Dubh-linn: A Novel of Viking Age Ireland (The Norsemen Saga Book 2)

by James L. Nelson

  Thorgrim shouted with agony, something he could not recall ever having done. He lashed out at Arinbjorn with his fist, connected with the side of his head and sent him stumbling back, but the punch was weak and he knew it, and he could see Arinbjorn had moved more from surprise than from the impact of the blow.

  There was no sound save for the two men gasping for breath, and then Godi’s voice came echoing down the length of the nave. “They’ve left off fighting!” he called. “I see men pointing this way!”

  Arinbjorn attacked again, driven by anger and a desperate need that Thorgrim could see in his eyes. And Thorgrim, growing weaker with each pulse of blood flowing from his wound, could do nothing but step back and step back again and try to keep Arinbjorn’s blade from getting past his defense. He was a leaking cask; the strength was flowing out of him now, and soon he would die because he could no longer hope to do anything but fend off Arinbjorn’s attack, and even that he could not do much longer.

  “Here they come!” Godi shouted and Thorgrim was vaguely aware of a murmur running through the watching Northmen and then his foot tangled in an overturned chair and he went down, falling back, straight back. There was something inevitable, even comforting in the fall, as if he was free from the terrible burden of fighting now, as if he would just fall and keep falling until he had fallen clear into oblivion.

  And then he hit, and the shuddering impact brought another scream of agony to his throat, but he clenched his teeth this time and held it back. Arinbjorn was above him, sword raised, and then the man’s throat seemed to explode in a shower of blood. His eyes went wide and his head snapped back and he made some weird noise, a liquid noise, and he collapsed, missing Thorgrim by inches, his arm falling across Thorgrim’s chest like a lover.

  Morrigan was standing there now, behind where Arinbjorn had been, a blood-tipped sword in her hand. “There,” she said. “No man has interfered with your ritual of pagan vengeance. Now take your plunder and go. Perhaps you will trade it all with Lucifer for a cup of water, but I think not.”

  And they went. Thorgrim, supported by Harald on one side, Starri on the other, was half-dragged, half carried through the door in the back, the others following behind, so that the church was between them and the Irish men-at-arms whom Godi reported cautiously advancing toward them. They crossed the open ground, made for the door, which Harald remembered well, the door that Brigit had led him through so many months before when she helped him escape from her father’s fatal designs. There were no guards this time. Every man who could carry a weapon had been fighting.

  If they were seen by the Irish, they had no knowledge of it. No shouts, no pursuit. They swung the door open, poured through that opening in the ringfort walls, made for the woods at the base of the long Hill of Tara. The Irish did not come after them. Any lust for combat they may have felt that morning had been sated long before.

  Morrigan sat amid the ruins of the church, the nave, like her life, torn apart, a tumble of broken bits, the damage the Northmen had inflicted before they discovered her prostrate on the floor. They had left through the back door, and soon after Ruarc mac Brain’s men had come in the front, and they had been none too gentle either, and with less excuse because they were not looking for plunder. They were just looking to destroy something that was not theirs.

  Through it all Morrigan had sat on the edge of an unturned chair, the heavy oak seat that the priest used when he was not at the altar, her eyes fixed on a crucifix lying on the floor. It was made of wood, not silver or gold, and so it had been left behind. Morrigan stared at the carving of her Lord in agony on the cross and she felt one with him, and she understood that it was not the physical pain, not the pain of nails through hands and feet, which gave him the hurt that consumed him so. She might have wept, but she was far beyond that now.

  After a while Ruarc’s men had left and still Morrigan sat, unmoving, unsure what she would do, other than simply remain where she was until she died of hunger and thirst. That would be fine. Would it be suicide? Did it matter? Was there any hope left for her stained and tattered soul?

  She heard the door open softly. Not flung open, but eased, just a crack, and she sensed rather than heard someone moving toward her.

  “Morrigan?”

  For the first time since the Norsemen had carried Thorgrim out the back door Morrigan lifted her eyes from the crucifix. “Father Finnian,” she said. It was a simple statement. She was not surprised to see him, because she was far too drained to feel surprise.

