Lion of Ireland (26 page)

“Men and women who have been married bed together.

Don’t you know that?”

“Yes,” she whispered, unmoving.

“Then, what’s the matter? Won’t you tell me? I wouldn’t hurt you for anything on this earth; surely you know that.”

“Yes.”

“Then ... ?”

Her voice was barely audible above his breathing and the tiny sound of sizzling candlefat. “I cannot possibly ...” “Why?” he asked incredulously. “Is it something I’ve done?” Surely it wasn’t Fiona—Deirdre couldn’t possibly know—and if she did, would she be holding it against him, using this way to punish him? It was inconceivable, and yet what other explanation could there be?

Although he would not have thought it possible, her eyes grew even larger. “Oh Brian, you’ve done nothing!” She was wringing her small hands together in some deep distress. “My dearest love, I assure you, the fault is mine and mine only; I’m just so ... afraid. I knew it would happen. I knew all along it would be like this, and I’ve tried so hard not to think about it!” Tears glittered in her eyes but did not roll down her pale cheeks.

“I kept putting it off, not letting myself imagine . . . when you were a child, Brian, were you ever threatened with punishment at the end of the day, and you went on playing and trying to be happy, pretending the twilight would never come?” She stared up into his face.

“Punishment?” That one word made some sense, at least. “You’ve been thinking of our . . . our being together as punishment?” He was appalled. No wonder she was terrified. “But I thought you loved me!”

“I do,” she said. Looking at her, he had to believe her. She spoke with a burning intensity, willing her love to be visible and convincing. “But I cannot love you that way.”

“There is no other way, Deirdre, unless you would be a nun and have me be a monk! Then we could pour out our love to Christ and keep our bodies chaste, though the people in holy orders are not always as chaste as they would have you believe. Even there, the flesh makes its demands.

“Men and women express their feelings for one another with their bodies, and it is a pleasure, not a punishment. I can show you, if you’ll just let me . . .”

As he talked he had moved cautiously around the bed until he was in reach of her, distracting her all the while with his voice. Then he tried to put his arms around her in the most tender, loving way he could, and she screamed.

Brian was horrified. Deirdre’s cry was not the moan to be expected of a virgin at the moment of defloration—it was the

wild shriek of a beast being slain. It echoed down the passageways of Cashel. The revelers beyond their chamber heard it and were struck silent. It was a terrible, heartbreaking sound, and the most important thing in the world at that moment was the necessity of quieting her.

He flung himself beside her on the bed, ignoring the violent convulsion of her body as she tried to get away, and pinioned her in his arms. He cradled the back of her head with one giant hand and turned her face to his breast, muffling her cries against his thudding heart. The guilt that had nagged him at the thought: of Fiona was forgotten; the normal nervousness of a young man facing his virgin wife was gone.

All that was left in him was a helpless pity and the awareness of another loss, another bereavement.

“It’s all right, it’s all right,” he whispered to her, rocking back and forth, holding her against him as a father would his child until the tortured moans died away. “I won’t let anything hurt you, Deirdre, I promise. I promise.”

So did Brian, prince of the Dal Cais, spend his wedding night with the shattered girl who was his love.

And in the darkest part of the night, as she lay sleeping at last in his arms, with Brian himself guarding her from the onslaught of his own manhood, she reached up in her dreams and softly touched his cheek.

Ivar made his move. Led by his son Harold, a raiding party from Limerick fell on a group of wedding guests returning home by way of the Tipperary road and slaughtered them all. In the ultimate Norse expression of contempt, they ripped open the corpses and arranged the lungs and entrails atop the bodies to form the Blood Eagle.

Mahon was outraged. The Northmen had deliberately ignored the truce to slay guests under his protection and besmirch his hospitality. There could be only one response to such a calculated provocation.

Neither Desmond nor Hy Carbery would send men to fight along with the Dalcassians; the massacred party had not been of the tuath of Molloy, or of Donovan. But other men came from other tribes, attracted by the promise of the new king and the legend of his brother.

Deirdre had watched Brian ride away. How gorgeous he was, mounted on the prancing bay horse Mahon had given him as a surprise! He sat tall, with his sword in his belt and a Norse battle ax strapped to his back. He looked invincible.

