Chain of Evidence (27 page)

The rain softened into a mist and a strong gust of wind blew the aromatic pine smoke into their faces. The fire flared and now Mara could see that each man held an unlit pine branch in his hands.
Creevagh
the place of the branches, she thought and had a moment’s insight into secret rites and shameful burnings that might have been held in this place. Tomás, she remembered, was the grandson of a man who had owned these townlands. A strange, unpleasant character, about whom there had been terrible rumours, Brigid had said. And there was a strange, unpleasant look about his descendent, she thought as the blank, almost-black eyes stared at her with a look of fury.

‘So I ask you now, good people, to go in peace, back to where you came from and to leave the legal affairs of the kingdom to me,’ went on Mara smoothly. Tomás, she noticed, had, with three other men, left the enclosure and gone along the sunken passage towards the second dolmen, where the fire flared and crackled. No one else stirred and so she talked on, telling this crowd of men from Thomond all about Poulnabrone and the ancient dolmen and about how her father had practised there and how she had qualified as
aigne
, then as an
ollamh
and finally as a Brehon.

But then she stopped in dismay as she saw all eyes leave her and go towards the sunken passageway.

Tomás and the others had returned, each with a short, blazing branch of pine. They went from one to the other of their clan members. And each man held out his branch of pine and waited until it, also, flamed up. The gloomy enclosure was filled with flames and smoke and a chant began.

‘
Cailleach, cailleach, cailleach,
’
hissed the men from Thomond. Tomás moved amongst them touching some men on the shoulder and then, two by two, twelve men advanced towards the slumped-over figure of the unconscious woman.

According to the law of Adomnán, the killing or the injuring of a woman is twice as serious an offence as if the same crime was committed against a man. As Jesus venerated his mother, so too should all women in the kingdom be venerated and no man’s hand lifted against them to do any serious injury.

Offences against children and clerics are to be also severely punished.

A
s the twelve men took their places, six on either side, a hand seized Mara and she felt herself clamped to the curve of a protruding stomach. The other hand went across her mouth and she found herself wordless and impotent in the grip of Boetius, a man whom she despised and disliked. She froze and waited.

‘Men of the Jury,’ called out Stephen in shrill and rather uncertain tones. ‘You have heard the evidence. You know that this woman, Slaney MacNamara, is accused of the crime of treason in that she murdered her husband, Garrett MacNamara. How find you? Guilty or not guilty?’

‘Guilty or not guilty?’ translated Tomás into Gaelic, an impatient note in his voice. He did not look towards Mara, but kept his eyes fixed on his makeshift jury. Mara contemplated biting Boetius and jabbing him sharply in the stomach, but could not bring herself to do it.

‘Guilty,’ shouted the twelve men in unison, and almost before the words were out of their mouths, the crowd took up the chant of ‘
Cailleach, cailleach, cailleach.
’

The inert form of Slaney, her eyes wide open and almost totally black, was dragged towards the passageway by two of the jurors; Boetius tightened his hold on Mara.

‘You will want to see justice done, Brehon, will you not?’ he said in her ear, and there was such a note of gloating in his voice that Mara decided not to struggle but to walk with him as well as she could. He was getting pleasure from this, she could tell, and was revenging himself for the humiliation at her hands some years ago, when she had dismissed him from her school and from her kingdom.

The narrow passageway leading out of the enclosure had been hacked out of the rock to a depth of about five feet. Mara was quite a tall woman, but only part of her head was above its steep-sided walls which were dripping with moisture. About thirty paces long, she thought, endeavouring to step out as briskly as she could. Her flesh crawled at Boetius’s clasp which was almost an embrace, and if she had a knife, she thought grimly, she would have undoubtedly used it. But her knife was in the satchel attached to her horse and, though useful for trimming pens and cutting tape, it probably would not do more than annoy Boetius.

It was a scene from hell, she thought. The end of the sunken passageway rose up and rounded out into a small enclosed circle that was almost completely filled by the dolmen. Huge branches of pine had been piled almost to the height of the surrounding wall. The place was full of smoke and shadows and the strong smell of burning wood. The fire rose high in the circle around the back and the sides of the dolmen at the end of the sunken passageway, encircling two of the upright stones that supported the table slab. Some branches had fallen in front of the third upright – a flat-sided piece of limestone encrusted with outcrops of gleaming quartz – and a man armed with a huge iron bar was carefully raking them to one side. Mara eyed the long black iron chain that was looped over it, and knew instantly what was intended. But there was nothing that she could do except pray that the boys would bring help before the final tragedy. About half an hour since they had gone, she calculated. She was glad that she had told Moylan to take her horse. Brig had been a present from the king, a well-bred horse with Arab blood and a horse that could almost fly when spurred on, but the distance to the smithy was so great that she suspected that he might only now be arriving.

