Brian Boru Read online

  Brian watched them from a distance, feeling terribly alone. The worst thing in all the world had happened and there was no one to hold him, no one to hug him and tell him everything would be all right. That was the sort of thing Bebinn would have done. But she would never hug him again.

  Never again.

  A cold wind seemed to swirl around Brian, chilling him to the marrow. ‘Mother,’ he sobbed.

  No loving voice answered.

  Brian made his way back to Bebinn and sat down beside her, drawing his knees up tight against his chest and wrapping his arms around them. He watched without really seeing as Mahon and Marcan began moving among the bodies, covering faces. Marcan appeared to be saying a prayer over each.

  A shout from beyond the gate announced the arrival of another of Kennedy’s sons, who had been with a herd beyond Slieve Bernagh. Soon all the surviving members of the family arrived, summoned by the disaster. Each in turn stopped and stared as Brian had done.

  Beal Boru was destroyed. Once it had been the proud stronghold of a tribal chieftain who owned many cows. Now it was rubble and ash, containing death. People seemed to notice Brian only because he was sitting by Bebinn’s body. No one knew what to do with him. The women of the clan had been killed or carried off by the Vikings. It had been they who cared for children, men had other work. The only survivors of the family were some of Brian’s brothers, men with no experience to equal that of a mother. They were not unkind to Brian, but they did not know what he needed.

  Mostly they just left him alone. They had to put out the fires, and collect the dead.

  The only time Brian said anything was when they wrapped Bebinn’s body in a cloak and carried her away. He followed her with his eyes, saying ‘Mother’ just once more.

  Very softly.

  That night the surviving sons of Kennedy slept together in the ruins of the old homestead below the grey crag. From there, they could not smell the ashes and burnt timber. Other Dalcassians had arrived and offered them help and hospitality, but by mutual agreement they had gone to their grandfather’s old fort instead. It was the nearest thing to their destroyed home.

  Brian lay on the earth beside Mahon, wrapped in a woollen cloak. He did not think of himself as afraid, but sometimes shudders ran through his body.

  A messenger had been sent to find Kennedy, who had gone across the Shannon to arrange a cattle trade with another tribe. When Brian tried, he found he could not remember his father’s face. But he could still see his mother as she lay dead.

  In the night a shriek wailed down the wind. It was not a human voice.

  ‘It’s the banshee,’ Mahon said, feeling the hairs rise on the back of his neck. ‘Aval mourns the Dalcassian dead.’

  No one slept that night, while the voice of the banshee ripped and tore the air.

  Rebuilding Beal Boru began as soon as Kennedy returned and the dead were buried. Brian’s father was frightening in his anger. At first he hardly spoke to anyone. He broke branches in his rage and drove his fist through burned timber walls. He roared at people in a voice that did not even sound like his own, and Brian stayed as far away from him as he could.

  Dalcassians of every rank came to assist their chieftain in rebuilding Beal Boru. Members of the warrior nobility wore gold and silver jewellery and pleated tunics. Freemen who farmed tribal land wore simpler clothing, and servants and unfree labourers dressed in the coarsest homespun, but all worked equally hard. Beal Boru was a symbol of Dalcassian pride.

  The surviving members of Kennedy’s family were changed by the raid. Kennedy himself was always angry. Marcan now prayed most of the time. Mahon seemed older, quieter, and did not play with Brian any more.

  Brian began starting fights with the sons of nearby farmers. Fighting took his mind off his pain, for a while. He pretended the farmers’ sons were Vikings and beat them so savagely their fathers protested to Kennedy.

  ‘I’m sending that young troublemaker away,’ the chieftain promised. ‘To the monks at Clonmacnois, for his education.’

  On the day Brian was to leave for Clonmacnois, his father sent him a set of new clothing, fit for a prince. He was given a linen undershirt with flowing sleeves, and a tunic dyed with saffron, to be belted with carved leather. A new mantle of dark red wool trimmed in otter fur reached almost to the ground, barely revealing snug woollen trews that extended from his hips to his ankles and were held in place by a strap under the arch of his foot. On Brian’s feet were the first shoes he had ever worn, a pair of soft leather boots cut low and embossed with a few strips of silver wire.

