Donough felt no earth beneath his feet, no air in his lungs.
In that moment Neassa became precious to him.
Her miscarried infant was equally precious. A boy; a son! A child Donough had thought of only as an abstraction, another reason for building the fort, suddenly became a flesh-and-blood person.
And dead.
My child, he thought, the reality sinking in. My child!
A spasm of agony convulsed him.
He did not know if he wept for Neassa or the dead infant or all the possible futures so cruelly extinguished. He sobbed like a child, though he was seventeen years old and a man.
Then two arms enfolded him and a hand at the back of his neck pressed his face into someone’s shoulder.
Gormlaith held Donough locked in her arms while he wept, her eyes daring anyone else to try to comfort him.
When a messenger came to announce the fort on the peaty stream was almost finished, Donough showed no interest. “You can move down there now if you want,” he told his mother with an air of indifference.
“I? Live by myself in the wilderness?”
“You can have servants.”
She laughed harshly.
“What are you going to do?” people kept asking him, but he did not know. It was easiest to do nothing.
The fever that had claimed Neassa did not kill anyone else, though several in Conor’s fort sickened for a time until the lord of Corcomrua sent for help to purify his stronghold.
“A priest could bless the place,” he explained to Donough, “but the spirits that inhabit the Burren are older than Christianity. We need someone who knows how to placate them, so I’m sending runners for a druid.”
Donough’s eyes brightened for the first time in days.
Then he was angry with himself for hoping it might be Padraic’s daughter who responded to the summons.
At night he lay on the bed he had shared with Neassa and endured the corroding pangs of guilt for the first time in his young life. He gnawed on his knuckles and writhed, sleepless, as he imagined the things he might have done differently; actions that could have led to a happier outcome.
If I bad known she would die … if … if …
A druid arrived in due course, leading an ass piled high with sticks of ashwood and bags of herbs. He was a stooped graybeard with a feral face; no one could be less like Padraic’s daughter. He built fires throughout the cashel, creating clouds of thick smoke scented with spratling poppy, borage, and trefoil. The smoke was driven into chamber and outbuilding by means of flapping blankets, while the druid chanted unintelligibly in a high, nasal voice; a song for elder gods.
When the old man had performed this ritual for three consecutive nights at the dark of the moon, he packed what remained of his wood and herbs and sat down to enjoy a feast prepared by Conor’s women.
“Your home is safe now,” he assured them. “Have you any ale to wash down this meat? It seems a little tough and my teeth are not what they were. I would not mind a few more stewed apples, while you’re about it. And some honeycomb, perhaps, with a nice bit of oatcake?”
When he had gone, Conor called in Christian priests to bless his stronghold.
They wrinkled their noses at the smell of herb-scented smoke but wisely refrained from commenting. They were men of the Burren.
Chapter Twenty-nine
I rode south one more time to the fort in the ivy-girt valley. With Neassa and the child dead it was hard to imagine myself living there, but I needed to have another look at the place. Perhaps then I could make some decisions about what to do next
Ronan and a small armed guard accompanied me, but I insisted they wait some distance from the fort I wanted to be alone within the walls.
The men who had built the fort were gone. The stronghold was completed, lacking only furnishing and provisioning. Oak gates yawned ajar, waiting.
Waiting for what? I wondered as I spancelled my horse and turned it loose to graze. The animal was used to the soft leather hobbles and knew exactly how long a step it could take as it drifted off across the meadow, sampling various grasses.
I just stood and watched it for a time, forestalling the moment Then I turned and walked slowly through the gateway.
There should have been a welcoming ceremony with a symbolic burial beneath the lintel. Harp and pipe and timpan playing; people singing. The first fire kindled on the hearth, a whole ox roasting on the spit. Vats of ale and buttermilk Men roistering, women laughing.
Instead there was … nothing.
In front of the round stone house I would have shared with Neassa, I cocked my head to listen.
