Of Chiefs and Champions Read online

  This fact was part of what really drove Brian the Burly, for he knew that all of the land of Eireann—were it left at peace, without armies and warbands constantly fighting and marching over it, killing folk, burning buildings, trampling down growing crops, slaughtering or lifting cattle and other kine—could produce every bit as richly and well. Of course, a strong, just ruler would be needed to order and maintain the land and its hotheaded nobility, but then he knew precisely the identity of this man, he saw him each time he looked into a mirror.

  As often when he sat alone in this concealed room, Brian the Burly talked aloud to himself as if to another listener. "I must make the affairs of this island just as they were in the distant past. In those days, the title Ard-Righ had true meaning. He was a priest-king, then, both druid and temporal ruler, the most powerful man in all of Eireann, obliged not only to rule men but to intercede for his subjects with gods of Earth and Waters and Sky. He it was, and the druids were responsible for offering sacrifices to the Forces for Light and ever battling the Forces for Darkness in the world of men."

  "No man in all the land ruled as chief or king without the Ard-Righ's holy anointing, and his hand it was that wielded the Holy Axe at the Sun-Birth Festival and struck down the spotted stallion to appease the gods. That's where our breed of leopard-horses came from, though few know it anymore; they were the sacred horses of the Old Religion, the Steeds of Epona, the Horse Goddess, worshiped by our holy race since before rocks were spawned. Mide still is the only place where they're bred and trained as the warhorses they are become in the reign of Christ."

  "And well-trained mounts, savage destriers, beautiful, graceful creatures that the leopard-horses are, even so, that still is not the reason why every king in this land, every chief, even my sworn and bitter enemies still is more than willing to deal with me, to pay me pounds of pure gold for one of them as a battle steed. No, the real reason is that they are of Her breed. Deep within our hearts of hearts, the old racial ties still bind, still do we give reverence to Her, to Epona, and not just to Her, for all our show of Christianity, of subservience to Rome. Riding a leopard-horse, a man feels kinship with all that was of old, can hope for the support of not just the Christ, but of the Mighty Ones He supplanted in this land."

  "One wonders if there is not a way to gain more than a little advantage through the tapping of this hidden strain of belief in the powers that ruled the Elder World, nor am I the first one to so wonder. My sire did, and he even made some slight twitches in that direction, too. Hah hah! Boy that I then was, still do I recall it well. His enemies got word of it to the papal legate then resident in Dublin and that old Moorish by-blow, Gamal, then trooped down here to the Lagore Palace to meet with His Majesty and scowl and mumble darkly of backsliding heretics, a resurgence of evil paganism, of excommunication and interdiction. They say that that old bastard's bowels were got in such an uproar by it all that for long it was thought that he was suffering of camp fever, the bloody flux. And His Majesty, who at that time was prosecuting one war in the north and another in the west, thought it the better course to follow to not pick another fight with Rome at the same time, so he finally sent the flea-bitten old desert rat back to Dublin with assurances that word of his quite innocent attempts to reinstitute some usages of past centuries had been deliberately blown up and embroidered upon by his legions of sworn enemies to give the appearance of a state of apostasy in his household and realm and that there was no truth or merit to any of it and that only a man slipping into his senile dotage would have believed the tale of Ard-Righ Brian VII, Righ of Mide and Ri of the southern branch of Ui Neill to begin."

  "His majesty then honey-coated his insult by gifting the Moor a snow-white riding mule with gilt harness and saddle. But of course he didn't bother to tell the swarthy son of a jackal that that mule had a mouth as tough as gunmetal and an established tendency to run into streams and flop down on its side on hot days. Heheheheh. I doubt me not that the first discovery of that playful little trait discommoded the hook-nosed bit of Afriqan scum somewhat more than just a trifle. His Majesty and the court joked and laughed about it for weeks after. Even my mentor and dear friend, gentle old Abbot Cormac, could not but smile at the thought of that arrogant, holier-than-thou, posturing, supercilious ape dragging himself from under that mule, his fine garments all water-soaked and coated in good, thick, gooey Irish mud. And as the mule had been the parting gift of the Ard-Righ, to have sold it or killed it or even ill-treated it would've been a clear-cut instance of the heinous crime of laesa majestas, and had His Majesty petitioned Rome for redress—as he most assuredly would have done in that case as he just did not like the then-legate—the misdeed would assuredly have resulted in Gamal's recall and replacement."