Only she and he knew how he was defeated each night by her tears and terror.

During the day he was attentive, obviously devoted, although the building tension in him made him quick tempered. She walked proudly beside him and thought her heart’ would burst with love. But at night, when the looming bed waited for them like some malevolent monster, the warmth in her was replaced by cold horror. Even the blazing candles and the constant flame in the bronze lamps could not keep away the darkness of hysteria that threatened her.

It hurt her to see how gladly he grabbed at the opportunity of escaping her by going to battle.

For Brian, action was freedom. It supplanted the tortuous maze of emotions that could not be resolved with the clean, simple outcomes of life and death. This was to be skirmish warfare, the kind he knew best—hit and run, strike and vanish.

They caught up with their first sizable band of Norse raiders at the edge of Knocklong. The invaders had camped for the night after a rowdy day spent terrorizing the countryside and burning a few small farmsteads; nothing serious, just having a little fun.

Brian had found himself with an embarrassment of riches; so many men volunteered to follow the standard of the three

lions that utilizing all of them would destroy the precious element of surprise.

He carefully explained to his captains, “The usual way of warfare is for two lines of men to face each other in the daylight and then hammer away until one side is forced to break. That is a poor way to face the Northmen; indeed, it is the most inefficient of all battle plans, for it means an unnecessary wastage of men and presents great problems in maneuvering and communications.

“We will attack by night whenever we can, from the flanks, from the rear, any way is preferable to going in head on. Remember, if the scales are equal the other man has an equal chance to kill you, and he probably will. As long as I command, your first order is to win, not to die. Every life is precious to me.”

They repeated that, among themselves and to their men: “Every life is precious to Brian.”

He had them smear their pale faces and their bare arms with mud, and every piece of equipment that might rattle or jingle was left at a distance with the horseholders. Naked save for their dark tunics, trousers, and belts, they crept through the woods and stationed themselves behind every tree surrounding the Norse camp.

“I want each man close enough to his neighbor to see him or touch him, so that we will be a tight-meshed net through which no foreigner can slip,” Brian ordered. “No javelins, they’re too awkward in close quarters, and no slings, because the visibility will be too poor. Knife, sword, club, hand ax—these are your weapons tonight.”

“And yours?” Thomas Three-Fingers asked.

“I have a Norse battle ax,” Brian said, and smiled.

The Northmen sang their last drinking song, full throated, listening to the echoes from the hills. Let the countryfolk cower in their beds and pull their blankets over their ears! Let them know Ivar’s men were abroad, fearing nothing, with the stains of wound-dew fresh on their weapons! Great Odin ruled these hills now, and his dark lust must be served.

In the high tide of their strength and confidence they fell asleep on the bare earth, and awoke to hell.

The attackers fell on them from all sides, bursting out of the underbrush and running forward so swiftly that the first men died while the bushes were still whipping back into place. The Northmen were clubbed on the ground, and if any Irishman felt that was ignoble the sentiment did not stay his arm.

As the Norse struggled to their feet to put up a doomed defense Brian heard himself shouting, “Boruma!

Boruma!” at them, and soon some of his men took it up. A bearded Northman came at him, swinging a long sword and yelling, “You damned Dalcassian!” in guttural but understandable Gaelic. Brian took the blow on the haft of his ax, feet braced to absorb the teeth-rattling jolt, then shoved the man backward and cut him in half as he fell.

Even when the man was obviously dead Brian went on swinging the ax. Ardan came up to him and caught his arm, but Brian pulled away, unwilling to stop the flow of cleansing anger. When there was nothing left but a heap of bloody fragments and, indeed, all sounds of fighting had ceased, he drew back his foot and aimed one last kick at the nearest mangled corpse.

They marched back to Cashel singing. Not the Norse songs of death and doom, but the songs that lift a man’s heart. They passed over rolling green hills and emerald patchworks of meadow, and down rutted pathways where roses bloomed thick around tiny cottages. Success bubbled in their veins. Children ran out, laughing, to trot beside them as they marched, and smiling Munsterwomen stood in their doorways and waved.

