Storm Maker [The Dawn of Ireland 1] Page 28

  A hunting party had returned with a variety of wild hares, squirrels, and other small animals I did not recognize, and soon we smelled the tantalizing aroma of roasting game.

  I saw that Liam still seemed sad and reserved. Some dark thought was chewing at him. “Liam,” I said gently. “And Michael. I think when we get home, Father Patrick will be there.” I spoke so that only those two would hear my words, and Michael told him what I had said.

  His eyes took on the expression I had come to love—the eager expectation of a young man on the verge of discovery. “Truly, Caitlín?”

  I nodded, smiling.

  “Then let us go home right now.”

  We both laughed, and I leaned toward him. He kissed me as though I were made of egg shells. “Just be careful,” he said, and Michael repeated his words. “Do not be taken in ambush on the way home this time.” The familiar half smile was playing around his mouth.

  “Let us eat,” said Torin somewhere above us, and we scrambled to our feet.

  Midafternoon was not a traditional eating time, either in here in Éire or back in my homeland of Britannia. But going without real food for almost a day had made all of us a bit on edge, and now we tore into our food as though it were out last meal.

  While we were eating, I saw a small group of Glaed Keepers stride to the fire and seize a sizable portion of roasted hare. I realized they were the party who had been sent to search for any trace of Sweeney’s sentries. Glaed talked to one of them as his men squatted near the fire, and then he walked over to me.

  “Milady, these men are my best trackers. There is no sign of lingering sentries. Not on foot, not on horseback. The tracks all lead toward the mouth of the bay—two horses each carrying a rider, and a small cart, as the birds have already told Jay.”

  “Very well, Glaed. We now await word from the raven and magpie, and then we will also travel along the shoreline of that very bay.”

  We set about erasing all evidence of our fire and waited for Jay’s messengers to return.

  I stood on the ridge of the hill, looking down into the valley where the length of the bay lay before me. The sun behind me, two hours or more before setting, made the long, sinuous waters of the bay gleam like a length of silver ribbon beaten into the dark rocks by a master smith.

  I felt a presence behind me, and I knew it was Liam. He stayed there behind me, his arms around my waist, resting his chin on the top of my head. We stood for several minutes looking down on the unspoiled scene. I felt the rankness of Sweeney’s holdings being swept clean by the autumn wind.

  I leaned back against him, trying to let the tenseness in my shoulders flow into his strong chest, stroking his hands and arms. These were the moments I treasured most, when Liam and I seemed to share a singular moment of beauty, or of surpassing peace, not needing to speak.

  We saw the black forms of Talon and Claw over our heads, and the loud call announcing their presence shook us out of our mood. Joining hands, we walked back up the hill to seek Jay Feather and learn whatever news his strange kin were bringing to us.

  The news was as strange as the bearers. Sweeney’s currach was coming back south, toward us, toward his homestead. It was as though he had been treading water, waiting to come back to his home. As Glaed had said earlier, it seemed as though he were skulking back, straight into our drawn weapons.

  Gristle seemed angry. “He has drawn us back, then forth, then back again. And we seem to be his willing pawns. What kind of demented chess game is he playing?”

  I was as exasperated as Gristle, and I wanted this to end right now. “If indeed he is returning, he must think we have given up. So let us wait for him. Uninvited guests in his home.”

  Squatting next to a stand of thorny hawthorns, I outlined a plan and my friends listened. It was simple and direct, but it meant that someone would have to wait alone, cramped and cold, in the tunnel beneath Sweeney’s vile teach.

  Then I stood. Withdrawing my long knife, I quickly cut a length of hawthorn branch and put it through my belt. Not exactly a shillelagh, but it would serve. “Come, my friends. I will hear no more arguments. Let us capture this brute for once and for all. I have a wedding to attend.”

  Chapter 27:

  Owen Sweeney

  The hole was dank and smelled of sweat. Fighting against rising nausea, I slowed my breathing to less than half my normal intake of air. I could slow it even much more if necessary. I shifted my body a bit and withdrew my long knife from its sheath in my belt. I laid it close to the place where the tunnel came out on the floor of the teach above me. If I had to leave this hole quickly, I did not want the knife to catch and hold me.

