‘To hell with your complexion,’ said Slaney, ‘what about mine? Will Cennsellach Mac Brain still love me now I’m old and freckled?’
‘You’re not old enough to know what love means,’ said Dervorgilla from the superiority of her sixteen years, but she said it kindly and once again alarmed her younger sister by leaning over to pat her hand. They usually communicated by banter and her sisters’ sympathy indicated to Slaney that they knew something she didn’t know about the boy she had grown up with. She’d begged them to tell her if they did, but they said they did not. She’d begged Dermot to tell her what had happened to Mac Brain, who’d been his hostage, but he’d said, ‘Would I hurt anybody whose hurt would hurt you, pigling?’ And she’d believed him, and loved him and been so sorry for him that she’d agreed to go with him into the outer darkness into which Connaught and Breffni and all the other treacherous bastards had driven him. ‘It won’t be for long,’ he’d said.
Outer darkness had proved to be this blinding country which had changed Dermot. He had become silent and deaf, refusing rest, insisting on going on until it was too dark to see and they had to make camp on rock- or mosquito-infested riverbeds. It had got to the stage where his daughters and followers reckoned he had gone mad and that the compulsion to find Fitzempress, the duke of this appalling eternity, was a disorder of his mind.
‘I swear we passed that castle two weeks ago,’ said Dervorgilla, squinting ahead at an elaborate fortification on the mountain ahead, ‘except then it wasn’t hanging clothes from its crenels… Oh Mother of God, they’re not clothes.’
What had looked like two flesh-coloured pillow slips writhed and kicked for a minute and then hung limp. The daughters of Dermot reached out to clasp each other’s hands for comfort.
From the direction of the valley below the castle an approaching train of dust indicated a horse and rider travelling fast. ‘It’s Phelim.’ The scout slid off his horse two yards from Dermot onto one knee – all Dermot’s men and women maintained a meticulous standard of respect to him in his exile – ‘Found him, my lord. He’s sieging that castle and will be happy to receive you, he says, if you will forgive “lack of ceremony caused by the exigencies of warfare”.’
‘Let us come with you, Father,’ said Slaney, ‘those barbarians are hanging men from that castle wall like you would hang flags.’ Dermot patted her head and didn’t hear her, just as his ears had attended to nothing but the name of Fitzempress for three months. ‘Tell them to make camp here,’ he told Phelim, ‘but first get them to unpack the best linen, my ermine cloak and the gold filet and jewels. I must look like a king.’
* * *
‘I do hope you don’t mind sitting under this awning while we talk,’ said the King of England, ‘only the rebels in that castle over there are hanging some of my subjects to try and frighten me off and I feel the least I can do for the poor bastards is to count them as they go. How many’s that, Ursus?’
‘Three, my lord.’
‘You see,’ said Henry, turning back to Dermot, ‘until I married their duchess these Aquitanians had no more idea of political entity than my arse. Less, actually. Any lord who owns a castle – like the fellow in Talmont over there – thinks he can do anything he likes. In fact, that fellow over there – he’s a Gascon; have you met any Gascons? Don’t bother – is even disputing that he’s part of Aquitaine at all. So I sent my uncle-in-law, a man in whom my duchess reposes somewhat misguided trust…’ Fitzempress looked venomously towards a beautifully-accoutred but agonised knight who was watching the castle in the distance and biting his nails, ‘…to tell the sod that Aquitaine begins and ends where I say it does.’
‘Three more,’ said Ursus.
‘And what does he do?’ asked Fitzempress of Dermot, ‘He sends his vanguard galloping into the castle bailey ahead of the main force and the portcullis bangs down and traps them in there. Oldest trick in the book. If I’ve told you once, Ralph… how many of your men do you reckon they’ve got?’
‘Twenty-five, my lord,’ said Ralph de Faye, ‘My lord, couldn’t we treat with…’
‘No, we couldn’t. I’m not having this anarchy spreading. You stand there and watch them hang. Teach you to be more careful next time. Now where was I?’
‘Four more,’ said Ursus.
‘So I’ve got to reduce that sodding Gascon, and his castle in… how long did you say it would take to capture Talmont, Ralph?’
‘Three months, my lord, it is strongly positioned and…’
‘Three days. I haven’t time to stand about.’
