‘Ready.’ As one, the archers strained their bows, gauging the distance.
‘Hold it. Here it comes!’
‘Take your mark . . . on my word . . .’
Conor burst from the dunes in a cloud of sand as he rolled, laughing with the unrestrained joy of a child, down the sand slope. Jumping to his feet, he waved, ‘Come on, Aoife, come on!’
In the confusion, I hadn’t noticed him missing. He ran through the Normans, excitedly showing me his spoils: a few seashells and an old bone of some sort. I think the relief of the men overcame their anger. Laughing, Rob ruffled Conor’s long golden hair, telling him he was the fiercest thing he’d ever seen, charging at him armed with deadly shells and pebbles.
I felt a bit sheepish. Donal was none too pleased with me, for Conor was my charge, and he hardly spoke to me as we gathered and set off from the strand towards Ferns, the seat of MacMurrough power in Leinster. From there, the place where our journey had started almost twelve months ago to the day, my father could claim some authority.
It was clear as we approached the town that we were not expected. The few travellers we met on the road stood aside, regarding us curiously, with our hoods concealing our identities. I was worried that the distinctive V shape shaved into the back of the heads of the foot soldiers, who carried their helmets, would alert some observant eyes as to the presence of Normans. So we moved quickly from the coast, hoping to reach the town ahead of any news of our arrival.
The east gate was open as we emerged from the dark woodlands onto the expanse of sowing fields surrounding the wooden palisade walls. The scars from the fire which had engulfed the town when we fled a year past stained the walls at intervals. The blackened trunks of the oak trees marked the long, reddish-tinged walls like missing teeth. In some places, the stumps were all that remained, and I could see men labouring to repair one section close to the gate. I shuddered at the recollection of Conor sitting under the blade of the axeman in that very spot.
As an important trading centre, Ferns also hosted the large monastery, which my father had granted to the Augustinians to gain the favour of the church when he had need of it, which happened to be quite frequently in the past. The regular bustle of activity masked our approach as we passed through the gates. The damage wrought by the fire stunned us. Rows of houses and entire alleyways and streets lay in waste. The skeletal remains of the charred oak support beams of some stood derisively in places, mocking the expanse of what had been lost. The buildings on one side of the small square inside the gate still stood, somehow miraculously escaping the fire. The bright yellow of their fresh thatch shimmered in the heat; they had saved the houses by pulling down the old thatch to stop the flames leaping across the roofs in the gusting winds of that nightmare. An arid hint of ash caught the back of my throat; the light breeze still bore the trace of the inferno which had engulfed the town.
I shivered remembering the horror of that night when I had ridden headlong across that square to save Conor.
In the confusion of the bustling square, I could see Donal and the Normans quietly making their weapons ready. A guard who had been dozing in the heat roused himself. He shouted down from the fighting platform above the gate for us to identify ourselves.
He was shocked when my father threw off his cloak. Immediately recognisable, he was a huge man with long jet-black hair that merged into his thick beard. His voice, made harsh from the din of battle, boomed for all to hear; he, Diarmuit MacMurrough, as the only legitimate king of Leinster by blood right and the sword, had returned to reclaim his throne. It had been stolen by foul treachery, and he would avenge it in blood. Any man who opposed him would taste the steel of his revenge.
Squinting into the sunlight, the guard looked to the horn hung over the sharpened point of an oak trunk in the wall beside his spear. Seeing the armed men arrayed around the square, several archers with arrows in the bows, the guard, gauging his chances, sensibly did nothing. ‘Lord King,’ he said, with a bow of his head.
Donal ordered a few men to guard the gate, and we arranged ourselves with a vanguard and rear of men-at-arms and set off quickly towards the centre of the town, where our caistéal, or palace, stood.
Word of our return spread before us, rippling through the alleyways as we approached what had been our main hall. It was a large half-brick, half-timber cavernous room with a high beamed roof supported by thick oak trusses. At one end sat a raised dais, the throne chair from which my father oversaw official matters of the kingdom. The king would dine here on formal occasions, with the top table set on the dais facing the hall, as was also the custom in Chepstow when Strongbow entertained guests. The hall was built amongst an arrangement of smaller halls, some connected, which provided the extensive accommodation and living chambers for the family and guests of the king.
Ferns, with its royal palaces and residences, was the administrative centre of the most prosperous province in Ireland: Leinster. It was by far the largest Irish town in Ireland—the coastal towns were controlled by the Norse—and could have been regarded as the capital. Although seeing the devastation that day, I doubted it could ever fully recover. It had been the venue for hosting vassal lords of the noble families of Leinster, foreign dignitaries, kings, and merchants, vying for the lucrative trading relationships that my father’s kingdom offered. The extensive palace grounds were laid with paved-stone or raised-timber walkways, all set within an inner palisade within the town for added protection, but more to impress. Visitors would see the wealth and power of the king of Leinster in his stronghold.
