Of Beginnings and Endings Page 16

  "In other, plainer words," thought Bass, "you and your agents just found out the hard way that you can't buy or otherwise subvert Captain Fahrooq or Walid Pasha. You're in aching need of more such shocking comeuppances, you arrogant, lying bastard."

  But aloud he said smoothly, "Your Majesty, I felt it necessary and proper to request instructions of my own monarch before I consider agreement to take my land and sea forces so far away from his realm, lest he have need of them and they be not easily or quickly available. His Majesty's reply was that I should use my own best judgment in the matter, bearing in mind, however, that Great Ireland, for all its misleading name, is in no way any part of the Ireland of High Kings, but is rather an oversea colony—and a completely illegal one, according to the dictates of Rome—of the reigning King of Connachta, with which kingdom Your Majesty was, when last he had word of the matter, at war. His Majesty would prefer that I and my troops be employed for the original purpose for which he sent us to Ireland: to help Your Majesty in combating forces of Rome and consolidating the other small kingdoms under the suzerainty of Tara. He would be most wroth to see my men and ships frittered away in trying to take control of a distant colony which cannot in any way or form even be uncontestably claimed by its present holder, much less Your Majesty, should we succeed in conquering it for your royal arms."

  The Ard-Righ repressed a bestial snarl of frustrated rage with difficulty, and his big, hairy, calloused hands tightened their grip on the arms of his cathedra until the scarred knuckles shone as white as new-fallen snow. He took a deep breath, then another, then, finally, said in a tight, controlled voice, "We bear you, personally, no slightest ill will, Your Grace. You are, above all else, a vassal of proven loyalty to your royal overlord, and such men as you cannot but be admired by other monarchs. Moreover, you have ever done no less than your best for us whilst serving us; though circumstances have conspired against our interests and goals, these were matters over which you owned and own very little if any control, and we realize that truth."

  "However, we feel strongly that our dear cousin of England presumes too much and too far, for powerful as he has become in recent years he still is in no way our overlord, and thus he owns no right to attempt to dictate to us the uses of any of our forces, the original provenance of any of those forces being completely immaterial to the issue."

  "King Arthur's entangling web of alliances has frustrated my arms and aims enough as it is, Your Grace. The completely Irish kingdoms of Ulaid and Airgialla—both of them rightfully clients of Tara—are become feoffs of a foreigner, the Regulus of the Isles, a thrice-damned Scot, and damn-all we can do to rectify this sorry mess of stinking offal. And why?—because this selfsame Regulus is, at one and the one time, vassal and overlord of King James of Scotland, who is now friend and close ally of Cousin Arthur, and should we attack the scheming Regulus to regain our own, then our dear cousin would be treaty-bound to mount attack upon us in support of his ally's suzerain-vassal."

  "As if that alone were not enough to sicken a Waterford sow, Your Grace—and this may be a something of which you are not yet aware, unless your overlord mentioned it in his reply to you—that conniving, treacherous by-blow of a poxy Italian mongrel, that Duce di Bolgia, who is King of Munster in all save only the title, has engineered a pact of mutual assistance with not only his accursed brother's new overlord, the Regulus, but with that murdering, land-grabbing, mercenary bastard who now is King of Connachta. This means that do we move against any of them—Munster, Connachta, Airgialla, or even Ulaid—even with provocation, mind you, we stand in peril of attack from Munster in the south, from Connachta in the west, from Ulaid and Airgialla in the north, and from the fleet of the Regulus in the east. How are we to unite all Eireann under us are we bogged at every turn by such stinking political quagmires? Why can't those dog-vomit di Bolgias hie them back to their sun-blasted acres in Italy and take their sly, conspiratorial ways with them? We were well on the way to fulfilling our dream of fully uniting all Eireann and all Irishmen in peace under one king before those two came to disrupt everything so abominably."

  Bass Foster sighed silently while the Ard-Righ awaited an answer. At length, speaking slowly as he thought carefully to choose just the right words to lay before the mercurial and sometimes ill-controlled man, "Look at it in this way, Your Majesty: Although Airgialla is now lost to you, you still have both Mide and Lagan, which you held before, and Breifne and the holdings of the Northern Ui Neills, which you did not, and that is more land than your royal sire or any other Ard-Righ has held in centuries. Cannot this be considered at least progress? Some goals are just too much, often, for one man to achieve in one lifetime."