  "Considering his basal sentiments, His late Majesty would have loved the situation today, when there is no papal legate at all in Eireann, nor yet a pope in Rome to appoint one, though one supposes that Cardinal d'Este could send one did he not have bigger fish to fry at his own seat in Palermo, not to mention the long, sly Italian fingers he had deep-sunk in the stinking mess in Rome."

  Brian the Burly sighed and shifted in the chair. "But who am I to talk of the stinking messes of other realms, eh? My own, here in Eireann, is deep and foul enough for any man and with a reek of a hogshead of rotten mackerel. It seems that nothing, not one damned scheme, has ended aright since the foreigners came to Eireann. Now, true, I had nothing to do with di Bolgia and his condottas entering Munster, that was all the doing of d'Este and the late legate. But it was me who had to ask Cousin Arthur for the loan of a great captain and some troops to help me acquire the rest of the Magical Jewels of Eireann . . . and just look at the seething caldron into which that has plunged Eireann and me."

  "Oh, yes, His Grace of Norfolk, Sir Bass Foster, is seemingly a good, honest, honorable man, a veteran soldier, a gifted captain; no doubt of it but that he would make a better king than right many now reigning of whom I can easily think. But if he and the other visiting foreign warriors don't stop fulfilling old prophecies to the serious detriment of my plans and schemes for Eireann, I'm just going to have to find ways—by fair means or the foulest—to get them either out of this land entirely or underground with the majority."

  "I thought myself sorely tried to have Conan Ruarc Mac Dallain to deal with up in Ulaid, yet for all his failings and many crimes, the man was still of Eireann, still an Ui Neill, though begotten on the wrong side of the blanket. The fahda had sung of that ancient prophecy for almost forever, sung that when the positions of the stars were right, the original Magical Jewel of Ulaid would leap out from its grave in the peat of Lough Neagh and cleave to the flesh of the foreign warrior from whose loins would issue the seed of a reborn royal house of Ulaid. All right, the fahda ever are singing of some fanciful prophecy or other, and who in his right mind believes such?"

  "So I send cousin Arthur's loaned great captain and his troops up into Ulaid, fully expecting him and them to end by hacking the damned bastard Conan Ruarc into bloody gobbets and bringing me back the jewel from off his dead hand. He did bring me back that big yellow diamond, right enough, and thank God it has intrinsic value, because otherwise the piece of dung is now utterly worthless to my ends. Who would ever have even so much as fancied that a damned Italian knight, a mere mercenary who only was serving with Sir Bass' force as an observer for me and, likely, his brother, too, would fall into the lough and be dragged out with the archaic, original Jewel of Ulaid's bodkin jammed deep into his foot?"

  "Yet, against all reason, that is just what occurred up there. So now I still am faced with the need to get my hands on that ancient Jewel long enough to make a true copy of it and no hope at all of so doing because that new Righ Roberto—pagh, a pest on the bastard, it makes me feel like puking just to have to couple his foreign name with a decent Gaelic title!—knows my way with the jewels that do happen to come into my hands, and, sly, scheming Italian that he is, I can rest assured that the only way I'll ever get to hold
that old-new Jewel is through raw force. And where I just might've been able to invade Conan Ruarc's Ulaid and have expected the surviving men of the older noble houses and the chiefs and the commoners to rise to my call against the bastard usurper, that chance now is dead and underground along with Conan Ruarc's corpse, for I'm reliably told that every man and woman of any class in Ulaid looks upon their new righ as God's Holy Gift to them and the land."

  "Then, on his way back here with that damned useless bauble of a ring, Sir Bass proceeded to near-sack the palace and city of Righ Ronan of Airgialla, my own client, and lift from the very heart of his palace a slave girl that had taken his fancy, spiriting her away to England before I ever knew aught of it and could try to force him to send her back to her lawful master. Now that disgusting, gutless wonder, Ronan, has dredged up from out the sodden mind of his filid the hoary legend that the last ruler of his line will lose his head and die without issue, done to a dishonorable death by the will of a woman he had wronged and enslaved. He bombards me with letters, keeps the roads dusty in the wake of his gallopers, and each letter indicating greater degrees of terror and outright cowardice than the one preceding it. Such is his funk that I would doubt he now has in all his palace a single mattress or pair of trews that does not stink of his loose dung."

