Out of nowhere Olaf Cuarán said, “I will make you a present of this human pig’s head. Would you like that?”
The prince swallowed his ale and stared with surmise at his father-in-law. He smiled.
The old king got up, rubbing his aching spine and rubbing his backside by the fire. Then he bent for a moment to smooth the silken hair of his sleeping son. Doing so, he lifted the crystal jewel, with its incised birds and serpents, from the boy’s relaxed fist and balanced it in his palm. The hall was reflected dark in its glass surface, except for the swimming specks of the lamp’s light.
Chapter Thirteen
Eochaid reached the Brugh Mac Og. A tall man came to them and would have turned them out of the country, but they avoided him. In that night he killed all their horses, and in the morning came back and said, “Unless you get out of this country, I will bring death to the whole lot of you.”
The Death of Eochaid, from
The Book of the Dun Cow
“I’m sorry you could not at least see Domnall Cloen,” the girl said to MacCullen.
“I’m not,” he replied. “What could this story do but add to his load of bitterness?” He shielded his face from an overhanging pine bough.
Ailesh stumbled over the rock in a path and caught herself on an elm sapling. Everyone had to stop in place, from her to the hinny laden with books and the heavy iron caldron, while she pulled her hair free of the twigs.
“Ouch! This is no cow path at all, but a deer path, eh? It goes straight up.” She turned a sunburnt face toward John, smiling.
Derval cleared her throat. “There is no need for you to be imitating John’s bad Irish, heart of my heart.”
“But ‘eh’ is a very useful word. It can mean anything, I think.” Ailesh’s voice was teasing, and as John Thornburn glanced at her he remembered how young the girl was. He remembered, also, that she was a girl.
“Can not,” he replied gruffly. “It means…it means…”
“Anything that you want it to mean.”
“Not true. Sometimes it means ‘Don’t you agree with me,’ or ‘Wouldn’t you like to,’ but mostly it means ‘Give me an answer so I know you’re listening.’“
“But being shorter than all these, it is better,” stated Ailesh. “Eh?”
Then Derval laughed despite her blisters, and also Ou Neal, seated on the white mare. But Labres MacCullen twitched from his blond head to his feet in irritation. “Is that the attitude you take to the language and culture that has nourished you, Daughter of Goban? Then we could all save a great deal of trouble if we gave up speaking altogether and grunted like pigs. The Saxons love to be silent, and then grunt at one another after long times empty of speech.”
Days spent in the Ollave’s close company had eroded Ailesh’s deference. She giggled. Clorfíonn Iníon Thuathal only smiled, her old eyes green under the leaves. “Who are you to lecture like the oldest monk in the abbey, Labres? If you have turned thirty years old, I don’t remember it.”
He lifted his handsome head. “Then you don’t remember yesterday, foster mother, for I turned thirty on the morning we left Dublin.”
Clorfíonn caught her breath. “So it is! I grieve that I forgot, Labres. And here on this deer path (as Ailesh so correctly calls it) there is nothing I can do to mark the event.”
“Happy birthday,” said Derval ceremoniously, in English. John echoed her. MacCullen bowed from the waist. “I will bake bread on the coals tonight,” promised Ailesh, “and we will pretend it is a feast.”
“Then it will be,” said the poet. He spared a glance from the path. “Iníon Goban, Cuhain, Thorboern, it is to you three that I owe my thirty-first year. But for your courage I would be under Christ’s judgment now. Or sleeping in some new mother’s womb, forgetful of all I was and all I cared for.”
“Is that what you think?” asked Derval casually. “About death? Either judgment or reincarnation?” She was once more struck by the amount of paganism this Culdee Christianity had managed to absorb without indigestion.
But MacCullen shied visibly away from her, and his eyes widened. “If you know otherwise, far traveler,” he whispered, “I am not ready to hear it. And if you know the manner of my death, I beg you never to tell me.” He strode forward hurriedly, up an incline that caused both hooves and booted feet to skid.
