Pride of Lions Page 10

  “He’s old enough to lead an army, so he’s old enough to marry,” her father replied. “How large a bride-gift did you say he was willing to offer for you?”

  “Maeve sends word that he is a fine young man, more comely than her own husband and with strong white legs,” Neassa’s mother added. “Few men have his advantages; you’ll grow thin and gray waiting for another.”

  Neassa was not convinced. She had not had one glimpse of Donough’s white legs before he spilled red wine over her, ruining the new gown she had so painstakingly embroidered for her first visit to Kincora. At that one brief meeting he had seemed abrupt, distracted, paying hardly any attention to her, and she could not imagine spending the rest of her life with him.

  He was probably very dull, she decided. Something better would come along.

  Now she meandered dreamily across the meadow, swinging a small glass phial hanging from a leather thong and thinking in a vague way about the future. About marriage. About curling her hair in a different style. She began toying with the idea of entering a convent and imagined herself garbed in bleached linen—which was very becoming—and doing good works. She might even one day be a saint like Princess Brigit of Kildare and …

  Neassa’s reverie was interrupted by the cadence of galloping hooves. Startled, she dropped her little phial of dew just as Donough burst out of the woods, riding one horse and leading another. He reined to a hasty stop and they stared at one another.

  Neassa recovered firs. “What are you doing here?”

  He took a deep breath. “I’ve come …” His voice cracked; his face turned a fiery red. He tried again. “I’ve come to kidnap you.”

  Teigue was astonished. “He’s done what?”

  “Kidnapped Gadhra’s daughter, Neassa. Rode right into her father’s holding, the runner says, and carried her away with him.”

  Teigue’s face was as stormy as a March morning. “That proves it. He’s too impetuous to be entrusted with any responsibility, never mind letting him have Kincora. What am I going to say to Gadhra? He’s my father-in-law and I’ve always had good relations with him, but he won’t take this well. No proper negotiations, no bride-price … unless I offer him one in my brother’s name. Should I? Damn Donough! I don’t even know what one does in these situations. Send me a brehon!”

  While Teigue struggled with the formalities and cursed his half-brother, Donough and his stolen woman were galloping across Thomond.

  Galloping is not an altogether accurate description. They had begun at the gallop, with Neassa, who had never ridden a horse in her life and refused to mount the one Donough had brought for her, slung across the withers of his mount like a sack of corn. In this uncomfortable position she had protested so loudly that he was forced to slow to a more sedate pace.

  So he kidnapped his wife at the walk, once they were out of sight of her father’s landholding. Trusting the superfluous horse to find its way back to the stables at Kincora, he knotted the reins on the animal’s neck and turned it loose.

  Then he allowed Neassa to sit up in front of him, and tried to make her comfortable straddling his horse’s shoulders with his arms around her, one hand holding the reins. He could smell her hair and feel the warmth of her body, and when he glanced down he could see the swell of her breasts, and her skirt hiked up to her thighs.

  She busied herself smoothing the front of her gown. Had she known she was going to be carried off she would have worn something more suitable, like the flowing draperies of Irish princesses in the ancient legends. Instead she was clothed in a plain ankle-length dress of brown wool over a bodice of very crumpled linen. No jewelry, even. And her exposed thighs looked too fat.

  To keep him from paying attention to them she tapped his arm and remarked brightly, “Sitting on a horse puts one up very high, doesn’t it?”

  “It does.” Donough waited for her to say something else but she did not. His mother had a fund of intelligent conversation for any occasion, he recalled, and even at her worst Gormlaith was entertaining. Perhaps Neassa was too frightened to be charming. Perhaps when she got to know him better she would be a good companion.

  For her part, Neassa had changed her mind about Donough. Obviously he was not dull. When he announced he was going to kidnap her she had been startled, then willing. On a radiant spring morning the idea was delightful.

  But as the day progressed and she grew increasingly tired of sitting on the horse—and increasingly sore in her female parts—delight faded.

