She would be merely a diversion; a form of exotica in a life which had offered nothing exotic before.
“I have a private chamber,” he said.
Chapter Forty
THE KING OF THE SCOTS AND THE PICTS WAS NO SKILLED VOLUPTUARY, but had what he considered an adequate experience of women. From the first lass he had tumbled in a cow-byre when he was little more than a child, he had enjoyed the female sex as he enjoyed meat and drink and a good scratch. He was well acquainted with the landscape of the female body, and he knew enough about female moods to ignore them. In fact, apart from the occasional sexual conquests he still undertook when away from Glamis, he tended to ignore women. The fires of youth were far behind him and he had more important matters on his mind.
Yet from the moment Gormlaith swept into his private chamber carrying an ornamented casket, he felt as if he had been catapulted into unfamiliar territory.
“Sit there,” she said peremptorily, indicating with a nod the bench next to the brazier where a fresh fire crackled. He started to protest, thought better of it, and, bemused, sat as she requested.
Pushing a small table in front of the bench, she placed the unopened casket upon it. Polished silver gleamed in the firelight. “No looking yet,” she warned. “Have you mead, or is Alba too cold for bees and apples? That Danish ale you served last night is good enough for woodcutters and leather tanners, but I have a finer palate.”
“We have good mead,” Malcolm assured her, feeling uncharacteristically defensive. Raising his voice, he bellowed “Mead! To the king now!” The cry rang through stone passageways and a servant arrived at the run with a pitcher in hand.
Gormlaith stood waiting until two silver cups were brimming with the fragrant golden liquid, then she downed hers in a long, appreciative gulp, as straightforward as a man. She set the cup back on the table and glared at the servant. “Go!” she commanded.
The man went.
Gormlaith turned back to Malcolm. There was a smile in her eyes but not yet on her lips; a slow warmth full of possibilities. “Do you want to see what I brought you now?” she asked in that husky voice he remembered.
His mouth being unaccountably dry in spite of the mead, he merely nodded.
Gormlaith opened the casket. “A king should have a king’s gift,” she murmured, bending forward to remove the contents.
Malcolm found himself staring into the neckline of her gown.
From the ornamented box, Gormlaith began removing chess pieces, intricately carved figures in ivory and polished basalt. Each piece was decorated with gold or silver, and the larger ones were set with gems. The white, Malcolm saw, were in Gaelic costume; the black pieces represented Vikings.
Pressing a panel on the bottom of the casket, Gormlaith revealed a folded chessboard that swung open to full size. Its squares were inlaid with the same ivory and black, and each square was outlined with a minute Celtic knotwork of gold wire.
It was the most beautiful object Malcolm had ever seen.
Gormlaith read the appreciation in his eyes. The smile in hers extended to her lips. “This was the chess set of … the former Ard Ri,” she said.
He dragged his gaze away from the chess set and looked up at her. “How did you come by it?”
“I stole it.”
“You what?”
She shrugged. “I stole it from Kincora. When I, ah, left there after our marriage was set aside, all I took was the clothes on my back, but later …”
“I heard that Brian threw you out.”
Her eyes flashed. “We mutually tired of one another. But the point is, he did not return my full dowry to me; I was entitled to more. The last time I was at Kincora I took his chess set as part compensation, and now I give it to you.”
Malcolm gaped at her, dumbfounded.
She arched an eyebrow. “Can it be you don’t know how to play? Perhaps you might know one of the simpler Irish games, then; fidchell, or bran dubh? I’m sure my son has …”
“Of course I can play chess,” he snapped, on the defensive again. “I learned on the Isle of Lewis.”
“Then you will grant me a match?” Before he could answer she had drawn up a stool and seated herself facing him. She took a black pawn in one fist and a white in the other. “Choose one.”
When he tapped her left fist with his forefinger, he felt a spark jump between them.
Never in his life had Malcolm played chess with a woman. Such games were an extension of warfare, requiring a masculine mind. But from the first moves, it was obvious Gormlaith was a skilled player. Soon he was fighting for survival as surely as he had ever fought on a battlefield.
He could feel sweat rolling down his back.
To his consternation, Gormlaith was able to play while carrying on a conversation. No sooner were they into the game than she began questioning him about his recent campaigns.
“I understand you recently defeated a large army of Northumbrians at Carham and now claim everything to the Cheviot Hills,” she remarked as she moved a pawn deep into his territory.
Malcolm frowned at the chessboard. “You give me credit for my ambitions but not necessarily my achievements. There are regions not yet secure. Perhaps with the help of foreign allies … ?”
She glanced up with a demure smile. “I’m sure you will triumph,” she told him.
When he looked down again he discovered she had captured his queen’s bishop.
The pace of the game slowed. Gormlaith kept asking Malcolm questions he felt impelled to answer, which spoiled his concentration, and he was increasingly aware of her sensually, an awareness that grew into a thundering tension that was giving him a headache.
“What do you think of my son?” she inquired as she put one of Malcolm’s rooks in jeopardy.
“When we met he kicked his bench aside. A bold gesture that attracted me immediately, I must admit. I tend to judge a man by small things.” As he spoke Malcolm made a countermove he immediately regretted, certain it was a mistake.