  The length of hawthorn branch in my belt was clearly not a weapon, for it was thin and pliant—more like a wand or a switch—although studded with sharp, little thorns. I had seized it on a whim. It may help me in my aspect as Macha, I thought, even though I knew that Sweeney was not a superstitious man. I resolved that today I would change his way of thinking.

  I ran back in my mind what I knew about hawthorn. Grandfather had told me that it had been used since ancient times to induce sleep by slowing the beating of the heart. I would not need that property of the plant. I remembered, though, what I had heard from the monks at the hill of Macha—that the superstitious thought it was a guide to the underworld. I am already in the underworld, I thought wryly. May this hawthorn guide me to the light.

  The monks had also told me that Christ’s crown was constructed of a hawthorn branch, very like the one I had now. So it was held sacred not just by the people of Éire, but by the Christian devout. To me, it was a sign of good fortune.

  I lay still and quiet, thankful for the fox-skin tunic and long leather leggings that kept the damp chill from seeping into my bones. I thought about the deployment of Liam and the clansmen, the Keepers, and my other friends. They were lined up in the tunnel, completely hidden, their bulky bodies barely able to fit in the hollowed out space. I had already instructed Glaed on the virtues of slow breathing, and I was sure he reminded his men how to survive in their new underground hiding place.

  When the riders approached to inspect the little bally, as I was sure they would do, they would find quiet, deserted buildings. We had deliberately left the doors of the barracks and the teach hanging open, creaking and yawning in the wind. Jay had used his ancient skill to cover all traces of the tunnel portal next to Sweeney’s clay house. Jay himself lay hunkered in the stone hovel, and I prayed that Sweeney’s men would be too stupid to inspect a tiny prison. If they discovered him, he could and would defend himself—but at the expense of our surprise attack.

  The only living things the advance riders would find—if indeed they looked that high—would be a couple of dark, crow-like birds perched on the thatched roof of the round-house, unusually silent and motionless, their heads cocked as if listening.

  The minutes crawled by. I reckoned that I had lain there about twenty minutes. Sunset was an hour away, perhaps a little more. I willed my thoughts to slow like my breath while I concentrated only on listening.

  And then I heard him.

  Sweeney’s voice was one I had never forgotten. It was penetrating and articulate, cold as a shard of ice. “You fools. Set me down easily. Bring my chair. Build me a fire.”

  At that moment I felt as though a knife blade had entered my throat, and I forgot all my control and discipline as I fought to breathe. The sounds of his men dragging the invalid chair across the boards and Sweeney’s own voice covered my terrified gasp. I shut my eyes—not tightly, but as if sleeping—and struggled to remember my old training. Slowly, slowly, my self-control returned until I felt again like a terrible warrior goddess, waiting to wreak havoc on the pitiful world of men.

  I heard the sounds of a fire crackling in the pit, and the clank of the metal cauldron against the grate. Obviously Sweeney’s men had snared him a meal, and they were now cooking it. I heard the sounds of three men breathing. One, measured and slow, was Sweeney. The others wer
e ragged and wheezing—Sweeney’s frightened men. They were terrified by him, I knew. More intelligent men would long ago have seized control of the cowardly cripple, but he had convinced them of his superiority, or he had another kind of hold on them that I could not imagine.

  After a while, Sweeney spoke again. “Leave me.”

  I heard the door being shut and the sound of Sweeney drawing the latch. I heard the rasp of his cart wheels against the floorboards and knew he had wheeled himself back to the table. Not to be tricked again, I strained to hear more than his own even breathing. No. His men really had left.

  Somehow the knowledge that I was alone with him was more daunting than my knowing the other two men were nearby. I heard the sounds of his noisy slurping and chewing. I opened my eyes and peered through the tunnel with one quick glance, then ducked down again. I had seen pools of candlelight in three different places. The fire pit, I thought. And the table, and—where? Perhaps the floorboards near the bed.

