Princes of Ireland - Edward Rutherfurd [99]
Standing beside Caoilinn, but also just in front, he rather convincingly intoned the priest’s part and gave the bridegroom’s responses. The antler ring was fitted, the bride duly but chastely kissed on the cheek, and Caoilinn, delighted with herself as always, walked about with her arm linked in his and the ring on her finger. She would wear it until the end of their games when, upon parting, she would give it back to him, to be put safely in the pouch until the next time.
What did it all mean? She might not know herself, but Osgar supposed that indeed, one day, they would marry in earnest.
You could see they were cousins. They had the same dark hair and good looks that had usually run in the family. But whereas Osgar’s eyes were deep blue, hers were a startling green. He knew that green eyes ran in the family, but of all his cousins, she was the only one to have them, and that had made her seem special to him, even when she was only an infant. There was something about a cousin, too. Their shared ancestry seemed to form a strange bond between them—familiar, yet magical. He couldn’t quite explain it, but he felt as if they were destined to be together in a world from which other families were somehow excluded. Yet even if they hadn’t been cousins, he would have been fascinated by her wild, free spirit. The grown-ups, his uncles and aunts, had always considered him the most responsible of all the children of the extended family. The boy who was most likely to lead. He wasn’t sure why, but it had been so even before the death of his father. Perhaps that was why he felt a special protectiveness towards his little cousin Caoilinn, who always did what she wanted, and climbed the tallest trees, and insisted that he marry her. For in his heart he knew that he could not think of marrying anyone else. The bright little spirit with her green eyes had long ago enchanted him.
They stayed there for a while, playing by the Thingmount and along the banks of a little stream that crossed the grass nearby; but at last it was time to return. And Caoilinn had just slipped off the ring and handed it to Osgar when they noticed two figures coming in their direction. One was a tall red-haired man on a splendid horse; the other a red-haired boy on a pony. They rode slowly along the riverside edge of Hoggen Green.
“Who are they?” Osgar asked Caoilinn. She always knew everybody.
“Ostmen. Norwegians. They’ve been here a long time,” she said. “They live out in Fingal but they come into Dyflin sometimes. Rich farmers.”
“Oh.” He thought he knew the farmstead, and gazed at the two riders curiously, supposing they had come to visit the Thingmount. But to his surprise, though they glanced in the mound’s direction, the two figures abruptly turned away towards the estuary and started heading into the shallows. “They must be going to the stone, then,” he remarked.
It was a strange sight. Out on the watery mudflats, a single standing stone stood like a lonely sentinel, with only the crying seabirds for company. Behind it, bare mud and sea pool; before it, the breeze-blown waters of the estuary: the Long Stone, as it was called, had been set there by the Vikings to mark the place where, a century and a half earlier, their leading longship had first run aground on the Liffey’s shore. For the two Norwegians, Osgar supposed, the Long Stone at the sea’s edge might evoke the same ancestral echoes as the tomb of old Fergus did for him.
There was no question, he thought, that the tall Ostman with his red hair was a fine-looking man. And as if catching