In the early afternoon a look-out shouted, ‘Lord De Cogan crossing the bridge.’
Raymond Le Gros met his fellow-commander in the inn’s doorway. ‘Nice place,’ said De Cogan.
‘Keep your eyes off, Miles. I liberated it. Everybody in position?’
‘Yes. The river’s the problem, trying to stop the bastards getting word to O’Conor. Dermot’s parleying across the walls with Asgall, demanding hostages, but the Vikings can’t make up their minds who to give as hostage.’
‘God, Miles, we can’t wait for this crapping about. We need to be in that bloody city before O’Conor moves.’
‘That’s what I say…’ Their voices moved out of Finn’s range as they climbed up to the tower. Later they sent for food and wine, but Le Gros ordered Perse to fetch it. He’d taken to her.
Most of the men drank ale, for which Finn thanked God; nevertheless, Le Gros’ consumption would finish the kosher wine quickly at this rate, in which case somebody might move the barrel. She told Perse to serve the Aquitanian Aragon had brought on the last trip, and hoped to God the Normans would be kept too busy with their own concerns to wonder why such heavy goods should be transported to such an inconvenient place as a tower cellar, and whether they had got there by some other route than through the inn.
She must get Pinginn and Elfwida away. She wasn’t worried about Perse, who could obviously look after herself, or Gorm, who had a universal camouflage in being the sort of silent, capable, elderly, jack-of-all-trades to be found in inns all over the world. Already he could move about without the continual watch kept on the rest of them. Jacques had got him mending broken harness.
It was still only mid-afternoon – she cast an amazed look at the sun, wondering whether it had stopped – when Pinginn was allowed out of the tower to the garden privies.
She managed to look as if she were gathering herbs and move into Pinginn’s path. As he passed her, he said in Irish, ‘They’re going to storm the city tonight,’ before his guard pushed him on.
‘Can we warn them?’ asked Elfwida when the two of them could exchange a few words in the kitchen.
Finn shook her head. ‘We must get away.’ If Dublin wasn’t prepared for a surprise attack by now, nothing she could do would help.
‘It’s a shame,’ said Perse, ‘but never mind, the wedding’ll cheer things up.’
‘What wedding?’
‘Lord Strongbow’s. I heard two of the Welshmen talking, but I didn’t let on I understood because they’re southerners and persingly I don’t like southerners.’
‘But how did you understand?’ She stood there, bovine and confiding, her fingers making knuckle-shapes in dough.
‘Well, it isn’t what we spoke up in the north exactly, but near.’
‘Perse,’ said Finn, smiling for the first time that day, ‘you’re Welsh.’ She’d never thought of Perse as having nationality; she had seemed to belong to some unique breed of her own, descendant of a long line of Perses.
‘Was,’ said Perse.
‘Who’s the swine marrying, anyway?’
‘One of Dermot’s daughters.’
* * *
Their dependable, lovely, refined, intelligent Aoife was trying to crawl under the canvas of the pavilion. When the Hy Kinsella lifted her back she ran around it, snatching at hangings, throwing over stools, battering her father, howling.
Dermot pushed her off and sat down in his camp chair, rearranging his cloak. ‘This is unseemly. I told you, it doesn’t matter.’
‘It matters to me,’ shrieked Aoife.
There has been a mistake, thought Slaney. God has put us into hell while we’re still alive. That is not Aoife. That is not Father. This not me. All this is outside what I am capable of believing.
‘You were never free to marry whom you liked,’ said Dermot.
‘Irish, Irish.’ The pavilion smelled of bruised grass. Aoife was on her hands and knees, clawing at it, hitting her head on it. ‘Not a thing from another world entering me. You said it was just a ruse. You said it was a ru-u-u-use.’ Her body went limp as the word throbbed out of it.
‘It’s still a ruse,’ said Dermot. He was puzzled at her reaction. ‘This way he’ll win the High Kingship for me. He’ll think he’ll inherit it after me, not knowing he can’t. You can kill him then if you like. When he sleeps or something. Or I’ll send him back to England. But you must understand, Aoife, that Tara is attainable now, so close. I can feel the wind on its hilltop.’
