Teigue gave his younger brother a hard stare. “I am the only man,” he said in a stern voice. He had not wanted kingship, but now, angered at Donough’s reaction, he began to feel some of Brian Boru’s ambition surfacing in himself after all.
Donough checked a scathing retort. Further alienating his brother would serve no purpose. Besides, Teigue was the closest kin he had left, other than sisters he never saw and a mother he did not want to see.
With an effort he admitted, “I made a mistake in quarreling with Cian. But the Owenacht tribe has always been contentious. Had you been there, the same thing might have happened. Cian is easily offended.”
“I don’t want you blaming this on Cian. You have to take responsibility for what you do yourself.”
“That’s what I was trying to do!”
Teigue gave a tired sigh. “Leave it then, Donough. When this wedding is over I shall attempt to reestablish friendly relations with the prince of Desmond.”
Donough replied, “That should be my task if I’m responsible for the problem.”
“I don’t want you muddying the waters any further,” his brother said sternly.
“I feel like a spancelled horse,” Donough complained to Mac Liag later. He found himself journeying to the old poet’s house by the lake almost every day, seeking … he knew not what.
“Spancelled horses accept their hobbles and are obedient,” Mac Liag replied.
“But it was I who brought the army of Munster back from Clontarf! I even won a victory of sorts on the way. Surely I deserve better than to be treated like a child now.”
The old man’s eyes twinkled. “Your brother Murrough voiced the same complaints right up until the time he died. Brian would never let him run.”
“At least he let Murrough die with him,” Donough said bitterly.
“It is not easy to be one who survives. I know. Every day of my life I regret that I did not die with the flower of the Dalcassians.”
“That’s exactly what I mean!” the young man cried. “You talk like everyone else, as if all that was finest and most noble is dead! But I’m alive. Look at me. I’m flesh and blood standing here before you.”
“Be patient, lad,” counseled Mac Liag. “What is for you will not pass by you.”
As Donough was leaving the poet’s house he said out of the side of his mouth to Cumara, “It’s all very well for him to talk, he’s lived his life and had his honors. But what about me?”
Cumara looked sympathetic.
The day of the wedding dawned overcast. A curtain of soft gray rain hung in the sky north of the lake.
Brooding above Kincora, Crag Liath was lost in cloud.
Teigue’s steward Torcan had offered Donough an attendant to help him prepare for the occasion, but he had asked Fergal to be with him instead.
“I want an ally at my elbow,” he explained to his cousin.
“Why? Are you nervous? It’s only a marriage and you’ve already lain with the woman.”
“I want you with me,” Donough repeated. Fergal’s common sense did not seem to help with the knot in his belly.
He dressed in a new leine and a mantle large enough to wrap four times around his body. So much woven wool was indicative of his wealth as a prince. The mantle was crimson speckled with gray and black, and decorated with huge horsehair tassels.
Standing in front of him, Fergal held up a mirror so Donough could examine the effect. In the polished metal surface he thought he looked rather like his father. “Do I remind you of anyone?” he asked Fergal.
“You remind me of a scared boy afraid someone’s going to give him a whipping,” his cousin remarked unfeelingly. “Are you ready to go?”
The first event of the day was the recitation of the agreed marriage contract before the senior brehon. This was a private and sober ceremony as befitted legal arrangements concerning property. Only Teigue and Gadhra accompanied the young couple as their two clans would be bound by the settlements made. Once the contract had been formally accepted by both sides and tokens exchanged—gilded leathers representing the bride-price of cattle, ceremonial knives representing a strengthened alliance with Gadhra’s clan—the festivities could beign.
The blessing of the Church would be delivered by the Abbot of Kill Dalua in the chapel of Saint Flannan, and would mark the beginning of three days of celebration. Priestly participation was not customary for ordinary marriages, but had become increasingly a part of weddings involving noble clans as Christianity consolidated its hold on Ireland.
