The next morning Muirna and Bevo rowed out into the Liffey and shouted out the attractions of the Swan to passing boats, but all that did was to give a crew of a Manx traders the idea that the place was a brothel, and their disappointment on finding that it wasn’t led to a nasty scene which ended in the hags having to throw them out.
It was in the middle of this fracas that Belaset arrived to see what was happening to her loan. A crazily-coloured figure against the dull blues and greens of the Liffey landscape, she hauled herself out of Lief’s longboat, which with its shallow draught could navigate the Stein, and up the steps of the quay, watching with interest as a protesting trader thrown by Bevo splashed down into the creek. ‘You got so many customers you can throw them away?’ she asked Finn. She hobbled into the first-class parlour and stood near the fire taking off her shoes and rubbing her backside. She refused Finn’s offer of refreshment and looked round. ‘Nice place.’
‘It’s good to see you,’ said Finn, ‘but I thought you’d be coming over with Aragon.’
‘Nothing personal,’ said the Lady Belaset, ‘but I should experiment at my time of life? If that girl don’t sink her first few trips, then maybe, but I got other business here in Dublin can’t be done forty fathoms down. Now then.’ Despite her fatiguing trip she wanted to meet everybody and see everything. She disapproved of the ex-prostitutes still wan and coughing in the tower chamber – ‘Charity’s one thing, maybe: millstones is something else’ – but she was delighted by the smuggling route which she thought might prove useful to the Dublin Jewry on occasion.
‘Nice place,’ she said again when they were once more back in the parlour, ‘Pity the clientele’s invisible.’
‘I don’t know what to do,’ confessed Finn miserably.
‘You got to give the place personality. Get it known for something definite, something the others don’t got. Swan’s a crap name, anyhow, too pure and who wants pure? The monastries got pure. More like “Amazon” the way your girls handle men. Now, Bela, you got an idea.’
She chewed the rouge off her lips while the Swan staff sat and watched her much as the ancient people had waited for the pythoness to speak.
‘You remember Eleanor Aquitaine went crusading with that pissy first husband of hers, Louis of France? Dressed her ladies like Amazons, bare boobs and all?’
‘I’m not baring mine,’ said Bevo, firmly.
Belaset didn’t hear her. ‘You up in crusades?’ she asked them.
She left shortly afterwards, still refusing wine or food. ‘You want Jews to drink here you got to get kosher wine,’ she told them.
They all stood on the quay to wave her goodbye as Lief’s rowers took her on towards Dublin city to pursue her other investments. ‘Even she won’t eat here,’ said Finn, ‘and she owns it.’
But after such a long, dull winter the nobles of Dublin had become bored, and they pricked up their ears as word mysteriously spread of a strange inn down by the Stein run by strange women who had sworn to remain virgin until Jerusalem was freed and had actually gone on crusade to the Holy Land, where they had learned strange skills from the Saracens. The intriguing rumour came to the ears of Asgall Mac Torcaill, the King of Dublin, who was sick of the sight of his own city walls and was in search of somewhere new to drop into after hunting trips.
Vives hurried over the Stein to warn Finn. ‘The king intends to pay you a visit,’ he told her. ‘He will pretend it is on impulse – he cultivates the Viking virtue of spontaneity. Open-handedness, drinking bouts, quick to anger, that sort of thing.’
Finn could see he disapproved. Like her cousin Nessa, Vives was a careful man, but whereas Nessa’s carefulness was natural to him, Vives had learned it in a hard school. It was his survival.
‘How did you get the information he was coming here?’ she asked after she’d thanked him.
‘My people depend on advance information; forwarned is forearmed. We are a network all over the world. We exchange it. Sometimes it saves our lives, sometimes it doesn’t.’
Finn nodded. ‘After I’ve got this inn established, Master Vives,’ she said, ‘you and I must have a little talk.’
* * *
‘We saw your welcome-light,’ boomed King Asgall, ‘and were drawn by thought of mead-foamed cups.’
