Strongbow (12 page)
Authors: Morgan Llywelyn
How good it felt to be on the winning side! ‘Chase O’Connor and take the high kingship away from him and give it to my father!’ I urged Richard.
‘No, Aoife,’ he said. ‘That would be reckless. We must make certain that the places we’ve already captured are firmly held.’
He said the same thing to Father, who didn’t like it any more than I did. Father could almost taste the high kingship.
Richard told him, ‘I intend to go back to Waterford for the winter and build earthworks and strongholds there. Then in the spring I’ll be in a strong position for more fighting.’
‘No!’ Father argued. ‘If we don’t pursue the High King now we’ll have lost a priceless opportunity!’
‘You want revenge,’ Richard said. ‘I want something more solid than that. I’ve risked everything to come here, I don’t want to lose it all now just to give you the pleasure of holding a knife to Rory O’Connor’s throat.’
‘Make him see my side, Aoife,’ Father pleaded with me.
I was torn between them. I understood how Father felt because I felt the same way myself. But this time … this time, I suspected Richard was right.
And he was my husband. At last I took his side. I had given my
word to God at our marriage.
When I told Father I wouldn’t argue his case with my husband he looked very sad. ‘Only bad things can come of a daughter’s failing to stand up for her father,’ he said. ‘But very well; I’ll do what must be done, myself.’ He put one hand to either side of my face and pulled me to his lips for a kiss. ‘God’s blessing on you, Aoife,’ he said. Then he left me with Richard.
We returned to Waterford, where Richard began the building of forts and strongholds. Messengers brought us news of Father almost every week, however, and Richard always shared it with me.
We learned that the High King had reminded my father of the treaty by which he had been allowed the freedom of Leinster, and demanded that he send away his hired warriors and give up warring.
Father proudly – and recklessly – replied that he would do no such thing. He went even further. He swore to keep fighting until he had claimed the monarchy of all Ireland.
Aflame with success, Father and his loyal Leinstermen set out across Meath. His true target, I knew, was his old enemy, O’Rourke of Brefni. Father thundered across the countryside, battering Clonard and burning Kells on his way. On reaching Brefni he took prisoners and cattle, but didn’t succeed in capturing Tiernan O’Rourke, who escaped.
O’Rourke fled to Rory O’Connor.
‘This is frightening news,’ I told Richard. ‘When Father made that treaty with the High King he was forced to give hostages of good conduct. My own brother, Conor, and Donal Mac Murrough Kavanaugh’s son were among them.
‘Father was so certain they’d be safe. The High King has never personally done harm to any of our family.’
‘Your brother Enna was blinded,’ Richard reminded me. He had begun learning all he could of events in Ireland. He seemed determined to become as Irish as any of us.
‘Enna was held by another tribe, not by the High King,’ I explained. ‘They were our enemies too, and allies of the High King. But Rory O’Connor had no control over what they did.’
‘Yet now you’re frightened for the hostages the High King holds?’
‘I am indeed,’ I said, ‘because Tiernan O’Rourke is with the High King. He hates Father so much, and he has the High King’s ear. He could persuade him to do… anything.’
He did. My worst fears came true.
According to Irish law, hostages must be kept in as much comfort as their hosts. Conor and Donal’s son and another lad, foster-kin of ours, had been well fed and well housed while living in the High King’s household in Connaught. Conor had even planned a marriage with the High King’s daughter.
Then my father trailed his coat in front of the High King and Tiernan O’Rourke, and old anger burst into new flame. O’Rourke must have argued long and hard to get him to do it, but at last the High King gave the order.
The three hostages were slain beside the Shannon river at Athlone, and their heads were sent to my father.
Even Strongbow was shocked. ‘What sort of people are you?’ he demanded of me.
‘Why don’t you ask what sort of person Tiernan O’Rourke is? He’s to blame for this, I know it! He spent years and years trying to get even with my father, and now he’s done it. He’s a monster, oh, he’s a monster!’ I cried, sobbing.