Brian felt himself on the crest of a sunlit wave; it seemed ages since he had been so lighthearted. He looked into his memory and saw little pockets of brilliant color surrounded by darkness, but as they drew nearer to Cashel the darkness expanded to shadow the future.

When at last the Rock rose before them, towering from the

meadow-mist, Brian said to Liam, “Lead the men on to camp, and then make report to the king.”

Liam was startled. Surely Brian would want to carry such good news to Mahon himself?

“Once a battle ends it’s in the past, and no longer my concern,” Brian replied. “The only things I can affect are in the future; I would as soon leave the reports and the histories to others.”

They came to a branch in the road. Brian reined in his horse and watched impassively as the column of men marched by, each dipping his head in the briefest of nods as, one by one, they came up to him. They swung off to the right, toward the base camp northwest of the Rock, and when they were out of sight Brian turned his horse’s head to the left, toward the village.

Above him a battalion of clouds ranged across the sky, threatening the sun. In the distance a stone cross was visible, rising in somber ‘sanctity above the fortress wall of Cashel. The carvings on the face of Christ’s symbol were pagan in derivation, although mat detail was invisible at such a distance.

He halted the bay at the door of the herbalist’s cottage and looked over his shoulder once more at that cross, hung in the sky as a beacon for troubled souls. But it has no answer for him.

She knew he was there. Even before he could dismount she had opened the door and stood leaning against the frame, trying to read the expression on his face.

“You’ve come, then,” she said. “I didn’t know if you ever would again, after your marriage.”

He knotted the horse’s rein around an iron ring set in a post at the doorway. “I thought you could read the future,” he reminded her, stroking the bay’s nose and avoiding Fiona’s eyes.

“Some things I don’t look for, and some I don’t want to know. But you’re here, so come along in with you; it will be raining soon.”

He made an impatient gesture. “I didn’t come here for shelter from the elements, woman! Or . .. perhaps I did, in a

way; I don’t know. I don’t know why I’ve come; I never meant to enter this doorway again. I’ve just won a battle and I should be ... celebrating ...”

She moved closer to him, putting her brown hand gently on his arm as she looked up into his face. The lines of pain she saw were new and deep, and they hurt her like lacerations across her own heart.

“Come in, Brian of Boruma,” she said softly.

The words, once started, flowed on and on. They were a disloyalty and yet they were a cleansing, like the battle-rage.

“It’s almost an illness with her, this terror,” he told Fiona. He was sitting on the one small stool her household possessed, drinking a hot brew she had given him, and she sat at his feet, leaning against his knee and listening without comment except when his pauses needed filling. “Deirdre is so fearful of everything!” He went on, “Not only the marriage bed but darkness, shadows—even a sudden move in her vicinity can startle her into a fit of shivers.”

“There are people who are abnormally timid, like deer,” Fiona remarked.

“No, that isn’t quite the way it is with Deirdre. There are times when she seems as gay and lighthearted as a child, and a delight to everyone around her. Then she is like other women, only more beautiful.” He did not notice the flat look in Fiona’s eyes when he spoke of Deirdre’s beauty. “But her moods change so fast, and for no apparent reason! I think she’s desperately unhappy, but I don’t seem to be able to help her.”

Fiona shifted, withdrawing a little of her weight from his legs. “Have you tried praying to your God?” she asked with veiled contempt.

“I’ve haunted the chapel until even the bishop has praised my piety, but it doesn’t do any good. We are not yet man and wife, and at this rate we may never be,” he said morosely.

Fiona sat waiting, saying nothing Her level gaze began to make him uncomfortable. “I shouldn’t be telling you these things ...”

She put one hand firmly on his arm. “You are wrong about that; I am the very person you should tell.

Whatever has been between us, or will be, we are bonded in ways you do not even understand, Brian. I will always be within your reach, to help you when you have need of me, and to watch over you when you are in danger.”

He stared at her. “What are you talking about?” She made an airy little gesture with her fingers. “It is nothing—don’t think about it. I am merely saying I may be able to help you, if you like. I have ways of knowing things that your priests and your physicians can never guess, and I will use them on behalf of your Deirdre, if that is what you really want.