Lion of Ireland (21 page)

His eyes, wide set in deeply carved sockets, dominated his face. They were a luminous shade of gray, changeable as the sea, long lashed, and drowsy in their glance. Yet their expression could change from seductive to savage with the slightest tightening of the lids and musculature, and a white-hot temper blaze where a moment before there had been apparent tranquility.

Ignoring everyone else, Brian went straight to Mahon and dipped a knee before him in the sketchiest of greetings. The awed harper, his eyes fixed on the young giant, strummed a crescendo on his instrument as if he were announcing a confrontation of titans.

“Brother, I salute you,” Brian said in clipped tones. Mahon rose uncertainly, wondering what he was supposed to feel.. Gratitude that Brian had returned? Relief that his brother was still alive at all? Or hostility—for Brian’s desertion had been an embarrassment to him as a leader and a cruel blow to take from a brother. Yet now he was back; he stood in his rags a hero, and Mahon knew a thrill of pride as he saw him there, waiting with head unbowed. “Hail, brother. I welcome you home.” The answer came instantly. “And my companions, are they welcome as well?” “What companions?”

“I brought with me fifteen men who are more my brothers than any in this hall. They are all that are left to me, and if I am welcome, so must they be welcomed.”

Mahon received this declaration with astonishment. Fifteen men. Out of all that mighty army Brian had supposedly built, only fifteen men?

Reading his eyes, Brian said, “We were a greater number most of the time, but three severe winters and a lot of hard fighting have reduced us to this. If it were just for myself I would still be in the mountains, but these men have given all they had to give and twice more, and I have an obligation to them. They need medicine and rest.”

“And you?”

“All I need is my sword and myself,” Brian answered simply.

Mahon sank back onto his bench, aware of the eager faces crowded around them and the palpable excitement in the room—excitement that had entered with Brian. Everyone was listening to them except for the inspired harper, who was bent over his harp with closed eyes, summoning from it a new story on the deeds of the son of Cennedi.

“You intend to go on fighting, then?” Mahon asked his brother.

“Until an hour after my body is dead,” was the reply. Behind Mahon, someone clapped hands in admiration.

“Although you understand that I do not war on the Northmen now?”

Brian made a gesture with his hand, brushing away something of no importance. “Your peace is little better than a complete surrender, and it would have been broken fifty times but for me and my men. Our father would never have accepted this peace of yours”—his voice dripped contempt—“and neither would our grandsire Lorcan. Not while the foreigners still hold sway over the land and the inheritance of the Dal Cais!”

The gray eyes blazed with unabated battle fury, and for a flicker of time Mahon thought he was gazing at Cennedi himself. It is a thing in the blood, he thought, that has somehow skipped me. But there is no way I can escape the consequences of it; those dead warriors have come back in my brother’s body to haunt and shame me.

“What you say is true, Brian, but it doesn’t change the facts. It is impossible to meet the Northmen in open battle

anymore, for they have a wealth of weapons we cannot equal and their coats of iron links make them nearly impregnable. With every passing month they grow stronger. Why should I lead my people against such an enemy, only to reap a harvest of dead Dalcassians on the battlefield?”

The women in the room murmured their agreement, but the men were silent, listening for Brian’s reply.

Even the harper stayed his hand on the strings, so that the words fell one by one, pure and undisturbed, into the waiting hush.

“It is natural for men to die, brother, and all men shall, in time. You cannot prevent mortality. But death on the battlefield is easier to bear than a life of subservience and fear. You know as well as I that the Northmen have taken a number of the Irish as slaves and concubines, and you may be assured that eventually they will enslave us all, to such a degree as we allow it. There can be only one ultimate power in any land, and as the foreigners grow stronger we must grow weaker, for they are fattening on us.

“But if death is natural and normal for our people,” Brian’s deep voice continued, “there is one thing that is not natural, and that is for us to submit meekly to humiliation. Our boob and manuscripts are destroyed, our churches looted and our monasteries sacked, our women are violated and our children murdered. And we trade with the murderers.

“It is a shameful thing that the land our ancestors fought for and fed with their blood for two thousand years should be meekly handed over to barbarians!”

