Dubh-Linn: A Novel of Viking Age Ireland (The Norsemen Saga Book 2) (42 page)

  Brigit was quick to ascribe it to animal stupidity. Ruarc would not generally be satisfied with so simple an answer, but try as he might he could think of no other.

  “Do you have a feel for their mood? Will they join us in arms?” Ruarc asked.

  “I don’t know,” Brigit said. The rain had turned her wavy hair into straight tendrils and her formerly ruddy complexion was white, making her look as if she had drowned. But the rain, at last, was starting to ease. “I don’t know,” Brigit said again, looking not at Ruarc but at the Viking leaders gathered some ways off. “They are animals, you know, and they are governed by their appetites alone. Appetites for silver and gold, food, women. If they can conjure up one intelligent thought between the lot of them, they’ll realize that those things will not be had fighting you, only by taking Tara.”

  “And if we take Tara? What then?” Ruarc asked. “We round up what gold and silver is there and hand it to them?”

  Brigit turned to him quick, as if surprised by his words. “Dear God, no,” she said, and there was a hardness to her voice that he would not have expected from one so young and lovely as Brigit nic Máel Sechnaill. “They cannot be suffered to live. We send them in first, against Flann’s men, and any who live through that, we kill them like the rabid dogs they are.”

  “Indeed,” Ruarc said. He looked off at the gathering of leaders. He could see arms waving, an animated discussion. He was not certain how comfortable he was with this. To form an alliance with these men, and then butcher them? He was not sure.

  “My Lord Ruarc,” Brigit said, as if he had voiced his doubts out loud. “These are not Irishmen and they are not Christians. They come to our land, take what they wish, plunder our churches, rape and enslave our women. They try to crush the true faith under foot. And they will not stop. If there was a pack of wolves on your lands, killing your sheep, you would hunt them down and kill them all, by whatever means available. Well, sir, there
is
a pack of wolves on your lands.”

  Ruarc nodded. Every word she spoke was true, and the threat from the Northmen was real and it was here. She was right. They could not be suffered to live.

  Before he could reply he saw that the council of leaders was breaking up, that the men had come to some sort of decision. They approached the line. Leading the way was an older man, a huge man with a massive beard and long hair who seemed to roll as he walked.

  “This old sodomite is the one they call Ornolf,” Brigit said, her contempt clear as the purest water.

  “He is their leader? Lord over these men?”

  “I don’t know the extent of his authority,” Brigit said, “but he is a drunkard and a fool, so that would put him in good stead to command the others.”

  The shieldwall opened up wider and the one called Ornolf stepped through and the others followed behind like geese in flight. They stopped ten feet from where Ruarc, Brigit and the others waited, looking down at them from their mounts. A young man, much younger than the others, came and stood by Ornolf’s side. Ruarc recognized him as the boy who had brought Brigit to their camp.

  Ornolf spoke in a voice to match his frame. The young man translated the words into a broken but passable Irish. “I am Ornolf Hrafnsson, jarl in East Agder, in Vik,”

  “Have you come to a decision?” Ruarc called before the old man could continue with his titles.

  The boy translated, listened to Ornolf’s reply, and then said, “We have. We will join you. We will fight to conquer this place you call Tara. In exchange for the plunder of that place.”

  Ruarc nodded.              “I honor your decision, and I welcome your friendship,” he said and the boy translated. “We will advance in a line of battle. We have a battering ram and we will use it to knock the gate open. My men and your men will use their shields to protect those wielding the ram from arrows. Then, when the gate is broken down, your men will advance through and engage the enemy there, and we shall follow behind and join with you.”

  He waited while the boy stumbled through the translation. When he got to the end, the old man named Ornolf threw back his head and roared with laughter. When he was done he wiped his eyes and said something to the boy, which the boy translated as, “Ornolf says…he says, the fight is for the Irish…Norsemen and Irish will go in together…”

  Ruarc had the sense that the boy was softening the words, but it did not matter. “Very well,” he called, “We go in together. Let your men form up there.” He pointed to the right wing on his line.

  The boy translated. Ornolf shouted orders, and then others shouted orders, and the Northmen began forming up in a surprisingly coordinated manner. Ruarc swung his horse around so he was addressing Breandan mac Aidan and the others, his back to the line of men. “Pass the word to your officers,” he said. “Once the main gate is battered open, we enter, Irish and Norsemen, and we engage Flann’s troops. They are not many, and it should not be any great task to defeat them. Then we turn immediately on the Norsemen, cut them down where they stand. They are a threat, not to be trusted, and we must eliminate them. No quarter.”

  Heads nodded. These men understood. They had been in Ruarc mac Brain’s service for some time, many years in some instances. They knew he spoke plain and his judgment was good, and they would do as he instructed.

  Ten minutes later the line was formed, and ready. Ruarc mac Brain called an order in a voice that carried over the wet field and with an answering shout they rolled forward, Irish and Norsemen, a battle line three hundred

or more strong, moving inexorably up the hill to Tara.

They will tunnel beneath God’s oratories;

churches will be burned…

                                                     Irish Poem of Prophesy

                                                       attributed to Bec mac Dé

It was all visible from the walls of Tara. They could see it, but they could not understand it.