“I don’t,” said Derval, panting. “I wouldn’t.” She kept her eyes to the stony, overgrown earth, feeling obscurely guilty.
Late in the afternoon there was a brief scare, as it was discovered that the hinny Hulda was leading had lost her burden of manuscripts. In the urgency of turning back for them, Clorfíonn came off her horse and landed on her back on the rough and stony trail.
For a moment she lay flat, staring at the sky dazedly. Holdfried cried out and would have plucked the tiny woman from the ground, but that his sister shoved him away. “Are you all right, Benefactress?” the tall Saxon woman whispered, kneeling by Clorfíonn’s head.
Clorfíonn blinked attentively at Hulda. “Shouldn’t wonder if I was,” she said, and she drummed her fingers on the hard ground. Slowly she curled onto her side and put her feet under her. Hulda and Holdfried brushed the leaves gently from her back and shook out her brat. “I guess my dancing days are not yet over, children.” She chose to walk behind the horse from that time on.
Luckily the leather bags were found only a hundred yards behind, where they had snagged on a blackthorn bush. But as they congratulated one another for the discovery, the sound of heavy hoof falls silenced the whole party.
“There is nowhere to hide,” whispered Ailesh. “Nothing but slick bare hill.”
The brehan groaned. “Forgive me, my dear ones. If this is a hireling of Olaf’s, it is me he is seeking. And but for me, you would not be fleeing in the wilderness this way.”
MacCullen exploded. “But for you! Clorfíonn, but for my insistence on the matter, you would not have involved yourself in our war with the false—”
“Let me by,” cried the brehan, striving to force her way past MacCullen, to be first in the path of the unknown. But he held her by her léinne.
Ailesh took out her hammer. “Brace yourselves,” said John, in an English only Derval understood. Hulda and Holdfried flanked their mistress, obscuring her completely.
Around a corner of gorse bushes came a tall black horse, sweating and scrabbling with the climb. Its neck was nearly as thick as an Irish pony’s body, and it wore a harness of brass and black leather. Sitting upon it was a man also in black, his woolen surcoat thrown back to reveal a mail shirt lined with a quilted cotton. A helm fit over the man’s head, hiding the face completely. It was fashioned like an eagle, wings uplifted.
He yanked the bit till the horse’s chin nearly touched its neck. The beast strutted on the slippery path, its eyes white-rimmed, dropping sweat from its sides to make black spots on the rock. A huge, gaudy-hilted sword spanked the horse’s side as it pranced. The rider lifted his gloved hands upward.
Ailesh, likewise, lifted her hammer. John started, stared at the sword, and bulled his way to the front. “Snorri!” he cried. “Goddammit. It’s Snorri the Icelander, decked out like the black prince!”
As the helm came up, Snorri’s broad features were revealed. He was sweating as much as his horse. “You left me!” was his first statement, and he made it an accusation. “I go out to the wharf to buy a little something, and I come back to find you flee without me!”
MacCullen stepped up beside John. He regarded the Icelander’s outfit with obvious approval. “We did not think you to be in any danger, my friend. Or none that would not depart when we did.”
He motioned for John to hold his horse’s head. John did so with trepidation, for the animal was thicker through than Derval’s Tinker, and it glared at him wickedly. Snorri Finnbogison swung his leg over the table-sized croup and hit the ground. His knees buckled for a moment and he leaned against the horse’s side, “What,” he began, “do you think I went to the market for, I a
sk you? Or do you think I bought all this to sit in the alehouse and be admired?
“Of course the danger is yours, Irish poet. But while it is yours it is Thorbeorn’s. And while it is Thorbeorn’s, it is mine. So the circle is closed.”
“With Eoin at the center, once more,” muttered MacCullen, thoughtfully. He raised his eyes to Derval. “I have said before, scholar, that our cattle leaper is no ordinary man.”
Derval snickered and glanced at the Canadian with amused fondness. John, not having understood the beginning of the exchange, looked from one to the other and then back at Snorri.