  Finnian walked further into the church, looking at the detritus left in the wake of passing hordes. He stopped just a few feet from Morrigan. “Your brother Flann is dead,” he said, his voice soft and compassionate. Morrigan just nodded her head. She already knew that, knew it in her soul.

  “Ruarc mac Brain has taken Tara,” Finnian continued. “He will put Brigit on the throne. But no harm will come to you, I’ve seen to that.”

  Morrigan looked at him for a moment, then looked away. “It does not matter,” she said.

  Finnian came closer still, until he was inches away. He reached out and gently pressed his palm against her cheek and turned her face so she was looking up at him. She saw in his eyes an empathy and a tenderness that she had not seen in many years, and even then had seen only in her brother’s eyes, when they were children, before Flann had come into the service of Máel Sechnaill mac Ruanaid, before he had learned how to kill men.

  “You have suffered greatly, Morrigan,” Finnian said. “I know that.”

  “And now I am to suffer more?”

  “That I do not know. I can absolve you of your sins. Beyond that, it is not up to me.”

  Morrigan looked back at the wooden Christ on the cross. Genuine repentance, confession, absolution, these were things she believed were as true as the sunrise, but she no longer believed that they could be hers. Not after all this.

  “I can see the repentance in your eyes, my child,” Finnian said. “Let me hear your confession, and absolution is yours. And then you will help me to remove a great evil, and we will see you off to another place. And I pray,

  sincerely I do, that it is a better place.”

  Epilogue

  The haughty unshaven horde

  Began to traverse the harbours;

  Birds' bills with bearded heads were seen

  Coming from the churches of Ulaid.

  The Annals of Ulster

  From the ship’s afterdeck, Thorgrim cursed it all; the Liffey, the thick cluster of homes and shops, the earthen walls of the outer defenses, the hills rolling away green from the edge of the sea, ugly Dubh-linn, huddled against the gray river, the smoke hanging low over the thatched roofs. The deck was his deck, the ship his own ship, and he was a richer man now for all the plunder they had taken from Tara, but none of that could ease the bitterness he felt at being here again, once more crawling down the river to Dubh-linn, that cursed Dubh-linn, from which the gods seemed unwilling to release him.

  It was one week since the fighting at Tara. They had half carried Thorgrim to the edge of the woods and there had paused long enough to rig up a stretcher and carry him back to the ships that lay at anchor in the river Boyne. They kept a sharp lookout behind, waiting for the Irish, enraged and hungry for revenge, to burst like a flock of ravens from the ringfort and tear into them, but they never came, and the only impediments that the Northmen encountered on their march to the river were their own weariness and the wounds they had suffered.

  They removed Thorgrim’s mail shirt while he forced himself to remain silent, despite the agony. They cut the blood-encrusted tunic away. It was now that they wanted for Morrigan and her healing ways, but there were men among the Norsemen who had considerable experience in treating battle wounds, and they attended to Thorgrim with skill. The wound was deep, but Arinbjorn’s dagger had been thin and sharp and had not ripped up the muscle in its passing. The dried blood was washed away; a poultice was put in place, bandages wrapped around the ugly lacerat
ion. Harald hovered and made himself conspicuously helpful until Thorgrim, biting back the irritation, commanded him to stop.

  They were underway the next morning, but little wind, and then contrary wind and racing currents made their voyage back to the longphort a long, wearisome and frustrating endeavor. Six days underway before they raised Dubh-linn, and then for eight hours the mouth of the Liffey remained in sight as the fleet pulled against the tide with their long oars, the carved heads at the bows removed to not frighten any spirits ashore, and to signal to those watching from the longphort that they did not come with the intent to do harm.

  The ships were hauled up on the beach and once again Thorgrim was eased into the stretcher and with Harald and Starri at his head and Godi and Ingolf at his feet, Ornolf at his side keeping up a running soliloquy, they carried him swaying and cursing up the plank road to Almaith’s house.

