Lion of Ireland

by Morgan Llywelyn

  “Go on, about Ireland,” Brian urged.

  “Ah. The Nemedians fell to the Fomorians, or so the Irish legends call them—searobbers in painted ships from the coast of Africa. Some of the Nemedians escaped and made their way to what is now Greece, in the morning of that culture. They would later return here as Firbolgs.

  “And after the Firbolgs came the Tuatha de Danann, the magic people, masters of medicine and the occult sciences, who originated—where? The isles of the Aegean Sea? Or some lost civilization whose very name is unknown to us? There are stone inscriptions on the tombs on the Boyne that are very similar to the carvings of Mycenae, but the evidences of many cultures are in Ireland, and were already old here when the Greek world was young.

  “We are talking about events two and three thousand years ago, my lord, and all such speculation is guesswork, but I hope someday there will be scholars more gifted than I who will be able to clarify the ancient histories and put everything into its chronological order. It is evident that vanished cultures once flourished here, perhaps more highly developed than anything we imagine.”

  “It would be wonderful to know,” Brian breathed, his eyes clouded with dreams.

  “Someday we shall,” Carroll assured him. “But at least the outline I have given you will explain why I said you are not a pure Celt. If I am correct, then in truth none of us is. The Milesian Celts were latecomers to Ireland by way of Iberia, and they mixed their blood with the descendants of all those invaders who had come before. The fighting Celts contributed their abilities to the races already blended here, to be transmuted by the special magic of the land into the people who would be called the Irish.

  “Your intellect, your discipline, your organizational ability are all gifts from peoples whose very names have passed into myth. You are all that Ireland has ever been, distilled into one extraordinary man, Brian Boru.”

  The king’s gray eyes reflected the candle flame. Then, slowly, the light faded. “Tell my son that, historian,” he said in a voice Carroll scarcely recognized. “Go to his tomb and tell my father. Tell Mahon.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  Ireland, in all the shades of green and gray. Moss and ferns draping the stones with velvet, blue fingers of sea and purple ridges of mountain coming together in misty solitude. Salt-tanged sea wind blew inland from the ocean and raked the sheep grazing the bald rolling hills of western Thomond. To the east, fog shrouded the mountains of Wicklow, muffling the cries of birth and death in tiny cottages tucked into the forested folds of the land. In the kingdoms of Ulster the mountains towered serenely in their stronghold between lake and sea, with apple trees at their feet and God on their shoulders.

  In Connacht, Conor had had time to reflect sourly on the behavior of the king of Munster, and found that his memory of the strength of the army from the south was dimming. Sitting in his own stout hall with his feet up before the fire, he could picture them as little men, easily stampeded.

  “If Brian Boru were a real warrior,” he said to all who would listen, “he would have stood with me at Lough Ennell.”

  “He promised me aid and he lied,” he sulked to his wife on their pillow. “That Boru is very casual with the truth. He touches it lightly from time to time and thinks that is sufficient. We need no longer regard Munster as an ally.”

  Now it was Conor who was pressing his princes from behind, urging the southern kingdoms to renew hostilities with Munster. With some reluctance they took up sword and spear once more and began small, cautious raids into Thomond, stealing a few cattle and capturing a few women. Always with a nervous eye looking southward.

  Brian held court at Cashel. Messengers had come from the east, lips twitching with the latest news of Malachi. “The Ard Ri quarreled with Sitric of Dublin, mended the tear, and now has quarreled again!”

  Brian nodded. “Malachi will have his hands full for a time. Padraic, we will prepare to settle this matter with Connacht right now. Get ready to march.”

  In spite of all the years spent with sword and spear, the thrill was still there for Padraic. To march! He could feel his heart begin to beat more strongly, preparing itself for the feats of endurance, the overcoming of the flesh that enlarged a man in his own eyes. To meet another warrior, eye to eye and breast to heaving breast, protecting the fragile vessel of your existence with all your strength and skill, fighting right through, surviving, surviving above all else, pitting yourself against the worst the enemy could offer and coming out on top with gritted teeth and flashing eyes … “We march,” Padraic announced happily in the banquet hall, and saw the answering flame leap in the eyes of the others.

