Pride of Lions (33 page)

Gormlaith! The ultimate prize, in his chamber, beneath him!

Contrary to his expectations, Cathal Mac Maine did not die. He was convinced he had heard the ban shee wail for him, but days, weeks, months passed, and the worst fate that befell him was increasingly severe rheumatism during a long, wet winter.

His dreams were haunted by echoes. Usually they took the form of a ban shee's keening, but occasionally they contained an underlying, mocking laughter.

"Those pagans have cursed me!" he complained bitterly to Brother Declan. "They put the ague in my bones."

Though the scribe had heard Cathal complain of joint pain for years, he dare not contradict his abbot. Keeping his thoughts to himself, he dutifully updated the annals and transcribed Cathal's letters. Early in 1018 sympathy was expressed to the Abbot of Kildare, whose monastery had been struck by lightning, and to the Abbot of Kells, whose abbey was plundered by Sitric Silkbeard and the Danes of Dublin. Cathal viewed both disasters in the same light.

For a letter to Malachi Mor, Cathal dictated, "We share your grief in this time of your trouble. The death of two of your sons, Ardgal and Ardchu, is a great loss. Sad it is for them that they were slain by the treacherous tribe of the Cenel Eoghain, rising against your authority. They shall be remembered in our prayers at Kill Dalua for a seven-night."

Privately, Declan thought a seven-night was a bit mean; the sons of the Ard Ri surely deserved a longer period of mourning. But everyone knew that during the reign of a good Ard Ri grain overflowed the storehouses and every cow had twins, while a bad Ard Ri inevitably brought on an era of calamities.

Disasters were indeed occurring, but Cathal was increasingly attributing them to the lingering paganism in Ireland, and more specifically to the druids themselves.

In this he was in the minority, even among his fellow clerics, as Declan well knew.

Since the coming of Christianity to Ireland in the fifth century, a degree of tacit coexistence had marked the relationship of the Church with druidry.

Christian missionaries almost from the beginning had realized that the druids had smoothed their path for them by teaching that the soul was immortal. Having this central belief in common helped make the conversion of Ireland bloodless. The New Faith was not so radically different as to be unacceptable to druids; in many instances, it was just a matter of changing the names of festival days, or grafting one superstition onto another.

Druids were members of the filidh, the intellectual class of Irish society which included teachers, sacrificers, healers, brehons, historians, philosophers, and poets. Some of these functions the Church appropriated unto itself, but others were still very much the realm of the druid. Christianity had as yet made no concerted effort to supplant them.

Over the centuries the balance of power had shifted as members of the filidh accepted the New Faith. They did not abandon their sacral reverence for the land, however; they merely enlarged their view of godhood, recognizing the god of the Christians as immanent in his creations. Such innocent pantheism added a new dimension to the Church, giving it a uniquely Celtic flavor. In lonely ascetic cells, Irish monks composed poems celebrating the beauties of nature and thus affirming spiritual kinship with the pagans.

But there were still those in the vast dark forests who practiced the Old Faith undiluted by Christianity.

Irish druids did not engage in human sacrifice as their continental counterparts had done, but they manipulated the environment through techniques the Church called sorcery. They healed the sick, cursed the wrongdoer, instructed the young--aside from the sons of princes who were educated in the great monastic schools--and continued to devote themselves to the natural sciences as they had done for a thousand years.

Such practices were tolerated if not condoned.

In the soft mists of Ireland old gods and new had intermingled, and the bitter plant of intolerance had yet to take root.

Christian chapels were sometimes ornamented with the carved, stylized heads of men and animals, a purely pagan embellishment not intended to represent saints. Brehon Law still governed such customs as marriage, allowing polygamy and divorce and denying the concept of illegitimacy, because every union that could result in a child was considered a form of marriage.

This enduring pagan influence was increasingly resented as the Church sought to expand its power, however, and Cathal Mac Maine was more resentful than most. He saw the druids as being in direct competition with the Church, and their intention as the destruction of Christianity.

