Lion of Ireland (50 page)

And then, between one breath and the next, the woman, was gone. The path lay empty and open before him, a dim road winding through the trees into the gloom of a narrow valley. The mare’s trot slowed to a walk and Padraic pushed forward warily, trying to analyze every pattern of foliage for the discordant shape of a hidden watcher.

It seemed he had ridden for miles. Surely the woman could not have come this far! But by now he was reluctant to turn back, too committed to the quest to admit failure.

A girl appeared beside the path “so suddenly that his horse shied. Padraic scrabbled desperately for a handhold of mane, but the landscape spun around him and he hit the earth with a jolting thud. He lay stunned, waiting for the telltale nausea of a broken bone. When it did not materialize, he sat up gingerly.

The girl knelt beside him. “Are you all right?” she asked in a voice like the whisper of dry leaves. He looked at her in wonder, unable to answer.

Her rippling hair was red-gold, a fall of molten copper in the shadowy light. Her features were finely chiseled and strangely familiar. The big brown eyes that regarded him with concern might have come from a doe’s face.

“I said, are you all right?” she repeated, leaning toward him. Seen at close range, she was not a girl but a sweetly matured young woman. There was something about her face that was known to him, already achingly dear. He watched his hand reach to touch the strong curve of her cheekbone.

“I’ve never felt better,” he told her honestly. “It’s glad I am to hear it,” she replied, lowering her eyelids before the intensity of his gaze. “Rest there a bit, and I’ll catch your horse for you.” She rose and chirruped to the mare, who was grazing beside the path, and the horse came at once, dropping her head to receive the touch of the girl’s hand.

“How did you do that?” Padraic asked in surprise.

“Ach, ‘tis easy to talk to animals. They’re not like . . .”

“Not like what?”

“Like people.” She looked as shy as a coney, ready to break and run, but there was strength in her face and a hidden merriment that twinkled in the depths of her eyes.

“Don’t you see many people?” he asked her. “A fair lass like yourself, so close to Kincora ...”

Her eyes widened in alarm. “I never go there! I rarely come this far, but I wanted to fetch my mother.

She walks in these woods sometimes, and today she went off without her woolens and the weather’s turned raw.”

Padraic stood up and began self-consciously brushing himself off. “Is your mother a small woman, rather dark, with some sort of brown robe?” “Aye. Have you seen her?” Padraic hesitated between the truth and a polite fiction.

What would Brian do? The king would certainly never come right out and say he had chased this beauty’s mother through the woods like a wild animal! “Ah ... I believe I saw her back there a way ...”

he gestured vaguely toward Kincora, “but she was headed in this direction. No doubt she’s on her way home and you’ll be seeing her very soon.”

The girl smiled gravely and watched as he pulled himself awkwardly onto the horse. “Will I be seeing you again?” she asked shyly.

Padraic, a man long grown and with some experience of the world, felt his ears growing hot and his heart racing. “If I knew where we might meet . .. ?” he said hopefully.

At Kincora he was the recipient of much teasing. Faithful Padraic, who belonged heart and soul to the king, neglecting his duties to go off in the hills chasing a woods-woman? “Why, man, there are scores of women within the palace walls who’ve made eyes at you, if you’d but notice,” Laoghaire the Black told him.

“Aye,” his brother Red Laoghaire added, “and when they faded away for lack of you I’ve been here to console them!”

“The king and I have no time for women,” Padraic said loftily.

“Oh, well, the king . .. that’s one thing. I think we all agree he will not soon commit his heart again; that is a wound scarred over but not healed. An occasional lady to warm his bed, perhaps—but you, Padraic?

You have not even taken your share of bedwarmers. Until now!” They laughed and winked at one another.

“This is different.” Padraic drew himself to his full height and glared at them.

Guffaws. “Oh, yes, they’re all different! This one is short and that one is tall and the other yells in bed and squirms like a ...”

Padraic’s face was crimson around its freckles. “I won’t have you talking about Niamh that way!” he cried, knotting his fists.

Brendan grinned at him. “So it’s Niamh, is it? And who is

this Niamh who has bewitched you away from us and is so different from other women? Why don’t you bring her to Kincora and let us have a look at this treasure?”