  MacLiag had returned from a bardic tour of the lake country with some vague illness that Cairbre could not diagnose (“He was simply entertained too richly by the princes wanting to win his influence with the king,” the physician said later in the hall). Before the march northward, Padraic went to pay a farewell visit to the poet, partly out of courtesy and partly because he was anxious to discuss the problem that lay at the back of his mind as it did the king’s—the continued silence of Murrough, brooding at a distance with his new wife and his old angers.

  But one glance dissuaded Padraic from discussing anything so worrisome with MacLiag.

  The poet’s chamber was a spacious room beyond the chapel, a private little building with its roof newly thatched, its walls hung with rugs in the six colors appropriate for an ollamh poet. Only the king had more. MacLiag’s blankets were of otter skin, his candles purest mutton fat, his attendants comely and solicitous. But none of that comforted him.

  “I am dying,” he greeted Padraic dolefully.

  “Of course you’re not dying! Who told you such nonsense?”

  “No one has to tell me; I feel it in my bones.” He sighed deeply. A tear sparkled at the corner of his eye.

  The years had faded Padraic’s freckles, but some of them, the most persistent of the sun’s kisses, had turned into liver spots instead, and still showed plainly when he crinkled his nose. “Everyone feels bad occasionally, MacLiag, but that doesn’t mean you’re dying. It means you ate and drank too much, as I’m sure Cairbre has already told you. I can see it for myself, and I’m no physician. The whites of your eyes have turned yellow and your face is very puffy.”

  “There, you see! Those are some of the symptoms!”

  “Of what disease? Plague doesn’t take you that way, and you surely haven’t suffered a sword wound!”

  MacLiag groaned. “It’s a disease that doesn’t have a name; perhaps I’m the first ever to have it. But I can assure you it’s a dreadful affliction, my friend.”

  Padraic was dubious. “The miasma that rises from the bogs sometimes …”

  “That’s it, the very thing! We skirted many a bog between here and Muckross, and several others had roads laid through them. I must have taken the fever then.”

  Padraic laid his callused palm on the poet’s forehead. “You’re cooler than I am,” he said. “It can’t be bog fever.”

  “No fever? That’s worse than I thought. Some terrible growth within, perhaps … I have this lumpiness here …” He raised his right arm and urged Padraic to feel beneath it.

  With a small grimace of distaste Padraic probed the plump flesh. Then he straightened and looked severely at Brian’s bard. “That’s fat,” he said. “You eat too much.”

  MacLiag’s eyes misted. “I thought you were my friend!”

  “I am your friend, but I’m also an old warrior. I’ve seen plenty of illness and dying, the real thing, and this isn’t it. Do you think I would be your friend if I lied to you? Do you want to be sick?”

  “Of course not! I hate ill health. I would give ten good lambs this very morning if I could be up and about, enjoying a fine rare day.”

  Padraic shrugged. “Then put on your bratt and come out with me now.”

  MacLiag recoiled. “It would be the death of me!”

  Padraic reported MacLiag’s condition to Brian with some amusement.
“I’ve never seen a man enjoy himself more. He lies there in bed, swelling up like a toad from lack of exercise, and sends his servants running in every direction to fetch this or that for a dying man. Cairbre won’t even see him anymore, he’s that disgusted.”

  Brian laughed. “Well, we can’t wait on him. Send someone to tell him that he has to get up and run that fat off now, or we’ll put him in a cart if we have to, because I intend to leave him safely at Kincora on our way north. There’s no danger of his being really ill, is there?”

  Padraic chuckled. “Not that one. He’s always dosed himself on every potion in the herbalist’s stock, and gone crying to the physician with every wheeze and sneeze. Nothing ever comes of it. When the rest of us are sleeping beneath our shields he’ll still be above ground, singing our praises and moaning over his pains.”

