Princes of Ireland - Edward Rutherfurd [121]
His first objective was not far away. Across the Plain of Bird Flocks lay the farmstead of Harold.
Though he had no reason to doubt that his friend was happily married, Morann couldn’t help wondering whether Harold’s wife, Astrid, might sometimes regret encouraging him to go to sea. It had brought them wealth, of course. Harold the Lame, as he was called, had already become a notable sea trader; but his voyages sometimes kept him away for weeks at a time. More than a month had passed since he had set out on a voyage that was to take him to Normandy and England. Since his father had died in an accident three years ago, Harold and his wife had taken over the running of the farmstead as well. But as Harold’s wife and children came out to greet him that morning, Morann’s message was blunt.
“You must leave the farm,” he told them, “and come with us.” And when Astrid was unwilling, and remarked, “They have come here before,” he shook his head and urged her to pack up at once.
“This time,” he said, “it will be different.”
It was six centuries since Niall of the Nine Hostages had founded the mighty dynasty of O’Neill, and in all that time, despite the ebbs and flows of power amongst the island’s Celtic chiefs, no one had ever dislodged the O’Neill from the High Kingship. Until now.
Brian: his father’s given name was Kennedy, so he was properly called Brian, son of Kennedy. But like Niall of the Nine Hostages many centuries earlier, Brian was so well known for the tribute he collected that he was called “Boruma,” the cattle counter, or Brian Boru. He had astounded all Ireland by his rise.
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