Their own terror made them brutal; this island had floated in its uncharted sea on the edge of knowledge for aeons, misty with harp-music, sacred wells, strange saints and senseless language. The people were unrelated to them, another species. There was no Arthurian legend here like that which formed the basis of their knighthood, neither Joseph of Aramithea nor the disciples nor any saint they knew of had planted familiar, revered feet on these hills to make a path for a Christianity they recognised.
So, like dogs piddling scent to mark a territory for their own, they were impelled to superimpose their own reek on this alien place by sword and semen.
* * *
It was the spring equinox and the daughters of Dermot were back where they belonged. With other girls of the Hy Kinsella, they went to the lonely countryside of the southern Wicklow hills to express joy at their youth and homecoming, and to dance the Mayday in through a ritual which connected them to dancing ancestresses in a cowslip chain of vitality.
Sun welcomed them, Irish grass laved their bare feet as they circled in the ancient rhythm to the point where its mystery lifted them two inches in the air and they skimmed like the Children of Lir at take-off – until Dervorgilla saw the mailed horsemen above them on the hill.
The horsemen saw a bunch of peasant girls playing silly buggers. Asking for it.
* * *
‘Who were they?’ whispered Dermot.
‘Foreigners. I don’t know.’ Aoife’s voice was toneless between puffed lips.
‘They kept their hats on,’ said Dervorgilla. The iron of the nasals had torn their faces as the penises had torn their vaginas. Her nose was broken and still bleeding and she rocked forward, giggling out of control. Slaney regarded the enraged, shouting Hy Kinsella men around her out of uninterested eyes. A flap along her cheekbones hung open.
Dermot wept. ‘They’re spoiled. My little flowers, all spoiled. They smell of men.’
Murchadh brought the two army doctors into the tent. ‘Lucky that Morrow saw them. Their clothes were blowing around the hill; he thought they were sheep.’ He watched the doctors begin work, then raised Dermot and took him outside. ‘Will we go to Wexford and burn the foreigners alive, brother, and let the wind blow their filthy cinders back to Wales.’ It wasn’t a question.
Dermot wiped his eyes. ‘No. We must feast our guests. What are you thinking of, Murchadh? Feast them. We’ll give them the meat they tainted.’ He smiled at his brother. ‘They’ll marry their own poison. Where is the woman that teaches other women to kill?’
It was only then that Murchadh saw how deeply the disease had eaten into his brother’s brain. ‘Will you destory everything, Mac Murrough?’
Dermot patted him, amazed he had to ask. ‘Destruction’s all there is.’
* * *
‘I can’t tell you how sorry I am, my lord,’ said FitzStephen with complete honesty. ‘My fault, really. We were short of supplies, you see, and I’d sent this lot out foraging. But they had strict instructions… I had no idea.’
‘What did you do with them, as a matter of interest?’ asked Dermot. He was taking it very well.
‘Hanged them,’ said FitzStephen. ‘Flogged them and strung ’em up immediately. They suffered before they died, I can tell you.’ He’d certainly had them whipped and rubbed salt in the lashes to remind them to keep their hands to themselves, but hanging was out of the question: he was short of men as it was. He approached his next question with delicacy. ‘The ladies concerned, were they, well, anything special?’
‘Peasant women, just peasant women,’ said Dermot. ‘Mind you…’
‘Oh, indeed,’ said FitzStephen, ‘One will be happy to pay their eric or whatever recompense you give over here. I mean, it’s not pleasant whoever it is. But there you are, Flemings will be Flemings. Well, my lord, it is good of you to show such Christian forebearance. Not a good beginning, but we’ll go on to a better. With your men and mine our army must be, oh, nine hundred strong. Shall we proceed to get Leinster back for you?’
‘Yes,’ said Dermot. ‘And when we have, you shall marry my eldest daughter and be my beloved heir. All you brave, strong knights must marry my daughters. I want you to have your reward.’