And even now men were propping Slaney up against the stone and winding the great loops of the chain around her, pulling it in tightly under her bosom and tying the two ends into a knot. Not hard to undo, thought Mara. A chain meant to hold someone would flush-leftly have had the ends softened with red-hot tongs and then hammered together by a blacksmith. But there was no blacksmith there and Slaney was so drugged that she knew nothing of what was happening and slept on.

When the flames began to lick around her flesh, though, she would probably be shocked out of her stupor and perhaps make an effort to escape.

What would happen then?

And then came a tiny miracle, an answer to the prayers that were flooding through Mara’s mind. A sudden gust of wind eddied through the enclosed space and smoke filled all eyes. A glowing fragment of smouldering pine was blown up against Boetius and Mara smelled the stench of burning hair as his red beard flared up. With an oath he released her and she sprang away from him picking up the iron bar and standing with her back to the limestone upright slab, beside the body of Slaney.

‘I swear that I will beat out the brains of any man who comes near to me,’ she roared using the full power of her well-trained voice. ‘Get back all of you; get back, I say. How dare you take justice into your own hands?’

Swiftly she swung the bar, raking the burning branches so that more glowing embers flew out on the wind towards the crowd. They pressed back, those still in the passageway, being trodden on by their fellows who were escaping from the shower of burning embers.

‘Think shame to you,’ she screamed, not caring for her dignity or for anything other than the overwhelming desire to save this unfortunate woman from an appalling death. ‘The poets and the legend makers will sing of this deed of yours in the years to come, won’t they? They will tell how the mighty MacNamara clan, the sons of the warriors from the sea, took an old, sick woman and tortured her. Will you tell that story to your grandchildren?’ Again she swung the iron bar and again the wind blew the embers.

Her throat was beginning to fill with smoke though and the fire was licking at her boots and at her drenched woollen mantle. She could not hold them off for long. She remembered a story of the boy who was surrounded by wolves up on the mountain peak of Cappanawalla. He had kept the animals at bay all night long by flinging burning spars of wood at them.

Immediately she seized a brand from the fire and hurled it at Boetius and heard him yelp; she felt an immense inner satisfaction which compensated for the pain of her scorched hand.

‘And this one for you, Stephen Gardiner,’ she shouted pulling out another one. ‘Go back to London and tell Cardinal Wolsley about your experiences among the
wilde Irish
.’

Then she saved her voice, just hurling the flaming branches as fast as she could at anyone that came near. It was amazing, she thought contemptuously, that they did not band together and capture her, but there was a primitive fear of fire among all people of the Celtic race and the wind had risen to storm force and it seemed to hurl sound and smoke down the sunken passageway, choking and blinding those crowded in the narrow walled space.

‘Let’s burn the two of them,’ shouted someone, and then men hissed hoarsely, ‘
cailleach, cailleach, cailleach
,’ but the chant had lost its potency and the words were swept away by the surging wind that now rattled through the stones of the enclosure.

However, the wind, Mara realised a moment later, brought its dangers. The gusts that swept through the dugout enclosure fanned the flames of the easily ignited pine branches. The fire roared like a wolf, the flames leaping up to the height of the stone table and beyond and illuminating the white faces and black eyes of those who pressed to the front to glimpse the human sacrifice.

And then the wind caught the flames and they curved around to the front of the dolmen where Slaney lay slumped in stupor, bound by an iron chain to the limestone slab. And Slaney, unlike Mara, was not wearing a mantle of heavy, felted sheepswool, soaked with rain. She was clothed only in a thin
léine
, a garment made of easily-inflammable linen threads. The flame licked around the corner and then found the material and blazed. Pain penetrated through the drug-induced stupor and Slaney screamed suddenly. The result was odd. Suddenly all chanting ceased. Half a hundred pairs of dilated black eyes stared at Mara and Mara reacted immediately. Lifting the skirt of her mantle, and feeling with thankfulness how soaked with rainwater it was, she dropped to her knees beside Slaney’s inert form and bunched the material over the flames. They went out immediately and although the woman sobbed with pain, at least she was no longer on fire. A strong smell of scorched linen, mixed with the stench of scorched flesh, filled the small round enclosure where the dolmen ended the sunken passage. There was a gasp from the crowd, but whether it was horror or excitement was hard to tell. Mara used her iron bar to clear the burning branches away from Slaney, but was conscious that the fire was gathering strength and that soon they could both be engulfed in its flames.

