Dark Lord of Geeragh

by Veronica Geoghegan Sweeney

  Gruffly, Lord Bress said, “You all seemed… happy, and busy, when I saw you. Your father loved you -”

  “He never asked us how we felt! We spent our days embroidering, or learning dance steps for the various court dances and masques - and then only because we had to be seen as elegant as possible to impress our future husbands.”

  “Husbands? You never spoke of this! Your father had chosen husbands for you?”

  “Did you not read any of the Declarations of War from the other countries?” Jet seemed aghast. “But…one of the main points of contention in every one…”

  “They were too long,“ Dismissively from Lord Bress, “I read the opening sentences and said, “Well, if war it is what they want…”

  “Along with your attacks along the borders, there was the matter of my sisters and our betrothals - each one organized from the day of our birth: Ruby was betrothed to King Tiarn of Foyrr…”

  “What?”

  “…And Sapphire was to marry Father’s cousin the Duke of Slieve Bawn…”

  “He died of old age a hundred years ago!”

  “And I was to marry -”

  “Stop, I don’t want to hear any more!”

  They gazed at each other, there on the path, Lord Bress furious, the Princess Jet looking up at him almost sadly. “they were important alliances, Bress, to kind men.”

  “Old men. So…” he walked away a little, fortunately in the opposite direction from where I stood. “So… which would you choose, if you could? To remain here, is that it? Are you saying that you want to stay here, under the.. conditions that I laid down, three hundred years ago?” He had turned to her and moved close enough so that their bodies almost touched. Some frisson was there between them - not anger… I had the feeling he was going to kiss her, which was odd. But she stayed very still, and gradually the fire seemed to die from his eyes, and the broad mouth curled with what, in a normal man, would be called a smile.

  The Princess had stood her ground through this moment, so close to him, her face raised to his and not retreating from his gaze. She said, now, quietly, “I can only speak for myself. I think you should ask each of my sisters.”

  “And so I shall - here they are.”

  I was discovered. The remaining eleven princesses came laughing along the path and took hold of me and swept me forward amongst them, like a brightly-coloured, exquisite tide…

  “You!” Lord Bress singled me out from amongst the perfumed cloud of young women and bellowed the word with such anger that they stopped their chatter and jumped, visibly.

  Into the silence, Jet - clever Jet - said, quickly, “Dears, the Lord Bress wants to ask each of you if you wish to stay here in the Palace as we are, or to return to live at High Geeragh, and find husbands, once a peace has been declared with Foyrr and Arrach and Sowragh.”

  None of the girls moved. I think they had forgotten me. They gazed from Lord Bress to their eldest sister, and back again. “L…leave?” murmured Amber.

  “To marry the men Father chose for us?” Sapphire’s voice shook.

  “But, My Lord,” said Pearl, “we have been so happy here…” Her sisters turned to look at her. “I… I have taught myself to read Latin and Greek, thanks to the wonderful library that you gave us - and you never vetted our books, or denied us anything, so we’ve learnt so much.”

  “And you never set guards over us,” added Topaz, “or had us watched, so we often dressed in peasant garb and went to the markets or the seaside…”

  “And you let us choose our own servants, and never questioned us about…” Emerald lapsed into silence, finding all her sisters gazing at her fixedly.

  Lord Bress was smiling; he shook his head, and murmured, “So you want to stay here? As you are? You don’t want me to restore things to the way they used to be?”

  “Oh, no!” Emerald burst out. “We couldn’t bear to live without - ow!”

  One of her sisters, standing close to her, had kicked her. I wasn’t even looking, and yet I knew it. So did Lord Bress.

  He turned to lock gazes with Jet.

  “My Lord,” said the eldest Princess calmly, “We have a request to make. That is, each of us has a request to make, that will, perhaps, put your mind at ease.”

  Bress looked at each of them in turn. “Twelve requests.”

  “Yes, My Lord,” said Jet, and eleven pretty heads nodded in agreement. “I know you wish to speak to young Fen,” she smiled at me apologetically, “so may we have an audience in the Great Hall in an hour?”