"My confrontation with Torccan Mac Padraic was all the proof I need," he confided to Brother Declan. "The man demonstrated a reasoning ability no enlightened pagan could possess. It is the work of Lucifer."

Torccan's intelligence was not all that upset the abbot, however. Padraic's children radiated an inner serenity that scandalized Cathal. Such a gift should belong only to Christ's annointed.

To make matters worse, they took a heathenish pleasure in being alive.

"This temporal existence is a burden and a punishment, an ordeal to be endured so we may earn an eternity in the company of Christ," the abbot frequently lectured his monks. The druidic joy in life was a refutation of his personal philosophy.

"We are taught that unquestioning obedience to the Church," Cathal sternly reminded Declan, "is the only path to true happiness. How then can we tolerate the dangerous example the druids set?"

He began to write letters to the hierarchy expressing his fear and loathing and urging that something be done, once and for all, to destroy druidry. But the bishops he addressed were, like himself, Irish. Their Christianity, no matter how ardent, overlaid a respect for ancient wisdom bred deep in their bones. They were not prepared to attack the druids overtly.

"Pray for their souls," Cathal was advised,

"that they may find the path of redemption."

Sworn to obedience, he tried. He prayed long and hard on the cold stone flags of the chapel and arose with painfully stiffened knees. These he offered as a sacrifice to God, but his heart was not softened. Having recognized the menace, he saw it everywhere. Ireland abounded in druidic seductions.

Cathal loved the Church with all the passion of a man who has felt only one passion in his life. His was a fierce, proprietary devotion.

were it possible for him to convert Padraic's children he would have done so, but instead, as in a vision, he saw himself singlehandedly defending Christianity against them.

The warrior in him thrilled. The Church Triumphant.

Gormlaith awake; a layered process beginning with a foggy awareness of self, then of a hard surface beneath her, lastly of a throbbing head. She was lying on the floor. Someone had wrapped a woolen robe around her and jammed the ends under her body. When she moved she felt another sort of throbbing lower down, a sweet, familiar soreness in her female parts.

Her eyes opened the merest slit. An arm's length from her face lay a tumble of chess pieces.

Brian's chess pieces.

She stared at them blankly for a moment--then saw, in clear and perfect memory, a large hand hover over the pawns. A hand with red-gold hair on the back.

Her body turned to ice; to fire.

He was alive!

Of course he was alive. How could she have been so foolish as to think otherwise? The man had not been born who could kill Brian Boru!

He was alive and the terrible past was relegated to nightmare.

All my sins are forgiven me, Gormlaith thought gratefully. She dragged herself to her knees and signed the Cross on her breast.

Soon he will come through the door, she told herself, and we will be together again as we were in the beginning, or as we should have been, if I had been content to love him as a woman loves a man, and not compete with him. This time things will be different.

She glanced down at her hands. In the dim light they looked young and smooth. When she raised her fingers to her throat and stroked the skin, it felt firm to her touch.

The years have been rolled back, she thought in amazement. I am a girl again, and he will be the only man I ever know. I shall make him happy, oh, I shall make him so very happy!

Gormlaith gazed around the chamber, looking for a basin in which to wash her face, or a comb for her tangled hair. He must never see her so rumpled. She must be beautiful for him; beautiful and young. As he would be beautiful and young, so tall, so strong, blazing, and crackling with that ferocious, irresistible energy that had won Ireland.

No. If he was young, his great victories were still ahead of him. Kincora was not yet built.

"So where am I?" Gormlaith asked of the stone walls.

They kept silent.

She got slowly to her feet. Sleeping on the stone floor had left her very stiff, but she ignored the pain. It was nothing to someone so young. A torn gown she did not recognize lay on the floor, but she did not pick it up. Let him return--and find her naked, and they would ...

There were footsteps in the passage. Her heart was pounding so hard she could barely breathe. As the door opened a cold draught blew across the floor and she shivered, but the smile she put on for him was radiant.

"Brian." Her lips shaped his name silently. Like a prayer.

