Grania: She-King of the Irish Seas Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Prologue

  PART ONE - Donal

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  PART TWO - Huw

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  PART THREE - Iron Richard

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  PART FOUR - Philip

  20

  21

  22

  23

  PART FIVE - Tigernan

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  PART SIX - Elizabeth

  30

  31

  32

  Epilogue

  BY MORGAN LLYWELYN FROM TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright Page

  For Charles

  Forever

  Prologue

  DARK UPON DARK STONES, ROCKFLEET. SEEN FROM OUTSIDE, THE square stone tower was forbidding. Like some dark, stout, weathered woman, it stood defiantly without even a softening veil of ivy. But within was a different atmosphere. Fires burned brightly on the hearths, old tapestries glowed on the walls. The fortress could offer warmth and something of beauty to the few who gained admittance.

  The woman came bounding up the circular stone stairway two steps at a time, as always. The feat was risky, for the stair was narrow in order to repel invaders, but she did not hesitate until she reached the chamber doorway. There she paused, surprised by the pounding of her heart.

  She pressed one hand to her chest for a moment and it eased. The sea called to her through one of the narrow oblong window-slits and she started across the room, only to pause again with the color draining from her face. A stab of pain shocked her. There was a brief, coppery taste in her mouth that she recognized of old. Trying to ignore it, she made her way across a floor carpeted with fresh rushes and sank into a cushioned window embrasure, her eyes turning out of habit toward Clew bay.

  People might think her aged and past her prime, but she had never lost the seaward perspective. Survival and action were the imperatives of her existence. The laws of the land, like the land itself, were obstacles to the unrestricted movement she craved.

  She stirred restlessly on her seat, clenching her hands on her knees, gnawing her underlip to will the pain away. She would get up soon. The ability to pick herself up and go on, no matter what, had always been her greatest strength. War and murder, impoverishment and imprisonment—wild currents had swirled around her all her days, dragging her down again and again. Yet she fought her way back to the surface still able to laugh, still able to wring satisfaction from life. She would do it this time, too.

  I am as sound as new rope, she insisted silently. She took one hand from her knee and made a fist to pound against her thigh, testing the muscle. It did not seem possible that the rich tide of her life might finally be ebbing.

  She moved deeper into the embrasure and leaned on her elbows so she could see through the loophole to her boats at waters’ edge below. Guns had been fired through that loophole—yes, and she had fired them, and could again, in defense of those boats and this fortress. Her flag flew from both. Not an English flag but an Irish one, the banner of Grace O Malley, as Elizabeth Tudor had called her. Gráinne Ni Mháille. Granuaile. Grania.

  “When the time does come for me to die,” she wondered aloud to the empty room, “will anyone remember me as the Tudor woman will be remembered?”

  She listened to the silence echoing from the stones. No. Probably not. Yet she had spent much of her life gaming with Elizabeth Tudor and winning, sometimes.

  Sometimes.

  She was not one to count her losses.

  Bards were outlawed in Ireland now, on the brink of the seventeenth century, so who would there be to tell her grandsons’ grandsons the truth of what she had done and been, of her struggles to hold her place in an increasingly hostile world? She had survived the destruction of civilization as she knew it, but who would chronicle that survival? There would be only biased accounts of her exploits in the records of the English and the wild tales her own countryfolk delighted in spreading.

  Chuckling in spite of the pain, she recalled the most recent story that fierce, funny man had heard somewhere and brought back to share with her. Inlanders were saying she slept in this very chamber with the hawser of her galley passed through a loophole and tied to her body. If anyone tampered with her ship, according to the story, the tug of the rope would warn her at once so she could plunge down the stairs, brandishing her pistols.

  The chuckle became a full-throated laugh and she threw back her head to surrender to it. The pain retreated in response. What an absurd story, she thought. Every lapping of the water would have tugged on a rope fastened that way, and the turn of the tide would have dragged her out of bed. She had to admit it made a grand tale, though; one she would never spoil with a denial.

  But she understood that the reality of her life was more unlikely than any storyteller’s creation. She was a woman who had defied every convention and rebuilt more than once from wreckage and rubble. She had lived fully according to a pattern of her own design and meant to do so until the end.

  No more laziness, she commanded herself. With an effort she stood up, straightening her spine in increments. There. She planted her feet wide apart and drew a deep breath, then glanced around the chamber for the ledger in which she recorded all business transactions, legal or not.

  At first she could not find that precious compilation of so many small victories. If it fell into the wrong hands it contained enough information to hang her, and she knew just whose fingers itched to tie the knot around her neck. But when she searched a second time, with a lighted candle, she found the roll of papers had fallen down behind her sea chest. Seizing it with a sigh of relief, she riffled through to reread the last entry, fish and a few kegs of gunpowder and two men with an English price on their heads hidden under canvas in the bottom of her galley. They had paid well, and the gunpowder was stolen so it represented pure profit.

