Pride of Lions (2 page)

Brian is a decade older than me,

Malachi thought. He's seventy-three this month. Can it be possible? where have the years gone?

And both of us still fighting.

He shook his head ruefully, dragging his thoughts back to this time and place. He covered the dead boy's face and asked one of the bearers, "Where's Prince Murrough?"

"They're bringing him now," volunteered a Dalcassian warrior, limping past them in the twilight.

Murrough's litter bearers were Dalcassian heroes famed for their strength, yet they were tottering like old men as they approached. Both they and the litter were bathed in blood.

Malachi stepped forward to intercept them.

"What happened to him?" he asked, staring down. The face of the corpse was uncovered, but masses of clotted gore obscured the features.

"That blood's not from his wounds," a bearer said.

"We carried him here through Tomar's Wood, where the worst of the axe fighting was. Blood's still dripping from the branches of the trees."

In spite of himself, Malachi shuddered.

With the hem of his own tunic he wiped the blood from the dead man's eye sockets. The lids, he was thankful to find, were closed. The face which he had so often seen contorted with anger was peaceful now, all quarrels forgotten.

Including ours, Malachi told Murrough silently, Forgotten and forgiven.

He laid the palm of his hand on the bloody forehead in benediction, then motioned the bearers to move on. The depth of his grief surprised him. He and Brian Boru's eldest son had never liked one another.

The collecting of the dead continued. It would go on for days.

The night smelled of death and excrement.

Somewhere down near the bay someone was chanting wildly "Boru! Boru! Boru!"

The gray horse had been bred for endurance on the limestone-rich plains of Kildare, but it was tired now. Men and horses alike were tired, yet Donough drove them on. "The Ard Ri needs me," he insisted.

As usual, Ronan, his second in command and the senior member of the company, contradicted him.

"The Ard Ri does not need you. I myself heard him say he does not expect us to join him until after Easter. Those were his precise orders."

Ignoring Ronan, Donough pushed on.

Saturday evening found his band in the Wicklow mountains, the men wearied to the point of revolt.

When they paused to water their horses at an icy stream, Ronan tried again. "You have to have some consideration for your men," he told Donough.

"You're being reckless, forcing such a pace when there is no need for it. I must protest, Donnchad."

The youngster's gray eyes flashed. "I told you before. Call me Donough from now on."

He pronounced the name Donno in his Munster accent. He despised the name Donnchad, which his mother had given him, and with which she prefaced her constant criticisms of him. He considered himself a man now, entitled to a new name to reflect his new status. Had not Brian Mac Cennedi become Brian Boru?

"Och, I forgot," Ronan replied with a shrug, as if it did not matter. "But listen to the voice of experience, lad. What you're doing is dangerous. Weary horses are likely to stumble and break their legs or our necks. It could happen to you as easily as to one of us, and then there would be trouble. We have orders to ..."

"To what?" snapped Donough, instantly suspicious. "You have orders to what?"

"To keep you safe," Ronan admitted.

"That's why the Ard Ri assigned us to come south with you while the rest of them went to Dublin."

"I thought so!" Donough exploded. "And I tell you, no one is needed to keep me safe.

I can take care of myself! Am I not the same age my father was when he began fighting the Vikings?

And am I not in command of this company? We're riding on to Dublin now, Ronan, and if that means we keep going throughout the night, so be it!"

Below a flowing russet moustache, Ronan thrust forward a clean-shaven jaw. "If the Ard Ri were here right now," he said, "he would tear strips off you. He's famous for taking care of his warriors."

Donough felt a momentary empathy with his oldest half-brother. Murrough frequently complained of having Brian Boru held up to him, an unattainable standard of perfection. The burden of such a father weighed heavily on his sons, particularly the eldest.

Donough, the youngest, tried to imagine what his father would do in the same situation. Compromise, he decided. Compromise was one of the Ard Ri's most effective weapons, a lesson Murrough had never learned. But Donough would learn. He idolized Brian. It was his ambition to be just like him.

"I'll strike a bargain with you, Ronan,"

he offered. "You and the others ride on with me now until the wind changes. Whenever that happens, we will set up camp and have a rest before we go any farther."