“It’s a disgrace to us all!” someone shouted in agreement, and there was the clatter of a bench being knocked over as an enthusiastic man stood up too fast. People pushed forward to be close to Brian, flowing past Mahon as water divides and passes a boulder thrown into its course.

Brian acknowledged them with a radiant smile and continued to speak. “As for the fighting ability of the Northmen, they are no more invincible than other men. They bleed and die, brother, and they run when they are afraid. My men have often routed them in open fight, and not just when wt outnumbered them, either. Back in the hills I have a cave filled with Norse axes and longswords, taken from Northmen we reduced to cooling meat, and all my men have been trained to use them as well as the Northmen do themselves. “If I had forces enough to mount a cavalry, and ships to patrol the waterways and coastlines, I could give you an army the equal of any that could be sent against us. I’ve learned how to use their weapons, Mahon, and I’ve learned to use , their fears and weaknesses, too. While you and the others sat idly by, I’ve taken a handful of men and swept the region nearly clean of the invaders. What does that tell you, brother?”

Mahon felt the tide racing past him, drawn irresistibly out to sea. It carried men with it, men whose allegiance was sworn to him, men bound to him by ties of blood and law, but taken from him by something stronger. They brushed past him, crowding and jostling in their impatience to reach Brian.

“Is it true?” “Can it really be done?” “Can you do it?” They clustered around him, eager to be close to the hope he offered them, tired of the long winter and anxious for rebirth.

“We can do it,” he told them. Over their heads, his eyes met Mahon’s in silent entreaty. We can do it, brother. Join me.

Candles smoked and guttered in pools of tallow. The harper bent in love over his strings as the servants carried away empty dishes and refilled cups. Warm and well fed, Brian and his men sat around the hearth, and the cold, lean times seemed to recede as a bad dream fades.

The priest had come and blessed them, and in the morning they would share in the holy Mass with the king and his household. “Our brother Marcan will be glad to hear that you are well,” Mahon told Brian.

“I will send a runner with news in the morning. He has often asked about you, and I know he prays for you daily.”

“Marcan is still in the monastery?”

“He’s taken Holy Orders and joined the priesthood of Munster. Like all of us, he prays unceasingly for peace.”

Brian scowled, “The kind of peace you are talking about is just an illusion, a foolish dream you are harboring with no substance to back it up.”

Mahon’s face was sad, and it seemed to Brian to be a portrait shaped by compromise and resignation.

But the kindliness of his voice was the same quality Brian remembered from childhood. “I hate seeing my people die, Brian. Whenever I speak with your brother Marcan he reminds me that to live by the sword is to die by the sword; he believes that very strongly, and he is determined to convince me of it, too. He has told me again and again that we must put ourselves in God’s hands and trust Him to care for us.

Marcan believes that the terror of the Northmen is a visitation of God’s will upon us, to test the strength of our faith, and we should submit to it and offer our sufferings to God.”

Brian took a long time to respond. A man had to be very careful how he framed such a reply, for he would surely have to answer for it someday. “I wear Christ’s symbol,” he said slowly, as he felt beneath his beard and drew out a sin wooden cross on a leather thong. “This has always lain on my heart, since our mother put it there.

“As a boy, I learned my religion by rote, and the first time someone questioned it I defended it the same way, with all the fervor of a child who believes he knows all the answers.

I envisioned the struggle against the Northmen as a sort of holy mission; I thought I was God’s tool, like Charlemagne, and that I would march to victory in the shadow of the Cross.

“I had a mystical vision, if you would like to call it that, but it has faded along the way. The rain washed it out, as it washed the rivulets of blood from the bodies and turned the land into a sea of stinking mud. The battle cries drowned it out. What I mistook for glory turned to horror, and yet it seems I am more committed to it than ever. I believe with my whole soul that God wants us to free Ireland of the foreigners, Mahon. We are not a people to submit meekly to slaughter like sacrificial lambs.”

The conviction in his voice was as absolute as the conviction had been in Marcan’s arguments but the power that radiated from Brian was far greater. He felt Mahon weaken.

