Lion of Ireland (55 page)

“Like that fawning sycophant, Donogh? You choose him because he follows your orders, you tell me; well, he has to, because he never has an original idea of his own!” Murrough was so overwrought that tears glinted in his eyes, and it hurt Brian, seeing them there “I used to think you were a great champion and a splendid warrior!” the young man cried, his voice rising. “I was so proud to be your oldest son! I could hardly wait for the day when we would win important battles together, and you would count on me to be your front-line officer!”

“I have counted on you for more than just that, Murrough,” Brian began. “If only you would listen . . .”

“I’m through listening to you! You want me to be a tame thing you keep on a leash, but I’m not your housedog anymore. I’ll leave Kincora tonight and beg no more scraps from your table!”

Brian was shocked. “Murrough ... I” He reached out his

hand to his son, but the prince whirled away from him and ran from the chamber.

Brian was absent from the banquet hall that night. Alone in his chamber, he watched the candle flames and ate a pot of cheese, trying to keep the pain at a distance. When Padraic asked timidly if he wished company he sent back a blunt refusal.

When the torches were extinguished in the hall, Carroll made his way to the door of the king’s chamber.

He stood there for a long time, shifting from one foot to the other while the guard watched him curiously.

He cleared his throat several times, and at last turned away.

“Come, historian,” Brian’s resigned voice called out to him.

“My lord? We were all concerned . . .”

“No need for it. There are times when a man requires his own company more than anyone else’s, and this has been one of them.”

“I’ll not trouble you, then.”

“No . . . stay. Please. Too much solitude feeds on itself and makes me see things in an overly dark light.

I’d begun to hear echoes in the passageway .. . Tell me, is Prince Murrough still at Kincora?”

“No, my lord, he left even before dinner. He took horses and his guard—and some carts of goods, I believe—and rode south to be with his princess.”

Brian turned to stare at Carroll. “His what?”

“His princess, my lord. Didn’t he tell you about her? To commemorate his twenty-fifth birthday, he asked for a marriage contract to be drawn up between the Dal Cais and the family of Fedelma of the tribe Hy Liathain. That’s what he intended to discuss with you today.”

“Oh.” Brian slumped back on his bench. “Well we never got to it. I began telling him of our expedition to Lough Ennell, and before I could make him understand my reasons for not engaging the Meathmen-in battle we had an argument and he left.”

“Could you have made him understand?”

“I don’t know,” Brian sighed. “He has no patience with any of the subtleties of statecraft; he always thinks things can be simplest settled with the sword. But I’ve been party to the taking of a kingdom by force before, and have seen the consequences of it. The pattern must be broken. Ireland must be given to me, as a maiden is given to her husband.”

“And for that you were willing to forgo a certain military victory?”

“Of course.”

Carroll gave Brian a long, speculative look. “You are not pure Celt, my lord,” he commented.

The golden eyebrows arched upward. “What do you mean by that?” It was a totally Celtic voice, quick to perceive the implied insult.

Carroll smiled. “Nothing unflattering, I assure you. Just that the rootstock of the Irish is very old, and comes from many different sources, and I detect in the depths of your character some echoes from lost worlds.”

“You had better explain that, historian. Sit.”

Carroll planted his ample bottom on a bench and nodded gratefully. “It’s been a long day; my tail is dragging so low it’s wiping out my footprints.”

Brian could not help smiling. “Go on, Carroll—about my character.”

“You refer often to our history and the legends of the invasions, my lord. In my youth I learned the same stories, but when I studied on the Continent and had access to the libraries of Byzantium I was able to see them in a light more of scholarship and less of legend.

“I believe, from what I have read and deduced, that the earliest settlers in Ireland were probably Parthalonians, voyagers here from the eastern Mediterranean after the Great Flood. Most of them subsequently died of plague on the plain of Moy-Elta, between Dublin and Howth, and were buried a Tallaght, the so-called ‘plague grave,’ by the survivors.

“In time a second wave of colonists arrived, the sons o Nemed. They were skilled goldsmiths, and seem to be

members of a hardy race of warriors from the region above the Black Sea.”

“Where did you learn all this?” Brian asked.