As we approached, I could see that the palace bore little damage from the fire and was still largely intact. The east side of the town stretching down to the Bann—the small river that ran under the eastern wall—had suffered the worst of the fire as my father’s men, escaping from the centre towards the east gate, had hurled their flaming torches from their horses, setting fires in their wake.
My uncle, Murchad, was plainly surprised to see us, particularly with the support of a band of well-armed Norman knights, foot soldiers and archers. He had had no word of our coming. Ever suspicious, my father had chosen not to test his brother’s loyalty and risk our safety by alerting him of our plans. In the fickle, treacherous matters of the inheritance of kingdoms in Ireland, brothers were the least to be trusted.
The Normans were shocked by the venomous rivalries in the households of the royal families here. For them, it was the right of the first-born legitimate male child to inherit a father’s lordship or kingdom. In that, there was a simplicity and certainty.
The long-established Irish custom meant it was possible for any warrior born of numerous royal families to emerge as king, providing he could win the support of enough noble families through alliances or threats. The crown was not any prince’s right by inheritance. It had to be won, and many kings came to their throne with bloodied sword in hand over the corpses of their kinsmen. Hence, the main rivals for an aspiring young prince were, more often than not, those closest to him—and none more so than his own brothers. This left little room for love or loyalty. The passing of crowns in Ireland were bloody affairs indeed.
For now, my father’s caution was unnecessary. Murchad was welcoming having kept my father informed with secreted messages sent with loyal merchants to Chepstow. The loyalties of the kinsmen of the wider clan were far less certain.
The rise to win a crown in Ireland was built on the foundation of the family. First, a man would, through whatever means, take the leadership of his own family group as Ceann Finn (chieftain); these groups were bonded by family ties and common land ownership. Having achieved that, he would move to acquire the recognition of other families of his kin group in his region. My family, the MacMurroughs, were one of the most prominent royal houses of the most powerful clan in South Leinster, the Uí Chennselaig. As chieftain of the MacMurroughs, my father was accepted as head of the Uí Chennselaig clan, as had his father and his father’s father and many more preceding.
My own father’s rise to power had not left him with clean hands; he was well endowed with the ruthlessness required to gain a throne in Ireland. After his own father, Donough MacMurrough, had been killed by the Norsemen of Dublin in 1115, when my father was five years of age, the Norse had desecrated his body by burying him with a dog, the ultimate humiliation. My father’s older brother, Eanna, had inherited the throne, being strong enough at the time to force the other dynastic families of Leinster into submission. When he died in 1126, these families, several with ambitions of their own to the throne, did not so easily agree to my father becoming king. There followed several years of bloody rivalry within Leinster, inflamed by the ambitions of other provincial kings, foremost of which were my father’s bitter enemies of today, Rory O’Connor, Tiarnan O’Rourke and Domnall Mac Giolla Patrick.
At times, my father’s cause appeared hopeless, but as with all who rise to great things, the path is seldom smooth and without moments of despair. An unreasonable persistence, when most would retire, and a resilience, when to continue appears futile, sustained him and gave him the most valuable of gifts: time. For in time fortune can turn, and so it did for my father. It eventually delivered the cream of the nobility of the rival Leinster dynasties into his hands. He murdered most and pierced the eyeballs of the others; thereby, in one fell night’s gory work, he rid himself of any claimants to the throne of Leinster for a generation.
All bar one, his brother Murchad, who welcomed us to Ferns today. He was arguably my father’s most potent rival; most aspiring princes to a throne in Ireland would have at least taken his eyes. I was to learn in time, when I came to understand my father better and measure his actions against the grim choices I myself would make, of his deep-seated humanity, not always apparent and often masked by a lesser cruelty. My father’s affection for his brother, unusual in the times, had not let him sully his hands with such a barbarity. He would rule the Uí Chennselaig without the mutilation or slaughter of his own household on his conscience.
This, our clan, was dominant in South Leinster, part of one of the five provinces of Ireland: the kingdoms of the North, Leinster, Munster, Connaught and Meath. Each in turn was dominated by a clutch of family tuaths, one of which would emerge as dominant for periods, as fortune favoured, and provide the provincial kings. Our tuath, the Uí Chennselaig, had, through my family, sat on the throne of Leinster for more than three-quarters of a century.
However, even then, it was not a comfortable seat. The ambitions of the lesser families were little quenched, and a king’s throne and life survived only by constant vigilance, as my father had explained to Strongbow on the evenings when we had dined together in the Great Tower at Chepstow.
‘So, we cannot rely on the support of your own kinsfolk when we land?’ Strongbow had asked my father on one such occasion. I learned as much as he did as my father explained the intricacies of power in Ireland; Strongbow took these opportunities to deepen his understanding of the land and people he would assail.