“Och, he’s bold enough. He just needs a little push, so to speak, to come into his own. I do what I can to counsel him and guide his moves …”—she moved her queen unexpectedly, devouring Malcolm’s bishop—“ … so that he can rise to the eminence he deserves.”
The Scot gave her an appraising look from beneath his heavy eyebrows. “And you? A rise in status for Donough would elevate you as well, I presume.”
She bit her lower lip and studied the chessboard.
“You like being allied to power, don’t you?” guessed Malcolm.
Her green eyes met his with jolting force. “I like having power,” Gormlaith replied.
The game continued.
The flickering firelight from the brazier cast grotesque shadows on the chamber walls. Malcolm was seated at an angle that left his face in darkness, though his hands were clearly visible on the chessboard. Gormlaith found herself studying them while she and the king discussed power and politics, schemes and strategy.
How pleasant it is, she thought, to converse once more with an equal. She was reminded of years ago, when he taught her to play chess and they used to talk for hours, long after everyone else had gone to bed, while the pieces swooped around the board and wars were won and lost.
Flattered by Gormlaith’s interest, Malcolm began describing his successful campaign against an invading force of Orkneymen in Moray in 1010. “The Orkneys are a major base for the sea empire of the Norsemen,” he explained. “In order to safeguard Alba from their depredations I had to prove I could defeat them in battle, but I also took the precaution of arranging an alliance with their most powerful family through marriage to one of my daughters. Since Sigurd’s death, the son of that marriage is here with us at Glamis. A hard little boy called Thorfinn; I like to think I see something of myself in him.”
“Perhaps we can profit from your example,” Gormlaith commented.
“What do you mean?”
“If my son Donough is to attain the power he deserve
s, he needs an advantageous marriage. Left to his own devices he’ll accept someone as unsuitable as his first wife. The poor thing was nothing more than a cattle lord’s daughter; he could have done much better. Perhaps you and I can think of someone who would enhance his opportunities?” Her hands hovered over the chessboard.
“There are advantages to be gained from a clever political marriage,” Malcolm agreed. “Unfortunately all my daughters are wed now or I would …” He fell silent, frowning over strategy.
Gormlaith heard what he did not say. “Your relations with Orkney may be amicable enough these days—but a king is always under siege of one sort or another. Perhaps we could marry my son to a woman whose connections would be of benefit to you. Since there are already alliances established between us,” she added, smiling meaningfully.
The woman astonished him. Her mind went straight to the point like a well-thrown spear. Even as she was speaking he was thinking of Canute, of Dane and of Saxon to the south, of the great power struggle he sensed coming.
As the game progressed, Gormlaith became more and more aware of Malcolm’s hands. Huge hands, with strong, well-shaped fingers. In the dim room it was impossible to tell if the hair on their backs was dark or bright.
It might have been red-gold.
She did not look up at his face. As long as she watched only his hands, she could almost imagine that someone else sat across the chessboard from her. Another king … another powerful man …
She drank a fourth cup of mead, a fifth, the fumes dancing in her brain. She laughed, she flirted, she dazzled him with the extent of her intellect. Sparkling like a polished gemstone, she displayed a dozen facets of Gormlaith.
The man whose face was in shadow became not one specific person, but the male audience for whom she had always performed. Moment by moment she felt the flesh growing firmer on her bones, the age melting out of her muscles. Like a river reversed, the years flowed backward until she was in Glamis no longer, but somewhere else …
… facing someone else across the chessboard …
The hair on the backs of his hands was a burnished red-gold.
Emotion she had thought long dead welled up in Gormlaith. Her eyes stung with long-forgotten tears.
A great, aching tenderness swept through her. She fought it back; to be tender was to be vulnerable, to be feminine and weak. Men took advantage of female vulnerability; she had learned that lesson with the first flush of her beauty.
There had been a time when she wanted desperately to explore the soft side of her nature. There had been one man to whom she longed to present the varied facets of Gormlaith; for him she would have been child and woman, devil and angel, seductress and playmate and friend. But fate had made them adversaries, even in the marriage bed. And he had died at Clontarf …
He had not died. He sat across from her now. She knew those hands, knew the skill with which they suddenly began to maneuver the chess pieces. She had never succeeded in defeating Brian Boru.
Gormlaith gave a little sob.
Startled, Malcolm glanced at her face.
Her eyes were immense and full of light. By some trick of the firelight she looked like a young woman, a spectacularly beautiful woman whose face glowed with passion.
Malcolm held power by never failing to recognize and take advantage of an opportunity.
With a sweep of his arm he knocked the priceless chess pieces off the board and onto the floor. He leaned across the emptied table and caught Gormlaith by the shoulders, drawing her face toward his.
Before the light could reveal his features, she closed her eyes.
The lips that crushed hers were hard and bruising, but she did not respond in kind. Not this time. I have learned my lesson, she thought. He has come back to me and I have learned my lesson.
She let her mouth go soft; let her body go soft in his arms as he stood and pulled her against him. All of her was a yielding and a giving, so opposite from what Malcolm had expected that he almost dropped her. He had thought to embrace a tiger; instead he held a virginal girl.