“Mostly in the great library at Constantinople, my lord. There are records in papyrus and parchment, maps, clay tablets---much of the history of the ancient world is preserved there, if a scholar will take the time to piece it together.” His smile was dreamy. “The poems of Homer ...”

“Go on, about Ireland,” Brian urged.

“Ah. The Nemedians fell to the Fomorians, or so the Irish legends call them—searobbers in painted ships from the coast of Africa. Some of the Nemedians escaped and made their way to what is now Greece, in the morning of that culture. They would later return here as Firbolgs.

“And after the Firbolgs came the Tuatha de Danann, the magic people, masters of medicine and the occult sciences, who originated—where? The isles of the Aegean Sea? Or some lost civilization whose very name is unknown to us? There are stone inscriptions on the tombs on the Boyne that are very similar to the carvings of Mycenae, but the evidences of many cultures are in Ireland, and were already old here when the Greek world was young.

“We are talking about events two and three thousand years ago, my lord, and all such speculation is guesswork, but I hope someday there will be scholars more gifted than I who will be able to clarify the ancient histories and put everything into its chronological order. It is evident that vanished cultures once flourished here, perhaps more highly developed than anything we imagine.”

“It would be wonderful to know” Brian breathed, his eyes clouded with dreams.

“Someday we shall,” Carroll assured him. “But at least the outline I have given you will explain why I said you are not a pure Celt. If I am correct, then in truth none of us is. The Milesian Celts were latecomers to Ireland by way of Iberia, and they mixed their blood with the descendants of all those invaders who had come before. The fighting Celts contributed their abilities to the races already blended here, to be transmuted by the special magic of the land into the people who would be called the Irish.

“Your intellect, your discipline, your organizational ability are all gifts from peoples whose very names have passed into myth. You are all that Ireland has ever been, distilled into one extraordinary man, Brian Boru.”

The king’s gray eyes reflected the candle flame. Then, slowly, the light faded. “Tell my son that, historian,” he said in a voice Carroll scarcely recognized. “Go to his tomb and tell my father. Tell Mahon.”

Ireland, in all the shades of green and gray. Moss and ferns draping the stones with velvet, blue fingers of sea and purple ridges of mountain coming together in misty solitude. Salt and sea wind blew inland from the ocean and raked the sheep grazing the bald rolling hills of western Thomond. To the east, fog shrouded the mountains of Wicklow, muffling the cries of birth and death in tiny cottages tucked into the emerald folds of the land. In the kingdoms of Ulster the mountains towered serenely in their stronghold between lake and sea, with apple trees at then-feet and God on their shoulders.

In Connacht, Conor had had time to reflect sourly on the behavior of the king of Munster, and found that his memory of the strength of the army from the south was dimming. Sitting in his own stout hall with his feet up before the fire, he could picture them as little men, easily stampeded.

“If Brian Boru were a real warrior,” he said to all who would listen, “he would have stood with me at Lough Ennell.”

“He promised me aid and he lied,” he sulked to his wife of their pillow. “That Boru is very casual with the truth.

touches it lightly from time to time and thinks that is sufficient. We need no longer regard Munster as an ally.”

Now it was Conor who was pressing his princes from behind, urging the southern kingdoms to renew hostilities with Munster. With some reluctance they took up sword and spear once more and began small, cautious raids into Thomond, stealing a few cattle and capturing a few women. Always with a nervous eye looking southward.

Brian held court at Cashel. Messengers had come from the east, lips twitching with the latest news of Malachi. “The Ard Ri quarreled with Sitric of Dublin, mended the tear, and now has quarreled again!”

Brian nodded. “Malachi will have his hands full for a time. Padraic, we will prepare to settle this matter with Connacht right now. Get ready to march.”

In spite of all the years spent with sword and spear, the thrill was still there for Padraic. To march! He could feel his heart begin to beat more strongly, preparing itself for the feats of endurance, the overcoming of the flesh that enlarged a man in his own eyes. To meet another warrior, eye to eye and breast to heaving breast, protecting the fragile vessel of your existence with all your strength and skill, fighting right through, surviving, surviving above all else, pitting yourself against the worst the enemy could offer and coming out on top with gritted teeth and flashing eyes ... “We march,” Padraic announced happily hi the banquet hall, and saw the answering flame leap in the eyes of the others.