Padraic rounded on him. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you? Well, you’ll all have a long wait; I have to have some private life, you know!” He stalked away from them, fists still clenched, shoulders rigid.

“Whew!” breathed Carroll, who had entered the hall in time to hear the end of the conversation. “What was that all about?”

“Padraic has a woman hidden away somewhere, bit of a mystery, and he’s taking it all very seriously. But he hasn’t brought her to Kincora for the king’s approval, for some reason. There was a time when Padraic wouldn’t squat over a pot without Brian’s nod.”

“Padraic takes everything seriously,” Carroll commented, “himself foremost. But if he wants to have a private lass, that’s his business and we should let him be.”

Brendan, whose high voice was always so unexpected issuing from his bull neck and massive chest, said,

“You’re more generous to Padraic then he would be to you, Carroll.”

“What does that mean?”

“The man’s so jealous of you and your closeness to the king that it put him off his feed, even before he took up with this woman of his.”

“Padraic and I are friends!”

“That may be, but if the king snapped his fingers for Padraic just as you stepped between them, Padraic would leave you lying on the ground with his footprints on your face. He has sat at Brian’s feet and all but worshiped him since he first joined us. Now you spend so much time with the king he fears you’re trying to supplant him.”

Carroll was taken aback. “I mean to do no such thing! I am merely filling the position assigned me. Why, I don’t even call the king ‘Brian’ the way the rest of you do; he’s never encouraged me to be so familiar.”

He thought for a moment, then a slow smile spread across his face. “Now that I think of it, it was Padraic himself who told me the king was only called Brian by his very closest friends.”

“He has a lot of close friends, then!” Laoghaire the Black said with a snort. “Padraic was trying to keep some distance between the two of you. He’s gotten cunning as a fox over the years.”

“He learned it at Brian’s knee,” Brendan said, and they all laughed.

Padraic and Niamh met throughout the winter, whenever he could find time away from Kincora. It gnawed at him, leaving Carroll to hear Brian’s inner thoughts, but Carroll found ways to set him at peace by mentioning, casually, what a private man the king was and how much he kept to himself.

It is all right, then, Padraic thought. He makes speeches for the historian, but he does not really share himself. Only I am his true friend.

He boasted of it to Niamh. Fiona was never there when he met the young woman, although cold weather forced them to stay in the warmth of the little cottage Niamh shared with her mother in the lee of a hill.

“Mother goes out in all weathers,” Niamh explained. “She hates being under a roof.”

When he had gone back to Kincora Fiona would appear, red-cheeked and icy of hand, anxious to sit by the fire and hear Niamh repeat Padraic’s tales of the king. She devoured every word, greedy for the smallest detail of Brian’s life. “Are you certain of this?” she would ask. “Is it really so? What did he do then?”

“Padraic assures me it is true, and he is the king’s only confidant. He says he knows everything about him.”

“Everyone must tell his secrets to someone, girl.”

“Not you, Mother. You keep all yours to yourself.”

“I tell them to the trees,” Fiona said.

“You are one of the trees, Mother,” Niamh said laughing. “But seriously, you are still a healthy woman; you could find a man like my Padraic and be happy.”

“He isn’t your Padraic,” Fiona reminded her. “People do not belong to other people, only to themselves and the gods. The time for me to have a man has come and gone; it would not be appropriate for me now. I have other, more important, things to think about.”

When Fiona spoke in that faraway voice, her “vision” voice, Niamh felt the presence of ancient magic.

“You mean the guardianship, Mother?”

Fiona nodded. A fat tabby cat came and rubbed against her thin ankles; the evening meal bubbled in its cauldron, sending up a rich aroma of winter meat and herbs. She sat quietly for a time, gazing into the fire, and then she spoke again.

“The old ways are gone and all but forgotten, Niamh. Most of our race is dead now. But the gods are not dead. This is their land and they are part of it, part of every tree and bird and flower; and we must protect it for them as best we can. We are sworn to their service; I, by my grandfather, and you, by me.”

“But there are so few of us left, Mother—you said that yourself. What can we do when we have so little strength?” “We keep our race and our obligation alive as best we can, my child. Long ago, my grandsire Camin foresaw the future and the power that would come to Brian of Boruma. It was his wish that Brian’s blood be added to our race, to give us a link with all the tomorrows.”