  The Ard-Righ's growl then sounded so feral as to set the hairs of Bass's nape to rising and twitching. "Oh, aye," he said bitterly, "we still hold Mide . . . but we perforce have had to relinquish some of the most productive of the western baronies to Connachta in order to secure peace, and a humiliating peace, at that. Righ Roberto of Ulaid, acting in his capacity as regent for the infant Righ Ringeann of Airgialla, has led troops in seizing no less than two more baronies ceded to us by the late Righ Ronan, saying that Righ Ringeann cannot be bound by the mistakes of his predecessors, not even those of his own shamefully murdered sire. Moreover, a new ambassador has come to us bearing letters from Righ Flann Mac Core Ui Fingen of Munster, though that piece of backbiting filth di Bolgia might as well have signed them, since his devious, Italianate hand is clear in all of them; these letters demand—demand, God curse him!—that we immediately cede to Munster some of the richest, most fruitful baronies we own, baronies won by our sire long years ago, promising to take them by force of arms do we not cede them peaceably. That damned di Bolgia knows that we dare not but bow to his hellish will, for do we stand in arms to defend our holdings or march against Corcaigh to take it by storm and burn it down around his hairy arse—which was our first impulse upon the reading—then the provisions of that Satan-spawn treaty he and his brother and the rest signed would be brought to bear, and we well know that we could not long stand against so many foes attacking us from every side."

  "And it gets worse, Your Grace, far worse. Now Righ Eammon III of Lagan, whose dynasty owes its very genesis to our late sire's bounty, who is a blood cousin of us and whose late sire's intemperance in humiliating a papal legate came verily within the width of a hare's whisker of seeing all Eireann placed under interdict and all Irish royalty and higher nobility rendered excommunicants by papal fiat, has turned on us. It is almost more than mere flesh and blood, albeit royal, can bear, Your Grace."

  "This backbiting pissant of a pocket monarch is making to turn upon his own kindred, suggesting that certain rich baronies which his plaguey sire ceded to us and Mide be returned to his ownership; otherwise, he states his intention of seeking alliance with the Righ of Munster and the Righ of Connachta. And hard on the heels of that ingratitude, that shameful degree of insolence, came the word that this son of a syphilitic sow had sent armed men to seize the Port of Wexford, cast out my garrison and officials, and declare that henceforth it and its revenues would be possessions of the Righ of Lagan."

  "We must admit to a mistake on our part, Your Grace. At one time, for a while, we entertained the thought that Your Grace's coming, it was, had in some way begun to discommode us, cause us to see our fondest hopes and plans for Eireann dashed, not through conscious intent of Your Grace, perhaps, but through mischances which would not and could not have occurred without Your Grace's presence in Eireann. So irate did we become, on occasion, Your Grace, that we even seriously considered arranging Your Grace's quiet assassination."

  It was all that Bass Foster could do to not shudder at those words, for he well knew that this amoral, devious, and often violent man was fully capable of any enormity, and if Brian chose to kill him or have him killed here, this day, for good reason or ill, not the force of all his men and ships and guns could save him . . . though they might exact a fearful vengeance against Brian and his o
wn forces and lands and city. True, neither the words nor the momentary demeanor of the veteran warrior signaled one of his justly feared killing rages, but with him that all could change in a bare eye-blink of elapsed time, too. Nonetheless, he marshaled his courage and stood silent, unmoving, awaiting the next words from the Ard-Righ.

  "But that," continued Brian, "was ere we closeted ourselves within a very private place and thought it all through, of a late night. Aye, a foreign, disruptive, and most divisive element was indeed introduced into Eireann to the detriment of all our erstwhile hopes and dreams and ambitions and even our heartfelt prayers. It was not Your Grace, however, rather was it that evil condottiere thrust into Munster by agents of Rome, most likely, with the very purposes of division and disruption in their minds, and he and his brother have succeeded well in their schemes."

