Chapter 25

Coming Kings

Tŷrel left in the morning, taking his chaualiers and passing quietly from the southern postern. I watched them go from the height of the palisade, cleaning my teeth with the frayed end of a twig. A sentry prowled the timber walkway. The level of scorn such men permitted themselves towards me told me much of my status. In his ambivalence and restraint with spear butt or cuffing hand, I read safety.

The hammering of the adzes on timber started soon after, drawing my attention to the outer bailey, where women moved among the steaming, corralled herds looking for heifers in milk. Beyond, the nature of the building work revealed itself in the line of posts and beams standing like ancient stones in a curving circle enclosing the landing of the bridge on the far side of the Bóinne. On his fourth, trudging pass from merlon to merlon, I spoke to the sentry.

‘The cattle penned in and fortifying on every hand. Men pacing the palisade—there is fear in this camp. Do you think there is danger?’

He slowed but did not stop. I turned back to the south, hanging my arms over the timber breastwork, watching Tŷrel’s party negotiate the climb out of the valley.

On his next pass, he stood his spear against the wall and his arms appeared by mine, hanging out over the drop into the dry moat below.

‘At sundown, an eagle flew up the valley over the water and perched on that stump’, he said in a deep accent that I had learned to recognise as Welsh, his forearm raising to point towards a hoary trunk, ghoulish in its posture, leering over the road crossing. ‘It pecked five times, screeched thrice and flew into the west’. I nodded silently, waiting for more. ‘In the night, during my watch, I heard terrible cries from below. Three times. My companions also heard and it froze our hearts. We came together, looking out over the blackness, seeing nothing, hearing nothing. And then from the dark, a corpse light showed, far out over the bog’. He looked at me, his face marked by the passing of some disease that concealed his age. ‘That is all I know. If I were at home, I would say the Cyhyraeth had spoken’.

‘There are demons in the night. There are sídhe in the mounds. Neither want us here’, I said. ‘But there is no army in the west’.

The morning light strengthened and the sun rose, showing its rim through the trees. From the camp over the river, horses broke from the shadow of the valley, riding out hard.

‘I don’t know about an army, but thank God and St Samson for that man and his hellions’, the soldier said. ‘There is royal blood in his veins, you know. Cousin to our King Henri. Though not in the right way, if you follow my meaning’.

I watched them go, Meyler and his raiders cresting the hill on the far side of the river, thundering past the watchtower, my eyes watering eventually, and I had to look away without discerning whether a flying pennant of hair strung out behind him.

‘Thank God and St Féichín’, I said, free of Meyler and his men for the day, and I moved off, saying to the soldier, ‘Sleep well. You’ve earned it’.

I took the steps down by the gatehouse and slipped through the open passage to cross the bridge. On the riverbank, hordes of men worked splitting heartwood from long sections of trunks, adzing them into squared beams and planks. Another group digging a well within the circuit of the palisade. The gangers walked among them, bawling, breaking staves over sluggish backs.

I worked on at de Feypo’s plot for the morning. Bending soaked wattles into hurdles, staking them out perch by perch. I worked with heavy-set soldiers from de Feypo’s household. Men willing and strong, but lacking in patience. We pegged out the shape of the building, made the posts earthfast and wove the sturdy saileach rods between. Then it was a matter of clapping mud to the frame. I went ahead, one of the men casting water continually as I packed and formed the mud, finishing it as smoothly as my skill would allow. I welcomed the work. The movement of it, the tight movements of the meithel. Though still I watched, scanning every passing face, every moving figure, near or distant, as I drank deeply from the water bucket. I watched all the shapes on the road, moving downslope around the bridge, and eventually I saw her come up from the chapel yard. I saw her, her head covered with a deep hood, and I could not tell if her eye was dark with shadow or from bruising. She moved past our plot, her gaze turned downwards. Avoiding my searching eyes. Meyler’s cousin walked with her. As he passed, he feigned to strike me, laughing as I stumbled backwards.

When they had passed, I sought the shade of the building, hiding my face and working on. Faster and faster I worked, but the mud would not take. I mixed it too wet and it slopped from the frame. I threw the last daubs to the ground and pushed out past the men, looking for something more brutish to do. I took up the broad horse bone and dug along the limit of de Feypo’s plot, heaping the upcast into a narrow bank defining the extent of his property. I dug my back crooked, dug my fingers raw. I dug until I exhausted myself and ran out the spool of my thoughts, dug until I fell backwards on the bank, the cool breeze flaring cold across my sweat-soaked arms, painful in my hungry lungs. I lay willing myself to fall into the overarching sky, to plummet towards the high, streaking clouds in that pale blue immensity.