My father answered that truth with a smile, marvelling at the naivety. ‘So has it ever been. The ties which bind a province in Ireland are weak and constantly strained. You see a clansman may give his life for his chieftain, but he has little notion of the province or a provincial king. Even less of a remote, rarely seen high king of Ireland—the ard rí.’ He went on to explain how loyalty in Ireland was built on the practice of hostage taking. It was the accepted system of subjugation and enforcement of authority. By gathering the hostages of the noble dynasties of his province, a king could bend the families to his will. No one was bound by any higher sense of duty or loyalty. I was surprised when he quoted the Brehon law tract which cemented this practice, setting that expectation of a king: ‘He is not a king who has not hostages in fetters.’ I should not have been. My father was a man who had fought his way to a throne and held it for decades in the maelstrom that was Irish dynastic statecraft. He was well acquainted with its ways and what was required of a man to succeed.
He too had taken and given up hostages when necessary. It was commonly the case that these hostages were treated as honoured guests, dining at the table of the king, their captor. It was equally common for their lives to be summarily forfeit by the axeman after some transgression by the head of their own family against their host.
‘Listen, Pembroke.’ My father addressed Strongbow in the familiar but formal use of his denied title, edging into flattery. ‘Our land is best understood as a landscape of about one hundred and eighty-five clans of uncertain loyalties, some of whom are more commonly grouped together. You’ll need to understand that. Aoife can help you with that,’ he said, looking to me before continuing. ‘The interests of these people do not stretch beyond the clan. Unless compelled to do otherwise, or they stand to gain, they will, at the very least, stand aloof from conflicts when they can.’
We listened as my father spoke with great authority on these occasions, and Strongbow’s quiet concentration showed his respect for my father’s knowledge and advice. It would be invaluable if he was to succeed in Ireland. He learned that this lack of cohesion at a level higher than the clan meant that the provinces, and to a greater extent the island of Ireland itself, could not mount an effective resistance to withstand invading forces. ‘As the Norsemen found when they arrived a few centuries ago,’ my father said. ‘Having said that, it is because the tribes are difficult to unify that the land is near impossible to defeat, as the Norse also found. You see, there’s no capital to capture, no single king’s head which, when cleaved from his shoulders, would bring the rest of the land to heel.’
And while I learned much about the intricacies of the politics of power in Ireland on these evenings, I learned more of the man who had successfully navigated its treacherous waters for decades. He seemed to speak to me as much as he did to Strongbow. Back then I may have thought he was attempting to in some way explain his actions—his murderous cruelty, his fickle loyalties, his apparent lack of honour . . . his desertion of Eanna—an attempt to justify himself in my eyes. In time, as my life unfolded, I was to come to understand he was preparing me. The path he foresaw for our family, our clan, Leinster and ultimately Ireland would place me at its centre. With that faith would inevitably come unavoidable deeds, however unpalatable to those who wielded the knife.
‘There’s a mercurial nature to that island,’ he had said, unconsciously leaning back and looking to the west, as if trying to grasp its essence from where he sat at Strongbow’s table in Chepstow. ‘It cannot be wholly grasped by man or God, as was also discovered by the Christian church.’ He turned to the archdeacon, who had been invited to join us one evening.
He nodded his agreement to what my father had said and went on to express his exasperation at what he had learned of the Christian church in Ireland. ‘It borders on heresy, m’lord,’ he said to Strongbow, shaking his head. ‘They recognise no central authority, barely acknowledging the existence of Rome. Their allegiance is local, to their local chieftains. There are multitudes of bishops, appointed at a whim. As they have no single king’s authority by divine right, they have no accepted archbishop. It’s ridiculous!’ His frustration was obvious. ‘I’d go so far as to say it’s unchristian in its ways, almost pagan. They seem to have moulded more to these satanic practices than enlightened them with the grace of God. They have simply made their pagan feast days our saint’s days, made their gods our saints. It’s heretical!’
He explained how the Irish church had even gone as far as recognising that the dominant position of authority was with the abbess of Kildare. All other clergy, including the archbishop of Dublin, deferred to her—an abomination in the sight of the wider Christian church, which wisely confined female influence in the church to its rightful place. He looked to me as he said this. I remember thinking he would probably have phrased it differently had I not been present.
I knew his views on this matter, and he knew mine. He had been appalled at the authority of the abbess. Not long before, as we sat in the courtyard one evening with Myler, he became quite animated about it. Trying to justify his position, he had quoted some of the saints regarding the harsh attitude of his religion to women. Myler and I found it highly amusing as he shuffled through his manuscripts, eventually finding the authoritative scripts.
‘Yes, here it is . . . “Woman is a misbegotten man and has a faulty and defective nature in comparison to his. What she cannot get, she seeks to obtain through lying and diabolical deceptions. And so, to put it kindly, one must be on one’s guard with every woman, as if she were a poisonous snake and horned devil,”’ he intoned loftily, although he did raise an eyebrow and seemed to lose a certain momentum as he finished. ‘That was written by Saint Albertus Magnus, no less,’ he said.
‘Well, he must have met Agnes, the shepherd’s daughter,’ Rob chuckled as he joined us. Myler and I couldn’t contain ourselves, and I felt for his uncle who, while earnest, didn’t seem entirely convinced himself. But he persisted nonetheless.
