Lion of Ireland

by Morgan Llywelyn

  So did Brian, prince of the Dal Cais, spend his wedding night with the shattered girl who was his love. And in the darkest part of the night, as she lay sleeping at last in his arms, with Brian himself guarding her from the onslaught of his own manhood, she reached up in her dreams and softly touched his cheek.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Ivar made his move. Led by his son Harold, a raiding party from Limerick fell on a group of wedding guests returning home by way of the Tipperary road and slaughtered them all. In the ultimate Norse expression of contempt, they ripped open the corpses and arranged the lungs and entrails atop the bodies to form the Blood Eagle.

  Mahon was outraged. The Northmen had deliberately ignored the truce to slay guests under his protection and besmirch his hospitality. There could be only one response to such a calculated provocation.

  Neither Desmond nor Hy Carbery would send men to fight along with the Dalcassians; the massacred party had not been of the tuath of Molloy, or of Donovan. But other men came from other tribes, attracted by the promise of the new king and the legend of his brother.

  Deirdre had watched Brian ride away. How gorgeous he was, mounted on the prancing bay horse Mahon had given him as a surprise! He sat tall, with his sword in his belt and a Norse battle ax strapped to his back. He looked invincible.

  Only she and he knew how he was defeated each night by her tears and terror.

  During the day he was attentive, obviously devoted, although the building tension in him made him quick tempered. She walked proudly beside him and thought her heart would burst with love. But at night, when the looming bed waited for them like some malevolent monster, the warmth in her was replaced by cold horror. Even the blazing candles and the constant flame in the bronze lamps could not keep away the darkness of hysteria that threatened her.

  It hurt her to see how gladly he grabbed at the opportunity of escaping her by going to battle.

  For Brian, action was freedom. It supplanted the tortuous maze of emotions that could not be resolved with the clean, simple outcomes of life and death. This was to be skirmish warfare, the kind he knew best—hit and run, strike and vanish.

  They caught up with their first sizable band of Norse raiders at the edge of Knocklong. The invaders had camped for the night after a rowdy day spent terrorizing the countryside and burning a few small farmsteads; nothing serious, just having a little fun.

  Brian had found himself with an embarrassment of riches; so many men volunteered to follow the standard of the three lions that utilizing all of them would destroy the precious element of surprise.

  He carefully explained to his captains, “The usual way of warfare is for two lines of men to face each other in the daylight and then hammer away until one side is forced to break. That is a poor way to face the Northmen; indeed, it is the most inefficient of all battle plans, for it means an unnecessary wastage of men and presents great problems in maneuvering and communications.

  “We will attack by night whenever we can, from the flanks, from the rear, any way is preferable to going in head on. Remember, if the scales are equal the other man has an equal chance to kill you, and he probably will. As long as I command, your first order is to win, not to die. Every life is precious to me.”

  They repeated that, among themselves and to their men: “Every life is precious to Brian.”

  He had them smear their pale faces and their bare arms with mud, and every piece of equipment that might rattle or jingle was left at a distance with the horseholders. Naked save for their dark tunics, trousers, and belts, they crept through the woods and stationed themselves behind every tree surrounding the Norse camp.

  “I want each man close enough to his neighbor to see him or touch him, so that we will be a tight-meshed net through which no foreigner can slip,” Brian ordered. “No javelins, they’re too awkward in close quarters, and no slings, because the visibility will be too poor. Knife, sword, club, hand ax—these are your weapons tonight.”

  “And yours?” Thomas Three-Fingers asked.

  “I have a Norse battle ax,” Brian said, and smiled.

  The Northmen sang their last drinking song, full throated, listening to the echoes from the hills. Let the countryfolk cower in their beds and pull their blankets over their ears! Let them know Ivar’s men were abroad, fearing nothing, with the stains of wound-dew fresh on their weapons! Great Odin ruled these hills now, and his dark lust must be served.

  In the high tide of their strength and confidence they fell asleep on the bare earth, and awoke to hell.

