Her customers were calling for their mead, but Finn didn’t hear them. She stood still, gripping the tray. In all her watching and scheming against Fitzempress she had never forgotten that Dermot was the cancer within Ireland. Her planning, her sacrifice, all the work she had put in these last few years might bear fruit now. She might actually rid Ireland of Dermot. The weight of the rape that had oppressed her body and mind might at long last come off it. It might actually come off.
She woke up to find Ragnar shaking her arm. ‘Thirst-quencher, we’re waiting.’ Finn slammed the mugs down on the table and looked at Ragnar without seeing him, ‘And what’s an English whore to all that?’ she asked.
Late that night when the inn was quiet, Elfwida dragged herself up to Finn’s room. ‘“To my beloved brother in Christ, Archbishop O’Toole, from the primate of Armagh,’’’ she said carefully, ‘“Know that for the crime of sacrilege and murder we have cut off MacLochlainn, High King of Ireland, from the body of Mother Church. Know also that Donnchad, King of Oriel, has foresworn his allegiance to the High King and that at our urging others are expected to follow his example and to declare war on the High King that he may be deposed for his sins.’’’
The news was of such magnitude that unconsciously Finn turned to go up the stairs to the roof where she did her best thinking. All kings everywhere held their throne with the blessing of God and His Church. If the Church removed that blessing they were no longer a proper king.
Excommunication was the axe being held over the head of Fitzempress by Becket at this moment. And in Ulster, another archbishop had actually brought it down on the High King of Ireland. An excommunicated king lost the faith of his people and could not last long, especially if the Church was commanding his allies to desert him.
MacLochlainn was virtually finished, which left Dermot of Leinster isolated. She’d give the bastard isolation. She’d fix up a meeting between Dublin and Connaught, she’d bring the curse of Brigid to bear…
‘Am I a hag now?’ said a voice behind her.
She turned round. ‘What?’
The girl Elfwida’s face looked odd, as if its bones had slightly warped. ‘You don’t want to know, do you?’ she said, and her voice was as unnatural as her face. ‘But I want you to. That was the first fuck I ever got a thrill out of. Know why? Because he thought he was screwing me. But this time I was getting something out of it. For you. For the first time it was me doing the screwing. Does that make me a hag?’
Finn fought down her repulsion. ‘I didn’t ask you. But the information is useful. Thank you. And go to bed. You must be tired.’ She turned back to the steps and went up to the roof to plot in the good, clean air. Towards dawn her calculations were interrupted by a sound which reached her from the middle room, the whimpering of a girl returning to a recurrent nightmare. Finn covered her ears so that she could go on thinking.
* * *
Knowing that King Asgall would not take seriously any negotiations which had been set up by a woman, Finn used Lief as the go-between. Grudgingly she admitted to herself that the man was not only calm but intelligent, and literally had the stature that the two kings would respect, though why men had faith in someone just because he was taller than they were she couldn’t understand.
Lief performed well, and it was some satisfaction to Finn that the meeting between the two sides took place in the tower of the Swan Inn. It was the natural venue; Asgall could visit it in the normal way without attracting the curiosity of Dermot’s spies in the city, and O’Conor’s negotiator Eoin, his mór-maer was met on the north bank, rowed across the river and smuggled into the tower via the trapdoor. This was, after all, part of Dermot’s territory.
The talks between the two, with Lief as guarantor for both men’s safety, took all night. At one point Lief, climbing up onto the roof for some air, discovered Finn listening at the top of the stairwell. ‘There’s yust one point they don’t agree,’ he said, ‘Asgall wants six thousand cows for his homage to the O’Conor. Eoin offers fifteen hundred.’
Finn considered. Six thousand was a ridiculously large amount, but on the other hand fifteen hundred was ridiculously small. O’Conor, who had only one large trading port in his kingdom, Galway, had probably no idea of how important a city Dublin had become. ‘It’s worth four thousand,’ she said, ‘but only on condition that Asgall persuades the Norsemen of Waterford to join him in the rebellion against Dermot.’
