Lion of Ireland

by Morgan Llywelyn

  “I’ve tried ale and I’ve tried women; I’ve had the Runes read and made sacrifices to every god, but nothing helps. Day by day, fortune slips away from me and I am powerless to prevent it. I’ve come to one conclusion, Magnus, and I am telling it to you first because you’ve been my friend since we first fed our swords wound-dew together. I’ve decided to become a Christian.”

  Magnus sat bolt upright. “You’ve what! I can’t believe my ears, the sea wind must have finally destroyed them!”

  “You heard me. We are too far from the old gods; they have no power to help us here. I have long suspected it and now I am certain. I will convert to the White Christ and ask his protection instead, for he is young and vigorous in this land and his priests say he is a god of compassion. I need compassion. I’m an old man with a young wife and enemies on every side. There is more for me in Christ’s religion than in Odin’s.”

  “That young wife of yours, is it her hand I recognize in this?”

  Olaf laughed without humor. “Gormlaith has no interest in converting new disciples to the Christ; she is much too involved in her own schemes. I tell you, Magnus, that woman is not the least of my problems!

  “When I first became aware of the threat from Meath, she was plaguing me at the time for something to occupy her mind. Almost in jest I asked her to learn something of Malachi and suggest a way to handle him—after all, she knows the Irish disposition. To my surprise, she set about it as if the whole thing were a serious military campaign! In a most unwomanly way she organized a system of spies and acquired a complete history of the man. She came to me and described his character for me as fully as if they had been raised in the same crib.”

  “She must be an extraordinary woman.”

  Olaf’s expression became even more despondent. “She is that. Extraordinary. She has no talent at all for woman’s business, and no interest in it; she must be forever pushing her oar in where it is not wanted, and her deepest desire seems to be to stir up trouble. If I did not exhaust myself keeping her occupied she would have every man in Dublin at his neighbor’s throat by this time tomorrow.”

  “And yet it is said of her that she is the fairest woman in Ireland,” Magnus remarked, hoping to bring some ray of light to his downcast host, and curious to see for himself the Irish princess with a man’s mind and a body like no other woman’s. “There is a song sung of her in the streets; it is said that she is best gifted in everything that is not in her own power, and does all things ill over which she has any power.”

  Olaf expelled a long, quivering sigh. “Aye, that’s Gormlaith.”

  “Then why do you not do as I suggested and get rid of her? Surely her brother’s goodwill is not that important to you—a mere Irishman, after all!”

  “If I were a younger, stronger man, I would. I have several good sons by women I kept before her, all Northmen at heart and capable of taking my place when I am gone. But Gormlaith has also borne me a son, Sitric, a strapping big boy who reminds me more of myself than any of the others. When he is a man grown I will be proud to own him. If I throw out the mother and keep the son I know she will bring her brother down on me, and if you have contempt for the anger of the Irish, I do not. Not anymore. I want to make no more enemies among them. I am already spread too thin, Magnus, I cannot afford that.”

  “You are in a trap, then, old Ravenfeeder.”

  “I know it.”

  Magnus swirled his drinking horn in his hand, staring down into the dark brown liquid. “Perhaps there is a way out, for a patient man,” he said at last. “The Irish cannot go for long without losing their tempers with one another, as you and I both know. They are divided into too many factions to all sleep comfortably in the same bed. If you only maintain things as they are and wait, they will fall to quarreling among themselves as they always have and can easily be destroyed.

  “You can even work behind the bush to help them. Incite them against one another. Remind them of old grievances and start new feuds. They are an easy people to goad.”

  “That would not be a Christian thing to do,” Olaf said, but there was a light in his eyes.

  “Do you intend to adopt this Christianity all the way through, or only on the surface?”

  “As deep as it needs to go, I suppose.”

  “Then take my advice and keep your viking heart, my friend. If it gives you comfort to embrace the White Christ do so, but do not think that means you must abandon Ireland to the Celts. Give them enough time and the Irish will destroy their own strength.”

