When once he had completed his rather rushed holy rites. Father Mochtae looked up and said. “Oh, ye of little faith. Never you fear. Your Grace, God will provide us a new and a better Righ for Ulaid.”
Not anticipating taking the hideously heavy and unwieldy guns and trucks back the way they had been brought with any real relish. Walid Pasha put men to making of suitable timbers and boards that had been used in the defenses and entrenchments rafts to be towed and guided by polemen down the Ban as far as the ruins of Coleraine, where they could then be gotten back aboard Revenge with far less trouble and strain.
When the rafts were ready, they were dragged out to water deep enough to float them and launched, then pulled close up to the side of the strongest-looking pier and there tied in place securely while the seamen speedily erected a strong beam and support and stapled and lashed to the beam a huge iron pulley.
Four of the long, wide rafts had been fully laden and were being poled out to Cassius. that the towlines might be rove, when Sirs Ali, Ugo. and Roberto di Bolgia rode up. dismounted, and wandered to the land end of the dock to observe the process being done by a mixed work gang of seamen, ship’s officers, marine fighters, and Ulaidians. When tired, sweaty hands seemed to be slipping on a guiding line in the lowering of the bronze tube of a massive thirty-two-pounder demicannon. Sir Roberto hurriedly kicked off his jackboots and ran out onto the wet, mud-slimy, uneven boards to add his strength to the task. Halfway to the work crew, his feet slipped in a muddy puddle and, all the while snarling foul Italian curses and blasphemies, the big, hefty man plunged feet-foremost into the peat-murky water that lapped against the uneven line of pilings.
As he splashed into the water of Lough Neagh’s north-em shallows. Sirs Ali and Ugo, Walid Pasha, and the entire work crew paused in place to have a hearty laugh. But Sirs Ali and Ugo, who had come out onto the ill-built pier at a slower and more cautious pace, ceased to laugh and make broad jests at and to their unfortunate companion when he snarled and spoke.
“Damn your wormy lights, you sons of sows, help me out of here. Something’s stabbed me in the sole of my foot, down in that muck. I can’t reach the fornicating thing!”
Hearing the words, Walid Pasha brought a rope, and once Sir Roberto had got a good hold on it. they three and a couple of Ulaidians easily drew him up and out and onto the pier, dripping thick mud and water.
Squatting beside the soaked knight. Sir Ali grasped one of his muddy ankles and. after a moment, drew the long pin of a brooch from Sir Roberto’s sole just under the arch of the left foot.
Whistling softly, he held the brooch on the palm of his hand, saying, “A lucky fisher you are, my fine Italian friend. If I am not blind, this thing that came out stuck to your foot is pure gold, heavy stuff, too, and set with what look much like small rubies, six of them. Now, what’s gotten into these men, Walid?”
The two Ulaidians, upon seeing the brooch, even before Sir Ali had pulled it free, had dropped to their knees and were shouting a spate of Gaelic words to their fellows still working. The only words any of the non-Irish could understand were “Righ” and “Ulaid.”
CHAPTER
THE TWELFTH
In a windowless, doorless, stone-walled, -floored, and -ceilinged room well hidden within the recesses of the Ard-Righ’s royal palace at Lagore, Brian the Burly sat once again in his backless arm-stool at the table on which rested a velvet-lined tray taken from the only unlocked and opened chest of all the many lining the walls of the strongroom.
Where once, not too long ago, only two of the oddly shaped depressions sunk into the tray had been filled, now five were occupied, with but three still gaping empty, and so one would have expected Brian VIII, Ard-Righ of Eireann, to be pleased with himself and with recent events, but such was not the case, far from it, in fact.
Poking roughly at a diamond set in a ring of heavy gold that filled one of the depressions, Brian snarled like some wild beast, talking to the otherwise empty chamber as if to another person.
