Dublin (38 page)

  His people, the Dal Cais, had only been a small and unimportant Munster tribe in his grandfather's day. They lived on the banks of the Shannon just upstream from where it opens out into its long western estuary. But when the Vikings founded their settlement nearby at Limerick, Brian's grandfather had refused to come to terms with them. For three generations, the family had conducted a guerrilla war against the Vikings' river traffic. The Dal Cais had become famous. Brian's grandfather had called himself a king; Brian's mother had been a princess from Connacht; his sister had even been chosen as a wife by the king at Tara-though this hadn't done the: family much good after she was executed for sleeping with her husband's son.

  The Dal Cais were ambitious. They had a hardened fighting force. Brian's brothers had already tested their strength against several of the other rulers in the region. But no one could have imagined what they did next. All Ireland gasped when the news of it came.

  "They've taken Cashel."

  Cashel-the ancient stronghold of the Munster kings.

  True, the Munster kings were not what they were. But the cheek of it! And when the King of Munster got the Vikings of Limerick to join him: to punish these insolent upstarts, the Dal Cais beat them all, and plundered Limerick, too. A few years later Brian Boru took over as King of Munster.

  A minor chieftain's family had taken one of the four great kingships of Ireland-where the Celtic royal dynasties went back into the mists of time.

  And indeed, to go with their new position, the Dal Cais decided to improve their ancestry.

  Suddenly it was discovered, and declared in the chronicles, that they had an ancient, ancestral right to share the old Munster kingship with the previous dynasty-a claim that would certainly have surprised Brian's grandfather. But these alterations to the record were not as rare as might be supposed: even the mighty O'neill had falsified large parts of their genealogy Brian was in his prime. The tides of fortune were with him. He was King of Munster. Where else could ambition take him? Only gradually did it become clear that he had decided to aim at nothing less than the High Kingship itself.

  He was bold, methodical, and patient.

  One year he moved against the nearby territory of Ossory; another, he took a great fleet into Connacht; a dozen years after becoming King of Munster, he even moved into the island's central heartland and camped by the sacred site of Uisnech.

  He had taken his time, but the message to the O'neill was clear: either they must crush Brian Boru or give him the recognition he asked for.

  Two years ago the High King had come to meet him.

  It was fortunate for Brian, and probably for Ireland, that the O'neill High King at this time was of a noble and statesmanlike mind. The choice was clear, but not easy: either he must challenge the Munster man to a war, which could only involve a huge loss of life, or he must swallow his pride and come to terms with him, if the thing could be done with honour. He chose the latter course. And reviving the ancient division of the island into two halves, the upper Leth Cuinn, and the lower Leth Moga, he declared, "Let us rule jointly: you in the south, and I in the north."

  "I should rule Leinster as well as Munster then, while you keep Connacht and Ulster," Brian solemnly agreed. "Which means," he pointed out to his followers afterwards, "that I shall control all the chief ports, including Dyflin." Without having to strike another blow, he had just gained all the richest prizes in Ireland.

  Or thought he had.

  Morann stayed two days at the farmstead. He tried his best, but nothing that he or his wife could say would persuade Astrid to come with them. She did agree to bury some of their valuables. "Leave some for the Munster men to find," he advised her grimly,

  "if you don't want the farm burned down."

  Morann stayed there as long as he could in the hope that Harold might return; but when he could stay no longer, he begged her a last time at least to seek a place of sanctuary.

  "There's Swords nearby," she remarked. This was a fine little monastery with stout walls and a high round tower, which might have offered sanctuary. "But we aren't Christian. Or there's Dyflin. That's where Harold will be coming. I don't mind going there."

  Morann sighed.

  "Dyflin will have to do then," he answered. And it was agreed that the family would occupy Morann's house in the city.

  The following day, he continued on his way. They passed the monastery at Swords-secure enough, but too close to Dyflin for his liking-and headed north. They did not stop until that evening, when they slept below the Hill of Tara.

  The High King might have meant well, but when he gave the [*reggg'overlordship of their kingdom to Brian, the proud men of Leinster were unimpressed. Nobody had asked them. The king and the chiefs in particular were incensed. The new overlord, you could be sure, would be wanting tribute and taking their sons as hostages for their good behaviour, in the usual way.

  "Give our sons to the man from Munster?" they cried. The upstart? "If the O'neill can't defend us, what right have they to give us,andbrvbar; to this fellow?" they demanded.

  Whatever the Leinster men might have felt about the Vikings of Dyflin when they first arrived, the two communities had been living together for generations now.

  They'd intermarried. Indeed, King Sitric of Dyflin was actually the King of Leinster's nephew.

  True, many of the Vikings were still pagan, but even religion had to take second place where matters of honour were at stake. As for the Vikings themselves, they had been stubbornly resisting the control of the High King for a long time. They were hardly likely to submit to Brian Boru just because the O'neill High King, who was too weak to fight, told them that they should.

  So it was that autumn that the King of Leinster and the King of Dyflin had decided to refuse to recognise the Munster man. "If he wants a fight," they declared, "he'll get more than he bargained for." And now the Munster man was coming, and they had gone out to meet him.

  The sky was overcast the next morning when Morann and his family crossed the River Boyne; it was still dull grey at noon. Their spirits were not high. To the children, the journey seemed long; and he suspected that his wife would secretly have preferred to remain inside the walls of Dyflin with her neighbours and Harold's wife. More than once she had asked him doubtfully about the place to which they were going. Could it really be any more secure than Dyflin? "You'll see. We'll be there before nightfall," he promised them. The afternoon wore on, the horse pulling the wagon seemed to plod more slowly, and though his children dared not say so, they were wondering whether they would be spending another night out in the empty landscape when, as the darkness was closing in, a shaft of vivid evening sunlight suddenly pierced the cloud and they saw, illuminated upon a hill some way ahead, the great walled sanctuary that was their destination.

