Lion of Ireland (31 page)

By the earliest dawn light he could see them, the ranks of men stretching away before him in their neat and unfamiliar geometry. Officers, mounted and on foot, waited with their companies; some with their arms folded across their chests and a half sneer hidden by their beards.

The Northmen were only a mile away.

There was coughing and foot shifting among the soldiers, and they rippled like pond water, leaning forward, falling back. It would be impossible for all of them to hear him, no matter how strong his voice.

He rode his horse slowly to the open space in front of the line, and when he was certain most of them were watching, he drew his sword and held it over his head.

“I am Brian of Boruma!” he called to them, with all the power in his deep lungs. “I am one of you!” He slid off the horse and stood before them on foot. The horse, uncertain, drifted away and he made no effort to stop it.

There was a gasp in the ranks, and he turned to look behind him. A line of men had come up over the horizon, a dark metallic band that advanced steadily toward them across the plain, dividing to flow through woods and around obstacles and then joining again, one inexorable mass that was coming to crush the Irish forever.

Brian turned back to face his army. The sun was just up now, its first pure light touching his face and picking out the glinting copper threads in his hair.

“I am Brian of Boruma!” he cried again, filling his lungs with the sweet morning air of Ireland. “I am going to die, but I am going to die a free man! If you would be free also, come with me!”

He looked to the side and gave the signal to the right wing to follow him. No one; moved. They stood transfixed, staring at the unbelievable numbers of the Northmen who had now come to a halt a half mile away and were drawing themselves into their battle formation.

He sent his face toward the enemy, lifted his chin, and began to march forward. He did not look back to see if anyone followed. He heard nothing behind him.

The Vikings waited. Sunshine struck sparks from the metal on their bodies; in their hands. They watched in eerie silence as Brian advanced alone.

He heard nothing behind him.

His belly was hollowed by fear. His guts cramped, anticipating the thrust of a sword. His whole body was suddenly slippery with sweat. Salt rivulets ran down his forehead and into his eyes, stinging him. In a few minutes he would die. But he had to go forward. He heard . .. something ... behind him. The waiting Northmen tensed, began to move about. Brian could see them shifting their weapons and preparing for some sort of action. A shield wall was raised, as if that were necessary to repel one lone warrior.

But Brian was no longer alone.

He heard the tramp of feet behind him, the jingle of bits and the rasp of swords being drawn, the slap of leather throwing slings against open palms, the grunt as javelins were hefted and balanced, the rustic and clatter and thunder of an army at his back.

An army carried forward by his courage, caught up in it like a net. An army that was powerless to resist the tidal pull of his magnetism. An army, beginning to chant something.

“Brian of Boruma! Brian of Boruma!”

He felt them as a weight behind him, a wall at his back, a light shining over his shoulder. The fear still gnawed his vitals, but a pulse had begun to beat in his throat, stronger than the fear, stronger than wine or the desire for women.

“Brian Boru! Brian Boru!”

He raised his sword above his head, willing the sunlight to enter it and magnify its brilliance. He heard the men cheer. He heard the men following him.

“Brian Boru! Brian Boru!”

The flesh crawled on the back of his neck. A love pounded through him; love for the mass of them, the faceless unit and the individual man, a love so deep and total he felt it transform him as he advanced. He could not be beaten now.

Following him, they felt it. Their common fear became a common rapture, an exultation that made hearts race and eyes glitter. They were lifted beyond themselves into something greater, something that seemed, at that moment, immortal.

“Boru! Boru!”

He had them now. They were with him like the beats of his heart.

“Boru! Boru!”

One body of men—his body. One will—his will. “Boru! Boru!” The chant at his back, building. Their strength flooding

through him, the wave of their devotion pouring over him, carrying him forward on its crest.

“Boru! Emu!”

They went forward together into the swords, into the axes, and nothing could stop them. Nothing could defeat them. They were the Irish; they were his men. They were Brian.

“Boru! Boru! Boru!”

And the Northmen fell away before them like wheat from

the scythe.

