She saw more clearly than ever the lopsidedness of the Word of Man. ‘How could they leave out Motherhood in the Bible?’ she asked Brother Pinginn, ‘when it’s the most important thing in the world?’
He was her only comfort in his understanding. ‘I don’t think they left it out,’ he said, ‘they just downgraded it.’
She remembered the Thing on the Wall at Kildare, and the weighty, breasted idol in Scathagh’s gallery. ‘It was too much for them, wasn’t it? Scathagh referred to God as She.’
‘From what you tell me, Scathagh made the same mistake as men, only the other way round. I’ve been thinking lately that if we’re made in the image of God, all of us, then he must be both male and female. God the Father, God the Mother and God the Son. And Jesus was the combination of the best of both.’
She looked at the little monk and tears plopped down her cheeks. ‘I do love you, Pinginn.’
‘I love you too. It’s nice, isn’t it?’
‘Will you make me some vellum?’
They had to wait until one of the inn’s cows aborted her calf and then, crying for the mooing mother and the little dead thing, Pinginn scraped, soaked and rubbed its skin and stretched it on hoop-frames to dry. The ink he made from oak galls, copperas and gum, and the quill from a crow, which enabled smaller writing than did a goose quill. He went to a whitesmith and at his own expense had two lead inkwells made, one for Finn, one for Elfwida.
While he was doing it, Finn set her spies not only to watch Dermot, but to guard her daughter. She felt gratitude as the reports came in of an apparently happy, well-rounded girl who had affection for the man she believed to be her father. If it turned out that the child’s happiness would depend on her keeping that affection, then Finn was amazed to find that in her new-found motherhood she was prepared to opt for that.
But it gave her a satisfaction in serving her daughter, to go back to Kildare and offer a home to Censellach Mac Brain, the boy whom Slaney had loved, and whom Dermot had blinded and castrated. Mór arranged for the interview to take place in her room. He was very young, but his milky white eyes gave him an ageless look, like a statue. The brassard he wore on his left arm – a snake biting its own tail – showed the excellence for which the Mac Brain goldsmiths were renowned.
‘Why?’ he asked, when she made her offer.
‘I’m told you don’t take to monastery life.’ There was no point in telling him their connection. ‘If you’re not going to go back to your clan, you could help me watch Ireland.’
‘Who is this silly bitch?’ he asked of the monk who’d guided him into the room. ‘Is she blind as well?’
The monk, who was new, mouthed apologetically at the well-dressed lady, ‘I’m afraid he’s got very bitter.’
She wasn’t surprised. The boy was fifteen years old and the coffin lid had already closed for him. She said, ‘You won’t need eyes for the sort of watching I do. Dermot Mac Murrough is trying to gather a force of mercenaries together so that he can win back Leinster. Some of us are trying to put a spoke in his wheel.’
She looked at the monk, but he didn’t seem to be paying attention. Nobody in Ireland seemed to be paying attention. When she’d given Ruairi O’Conor her agents’ reports of what Dermot was up to in Bristol and Wales he’d been undisturbed. ‘My dear cousin, Ireland is uniting at last. What can a few mercenaries do against the size of army I can bring into the field?’ While it was true that the clans of Ireland were, in an exhausted kind of way, showing signs of accepting the rule of Connaught and O’Conor as their High King, she knew that they had never faced mailed knights and had no idea of their effectiveness – she said so. ‘Call no new thing fair,’ Ruairi had said, as he so often did of things outside his experience. To her chagrin he was using the fine herd of cavalry horses that Iogenán had bred out of her Fitzempress’ mare as hunters.
But as least she had the blind Censellach’s attention now. ‘Mac Murrough? You’re opposing the Mac Murrough?’ His thin, adolescent fingers reached out and were crawling over her face. ‘Will we hurt him?’
‘We’ll stop him.’
‘I’ll come.’