Broken by the news, Father was returning to Ferns. I had to be with him. I didn’t ask Richard for permission. I simply told him I was going. I would meet Father and join him in his grief.
My husband ordered a company of his warriors to go with me, and we set off through winter-bleak countryside for the palace that had once been my home.
When I saw Father I hardly knew him. Donal was trying to be
brave about his loss, but Father was destroyed. His hair had gone almost white, and he had the face of a man of ninety. He shuffled when he walked, and moved his lips even when he wasn’t talking. It broke my heart to see him.
I couldn’t find it in me to blame him for the recklessness and ambition that had brought this disaster upon us. He was suffering enough already.
Mor was still blaming everything on Dervorgilla. She spoke of nothing else. My mother, who now had a dead son and a blind one, wouldn’t speak at all. She went to her bed and never said another word to my father as long as she lived.
Only a few weeks before, Father had been swelled with victory and full of life. Now anyone could see he was dying. His years had caught up with him all at once.
I walked with him through the grounds of Ferns and tried to talk of pleasant things, but he paid no attention to me.
‘How grand everything looks now, Father,’ I said as cheerfully as I knew how. ‘You’ve made Ferns more beautiful than ever.’
He didn’t look at me. He mumbled something, but I couldn’t make out any words.
‘Will you build some more?’ I asked, trying to get him to talk.
He shrugged. He stared off into space.
What could I say to him? How could I comfort him? I couldn’t even comfort myself. Tears began leaking down my cheeks.
Father stopped, turned to me, looked at me dimly, and said, ‘My merry Aoife. Why don’t you laugh any more?’
Then he laughed, an awful cracked sound that chilled me to my soul. He laughed and the laughter broke into a thousand pieces and became great deep sobs I couldn’t bear to hear.
I fled back to Richard. I couldn’t stand the sight of Ferns.
I spent the bleak months of winter helping my husband fortify his new holdings. He stayed in contact with my uncle, the Archbishop of
Dublin, and there was talk between them of building a new cathedral.
‘God will bless us in Ireland if we do this,’ Richard told me.
But I recalled the churches and monasteries Father had built, and wasn’t so sure. ‘God cannot be bought,’ I told Richard.
Then a message came to us from England. Word had reached King Henry of my husband’s successes in Ireland. In fact, he had been told that Strongbow was now master of Leinster and other territories.
To the English king, it must have sounded as if my husband was grabbing everything he could. Henry’s response was swift. He immediately sent out a notice that no more ships should leave England for Ireland, and that all his subjects now in Ireland should return to England before Easter, on pain of losing all they possessed and being banished forever.
A messenger read this notice aloud to my husband, in the English tongue. I saw Richard’s eyes go cold. He told me what the king was demanding.
‘Will you go back?’ I asked. ‘You have a castle there. And kin.’
My husband didn’t answer. Instead he walked to the arrowslit of the new stronghold we were building in a place called Kilkenny, and gazed out across the land. ‘I have a son and daughter there,’ he said. ‘But I’ve already sent back enough riches from Ireland to provide for them.’
‘Don’t you worry about them?’ I wanted to know. ‘My father always worried about his children. Don’t you at least long to see yours again?’
‘We were never very close,’ he said sadly. ‘I dare say they’re not eager to see me.’
It was the first time he had spoken to me of his other family. I hadn’t asked about them. I didn’t want to think about them. I wanted Richard to be just mine.
But now the ice was broken. ‘What was your first wife like?’ I asked.
He smiled with one side of his mouth only. ‘Nothing like you, Aoife. I didn’t know what it meant to be happy until I came to Ireland.’ He put one hand on my shoulder, so very gently. If only the people who called him Strongbow could have seen him in that moment!
‘All the riches I want are here,’ he said.
Richard had a scribe write his reply to the English king: ‘My Lord, it was with your licence, as I understood, that I came to Ireland for the purpose of helping Dermot Mac Murrough recover his kingdom. Whatever lands I have had the good fortune to acquire in this country, either from Dermot or any other person, I owe to your gracious favour and I shall hold them at your disposal.’
