Lion of Ireland (73 page)

He snapped his dry fingers to summon his guard. “If you are so superior to the rest of us, Brian Boru, then you don’t need me or any man to stand with you. You are the great champion; you can fight the invaders alone for all I care, unless you finally repudiate this mudmouth son of yours and apologize for him in my presence and that of my officers.”

Brian glanced at Murrough, at the face that had so often turned to him in anger, at the thin line of the mouth that had so often spoken against him. Murrough held himself rigidly impassive, though he too was on his feet, and from the controlled lines of his body Brian knew that he was awaiting his father’s punishment as tensely as Malachi.

Brian turned back .to the king of Meath. “No,” he said in a firm voice. “I will not repudiate a son of mine for any man, or at any cost. He is blood of my blood; how can I teach him loyalty except by example? I may discipline him in private, as befits one of my officers who has made a mistake in judgment, but I will not humiliate him publicly to give you satisfaction. You must do what your conscience bids you, Malachi Mor, and so must I.”

Malachi hesitated, then forced himself to turn and walk with dignity to the tent flap. He spoke once more, over his shoulder, before he went into the night.

“Fight your enemies all by yourself, Brian Born,” he said.

Hot on Malachi’s departing heels Ospak arrived, breathless and excited. “I have word from the spies I sent to Dublin, my lord! My brother consulted some Norse oracle and was told that unless the battle were fought on Good Friday, his forces and those of Sigurd and Maelmordha would be defeated, all their leaders slain. But if the battle is fought on Good Friday, the oracle promised Brian Boru would die.

It is on Freya’s Day, then, that he and the others mean to attack you.” “Good Friday,” Brian said softly,

“is tomorrow.” “There is no time left us!” Murrough cried into the stunned silence. “We must attack at dawn or they will bring the fight to us!” He put his arm around Turlough and drew the boy close to him.

“God knows I would rather not fight on such a holy day,” Brian said sorrowfully, “but it was too much to hope that they would grant us Easter. Right now we have them with their backs to the sea, but if they come west before we move it will cost us the advantage. And we have already lost the support of Meath, a defection we could ill afford.”

Murrough struggled to say something, but could not.

“What will you do, my lord?” Ospak asked.

Brian drew a slow breath. “Fight; there are no options. At sunrise I will lead the army of Ireland against those who would destroy her.”

“No!” Murrough cried out. “You are past the age when any man goes into combat, my lord! You have the heart of a lion, but you know I speak the truth, and my brothers and your officers will agree with me!”

“I fought last year,” Brian said sternly. “And won.”

“Please ... Father. Listen! You are too valuable to be risked in this battle, for you are the soul of Ireland, and if anything were to happen to you all our efforts would mean nothing. Just tell us what to do, outline every step we are to take, and I promise you, Malachi or no, we will capture Dublin and put Maelmordha and his foreign allies to the sword.”

Brian stared at his son. “I cannot let some other man lead my army! Every time another has fought my fight, I have wept over his grave.”

Murrough was suffering inner agonies. There are words that come hard, when they have never been said, but a man’s greatest victory is not always on the field of battle. Ignoring the others in the tent he went to stand toe to toe with his father. The words he sought were rusty with disuse, but they came.

“Father,” he said, “I ... love you. Always. I ... don’t want you to be in danger anymore. You’ve given your whole life to Ireland, to building the Erin my children will inherit. You’ve tried to make me see your dream so that I and my brothers could carry it on, after .. . after you’re gone, but I’ve been pigheaded and stubborn; I know it. I regret it. The future will be different.

“Let me carry your banner and go in your name to lead this last battle. Upon my honor, as a man ... of the line O Brian, I will do everything as you would do it. I’ve been the cause of much of this, and I must do what I can to make up for it.”

Wordless, his throat constricted with a joyous pain, Brian watched him.

Murrough dropped his voice a little and spoke as tenderly as he could. “Please, father,” he said again.

“Let me give you this victory.”

Brian’s eyes burned as they had not in years. The gift of tears, Padraic had said. The gift was for Murrough, at last. He nodded briefly in assent, then put his hand on his son’s shoulder.

“I have my victory now,” said Brian.

