Finn believed him. ‘And you got me instead.’
‘A portent,’ said Brother Pinginn, ‘that’s what it was. And don’t tell me you don’t need me for something or other, because I don’t believe you and I shall help you anyway. So there.’
Obviously she had acquired him, or he had acquired her. ‘Can you teach me to write?’
‘Oh, that,’ said Brother Pinginn, ‘Consider it done, dear.’
* * *
A week later three pairs of eyes watching from a mountaintop saw a rider take St Kevin’s Road towards the north at breakneck speed. Even as miniaturised by distance, they could tell that it was a bitterly angry young man who rode as if in pursuit of something or someone.
‘And that’s that,’ said Finn. ‘Now we can get on with the plan. But first I’m going for a walk. I don’t want anyone with me.’
* * *
Brother Pinginn came toiling up the track to where Art and Finn waited for him under the trees. It would have been cooler to wait in the cave – the heat was becoming ferocious – but Finn was impatient and insisted on going to meet him.
‘Well?’ she said.
‘Do you mind?’ asked Brother Pinginn, going to a trickle of a stream and dabbing his face with its water. ‘It’s hot. I’m a very hot person.’
‘Well?’
‘Well, he’s there all right, like your cousin said. And he really is a priest, though who ordained him I can’t think, because he drinks, God love him. Perhaps he’s got a secret sorrow.’
‘I’ll give him secret sorrow,’ said Finn, ‘Go on.’
‘Well, my friend – the kitchen porter, you know – my friend says that he – that’s the priest, not my friend – got so unreliable with his drinking that even Dermot got fed up with him and chucked him out of his household, and he sought sanctuary at Glendalough.’
‘We know that,’ said Art roughly. He couldn’t stand Brother Pinginn. ‘What did you do?’
‘Well, I told my friend the kitchen porter to take him a message, not saying who it was from of course, to say that if he can climb over the wall tonight while the others are at night office, he’ll find some people waiting for him who know something to his advantage.’
‘He’ll be suspicious,’ said Finn, ‘God in heaven, it even sounds suspicious to me. He won’t come.’
‘Well I didn’t know what to do,’ said Pinginn crossly. ‘But I also said that these same people would give him a flask of wine if he came. And that was very clever, you know, because Abbot Laurence has forbidden him all alcohol except communion wine, so he hasn’t had a proper drink for ages. I know drunks. I bet you he comes.’
‘How much?’ asked Finn automatically. ‘All right, we’ll pack up and be ready in case it works. Did you ask about… the Pilgrim?’
‘Yes, I did. The poor leper. Well, he was very bewildered at first when he came round. He kept saying there’d been a mistake and that you would come and explain everything.’ Pinginn’s small face distorted with pain, because Finn had squeezed her eyes tight shut. ‘I’m so sorry. But it’s all right; he got angry after a bit, especially when Brother Clyn kept trying to give him herbal baths and such. In fact, he threw Brother Clyn into the river and knocked down the monks who were trying to restrain him, and stole a horse and rode off saying that he was going to England and that if you ever crossed his path again he’d kill you. So that’s better, isn’t it?’
‘Ideal.’ It was what she’d planned; there was no point in whining over her success being a desolation.
‘And I also told my friend to tell Abbot Laurence that I’d received a visitation from St Brigid saying I must take the world for my pillow and go off to serve her.’ He crossed himself. ‘Well, you were her Comarba so it’s true in a way, isn’t it?’
The processional that night was Psalm 37. ‘Fret not thyself because of evildoers, neither be thou envious against workers of iniquity,’ sang the monks on their way to church, ‘For they shall soon be cut down like the grass, and wither as the green herb.’
Sitting on the bench by the stream on the other side of the wall from the chanters, where the oak tree shaded her from the light of an August moon, Finn experienced a longing to go back to the purity and ritual of Mother Church which made everything so simple. She was tired and scared at making decisions on her own authority. ‘But what else can Ido?’
‘Trust in the Lord, and do good,’ sang back the monks, ‘so shalt thou dwell in the land, and verily thou shalt be fed.’
