Lion of Ireland

by Morgan Llywelyn

  Wait, don’t rush it, he warned himself. Give her time, be sure the potion has fully affected her or she might shake it off. So he sat, tense as she had been, and tried without success to concentrate on the acrobats. But their performance was coming to an end. Aed rose to recite a poem in their honor, Mahon gave them a gift of gold, and they left the hall.

  Deirdre was, decidedly, leaning against Brian’s shoulder.

  He looked down at her, his eyes lovingly tracing the glossy black curls that had pulled themselves free from her hairdress. “Do you want to go to bed?” he asked gently.

  She widened her eyes, trying to see him clearly. She felt deliciously drowsy, all the sharp edges of everything were blurred away; even the black menace of the shadows had been transformed into something soft and welcoming. The man beside her was so big and warm; it was pleasant just to lean against him and feel his heat. “If you want to,” she replied to his question, her voice almost inaudible.

  Brian put his arm about her waist as they walked to their apartment, and her pliant body accepted his support without resistance. Her maidservant was waiting at the door to their chamber, but he waved her away. “I will take care of the princess myself,” he told the woman, and was mildly amused at the lascivious gleam in her eyes as she backed away, bowing and grinning.

  He undressed Dierdre himself, with fingers suddenly gone cold and awkwardly stiff, but she did not flinch from their touch. She stood, patient as a child, her head drooping on the fragile stem of her neck, a half smile curving her lips. When her white body bloomed free of its confinement she gave one deep sigh.

  Her skin was scented with almond oil, and softer than any woman’s he had known. The bones lay just beneath the surface, lightly padded; he cupped his hand over her hip and felt the marvelous play of the joint in its socket as she turned toward him. The lust that had tormented him seemed to drain away, leaving him with a worshipful awe for the perfection of her. God’s creature, molded into a masterpiece.

  She was quiet, watching him with open, remote eyes, and a small smile that could mean everything or nothing.

  He ran his hand, huge and rough, down the white flesh, waiting to feel the heat rise in him, but it did not. He looked at her face and saw her eyes, watching, incurious. Bending over her he sealed them shut with kisses, then let his lips wander down her face, her throat, the slight swell of her virginal breasts. At the touch of his mouth the nipple stood erect in their dainty pink aureoles, and he saw that they were still like the nipples of a child.

  Her body was cool and he tried to warm it with his hands. The ice had left his fingers; he could tell by comparison with her flesh that he was warmer than she. Slowly, expecting her to stop him, he moved his hand between her thighs. They did not open for him, but neither did they clamp shut.

  At last it was beginning in him. The heavy weight in the loins, the intense, pulsating sweetness that had only one morality and one blind goal. He looked at her again, but her face was closed and calm, seemingly unaware of the hot club pressed against her leg. If she were going to reject him, she would already have done so.

  As he moved over her he thought she stiffened a little, but that was all. Fiona would have guided him with her hands and her body, moving and murmuring, punctuating each new beat of pleasure with her responding gasp. But Deirdre lay still as a carven image.

  I should spend more time caressing her, he thought belatedly, but his body had already taken over with its own rhythms. He tried to enter her and found her dry, and used his saliva to moisten the way, embarrassed obscurely lest she open her eyes and see him. But the violet eyes stayed shut, the thick black lashes lying unquivering on her pale cheeks.

  He made his first thrust tentatively, expecting to feel the taut barrier of the hymen, and was suddenly aware that he was deep inside her. A part of his mind registered the fact with a cold click, to be considered later, and a part of his emotions reacted with a wave of anger that freed him from gentleness and allowed him to drive strongly into her unresisting body.

  Sunlight fell in slanting yellow bars across the room, and silver dust motes danced. She lay for a long time, aware only that her eyes were open, and then finally she realized it was morning. Her head ached.

  Brian lay beside her, his back turned, his deep breathing very loud in the quiet chamber. Deirdre moved her legs a little and felt something warm and sticky; when she tried to sit up a slight soreness told her the rest of the story.

