Lion of Ireland (33 page)

“Where are you from?” Brian asked the trembling youth. The boy’s eyes were starting from his head.

“D-D-Desmond, my lord,” he stammered.

“Does your king know you are here?” The boy dropped his lips over his blue eyes, but not before Brian saw the glint of tears. “Yes, my lord,” he said very low. “And he has made no effort to free you?” “He is the prince Molloy of Desmond,” the boy replied, “and he sat at that table this very night, and took his meal with Ivar, and ran away with the others when your army reached the gates. They left us all here to die.”

Brian drew his sword and took a firm hold on the boy, who appeared to be about to faint at the sight of the naked blade. “Be still!” Brian commanded. “I’m not going to hurt you.” He lifted his arm and brought it down in a powerful arc, severing the horsehair shackle. “You are a free man,” he said. “Get out of here and get yourself home, and tell every person you meet just how you were treated by Molloy of Desmond. And tell, also, that it was Brian of Boruma who saved you.” He set the rest of them free with the same injunction, and assigned two strong swordsmen to accompany each former slave safely home, no matter how long the journey.

The looting and burning lasted throughout the night. Brian issued orders that prisoners were to be taken, not slain—an order already given by Mahon, but generally ignored. Brian rode through the streets himself, sword in hand, and saw that as many Norse men and women as possible were bound, living, and herded to a holding area beyond the gates.

The king had ordered his tent set up at some distance from the city, and Brian at last joined him there. He found Mahon on his knees, on the portable prayer stool that he always took into battle.

“We are taking prisoners now,” Brian said briskly. “What

do you want done with them?”

Mahon looked up. His face was drawn and pale in the light of the small lamp hung beside his stool. He might have been

any weary soldier after a battle that had gone against him, instead of a triumphant king who had just won a major victory.

“What . . .?”

“The prisoners,” Brian repeated. “What is to be done with them?”

Mahon looked at his younger brother and wondered just who he was seeing. Brian looked so strong, so sure of himself, his face untouched by the slaughter he had witnessed. There was a smear of blood across his brow; he wore it as he might wear a gold circlet—with elegance and unconcern.

“I don’t want to think about the prisoners now,” Mahon said in a vague voice. “I just want the killing to stop. I’ve been praying ...”

Brian looked over his shoulder, in the direction of the savaged city. “Nothing can stop it now, brother; neither you nor I. Our people have suffered for too many generations, they have built up hatreds even they were not aware of until this night. What’s happening back there is a cleansing, and it won’t end until they have rid their nostrils of the stink of the Northmen.”

Mahon glared at his brother. “You condone it!”

“I understand it. It’s not the same thing.”

“But it’s not only Northmen they are killing, Brian! There are Irish folk in those burning buildings, slaves and concubines. They’re being slaughtered with the rest; I’ve seen it. And the infants, Brian; the little babies! I’ve seen them snatched up by their ankles, their heads dashed against walls ...” Mahon’s voice faltered and he passed his hand across his eyes as if it were possible to wipe out that vision.

“It was done to us first, by the foreigners,” Brian said in a tight voice.

“That doesn’t make it right!”

“No.”

“I led this army here,” Mahon went on, as much to himself as to his brother “The death of all these innocent people will be charged to my soul.”

“Many innocent people die in wartime. You’re torturing yourself to no purpose, brother. That’s easy to do, as well I

know, and I advise you against it. At Sulcoit today we broke the Northman’s hold on Munster; be proud of that, instead of agonizing over something you cannot control. Our people will bless your name for your deeds here, “when the smoke clears and the blood dries.”

“The blood will never dry,” Mahon mourned.

The thread of Brian’s patience snapped. “You were willing enough to march at the head of an army and have people throw flowers and kisses at you! When the blood of battle finally warmed your veins, you swung your sword with the rest of us and made your kill, and I would be willing to wager a good Kildare horse that you enjoyed it well enough—then!

“But if you accept responsibility for part of an act you must accept responsibility for all of it, brother; the glory of clean battle and the sacking and death of a city are but two faces of the same creature. When you accepted the kingship of Munster you accepted all of it, the reward and the obligation, the cheering and the crying.”

