Pride of Lions Page 2

  He tensed abruptly. He thought he heard a woman cry out—but what woman would be in these mountains at night when wolves might be hunting? Perhaps it was a wolf he heard. He dropped a cautious hand to his sword hilt.

  The sound came again, raising the hackles on his neck. That was no wolf. Now Donough was certain it was a female voice, one with an unnameable quality at once familiar and frightening.

  The wail drifted on the wind. And all at once, he knew.

  “Ban shee!” he hissed in horror.

  “Whassay?” mumbled a warrior lying near him on the ground, wrapped in a voluminous shaggy cloak.

  Donough stood transfixed as the sound rose in volume, shrilling upward into an inhuman ululation as much a part of Ireland as her fields and forests.

  “Mother of God!” gasped the warrior on the ground, trying to scramble out of the enveloping folds of his cloak so he could get to his feet. “What was that?”

  “The guardian spirit of the Dal Cais,” Donough told him with sudden, absolute certainty. His blood and bones identified the sound. “She who lives on Crag Liath, the Grey Crag above Kincora. But she’s not there now. She’s somewhere on this side of the country, and she’s keening for the Dalcassian dead!”

  “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph protect us!” cried the warrior, fervently signing the Cross on his breast.

  The others were waking in spite of their weariness, the very mention of the ban shee enough to cut through the fog of sleep. Their priests claimed that the ban shees—fairies, Little People, supernatural relicts of a vanished race—were but myths and legends preying on superstitious minds. But when her next cry came with chilling clarity, they all heard it.

  She screamed like a hare being torn apart by hounds. In that despairing shriek was all the grief and pain in the world.

  “I told you my father needs me!” Donough sobbed in anguish.

  In a matter of minutes camp was broken. The company set off at a hasty trot along narrow mountain trails, impelled by the memory of the ban shee’s scream.

  The first light of a gray, bitterly cold Easter morning found them descending from the mountains toward Dublin. The veteran warriors said little to one another. Fear and superstition rode with them, embedded in their bones.

  Donough was also silent. His jaws were clamped tight on his anxiety, but his thoughts raced feverishly inside his skull.

  His father, his half-brothers by Brian’s various women, his Dalcassian cousins—all the men who represented stability in his life—were in Dublin to fight the invaders.

  His mother was in Dublin too. Gormlaith, the antithesis of stability.

  Once they left the mountains, their route joined with the Slighe Cualann, one of the five major roads developed by King Cormac Mac Airt in the third century of the Christian era to bring commerce and tribute from every part of Ireland to his stronghold at Tara. The island had countless small roads composed of foot-beaten earth, called bothars, or cow roads, because they were the width of two cows, one lengthwise and one athwart. But these casual trails were hardly sufficient for the traffic Cormac had envisioned—hence the slighe.

  Originally constructed of oak logs laid down across timber supports, a slighe was designed to accommodate, two abreast, the war chariots once used by Gaelic champions. The passage of centuries had seen the disappearance of war chariots, although similar carts of wickerwork were still used for personal transportation by the nobility. Meanwhile wooden-wheeled traders’ wagons had combined with the Irish weather to erode the slighe. Stones had been added to its bed from time to time so it would continue to provide a stable surface over mud and bogland, but it was very difficult footing for weary horses.

  Unthinkingly, Donough guided his horse onto the slighe. Ronan, directly behind him, reined his animal to one side and rode beside the slighe rather than upon it. The others followed his example. Donough noticed, but continued as he had begun, refusing to be instructed by his second-in-command.

  Ronan grinned to himself. Proud and stubborn; not surprising.

  As they drew closer to Dublin, the company began encountering refugees, big-boned, fair-haired people typical of the Scandinavian population of the city. The first ones they met were not prosperous Viking sea rovers, however, but three men and two women whose clothing identified them as members of the laboring class. The men wore tattered woolen coats and leggings that had been many times patched. The women, who might have been mother and daughter, were clothed in unfitted ankle-length gowns of coarse wool over shifts of equally coarse linen. Neither gown was ornamented with embroidery. Like all Vikings they wore shoes, but these were in bits and bound to their feet with string.