  It was done, then; the marriage was consummated. But why could she remember so little about it? Last night was a blue haze, and someone dancing, and someone else—Brian?—cradling her in his arms. Was it possible that her fear had washed away the memory of it? Surely Brian would not have taken advantage of her if she had not allowed it, but how could that be?

  She turned to look at him, feeling her heart start to hammer in her chest. The fear was back. She wanted, more than anything to leap out of bed and put as much distance as possible between them. Yet how could she do that now?

  His shoulder loomed in her vision. He must have felt her move, for the easy rhythm of his breathing was broken and after a time he rolled over and lay facing her, his eyes open and very clear. He said nothing, just studied her face, and in the morning light there was a guarded quality to his expression that had never before been there when he looked at her.

  “I wish you joy in the morning, my lord,” she said shyly, pulling the blankets into bunches with her nervous hands and unconsciously building them into a barricade between his body and hers.

  “And I to you,” he replied with gravity. “Did you sleep well?”

  “Yes, I think so. I don’t really remember. My head aches this morning and I feel so … did I drink too much wine?”

  “Don’t you know?” he asked. It seemed as though he was asking something else.

  “No.”

  Her face was innocent, wounded, fearful beyond his power to reassure. How could he ask her outright if she had been a virgin? How could he be certain she wasn’t, he who knew so little about women? To use a Druid’s compound to make her calm, then seduce her, and then have the nerve to question her virtue—No! That was more than he would allow himself.

  “I love you, wife,” he said gently.

  The pale oval of her face broke apart as if she would cry, the features rearranging themselves in a swift succession of expressions. “Oh, Brian, last night … I mean, did you? Did we … ?”

  He continued to smile at her. “We did. You remember nothing?”

  She shook her head. “Nothing. It must have been the wine, I’ve never had a head for it. After this I shall only drink mead and water.

  “But if you say it happened I believe you; I know you would never deceive me.

  Her eyes were shadowed, smudged in their sockets. I have violated a child, he thought. And she lies there looking at me with such determination to trust! An unreasonable resentment took hold of him.

  “It’s true,” he told her in a firm, deep voice. “Last night we became man and wife fully, under the Law; the marriage is consummated to the final degree. If you don’t remember anything about it I’m sorry, for I tried to make the experience as beautiful for you as I could.”

  There, let her feel a little guilty, too!

  “Oh, my lord, I’m so sorry!” The huge eyes glittered with the threat of tears. “But there will be other times, now that … I mean, if it happened once, it will happen again, and next time I shall be less afraid. And I’ll remember.”

  She studied his face with its new, shuttered look, and realized that the time had passed forever when she might have told him. Once, when he was open to her and adoring, it might have been possible for her to tell him her dreadful secret, under just the right circumstances, but now their bodies had come together and she felt their souls had moved further apart. It could not be that he had discovered her lack of virginity, for undoubtedly he would have made an issue of it immediately, not lain there smiling at her. So something else had happened,
something she could not even guess, one of the complicated things that went on beneath the surface of men and women; she imagined a vast multilayered structure of emotion and reaction with which she had no experience, and for which she lacked the emotional strength. The magical thread that had brought Brian to her along a highway of dreams had been broken somewhere, for some reason she could not understand, and the effort to reweave the torn fabric of her life was more than she could ever undertake.

  Let it go, she thought, let it go. Everything hurts too much and frightens me. I will just try to be a good wife to him, and make him happy in whatever ways I can; my sufferings I will keep to myself.

  They smiled at each other in their marriage bed. And all the unspoken words piled between them to make a wall infinitely higher than Deirdre’s pitiful little barrier of blankets.

  The wheel of the seasons turned, and turned. Lupin and stock and honeysuckle bloomed their time and faded away; the great loughs brooded serene, reflecting summer skies; the turnstone birds pottered about on the shore, then swerved out over the water in crescent flight, their wings a-glint with chevrons of silver feathers.