Black from head to foot, and redolent with the smell of well-cured leather. The helm turned Snorri’s fleshy head into a fantasy. “You look,” said John, searching his vocabulary for any word in Irish, Norse, or English to fit. “Just…bitchin’!”
Snorri grinned at the approval. “You could all have horses,” he said with a shade of resentment. “And war gear. I was going to buy it for all who wanted it. We would have left Dublin like a royal parade!”
MacCullen met his glance soberly. “Then we would have been too much in your debt, Finnbogison.”
Snorri growled and led his horse forward, favoring a right leg which long riding had sent to sleep. “What is the money for, then? I have no family, but for two older sisters who are glad to see my butt off the hearthstones. My ship and stock are at the bottom of the sea.”
He laughed mordantly and dropped his spiny helmet into John’s care. “My money comes from the king of Dublin. I built him a longship this spring: the best he’s got. If we can use my gold to beat this sow’s son who would send three warriors after an old woman, then better the joke on him!” The garnet eyes of the stylized hawk that adorned the crest of the helmet glinted in perfect oneness with Snorri’s own.
They camped in a rocky dimple at the crest of the hill they had spent all afternoon climbing. Ailesh’s pot bread was a great success and all toasted MacCullen’s thirtieth birthday with enthusiasm.
“We are out of Cuarán’s country by now,” murmured the poet to Clorfíonn. “Another day’s travel and we will be with your kin.” She glanced up from her bowl of cheese, to see Labres MacCullen sitting rapt by the orange campfire, his waving hair tossed back by the heat, his eyes dry and mouth slightly open.
A poet makes a strange sort of man, she thought. A great poet must be a madman. She was happy to see that Labres grew madder every day.
“But we must not relax,” she said. “For if he will not protect what is within his boundaries, then who can be sure he will respect what is without?” Without waiting for a reply she asked, “What then, Labres? After I am deposited with my kin in Brega? Will you stay with us? All these—your new foster brothers and sisters—are welcome wherever I am in the true lands.”
He rested his chin on his fist and his fist on his knee. “I am grateful, Clorfíonn. But I have a heavy duty before me, and that will take me south again.”
“To tell Cennait about Caeilte?”
“That’s it. And the longer I wait, the harder it becomes.
“And then, for at least Ailesh and me, there is a question of a murder price unfulfilled.”
Clorfíonn nodded, unsurprised. “And of the others…the foreign friends? What is their interest in the matter, Labres, and what are their plans?”
His eyes, when he raised them, blazed like the fire. “It is gaes for me to talk of that.” He rose from the fireside and shook out his blankets.
John found himself quite heartened to have Snorri along, even though, never having asked for a translation, he had no idea why the Icelander was there. He suspected it had something to do with him, though, and it was a new thing with John for someone to go out of his way for the sake of John’s company.
As long as the light lasted John played, monkeylike, with the black battle harness.
Delbeth eased himself off his dun pony, trying not to disturb the harp. He stared around him at the Dublin wharves in a confusion so great he began to drool. To ask—to merely ask—after the people he sought was beyond him. The tall buildings and taller ships loomed over him in their angularity and he felt crushed. A man in Norse costume brushed by him, causing the harp to sing an out-of-tune protest. Though he knew this was no reaver, his hand tightened on his spear haft.
All the men were dressed like that, except for the very dark one with a cloth wrapped around his head like a huge bandage, who sat with his back against a pier and cursed outlandishly.
Delbeth led the pony along the waterside, between close housefronts and stalls of beads and axheads. Merchants wished him to the devil as the gangling boy and the wide pony with baggage brushed by.
Though the day was cool, sweat dripped along Delbeth’s nose. He had never been in a city before, let alone the largest city in Ireland, and he had never been without clan protection.
Indeed, who ever was without clan protection? It was like being a severed finger (if a severed finger had the power to grope on its own). Thinking of that last interview with the taiseach, Delbeth did not curse but rather got tears in his eyes. To be so deluded by guests. Yet it seemed to him that a year’s banishment was an unjust punishment for the crime of letting prisoners go, when he hadn’t been told they were prisoners.
