Pride of Lions (23 page)

"I've never been so insulted!" she cried.

"Somehow I doubt that," murmured Fergal behind his hand to Ronan.

The night grew later; darker. Glimmers of light from bronze lamps filled with shark oil from Blacksod Bay shone through the cracks in the door, but no one emerged from the chamber where the sick woman lay. Once or twice Donough knocked on the door and called out, but the only response he received was a demand that he go away.

"Why don't you keep a physician here?"

he demanded of Conor.

"I don't have enough rank to entitle me to a personal physician. But my women know herbs and potions, they'll take good care of her. Stop pacing back and forth, will you? You're wearing a groove in the courtyard."

Shortly before dawn, Conor's wife came out. Her face was drawn with fatigue. "I'm sorry," she murmured to Donough.

"Sorry? Sorry for what?"

"They're both dead, there was nothing we could do."

He felt suspended in space. "Both?" The word had no meaning.

She put a hand on his arm. "Your wife and child.

Neassa burnt up with fever and slipped a tiny dead boy, then died shortly after. It was God's will."

Donough felt no earth beneath his feet, no air in his lungs.

In that moment Neassa became precious to him.

Her miscarried infant was equally precious.

A boy; a son! A child Donough had thought of only as an abstraction, another reason for building the fort, suddenly became a flesh-and-blood person.

And dead.

My child, he thought, the reality sinking in.

My child!

A spasm of agony convulsed him.

He did not know if he wept for Neassa or the dead infant or all the possible futures so cruelly extinguished. He sobbed like a child, though he was seventeen years old and a man.

Then two arms enfolded him and a hand at the back of his neck pressed his face into someone's shoulder.

Gormlaith held Donough locked in her arms while he wept, her eyes daring anyone else to try to comfort him.

When a messenger came to announce the fort on the peaty stream was almost finished, Donough showed no interest. "You can move down there now if you want," he told his mother with an air of indifference.

"I? Live by myself in the wilderness?"

"You can have servants."

She laughed harshly.

"What are you going to do?" people kept asking him, but he did not know. It was easiest to do nothing.

The fever that had claimed Neassa did not kill anyone else, though several in Conor's fort sickened for a time until the lord of Corcomrua sent for help to purify his stronghold.

"A priest could bless the place," he explained to Donough, "but the spirits that inhabit the Burren are older than Christianity. We need someone who knows how to placate them, so I'm sending runners for a druid."

Donough's eyes brightened for the first time in days.

Then he was angry with himself for hoping it might be Padraic's daughter who responded to the summons.

At night he lay on the bed he had shared with Neassa and endured the corroding pangs of guilt for the first time in his young life. He gnawed on his knuckles and writhed, sleepless, as he imagined the things he might have done differently; actions that could have led to a happier outcome.

If I had known she would die ... if ...

if ...

A druid arrived in due course, leading an ass piled high with sticks of ashwood and bags of herbs. He was a stooped graybeard with a feral face; no one could be less like Padraic's daughter. He built fires throughout the cashel, creating clouds of thick smoke scented with spratling poppy, borage, and trefoil. The smoke was driven into chamber and outbuilding by means of flapping blankets, while the druid chanted unintelligibly in a high, nasal voice; a song for elder gods.

When the old man had performed this ritual for three consecutive nights at the dark of the moon, he packed what remained of his wood and herbs and sat down to enjoy a feast prepared by Conor's women.

"Your home is safe now," he assured them.

"Have you any ale to wash down this meat? It seems a little tough and my teeth are not what they were. I would not mind a few more stewed apples, while you're about it. And some honeycomb, perhaps, with a nice bit of oatcake?"

When he had gone, Conor called in Christian priests to bless his stronghold.

They wrinkled their noses at the smell of herb-scented smoke but wisely refrained from commenting. They were men of the Burren.

I rode south one more time to the fort in the ivy-girt valley. With Neassa and the child dead it was hard to imagine myself living there, but I needed to have another look at the place. Perhaps then I could make some decisions about what to do next.