  At Kincora Brian faced a new set of messengers, with fresh news of Malachi. “The Ard Ri has attacked Dublin savagely, driving Sitric to flee to his relatives and then plundering the Norse treasure!

  “He stood up before the Northmen in their own hall, wearing the great gold collar of the viking Tomar and brandishing the sword of their Carlus, and bragged about his victories. But then, when he had crowed over his successes to his heart’s content, he finally backed down and agreed to restore Sitric as ruler of Dublin as long as the Norse would agree not to retaliate against Meath.”

  Carroll and Brian exchanged glances. “Malachi is storing up trouble for us all,” Brian commented.

  Trying to protect his men, trying to win victories by intimidation rather than slaughter wherever possible, Brian fought across Connacht and ravaged Brefni. The princes of the province, the under-kings fighting defiantly for their tribal honor, the warriors with nicks slashed in their belts to represent the number of their personal kills—they came to Brian, battle after battle, with bowed heads and swords laid horizontally across their extended palms, and knelt in submission.

  To each of them he said the same thing: “You must not waste yourself and your good men fighting me. We have a common enemy to fight and much work to be done together. Throw in your lot with me now, not for Munster, but for Ireland.”

  One by one they bowed their necks and bent before him, and he laid the edge of his hand like the blade of a sword on the defenseless spine. “God bless thee, Irish man,” he said to each in turn.

  When they raised their heads, there was something new in their eyes.

  Believing Dublin to be pacified, Malachi and his retinue made the circuit of hospitality from Leinster to Ulster, sharing banquet tables, draining goblets, telling jokes, laughing and singing and sleeping in linen.

  There were women to be enjoyed; soft, pliant women who were content to stay in the ladies’ chambers until their presence was requested. Women who were awed by the king of the kings. Respectful, quiet women. Malachi thought for the first time in years of taking a new wife, and applied to the brehon for the final step in setting Gormlaith aside.

  There were seanchaithe who told of the long centuries of Hy Neill dominance in Ireland and did not mention the growing legends of Brian Boru. In the halls and at the hearths, Malachi was given the same advice again and again: “You must stand up to the Dalcassian and destroy his fighting ability now, before he actually marches on Tara and profanes the Stone of Fal with his unworthy body.”

  In the spring of the year 996 the Ard Ri gathered his armies and marched in columns six men wide into Munster, taking advantage of the fact that Brian and his army were a safe distance away in the north. At Nenagh, Malachi drove the people from their homes and burned the community to the ground, its black smoke a stain of warning across the sky, drifting over the Shannon on the east wind, carrying its ugly message over Kincora.

  Brian’s reaction was immediate. “We will begin immediately to fortify Thomond so extensively as to discourage any further attack. New garrisons, more men at arms. And I think perhaps we need more hostages of good conduct from Leinster, since they forget themselves in their cordiality to Malachi.”

  “What about Murrough?” Flann asked his father. “Will you summon him?”

  Brian kept his face closed. “He would demand to know why we were not hurrying to kill the Ard Ri,” he said, “and he would never allow himself to understand my answer.”

  “There are many who agree with him, my lord,” Illan Finn commented.

  Brian looked hard at his long-time friend. “Are you one of them?”

  Illan Finn burned red from his throat to his hair line. “I’m a Dalcassian, Brian! We would, all of us, rather be run through by your own sword than fail you. I … we … that is, some of us just thought it might be better to summon Prince Murrough back to stand with you, where you can keep an eye on him …”

  Brian cut him off sharply. “My oldest son is like Ireland. He must come to me of his own free will. Otherwise …” He broke off abruptly, and when he spoke again his voice was firm and of a different tone. “I take it I can count on all of you? We continue to be of one company, with the strong hand uppermost?”

  They shouted it back to him. “The strong hand uppermost! Lamh laidir an uachdar!”

  Brian had the motto etched on his sword. Someday, Murrough might see it there.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  The tall woman walked alone, tramping the valley of the dark-watered Liffey in every weather, wrapped in her furred cloak and her anger. When the wind rose she threw back her shawl and let it whip her heavy hair into a tangled red curtain, obscuring her face. But her green eyes still blazed through, and cottagers stepped off the path to avoid her.

