Pride of Lions Read Free Page B

But when her next cry came with chilling clarity, they all heard it.
    She screamed like a hare being torn apart by hounds. In that despairing shriek was all the grief and pain in the world.
    "I told you my father needs me!" Donough sobbed in anguish.
    In a matter of minutes camp was broken. The company set off at a hasty trot along narrow mountain trails, impelled by the memory of the ban shee's scream.
    The first light of a gray, bitterly cold Easter morning found them descending from the mountains toward Dublin. The veteran warriors said little to one another. Fear and superstition rode with them, embedded in their bones.
    Donough was also silent. His jaws were clamped tight on his anxiety, but his thoughts raced feverishly inside his skull.
    His father, his half-brothers by Brian's various women, his Dalcassian cousins--all the men who represented stability in his life--were in Dublin to fight the invaders.
    His mother was in Dublin too. Gormlaith, the antithesis of stability.
    Once they left the mountains, their route joined with the Slighe Cualann, one of the five major roads developed by King Cormac Mac Airt in the third century of the Christian era to bring commerce and tribute from every part of Ireland to his stronghold at Tara. The island had countless small roads composed of foot-beaten earth, called bothars, or cow roads, because they were the width of two cows, one lengthwise and one athwart. But these casual trails were hardly sufficient for the traffic Cormac had envisioned--
    hence the slighe.
    Originally constructed of oak logs laid down across timber supports, a slighe was designed to accommodate, two abreast, the war chariots once used by Gaelic champions. The passage of centuries had seen the disappearance of war chariots, although similar carts of wickerwork were still used for personal transportation by the nobility.
    Meanwhile wooden-wheeled traders'
    wagons had combined with the Irish weather to erode the slighe. Stones had been added to its bed from time to time so it would continue to provide a stable surface over mud and bogland, but it was very difficult footing for weary horses.
    Unthinkingly, Donough guided his horse onto the slighe. Ronan, directly behind him, reined his animal to one side and rode beside the slighe rather than upon it. The others followed his example.
    Donough noticed, but continued as he had begun, refusing to be instructed by his
    second-in-command.
    Ronan grinned to himself. Proud and stubborn; not surprising.
    As they drew closer to Dublin, the company began encountering refugees, big-boned, fair-haired people typical of the Scandinavian population of the city. The first ones they met were not prosperous Viking sea rovers, however, but three men and two women whose clothing identified them as members of the laboring class. The men wore tattered woolen coats and leggings that had been many times patched. The women, who might have been mother and daughter, were clothed in unfitted ankle-length gowns of coarse wool over shifts of equally coarse linen. Neither gown was ornamented with embroidery. Like all Vikings they wore shoes, but these were in bits and bound to their feet with string.
    They straggled to a halt and peered up at the horsemen, fear in their eyes. The two women held hands.
    "Are you from Dublin?" Donough demanded to know in an awkward mixture of aristocratic Irish and the Norse spoken by the inhabitants of Limerick, the only Vikings he knew. "What happened on Good Friday?" he asked urgently, leaning forward on his horse.
    The refugees gaped at him, slack-mouthed.
    Ronan, who was familiar with Dublin and its people, inquired in their own dialect, "Was there fighting on Freya's Day?"
    A scrawny man with soot ground into every pore had been staring openly at Donough's torc, the gold neck ring that identified him as a member of the chieftainly class. Now the man transferred his gaze to Ronan. "Yah, yah, fighting," he affirmed. He waved his arms.
    "Big battle at the