Lion of Ireland (70 page)

“How long ago did he leave?” Brian asked. In the morning light the deep lines-were clearly visible above his eyes, and two broad wings of white lay across his once-bright hair.

He was told, “Maelmordha and his party went out through the gates just a short time ago, they may not even have crossed the river yet.”

Brian sat for a moment in deep thought. Scores of faces pressed around him, each intent with business to be discussed, and directly before him stood his eldest son, fidgeting, already working up an anger if he thought himself slighted.

“I cannot go after him right now,” Brian said with regret. “But I’ll send someone ... you, Core, you have a smooth tongue and a soothing disposition. Take the fastest horse here and ride after the king of Leinster immediately. Apologize to him for whatever has gone wrong—be sure to put all the blame on us and none on him—and urge him to return so that we can settle the problem amicably. Meanwhile, I’ll try to find out what happened to upset him.”

A sharp gallop brought Core up with Maelmordha’s retinue not far beyond the bridge. The disgruntled king had had yet another tribulation; his horse had stumbled and lamed itself, and progress had halted while Maelmordha took a mount from one of his courtiers. He had just decided that there was not a horse fit to ride in the entire party when Core caught up with them, and Maelmordha greeted him with a face like a thundercloud. Naturally, Brian’s man rode a superb horse!

“What do you want now, Dalcassian!” he roared. “Has your master thought of some new insult to heap on my head, and sent you with it at the gallop, lest I get home without hearing it?”

Core slid from his horse and approached the king on foot, mindful of Brian’s admonition to be as diplomatic as possible. “My lord,” he began carefully, “the Ard Ri only wishes to inquire after your comfort, and urge you to return to his hospitality . . .”

Before he could finish, Maelmordha exploded with a violent oath and a mighty swing of the heavy yew horse-rod he carried. It hit the unprepared Core full on the temple, making a dismal wet thwack. Core dropped to the ground without a sound. Blood ran from his ears and nose, forming red rivulets in the cart tracks of the road.

Breathing heavily, Maelmordha stared at the fallen man. He reached out with his foot and poked at Core.

It was like kicking a sack of grain.

“I think you have killed him, my lord,” someone said.

Maelmordha looked around at them. “It was provoked! I thought the fool meant to attack me!” No one said anything.

Maelmordha kicked once more at Core’s lifeless body, then signaled two of his servants. “Carry this wreckage to the foot of the bridge and leave it there. We will waste no further courtesies on Brian Boru!”

*

“He was found at the Killaloe Bridge, my lord,” someone said. “Maelmordha ...” The sentence was left unfinished, the one name hanging in the air.

Gormlaith was standing a short distance away, staring at the body with horror. When her brother was mentioned she raised her head and looked at Brian. The gray eyes that met hers were eyes a hundred men had seen as their last vision on earth, before the slashing sword; they were not eyes she knew.

“You said there was a little argument,” he accused. “You said it didn’t amount to anything.”

“There are always arguments ... I never thought he would do this ...”

“There are always arguments where you are, Gormlaith,” Brian said, his voice a spear of cold iron hurled directly at her. “I want you out of Kincora, woman. Forever.”

“You blame me?” she asked, frozen with shock.

“I want you out of Kincora,” he repeated in the same deadly voice. “Your murderous brother did this thing, but I know where the provocation lay. The best work I can do is cut you out of my world as I would cut an arrow out of my flesh.”

“It’s my world, too!” she protested.

“Not anymore. Pack your things and go, Gormlaith,” he ordered, staring beyond her. “You are my wife no longer.”

She was trembling from head to foot, but she would not allow herself to cry. She never allowed herself to be seen crying. Feeling sick, she walked slowly toward him, one painful step at a time, willing him to look at her.

He waited impassively until she stood right in front of him, her breath stirring the ends of his beard. Her green eyes were the color of Ireland, and there were dreams and laughter in them that belonged to some distant past. He wondered, with a vast indifference, if she would yell or cry or fall at his feet. It would be easy to turn away from her if she did any of those things.

Behind him, Core lay dead. With an intuitive ache in his bones, Brian knew that peace itself lay dead beneath the bloodstained wool.

