Lion of Ireland (18 page)

Observing them, Brian thought, I am not the only one who loves a story, nor is mine the only heart that hungers for heroic deeds. A champion like those in the legends could unite these men in a bond too strong for the Northmen to break, for the love of great deeds is still alive in our blood.

But who? Murketagh of the Leather Cloaks was such a man, but he died spitted on a Danish sword when I was an infant. His son Donall is Ard Ri now, but the land suffers as much as ever and the provinces fight among themselves like a pack of dogs; Donall is powerless to bring them together.

Once, I thought that Mahon ... but that is over. No king in Ireland is less fit than he for such a role.

Brian stood very still, looking into the night beyond the fire. If the legends could live again; if a hero could be found ... or made ...

From the forests and mountain solitudes of Thomond, Brian and his little band of followers waged their relentless war. Danish merchants with richly laden vessels learned to watch the shores of the Shannon as they made their way downriver to Limerick, or followed the inland highway of the river and lakes to Portumna and Athlone. Norse raiding parties began to choose those routes which led over open country and the treeless, windswept lowlands, and leave the highlands to Brian and his men.

Mahon, rebuilding the Dal Cais tuath at Boruma, heard the tales told of his brother. It was impossible not to, for it seemed that Brian’s name was on the lips of every passing traveler.

“He and his men sleep curled on the bare ground, with their heads on tree roots,” the story went. “They ignore the cold and rain; they go without food for days and still fight like the wolves themselves. They lay traps and snares and seize up the Northmen like hares, and some of the boys get a bit taken away with the fun of it all and do some fancy carving on the foreigners with their knives.”

Mahon shuddered the first time he heard that. “Is that what we’ve come to—mutilating” a fallen enemy?”

The left corner of Olan’s mouth had dragged downward with the passage of time, leaving a permanent sneer that showed the stumps of his teeth against his paling gums. “The Northmen fight that way themselves,” he remarked. “Prince Brian is leaving his mark on them in a way they can understand.”

“You didn’t think much of Brian when he was with us; now that he’s a deserter you seem to admire him.”

“A man can change his opinion,” Olan said stiffly. “It may be I think he’s acquitted himself well.”

Mahon made a gesture that included the large, well-furnished room where they stood and the community that lay beyond. “And haven’t I acquitted myself well, Olan? I have rebuilt my father’s house, finer than it ever was before, and had the best stonecarvers in Munster to honor my mother’s tomb. There’s mead on my table in glass goblets, and silk on my back—and on yours, too. I didn’t notice you refuse it.”

“I only wore it the one time. When I learned it was a gift from a Danish chief I tore it up and buried the pieces under a rock,” Olan said gruffly.

Mahon looked in astonishment at his longtime friend. “You did! I never suspected you capable of such gestures.”

“I never thought you would take silk from a Dane.”

A year passed, and then another. The stories told of Brian grew wilder.

A pair of travelers making their way to Roscrea had encountered Brian’s band returning from a skirmish and had been invited to spend the night under their protection. One of the travelers, an old graybeard known as Young Rory, recounted the story of that evening to Mahon and the tribal elders over a dinner far different from that he had shared in the wilderness with Brian.

“There are no more than fifty of them left,” he told his hushed audience, “but they are men of such strength I cannot describe it convincingly. They are lean as winter wolves, and they run miles each day, faster than deer over the rocks. All their time is given over to making themselves strong and savage; I swear they think of nothing else.

“A meal was brought, one stringy cow that had been stolen somewhere, and the poor carcass was thrown down in the center of their camping place. Prince Brian called all to him, and fought them in turn for the meat.”

There were shocked murmurs.

”It’s true, I swear it! He put them on the ground, every one of them, and taunted them as he did it.”

Young Rory paused to mop his perspiring brow and judge the effect this recital had had upon Brian’s kinsmen. He was not disappointed.

“Ach, yes,” he resumed, “the prince has become a terrible hard man. No single warrior can stand against him. Some awful rage moves him—what, I cannot say, but it burns around him like a light wherever he goes.”

Mahon looked at his cousins and friends and saw the admiration written plainly on their faces. Their chins were greasy with the rich food he had provided for them, but in their hearts they were in the mountains, wrestling Brian for the stringy haunch of a stolen cow.