  They straggled to a halt and peered up at the horsemen, fear in their eyes. The two women held hands.

  “Are you from Dublin?” Donough demanded to know in an awkward mixture of aristocratic Irish and the Norse spoken by the inhabitants of Limerick, the only Vikings he knew. “What happened on Good Friday?” he asked urgently, leaning forward on his horse.

  The refugees gaped at him, slack-mouthed.

  Ronan, who was familiar with Dublin and its people, inquired in their own dialect, “Was there fighting on Freya’s Day?”

  A scrawny man with soot ground into every pore had been staring openly at Donough’s torc, the gold neck ring that identified him as a member of the chieftainly class. Now the man transferred his gaze to Ronan. “Yah, yah, fighting,” he affirmed. He waved his arms. “Big battle at the Meadow of the Bull!”

  “Clontarf?”

  “Yah yah.”

  Donough, following the exchange as best he could, said impatiently, “Ask him who won, Ronan. Ask him what he knows of my … of the Ard Ri.”

  Ronan repeated the questions but got no reply other than a blank stare. To emphasize his demand he drew his short-sword from the scabbard affixed to his belt, which reduced the Dubliner to near hysteria and made the women shriek and throw their arms around one another.

  “I am a charcoal burner, I know nothing about anything!” the sooty man cried. “I know nothing!” His eyes skittered in their sockets like frightened insects.

  A second man managed to say, “We were frightened so we hid. It is always people like us who suffer. No matter who wins, the victors burn and rape. We hid for a long time. Then this morning we came out when they opened the gates.”

  “When who opened the gates? Brian Boru’s men, or Sitric Silkbeard’s?”

  The refugee shrugged. “Men with spears.”

  Men with spears were all the same to him, whatever their army.

  Ronan turned to Donough. “We won’t get anything from this lot. They were probably cowering in a cellar the whole time.”

  “Let them go, then. We may have better luck farther along.”

  Ronan sheathed his sword and the company rode off, leaving the refugees huddled together like sheep, staring after them.

  The next group was better dressed and was pushing a hand barrow piled with household goods. One of the women was leading a goat by a length of rope. When she saw the horsemen bearing down on them she tried to conceal the goat with her body.

  A thickset man with a face like a red moon stepped forward warily. Donough let Ronan question him.

  “I’m a shoemaker,” the man said, “with a shop in Fishamble Street. I hope it’s still there when we return,” he added wistfully.

  “What do you know about a battle? At Clontarf?”

  “Not just Clontarf, but everywhere!” was the reply. “It was terrible, like the end of the world. People fighting all around the city and the plains beyond.

  “We had been hearing rumors for weeks that King Sitric had summoned a great hosting from the north to challenge the High King of the Irish and take control of the country away from him. Everything would have been ours, then: the riches of this rich island …” He sighed as if they had been snatched out of his own hands.

  “Go on,” Ronan urged.

  “For days, ships had been sailing into Dublin Bay bring
ing warriors from Scandinavia, the Orkneys, the Hebrides. Even King Amlaff of Denmark himself, someone said.

  “Then Brian Boru came marching east with a great army gathered from throughout Ireland. He was even said to have Norse traitors from Limerick with him, come to fight against their own countrymen.

  “When he reached the coast he put the torch to the land from Fingal to Howth, trying to intimidate Sitric. The smoke was so black we in Dublin had to light lamps in the middle of the day.

  “My wife wanted to leave the city then, but I was not prepared to abandon my shop. So we stayed. On the morning of Freya’s Day the Irish army swept toward the sea, and the longships sent another army ashore to meet them, and the battle began. There was such clashing and banging and screaming we could hear it even inside the walls of Dublin, though in the beginning the fighting was well north of the Liffey.”

  “The noise frightened the children,” said a tall women with a number of missing teeth. “They screamed and clapped their hands over their ears. I knew then we should have left.” She cast a dark look at the shoemaker. “I warned my husband I would be raped if we did not leave at once.”

