Sing Me Home (11 page)

But this couldn’t possibly be. For a
filidh
must study for twelve years in one of the bardic schools—a place reserved for the younger sons of only the most noble of Irish families. A
filidh
must spend hours—weeks—composing in the darkness of a sod hut, and memorizing the compositions of others.

Colin’s voice rose as he spoke of battles and bravery, of defiance and determination. He spoke of a time when the Irish tribes fought constantly against one another. The guests didn’t seem to care that he told an Irish tale to a crowd more English than Irish. She was just as caught up as they in the passions of Fergus MacEgan, the brash warrior, battling to keep something that had always been his.

Fingar’s harp strummed in rhythm with the story. As Colin spoke of hordes of men galloping across the fields, their shields gleaming in the sun, Fingar worked the pads of his fingertips over the high strings. It was as if everyone in the room could hear the distant drumming of hooves over the hill.
They are coming nearer,
Colin would say, and the plucking would become more distinct, the hoofbeats louder—then—
they are here!
The music became harsher as Fingar plucked the strings between fingertip and curved fingernail—Clash! Clash! Like the strike of sword against shield, like the clatter of armor and the crack of hoof, and then, suddenly, all was silence.

“Then it was over,” Colin said, his voice dropping in pitch, “and Fergus knew he’d been betrayed.”

Something shifted in the room as Colin continued. A shifting like the dull, humid weight that precedes the coming of a storm. Maura heard Arnaud’s swift hiss in the dimness behind her. There was a rustling at the trestle table, the sound of a bench scraping through the rushes, the slap of a hand on an arm, hard murmured words. Behind her came the skitter of many feet. The noise annoyed her, for Colin was still telling the tale, and she was angry about how Fergus had been betrayed by a distant kinsmen, a fellow warrior, a man that Fergus had called a friend.

“Come,” Arnaud whispered in her ear as he curled his fingers around her arm. “We must leave.”

“I’m not leaving.” She tugged her arm free. “He’s just getting to the best of it.”

Caught up in the story, she waited for the inevitable. She felt the first tickle of fear when Colin faced the trestle table and breathed a curse vile enough to make the hairs stand up on the nape of her neck.

“Evil death and short life to O’Kelly.
May spears of battle slay O’Kelly.
The rejected of the land and the earth is O’Kelly.
Beneath the mountains and the rocks be O’Kelly.”

“Come, woman.” Arnaud yanked her into the shadows.

She escaped out the servant’s door just as she heard the sound of a sword scraping out of a scabbard.

***

Colin was gone.

Maura and the troupe fled south, where the sparse woodlands ceded to a stretch of rolling, rocky earth. White limestone houses spotted the landscape, their thatch hanging so low as to brush the ground on two sides. Rock-pile fences curled over the soft hills and snaked across the fields, separating patches of earth sprouting as rich as emerald, and others glowing as golden as winter wheat, and all of it gently scoured by a wind smelling more and more of the sea. She searched that landscape daily, hourly, by the minute, hoping to see some glimpse of Colin riding toward them.

Days passed with no word.

Maura trailed after the troupe, blocking out the sound of Maguire’s voice as he belted out yet another verse of ‘The Bastard King of England,’ with Padraig piping the drinking tune lustily behind him, and the twins giggling at the end of each bawdy verse. Maura strode, her head down, angry at their indifference, for they acted as if they’d never had a certain Irish wrestler among their troupe.

She wondered if she’d ever lay eyes upon Colin again. She wondered, too, why her heart ached so much at the thought.

She winced as something sharp dug into her heel. Flopping down upon a stone fence, she hiked up her foot, thrust her finger into the hole in the heel, and rolled it around until she found the offending stone. Pinching it out, she hurled it skipping across the rocky path. A cow in a nearby field lifted its head and snorted into the misty air. Maura planted her elbows upon her knees and sank her face into her hands.

Maguire’s rag-clad legs came into her vision.

“What have we here? A calf lost from its herd, mooning and moping about as if its mother had just been sent to slaughter.” Maguire’s breath blasted Maura’s face. “I’ve got another riddle for you, Abbess.”