  "Munster, now, God Almighty, what a foul mess that is become of late. With the recall and subsequent murder of the legate, di Rezzi, the unfortunate fatal accident that took the life of Righ Tamhas, the election and coronation of Righ Sean IV FitzRobert in Tamhas' place and with the city of Corcaigh under the firm control of Dux Timoteo di Bolgia, I had thought, had hoped, that I could forget about Munster for a while, since I had the real Star of Munster here, among my other pretties. Forget, hell! That's now a most unfunny joke. Those damned erratic, half-lunatic FitzGeralds—I would that the whole of their foul breed were burning in the deepest, hottest pit of Gehenna. What did the forsworn maniacs do? They invited Righ Sean to be formally invested as Ri of FitzGerald, then they murdered him and incited the people of Corcaigh to rise up against di Bolgia and his troops. That would've been bad enough, but at the sticking point, the other condotta—the Afriqan lancers, priests' plague take them all—slew their own officers and threw in with the Corcaighers and the crazy FitzGerald ilk, virtually besieging di Bolgia and his loyal troops in the royal palace and the old royal castle-citadel."

  "Poor Sir Ugo d'Orsini got out, hacked his way from the city, showed my seal to an officer in my siegelines that still are in the process of lifting that siege, and rode up here more dead than alive to bring me word of the calamity. I scratched up as large a force as I could and rode hard for Corcaigh. I might as well have saved myself the trouble, of course. Trust an oily Italian to manage to wriggle out of even the closest of traps, it's long been averred, and rightly, too. Having pent up the mercenaries, those drooling idiot FitzGeralds decided—lacking the wits that God gave pissants, one of that ilk's best-known traits—upon spurring the untrained mob of Corcaighers to follow them on a foray in force against what was then left of my siegelines and troops. For all that two thirds of mine were departed for Connaught weeks agone, those few who were left manned their cannon and blasted the most of that howling, ill-armed mob to chunks before they'd most of them gotten a hundred yards from the city walls, then countercharged and drove the survivors back to whence they'd come, chastised to the point of hysterical terror, I'm informed."

  "The few FitzGeralds who still were able to run or walk or crawl and the remnants of that butchered mob got back into the city to find that di Bolgia and his men had, in their absence, fought and mostly slain all of the mutinous Afriqans—who, being professionals, had known better than to join in the FitzGerald-spawned insanity outside the walls—then barricaded every street leading to the north gate, mounted cannon on them, and waited for the mob to return. When what was left of it came pouring back through the gate, di Bolgia's force force-fed them large helpings of grape and langrage at point-blank range, while hackbut-men shot down every FitzGerald they could identify from out the survivors. After a second discharging of the guns, the mercenaries waded into the remains of that mob with dirk and sword and axe and pistol."

  "So, by the time I and my scratch force rode into Corcaigh, the place was become at best a charnel-house, within walls and without. After they had done with the FitzGeralds and their mob, di Bolgia had slipped the leads on his pack, given them leave to loot, rape, kill, and burn to their hearts' content for the rest of that day and all of the next. And having, myself, been present at not a few intakings, I can attest that the di Bolgia condotta did a thorough and a most professional job of marauding within the walls of the city of Corcaigh; indeed, so depopulated is the place become now that I may have to ship in new folk from out Dublin and elsewhere to bring it back to life and its former importance as a port and center of commerce. Di Bolgia, astute man that he is, has already put guards on the fishing fleet and had the rudders removed from many of the moored ships to prevent surviving resident foreign merchants and their families from departing Corcaigh-port and Munster altogether."

  "When I tried to appoint one of my retainers viceroy of Corcaigh and Munster, however, that damned mercenary had the gall to claim that he had conquered it and that he was holding it for Cardinal d'Este and Rome. Next, he'll be declaring himself to be Righ-'m-facl of Corcaigh, if not of all of Munster, I can feel it in my bones. Then I'll be plagued with one di Bolgia in the north and the other, the most dangerous, in the south of Eireann; a fine kettle of spoiled fish that will be. I never thought, after he was gone, I'd ever long to have Righ Tamhas FitzGerald back, but I do . . . I think."