  He hated the shoes. His feet did not like being trapped in leather, they wanted to feel the earth and the grass.

  And the new woollen trews itched.

  When Brian stood before his father for inspection, Kennedy’s first words were, ‘Stop scratching. You’ll get used to those trews.’

  ‘Do I really have to go away?’ Brian wanted to know. ‘I want to stay here.’

  ‘You’re no use to us here. You won’t be old enough to take up arms and go to war until you’re fifteen, and in the meantime you’re in everyone’s way. We don’t have your mother to mind you now. Going to Clonmacnois is for your own good.’

  ‘Whenever someone wants me to do something I don’t want to do, they say it’s for my own good,’ Brian protested.

  Mahon, who was waiting to take him to the monastic school upriver, chuckled.

  Kennedy shot him a warning glance. ‘Don’t encourage the boy, there’s too much of the rebel in him already. I don’t envy the good brothers who will have to tame him.’

  Mahon said little on the ride north, and Brian said less. The pain closed around him again. He was being sent away. He had lost his mother; now he was losing his home. He bit his lip and hated the Vikings. It had all begun with them.

  When they arrived at Clonmacnois, the abbot who greeted them looked Brian over from his heels to his head. ‘What are we to make of you?’ he said at last.

  ‘A warrior. I’m going to kill all the Vikings.’

  ‘That is not worthy of a Christian,’ the abbot said sternly. But he gave the boy another look. There was something wild in the young Dalcassian’s eyes. This one will be a challenge, the abbot said to himself.

  He led the way through a low stone archway into a paved courtyard. A number of scholars were sitting on wooden benches, listening to a monk who was speaking in a strange language.

  Brian halted, his eyes narrowing with suspicion. He looked over his shoulder to see what Mahon made of this, but Mahon was gone.

  He had left without saying goodbye.

  Brian took a deep breath. He was hurt but he would not let it show. I am alone, he thought. Now I have no one but me. He lifted his chin and swallowed hard against the lump in his throat. ‘What language is that man speaking?’ he asked the abbot. ‘Is he a foreigner?’

  ‘He is teaching Greek,’ the abbot explained, ‘which is a tongue, like Latin, that is read by civilised people. But he is as Irish as yourself, born no more than a morning’s walk from here.’

  ‘Are you going to teach me Greek and Latin?’

  ‘If you are capable of learning it. And if you are entitled to such an education. What is your ancestry?’

  As the historian of the Dalcassians had taught him, Brian recited, ‘I am the son of Kennedy who is the son of Lorcan, King of Thomond, who was descended from Corc, first King of Thomond, who was descended from Cormac Cas, and through him from the Milesian princes.’

  The abbot nodded. ‘You are entitled to all we have to teach, then.’

  ‘Will you train me in the finer arts of sword and spear?’ Brian asked eagerly.

  The abbot frowned at him. ‘We serve the God of Peace here, not the gods of war,’ he said sternly.

  But Brian had already noted the high stone walls built to protect the great monastic school that dreamed in the watery meadows beside the Shannon. He had seen the tall stone tower with its cone-shaped roof and asked Mahon about it as they w
ere approaching the place.

  ‘That is a round tower where the monks keep lookout for raiders,’ Mahon had explained. ‘If they see Vikings coming up the river, they take the Church’s treasures into the top of the tower and pull up the ladder so no one can get to them. It’s the only way to protect gold and silver from the Danes and Norsemen … and from some of our own plundering clans,’ he had added.

  So as he listened to the abbot, Brian was thinking to himself, war comes here in spite of what this man says. There is no safe place, then. But there should be.

  There should be!

  Brian’s early days at Clonmacnois were spent learning the discipline of monastic life. The monks were not gentle teachers. His frequent rebellions were met with frequent punishments, and the rope belt around the abbot’s waist was often removed and used across young Brian’s back.

