Lion of Ireland

LION OF IRELAND

BY

MORGAN LLYWELYN

KING, WARRIOR, LOVER

Brian Boru was stronger, braver, and wiser than all other men—the greatest king Ireland has ever known. Out of the mists of the country’s most violent age, he emerged to lead his people to the peak of their golden era.

His women were as remarkable as his adventures. Fiona, the druidess with mystical powers. Deirdre, beautiful victim of a Norse invader’s brutal lust. Gormlaith. six-foot, red-haired goddess of sensuality.

Set against the barbaric splendors of the tenth century, this is a story rich in truth and legend—in which friends become deadly enemies, bedrooms turn into battlefields, and dreams of glory are finally fulfilled.

Author Morgan Llywelyn recreates all the passion and greed.

“Llywelyn has woven the historical tales of her country and its greatest High King into a single magnificent book....This is an extraordinary biography of a very human man...with convincing characterizations and vivid, detailed descriptions...

Tom Doherty Associates, Inc. Book Printed in the USA

Praise for Morgan Llywelyn

“Morgan Llywelyn is known for giving life to Irish myth and history in novel form....She presents history in a most readable fashion.”

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Charleston Post & Courier

“Morgan Llywelyn writes about ancient Ireland as if she just had breakfast there.”

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Parke Godwin

“One of my all-time favorite authors.”

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Jude Deveraux

“The best there is in the field of historical fiction.”

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Jennifer Wilde

“A spellbinding tale that evokes Ireland’s misty hills and tumultuous history with style and passion.”

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Library Journal

“A rousing story. ...Something to enjoy on a cold night by the fireplace with your goblet of mead or strong ale.”

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Boston Sunday Globe

“Rich, panoramic__One of the most exciting periods of

Irish history.”

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Cleveland Plain Dealer

“Extraordinary... .Vivid... .Magnificent... .Makes one realize that human nature has really changed very little in the past thousand years.”

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The Dallas Morning News

“A major talent for historical fiction.”

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Parade of Books

by Morgan Llywelyn from tom doherty associates

Bard

Brian Boru

The Elementals

Finn Mac Cool

Lion of Ireland

The Horse Goddess

lion of ireland

TOR®

A TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK NEW YORK

For CHARLES

For sean

For MICHAEL

NOTE: If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher and neither the author nor the publisher has received payment for I this “stripped book.” I This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously.

LION OF IRELAND

Copyright © 1981 by Morgan Llywelyn ‘

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

A Tor Book

Published by Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.

175 Fifth Avenue New York, NY 10010

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Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.

ISBN: 0-812-55399-3 First Tor edition: March 1996 Printed in the United States of America 09876543

PART ONE

The little boy sat on the crown of a rocky hill, his thin arms hugging his scabby knees. He tilted his head back and gazed up into the immense vault of the sky, feeling wonderfully alone.

To the youngest child of a large and brawling family, privacy is a rare thing. Brian always seemed to be walking in someone else’s shadow. He had sought this hill because, at the moment, no one else claimed it, and he held his occupancy uncontested.

In a tentative voice he addressed the darkening gray sky. “I am the king,” he said, tasting the words. He heard no argument, so he repeated it. Louder. Standing up. “I am the king of all the kings!” he cried, throwing wide his arms to embrace as much as possible of his domain.

The tireless wind swept across the green land. It came driving inland from the sea, herding a flock of rain clouds before it, and releasing them at last above the wooded hills and granite mountains.

Even before the rain fell the air was saturated, heavy and rich with a wetness like the moist breath of babies. Ferns in their dark hollows burned with an emerald flame; the curving flanks of the mountains glistened, polished; the air smelled of life and death and growing things.

Under the cairns and dolmens, within the ruined ring forts and passage graves, deep in the mossy, haunted earth, ghosts stirred. Giants and heroes and cowards slept their thousand-year death in the ancient soil and were aware in their powdered bones of the coming of another spring. tates of Ame Brigid came to find him, of course. Even the littlest boy had tasks to perform, and Brian was assigned to guard the flock of tame geese that nibbled grass along the banks of the Shannon. Cennedi had no small daughters to be goose-girls. “Aha, here you are!” Brigid crowed as he came up over the breast of the hill. “Never where you’re supposed to be, are you? Your mother’s geese could be in a wolfs belly by now for all the good you’ve been to them.” She reached out to pinch his shoulder and give him a shaking, but Brian backed away. He was not about to accept punishment from a girl who was merely the daughter of his father’s herdsman.

“The geese are all right,” he told her confidently, trying to shade his boyish treble so that she would recognize it as a kingly voice. “I can protect them; I can protect all this!” He gestured expansively to indicate his kingdom.

But Brigid was a hard-working girl with chores of her own, resentful at being summoned from them to fetch an errant child, and she had no interest in a little boy’s pretend world. She stood before him with her hands on her hips, her tangled chestnut hair whipped about her face by the rising wind. “And how would you be knowing they’re all right, when you probably haven’t laid eyes on them all afternoon? You come with me right now, and we’ll try to get them back to Boruma before this storm blows them away.”

She extended a red-knuckled hand to him and, after a brief hesitation, he took it. The two of them started down the hill as the first drop’s of rain splattered about them. Brigid checked her stride and looked at the little boy.

“And did you come out with no warm clothes? What have you done with your bratt?”

