Pride of Lions by Morgan Llywelyn Page A

on him. "Do you claim all else that was his as well? Do you mean to be King of Munster too, and possess the fortress of Cashel?" He started to say more but common sense finally caught up with him and he refrained from asking if Teigue wanted to be Ard Ri.
    What he had already said was enough to constitute a challenge, however. Teigue's pride forced him to respond, "I will serve my people in whatever way they decide."
    "The Owenachts may fight you for the kingship of Munster," warned a prince from the Slieve Aughty mountains.
    "Then I'll fight," Teigue replied grimly.
    In spite of himself Donough laughed aloud.
    "Teigue Mac Brian, fight? The closest you ever came to emulating our father was when you made canoes out of bark and sailed them on the Shannon. And then you let them get away from you."
    Maeve hurled her thoughts at her husband with all the strength she possessed. Leave it be! she shouted at him silently. Stop now before this goes any further!
    But he did not hear. Addressing Donough, but speaking for the benefit of everyone in the hall, Teigue announced, "In the absence of evidence to the contrary, I must consider myself Brian Boru's heir. Donough, I invite you to remain as my guest at Kincora until Carroll and the others return from Armagh. If at that time your claim to our father's stronghold is confirmed, I will of course surrender it to you. In the meantime I ask those present to vote on the chieftaincy of the Dal Cais."
    "And what of Munster?" someone called.
    No! Maeve shouted silently.
    With shadows in his eyes Teigue said, "If I become chief of the Dal Cais, I am willing to hold the kingship of Munster for my tribe."

Chapter Fifteen
    For a man who was chief poet of Munster, a rank second in status to that of the king, Mac Liag had a very modest home. Built of timber planking, it was rectangular in shape with a sod roof and only two chambers. But Mac Liag loved his house by the lake. It had, he rhapsodized, "An ash tree on one side of the doorway and a hazel on the other. A row of pines behind, singing with the wind. Salmon and pike and perch and Gillaroo trout for my supper, and the song of the lark to wake me in the morning."
    In the poet's old age his widowed son Cumara lived with him and tended his simple needs.
    It was Cumara who answered Donough's knock on the doorframe--the door itself was hardly ever closed--and made no effort to hide his surprise. "No one calls on my father here,"
    he told the unexpected visitor. "The Ard Ri was the only exception. This is father's private place; those who wish to see the chief poet attend him at Kincora."
    "I want to see him, but I don't want to talk to him inside Kincora," Donough told the round-shouldered, brown-haired Cumara, who in spite of being a widower was but a decade older than himself.
    "I'll send him out to you if he's willing," the other man replied.
    As Donough waited he gazed out across the lake. Lough Derg, the Red Lake. Sometimes carmined by sunset, sometimes flushed with tides of roseate plankton that appeared and vanished inexplicably.
    Sometimes stained with blood.
    "You sought me, Prince Donough?" inquired a mellifluous voice behind him.
    Donough turned and looked down at Mac Liag. He had last seen the poet in the hall at Kincora three months earlier, but in those three months Mac Liag had aged years. His subcutaneous fat had melted away, leaving his flesh sagging from his bones like a garment borrowed from a much larger man.
    Donough said, "You were my father's friend, and I need a friend now."
    Inclining his head in the direction of Kincora, Mac Liag replied, "Surely you have many friends inside."
    "Do I? And who would they be? Friends of my mother's, perhaps?"
    "Perhaps."
    "Come now, Mac Liag, you know she had no friends here."
    "That was her own doing. Brian gave her every opportunity to have a good life with him. Had she made him happy, his friends would have been hers."
    It was the first time Donough had ever heard anyone refer to his