Brian’s cavalry galloped diagonally across the rapidly closing space between the two armies, thrusting deep into the Norse left, opening a corridor into the main body of the enemy through which the Irish foot soldiers poured. The front line of javelins came up behind Brian on the run and went with him shoulder to shoulder into the front line of the Northmen, holding a formation almost as tight as the foreigners’ shield wall.

The Northmen, surprised by a type of assault they had never experienced, milled about and were cut down by the cavalry swords and the singing flight of the spears. Brian briefly regretted losing his horse, for on foot it was not possible to sight the Norse leaders who were his principal target. But the charge of the mounted men was a flash of glory quickly past; the weight of the battle lay with the thunderous coming together of the two main bodies, and that was where the most intense fighting took place.

From his position to Brian’s left Mahon noted with relief the successful outcome of the first stage of his brother’s plan. The Norse army, bisected and confused, hit the clench-jawed Irish line and almost immediately fell back. They had no berserkers, nothing with which to match the inspired battle lust of the Celts. Every man the Northmen faced thought himself a hero and invincible for that brief space of time. Ivar’s men had come prepared to take the offensive only; Mahon saw more than one Northman look wildly around, then whirl and begin shoving his way back through his comrades, headed for the rear.

It was then Mahon heard his own voice chanting with the others, “Boru! Boru! Boru!” as his sword sliced halfway through the neck of a silver-thatched Norseman who had somehow lost his helmet. The man fell with a groan strangled by bubbling blood and Mahon stepped over him and went on, still chanting.

Brian was deep in a press of men, a stench of sweat, and a creak of leather. The clash of metal on metal left his ears ringing, but there was no need to hear anyway, there was only the senseless shouting and the cries of the dying. The fear was totally gone now, set aside with every other emotion, replaced by the dynamics of battle. Thrust and shock and forward. Dodge and slice and forward. If he was aware of any feeling at all it was a momentary objective appreciation of the neatness with which his body anticipated and sidestepped a crushing blow; the fluid, reflexive response that laid a Northman low and went on in one stride to the next.

He was still in the van, unwounded as if magically protected, but he was not thinking of death. One of the javelin carriers stepped up beside him and put the point of his weapon squarely into a Norse throat, then glanced sideways at Brian out of a sweated, blood-smeared face and grinned. “Boru!” the man yelled at him, and Brian grinned back. Then each turned to meet his next opponent.

King Cahal, proudly afoot and naked save for his saffron tunic and a magnificent yew-wood shield covered with embossed leather, was the first of the dissident leaders to realize that the tide of battle was receding toward Limerick. He paused in astonishment to comment to his nearest captain, “That damned Dalcassian was right; the Northmen are retreating!” Just then a warrior burst out of an alder thicket to his left and directed a mighty ax blow at his shield, splitting down the center. Cahal flung it away from him and pulled his dagger from his belt as the Norsemen closed with him. He rave one slice with his sword, then ducked under his enemy’s arm to bury the dagger in the man’s belly.

The Norse who had been in the front lines were now struggling toward the rear, breasting a sea of their own comrades. Commands shouted in several languages and dialects added to their confusion; some of them ran into a knot of the Irish-Norse outlaws who slew them as cheerfully as if they had been on opposing sides, instead of all following the standard of Ivar.

At the head of his Desmonians, well insulated by the first line of Norsemen, Molloy had thought to be in a good position. When discussing the battle formation with Harold the night before, he had explained to Ivar’s son, “I would prefer not to be in the forefront of the fighting when the usurper goes down. I want Mahon killed, but not by my sword—you understand?”

Harold looked at him with some amusement. “Irish kill Irish all the time, Desmond, and did so long before my people ever came here. Why should you not be in at the death of the man who took your crown?”

“We are a vengeful people—not unlike yourselves, Northman. If I am nearby when Mahon falls, some of his supporters might seek me out personally later and take his blood-price from my skin. My life is a little too precious to me for that! I intend to live long and well as the king of Minister.

“So I urge you, Harold Ivarsson; see to it that the bogus king falls in the first heat of battle, and then I and my men will support you with a good will until victory is won.”