Ronan looked dubious. "What if the wind doesn't change?"

"Surely it will, it's been shifting almost constantly for days. You yourself said you had never known it to be so unpredictable. Have we an agreement?"

The veteran hesitated, to make it look as if he had a choice. "We do," he said at last.

They mounted and rode on in gathering darkness, a weary band in saffron-dyed tunics and woolen mantles, bare-legged, cold, hungry.

One of the warriors remarked, low-voiced, to Ronan, "You were afraid he'd go off without us and report us as deserters to his father."

"I'm not afraid of Brian Boru," came the swift reply. "I tell you something for nothing --that lad's mother is the one to be feared."

At the mention of Gormlaith a ripple of coarse laughter ran though the company. "If we let her baby ride off by himself and anything happened to him," Ronan elaborated, "she would put a fearful curse on the lot of us."

"That Gormlaith is a curse all by herself,"

another man said.

No one disagreed.

The night was bitterly black; the wind was icy. Neither moon nor stars lit the way. The sky was opaque with cloud.

Sooner than he would have liked, Donough felt the wind shift, swinging around to blow straight out of the north. It had gained him a little more time, at least, and for that he was thankful. He signaled a halt and his men were sliding off their horses almost before he gave the order.

They made camp in the lee of a massive stony outcropping that shielded them from the worst of the wind. With flints, one of the warriors struck sparks and made a fire of dry gorse and winter-killed bracken. They were too tired to forage, so contented themselves with eating bread and stringy dried venison from their supplies, then settled down to sleep.

But Donough could not rest. He wandered around the perimeter of the campsite, listening to the snores of his men and the chewing of the hobbled horses as they grazed on mountain grass. The bitter wind tugged at the edges of the brat he wore, the heavy knee-length mantle fastened at the shoulder with a massive bronze brooch.

Although he was angry with his father for putting him in what he considered to be a humiliating position, denied a part in the real fighting, most of his anger was reserved for his mother. If it were not for Gormlaith there would be no invasion to threaten an aging High King who should have been allowed to live out his remaining years in peace.

Donough wanted to share those years with Brian Boru. He had not been allowed much time with his father while Brian and Gormlaith were married, for she had deliberately contrived to keep her son away from his sire so she could demand Brian's attention for herself. But when at last the Ard Ri divorced Gormlaith under Brehon Law and sent her from Kincora, he had kept Donough with him.

The youngster had taken this as a sign of special affection, and began imagining himself someday supplanting Murrough as Brian's favorite, the son being groomed to succeed his father.

But now Murrough, who had spent his life trying to step out of Brian's shadow and be his own man, was with the Ard Ri at Dublin, while Donough was being held at arm's length. To keep him safe.

He ground his teeth in the darkness.

With no one watching, Donough did not have to keep up the fa@cade of maturity he assumed by daylight. He could be what he was, a sixteen-year-old boy ... well, to be honest, sixteen in two months ... in unfamiliar country in the middle of the night, assailed by the fears that worry most youngsters at some time.

What would I do, he asked himself, if anything happened to my father?

The mere idea made his stomach churn.

Without Brian behind him, Donough was nothing more than Gormlaith's son; the son of the Princess of Leinster, the most hated woman in Ireland.

Surely, he thought, concentrating with desperate intensity, God will not let anyone harm the Ard Ri!

He pictured his father as he had last seen him at Kincora--tall, regal, looking far younger than his years.

But old nevertheless. Brian had been old for all of Donough's lifetime.

The boy recalled his father's voice, that deep, slow voice which dropped each word as if it were a jewel, compelling people to listen. Donough had strained his throat trying to force his own voice into a lower register, and when someone eventually commented that he was beginning to sound like the Ard Ri he had glowed like a beeswax candle.

He knew he looked somewhat like Brian. In his mother's many mirrors he had studied his face, searching out similarities. He had the same broad brow and long, straight nose. To his regret he had also inherited his mother's curving mouth, but as soon as he could grow the drooping moustache of a warrior he would hide that flaw.

Unfortunately he lacked Brian's famous red-gold mane, for his own hair was an auburn so dark it looked almost black unless he stood in the sunlight. But at least he was tall. Someday he might be as tall as the Lion of Ireland.