There was a moan from the knights standing around them; like straw scarecrows, men were being tossed over the crenels to jerk and kick and then slump at the end of ropes invisible in the heat haze which swam between the castle and its besiegers across the valley.
‘Five in a row,’ said Ursus. ‘That makes eleven.’
One of Fitzempress’ hands slammed into the palm of the other. ‘Anyway, my lord, you will understand why I am forced to receive you without the ceremony which is your due, and I beg that, as one king to another, you will overlook it. Now then, in what may I serve you? Will somebody get some wine for my lord of Leinster?’
There was a scamper for wine which was politely handed to Dermot by, had he known it, the Earl of Salisbury – a Fitzempress campaign usually moved too fast for its supply train to keep up and lords of the Angevin empire frequently found themselves acting as their own menials.
Dermot looked at his hand holding a chipped beaker of wine which had been poured from somebody’s private flask and apparently previously boiled. The king he had come so far to see wore a leather jerkin which had seen better days and sat on a camp stool, having given Dermot the only decent chair in the place. Apologetically, Fitzempress got out a needle and thread to mend a tear in the finger of one of his gloves. ‘I concentrate better if I’m busy. Do go on.’
Molloy, Dermot’s cousin, muttered in Irish, ‘This is against your honour, Mac Murrough. Where are the footbaths, and the trumpets, the oils of welcome? This is a kern, not a king. Let me teach him manners.’
But Dermot’s madness made everything around him, the knights, the tapestried pavilion, the hanged men, the countryside through which he’d travelled, this low-class king, merely a background that moved past him while he himself stayed still. Part of him was in Ireland and the rest of him wriggled for the means to rejoin it like a worm cut in half. Carefully he got up and carefully he sank to one knee before the young king. He had learned the words he had to say by heart, he had repeated them to himself every day away from Leinster and, though he recited them in the Latin, he gave them the musical artificiality with which important speeches were made in High Irish back home, so that it seemed to his listeners as if he were singing.
He cried as he sang, and his hearers may have thought that he cried with self-pity at his wrongs, but Dermot’s insanity at that moment was such that it gave him insight into the millenium of wrong he was bringing on Ireland. In full knowledge of what he was doing he wept for his country and sang his song just the same.
Inside the tent a hidden knight, perspiring with heat, put his ear closer to the calico.
‘May God who dwells on High ward and save you, King Henry, and likewise give you heart and courage and inclination to avenge my shame and my misfortune that my own people have brought upon me. Hear, noble King Henry, whence I was born, of what country. Of Ireland I was born a lord…’
It was ten minutes before he finished recounting his lineage and got to his own achievements. Some of the knights sniggered but a glance from Fitzempress’ eye converted the sound into coughs.
‘Six more,’ said Ursus, ‘Seventeen.’
‘In the presence of the barons of your empire, good sire,’ chanted Dermot, ‘Your liegemen I shall become henceforth all the days of my life. On condition that you be my helper, so that I lose not everything, you shall I acknowledge as sire and lord.’
The song ended and the silence it left was fil
led with the stridulation of cicadas. Dermot got up and resumed his chair, staring at nothing. Molloy threw himself at his feet. ‘What have you done, Mac Murrough, selling us to the foreigners?’
Fitzempress knotted the last stitch on his glove and bit through the thread. ‘You honour me with your confidence, my lord,’ he said. ‘Obviously such a great matter cannot be decided without great thought. Allow my men to find you some fit place where you and your retinue – did I understand there are ladies in it? – can be comfortable while I take counsel with my barons.’
He stood up and bowed and gave orders in rapid Norman patois: ‘See he gets the best we’ve got, and any bugger who insults him or even winks at his girls will suffer immediate loss of balls.’
When Dermot and a sobbing Molloy had been escorted off, Fitzempress went into the tent to his sweating knight. ‘Lucky you were here, Spymaster. Did you or did you not hear that old man with the comic beard offer to sell me Ireland?’
‘I did, my lord.’
The two men emerged from the sweltering tent into the sweltering evening air and strolled towards the one tree, a cedar, which had not been cut down to make siege engines and pit props.
