At close range Sitric saw that there were faint lines in the delicate skin around her eyes, the first soft fingerings of time, as if the weight of her heavy lashes was causing a slight sagging of the fragile flesh. She shrugged out of his embrace impatiently and turned her face away, unwilling to have it reveal secrets.
“I believe there is a soft spot in you somewhere after all, mother,” Sitric told her. “Didn’t your Malachi ever take time to learn that you have a passion for music, or a gift for writing poetry, or that you have a tender smile just here”—he reached out to trace the curve of her lips with his forefinger—“at the corner of your mouth?”
“Stop that! You take liberties, Sitric; my inner feelings are my own!” She pushed his hand away and turned from him, but the tender smile he had mentioned played for a moment across her lips.
She continued to walk the fields alone, wrapped in her bitterness and her hurt pride. On wild and windy days when spume blew inland from the bay, she imagined attacking the Ard Ri with his own sword, and laughing when he begged for mercy. On soft mornings when the mist could be tasted on the tongue and the lowing of cattle came like music from the meadows, she walked in silence, her head down and her fists clutched to the emptiness in her bosom. In the evenings, as warm light winked from every cottage doorway, she returned to the fortress of Dublin one reluctant step at a time, her eyes measuring every man she passed. They were all small men, as Malachi had been.
She sat at her son’s table and watched with remote green eyes as the jarls raised their drinking horns to her. I am the last of a race of giants, Gormlaith thought. I will live and die alone.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
The king of Munster spent the remainder of that year and the next spring consolidating his strength. All Munster now lay beneath his hand, obedient to his order. Only northern Connacht was still in question, but Brian and Donogh mac Connlaoch marched northward at the head of a large army and King Conor capitulated without forcing another battle. “It seems there are more nobles in Connacht willing to march beneath your banner than beneath mine,” he told Brian. Conor’s face was as long and sad as ever, but there was no enmity in it. “You fight in more ways than I know how, Boru,” he said honestly. “I invite you to make the circuit of hospitality in my kingdom while the weather is fine and the milk is sweet. The princes of Connacht will make you welcome from Lough Allen to Lough Corrib. Go where you will, Brian Boru; Connacht is yours.”
Conor himself escorted the king of Munster’s party on a tour Brian had particularly wanted to make, to the Cave of the King on the northeast flank of Keshcorran Mountain. The two monarchs entered the cave together, leaving their companions waiting nervously outside. The entrance was all but obscured by a forest of luxuriant ferns sprouting from the damp earth, but once inside one could turn and see an unimpeded view of the gently rolling plain. The wind sang through the narrow aperture, whistling timeless tunes.
The damp stone walls leaned toward them.
“Cormac mac Airt spent his childhood here,” Brian said reverently, not looking at Conor.
“So the histories say.”
“King of all Ireland two hundred years after Christ was crucified. Carroll says he was a pagan, but he could read and write, and the land bloomed rich in his reign. He founded three colleges at Tara: one for history, one for military science, and one for the study of the law.
“What must life have been like in those days, Conor; do you ever wonder? No Northmen to ravage the land, and the gentle Saint Patrick still two centuries in the future. Our ancestors worshiped a pantheon of gods and the Tuatha de Danann still ventured occasionally from their underground hiding places. Our Golden Age, Conor, when poetry and law were sacred. All we have left of it are caves and standing stones and legends that grow dimmer with the years, and a future lit by Norse flames.”
His deep voice boomed eerily in the cave, and an uncontrollable shudder ran down the spine of Conor of Connacht. “You talk like a poet yourself, Boru—or a prophet,” he said uneasily, “but I cannot make out if you speak of the past or the future.”
“Sometimes I cannot tell the difference,” Brian replied.
As Brian’s entourage prepared for the next leg of their journey, word came from Ulster that dragonships were sighted near the Inishtrahull Islands, off the northern coast between Lough Foyle and Lough Swilly, and others were anchored ominously in the lakes themselves. A larger force of Northmen was following the coastline of Dalriada, apparently headed for Bangor.
