly cleared to reveal a dark shape bending over him. He was lying with his head in someone’s lap. Or so it seemed.
“Did we win?” he asked hoarsely.
“Win what?”
“The battle.” His lips were dry, his tongue thick.
“I saw no battle. Only you and the other one, the one who hit you.”
Donough tried to raise his head. “Where is he?” Before a blinding stab of pain lanced through his skull, forcing him to lie down again, he glimpsed a man lying on his face a few paces distant.
Donough closed his eyes, grateful for the touch of the soothing hands on his head again. “What happened to him?”
“He was trying to hurt you.”
“Did you … ?” He left the thought unfinished. Talking, even thinking, was too painful. Closing his eyes, he let himself tumble down into some lovely soft gray wool that seemed to have gathered around him …
When next he opened his eyes, he saw the rotting litter of a forest floor. His cheek was not pillowed on a lap, but on the earth.
A man lay facedown a few paces away.
Experimentally, Donough raised his head. No pain. He got to his hands and knees and crept over to the other man.
When he turned the body over he was disappointed to discover it did not belong to Domnall Mac Donohue.
Nor was there a mark on it. No weapon had slain him, whoever he was.
Suddenly Donough was fully conscious, every sense alert. The memory of the previous conversation came back to him like an echo.
Who was with me? A woman?
“He was trying to hurt you,” I thought my rescuer bad said. But what was the voice like? Male … no. Surely it was female. My ears were ringing and I was groggy; I should have paid more attention.
But had the conversation ever taken place at all, or was it his imagination, the dream of an injured man? It was receding like the memory of harp music, fading into the blur of battle and excitement and chasing someone …
Donough returned to the body and examined it again. There were not even any bruises. A big, strong warrior with the unmistakable stamp of an Owenacht was dead of no apparent cause.
With tentative fingers, Donough examined himself. He found a sizable wound on the right side of his skull, above and slightly behind the ear, where the glancing blow of a blade had torn loose a flap of skin. His neck and shoulder were bathed with blood, which had already begun to form a crust.
His ears were still ringing. But there was no pain.
In its sheath, he found his short-sword.
The last he remembered it had been in his hand.
He began a systematic search of the surrounding forest. No one. Only the trail left by broken undergrowth where he had chased the Owenacht.
Returning to the dead warrior, Donough studied him thoughtfully for some time. Then he drew his short-sword and stabbed the man through the heart. The Owenacht’s battle axe he thrust through his own belt.
Expecting pain, he crouched, wrestled the dead body onto his shoulders, stood up.
There was no pain.
Bemused, he set off through the woods carrying his dead enemy and looking for the rest of the Dalcassians.
Chapter Twenty-seven
IN THE ANNALS, DECLAN OF KILL DALUA SUBSEQUENTLY WROTE, “A battle was fought at Annacotty, the Ford of Small Boats, between the sons of Brian Boru and Domnall of the Owenachts. A number of men were slain.”
As Donough had discovered before he returned to the ford, the man he killed in the forest was not the Owenacht leader. That honor had gone to his cousin Fergal Mac Anluan, who endlessly recounted every detail of the death of Domnall Mac Donohue until no one would listen.
Teigue had also slain several men, but he did not talk about them. For a victorious warrior, he was in a far from celebratory mood.
“All-out war with the Owenachts, that’s what this means,” he predicted glumly to his officers as they made their way back to Kincora. “Cian was turned against us already, now the rest of his tribe share his enmity.”
He shot a dark look toward his younger brother, riding off to one side. But Donough did not notice. His thoughts were far away.
He was trying to recall the voice of the person who had soothed his injured head in the forest—and perhaps saved his life. A conviction was slowly growing in him, based on no fact whatsoever, that he had been rescued by the girl in the red skirt.
Impossible, he knew.
And yet … and yet, he wanted to believe.
He rode bemused, letting his horse pick its own way. From time to time he reached up absentmindedly to scratch at the dried blood crusted on his ear and jaw.
As soon as they reached Kincora, Teigue summoned his personal physician to examine his brother’s head wound. Ferchar had Donough sit on a stool in the courtyard, in good light. “You say you were hit with an axe?”
“Only a glancing blow, fortunately. I brought the axe back with me.”
Donough tried not to flinch as Ferchar lifted the partially dislodged flap of skin with a practiced thumb, bathed it gently with willow-water to free the clotted hair, then eased it into its proper place and affixed an herbal poultice of ribwort and plantain. “For an axe wound this is remarkably clean,” the physician commented. “Men who survive axe wounds usually die anyway of some latent poison that clings to the blades, but there is no sign of purulence here. Did you bathe your head in a magic spring? Or did the guardian spirit of the Dal Cais come down from her mountain to mend you?” he teased, chuckling.
Donough did not laugh. Instead something shifted behind his eyes.
He had told no one of his encounter in the forest, partly because it might be a figment of his imagination resulting from his head wound. Partly because, if real, it was a very private memory.
His response to Ferchar was simply, “The axe hasn’t been forged that can kill me.”
Perhaps it was true.
Once Teigue learned that his brother was going to be all right, he crisply informed Donough that his services were no longer required at Kincora.
He chose not to remember the promise he had made to himself in the ford.
Donough was genuinely taken aback. “Is
this how you show your gratitude for my help in the battle?”
“There would have been no battle if you had not caused trouble between our tribe and the Owenachts.”
“A quarrel! It was just a simple quarrel!”
“That’s how wars start,” Teigue told him. “Had it not been for your ‘simple quarrel’ I doubt if the Owenachts would ever have undertaken to march on Limerick.”
“You can’t know that! Don’t you listen to the news your own messengers bring you? Battles are breaking out all over Ireland. Men who have been allies for years are turning on one another. The Ard Ri held them together, but those coalitions are falling apart now”
Teigue ignored him. “You alone are responsible for this problem,” he insisted, “and I think the farther you stay from Kincora, the better. Perhaps with time resentments will die down.”
“And you’ll continue as King of Munster without opposition,” Donough said darkly. “Or so you think.”
“What does that mean?”
Donough shrugged. “Whatever you want it to mean.”
Gathering his supporters, he informed them in terse monosyllables that they were leaving again. “We will go back to Corcomrua long enough to collect my women,” he told Conor, “but then I must build a fort for myself. I don’t have to have Kincora to survive.”
But the jut of his jaw and the light in his eyes said otherwise.
Before they set out for the Burren once more, Donough called on Maeve. “Whatever happens between Teigue and myself,” he told her, “I shall always be grateful to you for the kindness you have shown me.”
She put out her hand to him. “I don’t want the two of you quarreling. I don’t think he does either, not really. But by now it’s become a matter of pride with him; he’s his father’s son.”
“So am I,” said Donough.
He had one final visit to pay. Approaching Mac Liag’s house by the lake, he found the poet standing in the doorway as if expecting him.
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