  The attackers fell on them from all sides, bursting out of the underbrush and running forward so swiftly that the first men died while the bushes were still whipping back into place. The Northmen were clubbed on the ground, and if any Irishman felt that was ignoble the sentiment did not stay his arm.

  As the Norse struggled to their feet to put up a doomed defense Brian heard himself shouting, “Boruma! Boruma!” at them, and soon some of his men took it up. A bearded Northman came at him, swinging a long sword and yelling, “You damned Dalcassian!” in guttural but understandable Gaelic. Brian took the blow on the haft of his ax, feet braced to absorb the teethrattling jolt, then shoved the man backward and cut him in half as he fell.

  Even when the man was obviously dead Brian went on swinging the ax. Ardan came up to him and caught his arm, but Brian pulled away, unwilling to stop the flow of cleansing anger. When there was nothing left but a heap of bloody fragments and, indeed, all sounds of fighting had ceased, he drew back his foot and aimed one last kick at the nearest mangled corpse.

  They marched back to Cashel singing. Not the Norse songs of death and doom, but the songs that lift a man’s heart. They passed over rolling green hills and emerald patchworks of meadow, and down rutted pathways where roses bloomed thick around tiny cottages. Success bubbled in their veins. Children ran out, laughing, to trot beside them as they marched, and smiling Munsterwomen stood in their doorways and waved.

  Brian felt himself on the crest of a sunlit wave; it seemed ages since he had been so lighthearted. He looked into his memory and saw little pockets of brilliant color surrounded by darkness, but as they drew nearer to Cashel the darkness expanded to shadow the future.

  When at last the Rock rose before them, towering from the meadowmist, Brian said to Liam, “Lead the men on to camp, and then make report to the king.”

  Liam was startled. Surely Brian would want to carry such good news to Mahon himself?

  “Once a battle ends it’s in the past, and no longer my concern,” Brian replied. “The only things I can affect are in the future; I would as soon leave the reports and the histories to others.”

  They came to a branch in the road. Brian reined in his horse and watched impassively as the column of men marched by, each dipping his head in the briefest of nods as, one by one, they came up to him. They swung off to the right, toward the base camp northwest of the Rock, and when they were out of sight Brian turned his horse’s head to the left, toward the village.

  Above him a battalion of clouds ranged across the sky, threatening the sun. In the distance a stone cross was visible, rising in somber sanctity above the fortress wall of Cashel. The carvings on the face of Christ’s symbol were pagan in derivation, although that detail was invisible at such a distance.

  He halted the bay at the door of the herbalist’s cottage and looked over his shoulder once more at that cross, hung in the sky as a beacon for troubled souls. But it has no answer for him.

  She knew he was there. Even before he could dismount she had opened the door and stood leaning against the frame, trying to read the expression on his face.

  “You’ve come, then,” she said. “I didn’t know if you ever would again, after your marriage.”

  He knotted the horse’s rein around an iron ring set in a post at the doorway. “I thought you could read the future,” he reminded her, stroking the bay’s nose and avoiding Fiona’s eyes.

  “Some things I don’t look for, and
some I don’t want to know. But you’re here, so come along in with you; it will be raining soon.”

  He made an impatient gesture. “I didn’t come here for shelter from the elements, woman! Or … perhaps I did, in a way; I don’t know. I don’t know why I’ve come; I never meant to enter this doorway again. I’ve just won a battle and I should be … celebrating …”

  She moved closer to him, putting her brown hand gently on his arm as she looked up into his face. The lines of pain she saw were new and deep, and they hurt her like lacerations across her own heart.

  “Come in, Brian of Boruma,” she said softly.

  The words, once started, flowed on and on. They were a disloyalty and yet they were a cleansing, like the battle-rage.

  “It’s almost an illness with her, this terror,” he told Fiona. He was sitting on the one small stool her household possessed, drinking a hot brew she had given him, and she sat at his feet, leaning against his knee and listening without comment except when his pauses needed filling. “Deirdre is so fearful of everything!” He went on, “Not only the marriage bed but darkness, shadows—even a sudden move in her vicinity can startle her into a fit of shivers.”