* * *
If the Normans had been less greedy, or more imaginative, they would have been frightened to death of the odds against them. The High King whose country they had invaded could whistle up an army five times their strength by merely pursing his lips. Their enemy was on familiar ground which enabled it to disappear into the vast forests, cross the deadly bogs as if they were streets, blend into the camouflage of the mountains – and pop up again, refreshed, to attack from some completely different quarter.
To some extent the Normans were prepared for that; most of them had fought in Wales and had experience of ambush in difficult terrain. They had an advantage in being armoured. In a cavalry charge they could chop and axe their opponents from a greater height and, therefore, with greater force than a rider without stirrups. Their Welsh archers had a new and terrible weapon, the longbow, which released iron-tipped arrows at such speed that the sound of the air they displaced as they flew ripped the courage out of an opponent even before they stuck through him – and a longbow arrow could pierce a thick oak door.
But Ireland was the enticement to landless men that a bitch on heat is to roving dogs; they were out of control with the excitement of her, and what would have been a defeat had one Irish clan inflicted such damage on another, to the invaders was a temporary set-back in which to pant while they worked out some other form of assault.
When, outnumbered by three to one, they sieged Wexford, the defenders chucked bits of their city down on the Normans’ heads. Robert de Barry, brother to Giraldus Cambriensis, was struck on his helmet by a great stone and fell down into the moat. But his companions dragged him out and he threw himself at the walls again with the rest of them. The Norse of Wexford were worn out by besiegers who were either bravely insane or insanely brave but either way couldn’t be stopped. Their arms were tired with throwing things at them and, anyway, there was nothing left to throw. They sent their bishops out to sue for peace and submitted to Dermot Mac Murrough.
So Wexford fell. The annalist of Innisfallen, sitting in his monastery scriptorum, with the rest of Ireland as remote to him as if it were mythical Cathay, recorded, ‘This year was a bad one for hazelnuts.’ He dipped his quill into the inkwell and added, ‘Also did Dermot Mac Murrough bring a fleet of foreigners to the shore of Erin.’
The High King, Ruairi O’Conor, had no time either to pay attention to what was happening in the south-east. He ignored the warnings that came from his watcher by the sea. He was having trouble subduing the clans of Thomond who were pursuing a vendetta against him.
Three weeks later Dermot and his army crossed the Blackstairs mountains and invade Ossory which was the kingdom of Donal MacGiolla Phadraig, who had been given Leinster when Dermot was exiled. MacGiolla Phadraig held Dermot’s eldest son, Eanna, as hostage against just such an attack. Now he blinded him.
Ireland was lost during that long-running battle, though nobody realised it. MacGiolla Phadraig did all he could. He made the most of his thick forests, ambushed the invaders, skirmished, killed their stragglers, fell back into the bogs and emerged – to find Dermot and his Normans waiting for him. He was forced into a pitched battle which lasted for three days and he lost it. Outnumbered several times over, the Normans had encountered the best that an Irish force on its own territory could do, and the best had not proved good enough.
Two hundred Ossorian heads were cut off after the final battle. The Normans watched as Dermot roamed among them, talking to himself and turning them over one by one.
‘What’s he looking for?’ asked Maurice de Prendergast to his friend, the lord of Llanthony. He was a Flemish captain, and not usually a squeamish man.
‘The face of the executioner who blinded his son.’
‘I tell you, John, there are times I think even Ireland
is no reward for being an ally to such a man. I don’t trust him.’ Straws in the wind, a glint in the Mac Murrough eye, made him suspect that Dermot did not intend to reward his allies once they’d won back his throne for him, but that he would turn and send them back where they came from – with or without their heads.
Beside him the lord of Llanthony sucked in his breath: ‘If I had my way, I’d kill him.’ But Fitzempress had sent him on a watching brief. Keep Dermot safe, Fitzempress had said, we may need him. But when we’ve finished needing him… John dwelled on what he would then do to the King of Leinster.