  I am what they call me, a pirate, she mused. And several other things too, for have I not lived many lives in one? And known more than one man … her lips curved in a smile, remembering. I’ve taken what I wanted, but I’ve also done the best I could for those who depended on me. Some call me an ally and some think me a traitor because they do not understand that.

  He understands, though, she told herself as his familiar step sounded on the stair. She had fought the pain back, it would not dare attack her again this night. There were years left, surely. Surely …

  She strode to the doorway and called down to him, “Go and get some more turf for the fire and bring up the last of the good ale, and be quick! When you get back here I may give you a hug to crush your bones.”

  He would return the embrace in full measure, she knew. They were two strong people.

  Waiting for him, she put the ledger aside. For once the details of trade had lost their fascination. Pain, with its intimations of mortality, had given her the desire for a different kind of accounting. Tonight she wanted to sit with him and just watch the fire on the hearth and talk of the old days, the wild days. The spectacular days. She felt compelled to examine the details of her past and decide if her life had really been a tragic one, as many might say.

  Or a triumph.

  PART ONE

  Donal

  1

  THE FIRE
WAS ONLY A SPARK AT FIRST. ANYONE WHO SAW IT could have extinguished it. But no one did.

  In the darkest watch of the night, a sailor from the forecastle had crept to the rail and glanced around nervously, making certain he was unobserved. From beneath his tunic he had slipped a small metal case, a pierced-brass body warmer given him by his wife. Her man suffered chills and fever but had insisted on going on this voyage anyway. Their cottage overflowed with children, and a crewmember’s portion of the profit the captain so generously shared would support the whole family.

  The sailor had concealed his illness as best he could when he came aboard, for he meant to haul his share of tackle. But soon after they set sail his bones began shivering in their envelope of flesh. When the ship anchored off the coast for the night, he sneaked below to the brick cooking hearth, bedded on gravel ballast in the hold, and stole some hot ashes for his warming pan. Wrapped in flannel and pressed against his chest, the warmer offered welcome comfort.

  He knew he was breaking a cardinal rule of the sea. None but the cook was allowed access to the hearth, for fire was the terror of timbered sailing ships. When his pan cooled, the man had surreptitiously emptied the ashes over the side and replaced them with a hand fishing line and some bobbers, innocent equipment most seamen carried in packets on their persons.

  He was so concerned about being discovered he did not notice that a small coal among the ashes was still warm. As he pitched it over the side, the wind caught a living spark and blew it back inboard, dropping it into a coil of tarred rope in the waist of the vessel, out of sight behind the ship’s boat.

  The sky paled and the wind calmed, then freshened, making the great sails creak overhead. The half-hour glass, made in Venice and so fragile the ship carried several spares, was turned and turned again. The watch bell sounded. Seamen exchanged places. Some went to their hammocks in the forecastle or their favorite corner of the deck where they could brace themselves against the pitch and roll of the ship; others, rubbing their eyes, went shuffling to the break in the poop to relieve themselves and then lined up for a meal of oatcakes, cheese, and onions. A fresh lookout was posted fore and aft, and the ship’s boy made his way to the captain’s cabin, carrying a meal in a wooden bowl. The anchor was hoisted, the ship under way.

  And in its hiding place the spark grew a little red tongue and began tasting the frayed fibers of its rope nest. The waist of the caravel was low and often awash in a high sea, and the rope was far from dry. But the tiny fire was stubborn; it meant to survive.

  A fair wind was blowing by now, and the caravel was an eager ship. Accompanied by two galleys, she was on a trading voyage intended to follow the southern coast of Ireland as far as Wexford harbor, having originated northwest of Galway bay. Wool and tallow from Iar Connaught waited in her holds for eager southern customers, and the clansmen of Iar Connaught waited just as eagerly for the goods she would bring back in return.

  The older crewmen were hard at work manning halyards and tending tacklings, while their younger, more agile mates served as foremastmen, furling and slinging the foresail as needed or scrambling aloft to tend the great fore-and-aft lateens that furnished the ship’s principal motive power. On a tossing deck, footing was precarious enough, but for a foremastman aloft, with bare prehensile toes clinging to ratlines or muscular torso stretched out along a yardarm, life was uncertain from one heartbeat to the next. A misstep, a lost handhold, and the sailor could be pitched headfirst into the sea. In common with seamen everywhere, the crewmen of the caravel were not swimmers. Their trust was in their ship and captain … and their God.

  On the morning watch, the youngest apprentices scrubbed the decks with seawater carried from a tub amidships. Keeping that tub filled was hard work, and dangerous, because the boys had to lean far out in order to lower their leather buckets into the sea, and if the caravel wallowed it was easy enough to go overboard. Once the tub was filled there was no danger but the tedium of the task, which the apprentices relieved by singing and joking as they worked, sweeping the planking with coarse brooms and taking up the remaining moisture with mops made from rope-ravelings.