The boy found me there, head cast back over the bank, veins throbbing on my forehead and face. Eyes strained and stinging.

‘You are summoned to the hall’, he said, delivering his message with a fearful reluctance, as if throwing a morsel to a ravening dog, backing away from me as I rose, the clicking pops repeating down my spine.

‘Summoned by who?’ I asked, but he was gone, running over the broken ground towards the bridge. I shook the crumbs of dirt from my hair and, plunging my raw hands into the water butt, washed my face. I unfurled my wadded linen shirt and smoothed it out over my bare torso, slipped it over my head and went looking for de Feypo. He was not in the house, nor did I see him in the lean-to serving as his stable. My hope was that I would find him in the hall. That he would sit by and I would be safe in the shadow of his clemency.

I passed through the skeletal barbican, carpenters shouting to each other as they lowered cross-beams into place, and I crossed the bridge into the fortress. In the castel yard, I skirted the stable to see what horses were in. Among the noise and activity, squires busied themselves with Meyler’s courser. Anger and fear collided in me. The hanging shields of his men, all bearing the same device—a sign of Meyler’s growing power.

As I approached the hall, the door burst open. De Feypo stood out into the light, shading his eyes and looking towards the gatehouse. He caught sight of me approaching from the stable and came hurrying over.

‘Alberic!’ he shouted. ‘Come, boy, come’.

‘Am I to be punished?’ I asked as he beckoned me towards the hall, and de Feypo’s brow knitted.

‘Come’, he said impatiently, ‘we have found him’. He took me by the shoulders, driving me onwards through the door into the smoky gloom. ‘Revenge is waiting for you with a warm hand’. As my eyes adjusted, I saw that they had rigged a kind of tent inside the hall, closing off a small space by the dais. Light from the tallow lamps showed figures moving within. Outside the tent, several men gathered, sitting and standing, rubbing at their mouths and speaking in low conclave. They stopped talking and looked towards us as we entered. Angulo there, brooding, and Meyler rose from amongst them.

‘Come, friend, come, Alberic’, he said in a low, restrained voice, ‘Come. The one we have been waiting for’. The smell of wood smoke and something else. Hot metal. Meyler’s powerful arm came over my shoulder, enfolding me. He sniffed the air performatively. ‘You stink, lad’, he proclaimed with a muted and false laughter. ‘De Feypo is working you too hard’. His retinue each smiled darkly. ‘A man of your talents should not be wasted digging ditches’. His arm lifted then, his broad hand taking gentle hold of the back of my neck, guiding me along. The heat of his skin uncomfortable on mine, the hoary roughness of his finger pads grating, applying slight pressure to the knobs of my spine, announcing their terrible strength. The others fell back as he ushered me past. The bull of the herd. ‘We have him, friend. We have him’, he said softly as we neared the flap of material cast over the roof beams. ‘I need you to tell him that. We have him. And that we will take the skin off his back unless he tells us all. Who moves against us. Where they will strike. Numbers. Archers. Horsemen. Everything, Alberic, I want everything’.

These last words sounded as he pushed me gently ahead and, with his free arm, lifted the hanging fabric, urging me into the close, fetid space beyond. I entered. Inside, three men sat, back to back, bound tightly to the frame of a broken loom.

The closest looked up through battered eyes, his features drawn, a hard stubble on his cheeks, some of his scalp burned and weeping clear droplets, one side of his moustache cut away roughly. Mánus. The sight of him struck me bodily—like the shock of hitting a branch at full gallop. My face cold, blood draining, and I cupped my hand quickly over my mouth to hide my identity. Meyler pushed in behind me and walked me around the outward facing circle. I looked down at the other two men, who had barely the strength to raise their heads. I knew Donchad by the bald crown and the flat shape of his skull—his swollen face was not recognisable. The other I did not know.

We walked the circle, coming to a stop by Mánus once again. Though he looked up to see what change had occurred, in the dimness he did not recognise me. His regard was weary, one displaced and not knowing from where danger came. I could hear Donchad attempt to speak. To warn or to counsel or to urge strength to his Tiarna. No word beyond a gasping wet sound emerged. Meyler directed me out of the tent and into the open hall.

‘Do you not recognise them?’ he said. ‘Is he not your captor, your tormentor? The man who shamed your family and held you a slave?’

‘No’, I said before I had considered. ‘Not him’. I stood immobilised by the lie, and Meyler studied my face. He said nothing for a time and then turned his back to me so that I could not see what expression or sign he would make to his men. There were more of these by the minute as the door to the hall opened again and again. Men coming in twos and threes, clapping their comrades’ shoulders, looking for news, all in subdued undertones. Enemies all. Angulo among them, his eyes boring into me, like the blowholes of a furnace.