She straightened up to get away from the ale fumes. Maguire had buzzed after her all the way from Tuam. He’d hung around her like a gnat when they’d stopped to play in another stinking alehouse in Athenry, and spent his days filling her ears with the filth of his repertoire.

She had a strange feeling that the little man thought this attention was a kindness, that he was distracting her from worry.

“Another riddle then?” she said. “I’d think I would have heard them all by now.”

Maguire barked a laugh, and then thrust his chin in the air like a rooster about to crow.

“Stiff standing on the bed,
First it’s white and then it’s red.
There’s not a lady in the land
Who would not take it in her hand.”

Maura sighed, stood up, and set her foot back upon the path. “Another heartwarming riddle from the dung heap of your mind.”

“Know you the answer, Abbess? Speak!”

“It’s stiff on the bed, you say?”

“As hard as iron, Abbess, straight and tall.”

“First it’s white, and then it’s red.”

“When well-tended by a fine woman, it does grow and become so.”

“Any lady would take it in her hand?”

“Personally,” Maguire said, “I prefer it in the lady’s mouth.”

Maura narrowed her eyes at him. “Cracked between her teeth, I think.”

Maguire winced, crossing his knees and mock stumbling.

“And chewed thoroughly, I’d say.”

“By God’s Nails—”

“Or boiled in a pot with turnips and a bit of meat.”

“Cruel wench you.”

“So cruel? To treat a
carrot
so?” She kicked a spray of pebbles into the grass. “A carrot stiff in the garden-bed, ripening from white to red. Maguire, your japes are becoming as stale as the ale you drink.”

The little man frowned, scratching a nit out of his beard. “Your wit has grown these weeks. I have another.”

“You have a hole above your knee
and pricked it was and pricked shall be
and yet it is not sore
and yet it shall be pricked more.”

She sighed and scraped her knife out of its sheath. “It wouldn’t be this sheath you’re talking about, would it?”

Maguire smiled and clapped his hands and skittered away. She wanted to scream,
do you care? Do any of you care?
She wished they would all stop their laughter and prancing. Not a word about Colin’s fate had come back to them. Arnaud had shrugged and brushed off her questions, telling her never to ask a man a question he doesn’t wish to answer, telling her to keep her mind on performing, that’s what would put food in their bellies. A fine friend he was for abandoning Colin to a chieftain’s blade, she’d told him, or a hangman’s noose without a never-you-mind.

She didn’t even know if Colin lived or died.

Now they walked hell-bent for Kilcolgan, in the exact opposite direction of St. Patrick’s Purgatory, passing plenty of villages, Colin’s name and his fate carefully left out of every conversation. How long and weary the roads seemed without him sparring with the troupe, honing the blade of his wit upon her, flirting sometimes.

Kissing her, now and again.

Maguire whirled on her again and she glared at him. “Have you no better thing to do than to play the fool?”

“‘Tis my profession, lady.” Maguire danced a ring around her. “Think on this: If I stop playing the fool, am I still a fool? And if so, who’s to say if I’m playing or not?”

“Is that wretch bothering you still, Maura?”

Matilda waddled her way toward them. Her girdle lay right beneath her breasts now, to make room for the belly distending her tunic. Her boots lay tied together across her shoulders, and she’d pulled her hair away from a face pale of rouge. Without her silks, Matilda looked like the dairymaid of the Tuscan countryside that she’d told Maura she had been before Arnaud had lured her into the troupe.

Maura linked her arm with Matilda’s, to give the woman someone to lean upon, though Maura dodged Matilda’s brown eyes full of sympathy.

“Save your riddles for the fair of Kilcolgan,” Matilda said, setting her eye on Maguire. “Not all of us need show off our wares between towns.”

“You’re jealous, Makejoy, that I can work my wits and still earn a penny by it.” Maguire darted over and gave her belly a pat. “What man wants to climb a mountain for the mounting—and find the cave well filled?”

“A man with a spade hard enough to dig, Mudman, and not a limp tatter of a spoon like yours.”

The growing sound of a horse’s hooves coming up the road put an end to the sparring. They paused to watch as a man on a large palfrey appeared around the bend. Maura and the other minstrels skittered to the edge of the road to make way for him, but he rode past and then stopped, barring the way.

