Princes of Ireland - Edward Rutherfurd [156]
Osgar’s message, arriving the day she had gone into Dyflin, had come as a surprise. The truth was that with so many other matters on her mind since the summer, she had forgotten all about him.
Since the day she had thrown Harold out of her house, she had not seen the Norseman. She was not sure that her son had been pleased about her break with Harold. The worse for him then. Every day now, as she looked out at the hateful Munster king’s camp, her fury was rekindled. She wished she had stayed at Rathmines if only to curse Brian as he passed. What could he have done to her, the snake? Let him kill her if he dared. And for Harold to have supposed she would lend support to such a devil—it made her white with anger to think of it. Even her own son had tried, once, to argue with her about it. “Harold is only doing his best for you,” he had dared to suggest.
“Are you forgetting who your own father was?” she snapped back. That had silenced him.
The only mistake she admitted to herself was her choice of parting words to the Norseman. To have called him a pagan and a traitor was no more than the truth. But telling him not to limp into her house again—calling him a cripple—that was wrong because it was beneath her. She would even have wished to apologise, if the circumstances had been different. But, of course, that was impossible. No word had come from Harold since that day; in all likelihood, she thought, she would never see him again.
Morann Mac Goibnenn was still uneasy. As the next months passed, he had ample opportunity to observe the forces ranged against Dyflin, and he was still convinced that his own estimation of the situation had been correct.
When, back in the late summer, he had taken his family north to the O’Neill King of Tara, he had been well received. Tall, handsome, with a flowing white beard, the old king had a noble air about him, though his eyes, it had seemed to Morann, were still watchful. It had not been difficult to secure a protection for the farmstead of his friend Harold; but his plan to stay safely out of trouble with the O’Neill king had not been so successful, since the old monarch had required him to accompany the party that had gone, in August, to summon Brian to his aid. So anxious was he that the craftsman should go, and so fervent were his expressions of loyalty to Brian, that Morann suspected O’Neill was using him to convince the Munster king that the call for help was genuine.
Brian Boru had welcomed him warmly. “Here’s a man who keeps his oath,” he had told the chiefs around him. It was ten years since Morann had seen the Munster king in person. He found him still impressive. He was grey; his teeth were long and yellow, though remarkably he had kept most of them. A quick calculation reminded Morann that Brian must be more than seventy years old, but even so, a sense of power exuded from him. “I am slower, Morann,” he confessed, “and I get aches and pains that I never had before, but this one,” he indicated the young woman who was now his wife, “keeps me younger than my years.” This was the fourth wife, by Morann’s count. You had to admire the old man.
“You shall accompany me,” Brian told him, “on my way up to Dyflin.”
It had been early in September, on a bright day when Brian’s advancing army, on its way to Dyflin, had just emerged onto the Liffey Plain. Morann had been riding not far from the Munster king, in the vanguard of the army, when to his surprise he saw, coming towards them, the splendidly mounted figure of Harold, quite alone. He had been even more surprised when he had learned why the Norseman was there.
“You want me to ask King Brian to spare Caoilinn’s estate? After all she has done?” He had been shocked, the previous summer, by the treatment