In her eagerness to serve her daughter by taking the boy into her care, Finn had discounted the difficulty. The few unsighted people she had met in her life had been blind from birth and had trained themselves in various skills as harpers, storytellers and such. The hereditary brehon of the O’Faolain clan had been blind, carrying the massive weight of Irish law in his memory. Familiarity of place had enabled them to move around fairly freely with the aid of a stick or a slave. It hadn’t occurred to her that the newly-blinded Censellach would be virtually helpless, nor that his scarred mind would refuse to help itself. It wasn’t that the Swan staff didn’t do their best – Blat cooked special little delicacies for him, Art took him out riding on a leading rein and tried to get him interested in pigeon-rearing, Lief carved him a stick and Brother Pinginn went into contortions of sympathy, devoting much of his time to reading and talking to the boy. Finn gave him his own chair in the nobles’ bar and, to her relief, found that the jarls were so moved by what had happened to him – not so much the blinding as the castration, which was their nightmare – that they tried to include him in their talk. But when, inevitably, they got onto subjects like hunting, which had been his joy, he spat at them and ran across the room, nearly blundering into the fire. ‘Don’t those pigs have any feelings?’ he screamed at Finn, ‘why do they have to remind me?’
He had been a good-looking, charming, careless, extrovert young man who had not been fed on enough intellectual protein to sustain him now that his sexual and active life was over. Pinginn watched in agony as the boy dug himself into a time trench, refusing to look back and rejecting any advance to the future. Finn longed to hear anecdotes about Slaney but he had wiped out his past for his self-protection and she learned nothing. He spurned the help of Art, and when Tailltin suggested that he might like to take charge of feeding the poultry, he turned on her furiously. ‘I am high-born, not a hen-keeper.’ Pinginn offered him the consolation of religion, but he said, ‘Don’t talk to me about God. How could He let this happen to me?’ He took the stick Lief gave him and gradually learned to tap his way round the inn and its environs, screaming with frustration whenever a guest left a stool out of place and he fell over it. Since he couldn’t abide the company of his peers, Finn put his chair in the commoners’ bar, telling him that by listening to the sailors’ talk for information he could be useful to Ireland. He sneered – he had no conception of Ireland as an entity, like so many of the clan aristocrats – but the only alternative was to sit brooding in the tower, so he did it. But even as a spy Censellach was limited because the one subject which interested him was Dermot. ‘Why didn’t you tell me what the Manx sailor was saying, about FitzStephen trying to recruit men from the King of Man?’ Finn asked him crossly, one night, ‘Even Perse realised that was important.’
He sulked. ‘I was listening to the trader who said Dermot had gone back to Bristol.’
‘But we know that.’
‘Well, if you know that why don’t we send someone over to kill him?’
She was silent. She’d dreamed of it. A few years ago, when it was impossible, she had spent happy hours plunging hypothetical knives into the Mac Murrough neck; now that it was a feasible proposition she no longer had the necessary hatred.
‘I could do it, Finn.’ The boy’s hands crawled over her face again. ‘One of his daughters used to love me, she probably still does. I could trick her into getting me close to him and I could do it.’
‘No.’
During the daytime while the staff were busy preparing for the guests, Censellach took to wandering outside the inn, stick-tapping excursions along the quay and over the bridge to the mill, but most frequently up Lazy Hill behind the Swan where he was often to be seen in conversation – at a safe distance – with the lepers. ‘What on earth can he find to talk about with them?’ she asked Pinginn, who had followed hi
m at first to see he didn’t fall. The lepers were still her bêtes noirs and, though they had learned to keep their distance, she suspected them every time a clutch of eggs or a hen went missing.
‘Hatred for the unafflicted,’ said Pinginn sadly. ‘I’m afraid for that young man, Finn. And of him.’
She didn’t have time to pursue it. She and Tailltin and Pinginn were preparing for a mission. Thanks to the information that Dermot was sounding out the Isle of Man for mercenaries, she had been able to thwart him by getting Asgall, his fellow Norseman, to warn the Manx king that it would be regarded as an unfriendly act if any of his people joined forces with the exile. It would be less easy to stop the recruitment of Welsh and Scots mercenaries, but they were going to try.
