Lion of Ireland (39 page)

Within view of the pass but a safe distance from it, Molloy of Desmond waited with a band of his followers and a company of armed men. He saw the tiny figures of the two groups merge; raising one hand, he fingered the massive ruby that hung around his neck on a chain of silver. “Enough of silver,” he said to the man nearest him. “I was born for gold.”

Donovan’s men, their mission accomplished, stepped back and left Mahon alone to meet his escort. He stood straight, with only a fleeting thought that this might be the last time he would greet anyone as the king of Munster. A sunbeam broke through the overcast and haloed his hair. Ignoring the soldiers advancing upon him, he smiled a greeting at the little band of clergymen who walked with them.

And then he looked at the soldiers, who were not pausing to salute him. He saw their intent in their faces, and he knew. Knowing, he was aware that he wanted to meet death with courage, to die as a Christian martyr with Christ’s holy name on his lips. He saw the death blow coming at him and realized, with a soldier’s knowledge, that it would cleave his torso and his gushing blood would soak the Bible he carried, obliterating God’s sacred word.

He flung the book wildly from him, trying to hurl it into the safe haven of a thornbush, but his aim was bad and he hit one of the priests square on the chest. The startled man, only just becoming aware that murder was about to be done in his presence, caught the Bible by reflex and stared open mouthed at Mahon., The upraised sword sliced toward him. Mahon lifted his chin to meet the coming darkness—and at the last moment something within him gave way without his permission, and he dodged sideways and tried to run.

Molloy saw the downward flash of the sword in the sun. It was done, then. He wanted to cheer. He looked around and called for his horse, and as he did so a puzzled voice asked at his elbow, “What is it you want me to do?”

An elderly priest, one of the number he had summoned to give this occasion its spurious sanctity, stood beside him looking puzzled. He had stayed behind when his fellows went to meet the Dalcassian, and now he was unaware what had happened and was peering at the distant scene in bewilderment.

Molloy swung onto his horse’s back. “I’ll tell you what you can do,” he said. “Cure yonder man if he should come to

you!” Laughing, he drummed his heels into the horse’s ribs and galloped away.

The other priests came running back over the broken ground, their faces ashen with shock and horror.

“Murder! Murder!” they cried, crowding around the old one, repeating themselves endlessly in their disbelief. “We have been used as dupes, as bait! We have been tricked into mocking God! Instead of going to meet Mahon of Munster and seeing to his safety, we lured him to his death. He is killed, murdered, when he thought himself welcomed to the bosom of the Church!” A thrill of revulsion ran through them. Some fell to their knees to pray for the fallen king. Others went back, drawing strength from the company of one another, and approached the place where he lay, quite alone now, staring at the sky. They shut his eyes and covered him with their cloaks after they had administered the last kind offices of their calling.

“We must send word to his household, and to the bishop of Cork,” they told one another. “He was deceived even as we were; the princes of Desmond told him they were anxious for peace when all they really wanted was to get this good man in their grasp and kill him.”

One of the younger priests shook his head as he wiped his bloodstained hands on his clothes. “It will not go well with Prince Molloy for having done this evil thing.” He looked with distaste at the brown smear on the rough gray wool. “But who will punish him?” he asked.

There would be no shining rescue. They brought Mahon back to Cashel on a cart, his multicolored cloak of kingship spread over him. The priest who had caught his Bible accompanied him; he had wept as he laid the book atop the dead king’s chest. “I would have taken the blow myself, if I had known it was coming,” he told all who would listen. But it was too late.

The skies wept for Mahon. A tomb Was prepared for the murdered king in a drumming downpour that left clothes and spirits sodden. Fithir, who had buried a husband before, squeezed her plumpness into the same gown of mourning and felt a pang of guilt. “What kind of a woman am I, to have outlived two men?” she asked her maid.

“Fortunate,” was the succinct reply.

Mahon was to rest in hallowed ground at Cashel, a stone tomb shielding his bones, a stone cross above him. The somber celebrants of the funeral ritual arrived to pay him homage, fewer than had attended his coronation. The political wind had taken an unexpected shift; a man must keep his allegiances fluid and not be too conspicuous in his mourning.