  “Make that man tell you about the battle,” Donough instructed Ronan, but the narrative had been taken away from the shoemaker. His wife continued, with evident relish at being the center of attention, “I saw her, you know. With these two eyes I saw Kormlada.” She gave Gormlaith’s name its Viking pronunciation. “She was watching the battle from atop the walls of the city with her son, King Sitric. Her son by the old King of Dublin, him they called Olaf Cuaran.”

  At the mention of his mother’s name Donough had fixed his eyes on the woman’s face with fierce intensity.

  “Olaf was Kormlada’s first husband,” she was saying, obviously preferring gossip to descriptions of battle. “She is Irish, you know, a princess of Leinster or so she claims, but she married a Viking king. After he died she married Malachi Mor, High King of the Irish. Then when Brian Boru took the kingship away from Malachi, did she not change her gown and marry him? And have another son by him, though she was old enough to be a grandmother!” The woman lowered her voice to a confidential murmur. “They say King Sitric offered his mother in the marriage bed to any foreign lord who could succeed in killing Brian Boru.”

  Abruptly, Donough exclaimed, “We have to go now!” He lashed his weary horse so savagely with the goad that it leaped forward into full gallop, its hooves skidding on the stones of the slighe.

  Ronan shouted after him, “But I thought you wanted me to question …”

  Donough was already out of earshot. Ronan glanced around at the other horsemen and shrugged. They set off after Donough.

  The refugees watched them go. “What do you make of that?” asked the woman with the goat, which was chewing unnoticed on the embroidery of her sleeve.

  “It was the mention of Kormlada that did it,” said the shoemaker. “Did you mark how the beardless one went white around the mouth? The Irish hate her.”

  “She is not much loved in Dublin either,” commented an older man leaning on a walking stick. “Swanning around the city, criticizing our customs. Her son may be King of Dublin but she is just an old Irish woman.”

  “Just an old Irish woman?” The shoemaker raised an eyebrow. “I myself have seen Kormlada striding down Fishamble Street with sunlight flaming her hair and the sea in her green eyes, and there is no Viking woman the equal of her, no matter how old she is.”

  His wife rounded on him. “You would say that, you man! Just because she has a big body and a disgusting amount of red hair you think she is a marvel. But she was born with those things, they are none of her doing. You know what people say of her: ‘Kormlada of Leinster is most gifted in that over which she has no control, but works evil in all those things over which she has any power.’ Did we not see the proof of the saying on Freya’s Day?”

  The shoemaker replied mildly, “Surely one woman could not cause a war.”

  His wife sniffed. “Consider this. Brian Boru had kept peace in Ireland for ten years. He even married one of his daughters to King Sitric to build an alliance with the Dublin Vikings. Then he divorced Kormlada, and suddenly there is war.

  “Where would you lay the blame?”

  Chapter Four

  LASHED BY INTERMITTENT RAIN, DONOUGH’S COMPANY HURRIED ON toward the city. Though it was Easter Sunday, the celebration of the Feast of the Resurrection was the furthest thing from their minds.

  Only by courtesy could Dublin be called a city. Compared to Rome or Constantinople it was a primitive town, a Viking trading port whose narrow, twisting laneways ran between cramped houses and shops of post-and-wattle construction, daubed with mud and manure to keep out the weather. Some of the more prosperous sea raiders had built themselves two-roomed houses of timber planking, but thatch made of river reeds was the ubiquitous roofing material. Goats and geese were penned in filthy yards, and half-wild swine rooted in midden heaps, adding to the pervasive effluvium of fishmarkets and smoky fires and wet wool and rotting seaweed and scabrous hounds and tidal mudflats and running sewage.

  Dublin was a city you could smell, on a warm day when the wind was off the river, before you could see it.

  Its origins could be traced to a small support settlement that had grown up around several Christian churches on the south bank of the river Liffey at a place known as Ath Cliath—the Ford of the Hurdles. The Irish staked sheep hurdles—panels of woven wattles used to make temporary sheep pens—in the bed of the shallow river at this point, to provide a ford across the Liffey. While it did not keep their feet dry, at least it kept them from becoming mired in mud and silt.

