Pride of Lions Read Free

admitted.
    "That's why the Ard Ri assigned us to come south with you while the rest of them went to Dublin."
    "I thought so!" Donough exploded. "And I tell you, no one is needed to keep me safe.
    I can take care of myself! Am I not the same age my father was when he began fighting the Vikings?
    And am I not in command of this company? We're riding on to Dublin now, Ronan, and if that means we keep going throughout the night, so be it!"
    Below a flowing russet moustache, Ronan thrust forward a clean-shaven jaw. "If the Ard Ri were here right now," he said, "he would tear strips off you. He's famous for taking care of his warriors."
    Donough felt a momentary empathy with his oldest half-brother. Murrough frequently complained of having Brian Boru held up to him, an unattainable standard of perfection. The burden of such a father weighed heavily on his sons, particularly the eldest.
    Donough, the youngest, tried to imagine what his father would do in the same situation. Compromise, he decided. Compromise was one of the Ard Ri's most effective weapons, a lesson Murrough had never learned. But Donough would learn. He idolized Brian. It was his ambition to be just like him.
    "I'll strike a bargain with you, Ronan,"
    he offered. "You and the others ride on with me now until the wind changes. Whenever that happens, we will set up camp and have a rest before we go any farther."
    Ronan looked dubious. "What if the wind doesn't change?"
    "Surely it will, it's been shifting almost constantly for days. You yourself said you had never known it to be so unpredictable. Have we an agreement?"
    The veteran hesitated, to make it look as if he had a choice. "We do," he said at last.
    They mounted and rode on in gathering darkness, a weary band in saffron-dyed tunics and woolen mantles, bare-legged, cold, hungry.
    One of the warriors remarked, low-voiced, to Ronan, "You were afraid he'd go off without us and report us as deserters to his father."
    "I'm not afraid of Brian Boru," came the swift reply. "I tell you something for nothing --that lad's mother is the one to be feared."
    At the mention of Gormlaith a ripple of coarse laughter ran though the company. "If we let her baby ride off by himself and anything happened to him," Ronan elaborated, "she would put a fearful curse on the lot of us."
    "That Gormlaith is a curse all by herself,"
    another man said.
    No one disagreed.
    The night was bitterly black; the wind was icy. Neither moon nor stars lit the way. The sky was opaque with cloud.
    Sooner than he would have liked, Donough felt the wind shift, swinging around to blow straight out of the north. It had gained him a little more time, at least, and for that he was thankful. He signaled a halt and his men were sliding off their horses almost before he gave the order.
    They made camp in the lee of a massive stony outcropping that shielded them from the worst of the wind. With flints, one of the warriors struck sparks and made a fire of dry gorse and winter-killed bracken. They were too tired to forage, so contented themselves with eating bread and stringy dried venison from their supplies, then settled down to sleep.
    But Donough could not rest. He wandered around the perimeter of the campsite, listening to the snores of his men and the chewing of the hobbled horses as they grazed on mountain grass. The bitter wind tugged at the edges of the brat he wore, the heavy knee-length mantle fastened at the shoulder with a massive bronze brooch.
    Although he was angry with his father for putting him in what he considered to be a humiliating position, denied a part in the real fighting, most of his anger was reserved for his mother. If it were not for Gormlaith there would be no invasion to threaten an aging High King who should have been allowed to live out his remaining years in peace.
    Donough wanted to share those years with Brian Boru. He had not been allowed much time with his father while Brian and Gormlaith were married, for she had deliberately