  The forge was cold, and the house quiet, the constant hammering and the hiss of the bellow now gone, but Almaith was there and she gasped in surprise to see Thorgrim and the condition he was in. She ordered him brought inside and laid out on the bedding in the big room while she stoked up the fire under the iron pot and gathered up her medicines; dried nettles, dandelion, St. John’s wort.

  Thorgrim did not doubt they would find a welcome at Almaith’s hearth. Almaith cared about him, he could see that. He could see past everything she was and see that at her very core the affection she had for him was real. And on a more practical level, she needed him and the other men, Harald, Starri, Ornolf. She needed them there because she, an Irish woman alone in the Viking longphort, was in a precarious way without them. And Thorgrim knew her secret. He knew the treachery of which she was guilty, he knew that it had led to many needless deaths among the Norsemen. He knew and he kept it to himself. She would be grateful for that, and she would be wary of him.

  But mostly, he was welcome because she cared for him. It was as simple as that.

  And so Thorgrim lay back on the thick furs and tried to ignore the extraordinary pain in his shoulder and the bustle around him, the voices of the people as they shuffled in and out, and noise from the town crowded around the house, the ring of the hammers and the sounds of labor and commerce, the call of gulls fighting for scraps and men and women and children living out their lives. He closed his eyes and he thought of the sea, and he thought of his ship cleaving the dark blue waves and sending the water curling white down the long run of the hull. He pictured himself at the tiller, shifting the steering board a bit to larboard, a bit to starboard to keep her track straight and true.

  The track led east. It led away from this accursed Dubh-linn, this Ireland with its fighting and treachery and pain. It led back to his farm in Vik, his grandchildren, his home. He would heal and he would take his son, and his father-in-law if he would go, and he would gather a crew and he would steer his ship that way, east, straight and true.

  It was six months after Ruarc mac Brain had taken Tara from the pretender Flann and reestablished the line of Máel Sechnaill mac Ruanaid on the throne, half a year during which the rains of spring had yielded to summer and Ireland bloomed with the glorious abundance of that place, the cattle and sheep grew fat, and the brown earth was lost from sight under the great blooms of wheat and barley before Father Finnian had the chance to ride north.

  And when he did, the rains had come again, bitter cold and driving hard with the advent of autumn, and the harvest was brought in and the stores laid up for gray winter and he stood huddled before a peat fire in the scribe’s room at the Abbey of Kells, ten day’s ride from Tara.

  The abbey had stood where it stood for nearly three hundred years, and though generations before it had been all but abandoned, it flourished again during the lifetime of Finnian’s father, when an order of Columban monks had fled there from the edge of the sea, the sea that brought the heathen raiders again and again. But even that had not spared the monks from the wrath of the Northmen, who spread like rushes across Ireland, because proximity to the sea was no longer necessary to invite their depredations.

  Finnian held his hands up to the inadequate flame, and then with a flush of guilt he tossed another peat brick onto the fire. It flared and caught. The flame blossomed and a wave of heat rose up to Finnian’s numb hands. He had just made some extra work for some peasant, some poor soul who would toil in the peat bog to cut one more brick because he, Finnian, felt the need for more warmth.

  His particular friend, Father Ainmire, sat at the tall writing desk behind him. Ainmire would not mind the extra peat; it would not even occur to him that Finnian was being wasteful, because Ainmire was, in Finnian’s opinion, the most generous of souls. Here indeed was yet another example of that generosity. Ainmire was desperately eager to hear what Finnian had to say, and Finnian knew it well, but his friend was willing to wait with admirable patience as Finnian regained his circulation.

  The wind whipped around the stone walls and worked its way into the cracks and the windows and made a whistling and moaning sound. The fire danced in the fireplace and the flame of the candle on Ainmire’s desk danced and the two men enjoyed the moment of companionable silence.

  “The devil has been loose in Brega this year, or so I hear from those few travelers who pass this way,” Ainmire said at last.