Lief nodded. ‘That should do it,’ he said and lumbered back to the council chamber. It did.
* * *
It seemed at very long last, but it was only early spring, on one of those mornings of pearly mistiness which indicate frost, that a rider appeared at the summit of a hill on the north bank of the Liffey. He was cloaked and, though without stirrups, the sun reflecting on his and his horse’s head threw back a gold light. He was still and the city he looked at across the river was silent. There was a drum of hoofbeats and the hilltop around him sprouted hundreds of horsemen and banners, like sudden barley.
On the roof of the tower by the Stein stood a small group of people, gripping each other’s hands. They had been waiting and working for this day. As the banner of Connaught unfurled on the north bank, another, smaller version streamed across the roof of the Swan Inn from where ululating howls of triumph went vibrating across the Liffey.
The bells of Dublin woke up and began ringing. Its gates swung open and Ruairi O’Conor with his Connaught clans rode down to be received into it and be proclaimed king of its king and High King of Ireland, a post that MacLochlainn had relinquished when an Oriel spear pierced his lung during the recent battle at the Gap of the North in Armagh.
Two days later the O’Conor rode out of Dublin with his ranks swelled by its Norsemen – but not before he had gone to an inn on the Stein promontory and asked for a drink.
* * *
It was still in Irish Lent, which didn’t exactly coincide with anywhere else’s Lent, that Dermot of Leinster was defeated in the Blackstair Forest. His defeat was due as much to the defection of his friends as the victory of his enemies. Only the Hy Kinsella and a few others were with him at the end.
The clans of north Leinster like the O’Faolain who’d already been wavering in their allegiance to Dermot were finally convinced that they should desert him by a strange visitation from a woman bearing a striking resemblance to the ex-Comarba of Kildare, who told them to remember Kildare.
And what to do with him now they’d caught him? O’Rourke wanted him castrated and blinded but Ruairi O’Conor, benificent in his High Kingship, wouldn’t allow it. They compromised on a punishment which, to Dermot, was nearly as terrible. They commanded him to go into exile and turned the exiling into a public event. They practically sold tickets.
* * *
The long ship carrying Dermot and the sixty or so companions who had chosen to go into exile with him came down the Slaney. Along the upper reaches of the river the banks were lined by his silent, disarmed Hy Kinsella. Whether he was defeated, whether God and St Brigid were against him, Dermot had their blood as they had his. The hills above them echoed with shouts of encouragement to their lord from those who remained uncaptured as they retreated into the mountain forests.
But down the lower reaches, near the protection of Norse Wexford, other clans were delighted to watch him go. They spat at his ship as it passed and allowed their children to run along the banks throwing cow pats at it.
Two miles above Wexford, at Ferrycarrig, the river narrowed to squeeze between jutting cliffs. The right was impregnable from north and east and on its top some long-forgotten chief had built a rath. It was on the grandstand provided by its walls that the noble haters of Dermot Mac Murrough stood to witness his passing; kings, ex-hostages, former vassals, maimed chieftains – and the staff of the Swan Inn, Dublin.
As they waited there was an air of holiday. Ruairi O’Conor moved blithely among the crowd, pressing everyone to eat and drink the provisions his stewards had provided, mak
ing sure Dermot’s victims were comfortable and describing the springtime scene to those whom Dermot had blinded. When he came to Finn he said, ‘Isn’t this the great day? And didn’t I promise it to you?’ He congratulated the hags on their part in the war – he had refused to let them fight in it, saying it was against his honour to use women warriors but, when they pointed out that as Connaught women it was their war as much as his, he had allowed them to carry despatches through enemy lines for him. He had a special word for Brother Pinginn who had taken messages to the monasteries, and who had fallen in love with him.
Finn barely heard him. She was rigid with tension that something could still go wrong. Dermot had contaminated the air she breathed for so long it seemed impossible that it could be cleansed, that the easy river below her could debouch him out to sea as simply as it did all its other detritus. She barely noticed the one other person who was as intent on the river as she was. Tighernan O’Rourke had waited fourteen years for revenge on the man who had abducted his wife. If O’Rourke could have had his way, Dermot would have floated down the Slaney in pieces.