  “But how much time is ‘enough time’?” Olaf asked.

  The next morning, Magnus arose early. Olaf’s unease had communicated itself to him in some fashion, and he had spent a bad night, fragmented by dreams that were too close to wakefulness. At cockcrow his head ached and his mouth tasted like dead fish. There was nothing to be done for it but get up and begin the day.

  He stepped over the sleeping bodies of Olaf’s men and made his way out of the hall. The pallid sky was pregnant with snow. He stood with his back to the Norse palace, stretching, forcing the cold air into his lungs where it cut like new knives.

  “Magnus Ulricsson,” said a voice behind him. A throaty, rich voice; a voice the color of dark amber. “Are you trying to escape without ever having greeted your king’s wife?”

  He turned.

  Magnus thought himself a tall man, but the princess of Leinster was taller. Big-boned in the way of the Irish peasant class, she had the elegantly structured face of a noblewoman. Her bosom was a white swan’s, broad and full, and no man could look at it without wanting to bury his face between those magnificent breasts. Firm-waisted, she was broad of hip and long of leg, and when she walked she undulated in a subtle mimickry of the way a woman thrust her pelvis against a man in the act of love.

  He did not notice what she wore.

  Gormlaith’s skin was rich cream, glowing and flawless. Her large mouth was red-lipped, quivering, the full underlip moistly inviting. Green eyes, the green of Ireland itself, blazing, emerald, fiery with unquenchable life.

  And crowning it all, her hair. Her hair such as no other woman on earth possessed. A flame of dark red so pure in color that it had bluish lights, it was plaited and crossed atop her head to form an incomparable crown, then hung in great loops and swags of braid to her hips.

  She advanced toward him, insolent in her power, smiling and holding out her hand. She took one step closer than any other woman would have, and he steeled himself to avoid stepping back. The natural fragrance of her flesh was that of ripe apricots in the sun; beneath it lay a faint, more disturbing scent—the musk of an animal in heat.

  “My husband never introduces me to his guests,” she said, although her eyes were saying other things. “At least, not to the big, strong ones. He tells me about them after they’ve gone.” She took a deep breath and slowly shifted her weight from one hip to the other.

  Magnus seemed to have acquired an obstruction in his throat. He spoke around it with difficulty. “Your husband is a prudent man, my lady!”

  Her eyes glittered with amusement. “He has learned to be one. Olaf is old and worn, not the man he once was. Tell me, Magnus Ulricsson—are you the man you were in your youth?” Challenge was implicit in every line of her body and syllable of her speech. Magnus felt that he was standing too close to a fire that would strip his flesh from his bones. He tried to move away unobtrusively.

  But she noticed, and her eyes danced. “I suppose not,” she said, answering her own question. “I am a student of men, Magnus; did my husband tell you that? I collect them, as other women collect jewels or robes. But they must be the strongest and best. Why do you suppose is the strongest man in Ireland today?”

  “Your husband, the Iron Shoe. Olaf Cuaran,” he answered loyally.

  “You lie,” she laughed at him. “I don’t mind that—I tell lies myself. But surely you know that he has little strength left; his power is peeling away from him like the layers of a boiled onion. Forget
Olaf, I will give you the answer.

  “The superior man is Malachi of Meath, he who already calls himself Malachi Mor—Malachi the Great. He will be Ard Ri when old Donall is dead, and the Stone of Fal will cry aloud for him. Ireland will have a High King such as she has not known for generations. The five provinces will kneel in submission before him!”

  “How can you be certain of that?”

  She shifted her weight again, closing the space between them. Though the day was cold a dew of sweat had begun to form on Magnus’s upper lip.

  “I have made it my business to know a great deal about Malachi Mor,” he told him. “He is the obvious successor to the kingship of Tara; he is of the southern branch of the Hy Neill, and the Ard Ri has always been of the Hy Neill. Donall is northern Hy Neill, so by the tradition of alternate kingship it will go next to the south. Malachi is young and aggressive, hungry to make a name for himself to rival that of his famous ancestor, the first Malachi Mor. There is no other man in the land with a future such as his.”