  “The devil has been there, my friend, but the angels, too, I’m pleased to say.” Finnian turned to face Ainmire and to give his backside a chance to enjoy the delicious warmth of the fire. Ainmire’s face was all yellow light and shadow from the flame of the candle. He reached up and drew a quill from an inkpot, feigning all the indifference he was able to feign.

  Gossip was a sin, and such eagerness for news unseemly, but Ainmire’s interest in the goings-on was more than mere curiosity. Before him lay a scrap of vellum on which he would record those things that Finnian told him. Later he would transcribe those words into the great volume of annals that was his sacred duty, and that of his fellow monks, to keep. The annals comprised the history of the land of Ireland, a record of the events of great importance and a way to mark the passing of the days and months that allowed them to calculate the proper date for their moveable feasts.

  “We heard here that Brigit nic Máel Sechnaill was wed,” Ainmire prompted.

  “Wed this past spring, to Conlaed uí Chennselaigh of Ardsallagh, but it was not a fortunate union. Not a week or more after, there was a fire in the royal house. Half the building in ashes. Brigit managed to get out, but Conlaed did not.”

  “How did she escape and not him?” Ainmire asked.

  “I don’t know. Brigit did not know, she seems to have forgotten all that took place that night. She reckoned Conlaed died in saving her.”

  Ainmire’s quill scratched at the vellum.

  “That was when the devil came to Tara,” Finnian went on. “Flann was already on the throne, and his sister, Morrigan, held much of the power and did not seem inclined to give it up. Brigit feared for her life. So she fled.”

  Scratch, scratch, scratch. “To where, brother?”

  “To Dubh-linn at first, I believe,” Finnian said. “She told me after, she thought there was no place among the Irish where she would be safe. But later she realized the heathens were worse than any Irish might be, so she sought out Ruarc mac Brain, who she knew to be a good man, and it was he who restored her to the throne of Tara.”

  “And is it true they are to wed?”

  Finnian smiled. “Yes, it’s true. Ruarc is a brave man. Brigit has been married twice thus far, and twice have her husbands come to bad ends.”

  Scratch, scratch, scratch. “So there might yet be an heir to the throne at Tara?”

  “There is already,” Finnian said. Ainmire looked up from his vellum with a quizzical look in which Finnian took a secret delight. “A son was born to Brigit about three months back.”

  “How…?”

  “He is the child of Brigit and Conlaed uí Chennselaigh. They were married but a week, it’s true, but a week is time enoug
h. A wedding night is time enough.” By the light of the candle Finnian saw Ainmire blush and turn back to his writing.

  “And Flann?” Ainmire asked. “And Morrigan?”

  “Flann was killed in fighting Ruarc mac Brain,” Finnian said. “As to Morrigan, I’ll admit to stepping in there and seeing no harm came to her. She did a bad thing, but she was repentant, truly, and forgiven in the eyes of God. And she has suffered a great deal in this life.”

  Ainmire wrote. “So, where is she?” he asked.

  “She has joined a holy order. Her life will be spent bringing glory to God.”

  Ainmire wrote. And thus is history created, Finnian thought.

  “There is one more thing…” Ainmire said, and his tone was slightly embarrassed. “I would not mention it, but we have heard rumors, you know, more than one.”

  “Yes?”

  “There are some that say St. Patrick himself has come back, and has visited poor farmers to the south. Have you heard such? I ask because of the annals….”

  Finnian smiled. “Yes, I’ve heard such,” he said. “But I think I would not put that in your book. Who can tell from where such stories come?”

  It was just over a year after Ruarc mac Brain set Brigit nic Máel Sechnaill on the throne of Tara that a certain beamy, squat merchant ship moved listlessly in the light air blowing over the Sea of Marmara. It may have been a distant cousin to the Viking longships, with its single square sail and the smooth run of its sheer, but there the similarities ended. Where the longship was narrow and fast, the merchantman was wide and slow, with a deep and heavy hull, decked over as the longships were not, providing safe storage below for the considerable cargo she carried; silks and amphora jugs of wine and olive oil, sacks of grain, all the varied commerce that had moved for centuries around the Mediterranean world.