Ronan and a small armed guard accompanied me, but I insisted they wait some distance from the fort.

I wanted to be alone within the walls.

The men who had built the fort were gone. The stronghold was completed, lacking only furnishing and provisioning. Oak gates yawned ajar, waiting.

Waiting for what? I wondered as I spancelled my horse and turned it loose to graze. The animal was used to the soft leather hobbles and knew exactly how long a step it could take as it drifted off across the meadow, sampling various grasses.

I just stood and watched it for a time, forestalling the moment. Then turned and walked slowly through the gateway.

There should have been a welcoming ceremony with a symbolic burial beneath the lintel. Harp and pipe and timpan playing; people singing. The first fire kindled on the hearth, a whole ox roasting on the spit. Vats of ale and buttermilk. Men roistering, women laughing.

Instead there was ... nothing.

In front of the round stone house I would have shared with Neassa, I cocked my head to listen.

Soft wind whispered across Thomond. In the meadow a cuckoo reiterated its two-syllable announcement of self. The air was heavy with summer; high summer, drowsy and warm.

Cresses were green in the stream. Insects rustled through the ivy on the bank.

Within the fort, however, there was only stillness and silence. No life but my own.

Something seemed to stir at the edge of my vision; when I turned to look nothing was there.

Can a place that's never been lived in be haunted? The ghosts of a future that will not happen, perhaps.

Steeling myself, I peered inside the unoccupied house. My imagination had long since furnished the chamber with a carved and painted bed box, iron firedogs at the hearth, chests for clothing, a woman's loom, cauldrons and vats and pots, herbs suspended from the rafters, drying.

But when my eyes adjusted to the dimness they saw only empty shadows.

Something ached at the bottom of my throat.

Turning away, I wandered around the stronghold.

Mine was a desultory examination; the enthusiasm I once felt was gone.

I had not re-created Kincora after all. The fort was too small and too ordinary and its very newness offended me, the skinned surfaces of the stone, the wounded wood still bleeding from axe and adze.

As if to add to my pain, everywhere I looked found sloppy workmanship, not good enough for Brian Boru but obviously considered good enough for Donough Mac Brian. The Celtic carvings on pillar and post looked as if they had been hacked out of the wood by a malevolent child. Iron hinges that should have gleamed with grease were raw and dull, already dappled with rust.

Nothing was as I had dreamed.

Suddenly I froze.

This time I was certain I saw something out of the corner of my eye.

I spun around.

Shifting shadows on a stone wall briefly produced the effect of a full skirt brisking around a corner.

A trick of light made an arm seem to beckon from an open doorway.

My heart thudded. "Are you here?" I cried as I ran forward, hope and guilt struggling for supremacy.

Guilt won. My steps slowed.

If I had been with Neassa and the unborn child instead of here ...

If I had not been lured by the vision of another woman and wanted to build my fort close to her ...

Druids ... Accursed ... Cathal is right about them ...

I stopped. Turned around, prepared to make my way back to the gate.

Then I heard a sound like a light foot pattering over beaten earth and my heart leaped again.

Someone was humming at the very edge of audibility.

Instinctively my hand dropped to my sword hilt.

But the voice was light and soft; a woman's.

The wife of one of the local laborers, I tried to tell myself, curious to see what her husband built.

But I did not believe it.

Without bothering to summon Ronan and his men, I undertook a thorough search of the fort.

While the sun moved through the sky I moved from chamber to outbuilding and back again, crossing and recrossing my tracks, peering into storerooms, clambering onto walls to see what was on the other side. I had the profound conviction that the fort contained another being who was always just a few steps ahead of me. Or a few steps behind.

Several times I whirled around to find only my shadow following me.

But I was not alone. Of that I was certain. And I wanted desperately to find her.

Until Neassa's death I had

been a boy; now I was a man. Being a man was terribly lonely.

"Where are you?"

Only echoes answered.

"Who are you?"

The echoes mocked me.

At last, despairing, I stood in the center of the stronghold I had built and recalled the words of the poet Mac Liag: "The possession of a palace will not make you happy."