“You would divorce me, Brian?” she asked. Her voice was deep and tightly controlled. “I thought you said you were through with acts of vengeance. Now you want to set me aside, and you absolve yourself of guilt by making it a retaliation for something my brother has done?

“That is beneath you, Boru! I suppose you will also send warriors after him to cut him down before he can leave Munster?”

She knows the words to wound, he thought. She knows too much; she bums too hot. She is an example of all that unbridled passion that would destroy my Ireland.

God help me, I still want her.

He closed his eyes briefly while he reinforced the inner walls that held pain at bay. He heard muttering in the hall, voices urging him to follow Gormlaith’s suggestion and send soldiers to drag Maelmordha back and punish him for his crimes.

How easily the pot boils over, he thought. And Gormlaith can never resist stirring it.

He opened his eyes. “No! As long as Maelmordha is still in Munster he is my guest, and I will not abuse the laws of hospitality. When I apply to Maelmordha for satisfaction, it will be at the door of his own house.”

“You just want to get rid of me so you can have your fill of other women, and this is the excuse you are using!” Gormlaith cried.

His voice was almost gentle when he answered her. “You’ve always mistaken the nature of your rival, Gormlaith. There are no other women; you blot them out as the sun blots out the stars. But I have to choose between you and what’s best for Ireland, and that is no contest at all. I won’t keep you here where you can hack with an ax at all I have spent my life building.” Deliberately, he turned his back on her.

He did not see her writhe as if a knife had cut into her vitals. But he heard the wild despair in her voice as it rose behind him. “Brian!”

“Go,” he said, over his shoulder. “We are finished.”

There was a stunned silence, and then she screamed at him with the rage of a wounded animal, “You will regret this, Brian Boru!”

He continued walking away from her, seeing nothing, putting one foot in front of the other.

One more time she called to him, desperate, her voice breaking over his name. “You, of all men, cannot reject me! Not you! Brian!”

Something made him turn back, reluctantly. She started toward him and then hesitated. “Brian, you don’t understand. I really ... I ...”

He forced his voice to be cold. “Yes?”

She searched his face, but saw nothing in it for her. Mourning his slaughtered union, Brian’s level gaze looked through her to a darkening future.

“I ... hate you, Boru!” she cried then. “I hate you with all my heart!”

He turned away once more from her contorted face and doubled fists. “Someone pack her things and send her back to Dublin, to Sitric,” he said to the room at large. “There is a burial to be prepared here.”

There were tears in his eyes, and the watchers thought they were for Core.

Maelmordha hurried eastward, nursing his rage, anxious for the stout walls of Naas. As soon as he arrived he summoned the under-kings of Leinster and repeated to them the feverish story of the insult and dishonor he had received at the hands of the Ard Ri. The recitation improved with each telling, until Per Rogain of the tribe Fotharta arrived to hear that Maelmordha and all his men had been reviled and spat upon at the Ard Ri’s banquet table.

“Leinstermen have received a mortal insult!” Maelmordha cried, and they all agreed with clenched fists upraised.

“Boru has lived well at our expense far too long,” Maelmordha continued, “under the guise of this nationhood he proclaims. I tell you, it’s all a trick to extort our property from us, and once he has that in his hands he has nothing but contempt for us. We must overthrow the High King—it’s been done before, Boru did it himself—and take back all that rightfully belongs to us!”

Messengers were sent in stealth to the Hy Neill in Ulster, to the king of Brefni, to the young chief of Hy Carbery, son of the son of Brian’s old enemy Donovan. At first there was reluctance to join with Leinster, but Maelmordha had chosen well; he knew where old grudges festered, where old resentments still rankled, and in time he had a force to stand with him.

From Dublin, Sitric came to Naas to discuss the situation. “My mother is almost insane in her rage against Boru,” he told Maelmordha. “She and my wife cannot share the same roof, or the air rings with arguments night and day and I am caught in the middle. The Ard Ri has kept his promises to me, Maelmordha, and his power is formidable. I’m not eager to take up the sword against him.”

Maelmordha sneered. “When did you ever take up the sword against anybody? You are too sly, too cautious, Sitric, too anxious to keep your famous beard free of bloodstains. But I should think you would be willing to avenge your mother’s honor in this matter.”

