“This temporal existence is a burden and a punishment, an ordeal to be endured so we may earn an eternity in the company of Christ,” the abbot frequently lectured his monks. The druidic joy in life was a refutation of his personal philosophy.
“We are taught that unquestioning obedience to the Church,” Cathal sternly reminded Declan, “is the only path to true happiness. How then can we tolerate the dangerous example the druids set?”
He began to write letters to the hierarchy expressing his fear and loathing and urging that something be done, once and for all, to destroy druidry. But the bishops he addressed were, like himself, Irish. Their Christianity, no matter how ardent, overlaid a respect for ancient wisdom bred deep in their bones. They were not prepared to attack the druids overtly.
“Pray for their souls,” Cathal was advised, “that they may find the path of redemption.”
Sworn to obedience, he tried. He prayed long and hard on the cold stone flags of the chapel and arose with painfully stiffened knees. These he offered as a sacrifice to God, but his heart was not softened. Having recognized the menace, he saw it everywhere. Ireland abounded in druidic seductions.
Cathal loved the Church with all the passion of a man who has felt only one passion in his life. His was a fierce, proprietary devotion. Were it possible for him to convert Padraic’s children he would have done so, but instead, as in a vision, he saw himself singlehandedly defending Christianity against them.
The warrior in him thrilled. The Church Triumphant.
Chapter Forty-two
GORMLAITH AWOKE; A LAYERED PROCESS BEGINNING WITH A FOGGY awareness of self, then of a hard surface beneath her, lastly of a throbbing head. She was lying on the floor. Someone had wrapped a woolen robe around her and jammed the ends under her body. When she moved she felt another sort of throbbing lower down, a sweet, familiar soreness in her female parts.
Her eyes opened the merest slit. An arm’s length from her face lay a tumble of chess pieces.
Brian’s chess pieces.
She stared at them blankly for a moment—then saw, in clear and perfect memory, a large hand hover over the pawns. A hand with red-gold hair on the back.
Her body turned to ice; to fire.
He was alive!
Of course he was alive. How could she have been so foolish as to think otherwise? The man had not been born who could kill Brian Boru!
He was alive and the terrible past was relegated to nightmare.
All my sins are forgiven me, Gormlaith thought gratefully. She dragged herself to her knees and signed the Cross on her breast.
Soon he will come through the door, she told herself, and we will be together again as we were in the beginning, or as we should have been, if I had been content to love him as a woman loves a man, and not compete with him. This time things will be different.
She glanced down at her hands. In the dim light they looked young and smooth. When she raised her fingers to her throat and stroked the skin, it felt firm to her touch.
The years have been rolled back, she thought in amazement. I am a girl again, and he will be the only man I ever know. I shall make him happy, oh, I shall make him so very happy!
Gormlaith gazed around the chamber, looking for a basin in which to wash her face, or a comb for her tangled hair. He must never see her so rumpled. She must be beautiful for him; beautiful and young. As he would be beautiful and young, so tall, so strong, blazing, and crackling with that ferocious, irresistible energy that had won Ireland …
No. If he was young, his great victories were still ahead of him. Kincora was not yet built …
“So where am I?” Gormlaith asked of the stone walls.
They kept silent.
She got slowly to her feet. Sleeping on the stone floor had left her very stiff, but she ignored the pain. It was nothing to someone so young. A torn gown she did not recognize lay on the floor, but she did not pick it up. Let him return and find her naked, and they would …
There were footsteps in the passage. Her heart was pounding so hard she could barely breathe. As the door opened a cold draught blew across the floor and she shivered, but the smile she put on for him was radiant.
“Brian.” Her lips shaped his name silently. Like a prayer.
He stood in the doorway, a big man, filling the space. Suddenly she was as shy as a virgin. She stood waiting for him to take her in his arms, and as he came toward her, she saw with perfect clarity the noble forehead, the long, straight nose, the stark cheekbones. The luminous gray eyes in their deeply carved sockets.