And when he stroked the clàirseach in its leather wrappings, Delbeth remembered the honest eyes of the poet MacCullen and those finer yet of the dark woman with him, and his resentment faded for the moment, and he tried to believe there had been some other explanation to the story they had told him that night in the cattle enclosure: the story the taiseach had called a lie. All in all, the young man couldn’t have said whether he was chasing after MacCullen for vengeance or sympathy.
There was a fat man, dressed in Gaelic linnia, sitting on a stump beside one of the featureless housefronts. He grinned at Delbeth with a mottled mouth. “Harper, is it? Come to replace the one the Munster poet lost in the raid, boy?”
Delbeth stared stupidly, while he made connections between this man’s supposition and his own information.
“Well, I’m sorry to say you’re too late,” the fat man continued. He paused to scrape dried turnip from his yellow shirt. “They’ve all gone already. Left in the night. Heard they had no choice.”
Delbeth leaned wearily against his pony, who leaned in turn against Delbeth. The complexity of Dublin chattering around his head almost drove him to his knees. “Gone?”
“Because they were dedicated to Odin,” stated Holvar. The sullen face of Skully, with bloodshot eyes and black scab on his nose, did not turn away.
“So tell Odin they got away.”
Holvar had to restrain an impulse to set his sword between the duelist’s chin and shoulders. To see that insolent head go bouncing over the ground now… “Ours is not a god of failure,” he answered the boy evenly.
“What will he do about it?”
“Grant us short lives, shameful death, and the afterlife of a slave.” Holvar spoke with conviction. “Though it is no true warrior that has to be driven into Odin’s embrace by fear. If you had a good heart, it would throb to serve him!”
Glancing around at his dirty and very tired subordinates, Holvar Hjor wondered if he had gone too far. “My heart is throbbing for a Dublin alehouse,” came a murmur, unlocatable. Holvar had not intended to speak about the prince of Norway’s presence in the city, lest fear or foreboding of failure unman his warriors. But now he said, “Then you’ll die hanging over the Dublin gates, fellow, for the man who had declared us outlaw in England is in the city, and he is son-in-law to the Dublin king. And if that is not enough peril for you, know that the sacrifice that escaped us is traveling now to recruit an army of Irish to drive us into the sea!”
Now he’d got their attention. Holvar raised himself off the ground and pointed eastward, over the sloping downs to the sea. “Just today I heard that news, in Dublin City.”
“Did you get any money in Dublin, Battle Chief?” was all Skully’s reply. “Will we at least
be able to eat while we track this perilous Irish wench over the length and breadth of the island?”
Holvar growled. “That was a mistake. The toys I took were signed by the maker. That squat man we found by the stone was known in Dublin, it seems. A man of importance.”
Skully scratched a pimple on his youthful face, and the pull on his skin made the scab on his nose smart. “Too bad, then, that we didn’t hold him for ransom.”
Holvar lost patience. “We couldn’t! Not after dedica— Oh, dog’s shit. We leave in the morning.”
The Vikings groaned like so many galley slaves.
What a farce: keeping watch on a night of no moon. Derval sat wrapped in blankets on the lip of the dell on the hilltop and tried to make sense of what she saw. Luckily the limestoney earth tended to reflect what light the stars gave out, so she at least could tell heaven from earth and the road from the underbrush. But how useful would that be, if an army came pelting up that shimmering path? But, she reasoned, she was as invisible as they were, now that the fire had burned low.
At least the dark and quiet sharpened her ears. She could hear a night bird cry with a voice like a saw on wood. She heard the wind in the hazel, which sounded different from the same wind blowing through oak leaves. She heard every stir and creak of John Thornburn as he rose from his spot by the dying fire and sought her out by feel.
“Here,” she whispered. “Ten feet from you. On a boulder.”
She removed a seeking hand from the vicinity of her mouth. “Right here. Sit down so I can listen again.”
“Listen to what?” asked John, rather too loudly. He bit off his own words.
Book of Kells Page 28