There were spots round his mouth and he scratched himself continually. He is dead, thought Slaney, and the body still twitches to drag itself up a grass-covered mound where ancient kings stood once for a ritual. You’re a corpse. Die now, decently, before you do this thing to Aoife.
‘You must see,’ said Dermot, ‘It doesn’t matter who enters you. You’ve been defiled already. Again won’t matter. Take them away and prepare them.’
As the Hy Kinsella closed in, Slaney said, ‘If I can, Father, I will kill you.’
Dermot focussed on her. ‘I forget who your father was, but I know he raped your mother.’ He frowned and put a flaking hand to his head. ‘I can’t remember why.’
* * *
Scraps of food were chucked down into the undercroft after them. ‘Tell them not to touch that bloody wine,’ they heard Le Gros say, and the trapdoor which sealed off the undercroft from the upper floors slammed down. Bolts rusty from disuse scraped home, boots thudded overhead and they were in a darkness so complete it muffled the eyes. There was silence, apart from Molling’s whimpering. The man had completely gone to pieces.
‘Gorm, Pinginn, get that vat rolled away. Elf, help me find the chest.’ They stumbled and tripped in their disorientation but eventually Finn’s hands were on the nun’s habit. In the maelstrom of horror into which she was going it would be little enough protection, but it was all she had. ‘I’m sorry,’ she kept saying as she dressed. ‘I’m so sorry. But I’ve got to get to her if I can. To help her, at least to be there. If it is her.’
‘Whoever it is, the poor thing,’ said Pinginn.
It would be terrible going upriver when their only safety lay the other way, but the boat was small and couldn’t take all of them; she would have had to make choices whatever she did. She felt Elfwida’s hands buttoning up the back of the habit and turned round to clasp them. ‘I’ll be back. I promise, I promise. Say it.’
‘You’ll be back,’ said Elfwida tonelessly.
‘What’ll we do if the Normans find you gone?’ shrieked Molling. Perse said, ‘It’s not very nice, all this.’ Oddly, she was a comfort.
The trapdoor was raised to let in the smell of river and an impression of light rather than light itself. ‘What time would it be?’ ‘About prime.’ Everything was quiet outside apart from the hiss of rain. She stumbled over to the opening, sat down, felt about for the thwart with her feet and dropped down. The curragh rocked as she was pushed aside by Pinginn dropping down beside her. ‘You can’t come,’ she said, clutching at him.
‘Did God put you into my hand or not?’
She was so afraid that she didn’t protest any more.
‘What’ll we do if the Normans come back and find you gone?’ shouted Molling again, but his voice resounded in an empty cave.
A bad August was turning into a worse September and the moon was obscured by cloud but there was a glow from the fires along the north shore which would illuminate them. They hauled the curragh round the rock face by pulling on their hands against its surface, with the river trying to pull them in the other direction, as if it knew something. Sculling across the mouth of the Stein and into the view of anyone on top of the tower or along the quay was an exposure so blatant it seemed obscene, but they had to break cover at some point. The sculls creaked in their wooden rowlocks and Pinginn, always a clumsy oarsman, missed his stroke and hit the water like a child batting a stick against it. If there was anyone on the tower, he was blind and deaf.
‘We could land and make it on
foot,’ he whispered hopefully. She considered. Out here they were a target and the impulse to get among trees was strong, but in the darkness of the shore they could blunder into a group of soldiers before they knew it whereas in a boat, if the first arrows missed, they could lie down and let it take them back to where they’d come from. ‘Not yet.’ She watched the north shore bonfires as they rowed but saw no movement; one or two were being damped down by the rain, which was increasing. Presumably the troops which had lit them had been pulled in for the coming attack on the city. Nothing was happening yet. Behind them as they rowed Dublin looked as it had done on the thousands of nights she had watched it, a faint patina coming from the braziers and flares in its streets, tiny arches of light which were the illuminated upper windows of its castle where men were talking, worried but not worried enough, still relying on the old Irish custom of last-minute negotiation to save them, unaware that everything Irish was about to be swept away and that negotiation was gone for ever.