Brian was a tall column of in held pain. It burned in the hollows of his gray eyes. From the moment they learned Mahon was dead, he had been the prisoner of an accumulation of guilts whose voices were louder than the keening of the mourners.

I sought his death, Brian’s inner voice accused him endlessly. I stood over him as he slept and planned to kill him. I justified it to myself as a necessity as surely as Molloy must have done. It was only by God’s grace that mine was not his assassin’s hand.

Once I wanted him dead. Wished for it. And now his lifeless body ties at Cashel, surrounded by candles.

Once I dreamed of the things I could accomplish if only I had his power. And now the kingship of Munster is vacant. But sweet Jesus, how can I believe that my brother’s murder is God’s way of answering my prayers? What kind of God is that?

He writhed and twisted inwardly, and no one saw.

I almost killed him once, that merciless voice reminded him. And perhaps, because of me and my ambition, another man has acted as my surrogate and completed that crime. I thought I had escaped the guilt of it, but now I never can. My brother is sacrificed to a dream that was not his. He had begun to find serenity within himself, the peace which this world would not grant. And he is gone, and I am left at war with myself.

What can I possibly do to make the life that is left me worth the price he paid?

Brian went out into the rain and stood alone at the edge of the area where the tomb was being prepared.

The workmen

saw him, a gaunt figure wrapped in a dark cloak, but they stayed out of his way and avoided his eyes.

Cahal came to him at last, braving the weather and glaring up at the skies as if his annoyance would lessen the downpour. He had to put his hand on Brian’s arm and squeeze hard before the prince would turn and look at him.

“We’re all worried, my lord!” he called above the incessant rain. “Desmond will be marching on us soon, I fear; there’s no doubt that he will claim the kingship now, and decisions must be made immediately.”

Brian looked at him from a far distance. It took a while before he recognized Cahal, and then another space of time before Cabal’s words made sense. They seemed to be a meaningless babble. Kingships.

Politics. More fighting. It took a tremendous effort of will to focus on those things, and keep his eyes away from the tomb being built for his brother. “Molloy will not profit from his crime,” Brian said at last in a dead voice.

“But what’s to be done? Now that he has shown himself to be strong he will find new allies and the Owenachts will rally behind him. And there’s Ivar . ..”

Brian turned away as if the subject held no interest for him. “We will talk of it later,” he said dully.

He was not to be left alone with his pain. There were too many questions and no answers, and, apologetically, the chieftains and officers sought him out, demanding that he put aside the indulgence of grief and give thought to the urgencies of the living. He spoke with them at last in the king’s council chamber, where the empty High Seat loomed as a stark reminder.

“What is to be done?” they all clamored to know.

The tuatha-kings, each with his own family and small community to care for; the princes who claimed the allegiance of many tuaths; the officers whose men were waiting in their tents and in the muddy fields—they crowded together like nervous horses about to bolt at a clap of thunder, and Brian smelled their fear in the room.

He still wore the clothes he had worn as he stood in the rain beside his brother’s unfinished tomb. They dripped into an icy puddle at his feet. “I have promised Cahal of Delvin More that the prince of Desmond will not make a triumph of King Mahon’s killing,” he told them. “The treacherous Molloy shall not rule Munster, giving away its riches to his Norse allies and destroying all we have built. Each year of my brother’s reign saw less warfare and more folk fairs, and that is the way it must continue in his memory.

The murderers will be punished and peace secured, and a new order raised in the land.”

“A new order?” they asked, surprised. “This outrage was committed because the old laws of succession encouraged it,” Brian said in an impassioned voice. “Kings have been chosen from alternate tribes in an effort to placate everyone, which in reality only sets one side against the other. The result is that a man like Molloy now thinks he has a perfect right to rule Munster just because it’s his turn. “But I tell you, the continuation of that policy will keep our land forever fragmented, the tribes at war with one another. The king should be the man best qualified to rule, a man blessed with strength and prepared by education.