It had been a problem persuading Brother Pinginn to get on a horse, though eventually, shaking with fright, he had persuaded himself: ‘Well, if it kills me perhaps it will cry, like Achilles’ horses did for their dead charioteer,’ though who his friend Achilles was he did not explain.
The chanting faded, commending Finn to commit her way to the Lord and He would bring it to pass, and as it did so a stone from the monastery wall rattled into the roadway, and a figure hung from its arms for a moment then dropped itself down.
Finn got up and walked towards it.
‘Hello, Madoc,’ she said.
They had laid plans for practically every contingency when Dermot of Leinster’s priest recognised her… if he attacked, if he ran, if he shouted… in the event he did none of these things because he didn’t recognise her. The bloated face which had presided over her rape at Kildare just stared sullenly back into hers and the voice which had blessed the assault into a marriage said: ‘What do you want?’
All that blood and pain, the baby, the madness, her exile from the normal world, and he didn’t even know who she was.
‘This,’ she said, and gave him Scathagh’s Ploy Number One. When he was on the ground retching she kicked him. ‘That’s for Boniface.’ He was dealing with a hag now, not a nun. She kicked him again, ‘And that’s for all the dead people,’ and once more, until Brother Pinginn, protesting, dragged her away. ‘That’s not going to help us.’
‘It helps me.’
A grinning Art bound the man’s hands, stuffed his bridle-cleaning rag into the open mouth, and got him up on a horse.
Then they headed for Dublin.
* * *
Brother Pinginn babbled nervously as they waited on Wood Quay where, they’d been told, most of the ships plying between Dublin and Bristol tied up.
Finn shook him. ‘Stop that silliness. We’ll have to take whatever boat will take us.’ And there won’t be too many of them, she thought. Most common sailors were superstitious about women, priests and monks as passengers and here was her party containing a representative from each of those unlucky categories. Two sea captains had already turned them down, and Art had gone off to try to find one prepared to take the risk. She could have taken passage in one of the high-class ships which served the monasteries, but she was afraid they would ask questions about Madoc, who at the moment was sitting comparatively quietly beside Brother Pinginn on a pile of planks in the semi-comatose condition induced by a dose of Scathagh’s laced mead, but who would become troublesome when it wore off. He had developed a horror of Finn and when conscious kept trying to escape from her as if from some dreadful thing in a nightmare.
Finn was tired, flustered and hot, lovesick for Lough Mask. Behind her the open gates in the walls of Dublin city spewed out people, sewage, and the effluent of its tanneries, butcheries and iron foundries down tiny alleyways lined with shops selling everything from women to whelks. The summer was drying up Dublin’s water supply so that instead of being swept down the open drains on either side of the streets and into the River Liffey, the sludge accumulated in them to the delight of a large population of flies. The knowledge that of her own free will she had opted for this place made her even sicker than its smell.
As they sat there, however, she became diverted, and Brother Pinginn became entranced, by the entertainment of Dublin’s quayside which was so busy and so noisy with such a polyglot mixture of tongues and nationalities that the devil puffing sulphur and wagging his tail could have passe
d through it virtually unremarked. His representatives on earth were there; Finn and Brother Pinginn watched with appalled fascination as the entire crew of a very strangely-shaped ship with a crescent on her mainsail unrolled mats onto the deck, knelt on them facing west and began a complicated series of obeisances and mutterings.
‘Saracens,’ squeaked Pinginn. They waited to see if God would strike them dead but, apart from shrieked imprecations from a St Patrick’s monk who was overseeing the unloading of oakboards from a curragh, nothing happened to them.
The St Patrick’s monk was having a bad time; while he was voicing his protest against the presence of a Saracen ship to the quaymaster, he caught sight of a party of merchants disembarking from a French fishing boat, and held up his crucifix as protection. The quaymaster shrugged; as long as the ungodly paid their harbour dues it was all right by him.
In many ways the indigenous traders, seafarers, shipwrights and workhands who strode the quays of Dublin were as compelling as its foreigners. The few women who were among them were as proportionally large as the men, who were tall and mostly fair, like their Norse ancestors who had come over in their dragon-prowed boats and made Ireland hell until it had domesticated them, its soft air dissipating their icy energy. Now they bellowed their greetings, bargainings and quarrels in the liquidity of the Irish language.