He was alive.
Gormlaith could not wait any longer, but hurled herself into his arms.
A moment later her scream rang wildly through the corridors of Glamis.
In the days that followed, Gormlaith’s use of paints and dyes grew more lavish, accentuating her age, yet she took to wearing the simple gowns of an unmarried girl. She was by turns giddy, querulous, diffident, and demanding.
But the king continued to welcome her to his bed.
She had given him a fright on that first occasion, screaming like a madwoman when he returned to his chamber. Malcolm had hastily clamped his arms around her and put one hand over her mouth to muffle her screams. Then, when she was quiet, he let his hand slide down her body, enjoying her heaving breasts.
“I thought you were Brian,” she murmured.
“You were groggy and half-awake, it was just a dream,” he insisted.
She almost believed him.
But not quite.
She closed her eyes and let him fondle her, however, and in the dark behind her eyelids the alchemy of desire changed one king into another.
“Brian,” Gormlaith whispered, parting her thighs for him.
Malcolm had smiled grimly to himself. So that was the game she preferred to play, was it? Well, he was able for her—particularly since he was the beneficiary of her passion.
The next night he again invited her to his chamber and kept the room in darkness, and when she called him Brian he did not contradict her.
If she had been good before, she then became extraordinary.
Thereafter Malcolm slept with her as often as the desire took him, which was often indeed. The fires of his youth flamed again, an unexpected spring interrupting the onset of winter.
And in the dark, afterward, he found himself talking with her as he had never talked with any of his other women.
Not a passive confidante like Blanaid, Gormlaith demonstrated an uncanny understanding of the male world of politics and power. She was a font of stratagems. Privately, his courtiers grumbled that the king’s bedchamber became his council chamber when the Princess of Leinster arrived.
The winter Donough spent at the court of Malcolm the Second was the coldest of his life. But as fire tempers a sword blade, harsh Alba tempered him. A young man had arrived at Glamis; a man full-grown would leave it.
During the gray months, Malcolm kept the Irish prince close by his side. Donough answered the questions he asked, but more frequently was content to listen. The older man was wily and experienced and did not seem to mind passing on his wisdom.
But on an evening when he had drunk too much Danish ale at a banquet to entertain a chieftain from Strathclyde, Donough remarked to Cumara, “Malcolm is not easy company. My mother gets along with him, but I always feel as if he’s watching me over the edge of a shield.”
“Does it bother you, knowing they sleep together?” the poet’s son asked bluntly. He too had drunk an excess of ale.
Donough hesitated before answering. “At first it did. It seemed a betrayal of my father. Then I reminded myself that he had ended their marriage, and if she married one man or slept with a thousand it no longer had anything to do with him. Now I am glad that she has found some pleasure in life again.”
“Do you really mean that?”
Donough stiffened. “I do of course.”
“You answered just a bit too quickly.”
“Nonsense, Cum
ara, you’re imagining things.”
Yet at night, when he lay in his bed knowing full well Gormlaith had gone to Malcolm’s chamber, Donough tossed and turned. His fevered imagination presented him with a hundred different images of his mother in the arms of the swarthy Scot.
Late one night he could bear it no longer. He rose, threw on a furlined brat, and went out into the passageway. He had no destination in mind other than escape from his thoughts, but he had gone only a short distance when he met his sister.
In the light from a torch still burning on the passage wall Donough could see that his sister’s face was drawn, her eyes red-rimmed.
“Is anything wrong?” he asked. He felt a sudden urge to take her in his arms and comfort her, but she had done nothing so far to encourage such an intimacy.
Blanaid lifted her chin. “Of course not, I merely wanted a breath of air.”
“I do myself. Shall I go with you?”
When she nodded assent they continued along the passage together, then made their way single-file down a narrow stone staircase and out into the great hall. Humans and hounds slept together on the rushstrewn floor, keeping one another warm. The fire on the hearth had gone out. The stale air smelled of dead ash and sleep.