Harold shrugged. “As you will. But if it were me, I had rather meet my enemy face to face and let him know that mine was the hand that killed him.”

Molloy helped himself to some more of Harold’s ale, wiping his mouth with his forearm when the brew overflowed onto his chin. “You live too simple a life, Northman. Among my race the shifts of power are sudden and frequent; your friend today may be your enemy tomorrow, a king may spring up out of the oystergrass and strip you of all your holdings in the wink of an eye. I am very careful as to which enemies I make; I want no surviving Dalcassian to say he saw me kill his chief.”

At Sulcoit that bright summer morning in the year 968, Molloy found himself relieved of at least one of his worries—no man would say that his had been the hand that slew Mahon. Indeed, no ax or sword touched Mahon at all, and, as the Northmen fell back, the Irish advanced steadily, with unusually light casualties. Harold’s command was routed and heading toward the rear, their barely controlled panic communicating itself to the Desmonians. Even Ivar, who had not taken part in the attack but was stationed on a slight rise to enjoy the spectacle of a major Irish defeat, thought better as to the wisdom of his position and began moving back toward the Limerick road. If his son failed to make a stand and hold the Munstermen, there was nothing between them and Ivar’s city on the Shannon but a small forest and too few miles of open country.

Forward momentum successfully achieved, Brian was able to leave his position briefly, acquire a horse, and get an overall picture of the way the action was going. “If nothing else, my beauty,” he whispered to the rawboned gray stallion he had commandeered, “you’ll let me see with my own eyes instead of trusting the reports of others.”

And it was a sight worth the seeing. The right wing, having broken all the way through the main body of Ivar’s army, had drawn up behind it, effectively blocking retreat. Brian sent word to his two reserve units to move up along both sides and encircle the Northmen. When they realized their situation, Harold and Donovan tried to get as many of their men into the protection of the woods as they could, but the Irish followed them relentlessly and the slaughter began in earnest.

At the southern edge of the wood a company of Norsemen was making a desperate stand against the tightening noose of the Irish. Brian rode toward them, watching over the heads of his Munstermen as the foreigners sought in vain for some way out of the trap.

He saw one burly warrior—much swarthier than the usual Norse, he might have been a Dane—step forward just as the first Irish javelins were hurled. The armored warrior moved into the very path of one, dodged aside with the skill born of long practice, and caught the passing spear with a backhanded movement, then swung his brawny arm in a backward circle so that the spear was brought round again and up. His return cast was right on target and he nailed a hapless Irishman to the earth.

“I can learn to do that,” Brian promised himself as he urged his horse forward and leaned into his sword thrust. He guided the animal with his weight and his legs, pushing through the ranks of men locked in mortal combat until he came to the dark foreigner, who had just bludgeoned a Munsterman to the earth with his interlocked fists.

Brian loomed above him on the prancing horse and the Dane glanced up; two pairs of gray eyes met.

Brian swept his sword up and touched it to his forehead in a gesture of respect and saw the man’s eyes widen with astonishment; then the weapon came down in a powerful arc that cleft the Danish skull in two and dispatched the warrior to Valhalla with one clean blow.

Brian rode up and down the battle line, killing when he had the opportunity, issuing commands, and moving his men about in accordance with the detailed plan unfolding in his head. There were isolated, wonderful moments when he felt that he stood on a mountain top, everything spread out before him and clearly visible, and he could locate each little pocket of resistance, direct each unit of men to the place of greatest need at the perfect time. His absolute confidence communicated itself to his followers, and they obeyed him without question; Olan and Kernac and the other captains accepting his orders willingly now.

As the sun neared its zenith, Ardan the Slinger led his command into a grove of trees in hot pursuit of fleeing backs. The blue-green shade was sudden; the eye did not adjust quickly after the brightness of midday. Ardan smelled the loamy, leaf-molded earth, and a mighty tree trunk reared up directly before him, like some legendary champion making a rear-guard defense to allow his troops to complete their escape.