‘Aren’t they the big men,’ commented Brother Pinginn, wriggling with pleasure, ‘They make me feel weak. Ooh-er, look at that giant.’
A truly enormous blond man, at least six-foot-four in height, was standing in a rowing boat, sculling it upriver with one oar over the stern. As he reached their section of the quay, he moored it to one of the bollards, clambered ashore and leaned down into his boat to pull up a passenger in it with one hand so easily that for a moment he held him in the air before setting him gently on his feet. The passenger was Art.
‘Your man’s name is Hjörlief something,’ said Art as if his enormous companion were deaf, ‘He’s a Finnghoil but he’s left his land for this one and he trades mostly between Dublin and Bristol. He’ll give us a passage if he likes the look of us.’
Finn looked mistrustfully at the Norwegian, finding masculinity on this scale bothersome: ‘He’s over-large,’ she said.
‘Will you hush?’ hissed Art, ‘It’s taken me an age of trouble to find him.’ Finn saw that Art had done most of his searching in taverns.
At that moment Madoc, who had been coming round unnoticed while their attention was diverted, screamed at the sight of Finn beside him and bolted round the woodpile behind them. Finn bolted after him and found him trapped in a cul-de-sac formed by the stacked planking. Madoc shrieked when he saw her coming after him and began fighting. For the second time Finn gave him Scathagh’s Ploy Number One and followed it up by a modified version of Number Four, which cut off his air supply just enough to quieten him down without killing him. ‘The mead,’ she shouted to Pinginn on the other side of the woodpile. As she looked up she saw that the Norwegian, the only man tall enough to see over the stack, was watching her with interest. ‘Pinginn,’ she shouted again, and spoke upwards to the Norwegian: ‘I’m taking him to England as a witness in a property case. It’s all right. He just gets funny turns. He won’t be any trouble on the boat.’
‘Yust a property case, sure.’ The big man nodded calmly.
Madoc was drugged and half-dragged back to his place, peacefully leering. ‘He thinks he’s drunk again, poor lamb,’ said Brother Pinginn.
Finn was ruffled. ‘Will you take us or not?’ she demanded of the Norwegian. He nodded. ‘Ya. Three shillings each.’
‘Twelve shillings?’ Finn was appalled. ‘I could buy four horses for that.’
‘Could they yump from here to Bristol?’ asked the big man. ‘And property case maybe, but abduction we call it where I come from.’ His accent dipped and rose, but he was obviously no fool.
It was like bargaining with a mattress; behind the Norwegian’s vast, stolid exterior was a vast, stolid implacability which infuriated Finn. However, by reviving some of the old skills from Boniface’s marketing days, she eventually won concessions. It would make a large hole in Queen Eleanor’s gold, but the twelve shillings was to cover the return trip as well. They were also given permission to camp out over the nights in port on board the Norwegian’s ship, which was a relief since putting up with Madoc at a tavern on the way to Dublin had been an experience which shortened Finn’s life.
‘Where’s the Noes Inn?’ she asked when it was settled that they sail on the next dawn’s tide.
The man looked down at her. ‘You don’t want to go there.’
Finn’s temper snapped. ‘Don’t you tell me where I want to go, you overgrown pirate. I’ll go where I want. Are you going to tell me or not?’ The lips of the colossus twitched under his gold beard. ‘Yust along, by the Stein.’ He nodded downriver.
Pulling a somnambulistic Madoc between them, they skirted the western walls of the city towards the Dame’s Gate Bridge. Brother Pinginn said: ‘What got into you? You were very rude to that man.’
Finn turned on him. ‘I’ll tell you what got into me. I’m sick of being pushed about by men. I’m sick of sailors, and priests, and pilgrims and kings. I’m sick of loving them and hating them and being exploited and betrayed and buggered about by the bastards. Well, it’s finished. I’m going to do what I want from now on, and if you don’t like it you can get out of my way.’
Brother Pinginn blinked. ‘Ooh-er. I thought he was lovely.’