Mead-foamed cups were ready, silver-shoaled herring browned on oil-spluttering griddle, venison cuts from antlered forest-runner stewed in iron-bound cauldron in flame-flaring fireplace. ‘And if they don’t stop shouting,’ grumbled Blat, ‘they’ll get thin-bladed onion-chopper up leather-clad arseholes.’ The Dublin-Norse mode of speech was catching. For days afterwards the staff of the Swan referred to the Liffey as ‘Stag of billows, peatland courser.’ To have guests at all was thrilling, especially such exalted ones as the King of Dublin and eleven of his jarls, but there was no doubt they were wearing.
‘When are they going home to their night-linened wives?’ asked Bevo, exhausted, after seven hours of running back and forth with pitchers of ale, mead and wine. ‘Not till rise of dawn-breaker from the looks of it,’ said Finn, putting the sixth batch of bread into the wall-oven.
The Dublin Norsemen looked like Vikings, ate and drank like Vikings, boasted like Vikings and, by the end of the night, were belching and farting like Vikings, but Finn decided that three hundred or so years of Celtic influence and inter-breeding had made an uneasy mixture. Instead of being benign it had robbed the Vikings of their confidence and made them curiously effete. For all his back-slapping geniality, King Asgall’s eyes flickered about to see what impression he was making. He and his fathers had long ago adopted Christianity, but he liked to confuse it with a little paganism and replied to Brother Pinginn’s grace with: ‘Thanks be to Balder. I mean, Christ.’
There was a forced quality in the way he and his jarls insisted on putting Norse speech patterns into their now Irish mother-tongue, as if they were clinging onto the time when dragon-prowed ships had sailed the widow-maker and terrified the world. They still thought of themselves as terrifying, and there was defiance in the way they remembered that they had risen against Dermot of Leinster’s father and killed him, as if it had been a great deed and not just another tribal assassination which had caught him by surprise. There was insistence on how any man could speak his mind to the king on the Thingmount, the great man-made hill which stood midway between the Stein and the city, but Finn noticed that his jarls fawned on Asgall and praised his prowess in a way that would have sickened Irish nobles. Certainly their democracy did not include inviting their servants in to eat with them; it was only at Finn’s suggestion that they were taken into the common parlour to eat at all. And once they’d elaborated on how brave they’d been on their hunting trip, ‘kiss of thin-lipped axe on wolf-pate,’ the hunters fell to swapping gossip.
Art was disappointed. ‘Lief’s a better Viking than any of them,’ he said, and Finn saw that the huge Nowegian was watching the feast from the kitchen door. As she pushed past him to get more ale he said, ‘You take care. They get dangerous now.’
The jarls were getting restive as they got drunker. Finn had managed to recruit some entertainment – a harper, a sword-swallower and a couple of acrobats – but hadn’t had time to find anything special, and anyway the jarls had seen them all before; a couple of them began banging on the table calling for women. ‘Where’s Amazons?’ shouted somebody and the banging became concerted with a cry of ‘We want Amazons.’ A large red-headed jarl stood up to make a grab at Muirna, the gentlest-looking of the hags, which was probably why he picked on her. ‘You an Amazon? Let’s see your tits,’ and began trying to tear her dress front down with a hand made clumsy by drink.
Lief reached for his dagger, but Finn’s hand clamped on his arm. ‘You dare,’ she said. The last thing she wanted was a knife-fight. ‘Leave it to Muirna.’ They saw Muirna smile in kindly fashion at the Norseman as she gave him Scathagh’s Ploy Number One. The sight of their companion rolling and gasping on the floor as he held his testicles so am
used the rest of the jarls that their humour was restored. King Asgall was still laughing when he eventually left, and in a grand gesture scattered enough silver on the floor to pay for the food, drink and breakages twice over. ‘Come again, my lord,’ called Finn as her guests lumbered onto their horses and headed for the city.
* * *
The Swan’s reputation was made, though from that moment on both the inn and its female staff were given the generic name ‘Amazon’. The ladies of Dublin insisted their lords bring them to look at the women who had the fighting skills of the mysterious East and asked questions about the crusades which the hags couldn’t answer. They adopted Belaset’s advice, saying they were under a vow to reveal nothing of what they had seen and learned, thus making themselves even more mysterious. One lady looked up at the sign Brother Pinginn had painted and which hung above the door. ‘Is that what Outremer looks like? What a pity. No different from Connemara.’
