Pride of Lions

by Morgan Llywelyn

  Donough was reluctant to accept. “This will not endear you to my brother,” he warned the poet.

  Mac Liag shrugged. “I’m too old to worry about such things. Besides, who would harass a dying man?”

  “You aren’t dying, Father,” Cumara responded automatically, as he had done at least once a day for as long as he could remember.

  “Of course I am. It’s a miracle I’ve lived this long, and I have no desire to live longer. The house will be yours when I’m gone and you can take another wife to look after you, instead of yourself tending a sick old man.”

  In an aside to Fergal, Cumara remarked, “I’ve tended that sick old man for so long I’ve forgot what to do with a woman.”

  “You will remember soon enough when you have the chance,” Fergal replied with a wink and a nudge. “Your parts fit hers, and the rest is obvious.”

  Seasoned warriors all, the Dalcassians would sleep on the ground outside Mac Liag’s house, but the poet ushered Donough and the two women inside. “You may have my bed,” he told the newly married couple. “It’s a real bedbox, carved oak, with a feather mattress.” His faded eyes twinkled with unforgotten fire.

  For some reason an image flashed through Donough’s mind of Crag Liath, brooding above them. “I’ll sleep outside with my men,” he decided. “They expect it.”

  Neassa thrust out her lower lip. “They do not expect it. I expect you to sleep with me.”

  “If anyone requires a feather mattress, I do,” Gormlaith announced. “You can squabble over sleeping arrangements all you like, Donough. But Mac Liag will show me to his bed.”

  The old poet looked so horrified even Gormlaith had to laugh. “Where I shall sleep alone,” she added, then laughed again at the relief on his face.

  “What about me?” wailed Neassa.

  “I’ll fix you a pallet by the hearth,” Cumara promised.

  She would not be mollified. “Am I to surrender the only good bed to that woman? I’m the one who just married a prince!”

  Cumara exchanged glances with his father. As gently as he could, Mac Liag took Neassa by the elbow and drew her aside. “I suggest you take what’s offered and say nothing, little flower. There is trouble enough already, and no one has ever profited from arguing with Gormlaith—quite the reverse.”

  Neassa turned with arms outstretched in supplication toward her husband. But Donough had already left the house.

  He wrapped himself in his cloak and lay down on the ground with the other men, to sleep for what little remained of the night.

  Dawn found him still wide awake, lying on his back with his arms crossed behind his head. The night had turned cold but clear; the dawn was a glory. Salmon-colored light blazed across the sky, silhouetting the mountains east of the Shannon.

  Donough sat up and glanced toward the house. All quiet.

  Perhaps too quiet, he thought, remembering that both his mother and his wife were under the same roof. After Gormlaith had left Kincora and moved in with her son Sitric in Dublin, there had been much amused speculation as to what Sitric’s home life was like, with Gormlaith and Brian’s daughter under the one roof.

  What am I going to do with her? Donough asked himself. Send her back to Sitric? Will he take her? What if he refuses? He rolled over on his stomach and reached out to touch the shoulder of the sleeping Fergal. “Fergal! Are you awake?”

  “I am now,” came the growl from within a fold of woolen cloak. “But I did not want to be.”

  “Listen here to me. Your mother and father ended their marriage, did they not?”

  Fergal sighed, groaned, tossed the cloak aside, and propped himself on one elbow. “They did. Why? Are you tired of the fair Neassa already?”

  Donough chose to ignore the question. “Where did your mother go—after?”

  “Under Brehon Law she was given back all the property she had brought to the marriage, of course, plus her share of the bride-gift. She had a fine house built for herself in the Arra mountains. Why?”

  “I wonder if my mother got her dowry back.”

  “From which marriage?”

  “Any of them. My father.”

  “If she did,” Fergal replied, getting up to go relieve his bladder into the lake, “it’s gone now. Spent on jewels and silks, I’d say from the look of her. There’s a woman who denies herself nothing.”