  In time he became as obedient as he had to be, but they never made him cry. Brian had done his crying at Beal Boru.

  When his lessons began he found unexpected pleasure in them. If the weather was fine, classes were taught outside in the courtyards and on the lawns. Most of the students were young men intended for the Church, but some, like Brian, were merely the sons of various noble clans who had been sent to the monks for polishing. From time to time a few well-born girls joined their number to learn to read and write. Under the old Brehon law education was not denied to women who wanted it.

  But the Brehon law itself was not taught at Clonmacnois. As Brother Tomas explained when Brian asked him about it, ‘The Brehon law is pagan and we are Christian. But we do not openly oppose it, because the people would resist. It is not easy to change a person’s beliefs and traditions, Brian, so we have learned to tolerate them, letting the Brehon law exist side-by-side with Christian teaching. Tolerance is a virtue.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Brian, ‘but I could never tolerate the foreigners!’

  ‘The young Dalcassian is as prickly as a gorse bush,’

  Brother Tomas told the abbot.

  To his surprise, Brian discovered that he enjoyed studying. His hungry mind gobbled up information and asked for more. He liked music and mathematics, he was good at languages, but history was best of all. History was filled with war stories, and by studying them he learned how great victories had been won in the past, by heroes far beyond Ireland. Men with names like Alexander and Alfred and Charlemagne. Great warriors all.

  By studying how they won, I will learn how the Vikings could be beaten, Brian thought to himself. And when he was pouring over his lessons he did not feel so alone.

  But he was still only ten years old, and far from home. At night as he lay on his narrow bed in the cold stone dormitory, he hugged himself for comfort and wondered if Aval could still see him. He felt as if he had been torn loose from everything he loved.

  At first some of the other students teased him, because he was the youngest pupil in the school. Scholars came from all over Europe to study at Clonmacnois, and a Briton called Alcuin told Brian, ‘You spend too much time at your lessons. You will grow soft and fat and become a round-shouldered scribe with weak eyes.’

  ‘Do you think so?’ Brian asked calmly. He was half afraid of Alcuin, who was larger and older, but he would not let the fear show. Fear was like crying – no one must see. Setting aside his wax tablet and pointed stylus, he fell upon Alcuin with doubled fists.

  Brian was winning when the monks finally pulled them apart.

  The abbot was not pleased. ‘How are we to cure you of this fighting?’ he asked, almost in despair.

  ‘I am a warrior,’ Brian said stubbornly.

  ‘You are still a child!’

  That night the rope lashed Brian’s back, but he did not cry out. The next day, Alcuin came to him and offered to be friends.

  One by one, the other students became his friends too. They liked and admired Brian, who appeared both cheerful and fearless. They could not see how he felt inside and he kept it to himself. It was wonderful to be part of a group again, to have companions who laughed and joked with him – and looked up to him.

  For, to the great surprise of the abbot, in time Brian proved to be the best scholar at Clonmacnois.

  But sometimes he wandered away from his friends and walked alone beside the Shannon, his eyes following the water as if it were a road leading south to Beal Boru.

  ‘I will go back, ‘he promised himself, ‘and use what I have learned here to build the strongest fortress in Ireland and be revenged on the foreigners!’

  Action was one answer to pain and grief. Learning was another. Learning opened up the world to Brian, and when the bell sounded he left the river and returned to the classroom to study the career of Charlemagne of France, who had dreamed great dreams and made them come true.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Becoming a Warrior

  There was always more to learn. When one of the monks from Clonmacnois travelled south to the monastic school of Inisfallen, amid the lakes of Killarney, Brian travelled with him to study in the scriptorium there.

  The monks were sad because so many of their books had been destroyed or stolen by raiders. ‘They are sometimes sold on the Continent for a high price,’ they told Brian.

  ‘If you know where they are, why don’t you go and get them back?’

  ‘Ah, Brian, life is not that easy!’

  ‘Why not?’ he wanted to know. But they could not tell him. No one could tell him why good people were slain, why treasures were stolen, why children had to grow up motherless. But he knew such things were wrong.