‘No matter’, Meyler said at last. ‘These men have information that we need. You are a latimer, boy, are you not?’

‘I am’.

‘Then you tell them that they can speak to you. Or they can continue the way of trial by fire’. It was then I looked sharply to the hearth and identified the smell that had been hanging in the air, seeking to be recognised since I had entered the room. A ploughshare sat within the flame, a deep red glow festering along its edge. The door opened again, and de Feypo admitted two more newcomers. Through the opening I saw that many more men had arrived and were gathering around the water trough outside. Word was abroad, a racket like roosting crows. The King of Míde was captured.

The door closed once again, shutting out the brightness. Meyler came to my side.

‘Talk to him now, Alberic, and reveal yourself. Tell him what you will. Speak to him shrewdly and give him hope, or speak sternly with steel in hand—you know best’. I feared his eyes on me. I feared the lie spoken in haste; a lie that had not been weighed in the balance. Of course, he knew that Mánus was King. That Mánus was my Tiarna. I went back into the tent, a shudder running through me. A realisation that I had taken a misstep. One that might result in my dismemberment before the setting of the sun. My limbs began to shake as I entered the tent, and I welcomed the thin, dropping veil of fabric that fell between us.

‘A thiarna’, I said, and all three of the bound men kicked upright at the sound of words they could recognise. ‘A thiarna, this is not how I would have hoped to meet’. His wild eyes flashed with many emotions—confusion, fear, anger. He took several moments, unsure of himself, before speaking.

‘Alberagh?’ he said then, his ruined voice barely a whisper. ‘You have grown, boy’. Donchad strained instantly against his bonds, trying to free his arms, trying to turn his head.

‘What has happened?’ I asked, lowering down to a crouch in front of Mánus. ‘What drochradh has brought you here?’

‘A lame horse’, he replied, testing a sad smile. ‘A lame shit of a horse’, and the smile tightened and tugged his weeping scalp. He winced and shook his head as if to fight back panic, to resist despair. ‘I could ask you the same thing. You look as though they’re working you harder than I ever did’. I looked down to my dirt-grimed garments.

‘It’s true, I’m on dangerous ground’, I said, ‘perhaps fatal ground, for I have just denied your identity to a man who is not lacking in reasons to kill me’.

‘Stupid, stained runt’, said Donchad, his words bumbling from between swollen lips. I smiled at his bravado. I remembered him on the táin, outside the house of Áed Buidhe, his strong stance between me and danger, and I was filled with an urge to break their bonds and lead them away somehow, westwards beyond the palisade.

‘She is here, Donchad’, I confessed. ‘She is here and with that churl who holds you captive’.

His head bowed, and I could see his shoulders working up and down in silent laughter. Laughter for the end of days. Mánus watched me, silently, and I could see the frantic workings of his mind behind that vivid stare. His thoughts following path after path, proofing possibility after possibility, and each one reaching the same end.

‘A thiarna’, I spoke freely, unburdened by the future. Untethered from the past. ‘Please know that I did all that I could for Conn. I did everything I could in a strange place far from those I knew’.

I watched, dismayed, as his composure broke, his face dissolving into a tearful grimace, and he could not bring his hands forth to hide in. I looked away, and at length he spoke.

‘Milesius told all of your bravery, of your cunning. You will be forever honoured among us’.

‘A thiarna’, I said, bowing, ‘I had not expected such words from you. Had I known, I would have come. I would have come with Ness’. He did not heed me, his thoughts flying free of bondage, of pain, flying free, seeking his family, seeking the days when he ruled and the world was knowable to him, his knowledge sufficient to protect him and his clann. In that softness, in that hopeless defeat, in that bated lull permeated with the smell of hot iron, I asked my question.

‘Who comes from the west?’

‘Not hard to tell’, he said. ‘The Gael come from the west’. The third man I did not know spoke suddenly and sharply.

‘A thiarna, no’. Mánus did not heed.

‘The army of the Gael marches. An army that would dwarf Boru’s. If I had seven heads, and each of those heads had seven tongues, I would need seven years to finish naming the men who march upon this place. Ua Néil has submitted to Ua Conor. An army beyond comparison comes here, and these foreigners will be hounded to the sea, their castels destroyed, their bodies broken’.

‘Not so, a thiarna’, I said. ‘Never has there been such. Never the north submitting to the west’.

‘It has happened. We have seen it. As you, too, will see it. The foreigner will perish’.

‘When will they come?’