* * *
That spring the most innocent of parties, two nuns and a priest – a very small priest – journeyed through Scotland, by chance following in the wake of some knights who were trying to recruit men for an expedition into Ireland. They were like an eraser, for wherever they passed the enthusiasm for the expedition among those who had promised to join it in two months’ time was obliterated. The knights had offered good pay – sixpence a day for axemen, a shilling for mounted men with armour – and rewards of land. The nuns and the priest said with compelling earnestness that the expedition was doomed because St Brigid, of whom even non-Irish Celts were in awe, had cursed Dermot Mac Murrough whose expedition it was with a deep, long curse. Her disfavour had already exiled him; if he returned to his native land to face it again the fate of Gehenna awaited him and all his soldiers with him.
Some were prepared to take the chance, but the superstitious majority were not.
Elated by their success, Finn, Tailltin and Pinginn took their message of doom into the enemy’s territory, into Wales, to counteract recruitment under the noses of the recruiters, the sons of Nesta themselves, which was how they got caught.
Chapter Twelve
‘Well, well, my lord,’ said FitzStephen, welcoming his visitor to Strongbow’s castle at Chepstow, ‘who’d have thought it?’
‘Not me,’ said the lord of Llanthony, dismounting, ‘but these are chancy times. And Fitzempress is a chancy king.’
‘He’s let you keep your lands?’
‘So far, but you know what he is. I could be deprived of them any minute. He won’t have me in his sight just now, so I thought…’
A groom led the horses away. Stiff-legged, John followed his host across the bailey and up the steps to the hall. FitzStephen ushered him in and gave him wine: ‘So you thought you’d better acquire more, just in case.’
‘I regard this expedition to Ireland as a crusade,’ said John with what he considered just the right touch of hypocrisy. ‘To bring the enlightenment of the True Church into Celtic darkness.’
‘Don’t we all. And in what did you offend our noble king?’
‘Well, I happen to think he’s going too far in his animosity towards Becket. He’ll bring the country under interdict if he’s not careful. Like a fool, I said so.’
‘And the sky fell in? Dear me, I thought you were so close to Fitzempress.’ FitzStephen’s foxy eyes flickered at his guest.
‘So did I. I reckoned myself the best of his marshals.’ John stamped the mud off his boots and alarmed the falcon sitting on its be-dropped perch. ‘How’s the recruitment going?’
‘Not well. We’ll be glad of any men you can bring. Jesus, I’ll swear someone’s deliberately blocking our attempts. Is Fitzempress playing one of his games?’ Again his eyes went sideways.
John said with perfect truth, ‘He’s got too many troubles everywhere else just now.’
FitzStephen nodded. ‘Well, Strongbow’s gone off to lick the king’s arse and make sure he’s not offending him. The damned Jews are being backward about advancing the money. You’d have thought on a venture like this… and that Manx idiot refuses to let any of his people join us and the Scots have proved broken reeds. I thought there’d be some Welsh surplus, and I was sure we’d get a lot from the Flemings who’ve settled here, but there’s this odd reluctance. There’s a rumour going round among wives and mothers that Dermot’s been cursed by some Irish saint and that if we join him we’ll never have sons, or be struck down by disease or something.’
John became alert. The green fleck again. ‘I bloody know somebody’s blocking you. I’ve had an idea for some time that someone over in Ireland is causing trouble all over Europe, and when I get my hands on them…’
FitzStephen was pleased. ‘Now I’m glad you said that, because we’ve had a bit of luck. One of the FitzGeralds was in Caerleon three days ago when he heard that a woman had been spreading the curse-rumour in the market place the day before and, not being the fool he looks, he chased along the road she was supposed to have taken and rounded up every suspicious looking woman he met. I told his rider to bring them here for questioning… ah ha.’
Down in the bailey there was a sound of horse-shoes on cobbles, shouts and muffled screaming. The two men moved to the doorway and looked down on some large, sheep-skinned riders who were escorting a train of pack mules, each one with a skirted figure tied across its saddle. Feminine legs kicked at one end of the bundles and from the other, under the sacks over their heads, issued feminine curses.
‘Bit wholesale, wasn’t he?’ shouted John to FitzStephen, who shrugged.