“It is the Norse jarl, Gilli of the Hebrides,” runners reported. “He sails with Sigurd Hlodvisson of the Orkneys. They envy Olaf Tryggvesson of Lochlann, who is making a name for himself as a raider of the Saxon lands, and the fearsome Svein, son of Harold of Denmark. The Norsemen think to build an empire here to rival the one forming across the Irish Sea.”
Conor was pale. “The nightmare is coming again!” he said, signing the Cross on his chest.
“No,” said Boru.
They returned to Thomond to prepare for the harvest and rearm. Brian accepted an invitation to spend a few days at the tuath of a king of the tribe Corcu Baiscind, in the empty windswept land south of Galway Bay and below the Burren—the Meeting Place of the Birds. It was a wildly desolate place, but strangely peaceful, and its silences called to Brian.
He spent little time in his host’s hall. With only Padraic as guard, he spent long hours exploring the countryside, standing with his face to the west and the sea wind lifting his hair, or skirting the edge of the one small patch of woodland that clung determinedly to that inhospitable soil. Then he returned to the guest chamber and his bed, and prayed for strength to come to him when he needed it, as it always had before.
The betrayal was total and shocking; the more so for being unexpected. The desertion of a lifelong ally is almost impossible to believe, yet there came a morning when the proof was there, all too plain, for the eye to see and the heart to suffer.
He could not make himself get out of bed, though he had heard a cock crow several times and the bells had rung the hour of Prime. The bustle in the courtyard could be heard beyond the walls of his guest house. He tossed off his covering and lay on the bed, looking idly down the length of his tall body. For the first time in years he examined it with an objective eye, and was horrified.
He stared in disgust at the small blur of fat around his once lean waist, the faint convexity of what had been a flat belly. Where had it come from, that slackness of thigh skin? Where had it gone, the glow and ripple of taut flesh stretched over hard muscle? He found himself trapped in an enemy camp, imprisoned in an aging body that could not possibly be his, doomed to be carried in it all the way to old age and the grave.
It was a hideous revelation.
He lay back on the bed and tried to plot an escape. His thoughts ran wild, shaping fantasies he knew to be impossible, while his sense of reality sat detached and coldly amused. You are getting old, Brian. The days ahead will become an old man’s days. Walking stoop-shouldered, grinning without teeth, the strong muscles shrunk away to mere lumps of stringy meat, hanging flabbily from your bones.
With a shudder of revulsion he rolled from the bed and began to pace the floor, loathing his thoughts but unable to escape them.
I always prided myself on knowing how to lose, on being able to take a defeat and keep right on going until there was another opportunity for winning. When I lost on the battlefield I spoke of a strategic withdrawal, and did not dwell on the bitter taste in my mouth or the burning in my gut. Survive and keep going. But how can I outlast this enemy? How much time is left me before I begin to lose more than I win?
He went through the formalities of the day like a man who had lost his hearing, unreachable most of the time. In the early afternoon Carroll came to him with a parchment and pen, requesting his name on some document, and he took the pen from his secretary’s fingers and hurled it across the chamber. “Words!” he cried. “I drown in a sea of words! I am so damnably weary of
promises and manipulations and lies that sound like the truth and truth that must be altered …”
Carroll stared at him open-mouthed.
Padraic was able to shed no light on the matter. “Of course, I know Brian better than anyone,” he told Carroll, “but sometimes, even I …” His shrug was eloquent.
Brian took his horse and, refusing even Padraic’s company, rode out alone in the direction of the setting sun. He rode for hours, unmindful of time or distance. As he passed the little knot of stunted trees beyond the king’s tuath, they dug their roots into the stony soil and watched him pass by. The small clump of woods at Ireland’s western rim was not uninhabited, but Brian did not feel the eyes that followed him. He felt nothing but the coldness and the brittleness of his bones.