‘They are here. They are all around. We came ahead, scouting the country. I was sure to raise some men. Lochru, your father, others from the túath. But all has been destroyed and scattered before us. The army comes on, kern through the forests on all sides. Take us from here, Alberagh, take us over the walls, and I will show you’. His words came quicker, falling over themselves and fading to silence as Mánus acknowledged their futility. He hung his head and began to weep.

‘Tell me about my mother’, I said.

He looked up at me finally, his face resigned and empty.

‘Who was my mother?’ I repeated more sternly, and concealed in that sternness was the weight of my power over them.

‘I never knew her name’, he said.

‘But you knew her body?’ I said, anger creeping.

‘Ho, boy’, Donchad growled in futile warning. I persisted.

‘Did you know her before or after my birth?’ I said.

‘Alberagh, this is how we live. Take from one lord in the knowledge that you can feel the same sting. Yes, I knew her, I lay with her, but I never hurt her. She was a person both tender and beautiful’.

‘Am I your son, Mánus?’ I said, Donchad growling at my utterance of the name. Mánus raised his head and regarded me sadly. He shook his head.

‘Boy, your father waits for you at the right hand of the Lord’. I watched his face for traces of a lie. None were there. ‘You do not need a father to be a man’, he said. ‘You do not need a mother to be a Gael’.

I stood over him, his words angering me. The softness of the moment dispelled, and I felt the power I possessed over him. As I considered my next move, a sudden shadow loomed. The fabric of the tent fell, torn away, and the close, soft space collapsed. We were surrounded by a ravening amphitheatre of men. I stood, looking for Meyler. He lunged from the press of bodies, his closed hand thundered into my temple and I fell to my knees before him. His fist, closing in my hair, dragged me to standing. His next blow hammered onto the bridge of my nose, and he discarded me, and in pitching backwards, I heard him speak with venom.

‘Cry for your mother, you sanglant worm’.

And I fell, and in falling he walked over me, a man beside him coming on with the smoking ploughshare on a stave, held in the crook of one arm, the other sleeve fluttered flaccid and empty. Ua Ragallaig there all along, in the shadows, translating my every word. I rolled onto my side, scrambling towards a roof post where I propped myself, avoiding the trample that closed in from all sides.

The sudden, terrible sound of searing flesh rose from the centre of the crowd, and through the milling legs, I caught sight of Donchad’s screaming face until Meyler stepped over him, pushing the tip of his sword slowly into the space between two ribs. Ua Ragallaig bent close to Mánus, speaking rapid, scornful words into his ear.

‘Outside with them’, Meyler shouted wildly. ‘We will feed the dogs’. The crowd erupted, cutting cords and laying hands on limbs, lifting the ragged bodies in the air and drowning out their pained cries with their own baying.

I scrambled low towards the shadowed eaves of the hall, looking for somewhere to hide, some bench or hanging fur to crawl beneath. A foot crashed down on my back, driving me into the ground. A hand hooked my throat, and I was lifted into the air. Meyler’s cousin, his face butting into mine.

‘Your true nature is laid bare, sale bâtard. I will have your intestines wreathed around your neck’.

I fought then. I fought with tooth and with nail, as this was surely the end. Thrashing madly in the grip of impossibly strong arms. My legs were hoisted into the air, and I kicked out again and again, striking unknown objects. They rammed me into the roof pole, cracking my face into the unyielding wood and my chest ramming into the post, driving the breath irrevocably from my lungs so violently that I felt I would never breathe again. I gasped wildly for air as I was carried among cruel shadows, laughing and jeering.

‘You are meat now, meat for the dogs’.

‘Poor, stupid villein’.

I went then without fight, barely conscious with limbs hanging free, head lolling backwards, upside down so that I felt blood running up my forehead and into my hair. A thick, slow flow of it from my teeth and lips down my throat. The light blinded me when it came, the men fanning out, carrying us across the courtyard, through the inner gate to the outer bailey to the flat ground they used for marshalling horses. Men and women gathered around us as we went, stable boys skipping around gleefully. I saw Donchad between two men, his head fallen forward, his knees dragging in the dirt. They ran ahead whooping towards something new rising from the beaten earth. Stout beams hammered into a cross-tree, a rope hanging. Soldiers and work gangs and kitchen maids running alongside us, joining in, crying out in the frenzy, tearing at us for a relic of a hanged man. Some darting in with small knives looking to come away with a scrap of cloth or, better, a finger. Meyler’s men cast them back, hauling us together into a clearing in the crowd. I saw Ness coming towards Meyler, her hands imploring, her words unheard. He pushed her away dismissively and she stumbled backwards, the oncoming rush swallowing her up, and I saw no more.

