CHAPTER NINE

Cú Gets the Show off the Ground

The continuing skirmish and screeching of the women in the garden was augmented by the angry voices of the men, trying vainly to interpret and assess the conflicting claims of the three warriors' wives.

Cúchulainn was the first to react to the situation, Emer as wife of the winning Champion must enter the building first. He placed an arm around her and whisked her away from the noisy dispute then ordered Laeg to come at once to his side.

"I need you to provoke my battle rage. I want to lift the building off its foundations so that Emer can roll underneath the wall. As this is happening you must keep the other two women from trying to follow her."

"But, Cúchulainn, the pains. What about the Cess Noínden Uladh? You have not the strength. And the pains? What about the pains?"

"Gone," grunted Cúchulainn, "thanks to Farroch now help me get this edifice off the ground."

"Right!"

Laeg answered as casually as if he had been asked to pour a drink for the raging and rather drunk Cúchulainn. The charioteer cleared his throat, scratched his head thoughtfully for a moment as he summoned his creative juices. Then licking his lips, began mercilessly to taunt the warrior. This was one of his duties, to release amazing strength from his mater's inner being by inducing battle rage.

"You useless bastard of Lú of the Long Hand, you couldn't lift a sack of goose down, let alone Bricriú's dining hall. You should have stuck to being a guard dog for Culainn the smith! If it hadn't been for him you'd be selling chicken shit door to door."

"Come on Laeg," snarled Cúchulainn impatiently, "you can do better than that."

Laeg took a deep breath, his lips shut into a thin line.

"Very well then, you pissed in your breeks yesterday when those Fomorians were hard on your cowardly heels. Why, I could smell you shitting yourself, you great big windbag. Then you quaked in your boots before Emer and were afraid to let her see the heads you brought back. You were afraid she'd make like your Mamma, hoist your tunic and smack your horrid smelly arse."

During this tirade of abuse, Cúchulainn kept his eyes shut tightly, teeth and fists clenched as he worked up his rage.

Already there was a faint halo around his head while beads of sweat appeared on his forehead. At last the halo suddenly blazed into a swelling, blindingly luminous cloud that so startled those around him that they fell back from him and most of the women fled screaming around the garden.

Just as the bellowing Cúchulainn was hunching his shoulders and digging under the wall with both hands, Sencha appeared at the doorway, arms outstretched imploringly.

"My dear people of Eamhain Macha," Sencha cried, "have you not learned to see through Bricriú's trickery of turning friend against friend? Return to the banquet table at once. Do not further shame your king and his kingdom."

The poet judge had come too late. As King Conor peered helplessly over Sencha's shoulder, Cúchulainn's rage was unstoppable, Emer's determination unyielding, Laeg's eruption of invective unquenchable and the warrior's hands had gained a purchase on the underside of the wall.

"Are you ready Emer?"

"I'm ready."

Emitting a roar that was part scream, part groan, the big Ulsterman lifted the entire hall three feet clear of its foundation.

Emer slid nimbly underneath and glided a few paces along the polished floor. As she did so, there was a deafening rending and tearing of masonry, a thunderous crashing of furniture and crockery, as the royal gallery, which was attached to the walls of the building tilted.

The glass chamber of Bricriú and Gráinne began first to slip, jerkily at first, and then to roll, gathering speed, towards the end of the gallery.

Bricriú and Gráinne clawed helplessly at the glass. When the leather hose and the bellows snapped free the contraption succumbed to gravity. As Cúchulainn's lift reached its zenith the runaway glass chamber crashed clean through a tall window, cleared the fort's perimeter wall and crashed into a defence ditch.

The instant Emer was safely inside Cúchulainn dropped his prodigious burden with a bellow of relief. The building fell with thunderous violence bringing some of the chandeliers crashing to the floor.

Before the falling wall, like a gigantic shutter, obscured his view, Cúchulainn noted briefly the look of horror on Conor's face. Bricriú's priceless edifice had fallen with such force that its foundations were now listing like a stricken ship.