Month followed month, and there was peace at Boruma. Mahon credited it to his truce, and his subsequent dealing with the Norsemen and the Danes, but there were others in the community who said openly, “The Northmen will not bother us as long as Brian watches over us from the hills.” Their second winter in the mountains was bitterly cold. Nessa had somehow injured his back during the performance at the river crossing, and when at last he caught up with Brian it was obvious he would be unable to fight for a long time. He never really regained his strength, and his face became haggard, with old eyes that watched uncomplainingly as preparations were made to move the camp for yet another time.

Both Ivar of Limerick and the Norse king of Dublin, Olaf Cuaran, had begun to tire of Brian’s persistent harassment. They sent search parties to scour the mountains and put an end to what Ivar called “the black-fly bites” of the Dalcassian, but Brian’s knowledge of the region had become so complete that he was able to melt away from them again and again, hiding in forgotten glens and lost caves beneath the hills. It meant that they were constantly on the move, and Nessa suffered.

At the end of the season of Advent, when the band was contemplating a bleak Christ Mass, Nessa summoned Brian

to-him. “I’ve grown to be a burden to you, my lord,” he said with regret. “It would be better for you to let me starve, or freeze, or put your sword through me yourself, than for me to be the cause of your being caught some dark day.”

Brian took Nessa’s hand in his and felt how thin the cold fingers had become, how cracked and dead the skin. Pain had made Nessa an old man. Yet his eyes still glowed with the fire of youthful pride as he looked at the tall figure bent over him. “You know what I say is true, Brian.”

Brian looked away and made no answer.

“I know that you have left death-wounded men on the field of battle in order to save the whole body of your force. It hurt you to do it, for I’ve seen it in your eyes when you thought no one was watching. But it was the best military decision, and because of it we’ve survived to fight again. The men know that and they respect you for it. That’s why you should do the same for me, now.”

“My old mare is thin and weak, Nessa. Should I slaughter her, too, and feed her to my men?” Brian asked in a bitter voice.

“Yes, if it comes to that She is a warhorse, Brian, as I am a warrior; we are pledged to be spent in the pursuit of victory.”

Brian turned away. The cold wind howled down the mountain passes.

At Cashel, passing bards sang of the new Lion of Thomond who had killed a hundred Northmen in a single day. Callachan, on the brink of death, did not hear the songs, but his son listened with a scowl on his face. The young Deirdre held her hands in her lap and kept her eyes downcast as a maiden should, but a rose flush colored her cheeks as she listened to the marvelous exploits of the Dalcassian prince.

Noticing, Donogh warned her, “The man sounds like a wild animal. You would do well to stop up your ears, my dear.”

“He is no wild animal,” the bard hastened to explain. “He is more like the great Cuchullain reborn. It is said that he hem in turn for the meat dresses in samite and cloth of gold, is as beautiful as the dawn, and is building a mighty army that will sweep the invaders into the sea forever!”

“Is he really so beautiful?” Deirdre asked, raising her violet eyes.

“Mother of God!” swore Donogh. “Enough of this yammer. There is a dying man in the king’s chamber this night, and I beg you to be quiet out of respect for him.”

In the month of the two-headed Roman god, Brian and the ragged men still left to him returned to their latest hiding place to find Nessa’s body, an ax buried in the skull and human excrement smeared over the corpse in contempt. The love Brian had borne his friend drove him to his knees in agony, and he sobbed without shame over the pitiful form.

His men stood in a half-circle around them, linked by sorrow, shivering with cold and hunger. At, last Brian turned to face them, Nessa’s ghastly head cradled against his heart, and ‘ said in a voice like a sword blade, “I swear, before God, I will do whatever it takes to make this land a safe place for decent men!”

“Odi-i-i-n-n-n!” The scream rang from the rocks as the Northmen burst from their hiding places and fell upon them.

As the viking rage erupted around him, Brian felt something happen inside himself. A knot slipped open, a chain was burst, and a being long restrained was freed. Even before the other men had realized what was happening he knew they were ambushed, outnumbered and helpless, and it did not matter.