  “What about this king of Munster, Mahon the Dalcassian? Isn’t he coming to be something of a force among the Irish?”

  Gormlaith lifted her silky eyebrows. “He is not Hy Neill! It is unthinkable that a usurper from a minor tribe should be crowned Ard Ri at Tara. No, it will be Malachi, and my poor husband is already shivering in his sleep for fear of him.”

  It was hard for Magnus to imagine that any man could so unnerve Olaf Cuaran, the conqueror of Northumbria, victor of a hundred savage battles. “You misjudge Olaf, woman,” he said sternly, determined to put an end to her aggression before it became too threatening. “He is a magnificent warrior, he has made of these Irish a subservient race, and he will not lie trembling in his bed this night or any other, just because one of them rises against him.”

  She tossed her head. Her smile was no longer hot and full of promises. It was as if he had failed some vital test. “Olaf is a man to be broken, like any other man,” she said. “I could break you, Magnus Ulricsson, if I thought you were worth the effort. But you are a little man, a weak man, an old man like my husband. The sap has dried in you. It would be more interesting to match myself against, say, this Malachi Mor.”

  She turned her shoulder to him then and looked away. “A storm is coming,” she said in a voice grown cool with disinterest. “Can you smell it? I love storms.” Then she whirled away and was gone, and where she had been there was a cold emptiness.

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  A long season of peace came to Munster. A landman could plant his crop, harvest it, let the land lie fallow, and then plant again, and still it was not watered with the blood of his children. The Northmen skulked along the coast and pieced together the shattered fragments of their strength, but each time they challenged the power of Cashel an army marched out behind the king’s brother, and death came with it.

  The Norse bided their time, licking their wounds.

  To the east, Malachi was enjoying similar successes, and the fellowship he had once felt toward the Irish in Munster began to fade in the light of his own ambition. He called back those of his troops who had stood with Mahon and employed them in continuing campaigns against the foreigners in his own kingdom and the Leinstermen to the south.

  The monument that was Cashel brooded beneath wintry skies and glowed in the summer sun.

  Marcan was often there, closing the gap between his elder brother and his God, encouraging Mahan in the religious fervor that grew within him. From dawn to dark prayers arose from the precincts of Cashel, punctuated occasionally by the cries of an infant as Brian’s children were born.

  Conor followed Murrough with but a year between them, and then Sabia, a lovely miniature of her mother, and next the dimpled daughter they named Emer, for Cuchullain’s wife. And Flann, and merry Teigue.

  If the policies of Munster were the policies of Brian of Boruma, few knew that but Brian and the king. With each passing year Mahon found it simpler to give Brian the decisions to make, the responsibilities to carry, and Brian accepted them all without hesitation. To him, Mahon had ceased being the king; he was God’s man now—and, sometimes, Fithir’s, although his marriage had not rekindled his interest in things of the flesh as much as that lady might have desired.

  Apart from all of them, from Mahon and Deirdre and even his children, Brian lived alone within himself. And waited, as the Northmen waited. Something was coming alive in his mind. Sometimes he could catch a glimpse of it, a glimmering of an outline, a fragment of a perimeter, and he knew with deep certainty that the time would come when it would all be there, intact and perfect. It need not be rushed. It grew quietly in the dark, nourished by his experiences and his love. He thought of it not as a dream, but as a presence.

  The green land, the passionate, intensely alive people, the great weight of their history together that stretched back through memory to myth, to some prehistoric dawn he could not even imagine.

  Ireland.

  A need to love which could not be fearlessly bestowed on any mortal being could be satisfied by the country herself. She could not die. If a man could weave himself into her very fabric she would be his forever, capable of absorbing all his passion, his to safeguard and cherish.

  Ireland. The beautiful, ravaged, troubled land.

