All during the dining and drinking, relays of musicians strummed and tootled and thumped and droned. Between courses, there were bears wrestling and otherwise performing, tumblers, jugglers, knifethrowers, dancers of differing types, a sword-swaliower, a fire-eater, two bards competing to come up with the funniest or most shocking doggerel verses extemporaneously in Gaelic, a sleight-of-hand performer, some dancing dogs, and several pairs of fighting cocks.
The piece de resistance, whole roasted wild boar, was borne in to the accompaniment of two drummers and a war piper in royal livery. The full-throated pipes were deafening in the confines of the stone walls, and the drones brought the hairs prickling erect on the back of Bass’s neck, bringing back to mind that terrible night of terror and blood and death when he and his squadron of English and Welsh heavy horse had held the waggon square against the attacks of the wild Highlander irregulars of King Alexander’s Scottish Army at Denham.
Bass and Wolfgang, as the highest-ranking nobleman, flanked the Righ at the high table. King Ronan and Wolfgang paired for dining, Bass paired with the lissome, pale-blond Bean-Righ, Deirdre. The girl appeared to be about fourteen or fifteen, was very pregnant, and spoke a fair amount of English, having been reared at the Ard-Righ’s court, one of his quasi-legitimate (that is, illegitimate but recognized) daughters. Conversation with the merry girl imparted to Bass that not only was she a daughter of Brian VIII, but she was a second cousin of Righ Amladh IV of Laigin and a great-granddaughter of the famous Prince Emmett Ui Mail de Tara, he who first had made the prized Tara Steel.
At this, Bass could not help squirming a little, uncomfortably, for he still bore that very man’s gold-hilted Tara-Steel sword and his dagger and his matched pair of wheellock pistols, all of them garnered from the Prince’s corpse after a battle in England. At the time, he had not known the dead man’s identity or rank; that knowledge had come much later from the mouth of Harold of York, who had been projected to this world and time almost two centuries ago along with Emmett O’Malley, from the twenty-first-century world that had developed the projector. The dead man’s ring, which Bass had worried from off his cold, livid finger-—that worn-down band that had borne the letters reading MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY CLASS OF 1998—he had given to the Archbishop of York, once known, in another world and time, as Dr. Harold Kenmore.
That body had not even been granted the final dignity of a grave, but after being stripped by others of anything still usable, had been thrown into the cold sea along with all of the other corpses of the Irish Crusaders found upon that beach, food for nameles sea-beasts.
The feast itself reminded Bass to some extent of those well-remembered days and nights of feasting and drinking and good-fellowship with old Sir John Heron, Sir Francis Whytfler, Buddy Webster, and the rest at Heron Hall, before the invading Scots Crusaders had razed that place of good cheer and butchered its inhabitants.
The first course, put on the tables all at once, as were all the succeeding courses, consisted of tiny pasties full of codfish liver or beef marrow, a brewet of sliced pork in a spicy sauce, greasy fritters of more beef marrow, eels in a ginger-flavored aspic, bream fillets in a watery green sauce of herbs, a baron of tough and stringy beef for each pair of diners, boiled shoulders of pork and veal, and, to bring the course to an end, a seven-foot sturgeon, cooked whole and served with the skin replaced, surrounded by bowls of a sauce that Bass thought would have made a Mexican or Korean homesick, so hot was it.
But the sauces were all that arrived at low table or high table hot. All of the dishes served were cold on arrival, thick and tacky with globules of congealed fat afloat in the sauces. The wines—these only at the high table, the other tables furnished with ewers of beer and ales—were no cooler than was the room or cellar in which they had been stored: furthermore, as in England, Bass noted that no one seemed to have heard of serving of a certain color or sweetness of wine with a particular kind of meat or fish; the ewers were borne by cupmen who filled and refilled drinking vessels with whichever of the potables each nobleman or -woman demanded.
Far sooner than he was ready for more food, Bass saw the boar borne in with its accompaniment of pipe and drums. Behind it, servants brought poached trout and loach, a broth of bacon and onions, a tile of chicken and pork in a spicy sauce and garnished with whole almonds and crayfish, pasties filled with goose liver or fish roe or the flaked flesh of bream or eels, and at last a monstrous caldron of blamanger—shredded chicken and whole barley grains simmered to a consistency of library paste in almond milk with salt and honey and anise and garnished with fried almonds.
There was another hiatus of drinking and entertainment which included an appearance by the coun filid, Dungal Ui Delbna, a rather short, paunchy, jowly man who, accompanying himself on a knee harp, sang a succession of rhyming verses in an archaic dialect of Gaelic. The verses went on and on and on. carried musically enough on the filid’s fine tenor voice, but so many of them were there that Bass was certain the song never was going to end. Worse, he could only understand a few of the words, for he had yet to really master the Gaelic in current use, much less a form of the language that most likely had not been a commonly spoken tongue for who knew just how many generations. From what little he could understand, he took the verses to be a compilation of the deeds and misdeeds of the royal house of Airgialla—wars and raidings, victories and defeats, murders and executions and famous judgments handed down by kings and chiefs.
Bass had witnessed almost unbelievable prodigies of memory in the England of this world, but the plump Irish filid, who paused at times to generously wet down his throat with full goblets of wine, assuredly took the cake in the memory category. Bass could not for the life of him imagine how anyone could remember or so smoothly compose and deliver extemporaneously close to an hour and a half of verses.
After the filid, the bears were brought back to dance lumberingly to the tune of the piper and his brace of drummers. Then came yet another food course.
This time, the opening pasties were filled with pease paste, chicken lights simmered in broth, pork brains, a very salty meat paste with chopped raisins and spices, and what at first looked to Bass like worms in slime, but which his royal dining companion identified as whole baby eels in a clear thickened eel broth.
The came venison—both joints and racks, larded and roasted—with the inevitable accompaniment of frumenty, fritters of forcemeat with chopped onions and garlic, lampreys in a sauce that made the previous hot sauces seem exceedingly mild by comparison, roasted whole breams stuffed with breadcrumbs and chopped mussel*, whole capons stewed in broth with leeks and herbs and wine . . . and then came the sweets and fruits and nuts and honey-meads.
For all that he had eaten far more lightly than the Bean-Righ or. indeed, any other personage at the high table, Bass felt stuffed—so very uncomfortably stuffed that he fleetingly regretted that the ancient Romans never had mvaded Ireland and introduced the practice of the vomitorium—and, despite the hideous quantities of food he had forced himself to consume, he felt very tiddly and not a little drowsy. He now could easily understand how the filid and not a few of the more mature men and women of the court of Airgialla had gotten so fat, and he wondered how long the young king and his queen would retain their youthful slenderness on such overabundance of food and drink.
Although the sun was not yet fully below the horizon for more than a very few minutes, the serious drinking commenced immediately all of the ladies had departed. Bass drank as little as he could; in courtesy to his royal host, he had to drink some. When he saw a man of about his own age—he could not recall the terribly scarred and fattening man’s name, but did remember that he was a half-uncle of the Righ—wave frantically at the waiting line of cupmen and be quickly presented with a container that looked a bit like an oversized chamberpot, into which he noisely regurgitated, Bass saw his salvation.
Once his own straining stomach was empty of its unaccustomed burden, he felt so much better that he actually could enjoy the next sips of strong Spanish wine, and an herbal cordial with an undertaste that hinted of spearmint was most refreshing. However, when Wolfgang, Righ Ronan, and certain others of his companions at the high table began to imbibe of mixtures of various wines and brandy, he decided it was high time that the Duke of Norfolk retired, and he made his goodnights. citing as excuses the long ride up from Lagore and certain old battle wounds that often plagued him of nights.