Finn’s attention was caught for a second by the sound of Lief’s deep voice behind her saying something about ‘a mistake’.
‘But why, Lief, my little Viking primrose?’ she heard Pinginn ask. ‘This is the Christian way – exile rather than mutilation.’
‘Maybe. But keep him here. Better Dermot in the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in.’
As usual when the Norwegian spoke, Finn became furious. What did he know? Then somebody shouted, ‘There he is!’ and she forgot everything else.
The ship slid down the river in long pulls, its fifty oars making tiny scars in the water, like stitchmarks along an old wound. Dermot stood by the mast – they recognised his grey hair. Everything the wits among them had planned to shout at him died as inappropriate; he wouldn’t have heard them. The man might be a weasel but he’d been a royal weasel, fighting until the last second. When they’d overrun his beloved stone castle at Ferns it had already been set alight by his own hand so that they should not have it. Even now he did not look around him like a man saying goodbye but stared ahead, ignoring the last chance to see his kingdom. And, after all, they were sending him into the outer darkness, to the rest of the world which orbited the sea around Ireland like the sun orbited the earth.
As the ship manoeuvred the bend in the river between the promontories one of the girls on board began to sing; unselfconsciously, beautifully, her voice said goodbye to Leinster on Dermot’s behalf in some Hy Kinsella lament and for just one moment the men and women on the clifftop re-experienced the transfixing freshness of a child’s countryside.
Finn walked along the edge to keep pace with the ship a hundred feet below; there were several girls aboard, all of them young. The one who was singing had long, dark hair, but as she felt the breeze from the estuary touch it for the first time she fell silent, smelling exile.
Tighernan O’Rourke and the landlady of the Swan Inn watched the ship until it was out of sight. Finn shook herself. ‘What did you do with Dervorgilla?’ she asked. The King of Breffni turned his one, hating eye on her. He was ugly, old and short and his temper was even shorter. ‘Get out of my way,’ he said.
Finn stretched and went to join Pinginn and the others. They saw that she looked younger than she had for years. Tailltin gave her a drink and toasted her. ‘Can we all go home now?’
‘You can,’ said Finn, ‘I’ve got one last call to make.’
* * *
Mór had grown tireder and fatter in the years of her Comarbship of Kildare. She was upset by the visitor who had been smuggled into her private apartments and now stood looking out of its window at the courtyard below. ‘You cut down the pear tree,’ said the visitor.
‘It was diseased,’ Mór told her. ‘Why now? After all these years, why do you want to know now?’
The woman at the window said, ‘I had to clear Dermot away first.’
‘“Vengeance is mine”,’ quoted Mór, ‘The only thing worse than not getting what you want is getting it.’
The woman turned round and Mór saw that she too had grown tireder, but that she was still beautiful, the greying of her hair merely gave it a quality of dark mist. She said: ‘It bloody nearly killed me to come here. Are you going to tell me or not?’
Mór sighed. ‘It was a girl.’
A girl. ‘What happened to her?’
‘We gave her to Dermot.’
The abbess fetched some wine and put it in Finn’s hand. ‘My dear child, what were we to do? He demanded her. If we needed an example of what came to those who opposed him, we had only to look around us. We were still rebuilding the town and burying those who took time to die from their injuries. There.’ She wiped Finn’s face with her trailing sleeve and went back to her chair. The bell was ringing for None and outside the quietness of the room the bustle of the abbey was moving into another rhythm. Mór ignored it. ‘As a matter of fact, my dear, it was perhaps no terrible thing to do. Dermot has a fondness for children, especially girls and especially his own. And he felt responsible for this one.’
Finn went back to the window. ‘Well he was, wasn’t he?’
‘Are you all right, my child?’
‘Yes.’