When the wedding party left the private chamber where the marriage contract had been formally accepted, they crossed the main courtyard of Kincora to the gray stone chapel. Kinspeople and dependents now crowded around them.
Servants had lined the way with newly cut rushes and strewn their path with fragrant hawthorn blossoms, the last of the season. The poets claimed hawthorn bloomed longer around Kincora than anywhere else in Ireland.
“I feel like a queen,” enthused Neassa, beaming left and right. She was resplendent in a sleeveless coat of loosely woven wool over a semi-fitted linen gown lavishly embroidered with silk thread. Imported glass beads were sewn onto her slippers. She waggled her fingers at the spectators as if they were her subjects. Once or twice she giggled.
Donough was both elated and embarrassed. This was only the second ritual of his life in which he had played a central part, and he did not remember the first, his baptism. He paced forward selfconsciously, trying to look dignified.
Neassa matched her stride to his, but one step behind. Under Brehon Law theirs was a marriage of the second degree, as they were not equal in status and property; her position in the procession was ordained by custom.
Among the crowd forming a line on either side of their passage was a bony, elderly man whose faded hair still retained a hint of red. By the sunken hollows of his blind eyes Donough identified him as Padraic, former spear carrier. Several young people clustered protectively around him.
One of them was a slender, dark-haired girl.
Donough had almost walked past her when something captured his attention and he turned to look.
Alone of all the wedding guests, she wore no shoes. Her high-arched white feet were bare, and the skirt she wore over her linen smock was red.
Donough lifted his gaze to her face. Her nose was very straight, almost Grecian; the modeling of her rather stubborn chin would do honor to a queen. Beneath level eyebrows, stars welled from fathomless pupils, setting dark eyes aglow.
It was a face he would have recognized anywhere, though he could have put his hand on his heart and sworn he had never met her before.
While they stared at each other a silent conversation took place between them. Its intensity left him shaken.
Donough forgot the crowd around him, forgot his new wife at his shoulder, the abbot waiting for them. He was surrounded by gray cloud pierced by a single beam of light, and in that light stood the girl in the red skirt smiling at him as if she had known him a thousand years.
Chapter Twenty
I could never afterward remember entering the chapel, nor the prayers Cathal Mac Maine intoned before the altar. Although my eyes remained fixed on the abbot, some deeper sense was searching the dim interior for the girl’s presence.
When I realized she had not entered the chapel I was upset I wanted Cathal to stop droning on and on so I could go outside again and see where she was.
Neassa elbowed me in the ribs. “the responses,” she hissed.
“The … ah. Indeed.” I dragged my mind back to the present and mouthed the expected Latin. Cathal signed the Cross over us, more prayers were offered, the ceremony was over.
I almost ran from the chapel.
The girl in the red skirt was gone.
Chapter Twenty-one
IN HONOR OF THE OCCASION, MAC LIAG HAD WORN ALL SIX COLORS to which a poet was entitled. His leine extended to his ankles in pleated folds; his long, semicircular mantle was striped in yellow,
green, black, red, gray, and blue-purple. Even Teigue, who was not yet King of Munster, was not so gaudily attired. Mac Liag stood out from the throng in the courtyard like a rainbow.
Donough went straight to him. “That blind man who was here a while ago, that was Padraic, was it not?”
“It was. I was glad to see him; it’s been a long time.”
“Who was that with him? The young woman in the red skirt?”
Mac Liag searched his memory. “I didn’t notice her, but I suppose she was one of his daughters. He is a widower like myself, you know, and he—”
“Why didn’t they come into the chapel?” Donough interrupted impatiently.
“Ah, Padraic would never be guilty of such an impropriety.”
“What do you mean?”
“Don’t you remember what I told you? His wife followed the Old Faith and her children do the same. Pagans are not welcome in Saint Flannan’s, and Padraic would never enter without them.”