He came at last to the very edge of the land, where the cliffs towered above a miniscule stretch of beach, framed in black rocks. He had never been alone with the sea.
And it may never happen again, he thought. This may be the only time. In my entire life.
He tethered his horse and picked his way down the cliff face, sweating with fear at the drop that yawned below him. What a fool you would look, old man, lying here on the edge of the Cold Sea with your bones shattered.
Old man.
He reached the narrow strip of sand and checked himself, panting, as he teetered precariously on the slippery surface of a black rock at the very edge of the breaking surf. The difficult descent had heated him; his cloak dragged at his shoulders and he threw it aside. He felt a desire that he recognized as ancient and pagan, a longing to strip off his tunic and stand naked to the stars. Once he might have done so, proud of his body and feeling sweet kinship with all of nature. But on this evening his confidence was at low ebb, his emotions clouded; he did not know what he really wanted to do, only that he was troubled and desperate in some nameless way.
There was a movement at the very edge of his vision, a stirring not in rhythm with the lapping of the waves against the rocks. Suddenly embarrassed, Brian turned and peered into the gathering darkness, searching angrily for the interloper who dared spy on him at such a private moment.
Crouched in the shadow of a large boulder was a woman. A young, naked woman.
It was impossible, one of his midnight fantasies that had somehow broken through into his waking hours. He let himself down from his perch gingerly, unwilling to risk a broken leg in that moment, and walked slowly forward until he could get a good look at her.
The vision did not vanish. She huddled there quietly, her skin glimmering in the first wan moonlight. Her dark hair glistened wetly and the eyes she lifted to meet his were enormous, night-colored, with the look of a wild creature waiting for the hunter’s decision. He had the fanciful thought that she might be one of the Selkies, the enchanted sea-dwellers who throw off their seals’ skins from time to time and come on to the dry land to dance by moonlight.
“What sort of creature are you?” he asked. “What sorcery brings you here?”
She took a deep breath and flattened herself backward, pressing against the rock. Her huge eyes never left his face, but she said nothing.
Disconcerted, he reached down to touch her.
She started to pull away, then checked herself and slowly surrendered her hand to him. The fingers that slid between his were warm and soft, uncallused. He tugged gently to lift her to her feet, and she flowed upward in one easy motion of such fluid grace that his heart constricted with the pleasure of seeing it.
She stood submissively before him, making no effort to hide her nakedness, holding herself like a goddess who expects to be worshiped. It seemed imperative that he look at her; and he had no desire to resist. His eyes devoured her slim body as if he had never seen a woman unclothed. Indeed, in that moment he felt that he had not. This girl was so firm, so fresh, her body so untouched by time that just looking at her made him feel young again, too.
Her round throat was strongly modeled, with a pulse beating in the deep hollow at its base. Her shoulders sloped into plump white arms, and her breasts were small, virginal, the nipples dark against her fair skin. But there was a weight to them, a just ripening richness that tempted his hands and lips.
“What’s your name?” he asked again, feeling compelled to say something. She shook her head slightly and parted her lips but made no sound; her big, black eyes, heavily fringed with a tangle of dark lashes, were as expressionless as pools of water. In such a situation a man might expect fear, or bravado, or even desire, but this girl was merely waiting. Naked, in his hands.
He was holding his breath and did not know it. A string like that of a harp was stretched tight in him, the tension growing with every moment, till it pulled at his belly and tugged his vital organs. He took a half step backward, drawing her with him into the moonlight so that he could see every detail of her body.
“You are pure poetry!” he told her hoarsely, but she did not react to his compliment. She just stood there, open to him, pliable and silent.
He looked at the curve of her hips, the round fertility of her belly, the long legs and high-arched feet planted firmly apart in the damp sand. Even in summer the night sea was a cold place to bathe, and now autumn chill was in the air, but the girl did not seem cold. Her skin smell was warm and clean. There was no more odor of smoke or grease or perfume about her than about a wild animal.