It did not matter at all. Nothing mattered, only. action. Only the release of the insane thing raging within him. As if there were all the time in the world, he laid Nessa’s ruined head back upon the ground, very gently, the last tender gesture of his sanity, and then he rose to meet the Northmen.

They were everywhere. They had left Nessa’s body for bait and hidden themselves among the tumble of rocks which had formerly sheltered the Irish, moving in stealth until they effected a complete encirclement. For every one of Brian’s men there were three Northmen, armed and armored, emotionally prepared for battle as me Irish were not.

Save for Brian. Never in his life had he been so ready to fight.

For the second time in his memory he heard a howl break from his chest and rip upward through his throat, a hideous sound that was neither human nor animal. He leaped forward as if propelled by that wild roar and seized the nearest Northman with his bare hands, making no effort to use his knife or sword. Indeed, he was not aware of them.

The Northman, a Danish mercenary with a conical helmet and an outthrust sword, saw the wildman coming at him, blood-smeared, foam-lipped, and stepped forward to skewer the Irishman like a pig.

Brian read his eyes and slipped past the sword, not feeling its cold kiss on his arm. with his gaze still on the Dane’s face he clutched at his enemy’s features, grasping the cheek piece of the helmet and twisting it away as easily as if it were cloth, instead of bronze. The Dane had opened his mouth to answer Brian’s cry with an ululation of his own, but it died in his throat. The Dalcassian prince seized the man’s lower jaw in an incredible grip, grunted, wrenched the entire jaw sideways, and tore it free of the skull with a ghastly crunching of bone and gouting of blood.

He flung the dying Northman from him and launched himself at the next one.

An ax, clumsily swung, hit his shoulder with a glancing blow, but he did not feel it. Somehow his sword was in his hand now, and he began slashing it through the air, reaching like a hungry claw for victims.

Accustomed to savagery, themselves past masters of it, even the Northmen were not prepared for the cyclonic rage of the tall Irishman. The squad that had located Brian’s band were not berserkers, though most of them had gone into battle at various times behind a vanguard of the berserks, and watched in awe as everything gave way before the insane invincibility of the fanatics. Now for the first time they saw that same frenzy in an Irishman, and their experience made them fall back with fearful respect. Even the Dalcassians, used to fighting with Brian, were shocked by his response.

But months of hardship, during which they had been hunted like wild animals, had sharpened their reflexes to a thin edge. Their recovery was faster than the Northmen’s and they hurried to make themselves part of Brian’s attack, pressing the advantage.

Incredibly, the Northmen continued to fall back before them. A howling, maniacal Brian, making every effort to wrench the limbs from living men, seemed impervious to weapons. The Dalcassians swarmed forward in his wake, yelling incoherently and brandishing their swords and javelins in a way nearly as hysterical as his own. It should not have succeeded, but it did. Appalled by the unexpected, oppressed by the almost supernatural quality of the Irish counterattack, the Northmen retreated to the nearest tumble of boulders and then broke and ran for their lives.

Afterward—long afterward—the exhausted little band of Irish sat or sprawled about their campfire, reliving the skirmish. Brian sat apart, wrapped in his ragged bratt, hunched over and brooding. From time to time they cast nervous glances at him and then looked away again.

Liam mac Aengus, who was helping Led (and up a wound in his arm, said in a low voice, “I’ve never seen anything like that. Was he clear out of his head, do you suppose?”

Leti tried not to flinch from his friend’s none-too-gentle touch. The blows unfelt in battle hurt mightily after. “I couldn’t say,” he replied through gritted teeth, “and I’m not about to ask him. I wouldn’t think any man could act that way deliberately, though.”

“The berserkers are like that.”

“Oh, well—berserkers. They’re like religious fanatics, you know; they work themselves up with drink and potions and crazy rituals, but I’ve heard that they’re never completely sane anyway. That’s why their sect is so dreaded, even among the other Northmen. But Prince Brian is certainly not mad; at least, not now.”

“Nevertheless, it’s right thankful I am that he’s on our side and not theirs!” Liam said with heartfelt emotion. “And I do wonder what sort of story the foreigners will be telling when they report back to whoever sent them.”