Brian stared blankly up into her stern face, then looked around him. A few yards distant, crumpled and forgotten, lay his bratt, the heavy cloak that was a necessity in the damp climate. Until Brigid mentioned it he had been unaware of the cold, but suddenly the red wool looked inviting.

He retrieved it quickly and handed it to her to pin around him with the silver brooch that was his only personal wealth. The wind, which seemed to have been waiting until the child was snugly wrapped, responded with a rising howl that sent Brian and Brigid plunging headlong down the slope together, anxious to get the geese to their pen and themselves under a roof.

They trotted hand in hand through the rain until they caught up with the scattered flock, grazing in the marshy grass at the river’s edge. Brigid, twice Brian’s age and size, moved after them with the dogged persistence of one who knows a task will get done somehow. Brian darted about like quicksilver, second-guessing the nimble geese, turning and maneuvering them with a skill beyond his years.

To Brigid his antics were annoying; she was afraid he would scatter the birds and delay them both in the increasingly chill rain. But Brian was not herding geese; in the well-lit inner landscape of his mind he was a general, marshaling his troops, wheeling and driving them with the expertise of a battlefield veteran. His imagination quickly reduced Brigid to the role of second in command, so that he was angered when she guided the geese according to some plan of her own.

“Not that way!” he shouted to her. “Take them up the path through the trees!” Open country was not safe, his army could be spotted too easily by enemy scouts!

“And lose half of them in the woods before we get them home?” Brigid countered indignantly. “Your mother would have my hide for the pot! Do come along, Brian, and quit playing around; the both of us will be soaked before we get these stupid birds penned!”

Actually, Brian was right. The path through the trees was shorter and more direct, and once the geese were headed home, their awakening memory of grain was sufficient to keep them going in the right direction. But Brigid had never seen them taken by any course but across the meadow, so that was the way they must go. Flapping her sodden skirt at them, clucking and shooing, she drove them before her as Brian watched in frustration.

“She thinks I don’t know anything,” he fumed to himself, wiping a lock of dripping red hair from his freckled forehead. “Nobody ever listens to me.” He kicked at a small stone that lay invitingly near his foot, then turned to gaze once more at his chosen line of march; he shrugged his shoulders and set off in the wake of Brigid and the flock. “Next time,” he promised himself under his breath, “I’ll bring them my own way.”

The thatched roofs of home glowed golden through the rain. Set in a magnificent grove of oak and pine, Boruma had been built by the princes of the Dal Cais on the ruins of an old ring fort, or dun, utilizing its earthen wall and deep ditch as the perimeter of their personal compound. In keeping with his status as tribal king, Cennedi’s round timber-and-wattle dwelling was the largest of the buildings. It occupied a central position opposite the gate, surrounded by the homes of his noble kinsmen and domestic buildings and pens for stock. Beyond the wall were the farming lands of the Dal Cais and the cottages of the plowmen. Boruma was—almost—a town, and as large a concentration of people as one could find outside the monasteries and the port cities built by the Norsemen from the distant shores of the place they called Lochlann.

The geese broke into a waddling run as they drew near the gate of the compound. All winter Brian’s mother had fattened them in a brush-and-timber pen, feeding them on sprouted grain and bread soaked in barley water. That memory called strongly to them now.

“You feed those birds better than you feed me,” Cennedi liked to complain to his wife; but she always had the same smiling answer: “You will get it all eventually, and bad grain and stale bread are much improved by being converted into fat gooseflesh.”

“Practical,” Cennedi sighed to himself, “she’s so practical.” Left to his own devices, the chieftain of the tribe was inclined to daydreaming and grandiose visions. It was his wife who saw that nothing was wasted, that food was stored in the souterrains each autumn, and that mattresses were replaced and weapons sharpened in the spring.

Today she was busy in the miller’s shed, grinding flour in the communal stone quern. A handsome woman who had not outgrown her beauty, Bebinn looked at the world through calm gray eyes, set in large sockets beneath arching brows She lifted one feathery brow even higher as the commotion outside announced the arrival of Brian, Brigid, and the geese.

Pouring through the gate, the geese headed straight for their feeding pen, just in time to encounter Cennedi’s brace of shaggy wolfhounds returning from some adventure of their own. Forgetting their usual discipline, the dogs flung themselves joyously into the flock, yapping and snapping in mock attack and setting off a cacophony of squawks that brought faces peering from doorways throughout the compound.

Within a matter of moments all was chaos. Bebinn remained at the quern, an amused smile curving her lips. She expected, with justification, that the commotion would become a war and she would be called upon to pacify it.

Soon enough her husband came storming into the miller’s hut, waving his fists and complaining bitterly about the amount of peace a man could expect in his own household.

“Your son is out there now, woman, running the feathers off the geese and exciting my hounds so much they’ll be no good for hunting for a fortnight! Can’t you control that child?”

“I am controlling him,” Bebinn responded evenly, not lifting her eyes from her work. “I gave him the job of minding the fowl,, to teach him discipline and responsibility.”

“Discipline! Responsibility! I tell you, he’s out there playing with them, like a wolf harrying lambs! Is that how you want your geese tended?” A massive man with graying hair that had once been the same bright copper as Brian’s, Cennedi had a tendency to turn crimson in the face when he was excited. The more he blustered and waved his hands, the calmer his wife became.

“He will always have to make mistakes and suffer for them, if he is to learn,” she replied. “It some of the geese are damaged we will cook and eat them, and he shall watch us do it while he goes hungry. And he will learn. But there is nothing to be gained if you go out there yelling and adding to the upset.”