  Limestone crumbled and sank into the mother earth; mantling ivy spread its caress over ruins abandoned before Christ was born. Life was given and life was taken away. The cold wind howled in from the sea. Even as the year died, something new was gathering strength in the land.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Olaf Cuaran, king of Dublin, was about to become a father. He paced restlessly outside the chamber where his young wife lay, listening to her occasional moans and trying to judge them in relation to the sounds of the wounded on a battlefield.

  Other women shrieked and screamed; he had been told that childbirth was worse than an ax-wound, but his Irish princess cried out only once. Her courage was the equal of her beauty, then—and of her temper. From a woman like that a man could expect a fine boy.

  The midwife came smiling to the door, holding in her arms a bundle that mewled and squalled. “Lochlann and Ireland have produced a son!” she beamed.

  Olaf looked down at the tiny wrinkled face, red and sour, a small fist jammed against its open mouth. Its cries of outrage were out of all proportion to its size. “Odin be praised!” Olaf said fervently, tying to take the baby in his arms, but the woman swung away with it.

  “Your wife has asked that a priest bless her infant,” she told Olaf.

  He scowled. “I thought she had forgotten all about that nonsense.”

  “Well, she hasn’t.” The midwife smiled at him and winked conspiratorially. “A little oil on his forehead won’t make a Christ man out of a male child born to go viking—not with his father to guide him.”

  Olaf winked back at her. “That’s the truth,” he agreed. “There’s no harm in giving in to a female’s whim this once, I suppose.” With another pleased look at his son he turned and went into the bedchamber to congratulate the mother.

  The midwife squinted at his retreating back. “This once,” she said under her breath. “As if that red-haired demon in there would ever be satisfied with having her way just once.” She caught the eye of a guard slouching against the timbered wall, trying to be comfortable inside his chainmail tunic. “I never thought I’d see the day an Irish girl would make a wagtail puppy out of a Norseman.”

  The guard rolled his eyes. “I never thought I’d see any girl like that one, Irish or otherwise. She’s …” he searched his vocabulary for a word to fit Olaf’s bride, then shrugged in defeat.

  The midwife laughed. “Aye, she is!” she agreed.

  In the small, dank bedchamber, heavy with the smells of smoke and blood and damp wood, Olaf stood gazing down at his wife. Gormlaith looked up at him with green eyes that blazed with life, her face untouched by the ordeal of childbirth save for a faint softening of weariness. The bed about her head and shoulders seemed to be covered by a rippling sea of dark red flame.

  “Your hair is wet,” he heard himself say inanely.

  She laughed. He had so obviously come in here to make an epic speech about fatherhood and Norse power and all of that nonsense, and, as usual, the sight of her had broken his train of thought. What did he know of real power? She took a deep breath and arched her back, ignoring the stab of pain it caused in her pelvic region, and saw his gaze slide helplessly down her throat to her upthrust breasts, swollen for the baby. “I’m wet all over,” she said in her husky voice.

  Olaf stared at her. What other woman would have the audacity to be seductive while she lay in childbed? He had bartered for the girl with her father, a prince of Leinster, as a move to improve his position with the Irish surrounding Dublin, and her beauty had come as an extra gift. But since their marriage she had not only grown more beautiful with her ripening; she had proved to be a lusty, eager bedmate, with an added flair of drama and imagination that must have come from her Celtic blood. She was, truly, a wife for a king. Yet there were moments when she made him doubt in his secret heart if he were king enough—or man enough—for her.

  “Do I get a birth-boon?” she asked him.

  He made himself look up from her breasts. (So full, so round, the blue veins beneath the soft flesh … ) “You’ve already had it, Gormlaith,” he told her. “Our son is with your Christian priest right now, being blessed or some such.”