At that moment, when she had almost despaired, the purple sky fulfilled its promise. An icy rainstorm poured down, small frozen balls of hail bounced on the flames. The air was winter cold and the rooks overhead cawed as though they could not wait to get home and away from man’s cruelty. The wind had dropped and the heavy downpour seemed to quench the enthusiasm of the surrounding clan members. They blinked and looked away, many raising a hand to pass it over their eyes. Not all of those who had been at the castle were present, thought Mara suddenly and her optimistic nature took comfort in that observation. Perhaps there were still some sane members of the clan back in the castle. Perhaps someone might come to their rescue.

Slaney shrieked again. This time it must be from the agony of her burns. Mara herself felt that the burning pain in her hands had been relieved by the shower of frozen hail, but Slaney was a different case. The linen petticoat had gone up in flames and there was an ugly bright-red stripe down the woman’s left thigh. By the light of the fire, Mara could see huge blisters bubble up from the flesh.

And then, unfortunately, the hail storm ceased almost as quickly as it had begun. The dull grey of the smouldering pine branches reddened and new flames began to lick upwards. Boetius wrenched the iron bar from Mara’s hand and deliberately raked the crackling branches towards her. Mara swallowed hard, sending as much saliva as possible down her smoke-filled throat. The crowd in the passageway were surging forward. ‘Burn, burn, burn,’ they shouted and there was an insane, high-pitched note in the voices which made her knees tremble. She blinked hard and gathered all of her strength, trying to ignore her inflamed throat and her streaming eyes.

‘Tomás MacNamara,’ she called, keeping her voice at a level that it would reach his ears, but not attempting to make it reach to the back of the crowd, ‘Tomás MacNamara,’ she repeated, ‘as
taoiseach
of the MacNamara clan, you have sworn loyalty to your overlord, King Turlough Donn O’Brien. What shall you tell him when next you meet?’

He stared at her blackly for a moment. There was almost an insane look in his dark eyes, but then he blinked hard and held up a hand. The chanting died down and the place was silent except for the roar of the flames and the harsh cawing of the rooks overhead. Mara quickly pursued her advantage.

‘I swear to you, Tomás MacNamara, that if this affair goes ahead, that will be the end of you. You will be as nothing in the land. I shall condemn you. You will be an outlaw, a wanderer on the face of the earth. You will lose your honour price.’ She paused to allow this to sink in; only a fugitive and an outlaw did not have an honour price;
lóg n-enech
(the price of the face) was the backbone to Celtic society. A man who lost that was a man without rights, a man who could be driven from the kingdom or killed with impunity.

At her words, suddenly something seemed to come over Tomás’s face, almost like the expression of a man rousing himself from a dream. He blinked hard once again and passed a hand across his face. A shadow of hope began to steal into Mara’s brain. Quickly she resumed talking, forcing the words out from her rasped throat, reminding him of the clan’s reputation for hospitality, of the great deeds of his ancestors, of Sioda the Mighty . . . but she was not allowed to go any further. She had been conscious of an exchange of glances between Stephen Gardiner and Boetius. Stephen’s mission was to stir up trouble between the clans – Turlough had been right when he had spoken of that. A man of burning ambition was this Stephen Gardiner; a young man who would do anything to raise himself in the favour of Cardinal Wolsey and of the king of England. And Boetius was his tool. He had lost Garrett, who had been so willing to bend the knee to Henry VIII, but now he had Tomás under his thumb. And suddenly she realised that now the stakes were higher. Not Slaney’s death, not just a way of bringing English laws and English punishments into the Gaelic west of Ireland was his aim, but the death of Mara, Brehon of the Burren and wife of King Turlough Donn. This would immediately cause an all-out war between the O’Brien and the MacNamara clans – and in that war England, through the agency of O’Donnell, would send arms and men to assist the MacNamaras and hope that the death of their life-long enemy, Turlough Donn O’Brien, would be the outcome.