  “There are people who are abnormally timid, like deer,” Fiona remarked.

  “No, that isn’t quite the way it is with Deirdre. There are times when she seems as gay and lighthearted as a child, and a delight to everyone around her. Then she is like other women, only more beautiful.” He did not notice the flat look in Fiona’s eyes when he spoke of Deirdre’s beauty. “But her moods change so fast, and for no apparent reason! I think she’s desperately unhappy, but I don’t seem to be able to help her.”

  Fiona shifted, withdrawing a little of her weight from his legs. “Have you tried praying to your God?” she asked with veiled contempt.

  “I’ve haunted the chapel until even the bishop has praised my piety, but it doesn’t do any good. We are not yet man and wife, and at this rate we may never be,” he said morosely.

  Fiona sat waiting, saying nothing. Her level gaze began to make him uncomfortable. “I shouldn’t be telling you these things …”

  She put one hand firmly on his arm. “You are wrong about that; I am the very person you should tell. Whatever has been between us, or will be, we are bonded in ways you do not even understand, Brian. I will always be within your reach, to help you when you have need of me, and to watch over you when you are in danger.”

  He stared at her. “What are you talking about?”

  She made an airy little gesture with her fingers. “It is nothing—don’t think about it. I am merely saying I may be able to help you, if you like. I have ways of knowing things that your priests and your physicians can never guess, and I will use them on behalf of your Deirdre, if that is what you really want.

  “She may be suffering from an illness, as you said; people can get sick in their minds, as well as in their bodies. Or perhaps she is under an enchantment, cursed for some deed done long ago in another life. Or yet again she may have been born under a malevolent star.”

  Brian cocked an eyebrow. “I’ve heard of that old superstition, but …”

  She grinned at him. “You would call it a superstition, but it is a science, and a true one. My people have always known how to cast horoscopes and learn the forces that influence us. Can your priests do that for you?”

  “No,” he said shortly, and fell silent, gazing thoughtfully into his empty cup. Fiona got up to refill it for him and left him alone with his thoughts.

  At last he spoke. “I’m a Christian, and everything I’ve been taught tells me that what you are offering is somehow evil. But I’m also a warrior, and one thing a warrior must learn, if he is to stay alive, is to explore every possibility and accept the fact that there are usually alternate ways to achieve a goal. I believe in my God, and in Christ, but I have to do everything I can to help my wife, even if it means imperiling my own soul.”

  Fiona threw back her head and laughed with delight. “Oh, Brian, you’re not endangering your soul!”

  He scowled at her. “I don’t know why I came here at all!”

  Her laughter softened to a gentle smile. “You came because you need help, Brian, and deep down you knew that I could give it to you. And so I shall—you have only to ask. It won’t cost you your soul, either.”

  She stood before him with her head thrown back, the clean line of her arched throat inviting, the lift of her breasts demanding his gaze. There was the unstated price; it only remained to learn what it would buy. And to determine if he would pay it. Rain fell on the thatch, and hens scrabbled at the door like dogs, anxious to be let in.

  “Do what you can,” Brian said at last.

  As the night thickened into blackness and a rising wind blew skitters of leaves against the cottage, Fiona drew the forbidden symbols upon her earthen floor and cast Deirdre’s sun-signs for him, using the information he gave her about the girl’s time and place of birth.

  Then she insisted that Brian bow with her as she chanted the prayers to Dagda, the good father, and Lugh, god of light, and she sang in a soft monotone those hymns that were no longer heard by day.

  When the ashy dawn was beginning to seep through her shuttered window she turned at last to Brian. “I’ve done all I can,” she told him in a voice roughened and grainy with weariness. “I can tell you this: There is no curse on your Deirdre, the gods have no quarrel with her, and the burdens she brought with her into this world from her last life are minor ones. But there is a darkness hanging over her; she has been done a great wrong, and she goes into a doomed future as a lamb goes to sacrifice.”

