Chapter Sixteen
This time, Gareth wasn’t going to make the mistake of taking the long way to Dolwyddelan. When he’d gone to meet Anarawd before the ambush, he’d followed the well-traveled road from Aber to Caerhun, and then south to Dolwyddelan: the same road he and Gwen had ridden along together in the opposite direction.
He’d had another choice, which he hadn’t taken then. He still cursed himself for choosing the longer route. Who knows what could have happened? He could have fallen in with Hywel after seeing the mercenaries. Perhaps he’d have followed their path and warned Anarawd they were waiting for him. Admittedly, he could have also come upon them by mistake and been murdered himself.
A lifetime ago (though really only five days), the attraction of breaking his journey with the mead at Caerhun had been too good to pass up. Since dawn today, however, Gareth had followed a track that ran from Aber straight into the mountains, skirting the peaks of Snowdonia that loomed above him, almost close enough to touch. It was by far the shorter route in terms of distance—as well as in time for one man and horse alone. If it hadn’t been so impossible to widen properly, the Romans might have improved this road instead of the one that passed between the standing stones. As it was, they’d given it up as a lost cause. The native Welsh had not and had continued to use it hundreds of years after the Romans had departed.
He’d said goodbye to Gwen with some reluctance. A warm rain had been falling as he’d left Aber, and they’d stood in the middle of it, arguing.
“You could take me with you,” she’d said. “Two pairs of eyes are better than one.”
“You may be one of Hywel’s spies, but that doesn’t give you license to do anything you want,” Gareth said.
Gwen opened her mouth to protest, but Gareth overrode her. “As it is, Hywel gave me permission to leave Aber—and against his better judgment. Only a few days ago, I was under orders not to leave the castle at all. He’s concerned about how this looks.”
“The Council dismissed the charges that you were involved in Anarawd’s death, and King Owain agreed,” Gwen said. “It will show all Gwynedd that Hywel trusts you.”
“Just as long as nothing else goes wrong,” Gareth said.
“That’s why you need to bring me with you,” Gwen said. “I was never under suspicion at all, and I can confirm to the King anything we find.”
“Be that as it may, you cannot come,” Gareth said. “Your father would have my head. I’ll be back by tomorrow morning. It’s hardly any time at all.” He leaned in closer. “Besides, I need you to keep an eye on things here.”
Gwen narrowed her eyes at him. “What aren’t you telling me?”
Gareth shook his head. “I don’t even know enough to articulate what worries me. Suffice to say, I don’t trust anyone but you.”
That was a significant admission on his part and seemed to satisfy Gwen. It helped that it was true. Gareth did miss her company as the towers of Aber fell away, and the mountains hid him from a watcher’s view. The higher he ascended into the hills, the more alone he became, but the more his heart eased. He shed the tensions of the last days. Early on in the journey, he encountered a few shepherds, watching their flocks in the higher meadows, but they too disappeared the higher he climbed.
He crossed the barren uplands on which only grasses and scraggly bushes grew, and passed the initial peaks, bare of snow this late in the summer. As he traveled over a ridge and trekked down into one of the high valleys in which a highland lake nestled, the rain lessened and finally stopped, although the wind whipped his hood from his head.
Over the next few miles, the landscape changed further, becoming more treed, with streams and waterfalls racing back the way he’d come. Ultimately, he came out of a long stretch of difficult terrain and reached the abandoned Roman fort that stood near the intersection of several paths. This was where Hywel had lost the Danes. The main road lay farther on.
Most of the stones had disappeared into the ground or had been appropriated for other buildings. The fort lay in a valley, surrounded by tree-covered hills and covering nearly four acres. The River Llugwy split the western half from the eastern larger half, in which Gareth found himself.
The ruins loomed over Gareth, disturbing old wounds that every Welshman felt in his blood. Many of his people refused to approach any Roman structure, claiming that ghosts—whether Roman, Welsh, or both—haunted them. Today, Gareth would have believed it, since a real corpse slumped on the ground against the far wall of the fort.
The man, not well-armored but with an axe at his belt, lay propped against a pillar, his legs splayed. A spear skewered him through his gut and a knife had been driven to the hilt into his chest. Even if his injuries had been less apparent, Gareth would have known the man was dead by the flies that gathered around his head. With more reluctance than haste, Gareth dismounted and headed towards the body, clambering over fallen stones and through ruined rooms to reach it.