Donough’s temper flared. “Who says they would not be welcome? It’s my marriage, I can have whoever I want, and I wanted Padraic and his family in the chapel!”
Cathal Mac Maine appeared at his elbow, the abbot’s heavy features set in folds of disapproval. “You have just come from the House of God,” he reminded Donough. “I expect a certain decorum from you with the blessing still crowning your brow. Instead you are willfully making trouble.”
“You overheard what we were saying?”
“Of course I did. Your voice is deep and it carries. You wanted to bring pagans into the House of God.”
Mac Liag tried to smooth things over. “I was just explaining to him, Cathal. He didn’t know.”
“I knew,” Donough contradicted him. “You told me before. But I wanted my father’s old friend and his family too. In light of Padraic’s service to the Ard Ri, no one can deny them Kincora.”
“Kincora, no,” the abbot agreed. “But I would stand in the doorway of Saint Flannan’s and bar them from its sacred precincts with my own body if necessary. Do you hear me?”
Teigue excused himself from a conversation he was having with Gadhra and strode across the courtyard toward them. “What’s wrong here?”
Donough tried to bite back anger. “Why do you always assume there’s something wrong when I’m involved?”
Cathal Mac Maine promptly launched into an explanation, complete with expressions of clerical outrage. Donough began defending his position, Mac Liag tried to outtalk them both, and Teigue struggled futilely to take charge of the situation.
Voices snarled into a knot.
“Look at those men over there!” Neassa protested to Maeve. “It’s my wedding day and they’re quarreling, trying to ruin it for me.”
Her sister cast an experienced eye over the group in question. “They are men of the Gael,” she commented. “They love to argue. They aren’t doing it to ruin your feast day, I assure you. Irish princes are warriors, that’s how they became nobility in the first place, by fighting and winning. You cannot tame them; you would destroy them.”
“Your Teigue’s no warrior,” Neassa replied thoughtlessly. “Everyone know’s he’s as gentle as an ox.”
Maeve rounded on her sister. “My Teigue can fight as well as any! You are a stupid, ignorant girl.”
“Don’t shout at me!” Neassa flared. Her face turned red, her eyes filled with angry tears.
Within moments people were taking sides. A fight was as good as a wedding; better, in the opinion of many. Raised voices echoed through the stronghold of the Dalcassians.
By late in the day, the great hall was given over to feasting. A constant stream of servants moved in and out of the kitchens, bearing food and drink and taking away empty platters, while tactfully ignoring arguments that waxed or waned on every side. Guests discussing Donough’s marriage later would boast that it was the most contentious they had ever attended. Three fights had turned serious and Ferchar the physician was kept busy tending injuries.
After she had drunk too much mead in the women’s gallery, Neassa began sobbing and demanding to go home with her father.
Gadhra suggested to Teigue that the property arrangements might be forfeit if his daughter was dissatisfied.
Fergal Mac Anluan hit one of Gadhra’s kinsmen over the head with a three-legged stool.
Ruadri of Ara found himself involved in a violent argument over which of the Dalcassians had acquitted themselves most bravely at Clontarf, and soon that battle was being refought by torchlight in the courtyard, with the wolfhounds of Kincora adding to the confusion as they tried to join in.
Only the storm center, Donough Mac Brian, did not take part.
His brother was angry with him, the abbot was angry with him, his wife was crying … he slipped out of the hall almost unnoticed and walked through the mist to the main gates of Kincora.
“Did the blind man, Padraic, leave by this way earlier?” he asked the sentry.
“I just came on duty. Wait here; I’ll ask around if anyone saw him.”
As Donough waited, a fresh wind sprang up off the lake, blowing the mist away. Shreds seemed to drift toward the rising moon and form a circle there, until one pale face peered from a pastel halo.
The moon was gazing toward the summit of Crag Liath.
Donough wandered out through the open gateway. His feet chose their path without his conscious thought, turning northwest.