They heard a squeal of delight. Dermot was holding one of the heads up by its ears like a two-handled chalice. Slowly he brought it down to his own face as if to drink from it, and tore off its lips with his teeth.
* * *
The loss of Maurice de Prendergast and the two hundred mercenaries who went with him back to Wales, consigning Ireland and its mad kings to the devil, was made up by the enlargement of Dermot’s army as he overran more and more territory and forcibly enlisted the men of his old kingdom.
It was left to his brother to attend to the details, such as supplying the army, dispensing justice, raising taxes – and now making the arrangements for a group of girls who, in Murchadh’s view, were more trouble than they were worth. Left to himself, Murchadh would have married them off quickly. The fact that they had been raped was not an obstacle – the Irish didn’t set much store by female virginity, except nuns’. That foreigners had raped them, and thereby shamed the clan, was much more serious. It had to be kept secret or Dermot’s honour would be in the sewer. Nobody, and especially the foreigners themselves, must ever know of it. Dermot’s plan to have them turned into warrior-women and then married off to the foreigners’ leaders to carry out his revenge on them was, to the unsubtle Murchadh, another example of his brother’s over-deviousness. Nevertheless, Dermot had ordered it to be done and all his life Murchadh had done what Dermot wanted. Not for him the game of blinding and assassination which other clan chieftains played to ensure kingship for themselves. During Dermot’s exile he had been given the kingship of the Hy Kinsella in the share-out of Leinster ordained by the O’Conor, and on Dermot’s return he had handed it back as easily as if Dermot were reclaiming an old coat he’d left behind. As far as Murchadh was concerned, his brother was the true king and that was that.
The problem was that Dermot had not said exactly where, to whom and with what assurances for their security the girls were to be sent; once he’d given the order he had refused to see his daughters again; he had lost his enjoyment of them. Doggedly, Murchadh sent an ambassador to the only warrior-woman he knew of, the one in the Western Isles of Scotland, the ancient home of warrior-women where Cuchulainn had learned his legendary skills. On receiving assurance that she was apolitical and would return the girls, suitably militant, back to the Hy Kinsella in a year and a day, he sent off the girls themselves and went back to his other, overwhelming duties.
Murchadh was not to know that Scathagh would decide to reconvene her Academy on its old site at Lough Mask in the territory of the greatest enemy of her candidates’ father and king. Nor that she was short of instructresses for so many candidates and would, therefore, send to Dublin for help from some old pupils.
* * *
Patriotism, politics, spying went for nothing when Finn heard what had happened to Slaney and the others. She’d have sold Ireland, she’d have watched the Pilgrim die and most certainly she would have died herself, if she could have saved her child from this. As she rode to Lough Mask, her own rape dwindled into an incident. What the hell had she made the fuss about? The suffering was transmuted away from herself and became a vehicle to experience the suffering of someone else. ‘I’ll do anything,’ she promised the God who had whipped her back in her impotence to bleat with the rest of the flock, ‘only let her be all right.’ She was not capable of much coherent thought on that ride, but among the panic and grief grew a suspicion, later a conviction, that if God was capable of feeling the supreme suffering of his human beings, then he had not stayed in heaven and watched while his Son was on the cross, neither was he on the cross himself, but he was where the greatest agony was, with Mary, screaming and scrabbling with her fingernails at the wood of the cross’s foot. Mary was God.
Lough Mask was always silent in high summer, with the mother birds sheltering their broods in the reeds and grasses. Its water reflected an amethyst sunset and the tower of Inis Cailleach was casting a shadow blacker than the tower itself, whose stone was pink in the dying light. From Scathagh’s gallery it was a shock to see so many girls trooping quietly in to the main beehive of the courtyard; at least three were dark.
‘Which one is Slaney? I’m taking her home with me.’
‘Why?’
‘She’s my daughter.’
‘Still, why?’
Finn looked at the bulk beside her. ‘I can’t let her go through it. All the hardship, the wolf-hunt… It’s too dangerous.’
‘You managed it.’