Soft wind whispered across Thomond. In the meadow a cuckoo reiterated its two-syllable announcement of self. The air was heavy with summer; high summer, drowsy and warm. Cresses were green in the stream. Insects rustled through the ivy on the bank.
Within the fort, however, there was only stillness and silence. No life but my own.
Something seemed to stir at the edge of my vision; when I turned to look nothing was there.
Can a place that’s never been lived in be haunted? The ghosts of a future that will not happen, perhaps.
Steeling myself, I peered inside the unoccupied house. My imagination had long since furnished the chamber with a carved and painted bedbox, iron firedogs at the hearth, chests for clothing, a woman’s loom, cauldrons and vats and pots, herbs suspended from the rafters, drying.
But when my eyes adjusted to the dimness they saw only empty shadows.
Something ached at the bottom of my throat
Turning away, I wandered around the stronghold. Mine was a desultory examination; the enthusiasm I once felt was gone.
I had not re-created Kincora after all. The fort was too small and too ordinary and its very newness offended me, the skinned surfaces of the stone, the wounded wood still bleeding from axe and adze.
As if to add to my pain, everywhere I looked I found sloppy workmanship, not good enough for Brian Boru but obviously considered good enough for Donough Mac Brian. The Celtic carvings on pillar and post looked as if they had been hacked out of the wood by a malevolent child. Iron hinges that should have gleamed with grease were raw and dull, already dappled with rust
Nothing was as I had dreamed.
Suddenly I froze.
This time I was certain I saw something out of the corner of my eye.
I spun around.
Shifting shadows on a stone wall briefly produced the effect of a full skirt brisking around a corner.
A trick of light made an arm seem to beckon from an open doorway.
My heart thudded. “Are you here?” I cried as I ran forward, hope and guilt struggling for supremacy.
Guilt won. My steps slowed.
If I had been with Neassa and the unborn child instead of here …
If I had not been lured by the vision of another woman and wanted to build my fort close to her …
Druids … Accursed … Cathal is right about them …
I stopped. Turned around, prepared to make my way back to the gate.
Then I heard a sound like a light foot pattering over beaten earth and my heart leaped again.
Someone was humming at the very edge of audibility.
Instinctively my hand dropped to my sword hilt
But the voice was light and soft; a woman’s.
The wife of one of the local laborers, I tried to tell myself, curious to see what her husband built
But I did not believe it
Without bothering to summon Ronan and his men, I undertook a thorough search of the fort
While the sun moved through the sky I moved from chamber to outbuilding and back again, crossing and recrossing my tracks, peering into storerooms, clambering onto walls to see what was on the other side. I had the profound conviction that the fort contained another being who was always just a few steps ahead of me. Or a few steps behind.
Several times I whirled around to find only my shadow follo
wing me.
But I was not alone. Of that I was certain. And I wanted desperately to find her.
Until Neassa’s death I had been a boy; now I was a man. Being a man was terribly lonely.
“Where are you?”
Only echoes answered.
“Who are you?”
The echoes mocked me.
At last, despairing, I stood in the center of the stronghold I had built and recalled the words of the poet Mac Liag: “The possession of a palace will not make you happy.”
Chapter Thirty
THE COLD, SHARP AIR OF ALBA DID NOT SMELL LIKE HOME, EVEN after all these years. If she closed her eyes, Blanaid could still summon Ireland: lush grassy meadows fringed by fragrant, magical hawthorn; wet ferns glowing as if with inner light; holly guarding the approaches to primeval forests of oak and ash that rang in all seasons with bird-song. Her senses were starved for that wanton luxuriance.
On a day like this when the wind was blowing from the southwest, it was easy to surrender to melancholy. The Welsh princes who sometimes visited her husband’s court had a word, hiraeth, that meant a deep yearning, and another word, cynefin, that referred to one’s own place, one’s native habitat. Blanaid understood both words, though she had learned little Welsh.
She did not speak of her feelings to Malcolm, of course. He had no patience with women’s moods, the ephemera of emotion. His interests and energies were totally involved with being King of Alba, a title he had held since 1005.
