Princes of Ireland - Edward Rutherfurd [144]
“I should indeed.”
“Even to the death?” He looked Morann in the eye.
And just for a moment, because he was honest, Morann hesitated.
“To the death, Brian, son of Kennedy,” he answered.
Then Brian Boru smiled.
“Will you look at that,” he called out to the company gathered in the hall. “Here’s a man, when he swears to be your friend, who really means it.” He turned back to Morann. “Your friend’s life, Morann, I will give you if you vouch for his future loyalty also, and if he pays five of those silver coins you mint here to my man Sigurd, who never did him any harm. His wife and children you may buy from me yourself. I shall be needing a silver chalice to give to the monastery at Kells. Could you make me such a thing by Easter?”
Morann nodded.
“No doubt it will be a fine one,” the king said with a smile.
And it was.
II
1013
There was no doubt about it, at the age of forty-one, with her dark hair and brilliant green eyes, Caoilinn was still a very striking woman; and it was also generally agreed, by summer’s end, that she was looking for a new husband.
She had earned some happiness. Nobody would have disputed that. She had looked after her sick husband devotedly for more than a dozen years. Cormac had never recovered his health after the battle of Glen Mama. With one arm missing and a terrible wound in his stomach, it was only thanks to Caoilinn’s nursing that he had lived at all. But worse even than his physical disabilities had been his melancholy. Sometimes he was depressed, sometimes angry; increasingly, as the years went by, he drank too much. The last years had been difficult indeed.
To get through them, Caoilinn had clung to her memory. She did not see before her the broken man that he now was. She managed instead to see the tall, handsome figure he once had been. She thought of his courage, his strength, his royal blood. Above all, she had wanted to protect his children. Their father was always presented to them as a fallen hero. If he lay idle for weeks on end, or suddenly burst out in a rage over nothing, these were the tribulations of his heroic nature. If his mood in the last days descended into a morbid darkness, it was not a darkness of his own making but one created by the evil spirits who had surrounded him and were dragging him down. And from what quarter did these spirits come? Who was the evil influence behind them, and the ultimate cause of all this misery? To be sure, it could only be one person: who else but the instigator of the trouble, the upstart who had come deliberately to humiliate the old royal house of Leinster to which her husband and her children were proud to belong. It was Brian Boru who was to blame. It was not her husband’s weakness but Brian’s malevolence that was the cause of their misery. So she taught her children to believe. And as the humiliations gathered with the passing of the years, she even came to believe it herself. It was Brian who had caused her husband’s sickness, his sadness, his rage, and his dissolution. It was Brian who was the evil presence in their family life. Even when their father started a drinking bout, it was Brian Boru who drove him to it, she told them. It seemed the Munster king had a personal animus against the family at Rathmines. So perfect was her belief that, in the course of time, it had transformed itself into something that was almost tangible, as though King Brian’s enmity had solidified into a stone. And even now, when she was a free woman again and her children grown, she still carried her hatred of Brian like a flint in her heart.
Cormac had died at midwinter. It had been a relief. Whatever painful memories she had, her conscience was clear. She had done her best. Their children were healthy. And thanks to her good stewardship—for in fact, if not in name, she had been running his estate for years—she and the children were now almost as rich as they had been before the battle of Glen Mama. By spring, the wound of her sadness had begun to heal. By early summer, she felt quite cheerful.