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Austin Macauley Publishers - George Burns

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97 pages

English

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The year is 908, and the island of Ireland is tearing itself apart. As the small nations within this island struggle for power, one king dreams of peace. The Pagan's Revenge centres around Finnan, a young man sworn to protect the King and Queen of Munster. A story of love, betrayal, and war, that will keep you on the edge until the very last page.

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Historical romance

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Publié par	Austin Macauley Publishers
Date de parution	29 mai 2020
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781645365358
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0175€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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The Pagan’s Revenge
George Burns
Austin Macauley Publishers
2020-05-29
The Pagan’s Revenge About The Author Dedication Copyright Information © Acknowledgements Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Chapter Nine Chapter Ten Chapter Eleven Chapter Twelve Chapter Thirteen Chapter Fourteen Chapter Fifteen
About The Author

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George Burns is an Irish-Canadian author who emigrated from Ireland to Canada in 2010. He currently resides in Vancouver, British Columbia, with his wife, Theresa, and daughter Naoise. Having graduated with an honors bachelor in Civil Engineering, Burns works as a professional engineer and writes in his spare time. When not writing or reading, George can be found hiking and camping all over the lower mainland of British Columbia.
Dedication
This book is dedicated to my mother. I wish she knew I was writing it. And to my wife, Theresa, who has supported me every step of the way.
Copyright Information ©
George Burns (2020)
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher.
Any person who commits any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Ordering Information:
Quantity sales: special discounts are available on quantity purchases by corporations, associations, and others. For details, contact the publisher at the address below.
Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication data
Burns, George
The Pagan’s Revenge
ISBN 9781643788418 (Paperback)
ISBN 9781643788425 (Hardback)
ISBN 9781645365358 (ePub e-book)
Library of Congress Control Number: 2020900842
www.austinmacauley.com/us
First Published (2020)
Austin Macauley Publishers LLC
40 Wall Street, 28th Floor
New York, NY 10005
USA
mail-usa@austinmacauley.com
+1 (646) 5125767
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Eamon Kane, for sharing his local knowledge of the battle of Ballaghmoon.
Chapter One
The sky is dark over Western Europe, as the cold harsh weather hammers the shores of its outermost island. She has been shaped by the incessant rain and the wind, having emerged after tens of thousands of years from an ice tomb with her neighboring islands and the rest of mainland Europe.
A vast forested island of green, ringed with ancient mountains, eaten away by the Gods of the Ice Age, broken down by eons of erosion. The black sea crashes on her harsh shores, a lonely outpost on the edge of the Atlantic.
There are no cities to speak of, but countless kingdoms dotted with towns, monasteries, and small settlements.
The Roman Empire is shrinking, having left Britain some four hundred years before. The Vikings are coming from the east to burn the lands of Western Europe and take what they will. In some ways, they will conquer the earth, making their way as far as The New World, whilst ravaging the places they pass through, killing, raping, and taking the spoils of war.
They set their sights all over Europe, eventually becoming the Norman force which will sink her blood-drenched claws into this wild and beautiful Atlantic outpost, never fully letting go. But that is a story for another day.
Seeing the splendor of these harsh lands, the Vikings set sail, fighting the Saxons in Britain, while making their way further west to spill the blood of innocents on an island where there are riches beyond belief. The word of God is ripe. Centers of art and learning are spread throughout this land of saints and scholars. Monasteries are rich in gold and knowledge. A beacon of light and hope for those who would follow. A beacon of greed and opportunity for those who would take.
It is not only from the east that she is attacked. She is torn apart from within like a great sickness inside of her belly, a cancer which will kill her over a thousand years. Her broken factions are constantly at war, where men defile the earth with the blood of those who share a common home, language, and ancestry. Peace is only a dream, something this land has never known in thousands of years. This same dream which will not be realized for another eleven hundred years.