‘The king took Dervorgilla’s little girl as well, naming her after her mother. The child, the one… you know,’ she did not know whether or not to say ‘your child’, ‘…he called Slaney, after his favourite river. They have both been brought up with his other daughters and I have taken care to reassure myself of their well-being and could find no fault with it; I myself taught them their catechism and the Bishop of Lismore himself confirmed them. If she could only quell a tendency to tomboyishness she would show fair to progress in the favour of God, his Holy Mother and St Brigid.’
The abbess had begun to speak with proprietorial fondness. She’s forgotten I’m here, thought Finn.
‘I would have received her into our convent here, but she was not willing, and I fear Dermot indulges her in everything. She preferred to be promised in marriage to one of the young princes Mac Brain who was brought up as a hostage of the court and whom she has therefore known since childhood.’ The abbess sighed. ‘The poor lamb. That’s one wish which can’t be granted to her now. Dermot was not that indulgent.’
‘Why?’ Then Finn remembered. ‘The Mac Brains deserted to O’Conor. Was the boy still Dermot’s hostage?’
‘And paid for his clan’s defection. Dermot had him blinded. Our monks have been looking after him and wish him to be a novitiate, though he rails against God. I understand Dermot’s blinding also included having him, er, physically disqualified from marriage. It is a good thing the world is coming to an end, such times do we live in.’
‘Does she know?’
‘I imagine not, or she would not have agreed to go with Dermot.’
The patchwork of abbey sounds, a far-off Jubilate, a brush sweeping some corridor, the linnets in the courtyard, were remembered but alien.
‘Would you wish to return to us, my daughter? I could get permission. Dervorgilla has been received into the nunnery at Clonmacnois these many years.’
Finn shook her head.
The abbess said gently: ‘She is a happy child, Boniface. Much like you in looks and colouring, and God has blessed her with a most beautiful voice. You ought to hear her sing.’
Finn turned to her. ‘That’s a humorous God of yours,’ she said, ‘I just did.’
Chapter Eleven
The train of the exiled Leinster men and women crawled through the landscapes of Aquitaine for three months like a beetle. Names the Irish had difficulty pronouncing, Perigeux, Bordeaux, Toulouse, Saintonge, became goals, then shapes on a horizon; then buildings and streets which lost none of their strangeness when surrounding them. The scale of everything was oppressive, distances were too far, cathedrals and castles too big, mountains too high. They became unwell from unfamiliarity with smells and plants
and music, their stomachs revolted by alien food. Three died on that journey, Nuala, Dermot’s aunt, and two of the Hy Kinsella who had elected to go with him. All of them were elderly, but it wasn’t age nor illness which killed them, it was disorientation.
They moved in and out of areas ruled by brigands but their party was too large to warrant attack and was anyway protected by its air of poverty and pilgrimage. What was strange to the people it passed by was that it didn’t keep to the pilgrim routes nor ask for the local holy places. It enquired after one man and when they heard his name the inhabitants would shrug; he had been there last month, last week, yesterday, he would come back in two days, forty, next year. He was never there today. They passed through towns still shaking from his visit. At Castillon-sur-Agen they were told that he had reduced its castle, well fortified by nature and artifice, within a week to the wonder and terror of its Gascons, but that now he had gone elsewhere and a good thing too.
Their real enemy moved with them. Back home in Leinster, even on the hottest day, sun was a diffuse element, dappling on the ground of forests, splintering on streams, and generally flirting with the possibility of going away again. You ran out to enjoy it. But here it was permanent, an entrapment of heat like an endlessly large prison from which the only freedom was to enter the dim, unhygienic shelter of stone walls. At first Dermot’s daughters, being young, had enjoyed the alien ferocity of colour, the enamelled blue sky on land burned ochre, clashing sandstone castles and red tiles. But a month of travelling in it after the elusive king their father was seeking, making detours to find water for thirsty horses, balked by unfamiliar language, developing rashes and saddle sores, unable to change their menstrual cloths often enough… ‘Frankly,’ drawled Aoife, ‘it’s beginning to pall. It’s doing nothing for my complexion.’
Daughter of Lir Page 36