Mahon rose heavily from his stool and planted himself in front of the younger man, holding his hands out, palm up, pleading with Brian to understand just this one time. He was still golden, and kingly, and beautiful, and Brian felt the old love move in him.

“I never wanted to be king!” Mahon cried.

Brian took a step backward as if from feared contamination. “How can you say such a thing!”

“It’s true, I swear it. By the agony of Christ on the Cross. It was a thing that was forced on me; no matter which way I turned there were such pressures . . . everyone else wanted ... no one else understood ...”

Brian’s eyes were wild. “Oh, I understood once, all right! It nearly cost me my sanity, understanding you!

But I finally put that aside and convinced myself that I had been wrong about you, that you were as fine as our father believed you to be, and that together we could achieve something great.

“Now you want to deny your kingship ... Is that what you’re telling me?”

“I hate it!” Mahon cried. “I hate all of it! Ordering men to

their deaths, seeing them turn into ravening beasts, facing the widows afterward . .. and the decisions, Brian, and the lives that hang on them ... I never wanted any part of this! I wanted to be tuath-king of Boruma, and perhaps the chief Dal Cais, if the elders thought me worthy. To plow the land, and see the calves born in the spring ...”

There were tears in Mahon’s eyes, and his hands were fumbling at the Cross hung round his neck as if there were nothing left to which he might cling but that. “I tried!” he said earnestly, but then his voice faltered. “I did my best. I did . ..”

The night wind shifted and screams came to them clearly, mingled with the roar of the flames and the crashing of timbers.

Limerick was a blazing torch, a death pyre as so many Irish settlements had been before it. From his safe place far out in the river Ivar must have seen it; Molloy and Donovan must have ridden the Norse boats in awed silence, their eyes on the blood-colored sunrise that was not a sunrise.

Carts streamed out of the ruined port, heavily laden with viking loot and Norse household goods. A long chain of prisoners marched out of the gates, dragging their feet and coughing from the acrid smoke, alternately guided and jeered at by their Irish captors. Mounted officers galloped back and forth, assuring themselves that their share of the treasure was safely claimed and out of the dying city.

The timbers of Ivar’s hall collapsed, and a great shower of glowing sparks flew up into a sky already paling with the first gray of dawn.

Still mounted, his sword in his hand, Brian of Boruma rode among the survivors, rounding up the scattered army and beginning to form it once more into some semblance of marching order. “You, Leti!” he called out, seeing a scarred, familiar face amid the smoked and grimed straggle of soldiers. “Attend me!”

“Yes, my lord.” The faithful captain rounded his shoulders and ducked his head, using his elbows with skill as he plowed against the force of the crowd streaming along the Tipperary road.

“Did my brother pass this way?” Brian yelled at him.

“King Mahon? I don’t know, my lord—I haven’t seen him. Has he already gone?”

Brian nodded and reined his tired horse to a halt. Leti came to stand at the animal’s shoulder, a weary warrior with a bloodstained sword thrust through his belt, his sturdy body half naked where the tunic had been ripped and torn during the long day. A flash of square white teeth gleamed through an old wound in his cheek, reminder of the day he had stepped between Brian and a Northman’s knife.

“My brother and his aides struck camp some time before dawn,” Brian told him. “We had been discussing the disposition of prisoners when a large band of Norsemen came out of hiding in the reeds at the water’s edge, upstream of the city. I went to join battle, and when I got back my brother was . gone, leaving no word for me. I was only told that he had headed back to Cashel before first light, and no one knew what he wanted done with the prisoners.”

“Ah,” said Leti. “Well, that’s a problem, isn’t it? I can hardly think he wanted us to take them all the way back across the Suir; what would we do with them?”

“What will we do with them here?” Brian asked, not expecting an answer. “Is that Cahal over there?”

“I think so, my lord.”

“Perhaps he and the other chieftains would like to take some of this lot; there are sturdy bodies here, capable of hard work, and it would do the Northmen good to learn what life is like for slaves.

“Oh, and Leti .. . my spear carrier was killed last night.

Will you send me one to replace him, someone totally trustworthy?”