  "His first actions here were to try to hoodwink me into raising my siege of Corcaigh, and when I saw through that scheme and did not cooperate with him, he and his pack did coldly murder his supposed patron, Righ Tamhas FitzGerald of Munster, and see one Sean FitzRobert sanctified in the place of our assassinated cousin. Then, when the scandalized FitzGeralds rose up, slew the usurper he had forced upon them, and made to slay di Bolgia himself, he and his pack of cold-blooded mercenaries butchered every last man of that ancient house, killed until the very streets of Corcaigh ran red with noble blood. After that, with no male member of that noted Norman house still living and old enough to be sanctified as befits a righ, he proceeded to hunt around Munster and finally find a poor, humble, simple-minded peasant who happens to be a very, very distant descendant of the last native-Irish King of Munster and see him crowned Righ Flann . . . although even a blind idiot could see where the true power really lies in Munster, of course."

  As the Ard-Righ continued to aggrievedly catalogue the many and heinous injustices committed against him and his plans for the conquering of the entire island, Bass thought that he most likely was completely right that di Bolgia had been the factor the introduction of which into Ireland had begun to dismantle the schemes of Brian the Burly. Faced only by other Irishmen—the majority of whom rigidly adhered to archaic forms and methods of waging war as the only "honorable" ways of so doing—Brian and his large and partially modernized field army had been winning rather consistently for years. Had Brian been left completely to his own devices—which devices included not just military actions but also the wiles of treaties he never intended to keep, purchase of treachery, extortion of compliance on all levels, theft, lying, betrayals, and murders—he just might have accomplished his goal of subduing all of Ireland within his lifetime, for being somewhat xenophobic, your average Irish righ, no matter how severely pressed or threatened, would not have so much as dreamed of arranging for aid from some foreign monarch, all of them recalling the frightful consequences of just such a step which long ago had resulted in the establishment of the Normans in Ireland."

  But the di Bolgias had come to Ireland, and when once Sir Roberto di Bolgia had so miraculously become a righ in Ulaid, with his elder brother, Sir Timoteo, il Duce di Bolgia, holding Munster with his condotta for its righ, they had both realized that there existed no way that their two small principalities could hope to stop or even slow for long the inexorable advance of the Ard-Righ's strong forces whenever he got around to moving against them. Therefore, Righ Roberto had sailed across the sea to Islay, seat of the Lord or Regulus of the Western Isles, old Sir Aonghas Mac Dhomhnuill. To the immensely powerful Regulus, he had given over his pocket kingdom, then accepted it back as a feoff, thus becoming the willing vassal of the old man, but gaining for himself and his kingdom the protection of Sir Aonghas' large fleet of galleys and sailing ships, his thousands of justly feared Hebridean axemen, and, if necessary, the additional aid of yet another of Sir Aonghas' vassals, James, King of Scotland.

  Realist that he seemed to be, not bearing the basically useless burdens of antique usages and customs as did most of the Irish or the almost-mediaeval concept of pure honor that hobbled the bulk of the Norman-Irish, but still probably bearing in mind that he could move only so far and so fast were he to continue to enjoy the full support and the faith of the somewhat backward, unmodern, barely civilized people he was trying to help, Righ Roberto's elder brother had most likely moved through him to establish contact with old Sir Aonghas. The condottiere had undoubtedly known that no matter how much Righ Flann of Munster owed him, no matter how much that new-made monarch depended upon him and his forces and counsel, he still could not and would not even consider such action as Righ Roberto of Ulaid had undertaken to protect himself, his people, and his lands from the rapacious, unscrupulous Ard-Righ Brian, and so the idea for a treaty of mutual assistance was born.

  Actually, the treaty was a better plan than that earlier carried out by Righ Roberto, to Bass' way of thinking. While enjoying just about as much real protection through the threat of Sir Aonghas's not inconsiderable forces of sea and land, Munster still retained its freedom, not being in vassalage to any foreign power, which was more than Ulaid could say, these days.

  As for the Connachta element, Bass happened to know more about that than he thought it presently wise to reveal to Brian the Burly for some time yet to come. After his several meetings with the various lesser kings of the principalities on the unhappy island, he was coming to the conclusion that almost any one of them would make Ireland a better Ard-Righ than was Brian.

