Prologue

1166

It began before my story. Some short years before, while I, Alberic, laboured still in Yrlande. I heard it from a poet who came to Milesius’ monastery. He claimed to have seen it all. Their approach to a town above low, vine-covered hillsides of fragrant black soil, studded with white pebbles and wind-fallen grapes. Stumping like pilgrims, walking their horses and mules with Mac Murchada at their head, driving on. A cloak shading over his brow. Through an unending country they had travelled, from landfall at Honfleur, through Roeun, Chartres, Chinon and the uncertain wooded expanses between. Routiers and mercenaries in the desolate places gauging the prey and, at each new town, the welcome uncertain, the castellan high-handed or the burghers wary.

Mac Murchada driving always onwards, silent, lips cracked and gaze beaming ahead. And everywhere they went, the king’s tracks in the street, the piles of bone from feasting. The favoured still fingering their furs and gilded surcoats and other gifts richly given. The transgressors black-faced and purple-tongued, hanged from the appointed places.

At Samnur, finally, they caught sight of his pennant flying on the slighted castle, lithe, lions on a field of red. Henri Plantagenet, Henri Cortmantle, Henri Fitzempress—King of England, Count of Anjou and of Normandy, regent of Aquitaine.

They stopped below the town, leaving the road to pass between rows of tortured vines. Mac Murchada pushing into a cave strung with bushels of lavender, garlic and the wooden tools of the vendange. The broad farmer and his sons falling away meekly before the dark determination of that crook-backed, bear-shouldered foreigner.

Wordlessly, his small retinue went to work, pulling cinched leather packs from the mules’ flanks, unfurling the cotton wrapping and flattening out the saffron-dyed shirt, the woven trews, and beating out Mac Murchada’s mantle. Rich gifts for the King clanging from hand to hand.

The warm rain streaming along the rutted streets, carrying straw and ordure down the hill. The old bear, stepping like a maid across the plank pavement with his cloak caught up over his arm. The water dividing around his ankles. Peasant boys paid a denier to run ahead and announce his coming.

Quick words between the steward and latimer at the hall doorway. Across the threshold, steady as a Roman consul, Mac Murchada strode forward, his step devouring the length of the long room with courtiers shuffling indignantly around the verge. He paid them no heed, pacing on, and, reaching the foot of the king’s dais, he bent his knee in a continuation of his forward momentum, sweeping his cloth before him in a wide, luxuriant bow. And at once—in that same impulse of trajectory that had driven him across the seas, gripping the side rail impatiently in the dense heaving of contrary waves, beating horses’ flanks illiberally, grinding down the French hillsides with the irresistible passage of his boots—words shot from his mouth. A quarrel from a crossbow. A wrecked voice, hoarse, yet sibilant. The latimer rushing up alongside, launching desperately into his fervid translation.

‘May God who dwells on high save and protect you, King Henri of the Engleis, the Normans, the Poitevins, Angevins, Gascons, Bretons, Welsh and Scots and of many more living and more again yet to be born, and may he grant you also the courage and the desire and the will to avenge my shame and my sorrow which my own people have brought upon me. Noble King Henri, hear where I was born and in what country: I was born a lord in Yrlande, and in that country I was acknowledged king before the devil Ua Ruairc wrongfully cast me out from the kingdom, so that I come here to a distant land where I know not the paths, over waters wide and through dark valleys and high hills, to appeal to you fair sire before the barons of your empire and to swear, powerful king, vested emperor, that I will become your liegeman for as long as I live, provided that you will help me, and so that I do not lose everything, I will submit to call you lord in the presence of your barons and earls’.

Mac Murchada finished, his head lowering almost to the ground as his breath expended, fell quiet, and it was to all as if a powerful wave had come crashing through the doors and in one fluid, elegant and unstoppable motion had broken at the feet of the dais, flinging bouquets of bright foam against the stones. And even as the latimer’s meagre tone stuttered on, delivering the ending, it was plain for all to see that the King was affected by this man, so lofty and fine, yet bent so low, but with a vehemence and a determination that yet radiated from his person.

The king’s hand rose slowly to his beard, and, pinching together the long hairs at the corner of his lip, his fingers twisted them delicately into a curled taper. His eyes lustrous beneath the dark ridge of his brow—an idea forming rapidly in his far-reaching, prophesying mind.

He opened his mouth. A word emerged. And everything that followed sprouted from that seed: Mac Murchada’s flight back to Honfleur on brutalised horses, the crossing of the channel that lay down flat for him, the shouldering into flint-hard castles up and down the Welsh March with the king’s writ in his fist and loud words of rich reward and fertile field for any who would follow him across the sea to Yrlande and help win back his province. The Earl Pembroke stepping forward finally, his cloak tawdry, his fortunes straitened, saying, ‘I will come, I will serve’, licking his lips, ‘and in payment—your daughter’.

Without pause, Mac Murchada gripping the Earl by hand and by elbow, seizing him with steel-edged joy, tasting on his tongue iron scale, grit, the dirt of the fields, hearing in his ear the roar of the trees, the song of the Gael, and deep in his gut—blooming out like a drop of milk in a pail of water, chiming like the silversmith’s craft—the grim fire of anticipation. For vengeance. Gripping the Earl’s arm, drawing him in, pressing him into that warm, embracing fury, he kissed the Earl’s cheeks. And in that same action, he opened the gate. Yrlande a sow on her back. And the knife pressed into an Engleis palm. And that was the beginning. Of the sack of Yrlande and the conquest of the Gael. That was the beginning of what would come to be my story.