Unlike Anarawd, this man had died where he lay, the remains of the pool of blood still evident on the ground around him. The rain that had fallen on the coast that morning had never reached here, and the warmer summer air had accelerated the decaying process such that maggots had gotten inside the wounds. Gareth guessed the man had been dead for several days.
Sometimes Gareth hated his job.
He crouched before the man, not wanting to touch him yet—and not just because of the insects that crept and crawled all over and inside him. The man had no weapon in or near his hand, leading Gareth to believe that—like Anarawd—he’d known his killer and been unprepared for the attack.
Although Gareth couldn’t tell the man’s ancestry from his face, he wore armor and clothing like the other men they’d encountered—and killed—on the road from Dolwyddelan. In addition, the bushiness of the man’s beard and the length and color of his hair had Gareth thinking the man was a Dane. Besides, the crest of the King of Dublin was embossed into the leather of the man’s vest.
Damping down a squeamishness he couldn’t help, Gareth pulled out the spear and set it to one side. He then grasped the rough and unadorned hilt of the knife. The blade slid out easily. The lack of catch told him even before he wiped away the blood so he could inspect the knife that this wasn’t the same one that had killed Anarawd. This blade, though newly sharpened, was thicker than the other. It was one a peasant might use for eating or whittling—although the odds of a peasant having killed this man were slim.
Whoever he was, whoever had done this deed, had been more prepared for the act than when he’d killed Anarawd—if indeed the two were murdered by the same person—which now that Gareth thought about it a bit more, he doubted. More likely, this man killed Anarawd and then another person killed him to silence him. Or this soldier had a falling out with his paymaster.
When Gareth had jerked out the spear, the dead man had fallen onto his side, so now Gareth pulled on his legs to flatten him out. He shifted the man’s armor and clothing, first of all searching for the knife that killed Anarawd (which would have been quite a find), and secondly for anything that might tell him the identity of this man or the man who killed him. It was rough work. Gareth continued to wear his riding gloves, knowing that, regardless of the waste and the cost of new ones, he’d have to discard them when he was done.
He sat back on his heels to study the body. What else do you have to tell me? Holding his breath against the putrid smell and the crawling insects, Gareth stripped off the man’s clothing so he could inspect his wounds more fully. It was the spear through the gut that bothered him the most. The knife wound had bled freely, indicating that it was the fatal blow. But if the man was already dying or dead, why skewer him afterwards? It spoke of anger.
Gareth thought back to the last moments of his milk-brother’s life. The Danes had backtracked from the first ambush site, perhaps to here, following a different path from Hywel and his men, and then set up the second ambush. According to Bran, they hadn’t gotten the seal
from Anarawd in the first attack, and thus couldn’t prove he was dead. Prove to whom? And was that failure why this man was dead?
For about two heartbeats, Gareth thought about throwing the body over Braith, but immediately discarded the notion. Even if the body itself had something more to tell him, he loathed the idea of carrying it all the way to Dolwyddelan.
Instead, Gareth used the man’s axe to dig a shallow grave. He dumped the body into it and stacked rocks and stones from the fort over it to protect it from wild animals. Then with the armor and weapons lashed to his saddle bags, Gareth mounted Braith, turned her onto the track, and continued to the site of the original ambush, still evident by the churned up road and darkened blood. It had soaked into the earth by now, but its discoloration was unmistakable. It was helpful that it hadn’t recently rained this high in the mountains. But even if it had, and rain had washed all signs of the battle into the creek that ran beside the road, the putrid pile of dead horse flesh would have given the location away.
That had been a long morning. With two truncated shovels Meilyr found in his cart, some of the men-at-arms had dug a ditch in which to pile the horses. While Gwen appeared to carry nothing with her but one satchel of clothing and a small bag of medicines, Meilyr was a packrat.
“What made you bring these all the way from wherever you’ve been?” Gareth had asked him.
“Some days we camp beside the road—particularly in the summer as we move from one location to another before looking for a winter patron,” Meilyr said. “It’s quite pleasant, even if it doesn’t sound like it to you, and we use the shovels to dig for roots to eat, to carve out a fire pit, or to make a makeshift latrine.”
So that explained the shovels, but not the odd mix of broken cookware, bent tools, and discarded clothing that covered the bottom of the cart. Gareth had chided Gwen about it on their walk to Caerhun, before the second ambush.