The satin sheen from mudflats on their right told her that further inland stood the Thingmount, another vantage point from which arrows could fly at them; she had no plan, there couldn’t be one; she was just moving upstream to save her daughter, a clumsy salmon likely to be speared at any moment but unable to disobey the summons of its body.
The sculls creaked and water splashed off the blades in the same sound she had listened to a hundred times as she had pulled over the gentle surface of Lough Mask. Out there were men wanting to kill other men and harm women who had legs, arms, breasts, a head, like their own women at home. Tonight there would be children experiencing a fear that would darken the rest of their lives, if they lived them at all. God, stop it and send us all home.
From the far side of the city there came a single battle-cry, the voice self-conscious as it broke the peace of the night, its false note followed by a roaring drum of sound sweeping on and on round the ouside of the city, engulfing it, bouncing back off its walls in a wave that ran down the river like a bore, so violent it seemed to rock them. ‘Oh, Jesus.’ If they went on it would consume them as well as Dublin.
They pulled for the shore, hid the boat under a clump of alders and climbed up through mud until they found a path. They were stupefied into carelessness by the assault of noise but there could be no danger in the no-man’s land of Hogges Green now; every invader in Ireland had to be contributing his throat in that immense shout, magnetised towards the city by its promise of power, booty and killing. Their own heads were turned to it and when they came to an avenue of beeches by a wall they stopped and positioned themselves to look in its direction as if they were the audience to some riveting entertainment.
The lights of the stage wavered as torches were set to buildings and then went up so that it was flared, showing ridiculously miniaturised shapes fighting along the top of the walls, a theatrical effect, a puppet show. The roar of shouting became ragged, augmented by screams, steel hitting steel, and the whoosh of fire. The rain became insistent and beech leaves turned down into small chutes which soaked them, but they didn’t notice and it wasn’t enough to put out the flames which bounced up and down in cascades where one house went up more quickly than its neighbour. They watched all night. The slope of the city to the river gradually skidded the action of the fighting down the walls to the right of their stage’s wings, so that all they could see was unchecked burning. They tried not to imagine what was happening as the people and army of Dublin were jammed down into the roads leading to the river, but the squealing from that direction was like a slaughterhouse and went on and on until that Finn found herself saying, ‘Stop it, stop it,’ not to the butchery, but to the noise of butchery.
She heard Brother Pinginn calling on his God and wondered why.
It was still raining when dawn came up and showed that Dublin had assumed different shapes, walls messily incomplete, spars where there had been comfortable clusters of thatch; the smoke over it was general instead of rising up from particular, domesticated fires. The stretch of land between it and where they stood, wet to the skin, was empty of living things except for birds which were going about their brisk morning flights and landings as if the world were still the same.
‘Where are we?’
‘It’s St Mary’s Abbey. If we go towards the city from here they might think we’re coming from it.’ There was no question in either of their minds that the Normans had won Dublin; the absence of people proved it. All the vultures had gathered in that one spot to gorge on whatever was in there. Pinginn said, ‘After all, there’ll be a need for priests. They’ll let us in.’
Almost aimless with shock they began wandering out from the shelter of the trees and then dodged back as they saw a horseman coming towards them at full speed from the direction of the city. He dismounted at the convent gates and rang the bell with energy, but they didn’t open; the nuns of St Mary’s had also had a grandstand seat to the destruction of their city. The horseman persisted after a long while they heard a squint-door being unlatched in the gate. They couldn’t hear the conversation that went on through it, though the horseman’s tone was peremptory. Apparently reluctantly, the gates opened and a nun, the superior by her dress, came out, her head up. She and the horseman spoke together without warmth for a moment or two, then she turned to beckon to her sisters who emerged, more hesitantly, in ones or twos.