King. Blanaid rolled the word on her tongue. Ri, in Gaelic; from the Latin, Rix.
Brian Boru’s daughter, she had been educated as befitted her station.
“Ard Ri,” she whispered to herself. “High King.”
That would always and only mean Brian Boru to her. How strange to think that Malachi Mor had reclaimed the title, with no formality, but as his right. Stranger still that no one had bothered to oppose him.
“Who could?” Malcolm had commented when they learned the previous year of Malachi’s accession. “Who else has the stature? Malachi has tradition behind him, being a prince of the Ui Neill, and he certainly knows the obligations of the office.”
“He should by now,” Blanaid had remarked bitterly. “He learned them by observing my father.”
“I meant from his own experience. Before Brian.”
Before Brian. Sometimes Blanaid felt that everything in life was divided in two parts, before Brian and after.
If she felt that way, how much more intensely must they feel it in Ireland?
Her mind far away across the sea, she paced slowly along the footpath leading down to the pond where she bathed in warm weather. The hardy Scots braved the water even in the dead of winter, but she came from a gentler land. She would not bathe this evening in late summer. There was already a hint of autumn in the air, a smell of woodsmoke. The wise woman predicted the winter of 1016 would be bitterly cold.
Blanaid shivered and drew her cloak more tightly around her body.
Behind her rose the stony mass of Malcolm’s royal seat, looking almost like a natural outcropping of rock. A hill-fort had stood on the site since ancient times, he once told her; built and destroyed and rebuilt and expanded in that curious death and rebirth common to such places.
From what stronghold does Malachi Mor rule Ireland now? Blanaid wondered. Not Tara, surely. Tara had not been used as a primary royal residence for centuries. Newly inaugurated high kings occupied its decaying magnificence only as a symbol of possession, and soon left for sturdier, more comfortable abodes. Brian had ruled from Kincora, although he could have used Cashel, seat of the kingdom of Munster. Malachi probably held court in his family stronghold at Dun na Sciath—not as kingly a palace as Kincora, Blanaid thought smugly.
But as she knew, he was demonstrating his reestablished kingship in other ways. In January of 1015, together with his kinsman Flaherty, King of Aileach, Malachi had led a successful attack on Dublin. The two looted and burned Sitric’s city in retaliation for the Easter rising against the Ard Ri, then turned southward and exacted revenge upon Leinster, taking many hostages. Gormlaith’s brother Maelmordha had been prince of Leinster, had joined Sitric in the rebellion against Brian, had fought and died at Clontarf. So Leinster must pay.
As part of his punishment of the eastern province, Malachi had—ill advisedly, Blanaid thought—bestowed kingship of Leinster on Donncuan, the son of one of Brian’s slain officers.
“A gesture of reconciliation,” Malcolm had remarked when they heard the news. “Malachi’s trying to mend his walls with the Dal Cais. He obviously has wit enough to realize he cannot retain the high kingship without the support of Munster.”
The Leinstermen were predictably outraged at this arbitrary bestowal of their tribelands upon a Dalcassian prince. Defeated at Clontarf by the man they would always consider “that upstart from Munster,” they were simmering, biding their time. They would rebel again; nothing was more certain.
The old pattern of reprisal, Blanaid thought wearily. My father tried to break that mold. But now …
Malachi as Ard Ri and everything the way it was, before Brian. The flower of the Dal Cais dead at Clontarf, and Malachi, apparently by general consent, presiding over an Ireland that was reverting to unbridled tribal warfare.
Sometimes Blanaid felt very old and tired.
A shrill whistle split the air behind her. She turned to see her maidservant standing at the top of the path with two fingers in her mouth. The woman called down, “Your husband summons you, lady. He says there’s something you might like to hear. A messenger brings the latest tidings from Ireland!”
Blanaid was briefly startled, as if God had overheard her thoughts and sent a direct response. Taking her skirts in her two hands, she hurried up the path.