“I’ve tried,” she’d said. “He won’t let me touch his things. But I also won’t let him bring any of it into our rooms once we find them. He’s accumulated this mess just since the spring.”
Even though Gareth wished Gwen were with him now, he was glad she hadn’t seen that dead man back at the fort, nor was forced to revisit the location of Anarawd’s death. They’d all worked hard shifting the dead horses off the road and preparing the human corpses for transport. Even Gwalchmai had helped once he returned with the carts, straining his thin shoulders and weak stomach.
Gareth dismounted and walked along the edge of the road until he reached the spot where Anarawd had lain, still marked with a trio of sticks. As he’d remembered, there wasn’t enough blood here to tell him more. He drifted into the woods, thinking of the man as he’d known him.
Anarawd was a number of years older than Gareth so had ruled in Deheubarth with his father and brothers long before Gareth had come to know of him. While none of Anarawd’s brothers had disputed his ascendancy to the throne upon their father’s death, Gareth had never thought much of the man. Like King Owain’s brother, Cadwaladr, he covered his lack of acumen with bluster, talking more than he listened, and felt that his hereditary right to the throne should automatically garner the respect that he, as a man, hadn’t earned.
At the same time, Gareth had heard no complaints from the people Anarawd governed, and one could often tell the kind of person a man was by the opinions of his inferiors. Prince Cadwaladr’s subjects could surely give anyone who asked an earful.
Focusing again, Gareth crept along the perimeter of the battlefield, his eyes on the ground. He hadn’t been mistaken that Anarawd’s murderer had moved his body. He didn’t know if he could learn anything from finding the exact spot, but a man could never have too much information. He crouched low near the eastern ditch, and at last picked up the parallel trail left by Anarawd’s boots. The killer had held him under the arms and dragged him out of the woods to the road. As Gwen had noted, hauling him by his feet would have been easier, though it would have done damage to his head, which perhaps the killer wanted to avoid.
Gareth backtracked the trail into the woods. The farther he went, the more obvious the signs of both the tracks and the blood, which must have poured from Anarawd’s body onto the ground. Another fifty feet in, and Gareth found the spot where Anarawd had fallen. The killer had tried to cover the blood stains with leaves, but Gareth removed them with a few swipes of his boot.
What had Anarawd been doing in the woods? Had he run from the battle as Hywel had surmised? And yet, the wound was to his chest. Gareth returned again and again to the indications that Anarawd had to have known—or at least momentarily trusted—the man who killed him. Otherwise, Anarawd would never have allowed him to get so close.
Abandoning the quest for answers for now, Gareth headed the last miles north to Dolwyddelan, marveling at the vagaries of fate. Because he hadn’t ridden these miles the other day, he’d failed in his duty to escort Anarawd to his wedding. And yet, because of that same failure, Gareth and Gwen had been thrown together on a joint task that allowed them opportunity to speak and work together as friends. Whatever the cost to Owain Gwynedd, Gareth couldn’t feel sorry for that.
Dolwyddelan Castle sat on a rocky knoll, guarding a mountain pass through the Vale of Conwy, one of the greenest and windiest regions of Wales. Dolwyddelan was primitive compared to Aber, but nonetheless, Gareth liked it. He’d first encountered Hywel here, and it was here that Hywel had offered him a second chance at honor.
At the time, Gareth hadn’t dared travel all the way to Aber to meet the prince, fearing that his reputation had preceded him. It had, but that hadn’t been a hindrance in Hywel’s eyes. Although he’d never mentioned it directly, Hywel had hinted that they were two of a kind. His father delegated his more unsavory tasks to Hywel, and not all of them could be done alone. Which is where Gareth came in.
The heavy wooden gate was open when Gareth reached the earth and timber wall that surrounded the castle. The guard waved him through.
“Sir Gareth!” A familiar figure trotted down the steps to the keep and across the courtyard to where Gareth waited.
“Gruffydd, my friend,” Gareth said, dismounting. “It’s a pleasure to see you—a delayed one, I might add.”
“We heard what happened to King Anarawd.” Gruffydd gripped Gareth’s arm in greeting. “I know you have much to preoccupy you in your service to Prince Hywel, but I’m glad you’re here. We’ve just found a body.”