Finn, who’d been watching through branches, let them spring back and closed her eyes. As the Mother Superior had turned she had seen her face. She knew it. She’d seen it before. She associated it with dread, but why? She’d seen it a long time ago in connection with something terrible. Terrible. A cold, flat voice in her memory said, ‘I don’t know what he will do to you, but it will be terrible. He is a terrible man.’
The horseman remounted and turned his horse in the direction he had come, leading the twenty or so nuns at walking pace towards the city.
‘Come on.’ She and Pinginn sprinted over the grass, their wet skirts flapping against their ankles, and joined the procession. The nuns were being taken into the city and whatever it was for, even if it was to be killed, it was a passport through the gates. A few of the nuns looked up as Finn pushed her way towards the Mother Superior but they were too afraid to question anything; their mouths moved in ritual, issuing a whisper of prayers, while their fingers flickered frantically over the knots of their rosaries.
The Mother Superior wasn’t praying. She walked stiffly with her eyes straight ahead and her face blank. Finn nudged her and said quietly: ‘Do you know me?’
The nun turned her head and focussed with an effort. The last time they had met it was Finn who had been the Mother Superior. ‘Yes.’ Whatever peace she had found in her sanctuary all these years it had not revived emotion in her, or perhaps the summons to Dublin had taken it away. She was as bloodless as on the night when she had warned the Abbess of Kildare that Dermot was on his way.
‘What’s happening?’
The woman who had once been Dermot’s wife glanced at the horseman riding ahead and said, ‘My sisters and I have been invited to a wedding. We are to lend respectability to the marriage between Strongbow and Aoife of Leinster.’
Aoife. It was Aoife who was to be sacrificed to a conqueror forty years older than herself. Finn shut her eyes in relief that it was not to be her daughter, then opened them wide as she remembered: Aoife was the daughter of the woman walking beside her. ‘I’m sorry.’ It seemed inadequate, but she didn’t know what else to say.
The Mother Superior shrugged. ‘I gave up my right to her by leaving, but Dermot had taken her away from me before that. He can share nothing. He would be delighted to know that he was inflicting this extra cruelty in making me attend the ceremony.’
‘Doesn’t he know then?’
‘No.’
Finn’s brain made more links. After all, one of the most powerful churchmen in the land, Laurence O’Toole, was this woman’s brother. He would have protected her. ‘Suppose Dermot recognises you?’
‘I hope he does.’ The former Queen of Leinster’s smile was not religious. ‘I should like him to know before he kills me that I aided his enemies. I gave all his jewels to Asgall to buy arms for use against him.’
So the two of us have been working to bring Dermot down, thought Finn, and for all the good it’s done we could have stayed at home and played with dolls. Such is the might of men and the powerlessness of women.
They were approaching the Dames Gate bridge. The horseman looked round to make sure his flock was keeping together. He hadn’t counted them at ay stage, and the fact that there was a monk among them caused him no surprise, so usual was it for nuns to be accompanied by a confessor.
‘I’m going to try and get my daughter away from that madman,’ said Finn, ‘I’ll take yours with me if I can.’
Again the Mother Superior shrugged; her face showed not only hopelessness but an acceptance of hopelessness that was almost satisfaction.
To judge from the crowd of nuns and monks around Dames Gate waiting to go in to the city, Strongbow had commanded every religious within heralding distance of Dublin to attend his wedding, hoping perhaps that the odour of so much sanctity would make it smell sweeter. The gates were open, but whatever was holding them up had sent most of the habited figures to their knees.
As the nuns from St Mary’s approached they saw the obstruction. Fifteen foot high in the gateway was a pile of bodies. A burial detail consisting of the non-combatants of Strongbow’s army – men and women – was working to clear a path through them by clambering up the shelves of trunks, legs, arms and heads and rolling the upper corpses down to loaders below who swung them into waiting carts. The nuns, Finn and Brother Pinginn knelt and prayed. Most the dead were men, but a few were women, and both sexes had already been stripped of cloaks, weapons and jewellery.
Daughter of Lir Page 45