Lion of Ireland (57 page)

The betrayal was total and shocking; the more so for being unexpected. The desertion of a lifelong ally is almost impossible to believe, yet there came a morning when the proof was there, all too plain, for the eye to see and the heart to suffer.

He could not make himself get out of bed, though he had heard a cock crow several times and the bells had rung the hour of Prime. The bustle in the courtyard could be heard beyond the walls of his guest house. He tossed off his covering and lay on the bed, looking idly down the length of his tall body. For the first time in years he examined it with an objective eye, and was horrified.

He stared in disgust at the small blur of fat around his once lean waist, the faint convexity of what had been a flat belly. Where had it come from, that slackness of thigh skin? Where had it gone, the glow and ripple of taut flesh stretched over hard muscle? He found himself trapped in an enemy camp, imprisoned in an aging body that could not possibly be his, doomed to be carried in it all the way to old age and the grave.

It was a hideous revelation.

He lay back on the bed and tried to plot an escape. His thoughts ran wild, shaping fantasies he knew to be impossible, while his sense of reality sat detached and coldly amused. You are getting old, Brian. The days ahead will become an old man’s days. Walking stoop-shouldered, grinning without teeth, the strong muscles shrunk away to mere lumps of stringy meat, hanging flabbily from your bones.

With a shudder of revulsion he rolled from the bed and began to pace the floor, loathing his thoughts but unable to escape them.

I always prided myself on knowing how to lose, on being able to take a defeat and keep right on going until there was another opportunity for winning. When I lost on the battlefield I spoke of a strategic withdrawal, and did not dwell on the bitter taste in my mouth or the burning in my gut. Survive and keep going. But how can I outlast this enemy? How much time is left me before I begin to lose more than I win?

He went through the formalities of the day like a man who had lost his hearing, unreachable most of the time. In the early afternoon Carroll came to him with a parchment and pen, requesting his name on some document, and he took the pen from his secretary’s fingers and hurled it across the chamber. “Words!”

he cried. “I drown in a sea of words! I am so damnably weary of promises and manipulations and lies that sound like the truth and truth that must be altered . ..”

Carroll stared at him openmouthed.

Padraic was able to shed no light on the matter. “Of course, I know Brian better than anyone,” he told Carroll, “but sometimes, even I ...” His shrug was eloquent.

Brian took his horse and, refusing even Padraic’s company, rode out alone in the direction of the setting sun. He rode for hours, unmindful of time or distance. As he passed the little knot of stunted trees beyond the king’s tuath, they dug their roots into the stony soil and watched him pass by. The small clump of woods at Ireland’s western rim was not uninhabited, but Brian did not feel the eyes that followed him. He felt nothing but the coldness and the brittleness of his bones.

He came at last to the very edge of the land, where the cliffs towered above a miniscule stretch of beach, framed in black rocks. He had never been alone with the sea.

And it may never happen again, he thought. This may be the only time. In my entire life.

He tethered his horse and picked his way down the cliff face, sweating with fear at the drop that yawned below him. What a fool you would look, old man, tying here on the edge of the Cold Sea with your bones shattered.

Old num.

He reached the narrow strip of sand and checked himself, panting, as he teetered precariously on the slippery surface of a black rock at the very edge of the breaking surf. The difficult descent had heated him; his cloak dragged at his shoulders and he threw it aside. He felt a desire that he recognized as ancient and pagan, a longing to strip off his tunic and stand naked to the stars. Once he might have done so, proud of his body and feeling sweet kinship with all of nature. But on this evening his confidence was at low ebb, his emotions clouded; he did not know what he really wanted to do, only that he was troubled and desperate in some nameless way.

There was a movement at the very edge of his vision, a stirring not in rhythm with the lapping of the waves against the rocks. Suddenly embarrassed, Brian turned and peered into the gathering darkness, searching angrily for the interloper who dared spy on him at such a private moment.

Crouched in the shadow of a large boulder was a woman. A young, naked woman.

It was impossible, one of his midnight fantasies that had somehow broken through into his waking hours.