In the darkness, Flann and his men crouched over tiny fires as they smeared one another with the glittering mud. It was cold on the skin and had an acrid, metallic odor. When they saw how eerily it sparkled in the firelight they forgot the discomfort and laughed, one man punching another on the arm, making rowdy jokes.

They left the camp quietly and made for the walls of Dublin and the encampment of the Leinstermen—the Leinstermen who had been raised on the tales of the Tuatha de Dannan; who knew the legend of the shining mist of invincibility that protected the warriors who were more than mortal. The sentries caught sight of them, rubbed their eyes, and peered again into the blackness, feeling a cold breath from the past blow over them.

“There’s something out there,” they whispered to one another, and the whisper traveled into the camp and chilled the men who lay waiting in their blankets. “Ghosts—wraiths—there are Beings out there that glow in the night!” They signed the Cross on their breasts and crouched low on the earth, fearing the sunrise. “What will happen to us tomorrow? What kind of enemy will we face?”

In the darkness, some of Maelmordha’s army began to desert him.

On the beach where Brodir and his men awaited the first light, an apparition came riding, a towering figure on a gray horse, an awesome shape wrapped in the colors of darkness and wearing the homed helmet of the gods. It groaned in & sepulchral voice and was gone, the thud of the horses’s hoofs lost in the sound of the sea.

Terrified Northmen stared at one another. “Odin!” one dared to gasp. “It is a dreadful omen!”

“It is a good omen!” Brodir argued, his voice shrill and harsh. “He has come to promise me the death of the Ard Ri this day!”

The others nodded and tried to believe him, but they could not keep from glancing up the beach now and again. Into the darkness. Into the terrible, haunted darkness.

The Irish marched at daybreak. The army was split into three divisions: the Dalcassians, led by Murrough and his son; the rest of the Munstermen, under the command of the prince of the Deisi, Mothla O Fealan; and Taig O Kelly with the army of Connacht and the two companies from the Scot Land. Malachi and the Meathmen had withdrawn to a distant vantage point to await the outcome of the battle, Malachi nursing his hurt pride and sitting heavily on the lid of the jar imprisoning his conscience.

It was dawn, and the tide was high. The Norse ships waited in the shallows off the mouth of the Liffey, their dragonheads looking inward. As the Ard Ri’s army came to meet them, the combined forces of the Leinstermen and the Northmen crossed the Liffey by its solitary bridge and swung northward to ford the Tolka, which ran parallel to the Liffey. Ahead of them Fingal was still smoking all the way to Howth, where Brian’s men had scorched the earth.

Brian rode in his chariot at the forefront of the Dalcassians, but when the Northmen became visible in the distance, he ordered his driver to rein in and turned to bless the army that would go on without him. His speech was brief and moving, and they wept with love for the man in whose name many of them would die.

Brian stepped down for a last word with his eldest son, and they embraced awkwardly, aware of the eyes of the warriors upon them.

“If there were any other way, I would not send you into battle on this holy day,” Brian reiterated. “But we must not retreat; we would draw the whole weight of them behind us into the heart of Ireland. So take my sword; it has served me well, and will protect you. And God go with you.”

Brian’s broad shoulders slumped perceptibly as Murrough reached for the golden hilt of Boru’s sword.

Sensitivity had come to Murrough late, but it had come. Gently, he pushed the weapon back into his father’s hands.

“You keep it, my lord,” he said. “You are still the greatest of warriors, and a warrior must have his sword at his side.”

With a crisp salute and a jaunty wave he was gone, the massed ranks of the Irish falling into step behind him.

Sitric stood on the northern watchtower of his fortress, watching the armies fanning out over the April-green fields in the distance. He could see where the ships of his allies waited in the bay, nestled close to the shallows at the fishing-weir of Clontarf. Brian’s men were drawing up on the north bank, the right wing anchored on the Liffey, the left on the Tolka. The fleet lay before them, the Northmen already howling with battle-hunger. To Sitric the protection of the city was of paramount importance, and he had ordered the battle lines stretched thin in order to protect the bridge that was the gateway to Dublin. A shocking number of Maelmordha’s Leinstermen seemed to be missing from the field, and Sitric commented on it to Gormlaith as she mounted the ladder and came to stand beside him.