  "That clan is now a lost cause, the ilk itself headed for fast extinction. All of their ranking nobility and gentlemen fell at Corcaigh, along with a goodly number of the lesser knights, and all the country cousins in Munster are of two or three minds at once of what, if anything, to do to avenge the dead and win back Corcaigh, or so my agents there are informed. Of course, I've sent out men to quietly seek among the Ui Cennedi and Ui Brian clans for a direct descendant of the old, pre-Norman line of Munster kingship, but even do I find such a treasure and he turns out to be more than just a dimwitted oaf of a land-slave peasant, how am I to put him on the throne of his very distant forebears? I can't afford the loss of troops it would take to conquer Corcaigh by storm and sieges of Corcaigh are simply an exercise in futility, frustrating without a sizable fleet, and at this juncture of my larger plans, I simply cannot tie up both fleet and army on the one project."

  "Yes, I sent off a swift ship with a letter to His Grace d'Este informing him that his condottiere, di Bolgia, had put down a revolt in Corcaigh, but now refuses to deliver the city and port into my hands, saying that he is holding it for Rome. But as chaotic as matters are in the Mediterranean and all of Italy just now, who knows when or if I'll get a response, and even if His Grace d'Este should order di Bolgia to give up Corcaigh to me, what is there to stop the man from thumbing his nose at his so-distant employer and continuing to hold it for his own purposes? And so, even if I find a decent candidate for Righ of Munster from among Gaels of the old blood, he would end up as a mere shadow righ, ruling over fishers and farmers and herders and villagers, and even that much only until di Bolgia got around to marching out of Corcaigh and bringing the rest of the kingdom under his illegal, immoral sway. Or until I ransom Corcaigh, maybe?"

  "Yes . . . yes, yes, that may well be it. He's an Italian and a mercenary, as well, and that's the proven way in which both species think: gold. Hell, it might just be worth it to buy him off, at that. I wonder how high a price he wants?"

  "Hell, that could be what the both of them are up to: waiting to see just how much I'd be willing to pay for Corcaigh and the Kingdom of Ulaid. Christ, how did I manage to fall afoul of these thrice-damned Italians? Moors, Jews, Armenians, Turks, Greeks, or even Spaniards, none of them can hold a candle to these over-shrewd, ever-grasping, devil-spawn Italians."

  "But at least al
l they two want is gold or a port city and a small, poor kingdom. I'm beginning to wonder if Cousin Arthur's great captain does not hide within him designs upon my throne. I would've been wise to send him and his force back to England with my thanks after that business in Ulaid and Airgialla. But no, I had to not heed the clear warning and sent him off to my cousins, the northern Ui Neills, to fetch me back the Striped Bull, their Jewel. And what did he do? My sweet Christ, what didn't he do?"

  While ruminating upon the largest slights and reverses that a fickle fate or the stars had dealt him through the person and actions of Sir Bass Foster, Duke of Norfolk and Lord Commander of the Royal Horse of Arthur III Tudor, King of England and Wales, Brian the Burly dug from out his belt purse a fancifully carven stone pipe and a bladder of tobacco, stuffed the former from out the latter's contents, then arose stiffly after sitting for so long. As he stepped over to light the pipe from the flame of a candle, he thought that rain must be on the way, for his every old scar and once-broken bone was aching.

  "Or is it just creeping age?" he asked the empty room. "After all, I'm no spring chicken, I'll be fifty-five this year. Or is it next year? Hell, I don't recall, I'll have to remember to ask the filid, he'll know, he knows when every ard-righ was born and died since long before Strongbow invaded, or the Norsemen, either, for that matter. So good is that old man's memory that sometimes I suspect that he had druidic training. For all that everyone swears that the Old Faith is long dead, I know for fact that there are—or, at least, were quite recently—well-hidden, very secret centers wherein inheritors of the old ways taught of their arcane and forbidden knowledge to a very few, very promising young men."