Leti nodded. “I know what you ask of a man. I have a fellow from above Ennis, one Padraic by name, devoted to you and very skillful with a spear, though he is a little more than a lad. lie has been my right arm for a year, and I give him to you gladly.”

Brian gathered the tribal kings in a flower-blanketed meadow to discuss the problem of the prisoners.

“Of course we will defer to King Mahon’s wishes in the matter,” Lonergan of the Acs Ella said formally.

Brian replied, “That’s the trouble. My brother has gone back to Cashel and left no orders about them, so far as I can learn. We have a large number of prisoners here, and they must be dealt with immediately, before we go back to our separate kingdoms.”

Brian was as red-eyed and begrimed as the rest, but his voice still rang with the clear tones of authority, and the others stood respectfully around him, willing now to put all decisions into his hands. At Brian’s feet was a cluster of little flowers, the exact violet shade of Deirdre’s eyes. He stared thoughtfully at them for a moment (“. . . Kill the Northman! Kill! Kill! Kill! . . .”).

Brian raised his head. “Last night in Limerick, I think we all saw the wishes of the people in this matter.

The soldiers of Munster wanted to kill and kill until there was no Northman left alive to destroy our homes or rob us of our heritage.

“Only those we took prisoner are still living, and I doubt there’s a man who fought yesterday at Sulcoit who would like to see a strong Northman, capable of murder, set free today.”

There were nods of agreement and one clenched fist was

raised in the air.

Brian swept his gaze over the assembled faces, then asked, “Is Ardan the Slinger among you? I don’t see him.”

“He was slain in the woods at Sulcoit, my lord,” called Kran. “No one saw him fall, but his body was found later, I heard.”

Core the Fifty Killer added, in a voice saddened by grief,

”He was struck down by an ax and dragged into the underbrush to die, where nobody could find him in time to save his life.”

Brian took a slow, deep breath. At the periphery of his vision another loved one walked away into the distance and was gone. He bowed his head in a brief prayer. When he looked up again his eyes were cold as winter frost; his voice had the warmth of a January sky.

“This is my order, then; I take full responsibility for it. Have all the prisoners brought to yonder hill, and I want every man who is fit for war killed, and the rest declared slaves and divided among you.”

The captured Norse were assembled on the hill known as Singland, and forced to kneel amidst the scent of flowers and the whisper of the gently waving grass. Bees hummed; blossoms opened to the sun.

Irish chieftains walked among the prisoners, occasionally claiming a strongly built wench or a young lad who might do for a house slave. Boys past the age of puberty, no matter how healthy or powerfully built, were never considered.

There were no small children among the prisoners. The night’s slaughter, undirected as it had seemed, had had a devastating effect on the next generation of limerick. With one accord, the Irish had killed every child they found, as if answering a cry from the graves of thousands of their murdered children.

When the slaves had been set aside and each lot quarreled over and claimed, a detachment of swordsmen came up the hill. Encircled by spearpoints the Northmen waited, their eyes glaring, their throats screaming defiance as death advanced upon them.

“The king will ask if we showed them mercy . ..” one of the officers remarked to Brian.

“I will show them mercy,” came the thin-lipped reply. “I will let them all die on the sword, so they can go to their pagan heaven.”

The bright day turned gray and a roil of clouds moved in from the west. A Northman, looking up as the swords closed

in on him, thought he saw the Valkyries waiting in the sky on their rearing warhorses, their breastplates gleaming, their spears raised in a victory salute. Then the red pain tore through him, and he crumpled forward.

When it was over and the human wreckage lay quiet on Singland hill, Brian looked toward Limerick once more. A few wisps of greasy smoke still coiled toward the lowering sky.

The young spear carrier Leti had sent to him had taken his place at the shoulder of Brian’s house. A rawboned lad with a deeply freckled face and a permanently quizzical expression, he bowed low in awed salute as the Dalcassian hero strode toward him.

“You are Padraic?” Brian asked.

“I am, my lord. And I am deeply honored ...”

“Yes, thank you,” Brian interrupted briskly. “If you are to serve me there are times I will need you to be my aide, as well as my spearman, and this is one of those times. We will be pulling out in a few minutes, but first I have something to show you, something secret for your eyes only. Come with me, Padraic ...”