They crossed the bridge over the River Poddle just before it widened out to enter the Liffey, and immediately they were in open country again. The noise of the city behind them dwindled to just another buzz among the buzzing of bees crawling into the foxgloves on the banks of the track. Flocks of sheep cropped common pasture that spread for miles with the occasional interrruption of a church and its outbuildings. Black-headed gulls skimmed along the Liffey to their left where cockle-gatherers stooped to get in their harvest from the mudflats before the wading birds beat them to it.
The building of Dublin and its continued building of boats had cost the land its big trees for miles around, but there were plenty of silver birches scattered over the common, and alders along the banks. The air was sunny and scented with a tang of salt. Finn breathed it in deeply as if into new lungs. She had a feeling of enlargement; the pieces which had been flown apart on the night Boniface died had come together, scarred, welded, but at least and at last a whole. Ever since that night she had been reacting to what had been done to her, by Dermot, by the Partraige, by the Lough and Scathagh. Even her affair with the Pilgrim had been a reaction to an unbidden emotion. She had been responding to disaster, hate and then love until she hadn’t known what was going on or what character was going to emerge out of it all.
Well, now she did. That encounter with the over-large, over-masculine Viking might have been petty, but it had been the latest in a long line of oppressions. She had felt daunted by him and when she had fought back and insulted him a new woman had exulted inside her, just as she had when she’d downed Madoc. Not a nice woman, perhaps, but a woman who was no longer prepared to be manipulated by laws – God’s, society’s, or anybody else’s. From here on she was going to make her own.
A little further on Brother Pinginn caught sight of a line of people being offloaded from a boat moored out in the middle of the Liffey and hauling themselves through the mudflats to a point on the bank where a group of armed men were waiting for them, away from the disapproval of the Dublin churches. As they got nearer they saw that the line was made up of pallid young men and women, some of them little more than children, strung together by a rope which passed round each one’s neck. Muddy and exhausted, they waded to where the slave-traders were waiting for them.
Finn found Brother Pinginn dragging her arm. ‘Use one of your ploys. Let’s go and rescue them. I can’t bear it. We could buy them and set them free.’ She shrugged him off: ‘Don’t be silly. We’re going to
need what money I’ve got left.’
‘But we must help them.’ He was crying. ‘Please, please. They’re going to be sold.’
‘That’s their problem.’ From now on she would concentrate only on her own. While Art coped with Madoc, she pulled Brother Pinginn on until they were well past the scene. He suffered all the way. ‘You’ve grown hard,’ he sobbed.
She looked into the depth of the mended soul. He was right.
* * *
The Noes Inn stood at the end of a line of battered warehouses and shacks on a wide stone quay which served the small river Stein where it entered the river Liffey just before the Liffey itself widened out into its own estuary. Behind it, a neck of land protected it from the sea before rising inland into a hill on which stood some tumuli overlooking Dublin Bay. Above the tumuli, exposed to all the winds, was a church hospital. ‘That’s a leper house,’ said Art, ‘The locals call it Lazy Hill, but it’s really Lazar Hill.’
‘We’ll check the water supply,’ said Finn, ‘I’m not using water a lot of lepers have been bathing in.’
On the west side of the creek, facing the quay, was a mill, but what commanded the eye in the green, blue and mud-coloured view was a vast standing stone which stood guard just outside the Stein’s mouth. Plain and stark, it towered about sixteen feet above the water. ‘Who the hell put that there?’
‘The Norsemen,’ said Art, ‘to mark their first landing place. This is where they first landed when they came to Ireland. In Irish it’s “The Long Stone” but Lief calls it “The Stein”. It’s what the creek and the whole area get their name from.’
‘Who?’
‘The sea captain,’ said Art. ‘He said I was to call him Lief.’
‘Huh.’
The bridge over the creek was made of wattle hurdles, like its much bigger counterpart over the Liffey further upriver, and had a disturbing flexibility. While crossing it warily they heard a shout from behind them: ‘Don’t go over there, lady.’ They looked round to see a powdered figure whom they presumed to be the owner of the west bank’s mill gesturing for Finn to come back. ‘It’s no place for you, lady.’
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