  Lord Bress gazed into her dark eyes, very thoughtfully, then he nodded. “An hour,” he agreed, and moved off down the path. “Come, you,” he said, with a gesture for me to follow him. I did so. When I glanced back at the Princesses, they were already flying back along the path to the Palace, like so many brightly-coloured blossoms being blown on the wind.

  Lord Bress walked about the gardens. And walked about the gardens. I followed, down one path, up another, across a lawn the size of two fields, through a widely-planted rose garden… I kept waiting for him to speak, but I began to think he had forgotten me. His gaze was before him, or on the ground, or across the wide blue expanse of lake, and he would stop, and sigh, and I would think, here is where he sends me back to Mam. But he did not speak to me, nor turn to me, nor acknowledge my presence at all. And when a footman came searching for us to inform the Lord of Geeragh that he was required in the Great Hall, we turned back towards the Palace - and I still had no idea of what my fate was to be.

  I entered the Great Hall in the Dark Lord’s wake, and immediately went to stand over by the great fireplace; here only the smallest turf fire glowed, in order to keep the chill from the marble walls. Again, to my relief, I was forgotten.

  Only Jet was in the huge room; before the high-backed chair where Bress often sat on visits to the palace, she faced him. They did not speak for some time, and I realised, then, that over the centuries that they had known each other, some kind of bond had been forged, less than love, but more, I think, than friendship.

  “Bress,” Jet said softly, “If Aninn has set your feet on this path, then I’m grateful. I pray that you find her. And my father. But… he may be dead, you know. The rumours of him being alive in the Southern Mountains may be just that, rumours.”

  “I’ll find him,” he said, grimly.

  “If he is dead,” she persisted, “then what will you do? He has no son to succeed him, no brother -”

  “He has you. You’re the oldest, Jet. I’ll set you on the throne...”

  “No, Bress!”

  “And hold you there by the neck, if I have to.”

  She smiled, with a kind of pity. “And do you think that will appease the gods?”

  “If your father Ryin wished you to succeed him -”

  “He had not made up his mind who would succeed him.”

  “Then he’ll tell us when I find him.” the broad face was obdurate.

  “And what of what I wish?”

  Bress snapped, “If your father is alive, he will be the one to decide your future.”

  She shook her head, slowly. “Bress, once I hated you: your implacable ambition, your conscienceless ability to use anyone who might help you reach your goals… Then, over the years, I began to pity you. Then, to like you a little. Now… now I’m very fond of you.”

  “Thank you. Gratifying.”

  “Our imprisonment in this palace,” Jet went on, “is a freedom, compared to the lives we would have known in our royal marriages. To send us back now, Bress, would right no wrongs - it would compound the evil.”

  He listened to this, then said, with a sigh, “What do you want of me, Jet? Tell me what I can do, now - if anything. How can I right the wrongs you’ve suffered?”

  She smiled, and there was a touch of trepidation to the smile. She nodded to the herald by the main doors. With a flourish of trumpet the doors opened, and the footman who had come to the garden to request Lord Bress’s presence, strode into the Great H
all. He bowed low before Bress, who gazed at him, puzzled; then he bowed again, to the Princess.

  Jet stepped forward and took up a position beside the young man. “This is Brocc, My Lord, senior footman at the Palace. We would like your blessing for our marriage to take place, and afterwards, permission to live here, as we have for the past fifteen years, in peace.”

  My Lord Bress stared. Brocc, a tall and fair-haired young man with a pleasant, open countenance, must have been very afraid, but he held his head up, and prepared to meet his fate like a man. Bress said, “You expect me to agree to…! Great stars! What do the others have in store for me?”

  At a gesture from the Princess there was another fanfare, and the doors were flung open to admit -

  “The Princess Pearl, and Cicerus, the Latin tutor!” the herald announced.

  The pale and delicate Pearl, in a jewel-trimmed blue gown, walked up the red carpet beside a handsome, fine-boned young man with a neat, dark beard. Both bowed deeply, and Pearl spoke up, “My Lord, this is my fiancé, Cicerus. We would like your blessing on our marriage, and permission to live here, where we have been so happy.”