  He knew they could be changed. Anything could be changed. Brian had seen change greater than he had ever imagined when Beal Boru was destroyed.

  He felt something growing in him like a hard core. If no one else will make things right, I shall, he thought. He could not accept the world as it was.

  Yet sometimes, alone in the night, he still felt like a small child, helpless and afraid. He did not tell anyone this. No one would care, he thought. Mahon had walked away and left him in the ruins of Beal Boru.

  I have only myself, he thought. I must make that be enough.

  But he had friends, too. Others wanted to be with him, because he was so good at everything he did. Brian was quick and clever and big for his age, and as the seasons passed he demanded more and more of himself. He had the woodcarver at the abbey make weapons for him out of wood, so he could practise with them since the monks forbade real ones. He worked just as hard at his lessons, and when his eyes burned and his head ached he did not let himself stop. I am studying how to win, he thought, reading of Charlemagne and Caesar.

  When the wind howled up the Shannon, he missed Aval on her crag. Under the stern gaze of the monks he prayed to God and Christ and the gentle Virgin in chapel with the other students. But when he was alone, dreaming by the river at the end of day, he thought of the shee. He thought of an older Ireland and tried to imagine what it had been like before the foreigners came.

  Brother Tomas understood. ‘Ancient Ireland? I shall teach you how to see it, Brian. Look in these books you study, with their illuminations. In their brilliant colours and free-flowing designs you can see our land as it was. You will see the land of saints and scholars, where an artist could paint with gold or make silver chalices and book boxes without having to fear they would be destroyed by heathen foreigners.’

  ‘Can Ireland be like that again?’ Brian asked, his eyes glowing.

  Brother Tomas shook his head sadly. ‘Ah, lad, times have changed. Times have changed.’

  But they can change again, thought Brian stubbornly.

  From other students at Clonmacnois Brian heard a different version of history. Some of them belonged to Irish clans who had done their share of robbing monasteries, just like the Vikings, and boasted of what they had taken.

  Brian was angry. ‘We can’t be thieves and robbers just because the foreigners are. We have to be better than they are.’

  When Brian talked about being better, the other boy
s listened. They admired him because he really was the best of them, at both games and studies. They wanted to be like him, so they began following the lead he set.

  The more Brian learned the more he wanted to know. He worked until he could play the harp as well as any harper, or recite the poems about ancient heroes as well as a bard. He even persuaded the carpenters and stonemasons who repaired the walls and buildings of Clonmacnois to teach him their skills.

  ‘I want to know how to build the strongest, safest fortress in Ireland someday,’ he explained.

  He was still very young, but when they looked into his eyes they did not laugh at him. They gave him tools and showed him how to use them, and he learned very fast.

  Brian always seemed to be in a hurry. He had more energy than he could spend, and no day was long enough for all he wanted to do. But because he played as hard as he worked he was well loved at Clonmacnois. The monks soon learned they could usually find him at the centre of a cluster of laughing friends.

  They also learned, as his parents had known, that when there was mischief brewing Brian was usually to blame. Yet he would always admit it with a cheerful grin, and take his punishment without complaining. And he never did any real damage.

  Brian had seen enough destruction at Beal Boru to last a lifetime.

  But there was always news of more destruction and loss, it seemed. The fighting never stopped in Ireland. When Brian was beginning his second year of studies, word arrived that Kennedy of the Dalcassians, his father, had been killed in a battle against Callahan of the Owenacht clan, who was both King of Munster and a friend to the Danes of Limerick.

  The abbot sent Brother Tomas to tell Brian. The monk found the boy where he often was in the late afternoons, on the footworn oval beyond the monastery where the students raced each other. Brian had just outrun a longlegged youth from Lough Ree and was grinning with victory, but his smile faded when he saw the expression on Brother Tomas’s face.

  He knew. Even before the monk opened his mouth, Brian knew something awful had happened. A great cold stone seemed to settle in the pit of his stomach.