The new inn became popular and the sight of boats tied up at the quay and the sound of cheerful feasting attracted the big ships coming up the Liffey so that it became a regular thing for their crews to row over and spend the night there before going on to the city to discharge their cargo. Finn began spending most of her nights serving in the second-class parlour listening to the sailors’ talk, asking questions and building up her knowledge of events in the outside world.
The drawback to the Amazonian reputation was that it became a matter of honour for some young drunk to challenge one of the hags to a fight and become sufficiently objectionable until he got it. Much of the clientele came in anticipation of seeing one of their number thrown out. Behaviour was considerably better in what became known as the sailors’ parlour.
‘It’s wearing me out,’ complained Bevo. ‘It took two of us to chuck out that bloody Ragnar last night. Eleanor of Aquitaine has a lot to answer for.’ But as a result they made sure they kept fit and did the exercises Dagda had taught them up in the tower room in their spare moments before a fascinated audience of two ex-prostitutes.
There weren’t many spare moments, and as spring advanced they became fewer. Once the wreckage of the previous night’s feasting had been cleared up there was a day’s work preparing for the next; there was brewing, baking, broth-pastry-sausage-cheese- and pudding-making, vegetable-peeling, butchering, salting, curing, saucing, spicing, pickling, herb-fruit-fungi- and egg-gathering, fish-catching, shellfish-collecting (these last were Brother Pinginn’s department), to say nothing of marketing, putting fresh straw into the used palliasses upstairs, emptying the baths and chamberpots, filling cauldrons of water and preparing the fires. They worked like slaves, though afterwards they all remembered that period as one of satisfaction. Ten times a day Finn wondered what they would have done without Blat whose generalship in the kitchen and whose ale, marrow-pudding and honey-salt pork glaze attracted their own admirers to the Swan/Amazon. It was also a pleasure to see Brother Pinginn in his element; though by no means the most useful member of the staff, he derived joy from the tasks he had to do and said he had never been happier in his life. He was occasionally a worry at nights when he could not resist batting his eyelids at some of the beefier Norsemen.
‘Will you stop it?’ said Finn, ‘I’m trying to make this a respectable inn. Did I or did I not see that sailor pinch your bottom?’ Brother Pinginn was contrite. ‘They always go too far,’ he said, ‘I don’t mean them to.’ And Finn knew he didn’t; the little monk was not out for a sexual encounter, he just couldn’t resist flirting. ‘Save it for Lief,’ she said. Perhaps knowing that he was safe, Pinginn was outrageous with Lief, mincing across the big man’s path whenever he came in, nudging him in the waist with his elbow and pretending to cry when the Norwegian merely picked him up and put him outside the window to get rid of him.
The drain on supplies during that first flush of the inn’s success was so great that Finn had to borrow money from Vives in order to buy more. But she was able to pay it back with its interest within a fortnight, and a month later began the repayment of Belaset’s loan, which Vives called every week to collect. It was Aragon, on her return with Harold of Bristol’s former ship, however, who raised the possibility of paying it off quickly.
They were having a meeting in the tower-room discussing Aragon’s forthcoming maiden voyage, when she said, ‘That stuff of Belaset’s, Finn. I think I can get more.’
‘What stuff?’
‘Ambergrease is it? She showed it to me. I’ve seen lumps like it before, only much bigger, some this big.’ Aragon spread her arms.
‘Jesus, where?’
‘When the O’Conor brehon and I were trying to get my ship money out of those stinking O’Malleys on the west coast.’ O’Conor’s judge had awarded Aragon the right to some of her ship’s value, but the Ui Maille, who had salvaged the ship, were delaying payment and earning Aragon’s wrath. ‘They call it “whale shit”, foul-mouthed pigs that they are. They find it floating on the sea and each of their boats carries some as magic. The O’Malley chief has this much in his house, like a boulder.’
‘Does he know what it’s good for?’
‘For scent?’ Aragon raised her heavy black eyebrows. ‘Have you smelled the O’Malleys? But if he thinks it’s valuable he’ll raise his price. I’d rather deal with Belaset even. You want me to get it when I go back and see if the O’Conor’s got my money out of them?’