We must have one royal family, one dynasty, one unity of vision and purpose. We must have the one strong bloodline capable of producing generations of able leaders. Tradition is not sacrosanct; a bad tradition must be set aside and a better one established.”

“But it isn’t done that way!” Aed exclaimed, scandalized. “It will be now,” Brian replied with determination.

In the damp meadows below the Rock of Cashel, the commonfolk gathered to pray for their dead king.

In small groups along the muddy road, in little clusters beneath the dripping trees, they kept their vigil.

Some carried lighted candles to cut through the gloom of the day, showing their respect with that small extravagance. Some carried crucifixes. Many had come a long distance, across countryside made safe during Mahon’s reign.

The nobles passed them by, riding up the road to the fortress.

At the very edge of the road, half hidden in a clump of young birch trees, a woman stood. A small brown woman, wrapped in a common bratt—she might almost have been a deer, watching there. A child crouched beside her. In their hands they held not crucifixes but mistletoe, and their lips moved in prayer like the Christians. But they were not Christians.

Fiona kept her watch throughout the long day, ignoring her tired feet and aching back, her eyes fixed on the road. He might come out; he might speak a word to his brother’s people. The child grew fretful and whined, and she took some dried meat from the bag slung at her waist and shared it with the little girl.

“Be still,” she admonished her. “You will be a woman in a very few years; you must learn patience. I promise you we will go home, when all is over.”

In the king’s hall at Cashel, his subjects assembled to say their last goodbyes. The funeral games had been played, the victors of each race and contest eulogized by Aed and given silver circlets according to the custom. The banquet tables were spread with food; the air was crowded with praises and reminiscences of the dead king. Harps and tympans were played without ceasing, even as the commonfolk below the Rock played their own bagpipes in memoriam.

It was the final day. The tomb was ready; the body would wait no longer. It lay on a trestle in the center of the hall, a quiet shape beneath a pallium of velvet. Upon the dead king’s chest were his Bible and the crown of Munster, a dull gold in the melancholy light.

All those who loved him were gathered for the leavetaking, the hour when Mahon would leave his hall for the last time, to be carried by a guard of honor to the damp tomb beneath the dripping rocks. In turn, they had each knelt before the bier, heads bowed, hearts full. It was not a day to be stingy with tears; as Aed reminded them. “The gift of tears is the mark of a noble soul.” Mahon’s subjects wept without restraint.

Last to come forward was Brian. When only Fithir remained at Mahon’s side, seated on the floor, her unbound hair streaming over her heaving bosom, her keening shrill in the hall—Brian entered the room.

The onlookers raised their eyes to him, and some gasped.

He was dressed in a single garment, an aged and ragged tunic belted at his waist with a worn leather strip. The cloth was stained with irregular dark blotches, so old that they might have been woven into the fabric. The briars of Thomond had torn that tunic, and Norse blood as well as Irish was on it.

He wore it as if it were ermine.

In one hand he carried his naked sword, in the other the little harp he sometimes played for Deirdre.

Brian knelt at the king’s feet and laid the sword there.

I am here, brother. You wanted me to suffer, and I am suffering. But I promise you, your death was not my desire. I am as hurt by the sight of destruction as you wished me to be, and a lifetime would not be enough for my atonement if I chose to spend it in sackcloth and ashes, blaming myself for this. But I will not. The time for blame is over.

I must go on.

He rose and turned to face outward, his back to the silent figure on the bier. He lifted the harp and ran his fingers gently, tentatively over the exquisite instrument. The other harpers fell silent, and Brian alone played the last music for Mahon, son of Cennedi.

He began with the Gentrai, the laughing, merry strains that evoked the boy his brother had once been.

The lilting tune brought a smile to the lips and an invitation to the feet, as if death were a thing with no power to still the joy of living.

The music drifted, changed, sank into the heartbreaking lament of the Goltrai, the keening for the dead. A thousand years of tears were in the voice of the harp, a liquid inconsolable grief as old as the loss of Eden. The music was wood-smoke and a doe’s eyes, the pain of a child’s grave, the emptiness of the winter sea. The cry of the banshee floated down the wind, and children clung to their mothers’ knees and shivered.