Maura wondered if he were a toll-collector, a common sight wherever the English had settled, until Matilda draw in a sudden breath and gripped her forearm.

The man shouted a question to Arnaud. Maura heard the name Colin, and her blood went cold.

“A bard you say?” Arnaud stepped up and pinched the flesh beneath his chin in contemplation. “You’re looking for an Irish poet?”

“He was masked,” the man said, “and disguised among a group of minstrels much like yourselves.”

Her blood rushed. Colin had escaped!

“He was last seen in Tuam.” The rider spoke a usurper’s English. “Have you been to Tuam?”

Maura eyed the rider. His hood was pulled low, covering most of his face against the spatter of rain. There was no doubting the authority in the set of his shoulders, or the richness of the studding on the horse’s harness, or the sure grip of his hands on the reins. But a man such as this, traveling alone, made her think he wasn’t English law.

Perhaps O’Kelly had put a reward on Colin’s head. She wondered how many other lone riders searched for Colin in the woods of Ireland.

“Ah,” Arnaud said, “I know of whom you speak. He was in our troupe not too long ago.”

Maura sucked in a breath. Did Arnaud have no sense of honor at all? Did these minstrels betray their own so easily?

“
Oui,
I know him,” Arnaud repeated, planting his fists on his hips. “He has caused us all more trouble than he’s worth, I’ll tell you. He’s a stubborn, reckless
bête
without a bit of sense in his head. He has dragged us into his battles but tells us nothing, and then leaves us scurrying out of castles like rats.”

The rider asked, “Where is he now?”

“I don’t know and I don’t care. If you find the bastard, string him up too high for even the ravens to find.”

Rich laughter rumbled out from beneath the hood. The rider dismounted with a snap of his cloak, then shoved the hood back upon his shoulders.

Colin’s grin lit up the world.

Maura stood, dumbfounded as the troupe rushed him. The minstrels’ laughter filled the air. Colin embraced a snarling Arnaud in a bearish hug. Padraig slapped him on the back. Matilda fixed his face in her hands and kissed him flat on the lips. The twins tumbled and hopped like children begging for wafers.

Maura covered her mouth with both hands, staring. She’d imagined him hanging by the neck from a tree on the side of the road, denied a good Christian burial. But his black hair gleamed on his shoulders, his eyes crinkled in laughter, and his face was marred with no more bruises and cuts than usual.

He told his story in pieces. How he’d dodged The O’Kelly’s blade, then called on the Baron of Tuam to protect the guests in his home. How the baron shouted for the fighting to stop. The baron had reminded O’Kelly that there was a hefty fine for killing a bard, one hundred and twenty good milk cows, and then ordered the angry Irishman to stop reading insults into a simple evening’s story. Colin bowed out, stole O’Kelly’s horse, and took a direction opposite of the minstrels to confuse the men O’Kelly promptly sent to kill him. Releasing the horse, Colin had then shadowed his own assassins on foot until a messenger summoned them back. Colin suspected that O’Kelly had finally come to his senses, realized he was only adding credence to Colin’s words by chasing him down, and then decided his pride wasn’t worth one hundred and twenty good milk cows.

Colin slapped the horse and sent the fine palfrey down the road, borrowed, so he said, from a toll-collector who had fallen asleep over his ale. He smiled at this, too, the swaggering thief. Then Colin lifted his gaze above the heads of the troupe and locked gazes with her. He shouldered his way through the circle, all pride and foolish courage.

“Well, Maura?” His breath smelled of green hazel-shoots as he leaned close to her. “Shall I not get a proper greeting from you?”

The shock of her fist against his cheekbone jolted her to the shoulder. He stumbled back from the surprise, tripped over the rock-pile fence and sprawled to the grass—sending Nutmeg, who had perched himself upon that fence with a cracked nut in his paws, reeling into the field. She stomped over to Colin, clambered over the fence, and braced her feet on either side of his hips. She glared down at him as he wiped his mouth and looked bemused at the blood upon his fingers.

“Did your mother drop you on your head when you were born?” Her anger bubbled like a stew left too long over the fire. “What were you thinking, playing a
filidh
and taunting an Irish nobleman with a bard’s curse? You could have got yourself hanged.”