The change confounded him. He sought to soften his kiss and meet her gentleness with gentleness, but he did not know how. His mouth could only seize and devour. Angered by failure, he became more fierce than ever, running his hands down her body and ripping away her robe. The fabric bruised her flesh as it pulled and tore and she winced, but he paid no attention.
He thought she murmured, “Please, not this time,” into his mouth, but he would not accept guidance from a mere female. He forced her backward and threw her down onto the floor, then hurled himself atop her.
“Lie still, woman; you’re going to bed another king.”
When she began to struggle he laughed. He forced a knee between her legs and fumbled with his clothes, aware that he had a massive erection.
Gormlaith! The ultimate prize, in his chamber, beneath him!
Chapter Forty-one
CONTRARY TO HIS EXPECTATIONS, CATHAL MAC MAINE DID NOT DIE. He was convinced he had heard the ban shee wail for him, but days, weeks, months passed, and the worst fate that befell him was increasingly severe rheumatism during a long, wet winter.
His dreams were haunted by echoes. Usually they took the form of a ban shee’s keening, but occasionally they contained an underlying, mocking laughter.
“Those pagans have cursed me!” he complained bitterly to Brother Declan. “They put the ague in my bones.”
Though the scribe had heard Cathal complain of joint pain for years, he dare not contradict his abbot. Keeping his thoughts to himself, he dutifully updated the annals and transcribed Cathal’s letters. Early in 1018 sympathy was expressed to the Abbot of Kildare, whose monastery had been struck by lightning, and to the Abbot of Kells, whose abbey was plundered by Sitric Silkbeard and the Danes of Dublin. Cathal viewed both disasters in the same light.
For a letter to Malachi Mor, Cathal dictated, “We share your grief in this time of your trouble. The death of two of your sons, Ardgal and Ardchu, is a great loss. Sad it is for them that they were slain by the treacherous tribe of the Cenel Eoghain, rising against your authority. They shall be remembered in our prayers at Kill Dalua for a seven-night.”
Privately, Declan thought a seven-night was a bit mean; the sons of the Ard Ri surely deserved a longer period of mourning. But everyone knew that during the reign of a good Ard Ri grain overflowed the storehouses and every cow had twins, while a bad Ard Ri inevitably brought on an era of calamities.
Disasters were indeed occurring, but Cathal was increasingly attributing them to the lingering paganism in Ireland, and more specifically to the druids themselves.
In this he was in the minority, even among his fellow clerics, as Declan well knew. Since the coming of Christianity to Ireland in the fifth century, a degree of tacit coexistence had marked the relationship of the Church with druidry. Christian missionaries almost from the beginning had realized that the druids had smoothed their path for them by teaching that the soul was immortal. Having this central belief in common helped make the conversion of Ireland bloodless. The New Faith was not so radically different as to be unacceptable to druids; in many instances, it was just a matter of changing the names of festival days, or grafting one superstition onto another.
Druids were members of the filidh, the intellectual class of Irish society which included teachers, sacrificers, healers, brehons, historians, philosophers, and poets. Some of these functions the Church appropriated unto itself, but others were still very much the realm of the druid. Christianity had as yet made no concerted effort to supplant them.
Over the centuries the balance of power had shifted as members of the filidh accepted the New Faith. They did not abandon their sacral reverence for the land, however; they merely enlarged their view of godhood, recognizing the god of the Christians as immanent in his creations. Such innocent pantheism added a new dimension to the Church, giving it a uniquely Celtic flavor. In lonely ascetic cells, Irish monks composed poems celebrating the beauti
es of nature and thus affirming spiritual kinship with the pagans.
But there were still those in the vast dark forests who practiced the Old Faith undiluted by Christianity.
Irish druids did not engage in human sacrifice as their continental counterparts had done, but they manipulated the environment through techniques the Church called sorcery. They healed the sick, cursed the wrongdoer, instructed the young—aside from the sons of princes who were educated in the great monastic schools—and continued to devote themselves to the natural sciences as they had done for a thousand years.
Such practices were tolerated if not condoned. In the soft mists of Ireland old gods and new had intermingled, and the bitter plant of intolerance had yet to take root.
Christian chapels were sometimes ornamented with the carved, stylized heads of men and animals, a purely pagan embellishment not intended to represent saints. Brehon Law still governed such customs as marriage, allowing polygamy and divorce and denying the concept of illegitimacy, because every union that could result in a child was considered a form of marriage.
This enduring pagan influence was increasingly resented as the Church sought to expand its power, however, and Cathal Mac Maine was more resentful than most. He saw the druids as being in direct competition with the Church, and their intention as the destruction of Christianity.
“My confrontation with Torccan Mac Padraic was all the proof I need,” he confided to Brother Declan. “The man demonstrated a reasoning ability no enlightened pagan could possess. It is the work of Lucifer.”
Torccan’s intelligence was not all that upset the abbot, however. Padraic’s children radiated an inner serenity that scandalized Cathal. Such a gift should belong only to Christ’s annointed. To make matters worse, they took a heathenish pleasure in being alive.
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