Richard had the letter read to him several times, until he was happy with the wording. Then he ordered Raymond le Gros to carry it personally to King Henry.
‘What will happen now?’ I asked my husband.
‘I don’t know,’ he said.
The Archbishop of Dublin sent word to me that a Synod of the clergy had been held at Armagh. The topic was the invasion by myself and the other Anglo-Normans. The clergy decided that we were the divine vengeance sent by God to punish the Irish for their sins.
I had never thought of myself as an instrument of God. Nor had I any desire to punish the Irish. The longer I lived among them, the more I liked them. Their songs and their food and their customs all appealed to me. I felt more at home in Ireland among the Irish than I had ever done in Pembrokeshire, though I couldn’t say why.
Perhaps it was because of Aoife.
Aoife was very worried about her father, and for her sake I worried also. I had a foothold in Ireland now, I could survive without Dermot Mac Murrough, but when we heard that he was dying I was almost as upset as my wife.
We galloped to Ferns on our fastest horses. We found his entire family – all who survived – gathered there, including his son-in-law, Donal O’Brien, who was King of Thomond now.
As we crossed the courtyard I could hear people whispering already. ‘Who will be King of Leinster when Dermot is dead?’ they were asking each other behind their hands.
The question seemed to hang in the air. I felt a knot gather in my
belly.
I had tried to learn as much as I could about Irish law. As Aoife had told me, Dermot could not make me a king, and neither could my marriage to his daughter. Yet if Norman feudal law prevailed in Ireland, I would be the new King of Leinster.
I should be. That was what Dermot had wanted, had promised me. He had controlled southeastern Ireland for forty-six years.
It was my turn now.
When we gathered around the dying man’s bed, I looked at the other faces. His brother Murrough. His son Donal Mac Murrough Kavanaugh. Murtough, Murrough’s son. Three strong men, each wanting to be king. One would be elected. Elected!
It was a mad way to choose a leader, I thought. Of all the Irish customs, this was one that must go.
The man who lay on the bed, his breath barely lifting his chest, was only sixty-one years old but he looked much older. As I bent over him he opened his eyes.
‘Strongbow? Is that you?’
I leaned closer so his dimming sight would know me. The other three men frowned. I knew then that they didn’t want me any closer to Dermot.
‘I’m here,’ I told the dying king. I leaned even closer, so no one else could hear when I said, ‘I’ve come to remind you of your promise.’
Weak though he was, he understood. Dermot’s brain never stopped working. ‘The kingship,’ he said hoarsely.
‘The kingship,’ I agreed. ‘The time has come for the transfer of power. Tell these men who stand by your bed that I’m to be the next King of Leinster.’
Dermot tried to draw a deep breath, and coughed. Donal Mac Murrough Kavanaugh reached out and caught my arm.
‘Leave him alone,’ he said warningly.
I lost my temper. ‘I brought this man victory!’ I roared. ‘I have a right to be here, and to ask a reward of him!’
Dermot found enough breath to speak then. ‘Victory,’ he said in a hollow voice, as if he didn’t know what the word meant. ‘Victory? You’re wrong, Strongbow. My life has been … a disaster from beginning to end.’
He closed his eyes, and died on the next breath.
I presume his soul went to God. How his Maker judged him, I can’t say. But he was gone, and I was no nearer to being King of Leinster than I was the day I first set foot in Ireland.
Aoife’s grief was terrible to see. The other women were all crying, but she didn’t cry. Her pain was in her eyes and wouldn’t spill out, but stayed there. Every time I looked at her I could see it.
‘I cried for Enna and Conor,’ she told me. ‘Father deserves something more.’
The night Dermot died, she tore out great handfuls of her heavy red hair. I found them strewn about our chamber, like rushes on the floor.
The next day Donal Mac Murrough Kavanaugh came to me. ‘If my father wanted you to be King of Leinster,’ he said, ‘I won’t vote against you.’ I never forgot that gesture. I realised then that he loved his father as much as Aoife did. Dermot was a man to envy, having children who loved him so.