A yellow-haired, jug-eared messenger stood warming his backside by the fire in Malcolm’s great hall while he regaled king and courtiers with a mixture of hard news and titillating gossip.
As Blanaid entered the hall, Malcolm threw an automatic glance in his wife’s direction. His dark eyes gleamed like obsidian beneath their heavy black brows. The sight of her still pleased him after all these years, though he never told her so. Revealing affection to a woman was a sign of weakness.
But she was wearing well, he admitted to himself.
He had wanted an Irish wife because he had an Irish mother who wore well. When Brian Boru, who was then only King of Munster, was marrying his children into noble families wherever he could to extend his influence beyond provincial borders, Malcolm had agreed to have a look at one of his daughters.
One look at Blanaid had been all he needed. Twenty-six years later she was still good to look at, with a straight back, a relatively unlined brow, and large eyes the color of the sea off Montrose. In dim light she could be mistaken for one of her own daughters.
“I thought you’d be interested in hearing this,” Malcolm said now as Blanaid paused just inside the low, arched doorway. “It’s about Ossory.”
Pressing her lips tightly together, Blanaid crossed the room to seat herself on a cushioned bench near the hearth. No matter how many times she told him, her husband still thought she came from Ossory.
“Tell us that part again,” Malcolm instructed the messenger. “Take up where I stopped you before.”
Dutifully the man recited, “When Maelfogarty of Ossory led a raiding party into Thomond recently, Prince Donough Mac Brian recruited an army to challenge him. The Ossorians defeated the Dalcassians and a number of Donough’s followers were slain.”
Malcolm turned to his wife. “What do you think of that? Your Ossorians must be good warriors.”
“They are not my Ossorians,” she reminded him patiently, as she had done many times before. “My mother was born in Ossory, but all her people came from Connacht Those things matter in Ireland. I am connected with Donough Mac Brian, though; he’s my half-brother.”
Malcolm suppressed a smile. Teasing his wife gave him a small and secret pleasure
because she never seemed to realize she was being teased. Long before she set foot on the shores of Alba, Blanaid had believed that all Scots were humorless. As Malcolm, until he met her, had assumed all Irish were emotional. Blanaid, however, was a deep pool, keeping her feelings to herself. She managed his household calmly and competently, eschewing extravagance, which pleased him. There had never been great passion between them—he believed she was incapable of passion—but her very serenity had proved a haven in his otherwise turbulent life.
And he did enjoy teasing her.
“I know about your half-brother,” he said aloud. “And you have another who is now King of Munster. Should he not be the one to challenge raiders in his kingdom?”
Blanaid’s thoughts ran back over the years, searching for brightly lit niches of memory along the dark passageway of time. “Teigue was always the least contentious of us,” she said. “I recall him as a rather gentle boy, compared to the others.”
“Gentle.” Malcolm gave a dismissive snort. “Not a particularly desirable attribute in a king; kings have to be fighters. What about Donough ? What’s he like?”
“I don’t know him. You and I were married and I was in Alba before he was born. He was the youngest of all Father’s children.”
“Your father certainly sired a number of sons,” Malcolm remarked, his rasping voice tinged with envy. Though he was only thirteen years younger than the late Ard Ri of Ireland, his offspring were lamentably fewer: four daughters. His people blamed Blanaid, but in his inmost heart he suspected the seeds for sons withered and died in him before he could ever sow them in a woman. Punishment for his sins, if one believed in such things. But a king could ill afford a conscience.
“Prince Donough is a widower,” volunteered the messenger in response to Malcolm’s query. “His wife miscarried a son and died of a fever.”
A frown stitched Blanaid’s forehead. “A widower already, and he not twenty? That’s a hard beginning.”
The messenger nodded agreement. “Added to that, Prince Teigue has refused him part of the inheritance he claimed, and now this defeat; a defeat he did not deserve!” the man added, betraying his own sympathies in the family quarrel. “He’s a fine warrior, Donough is.”
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