  The two young people waited hopefully.

  Lord Bress looked like a black cloud. When he did not - and did not - speak, Jet hurriedly gestured to the herald.

  Another fanfare. “The Princess Amber and Sawrawn, the Head Gardener…”

  And so it went on…

  “The Princess Ruby and Garad, the Captain of the Guards…”

  “The Princess Emerald and Constan, the Head Chef…”

  “The Princess Garnet and Arnawn, the blacksmith…”

  We did not stay for the betrothal celebrations. I was already waiting in the stable yard when Lord Bress, in his cloak, came down along the path from the Palace. He walked quickly, as if pleased to be away from the music and the laughter and the crowds of people who were gathering in the brightly-lit Palace above us.

  When I had first caught sight of him beginning his farewells with the Princess Jet, I had hurried to the stables and ordered our horses saddled, so by the time Lord Bress reached me, the stable lads were already tightening girths and strapping on the saddlebags of provisions.

  I had my little mare ready myself, for she would allow no one else to touch her, and I stood waiting, holding her reins. Bress stopped on seeing me. He regarded me grimly.

  “I called in,” I said, “because I thought they might know which way you had gone.”

  Silence. Lord Bress knew an untruth when he heard one.

  “I’ll go back to High Geeragh if you wish me to.”

  Silence.

  “That’s a lie, of course. I’ll follow you all the way.”

  A groom, who looked as if he would like to be somewhere else other than here, led Lord Bress’s stallion forward. Another groom followed with the burdened bay. Lord Bress mounted his own horse, and held his hand out for the lead of the pack animal. Then he tossed the lead to me.

  I caught it, deftly enough, and wanted to smile, but wondered if I dared.

  He said, his eyes on my little mare, “I trust that fat little beast has plenty of stamina.”

  “Yes, My Lord.”

  He had already turned the black stallion. I scrambled into my own saddle and put my heels to the mare’s sides. Only then did I dare to grin.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  I had no idea where we were going, and I did not wish to ask, terrified that the Dark Lord would change his volatile mind and that I would be sent back to the castle. But the days passed, crisp autumn days amongst yellow fields and green forests that were beginning to jewel themselves in colours that reminded me of the gowns favoured by the Princesses Topaz and Garnet and Ruby.

  No one recognised Lord Bress in his clothes of subdued maroon, his cloak of green: though the warhorse and his demeanour itself would, I would have thought, have given him away, he was, after all, a stranger to his people. So they mistook him for a knight, back from the War, or a wealthy landowner, and myself, his son.

  Still, he avoided inns and taverns, and, with the weather remaining fine, we camped outdoors beneath the cold stars, and here my wild, out-of-doors life on the shore and in the woods with my boyhood friends stood me in good stead. The Lord Bress was surprised and pleased that I could make a camp, start a fire, put up a make-shift shelter when the wind blew in. I began to feel less nervous of being sent back to High Geeragh.

  One morning, far to the south, we came across a little kirk, surrounded by a small graveyard of weathered headstones that leaned drunkenly this way and that. I was told to wait with the horses and I did so. Lord Bress went within, came out almost immediately and turned up the path to the small cottage close by. Here, too, he didn’t tarry long; he remounted his horse and we rode on, in silence. But he turned off the broad road, and we began to meander up tracks and down trails in the wooded hills, Bress pausing at crossroads, but always seeming to know where he was going.

  We came upon a rutted track, marked by a rustic cross to one side. And here Lord Bress paused.

  I looked about: nothing but woods all around us.

  “Come,” said Lord Bress, on a sigh, and we rode forward.

  At the top of the rise was a quaint little clearing and various roughly-built shelters: one contained chickens, and one seemed to be a small dairy, for the use of three fat cows that grazed in a small, fenced field. There was a garden patch, heavy with autumn produce - but there was no house.