  “Stop squirming,” said Donough. “You’re upsetting the horse, he isn’t used to carrying double.”

  Neassa protested, “And I’m not used to riding! Can’t I get down and walk?”

  “How would that look if anyone saw us—me mounted and you afoot?”

  “We could both walk and lead the horse.”

  “That would look even odder. Besides, why should I walk when I have a perfectly good mount? Now sit still and enjoy the ride.”

  Neassa tried to think of a persuasive argument, but none occurred to her. She shifted her body as delicately as she could to ease the most sensitive portions of her anatomy off the horse’s bony withers. “Where are we going and how soon will we be there?” she demanded to know.

  Donough was asking himself the same question. Caught up in the excitement of putting his idea to practice, he had not thought farther ahead than the actual seizure of Neassa. He assumed that a man who kidnapped a woman usually took her back to his own stronghold, but he had none. The purpose of this undertaking was the acquisition of Kincora. Under the circumstances he could hardly take her there and beg Teigue to give them shelter. Teigue would probably order him to take her home again and then give him a tongue-lashing for being impetuous.

  Which he had been. He knew it. But that did not help now.

  He must make Neassa physically his; then Teigue could not force him to give her back to her father. But where? If she was to be the wife of a prince of Thomond she should not be ravished in the open like a herder’s daughter. She was entitled to a roof, walls, a proper chamber and nuptial bed.

  Instead they had a sunny sky beginning to cloud over, and rolling grassland furnished with bracken and occasional briars.

  Neassa was squirming again and the horse flattened its ears with annoyance. Donough could feel the hump forming in its back; in another moment the beast would start bucking and ignominiously dump them both.

  A quick decision was imperative.

  Donough reined his horse to a halt in the lee of a low hill, which offered a sheltered grassy hollow with a scattering of daisies. By a stretch of poetic imagination, one might call it a sea full of stars.

  Would enough ardor, he wondered, persuade Neassa to overlook the shortcomings of the place as a wedding chamber?

  He pushed back onto the horse’s rump to give himself room to swing a leg over behind the girl, then slid off. Holding up his arms to her he invited, “Come down to me.”

  She was instantly suspicious. “Why?”

  “So I can hold you properly.”

  “You were holding me on the horse. Why did you get off? Is he going to run away with me?” Her voice rose.

  “He’s not going anywhere; he’s well trained. Come down.”

  For a woman who had been anxious to get off the horse, she seemed curiously reluctant. “Why?” she repeated.

  There was a light in her eyes Donough would have recognized as flirtatious if he had been a more experienced man.

  “Because I want you to!” he replied in exasperation. He seized Neassa by the waist and tried to pull her off and she shrieked—not too loudly—and struck out at him—not too hard.

  Donough had never fought with a woman. Unsure how to react, he tried to fend her off while still managing to get her onto the ground with him. In the struggle he lost his balance and the two of them fell, hard. His efforts to twist his body so he would cushion her fall went awry, thanks to her wild struggles, and when they hit the ground he somehow found himself on t
op.

  The wind was knocked out of her, but not for long. Before Donough could gather his thoughts, Neassa shrieked in earnest. “You clumsy maggot, you’ve hurt me!”

  Her voice was sharp enough to pierce holes in earlobes. Such a cry from a woman would bring anyone within hearing to her aid; Donough had no desire to be caught in such an embarrassing position. “Be quiet,” he hissed at her. “You’re not hurt.”

  “I am hurt! You owe me compensation, you owe me at the least an amber pendant and an ivory comb and …” She went rattling on, listing the sort of rewards with which her long-suffering father purchased peace in his own home. Appalled, Donough responded by clamping his hand over her mouth and one long leg across her body, pinning her down.

  Above his hand her furious eyes glared at him.

  There was only one thing he knew to do. He must possess her here and now so he would have a claim to her as wife. If he let her get away she would probably never allow him a second chance.

