Read Online Dublin by Edward Rutherfurd - Free Book Online Page A

magical feast of Samhain. Some years this took place at the great ceremonial centre of Tara; other years it was held at other places. At Samhain the excess livestock would be slaughtered, the rest put out on the wasteland and later brought into pens, while the High King and his followers set off on their winter rounds. Until then, however, it was a slow and peaceful time. The harvest was in, the weather still warm.
      It should, for the High King, have been a time of contentment.
      He was a swarthy man. His dark blue eyes looked out from under the broad crags of a pair of bushy eyebrows. Though his face was reddened by a network of tiny veins, and his square, once closely sinewed body was thickening, there was still a certain vibrant energy about him. His wife, a large, fair-haired woman, had been sitting enveloped in silence for some time. At last, just as the slowly sinking sun had passed behind a cloud, she spoke.
      "It is two months."
      He did not answer.
      "It is two months," she repeated, "two months since you made love to me." Is it?
      "Two months." If she had heard the irony in his tone, she ignored it.
      "We must do it again, my dearest," he continued, falsely. There had been plenty of lovemaking once; but that was long ago. Their sons were all full grown. A short pause followed while he continued to stare over the temporarily sombre landscape.
      "You do nothing for me," she said morosely.
      He waited, then made a small click with his tongue.
      "Will you look there?" He pointed.
      "What is it?"
      "Sheep." He watched them with interest. "There's the ram now." He smiled with satisfaction. "It is a hundred sheep he can service."
      There was a snort from the queen, followed by silence.
      "Nothing!" she suddenly burst out. "A soft, wet little finger of a thing. That is all I get! Nothing a woman can get hold of. I've seen a fish that was stiffen I've seen a tadpole that was bigger." The outburst was not entirely true, as they both of them knew; but if she hoped to shame him, his face remained serene. She snorted again. "Your father had three wives and two concubines. Five women and he could manage them all." The people of the island saw no virtues in monogamy. "But you…" "That cloud is almost off the sun now."
      You're no use to me.
      "And yet," he took his time, speaking meditatively, as though discussing a historical curiosity, "we must remember that I have serviced a mare."
      "So you say.
      "Oh, the thing was done. I could not be sitting here otherwise."
      The initiation ceremony when a great clan elected a new king on the island went back into the mists of time and belonged to a tradition found amongst the Indo-European peoples from Asia to the western outliers of Europe. In this ceremony, after a white bull had been killed, the king-to-be must mate with a sacred female horse. It is explicit both in the legends of Ireland and the temple carvings of India. Nor was the business as difficult as might be supposed. The mare in question was not large. Held by several strong men, her hindquarters suitably spread, she was presented to the future king who, so long as-by whatever means-he could be aroused, would have no great difficulty in penetrating her. It was a fitting ritual for a people who, since they emerged from the Eurasian plains, had depended for their leadership upon men who were wedded to the horse.
      Whether the queen was thinking about the mare or not was hard to say; but after a little time she spoke again, in a low voice.
      "The harvest was ruined."
      The High King frowned. Involuntarily he glanced back inside the empty hall, where the three-faced head was gazing out from its totem pole into the surrounding shadows.
      "That is your fault," she added.
      And now the High King pursed his lips. For this was politics.
      The High King was very good at politics. When he put his arm round a man's shoulder, that man was always his to command-or