He let himself down from his perch gingerly, unwilling to risk a broken leg in that moment, and walked slowly forward until he could get a good look at her.

the vision did not vanish. She huddled there quietly, her skin glimmering in the first wan moonlight. Her dark hair glistened wetly and the eyes she lifted to meet his were enormous, night-colored, with the look of a wild creature waiting for the hunter’s decision. He had the fanciful thought that she might be one of the Selkies, the enchanted sea-dwellers who throw off their seals’ skins from time to time and come on to the dry land to dance by moonlight.

“What sort of creature are you?” he asked. “What sorcery brings you here?”

She took a deep breath and flattened herself backward, pressing against the rock. Her huge eyes never left his face, but she said nothing.

Disconcerted, he reached down to touch her. She started to pull away, then checked herself and slowly surrendered her hand to him. The fingers that slid between his were warm and soft, uncallused. He tugged gently to lift her to her feet, and she flowed upward in one easy motion of such fluid grace that his heart constricted with the pleasure of seeing it.

She stood submissively before him, making no effort to

hide her nakedness, holding herself like a goddess who expects to be worshiped. It seemed imperative that he look at her, and he had no desire to resist. His eyes devoured her slim body as if he had never seen a woman unclothed. Indeed, in that moment he felt that he had not. This girl was so firm, so fresh, her body so untouched by time that just looking at her made him feel young again, too.

Her round throat was strongly modeled, with a pulse beating in the deep hollow at its base. Her shoulders-sloped into plump white arms, and her breasts were small, virginal, the nipples dark against her fair skin. But there was a weight to them, a just ripening richness that tempted his hands and lips.

“What’s your name?” he asked again, feeling compelled to say something. She shook her head slightly and parted her lips but made no sound; her big, black eyes, heavily fringed with a tangle of dark lashes, were as expressionless as pools of water. In such a situation a man might expect fear, or bravado, or even desire, but this girl was merely waiting. Naked, in his hands.

He was holding his breath and did not know it. A string like that of a harp was stretched tight in him, the tension growing with every moment, till it pulled at his belly and tugged his vital organs. He took a half step backward, drawing her with him into the moonlight so that he could see every detail of her body.

“You are pure poetry!” he told her hoarsely, but she did not react to his compliment. She just stood there, open to him, pliable and silent.

He looked at the curve of her hips, the round fertility of her belly, the long legs and high-arched feet planted firmly apart in the damp sand. Even in summer the night sea was a cold place to bathe, and now autumn chill was in the air, but the girl did not seem cold. Her skin smell was warm and clean. There was no more odor of smoke or grease or perfume about her than about a wild animal.

A lovely, wild animal.

hp raised his head and looked into her eyes once more,

I

and they were no longer blank. He saw his own desire mirrored in them.

He felt a trembling someplace inside himself.

She parted her lips and Brian knew a moment’s fear; if she spoke the spell might be broken. But she merely licked her lips and left them open, waiting for his tongue.

He grabbed her so savagely he half expected to hear her bones break in his embrace.

Their bodies melted together; he could not tell where his left off and hers began. It was if she were some amputated part of himself, miraculously rejoined to him. His youth, his wildness, the secret dreams he had put aside when he took up the hard realities of manhood’. Even his raging mind was stilled in her embrace, freed of the awful necessity to think. He had only to feel.

In the night, at the edge of the sea, Brian was engulfed in magic.

Brian awoke to a sense of loss. The moon was still high in the cobalt sky; a fat white crescent, partly obscured by threads of ragged, silver-edged cloud. He lay staring at it with a dim memory of having wrapped himself and the girl in his bratt some hours before; now the girl and the cloak were gone, leaving him cold.

He scrambled to his feet, surprised to find his body supple, his joints unprotesting. He began carefully examining each dark shape along the beach in turn. One of them might be, must be, the girl. The firm, dark-eyed, ripple-muscled girl. Must be. Must be. His head swung slowly from left to right and then back again, certain that he had somehow missed her and that she was there, waiting for him.