He stood in the doorway, a big man, filling the space. Suddenly she was as shy as a virgin. She stood waiting for him to take her in his arms, and as he came toward her, she saw with perfect clarity the noble forehead, the long, straight nose, the stark cheekbones. The luminous gray eyes in their deeply carved sockets.

He was alive.

Gormlaith could not wait any longer, but hurled herself into his arms.

A moment later her scream rang wildly through the corridors of Glamis.

In the days that followed, Gormlaith's use of paints and dyes grew more lavish, accentuating her age, yet she took to wearing the simple gowns of an unmarried girl. She was by turns giddy, querulous, diffident, and demanding.

But the king continued to welcome her to his bed.

She had given him a fright on that first occasion, screaming like a madwoman when he returned to his chamber. Malcolm had hastily clamped his arms around her and put one hand over her mouth to muffle her screams. Then, when she was quiet, he let his hand slide down her body, enjoying her heaving breasts.

"I thought you were Brian," she murmured.

"You were groggy and half-awake, it was just a dream," he insisted.

She almost believed him.

But not quite.

She closed her eyes and let him fondle her, however, and in the dark behind her eyelids the alchemy of desire changed one king into another.

"Brian," Gormlaith whispered, parting her thighs for him.

Malcolm had smiled grimly to himself. So that was the game she preferred to play, was it? Well, he was able for her--particularly since he was the beneficiary of her passion.

The next night he again invited her to his chamber and kept the room in darkness, and when she called him Brian he did not contradict her.

If she had been good before, she then became extraordinary.

Thereafter Malcolm slept with her as often as the desire took him, which was often indeed. The fires of his youth flamed again, an unexpected spring interrupting the onset of winter.

And in the dark, afterward, he found himself talking with her as he had never talked with any of his other women.

Not a passive confidante like Blanaid, Gormlaith demonstrated an uncanny understanding of the male world of politics and power. She was a font of stratagems. Privately, his courtiers grumbled that the king's bedchamber became his council chamber when the Princess of Leinster arrived.

The winter Donough spent at the court of Malcolm the Second was the coldest of his life. But as fire tempers a sword blade, harsh Alba tempered him. A young man had arrived at Glamis; a man full-grown would leave it.

During the gray months, Malcolm kept the Irish prince close by his side. Donough answered the questions he asked, but more frequently was content to listen. The older man was wily and experienced and did not seem to mind passing on his wisdom.

But on an evening when he had drunk too much Danish ale at a banquet to entertain a chieftain from Strathclyde, Donough remarked to Cumara, "Malcolm is not easy company.

My mother gets along with him, but I always feel as if he's watching me over the edge of a shield."

"Does it bother you, knowing they sleep together?"

the poet's son asked bluntly. He too had drunk an excess of ale.

Donough hesitated before answering. "At first it did. It seemed a betrayal of my father. Then I reminded myself that he had ended their marriage, and if she married one man or slept with a thousand it no longer had anything to do with him. Now I am glad that she has found some pleasure in life again."

"Do you really mean that?"

Donough stiffened. "I do of course."

"You answered just a bit too quickly."

"Nonsense, Cumara, you're imagining things."

Yet at night, when he lay in his bed knowing full well Gormlaith had gone to Malcolm's chamber, Donough tossed and turned. His fevered imagination presented him with a hundred different images of his mother in the arms of the swarthy Scot.

Late one night he could bear it no longer.

He rose, threw on a fur-lined brat, and went out into the passageway. He had no destination in mind other than escape from his thoughts, but he had gone only a short distance when he met his sister.

In the light from a torch still burning on the passage wall Donough could see that his sister's face was drawn, her eyes red-rimmed.

"Is anything wrong?" he asked. He felt a sudden urge to take her in his arms and comfort her, but she had done nothing so far to encourage such an intimacy.

Blanaid lifted her chin. "Of course not, I merely wanted a breath of air."

"I do myself. Shall I go with you?"

When she nodded assent they continued along the passage together, then made their way single-file down a narrow stone staircase and out into the great hall. Humans and hounds slept together on the rush-strewn floor, keeping one another warm.