They discussed it. The seas were opening for trade and Nessa was due to arrive with the Partraige hides and furs which Aragon, and a crew Lief had picked for her, were going to carry down to the Aquitaine where, it was thought, they could get a better price for them than in England. She was to bring back wine and any other commodity she judged saleable.
‘I’ll go to Connaught and get your money,’ said Finn, ‘I’ve got an idea I want to put to the O’Conor anyway, and I’ll get the ambergris from the O’Malley while I’m about it. I’ll teach him to owe a hag of Inis Cailleach.’
The absence of two hags from the inn would require the hiring of extra staff in their place. Finn cast longing eyes towards the consumptive girls who were still confined to the tower and eating their heads off. ‘They look better to me,’ she said.
‘And they’re going to stay better,’ said Brother Pinginn, firmly. ‘The year’s not up.’ So two members of Dublin’s proletariat, a boy and a girl, both lumpish and big for their age, were taken on as scullions.
When it came to it, Finn was reluctant to leave the inn, partly because she was sure it would go to pieces in her absence, and partly because it had become a home. But most of all she hated taking leave of Aragon, realising at the last moment the hazards of storm and current and robbers the hag would face on her voyage.
They renamed Harold of Bristol’s ship St Brigid and poured a jugful of the Bergerac wine over her prow for luck. The stain looked like blood, which earned them respect among the Dublin seamen who still secretly sacrificed a goat or a lamb over the figurehead of their ships at the beginning of every voyage, much to the rage of the Church.
* * *
Finn and Aragon stood on the Stein quay and looked out to where the St Brigid rode at her anchor in the middle of the Liffey. To Finn’s anxious eyes she looked frail, an uneasy cross between a rowing galley and a sloop.
‘Will you be all right?’
‘I want to go and I can manage it,’ Aragon reassured her, ‘She’s a sound ship and that’s a good crew Lief has found. They’re terrified of me.’
The inn staff lined up on Lazy Hill to watch the St Brigid row out to sea and set sail. On the same day they climbed to the roof of the tower and waved as Lief rowed Finn and Art to the north bank of the Liffey where horses were waiting for them. ‘Damn,’ thought Finn as they watched their figures dwindle into articulated matchsticks, ‘I’m going to stop this getting fond of people.’
However, now that the inn was established, she had to begin to watch out for Ireland.
‘She going to make this journey all right?’ asked Lief of A
rt.
‘Yes, she is,’ said Finn crossly, ‘and what are you going to be doing while she is away?’
‘I got business in Iceland,’ said Lief. ‘More ambergris there than you ever seen.’
Finn rounded on Art. ‘Do you have to tell him everything?’ Part of her anger was because the Norwegian would be away from the inn, where he had taken up semi-permanent residence. ‘He irritates the hell out of me,’ she thought, ‘but he’s safe.’
Chapter Nine
The Great Hall of Woodstock was only a royal palace because Fitzempress said it was. It was big, but it was still a hunting lodge. Antlered heads, the smelly masks of wolves and boars, spears and bows lined its otherwise plain walls. Though its stools and benches were finely carved there were no chairs. Dogs were everywhere. The breeze that ruffled the branches of Oxfordshire’s forest came through the wide windows and open doors, as if the hall were a temporary interruption in a landscape which had no intention of letting it stay.
Even the courtiers in it dressed like huntsmen in imitation of their king and thereby grossly wrong-footed the jewelled kings and princes who, summoned there against their will, had done their best to look impressive.
Nevertherless, one by one, the kings and princes approached the dais, ground their teeth, sank to their silken knees and swore loyalty and allegiance to the shabby man who stood on it.
‘King Malcolm of Scotland,’ called the chamberlain. The King of the Scots knelt.
‘Prince Owain of Gwynedd.’ Owain mumbled his homage.
‘Prince Rhys of Deheubarth.’ Rhys knelt. Aware that his defiance against Henry II and his subsequent defeat had brought about this humiliation of his Celtic fellow kings, he was forced to make his submission more placatory than was good for his pride. But after he’d made it, typical Welshman that he was, he stood up and saved his face with eloquence and grace. ‘It is to me no small source of pleasure that I have lost my lands to no mean or laggard clan, but to a king of rare fame and distinction.’
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