He was laid to rest in the churchyard of the cathedral at Ferns that he had supported in his lifetime. Once he was dead, many harsh things were said about him, some of them by the clergy. But I never heard his children say a word against him.
I took my wife back to the south and tried to comfort her. But soon I needed comforting.
Dermot had died on the first of May. The king to replace him was elected within a month. It was Dermot’s nephew, Murtough, who was of the noble line and a devout Christian man. The clergy wanted someone with a blameless reputation to succeed Dermot Mac
Murrough, and their influence on the voting chieftains was very strong.
The news hit me like a thunderbolt. ‘This isn’t what Dermot wanted! He promised me!
He promised me!
’ I raved to Aoife.
‘He promised what he had no right to promise,’ she reminded me. ‘You must be reasonable, Richard.’
I couldn’t be reasonable. ‘I don’t care,’ I said like an angry child. ‘He promised me!’
What could I do? How was I going to get back what had been taken from me?
Then Raymond le Gros returned to Ireland with still more bad news. ‘King Henry wishes you to know that he insists on your return to England. It’s a command.’
‘Is it now?’ I folded my arms across my chest. ‘What Henry wants isn’t that important any more. The kingship of Leinster means more to me than a command from Henry Plantagenet.’
‘You defy the king at your peril,’ Raymond warned me.
‘This whole venture has been at my peril!’ I reminded him. ‘And the only way I’ll claim my reward for my danger is to stay here and fight. For Ireland, not for England. England’s little more than a memory to me now.’
‘It’s your home,’ Raymond said.
‘Not any more. If it ever was. I’ve built strongholds for myself around the borders of the land that I claim here, and those are my homes now. When I travel to Kilkenny, or Kildare, or Dublin, the natives treat me with respect.
‘No one in England ever treated me with that much respect, Raymond. Murtough might be King of Leinster, but the name of Strongbow is on every tongue. All Ireland is watching and waiting to see what I’ll do next.
‘Whatever it is, I won’t be going back to England,’ I assured him.
In truth, I didn’t know what to do. Dermot’s death had left me in a
most awkward position. While he lived, I could be considered his chosen heir. Now that he was dead and another man ruled Leinster, I was no more than a leader of foreign mercenaries.
Aoife knew how miserable I was. ‘You should make your peace with my cousin Murtough,’ she suggested. ‘Our family has always stood together. Even when we quarrel among ourselves, we don’t break apart. You’re of my family now. Go to Murtough and offer to be his strong right arm as you were my father’s. Even if you aren’t King of Leinster, you can be a power in Leinster.’
‘You speak wisely,’ I admitted, ‘but it’s hard for me to bend the knee to the man who’s king in my place.’
‘Had you rather go back to England and bend your knee to Henry?’ Aoife asked shrewdly.
So I left her in safekeeping on the Slaney with Robert FitzStephen and rode for Ferns, as she wanted.
Murtough welcomed me most kindly. He knew what I was feeling. But he was indeed a good Christian man, he didn’t gloat. We had a long talk together and parted as friends, though several times I had to bite my tongue to keep from saying bitter words I would regret later.
When I left Ferns, I felt better. Murtough was not as strong a man as Dermot had been. When the time came, he could be shouldered aside gracefully.
From Ferns we rode to Dublin to learn how work was progressing on the new cathedral. Seeing Christ Church rise, Irish timber upon a foundation of Irish stone, I began to feel more hopeful. I was building for the future in a number of ways.
I knelt in the unfinished cathedral amid the smells of raw timber and stone dust, and bowed my head. I didn’t speak to God, but to my father. What I said was not a prayer, but one last plea for my father’s approval.
‘I defended our property and name as best I could in England,’ I told him. ‘But now I’ve won new land and new honour in Ireland. Be
proud of me.’
The church was very silent. My words to my father in heaven echoed in my head.
As I left the cathedral, a sentry shouted from the wall that surrounded Dublin, ‘The High King is said to have left Connacht! He’s marching this way with a mighty army!’