Someday ...

He tensed abruptly. He thought he heard a woman cry out--but what woman would be in these mountains at night when wolves might be hunting?

Perhaps it was a wolf he heard. He dropped a cautious hand to his sword hilt.

The sound came again, raising the hackles on his neck. That was no wolf. Now Donough was certain it was a female voice, one with an unnameable quality at once familiar and frightening.

The wail drifted on the wind. And all at once, he knew.

"Ban shee!" he hissed in horror.

"Whassay?" mumbled a warrior lying near him on the ground, wrapped in a voluminous shaggy cloak.

Donough stood transfixed as the sound rose in volume, shrilling upward into an inhuman ululation as much a part of Ireland as her fields and forests.

"Mother of God!" gasped the warrior on the ground, trying to scramble out of the enveloping folds of his cloak so he could get to his feet. "What was that?"

"The guardian spirit of the Dal Cais,"

Donough told him with sudden, absolute certainty. His blood and bones identified the sound. "She who lives on Crag Liath, the Grey Crag above Kincora. But she's not there now. She's somewhere on this side of the country, and she's keening for the Dalcassian dead!"

"Jesus, Mary, and Joseph protect us!"

cried the warrior, fervently signing the Cross on his breast.

The others were waking in spite of their weariness, the very mention of the ban shee enough to cut through the fog of sleep. Their priests claimed that the ban shees--fairies, Little People, supernatural relicts of a vanished race--were but myths and legends preying on superstitious minds. But when her next cry came with chilling clarity, they all heard it.

She screamed like a hare being torn apart by hounds. In that despairing shriek was all the grief and pain in the world.

"I told you my father needs me!" Donough sobbed in anguish.

In a matter of minutes camp was broken. The company set off at a hasty trot along narrow mountain trails, impelled by the memory of the ban shee's scream.

The first light of a gray, bitterly cold Easter morning found them descending from the mountains toward Dublin. The veteran warriors said little to one another. Fear and superstition rode with them, embedded in their bones.

Donough was also silent. His jaws were clamped tight on his anxiety, but his thoughts raced feverishly inside his skull.

His father, his half-brothers by Brian's various women, his Dalcassian cousins--all the men who represented stability in his life--were in Dublin to fight the invaders.

His mother was in Dublin too. Gormlaith, the antithesis of stability.

Once they left the mountains, their route joined with the Slighe Cualann, one of the five major roads developed by King Cormac Mac Airt in the third century of the Christian era to bring commerce and tribute from every part of Ireland to his stronghold at Tara. The island had countless small roads composed of foot-beaten earth, called bothars, or cow roads, because they were the width of two cows, one lengthwise and one athwart. But these casual trails were hardly sufficient for the traffic Cormac had envisioned--

hence the slighe.

Originally constructed of oak logs laid down across timber supports, a slighe was designed to accommodate, two abreast, the war chariots once used by Gaelic champions. The passage of centuries had seen the disappearance of war chariots, although similar carts of wickerwork were still used for personal transportation by the nobility.

Meanwhile wooden-wheeled traders'

wagons had combined with the Irish weather to erode the slighe. Stones had been added to its bed from time to time so it would continue to provide a stable surface over mud and bogland, but it was very difficult footing for weary horses.

Unthinkingly, Donough guided his horse onto the slighe. Ronan, directly behind him, reined his animal to one side and rode beside the slighe rather than upon it. The others followed his example.

Donough noticed, but continued as he had begun, refusing to be instructed by his

second-in-command.

Ronan grinned to himself. Proud and stubborn; not surprising.

As they drew closer to Dublin, the company began encountering refugees, big-boned, fair-haired people typical of the Scandinavian population of the city. The first ones they met were not prosperous Viking sea rovers, however, but three men and two women whose clothing identified them as members of the laboring class. The men wore tattered woolen coats and leggings that had been many times patched. The women, who might have been mother and daughter, were clothed in unfitted ankle-length gowns of coarse wool over shifts of equally coarse linen. Neither gown was ornamented with embroidery. Like all Vikings they wore shoes, but these were in bits and bound to their feet with string.