Niamh sat very still, staring at her mother. “Padraic says Boru is the greatest man in Ireland,” she whispered proudly. “Aye. He is the hope for the future, and it is the will of the gods that we guard and watch over him. I am not as strong as I used to be, Daughter; perhaps the time has come to summon the remnant of our people and charge them to share in our task. If we must vanish, yet we can continue to live in Boru’s children, so long as there is some thread carrying forward into the future until we are reunited in other worlds, in other lifetimes.

“Remember the old ways, Niamh; remember everything that I have taught you. If the time comes when Brian needs a gift that only the gods can provide, and I am . . . not here, I will charge you and the others to see to it.” Fiona sat with closed eyes. The smoke from the fire drifted around her, swirling, spiraling.

When Niamh’s belly began to swell, Fiona took her away.

Padraic was distraught. “I should have married her!” he moaned to his priest. “I begged her to, but she didn’t believe in the Christian marriage and I could not give myself to pagan ritual.”

“You did the right thing, my son.”

“I don’t think so!” Padraic cried.

Now the king and I have something in common, he told himself in the dark watches of the night. We have both lost our women.

Brian’s mind was not on women, but on the campaign to dominate Leinster, the skirmishes with Meath, the delicate shiftings in the balance of power between Munster and Connacht. The kings of both north and south Connacht had taken fright at the growing strength of their neighbor and were torn between war and negotiation. Brian woke each morning with an aching head full of diplomatic ploys and military stratagems, and when he went to bed at night his brain did not rest but churned on, invading his sleep until it was no different from wakefulness.

Even so preoccupied, he could not help noticing the change in Padraic. The whimsical quality was gone from his aide’s face, leaving it gaunt, with long vertical lines that ran from below his cheekbones to the edge of his jaw, showing through his slight beard. He no longer followed like a shadow at Brian’s heels, nor tried to place himself between the king and Carroll in the banquet hall.

There was something definitely amiss with Padraic.

Brian summoned him to his chamber, the sacrosanct room that even Padraic rarely entered. “I’m concerned about you,” he began without preamble.

“I’m all right, my lord.”

“You’re all wrong, Padraic, and everyone at Kincora is

aware of it. If you feel ill, speak to Cairbre the physician or get a tonic; if you have a problem, tell me and I’ll fix it.”

Padraic’s smile was crooked, threatening to slide off one side of his face. “Even you can’t fix this, my lord.”

“Oh. It’s a woman.”

“Yes.”

The two men sat in a companionable silence for a time. Then Brian said, “She won’t have you?”

“She did, but she’s gone. Run away. I’ve searched everywhere for her, even sent agents to try to find her, but she’s vanished from the earth.”

“Did she care for you, this lady of yours?”

“I thought she did. But she was not a lady, my lord; she was a woods-woman, a practitioner of the Old Religion.”

“Is that why you never brought her to court? You should have known better than that.”

“I tried, but she wouldn’t come. Her mother wouldn’t allow it; they were a strange family. I suspect her mother has taken her from me, and I’ll never see her again.” The pain skewered through his voice, twisting it into a shape Brian recognized all too well. He looked in understanding at Padraic, and their eyes met in the gentle brotherhood of vulnerability.

“I’m sorry, Padraic.”

“Thank you.”

Brian poured out two goblets of mead for them from the flagon on his table, and handed the first-poured to Padraic. “Sit here with me a time,” he offered.

They drank in silence. At last Brian said, “I wish I could tell you how to endure loss, my friend, but I have no talent for it either, as you know. The only thing I’m certain of is that no words make it easier. You just live through it, get it behind you, and come out on the other side. If you want her and think you have a chance of making it come right, stay with it until you find her.”

Padraic’s shoulders slumped. “I don’t think I can ever find her, my lord. If she had really wanted to be with me, she wouldn’t have let her mother take her away.” There was something Brian could give him, although the I

words were hard to say. He spoke carefully, searching among his store of phrases for those that would mean the most to Padraic. But it was strangely embarrassing. A small betrayal of Murrough, who would not care if he knew.