“I had thought—and that not too long since, either— that never would you grace this tray with your presence, you Sassenach pretender, yet here you are, for all the good your ownership does me or can do me or will do me. But who would ever, could ever have imagined that a Jewel— the long-centuries-lost original Jewel of Ulaid. having lain hidden in the mire and peat of Lough Neagh for near a full millennium—would’ve suddenly appeared, reappeared in this world of men, sunk into the foot of a damned Italian knight-for-hire, fulfilling to the very letter a prophecy made who knows how many hundreds of years ago? Hell, it makes one almost believe in the old religion that gave genesis to such arrant nonsense.
“Sir Roberto di Bolgia, Righ of Ulaid—the very words are enough and more to make a shit-eating dog puke. I hope the Italian swine gets the damned black-rot from the wound that that blasted Jewel put in his foot! Damn him and his damned impudence to the deepest, hottest, foulest pits of hell, anyway! The sly. backbiting by-blow bastard of a Satan-spawn Italian proceeds to send this now-valueless—well, for my purposes, valueless—piece of shit to me by way of Sir Ugo D’Orsmi, along with a letter written as if to an equal in rank, saying that in a short while, when he has settled affairs in his kingdom, he will consider whether or not to continue the practice of exchanging hostages with me and the other kings and advise me in due time of his decision on the matter.
“The southern-bred pig! Why, not long since he was squatting in Corcaigh with the rest of the honorless mercenaries sent to Munster by the Jew-shrewd Cardinal D’Este to foil my then plans. Now, thanks entirely to a stroke of luck so incredible that a superstitious man might think he’d signed a pact with Satan—and maybe he did, I’ve long thought that Satan was certain to be an Italian, if not a Moor, pest take them all!—this foreign trespasser on the sacred soil of Holy Eireann is being hailed by every caste of the people of Ulaid as the authentic. God-sent king that will restore their lands to the power and the glory they think their distant ancestors enjoyed. Pah, the fools are all self-deluded; Ulaid was never one of the original Fifths, only a part of one.”
Knotting up his right hand into a fist, he slammed its scarred knuckles into his hard thigh once, twice, thrice, each time harder than that preceding, the pain and action helping him to drain away his righteous indignation and rage.
Then, almost wistfully, he said, “This new, alien Righ might at the very least have sent me the real, the ancient Jewel of Ulaid, for surely his brother. Dux Timoteo di Bolgia, has told him of my needs, my high aspirations of completely uniting all of Eireann, of making my kingdom a force as strong in the world as the Empire or as Rome herself. It would’ve been returned to him . . . eventually. Well, at least he would’ve received back a facsimile so perfectly wrought by my goldsmiths that no one not knowing exactly what to look for and exactly where to look could’ve told the difference between the old and the new. And I would never have told a living soul of the substitution . . . unless the time came that I thought it best for Ulaid and Eireann that he be deposed and replaced.”
His finger, that same finger that had stabbed so cruelly hard at the nearby diamond thumb ring, now moved to gently, lovingly caress a large golden brooch of ancient workmanship. It centered a lustrous sapphire, and four isosceles triangles, formed by lines of much smaller sapphires, lay at each point—north, south, east, and west—of the larger, roundish central stone.
“That’s what I did for you, my sweet, my lovely,” he crooned to the bauble of stones and cold metal. “That’s why you still are here, safe with me, you know. Your replacement took a bit longer than I’d thought it would, when first I envisioned it; the goldwork was not difficult, it had long been roughed out and waiting only the finishing and careful comparison with yours, but the stones I had gathered were mostly of the wrong shade and I had the devil’s own time speedily finding enough others of the proper shade, but it’s all done now, and you’re safe, you’ll stay here, with me, in your velvet bed, unless there be more trouble with Munster, of course, and I need to prove the new king, this Righ Sean FitzRobert, was never truly coronated by the ancient rites and therefore cannot, has not ever truly been, Righ of Munster and Ri of FitzGerald. So, sleep you well, my pet.”