Princes of Ireland - Edward Rutherfurd [193]
And indeed, Conn probably had more prestige now than any chief of the Ui Fergusa had enjoyed before. His mother had been the last of the family of Caoilinn who had held the lands at Rathmines. Through his mother, therefore, the two strands of the descendants of Fergus were rejoined, and he inherited the blood of the ancient royal house of Leinster. As well as the family’s ancient drinking skull, his mother had also brought, as her dowry, some of those valuable Rathmines lands. By his own marriage, moreover, to a kinswoman of Lawrence O’Toole, he had allied himself with one of the noblest princely houses of northern Leinster. The Viking settlement might have taken over Fergus’s final resting place and the Church might have encroached upon many of the ancient grazing grounds in the region, but the present chief of the Ui Fergusa could still run his cattle over a huge tract of land down the coastal strip towards the Wicklow Mountains. More than this, the generations of family rule of the little monastery had given the chiefs a sacral role. And although the little monastery had been wound up and its chapel turned into a parish church, Gilpatrick’s father was still the vicar and as such he was, his son thought, that curiously Irish phenomenon, the druidical chief. No wonder his parishioners treated him with a special and tender respect.
Since he was dreading the conversation that was to come, Gilpatrick was glad that, as they walked down the roadway, his father seemed to feel no need to converse. When his father did speak, it was only to make a casual enquiry.
“Did you ever hear from that friend of yours, FitzDavid?”
At first, Gilpatrick had been a little disappointed that no word had ever come from Peter FitzDavid, and as time went by he had almost forgotten about him. Perhaps he had been killed.
The progress of King Diarmait and his foreign troops had been slow. The O’Connor High King and O’Rourke had gone down to Wexford to deal with him; there had been two skirmishes, neither very decisive. Diarmait had been forced to give hostages to the High King and pay O’Rourke a large fine in gold for the theft of his wife. He’d been allowed back into his ancestral lands in the south, but that was all. For a year he’d stayed down there and nobody had heard a squeak from him.
Last year, however, he’d managed to procure another, larger contingent of troops—thirty mounted men, about a hundred men-at-arms, and more than three hundred archers. They included several knights from prominent families that Gilpatrick had heard of, such as FitzGerald, Barri, and even an uncle of Strongbow himself. FitzGerald and his brother had been given the port of Wexford, which probably hadn’t pleased the Ostmen merchants there; and thanks to the mediation of Archbishop O’Toole of Dublin, the High King had agreed to a new deal.
“Send me your son as hostage,” he’d told Diarmait, “and—excluding Dublin, of course—you can have all Leinster.” To which he had quietly added, “If you can get it.” Diarmait had also had to promise that once he’d secured Leinster, he’d send all his foreigners back across the sea again.
But that had been a year ago, and still Diarmait hadn’t ventured into the northern part of the province. “You’ve no friends here,” he was firmly told.
“I doubt,” Gilpatrick’s father now remarked, “that you’ll be seeing your Welshman any time soon.”
They rounded the bend in the roadway above the pool and gazed down to the old burial ground. It was, Gilpatrick thought, a pleasant prospect. For if in former times the waterside site of Hoggen Green had been starkly bare, the spirits of the dead, perhaps, almost too free to wander as they liked, the Church had now placed its own sanctuaries beside the place, enclosing the spirits, as it were, with invisible barriers so that, if wander they must, they would have to go eastwards, past the old Viking stone and into the Liffey’s waters to be carried, no doubt, on the ebb tide, out into the long draw of the estuary