  My quick look had revealed Sweeney with his elbows on the table and his mouth lowered to his trencher, shoveling food into his mouth. I had seen him do the same a year ago in his spacious brugh near Derry, when I pretended to be a penitent seeking Father Patrick and shelter for the night.

  Back then, he thought I was a duchess newly arrived from Deva Victrix—in truth my own duchy wrought from the grasp of the gross Duke—and he was sheltering me under my pretense that he would be rewarded handsomely for his gracious hospitality. If I had not been in hiding, I would have spat at that moment, thinking about the way his wolf-like mouth and his eyes seemed to devour me.

  I had come to him with the suspicion that he had enslaved my mother, and my conjecture had proved true. Before I could steal out of his locked brugh that night, I had been trapped with him, my back against the door of his murdered wife’s sleep chamber. That same feeling returned now—the realization that I was cornered by a ravening animal, and only guile and cunning would free me from his jaws.

  I put together the next sounds I heard into a picture of what was happening. Sweeney rolled his chair away from the table and over to his raised bed. He put his enormous arms on the sides of the bed and slowly dragged his body out of the cart and pulled his bulk onto the bed. I could even hear the way he grasped his lifeless legs and drew them onto the bed, the way they fell with a thud onto the hard, matted-down surface.

  The man had not bothered to wash, or take off his clothes, or even to instruct his lickspittles to change the reeds on his bed. He had sunk so low that he truly had become almost an animal. No wonder the stench of the room was so powerful. It was the fetid odor of uncleanness and of something else, almost inhuman.

  Dear God, I thought, he would have held my beloved Liam as he had held my mother, in a near grave. What a foul, murdering excuse for a man. I had worked myself into just the right mood to confront him. In one fluid motion I was out of the hole and standing over him, just out of arm’s reach, holding my long knife in front of me like a thin, cold shield.

  “You smell. The sea should have washed you clean,” I said, almost pleasantly. “Do not make any move at all, or I swear I will throw this knife straight into your heart.”

  Sweeney glared at me from his pitiful bed. His hollow, dark eyes snapped and glittered, and his knife-thin mouth stretched into a hideous smile. “Duchess,” he said in a mock-polite tone to match my own. “What a remarkable surprise. May I offer you a cup of wine?”

  “You are already a dead man,” I said reasonably. “So my killing you now would be little noted by an uncaring world.” His right arm twitched just a little. “Do not move even a muscle,” I said quickly. “Unless you would test me.”

  He laid his head back, his dark hair falling away from his face, his prominent Adam’s apple moving in weary reply. “Your precious clan friends have stripped me of all I held dear. So go ahead. Kill me now.”

  “You are either crazy or a fool,” I said, my voice taking on an edge that frightened even me. “Your murder of your own wife, your unspeakable treatment of human slaves—that is what stripped you of what you once held.”

  I saw him raise his head as if to appraise my warrior readiness. I shifted into a part-crouch and changed the knife into my other hand. “Test me, Sweeney,” I grated, and he laid his head back again.

  “At least let me sit up, so that we can converse more easily.”

  “No,” I replied evenly—even reasonably, I thought. “Tell me how you escaped certain death, and I will let you live a bit longer while I listen.”

  I knew that Sweeney, like all men who see themselves as powerful and special, would relish the idea of boasting about how skillfully he had escaped a death sentence.

  “Very well—duchess. I seem to be surrounded perpetually by stupid people. The ones who bound me and lowered me into a currach were no different. My bindings were clumsy and loose, and the currach was set into shallow water, for they were too stupid or lazy to tow it to treacherous, deep waters before they left me for dead.

  “In a matter of moments, I had freed myself from the ropes. My own arms, trained to incredible strength, became my paddles. It was a simple matter of paddling myself along the near shore of the Lough Foyle, where they had abandoned me, and up the coast to the Bay of Trawbreaga.

  “I was soon found by a group of rude sheep herdsmen. I weaved a simple lie about losing my way, and the fools took me in. They fed me and clothed me, even rebuilt my wheeled cart for me, larger and better.”