One of the guards came trotting after him. “Prince Donough. Prince Donough! You were looking for the old blind man? His children have taken him home, back toward Ennis. They did not choose to spend the night in Kincora. They will seek hospitality from friends along the way.”
Donough stood still on the path. Ennis lay to the northwest, across mountain and forest and bogland.
Reluctantly he turned to go back inside. But first he looked toward Crag Liath bathed in moonlight.
“Where are you now?” he asked the girl in the red skirt.
The wind blew off the lake. The night air smelled damp and sweet, like the earth.
Donough’s keen ears heard distant sounds coming closer.
At once an armed guard stood beside him.
“There’s horses coming down the road,” the man affirmed, cupping one hand behind his ear. He shouted up to the sentry in the watchtower, “We’re about to have company! Look sharp!”
“Late guests?” Donough wondered.
“Very late indeed, if they are guests. But that’s why we keep the gates open. They’re coming fast; must be someone who knows the road even in the dark.”
Donough lingered to see who the new arrivals might be. Soon a wicker cart came careening into view, followed by an escort on horseback. Gormlaith stood bolt upright in the cart with her feet braced against its swaying as she drove the exhausted horses toward Kincora.
Chapter Twenty-two
THREE LARGE TORCHES SET IN IRON HOLDERS AS HIGH AS A MAN could reach burned on either side of the gateway. They shed a golden light that illuminated the road as far as the nearest stand of trees. In that glow Gormlaith’s face appeared haggard, the lines deeply scored, the famous eyes sunken. Yet her posture was as arrogant as ever. Whatever her failings, men would always say of her that she had the walk of a young queen.
As she stepped from the cart, Donough gazed at her in dismay. He could almost feel the bonds he had thought broken tightening around him again. “What are you doing here?”
“I came to prevent your making a dreadful mistake,” Gormlaith replied.
“What mistake?”
“Marrying someone who is not good enough for you, of course. Now show me to—”
With great satisfaction Donough announced, “If you mean Neassa Ni Gadhra, I’ve already married her.” It was the first time in memory that he had been able to thwart his mother.
Gormlaith folded her arms across her breasts. “You can’t. You simply cannot have done.”
“I have, this very day”
“A contract marriage?”
/> “Of the second degree. Sworn to before the chief brehon of Munster. Gadhra and Teigue were—”
“Then you can just go back to the chief brehon and tell him you divorce the woman,” Gormlaith demanded. “Tell him you made a mistake.”
From the moment Donough saw the girl in the red skirt he had known marrying Neassa was a mistake. Suddenly Gadhra’s daughter seemed … ordinary, no different from any number of other females.
Yet she was his wife, by agreed contract. His choice. If Gormlaith ordered him to set Neassa aside, he would keep her no matter what.
When he set his jaw he looked, in the flickering torchlight, more like his father than he knew.
“No, Gormlaith.” He did not call her Mother. He had never called her Mother.
The tall, haggard woman drew a deep breath. Sitting on their horses behind her, her mounted escort watched silently. No one could predict what she might do.
The sentries at the gates were just as uncertain. They remembered Gormlaith from the old days; remembered her all too well. She could explode like a pine knot in the fire and ignite everything within reach.
The chief sentry said over his shoulder to the man nearest him, “Run, don’t walk, to Prince Teigue and tell him she’s here.”
The guard ran.
Gormlaith paid no attention. Tall in the torchlight, she challenged her son with her eyes. “Who put you up to this? Your weakling brother? Let me speak to him!”
Throughout his life Donough had accepted his mother’s tyranny because he had no options. When he was a child she controlled him totally, and had continued to do so until the day Brian Boru sent her from Kincora.
Since then, however, Donough had taken up arms, seen battle, and led an army.
He would not let Gormlaith tyrannize him now.
He opened his mouth to tell her so—just as she put one hand on his chest and shoved him aside like a servant. With head held high she stalked through the gates of Kincora for the first time since her banishment.
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