Lion of Ireland

CHAPTER ONE The little boy sat on the crown of a rocky hill, his thin arms hugging his scabby knees. He tilted his head back and gazed up into the immense vault of the sky, feeling wonderfully alone. To the youngest child of a large and brawling family, privacy is a rare thing. Brian always seemed to be walking in someone else's shadow. He had sought this hill because, at the moment, no one else claimed it, and he held his occupancy uncontested. In a tentative voice he addressed the darkening gray sky. "I am the king," he said, tasting the words. He heard no argument, so he repeated it. Louder. Standing up. "I am the king of all the kings!" he cried, throwing wide his arms to embrace as much as possible of his domain. * * * The tireless wind swept across the green land. It came driving inland from the sea, herding a flock of rain clouds before it and releasing them at last above the wooded hills and granite mountains. Even before the rain fell the air was saturated, heavy and rich with a wetness like the moist breath of babies. Ferns in their dark hollows burned with an emerald flame; the curving flanks of the mountains glistened, polished; the air smelled of life and death and growing things. Under the cairns and dolmens, within the ruined ring forts and passage graves, deep in the mossy, haunted earth, ghosts stirred. Giants and heroes and cowards slept their thousand year death in the ancient soil and were aware in their powdered bones of the coming of another spring. * * * Brigid came to find him, of course. Even the littlest boy had tasks to perform, and Brian was assigned to guard the flock of tame geese that nibbled grass along the banks of the Shannon. Cennedi had no small daughters to be goose-girls. "Aha, here you are!" Brigid crowed as he came up over the breast of the hill. "Never where you're supposed to be, are you? Your mother's geese could be in a wolf's belly by now for all the good you've been to them." She reached out to pinch his shoulder and give him a shaking, but Brian backed away. He was not about to accept punishment from a girl who was merely the daughter of his father's herdsman. "The geese are all right," he told her confidently, trying to shade his boyish treble so that she would recognize it as a kingly voice. "I can protect them; I can protectallthis!" He gestured expansively to indicate his kingdom. But Brigid was a hard-working girl with chores of her own, resentful at being summoned from them to fetch an errant child, and she had no interest in a little boy's pretend world. She stood before him with her hands on her hips, her tangled chestnut hair whipped about her face by the rising wind. "And how would you be knowing they're all right, when you probably haven't laid eyes on them all afternoon? You come with me right now, and we'll try to get them back to Boruma before this storm blows them away." She extended a red-knuckled hand to him and, after a brief hesitation, he took it. The two of them started down the hill as the first drops of rain splattered about them. Brigid checked her stride and looked at the little boy. "And did you come out with no warm clothes? What have you done with your bratt?" Brian stared blankly up into her stern face, then looked around him. A few yards distant, crumpled and forgotten, lay his bratt, the heavy cloak that was a necessity in the damp climate. Until Brigid mentioned it he had been unaware of the cold, but suddenly the red wool looked inviting. He retrieved it quickly and handed it to her to pin around him with the silver brooch that was his only personal wealth. The wind, which seemed to have been waiting until theLlywelyn, Morgan is the author of 'Lion of Ireland' with ISBN 9780765302571 and ISBN 0765302578.