‘Niav didn’t.’
‘My child.’ Scathagh had not aged and her voice was still lovely. ‘My child, you cannot deprive her of the chance to find what you found. Nor have I the right to let her throw it away. She took the Academy oath with the rest. If you love her, you will help her and not keep her crippled as she is.’
‘Is she crippled?’
‘She has an advantage you didn’t have. She isn’t pregnant, though two of the girls are. She was one of a group and they will help each other more than anything you can do. At the moment they are hungry and they will go on being hungry until they can forget their present misery and do something about it. You remember.’
She remembered. Dagda brought them up steaming bowls of stew, carefully wafting them past the doorway of the beehive which answered with the smell of plain fish. As they ate, Finn put her problem to Scathagh. ‘So do I tell her I’m her mother?’
Scathagh munched greedily as she considered. ‘You don’t owe Dermot Mac Murrough any favours, that’s for sure. On the other hand the child thinks he’s wonderful – they all do. Whatever else he does, Dermot inspires love from his kin.’
‘Not his wives.’
‘Probably not. But the girl has lost so many illusions from the rape, that I think the loss of one more at this stage would be harmful. Leave it until she can cope with it.’
The next evening Scathagh, Dagda and Finn ate with the candidates in the beehive, helping themselves to their own rich dishes, apparently ignoring the fare apportioned to the girls, and with Finn trying not to watch every move her daughter made. The scar along the girl’s cheekbone gave what had once had been a chubby, innocent face a piratical look which might be intriguing if ever humour came back to it and drove away the bewilderment of perpetually-relived horror. Nevertheless, Finn saw that Scathagh was right and that while mass rape brought its own particular abasement, its victims would be more quickly formed into a team than she and the hags had been. Already they had got to the sullen stage. Next evening one of the girls – actually, Aoife – said angrily, ‘When are we going to be treated properly and have decent food?’
Finn leaned back in her chair and watched. Scathagh said, lifting a choice morsel to her mouth, ‘You want some nice venison like mine?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then kill it.’
The different perspective as she helped to teach the girls how to handle a curragh, watched them fetch peat, then began the training sessions with sling and javelin on the far side of the Lough, made Finn realise how unselfish Dagda had been in allowing the girls to ally themselves against her for their own good. It was a lonely business to be outside the team spirit as, very gradually, the girls became all-for-one and one-for-all hags who resented, and often said so, the women who drove them so hard. But Finn drove as hard as any.
‘You devil,’ Slaney screamed at her one day, bleeding from a cut knee after an unsuccessful steed leap, ‘I can’t do it. I’
ll never do it.’
‘Then fail,’ Finn said indifferently. She was beginning to know her daughter. Slaney mouthed some highly promising swear words and tried again. She had inherited no natural expertise with horses; Dervorgilla, Caitlin and several of the other girls mastered the jump before she did, but she had endurance and was beginning to get a sense of her own worth which Finn, at last, was prepared to make her suffer to achieve. She had missed out on the stage when she could have kissed a little girl’s knee better; all she could opt for now was to make the little girl into a better woman.
What qualities Slaney had inherited from her she didn’t know, but the girl was fearless, vain, and honest to the point of being able to laugh at herself. Finn became fond of all the girls, especially Aoife, who was at once kind and deservedly their acknowledged leader, but Slaney she began to admire as well as love. Her daughter’s humour reminded her time and again of the Pilgrim and increasingly she became his child as well as her own. That personality couldn’t have been formed in the terror of Kildare, it belonged to Swan Island.
It occurred to her that none of the young hags had the resources which, as Connaughtwomen, her class year had known among the Partraige. The Partraige life went on around the shore just the same as it always had, more or less ignoring the activities on Inis Cailleach.
So when the girls had stopped resenting their training and were beginning to see the point of it, Finn chose one night to say to Slaney: ‘If ever you want some privacy, you’re welcome to use my island. It’s the one over there. I stay there sometimes.’
Daughter of Lir Page 41