  Morrigan, Flan mac Conaing and a few others watched it play out as if they were Romans of old watching a battle in the Coliseum, staged for their amusement. In this instance, however, the outcome mattered far more to them than a few coins they might have bet on one side or the other.

  They watched Ruarc mac Brain’s men assemble as Arinbjorn and the Norse army rushed from the gate of Tara. For a moment it looked as if Arinbjorn was going to retreat, but then, as if conjured up from thin air, came another horde of Norsemen appeared, racing across the far end of the field and falling on Ruarc’s left flank. No doubt greatly encouraged by this, Arinbjorn’s men immediately advanced against Ruarc’s right.

  Morrigan stood by her brother and said nothing. But in mind and spirit she was near ecstasy as she watched her plan play out just as she had imagined. Better, in fact, than she had imagined. Her hope had been only for Arinbjorn to inflict some debilitating hurt on Ruarc mac Brain before Ruarc killed the Norsemen to a man. She had not known about this other army. And now it looked as if Ruarc mac Brain’s army would be the one destroyed, and the Northmen left crippled. And that was good, because the Northmen were not interested in sitting on the throne of Tara, as Ruarc no doubt was.

  Once Arinbjorn’s troops stopped their cowardly retreat and advanced, the fighting quickly enveloped the whole line, a great, bloody struggle, which Morrigan was privileged to witness from her high, safe vantage. And then the horns sounded, their clear note easily heard from the walls of Tara, and, inexplicably, the fighting stopped.

  What had happened she could not imagine, and when she asked, Flann admitted that he, too, had no notion of what was taking place on the far field. The fighting stopped, the two lines, Irish and Viking, separated. For long minutes no one seemed to be doing anything. And then the Vikings were moving again, but rather than renewing their attack they fell into the Irish battle line. Facing Tara. All of them, shields making a long row of bright dots in the wet, gray afternoon, all of them facing Tara. And then they began to move.

  “They have made a peace,” Flann said, soft, with resignation. “They have made a peace and joined together to fall on Tara.” They watched in silence for a minute more while the long line moved forward as one, building momentum as it came.

  “What Ruarc mac Brain might have said to those heathens, I cannot imagine,” Flann said at last. “What he promised them, once they have taken Tara, I do not like to think on.”

  “What will you do, brother?” Morrigan asked.

  “There is not much we can do. We will have our men on the walls, defending with spears and arrows. But they will have a battering ram, I have no doubt, and they will beat the doors of the gate down. It will not take them long. Then we’ll fight them as they come.”

  “No!” Morrigan said, frightened by what he was suggesting. “No!” she said again. “There must be something else.” Her mind was flailing like someone thrown into the sea, someone who could not swim. “Let me think!”

  “Sister,” Flann said, and his voice did not carry the harsh tone that it had these past days. It was soft, almost tender. “You’re a very clever girl, and you’ve done a great deal. You nearly saved us before. But the time for tricks is past. Now is the time to stand like men.”

  He turned and headed for the ladder.

  “No, brother, wait!” she said and Flann stopped and turned. She ran to him, stood very close and spoke softly. “You need not do this. There is a back way out, you know that. We can take horses, we’ll take Donnel and Patrick and we’ll ride hard. We can be miles gone before the gate is battered down.”

  Flann did not say anything, he just smiled a thin smile. Then he did something he had not done in a long time. He took her in his arms and hugged her, softly, and kissed the top of her head, the way he used to when she was a little girl and she had scraped her knee and he was the only one to comfort her.

  “God go with you, sister,” he said, “and pray for me, because I have put my soul in great peril.” Then he turned and hurried down the ladder, his officers following behind.

  Morrigan stood on the wall and watched him. She watched him as he crossed the open ground with bold strides, his arms waving as he issued orders and the men falling in, making two lines, one behind the other, facing the gate that would be battered down, forming a human wall against the tide that would rush in. This was when Flann was at his best, she knew, when he most felt he was doing what God had made him to do. Leading men into battle. Not ordering them into battle. Leading them.

  She turned and looked out at the line moving up the hill, the impossibly long line of men, more visible now as they grew closer, the shields distinct as individual circles, the helmets gleaming dull and wet in the slacking rain. Then she looked back at her brother. He was talking with his officers now, putting a reassuring hand on their shoulders, gripping their arms.

 
All my clever manipulations
, she thought. She had done this, all of it. Since she first conceived of setting the lineage of Flann mac Conaing on the throne of Tara, this had all, in one way or another, come about because of her plans and her tricks and her damned pride. And now she had killed Flann, her beloved brother, the only person in all the world she really loved. She had killed him as sure as if she had driven a dagger through his heart.

  The tears came with that realization. She could feel them welling up in her eyes and she could feel them rolling warm down her cold, wet cheeks. She ran along the wall and down the ladder, her feet slipping on the rungs, finding their place again. For her sins her brother would die and the heathens would rape Tara and unleash their horrible vengeance on her people.

  She did not consider what might happen to her; she didn’t care and in truth would have been happy for any torment that might help erase the pain of what she had done, any horror that could be visited on her that might distract from the anguish she was suffering now.