  He managed to look smug, even as I stood by him with a finely honed long knife. “Tell me of your brilliant scheme to take the high king’s son,” I said, my voice almost soothing.

  “That plan had been in my mind from the moment I was taken by MacCool and his henchmen. I would have taken MacCool, out of sheer hatred—but who would pay a copper for his worthless hide? I had time to wait and plan, all the while the young fool O’Neill galloped all over my own former property, driving my own stolen cattle. It was not hard to begin to plan for his downfall.

  “Yes, young Duchess of Deva, I knew that he returned to Derry with you, for my men have been watching your teach for a long time. They knew the precise moment when to attack and run. They had been given a brilliant plan by none other than Owen Sweeney, and our success was assured.”

  “Then what went wrong?” I asked, still soothing him with my voice, urging him to continue.

  “My men failed to signal as we had carefully planned.”

  So, I thought, we were undone—momentarily—by a simple smoke signal. If we had waited until Liam was in his clutches, we could have surrounded Sweeney and demanded surrender. But in the meantime, would Sweeney have allowed Liam to live through the ordeal? I would never know for sure.

  “So you knew we watched you from the bluff,” I said.

  “Of course. It was the only vantage point you had. That is why my holdings were here, on a great sweep of desolate, rocky beach. That is why I had my men scratch and dig for six months or more to construct a means of escape. And you and your minions were fooled.” He laughed, almost as though he had actually won the match.

  “But we held your hostage,” I said, still wondering why he had not fought harder to keep his prize.

  “We would soon have another hostage,” he said. “Whether your lover boy, or one of his brothers. We would still have the king’s jewels between our squeezing fingers, if you take my meaning.”

  I stepped a bit closer to the bed, judging the range of his arms and hands, watching his eyes very closely. “It must have rankled to know that we were so close to your men’s heels. That we knew exactly where to find your holdings.”

  “Merely a temporary setback,” he said, his eyes gazing at the ceiling. He sounded, and acted, as though he were still somehow in control.

  “It seems to me, Sweeney, that you know not your enemy.” Now I put a deliberate taunt in my tone, and he raised up on his elbows, his eyes seeming to batter me. My long knife flashed, and a second later his right arm bore a long
, thin wound that began to drip blood. “I said do—not—move.”

  He fell back again onto the bed. “You know, Caylith,” he said, speaking my name for the first time in our conversation, “I seem to remember that you are a good Christian woman.”

  “As I said, Sweeney, you are legally dead. The Lord will forgive my making sure the law is carried out.”

  “Will he?”

  “Yes. Especially since he knows that the slave woman you treated so unspeakably was my own dear mother. And the hostage you held was my own betrothed. Yes—he will forgive me.” I flashed my long knife again, and I drew a line across the former one, making a great X on his muscle-bound arm.

  I cut and moved back at the same time, my warrior skills sharpened and ready. He himself had just reminded me of the incredible strength of his arms, and I would not take that strength for granted.

  “Before I call justice down on your dirty, greasy, miserable head, I would tell you a tale,” I said pleasantly.

  As if knowing that my very speech was delaying his own certain death, Sweeney looked up at me with his lively, intelligent eyes. I saw a flash of teeth that passed for a smile. “Tell me, duchess.”

  I reached my long knife to his invalid’s chair and caught the wheels with the edge, and I drew it toward me. Crouching, watching him closely, I used one leg to push the cart with all my strength toward the door. It hit the wooden door with a loud crash, and Sweeney seemed to quail as he heard it hit.

  “I talked with a certain high king not too many days past,” I began conversationally. “He seemed to think that his own formerly trusted minions were perhaps in the employ of—shall we say—a ready pretender to the throne.” I was lying, of course, but perhaps I was closer to the truth than I thought.

  I thought I saw Sweeney’s chin twitch, but I could have imagined it. “Perhaps one who holds the king’s, um, jewels so tightly is also holding the jewels of his deceitful advisors. Perhaps paying them in the uncertain coin of future promises. What do you think? Am I getting close to the truth?”