MacLiag had returned from a bardic tour of the lake country with some vague illness that Cairbre could not diagnose (“He was simply entertained too richly by the princes wanting to win his influence with the king,” the physician said later in the hall). Before the march northward, Padraic went to pay a farewell visit to the poet, partly out of courtesy and partly because he was anxious to discuss the problem that lay at the back of his mind as it did the lane’s—the continued silence of Murrough, brooding at a distance with his new wife and his old angers.

But one glance dissuaded Padraic from discussing anything so worrisome with MacLiag.

The poet’s chamber was a spacious room beyond the chapel, a private little building with its roof newly thatched, its walls hung with rugs in the six colors appropriate for an ollamh poet. Only the king had more. MacLiag’s blankets were of otter skin, his candles purest mutton fat, his attendants comely and solicitous. But none of that comforted him.

“I am dying,” he greeted Padraic dolefully.

“Of course you’re not dying! Who told you such nonsense?”

“No one has to tell me; I feel it in my bones.” He sighed deeply. A tear sparkled at the corner of his eye.

The years had faded Padraic’s freckles, but some of them, the most persistent of the sun’s kisses, had turned into liver spots instead, and still showed plainly when he crinkled his nose. “Everyone feels bad occasionally, MacLiag, but that doesn’t mean you’re dying. It means you ate and drank too much, as I’m sure Cairbre has already told you. I can see it for myself, and I’m no physician. The whites of your eyes have turned yellow and your face is very puffy.”

“There, you see! Those are some of the symptoms!”

“Of what disease? Plague doesn’t take you that way, and you surely haven’t suffered a sword wound!”

MacLiag groaned. “It’s a disease that doesn’t have a name; perhaps I’m the first ever to have it. But I can assure you it’s a dreadful affliction, my friend.”

Padraic was dubious. “The miasma that rises from the bogs sometimes ...”

“That’s it, the very thing! We skirted many a bog between here and Muckross, and several others had roads laid through them. I must have taken the fever then.”

Padraic laid his callused palm on the poet’s forehead. “You’re cooler than I am,” he said. “It can’t be bog fever.”

“No fever’ That’s worse than

the growth within, perhaps ... I have this lumpiness here . ..” He raised his right arm and urged Padraic to feel beneath it.

With a small grimace of distaste Padraic probed the plump flesh. Then he straightened and looked severely at Brian’s seanchai. “That’s fat,” he said. “You eat too much.”

MacLiag’s eyes misted. “I thought you were my friend!”

“I am your friend, but I’m also an old warrior. I’ve seen plenty of illness and dying, the real tiling, and this isn’t it. Do you think I would be your friend if I lied to you? Do you want to be sick?”

“Of course not! I hate ill health. I would give ten good lambs this very morning if I could be up and about, enjoying a fine rare day.”

Padraic shrugged. “Then put on your bratt and come out with me now.”

Macliag recoiled. “It would be the death of me!”

Padraic reported the seanchai’s condition to Brian with some amusement. “I’ve never seen a man enjoy himself more. He, lies there in bed, swelling up like a toad from lack of exercise, and sends his servants running in every direction to fetch this or that for a dying man. Cairbre won’t even see him anymore, he’s that disgusted.”

Brian laughed. “Well, we can’t wait on him. Send someone to tell him that he has to get up and run that fat off now, or we’ll put him in a cart if we have to, because I intend to leave him safely at Kincora on our way north. There’s no danger of his being really ill, is there?”

Padraic chuckled. “Not that one. He’s always dosed himself on every potion in the herbalist’s stock, and gone crying to the physician with every wheeze and sneeze. Nothing ever comes of it. When the rest of us are sleeping beneath our shields he’ll still be above ground, singing our praises and moaning over his pains.”

At Kincora Brian faced a new set of messengers, with fresh news of Malachi. “The Ard Ri has attacked Dublin savagely,

driving Sitric to flee to his relatives and then plundering the Norse treasure!

“He stood up before the Northmen in their own hall, wearing the great gold collar of the viking Tomar and brandishing the sword of their Carlus, and bragged about his victories. But then, when he had crowed over his successes to his heart’s content, he finally backed down and agreed to restore Sitric as ruler of Dublin as long as the Norse would agree not to retaliate against Meath.”