Donough and Blanaid passed through the hall without waking anyone. A yawning guard unbolted a massive oak door for them with a curious glance but no question, and they went outside.
The night was bitterly cold. There was no moon; the stars were so bright they stabbed at the eyes. Blanaid drew her cloak more tightly around her and gazed upward. “Winter nights here have their own sort of beauty,” she said conversationally.
“They do.”
A pause ensued. “Is Alba what you expected?” she asked at last.
“I don’t know what I expected.”
“Why then did you come?”
“I’m not sure of that either,” he replied honestly. “My mother …”
“Ah yes. Your mother.” Blanaid’s voice was carefully neutral. “She was something I did not expect.”
Donough laughed. “No one is ever prepared for Gormlaith.”
In spite of herself, Blanaid laughed too. “No, I suppose not.”
Donough tried to read her face in the starlight. “Is she the reason you were crying?”
“I wasn’t crying. My husband has always had women; he’s a king. It means nothing to me.”
“No,” he agreed amiably. He slouched against the wall beside her, and together they watched the sky as if messages were concealed among the stars.
“How strange it must be,” Blanaid remarked after a while, “to have that woman as a mother.”
“She’s the only mother I’ve ever had, so I’ve no comparison. But most of the time I don’t think of her as my mother.”
“You don’t? How do you think of her?”
“Just as Gormlaith.”
“And our father?”
Donough drew a deep breath. When he spoke his voice was so deep and so familiar it startled Blanaid. “Ard Ri.”
She whirled to stare at him. “You sound just like him.”
“Do I?”
Blanaid’s throat closed. Her eyes began to sting again. Not fair! she thought. I have not wept in years, and now twice in the same night …
Donough exclaimed, “Look! Look there!”
She blinked hard and followed his pointing finger in time to see a shooting star. “The druids used to say a shooting star meant the death of a king,” she said around the lump in her throat.
At the mention of druids, Cera leaped into Donough’s mind. Overcome by an echo of sweet laughter and a smell of the wild woods, he stared unseeing into the night, his thoughts very far away.
Suddenly, unexpectedly, Blanaid broke. A storm of sobs shook her. She did not know if she was crying because Brian Boru was dead, because Malcolm was with Gormlaith, or simply because the sight of her brother had brought back Ireland with painful intensity.
In the next moment her brother’s arms were around her and his hand at the back of her head was gently pressing her face into the hollow of his shoulder.
“Sssh,” he whispered. “It’s all right. Sssh now.”
Never in his life had Donough held sister or mother as he held Blanaid now. The emotions engendered were a revelation to him.
Surely what he had felt for Cera was love; a love that time and distance were gradually investing with a nostalgic melancholy. His feelings for Blanaid lacked the sexual excitement, but they were equally tender, and to his surprise they gave him a sense of family which he had never experienced with Gormlaith.
As he held his sister he was very aware that they shared the same father, a connection that was almost tangible. Links in a chain, Donough thought musingly. It was impossible to imagine putting his arms around Brian Boru, yet through his sister he was somehow embracing the man.
Love had a life of its own, then, an immortality that had nothing to do with death or distance. With Blanaid in his arms, Donough had a sense of forces much larger than himself.
Cera, he thought again.
Brother and sister stood together under the stars.
They never spoke of that night afterward. Blanaid’s acquired Scottish reticence kept her silent, and Donough would not bring up the subject on his own, but he knew the same thing had happened to both of them. They had found family. When their eyes met in the hall or the courtyard or as they passed one another in some corridor, a warmth leaped between them that did not depend on words.
Across the Irish Sea, another member of Donough’s family was thinking of him, though not tenderly. Carroll the historian made it his business to follow the fortunes of Brian’s children, and had innocently mentioned Donough’s trip during a conversation with Teigue.