“Has the battle actually begun?” she asked tensely. She was swathed from head to foot in a heavy woolen cloak, her face very white, her eyes immense and haunted.

“It will start soon, I think,” Sitric answered her.

“Can you see Boru?”

“At this distance? Of course not, woman; did you expect to stand right here and watch him cut dead in front of you?”

Her eyes burned like live coals in her colorless face.

The jarl Sigurd led the foreign forces, including Brodir and his men. They were slightly in advance of the Dublin Norse under DubghalTs command. The third division of warriors was that of the rebel Irish, following the flag and the lifted sword arm of Maelmordha of Leinster.

As they marched into battle, some among them whispered to others of the dire signs that had been observed, the portents of doom and evil that seemed to swirl in the roiling clouds building over Clontarf.

Some believed and some scoffed. Many prayed to their various gods.

The edges of the opposing tides shifted back and forth, unstable, waiting. Stories filtered back from the front lines.

“An armored Northman has challenged any man in the Ard Ri’s army to single combat!”

“Will the battle be decided by champions?”

“Will we get to fight?”

“Is it over?”

“Can you see anything?”

“Domhnall, Steward of Mar, has accepted the challenge!”

“What’s happening?”

“Give me room, will you?”

Runners came back through the lines, wide-eyed and panting. “The two warriors have fought in the open space between the armies and struck each other dead! The battle has begun!”

The Dalcassians, fresh from receiving Brian’s blessing, were in the forefront of the Irish attack. They clashed eye to eye and knee to knee with warriors from the Orkneys and the Hebrides, and the din of battle rang out, clang and thud and scream.

In the watchtowers of Dublin people crowded together, peering northward, shouting and pointing out various stages of the action to one another. Only Gormlaith stood stonily silent, her white-knuckled hand clutching her cloak together at the throat. She might have been alone for all the notice she took of those around her.

Murrough fought like a man inspired. His breath hissed through his clenched teeth and sweat soon stung his eyes, but

he found the rhythm of his fighting and bore through the lines of the Northmen, with his own son protecting his back. “Boru!” they cried into the faces of the enemy. “Boru!”

Conaing, his hair as snowy as Brian’s but with no son’s love to hold him back, fought valiantly shoulder to shoulder with Cian the Owenacht, husband to Brian’s daughter Sabia. Scandlan mac Cathal swung an ax at a Dane in chain mail and grinned with savage joy as the weapon bit through the metal links and the man pitched forward onto the earth. He stepped over the fallen body and looked up to meet the approving smile of Ospak the Norseman, who wore a Christian cross on a chain around his neck. The two fought on together behind the banner of the Ard Ri.

Fearful to see but terrified of not knowing, Emer set her foot on the ladder of the watchtower and climbed up at last to stand beside her husband and his mother. The yelling of battle carried clearly to her horrified ears, but she could make little sense out of the distant scramble of men.

She put her hand on Sitric’s arm to get his attention. “How goes it?” she asked.

Sitric cast her a triumphant glance. “The foreigners are littering the field with the Ard Ri’s men! It is going to be a splendid harvest!”

She covered her face with her hands and turned away, but she did not leave the tower. She stood behind the immovable pillar that was Gormlaith, and prayed for her father.

Gormlaith’s lips were moving, too, but it was impossible to make out what she was saying.

Murrough and his personal guard broke through a knot of fighting men and came abruptly upon the jarl Sigurd himself, swinging a mighty ax beneath his banner in the shape of a raven. When the wind blew, it appeared that the raven flapped its wings, and Brodir’s men, seeing it, had pulled away from Sigurd in alarm.

Murrough closed with the standard bearer and drove him to

the earth, killing him with one mighty blow of his sword. But even as the banner fell another Northman snatched it up. Murrough spun around and hit the man with a backhanded blow and Turlough skewered him as he fell. With a growl deep in his throat, Murrough launched himself directly at Sigurd.

“Thorstein!” Sigurd’s voice rang above the frantic chorus of battle. “Take up the banner my mother made me!”

Amundi Stump-Tooth grabbed the arm of his comrade Thorstein and held him back. “Do not touch that flag!” he warned. “Whoever lifts it, dies!”