Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 11, 2025
When the darkness began to fall, Bertragh Castle came in sight far below a gray crag jutting up from the plain, scarped and embattled, the sea behind it and the watch-fires of men twinkling from its keep. All about lay farms and steads, and the lowing of byred cattle rose on the evening air when the snow ceased. "Be careful not to drink or eat in that hall," warned Cathbarr blackly.
Other men might have endured the same thing and laughed the next day, but Brian was high-strung and tense, and while his will was still strong, his physical endurance was shattered. With the next morning, this fact had become quite evident to the general disgust of all within Bertragh Castle.
With him were two of Cathbarr's axmen, and they led him to the hold occupied by Murrough O'Flaherty of the Kine, where Brian stayed half a day. He concluded a friendship with the mountaineers, promising them powder in exchange for cattle, and they promised, in turn, that within three weeks they would fetch a hundred kine down to Castle Bertragh.
So Turlough had decided, however, and he stuck to it. Brian then described closely how the four pirate ships lay in the bay under Bertragh, while Shaun went out to arrange the distribution of his men on Nuala's ships.
"He bade us say that he was leaving Galway to-morrow at dawn with a force of men, and that you should meet him at Bertragh Castle and fall on that place to take it." "That is good," laughed Brian. "Now learn that you have found the wrong ships, my man. We are not the Millhaven pirates, but I am Brian Buidh, who holds Bertragh; and here is the Lady Nuala, for whom I hold it."
By warlock arts O'Donnell More brings Brian and a handful of men through a snowstorm to Bertragh and makes him prisoner. He proceeds to torture him fiendishly, ending by nailing him to the castle door by one hand. Just then Colonel James Vere, British officer, arrives, and demands Brian in order to hang him comfortably in Galway.
The third message was from Galway itself, and said that the Dark Master was biding the coming of those Millhaven men, and had been promised both horsemen and shot if they came, so that Bertragh might be taken and held for Ireland against the Parliament. "It is not taken yet," laughed Nuala as old Turlough came shuffling up, and they gave him the sele of the day merrily enough.
So the Dark Master was going to the north to get him men in Sligo, as Turlough had predicted he would do, and his plan was to raise a force, bring down those Donegal pirates with whom he was in alliance, and set on Bertragh by sea and land, as Brian himself had aimed at doing. Turlough said that he was following, but would leave men at Swineford and Tobercurry with further news of what happed.
Brian gazed up after him, and on the hills he saw that dim beacon-fire heralding the Dark Master. The six men guarding the galley, two of them being O'Malleys, and three men who had watched on the tower, were all that remained alive in Bertragh besides Turlough and Brian.
His intention is to gather a storm of men and hold an independent place near Galway. He forms an alliance with Nuala O'Malley, known as the Bird Daughter because of her carrier pigeons, for the purpose of recovering her castle, Bertragh, which O'Donnell had won years before from her parents by black treachery.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking