Glendalough Fair Read Online Free Page B

fell like a plague from God. Temporary stalls were going up around the perimeter of the town square and running in rows down its center, and stages were building in the open areas. Flocks of animals driven in from the countryside were herded into makeshift pens; merchants from all over the south of Ireland arrived in their carts or with their bundles on their backs, and sought out one of the few taverns with beds and ale or set up their own shelters in the fields. There was an air of anticipation that hung like smoke over the town.
    The monastery at Glendalough and the town that rose up around it were nothing when compared to the great Norse longphorts of Dubh-linn and Wexford and others, but in a country made up of farmers and landowners and minor kings flung like barley seed across the land, Glendalough was an important point of trade. As such, Glendalough hosted market days and festivals through all the months when it was possible for the people to leave their homes and their farms and ringforts and gather in the town.
    And of all of those, none was as important, as popular or as lucrative as the one for which the town was now readying itself: the yearly Oénach , the Glendalough Fair.
    It was a springtime event, the first real chance for the people to emerge from the misery of winter and to indulge in something beyond mere survival. The fair would not begin for another three weeks, but already preparations were full underway.
    In truth, people had been anticipating it for months, and it was not just the local craftsmen. Merchants from as far away as Frankia and Frisia sent their wares to the Glendalough Fair. At Fair time, pilgrims of a different sort - actors and jugglers and animal trainers and cutpurses and whores - made their way to the monastery town in hopes of grabbing up some of the silver that flowed through the streets during the week-long celebration.
    The preparations were in full swing now, but the sound of the hammering and chopping, the shouts of the working men, the groan of the wagons and the lowing of oxen were barely audible to Louis, drowned out as they were by the driving rain and the gasping and moaning of the young Irishwoman who was at that moment writhing beneath him.
    Her name was Failend and Louis guessed she was probably around twenty, not much beyond that, certainly. As beautiful a woman as any he had been with, and he had been with many. Her skin was white and smooth as butter, her hair long and black and at that moment spread out in a wild profusion over the fur on which she lay.
    Louis began to move faster and Failend dug her heels into the small of his back and continued clawing his shoulders with her nails, a gesture that at first he had found arousing but now found simply painful. She gasped and shouted out something Louis did not understand. He had been in Ireland for less than a year, having arrived speaking nothing but his native Frankish. He could now speak the local tongue tolerably well, but he could not understand Failend’s words, spoken through clenched teeth as she bucked and twisted under him.
    He didn’t think the words mattered. In his considerable experience, women under those conditions all said pretty much the same things, regardless of the language. He moved faster still and Failend wrapped her arms around him and pulled him down on top of her and pushed hard against him. They were both gasping for breath now as they worked themselves up to that final moment and then pushed one another over the edge.
    For a long moment they just lay there, sunk deep in the thick furs that were spread out over the raised seating platform in the outer room. When he had first come by her house that morning, knocking lightly on the door and glancing around the square to make certain no one was looking in his direction, he had envisioned grappling in the bed chamber above as they had on past occasions. But they never made it that far.
    Failend had opened the door, pulled him in from the