Drunk though he was, Cúchulainn read the desperate questions in the king's eyes: How could he compensate Bricriú for the atrocious behaviour of his knights and their ladies? What of the reputation of his kingdom throughout the Gaelic world? Was he himself to be for ever impugned by history as the weak ruler whose rule collapsed and whose kingdom disintegrated into anarchy?

A total silence ensued as the onlookers struggled to come to terms with what they had just witnessed. Inside the hall fallen men, slipping and sliding on spilled food, drink and shattered tableware, scrambled to their feet. Gasps of amazement began to break the silence. These gave way to murmurs of amazement which in turn swelled to a buzz of wonderment and finally into a clamour of bewilderment.

Bricriú, covered in mud, his screams of rage rising above the chatter of the crowd, climbed out of the ditch, eyes popping, his mud-caked face a terrifying mask of wrath, as he dragged a bedraggled Gráinne with him.

"Right! That's it! No more wine until my building is restored to its pristine state. Can an injured and insulted man be more generous than that?"

When the men heard and relayed Bricriú's threat that drinking would be stopped until the palace was straightened they immediately, though in a disordered, perfunctory way at first, set about the work of restoration. As some kind of emergent leadership asserted itself they lined up facing the wall and, at a signal, bent and tried to get a grip under it. As this venture became the focus of attention a team of solicitous maidservants quickly surrounded the befouled Gráinne and conducted her to her quarters.

Bricriú, hands on hips, eyes blazing, thin lips quivering, oily red locks in disarray, stood over them and growled incoherently. One of his servants arrived with a small sand glass. Bricriú took it in his right hand and shook it threateningly at the men.

"This here is a cooking timer from my kitchen. I'm going to invert it and place it here on the ground. I am placing you under a solemn geas. You have, in the time it takes to cook half a King's measure of oxtail soup, to get those walls plumb and the floors level. If you fail, this feast is cancelled."

A manservant handed him a towel with which he mopped his face, then he drew a long, noisy breath through his nose. Inverting the timing glass he placed it on the ground and hissed:

"You will continue the work however long it may take until the task has been completed to my satisfaction."

A great groan arose from the men at the enormity of such a demand and at the burden of honour the geas laid upon them. To violate a geas would be unthinkable. Many maintained that a broken geas always brought disaster to the one who failed to honour it.

Then Cúchulainn flexed his biceps at the dispirited men, and bellowed for them to stand clear, pulling and pushing those nearest to him out of his way.

"Of course we can fix it. When I lift the foundations and the walls with them, I want you men, and women, to fill the hollow underneath the foundations as fast as you can with anything you can lay your hands on."

Then, spitting on the palm of each of his hands in turn, he squatted down, hands searching yet again for a grip, Laeg bent over him rapidly whispering vile insults in his ear.

"Come on you drunken bag of fart gas. A one-legged hag could lift this hut with one hand. I bet you would rather be dancing with Ginger Rogers. Oh, yes. I could see the lovelight in your eye as he held you close. You like the rough, craggy type."

Cúchulainn's halo began to glow again. The glow grew to a blinding light and the light to a fiery blaze that once more drove the onlookers back with fright. Then, ordering all of them to stand clear, Cúchulainn, straightening his legs and his back, lifted the palace, complete with foundation. The whole company of Eamhain Macha, men and women, responded with admirable alacrity.

Some of them, again both men and women, hurried into the hall and began to clear up the mess of broken furniture and crockery, fallen chandeliers, spilled food and shards of plaster from the once ornate ceiling. The craftsmen of Eamhain Macha soon had a web of larch poles ascending the walls and traversing the ceiling and had set about the work of restoration. On the ground men and women mixed plaster. Others gathered the myriad gems that had come off walls and ceiling in readiness for their repositioning.

Likewise outside in the garden, the guests had reacted with astonishing unanimity and ingenuity. They formed a human chain from the rear door, across the flower gardens to a long dry-stone wall that divided the flower garden from an apple orchard. The wall was quickly and efficiently dismantled and passed rapidly, stone by stone, hand to hand, to the waiting team of men lined up along the wall of the leaning hall of Dún Rodhraighe.