The patient ocean that had seen everything lapped at the edge of the beach, disinterested.

He felt an acute awareness of the necessity of her, not so much as a person but as an experience, a door he had entered to a world he had thought forever past. It occurred to him that he could return to his host’s tuath and request to have her found and brought to him. but he discarded the idea almost immediately. It would not be the same to have her beneath a roof, kneeling before him, her name known and her secrets laid bare. There were plenty of women he could have for the asking, if the physical relief were all he sought.

But it was more than that. He wanted to feel the string drawn tight inside him again, and know that when it was plucked the music it made would fill his soul.

He felt her presence very near him. Fearful of fooling himself he tried to ease the quick thudding of his heart as he turned slowly around, but she was there, standing a few yards behind him, wrapped in his bratt and smiling. Her eyes were luminous.

Feeling like a boneless boy, he ran to her and clasped her to him, burying his lips in her salty hair. She was cool and wet from the sea.

She exhaled a gentle breath and fitted her body against his smoothly, without a seam. I am young, he thought, holding her at the water’s edge. I am young, and there is no such thing as Time. Whatever enchantment bound her, she was human; he felt certain of it when he entered her and recognized the configuration of her body. But she made him feel more than human, unrestricted by the limitations of the years and the flesh. Whatever she was, she brought joy to life in him, and the hot tide of his youth poured over them both again.

When they lay at rest, her head pillowed on his shoulder, her damp hair streaming across his arm, she took a deep breath as if to speak, and to his surprise he found himself putting a hand across her mouth to stop her. What if her voice were rough with the coarse accent of a fisherwoman? What if she were stupid and dull? A body could be splendid with tittle mind behind it, and she had been so silent until now ... he did not want to know. “Sssshhh,” he whispered, his voice an echo of the sea. “Sssshhh.”

She lay quiet then, turning her face toward him so that the top of her head snuggled under his chin, and they fell asleep together, wrapped in stars and sea mist.

This time when he awoke his cloak was still with him, spread lovingly over him. It was morning, with the ocean chill

in the air, but he felt neither cold nor stiff. He raised himself and saw her bare footprints leading away from him, running along the sand to be lost on a shelf of rock. He started to stand up, pulling his bratt after him, and as he did so something heavy struck his leg.

There was a brooch pinned to the bratt, but not the gold which had fastened it last night. This brooch was of silver, blackened and worn, with an elaborate pattern of spirals.

He looked at it in the rosy dawnlight. His mouth was suddenly dry; the gooseflesh rose on his back and shoulders. He spun around and stared in wonder at the empty beach and the empty, empty sea.

“My lord? My lord of Munster?” The voice came to him from a far distance. He heard it and tried to close it out, but it dug at him persistently, forcing its way through the spell that gripped him.

“My lord, pleased” It was a plaintive wail forced in desperation from Padraic’s panting lungs. Brian looked up and saw his friend above him on the cliff, peering down, with Conaing beside him.

Yesterday, the steep climb would have winded him. On this radiant morning he made it easily, reaching the top in a final bound to find Padraic and the Dalcassian chieftain staring at him in astonishment. “My lord, how did you get down there? And what ...” Conaing began.

“Oh, my lord, I thought we’d never find you!” Padraic interrupted him, almost sobbing with relief. “I ...

I’m afraid I disobeyed your orders last night; I followed you at a distance—a great distance, to be sure!--because a king could not be allowed to go unescorted, even in this deserted place. It would have been a disgrace to us all, my lord!”

“And then when the messengers came from Kincora, looking for you, I set out after Padraic,” Conaing picked up the thread of the tale, “and together we’ve been searching for you ever since.”

The words got through to him then. “Messengers from Kincora? What’s happened?”

Padraic’s face was all smiles. “Word came from the south, from Prince Murrough, that his wife was safely delivered of a healthy female infant, my lord! Your first grandchild!”

Brian looked at them in disbelief. A grandchild? How could that be? His body felt young and hard, the flesh tight on the bones, the muscles rippling. Vitality coursed through him; he had enough energy for ten men. How could he be a grandfather?