Sitric smiled. “Her honor means nothing to you and you know it. And I suspect it is not your own that guides you, either. You just want to bring Boru down because he’s a greater man than you.”

“Now you insult me!”

“And you can swallow it as easily as a raw oyster, if I agree to stand with you. Isn’t that true?”

Maelmordha hesitated. “Will you?”

”Will you guarantee me that it will be profitable? The Irish interfere with our trade and give us competition in the marketplace; if you promise me unlimited sea control and the freedom of the coast, I think I can give you an army of Norsemen and Danes really capable of destroying the Ard Ri.”

“Done!” cried Maelmordha.

At Dun na Sciath, Malachi Mor was enjoying the fruits of the long peace. The souterrains beneath his stronghold were packed with food and grain, protected in the cool earth, and the casks of wine and ale were stacked atop one another. On a warm spring evening Malachi, bald and portly, was entertaining the nobles of Meath in his banquet hall. It was an informal occasion, with much singing and joviality, and after the meal there was to be dancing. The quiet, compliant woman who had replaced Gormlaith as Malachi’s wife would bring her ladies from the grianan and the music would play far into the night.

The steward had just supervised the presentation of a magnificently roasted pair of lambs when the door was thrown open and the gatekeeper burst into the hall.

He shoved past the startled herald and flung himself directly at the king’s table, mouth ajar, eyes wide and staring. With a prickling of his neck hairs, Malachi set down his goblet and got to his feet. Something urged him to receive this news standing.

“Invaders, my lord!” the gatekeeper cried. “We are attacked!”

Then they heard the shouting outside, the forgotten clashing of weapons and the sound of running feet.

Malachi swore

colorfully as the men around him leaped to their feet and turned to him for guidance. “Who is it?” Malachi demanded of the gatekeeper.

“It appears to be Northmen and Leinstermen, my lord,” the frightened man replied. “They must have gotten close to the walls by staying hidden among the new trees, and then they burst out at us all at once, yelling ...”

“Yelling what?”

“ ‘Death to Boru!’ my lord,” the gatekeeper answered with some reluctance. “It appears to be an uprising against the Ard Ri.”

“Against the Ard Ri,” Malachi repeated. He drew a deep breath and pushed his unfinished meal away from his place at the table. There would be no more eating for a while. He rolled his eyes briefly toward heaven. “Why me?” he asked. “Sweet Christ, why me?”

Then he moved briskly away from the banquet board and began preparing for war.

Brian was less surprised. “Maelmordha is consistent in his cowardice,” he commented upon hearing of the attack on Dun na Sciath. “He knows better than to march into Munster, and so he falls on the easier opponent.”

“Will you fight?” Conaing asked with blazing eyes. “Will we go to war against that murderous Leinsterman now?”

Brian shook his head. “Not if it can be prevented.”

He sent emissaries to Leinster, urging that the peace not be broken, but many were slain and none were heeded.

Malachi suffered a heavy defeat at Drinan, near Swords, when his own young son Flann and several of the princes of Meath were slain by the combined forces of Maelmordha and Sitric Silkbeard. In desperation he sent a plea to Kincora. “My lord begs you to know that his kingdom is being plundered, his sons and foster sons slain,” his messenger said. “He prays you not to permit the Northmen and the Leinstermen, the men of Brefni and Carbery and Cenel Eogain, to all come together against him.”

“Tell me, historian,” Brian asked Carroll, “has any king

ever been able to establish a permanent peace, anywhere in the world?”

“Not so far as I know, my lord. As the Romans would say, the dogs of warfare always unleashed, eventually.”

“And I wanted to alter the whole pattern of history.” Then Brian’s gray eyes warmed with light. “But I did for a while, didn’t I?”

“Ah yes, my lord. You succeeded grandly, for a while!”

Brian ordered all of Thomond fortified, and prepared, in the dawn of his seventy-second year, for another war.

He divided his armies into two powerful forces. At the head of one he ravaged the rebellious lands of Ossory. Murrough led the other force up through Leinster, devastating the country as far as the monastery of Glendalough, then marching northward to encamp at Kilmainham, near Dublin. Here he was joined by his father in early September, and together they blockaded the city.