‘That’s the FitzGeralds for you.’ Over the noise he told the man in charge. ‘Take them to the keep.’
He and John went back into the hall to finish their wine and conversation. ‘It’s a strange place, Ireland,’ said John, ‘and while I discount all this business of curses and ill-wishing, it might be that we should delay any move…’
‘It’s got to be now,’ said FitzStephen sharply. ‘Dermot Mac Murrough’s information is that the O’Conor is making a success of the High Kingship. We’ve got to get over there before the clans cohere for the first time in their history.’
‘My lord.’ A man had appeared at the door. ‘My lord, one of the women is asking for the lord of Llanthony.’
A cold trickle went down the backs of the men in the hall. ‘How did she know he was here, for God’s sake?’
‘She heard his voice, my lord. She says she knows him.’
‘Who is she?’
‘She’s a nun, my lord. But she said…’ the man was ill-at-ease, ‘she said to ask him, did he remember Bertha the Bosomy?’
* * *
She had been taken to the keep’s top room, so that he could speak to her alone, and flung into a corner. The fight she’d put up before she was captured had forfeited her captors’ respect for the nun’s habit. Her veil was off and hanging around her neck. She had a black eye and a bruise on her jaw. She looked a mess.
He had the beginnings of a paunch and the years had taken away most of the amusement from his face. He stood in the doorway for a long time before he spoke. ‘Just tell me why.’
‘Why what?’
‘Why Glendalough?’
Mother of God, after all these years it still ate away at him, and how familiarly beautiful he still was, how beautifully familiar, he was a shock near her in a doorway and just the same; it was Christmas and Easter and every saints’ day and spring. She shouldn’t have asked for him; but she’d known she was in danger of her life. Anyway, she couldn’t bear to have him just pass by again.
She said, ‘I couldn’t leave Ireland. But it nearly killed me to do it.’
He softened. So she’d gone back to the convent; there’d not been another man. All the resentment and the nights swearing vengeance if he saw her again melted into not mattering now that he’d found her. The damn harp staves were at it, louder than ever.
He shut the door behind him and the minutes switched into Lough Mask time. ‘It bloody nearly killed me. They kept putting me in herbal baths.’
She grinned and winced. ‘Very good for you.’ There was an iron cup with water on a shelf. He took off his surcoat and dipped the sleeve of his fine law
n shirt into the water and squatted down over her.
‘Don’t you come near me,’ she said. She had begun to breathe fast, ridiculous.
‘Wouldn’t want to, a bruiser like you.’ He wiped her face gently. She could smell his skin. ‘Loon, you were the only thing that was good for me.’
The scents of lakeland, juicy and full, were in the room. The floorboards were the grasses of Swan Island. ‘God almighty, you never used to wear all these buttons.’
* * *
When he eventually got back to the bailey, he found FitzStephen still talking with the woolly FitzGerald. He went over to them: ‘As I thought, my lords, nothing more sinister there than a nun on her way to Much Wenlock Priory. I used to know her a long time ago. I’ll escort her so that I can explain to her superior why she was waylaid in this fashion. There shouldn’t be any trouble.’
FitzStephen glanced up at the keep. ‘That’s what she told you, did she?’
‘Certainly.’ He was still light-headed. ‘Of course, she’s furious but…’
‘She didn’t explain where she learned to use sling-shot and fight like a gutter-rat, by any chance?’
The FitzGerald grunted. ‘She killed one of my lads outright and bloody near crippled two more. She fought so the two people with her got away.’
‘Ah well…’
‘And she didn’t happen to explain what she was doing with this in her saddle-bag, did she?’
FitzStephen held out ‘this’ on his open palm. It was a double-sided seal. John took it. The obverse portrayed a king enthroned with orb and sceptre. The reverse showed him mounted, his hand thrown back and clutching a sword. It was the seal of Henry II. Somebody had carved a pretty fair, but imperfect copy from a matrix. ‘It’s a forgery.’
‘No doubt. But one like this was good enough to make Owain of Gwynedd rebel – and take all the mercenaries in north Wales with him. She’s a spy.’
Daughter of Lir Page 39