  Brian was horrified. “Have I wronged her so?”

  Her glazed eyes saw through him to untold worlds. “Not you. Another. But she is damaged and mortally afraid.”

  “What can be done for her?”

  Fiona’s expression cleared. “I have a mixture I can give you for her. It dissolves in wine and has no taste, but it has a very soothing effect on the spirit. You can calm her and make life bearable for her as long as the effect of the drug lasts.”

  The words frightened him. “Can it harm her?”

  “No, it’s perfectly safe, although I suspect your court physician would never approve of it if you were foolish enough to tell him about it. He no doubt has his own remedies and believes only in them.”

  “I’ve already spoken to him,” Brian told her. “He seemed to think I wanted an aphrodisiac, and he was shocked.”

  The smile lurked at the corners of her mouth again. “Do you?”

  Brian returned to the palace to a hero’s welcome, as if he had won a great battle instead of an isolated skirmish. Toasts were raised to him in the banqueting hall. Deirdre greeted him with eager eyes and a misty smile, but her lips trembled when he brushed them with his and he felt her small body stiffen.

  He found an excuse to take her serving maid aside, and in a dark passageway he emptied the prescribed amount of clear liquid into her silver goblet.

  The entertainment for the evening was to be a team of touring acrobats. Extra lamps and rushlights were provided, and a space in the center of the floor was swept clean and sprinkled with wood shavings and water, then swept again to give them a safe performing surface. Deirdre was excited about the coming performance, as she seemed to be excited about anything which could keep her one moment longer from the marriage bed, and Brian watched her closely, waiting to see if the potion she had drunk with her dinner had begun its work.

  The acrobats were two young men and a slender girl, boyishly flat of bosom, all dressed alike in pleated linen tunics. Their arms and legs were bare, their hair cropped to a uniform length and bound with fillets of copper. They swept abreast into the hall, smiling and holding hands, and bowed low before the king’s seat. Then, well schooled in protocol, they bowed first to Brian and then to Aed, and then to the rest of the audience.

  The larger of the boys produced three smoky glass balls from somewhere within his scanty garment
and there was a ripple of admiration in the room. Deirdre laughed and clapped her hands together like a child. The boy tossed the spheres into the air in succession, rotating them expertly, and as he did so he began to perform a stylized dance. This was the cue for the others, who wove themselves around him, bending in and out, leaping, somersaulting, doing daring feats of agility that threatened but never destroyed the geometry of the tossing glass balls.

  The graceful young bodies were lovely in the golden light. The harper played a subtle accompaniment for them, and the rhythms of their dance became wilder, more abandoned. Once the girl leaped high into the air, twisted her body head to heels, and then came to rest perched on the shoulders of her partner, arms outflung and smile radiant. Now the juggler set his globes aside and joined them, and the two young men threw the girl back and forth between them as if she weighed no more than the glass balls. And each pattern produced by their bodies was more beautiful than the one before.

  At one point in the performance the girl came to a panting halt directly in front of Brian. The warmth of her body sent its own perfume to him as her bright eyes looked into his. He could see the firm points of her nipples beneath the sheer, damp fabric of her tunic. He smiled back, enjoying her and himself, and in that moment he felt Deirdre’s small hand come to rest, lightly but firmly, on his knee.

  “My husband,” she said to the acrobat, in tones as soft and clear as birdsong. The two women spoke briefly to one another in some language of eye and body that utterly excluded Brian, and then the girl spun away. She did not pause in front of him again.

  Sensitized to her every movement, Brian felt the change in Deirdre’s body as she began to relax. Keeping his face forward he glanced at her sidelong and noted the dreamy, bemused expression, the tranquility of the violet eyes. Her hands were no longer clasped tensely in her lap, as was her habit when the evening yawned toward night. They lay palm up, fingers half-curled inward, like weary little animals gone trustingly to sleep.