Carpenters hammered timber bracing before us, frantically trying to secure the scaffold as Meyler dragged Donchad forward. I watched as though from a far hilltop, seeing myself thrown into the dust, the dogs brought up by the master of the hunt, jumping and snapping in ferocious excitement. Meyler held out Donchad’s hand, and the fingers were taken instantly, the warrior’s head coming up in a grimace, dragged from his dying agony, and as his head rose, so the rope was slipped around his neck. No fine speeches, no sermons. Meyler himself, riled, impatient, vicious, took the hanging end of the rope in his hand, turning two coils around his wrist as he walked out in a wide arc, and, without pause, he jumped into the air, coming down, wrenching with the full and awful might of his arms. Donchad was dragged sideways with a terrifying crack; the big warrior’s hands did not even raise to take the weight from his neck. Meyler hauled, as a fisherman, hauling hand over hand with all of his strength, shouting in senseless and undecipherable rage until Donchad hung, his toes and shins brushing the earth, supporting no weight. No movement. Dead. Meyler let him fall and instantly moved towards Mánus’ unnamed companion, pulling him forward on his face. I saw, but did not see, the murder unfold. The same gruesome introduction to the dogs, the hounds pulled free of Donchad’s body to perform their task, this time taking the whole hand and a bone from the forearm.

The cheering and uproar continued, a constant clamour like a forest in storm. I lay slumped against someone’s legs, which moved and trampled me as the crowd jostled. Black dread showed itself to me, as someone shouting from afar. I recognised it but did not feel it. I lay there feeling nothing, as one insensible with ale, though I saw with a sharpness I could not dim. I gave myself to the moment with an unlooked-for calmness.

Meyler called for help to haul the weight, and several of his companions caught hold of the rope behind him. The man was pulled to his feet and then into the air, free of the ground, and he hung choking for several minutes before expiring. The beams cracked and complained, but the scaffold held. Though I tried to look away, I could not. I watched his face through it all. Inhuman paroxysms and bulging eyes.

Meyler paused then, breathing heavily, and the powerful rage abated in him. ‘The King, the King!’ he began shouting, and the crowd took up the chant, raising Mánus on many arms and propelling him towards the scaffold and the quiet dogs, busy at their work, tearing and pulling flesh apart with muscular shakes of the head.

I could not fully follow what happened next, though I saw it all. Meyler’s blade driven with all of his strength fell onto Mánus’ arm, breaking through the bones just below the elbow. Meyler plucking the hock from the bloodied stump, casting it high in a red-drizzling arc to where his dogs lay bunched and waiting, leaping from their hind legs and taking to the air. And more such base pageantry. Mánus’ face unseen. Ua Ragallaig standing by, his expression uncertain. His regard somewhere between triumph and fear as his eyes watched the crowd, darting left and right, cradling his own stump tenderly.

The blade sung out again and again, with my name next on its tongue. As the arcing trails flew, my mind unshackled from my body. My eyes sought escape, following the jagged line of the palisade. A soft and endless redness broken in the sky like the rippled sands left behind after a waning tide. A swallow flew low over the parapet. The first of the year. Mother? She came skimming above the crowd, dipping low over the head of a kern standing still within the crowd. Hair braided. Beard braided, leather ionar close fitted to his chest and short trews tight on his legs. He stood impassive, watching. The limbless trunk of Mánus hoisted against the sky, the rope hitched off and the crowd crying out and laughing, stooping for stones to pelt the dripping corpse. The kern, face daubed with mud, walked towards the scaffold, and it seemed that none noticed, until a chaualier of Meyler’s company stepped forward uncertainly to check his way. The kern moved swiftly sideways, drawing a long-bladed scian, and slid it deeply into the cheaulier’s gut. The blade entered at the liver, and the kern dragged it in a juddering butcher’s motion, cross-hand, and the man fell silently and slowly. The dogs reacted first; frothed into a frenzy, they broke away and began tearing at the spilling entrail.

Meyler’s face clouded, slow to accept the truth of what he saw. A cry cut short from the left-hand side as another man fell, his throat cut, a kern stepping out from the crowd. A silence descended, Meyler casting around, his men still, and on the breeze the sound of a distant bell. The watchtower on the hill was signalling. And suddenly the bailey erupted. Kern throughout the crowd dipped their long-bladed knives into unarmoured bodies, all in disarray and confusion. I rolled onto my side as feet trammelled the ground around me, swallowed by the uproar, and when I looked again, I saw Meyler run towards the outer gate, making for the steps to the palisade. At the same moment, the bell within the gate-tower began clanging.