  The sum of the parts of all her people. More than that.

  The shape in his mind began to firm. He could grasp its dimensions, and the size of it astonished him but did not frighten him. Once he had thought all his being consecrated to the destruction of the Northmen, but now he could see that was only a part of the overall task. The foreigners were but an obstacle to be removed from the road.

  The road?

  The words came to him and he played around with them, rearranging them in his head, waiting to see where they would lead.

  The road … to empire.

  It was there, finished and dazzling, in the center of his soul. The Empire of the Irish, as Charlemagne had built the Empire of the Franks, but stronger, immortal as Charlemagne’s was not. A land under God, where education and art were valued as the most precious of human accomplishments. An empire kept safe by the strength he would give it, where books would not be burned nor children butchered. The Empire of the Celts, of harps and hospitality, of poetry and peace.

  But it must be won by the sword.

  He began to be hungry for this thing that had never been.

  With Deirdre he was gentle and wary, always conscious on some level of the wounds within her that might break open once more. When she was tired she grew fretful, and her tears fell as easily as a child’s—there was the constant worry that they might not stop. She could not be joked with, nor could she endure casual play in bed. Indeed, the act of begetting children required her total forbearance, and he was aware of it. But though she felt no pleasure in their conception, she took pleasure in the little ones themselves, and it was the belief of everyone that her babies kept her quiet and sane.

  There was never any question of putting them out to fosterage. Noble families routinely exchanged children, to strengthen the ties between them, but, when Aed mentioned it in a passing conversation, Fithir silenced him with a stern glare. “My sister’s children will be raised in her household and no other, seanchai! They do her more good than all your wisdom or the physician’s medicaments.”

  “But it is the tradition, my lady. Young ones are being sent to Cashel from the four corners of Munster in accordance with the custom, and they expect like in return, or how else can we be of one family?”

  Fithir answered him resolutely. “The king and I will have many children and see one in every powerful tribe in the land, if that will insure peace. But speak no more of sending Deirdre’s away, and ask the Brehons not to mention it to her; even a whisper might do her harm.”

  Aed was saddened. Any break with tradition was a sacrilege to him, and though not every family participated in the ritual of fosterage he believed deeply in the wisdom of
the custom. He also saw, with the eyes of the observant, that Fithir was moving past her childbearing years and had not yet conceived. She holds Brian’s children close to warm her own heart, as well as for her sister’s sake, he thought.

  The youngsters wove a thread of merriment through Cashel. Murrough in particular was the light in his father’s eyes. He lacked Brian’s serious side, but he was a sturdy little fellow, scrappy and full of pranks, and he poured his enormous energy and opinionated spirit into everything he did. From earliest infancy Murrough had seemed to be very much his own person, and Brian delighted in him, even as he tried to control his more headstrong impulses.

  It was Murrough who was responsible for the scurry of cats at Cashel. As soon as he was old enough to straddle a pony he had ranged far from the Rock, fearless as an eagle, returning at day’s end with some present to placate his parents. Once it was a cloakful of squirming cats.

  “A little girl in the woods gave them to me, father,” he explained to an amused Brian. “She said her mother wanted you to have them!”

  Brian cocked an eyebrow and tried to appear serious. “And what would I be doing with a tribe of kittens? Are you sure this isn’t your latest army, little general?”

  “Oh, no, my lord!” Murrough insisted. “I was told they were a gift for you. To keep down mice, I expect,” he added earnestly.

  The cats were incorporated into the life of Cashel. They were good ratters, but they became more particularly, as Brian had expected, the playfellows of his oldest son.

  Murrough liked having his own way.

  On the eve of the young prince’s eighth birthday, Brian and Padraic were returning with a company of warriors from a skirmish exercise, a war game Brian had devised to keep his troops battle-ready in the absence of Northmen. Padraic, Brian’s shadow, had come to be more than an aide; he was as much of a confidant as Brian would allow himself, and the younger man was proud and jealous of his position.