  "The monastery of Kells," Morann announced with satisfaction.

  If the journey had been gloomy, the effect of the great monastery upon his family made up for it now.

  The children gazed at it with awe. Even his wife turned to him with a look of respect.

  "It looks like a city," she remarked.

  "It is a city," he said. "And a sanctuary. You can sleep easy tonight," he added, pleased by the impression he had made. "It's almost as big as Dyflin, you know," he said. Soon, while it was still light, he would give himself the pleasure of showing them around.

  But they had only gone a hundred paces when they heard the sound of horse hoofs cantering behind them, and turned to see a man wrapped in a cloak, his face pale as a ghost, his horse all in a lather, about to overtake them on his way to the monastery. He hardly seemed to see them as he came past, but in answer to Morann's calling out to ask him if he had news, he cried back, "We've lost.

  Brian Boru has smashed us. He's on his way to Dyflin now."

  The room was silent. Looking at the monks in their woollen habits, ch"com: sitting stooped over their desks, you might almost have taken them for five huge mice trying to burrow into the vellum before them. Vellum-skin of the newborn calf-pale and smooth; for the hair had been removed by soaking it in excrement or lime before scraping it with a sharp knife. Everyday documents and accounts were written on ordinary cattle skins, which were plentiful and cheap on the island. But for copying sacred texts like the Gospels, only costly vellum would do. And they could afford the finest vellum here, in the scriptorium of the great monastery of Kells.

  Glancing outside now, Osgar saw flakes of falling snow; swiftly, with only a faint scratch, his hand moved to and fro. It was nearly two months since he had come to Kells; soon he'd be leaving.

  But not just yet. Not if he could help it. He stared at the snow outside.

  The weather had changed abruptly that morning, as if in reaction to the news of the night before from Dyflin. But it was not the snow that concerned Brother Osgar, but the person who was be waiting for him out there. Perhaps the snow would be a deterrent.

  I; If he waited in the scriptorium until the bell for prayers, he could make his escape without getting caught. At least, he hoped so.

  He had changed in the last decade. There were some grey hairs now, a few stern lines on his face, a quiet dignity.

  His eyes went back to his work. The pale vellum had been neatly ruled into lines with a stylus. He dipped his pen in the ink.

  Most ft scribes used a quill pen, made from the tail feather of a goose or swan; but Osgar had always favoured reeds and he had brought a good supply with him, cut from the edge of the lake at Glen dalough.

  The ink was of two kinds: either a brownish colour, made

I

  from oak apples and sulphate of iron; or a jet-black, made from holly.

  Osgar was a skilful calligrapher. Writing in the clear, rounded be script of the Irish monasteries, he could copy a text at roughly fifty lines an hour. Working six hours a day, which was certainly the maximum possible during these short winter days-for good calligraphy needs natural daylight-he had almost finished copying the book of the Gospels for which he had come there. Another day and it would be done.

  He paused to stretch. Only those who had tried it understood- the calligrapher might seem only to be moving his hand, but in fact the whole body was engaged.

  It was hard on the arm, the back, even the legs.

  He settled back to his task. Another dozen lines, a quarter-hour of silence. Then he looked up again. One of the other monks caught his eye, and nodded. The light was fading; it was time to stop work. Osgar started to clean his pen.

  On the floor at his side were two bags. One contained a small, workmanlike text of the Gospels, another of the Pentateuch. The Psalms, of course, he knew by heart. There were also two little devotional books that he liked always to have with him. The other bag, into which he now dipped his hand, contained his writing materials and one other item. And it was upon this object that his fingers fastened.

  His secret sin. Nobody knew about it. He had never even mentioned it in the confessional. Oh, he had confessed the sin of lust itself, a hundred times. He was rather proud of it-the pride was a sin, too, of course. And yet, wasn't his concealment of the secret in a way even worse for having been repeated so many times? Was there anything else, his confessor would ask?

  No. A lie. A hundred lies. Yet he had no intention of confessing his secret, for the good reason that if he did, he would be told he must part with it.

  And that he could not do. His talisman. Caoilinn's ring.

  He had always kept it. There wasn't a day when he didn't take it out and look at it. Each time, he would give a little smile and then, with a sweet sadness, put the ring away again.

  What did she mean to him now? She was the dark-haired child he had planned to marry; the girl who had shown him her nakedness.

  He wasn't shocked anymore. If, for a little while, he had thought of her as a crude woman, a vessel of sin, her marriage soon afterwards had obliterated the idea.

  She was a respectably married woman, a Christian matron. Her body would have thickened now, he supposed. Did she sometimes think of him? He felt sure she did.

  How could she not, when he thought of her every day? The love he had given up.

  The ring was not just a sentimental mascot though.

  In a way it helped to regulate his life. If at times he thought of leaving the monastery, he had only to look at the ring to remind himself that, since Caoilinn was married to another, there was hardly any point. If, as had happened once or twice, he found himself attracted to a woman, the ring reminded him that his heart was given to another.

  And if perhaps some monk-like the young novice who had first shown him round Glendalough-if such a one seemed to be drawing too close, and if he, out of kindness, was drawn to return a gentle look or a touch, he had only to take out Caoilinn's little memento to relive the feelings he had experienced for her all those years ago, and to know that he would not be going down that other road which some of his fellow monks were travelling. So if he had first denied her by entering the monastery, and she had then made herself unavailable through marriage, it seemed to him that in this impossible relationship he had been granted a protection against greater evils; and he even dared to wonder whether, in his present small disobedience and sentimental lust, he might perceive the hand of providence itself gently helping him, poor sinner that he was, along his sometimes lonely way.