“Will you join me, brother?” he asked, taking Mahon’s hand in a firm clasp and looking forcefully into his eyes. “I have no army now, but I have the knowledge, and with your authority to raise troops and provision them we could make a start in the spring. This time things will be different.”

The tide had run-all the way out, and Mahon found himself stranded on a sandbar alone. With a deep sense of fatalism, he knew that he would agree, no matter how it ended for him. For the spirit of the people was not his, but Brian’s, and it would not be denied. The courage and vitality of the younger man might succeed, where all else had failed, in uniting the people and giving them a sense of purpose.

“Never my dream, but someone else’s,” Mahon mused absentmindedly.

“What’s that?”

“Oh, I was just thinking aloud. But I suppose you have worn me down, brother, and convinced me. The leadership you seem so hungry for came to me unsought, and I’ll be more than happy to share it with you. I’ll call a general meeting of the elders of the Dal Cais and you can present your case to them; if they are convinced, we will arm for war again.”

A dazzling smile lit Brian’s face, warming even the watchful eyes, and with an impulsive gesture he threw his arms around his brother and smothered Mahon in a bear’s hug. “You won’t regret it!” he cried.

“I’m beginning to, already,” Mahon’s muffled voice came to him faintly. “If I die here, buried in your beard, I shall regret it very much.”

Brian’s laugh was as full and unrestrained as a happy child’s. He straightened his arms and held the king at their full length from him. “The bad times are over!” he exulted.

“It hasn’t been all bad.”

“Victory will be much sweeter.”

“You are that certain of victory, are you?” Mahon asked, sobering.

Brian’s mood matched his instantly. “Only a fool is ever certain of anything. Let’s just say I’m determined.”

”It will take a lot more than determination to drive out the foreigners.”

“Yes, but maybe that’s been the missing ingredient. These past years, determination is all I’ve had, and it was almost enough. Just give me men to put with it.”

That night Brian slept for the first time in years beneath a roof. Mahon offered him a maidservant to “tend to your needs,” but Brian refused.

“I wouldn’t have taken you for a celibate,” the king remarked.

“I’m not. But all this . .. comfort,” he waved his hand to include the glowing fires, the fine linen, the wealth of skilled craftsmanship, “has a seductive quality and a danger of its own, and I choose to resist it. It’s important for a fighting man to know what it feels like to have nothing, and therefore to have nothing to lose, for then you are truly free and can do your best fighting. Riches and women can make a man timid.”

“You don’t have the monks’ disease, do you—a taste for a

boy’s round bottom?”

Brian laughed. It was becoming easier to laugh, for the rusted machinery of his natural merriment was beginning to glide smoothly once more. “Don’t worry about that; I like the women far too well.”

“And what did you do for women, in your mountain retreat?”

“Tried not to think about them.”

Mahon could not resist the temptation to tease, just a little; to find the recognizable humanity beneath the Homeric exterior. He could not believe it extended, unflawed by human weakness, to Brian’s inmost core. “Not even a goalkeeper’s daughter, just once in a while? Or a crofter’s wife on a hot summer morning?”

Brian’s expression was carefully veiled, the guarded look back in the eyes. Confess the dreams and fantasies that even the exhaustion after battle could not totally prevent? Speak of the way he saw a woman’s breast in the curve of a hill, or the madness of sunheat on his loins as he lay naked by some mountain pool? How could he admit the soul-deep loneliness, like a toothache in the gut, when twilight turned the world blue and there was no softness to sink into, no girl’s fragrant breath to mingle with his own?

Could Mahon understand that sometimes he thought he heard the wind whisper Fiona’s name?

There are so many feelings a man cannot share with another man, he thought. And I have no one else.

“I have no time for women now,” he told Mahon curtly, in a tone of voice that closed the subject.

Brian stood before them, the old men of the tribal council, with their smeared eyes and their shaking hands, and he spoke of the children they had lost. He addressed himself to those who were a little younger, with muscles still knotty and firm along their arms, and he mentioned farmsteads burned and women raped. He fingered the crucifix he wore at his throat and retold the story of slaughtered monks and desecrated altars.