  Donough rolled over and gazed up at the sky once more. Already its clarity was marred by the first threads of dark cloud.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  EMBOSOMED AMONG THE OAKS IN A STONE-AND-TURF CABIN SMOTHERED by ivy, Padraic sat dreaming. Behind his sightless eyes old wars were fought anew. Bronze battle tumpets blared. The bodhran thundered its relentless beat. A giant with red-gold hair strode among his enemies swinging a two-handed sword no ordinary man could brandish.

  “I wonder who has Brian’s sword now,” Padraic murmured.

  A soft voice replied, “Don’t you remember, Father? You asked, and that historian, Carroll, told you. They carried the sword to Armagh with the Ard Ri’s body.”

  “I heard,” the blind man said, “but I’m more interested in what I didn’t hear. Carroll never said they put the sword in the tomb with him. Brian Boru’s sword? I’ll wager it came back to Munster under someone’s cloak, Cera.”

  “You have a suspicious mind.” His daughter laughed.

  “I learned from the Ard Ri.”

  Humming as she worked, Cera busied herself about the house. They had been away for a time and there was much to do. According to the custom of the country, in their absence they had left the house open, with food and drink and blankets set out for any passing traveler who might need them. Someone had obviously availed himself of the hospitality, but had taken only a portion of the food and left the blankets neatly refolded.

  The hearth needed to be swept and the fire relaid, however, and fresh water fetched from the nearby spring. More bread must be baked in the round stone oven behind the house, using wheat ground in the mill at Ennis. There were goose eggs to gather and spinning to be done, the last of the previous year’s wool transformed into cloaks for the next winter.

  Cera’s three brothers had departed shortly after dawn to work the fields of their holding, while their sister Failenn searched out medicinal plants among the hedgerows. None of them would return until dark. Only Padraic’s youngest daughter would spend the day with him, but he was not lonely.

  He had the past.

  He tried to recall the exact words his Niamh had said about the past, the druid wisdom she had shared with him.

  “The past is the future” … was that it? “Life is a spiral; we come the same way repeatedly, but each time we have a different view.”

  “Please God,” Padraic murmured to himself. “Please God.” He saw no contradiction in calling on his Christian god to verify druid faith.

  “The Great Fire of Life shines on Christians the same as it does on druids,” Niamh had often said.

  His reverie was interrupted by Cera’s hands tucking a blanket around him.

  He tried to push her away. “I’m not cold, pet; I’m a warrior.”

  “Of course. But I’m cold, though I’ve put another stick on the fire. The weather will change soon.”

  He did not ask how she knew. Druids always knew.

  By midday a ferocious storm was lashing the kingdom of Thomond from the rim of the ocean to the grasslands of Tipperary.

  As she worked at her spinning wheel, Cera patted her foot in time to the music in her head. Occasionally the music broke out in the form of a melodious whistle, a sweet, slow air as haunting as the scent of hawthorn.

  Her father cocked his head to listen. “I swear your mother used to delight me with that same song,” he remarked. “Her that died when you were a tiny wee mite. How can you know her music?”

  But Cera only smiled.

  The fire on the hearth crackled and snapped its own music. From time to time the young woman arose to feed it a bit of wood. Once, passin
g close to her father, she paused to look down at him. “Where do you go behind your closed eyes?” she wondered aloud.

  “Here and there. Here and there.”

  “With Brian Boru?”

  “Aye.”

  Aside from the fire and the drumming of rain on the thatch, the house was very quiet. Cera and her father were alone together within a globe of being. It was a time when one might ask the deeper questions.

  “Are you never bitter, Father? About your eyes?”

  “Why should I be? Did I not have the use of them for many years, more years than a lot of warriors live?”

  “You gave all those years to the king and kept nothing for yourself.”

  He turned his face up toward her. “I’m not a wise man, not like Carroll or Mac Liag. But this I know. If you are blessed with strength, other people rely on it, and you give gladly because a gift is meant to be shared.” He paused and drew a deep breath. Cera thought his hands trembled a little, resting on his thighs.