  "I wonder," he thought, "just what Arthur's reaction would be if his Lord Commander of the Royal Horse should be instrumental in replacing his cousin, Brian, with a less closely related but more efficient High King? I'd like to sound out Archbishop Hal on this subject, but I won't do it unless I can talk to him face to face and in privacy, for with Brian's spies and Arthur's spies and Rome's spies and God alone knows who else's flitting about all over the place, bribing messengers and intercepting correspondence, it would be my life to put such volatile musings onto paper or vellum in any language I know. Time was when he and I could actually talk in complete privacy by letter using twentieth-century American English, which was utterly foolproof code, unreadable by anyone then living in this world, but until somebody finds out exactly what happened to that Armenian-American dance band, learns who snatched the lot of them and where they were taken, there's no longer any guarantee that some power—Rome, for instance—doesn't currently hold one or more persons who can be hurt or terrorized into reading, translating whatever Hal and I might write to each other.''

  "And so, your grace,"—the Ard-Righ paused long enough to drain a pint goblet of Rhenish wine, then went on, but now with something other than his litany of the abusive wrongs done him so recently and with so little cause—"with no one left in all Eireann against whom I any longer dare hurl you and your justly vaunted forces, I first toyed with the thought of just sending you and yours back to Cousin Arthur with sincere thanks for the loan of you all, then I thought me of the Great Eireann venture, and I still may ask that you go there with enough ships and men to make it mine, but first I must know if that grim, dangerous old man on Islay considers Great Eireann, too, to be under this damned, hellish, illegal, and immoral treaty he has signed and sealed with that onetime mercenary, sometime jackanapes, scurvy bastard who now styles himself Righ of Connachta, holds the Jewel of Connachta, withholding it from me, his Ard-Righ, despite my many and most courteous requests for it that it may be safely held here for Connachta and him as I now hold the Magical Jewels of Mide, Lagan, Breifne, the Northern Ui Neills, and Airgialla. This self-styled Righ of Connachta, since he claims and holds Great Eireann, must also be holding the Magical Jewel of that land, which likewise should rightly and properly be held by the Ard-Righ, by us." Abruptly, in mid-paragraph, the High King switched back to the regal plural. "But we doubt us that even old Aonghas longs to stretch his forces so thinly as to try to defend with them lands thousands of leagues distant and from which he draws no substance, in any case. However, he is not a man wisely taken for granted, theref
ore we must know his devious mind on the matter, ere we launch you and yours upon a course that might spell disaster for us all."

  "Now, we had entertained the idea at the first of sending us a formal herald to Islay to ask the question forthrightly, one royal personage to another, but then we thought that had Aonghas not previously considered the matter at all, and knowing of old just how ill he regards us, we might by so doing give him the thought of extending his protection to Great Eireann simply to spite us and hinder our plans."

  "Next, we thought us of sending Sir Ugo d'Orsini as a special—a very special—emissary to the court of the Regulus, he to be sent with both a public mission and a second, very private one. Italians, Moors, and Spaniards all are most adept at the proper execution of anything smacking of deceit, chicanery, dishonor, dissemblance, or the sub rosa, in general. But, alas, he bides still in England upon some papal mission."

  "So, now, we have determined that the best course will be to send you and a sizable entourage to Islay aboard one of your ships. If you decide to accept this mission, Your Grace, you will be entrusted with a quantity of gold, which, if your primary mission succeeds—though we truly doubt us that it will, all truths taken into account and considered, but still it, the offer, gives you a good, believable excuse to beard the old bastard in his very den—will serve as the initial payment and bona fides of the transaction."

  "You are to announce my intent to buy from the Regulus the lands that Righ Roberto of Ulaid holds in feoff from him. Drive as dear a bargain as you can, Your Grace, but know you also that if he will even consider selling us Ulaid, we will pay almost anything for that land, for with that infernal linchpin out, there would be little in it for him to justify the horrendous expenses of entering into open warfare with us and so this Christ-damned treaty would fall apart and all Eireann would again be ours for the mere plucking, so to speak."