Ursus came up to them. ‘That’s all of them now, my lord.’ The sun setting behind them had turned the white stone of Talmont castle to blonde and was gilding the row of bundles which hung, untidily but still, below its battlements. ‘That Gascon,’ said Fitzempress, ‘is a fool. He had twenty-five cards to play against me and he’s just thrown them away. Tell the priests we’ll attend a mass for their souls, but tell them to make it quick. We’ll start the diversion at dark and the miners can go in.’
Ursus lumbered off at a run. ‘Well,’ said Fitzempress, ‘you’re my Ireland-watcher. Shall I buy?’
‘You know my opinion, my lord,’ said the lord of Llanthony, ‘Don’t touch it with a bargepole. Dermot of Leinster…’ he tried to keep his mind and voice balanced, ‘…is untrustworthy and no better than a criminal.’
‘Haven’t you traced that fleck of Irish green yet?’ asked Fitzempress.
‘Not yet. He’s been lying quiet yet, as if he’s got something else to do. And since your lordship managed to quell the great Celtic rebellion, perhaps we’ve sent him off with his tail between his legs.’ He took a deep breath. ‘I’ve told you and told you, Ireland’s unwinnable. The terrain is bloody awful – you’re either up to your hocks in bog or you can’t see for trees. It’s all… misty. One clan might be your ally one day and the next it would be creeping up your rear with its knife in its teeth. It sort of runs between your fingers. Try to grab it and it slips away. Nobody will ever own it in the sense that we mean ownership.’
Fitzempress broke off a frond of cedar and smelled it. ‘I wish I’d met her.’
‘Who?’
‘Your lady.’ He patted his spymaster’s shoulder. ‘She got to you, didn’t she? Every time someone mentions Ireland you fulminate against it, but you get that moony look in your eye. I can practically hear the mystic harp chords playing in the air. Was she anything like my Rosamund?’
‘No,’ said John, ‘she was an unfeminine, ungrateful, treacherous bitch. Are we discussing Ireland or women?’
‘It appears to be the same thing. So what do we do with Dermot’s offer to make me his king?’
‘Stuff it up his arse.’ John was put out. How the hell did Henry know about the harp chords?
‘Ah, the anal school of diplomacy. We could stuff Becket up there as well. He’d be in his true element. Is he still stirring up shit?’
‘I’ve brought the agents’ despatches, my lord. At Pentecost in Vezelay he spoke from the pulpit and excommunicated Richard de Luci and Jocelin de Balliol for drafting the Constitutions of Clarendon and swore that you too would suffer Anathema unless you speedily gave satisfaction for what he calls your injuries to the church.’ John was a brave man, and now an important one, but he got ready to run. Fitzempress’ temper was something outside him, an elemental force; it could enter into him and turn him uncontrollably destructive, like a typhoon. And Becket’s was the spirit that called it up. The messenger who’d brought the news to the king that the archbishop had slipped abroad out of his clutches and joined up with Louis of France had been tossed in the air like a wheatsheaf, breaking his arm, though Henry had apologised later by awarding him nice little serjeantship in Surrey.
Nothing happened and he relaxed. ‘I heard,’ said Fitzempress, shortly. ‘And that’s why we’ve got to help this mad Irishman of yours, because if we don’t he’s going to go to somebody who will, like my royal overlord in France. A French Ireland – that’s all I need.’
John shut his mouth. Fitzempress wanted information and not opinion; he merely asked for it to shape his own. Anyway, he thought to better purpose than anyone else in the world. John had no mean regard for his own brain, but in Fitzempress’ presence he was humbled. He looked through the striped shade of the tree at his sturdy, unglamorous king and loved him, because John’s affection followed John’s ambition; he could not separate the two. It was why, in an unexcited way, he loved his wife Isabel that Fitzempress had given him and loved the lands and sons she had provided him with in her turn. He gave thanks at every mass for his escape from that liquidising passion which had once run through his bones in Ireland. He liked the duller colours, the even tenor of his deliverance and if, every so often, all sound became muted to a hum and he heard staves of music rising from a path, or saw a lakeland that sent him into a dream which lasted for hours… well, that was his cross to bear.
‘So what I think we’ll do, John,’ Fitzempress was saying, ‘is temporise. We’ll not help old Dermot ourselves, but we’ll give him permission to seek help among our subjects. And God help anybody who gives it to him.’