I raised myself up, with pain stabbing deep into my chest, knocked and buffeted as men rushed in all directions, running for the castel and the armoury it contained. Finding my feet, I followed Meyler. I watched him as he reached the top of the wall, his face scanning left and right.

‘Shut the gate!’ he began roaring, and then to his men down in the bailey, ‘Horses, now, ready the horses!’ and he disappeared into the gate-tower. I struggled to the base of the wall with dragging, constrained motions, buffeted by moving bodies, and began climbing the steps, one by one, each a new agony. Across the other side of the compound, all kern had grouped together, a mere dozen, fighting back to back against a gathering crowd of men and women coming up with spears, hammers, goads. They retreated towards the southern wall and passed out of view behind the carpenter’s shelter. Beyond, the great shuffling herd of cattle moved boisterously in their stockade, alarmed by the noise, the barking of dogs and the smell of blood. On each new step, I scanned the crowd below for a sign of Ness.

Reaching the top of the wall, I stumbled across to the parapet, falling against the timber posts, willing my shaking hands to close on the edge. The valley opened up before me. The bridge below and the slow curve of the river were unchanged. The unfinished barbican stood open on the opposite shore, timber and carpenter’s tools lay where they fell. In the slight breeze, curls of chiselled wood shuffled along the trampled ground. On the ridgeline opposite, the watchtower bell rang no more. The ridge itself could no longer be clearly seen. It was as though a forest had appeared; a massed blackness of men, moving slowly, unevenly. As I watched, a knot of men on horseback descended the slope. They picked their way slowly at first, until a lilting cry shattered the background noise, and I looked over to the palisade beyond the gatehouse to see that the kern had fought their way up and were showing themselves now to the host that spurred forward with a sudden urgency. Meyler burst from the far side of the gate-tower, rushing them in silent fury, sword gripped in two hands.

I slumped there against the parapet, watching the black, moving mass spill over the edge of the ridge and come down in uneven clumps of men—some galloping ahead on horses, some walking steadily in tight knots, others running madly down to the river and into the water. Below, in the compound, carpenters gathered beams and rushed to brace the gate as the cattle reared and raised up, butting against their roundwood stockade. The chaualiers and other soldiers already running uphill towards the castel. Meyler, blood to his elbows, jumped clean from the top of the palisade onto the ground below, rolling and coming up, crying out orders.

‘Horses, putaigne de villeins’. Above it all, the grotesquely weightless body of Mánus swung in a wide arc, casting thick beads of blood.

Seeing the danger, I scrambled down, jumping from the last step. I landed, crying out with the impact, as two score of men with longbows racing to the parapet barrelled past me already nocking arrows and, reaching the top, began to fire high into the oncoming masses. Around me, milling crowds, all moving up the slope towards the castel. I searched for a flash of her face, her garment, her hair.

‘Ness!’ I began to shout. ‘Ness!’ I shouted, screamed, without restraint, her name like scalding water over my lips. Dragging the taste of blood.

‘Ness!’

Javelins landed thick in the ground around me, flying high over the palisade with the sound of parting air. Several struck in the paddock, and the cattle surged and broke loose, cracking through the fencing in fright. They began skittish before gathering momentum, running in larger groups around the inner perimeter.

I followed the crowd towards the castel, among their screaming and crying, even as the archers on the walls began falling to the ground within the bailey, struck by javelin or pushed backwards by the clawing, dark figures coming over the walls in number. They joined what kern remained inside in kicking away the bracing on the inside of the gate, howling and alight with violent fervour.

I collapsed at the hanging place, unable to move further, and I lay there against a heap of building stone, gazing breathlessly towards the outer gate. I watched them breach the walls, I watched the archers fall from the walk, I watched the gates shudder, I watched it all happen in a hard clarity lit by a slanting evening sun, unable to move as my destiny unfolded.

And in gazing this way, I did not see Angulo and several men creep down from the castel and begin to gather the wild-eyed cattle together along the southern wall, gather them into a roiling knot before plunging a blade deep into the hindquarters of a slow heifer. The honking, urgent bellows of the beast cut across every other sound, sending the herd charging away, churning from behind, barrelling down the slope. Mad, fearless, sergenz stood out in the open with shields braced against them, shouting, waving their arms up, and rucking with huge collisions into the outliers, turning them ever towards the gate. I watched one man tossed to the ground and pounded to oblivion under a storm of thrashing hooves.