Many wise men walked this land, spreading the word of God and the message of peace. Many wise men ruled this land and hoped and dreamed of peace and unity, but it was not to be. This is the story of one of those men.
Chapter Two
On the twenty-first day of December, in the year of our Lord 883, a storm blew over the Hill of Tara and battered the castle with wind and rain. It lasted for two days and two nights. It is said that the crying of the newborn Princess of Tara, granddaughter to the High King of Ireland, could be heard for miles, over the hiss of rain and the howl of wind, as she came screaming into the world.
She was her father’s daughter, a warrior princess. Childbirth was complicated and dangerous in those days, and complications dictated that Gormfhlaith, as she would be named, would have to fight her way into the world, and fight she did, tearing through her mother for freedom to breathe the Irish air, a storm raging in the blackness of early morning in the chamber where she was to be delivered.
She tore her mother, inside the womb that morning, causing her to lose more blood than she could afford. She died shortly after she held the little Princess.
Flan Sinna, Prince of Tara at the time, was just nineteen years old and newly married, having married the woman he loved out of honor as she carried his child. Marriages for the nobles were usually borne out of practicality or the need for an alliance rather than love in those days. A marriage like Flan Sinna and Maobh was rare.
He had argued for four days and four nights with his father, the King, who did not concede until the priest confirmed she was carrying his grandchild. The King, softening in his old age, might have, in his earlier years, have had the woman put to death, but saw how useful it was for his own heir to also have a successor. And besides, a child about the castle would add color to an old man’s life.
Flan arrived in the delivery room to see his wife lying in a blood-soaked bed, holding a pink-skinned blob of flesh as the life left her body. She smiled at him through her last breath, trying to whisper the name of her daughter as her soul drifted to the heavens.
The wind howled outside and the rain pelted the wooden walls, it came through the narrow windows, as the child cried, harder and harder, perhaps lamenting over the end of the tragically short relationship with her mother.
Flan, knelt by his dead wife and took her hand, which was already cold, as the nun took his screaming child to clean her.
“A girl,” came a voice from behind him. “Hold your daughter, Princess Gormfhlaith.”
He didn’t realize how long he had been kneeling with his wife’s cold, dead hand, but the pink blob had stopped wailing and now resembled a tiny person, wrapped in a brown, woolen blanket.
“Gormfhlaith,” he whispered. “That’s what she wanted to call you.”
“That’s what she wanted,” replied the nun, handing the child over to the young father.
If Flan Sinna bore any resentment to his daughter, he did not show it. He became King at the age of twenty-three, by which time he had remarried and had two sons, a male heir, more importantly.
His daughter, the little Princess, ran about the castle, always talking, always questioning. She would question the priests about God, about the stars, about the earth, and the sea.
“Who made the stars?” she would ask.
“God made the stars,” the priests would reply.
“God made them? Why?” she would always ask, regardless what the subject matter was, she needed answers.
The priests would smile and say, “We do not know, my child, but if you say your prayers every day, he may tell you himself one day.”
She would run here and run there, picking flowers, chasing pigs, throwing stones for the hounds, and exploring, until eventually, she found her secret getaway, a tiny hole through the castle walls, just big enough for a small girl to squeeze through and explore the countryside.
From here, she would talk to the surrounding folk, farmers, hunters, and fishers of the rivers, and when her father would get word of this, he would forbid her to go outside the castle walls, but she would still go. In truth, he knew this was no harm, but assigned her a bodyguard anyway. A secret one, who would watch her at a distance.
But the clever little girl always saw the great, big, monstrous soldiers following her like fools from a distance, trying to be inconspicuous, so the King encouraged the friendships she would make so she would always be surrounded by people she knew, whether they be priests or soldiers, bakers or nuns, guards or farmers, the little Princess knew everybody and could never be far from friends.
One such friendship, which blossomed in the summer time of her twelfth year, was with a young soldier, scarcely fifteen years old.
Finnan was the son of a farmer who was indebted to the King. Flan Sinna, being a fair man at the time, forgave the debt, but fairness worked both ways. He expected something in return. This was the lifetime service of the farmer’s son, Finnan.
Finnan, a serious boy, was quite taken by the Princess, and was beaten for it when his superiors found out.