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Updated: June 16, 2025
Here they were joined by the captive O'Donnells and the seamen who had brought them to the castle, and Muiertach led them to the great hall. The father of this O'Malley woman must have been a man of parts, thought Brian as he gazed around. The hall was scantily filled with, perhaps, three-score men ranged along the walls, and at the farther end was a low dais where a huge log fire roared high.
"There shall be no quarter to these O'Donnells," she cried hotly. "Those whom we take shall hang, and the Scots with them " "Not the Scots," exclaimed Brian quickly. "They are honest men enough, Nuala, and may serve us well as recruits.
The chieftain families of Tyrconnell were the O'Donnells; of Tyrone, the O'Neils and McLaughlins; of Dalriada, O'Kanes, O'Haras, and O'Shields; of Ulidia, the Magennis of Iveagh and the Donlevys of Down; of Oriel, the McMahons and O'Hanlons. Among these populous tribes the invaders dealt some of their fiercest blows, both by land and sea, in the thirteenth century.
She stopped abruptly, and her words were lost in a choking gasp as blood came from her mouth. Brian swore. "Mile Mollaght! What has happened here, woman? Are you wounded?" "Aye, those dogs of O'Donnells," she moaned feebly. Then new strength came to her, and she peered up with another cackle. "But did I not tell wisely, son?
On the next instant his men had closed around him, muskets were stabbing the powder-smoke, and Brian fell to work with his Spanish blade. O'Donnells and Scots together heaved up against them, but Brian's point weaved out between cutlas and claymore and bit out men's lives until the mass of men surged back again like the backleash of a wave that comes against a wall.
Brian forced himself to bend all his energies toward carrying out his final desperate plan, but he silently vowed that the old woman who had so foully been cut down by the O'Donnells should not die unavenged. On they galloped without pause, gained the head of Bertraghboy Bay, and swung to the east on the last stretch of the trip.
His reluctance to come would have been accountable to the Adisters by a sentiment of shame at his family's dealings with theirs: in fact, a military captain of the O'Donnells had in old days played the adventurer and charmed a maid of a certain age into yielding her hand to him; and the lady was the squire of Earlsfont's only sister: she possessed funded property.
I would go on ahead to fish a pool, and leave him poring over Hyde's book; but when he picked me up, conversation went on where it broke off somewhere among the fortunes of Desmonds and Burkes, O'Neills and O'Donnells.
For all his bitterness, Brian noted that the four pirate ships had been brought around into the bay before the castle, into which the Scots had moved, while a great number of the O'Donnells had landed and were hastily throwing up brush huts on the height above the shore, evidently intending to camp there for the present.
But through the hall men's hands went out to one another in the darkness. For storm-driven fog was not a thing that many men had seen even on the west coast, and when it did happen men said that a warlock was at work. There was not far to seek for the warlock in this case, muttered the O'Donnells.
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