  “Oh, I don’t mean that. That was part of our marriage contract anyway; you had to agree to it before my father would sign. Have you forgotten what you promised me?”

  “Forgotten what?”

  She reached out her hand and trailed her fingers down his thigh, letting her nails scratch lightly through the wool of his trousers. “You great bear, you have forgotten. You promised me that if I bore you a healthy son you would share some of your responsibilities with me—now do you remember?”

  I said that? he wondered. But who knows what a man will say when the rutting-madness is on him; still, it’s hard to believe I made such a rash statement.

  “Aaahhh, my dear, why do you want to trouble your head with such matters? Surely you have enough to keep you occupied now, with a new baby as well as your other duties.”

  Her lower lip thrust out beyond the upper in a practiced pout. She never looked less childish than at such a moment, but the very perversity of her expression excited him. As she knew. “You promised,” she said again, her voice low in her throat. “I need things to think about, Olaf, not just all the dreary routine of women. I find myself rummaging around in my mind for something interesting to keep me from being bored. You wouldn’t want me to be bored, would you? When you’re busy elsewhere?”

  Olaf gave a deep sigh. This woman obviously would not be content with motherhood alone, as his previous wives had been. But then, she was nothing like his other women, anyway. Maybe it would help to get her involved in some of his affairs—minor things, of course.

  “Are you certain this is what you want, Gormlaith?”

  Her eyes blazed at him. Why wasn’t she weak, like other females at such a time? “Absolutely,” she told him firmly. “And I can do it, too. Among my people, women have always held rank and positions of power. Some of the greatest interpreters of the Brehon Law have been women, and we own our own property and are free to engage in trade. Indeed, it was less than three centuries ago that women were exempted from warfare at the Synod of Tara. I’m sorry about that; I should have enjoyed carrying a sword.”

  Olaf had been surprised on more than one occasion by her knowledge of history. The Irish were obsessed with it, forever dredging up the glories of the past as an escape from their decaying civilization in the present, but to find such an interest in a mere woman baffled him. Her mind was like a voracious animal, ceaselessly hunting. Best to throw some bone to it before it turned on him.

  “Very well, Gormlaith you can sit in council with me if you promise to say nothing; and if you are truly interested I will have someone explain our trade situation to you, and our holdings across the sea in Northumbria. But you must give yourself a chance to
regain your full strength first.”

  “I’ve never lost it,” she murmured.

  He thought she was probably overtaxing her abilities in order to show off for him. He would quiet her with a tidbit now or she would never rest and his son’s milk would be unhealthy. “You might think on this, woman,” he offered. “One of your so-called under-kings, a young fool named Malachi, of Meath, has been fighting the Danes and has attacked an anchorage of ours in the Boyne River and burned our ships to the waterline, as well as stealing a fine cargo of furs.

  “The situation must be handled carefully, as we have too many of our men in the Saxon land right now to be able to afford a major confrontation with Meath, but I have to get those furs back. I’ve already sold them for a sizable amount of Irish gold to my cousin at Waterford. When you want something to occupy your thoughts, think on how I can recover my property without stirring up a hornet’s nest in Meath or Waterford.”

  He had hardly reached the door when she called after him, “Tomorrow, send me someone who can tell me all about Malachi!”

  He checked in midstride. The woman never let up! When he was out of her immediate range her allure lost a little of its potency, and his physical reaction to her changed to a vague unease. She was like a turbulence in the air, a storm over the horizon that might come howling to rip your sail from its mast.

  He turned back to face her, determined to regain the feeling of superiority she consistently undermined. “Who could possibly explain the character of an Irishman, Gormlaith?” he asked with deliberate contempt.

  He left her then, glad to be out of the fetid chamber, eager for open air. He left the timbered hall which served as the Norse king’s palace in Dublin and walked across the courtyard toward the high wooden palisade. In the watchtowers at each corner guards stood, their eyes forever scanning the green countryside, alert to the increasing threat of the discontented Irish.