  “Then one day,” Padraic went on, “you find yourself alone. Those with whom you shared yourself have gone off with the strength you gave them, leaving none behind for you.

  “There is only the empty sea and the empty sky then, if you have eyes to look at them. But I have no eyes, so I look at the past instead. And it is bright and shining, Cera. Like your name. Bright and shining.”

  “Cera means bright red, Father,” she reminded him gently.

  “Aye.”

  “My hair is not red.”

  “Is it not? Come here to me, pet.”

  She bent down. The freckled hand, its fingers gnarled and nobbled with age, stroked her dark brown hair.

  “It feels red,” said Padraic.

  Later, when he had fallen asleep by the fire, Cera went to stand in the doorway of the house and watch the last of the storm blowing away eastward.

  The storms off the ocean always blow eastward, she mused, her eyes following the curtains of rain now sweeping the distant Shannon.

  Kincora.

  Padraic’s blind eyes saw only the past, but his daughter stood in a doorway facing eastward and looked to the future.

  Mac Liag’s hospitality was exemplary, but it was obvious from the first night that the arrangement must be short-lived. The house was too small and the proximity to Kincora made everyone uncomfortable. They were very aware of Teigue’s guards passing daily on the road a spear’s throw away.

  “They’re spying on us,” Gormlaith told the captain of her escort. “Teigue hates me, I’m sure he’s much angrier with me than he is with my son.”

  “We can go back to Dublin,” he suggested hopefully. He was not comfortable being heavily outnumbered in hostile territory.

  Gormlaith rewarded him with a frosty stare. “Go, then.”

  “We can’t go without you; we have orders to stay with you.”

  “I am with my son now. I don’t need you any longer. I insist you go.” Her eyes were like chips of green stone.

  The big Viking hesitated.

  “GO!” she screamed at him. Her fingers hooked into talons; her face became a mask of fury.

  As they were riding back toward Dublin at a brisk trot he told his men, “I had rather face Sitric Silkbeard any day than argue with that woman!”

  Waiting until they had been gone for quite some time, Gormlaith casually informed Donough that her guard had abandoned her. “I don’t know where they went,” she said innocently. “They just took off.”

  Donough had a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach.

  When he began soliciting offers of accommodation for the immediate future, Conor offered him the hospitality of his own clanholding at Corcomrua.

  Donough’s expression brightened.

  “In the Burren? North of Ennis?”

  “It is. At a place called the Fertile Rock,” Conor added with obvious pride.

  “That’s a long way to take these women,” Cumara remarked as the party was preparing to leave Mac Liag’s house, but Donough would not be dissuaded.

  “The farther I am from my brother right now, the better for both of us,” he said grimly.

  And so Donough Mac Brian and his followers set out across Thomond in the direction of the Burren. In spite of all he could do to dissuade her, Gormlaith was determined to accompany them. “I am abandoned—what else can I do?” she argued.

  “That woman is going to be like a burr tangled in his hair,” Fergal prophecied to Ronan.

  Though she had dispensed with her bodyguard, Gormlaith had kept her cart. She made the journey in style, driving the horses herself—with Neassa, at Donough’s insistence, beside her.

  Neither woman was happy about the arrangement.

  Each expressed her dissatisfaction to Donough at every opportunity.

  The trip to the Burren seemed to take a very long time.

  “That cart slows us up,” Conor told Fergal. “It’s less than two days on a good horse.”

  The other replied, “I suspect Donough would gladly leave the cart behind if he could—contents and all.”

  For the most part, however, Donough managed to ignore the complaining women. Their voices became magpie-screeches in his ears, as much a part of the background as the thud of hooves or the creak of cartwheels or the rustle of summer-wind through summer-leaves. Donough rode with his men, beside first one and then another, talking or being silent as the mood took them.

  They traveled west from Lough Derg through mountainous land dotted with lakes that gradually gave way to bog and grassland in the valley of the Fergus. As they rode Donough questioned Conor about various landmarks—and distances.