Inside the door Potchacarey had jury-rigged an elaborate plumb-bob. It consisted of a sword suspended by a cord from a tripod of spears mounted on a huge silver dish.

The alchemist had made a cross at the centre. This point he located in accordance with the findings of a three-hundred-year-old Greek druid by the name of Euclid. First he drew a circle within which he drew a chord. With a pair of dividers and a straight-edge he bisected the chord at right angles to establish a diameter. Finally he bisected the diameter to discover the centre. Bent over this device, Potchacarey signalled to Cúchulainn at intervals to lower and raise the building to and from its growing bed of stones.

As the work progressed, Potchacarey's assistants relayed their master's directions to Cúchulainn of when to set the hall down, when to raise it again, and to the team of ad hoc stonemasons, where to add or subtract from the fillings each time Cúchulainn lifted.

Cúchulainn's striving sent rivulets of sweat down his face and neck. These, he complained, combined to form a river that has turned the cleavage of his buttocks into a mini mill-race, soaking his breeks and fouling his boots. The deepening red of his face set off the snow-whiteness of his bared and clenched teeth like a pearl cluster in a mahogany jewel case. Veins stood out on his forehead like blue ropes and his eyes bulged like nascent eggs. To add to the terrifying aspect of his contorted face and grotesquely hunching body he was roaring at his aching muscles as though they were faltering labourers in need of goading.

Laeg augmented the process with his stream of creative invective. The blaze of the Ulsterman's rage-halo waxed and waned as his strength ebbed and flowed.

He opened one agonised eye and glanced at the timing glass.

The stones kept up their clattering, rasping and clonking as the men flung them into the space under the foundations or removed them according to the relayed instructions from Potchacarey. Sencha and King Conor held their breath as they watched the tiny pinch of sand in the glass diminish and finally disappear. But before it did Potchacarey gave a loud cry of triumph.

"That's it! We've succeeded!"

The pendulant sword was at last at rest and pointing at the centre mark.

"Long life to the great men of Ulster! Long live Cúchulainn!"

The crowd took up the applause, their whoops and cheers echoing in the night. Their jubilant voices rang loudly from the walls of Dún Rodhraighe, their echoes rolling away among the surrounding hills like a departing multitude. Cúchulainn, with a loud cry of relief, at last relinquished his grip on the wall; and falling back heavily on his rump he emitted a long, loud sigh. It sounded remarkably like a king's measure of oxtail soup boiling over into a fire.

All eyes turned on Bricriú in the silence that followed. He had been washing in a bowl of hot water held by a servant, and was drying his impassive face and his slender hands in a towel. Then, with a smirk that was almost a smile, he gave a little bow.

"Well done, however, there's the outstanding matter of what little is left of the dry stone wall that divided my orchard from my wife's flower garden!"

He remained silent for several seconds as he turned and surveyed the gardens with an imperious eye.

"H'm, come to think of it, it makes for an improvement visually. In practical terms, I never did like its long shadows depriving fruit and flowers of life-giving sunshine."

He laughed shortly as though at some private joke, affecting a bout of coughing.

"Speaking of sunshine and shadow, you people would do well to make the most of sunshine. One never knows what shadows may fall across the landscape in the days ahead."

As he spoke, a pool of strange light and shadow filled the area for miles around the fort. Despite the phenomenon, Gráinne, washed, changed and groomed, knew that her husband's speech referred to his plan for world dominance, and she slid like a snake to his side. Her knowing smirk revealed no hint of its meaning to the people of Eamhain Macha as Bricriú, pausing to savour their discomfort, broke the silence with a soft titter.

"I leave you to enjoy yourselves for as long as you like."

Are our heroes going to drink themselves into oblivion before anyone can be awarded The Champion's Portion, and what wicked plans does Bricriú have for them if they do? Can he set the Champions at each other's throats? Log on every Sunday for more chapters.