A lovely, wild animal.
He raised his head and looked into her eyes once more, and they were no longer blank. He saw his own desire mirrored in them.
He felt a trembling someplace inside himself.
She parted her lips and Brian knew a moment’s fear; if she spoke the spell might be broken. But she merely licked her lips and left them open, waiting for his tongue.
He grabbed her so savagely he half expected to hear her bones break in his embrace.
Their bodies melted together; he could not tell where his left off and hers began. It was if she were some amputated part of himself, miraculously rejoined to him. His youth, his wildness, the secret dreams he had put aside when he took up the hard realities of manhood. Even his raging mind was stilled in her embrace, freed of the awful necessity to think. He had only to feel.
In the night, at the edge of the sea, Brian was engulfed in magic.
Brian awoke to a sense of loss. The moon was still high in the cobalt sky; a fat white crescent, partly obscured by threads of ragged, silver-edged cloud. He lay staring at it with a dim memory of having wrapped himself and the girl in his bratt some hours before; now the girl and the cloak were gone, leaving him cold.
He scrambled to his feet, surprised to find his body supple, his joints unprotesting. He began carefully examining each dark shape along the beach in turn. One of them might be, must be, the girl. The firm, dark-eyed, ripplemuscled girl. Must be. Must be. His head swung slowly from left to right and then back again, certain that he had somehow missed her and that she was there, waiting for him.
The patient ocean that had seen everything lapped at the edge of the beach, disinterested.
He felt an acute awareness of the necessity of her, not so much as a person but as an experience, a door he had entered to a world he had thought forever past. It occurred to him that he could return to his host’s tuath and request to have her found and brought to him, but he discarded the idea almost immediately. It would not be the same to have her beneath a roof, kneeling before him, her name known and her secrets laid bare. There were plenty of women he could have for the asking, if the physical relief were all he sought.
But it was more than that. He wanted to feel the string drawn tight inside him again, and know that when it was plucked the music it made would fill his soul.
He felt her presence very near him. Fearful of fooling himself he tried to ease the quick thudding of his heart as he turned slowly around, but she was there, standing a few yards behind him, wrapped in his bratt and smiling. Her eyes were luminous.
Feeling like a boneless boy, he ran to her and clasped he
r to him, burying his lips in her salty hair. She was cool and wet from the sea.
She exhaled a gentle breath and fitted her body against his smoothly, without a seam. I am young, he thought, holding her at the water’s edge. I am young, and there is no such thing as Time.
Whatever enchantment bound her, she was human; he felt certain of it when he entered her and recognized the configuration of her body. But she made him feel more than human, unrestricted by the limitations of the years and the flesh. Whatever she was, she brought joy to life in him, and the hot tide of his youth poured over them both again.
When they lay at rest, her head pillowed on his shoulder, her damp hair streaming across his arm, she took a deep breath as if to speak, and to his surprise he found himself putting a hand across her mouth to stop her. What if her voice were rough with the coarse accent of a fisherwoman? What if she were stupid and dull? A body could be splendid with little mind behind it, and she had been so silent until now … he did not want to know. “Sssshhh,” he whispered, his voice an echo of the sea. “Sssshhh.”
She lay quiet then, turning her face toward him so that the top of her head snuggled under his chin, and they fell asleep together, wrapped in stars and sea mist.
This time when he awoke his cloak was still with him, spread lovingly over him. It was morning, with the ocean chill in the air, but he felt neither cold nor stiff. He raised himself and saw her bare footprints leading away from him, running along the sand to be lost on a shelf of rock. He started to stand up, pulling his bratt after him, and as he did so something heavy struck his leg.
There was a brooch pinned to the bratt, but not the gold which had fastened it last night. This brooch was of silver, blackened and worn, with an elaborate pattern of spirals.
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