They were in the great hall at Cashel, where Teigue now spent most of his time. Because the restoration of Kincora was taking longer than anticipated, he was keeping his family in the traditional fortress of the Munster kings. Cashel was magnificent in a forbidding way, comprised of a cluster of stone buildings perched atop a huge limestone outcropping with a view spanning much of Munster.
Teigue had begun taking several walks a day around the perimeter of the height. He would pause at various points and stand motionless, gazing out across the rolling, fertile land with a self-satisfied expression.
But Carroll would always prefer Kincora. He said as much, then added offhandedly, “I daresay Donough would agree with me. He must be finding Alba inhospitable by comparison.”
Teigue stiffened. “What’s he doing in Alba? Why did someone not tell me sooner?”
“I thought you knew already,” replied Carroll.
“I did not know. Is he on a pilgrimage? To Iona, perhaps?”
“It seems to be a family visit. Your sister Blanaid invited him to Malcolm’s stronghold at Glamis, so he and Gormlaith …”
“Donough took that woman? To Alba?!”
“He did.”
“Then it’s no family visit,” Teigue snapped. “If Gormlaith is involved it can only be a conspiracy. What’s she scheming to do now, have him take Munster from me?”
Carroll said soothingly, “Och, I’m sure neither of them has designs on your kingship.”
“You’re almost right,” Teigue shot back. “Munster is not their final objective, one province would never satisfy Gormlaith. She intends her son to be Ard Ri, and this visit to Malcolm’s court is her way of promoting that ambition. It should be perfectly obvious to anyone who knows the woman!
“The very fact that Donough is her son condemns him. He must never be allowed power; a door that opens the slightest for him lets Gormlaith enter.
“I did not seek to be King of Munster, but now that I am, Donough will not make Cashel his steppingstone to Tara. I won’t let him. With Brian Boru’s own sword I will bar his way.”
Carroll’s jaw dropped. “Brian’s sword? You have Brian’s sword?”
A sly light, which once would have been uncharacteri
stic of Teigue, crept into his eyes. “I might know where it is.”
He would say no more, but Carroll was like a hound with a bone. The historian began quietly questioning the sentries, the spear carriers, the lower echelon who always knew more than the nobility.
He never mentioned the sword directly, but in time he had the answer he sought. It was not the answer he expected.
Chapter Forty-three
IN ADDITION TO BEING KING OF THE SCOTS AND THE PICTS, MALCOLM had been, since the death of a cousin in 991, Prince of Cumbria, the northwestern region along the Irish Sea. With his defeat of the Northumbrian army at Carham in 1016, he had extended his reign south to the Cheviot Hills. The control of so much territory required not only constant military vigilance, but considerable monarchical administration.
For this purpose he held court at Scone, to which he invited Donough and his men to accompany him. The distance was not great, a long day’s ride along a well-beaten road through valleys carpeted with dead bracken. Gray crows wheeled above in gray sky, calling harshly to one another.
Scone was an ancient assembly site predating Christianity. The buildings that now stood there were constructed of stone-kerbed timbers, with sod roofs upon which rank grasses grew. Built in the manner of an ancient broch, they comprised a cluster of round chambers, low-ceilinged, smelling of the earth.
“The Picts prefer this to Glamis,” Malcolm explained to Donough on their first visit. “They are, or were, cave-dwellers, short-statured folk who feel comfortable in these surroundings. Skilled artisans, though. The silver ornamentation you see all around you is their work.”
Scone felt old, Donough thought. And not Celtic. There was something else here, a different flavor in the air. The scent of metal and stone-dust.
Malcolm personally escorted his Irish guests to the tree-girded Moot Hill, or Assembly Site. “This mound was formed centuries ago of earth collected from throughout Pictland,” he said proudly. “And there you see the Stone of Scone, believed to be part of the original stone pillow upon which the biblical patriarch Jacob rested while seeing his vision of angels.”
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