  “Have you never been in the west of Thomond before?” the lord of Corcomrua wondered.

  Donough shrugged. “I had no reason to be.”

  “Yet you seem most interested in it now.”

  “Some of my inherited landholdings are here. Besides, this is Dal Cais country. Should I not familiarize myself with every meadow and mountain?”

  Conor grinned. He was a stocky, merry man with a permanently wind-chapped face and very white teeth. “Why? Do you envision yourself being chief of the tribe some day? Your brother Teigue looks to be in good health to me.”

  Changing the subject, Donough extended an arm and pointed. “Does Ennis lie off that way?”

  “There’s nothing of interest in Ennis,” Conor assured him.

  “No important forts?”

  “Not really, no. Some minor cattle lords have holdings, and there’s a mill on the river, but not much else. Even the nearest crossroads fair is at Spancil Hill.”

  “I thought my father’s old spear carrier lived near Ennis.”

  “Blind Padraic? He’s a bit father on, somewhere around Drumcullaun Lough.”

  “Will we pass his holding?”

  “Not at all. It will be much easier, since we have the cart, if we swing north soon. There’s a road of sorts, that way.”

  The landscape changed again; became a moonscape. Great slabs of gray limestone lay like paving upon the earth, with a profusion of rare and delicate flowers thrusting up between them. “The Fertile Rock,” Conor pointed out.

  Donough looked around appreciatively. “None of my new holdings are in the Burren, but I might like to have a fort here myself.”

  At once Conor’s cheerful face turned sour. “This is my land,” he stressed.

  Conor’s wife made the party welcome when they arrived at his stronghold, and sent her women scurrying for heated water and cool wine. “I don’t know how she tolerates living here,” commented Gormlaith as she bathed her face and feet. “This isn’t a palace, it’s a pile of rocks.”

  Fortunately Conor, Lord of Corcomrua, did not hear these disparaging remarks. After greeting his wife and introducing his guests he had promptly set off for Galway Bay, just north of his holding, to conduct some trade. The unforeseen influx of so many guests meant arranging for additional supplies; he would exchange promises of hides and butter for smoked cod and ba
rrels of herring.

  Despite Gormlaith’s criticism, Corcomrua was a stronghold worthy of a chieftain. A circular cashel, or stone-built fort, its construction was dictated by its location. In the Burren stone was the most common material. Within buttressed stone walls stood several round stone houses as well as a capacious kitchen. Beyond this central ring-fort, secondary walls protected outbuildings and penned livestock. Burren limestone provided rich pasturage even in winter, and the lord of Corcomrua was known for the quality of his cattle.

  When she insisted that she have “accomodation befitting my rank,” Gormlaith was given sleeping space in the grianan, the women’s sunny-chamber. Donough, Neassa, and the other ranking members of the party were put in the guesting house.

  At night the men sat around the central hearth in Conor’s house and drank mead and discussed the situation. Burren mead was delicious, a potent honey-apple wine that sang through the veins. A few goblets were enough to make a man optimistic.

  “When the rest of the Dalcassians learn how Teigue has treated me, they’ll take my side,” Donough said.

  Conor extended his goblet to his wife for a refill. “In what way? Become your army instead of his? Do you hope to gain Kincora by force?”

  “I just want what is mine.”

  “But if you can’t prove it …”

  “Teigue has the title,” Fergal Mac Anluan interjected. “He’s chief of the Dal Cais now, no one can displace him from Kincora.”

  “The King of Munster could,” said a voice from the shadows.

  Gormlaith had entered the room.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  WOMEN DID NOT CUSTOMARILY BREAK INTO THE CONVERSATION OF men, but Gormlaith had never been one to follow custom. She walked straight to the hearth and seated herself on a bench, then unabashedly hiked her skirts around her knees and stretched her long legs toward the fire.

  Donough could not help noticing that his mother still had fine legs.

  They all noticed.

  After a long moment the cattle lord of Corcomrua inquired, “What did you say?”