  When he first thought of kidnapping Neassa, Donough had allowed his healthy young imagination to run riot with images of her body and the things they would do together. A woman of his own! He would be gentle with her, he promised himself. gentle and considerate but so passionate he would awaken desire in her and they would …

  Reality was different. Fumbling with his clothes while simultaneously trying to hold down the struggling girl, he discovered that ardor was not always available on demand.

  “What are you doing?” she asked unnecessarily. What he was attempting to do was perfectly obvious.

  Donough did not answer. Clutching her in mounting desperation, he shifted his body and tried to come at the problem from a different angle.

  Her skirt was in the way. Had she been cooperative the matter would have been quickly resolved, but as it was he had to try to push her clothing aside with his knee since he already had both hands occupied.

  Neassa wailed, “You’re ruining my gown!”

  “I’ll give you a new one,” he panted.

  She was not inclined to be reasonable. “I don’t want a new one, I want this one, and I want you to let go of me!”

  But by now Donough was grappling with her in grim earnest, feeling both his future and his manhood at stake. He dare not stop no matter how much he wished he could.

  He had listened to warriors boasting of conquest and rape, and like many youths felt a certain vicarious excitement. But when the opportunity came it was the last thing he wanted to do.

  He was disgusted by the struggle, which embarrassed rather than inflamed him and demeaned them both. At the start of the day he had only the best and most noble intentions toward Neassa. How could matters have disintegrated into this sweaty scuffle among the weeds?

  Then Neassa squirmed under him in a different way, and he felt the moist opening heat of her against his naked flesh. He gasped as his body took over, freeing him of conscious thought, his penis swelling and thrusting as if it had a mind of its own.

  “No,” she said with her mouth against the side of his face, but the word had no meaning. It was just a sound. When she repeated, “No no no no no,” her half-hearted protest was lost in the plunging rhythm of his body.

  He felt a barrier; he pushed, something gave and the girl gasped with pain but he could not stop.

  He experienced a peculiar sense of ascension as if he were running up a mountain while the air became thinner and thinner and his breathing more and more labored. He was desperately eager to reach the top, where someone or something wonderful waited for him, yet he did not want to get there. He wanted to go on climbing and climbing with the oxygen-starved rapture growing in him until …

  The climax when it came caught him by surprise. A violent shudder swept through his body at the summit of the climb and he cried out a name, but he was not aware he cried out.

  He was aware of nothing but the intensity of the pulsing spasm that shook him, tearing his soul loose from its moorings.

  To her credit, Neassa lay quiet under him while passion subsided. The passion had been his, not hers, but she had enough generosity to allow him the full experience. Only when he was quiet and his breathing began to slow did she say, in an aggrieved voice, “You’re crushing me.”

  Donough sat up hastily. His heart was still pounding, but he was in control of himself again—more or less. In control, and contrite. He did not want to look at her. He did not know where to look nor what to do. What to say. Of course he could not apologize, he was Brian Boru’s son.

  Out of the corner of his eye he saw Neassa slowly sit up, raising her hands to her hair in a timeless womanly gesture of repairing the damage. Her skirt foamed around her thighs; another foam was mixed there, streaked with blood. When she caught him looking she thrust out her lower lip. “You’ve made me very sore.”

  Late in the day, a sentry on the gates called down to those inside, “Someone’s coming. A single horse.” He squinted into the twilight, then grinned. “With two riders.”

  A flushed and defiant Donough rode through the gates as soon as they creaked open, looking neither left nor right. In his arms, Neassa was swiveling her head on her neck as if she had never seen Kincora before.

  Her lips were curved in a smug little smile.

  As soon as Maeve saw her sister’s smile, she knew everything. But Donough insisted on spelling it out for Teigue when he met with his brother in Teigue’s private chamber. “I consummated a marriage with this woman, I made her a wife to me under Brehon Law. I know the contracts hadn’t been agreed, and there was no priest on hand to call down God blessing on us, either. But she is my wife and I need a home for her.”