The kern within the gate saw the danger and began to push back, struggling to close the two stout timber doors of the gate as countless more forced them slowly inwards from without. Overlapping and competing shouts drowned each other as Angulo’s men drove on. Approaching the gate, some of the beasts took fright of the narrowness of the opening and the kern crowding, waving their hands, crying out. Some broke off and skirted along the inside of the palisade. The larger part of the herd ran straight, kern leaping aside, and smashed through the crowd that had emerged at the opening. A hundred horned heads shook and gored in terror, pushing onwards to the river, some running along the bank, others driving on into the deeper water and a small number ploughing through men on the bridge. They checked the surging advance of Gaels without the walls, driving many into the water.

At my back rose a cry, high and challenging, fringed with fear. I looked behind to see the chaualiers galloping from the castel gate, scattering those on foot seeking to enter. Meyler and his men, on horses badly prepared, their own armour cast on in haste, trailing untied laces. They raced downslope, and I recognised among them the colours of de Feypo and Tuite. Angulo and his men ran forward, catching unmounted horses brought out for them, swinging up onto saddles, and the whole bunched company raced for the cleared gate. The kern inside the bailey came at them, hurling javelins and jumping down from the sides of the gatehouse bringing axes to bear, a ragged group of Gaels outside the walls rushing forward also, and the fighting was savage but brief. Meyler’s men burst through, leaving none behind, though men and horses were stuck with spears. I caught sight of Meyler himself within the throng as they wheeled south along the outer walls, driving onwards for the rise, his head bare and a flap of scalp lifting as the horse spurred forward, an axe deep in his shield and three in his mount. Yet he mastered it, his merciless grip and goading spurs driving the screaming beast charging towards the valley side, hemmed in by his men. His face a bloody terror, alight with rage and exaltation. Until they were away, out of sight behind the jamb of the gate-tower. The Gaels were slow to follow. The castel awaited.

I lay back, the pain in my chest subsiding. I watched the high, feathery clouds touched with pink and saw, in my periphery, kern stalking past, heard them gathering the beasts, shushing them, corralling them. I heard the shouts of the soldiers, workmen and wives from the walls of the castel, shouts of anger, shouts of bravado to hide the fear, shouts of entreaty as the Gaels entered the outer bailey in a thickening stream, gathering their numbers before the inner ditch and palisade.

Conn’s ghost appeared to me then, his face breaking into my circle of sky. His expression hard.

‘Hello’, I said in a cracking voice, and I noticed an axe in his hand. ‘You are the one to bring me to St Peter?’

‘I am the one to send you to hell, traitor’, he said, tears in his eyes. The hacked stump of his father drifting above. The clouds turning pinker. Noises beginning behind me.

‘You live, brother’, I said weakly, and his arm raised. ‘I am glad that you live’.

The blade fell, clashing against the head of a spear that stabbed into my circle of sky, spoiling the blow. A voice spoke, and with it, power flooded my chest. A throbbing, painful bloom.

‘Desist’, it said. ‘He was next, look at him, he was next for the gallows. He was to hang for protecting your father’.

Ness, standing over me. Her bruised face, fierce. Spear braced. I pushed myself up, sitting now. I saw the bailey filled with Gaels moving in slow, deliberate business, entering all of the buildings, collecting horses, cattle, people and corralling them here and there. Behind me, the sounds of assault, the castel falling. Before me, Conn. Bigger, straighter than before. His hair bound beneath a leather helm, a short beard growing. Livid and rage-clouded eyes. Behind him a battalion of men, some working to lower Mánus to the ground, others coming slowly around us. Ness spoke again.

‘It was Ua Ragallaig—search for the one-armed traitor. He is behind the walls of the castel’.

Conn’s eyes flicked up, her words finding their mark. Ness shifted, her spear, her eyes alert to the kern closing slowly left and right.

‘He is but a boy’, she shouted, and these words hurt almost as much as my other wounds.

‘A boy who betrayed me, and my clann’, Conn said.

‘A boy who defied the Justiciar in the heart of the civitas’, said a voice coming through the crowd. ‘For you, Conn’, Milesius appearing, grey and bowed, planting his bronze-shod staff at once in challenge and supplication, ‘so that you could walk free’.

Conn’s anger faltered, watching me, and his eye snagged on something at my neckline. The kelt visible beneath my torn léine. The stone of his father. A relic from the past. And his rage roiled once more. He reached down to grab it, pulling it from my throat. Milesius reached out to stay him, and the kelt fell to the muck. Lasair’s scrap. Hamund’s tooth. Stamped into the ground as Conn came on again, shouting.

‘Back, false monk’, his axe raising, his men starting forward in response. Ness lowered her head, as if praying, and suddenly, her voice rose up. She stood tall and proclaimed loudly as men came on to take her.