  I paused to look about me, but Lord Bress rode his horse further into the clearing; he began to disappear into the trees, where the ground rose again, and a large, rocky outcrop seemed to lean a little, protectively, rather than threateningly, over the little clearing.

  He knew what he was looking for. When I followed Lord Bress I found him dismounting from his warhorse, his gaze upon a broad-mouthed cave that was built into the outcrop of rock. The greenery before it was to give it some privacy, for there was no door, no barrer across the cave’s entrance.

  I followed Lord Bress and dismounted, tying the horses to a nearby tree, and then stood beside him, peering into the cave’s depths. It was not large, and not as difficult to view as one might think, for the walls and ceiling were whitewashed, and its rustic bed and table and chairs and bureau were easily seen. Close to the door was a small, rough-stone fireplace, built more to warm the cave than to cook, for we had passed a more permanent outdoor fireplace in the clearing. Everything here seemed to be neat, but primitive.

  “Who lives here?” I ventured to ask; though I knew he was searching for the lost king, this seemed an odd place to find him.

  “the High Priest,” Lord Bress answered. “The Bishop of Geeragh.”

  “Is that another word for king?”

  He gave me a black look. “He’d like to think so. There must be some mistake,” and he turned back towards the horses. “I was told there was a church here -”

  “Ssh!” I was listening hard, and only then became aware that the Dark Lord had turned to give me a long, cold stare. “I mean - please, My Lord - I hear singing.”

  I led the way, across the clearing, keeping close to the high stone buttress, following a narrow path worn into the grasses… And the sound began to grow louder - I looked back, and even Lord Bress had heard it, now - a beautiful sound of melded voices, both melancholy and inspiring; because the source of the sound was so close to the rock wall, it seemed to come from all about us as we moved forward.

  We entered another clearing; stones were arranged in a circle, and on these were seated about twenty men, women and children, all singing that strange song, a kind of thanksgiving, but a haunting tune the likes of which I had never heard before.

  The song came to an end, and one of the men, older than the others, stood and addressed them, “Now, Brother Own and Sister Airna have provided us with bread this day. Let us break this bread together, my friends, and remember Him who loved us more than Himself. May His great affection for mankind touch us all and turn our hearts to g
ood deeds and our faces to smile upon each other.”

  “Amen,” said the little assembly, and then one of the children looked over at us, and pointed.

  A woman had handed the old man a basket of bread; he had begun to hand out little loaves, but stopped, then, and looked over at us. He handed back the food and the basket, and walked towards us, stopping in front of the Dark Lord.

  “So. I knew you would come one day.” He had a brown, leathery face, and very green eyes. The creases on his cheeks indicated that he smiled a lot. “Welcome, Bress, son of Bress of Iera.”

  “Zeequis.” As he spoke the name, Lord Bress seemed to hesitate, as if something else might be required of him, but before I could wonder at this unusual behaviour, the man Zeequis turned to me.

  “And this is…?”

  “Fen, son of Fenvar the fair-haired, one of my naval heroes. Fen is my… squire.”

  I stared up at him in amazement.

  “So young to be a squire! But an intelligent face, and noble,” Zeequis said, smiling down at me, then he seemed to remember where he was. “Come,” he said to Bress, and had the temerity to take the Dark Lord by the arm, “Come eat with us!”

  To the people, he called out, “My brothers and sisters! Here are two new friends come to join us for our simple meal!”

  The people welcomed us, and seemed inordinately pleased when Zeequis described us as old friends from his days as Bishop of Geeragh.

  I was surprised at the patience Lord Bress seemed to exercise. He must have wanted to speak to Zeequis urgently, but showed no sign of it. Instead, after our meal of bread and water, he watched the old man moving amongst his flock, and even agreed to go with him to a neighbouring farm where Zeequis was invited to dinner.

  It was when the brothers and sisters were bidding us farewell that I heard Lord Bress say, “I was told at the church of Solumn that you had a church of your own here in the hills. Why, then, are you holding simple services out of doors?”

  Zeequis turned to look at him with some humour. “My son, I do have a church here in the hills.” He waved a hand towards the people around him. “Here is my church, Bress.”