  Teigue’s arms were folded across his chest and his face was set in hard lines. “You behaved very badly. Her father and kinsmen are furious with us, and I don’t blame them.”

  “She’s my wife,” Donough reiterated doggedly. “I need a home for her.”

  “You can stay here until a fort can be built for you on your share of our father’s landholdings.”

  “I don’t want some other fort. I want this one, the one he willed to me!”

  Teigue sighed. “Send for Carroll,” he said over his shoulder to a servant.

  The confrontation was brief and unpleasant.

  “Brian left no written will,” Carroll told Donough with certainty.

  Carroll was fresh from a discussion with Mac Liag on this very subject, in which they had agreed that the boy was intelligent and full of spirit, but unready to assume major responsibility. “Remember he’s Gormlaith’s son,” Carroll had stressed, “and a more irresponsible woman never lived. We must protect her son from himself.”

  “I agree,” Mac Liag responded. “But tell me—in confidence, mind you—was there a will?”

  Carroll hesitated. “Never a written one. Although …”

  “Although?”

  “Before the battle got underway Brian did send for me, to remind me of his promise to bequeath his body to Armagh should he die. And during that conversation he also specifically bequeathed his blessing to his youngest son. Not to Teigue or any of the others, but to Gormlaith’s child. I wondered about that since.”

  “Could he have meant to single out Donough for special privilege, even above his brothers?”

  “Possibly,” Carroll conceded. “It was hard to know what was on Brian’s mind at the time. He was old and tired and a terrible battle was just ahead. Had he been thinking clearly, I cannot believe he would have bestowed favors on the child of the woman who caused the battle. Surely Brian never loved Gormlaith!”

  Mac Liag allowed himself the faintest of smiles. “Do you remember how she looked when they were first wed? The sight of her was enough to stop your heart.” With an effort, the old poet dragged his thoughts back to the present. “But you’re right of course; it would be a dreadful mistake for the boy to inherit Kincora. It could only do him harm.”

  “There was no will,” Carroll reiterated now. “I’m sorry.”

  Donough l
ooked astonished. “But there must have been! He told me his intentions!”

  “I cannot deny what he may have said to you, but I assure you he left no written will with me, nor did he dictate one to me.”

  Donough glared at Teigue. “Did you order him to say this?”

  “Not at all,” was the honest reply. “Try to be reasonable, lad. You and your, ah, your Neassa are welcome to live at Kincora as my guests while we make the appropriate arrangements to celebrate your marriage and placate her father’s tribe.”

  The mention of Neassa reminded Donough that on the ride back to Kincora, he had promised her the palace would be hers to command. This was going to make her unhappy, and he already knew her well enough to know she was not a woman to suffer in silence.

  Chapter Eighteen

  NEWS TRAVELED RAPIDLY ACROSS IRELAND WHEN IT CONCERNED THE marriages of kings and princes, involving the complicated network of tribal alliances. In Dublin, Gormlaith listened to the tidings from Munster with growing anger.

  “My son marrying a mere cattle lord’s daughter? He can’t!” Her eyes flashed with a trace of their old fire. “Did he learn nothing from me? A marriage must enhance status or enrich the clan. He understood that. He married one of his daughters to my son Sitric and another to a prince of the Scots. And married his other sons into the most noble families of Ireland … except for that foolish Teigue, of course, who never did have sufficient ambition.” Gormlaith snorted with contempt. “What can a cattle lord’s daughters offer to the clan of an Ard Ri? My son is young and foolish and they are taking advantage of him in Thomond. A cow-eyed girl has wrapped her plaits around him, obviously. Or her thighs. Well. I’ll soon put a stop to her gallop.”

  When his mother came storming into the hall to announce that she must leave Dublin at once, Sitric felt a powerful desire to fall to his knees and offer sacrifices of thanksgiving to Odin. With an effort he restrained himself. He knew Gormlaith too well to agree with her; that would only make her change her mind.