  She stumbled blindly across the open ground, past the lines of men readying for the moment when Tara’s gate would be battered down, and those being deployed to the top of the wall with spears and arrows. She ran through the ankle deep puddles and the mud that sucked at her shoes and grabbed at her feet as if trying to stop her flight, to drag her down to some place of torment beneath the earth.

  She ran past the royal residence with its new-build section, the fresh, clean daub and new thatch clearly delineating the border between it and the original house. She had ordered the new section to be built bigger, grander than it had been, a monument to her hubris and greed.

  At last she came to the lovely church, the sanctuary, the place she loved above all others within the walls of Tara. She pulled the doors open. The space was in twilight with the rain outside and no candles lit, the house of worship now a scene of frantic confusion, the monks rushing about with an urgency that bordered on panic. In the northern corner of the church a grave was open, the flat, heavy stone that marked the resting place of
Blessed Cummian, fifth abbot of Tara
, moved aside and settled on wooden blocks.

  Unknown to all but the monks and a select few others, there was no Blessed Cummian, fifth abbot of Tara, and never had been. The grave was a hiding place, and the monks were now carrying armfuls of gold and silver chalices and incensors, plates, bowls, reliquaries, bibles and prayer books with gold and jewel encrusted covers, wine ladles, monstrances, gold chains and crosiers, all the considerable wealth of the monastery at Tara, and placing it all in the hole in the floor that ostensibly housed an innocuous abbot one hundred and fifty years dead.

  Morrigan paid no attention to any of this activity. She could not think of it, or of protecting Tara, or hiding its wealth or anything at all beyond the spreading and perhaps irremovable stain on her soul. She knelt before the altar, the tears now running down her cheeks with abandon. She made the sign of the cross and began to pray and then, aware of how insufficient that gesture was, laid herself out, face down, arms outspread on the mat of rushes on the floor. In that position of supplication she began to pray, for her brother, for the people of Tara, for her enemies, and lastly for her own damaged soul.

  She prayed as she had not prayed in years, the way she had prayed when she was a little girl, the way she had prayed when she had been first taken by the Norsemen, all those years before. Before her life had become one nightmare of pain and humiliation built on another, and she had abandoned prayer in any meaningful way and let hate and doubt and ambition take its place.

  Soon Morrigan was lost in her prayers, oblivious to the world beyond the spiritual world in which she had entered, and it was only when a sound intruded on her prayers, a sound so rhythmic and insistent that she could not ignore it, that she returned from that place where she had gone. She had no notion of how much time had passed. The monks had left and Blessed Cummian’s stone was back in place. She cocked her head and listened.
Boom…boom…boom…
She did not recognize the sound, had never heard the like before. It was like a hand knocking on a door, a giant hand on a giant door.

 
Yes…
she thought, understanding at last what she was hearing.
That is exactly what it is
. It was a battering ram and it was knocking down the gates of Tara.

I am glad they are not all like this, these Irishmen,
Thorgrim thought as he watched the men-at-arms deploying the battering ram. The ram itself was no great marvel, just a substantial tree trunk with an iron cap and smaller cross pieces lashed beneath at regular intervals to serve as handles for the men wielding the device. What impressed him was the ease with which they had brought it into place, manned the grips while the others spread out and held their shields aloft to protect against a potential rain of spears or arrows. There had been few orders given. The men simply knew what to do and they did it.

 
If every Irish army were disciplined like these, and if they did not all fight one another, we would be driven from this land in a week…
Thorgrim thought.

  But that was not quite true, and he knew it. The Vikings represented a potent military force which, for a price, one Irish king could deploy against another, as was happening now. The Viking with their raids represented a redistribution of riches, which worked to the benefit of many Irish. Viking trade brought Irish goods to the world, and the world’s goods to Ireland in a way that the land-bound natives of this island never could. The Irish might bemoan the Norse sacking their Christ-God temples and monasteries, but Thorgrim knew for a fact that the Irish plundered their rivals’ temples as frequently as ever the Vikings did.

  No, for all their hatred of the
fin gall
and the
dubh gall
, the Irish found the Norsemen useful in a hundred ways.

 
Perhaps we
are
here to stay
, Thorgrim thought.
But not me.

  All this he considered as he watched the Irish take hold of the battering ram and with a rhythmic shout slam its iron-tipped end against the great oak gates of Tara. The doors shuddered and moved a bit, but held, and the men with the ram drew it back and slammed it into the doors again. On either side of them, more men-at-arms held shields aloft to defend against the occasional spear that darted down from the wall above, but there was little threat from that direction.

  Twenty feet behind the battering ram, Norse archers stood poised with arrows nocked in bows, ready to pick off any of the defenders of Tara who showed themselves on the wall. After the first three or four Irishmen had been flung back, screaming, arrows jutting from their bodies, the people on the other side had come to understand the deadly accuracy of the Viking bowmen, and the number of men who mounted the wall to interfere with the battering had dropped precipitously. Behind the archers, and spread out in a loose V formation, the rest of them, Norsemen and Irish, waited for the big door to break down, for their moment to rush in.