  Sometimes Sitric lost patience with his mother and sent an escort to fetch her. After all, she was his responsibility now, set aside by her husband, turned out of her own home. But she, who refused any armed guard and spurned any offer of companionship, was equally haughty to her son’s messengers, sending them back to him with the strong injunction to leave her alone.

  When she did return to her son’s hall she did not stay with the women, but strode across the yard to hang her cloak in front of Sitric’s hearth with the warriors. In the evenings she sat by the fire, brooding, and even the battlescarred jarls were uncomfortable in her presence.

  At last Sitric’s forbearance deserted him, and he spoke directly to Gormlaith of the Ard Ri and the repudiation. She responded with a fist slammed on the table and a screamed profanity that emptied the hall. Warriors and servants alike recalled urgent business elsewhere.

  In the flickering torchlight Sitric faced his mother. “Malachi set me aside!” she raged. “That puling whey-faced imitation of a man denied our marriage contract and had me put out of my own house as if I were some lowly servant!”

  Sitric had grown to be a stocky, thoughtful man, his mother’s still remarkable beauty missing from his own serious face, his one claim to comeliness being the waving and luxuriant beard that had earned him the title of Silkbeard. He met his mother’s violent outburst with a soft voice and an unruffled demeanor. “He had grounds for denying the existence of a marriage, Gormlaith. I understand you had an assortment of lovers quite openly over the last years, and he could have taken you before the judges and applied to have you punished for you adulteries.”

  “Adultery! I wish he had tried the case in person. I would have stood before the brehons and told them the real truth about their Ard Ri, what a dreary, unimaginative man he is, how incapable of pleasing a woman, how crippled in his manhood, and they would have all known that he is not fit to rule!”

  “He must have some manhood left,” Sitric commented. “I hear he’s taking a new wife.”

  “Phah! What could he hope to find in another woman to compare with what he had in me!” Gormlaith tossed her head so that the long, firm line of her white throat rose swanlike from the deep valley of her creamy breasts.

  When looking at her, Sitric found it hard to remember the fact that he had actually been carried within that superbly molded body. The intensity of her anger gave her a vitality a much youn
ger woman would have envied; indeed, had he not known her to be fifteen years his senior he would have thought her his contemporary. To discuss bed matters with such a female was an exciting experience as long as he forgot their relationship.

  Somehow, Gormlaith knew what he was feeling. She always knew. Her voice sank to a deep purr, still rich with malice, but no longer strident. “I want to see Malachi suffer for rejecting me publicly,” she said.

  “What more can I do?”

  “Hurt him; destroy him!”

  He looked at her and saw, to his surprise, a glitter in her eyes as if she were on the brink of tears. It momentarily unnerved him. “Malachi hurt you that badly?” he whispered.

  She stiffened. “No mere man can hurt me! He insulted me, that’s all, but first he failed me in every way a man can fail a woman.”

  Awkwardly, Sitric put one arm around his mother’s shoulders in a rare embrace. “I didn’t know you really cared for Malachi,” he said as sympathetically as he could.

  Her voice sharpened with annoyance. “I don’t, I never did! You misunderstand me, just like every other man. I’m not one of those soft Irish virgins full of wistful sighs and airy fantasies; I had all that nonsense knocked out of me when I was still a breastless child, and my father married me to a Norseman four times my age in order to fatten his depleted fortunes. I’ve never suffered that misery the poets call ‘love’ and I pray God I never shall.

  “But I was queen of Ireland, Sitric! Consort of the Ard Ri! I was no common wife to sit by the hearth and stir the pot, I should have been part of everything he did. Instead he left me to wilt of boredom while he jaunted about the countryside with his nobles, going to battles and feasts and having a fine time for himself. Of course I found ways to amuse myself; I can’t tell you how miserable my life was. Malachi had everything and shared nothing. Why is it no man ever appreciates me?”