The cold, sharp air of Alba did not smell like home, even after all these years. If she closed her eyes, Blanaid could still summon Ireland: lush grassy meadows fringed by fragrant, magical hawthorn; wet ferns glowing as if with inner light; holly guarding the approaches to primeval forests of oak and ash that rang in all seasons with birdsong. Her senses were starved for that wanton luxuriance.

On a day like this when the wind was blowing from the southwest, it was easy to surrender to melancholy.

The Welsh princes who sometimes visited her husband's court had a word, hiraeth, that meant a deep yearning, and another word, cynefin, that referred to one's own place, one's native habitat. Blanaid understood both words, though she had learned little Welsh.

She did not speak of her feelings to Malcolm, of course. He had no patience with women's moods, the ephemera of emotion. His interests and energies were totally involved with being King of Alba, a title he had held since 1005.

King. Blanaid rolled the word on her tongue. Ri, in Gaelic; from the Latin, Rix.

Brian Boru's daughter, she had been educated as befitted her station.

"Ard Ri," she whispered to herself. "High King."

That would always and only mean Brian Boru to her. How strange to think that Malachi Mor had reclaimed the title, with no formality, but as his right. Stranger still that no one had bothered to oppose him.

"Who could?" Malcolm had commented when they learned the previous year of Malachi's accession. "Who else has the stature?

Malachi has tradition behind him, being a prince of the Ui Neill, and he certainly knows the obligations of the office."

"He should by now," Blanaid had remarked bitterly. "He learned them by observing my father."

"I meant from his own experience. Before Brian."

Before Brian. Sometimes Blanaid felt that everything in life was divided in two parts, before Brian and after.

If she felt that way, how much more intensely must they feel it in Ireland?

Her mind far away across the sea, she paced slowly along the footpath leading down to the pond where she bathed in warm weather. The hardy Scots braved the water even in the dead of winter, but she came from a gentler land. She would not bathe this evening in late summer. There was already a hint of autumn in the air, a smell of woodsmoke. The wise woman predicted the winter of 1016 would be bitterly cold.

Blanaid shivered and drew her cloak more tightly around her body.

Behind her rose the stony mass of Malcolm's royal seat, looking almost like a natural outcropping of rock. A hill-fort had stood on the site since ancient times, he once told her; built and destroyed and rebuilt and expanded in that curious death and rebirth common to such places.

From what stronghold does Malachi Mor rule Ireland now? Blanaid wondered. Not Tara, surely. Tara had not been used as a primary royal residence for centuries.

Newly inaugurated high kings occupied its decaying magnificence only as a symbol of possession, and soon left for sturdier, more comfortable abodes. Brian had ruled from Kincora, although he could have used Cashel, seat of the kingdom of Munster. Malachi probably held court in his family stronghold at Dun na Sciath--not as kingly a palace as Kincora, Blanaid thought smugly.

But as she knew, he was demonstrating his reestablished kingship in other ways. In January of 1015, together with his kinsman Flaherty, King of Aileach, Malachi had led a successful attack on Dublin. The two looted and burned Sitric's city in retaliation for the Easter rising against the Ard Ri, then turned southward and exacted revenge upon Leinster, taking many hostages. Gormlaith's brother Maelmordha had been prince of Leinster, had joined Sitric in the rebellion against Brian, had fought and died at Clontarf.

So Leinster must pay.

As part of his punishment of the eastern province, Malachi had--ill advisedly, Blanaid thought --bestowed kingship of Leinster on Donncuan, the son of one of Brian's slain officers.

"A gesture of reconciliation," Malcolm had remarked when they heard the news.

"Malachi's trying to mend his walls with the Dal Cais. He obviously has wit enough to realize he cannot retain the high kingship without the support of Munster."

The Leinstermen were predictably outraged at this arbitrary bestowal of their tribelands upon a Dalcassian prince. Defeated at Clontarf by the man they would always consider "that upstart from Munster," they were simmering, biding their time. They would rebel again; nothing was more certain.