‘Brilliant.’
‘I know.’ Fitzempress linked his hands over the branch above his head and swung on it. He got bouncy when he was clever. ‘I want you to go back to England ahead of him, and go to Richard de Luci, bless his excommunicated heart. Tell him to look out a papal bull Adrian sent me once. Tell him to look for Laudabiliter and get copies made. Tell him I’ll give him “L” if he doesn’t find it.’ Fitzempress collapsed at his own joke.
‘What is it, my lord?’
‘It’s another bill of sale for Ireland. It shows I’ve been king of that bog hole all along. We might need it one day, you never know. And John, if Dermot does succeed in putting together an expeditionary force to win back his lands, I want you to be part of it. I must know what goes on over there. I can’t have some sodding mercenary setting himself up as High King of Ireland.’
It was getting dark. Frogs down by the river were taking over chorus-work from the cicadas. Fitzempress said, ‘It’s got to be you, John. You’re the only one I trust who’s got any idea about the situation over there.’
‘I know.’
‘Get on with it then. And John.’
‘Yes, my lord?’
‘You’re wrong about Dermot being the biggest bastard in the world.’
John nodded. ‘I know, Henry,’ he said. ‘You are.’
* * *
In the last days of August, Dermot, former King of Leinster, was to be found sitting on the steps of a cross in the centre of Bristol’s market place while above him a crier shouted an advertisement.
‘Hear, all men who love adventure, honour, reward and feat of arms, hear what our King Henry hath promised this king from over the sea. Listen to his words. ‘Henry, King of England, Duke of Normandy and Aquitaine, and Count of Anjou, to all his liegemen, English, Norman, Welsh and Scots, and to all nations subject to his sway, greetings. Know that we have received Dermot, Prince of Leinster, into our grace and favour; wherefore whosoever within the bounds of our territories shall be willing to give him aid, as our vassal and liegeman, in recovering his dominion, let him be assured of our favour and licence in that behalf.’ Listen to King Henry’s words and to what liberal promises of land and pay to all and sundry who may help him thi
s prince offers. O come near, ye men of spirit, and enrol under this prince’s banner.’
He was a good crier and he repeated the advertisement in English, Norman French and Welsh from the strike of Matins by the bell of St Augustine’s to the strike of Terce with half an hour’s break for lunch. If he flagged, his employer nudged him into remembering how much he was being paid. The rest of the time Dermot just sat, facing westward, his hands knotted on the head of his staff, spattered by passing carts, sniffed by passing dogs.
Plenty of people came to listen and a few threw the odd cabbage stalk to show their independence and because they always threw things at the conspicuous. But it was boom-time in Bristol and such adventurers as there were had other things to do, or had long ago been scooped up by Henry II who treated his mercenaries to good pay and certain victory. Dermot got a few drunks, one madman who insisted on standing beside him holding a wooden sword at the salute, and several small boys. But he sat on, resisting attempts by his daughters and followers to pull him away.
The girls were no more eager to see him use foreigners to regain their country than Molloy was, but as the days of humiliation dragged on they began to pray for somebody, anybody, who would volunteer and end them. ‘I’d fight for the poor old thing myself if it would do any good,’ wailed Slaney.
‘I confess I am disappointed,’ said Robert Fitz Harding, their host, when they appealed to him, ‘I had hoped the king would provide more co-operation to Mac Murrough than he has; no doubt he is overstretched. He will have good reason, good reason.’
Fitz Harding was a dear old man, Bristol’s most distinguished citizen, whose trading connections with Leinster went back a long way and who was anxious on that account to see Dermot reinstated. It was to his magnificent house in the city that Dermot had first gone to on being exiled and it was a letter from Fitz Harding which had procured his interview with Fitzempress. Henry of England owed a lot to the old; when he was still a child in the midst of his mother’s and uncle’s civil war, Fitz Harding had given him shelter, money and ensured him the loyalty of Bristol. Fitz Harding had been repaid by the gift of Berkeley Castle and half of Gloucestershire for only one knight’s fee. The girls were lodged in his home as if they’d been Norman princesses, with more luxury than they’d known in their lives.
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