  Scandinavian sea rovers had first discovered the site in 837, when Norse longships explored the bay and the mouth of the Liffey. They returned in force in 841, when the full terror of Viking raids descended upon peaceful, dreaming Ath Cliath.

  The Norse settled in to spend the winter at a nearby locale called Dubh Linn—the Black Pool—which was a tidal basin where the river Poddle joined the estuary of the Liffey. The Northmen busied themselves repairing their ships, gloating over their plunder, and enjoying a climate that was positively balmy by comparison with their homeland. They constructed what they called a longport, a camp that enclosed their beached longships inside a protective palisade.

  Within a few years Dublin would be the principal Viking colony in Ireland.

  In the beginning the Irish did not fully comprehend the ramifications. They had lived unmolested by invaders for over a thousand years. Even Caesar had not extended his campaign so far west. The Irish, who with the Scots comprised the Gaelic branch of the Celtic race, were a totally pastoral people. The resources of their island were so extensive they needed not take to the sea to support themselves, so they did not appreciate that the sea was a highway which could bring ever-increasing numbers of raiders to their shores. At first they considered the Vikings in their longships only a temporary hazard.

  But when more and more Norsemen arrived—raiding, pillaging, and, inevitably, beginning to form colonies wherever they found good harborage—the Irish took alarm. Then the Danes followed the Norse, to vie for control of a lucrative export trade in Irish gold, timber, leather, slaves, sacred vessels, and secular ornaments of unmatched craftsmanship. As the Viking presence grew, the Irish fought back.

  Meanwhile, Norse trading centers were established at such places as Waterford, Wexford, and Limerick. The Vikings introduced the concept of settled towns to a land whose inhabitants had gloried in the freedom of unfettered herding and hunting for countless generations.

  During the next two centuries Ireland was torn by almost constant warfare between Gael and Viking. The Northmen were as fierce at fighting as they were dedicated to trade, but the Irish were ruled by a warrior aristocracy that defined itself through combat In the bitter struggle for control of the island’s riches, neither side managed a decisive victory.

  To confuse the issue, as time passed the distinction betwe
en native and foreigner grew blurred. Some of the Vikings brought their own women with them, but others married Irish women and sired half breed families. Their sons became mercenaries, fighting for both sides.

  Some Irish chieftains formed alliances of convenience with the Vikings to further their own burgeoning interest in trade, or to add Viking warriors to their personal armies when carrying on ancient feuds with other Irish chieftains.

  Warfare ceased to be a simple matter of Gael against Viking.

  Nor was it merely Christian against pagan. Some Vikings converted to the teachings of Christ, while some Irish eschewed Christianity and continued to follow the Druid way, to the profound displeasure of the Church.

  This was the Ireland to which, against all odds, Brian Boru had brought a decade of peace.

  Now that peace was shattered.

  In the uncertain aftermath, Donough and his men made their way toward Dublin. When they met Vikings driving twenty-eight good oxen across the slighe, they fell on the startled herders and relieved them of their animals. “Spoils of war,” Donough claimed.

  The addition of plodding oxen to their company slowed him down, but he did not complain as his men expected. As they drew nearer the city, Donough was increasingly apprehensive about what he might find there, and willing to put off the moment as long as he comfortably could.

  Soon enough the walls of Dublin loomed ahead. As a result of countless assaults and sieges over the years, the city was heavily fortified, protected by timber palisades and guarded gateways.

  Close to the house of Vespers the horsemen crossed the Slighe Dala as it approached Dublin from the west. There they saw their first bodies. Irish warriors in saffron-dyed linen tunics and foreigners in chain mail lay twisted together in the dance of death, their blood stiff and black upon them.

  Lowering their heads, the oxen stared popeyed at the corpses and gave them a wide berth.

  One of Donough’s men pointed toward the city. “I see figures moving on the walls.”