‘Kings arise to meet battle’, she said, and at those laden words, the men hesitated. She went on, utterances of dark power, enumerating the end of things. A wind rising, shouts and screams from the castel behind.

Ramparts are sought,

Hosts give battle,

Spear upon shield,

Shield upon fist,

Blade-bristling fort,

Teeth mark,

Necks break,

A hundred cuts blossom,

Screams are heard,

Blood-zealous battle,

Raging on the raven-field,

Grey deer before spring.

Men, bred for war with sword and shield from boyhood, halted at these words. The dread words of the Mórrígan. Words to bring on the end of the world. Conn shook, overtaken by loss, falling to his knees amid torn pieces of clothes and scattered gobbets of flesh, some belonging to his father.

‘Enough’, came a voice, deep and thick with authority. A dark, high-born man on a beautiful white stallion nosing his mount slowly through the dense mass of men. He sat regarding. Ness’ fury spent. The words spoken. The surrounding noises kept at bay, not penetrating the circle. His bright eyes regarding her.

‘Come, grey deer’, he said. ‘Come and tell me your story. Come and see the battle to its end’.

I watched as, with strong thighs, he gently urged his horse forward, his hand reaching down towards her, stained, like my face, wine-red all over, splashing beyond the wrist. I watched her hesitate for the beat of a heart. Two. Three. Saw her clenched fist slacken, the tension along her shoulders release. The spear falling from her. She stepped forward, away from me, taking the hand offered, swinging herself smoothly up behind him.

I stood unsteadily and fell to my knees. With all of my remaining strength, I spoke desperate words.

‘A thiarna, please, that is my wife’.

The lord’s face impassive. Ness’ hidden behind a veil of blue-black hair. He spurred the horse onwards, slowly past me, and the men followed him towards the waiting walls beyond. Conn following, listless, behind.

Milesius came and knelt at my side. He helped me to rise and led me out of danger, his arm along my shoulder and a hand firm on my hanging wrist. His touch restrained, and in that restraint lived the warmth of a full embrace. He guided me away, down the slope against the incoming tide, battalions of men from far-off tuaithe, gazing around in open wonder at the scale of the fortress. The racing fervour had gone, replaced by a calm expectancy frilled with excitement—a palpable desire for the spoil to come.

‘The world is dark in the shadow of God’s love’, I said, hearing the sadness in my own voice. Milesius thought a while, silent. Then he replied with words of strength. Words of promise.

‘He has made my mouth like a sharp sword. In the shadow of His hand, He has made me a select arrow. He has hidden me in His quiver’.

And this gave me the power to continue. We passed with some difficulty through the outer gate and over the bridge, pushing against close-packed oncoming bodies. Milesius guided me back up the valley to an encampment of tents that had grown up on the ridge around the watchtower.

As we walked, we spoke, and I told him things I had rehearsed in dark hours before sleep, anticipating our eventual meeting, though now it was all soured by her absence. Told without conviction. He listened, regardless, with great interest, relaying his own journey and the great upheavals and happenings he had borne witness to. The submission of the north, the rise of the west. The gathering of the host.

‘Who is he?’ I asked, finally, as he laid me onto a bed of heaped broom in a corner of his tent.

‘Cathal Crobhdearg Ua Conor, Cathal of the wine-dark fist, brother of the King’. He brought me a draught of fiery spirit from a small leather flask, saying in a low voice, ‘She will be safe’, and I fell, the clamouring noise rising from over the valley like a festival on a hill, like the waking birds in a spring copse—small, distant, but filling the air. I fell into darkness as the dying light of the sun ceded to the flicker of an immense rising fire playing across the linen walls of the tent. And in that fire, the past blazed, Lasair’s scrap obliterated, the dark kelt cracking, Hamund’s tooth burning. I fell into sleep and, in doing so, missed the sack of the castel and the sharing out of spoil, the murder and rape. I missed the capture of Ua Ragallaig and the slow, artful revenge wreaked upon his body.

I missed her, clasping her fingers around a new frame, imparting her power, surviving, and perhaps gaining in the transaction, framed against a fire that was like nothing any man there had ever witnessed. It blazed still in the morning as we struck camp and marched south. The flame rising in a frightful violence, leaping in sheets high over the valley as smoke tunnelled and bloomed to the touch of the breeze. Ua Conor in the van, leading us south. To Duiblinn. His vast, unwieldy army of thousands following him, perhaps the largest the island had ever seen. And amongst them, her dark head, riding onwards. I turned from the fire and walked with them by Milesius’ side. I moved among them, following a different standard. Following her dark, streaming hair. Following her strength. In love and in obligation. Useless and afraid. Alive and determined. Her army of one.