A smile spread over Forgall’s features. “Aye,” he muttered low, and he lifted his blade on high so that all his men saw. Then he sheathed it.
Silent men of Leinster began to move among sleeping cattle and used spear-hafts as goading staves. Then came forward darling Bress Mac Keth. Before him walked a Meathman, at sword’s point.
“Thisun drank not deeply enough, Forgalclass="underline" Or vomited it up, more like.”
“One sound,” Forgall muttered, “and you die.”
“So I told him,” Bress muttered, and the prisoner started, feeling swordpoint at spine.
Forgall drew steel. “Bind him. Gag him. You, my glaze-eyed friend of Meath, will be after telling your fellows precisely what took place here.” Forgall smiled tightly. His sword held the Meathish weapon-man now, whilst Bress bound the fellow-with unnecessary tightness, of course.
“If these drunken sots ever awaken,” Forgall said, “do ye be telling them-and His Arrogance the High-king-that was Forgall Mac Aed of Athmore and Carman who did this… along with his sword-companion Partha Mac Othna. And it’s the king of Leinster we both serve, little fellow.
Bound hand and foot and gagged with cloth and cord, the single wakeful Meathman was dumped to ground-his fall cushioned by two cow-piles of excellent size-and left. His comrades slept on. Weapons and shields not worn were piled on the ale-cart with surprising lack of noise. Smiling men ringed the vast herd of cattle, knowing the thousands would follow the hundreds once they were set moving. They started the beasts amove, southward. The Leinstermen even repossessed their ale-cart, piled now with spears and shields, axes and swords, and a few helmets.
The ale had not been sufficient to keep these men of the High-king asleep throughout the raid, however silent; was Cormac’s suggestion of the druid-learned soporific that accomplished the snorey slumber, and all his comrades knew it.
Several cages of fowls the Leinsterman left, and Forgall stood over the dung-besmirched man they had gagged and trussed.
“The birds we leave. Tame fowls. It’s feathers you fine warriors will be eating, without beef or milk, when Lugaid on Tara-hill learns of what happened here this night!”
Laughing, the Leinstermen tramped south behind their cart. Brain, Cormac mused had prevailed over blade.
Chapter Eleven:
Samaire
News of the deed reached Carman before the doors themselves.
General Fergus’s men arrived to cheers, and to the discovery that a celebration had been arranged in their honour. The feast was being laid on by King Ulad Ceannselaigh himself. It would be held in the Assembly-house, to accommodate the remainder of Forgall’s Fifty-and its nine new members. For craft and guile had ever been highly respected and loved in Eirrin.
However excited and anticipatory, Forgall’s men and the rest of the army took almost at once to their beds. There most spent the greater part of the next twenty hours.
Then it was up to bathe and see to their hair, with Cond much in demand, and clean their boots; in high jocularity they referred to their preparations as prettying themselves for society. The while, the men of Forgall laughed and shouted jests and threats and called one another flatha: warrior-nobles. And then they trooped into Carman, and were cheered through the streets.
In clean unwrinkled shirt or long-sleeved tunic each man walked, with leggings of his choice over tight breeches of white linen tucked into newly-gleaming boots. Ceremoniously they carried their polished helms, and each wore his best cloak and brooch and bunne-do-ats.
The Feis-tech was Leinster’s greatest hall. Present for the celebration of a Leinsterish victory over Tara were nobles from Carman and elsewhere in the realm, and the poets and historians, minstrels and mages. Finely coiffed and bejewelled ladies, too, had come to do honour on the men who had outfoxed the High-king’s men-and returned five thousand cattle. The hall was scintillantly ablaze with richly-dyed robes, with buckles and ornaments of silver and gold, with pearls and gemstones, with coloured bits of glass and brilliant enamel-work, all flashing in the light of more candles and torches than any had seen before in one place.
Musicians played. Nobles babbled to each other and to common soldiers no longer so common. Servants scurried so that ale flowed like a mountain stream, foaming and bubbling.
Drisheen or black pudding there was, a rich mixture of entrails and blood; pork too in plenty, along with fresh-butchered beef (and jokes about its being the best-travelled beef in the history of Eirrin). The boards groaned beneath more side-dishes than most of Forgall’s men had known could exist. Among the red trout and cakes made of oaten meal, there was an abundance of the famed honey of Carman itself, and sloak and dulse from the nearby sea, as well as its game: millicks, or periwinkles still in their shells, scallops and the meaty black sole. To wash all down the hall fair swam in good brown ale, and beer made from wheat and honey, and that different drink also made from honey and called mead.
Ladies and their daughters wore crimson dyes on their nails, the black or deep blue of berries on their eyebrows, and other vegetable dyes here and there to enhance their faces-or so at least they thought, those noble women of Leinster. Golden rings or hollow balls of gold bound hair braided and curled to hang in dangling spirals; others wore their thick manes up, held by pins and pearls of gold. Soldiers-aye, and others who fancied themselves more sophisticated-goggled at the wife of one king’s cousin: she had dyed and bleached her hair so that it was an impossible silver-white. Some of these women of metropolitan Carman, Cormac noticed, even wore their beautiful combs of bone or horn. All the people of his isle were fond of their hair and its care, and their combs, but this style of making combs into ornaments was a new one to the youth from Connacht.
With winter-tide gone from the earth and summer not yet here, the well-born and high-placed of Leinster wore silks and satins and furs, along with light linens and heavier woolens. A filay or poet from Athaircthech over near Osraige affected clothing of peasantish russet-and displayed himself well, as he stood out among the sumptuously attired throngers.
Many wore the peallaid- originally a sheepskin and now a long strip of cloth adorned with stripes that crossed to form a design called plaide.
Fresh rushes crackled and hissed underfoot and the candles flickered so that the marvelous figures that decorated the wall-hangings seemed to roam and gambol on those huge panels of white linen.
Much in evidence all about was the superb work of the needles of Eirrin’s women and the delicate, brilliant work of jewel and metal-smiths. Clothes and ornaments, were broidered and purfled and picked out in sindle-whorls and fretwork, spirals and enamel inlays. Beside Cormac, Cas remarked the fact he’d looked at seven noble necks ere he saw a plain torc, and Cormac advised the farmer’s son that these people possessed more than one of those neck-ringing badges of Celtdom. Most he saw were indeed ornate, worn only for dress occasions, and among them were those that wore gold lunulae or bore pendent sun-disks.
Cormac saw too more than one man, and woman, and girl and boy, who wore the necklace of good fortune: garnets and jet beads strung on gold or silver wire. And despite winter’s being surely beyond the point of a surprise return, he saw two who were still wary of colds, for each wore the foot of a hare around his neck.
Rich clothing and precious metals and jewels blazed, in the Feis-tech.
Cormac was hardly the only blue-shirted guest who could not control the constant swiveling of his neck and his eyes that were bright in their sockets. He saw that the women much noted one another, too. It was just, he realized, that they were more circumpsect about it, as if afraid of being seen appraising or envying one another.