  There was always one boy who held his mop to his head so the ravelings lay like curls against his cheeks, while he pranced and played the girl and the others cheered him on. The decks rang with laughter and the old seamen scowled, but their eyes twinkled with memories of their own as the lads frolicked. The apprentices were mostly red-cheeked young Gaels from the hills of Connaught, with a taste for adventure. The sea had not yet turned on them, and it was a fine thing to be part of a bold venture off the coast of Ireland on a summer morning.

  One freckled boy, naked except for a pair of woolen trews chopped off at the knee, trotted up to the tub to refill his bucket for deck swabbing. He hesitated, wrinkling his nose at an unfamiliar smell. He was a rawboned, merry lad, and the sea was new to him. Until he came aboard for this voyage he had never been off dry land, and he did not yet know what sights and scents were commonplace to a four-masted caravel under full sail. But instinct warned him the odor of scorching rope and charring wood was wrong here—terribly wrong.

  Taking another sniff, he tried to isolate the smell from that of salt and tar and bilge. “Something’s burning,” he said tentatively. He did not want to make a fool of himself over nothing. The men who sailed on ships such as this—ships that sometimes engaged in piracy as well as trade—were the cream of their profession, hardbitten and courageous. They would make life miserable for anyone who acted timid, crying false alarms.

  But the smell was growing stronger.

  Then a shrill voice screamed, “Fire! Fire!” The boy did not realize it was he who screamed. He stood rooted to the deck, staring in horror at a sudden banner of red flame leaping above the ship’s boat and dancing in the seawind.

  “Fire!” cried a dozen other voices at once. There was no hesitation, because every man on board knew what fire could do at sea, where there was no way to escape from it. Men came swarming from every direction, ripping off their clothes to beat out the flames, shoving the boy aside in their hurry to get at the mop water in the tub. Somebody grabbed the bucket out of his hand and filled it and then threw the water at the fire in one smooth gesture, and the boy heard the fire hiss. But one bucket was not enough to drown it; the contents of the depleted tub were not enough to drown it.

  The fire took a deep breath and roared.

  “Send for the captain!” shouted the boatswain’s mate as he began trying to haul the ship’s boat, his particular responsibility, out of the way. The waist of the vessel was crowded, and there was little room to work. Other men joined him and grunted and tugged until the boat scraped forward, but the fire billowed into the cleared space like a beast released from a trap. It had already ignited the far side of the ship’s boat, and from there was reaching for the mainmast.

  “Keep it out of the rigging!”

  Sailors pressed forward, beating at the flames, as an acid, tarry stench seared the nostrils. The rising wind encouraged the fire to leap higher, snatching at the lateen sails.

  An inferno was being born. It exploded savagely, driving the men back. If fire got into the sails the ship was lost; falling spars and burning sheets would set the whole caravel ablaze.

  There was more to fight than fire. Panic rippled through the crew, and they reacted reflexively, without plan, running from this spot to that and getting in each other’s way. The country boy who had first spotted the fire had no idea what to do, and no one was able to tell him. He looked longingly toward the gunwales and imagined plunging into the cold sea. Drown or be burned.

  His eyes dilated with terror.

  “Look out, boy!” cried a voice roughened by years of shouting commands. Hands gripped his shoulders and flung him violently to the deck just as a burning shroud snapped overhead and whipped through the air.

  The apprentice was thrown forward. His cheekbone struck planking, and stars of pain shattered in his skull. He heard the vicious whoosh of the bl
azing line as it passed over him. He heard the scream of agony as it hit another man full in the face, searing his eyes.

  “Get up now, you’re in the way lying on deck,” demanded the boy’s rescuer. He recognized that voice, for he had heard it often since coming aboard, giving orders or requesting information or whooping with a great wild peal of laughter. Everyone knew the distinctive voice of the commander of the fleet and captain of this ship, a being with one foot already planted in legend.

  The commander grabbed the boy under the arms and hauled him upright, where he stood shivering and speechless, mouth agape.

  “You could thank me,” he was told. The eyes that met his were the shifting color of the sea, but he caught a glimpse of laughter in them.

  “Th … thank you,” the lad stammered, hating himself for his awkwardness.

  The fire would not wait for formalities. The commander could not waste time with an apprentice while the greater life, that of the ship itself, was threatened. She turned away abruptly to take up the battle for the caravel, and the boy stared after her, blushing crimson.

  “Gráinne Ni Mháille,” he whispered in Gaelic. “Grania.”

  The commander of the fleet was tall and lean, taut-muscled. The English would translate her name as Grace, but she was no milkskinned girl in a laced bodice. Aboard ship Grania, in her early thirties, wore a man’s sleeved shirt, a fustian jerkin, and worsted trews. Her coarse black mane was knotted at the neck to keep it out of her way. Heavy eyebrows cut a straight line across her strong-boned face, and her complexion was weather-beaten, squint lines framing the eyes. At a glance she could be mistaken for one of the Gaelic warlords who still struggled to hold their native Ireland against the encroachment of Elizabeth Tudor’s England.